In Front | Workbook: Early Mistakes About the Identity of Jesus

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

For many early Christians, the full humanity and divinity of Jesus was the essential Christian idea. Without it there could be no salvation. Only by God becoming fully human in Jesus could we be saved from sin and death. Listen to this from the 4^th century theologian Gregory Nazianzus, writing against Apollinarianism, the belief that Jesus had a human body but wasn’t really human:

For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved … Let (the Apollinarians) not … begrudge us our complete salvation, or clothe the Saviour only with bones and nerves and the portraiture of humanity.

A modern-day Orthodox bishop, Kallistos Ware, explains this comment, which typified the Early Church:

Christ … saves us by becoming what we are; he heals us by taking our broken humanity into himself, by ‘assuming’ it as his own, by entering into our human experiences and by knowing it from the inside, as being himself one of us. But had his sharing of our humanity been in some way incomplete, then man’s salvation would be likewise incomplete. If we believe that Christ has brought us total salvation, then it follows that he has assumed everything.

Source: Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, 1979, p. 75; To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius. (Ep. CI.); http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a.htm. 

3. Having seen some of the early mistakes theologians made regarding the identity of Jesus, why do you think the Church resisted them so strongly, going so far as to condemn them as “heresies”?  [Heresy: A belief that is contrary to the normative or orthodox view held by a religious group]