“Who do people say that I am?”

Jesus Christ asks the all important question

                        “Who do people say that I am?”

Mt. 16: 13-17; (Mk.8:27-30) – Question: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
Question: “But who do you say that I am?”

Answer: “John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”

Answer: “The Christ the Son of the Living God.”

Response: “Blessed are you, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My

Father who is in heaven.”

Following is a list of some of the things that people have said concerning who Jesus is. You may notice that many of these errors and heresies still linger on today. 

                                                                      †

Adoptionism : Jesus was merely an ordinary man of unusual virtue or closeness to God whom God “adopted” into divine sonship. This event took place at the baptism of Jesus and involved only a special divine activity upon Jesus, not the personal presence in Him of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. This position on the nature of Jesus was condemned as heresy at the Synod of Antioch A D 268. Some are still trying to bring this error back into the Church today, claiming that Jesus had no miraculous power until after His Baptism and that this exact same power is available to anyone today, if they will receive the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” This error of course denies the uniqueness and preeminence of Christ. While we will become like Christ, we will never become equal to Him in any way.

Arianism: Due to the fact that God is unique and ingenerate (self-existent, not generated) and that His essential attributes could never be communicated (shared, or transferred) to any other  (because that would bridge the great gulf between Creator and creature), Jesus could not be divine. In addition to this insurmountable problem, the human development and weakness of Jesus prove that He could not be divine. Jesus was the first creation of God the Father and was His special servant in the act of bringing into existence the rest of creation. God Himself is so distinctly separate and of other essence than all of creation that it was required that He bring the Son into existence first because the created order could not bear the immediate (direct) hand of God. This confusion still persists today in the cults such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Arianism was condemned at the council of Nicea in A D 324 and again at Constantinople in 381.

Docetism : (Gk. dokein = ‘to seem’) Christ’s human body was not really what it appeared to be. It was not made of flesh and blood but was in fact a phantasm. His sufferings and death were mere appearances. ‘If He suffered, He was not God.’ His deity is confirmed, but His humanity is denied. Docetism is the opposite of Arianism. The Gnostics among others held this view. The early church fathers Ignatius and Tertullian were two of the most vocal opponents of  Docetism and its denial of the humanity of Christ. Later in the eleventh century Anselm dealt a strong blow to this concept. In his famous “Why the God Man?” he pointed out most convincingly that to deny Christ’s humanity is to deny the basis of our reconciliation.

Monophysitism : Jesus Christ was not of two natures but of only one nature. That nature was the outcome of the unique union of the two previous natures, human and divine. This new nature was of a third kind and it was singular. The make up of this new singular nature was, regarding the divine like the oceans of the world, and as regarding the human like a drop of honey dissolved in those oceans. This position was repudiated at the Council of Chalcedon A D 451.

Apollinarianism : Apollinarius was the Bishop of Laodecia from A D 361-90. He was a follower of the Alexandrian School of theology, which stressed the deity of Christ over His humanity. He rejected the concept of two natures in Christ in favor of only one and that being divine. At the incarnation the divine Soul of the second person of the Trinity entered into a human body of flesh. As a result of the direct contact of God with the flesh the flesh was apotheosized (elevated to the same substance as God). Man’s redemption is secured by partaking of this divine flesh in the form of the Eucharist.                                                     

       It was absolutely necessary that Jesus not have a human soul because a human soul contains a human mind and a human mind can desire to sin. But Jesus was God and God cannot sin or desire to sin. Furthermore it was not possible for Jesus to have had two souls, a divine and a human, for that would be confusion and contradictory. Man is comprised of two parts, one body and one soul, 1+1= 2. If Jesus had two souls and one body that would be, 2+1= 3 which would make Jesus some kind of bizarre freak. It is not logical to say that 2+1= 2. Therefore the incarnation of the Son of God was a compound unity of a body of human flesh animated by the soul of the Divine Logos which when combined elevated the body to the status of  Divine. This concept was rejected at the Council of Rome in A D 377, at the Council of Alexandria in A D 378, at the Council of Antioch in A D 379, and finally at the Council of Constantinople in A D 381.

Nestorianism : Nestorius was Patriarch of Constantinople from A D 428- 51. He was a follower of the Antiochene School, which stressed the humanity of Christ to the point that some adopted the position that Christ was divided into two persons in one body. The idea was that because Jesus was only one man He appeared to have been the union of two natures. But in fact His humanity had the form of Godhead bestowed upon it, and His Deity took upon itself the form of a servant, the result being the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Nestorius strongly objected to the use of the phrase ‘The Mother of God’. He insisted that God could not have a mother and therefore Mary could only rightly be called ‘The mother of man’, the human person Jesus of Nazareth. This distinction lead to the condemnation of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesis in A D 431. Nestorius vehemently maintained his orthodoxy right up to his death. Controversy still surrounds the question as to whether he was a heretic or not, or if in fact he even ever taught that Christ was two persons in the form of one man. His defense was that he denied admitting to only a moral union of the two natures. But instead he held to the belief that the union was syntactic (the two natures were in complete agreement like parts of speech in the same voice, tense number and gender, forming an orderly arrangement that violated neither) and the union was voluntary. This doctrine survives today in the Assyrian Christian Church. There is still an ongoing debate among modern scholars as to whether or not Nestorius was ever really a Nestorian.

Orthodoxy : Jesus Christ is unique in human history. He was and is the God/man. He is one person with two natures. He was fully divine and He was fully human. His two natures are eternally united and eternally distinct. The foundational statement for orthodox Christology came out of the Council of Chalcedon in A D 451.

        ]  The question that Jesus asked two thousand years ago is still the most important question that anyone could ever ask. And so each of us must ask ourselves ‘Who do I say that Jesus is?’ There is no avoiding the issue, for to not ask or not answer is to deny the significance of Jesus Himself and that would be an answer in itself, an answer of denial of Christ. If however we can answer with Peter and millions of others ‘He is the Christ the Son of the living God’ we too will hear those miraculous words ‘Blessed are you, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.’