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For Theodore the icon of Christ is the best possible illustration of what is meant by the hypostatic union. What appears on the image is the very hypostasis of God the Word in the flesh. In the Byzantine tradition the inscription around the halo surrounding the head of Jesus says "The One who is," the equivalent of the sacred name YHWE, the name of God, whose person is revealed, but whose essence is inaccessible. It is neither God's indescribable divinity nor His human nature alone which is represented on an icon, but the person of God the Son who took flesh: "Every portrait," writes Theodore, "is the portrait of an hypostasis, and not of a nature."

To paint an image of the divine essence or of God before His incarnation is obviously impossible; just as it is impossible to represent human nature as such, other than symbolically. Thus, symbolic images of Old Testament thcophanies are not yet "icons" in a true sense. But the icon of Christ is different. With bodily eyes, the hypostasis of the Logos could be seen in the flesh, although its divine essence remained hidden; it is this mystery of the Incarnation which makes possible the sacred icons and requires their veneration.

The defense of images forced Byzantine thought to reaffirm the full concrete humanity of Christ.

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The triduum of Easter-the three days when Christ's humanity suffered the common fate of man, yet remained mysteriously en-hypostasized in the one divine hypostasis of the Logos-is graphically expressed in the traditional Byzantine iconography of the Resurrection: Christ trampling down the gates of Sheol and lifting Adam and Eve back to life. Better than any conceptual language, and better also than the image of any particular event or aspect of the mystery-such as the empty tomb, or even the crucifixion itself-this icon points to the dynamic, soteriological dimension of Christ's death: God's intrusion into the domain usurped by the devil and the breaking up of his control over humanity. The same mystery of hypostatic unity, which remained unbroken in death itself. . .

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... on Good Friday, at vespers, at the very moment when Christ gave up the spirit, the first hymns of the Resurrection are beginning to resound: "Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has shown Himself free from corruption." The hidden, yet decisive, triumph over death ...

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One discovers in these texts the ultimate, soteriological reason why Cyril's theopaschite formula became a criterion of orthodoxy in sixth-century Byzantine theology: death was vanquished precisely because God Himself had tasted of it hypostatically in the humanity which He had assumed. This is the paschal message of Christianity.

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But by rejecting God, human freedom, in fact, destroys itself. Outside of God, man ceases to be authentically and fully human. He is enslaved to the devil through death. This idea, which is central to Maximian thought and which made him profess so strongly the existence of a human, created will in Christ, serves as the basis of the Byzantine understanding of the destiny of man: participation in God, or "deification" (theosis), as the goal of human existence.

En-hypostasized in the Logos, Christ's humanity, in virtue of the "communication of idioms," is penetrated with divine "energy." It is, therefore, a deified humanity, which, however, does not in any way lose its human characteristics. Quite to the contrary. These characteristics become even more real and authentic by contact with the divine model according to which they were created. In this deified humanity of Christ's, man is called to participate, and to share in its deification. This is the meaning of sacramental life and the basis of Christian spirituality. The Christian is called not to an "imitation" of Jesus-a purely extrinsic and moral act-but, as Nicholas Cabasilas puts it, to "life in Christ"

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1. It's true that Jesus is fully God
2. It's true that Jesus is fully human
3. It's true that to be God is to be infinite
4. It's true that to be human is to be finite.
5. To claim something is both infinite and finite is to posit a paradox.
6. The incarnation is a paradox.

Since we affirm paradox in the incarnation why object to affirming both that God possesses EDF and that we are libertarianly free?

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Doc: What do you mean by "hands-off"? For various reasons, I don’t think God meticulously CONTROLS which possibilities come to pass. But I don’t think he’s detached from any of the possibilities that may come to pass. He’s completely active, within the parameters he set up which allow for free agency.

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Doc: The two natures view does NOT "entail" the "two minds view." I just thought that Morris denies the Kenotic view in favor of the two minds view. (Remember, Kenotic Christologists affirm, at least in principle, the "two natures" of Christ [though many of us question how meaningful this language is today]).

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Doc: (Remember, Kenotic Christologists affirm, at least in principle, the "two natures" of Christ [though many of us question how meaningful this language is today]).]

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SIM: But isn't Gruenler's point that God DID have the choice, knowing the possible outcomes, but chose to allow for the possible existence of evil?
Doc: Yes. And parents choose the same. But no one blames them for the evil the free children they choose to have commit. The intuition that drives this is that the risk of a person "turning out bad" is worth it. If WE didn’t believe this, we wouldn’t have children. So it seems disingenuous to blame God for taking the risk of creating free agents.

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The Christological Issue.



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Throughout the millennium between the Council of Chalcedon and the fall of Constantinople, Byzantine the theological thought was dominated by the Christological problem as it was defined in the dispute between Cyril and Nestorius and in the subsequent discussions and conciliar decrees. It must be remembered however that the central issue in these debates was the ultimate fate of man.

Western Christological thought since the early Middle Ages has been dominated by the Anselmian idea of redemption through "satisfaction;" the idea that Jesus offered to the Father a perfect and sufficient sacrifice, propitiatory for the sins of mankind, has been at the centre of Christological speculation playing a prominent role in modern historical research on the patristic age. The result is that Christology has been conceived as a topic in itself, clearly distinct from pneumatology and anthropology. But if one keeps in mind the Greek patristic notion that the true nature of man means life in God realized once and for all through the Holy Spirit in the hypostatic union of the man Jesus with the Logos and made accessible to all men through the same Holy Spirit in the humanity of Christ and in His body, the Church, Christology acquires a new and universal dimension. It cannot be isolated any longer from either the doctrine of the Holy Spirit or the doctrine of man, and it becomes a key for the understanding of the Gospel as a whole.

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