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Course 25 · Lesson 1.4

Tracing one doctrine from Scripture through the councils

11 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 25 outline

Module 1: Integrating Scripture and History

  1. The four theological disciplines and the questions each asks
  2. Biblical theology: the story of Scripture from creation to new creation
  3. Historical theology: how doctrine was formed, tested and defined
  4. Tracing one doctrine from Scripture through the councils

Module 2: Integrating Doctrine and Philosophy

  1. Systematic theology: coherence among doctrines
  2. Philosophical theology: clarifying and testing concepts
  3. Faith and reason: four historic accounts of their relation
  4. When the disciplines seem to conflict

Module 3: What Is Real and What Is a Human Being

  1. Creation, contingency and the God-world relation
  2. Christian metaphysics compared with materialism, pantheism and dualism
  3. The image of God and the dignity of the person
  4. Body, soul, the fall and the hope of resurrection

Module 4: How We Know and How We Live

  1. Christian epistemology: revelation, Scripture, tradition, reason and experience
  2. Christian ethics: command, virtue and natural law
  3. How doctrine shapes prayer, worship and conduct
  4. How practice tests and sometimes corrects doctrine

Module 5: Tensions and Commitments

  1. Stating a theological tension precisely
  2. Case studies: divine sovereignty and human freedom, one God and three persons, faith and works
  3. Telling a firm conviction from an open question
  4. Auditing your own commitments: reasons, evidence and uncertainty

Module 6: Building a Coherent Worldview

  1. What makes a worldview coherent: consistency, comprehensiveness and fit with experience
  2. Independent faith and historic Christianity: where they agree and differ
  3. Outlining the synthesis
  4. Drafting, testing and revising the synthesis

All courses

Program / Course 25: Theological Synthesis / Lesson 1.4

What you will learn

  • Apply a four-stage method to trace a doctrine from biblical texts to a church definition.
  • Follow the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ as a worked example.
  • Notice where each stage of the method raises questions that the next stage must answer.
  • Choose a doctrine of your own to trace in the final synthesis.

The big idea

Tracing a doctrine means following one teaching from its first appearance in Scripture, through the arguments of the early church, to the point where a council or confession states it. The method has four stages: gather the biblical evidence, find the question that arose, read the arguments used, and read the definition. Doing it once, carefully, trains the student to see how biblical, historical, systematic and philosophical work fit together, and shows what honest confidence in a doctrine looks like.

Key terms

Christology
The study of who Christ is, including the relation of his divinity and humanity.
Incarnation
The belief that the eternal Son of God became a human being in Jesus of Nazareth.
Homoousios
A Greek word used at Nicaea, usually translated of one substance or of the same being, to say that the Son is fully God with the Father.
Hypostasis
A Greek word used in the early church for an individual existing thing, and later for a person of the Trinity or the single person of Christ.
Nature
What something is. Chalcedon taught that Christ has a divine nature and a human nature.
Subordinationism
The view that the Son is lesser than the Father in being or rank. Some forms fit within the creed, and others were rejected.
Proof text
A single verse cited to support a doctrine. It can be useful but is weak when it ignores context.

Background

The last lesson showed that doctrines were defined in response to disputes. This lesson turns that observation into a method. The example is the doctrine that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, a teaching central to every major Christian tradition. It is a good example because the Bible, the debates and the definitions are all well documented, and because it touches every other doctrine: the Trinity, salvation, worship and the nature of God.

The point is not to prove the doctrine. It is to show how a careful student moves from text to definition and what questions arise at each step. A student who follows the steps for a different doctrine will find the details differ, but the stages stay the same.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Gather the biblical evidence

Start with the texts and do not decide in advance what they must mean. On the divinity of Christ, readers cite the opening of John, which says that the Word was with God and was God (John 1:1), Thomas’s confession of Jesus as my Lord and my God (John 20:28), and passages in which Jesus forgives sins or receives worship. On the humanity of Christ they cite hunger, weariness, grief and death (John 4:6, John 11:35, Mark 15:37).

A fair collection includes the texts that seem to point the other way, such as John 14:28, where Jesus says that the Father is greater than he, and Mark 13:32, where he says the Son does not know the day or the hour. These texts are not hidden by those who hold the doctrine. They are part of the question that later centuries had to answer.

Step 2: Find the question that arose

The New Testament does not state the relation between divinity and humanity in later technical terms. Early Christians worshiped Christ and prayed to the one God. The question that appeared in the third and fourth centuries was how to speak of Christ without either making him a lesser being or denying that he was truly human.

Arius answered that the Son was created before time. Others, such as Apollinaris, later argued that the Word took the place of a human mind in Jesus. Nestorius was accused of dividing Christ into two persons. Each position was a proposed solution, and each was judged by the church to lose something.

Step 3: Read the arguments used

Athanasius argued from salvation: if the Son were a creature, a creature could not bring creatures to God. Gregory of Nazianzus, in the late fourth century, offered the principle often summarized as what is not assumed is not healed, meaning that Christ must have taken a full human nature in order to redeem it. These arguments combine biblical texts, the practice of worship and a view of what salvation requires.

Notice how the stages overlap. The argument is partly biblical, partly historical, partly systematic (it links Christology to salvation) and partly philosophical (it relies on a claim about what can be united with God).

Step 4: Read the definition and its limits

Nicaea in 325 said that the Son is of one substance with the Father. Constantinople in 381 confirmed it and addressed the Spirit. The Council of Ephesus in 431 affirmed that Mary may be called Theotokos, God-bearer, to safeguard the unity of Christ’s person. Chalcedon in 451 taught one person in two natures, without confusion, change, division or separation.

Note what these definitions do and do not do. They exclude certain accounts. They do not explain how the union works. Many theologians since have proposed models, and the churches have not agreed on a single one.

Step 5: Ask what remains uncertain

Having traced the doctrine, list what is firm and what is open. Firm for the major traditions: Christ is truly God and truly man, one person. Open: how the two natures relate in thought and will, whether the Son’s knowledge was limited during his earthly life, and how to translate ancient terms into modern ones. Churches that did not accept Chalcedon also hold to the full divinity and humanity of Christ, but have understood the wording differently.

  1. Which biblical texts support the doctrine, and which seem to complicate it?
  2. What question arose that the biblical texts did not directly answer?
  3. What positions were proposed and rejected, and what did each lose?
  4. What did the definition exclude, and what did it leave open?
  5. How would I explain the doctrine to someone with no theological background?
  6. What do I hold firmly after tracing it, and what do I hold more loosely?

Examples

John 1 and the opening of the argument

The Gospel says the Word was God and became flesh (John 1:1, 14). Arius and his opponents all read this chapter. They differed on what it means that the Word was with God and was God. The text started the argument and did not end it.

A hymn in Philippians

Philippians 2:5-11 describes Christ Jesus, who was in the form of God, taking the form of a servant. Many scholars think Paul is quoting an earlier hymn, which would show very early worship of Christ. How to translate the Greek of verse 6 is debated, and the debate shows how translation choices matter.

A different doctrine: justification

To trace justification, gather the texts in Romans, Galatians and James. Ask which question arose in the sixteenth century. Read Luther and the decrees of Trent. The result is a more divided picture, where the traditions still disagree. The method is the same, but the outcome differs.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching holds the definitions of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon as binding. The Catechism presents the doctrine of the incarnation as the center of Christian faith and explains it in the language of these councils. Aquinas gave a detailed philosophical account of the union.

Orthodox

Orthodox Christians hold the same councils and the later councils through the seventh, including the defense of icons as an implication of the incarnation. The Orthodox emphasis falls on salvation as sharing in the life of God, which depends on the real union of God and man in Christ.

Protestant

The Reformation churches accepted the early Christological definitions and wrote them into their confessions, for example the Westminster Confession and the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. Lutherans and Reformed Christians have disagreed about how the human and divine natures relate, especially in the Lord’s Supper.

Non-Chalcedonian churches

The Oriental Orthodox churches (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and others) did not accept Chalcedon but confess that Christ is fully God and fully man. They prefer the language of one united nature of the incarnate Word. Recent agreements with other churches say the difference is largely one of terms.

Jewish and secular views

Jewish tradition holds that God is one and cannot become a man, and so rejects the incarnation. Secular historians ask when Christians first held that Jesus was divine and tend to see a development over the first century or two, while some argue that very high claims about Christ appear in the earliest texts. This is an active scholarly debate.

Why it matters

A tracing exercise protects against two opposite mistakes: accepting a doctrine only because it is old, and rejecting it only because its language is unfamiliar. By working through texts, arguments and definitions in order, a student can say what is claimed, why, and how confident it is reasonable to be. The same method will be used on the three tensions studied later in the course.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The divinity of Christ was invented at Nicaea.

Correction: Worship of Christ and claims about his divine status appear in the New Testament and the earliest Christian writings. Nicaea responded to a dispute about how to state it. Historians still debate how early and how explicit the belief was.

Misunderstanding: The councils explained how God became man.

Correction: They ruled out certain explanations and affirmed the union. They did not give a mechanism, and the mystery was said to remain.

Misunderstanding: Tracing a doctrine means finding one verse that proves it.

Correction: A doctrine is usually supported by a cluster of texts, read in context and in light of the whole story. A single proof text tends to be weak.

Misunderstanding: All Christians who reject Chalcedon reject the divinity of Christ.

Correction: The Oriental Orthodox churches do not accept Chalcedon but confess the full divinity and humanity of Christ. The disagreement is about terms and about the way Chalcedon was understood.

Knowledge check

What are the stages of the tracing method?

First gather the biblical evidence, including texts that complicate the doctrine. Second, find the question that arose and the positions proposed. Third, read the arguments used by the main participants. Fourth, read the definition and notice what it excludes and leaves open. A fifth step lists what is firm and what remains uncertain.

What did Chalcedon teach about Christ?

Chalcedon in 451 taught that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, which exist without confusion, change, division or separation. The council ruled out views that mixed the natures together and views that split Christ into two persons. It did not explain exactly how the union works.

Why did Athanasius argue from salvation?

He held that only God can bring human beings into union with God, so the Son who saves must be fully divine. This is a theological argument that links Christology to the doctrine of salvation, and it shows how systematic reasoning supports the reading of Scripture.

Why can two churches reject the same council and still agree on the divinity of Christ?

Because disagreement can concern the meaning of the terms used. The Oriental Orthodox churches did not accept Chalcedon’s language of two natures, yet confess that Christ is fully God and fully man. Recent dialogue has concluded that the difference is largely about wording and its history.

What should a student list at the end of tracing a doctrine?

What is firmly held across the major traditions, what is open or debated, and what the student holds with high or low confidence and why. This separates doctrine from speculation and keeps the student honest about the limits of the evidence.

Think it through

  1. Which doctrine would you most like to trace, and why?
  2. What biblical texts about Christ do you find hardest to fit together?
  3. Does knowing the dispute behind a definition make the definition more or less persuasive to you?
  4. What would it mean to hold a doctrine firmly yet be willing to explain it differently?

Independent assignment

Trace a doctrine

In your own notebook, write 500 to 700 words tracing one doctrine of your choice (the Trinity, the incarnation, the work of Christ or another). Use the four stages: biblical evidence (at least three passages, including one that complicates the doctrine), the question that arose, the arguments of at least one early writer, and the definition. End with a short list of what is firm and what is open. This tracing will serve as one section of your final synthesis.

Further study