Christological Dogma:Not Merely "About Him" But "Him and I"

Too often I hear Christian leaders tell me that "doctrine" or "dogma" is irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people, and that we are better off getting busy about feeding hungry mouths or sheltering homeless people, as if a dichotomy can be made between "things about Christ" and "Christ about things."  Certainly you've heard these charges:  "The message was exchanged for the Messenger"; "Dogma is an overcomplication of the simple Gospel"; "'Consubstantial' in the Creed has no practical meaning ."

In my early days, I as given the following description of "Roman" theology versus "Byzantine" theology:  Whereas Roman theologians would like to, say, measure the dimensions of a swimming pool, test the water's temperature, seek to discover the properties of fluid dynamics, and maybe, maybe wade in, Byzantine theologians like to dive-bomb right into the pool's deep end!

It is true that Roman theologians like to partition, compartmentalise, label, and store magisterial teachings in warehouses, but this is really only since the Baroque period.  And, of course, St Thomas Aquinas was aware of something like this, hence his complaint about the Scholastics of his day "multiplying useless questions."  It was not unusual, especially after the Twelfth Century Renaissance, for students to travel, amass knowledge, and make sure everyone knew about it.  Today we call them first-year seminarians.

Let's take, for our example, the doctrine of Christ's two wills.  The Sixth Ecumenical Council solemnly taught that there are in Christ

according to the teaching of the Holy Fathers, two natural volitions or wills and two natural actions, without division, without change, without separation, without confusion.  The two natural wills are not--by any means--opposed to each other as the impious heretics assert; but His human will is compliant; it does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will (DH 556).

Will is a property of nature, not of persons; since Christ is consubstantial (of the same substance of) with the Father, He has a divine nature, and since Christ is also consubstantial with the human race, He has also a human will.

The idea is easy enough, until one realises that Christ, as the God-Man, is one Subject, one Person, and not two.  The dogma is essentially teaching that the single Christ has two wills:  What He does as God, and what He does as man.

Far from being intellectualist hair-splitting, it is, in fact, salvific and existential:  It says something about Christ as Saviour and about you and me as the saved.

St Gregory the Theologian often said that "What was not assumed was not healed."  This is why Nestorius' proposal that Christ was two subjects morally united with each other could not be our Saviour, because it would mean that being Christian is about moralizing.  Nor could Eutyches' proposal that Christ's divinity absorbed or fused His humanity with His divinity, because then Christ would not have saved the human race but some hybrid race (that doesn't exist).  By teaching that Christ was two natures (divine, human) in the one Person of the Eternal Word means that the Incarnation effected a conjoining of two infinitely distanced natures--divinity and humanity--and not only distanced on account of their different natures, but also two alienated natures on account of God's utter holiness and human sin.  By brining together divinity and humanity into the one Person of the Eternal Word, this division and alienation was overcome and, at the same time, preserved the uniqueness of the divine nature and of the human nature.

Thus the 'sentimentality' of Christmas becomes, in hindsight, a cheapening of the Incarnation.

What about Christ's two wills?

Sin is nothing other than a misuse of freedom; God made us for excellence (and not "for whatever we like" as Occam later taught).  Christ as God took upon Himself human nature from the Virgin and, consequently, a concomitant human will.  As the dogmatic definition above stated, the two wills were "not...opposed to each other."  Christ humanly willed what His divinity also willed, thus overcoming Adam and Eve's initial rebellion that cause humanity's downfall.  Christ's obedience undid Adam's rebellion.  He did this "for me" and "for you."

But the "for" comes into play only when we are "in Christ" (Rom 3:24, 6:11; 1 Cor 1:30, 15:22; Eph 2:6, 13, &c) by way of incorporation into His Body, the Church.  By His human will, He overcame sin, and gifts us with a share in this overcoming, thus effecting in us salvation.

But it doesn't end there.  "[H]e who says he abides in Him [= Christ] ought to walk in the same way in which He walked" (1 Jn 2:).  Whereas Christ's human nature was united to the divine nature in the Subject of the Word--we call this the "Hypostatic Union"--you and I are united to the divine nature by sanctifying grace.  And, because of grace, we too are able to conform our individual human wills to God's will.  This is what we mean in the Lord's Prayer:  "Thy will be done."

Only then, when it is "Christ in me" feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless can we be Christians, rather than a mere mimicking of Him.

I hope you can see clearly that Christological dogma, far from being the nitpicking of theologians (though we do that, too, especially over a good ale or two, and only fun with at least one Thomist in the mix) is really the articulation of being "in Christ."  All the doctrines about Christ are not simply about Christ-as-Christ, but also about Christ-for-us and, ultimately, Christ-in-me.  These dogmas, therefore, are not only ontological--about the being of Christ--but especially existential, about "my existence" (this is piety) and "your existence" (this is mission)--because it speaks about what Christ did for us way back when and what He is doing in us here right now.