Welcome again to Things Unseen. This week on our podcast we've been trying to reflect

on things that help us to think in a deeper and more prolonged way about the Lord Jesus.

Yesterday we began to reflect on this, that Jesus is one person, the Son of God, and

after the incarnation, and wonderfully still now, he has two natures, divine and human.

And I was hinting that it took serious Christians about four centuries to work out how we can

express this in a way that would help us think rightly about Christ on the one hand, and

at the same time protect us against muddleheadedness or error or even heresy. And the result

of these years of hard thinking was a credo statement produced in 451 A.D. at the Council

of Calcedon, often called the Calcedonian Definition. And I quoted it at length yesterday.

Hope you weren't doing anything complicated when you were listening like driving your car,

because it was more, I suspect, than any of us could take in very theologically,

crystallologically dense. But what I wanted to impress on us by reading it was that it's very

carefully guarded, and it's also very carefully thought through in order to help us think clearly

and deeply about Christ. You know, Christians can be a bit impatient with that kind of detailed

thinking, can't we? But if we were musicians, we'd not be impatient with those funny squiggles

that Beethoven made on pieces of paper. We wouldn't say, oh, it's all just far too complex and

dense if, for example, we were listening to the Moonlight Sonata or maybe his sixth symphony.

Now should we think about these dense words of these great theological statements as too

complicated? What they are doing is giving us a beautiful detailed description of our Lord and

save your Jesus Christ, and if we're impatient, the fault is probably with ourselves.

But I want to focus on just one or two details. You see, these theologians weren't just being

theoretical. They were concerned about our muddle-headedness, about ways of thinking about Jesus

...