We've been thinking this week about a great credo statement that was produced by a church council held in 451 AD at Calcedon in Bithynia, now part of modern Turkey. Calcedon helps us to think clearly about the person

and natures of the Lord Jesus. I quoted it the other day, and I know it's a massive study on

its own, but we've picked out one or two things that help us to clarify our thinking.

We thought about Jesus in relationship to his true deity and his true humanity.

And I want to close the week by thinking about this statement Calcedon makes.

It says that Jesus Christ, the God man, is, quote, acknowledged in two

natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably. The difference of the natures being in

no way removed because of the union, but rather the properties

of each nature being preserved and both concurring into one person, one hypothesis, not as

though he was parted or divided into two persons, but one in the self-same son and only begotten God,

Word, Lord, Jesus Christ.

Now again, I know that's a mouthful, but these ancient theologians had a couple of errors

in mind here. One is called Utichianism, named after Utiches, who taught in Constantinople

in the first half of the fifth century. Utiches held that Christ was of two natures, but not in two

natures. That view is sometimes called the monophysite heresy. It held that in the

incarnation, the divine nature and the human nature were combined in the Lord Jesus. In other words,

he had a kind of new nature, a third kind of nature, a god-man nature, without a hyphen.

But the Calcedonian theologians were also reacting against another deviant view associated

with the name of Nestorius, who was briefly the patriarch of Constantinople.

Actually there have been questions about exactly what Nestorius taught, but the view named after

him held that in Jesus we've not only two natures human and divine, but also a human and a divine

person.

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