One Person, Two Natures
Things Unseen with Sinclair B. Ferguson
Ligonier Ministries
4.9 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
We must not think of Christ's incarnation as a mixture: partially of God and partially of man. Nor should we imagine that He is two persons. Today, Sinclair Ferguson reminds us why getting our Christology right is so important.
Read the transcript: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts/things-unseen-with-sinclair-ferguson/one-person-two-natures
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We've been thinking this week about a great credo statement that was produced by a church |
| 0:13.7 | council held in 451 AD at Calcadon in Bethinia, now part of modern Turkey. Calcadon helps |
| 0:24.0 | us to think clearly about the person and natures of the Lord Jesus. I quoted it the other |
| 0:29.5 | day and I know it's a massive study on its own but we've picked out one or two things that |
| 0:36.5 | help us to clarify our thinking. We thought about Jesus in relationship to his true deity and |
| 0:44.1 | his true humanity and I want to close the week by thinking about this statement Calcadon makes. |
| 0:52.4 | It says that Jesus Christ the God-man is, quote, acknowledged in two natures |
| 0:59.4 | unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably. The difference of the natures being |
| 1:09.6 | in no way removed because of the union but rather the properties of each nature being preserved |
| 1:17.6 | and both concurring into one person, one hypothesis, not as though he was parted or divided |
| 1:24.8 | into two persons but one in the self-same son and only begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ. |
| 1:34.4 | Now again I know that's a mouthful but these ancient theologians had a couple of errors in mind here. |
| 1:41.4 | One is called Utichianism, named after Utichese who taught in Constantinople in the first half of |
| 1:49.3 | the 5th century. Utichese held that Christ was of two natures but not in two natures. |
| 1:59.1 | That views sometimes called the monophysite heresy. It held that in the incarnation the divine |
| 2:06.3 | nature and the human nature were combined in the Lord Jesus. In other words, he had a kind of |
| 2:13.6 | new nature, a third kind of nature, a God-man nature without a hyphen. But the Calcadonian |
| 2:22.0 | theologians were also reacting against another deviant view associated with the name of Nistoreus |
| 2:28.5 | who was briefly the patriarch of Constantinople. I should have been questions about exactly what |
| 2:36.0 | Nistoreus taught but the view named after him held that in Jesus we have not only two natures |
| 2:44.0 | human and divine but also a human and a divine person. So he objected to calling Mary |
| 2:53.2 | Theotokos the God-bearer instead wanted to call her Christotokos the Christ-bearer as though |
... |
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