Introduction:             There is a tremendous concentration in the Bible on one man, Jesus of Nazareth.  If there had been no such concentration, or if the texts had been uniform in the nature of their descriptions, there might perhaps have been no need for Christology, for critical enquiry into the significance of Jesus Christ for Christian faith.  But there is this concentration, and the terms in which the subject is expressed are extremely varied.  As such, debates on the person Jesus took place every now and then.  Here we will attempt to study how the man Jesus was understood and portrayed by the NT writers and then the Christological debates leading up to Council of Chalcedon.

1          NT understanding and portrayal:    The man Jesus and the Christ of faith are understood and portrayed in the NT in a large number of different ways:

            (a)        Story of Jesus’ life in Synoptic Gospels:      The center of the Synoptic Gospels is the story of the man Jesus’ life.  There were the shepherds in the fields with their flocks.  They were afraid, but the angel said, “Do not be afraid.  Today in the city of David a deliver has been born to you, the Messiah, the Lord” (Lk.2:10).  An age-old expectation of Israel has been fulfilled.  For the Pauline community the child of Bethlehem has become the Lord (2 Cor.4:5f).  The Johannine Christ is himself the incarnate Word.  “So the Word became flesh; he came to dwell among us and we saw his glory, such glory as befits the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth (Jn.1:14).

            What think ye of Christ?  This man Jesus and the Christ of faith are understood and portrayed in the NT in different ways.  Throughout the history of the church hundreds of answers have been given to this central question: What think ye of Christ?  Christology, the doctrine of Christ, is enquiry into the significance of Jesus for Christian faith.

            (b)       Jesus as a witness to God:     Here Jesus is portrayed as a witness to God.  He speaks with authority, as the OT prophets had spoken and this authority is more than that of a prophet (Mt.5:21).  He proclaims the breaking in of God’s kingdom, which has come in his presence.  He calls for repentance, and God’s forgiveness is granted to those who will follow him.  He speaks strikingly of God as his Father.  His friends and followers were to go further, calling him the Messiah, the Lord.  But his life has never been the sole ground for belief in him, because the disaster of his execution put all that he was into question.  Whatever may have happened after his death and resurrection, this was part of the ground for belief in Jesus in the apostolic community.  We are invited to believe not in the dead Jesus but in the living Christ.

            St. Paul can speak of seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor.4:6).  This man Jesus as recorded in the Gospel says, “When a man believes in me, he believes in him who sent me rather than me; seeing me he sees him who sent me,” (Jn.6:29; 17:8).  This belief in God is directed towards the man Jesus.  The man is not the same as God: he speaks of his Father in heaven.  He is not good, but only his Father is perfectly good.  He is and remains a man, and still participates in the life, thought and action of his Father.

            This unique relationship of Jesus to God was expressed by various NT communities in a number of titles of honour-the Messiah, the Lord, the Word of God, the Son of God.  As Messiah Jesus completes and fulfills the expectations of Israel, yet in completing transforms them.  As the Johannine Word of God Jesus is not only the Messenger but is himself the source of true life.  The most striking claim of all is that Jesus is God’s only Son (Jn.3:16f).  God has come into humanity in the person of the Son.  But how can Jesus be a man and at the same time the only Son of God?  We are led into the central problem of Christology.

2          Christological debates leading up to Council of Chalcedon:        Who was this Jesus Christ, the subject of the church’s confession?  Was he human or divine or both, partly the one and partly the other?  In the early Christian literature Christ stands out as both human and divine, the Son of Man, but also the Son of God.  His sinless character is maintained, and he is regarded as a proper object of worship.  Naturally, the problem presented by Christ, as at once God and man, and the difficulties involved in such a conception, were not fully felt by the early Christian mind and only dawned on it in the light of controversy.  From the earliest time to the present there have been those who have seen Christ as a divine being walking the earth in human disguise.  The NT shows that to the Jews the doctrine of a crucified Messiah was a scandal and that to the Greeks the idea of a divine sufferer was folly.  Hence arose the first two heresies.  First, the Ebionites felt constrained, in the interest of monotheism, to deny the deity of Christ.  They regarded Jesus as a mere man, the son of Joseph and Mary, who was qualified at his baptism to be the Messiah, by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon him but left him at the Crucifixion..  Jesus’ humanity was not in question, but his divinity was played down by the Ebionites.  Second, there were the Docetists who taught that if Christ was divine his sufferings were untreal.  They suggested that Christ was not a true man but a phantom in human uniform in which the Son of God made himself visible for a while.  They refused to believe that God could ever soil himself by taking human flesh and blood upon himself.  They taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body.  They insisted that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who had nothing but the appearance of having a body.  The simplest form of Docetism is the complete denial that Jesus ever had a physical body.  However, the believers of the early church were not prepared to compromise the true divinity of Christ nor to tolerate any refusal to take seriously the reality of Christ’s manhood.  They held on to the belief in One who was divine and did suffer.  He who came down from heaven lived a full human life and was one person.  By holding to the Gospel facts the believers were able to make the faith, which at first seemed nonsense to many, both reasonable and intelligible.

            Logos Christology:     One important answer to the central question, who was this Jesus Christ, had roots in the Palestinian background.  Jesus was God’s messenger, his word, his Logos.  The word became flesh and dwelt among us.  But the Logos was also the all-pervasive rational principle of the universe in Stoic philosophy.  So Justin Martyr, when accused of blasphemy for worshipping not God but the man Jesus, could say in the middle of the second century that Jesus Christ was not merely a man, but the eternal and universal Logos of God from which all order and rationality were derived. His birth and conception were unique. He had indeed a body, soul and spirit, yet it was right to call him lord and to worship him, for this man was the Logos of God.  Here was Logos Christology.

            Still, within the conceptual framework the Logos was secondary, in some ways inferior to God.  Faith and worship seemed to involve that God was in Christ in such a way that there was no inequality.  The problem was how to express this state of affairs, which arose in the realm of worship and commitment, in a conceptual framework.  All kinds of variations on Logos Christology arose.  Paul of Samosata thought that the man Jesus united with the divine Logos by willing the same things-one in will with God.  He regarded Jesus as a man like every other man, born of Mary, and the Logos as the impersonal divine reason, which took up its abode in Christ in a pre-eminent sense, from the time of his baptism, and thus qualified him for his great task But his opponents argued that the very essence, and not just the will, of the Logos is incarnate.  But where in a human being do you locate essence?  How could you combine the essence of the nature of God, who did not change, with the nature of a man, who was crucified, dead and buried?  There was one important approach, commonly known as Arius’ approach (Arianism), to this question which will be seen below.

            Arius’ approach(Arianism):  Arius (c.250-336) was a Libyan Christian priest at Alexandria.  His theological teachings came to be known as Arianism where he affirmed the finite nature of Christ and was denounced by the early church as a major heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.  According to his approach, Christ was the incarnate Logos: Christ was subject to change.  Therefore, the Logos was subject to change.  He said, “there was (a time) when he (Christ) was  not.”  But, granting that God the creator was impassible, that he did not change, the Logos could not be identified with God.  The Logos suffered in Jesus, while God remained unchanged.  The fundamental premise of his system is the affirmation of the absolute uniqueness and transcendence of God, the unoriginate source of all reality.  Since God is unique, indivisible and transcendent, the being or essence of the Godhead cannot be shared or communicated.  For God to impart his substance to other being would imply that he is divisible and subject to change, which is inconceivable.  Arius appealed to Scripture (Jn.14:28; Col.1:15) and insisted that the Father’s divinity was greater than the Son’s, and that the Son was under God the Father, and not co-equal or co-eternal with God the Father.  He concluded this relation with the following things:  (a) the Son of the Word of God must be a creature; (b) as a creature the Son or the Word must have had a beginning; (c) the Son have no communion with, and indeed no direct knowledge of his Father; (d) the Son must be liable to change and even sin.

            The net result of this teaching was to reduce the Word to a demigod; even if infinitely transcendent all other creatures, he himself was no more than a creation in relation to God, the Father.  Arius tried to secure the divinity of Jesus in regards to other created human beings.  At the same time, this position did not make Jesus equal to the Father.  In a sense, Jesus was in the middle.  The controversy came to be expressed by two Greek words: homoousios, the Son is of the same essence as the Father, and homoiousios, the Son is of similar essence as the Father.  In order to settle this controversy the Council was called at Nicaea in 325 AD.

            Council of Nicaea (c.325 AD):           Emperor Constantine summoned the Council at Nicaeca in 325 AD.  About 250 bishops attended the Council which denounced and condemned Arius and his followers and the official Creed was formulated.  It reads: “We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made.”  The Council of Nicaea insisted that the Logos or Son was of one essence (homoousios) with the Father.  The great issue settled by the Nicene Creed is that only a savior fully divine is adequate for the salvation of the world.  Any idea of Christ as a semi-God is rejected.  Over against Arius’ reluctance to think of ultimate Godhead having contact with the world, the church insisted, on the basis of the Gospel facts, that the work of Christ in the world is that of the one true God; that he who reveals himself in creation and redemption is God himself and none others.  However, all problems were not solved by the Council.  Without solving the problem, Nicaea made it clear that Christ was in no sense a part of creation, subordinate to God, but that he was equal with God, of one substance with the Father.  In the next century (4th-5th cent.) another Christological controversy cropped up as we shall see below.

            Relation of divine and human in Jesus:       The fourth and the fifth centuries were concerned with understanding of the relation of the divine and human in Jesus.  Apollinarius of Laodicea (c.310-390 AD), following another error of Arius, denied the full humanity of Christ.  He taught that the manhood of Jesus consisted only of the body and animal life and that the Word took the place in him, of a human soul.  Apollinarius was condemned for his false teaching at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.  Later, Eutyches (378-454 AD), a  pro-Alexandrian, also denied real manhood to Christ by holding that at the incarnation the human nature was changed into the divine.  On the other hand, Nestorius, who became a bishop of Constantinople in 428 AD, exaggerated the separateness of two natures, making Jesus two persons, divine and human (dualism in Christ’s person), united only in will.

            The above two arguments represent two ways of looking at Jesus’ characteristic of the rival schools of Alexandria and Antioch.  The former regarded Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, the latter as the man in whom God dwelt.  The one stressed the divinity and unity but obscured the humanity.  The other stressed the humanity but by emphasizing the two natures tended either to destroy the unity of his person or to maintain it by seeing him as a man inspired by God.  This is the controversy which crippled the church’s life.  The Council was called at Chalcedon in 451 AD in order to settle this Christological controversy.

            Council of Chalcedon (451 AD):          In order to resolve the Christological controversies between Alexandrians and Antochenes a council was called at Chalcedon in 451 AD.  Some 500 bishops attended this council.  Christian teaching was summed up at this Council of Chalcedon in what is perhaps the nearest human language can reach in saying who Christ is.  After the struggle against theories that Christ was only a created being (Arius); or that the divine shared in an imperfect human nature (Apollinarius); or that Christ had two separate natures (Nestorius); or that the divine nature absorbed the human (Eutyches), the faith was thus expressed, which said among other things:  “We confess one and the same Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a rational soul and body, acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the two natures being by no means taken away because of the union but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved and combining in one person or entity.”

            The church fathers thought that by formulating a creed they could find a solution to the paradox of the divine and human in the person of Christ.  However, they tried, but could not solve the problem and reach the permanent settlement.  But the Council was able to combat some major heresies like Nestorianism and Eutychianism.  Therefore, the Council of Chalcedon is an important milestone in the church’s progress towards a deeper understanding of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion:    In his article on Christology, George Hendry, concluded that “Christological thought is fluid at the present time, and no one can predict what course it will take in the future.”  With this we may safely agree.  Not all, however, is complete confusion.  Let us imagine an account along these lines.  The parables of Jesus, his life and his teaching are the examples for Christians of self-giving love.  Kenosis is incarnation and service is the way of the cross (Phil.2:7).  Through the suffering humanity of Jesus Christ in humiliation comes resurrection.  God is compassionate and creates compassion in us.  Jesus Christ is God for us, answering God’s self-emptying in his own life of sacrificial love, a love eschatologically effective through resurrection.  Such an account says more than a little about Jesus, about God and man, and the way of discipleship in the world today and most Christians would agree on it.  The task of constantly improving construction and design in detail is left to the professional skill of theologians to work out in creative tension and discussion.