Jesus Christ, true God and true man

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Jesus of Nazareth is one Person with two natures. He is fully God - not a demigod, not God's greatest creature - and fully man - not God wearing a human costume, not a man specially inspired. Both, completely, without mixture and without division, forever.

This was defined at Chalcedon in 451 after two centuries of argument, and every word of the definition is fencing off a specific error. The Church learned the doctrine by watching what broke when someone dropped half of it.

Drop the divinity and the cross saves nobody: a good man dying is a tragedy, not a redemption. Drop the humanity and He has not touched us where we actually are: what is not assumed is not healed. Mix the two into a third thing and He is neither God nor man but a hybrid, and again nothing is bridged.

The incarnation is not God appearing in human form. It is God becoming, taking to Himself a real human nature with a human body, a human mind, a human will, and a human death - permanently. He did not put humanity down after the resurrection. There is a man at the right hand of the Father.

The virgin birth belongs here rather than to sentiment. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary: the new beginning of the human race does not come from the old stock's initiative. Something genuinely new starts, and it starts with God's act and a woman's yes.

Mary is therefore rightly called Theotokos, God-bearer - a title defined at Ephesus in 431 that is a statement about her Son before it is a statement about her. Whoever she bore was, from conception, God.

The question that would not go away

For the first four centuries the Church argued about Jesus more than about anything else. Not because she was uncertain whom she worshipped, but because saying it precisely turned out to be extraordinarily difficult.

The data were fixed and stubborn. He is hungry, tired, grieved; He weeps at a grave and sweats in a garden; He dies. He also forgives sins, commands storms, accepts worship, claims to have existed before Abraham, and rises. Any account that quietly drops half the evidence is easier to state and is not about the Jesus of the Gospels.

Every major heresy is a simplification. It is worth learning them not as trivia but as the four ways people still get this wrong, usually without knowing the names.

Chalcedon, in plain words

In 451 the Council of Chalcedon issued the definition the four traditions still hold. Stripped of its formality, it says:

One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The difference of the natures is in no way removed by their union; rather, the characteristics of each nature are preserved, and both come together in one Person, one hypostasis.

Four negatives, each aimed at a specific opponent:

• Without confusion and without change - the natures are not blended, and the divine is not converted into the human (against monophysitism).
• Without division and without separation - He is not two people cooperating (against Nestorianism).

And the key distinction is the same one used for the Trinity, running the other way. In the Trinity: one nature, three Persons. In Christ: one Person, two natures. Nature answers what, and there are two. Person answers who, and there is one.

This is why the Church can say that God was born, and that God died. Not that divinity as such came into existence or ceased - that would be nonsense - but that the one who was born and died is a divine Person, who did those things in His human nature. The technical name is the communication of properties: what is true of either nature can be said of the one Person, because there is only one Person to speak of.

The virgin birth

Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. Both creeds state it, and it is not decoration.

It marks a new beginning. The genealogies of Israel run father to son down the generations, and at the last step the chain breaks: Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus. The new humanity does not arise from the old stock by natural continuation. God begins something.

It safeguards the person. Not a man whom God later adopted, but God the Son taking human nature from the moment of conception. There was never a merely human Jesus who was subsequently promoted.

It shows the shape of grace. Mary's part is not achievement but consent: be it unto me according to thy word. That is the posture of every soul towards God, and the Fathers make much of the contrast with Eve - a woman's no at the beginning, a woman's yes at the turning.

And a caution about what it is not. It is not a claim that sex is unclean or that conception transmits sin by the act. Nor is it a borrowing from pagan myth: the pagan stories involve a god in more or less physical union with a woman producing a demigod. Luke has no union, no demigod, and a Jewish girl whose first reaction is bafflement.

Where the four traditions stand

All four accept Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon. The differences concern Mary and the way the two natures interact.