Speaker 1: Was linktern a little bit in the title. For whatever reason,
YouTube doesn't like it when you try to add people
in live stream titles, so I'll add it after the
show's complete. We did have I think a great response
twenty two thousand for our initial four hour talk, largely
from Kai, and of course we had a lot of
good input from David as well, and I think I
added some stuff too. We're going to continue with still
part one. We don't think we're going to completely finish
part one tonight, so remember this will be an ongoing series.
I'll try to eventually put it into a playlist. It'll
be its own kind of again, sort of college course
on the topic. Now, we haven't really gotten into the
specifics of everything yet. We really only touched on some
of the introductory issues with the Syrian Church of the
East and the Storian positions last time. So please be
patient and don't expect that every question must immediately be
dealt with on tonight's stream or the next stream or whatever.
I guarante to you every question that you have because
of the exhaustive thoroughness of this lecture series. Whatever your
questions are, they will eventually come up. So please be patient.
Also to the Orientals so called mods. If they spam
the chat like they did last time, in act ridiculous
as they are wonted to do, please just immediately boot them.
We are looking for honest, extensive discussions on these topics.
We're not trying to play the gotcha game where you
clip something that's thirty seconds. That's what all the low
tier Muslims, the low tier Roman Catholics, the load tier
Orientals do is look for low tier thirty second clips.
That's not what we do. We do the extensive, thorough
college course model here. And so Kai is going to
pick back up where we left off last time. And Kai,
if there's anything else you want to say before you
kick us off, or David as well, feel free to interject.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I just want to say thanks a lot, Jay. I'm
really looking forward to continuing this series. And just to reiterate,
this is the second installment of part one. We're probably
going to be doing three streams, maybe four streams on
part one, depends on how long it takes us to
go through all of the slides. One thing that I
would say is I think I'm going to expand the
series for what I had planned to do. Last time
we discussed some stuff on ecumenism. I did a community
post asking for a vote if you guys would like
to see something of that, and I think there is
definitely some interest there. So I think at some point,
I don't know where in the series I want to
put it in, but we'll have a topic dedicated specifically
to ecumenism and to discuss this whole notion that is
starting to kind of make some grounds of so called
Apostolic Christianity, as if to imply that the Oriental Churches,
the Assyrian Church of the East, the Roman Catholics, as
if these are Appostolic churches. So we vehemently deny any
Apostolicity to them. It's not just about tracing a particular
lineage to the Apostles that makes you apostolic. And I
think this is a very dangerous push by certain people
in the online sphere that are trying to make it
as if all of these churches have some kind of
validity to them. It's very important to emphasize as Orthodox
that the Orthodox Church, or if you want to call
it the Eastern Orthodox Church, we just refer to it
as the Orthodox Church really is the only church that
you can belong to to say that you are in
the body of Christ, that it is really the only
church where you will find valid sacraments, and outside of
that you cannot be guaranteed salvation. So that's just one
point there that I wanted to bring up, and I
may have Father Michael join us for that. He's a
very big proponent to speak against ecumenism. He's very knowledgeable
in the top topic. So I look forward in doing
that stream.
Speaker 1: Apart from that, Kai, they're saying that your voice is
a little too low. Could you jack back up what
you turned down?
Speaker 3: So I just increase my gain.
Speaker 1: That's fine right there, That should be good right there, okay, perfect.
Also the yeah, the point there, I think is that
we see a lot of people talking about this idea
of just generic so called apostolic Christianity, as if episodic
succession is some sort of mechanistic transmission that doesn't necessarily
correlate to the faith that one holds. One of the
big differences there is that Orthodox theology believes that not
only is a succession necessary for the church, but also
the Orthodox faith is necessary, and so both things are needed,
and there's no such thing as a kind of a
Roman Catholic mechanistic model where everybody has the Orthodox faith
just by virtue of being ordained in some line of people. No,
you can have succession and depart from the faith, and
so then you are no longer in the succession because
you're not teaching the faith of the apostles. It's that simple.
And also I would add that on that topic of
a humanism, Tim Honeycutt has posted a audio version of
a publication from the Athos Monastery of Grigoriu and it
has a statement which is the orthodox, fully orthodox statement
on what Christology is. I'll put that in the links
there as well if you want another sort of just
a backup topic discussion from you know, prominent I guess
monastics on Athos making all the points you hear us
make today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, data, was there anything you wanted to chime in on?
Speaker 2: Nothing really, I guess specific. It's kind of just so
far as presentation is pretty much at all those long introduction,
it is I think a necessary introduction to kind of
get Georgsodox point of view across in a very clear way.
Speaker 4: Of course, there's still going to be people that are
not going to get it.
Speaker 2: But it's important to point out where the developments and
I've speaken about not in terms of developments of douction,
but where the developments of the understanding of certain terms
and certain ideas, the chronology of it, and also.
Speaker 4: The conceptual mindset of it.
Speaker 2: And in terms of the talk that Jay was talking
about from Timothy Undcuts channel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely that work is.
Speaker 2: I will say, very important, and you're seeing a lot
of different works coming out in terms of how to
understand an offset issue. And I took to listen to it,
and as Jay said, I mean, it's pretty much a
lot of it is pretty much what I have been
talking about, you know, since twenty twenty on this issue.
So it goes through I mean, it's not just kind
of me kind of coming with these things up. It's
what exists in the literature. And the problem is this
literature has been you know, kept away, and it was
kind of hidden, the kind of obscure to find for
quite some time.
Speaker 4: But it's coming out.
Speaker 2: It's coming out, and people are starting to talk about these,
you know, very important issues. I think once again, ever
since you know, what we saw in the eighties and
nineties with relation to the supposed union conversations, and in
terms of you know, the ecumenism stuff. Again, the idea
that there are these multiple genuine Christian churches and they
somehow have this share in the Holy Spirit, and they
all partake in this generic universal like Platonic idea or
form of generic Christianity. It's it's just completely unacceptable, right,
It's completely it's not part of the experiential theology that
you see that is preserved within the your stock church. Right,
So at start succession, the point is it is to
preserve the meaning of what has been handed down to
the apostles from Christ themselves.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: There aren't multiple different perennial meanings, right there, There's one faith,
one Lord, one Baptism, as Saint Paul says. And this church,
which is the pillar and ground of truth, as Saint
Paul also says.
Speaker 4: Is one, just like Christ is one.
Speaker 2: So when we speaking about, you know, how Christ is one, right,
this extends to the church as well.
Speaker 4: It's not really.
Speaker 2: Honest to say that, you know, Christ is one, but
the Church is meaning. That's it's not really a good outlook,
it's an inconsistent outlook.
Speaker 4: And so this is why all of this is very crucially,
very important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's another form of branch theory. And if you
heard yesterday's stream, I had a pretty heated debate with
an Anglican trying to defend branch theory. So it's really
basically what it is. But anyway, Ky, do you want
to go ahead and start?
Speaker 3: Yeah, just before I start, I want to just make
another preliminary comment. After the first stream, it looks like
the Monophesites, the Orientals, they had a little bit of
a meltdown. They started putting out some kind of like
refutation streams. I mean, we didn't even get through part
one and we have like a nine part, ten part
series where we're going to discuss all of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and here they are.
Speaker 3: They think as if we've played all our cards, if
we have everything laid out. I'm not going to play
their game in terms of getting caught up in all
of the details. Right now, We're going to go through
this series and just do a very guided treatment of
all of these topics. Some of their so called attempts
at refuting us will just naturally play out to demonstrate
that they basically have nothing. But we will circle back
at some point and just demonstrate the the nonsense that
they're that they're putting out. So don't worry. At some
point we will address all the stuff that they're that
they're talking about. We're just gonna do it on our terms. Okay,
we have the upper hand in this, right. We will
take the time and we will do a thorough treatment,
and we will demonstrate the absolute stupidity of the Oriental position,
the Oriental argumentation, and just really drive the point home
that these people are idiots. They don't know metaphysics, they
just quote mine. They have no idea what they are
talking about.
Speaker 1: So that also, and they're just using these discussions to
get attention for their channels. That's basically with it, of course.
Speaker 3: And then they're they're making memes and all this stuff.
I mean, go ahead, make your memes. I don't really
care about that, because that's all you guys can do.
So to launch in So what we talked about before,
we started off looking at triadology and kind of setting
the stage for the orthodox Christological paradigm, and we're contrasting
that with the Orientals and the Nestorians, and now we're
kind of building it up. We ended the last stream
with basically looking at Saint Cyril of Alexandria in his
letter to Empitheodosius, and this was some those were these
are some key statements that he makes where he's not
relying on specific terms to set up the paradigm. He's
telling you in concepts to understand what exactly is being
communicated by him, how to understand Christ. And so this
is very important because we're not building our paradigm based
on certain terms. We're building our paradigm based on ideas,
and then these terms that we use are meant to
reflect these ideas. And now when we continue building up
this paradigm, we're going to look at some of the
key texts that really make it very clear what the
Orthodox position is. And one of these documents it is
Canon five of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the Council in
five point fifty three, and this ties into one of
the early slides from part from the first Stream that
I was saying how the Fifth Ecumenical Council is basically
like a litmus test whether or not you subscribe to
a Nestorian reading of Chalcidon of the Fourth Council or not,
because at issue here is the Church of the East.
The Assyrian Church, whati we call is the Historian Church,
and we rightly call it the Historian Church because it
is a historian. It does teach historianism. Well, what the
Orientals will do is they will say that, okay, you
see these Nestorians. They agree with Chalcedon, and therefore CalCon
is an historian. And so this first dream really kind
of put to bed how stupid that kind of reasoning is.
You can agree on wording but have completely different understandings
of the details of those wordings. And so when we
look at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, it starts making things
a lot more clear how Calcedon should be properly understood
and how you avoid Nestorianism from the Council of Calcedon.
And so in this canon, it's very clear that to
hold the Orthodox position, you cannot in any way subscribe
to this notion that in Christ are many hypostasies. And
this is very important because this idea of having multi
hypostasis in Christ is found in both the Oriental position
and the Nestorian position. The main differentiator between these two
is that the Nestorians maintain that these hypostases are juxtaposed,
they maintain their complete identities, whereas the Orientals allow a
combination of the hypostasis to result in a tertium quid,
a new hypostasis. And so this is something that we reject.
This is something that can in five makes absolutely clear.
You cannot hold to any notion of multiple hypostasies in Christ.
And you must profess that there is only one hypostasis,
one person of Christ. And this hypostasis is what is
in fleshed. It's not that you have some kind of
a hypostasis that takes on accidents of human nature and
somehow conjoins with the divine hypostasis. That hypostasis of Christ
is divine only. And there is no way you can
get around that. If you speak of any other kind
of epostasis in Christ, then you are not Orthodox. Is
there anything either of you want to add to that.
Speaker 1: No, that's a great statement of fact. That and that
vindicates as we've been saying for many years now. The
Fifth Council really demonstrates the error of not just these
online the historian positions, but and an off side positions
meophys out whatever. It also refuses the other people in
the so called Orthodox circles that are confused on this.
Speaker 3: All right, If there's nothing, David, I'm going to move on.
So we take a look here at some more explicit statements.
We'll look at one from Saint Justinian and per Saint Justinian,
I put the entire text up for context, and I
get it. Some of you guys who are watching the
stream on the phone, it's very small font for you,
you can't read it. If you're watch in your browser
and you make the stream full screen, then you will
be able to read the text quite nicely. But I
am thinking at some point in the future I will
make the slides publicly available, so then you guys can
have direct access to that. So I'll just read the
highlighted portions because those are the ones that are more
that are more relevant. So Saint Justinian, he's saying the
hypostatic union means that the divine logos, that is to say,
one hypostasis of the three divine hypostasis is not united
to a man who has his own hypostasis before the union,
but that in the womb of the Holy Virgin, the
Divine Logos made for himself in his own hypostasis flesh
that was taken from her, and that was endowed with
the reasonable and intellectual soul i e. Human nature. So
this is really important because what it's saying here is
this understanding of hypostatic union, or using the term hypostatic union,
is something that we share in common with the Orientals,
but we understand it completely differently. So what Saint Justinian
is saying here is the hypostatus, that the hypostatus, that hypostasis,
that is, Christ is the subject for his infleshment, and
it's in that where the union occurs of the natures
in that one hypostasis. The Orientals understand hypostatic union to
mean that you have two hypostases, one that is particular
to the divine nature, another one that is particular to
the human nature, that combine in such a way to
give you a single hypostasis. Though the properties of the
divine and human do not intermingle, according to them, but
nevertheless you do result in one hypostasis coming together, and
that is where they find quote unquote a union.
Speaker 1: When you say, according to them, they do not intermingle,
you must mean they're the the Storian side, right, because
the other side says they do intermingle.
Speaker 3: Well, they would say that you could. So the Orientals
would say that they the hypostasis come together, but that
you can still distinguish the divine properties and the human properties,
so that there isn't some kind of a new while
like a new divino human property. There is a tertim quid.
But they will say that there is still a distinction
in the properties. Now we our critique is is that
this is an inconsistent position, right, that this does not
make sense. It doesn't follow from the metaphysics. You can't
avoid having a mixture. So I'm just saying this is
the way. They're just trying to play the word games
by saying, well, we're going to combine these hypostasies, but
we don't really actually have a mingling, but we can
only talk about one. It's like you can't have it
both ways. So what you're saying doesn't actually follow from
the metaphysics right that you're professing. It's exactly the same
way how we critique the historians, where they say, well,
no we don't believe in two persons, we believe in
one person. Well, first of all, what do you mean
by one person? But no, you guys want to have
a certain result. But your metaphysics doesn't allow it, and
so you're actually holding to an inconsistent position. Absolutely, okay,
And so now Saint Justinian, he just ends this portion.
He says, for the fact of the matter is that
whenever this father said one nature of the logos incarnate,
so here he's referring to Saint Athanasius, who would use
that phrase one nature of the logos incarnate. He used
the term quote unquote nature in this formula for hypostasis,
meaning that the way we understand one nature of the
logos incarnate, we mean that Christ is a single subject,
that divine hypostasis is the subject for his infleshment. In
the writings in which he makes use of this formula,
he frequently follows it by adding either the terms sun
or logos or only begotten, which are not names that
indicate nature, but the hypostasis or prosopon. So this is
really beautiful that you see in Saint Cyril is Saint
Cyril goes out of his way to supplement what he says. Additionally,
with two, three, four.
Speaker 1: Others Cyril or Justinian.
Speaker 3: No, no, Saint just Onion is making reference to previous sabers.
Saint Cyril and Saint Anthonasius.
Speaker 1: Oh I heard you talking about Athanasius. Where's where's the seril?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I was, I was.
Speaker 2: I also wanted to add, like, in terms of one
nature statement, it's not found in Saint Anthonasius, It's found
in Saint Carol. But there are the press is having
one nature that are a poonym, because the Polonais himself
was actually the first one to say that Christ was
one nature.
Speaker 4: Exactly to ada on Kye's point.
Speaker 2: What he's trying to make, what he's trying to say
here is is that the one nature of the word
incarnate that statement of Saint Carole of Alexander the way
he understand it. First of all, he qualifies it with
it being in fleshed, and he even goes as far
as to say, if you didn't make this qualification, then yes,
we will be saying something heretical. So he actually implies
that you know, just like any formula, that there needs
to be qualifications. And the point that Saint Justin is
making we know that the term one nature here does
not refer to nature in the sense that we use
it as you know, essence or substance. It means you know,
a person because the terms sun logos only begots in.
These are names. These are terms that refer to the hypostasis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the first to the person.
Speaker 2: It does not refer to natural properties. Right, we don't
refer to the divine nature as sun.
Speaker 4: Father.
Speaker 2: The Father is not a sun, right, the Father is
not the only begotten for example, Right, Yeah, these names
are proper to the person, the word of God himself.
Speaker 1: What alone, Right, what Kai was probably referring to was
the at the time of Nicea, and if you read
the Nicene Creed, this is why hypostasis refers to nature.
They'll say that, you know, there's one there's one nature
in the godhead, one hypostasis. That's just because the word
is referring to at that time, a particular nature. And
it's after the capp of Dosans that the word takes
on a more precise meaning. But Cyril at times, as
David is saying, might use that term for just a
particular nature. However, in the case that we're looking at,
that particular is nature is particularized by the person of
the word. So it's it's it's not an either or
in the sense of like, well, you only have one
way that you could use the word hyposthasis. Sometimes it's
used in this more nuanced specific sense to refer to
a particular the person that has the nature. And that's
the whole point here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And also like to add throughout the Krillian writings,
like in terms of the Nestorian controversy, you need to
understand how he specifically uses certain terms. So one certain
terminology that he uses is that he'll refer to the
divine nature as Christ's own nature. And I mean he
speaks about the human nature. He does sometimes use the
term nature for it, but a lot of times he
kind of just refers to it in various different terms.
And the reason the reason why he does this is
to emphasize is that what he means by the divine
nature of being his own nature, he's actually referring to
the fact that the Word of God is a divine person. Right,
That's kind of what he's trying to point hope, you know,
point towards in relation to you know, the partner Storman
position and even the Pulinarian position.
Speaker 4: Is on the one hand, he's trying to.
Speaker 2: Stand on the fact that all of these activities, all
of these things that Christ does, it refers to the
Word of God, right, that Jesus Christ is the Word
of God.
Speaker 4: Right, they're the identical person.
Speaker 2: And so he's trying to establish that while also establishing
the reality of Christ's humanity.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So he'll speak about, you know, Christ assuming hyposthetically the
body and soul, and that he acts in accordance with
his human nature. And he'll even argues, for example that,
for example, in certain passages of Scripture.
Speaker 4: When Scripture says the word flesh.
Speaker 2: Argue, this means man, right, includes you know, it's about
the body and the soul as well, in order to
showcase first of all that he's not a pollinarian because
he affirms that Christ has a soul, but also at
the same time he affirms that this is the divine hypostasis,
the Word of God himself that he's speaking about. So
this is one example that's really important to understand why
seeing Curl uses this kind of terminology.
Speaker 4: Now, of course, as.
Speaker 2: We're going to see in the presentation in the future
future presentations, this terminology is understood in a very different
light when we look at the on.
Speaker 4: Off sadd interpretation of it.
Speaker 2: Right, So keep, you know, keep that somewhere in your
mind as we're going with this presentation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, just to kind of clarify what I was saying,
is so when I say Athanasius synathnesis using this same
kind of formula, you have to keep in mind that
at the time, so not discounting what Jay and David
had said with regards to the forgeries, at the time
it was believed that this was an appropriate phraseology to
be used within an Orthodox context, and so I make
that attribution in that sense of the word. Though we
do need to recognize it's a Pollinarian origin, and though
it hasn't a Pollinarian origin, there is a very clear
Orthodox way of understanding that, and the supplementation by terms
additional to its usage really kind of drives the point
home how we're supposed to be understanding this. So we
look at another another instance from Saint Justinian, and this
is actually made by a footnote by Russia, who was
the one to translate on the person of Christ, and
he's encapsulating the way the Christology is understood, and he's saying,
the hypostatsis of Christ is the divine Logos, who is
himself Jesus. So that we see that when we're talking
about the hypostasis of Christ. We're talking of a divine
only hypostasis. There is no additional hypostatic component, if you will,
or element to Christ. And the term composite Christ moreover
refers to the divine logos, not to the divine nature,
and is simply a way of saying that the divine
Logos becomes incarnate by adding to his previously divine mode
of existence a human mode of existence, taking on himself
on his hypostasis all the attributes and properties of human
nature without becoming a human hypostasis. So this is going
to lead into a future stream where we're going to
go into understanding the appellation composite Christ and fleshing that
out how we can make a proper Orthodox understanding of that.
Speaker 1: Add to the composite hypostasis between the Orthodox and the
Orientals has very different meanings, as Kay's pointing out here.
For the Orientals, it can mean that the person of
the word the hypostasis itself becomes now a new tertiam quid,
a new product of the union, in the sense that
he underwent substantial change, and in fact, one of the
guys calling in you've heard him basically trying to go
down that route a while back. That's the false reading
that we do not accept. Composite hypistasis means that what
he possesses is two what's to Nature's hence, it's just
a restatement of the meaning of diophysite. Diophysite means two natures,
that's all it means.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is really going to be very important
to understand how the Oriental charge against the Orthodox of
Nestorianism holds no weight whatsoever because what exactly is too
If we're saying that you have substantially one hypostasis, that
is Christ divine only, well, where do you have two persons?
Because Thestorianism is two persons.
Speaker 1: Two subjects, right, two.
Speaker 3: Subjects exactly, two clearly defined subjects. And it's impossible to
have that reading on the Orthodox context.
Speaker 2: Now, yes, I also want to add really quickly, just
a very quick demonstration of the importance of understanding that
Christ is a divine person on the one hand, that
the crisis divine human and how to understand as you know,
kan j pointed out, the composite hype stasis refers to
the composition of the hypesetic union of the two natures
that's the reference to. But we need to understand from
the orthodox perspective, right, it is completely heretical to refer to,
for example, the Virgin Mary as anthropotokos, right, the mother
of the man. Well, why is that wrong? Because isn't
Christ man?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: The reason is because this ter in how you're supposed
to refer to the Virgin Mary. It refers to the person, right,
That's that's one of the main points that we see.
And you know the sour has tried to go around
this by saying, oh, you know, we can call her
mother of Christ, which isn't really especially it doesn't really
convey anything new.
Speaker 4: And there are many Christs in scripture, right, which Christ? Right?
Speaker 2: But if you talk about, you know, the Mother of God,
when it picks out Jesus Christ, right, that picks out.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ as God.
Speaker 2: But the reason why we use the term Mother of
God isn't just to be scandalous or because we have this.
You know, we obviously you know a lot of the
Virgin Mary, and it's not just for that reason. It's
also to confess that Christ is a divine person.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So this is one example in which we can refer
to Christ in a specific way to his divinity. But
we don't make a reference to the Virgin Mary as
again just mother of the man. And it's again it's
not proper to say this. It's not even will I
believe it go as far as I say it's for
the most part, it will be incorrect to say because
the person she gave birth to is not a human person.
Speaker 4: It's a divine person.
Speaker 2: And if you're talking about a theanthropic person, right, divine
human person, that is again a reference to the natures
of Christ, right that he is in a sense composed
of in the hypostatic union. It is not bringing in
another human person or human personality into Christ. That's an
important distinction to make. And the you know, Theotoko's term
is one illustration of why that's important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks so much for that, David. In terms of anthropotocus,
I do have slides that I'm going to get to
and we will talk about this specifically and how it
relates to the Church of the East and Nestorianism. Some
other statements I'm actually going to pull from the Catechism
of the Roman Catholic Church. And though we as Orthodox
have issues with the Roman Catholics, on this particular point,
it actually does reinforce the idea that Christ is a
divine only person, and so I have it listed. There
are the specific sections the paragraphs where you can find these,
but you have statements from the Roman Catholics that say
stuff like Christ humanity has no other subject than the
divine person of the Son of God. We confess that
one in the same Christ, Lord and only begotten Son
is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division,
or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished
by their union, but rather the character property each of
the two natures was preserved as they came together in
one person prosopone and one hypostasis. Everything in Christ's human
nature is to be attributed to his divine person as
its proper subject. Christ's human nature belongs as his own
to the divine person of the Son of God who
assumed it. The Son of God therefore communicates to his
humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. Now,
the reason why I'm bringing in the Roman Catholic points
here is not because we need the Roman Catholics to
substantiate the Orthodox position. I'm bringing these in to show
how the Roman Catholic Church is setting itself up in
a contradiction when it says that it professes the same
Christology as other churches, for example, the Orientals or the
Church of the East. And I'll get to the point
where there was the joint agreement signed between Theman Catholics
and the Assyrian Church that says, well, basically, we're professing
the same faith. No, we are not professing the same faith.
The Assyrian Church of the East, that is a Nestorian,
will not permit this kind of language. It is absolutely
against the Christology to use this kind of expressions and
apply that to Christ. It just does not work.
Speaker 1: So note again the double hypocrisy there as Chai's pointing out.
On the one hand, the classical Roman Catholic position and
the Orthodox position on this specific point are in perfect unison.
We do not disagree at this point. But yet Rome,
as Chai is pointing out, because they want to, for
geopolitical and ecumenist reasons, placate and pretend that they're all
part of the same church. They now honor and revere Marnastorius,
and so this stuff is played down. When even the
Orientals will not agree to these positions, as Kai is
pointing out again showing that only the Orthodox position has
been consistent, and Rome admitting classically the Orthodox position, confirms
that point.
Speaker 2: I also want to add the parts for Kai oltdye
in green. A lot of them are, you know, sometimes
direct quotations, sometimes very clear paraphrases of seeing Curla, f
alexandri One in particular the last one right Christ human
nature belongs as his own to the divine person of
the Son of God who assumed it. And then he
says this son of God therefore communicates to his humanity
his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. So
seeing Carola, I think something says something very similar, but
says it in a different way, and I think it's
very relevant to the Orthodox view. He says this in
his Scholia on the Incarnation, he says, and he communicates
as to his own flesh the operation that is the
energy of his own divine powers. This was how he
was able to give life to the dead and to
heal the sick. This statement from Saint Curle that you know,
the Roman Catholic Catholicism is making a reference, is actually
making I will say a stronger point that the divine
energies of God, right yeah, and consistent, Yeah yeah, fully
interpreenetrate his humanity in a very strong way. Right, And
this is a model to our salvation essentially.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind Rome does not teach. Rome does
not teach that there are uncreated energies after Trent.
Speaker 4: Yes, so that kind of brought to my mind when
I was saying.
Speaker 2: But as I said, a lot of these parts in
Green there are again either direct quotations or paraphrase of
what Saint Kurla Alexander is saying. But the last one
needs I think a bit of a clarification to understand
it even even better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So now we're going to ask the question what
makes it so object because if we're going to insist
that Nestorianism is two subjects, so we need to kind
of look at, well, what do we mean when we
say a subject? And so we understand hypostasis in the
sense of a concrete, ontological existent and not in the
sense of an abstract category. So, for example, hypostasis in
the sense of nicee a one where it was just
a nature like human nature. And so though hypostasis was
used by Hellenic philosophers as well as in scripture and
some of the Church fathers in that antiquated sense and
the most immediate references in Hebrews one three. The Christological
application of hypostasis, indicating a concrete ontological existent, is an
extension of Origins usage with regards to the Holy Trinity. Now,
I want to be careful here because that does not
mean what we that we are using hypostasis in the
way Origin himself understood it in a complete sense. It's
just more of this idea to avoid modalism, so that
you have a real distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And so for Origin, hypostasis is what gives the Son
as well as the Holy Spirit a truly real ontological
existence distinct from the Father and not just a distinction
in thought only, so it staves off modalism, whereas for modalist,
a persona does not have ontological status or person, but
making person identical to hypostasis, thereby making both points to
the same underlying ontology is Cappadocian. And this is very important,
and essentially what it's saying is is that the individuated
is the individual. You can't separate that. And when you
talk to the Church of the East and historians they
play this three tier onto logical game where they'll say
the hypostasis that they will in a way equate it
with knuma, but at the same time say, well, it's
not really an equivalence. They will say the pnuma is
what individuates a kiana or a nature, but then to
get the individual that's the function of the parasupa or
the prosopon. So it would be like if you would
think the knuma is like a mannequin, you have a
row of mannequins that you can enumerate, but you can't
really distinguish them, and so for them that that's what
individuated means. It's something that is concretized that acts as
a substrate to concretize an abstract, But there still needs
to be some kind of individualizing of each of these
things that are individuated. So you think of like multiple mannequins,
you dress them up in different garb, and now you
can enumerate them and distinguish them.
Speaker 1: And that's specifically referring to the Church of the East
this terminology because of the only audience is going to
get their audience is going to get confused and lost,
and where simultaneous are responding to both the Coptic position,
the orient position, and the Assyrian position, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, and so this is very important because this
is where we see the metaphysical paradigms completely diverge, and
this is where it makes it impossible for example, Rome
to come into a Christological agree with the Church of
the East. So either the two sides are absolutely stupid
in their understanding of their metaphysics, or it's just a
geopolitical game that they're playing. They're looking for some kind
of geopolitical benefit for coming into union. But the Cappadocian
sense is very clear that you can't individuate without at
the same time individualizing, So the individual is what is individuated.
So a subject then is a hypostasis or person in
the sense of a concrete ontological existent in other words,
So for the Cappadocians, if you have a hypostasis, then
you have a subject. And it is from this basic
premise that two hypostasis means you have two subjects or
two persons in capitaltionmenclature. So anyone who believes that Christ
to be two hypostasis in the Cappadocian sense makes of
Christ two subjects or two persons, and maintaining two subjects
in Christ is fundamentally and unavoidably Nestorian. And it doesn't
matter how much one professes Christ to be quote unquote
one person, as the Nestorians do. And one thing that
I think needs to be made clear is that Nestorianism
is properly speaking to profess two subjects in Christ. And
so the reason the Orthodox will say that Nostorianism is
too quote unquote person is because for us person equals
the subject. And that's following the Cappadocians.
Speaker 1: And it's restated again as you just saw earlier in
the slides at the Fifth Council, which is intended to
resolve the linguistic dis view. It's on this topic after
many centuries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to wrap up this slide, so if
a different metaphysical system is used, and in this I'm
going to use an example of the Church of the East,
where their notion of person is not the same as
our notion of person, but two subjects can still be
identified in Christ, meaning that you still have two concrete
ontological existence along the lines of hypostasis, which they will
call Pnuma as an individuate in nature, then that still
constitutes Nestorianism, and in a similar vein the Oriental churches
are also to be considered a historian since the incarnation
adds another concrete ontological existent, the human hypostasis, to Christ.
Though the combining of the hypostasis in their scheme results
in a form of monophysitism, it doesn't matter that they
will say that the human hypostatic component in Christ is
never separate from the divine. Nevertheless, the fact that it's
added as a concrete means that you still have some
kind of two subjects that in some form reduces to
a one subject, So it would be a etertium quid subsc.
Speaker 1: But the point is that both of them are using
the same faulty definition of what a person or or
or what person hypostasis are, right, They coming to different conclusions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're just making different metaphysical moves, but making.
Speaker 1: But it's based on the same mistaken idea of hypostasis
as a particular particular nature, right.
Speaker 3: Correct, Correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'd also like to add, if you want to really
simplify it, you can just think of this in terms
of Aristotelian s since accident dichotomy, and this is going.
Speaker 4: To be this time.
Speaker 2: I'm planning on talking about this in future streams much
more extensively. But if you talk about, you know, substance
versus accident as defined as substance has self subsistent, accident
is non self subsistent, the main difference is, well, I
guess not the main difference. The common part that monosis
and the stories both have is this system and that
person in terms of rational beings, refers to a self
subsistent substance. And this is where we get the question
of Okay, how do we understand crisis one person? The
monopaid answer is, well, it has to be one substance.
Then the historian answer is, well, we have to protect
the quality of the natures. So two substances, and within
the certain view you get two self subsistent things. With
the monoposide, you get one self subsistent you know. Think
but both of these views lead to incorrect paths. And
the reason or that that being the case is because
they actually share the same pre suppositions that the Orthodox
do not hold to.
Speaker 4: So I believe I think, yeah.
Speaker 2: Saint Curly even says in the Scolia that the universal
particular distinction makes it hard to explain certain things about
you know, Christology, and he kind of points out that
it's not actually fully you know, helpful to kind.
Speaker 4: Of just completely use you.
Speaker 2: Know, aristotelic understanding of substance and accidents and particular and universal.
They need to be understood in an ecclesiastical manner. And
this is exactly what we see in the in the
Fifth Council, of the sixth Council. Uh, this getting more
you know, ecclesiastically, you know, define it a stronger.
Speaker 4: Aid even in the FLIC Medical Council.
Speaker 2: So this is again a very crucial point to bear
in mind. Otherwise you're going to have very serious problems
in terms of the Trinity and Christology, right, You're going
to go wrong in both of these pasts.
Speaker 4: So it's very important to understand that.
Speaker 2: A person is not simply just a particular nature or
just a particularization. But it is certainly correct to say
that it is very the particularization occurs. And that's a
very fine distinction, but a very important distinction that we see,
especially in Leontius of Jerusalem and the you know, the
time of the Fifth Council This becomes pretty much over time,
the main understood way of thinking about hypostasis, and another
key point I want to make, you know, I want to.
Speaker 4: Make again further simplify things.
Speaker 2: The modelists use the term prosopon right, which is translated
as person as to the persons of the trinity. Right,
there are three prosopa. But the problem with the term
process upon in the Greek is it also means mask.
It means appearance, right, So it doesn't have this substantiative
meaning of you know, personhood as a real concrete sense.
But hypostasis does because hyperstatis literally and it used to
pretty much mean basically this prior to the fourth century
as just essence.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: In Greek it literally meets substance hepaw under and stasis standing,
so it's basically substance and it's again that's an example
of a term becoming transformed in order to ecclesiastically defined
in a stronger manner the Orthodox faith.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, are you done? Can I say something? You
want to keep going?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Sure, yeah, sure, you can go ahead.
Speaker 1: This is also where the Cappadocians and others bring in
uh erisk Aerosol's notion of primary and secondary substance, which
correspond to person and nature as well. This is why
it's very crucial for trinitary theology and Christology to make
the nature person distinction. And that's really what's underlying the
page and the page that Kai has up. This is
why by the time of Saint John Amascus, he will
say twice, you know, on the Orthodox faith. I'm pretty
sure twice he says that the failure to distinguish nature
and person is in fact the root of all heresies,
and so this confusion is central here to avoid we
absolutely have to avoid the confusion collapsing nature into person
or making person nature. I just put up a thing
about the Tomas that do this very thing when they
talk about a saiety as the divine essence. I'm not
going to get into all that tonight, but Kai, I
did have a question for you, because it's David actually
touched on it indirectly, which is this confusing usage of
pros upon by the Nestorians. Nestorians will talk about a
prosopic union. I think you did touch on a last time,
but I think somebody in the chat made a comment
to this effect. Is that because in other words, it's
not that there's a problem with the word pros upon,
but the Nestorian understanding of pros upon is not the
same thing as what we mean by pros upon. And
that's why that terminology might be utilized by the Coptics,
for example, because they would say, oh, you're using the
Nestorian idea because you're using the word pros on, so
you just mean it's a mask, no no by for us.
As the Fifth Council says, prosopon refers to the hypostasis
of the word.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I don't want to get into too much
detail now, just because I actually will go into greater details.
But basically, we have our two tierontology of nature, person,
and here we're using person to refer to the same
ontology as the hypostasis, so we're using it equivalently synonymously.
But the historians they have a three tier ontology basically
nature hypostasis, person, and for them, in the Church of
the East, person does not mean the same thing as hypostasis.
I will get into greater until explain exactly what this
whole system entails.
Speaker 2: I also want to add, like very shortly, when it
comes to the christology of the vest and I think
it's very clear that prior to the Council Ofdon, the
Cristogiost is very you know, to nature focus, it's very Diophysite. Again,
I think this is kind of it's very difficult to
argue against this. But when they use the term person,
it is not as weak as the Greek term prosopon right,
because the Latin understanding of person already incorporates some kind
of substantiality to it by nature of the way it's
used in the Latin language.
Speaker 4: So that's also something to bear in mind. So then,
for example, you know.
Speaker 2: The tone of Leo talks about Christ being one person,
it is not as weak as a Greek saying Christ
is one prosopon right, And the story can say that,
but lost I can say that, Orthodox can say that.
But in the Latin context it's actually quite different. Right,
Latins don't really as far as I know, and I'm
ninety five percent sure in this, but Latins don't really
have this concept of person as just some external external appearance.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: There is indeed the understanding of you know, persona right
as kind of like making up a personality or wearing something.
Speaker 4: As a mask.
Speaker 2: But again within the Latin context, the way it's used,
that's much weaker, right, And there has been some discussions
from you know, the Western Church prescis in Western Church
on this issue as well at its time.
Speaker 4: So that's I.
Speaker 2: Think something important to point out that the Western Church
in the Eastern Church in terms of cristogia, although are
unified in this matter, the very certain terms developed, there's
different expressions, right, It's very important to bear this in mind.
The last thing that we should do is anachronistically apply
modern understandings of certain terms for how it was used
in the fifth century. We have to try to understand
how a person in the fifth century understood these terms
in order to understand exactly what they're saying. If you
don't do that, we're just going to be we're not
going to be able to go beyond just making you know,
ten second clips and just trying to own the opponent
and score.
Speaker 4: Some Internet points.
Speaker 2: That discussion is not going to be going beyond that
if we don't try to understand what these people actually
said for their time. This is why it's important to
actually listen and understand what you're reading.
Speaker 3: Right, consubstantial metaphysics. So this is now going into demonstrating
how the Orientals are trying to play two games at
the same time. So to speak of Christ being doubly
consubstantial with the Father meaning divine and Us meaning human,
is to admit Christ is in to nature's and this
is very important. Christ is in two natures if he's
to be doubly consubstantial. But the Orientals they're going to
say that Christ is in one nature, and that denies
the double consubstantiality. So, given that double consubstantiality requires speaking
of two distinct natures, we can speak of Christ in
two distinct natures because he is consubstantial with others in
those natures. In those natures. If you cannot speak of
Christ in two distinct natures, then you cannot speak of
Christ consubstantial with others in those natures. This is important
because it's precisely because consubstanti is at the level of
nature and not hypostasis, that Christ does not require a
human hypostasis in order to become substantial with us according
to human nature. This is why we deny that metaphysical
move that says we must first have some kind of
a human substrate that can individuate or particularize a human nature,
and that substrate has to be particular to that human nature.
We deny that metaphysical move and this is why we
can say that Christ is a divine only hypostasis. Now,
to be consubstantial is to be of the same essence
or homousios, as stipulated by the Nicene Creed, which, as
Saint Anthonasius reminds us, is to be of the same nature.
And he's using the word feces here, for we believe
that there is one Godhead and that it has one
nature feasin, and not that there is one nature of
the Father from which that of the Son of the
Holy Spirit are distinct. So the First Documenical Council mandates
that Christians profess the Father and Son to be of
the same essence homo ussios, meaning consubstantial, which means to
exist in the same nature. But now, if we look
at what the Orientals will say, that Christ can only
be spoken of as being in one nature. So they
will say he's of two natures, but they will not
say that he is in two natures. The Oriental position
is crystal clear that you can only ever speak of
Christ in one nature incarnating. So if he's only in
one nature. The oriental metaphysics has two possibilities. Either Christ
retains only his divine nature and as a result he
is not consubstantial with us, and that means that is
a form of gnosticism. Or Christ's nature changes and as
a result he is no longer consubstantial with the Father,
and that would be a form of arianism. So that
is a metaphysical consequence of the oriental positions. You cannot
have it both ways to say Christ is in one nature,
but say he's doubly consubstantial and saying that he has
human properties and divine properties and that is what makes
him consubstantial and leave it at that. That does not
work if you guys want to contribute anything to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the main response you get to this is,
you know, in terms of this, it's like, you know,
Christ is one whole out of two parts, right, and
we are referring to the two parts that the whole
is made of. But again, if you're going to use
the language of consubstantiality and say that this is real
and this is applicable to Christ after the hypostatic union,
I really fail to see how you can affirm double consubstantiality,
but not two natures, right, especially when nature and substance
in disregard that the av use, it is pretty much
the same.
Speaker 4: Right. So, and we.
Speaker 2: Also know that Serahsophantiac actually explicitly rejects saying that Christ
is into substances. And that's because he has a specific
understanding of universals.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: For him, universals are just collection of all particulars, all hypostasies, basically,
And so to say that there are two substances in
Christ for him will be to say that Christ has
all hypostasis of humanity and divinity in him.
Speaker 4: Right, That's kind of how he understands. But of course.
Speaker 2: You having a wrong understanding of the relationship between universe
and particular is not a good enough excuse to deny
a formula that actually gives a that has a very
strong expantory power for certain basic truths, such as that
Christ is fully God and fully mad. This is why
it's important again from Nords, that's perspective to make this confession.
And what is united in Christ? And what is being
united in different things? What is united in Christ?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: The two natures being united to each other, they're united
in his person in his hypostasis. You can think of
this in the same sense as the body and the soul, right,
for example, they're united in the person, the body and
the soul. That is uh So that's that's that's all
I have to add for for now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd also just like to add the conceptential metaphysics.
Conceptentiality plays a very important role when we start to
understand how Christ is mediator. What does it mean for
Christ to be mediator? And this is very important for
understanding why consubstantiality double consupstentiality is real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why i'd just put that quote in, you know,
from Timothy one media between God and man, right, the God,
man Christ Jesus.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So when we look at Saint Cyril's letter to
emper Theodosius, this is a highly relevant letter. I think
it's one of the more neglected writings from Saint Cyril
in the discussion. And I think it's really more neglected
just because a translation of it has only appeared fairly recently.
But I think it's it's it's highly highly relevant. It's
anticipating the Third Ecumenical Council to combat Nestorianism. But what's
really important about this letter is Saint Cyril is distancing
himself from various prior heresies, and in so doing he's
establishing single subject metaphysics. So when we talked about the
metaphysics earlier, what makes a subject, it's very important. This
letter goes to great length to demonstrate in Saint Cyril's
thought he has a single subject Christ in mind. Now,
some of the things that he distances himself from is
dough Cticism or doceticism, theomorphism arianism or Sellianism or pollinarianism,
and then the diophysitism, which is a direct front two
Nesto orientism. I'm not going to go into detail of
these heresies. I'm just giving you an overview of what
to expect if you're going to read that letter.
Speaker 4: I highly well.
Speaker 1: Note that diophysicism there does not mean nature's It means subjects.
Speaker 4: For him to subjects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also because because later on, of course, we
explicate the diophysite position, in other words, the two nature's position,
not the two subject position. Now. Uh, this this also
is of course what you consistently see presented in the
John mcguck and book that we've recommended for many many years.
Say Cyril of Alexander the Christological controversy. Really, the whole
thesis of the book is mainly just, I should say,
one of many theses is basically just presenting the argument
that Cyril is a single subject Christological proponent. That single
subject is identical to the subject prior to the incarnation,
namely the second person of the Godhead. And so that
means that in the incarnate state, the only subject for
all the incarnate action is the divine person of the word. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I'd also like to add one of the reasons
why I really like Saint Cyril's letter in this regard
is the way he's phrasing things, the way he's explaining things.
It is crushing all of the stupidity coming from the
Oriental side with their quote mining. It will demonstrate how
Saint Cyril's understanding of Christ is completely in line with
the Orthodox position. And when you really take the effort
to understand what he's saying in his letters, you start
to see. This is where the cracks start falling for
the Orientals that they really do not understand Saint Cyril.
Speaker 4: They really do not.
Speaker 3: Understand his terms, They do not understand what his thought is.
Speaker 1: The two letters to six census are also really good
for showing that after the resurrection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his formula for union letters nine, it's always
gets talked about and there's always a response against it,
which I don't think it's very convincing. But the main
point that I want to get across with letter thirty nine, right,
the formula of reunion he had with Jona Fantioch is.
Speaker 4: As as as you all see.
Speaker 2: Saint Cirrole's main point is that all of the sayings
of the Devincent humanity are attributed ultimately to the one
person word of God. That's the main point that he's
trying to protect. And it's very interesting that he says
that this is protected if you used to nature's language.
In letter thirty nine, right, he says this very clearly,
you know, right, he says, some theologians, you know, they
refer all the sayings to you know, some you know,
we refer to all the sayings of Christ to the
one person, and there are some theologians that refer to
the sayings of Christ, you know, dividing the sayings. No,
it's not dividing the natures, but dividing the sayings to
the two natures.
Speaker 4: So and he has. I think he's learned the Eulogius,
if I'm remember correctly.
Speaker 2: He defends this, right, he defends saying this, and he says, look,
you know they're they're actually trying to say the same
thing as we do. The highest criticism he makes like
you know, they're sayings are a bit obscure, more difficult
to understand. But never does he say, oh, yeah, you
know these people are heretics or anything like that, which
is what you see you know, monopsized later on, do
is I accuse this language of being a heretical language
and seeing curl of Alexandria at his own time accepted it.
And the main point that I'm trying to make is
that for Saint Carol, it is consistent to be able
to speak of one Christ, one divine person of the logos,
while being able to speak of you know, divine and
human things in Christ. And this is you know what
you see trout Saint Curle's writings. You know, he consistently
applies this these principles, right, this is not just the
concession that he made like this is actually what monopsized,
like service police, like he pretended to agree with what
they said, but he actually didn't agree with anything they said.
He was just trying to keep peace in the church.
And this is kind of problematic to say, but we'll
look at it in the future presentations. But what I'm
trying to get at here is what you're going to
see in this letter is again it's important to understand
Saint Curle and his own terms, the way he speaks,
and to understand what he's actually trying to say. And
this is why for us, seeing Curle is a teacher
of the two natures of Christ. It's not just that, oh,
he says one nature and that's that's the end of
the story, or he says two natures and that stated story.
His writings as a whole is what's preserved and what's explicated,
what's taught in the ecumenical councils, or rather, what Saint
Curle is teaching is he's actually teaching the Orthodox faith.
Speaker 4: So it's important to bear this in mind, all right.
Speaker 3: So with that in mind, I'm going to read these
quotes and I'm going to read them in their entirety
rather than just talking about them, because I want people
to actually hear Saint Cyril speaking the way he's portraying
his christology, so he'll say so. Someone will probably ask
at this point, to whom did the Holy Virgin give birth?
Was it to a man or to the Word of God.
Speaker 1: We reply that.
Speaker 3: Question is wholly misguided. It is in default of what
is right and true. As far as I'm concerned, you
ought not to allow any division after the union. Nor
may you reshape a manual into two persons by splitting
him up individually into a man and God the Word.
No one should accuse us of having taken an unorthodox
position here, since this is just what is expressly condemned
by Holy scripture. There is no way there can be
any division, especially if it involves talking of quote unquote
two after the union, or thinking of each separately. It
is appropriate for one's mind to sense a distinction between
the natures, after all, human and divine natures are not identical.
But at the same time as this acknowledgment, the mind
must also accept the concurrence of the two into a unity.
So it was as God that he issued from God
to Father, and as man that he issued from the
Virgin the Word who shone out from God the Father
in a manner that can be neither described nor imagined,
is said to have also been born of a woman,
descending into humanity and entering into what was not his own,
not with the aim of remaining thus emptied, but rather
so that he might be believed to be God and
appear on earth in human form, not just as if
he were dwelling inside someone, but by himself, becoming a
man by nature, while simultaneously preserving his own glory. So
God's mouthpiece, Paul Come binds these two things into a unity,
namely the divinity and the humanity, which would otherwise be
so far from being consubstantial with each other, and which
are so utterly distinct. And he makes this combination in
the context of salvation history. And then he demonstrates that
there is one single Christ out of the two elements,
one Son, one God. Here we see single subject christology.
We see that Saint Cyril allows for speaking of two
after the union. But he's telling you how you must
understand the speaking of two and what exactly is one.
This is completely in line with Canon five of the
Fifth Ecumenical Council. We don't necess necessarily have to express
our theology in this hippostatic language. But what Saint cyril
Is writing is exactly what our Christology reflects, and it
is completely contrary to the Orientals continuing on from the
same letter. So the Son, who was co eternal with
the one from whom he issued, and who exists prior
to every age, descended into human nature, taking up humanity
to himself, rather than slipping away from being God. And
hence he may legitimately be thought of as being born
of David's seed, and of experiencing a wholly new human birth.
What he took up into himself was not foreign to him,
but is truly his very own. It is therefore to
be reckoned as being one with him, just as one
might naturally think of how a person is constituted a
person whose nature is woven from unlike parts, namely soul
and body, but the combined person is still reckoned as
a single individual. One sometimes names an entire animal on
the basis of just its physical body, but at the
other times the combined being is meant when the soul
is explicitly mentioned. We ought to accept just the same
way of talking about Christ, for there is only one
son and one Lord Jesus Christ, both before his taking
flesh and when he appeared as a man. So this
here is important because now he's what Saint Cyril is
doing is he's elaborating what he said prior to this
and really enforce, reiterating and enforcing the point that we're
talking about one ontology, and he's not saying that you
can have a soul and a body come together and
then you get a result. That's not what Christ is,
the one soul and one body coming together. You don't
have the person without the soul without the body. It's
talking about. These are fundamental to what makes the ontology
in the first place, and that is the unity that
Christ is that he possesses. It's ontologically. Christ is one,
He is divine who in fleshes I still have just
a couple more quotes here, but I'm sure there will
be people who ask who is Jesus Christ really? Is
he a man born of a woman, or is he
God's Word? It is a waste of effort even to
bother repudiating such stuff and nonsense. I would say, though,
that splitting man and word into two separates the arts
is dangerous and will cause damage. It is excluded by souteriology,
while the Holy scriptures pronounced that Christ is one. I
would myself assert that neither God's word, while separate from
the humanity, nor the temple born of a woman, when
not united to the Word, can be called quote unquote
Jesus Christ. For what we think of as Christ is
God's Word, after it has been ineffably brought together with
the humanity in accordance with the Saving Union. He is
above humanity, since he is by nature God and Son.
But at the same time, the fact that he saw
fit to bring himself down to the human level does
him no dishonor. At one time he said, whoever has
seen me has seen the Father. I and the Father
are one, but then at another that the Father is
greater than I. It was for humanity's sake that he
called himself in fear, even though he was not actually
lesser than the Father, since he is the same in
terms of substance and in every way his equal. And
then the last part from the letter, so then the
same individual is at once both the only begotten and
the firstborn. He is the former in so far as
he is God, and he is the firstborn in so
far as he is one of us. In the way
the Saving Union requires it one among many brothers, a man.
The point of this was that we two, both in
Him and through Him naturally and also by grace, might
become God's children. So just the side comment this is
now getting into discussing this idea that Christ is a mediator.
We become so naturally because we exist in Him and
in Him alone, whereas we become so through Him by
the spirit by participating in his grace. Just as the
condition of being the only begotten, which belongs especially to Christ,
became a property of his humanity when the latter was
united to the Word, a conjunction that occurred in accordance
with the plan of salvation. So also, in turn to
the conditions of being quote unquote one among many brothers
and of being the firstborn, become properties of the Word
after being united to the flesh. Because his being God
and his eternal changelessness were firmly established, he remained just
what he was even when he became a man who
was crowned with the highest glory and transcendence. This is
why the most sacred and blessed army of heavenly spirits
has been commanded to worship Him, just as we do
where in any of this do you hear speaking of
hypostass But you hear quite clearly in explanatory terms, single
subject christology that is completely reflected when we as Orthodox
say that Christ is divine only who has become and fleshed.
We don't have a mixing of hypostasis or any of
that sort. I don't know if any if you guys
want to contribute to that. It's a bit of a
lengthy quote.
Speaker 4: I think you can. I think you can.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess, like I think this is kind
of just a very like a simple breakdown of Saint
Curl's Christology. And this is pretty much consistent with what
you see with throughout the rest of his work. Just
the main difference being like in certain different works he
explains on some of the things that he talks about
related to your manner, right, So that's the main thing
that I'd want to point out.
Speaker 4: I guess the one.
Speaker 2: Takeaway that one can make is that for him, nature
or substance is very real right in the person's and
between the persons, right, the union of between a human
person and another human person in terms of substance is
not just kind of in saying but it's very real,
it's very fundamental, and the basis of salvation is being
able to confess that Christ right, that Christ's divinity acting
is acting in his humanity, and so we being part
of his humanity, and we becoming a real substantial part
of his humanity by becoming members of his Church, which
is his body, are able to ex experience this right.
This is the basis of right salvation, experiencial theology in
the Orthodock's faith.
Speaker 4: So there's that aspect as well.
Speaker 2: It's important in terms of Christology because again I kind
of hinted at it, but what you see, if it's
service Fantich, for example, is a very kind of it's
kind of a monominalist account of universals if you ask me,
because the universe is just a collection of all particulars
and that's all it is. Right, It's not just that
all particulars are in the universes, but no, the universe
is just that, and so we can kind of contrast
that with this as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so then this also plays into this whole
understanding of a hypostatic union, where we see this differentiation
between ourselves as Orthodox and on the other hand, the Orientals.
So for us, this hypostatic union really meaning that we're
not separating Christ's divine in human existences, whereas the Orientals
when they're talking about hypostatic union and the logos and fleshing,
what they're talking about is not that Christ assumes another
mode of existence per se, but really that he assumes
another human hypostasis, sorry, assumes a human hypostasis into his
mode of existence upon in fleshing and so that you
see this substantial change. But for us, there is no
substantive change in Christ. He just comes in his incarnation
to exist in a separate mode or not a separate
modes or an additional mode in addition to being God
as well as a human. The prosopic union. So now
though we can understand the prosopic union in the Orthodox sense,
the prosopic union becomes relevant in the context of Nestorianism
because by separating the prosopic ontology from the hypostatic ontology,
the Nestorians, the Church of the East, they deny a
hypostatic union, but they profess a prosopic union. And this
is understood as a voluntary or an impassable unit union
because passibility cannot become part of the divine nature of
the logos. And so in Nestorius's thought, prosopon and will
are used synonymously. So to have the procipone of God
it means to will what God wills. To have the
prospone of God means to act as God acts revelation
of God to the world. Every nature must have a
prosopone which arises out of it as its natural expression,
which unquote reveals the nature or Usiah. And so the
union in Christ is to utilize the flesh in order
to express the divine and this expression is realized in
the quote unquote one person of Christ. So this is
now we're unfolding the metaphysics of the Nestorian position to
really understand what they mean by one person or what
they mean person in general. And you will now see
that it's going to be drastically different to the Cappadocian understanding.
This was something that I posted as a community post
and made the rounds and made the Oriental zol kind
of I don't know, have a melt down in pictorial representation.
If you have a human hypostatic component to Christ, then
while this can be thought of as a meme, it
really does accurately represent what is happening ontologically the Church
of the East. Having two subjects means that you really
do have two different centers that can be attributed to
Christ's activities. And this is very prominent when you read
somebody like Theodore of Mopsuestia in his commentaries, where he
will attribute divine activity specifically to the Logos and he
will attribute human activity specifically to the human component of Christ.
So there is a distinction between the activities of Christ
with the Orientals. With this tertian quid. You speak of Christ,
but now it becomes some kind of a combination of
the divine no human that acts. And that's kind of
like you can see in the in the picture, a
fair representation of what their metaphysics entails. Because if they
say you can only have one nay, that Christ is
in one nature, well, if you're talking about one nature,
it has to it can't be the divine only, it
can't be the human only. It is some tertian quid.
You cannot get around that orthodoxy if we speak of
Christ the way he is.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 3: So that kind of wraps up Christology, just an overview
of Christology and now we're going to go into soteriology,
and this is now very relevant because soteriology is discussing salvation.
It's talking about what is the whole purpose of Christ incarnating,
how does the incarnation be effectively selvific. And so in general,
we can divide the positions between the Orthodox, the Orientals,
and the Nestorians by hypostatic union language versus prosopic union language.
Though we the Orthodox can also talk about a prosopic union,
it's going to be in the same sense as a
hypostatic union. But what we have at play here is
when we look at the hypostatic union for the Orthodox position,
we are looking at Christ being a subject, and so
in this Christ has one hypostasis that exists in two
modes simultaneously, and the logos unites within himself to natures
because he exists in those to natures. But the metaphysical
system at play here is that a single hypostasis can
an hypostatize multiple natures. And that's the metaphysical move that
we as Orthodox make that differentiates us from the Orientals
and from the Nestorians. And then it's also important to
understand that in our system there are two wills in Christ,
and that will is a property of nature, it's not
a property of the hypostasis. And this is going to
be important in future slides when we get into discussing
will in a little bit more detail. For the Orientals,
the hypostatic union is that Christ is kind of both
a subject and an object kind of at the same time.
So essentially what you have is the hypostasis of the
logos assuming into itself a nonsense, self subsistent human hypostasis,
and that gives you that tertion quid hypostasis of Christ,
because you can only talk of one hypostasis after the incarnation,
and so this individuated human hypostasis cannot exist apart from Him.
And the metaphysical move that we deny that the Orientals
and the Church of the East make is that a
nature can only ever be individuated by a hypostasis of
its corresponding kind. So if you're going to talk about
Christ having a human nature or having a human mode
of existence, then there must be a human hypostasis. You
cannot avoid it. That's the metaphysical constraint that they're imposing.
The Orientals are just saying that this human hypostatic existence
cannot be a part from the logos. It is always
a part of the logos, and the logos is a
subject of it. For them, will Christ has only one will,
and that will is a property of the hypostasis. And
this is really important because in this particular case, this
is going to get the Orientals into a tritheistic problem,
because for them to try and be consistent in their
triadology with their Christology is going to necessitate that you
have basically three wills in the Godhead for Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. If the will is a property of hypostasis.
With regards to the Nestorians who take the prospic union,
Christ is an object. So you have two hypostases that
come together to give you Christ. Christ doesn't exist before
the incarnation, and you have the human hypostasis being self subsistent.
Speaker 4: There is no.
Speaker 3: Non self subsistence to it in a metaphysical sense. What
they're saying is, even though it is inseparable from the logos,
it is still in its metaphysical understanding ontologically self subsistent.
So then what ends up happening here is the union
that is brought about in Christ between these hypostasis or
krume is the Logos is giving his divine will to Jesus.
So that means that there isn't any kind of ontology
where the union is happening to hypostatic level. In terms
of the individuation, it's happening merely through some kind of
a giftable property. And again they make the same metaphysical
move as the Orientals to say that a nature is
only ever individuated by a hypostasis of its corresponding kind.
So the kruma kiana, the knuma individual individuates a kiana
according to kind. The divine Logos enters into a voluntary
conjunction with the human Jesus. And their position is that
there is only one will. It's a confluence of the
divine and human wills. So the human will is in
effect the divine will. I will show you from the
Nestorian writings where they profess one will. And though you
will have Nestorians who will say that no, they do
you agree that Christ has two wills, but that in
effect what is expressed is one will. This is going
to become very problematic for them because then that is
an admission to full blown Nestorianism. And I'm going to
show you why that is the case. But now let's
look at what are some things that Nestorius himself says,
and Thestorius is venerated in the Church of the East.
The suddeness spoken of in the Divine Scriptures in a
double manner in hypostasis, as relating to God the Word,
and in honor, as relating to him who was taken.
For in the honor of the union which he has
with God the Word, he is called son. He is
not son because of himself, nor in himself, nor through grace,
like those who are baptized, these being sons through grace.
The sonship therefore of the god Head and of the
manhood is not one in a composition of one hypostasis,
but in honor. If we say that, as in the
composition of a hypostasis, is there the form of a
servant who was taken and of him who takes united together,
he who was taken would be found to be derived
from the Father. If it is not by union or
by conjunction that he is called son. Okay, now, let's
contrast that to how we understand one person. When Saint
Justinian writes of one person and also of the fifty
humenical council. Nor do we believe that the divine logos
in Christ are different persons. But we confess that the
Lord Jesus Christ and the divine Logos are one and
the same. And so although we say there are two
different natures in one and the same only be God
and Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, we do
not propose two sons, or hypostasis or prosopa. And at
the same time we confess his one hypostasis despising the
division of Nestorius, and then the other one from the fifth.
A communical council is one that I already talked about.
But this is again really important because Rome would agree
with Saint Justinian. Saint Justinian is a saint under Rome,
they would agree with his Christology. And when you look
at what Nestorius himself says and what we hold to
a ar theology, they are irreconcilable. They're one hundred percent irreconcilable.
So now where do we get that Christ is a mediator?
So in the Orthodox position, Christ is consubstantial with the
Father and his divinity. Christ is consubstantial with us in
his humanity. So Christ is the mediator between us and
the Father because he is perfectly consubstantial with both the
Father and us. So we see here that Christ incarnating
is salvific. But for the Orientals, well, you don't have
consubstantiality with the Father, you don't have consubstantiality with us,
and so you can't have Christ being a mediator if
he is some unique tertium quid. So Christ incarnating is
not sealvific. There's no metaphysics to explain why Christ incarnating
would be salvific if he's not consubstantial to us. And
in the Church of the East a historian position, Christ
is not consubstantial with the Father. The logos in Christ
is what's consubstantial or who is consistential with the Father. Likewise,
Christ is not consubstantial to us. Only Jesus or the
human component in Christ, is consubstantial with us. So then
Christ cannot be the mediator between us and the Father
because he has no real ontological.
Speaker 1: I'd like to interject here because it's also important to
understand that the essence energy distinction is crucial at this
point to understand the metaphysics as you're speaking of by
which we are deified, and that deification is first of
all rooted in the glories, graces, and immortality, et cetera,
that the divine person of the word communicates to the
human nature that he assumed. This is pretty consistent throughout
the Church Fathers, but it really gets explicated especially in
John Damascus in book three about chapter fifteen onwards, where
he talks about the energies in Christ. It's restated at
the six Ecumenical Council where it says that the human
nature that he assumed he fully deified. How does this
deification occur? Well, two Letters to six Census and many
other texts of Saint Cyril, as David mentioned earlier, talk
about the uncreated energy in Christ deifying the human nature
that he assumed. So you have to keep in mind
that it is first of all rooted in this hypostatic
union as we're talking about. But what that hyposthetic union
affects is a synergy and a deification of the human
nature at the level of natures. So you understand that
it is a real raising of the human nature, a
real union. Otherwise there wouldn't there would not be a
real deification were it not a real union. And this
is so crucial to understand, not just for Christology, but
also for soteriology. So I know we're not specifically on
the point of the energies yet, but the two energies,
which is a necessary corollary of the two wills doctrine
of diophysitism, right, is bound up with the deification of
the human nature by the uncreated in energies of Christ,
not by the divine essence of Christ, but by the
divine energies of Christ, interpenetrating and fully suffusing the human
nature without destroying, without diminution, without division, without any destruction
to the properties of those natures. So even though the
human nature gets deified, and that's the root of our steriology,
it never ceases to create to retain his created properties,
so it never sees as being a creature, but it's
a deified creature. And again this is the two Letters
of Cerial to six Census, where he specifically talks about
even after the Resurrection, when Christ was no longer susceptible
to the blameless passions, right, he could still eat because
he willed to, even though he has this transfigured flesh.
And Cyril says that that transfigured flesh comes about not
by the divine essence communicating anything to the humanity, but
by the uncreated energies communicating to the humanity in Christ
that destroys Roman Catholicism and Tomism.
Speaker 2: By the way, another point that I also want to
make in addition is, look, you know Orientals and the historians,
they can say, and sometimes you know, their figures do say,
you know, Christ is constantial with the Father, Christ consubstantial
with us. But it's it's similar to how a Poulinarius
will say, right, Paulinaries will say Christ is doubly consubstantial.
But what they mean by consubstantial, for example, in this
case is Christ has a human body, because they think
the soul is the human you know, is the person
that is the human person. So it's important, Okay, what
do we mean by consubstantial and this is the question
that we should be asking ourselves.
Speaker 1: Okay, the soul is the person a Pollinarius, Oh yeah, okay, yeah,
exactly right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So like that's what he means that Christ is
consubstantial with us. When he says that, what he means
is he's not actually fully consubstantial, He's just consubstantial with
the human body.
Speaker 4: That's that's basically all that he's trying to say.
Speaker 2: When we say this, we're saying, and this is the
question that we must ask, what do we actually mean
by consubstantial? What does this term actually mean? What it
means is that there's something real that is in Christ
that we share as well, namely humanity. It's not just
that Christ is a body and the soul. We have
a different kind of a body and the soul, and
we you know, we use the same terminology, and they're
very similar, They're very close. And that's why, No, there
is a real ontological similarity with Christ's humanity and or humanity,
namely that or nature is the same. It's it's identical.
And this identical nature is something again, as I said,
it's a real ontological reality. This is why Christ's activities
in his humanity affects us.
Speaker 4: And you can say that these effects.
Speaker 2: Are actualized in a solvage way once that person joins
the Orthodox Church, right, once that person is baptized, Once
that person partakes of what Christ did and of what
he accomplished, this becomes the case. The problem is what
in the Oriental and in the Nestorian view, what do
you actually mean by consubstantial? And if you mean consistantial
with the sense that you know, as we say that
Christ and human beings and Christ with the Father, there
is this realantological sameness, right, and he's not just some
kind of a nominal like same set, but a genuine sameness.
Then you have to confess to natures. You have to
acknowledge that Christ is in two natures. In order to
make that convention, you have to be able to say
that if you think that Christ is consistential with us
in the sense that he has he is some kind
of you know, particular human existence that is in the
same set as this universal of all human particulars and
universal of all divine particulars, and he's part.
Speaker 4: Of those two sets.
Speaker 2: That kind of an understand I think is much closer
to noomenalism. If that's not already denomenalism. That's basically the
problem that's at hand. And if you read Seras Fantics,
and this is I guess we will be analyzed this
in the future presentation. But if you read Seras of
Antioch's letter to Julian, when Julian is an after taduktist,
which means he kind of denies that Christ has certain
specific human properties it's a lot stronger than just saying
that Christ doesn't suffer or anything like that. That he
kind of denies that Christ as human properties. He kind
of service kind of makes the point that you know,
Christ does not have a have two natures, but he
has properties, natural properties proper to human nature. Okay, So
does that not mean that he has human nature? I
mean does that mean that, of course he denies that
being the case, right, he denies that there is a
human nature and divine nature in Christ in order to
protect his old crystological projects, so to speak. So the
point here what you see with this slide is not
what orients and in the store.
Speaker 4: And say, is what actually is the case?
Speaker 2: That's very important to understand and when we again try
to talk about this, we need to ask us als, Okay,
what these terms, what do you actually mean by this?
And this is why double consubstantiality within your slax framework
is the doction of two natures. That's really kind of
you can even kind of say that's all there is
to it. It's kind of just very simple in this regard,
but it also has a lot of explanatory power in
order to understand how Christ has human activities. How Christ
as a human will and how the union of sativity
and humanity in the one person. You know, how there
is an interaction between the two. There's a lot of
expansive power in that regard. So that's all I wanted
to say.
Speaker 3: The Marganita, this is a very authoritative book in the
Church of the East. It is not a book that
an Assyrian Church of the East proponent can dismiss. It
is basically like catechortical instructions, if you will, It lays
out exactly what the Church of the East believes, using
its own terminology, its own phraseology. And this is that
what solidifies, if you will, that they are Nestorian without
a doubt. So in the Marganita, it segments the Orientals,
the Orthodox, and then the Church of the East, basically
identifying in the whole Kiana Knuma language what each respectively believes,
and so they the Margantha identifies the Orientals to hold
to one kana one kanuma basically one nature, one hypostasis.
With regards to the Orthodox, it basically says that we
profess two kiane, two natures, and one kanuma or one hypostasis.
And then it immediately follows and discusses the Nestorian or
the Church of the East position as consisting of two
kiane and two kume, so two natures and two hypostasis.
Now what's very interesting here is immediately following their statement
of what the Orthodox believe the Church of the East,
the Morganita, it does not redefine what cnuma means, so
its understanding of cnuma is functionally the same. And what
that then entails from a metaphysical perspective is the Marganita
the Church of the East correctly identifies metaphysically that the
Orthodox are saying that you can have one cnuma and
hipposthetizing to Kane, one hypostasis and hipposthetizing to natures. That
is correct, That is them clearly understanding the Orthodox position.
So then when they say to Knuma and Tukiane, they
are saying that metaphysically, each nature must have its own
particular individuating substrate, if you will, its own particular numa.
And then what the Marghanita says is they explicitly name Nestorius.
But they make a very big mistake that they probably
didn't even realize. And this is something what the Assyrian
speakers are perhaps ignorant of when they keep saying, oh,
it's a language issue, you don't know Syriac. There's a
specific meaning to Knuma all of that garbage, because they
say clearly that though Nestorius basically follows the position that
the Church of the East espouses, they say that Nestorius
held the same faith, but he didn't understand their language.
He didn't understand Syriac. So that means that if you
are telling us that Nestorius held the same faith, we
don't need to understand Syriac to understand what you believe.
We can understand Nestorius in the original Greek. We know
what Thestori has professed in the original Greek. That means
we do correctly understand what the Church of the East
is teaching, and we are correct in charging you with Nestorianism. Okay,
we don't need your kluma garbage. We don't need your Oh,
you don't understand what we're saying, because Syriac is a
mystical language that only us Assyrians can understand. No, we
understand what you're saying, and you are expressing specifically the
metaphysical move that you require to have a particular hippostatic
kind to individuate your nature, and that sets up a
double subject christology. And moreover, in your Marganita, you are
saying that you have two kluma, two subjects, but one will.
And you think that because you say that Christ has
one will or one son ship or one authority, that
this now is your one person, that is Christ. And
so now you're professing the the the Orthodox faith or
the true faith if you will. Well, it's clear that
when you're saying one person, you're not saying it in
the same way that we are saying one person, because
when you identify that we profess one cluma, that means
we profess one person. But when you say you have
two kluma, and then you're saying one person, well, if
you're going to deny that person equates with cnuma, So
then where what does person equate to? In your scheme?
You have no other ontology to point to but to will.
So for those who want to analyzer, who can understand
the Syriac, that's just the slide there that shows the
exact Syriac of the Marganita, that makes it crystal clear
exactly those terms being used. So the Margnita correctly identifies
the Orthodox Oriental and Church of the East positions with
regards to hypostasis and nature. It does not redefine nature
or person or like Keana or Knuma when elaborating the
Church of these positions for not person but hypostasis. So
there is no misunderstanding in Syriac between the Orthodox, Orientals
and Church of the East. The Morganita explicitly affirms that
the Church of the East professes the correct faith to
the exclusion of the Orthodox and Orientals. So this is
now setting up a problem for the Church of the
East to say that they profess the same theology as Rome,
because it clearly says that they don't, and it accepts
Nestorius as having correct theology, despite Mystorius not speaking or
writing in Syriac. And that is an admission that we
can understand the Church of the East theology in Greek
via Mystorius and by extension, Theodore of Mopsuestia. So Syriac
is not necessary to understand the Church of the Easts theology. Nevertheless,
we do understand your Syriac terminology. And so the modern
day proponents of the Church of the East are playing
word games when they insist that we as Orthodox do
not understand this Knuma nonsense. Okay, the issue is not
about Knuma. It is not about the Syriac language. You
guys can cry day and night about these terms. We
understand your metaphysics, We understand what you mean with your individuations.
We understand what you mean by your individuals and how
it pertains to universals in particulars. What is that play
here is that proponents of the Church of the East
are not competent in metaphysics to understand what their three
tier ontology actually entails, and they're being arrogant in their
claims by just simply relegating it as some Syriac terminology issue. Now,
this one, I don't think I need to really read.
All of what's quoted here is just put as a
reference just to establish the point that Christ has two
wills and not one one. One of the quotes is
from the letter of Pope Agatho. Then I'm quoting the
Catechism of the Orthodox Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church,
just to demonstrate that metaphysically, we believe that Christ has
two wills. So if you are going to enter into union,
then you have to press the same This is another one.
The definition of faith ratified at the sixth Ecumenical Council,
that makes it very clear that you must profess two wills,
and the Marganita it clearly says one will. And it
doesn't really matter all that much that you would have
other writings within the Church of the East that will
say two wills. In effect, you do have only one
one will. The importance of two wills is going to
come apparent when we have the stream on the energies
and wills being a property of nature. Now to unpack
the Nestorian monothelitism or this idea that Christ is one will.
So you have both the Church of the East and
the Orientals professing Christ to have one will. So then
you ask the question, well, is will a property of nature,
hypostasis or person? So the Orientals they'll take the position
that it's a property of the hypostasis. The Church of
the East must take will to be a property of
person in order to maintain and I'm going to use
this term loosely, a coherent metaphysics. I don't believe that
their metaphysics is coherent, but it's kind of like they
have certain premisses and in order to kind of maintain
the conclusions of those premisses and a coherent way they're
forced into a certain line of thinking. Will can't be
a property of nature because there is no union of
natures in Nestorian theology. In Church of the East theology,
will cannot be a property of hypostasis or kanuma because
there is no union of hypostasis or kanuma. So simply
by process of elimination, will must be a property of person,
wherein two wills come together in a prosopic union to
result in one will. However, this one will is a
will of unison and not unity, because the divine and
human subjects in Christ must maintain distinct personhood in order
for there to be a quote unquote prosopic union, i e.
A mixing of concrete ontological existence is not allowed. So
a prosopic union necessitates to prosopa to persons. Otherwise there
is no union because the natures and the hypostasis or
the kiana and the krume are not what unite. So
if the Logos gifts his person his parsupa to the humanity,
and it is in that where the union is realized,
then that is admission that there are two subjects in Christ,
because if the humanity requires a parsupa, a person wherever
it comes from divinity or elsewhere, then it demonstrates that
the humanity in Christ is comprised of nature, hypostasis, and person.
So then to what ontology does will refer process of
elimination forced it to refer to the ontology of person,
and in order to maintain a coherent quote unquote coherent metaphysics,
the ontology has to be real. It can't be an aggregate,
meaning that there must be two persons. So now this
whole thing that Nestorius really was a Nestorian, because there
have been some articles, some pseudo scholarship, and some bullship
being presented that Nestorius really wasn't a Nestorian. So when
we unpack this, the Nestorian three tier ontology is nature, hypostasis, person, kiana, knuma, persupa.
The kiana is your abstract common or your universal, your
knuma is your individuated, nature is your individual. So now
we remember that will. We have to take will as
a property of person of parsupa. So if Christ has
two wills, you see, because this is what the Nestorians
are gonna do they're gonna say, no, we deny that
Christ is one will. Christ will have two wills. Well,
you've got two natures, you've got two hypostases, you've got
two wills. That means you have two persons. And if
Nestorius's prosopic union is a quote unquote union of divine
and human wills, that's how you get your one will.
So the divine Logos gives his will to human Jesus
in order to quote unquote unite the two persons into
one person. And so the Nestorian incarnation is not an
ontological incarnation of the Logos. It is a gifting of
the divine will to a human subject. And so that
means that, in effect, the prosopic union is not a
real union. It is an illusion. What you have are
two subjects in unison.
Speaker 1: What does that exactly mean to gift the will? I mean,
that's just a very bizarre I mean, obviously he can't
undergo change and lose or forego the human will. So
what does it mean to gift a will to the humanity.
Speaker 3: It just means that the humanity will always act in
accordance to what the divine will wants or like wills,
it's basically.
Speaker 1: I think will in other words, grace. He graces the
humanity to always operate correctly.
Speaker 3: It essentially becomes like the logos is remote piloting a
human body. It's like he's playing a video game, if
you will. He has this little controller and he's exercising
his will to be actualized in humanity.
Speaker 2: But the main actisations started for cutting after it. But
the main actiation that you get from seeing curle F
Alexandria is that this kind of picture is basically like,
how is it any different from God? You know, the
Holy Spirit speaking true prophets? Right, this is the kind
of thing that they that he criticized, Like, this is
basically like big, No, this seems no different than the
Holy Spirit coming into a prophet and like having him speak,
Like where's the difference? And I think like logically speaking,
there doesn't seem to be any difference. It's just kind
of like instead of just like speaking like at a
point in time, like Christ is only just speaking by
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit within this picture, and
that's like what makes him different amongst other things as
well in this in this scheme.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but operationally there is no difference the main difference is,
like as you said, David, it's just an ongoing occurrence
of the logos rather than just a single moment in time.
So let's take a look at some example through the
Nestorian three tirontology how we can conceptualize this. So if
we're looking at kianu kruma, parsupa or nature hypostasis person.
So the nature in Christ you could say, is human,
the knuma is Jesus, and the parsupa is that this
Jesus is thirty three years old. Because that being thirty
three years old is what's going to distinguish that kunuma
from a different knuma that is, let's say twenty five
years old. There's some differentiating property that individualizes that knuma
to set it apart from all other instances of human. Well,
if you look at the divine aspect, so you have
the nature is divine, the knuma is the logos. So
it's not the Father, it's not the Holy Spirit, it
is the logos. But then what's the parsupa. It's that
it's eternal or it's quote unquote son. And so in
the prosopic union, sonship is given by the external divine logo,
the eternal divine logos to the thirty three year old
man Jesus, and this gifting of sonship. So remember that
quote from the fore from Nestorius of saying son by honor.
So Jesus is son basically by honor. The gifting of
sonship by the logos results in the quote unquote person
of Christ. And so then Christ just becomes a name
indicating the gifting of sonship to Jesus. And so Christ
in this metaphysical system does not have a distinct hypostasis,
does not have a distinct curuma. There is no one
to one hypostasis or cnuma two person part super relationship
for Christ. So the two subject christology is the result
of the prosopic union. And this is vehemently opposed by
Orthodox It is an ereconcilable difference.
Speaker 1: So what I have a questionnaire? Would that mean then
that the a Nestorian here doesn't affirm eternal generation because
if sonship is something that's given in the economia, it's
not an eternal relationship.
Speaker 3: Well, that would be applicable to the Jesus correct to
the humanity.
Speaker 2: I think I think it's more like they will affirm
that the word is begotten of the father. But that
so there's certain like the terms, the names, they don't
apply to.
Speaker 4: Communication.
Speaker 1: So Sun is a name that only applies in the
economy as all right.
Speaker 2: So Christ is a term that applies to both natures.
But if you say, for example, Jesus, that only applies
to the human right, So that's that's the kind of
naming convention. So Nestorians won't deny the eternal generation.
Speaker 4: This affirms it.
Speaker 2: But you know, he's yeah, so in terms of like
again like this is comic, communicunty, mattern, the communication of properties.
You don't have this in especially in this story, in
later in later this you know, in some Nestorians, for
who try to affirm the community cousture, they affirmed this
only as a manner of speaking, right thermis.
Speaker 4: In antological way like we do.
Speaker 2: For example, so when we say that, for example, the
Lord of Glory, Lord of Majesty was cruticified.
Speaker 4: For source, it's just a way of saying.
Speaker 2: But when we say that, we know the Lord of
Glory ontologically really was crucified, right, the divine logos was crucified.
The reason why he was critified was certainly because he
had a body and the soul, body and the soul.
But the communication of divine energies between the two persons
in Christ is ontological. It's not just a manner of speaking,
it's it's not a way of speaking, right, It's a
real ontological thing. That's what distinguishes us from the position.
But Earlierians like Theodore, the story is they're pretty much yeah,
this kind of like communication of names. Even they didn't
even accept that. So that's kind of where that comes from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when we consider Mariology, this is basically informing your Christology.
So the way we understand the Virgin Mary will basically
tell us whether or not you hold to an orthodox Christology.
And so when we look at what Nestorius writes and
his first letter to the Bishop of Rome san Celestine,
so this is leading up basically there are a bunch
of letters being communicated between Rome between Alexandria leading up
to the Third Ecumenical Council, and so Nestorius is writing,
we reject applying the term theotokos to the Virgin Mary,
for properly, the nativity was consubstantial with the one giving birth,
while his manifestation in a human being resulted from the
creation of the Lord's manhood joined to the Godhead from
the Virgin through the Spirit. Okay, So this is rejection
of the term deo tokus, and it's going to be
important in a moment. Nestorius in his second letter Christ tokos,
so this is the preferred term for this expression uses
a name that signifies both natures, namely Christ, and it
conjoins Godhead and manhood in one adoration, since the Godhead
of the son is consistential with the Godhead of the Father,
while the manhood was born at a later time from
the Holy Virgin, and because of its conjunction with the Godhead,
is worshiped together with it by men and angels. So basically,
what he's saying here is the only reason why you
can worship Christ in his humanity is because of its
association to the Divinity, and it's a conjunction, and that
is what makes the adoration possible. And this is why
he wants that term riso tolkus. Now Saint Cyril in
his second letter to Nestorius, he's basically responding to this understanding.
He's saying, we do not worship a man together with
the word, lest a semblance of division might creep in
through the use of the word quote unquote with But
we worship him as one and the same, because the
body with which he is enthroned with the Father is
not alien to the Word. So Saint Cyril is talking
metaphysics here, he's talking ontology. He's saying, we are worshiping
the same ontology that is the Word. And this is
why we call the Virgin Mary Theotokos, in understanding of
the ontology that she is giving birth to. And then
Nestorius in his second letter to Saint Cyril, for I
do not understand how it meaning the hypostatic union could
introduce the one declared earlier to be impassable and incapable
of a second birth as again passable and newly created,
as if the natural properties of God the Word are
destroyed by conjunction with a temple, or as if it
is thought a trivial thing by men that the sinless temple,
inseparable from the divine nature, should undergo birth and death
on behalf of sinners. So Nestorius is crystal clear the ontology,
that is the logos, is not incarnating. That's not what's happening.
The logos is not in fleshing. It is not the ontology,
that is the logos that is in fleshing. And he's
making it crystal clear. And the Marganitha is saying that
this is the position of the Church of the East,
because this is what Nestorians believe. Nestorius in the Church
of the East belief in the exact same thing. Well,
this is what Nestorius believes. Let's look at what the
Metropolitan of Malabar and India of the Assyrian Church of
the East says. So this is now an official cleric,
high ranking cleric in the Church of the East. The
necessity for a Nestorian Christology becomes inevitable when we think
of the greatest position ascribed to Virgin Mary in the
Roman Catholic Church. The fear expressed by Nestorius against the
use of theotokos should not be ignored. It is one
of the positive contributions of Nestorius to have exposed the
potential danger of this title. As far back as our
records of history go, there was nobody to speak against
this title before four to twenty eight AD, though it
was used by certain individuals. Perhaps it would have become
the standard expression of all Christians if Nestorius did not
wage such a crusade against this title.
Speaker 2: Can I just interject for this moment. I find it
really funny that he says it was used by certain
individuals like Saint Gregory Theologian. Yes, yes, certain individuals, certain individuals.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this.
Speaker 2: So this was pretty much like at the time this
term was introduced, theotokos was very much instantly received, very much,
very yeah, very much.
Speaker 3: Till the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Church of
the East was the only church which shared the concern
of Nestorius against the use of theo tokus. Since the Reformation, however,
many churches share this attitude, and thus the position taken
by the Church of the East singularly down through the
centuries is vindicated. Oh okay, so the Reformation actually was
was productive. You agree with the Reformation, you guys in
the Church of the East. You're siding with the reformers.
Oh but wait a minute, aren't you part of this
whole apostolic Christianity movement? Apparently not. The christological formula of
this church is that the prosopic union, rejecting the formula
of hypostatic union accepted by both Catholics and the Eastern
Orthodox churches. This prosopic union is a three tier Christology
where the union is not at the first level of natures,
nor at the second level of the hypostasis, but at
the third level of the prosopon. To the members of
this church, the idea of perfect God and Man is
understood only if Christ has both natures and plume of
both God and Man, and the union has taken place
only at the level of prosopon.
Speaker 2: I also want to yeah, like, so when we say
that there's a hypostatic union, right, this means that there's
a union in the hypostasis, right, what is united in
the hypostasis under two natures?
Speaker 4: So this perspective, what he's.
Speaker 2: Trying to get at is that I think the way
I understand is he's criticizing our view by saying that,
you know, you say Christ is fully human, but then
you say Christ does not have his own hypostasis, right,
So being fully human means having your own separate hypostasis,
and this kind of showcases that. First of all, it
means that there's no distinction proper between nature and person
because to be a human need to have human nature
means in this scheme, to be a human person. Right,
this is what you kind of get. And like in
this scheme the one person is kind of just again
a union of the two prosopa, and you have the hypostasis.
Speaker 4: The hypostasis is just a particularization of that nature. Right.
Speaker 2: So that's the kind of that's what the three you know,
that's what the threefold structure of this cern cristalgia. So
you have the nature, which is this abstract universal common reality,
so and so forth. Then you have the particular instantiation, right,
particular nature, and then you have the person, right, that
is attached.
Speaker 4: To it, and then the level of person.
Speaker 2: There is this union because there's the common will of
the man Jesus and the Word of God. And this
common will is the Word of God, you know, indwelling within.
So again, like if you look at the terminology of
the early historians, this becomes very clear, and they use scripture,
they use the biblical language of you know, indwelling, right,
that the Word dwells within the human body like he
dwells like God dwelt in the tabernacle. And of course
this is scriptural, right, But the meaning of the scriptural
understanding is just the distinction of the two natures. In fact,
in the skull of the incarnation. That's what saying curl
for Alexandrosiys. That's to say that the two natures are
distinct after the indwelling, which is kind of curious but.
Speaker 4: Curiously positive for the sidey, of course.
Speaker 2: But what I'm trying to get at is again with
the structure. It's important to understand that for the Nestorian side,
price being fully manned means he must have had his
own human hype stations or even his human personhood. So
when the Nestorian says that CHRISTI is a composite hype stasis,
and when the Orthodox says Christ composite type stasis, and
when the Monopasas says this says the same, there are
three different meanings, three radically different meanings from the Orthodox
perspective's union of the two natures.
Speaker 4: For a Nestorian perspective, it's a prosofect union. Right.
Speaker 2: There is a composition of two hypostasis that remain. For
the monopseide side, it's a composition of two hype statis.
But one of these hype stasis is an Aristotelian accidents,
so to speak, it's an accident. It's not really a substance.
It's more like an accident. So that's kind of the
three different key different differences in understanding composite hypostasis. And
this is why it's important to kind of understand, Okay,
what do we mean by these terms that we use.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not gonna be the last paragraph in its entirety,
but it's basically, as for the marriology, it refuses to
call Mary theotokus. Unlike the Orthodox Church. A historian is
an Orthodox without theotokus, Okay, correct. A Nestorian is proclaiming
the Virgin Mary without the appellation theotokos in its exclusivity,
but that doesn't make them Orthodox. And so it's very
clear that the Metropolitan, who is quite well understanding in
the three tier ontology to make the distinctions that he does,
to basically lay out for you that these are irreconcilable christologies.
We are not talking about the same thing. When we
say that Christ is one person, we are not saying
the same thing. We are not professing the same faith.
And will get to the agreement between Rome in a
moment Theotokus versus Cristo tocus. So Theodora of Mopsuestia allowed
the use of theotokos, but only in combination with Anthropotochus,
and the two terms expressed different yet complementary perspectives of
the incarnation. So Nestorius claimed to have reconciled proponents of
both alternative usages by proposing Christo tokos instead has recently
been doubted, But that Nestorius attempted in its theology to
bridge the divide in that one term is essentially what
Theodora of Mopsuestia tried to achieve by using those two
terms side by side. And so Nistorius has an open
hostility towards the usage of theotokos in its own.
Speaker 4: Right, Ja, Yeah, I think I think I can hear
my own sound.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, okay, all right.
Speaker 3: And so basically what's happening here is is you have
Nestorious and Theater representing Theodore of Mopsuestia's theology in just
a little bit more kind of cleaned up expressions.
Speaker 4: Can you can you go back? Can you go back?
One start?
Speaker 2: I just want to make some comments. This is a
very important to point out because so Theotokos. Again, as
I said earlier in the stream, it's not a reference
merely too, It's not just a statement that we make
to make the virgin maybe look, you know too pretty
upward language of her or anything like that. You can
see with Theodore of mop Sevestia and the stories is
pretty much he's basically saying what Theodore of Mops is
saying in a different term. Right again, this story is
the term Christ indicates the two natures, right, certain terms
like Jesus in case only the humanity, word of God indicates.
Speaker 4: Only the divinity, but Christ indicates both of them.
Speaker 2: So that's why he used the term chrystal tocos as
the as the best way to you know, that's that's
the firstest he's willing to go. So is it acceptable
to say that the virgin Mary is Teotokus in the
same way she is Anthropotocus? Now, despite desmight make some
people say, well Christ is God and man, so yeah,
why not?
Speaker 4: But again, what are you the mother of?
Speaker 2: Is the kind of questions asked? You're a mother of
a person, and what person is Christ? Christ is not
a human person like in historianism. That's why we reject
the term anthropotochos. It is not to reject the Christ
as human. Christ is human. What we are stating is
that Christ is a divine hypostasis.
Speaker 4: He's the divine word of God.
Speaker 2: Right, He's the pre existent Word of God who became
incarnate within the Virgin Mana. That's why the Virginia is theotokos.
That's why we reject crystal talkos. And again, chrystal tacos,
I mean biblically, the Virgin Mary is referred to as
the mother of Christ. But it's not a formula on
its own, mainly because again there are many Christs in scripture. Right,
What do you actually mean by crystal toalcos? What makes
Christ as a special? What makes Christ special in this sense?
There's nothing indicating that with crystal tokos. It's at best
doesn't really indicate anything special. At worst, it serves to
it serves a historian christology, right. But theotokos, that's a
confession that Christ is God and also a divine person.
He's the divine logos, right, and so there's a specific
aspect in Christ that we can speak of him again
as divine person. He's fully human, right, but he is
a divine person, and as Saint Maximums the Confessor says, right,
Christ is divine by hypostasis, but human by nature. So
it's a confession of the full reality of the human
nature of Christ. But being fully human does not mean
being a human person. And in fact, this proposition, this
idea that being fully human means being a human person
as well, is the proposition of Apollinarius that was denied
by Saint Atonatius, Saint Grigord's theologian, Saint Grigors Nizza.
Speaker 4: Right, so you can trace it back there.
Speaker 2: This is why the term crystal tocos and anthropotoccos, this
is why it is a problem. Right, It's not accepted.
It's why it's important to understand this. Right, the person
that the virgin may gave birth to is the Word
of God, is God the divine hypostasis. Right, So this
is how we must understand the divine hype states on
the one hand, and the compost hype station on the Again,
the composition of the two natures. But the divine hype
states is a reference to the eternally begodden word of God.
Speaker 3: And also I think we should mention where people might say, well,
theotokos and anthropotocus are referring to the divine in human
natures and just circles back to your point, Well, what
does the Virgin Mary give birth to? Or who does
the Virginmaria give birth to? She doesn't give birth to natures,
she gives birth to a person.
Speaker 2: And Saint Carole off Alexandra actually like he makes this argument, right,
he kind of he says, you know, no one separate
like if so, for example, the Virgin Mary, if you
want to be super technical, because we hold to a
creationist belief in the soul. Right, the human body is
generated from the parents, but the soul is created from God.
Speaker 4: Right, So the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 2: If you want to speak technically, right, it's only a
part of humanity that she generates Christ. But that doesn't
stop us from saying that she generates, you know, the
humanity of Christ, and she gives birth to Christ. Right,
it means generating in the sense of of course human body, right,
not like generation et cetera, et cetera. But the you know,
we for example, when we speak of a human being dying,
the death is the separation of the soul body, right,
the body dies, but we still say the whole of
man died right, so no one uses language in the
way of separating the nature is when we're supposed to
refer to the one person.
Speaker 4: Right. This is the point that Saint Kurla Alexandria's is trying.
Speaker 2: To make right, and this is why he considers this
to be a very important, very crucial point. So Saint
Carol is emphasizing that again the term tyotokis refers to
the person that is born right, and this reference is
made due to a specific part mean mainly the human
body that Christ hyposthetically assumed. Hyposthetic union again means that Christ,
that the Word of God, in his divine personhood, assumed
a full human nature to himself, right, And and it's
ontologically united to himself, right, It's it's taken up on himself.
It's not just an external kind of a union. He
really did ontologically become man, even in its limitations, right
though these limitations are not absolute, because Christ is still
God right, but rather he genuinely experienced these kinds of
genuine human experience, of course without sin, and this experience
was again revealed in the transfiguration right fully, and this
is kind of what we are being called to.
Speaker 4: So there.
Speaker 2: There's this kind of circling back to so theology at
play here as well. But it's very again, it's very important.
Why do we use the term theotokos. It's not just
to confess that Christ is God, it's to confess that
Christ is a divine person.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So we're almost wrapping up I guess part one this
one here. I don't care about the entirety of this text.
I give the link. You guys can look it up.
This is basically this so called common Christological Declaration between
Rome and the Assyrian Church of the East that took
place in nineteen ninety four. That a lot of Roman
Catholics will say that while you see, look, it was
all just a big misunderstanding. We're all saying the same thing.
Can't we all just get along? This is the unique
faith that we profess in the mystery of Christ. The
controversies of the past led to anathemas bearing on persons
and on sort in formulas. The Lord's Spirit permits us
to understand better today that the division brought about in
this way we're due in large part to misunderstandings. So
that's just a bunch of nonsense. We clearly see there
is no misunderstanding. But in this common Christological declaration, it
is said that both the Rome and the Church of
the East the Assyrians profess that there is one person
that is Christ. But you read this declaration and you
ask yourself the question, what is meant by one person?
And nowhere will you see this defined. Nowhere will you
see this understanding explicated by either party. This is quite
literally word concept fallacy, because we see that we do
not profess the same faith. And when I say we,
in this particular case, Rome would profess a one hippostatic,
divine only appolition for Christ. And this is not reconcilable
with a three tier ontology of the Church of the East,
and even the that hierarchy. The metropolitan for the Church
of the East, he is telling you, look, we don't
believe the same thing. The Matagantha is telling you, look,
we don't believe the same thing. So this is a
false union. This is a false union through and through.
And you cannot look at these declarations and then start
speaking about oh, Apostolic Christianity. No, it's not Apostolic Christianity.
You have churches that have deviated that they're not professing
the faith.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 3: Like it or not, they're not apostolic. So was it
all just a big misunderstanding? Well, if you're gonna say
that it was all just a big misunderstand did the
Bishop of Rome, Saint Celestine, and in the Bishop of Alexandria,
Saint Cyril, both get it wrong? What Saint Celestine wrote
to Nestorius, We have approved and approved the faith of
the Bishop of the Church of Alexandria, and you, Nestorius,
who have been amonished by him, must again share our
beliefs if you wish to share our fellowship. If you
are to demonstrate agreement with this brother, condemning everything you
have held here, there too, we require you to preach
at once what you see him to preach. Therefore, be
fully aware of this our sentence, unless you preach about Christ,
our God, that which is held by both the Roman
and Alexandrian and the Universal Catholic Church, and what was
also most firmly held by the Holy Church of the
City of Constantinople, until you, and by a public and
written profession, condemn the perfidious novelty that tries to divide
what venerable scripture unites by the tenth day counting from
the first day of this indictment becoming known to you.
You are to be aware that you are expelled from
the communion of the Universal Catholic Church. And then you
have the Ecumenical Council, guided by Holy Spirit, did it
get it wrong? The Holy Council assembled at Ephesus, by
the grace of God, according to the decree of our
most pious and Christ loving Emperors to Nestorius, the New Judas,
be informed that because of your impious preaching and violation
of the canons, you have been deposed by the Holy
Council in accordance with the laws of the Church, on
the twenty second of the present month of June, and
that you are stripped of every ecclesiastical rank. So no,
the Ecumenical Council didn't get it wrong. Saint Cyril didn't
get it wrong. Saint Celestine didn't get it wrong. They
got it right. Nestorius taught Nestorianism. The Church of the
East is nestorian, It teaches Nestorianism. It is not an
Apostolic church. So anybody who promotes the Church of the
East as apostolic is promoting garbage, is promoting heresy. We
are not in communion with that church. We will never
be in communion with that church insofar as it holds
to what it does as professed by the madiganthan Yuah
and likewise the Orientals. Anybody who holds that the Oriental
churches ow are Apostolic is preaching garbage. They are not apostolic,
and we will not hold into a union with them,
because we are clear in understanding the issues that divide us.
It is not just a matter of incorrect language or misunderstandings.
The misunderstandings are by idiots who don't understand the metaphysics,
thereby people who are illiterate and don't actually understand what
the discussion is about. If you take the time to learn,
if you take the time to study your faith seriously,
then you will see that the only apostolic church is
the Orthodox Church, and we will not compromise. We stand
firm in the faith, and we preach the faith. We
uphold what the councils have taught. Nomenclature alone is insufficient, Okay.
You cannot just simply do keyword searches and say, oh,
look at what this person said. What is the theology
behind those words? What is the underlying metaphysical paradigm? Do
you actually understand what these historic people taught? Do you
understand what the ecumenical councils taught? Do you accept that
the Ecumenical councils were guided by the Holy Spirit? How
are you certain that you're not committing word concept fallacies
or equivocating on certain words? Okay? Are you willing to
recognize that these issues are not just word games or
that you can just say that they're because of certain
political circumstances. Are you willing to recognize that there are
fundamentally irreconcilable differences theologically and metaphysically. Okay? Can you recognize
when being able to profess a particular doctrine actually precludes
is precluded due to your underlying theology and metaphysics, despite
that you want to profess that doctrine. By this, I
mean you'll say, no, we don't profess Nestorianism, for example
in the Church of the East. Well, no, look at
your metaphysics. Understand your metaphysics and understand how the logical
entailment of what your system is set up to hold
to it is actually it precludes for you concluding what
you want to conclude, Okay, have you developed a paradigm
that is consistent, that has meaningful explanatory power, or are
you just putting random quote minds in together and taking
ideas out of context. So all of these questions, this
is the whole point of why we want to do
this extended series of streams, is to really flesh out
the Orthodox positions, the Oriental and the Church of the
East positions and demonstrate to you that we are not
teaching the same thing, We are not compatible with each other,
and if we're not teaching the same thing, then not
everyone can be apostolic. It's not just a mechanical thing.
Like Jay said at the beginning. To be apostolic, you
have to uphold the correct faith, and this is not
about having just some kind of sophisticated system that is irrelevant.
Those people who can understand these things have an obligation
to understand them and to explain it to other people
to understand that they can better understand it. You cannot
just relegate these as unnecessary details. When you look at
the ecumenical councils, they went to great detail to explain
what's happening theologically