Cloud of Witnesses: Doctrine? Who needs doctrine?

It has been said that ‘Christian doctrine’ is the least favoured topic among students at theological colleges, and to the ordinary church-goer in the pew it might seem at best remote and at worst irrelevant. 

Trying to live by Christian values is difficult enough in the modern world without also having to worry about whether the Holy Spirit emanates from the Father and the Son or what it means to say that Jesus was begotten and not made. Yet there can be no religion without some kind of belief system, and you cannot attend a Christian service today without encountering an array of doctrinal assertions in the hymns and prayers and creeds. Some of these assertions have been – and still are – sources of disagreement. For example, the historical figure of Jesus has, over the centuries, given rise to contrasting beliefs about his humanity and his relationship to God.

Since about 400, most Christian creeds have asserted that Jesus was both a fully human man and, at the same time, the incarnation of God – ‘very God of very God’, as the original version of the Nicene creed expressed it. But there is an obvious tension between these two propositions: if Jesus was fully human, he couldn’t also have been God; but if he was God, then he couldn’t also have been an ordinary man. It was a dilemma that troubled the early church for a very long time as the bishops tried to find a way of reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable beliefs. Two who were deeply engaged in the very early stages of this process gaze down at us from their cloister windows in Chester Cathedral: St Ignatius and St Irenaeus. 

St Ignatius was born in Antioch in about 55 and may have known St Paul and some of the apostles. There is a tradition that he became bishop of Antioch on the instruction of its first bishop, St Peter. Like Paul, Ignatius wrote letters to Christian communities in Asia Minor dealing mainly with practical issues in the life of local churches; but he is remembered principally for his vigorous rejection of a popular ‘heresy’ about Jesus that was threatening the early church: Docetism.

The Docetists were a group of Christians who tried to resolve the question of whether Jesus was human or divine by arguing that if he really was God, he could not have been a fully human being – for by definition, humans are not gods. At best, Jesus could only have seemed to be human while all the time remaining truly God. (The word ‘docetism’ comes from the Greek dokien, ‘to seem’.) Ignatius rejected this argument, insisting that in Jesus, God had emptied himself of his divinity and come to earth in the form of a fully human man. That is what the incarnation meant, and to deny it would be to deny the bedrock of the developing faith.

But another group of early Christians, the Gnostics, took exactly the opposite view to the Docetists, arguing that if God was indeed the perfect spiritual being that he was believed to be, he could not possibly have suffered the all too human agony and humiliation of the cross. Jesus may have been the human vehicle for the heavenly messages sent by God, but he could not actually have been God. Just as St Ignatius had thrown his episcopal weight against Docetism a century earlier, St Irenaeus now did the same against Gnosticism, insisting that if Jesus had not been the very incarnation of God, the crucifixion would have been nothing more than a cruel human execution.

Of course, Irenaeus could not provide a logical answer to the conundrum of how Jesus could have been at once fully human and wholly divine; and it was not until much later that the western church finally decreed, as a matter of doctrine rather than logic, that in the earthly person of Jesus a wholly divine nature and a fully human nature had been joined in a seamless union. That is still the church’s ‘official’ position. But does it matter any longer? Does the faith of the ‘ordinary worshipper in the pew’ depend for its authenticity on the doctrine of the ‘seamless union’ of Jesus’s divine and human natures? After all, nobody nowadays seems even to notice – much less be troubled by - the Docetic phrase from Charles Wesley’s Christmas carol: ‘veiled in flesh the Godhead see’. As we pass by the images of St Ignatius and St Irenaeus in the cloister, it would be interesting to hear their modern take on the question!