And we are getting toward the close of our study of the creeds and confessions of the church, kind of paving the way for the study of our own confession coming up here later in the month of September. Today, we have been hinting at and talking about the various councils for several weeks, and today we want to introduce you to four important councils in the history of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries. Our own confession, as we'll see as we go through it in the months and years to come, our own confession has a great debt. to these councils and their creedal affirmations that were made as a result of them. So we're going to kind of look at all this under the heading of Christological Controversies. We had spoken, I think, last week about a doctrine known as Menarcheanism. Someone remind us what Menarcheanism was kind of all about. That God is the king. He is the sole king. There's no other God. And we would take this from even the Old Testament. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Or even the New Testament, 1 Corinthians chapter eight. For us, there is only one God and one Lord, Jesus Christ. And they're speaking about the divine nature of the Father and the Son together as one glorious God. But as time progressed in the church, the questions began to arise regarding the relationship of the son to the father. And we talked about Origen and Lucian and Arius a little bit in the last several weeks, leading us up to the fourth century, where we come to what's known as the Council of Micea. So these controversies that erupt in the fourth and fifth century, we call them Christological controversies because they are controversies, one, that are going to talk about how does Jesus relate to God? Is Jesus fully divine? And then they're also going to address the issue of how does Jesus, how do we think of Christ as a man? Is he fully man? And by the time we get to the end of 451 in the Council of Chalcedon, the church has expressed herself clearly and emphatically in some creedal affirmations regarding the full deity and full humanity of Christ. Now it's not that this orthodoxy wasn't present in the church from its earliest days, but as various challenges or various opposing views kind of came to rise up, the church had to formulate answers. and the church had to kind of think about how do we best address this particular theological issue and avoid extremes on one end or the other. Sometimes theology is like treading the edge of a razor. If you fall off, it's just real thin, and you can easily fall off one way or the other, and you wanna make sure that doesn't happen. So we're gonna talk about Jesus, the God-man, all right? So we're going to look at various councils and the controversies that either gave rise to them or even other controversies that somewhat came out of them. Because sometimes they would think that, oh, this council has like solved the problem. You ever had that issue with your kids maybe? You're sitting there and you talk to your children and you're feeling really good about yourself as a parent. You're like, problem solved. And then they walk away. And a millisecond happens, and it all falls apart. And you're like, I thought it was all good to go. Well, sometimes the councils were like this. We thought we'd solved the problem. But sure enough, they had not. So sometimes problems lead up to a council. Other times problems develop out of a council that another council has to kind of be called to address. Well, we're going to look at four Christological heresies, four Christological heresies. Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, and, this one's fun to say, Eutychianism. It has nothing to do with ticks. I've heard several comments over the last few weeks that we've been using lots of big words, and I'm sympathetic. Sometimes they get a little confusing. These are the four principal Christological heresies that we want to address. And they're all addressed at four principal Christological councils, Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. You should have a paper that was on the back table, and you may already be reading that and looking at that. I would probably encourage you at this point just to kind of put that to the side or flip it over on the back and use that for some notes or something. If you need that sheet, it's on the back table. So let's kind of get into these four councils and the corresponding heresies that they addressed, all right? We're going to begin with Arianism. Now, we've talked a little bit about Arius. I hope by the time we're done today, things will be a little more clear with each of these. Arianism is dealt with officially at the Council of Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea is in the actual town of Nicaea. of in the northwestern area of modern-day Turkey, very near modern-day Istanbul. If you have done any travel, it was interesting. I was talking to my mom about this several weeks ago, and mom and dad had actually been to Istanbul. I had no idea they'd been there, and they'd been to the town of Nicaea, where this all took place, and that was kind of neat to hear. Well, at the Council of Nicaea, it was held from May the 20th to June the 19th of 325. And I think I complain about a one-day associational meeting. So, you know, we have a meeting this coming Wednesday for our association. It's going to be from like 10 to 4. And I'm thinking, man, that's six hours. That's a lot of time. I could get a lot of things done in six hours. I really hope it's a good meeting. And when it's a rough meeting, Then you really look back on it, you're like, oh, I could have done with something other than that. These guys met for a month. They met for a month addressing the issue of Arianism. Now, they had other issues to deal with as well, but our main focus here is the Christological heresy of Arianism. It was a meeting called by Constantine the Great. Here again, we see the coming together of the church and the state, and this becomes a real problem for the church throughout the rest of the early patristic period and into the medieval days as well. The principal theological advisor for Constantine was a man by the name of Hosius. And Hosius is the bishop, I believe it's in Cordova, it's in Spain, and that's where Hosius was the leading bishop in that area. There were 300 bishops that were present at the Council of Nicaea. Now, what's interesting about that to me is, well, one, it is a lot of bishops in one room, one area together, trying to engage together. And remember, it was the bishops that participated in the councils. They were the ones that could engage theologically. They could speak across the table. But there were lots of other people present as well. Arius himself is present at the Council of Nicaea. He is an elder, a presbyter in the Church of Alexandria. Now his bishop, Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, is present at the Council of Nicaea. He is one of the participants, but Arius is just there as a presbyter. Also present at the Council of Nicaea and not participating is Athanasius. We've mentioned him before. Athanasius becomes the leading opponent of Arianism in the fourth century, and much of the battle falls on his shoulders. Another interesting point about these 300 bishops that are present, 1,800 bishops were invited. 1,500 did not come. Now, we don't know why they all didn't come. It could have been age, sickness. The travel was paid for by Constantine, but the travel just could have been too difficult, too hard, or not interested, or maybe they were more on the Aryan side, and they saw the handwriting on the wall like there in Daniel, and they thought Arius's days are numbered, and I don't want to be the guy that's standing there with him when they give him the boot, which they did at the end of June the 19th. So that's a little bit of the picture of what's going on at the Council of Nicaea. Now Constantine calls the meeting, but Hoseus really leads the meeting. He's the theological arm that's kind of pressing against Arius. And Hoseus is very much an anti-Arian, like Alexander, like Athanasius, right? There is a strong leadership given by Hoseus and Alexander against Arianism. Now there are many bishops, many of these 300 bishops present are leaning toward Arianism. But Hosius and Alexander theologically win the day. Now they win the day, but the war is not over because the war just, the battles ensue for the next like 40, 50 years. And it gets very difficult in the fourth century, leading to the point, I think I've mentioned Jerome before. Jerome makes the comment, he's the one who translated or wrote the Latin Vulgate. He said at one point in time in the fourth century, the whole world has become Aryan. So Aryanism does become very dominant in that day. It doesn't squash the light or extinguish the light, the truth, but it does have a strong presence, especially in the east. All right. The focus, so the focus of this particular council is on the teaching of Arius. We've mentioned already he is an elder in the church in Alexandria. He is a popular teacher. Now, I'm not gonna sing again because the guys threatened last week to post that thing on social media and maybe it's on some account I haven't been able to find yet, but I'll bet, I'll bet somewhere back there in that control brain center, they're holding the video hostage and it'll come up again one day. Maybe, what's the EMP thing or whatever? It'll just like wipe out all their hard drives. But Jeremy had asked about Arius's teaching being communicated through little songs, and Arius was a very creative type poet. He had these little short ditties, and he would put them to music, and he made his teachings very popular. They were well-received. He was a very beloved elder preacher in the church there in Alexandria. Arius and those who followed him were also what I would call staunch Biblicists. They had a real desire to keep the discussion just on Bible verses. As long as we're just talking Bible verses, we're fine. It's when you want to draw theological conclusions from these biblical texts that things got a little dicey for them. This is seen at the Council of Nicaea, where the principal Arian that is represented, the principal Arian bishop, is a man by the name of Eusebius of Nicomedia. Eusebius and his fellow Aryan kind of compatriots there that followed him around at the Council of Nicaea would dialogue with the anti-Aryans, and the anti-Aryans would say things like, well, do you believe, and then they would quote a Bible verse. And the Eusebius and his friends would kind of go over here and they would talk and they would kind of converse with one another. And then they would come back and they would say, yay and amen. And we also believe, and they'll throw another Bible verse out there just to show, see we're very biblical, all right. And the Antiarians would then go back and go, obviously this isn't working. They just kind of frustrated themselves for hours and days quoting biblical texts and saying, do you believe these texts? You can imagine yourself having a conversation with a Mormon at your door, all right? He comes by, knocks on the door, and you've got your Bible, he's got his Bible, or maybe he's got your Bible, all right? And you say, well, do you believe this Bible text? Well, yes, we believe that Bible text, and we believe this one, too, all right? And so as long as you're just keeping on quoting Bible verses back and forth, this can just be kind of like a volley. You're just, you're playing tennis, and you're just hitting the ball nice, and nobody's slamming anything on anybody. Nobody's winning. You're just going back and forth and back and forth. Well, The Antiarians of the Council of Nicaea realized that this needed to be addressed, and so they began to formulate their doctrinal positions using non-biblical terminology. Now, if you want to read about that a little more, there's a great little letter that Athanasius has written. It's called De Decretis. You can find it online for free. And I think in the, if you happen to have a series of books known as the Nicene, Post-Nicene, Anti-Nicene, Nicene, Post-Nicene Fathers, you can find this whole set of books, like 38 volumes, it's online, so it's free in that regard. And you can find PDFs of it, you can search and stuff like that. It's about 20 pages in this series. And it's a wonderful little, it's a letter written by Athanasius helping a friend understand what happened at the council. So the friend wrote to Athanasius, I don't understand what was going on at the council. You were there. You were an observer. Can you tell me what was going on? And he writes back, and he talks about Eusebius, and he refers to Eusebius as Eusebius and his fellows. That's the way he calls them all the time. He just says it over and over again. You can almost hear this little snarky tone coming out of Eusebius and his fellows. And they're the ones that are constantly going back and forth with him. But he comes to the conclusion at the end and explains why it is that they decided that they had to, in their creedal formulation, why did they have to actually use non-biblical terminology to explain biblical doctrine. So it's a great explanation of that, and it's really kind of a defense of creedalism and a defense of confessionalism. Because if we can't formulate our doctrine in non-biblical terms, then all we have are biblical terms. All we really have are like Bible texts, all right? And we just, nothing, there's no document that could possibly distinguish us from kind of the other group, all right? So the teaching of Arianism, briefly, The Son, according to Arius, does not share the Father's being or his essence. Ontologically speaking, the Father and the Son are different beings. So where Jesus comes and says, I and the Father are one, right? I'm sure Eusebius and his fellows would have an answer for that. But that's some pretty unifying language there. But their teaching was the son does not share the father's being. Joe, can I possibly get you to, do we have an extension cord? This thing started at 47%, now it's at 35%, and I see things sinking fast. The son is not coeternal with the father. So they're different in being, and the son is not co-eternal with the father. So they're distinct in being, and they're distinct, in a sense, in chronology. The father is eternal, the son is not eternal. This is where Arius' popular phrase comes in that he did put to music as a little ditty, there was a time when he was not. There was a time when the son was not. So he is denying here the full deity of the Son. The Son is for Arius a created being, hence a lesser God. There was a time when he came into being. Now it was before everything else came into being. The Son is the first of the creations of God the Father, and then through the Son, God makes everything else. Kind of the result of this council and this whole month-long discussion is that there is the production of what we call the Nicene Creed. As we've mentioned before, this is not the creed that's in your bulletin each and every Lord's Day that we confess that we call the Nicene Creed. It's kind of shorthand. The one that's in the bulletin is the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed that comes out of the Council of Constantinople in 381. This creed, and we read it, I think, last week, we had it on the screen, is a little briefer. It ends with the phrase, I think, we believe in the Holy Spirit, period, all right? Whereas the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed goes on and says, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who together with the father and sons be worshiped and glorified, et cetera. So Arius, as a result of this council, is condemned and exiled. There were two bishops that were exiled. I forget their names, but they were from Libya. So you think of the North Africa, Egypt, Libya area, and there ought to be a table or something. Thank you. Two bishops from Libya who were closely connected to Arius and really favored him, they were also exiled and banished. Now I've said at the end here that it's a weak consensus. This is where they're thinking they really have it solved, but they don't. And things begin to quickly unravel. We covered a little bit of that last week in the slide. I think it was some high points. You can kind of go back and look at that. I think these are on our sermon audio page if you want to get those. And if you want more on this, I can always email the PowerPoints or something. Maybe we can upload PowerPoints to sermon audio. Does that work? I'll try to get those to Jason. So there is a weak consensus. There is a consensus, but it's a weak one. Now there's a couple reasons probably it's weak. One is a theological reason. There are many, well, there are at least, there are at least three or two bishops at the council that don't sign the Nicene Creed, the two guys from Libya. Now Arius obviously doesn't sign, but he doesn't sign because he's an elder and not a bishop. Interestingly, Eusebius of Nicomedia does sign, but his signature is somewhat forced. And it's forced not simply by theological power, it's forced by political power. Many of the bishops at the meeting that were kind of had an inclination toward Arianism just submit because Constantine wants things to be at peace, right? And remember, Constantine's principal advisor is Hosius, who is pressing this on Constantine as well. Okay, that's a little bit about Arianism. Questions? Comments? Yeah, Steven. Alexander. That's convenient. Alexander of Alexander. Oh no, no, no, no, no. The Bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, is Athanasius' bishop. And this entire thing began, if we go back a little bit in the history of it, this entire thing begins with Arius writing letters to Alexander to basically argue for his case and declare his orthodoxy. And Alexander's like, I don't think so. That's not a direct quote. But you get the idea. Alexander's like, no way. You're not Orthodox at all. And there are appeals made to the Bishop of Rome, and there are appeals made to Constantine. Lots of letters going back and forth. There's an interesting text. It's by a guy named Rush, R-U-S-C-H. It's just called, I think, The Trinitarian Controversy. It's a little paperback book. You can probably find a copy for like five bucks on Amazon. And it has the primary source letters. And I didn't bring it today, but I just got in the mail the other day an exam copy of a book that I'm hoping to use for a class one day. It is a, it's like a 500-page book, and I haven't read it, but I've looked at it enough. It's letters from like 337 to 362. It's all the letters that went back and forth regarding these different controversies in this period. And getting back to those primary texts, it's really interesting when you read what they actually said. So yeah, Alexander is a total anti-Aryan. Yes. Yes. And that's why Alexander feels responsible. He has to deal with this. But he does have some kind of sense of connectivity to the other churches. So he writes to Rome. He writes to Constantinople. He wants to get input. And he's going to need them on his side, if you will, because he knows the church in Alexander can't just stand alone. So Tom? Athanasius is in Alexandria, Egypt. He's an Egyptian. Nicomedia is up by Constantinople, and that's where Eusebius is. And this is Eusebius of Nicomedia. This is not Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian. It's a different Eusebius. And so Ben and Michael, Ben's got... Okay, is she good? Well, think about it. I mean, this is a church with multiple presbyters, of which Alexander is a bishop, but he's a presbyter, all right? Now, the presbyters are not bishops, but the bishop would be considered a presbyter as well, all right? So there's dissension in the ranks in the leadership of a church. Go figure. I mean, like it's never happened before, you know? Yeah, just happens all the time. And so, Michael? Yeah, it's a good question. Don't know. I mean, that really wasn't even part of the conversation. That wasn't part of the discussion. And it's not that he denies the deity of Christ. He denies the full deity of Christ. So there's a sense in which you could say Jesus is divine. There's a sense in which you could say Jesus is a creature. It's a little messed up, all right? So he does not have a fully, he's not fully divine like the Father. So if you think back to last week, we talked about origin and his subordinationism, and Lucian, and where the Father and the Son are like united in will, but again, not in being, and then Arius just comes full out and says, Jesus is created. Now, he's created in eternity, so there's a sense he's kind of connected to some divine aspects, but he's not fully divine like the Father. Billy, and then Jeff, and then we probably need to move on, but Billy, what you got? Same church, yeah. Now it's not the same church like we're thinking of a church, like in this room together, all right? It's Alexandria, Egypt. It's a very large city in the northern part of Egypt, probably has multiple churches, multiple congregations meeting that are all headed up by these different elders that are all part of the larger church of Alexandria that comes under the bishopric of Alexandria. I don't know if that helps it. There's a lot of information, a lot of people's information. There's a lot of research stuff that's out there. There's a problem with the ability to live for 10, 20 minutes a week. So the idea is to find a way to pass it on to other people. It's very hard to have an issue with the ability to live for 10, 20 minutes a week. So it's kind of like a modern, like a lot of communities, Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah, there is a sense of a connected ecclesiology in some sense. We're talking here about the one holy Catholic apostolic church in that sense. There is a sense of connectivity, which finds some similarity in our concepts of like associationalism or whatever, but yeah. Jeff? Well, I mean, if this is embraced, it totally sinks the concept of the Trinity. Yeah, I mean, that's what's at stake. And that's why there's such fervor about it and such engagement, because they realize what the cost of this is. If, as our confession says, the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all of our communion with God, and we lose that, you have no what? You have no communion with God. So that's pretty overwhelming. All right. So let's kind of move on and to think, I didn't think I'd have enough information. Okay. Let's look at a second heresy, that being Apollinarianism. All right. So it has nothing to do with whether or not you should or shouldn't go to the moon. This is, sorry, I was just, I was trying. It's a tough crowd. All right. Council of Constantinople. Council of Constantinople meets from May to July 381. Don't have any more specific dates, but that might be more specific than you want anyway. It is called, not by Constantine, this is called later, it's called by Emperor Theodosius, Theodosius I. Now remember, Theodosius I is the emperor under whom Christianity moves from being a licit or legal or legitimate religion to now being what? the official religion of the empire, right? There are about 190 bishops that are present at the Council of Constantinople. Now the focus of this particular council is the teaching of a man by the name of Apollinaris. Apollinaris is the Bishop of Laodicea. Just kind of as a side note there, what does that make you think about? You ever wonder what happened to the church of Laodicea in Revelation chapter 3? It must have listened. Here it is. It's still here. That's pretty interesting, right? Think about that. You know, we're going to be in 431. We're going to be in Ephesus. Whatever happened to the church in Ephesus in Revelation chapter 2? It was still there in the 4th, 5th century, all right? Apollinaris is a friend, a close friend of Athanasius, and he is a defender of Nicene Christology. So, at the moment, prior to the Council of Constantinople, Apollinaris seems like one of the good guys. You got to be careful about putting white hats and black hats upon people in church history, because you might just get a whole bunch of hats with shades of gray, you know, the good guys and the bad guys. But Polinarus seems to be on the right side of history in that regard. He is defending Nicene Christianity. He is a staunch defender of this with Athanasius. Athanasius is with him in that regard. Now, Polynares' teaching focuses on what's called the Logos Christology. If you think of John chapter one, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. The word for word is the Greek term Logos. The word, the reason, thought can be translated different ways. And here in John one, it's speaking about the person of the son who becomes flesh. In Apollinaris' view of Lagos Christology, he teaches that in the man Jesus, the Lagos, the divine Lagos, replaces the human soul or the human mind of Jesus. So Jesus has a human body. Again, this is according to Apollinaris. Jesus has a human body, but he doesn't have a human soul or a human mind. He has a divine soul or a divine mind. The net result of this is that Apollinaris is denying the full humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember the opening slide here was we were talking about Christological heresies dealing with Jesus as the God-man. We don't simply affirm Jesus to be fully God, we also affirm him to be fully what? Fully man, all right? Apollinaris is opposed to Arianism that subordinates the son to the father to the point of being a creature, which would take away his full deity. Apollinaris is a defender of the full deity of the son. The problem is with Apollinaris is he's not a defender of the full humanity of the son. As a result of this, a couple of things. One, there is a synod that's held in 362 in Alexandria that rejected the teaching of this Lagos Christology that kind of made the humanity of the Lord Jesus less than fully human. However, at the Council or the Senate in 362, the focus was really on some Arians that were beginning to adopt this kind of teaching, and Apollinaris was somewhat slipping under the radar. Because remember, Apollinaris was a great defender of Nicene Orthodoxy regarding the deity of the sun. He's a great friend of Athanasius. Nobody really suspected Apollinaris at this point to be one of these guys saying these kinds of things, right? But now, by the time 381 rolls around, it becomes very clear that Apollinaris holds these views as well that take the humanity of the Lord Jesus as not fully human. And he is condemned by the Council of Constantinople. One of the leading bishops at the council was Gregory of Nazianzus. We've heard his name before. He was one of the three what? Do you remember? not cappuccino fathers, but the Cappadocian fathers, all right, one of those three guys, all right. And Gregory Nazianzus made the statement at the council, he said, what was not assumed was not, what, was not healed. If Jesus doesn't become fully man, then he cannot redeem those who are fully men. He must become fully incarnate. I mean, think about the biblical testimony to the fact that Jesus becomes flesh in every way as we, yet without sin. Because we are made of flesh and blood, the writer of Hebrews says Jesus had to become what? Flesh and blood, had to become just like we were, yet without sin. Questions on Apollinarianism. That is possible. We do live in this Greek dualistic world where, for example, the 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic heresies would teach that matter is bad and spirit is good. That can certainly be quote-unquote floating around in the air. I think what's really driving Apollinaris is the idea that he wants to defend the deity of Christ so much that the idea of him being human fully human and coming together as one here, how does that happen? And so he just errs on the side of making the humanity of Jesus kind of a less than full humanity. And this Lagos Christology, the idea of the Lagos kind of coming in and connecting with Christ or whatever, has been around since the second century, but it's never really been clarified and defined about how we're gonna talk about this relationship of the divine nature of Christ and the human nature of Christ. And still, at this point, the church still hasn't really come out with that clarity that we benefit from today. I've said before, we are standing on the shoulders of those who've gone before us. We don't want to be like children, ungrateful for their parents. If you're a child today and you're grateful for your parents, that's a wonderful thing. But how many times do kids grow up and think their parents don't know anything? You know, that happens a lot. And churches today often look back on the previous generations of the church and think, oh, we know more. And we are greatly indebted to them. Apollinaris? No. You know what's interesting about a lot of these guys, and this happens so often in church history, it happens today as well, whenever someone is charged with heresy, the next thing, you just don't understand. You don't understand what I'm saying. You're not listening to me. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this. And it sounds like they said the same thing they just said before. You know, if you're a teacher of the Bible and you are always having to clarify what you say, maybe you're just not very what? Maybe you're not very clear. So we want to make sure we're clear, all right? There are some Bible teachers that thrive in making ear-catching, you know, amazing statements that people are like, wow, I've never heard that before. And I used to be very amazed with some of them. And I'm not as amazed anymore as I just kind of stick clear of them. I want people to be clear. I don't want teachers to be original. I want them, what does the old hymn say? I'm so tempted to sing, tell me the old, old story. Right on my heart, every word. You know, I want those old paths. Some newfangled idea somebody's got, because he was clever. He came up with some cool things to say. And I won't name names, but maybe you can think of some. Yeah, Billy? Yes, this is where the final version that we have today that we call the Nicene Creed comes from here. Now, they do. I think, Michael, you were asking about the Holy Spirit. It's probably not that they didn't have some thoughts and views on the Holy Spirit. I'm sure they did. All right. And we can go back in the writings of the fathers and read about them. But the Holy Spirit, the discussion about the Holy Spirit was not on the table. By the time we get to the Council of Constance and Opal, it is. And hence, there's a brief paragraph in the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed about the Holy Spirit. I'm gonna mess it up, but I think I said a little bit ago, we believe in the Holy Spirit, who, just go blank. Lord and giver of life, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified, okay, something like that. So, now, one of the reasons for that, we don't talk about it on here, because it's not dealing with Apollinarianism, it's dealing with a group called the Nomadomachians. Say that five times really fast. The pneumatomachians. What is that? Well, kind of break it up, all right? Pneuma, the spirit. Machianism, the idea of fighting. The Pneumatomachians were the people who fought about the Holy Spirit. And they were going around in the 360s and the 370s, and they were saying all kinds of crazy stuff about the Holy Spirit. And the Cappadocian fathers, in particular, come out with some really great stuff on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I think, is it Basil who has the five orations about the Holy Spirit? And I should remember this. It's in my class. I assigned it, and now I can't remember. But I think maybe Basil the Great has the five orations about the Holy Spirit. You can look it up online sometime. And they're really, they're really good. And he's addressing, often, the Pneumatomachians. And so, hence the need to have a more full creedal affirmation of the Holy Spirit in 381. All right. Let's move on. We have much ground to cover. Nestorianism. Nestorianism. The Council of Ephesus addresses the issue of Nestorianism from June 22nd into July of 431. I don't know how far in July, but probably toward the end of the book. It's called by Theodosius II. Theodosius II is the last in the dynasty of those Theodosiuses. Kind of reaches back to Theodosius I, and sometimes this is called like the Golden Age of the Empire. There are 153 bishops that are present, and the leading theologian is a man by the name of Cyril, who is the Bishop of Alexandria. We're well past Alexander at this point, and now we are to a man by the name of Cyril. The focus of this council is Nestorius, who is the bishop of Constantinople. Now, remember Constantinople? In like 330, Constantine moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, calling Constantinople the new Rome. So this is the guy who is the bishop of the capital of the empire, all right? It's a very prominent place to be. He is a staunch defender of Nicaea, and he is an opponent of Apollinaris. So, so far, so good. He is a pursuer of heretics, and that's what I've called him. He is, he is, if there were blogs, remember back, any of you remember like, you know, 20 years ago, well, a little further than that, there was no internet. My kids always look at me, there was no internet. What did you do? We used books, used books. And, but there were all these discernment blogs. You remember those, all right? It was like, you'd go to the discernment blog, you know, www.ihateeverybody.com, all right? And you'd pull it up, and there'd be like a list going down forever. You know, it would start with Joyce Meyer, and you're like, yeah, all right? And then it would go to John MacArthur, and you're like, oh, that sounds wrong. And then R.C. Sproul's at the bottom, and you're like, this is wrong. So, you know, all these different things were happening, and you're like, He just doesn't like anybody. It was like everybody in the alphabet soup of Bible teachers, you know, was on this discernment blog, and I'd find these things. Well, Nestorius is kind of like that. He is going hard after all the people that he thinks are heretics in the empire, especially there around Constantinople. Now, this is probably going to make Nestorius a little on the critical side, all right? You know what happens to the people that surround people who are critical? They often become what? They become critical, too. All right? You know that old adage, if mama ain't happy, Nobody's happy. Well, I have found after 33 years of marriage, if daddy ain't happy, nobody's happy either. And I've often found, too, that if the kids ain't happy, mom and daddy ain't happy. And so it's just like everybody feeds off everybody else, you know. One person comes in the room, they're all happy. Everybody loves Ben at home. Ben comes in the room, he's all like jovial and happy or whatever. And I'm sitting here in my old man self and I'm like, And now he's a deacon. You've got to like, you know, listen to him, respect him a little bit more. You can't just say, stop it. Go to your room. All right. So, but, you know, he has a way of bringing levity back into the room and happiness back in the room. And Janice and I are like, we're just so glad for Ben. That's just really good. That's a great gift. It's a wonderful quality. Everybody notices it. And everybody can notice grumpiness too. Everybody can notice criticism. All right. And it kind of feeds. Well, Nestorius, provides the fuel for the fire that he starts, and it burns him. Because people begin to look at him a little more closely, and they realize, Mr. Nestorius, you are notorious, and there's a problem. So, his teaching, he affirms the divine and human natures of Jesus. So far, so good, all right? However, Nestorius affirms a union of the divine and human natures of Christ that are moral, are volitional. He is united with the Father in moral virtue, we might say. He is united with the Father in will, but he is not united with the Father in essence, or being. We're back to another ontological problem here, right? He rejects a term For Mary, and the term that is floating around in that day and is eventually affirmed at the Council of Ephesus, is the term Theotokos. And he prefers a term for Mary, Christotokos. Theotokos means the God-bearer. Sometimes translated today in the more vernacular, the mother of God. You might see how that could begin to make somebody a little uncomfortable, Mary as the mother of God. However, the one who is born of Mary is the word made flesh. The one born of Mary is indeed God, a very God. She is to be seen as Theotokos. Now, this term, the story is found to be very uncomfortable. And he preferred the term Christotakos, the mother of Christ, the mother of the human nature of Jesus. He didn't like Theotakos. In fact, there was a man, an elder in his church there in Constantinople, that preached a series of sermons against the concept of Theotakos, and Nestorius affirmed those sermons, which got him in no little bit of hot water. Just a note here about Theotokos. It may make you uncomfortable too, I don't know. I'm fine and affirm the term Theotokos and the concept of Theotokos because Theotokos is trying to make a statement about the one born of Mary. It's not trying to make a statement about Mary. Right? Now there is some sense in which Nestorius is concerned because he's like, this makes Mary like a goddess. Think of Greek mythology or whatever, you know, goddesses beget what? Little gods or something like that. So he has, we could say good intentions, but you know, we all heard our mothers say things about good intentions. You know, good intentions don't always get us the right place. Nestorius wants to separate the divine and the human natures of Jesus to such a point that it is feared by many that Nestorius is pressing two persons. This affirmation of two natures that are separated would create, essentially, two persons. And we can't have Christ being two persons. Now, the result of this, he is condemned and banished by the emperor. Now Nestorius rejects that he is holding to two persons. He does not say that. He says, I'm not holding to that. But he had so separated the two natures that it essentially led to the conclusion, the logical conclusion of two persons. Nestorius' books are burned. Yet there is a strong movement supporting Nestorius, and it breaks from the church and forms what is known to us today still as the Church of the East. And the Church of the East, those who are not in the Church of the East, those that remain with the church, if you will, in creedal orthodoxy, will often look at the Church of the East and say, oh, it finds its origins in Nestorius. But the Church of the East claims today their kind of theological founder as a man by the name of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who was a Bible teacher, elder in, I think, Antioch. And he had a very literal hermeneutic. He was very much a biblist in some sense. And there's a whole other story about Theodore of Mopsuestia. It doesn't really save them from some problems because Theodore has some issues as well. He and Nestorius were kind of contemporaries. All right. Briefly, any questions there? Yeah, Matt? I don't know, but it's not the deciding point right now. In other words, they don't have, this doctrine of the hypostatic union probably is gonna come somewhere out of, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes out of somewhere in Ephesus or Chalcedon. I'm not sure. I'll try to look that up. And it's a good question. And what Matt's alluding to, the doctrine of the hypostatic union, speaking about the union of the divine and human natures of Christ, that he's united in one person, But the natures are not compounded. The natures are not confused. They're not kind of conflated together. They are still distinct. The problem with Nestorius is that they are separate. He's not just saying they're distinct. They're united but distinct. No, they're just separate. So, all right, let's look at Eutychianism briefly. And this may be as far as we get. All right, the Council of Chalcedon, October the 8th through November the 1st, 451, called by Emperor Marcion. This is attended, note this, by 520 bishops. This is the largest of all the councils, and it is the most recorded. In other words, the minutes from this council, the notes from this council, are quite intricate, all right? Nicaea, for example, we have no minutes. We have no actual notes from anybody that was at Nicaea. Official notes. We have reports from different people, like Athanasius and his writing of De Decretis and other people who've said things about it, but no official notes. The focus is a man by the name of Eutyches. He is an elder in Constantinople. He is not a bishop. He's an elder and a leader of a monastery He is pro-Nicene and he is an opponent of Nestorius. It's very popular to be for Nicaea and it's very popular to be against the guy that just got condemned a few years earlier. It's always a good thing. His teaching is that he fails to hold a distinction in both natures. He mingles the two natures into one. This is the error of what is known historically as Monophysitism, or one nature. Now this is an error, interestingly, that is commonly associated with Cyril of Alexandria, from a prior generation. Cyril had a view of the one nature of Christ, and he used it to argue against others, but Cyril was never condemned The results here in this council, there is a Senate in 448 in Constantinople condemning historianism. Well, I don't have enough time. There's another Senate in 449 known as the Robbers' Senate. And basically, the anti-Nestorian bishop at this particular synod is beaten up by some monks. And the synod supposedly goes the way of reinstating Nestorius, or reinstating Eutyches in his eldership. But there are a lot of letters that go back and forth. Council of Chalcedon is called in 451. Leo, the bishop of Rome at that point in time, writes a letter that is sometimes referred to as Leo's Tome, and they read. Leo doesn't come. He doesn't come to the council at Chalcedon, but he sends his letter and sends his representatives, and they read his tome, which condemns Eutyches, and the council sides with Leo This is an interesting point historically because this is one of the places that we first see Leo, the Bishop of Rome, is one who really connects his bishop authority back to the apostles. And so if we think about the rise of apostolic succession, the rise of Roman primacy, so sometimes the question is asked, where does Rome begin to ascend to being seen itself as this kind of leading apostolic sea, this apostolic chair? And this is one of the places. And the churches that are assembled in Chalcedon, all these bishops do rejoice in Leo's declaration. Because most of these Christological controversies, they're all happening in the East. They're not happening in the West. In the West, things are much more stable. Remember, you had Hosius out in Spain. You had Irenaeus out in Lyon back in the 2nd century. You had Tertullian in the 2nd century in Carthage. A lot of Trinitarian indebtedness to him. You had in the 5th century, at this particular point in time, you have Augustine in Hippo. There's a lot of doctrinal stability in the West. Things are often struggling in the East. And there are some results of the council, don't have time to go into those things. All right, let's mention very briefly here, Chalcedonian Christology. This is a statement by Bruce Shelley, and I think it's helpful. You might just jot it down, all right? Chalcedonian Christology. By 451, this is a statement that Shelley makes to kind of sum up what's happened looking at those four councils. In Jesus Christ, true deity against Arius and full humanity against Apollinarius are indivisibly united in one person against Nestorius without being confused against Eudekes. I think that It's a very helpful sentence. I've kind of kept it with me for years. Bruce Shelley's book on church history, Church History in Plain Language. It's a great little book. You can get an audio book of that. It's wonderful to listen to because Shelley is a, he's a great writer. I mean, he could have been a novel writer, but he takes church history and weaves it together like one long narrative story. And it's really, really well written. So in Jesus, true deity and full humanity are indivisibly united in one person without being confused. Very quickly again, because we just don't have much time here, let me introduce you to what's known as the Chalcedonian Box. This is your paper. So if you still have that paper, turn it over, look at the box for just a moment, and let's kind of focus on just a few things about it. Notice the first two councils, are trying to address the issue of Jesus being fully divine and fully human. The Council of Nicaea, you ought to have this where the Council of Nicaea is at the top, all right? So the Council of Nicaea in 325, God alone can save us. This is against Arianism, all right? So if he's not fully God, we can't be saved, all right? But now flip it over. He's also fully human. Council of Constantinople. This is Gregor of Nazianzus' comment, that which is not assumed cannot be healed. Contra Apollinarianism. Now the next two councils are gonna say, okay, now that we've determined he's fully God and he's fully man, in what sense is he fully man? Well, flip over where Council of Ephesus is on the top, 431, he is one person. The one person of Christ is God the Son. This is contra Nestorianism. And then, okay, he is one person, but he's also two natures. Council of Chalcedon in 451, the one person of Christ has two natures, contra-Eutychianism. So in this one chart, it really sums up what's happening in these four councils regarding the divine and human nature of Christ, the singular personhood of Christ, and the two natures of Christ. So we affirm that Christ is fully God and fully man. We affirm that Christ is one in person and two in nature. Now, it doesn't address it here, but we also affirm that Christ is two in will. He has a human will, and he being God, he has the divine will, right? But this is kind of classic historic Orthodox Christianity coming out of these councils in these early years. Okay, it's two o'clock, which means we're done. So let's pray. And if you have questions, please come see me later on, and we will press on next week. laying some foundation for our study of our own confession. Father, we ask your blessing on us as we transition to a time of corporate worship. We thank you for the study we've had. I thank you for the interaction, and I pray that the instruction in these sessions we've had regarding these historic councils has been helpful. I pray that you would help us to remain grounded in sound orthodoxy regarding the person of Christ. We do desire this day to exalt him and to give praise and glory to his name. Father, help us as we move to a time of worship. May you watch over the gathering of your people. May you bring us by your spirit into your presence. May you receive our praise, hear our prayers, bring us your word, lead us to your table, help us to feed upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and send us out, God, back into the world God to be lights for Christ and to be faithful to him. We ask God all this in Jesus name.