Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Without separation, without division

"if God is pure spirit, it is not more like God to walk on water, have his face transfigured, or perform a miracle with the touch of his hand, than it is for him to be crucified.  All these acts (whatever the transcendent power they unleash, and certainly the Cross unleashes the greatest transcendent power in the form of salvation) are acts of a finite body performing in time and space."

     Aaron Riches, Ecco homo:  on the divine unity of Christ, Interventions (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2016), 82n89, on the "Nestorianism" of all insufficiently "Cyrillian" attempts to "parse what is proper to the Word from what is proper to the human nature" (81).  "To the Council Fathers, Cyril did not represent one Christological 'option,' much less a Christology bound to the style of a particular region [(the Christology of the so-called 'Alexandrian school')]; he was for them the representative of Catholic truth, of the Nicene orthodoxy defended by Athanasius, which they understood as the faith handed down from the apostles themselves.  The textual evidence of the Acta of Chalcedon is overwhelming:  the Council Fathers did not see themselves as 'Theodorian' in any way, [as balancing (or working out a compromise between) an Alexandrian and an Antiochian school,] but rather as confirming the doctrine held by 'blessed Cyril'" (78-79).

No comments: