In his study of Kenotic Christology, Lucien J. Richard wrote the
following about two-nature Christology (the Hypostatic Union) and the absurdities
thereof, such as how Jesus is “fully human,” such “humanity” is a charade vis-à-vis
the experiences of humanity:
Chalcedon
and the Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union
Later Christologies
such as that of Cyril of Alexandria affirms the full humanity of Jesus while
maintaining the impassibility and immutability of the divine Logos. The subject
of suffering is the human Jesus. There is a risk here of loosening the intimate
link between the divine Logos and human nature of Jesus. In expressing the
nature of the Incarnation, Cyril used the phrase “hypostatic union.” Cyril
rites: “We believe therefore, not in one like us honoured with Godhead by grace
. . . but rather in the Lord who appeared in servant’s form and Who was truly
like us and in human nature, yet remained God, for God the Word, when he took
flesh, laid not down what he was, but is conceived of the Same God alike and
man” (Cyril of Alexandria, “Scholia on the Incarnation,” in Five Tomes
Against Nestorius, ed. E.B. Posey, [Oxford: James Parrer and Co., 1881] 12,
p. 197). The two natures, divine and human, are so united in Jesus that we may
speak of one Person. Because of this unity we may speak in such terms as God
suffered, God died, Yet the Logos remains in his own nature impassible; he
remains “. . . external to suffering as far as pertains to His own Nature, for
God is Impassible” (Ibid., 13, p. 202). Cyril must simultaneously affirm the
impassibility of the Logos and the suffering of the Logos have effected
redemption. The Logos suffered in the human flesh and since this flesh is the Logos’ very own the Logos
suffered, but impassibly. Cyril’s difficulties with this question of Jesus’
suffering and divinity can be seen in the following quotation:
And though Jesus be
said also to suffer, the suffering will belong to the economy; but is said to
be His, and with all reason, because His to is that which suffered, and he was
in the suffering Body, He unknowing to suffer (for He is impassible as God); yet
as far as pertained to the daring of those who raged against Him, He would have
suffered, if he could have suffered. (Ibid.)
In Cyril’s doctrine on the Incarnation, we have a clear expression of
the difficulties inherent in accepting an understanding of God as changeless,
eternal and impassible, of identifying the Logos to such a God and of
attempting to attribute real suffering to the incarnated Logos. The Logos is
sympathetic to the suffering of the flesh, but does not suffer himself. The
divine in Christ is untouched by the suffering of his human nature. Instead of
being affected by becoming flesh, the divine Logos imparts its attributes to
the human nature. There is a deification of the human, but no humanization of the
divine.
Hilary presses the idea of impassibility to a point where the exemplary
nature of Christ’s experience in His human nature almost completely disappears. Writing
about the Logos’ human nature, Hilary affirms “When, in this humanity, He was
struck with blows, or smitten with wounds, or bound with ropes, or lifted on
high, He felt the force of suffering,
but without its pain . . . He had a body to suffer, and he suffered: but He had not a nature which
could feel pain. For His body possessed a unique nature of its own” (St.
Hilary, On the Trinity X, 23). In fact, Hilary believes that Jesus Christ never needed to satisfy bodily
longings. He writes, “ . . . it is never said that the Lord ate or drank or
wept when he was hungry or sorrowful. He conformed to the habits of the body to
prove the reality of his own body, to satisfy the custom of human bodies, by
doing as our nature does. When he ate and drank, it was a concession, not to
his own necessity but to our habits” (Ibid., X, 24). This approach seems to
evacuate the Passion narratives of their force: suffering undertaken for the
sake of men and women yet without pain is not suffering. (Lucien J. Richard, A Kenotic Christology: In the Humanity of
Jesus the Christ, the Compassion of Our God [Lanham, Md.: University Press
of America, 1982], 140-42, emphasis in bold added)
Elsewhere, we have the following endnote:
K. Rahner writes:
“The Jesus of the
Chalcedonian dogma, which was directed against Monophysitism and Monothelitism,
likewise has a subjective centre of action which is human and creaturely in
kind, such that in his human freedom he is in confrontation with God the
inconceivable, such that in it Jesus has undergone all those experiences which
we make of God not in a less radical, but on the contrary, in a more radical –
almost, we might say, in a more terrible – form than in our own case. And this
properly speaking not in spite of, but rather because of the so-called hypostatic
union.”
“The Position of
Christology in the Church Between Exegesis and Dogmatics,” Theological
Investigations, Vol. XI, (London: 1974) p. 198
P. Schoonenberg takes
a similar direction in his Christology, and affirms that one must speak of a
human person when one speaks about Jesus Christ. Cf. The Christ, (New
York: Herder & Herder, 1969). (Ibid., 155 n. 56)
Fortunately, Latter-day Saint theology allows us to affirm that Jesus
was truly and fully human and could truly suffer and experience all the toils
of humanity. On this and related topics, see, for e.g.:
