Saturday, July 18, 2020

Lucien J. Richard on Jesus' (Bogus) "Humanity" in the Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union

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.: