Tuesday, September 21, 2021

The Condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia at First Lateran (649) and the Synod’s Rejection of “God” in John 20:28 Being other than Christ

  

If anyone defends the impious Theodore of Mopsuestia, who said that God the Word is someone other than Christ, who was troubled by the passions of the soul and the desires of the flesh, was gradually separated from that which is worse and so because better by progress in works and was made faultless by his way of life, and that he was baptised as a mere man in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, received through baptism the grace of the Holy Spirit, was honoured with sonship, was worshipped as representing God the Word, on the level of an image of the emperor, and after his resurrection became immutable in his thoughts and totally sinless – furthermore the same impious Theodore said that the union of God the Word with Christ was of the same kind as that which the apostle ascribed to man and woman, ‘The two will become one flesh’; and in addition to his other innumerable blasphemies he dared to assert that, when after the resurrection the Lord breathed on his disciples and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ he did not give them the Holy Spirit but breathed on them only in semblance; and, as for the profession of Thomas, when he touched the Lord’s hands and side after the resurrection, namely ‘My Lord and my God,’ he asserted that this was not said by Thomas about Christ (for he says that Christ himself was not God) but that Thomas, amazed at the extraordinary character of the resurrection, was praising God for raising up Christ; and what is even worse is that in the commentary he composed on the Acts of the Apostles the same Theodore, comparing Christ to Plato, Mani, Epicurus and Marcion, says that just as each of these men, having devised his own teaching, caused his disciples to be called Platonists, Manichaeans, Epicureans and Marcionites, so in the same way when Christ had devised his teaching ‘Christians’ were called after him; . . . (The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014], 276-77 [Fourth Session])