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Why Was Nestorius Wrong?

I have been enjoying Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms very much. His chapters survey an enormous amount of material covering many of the more obscure parts of the history of Europe from late antiquity up to the present, and it’s been interesting to jump to different chapters depending on which one catches my attention at the […]

I have been enjoying Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms very much. His chapters survey an enormous amount of material covering many of the more obscure parts of the history of Europe from late antiquity up to the present, and it’s been interesting to jump to different chapters depending on which one catches my attention at the time. So far, I have come across very few things that stood out as incorrect. I noticed this mistake because it is such an easily avoidable one, but it’s one that I have seen more than one scholar make. In a very brief description of Nestorianism, Davies writes:

Nestorius…was condemned by the Council of Ephesus for holding that Christ’s nature was equally human and divine.

This is not correct. It is Orthodox teaching that Christ is one Person in two natures, fully man and fully God. Nestorius was unable to affirm the unity of Christ as St. Cyril and the council fathers defined it. The Nestorian error is to ascribe excessive division between the natures. The Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius first and foremost for rejecting the title of Theotokos applied to the Mother of God. That was the original cause of the controversy. The dispute over the title proved to be a dispute between competing theological interpretations of how to understand the relationship between Christ’s Humanity and Divinity, both of which all parties to the controversy wanted to affirm, albeit in significantly different ways.

This was the question that the Church had to answer: did the Word assume and appropriate human nature in the Incarnation, or did the Word dwell in a man that He put on? This is the difference between what Pelikan described as the theology of hypostatic union and the theology of the “indwelling Logos.” One problem for the Church that Nestorius’ teaching represented was that he could not accept the degree of unity necessary to affirm that God suffered in the flesh in the Incarnation. Nestorius and others arguing along similar lines before and after him could not accept the idea that God and the flesh of human nature could be united so closely that the Word was the subject of the sufferings described in Scripture. In the end, Nestorius effectively posited two subjects in Christ rather than one, which is why he could not refer to the Virgin Mary as Theotokos.

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