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To some, early church debates about Christ read like a computer programming language: impossible to decode. To others, the early church theology seems as relevant as the dress codes of a Carthusian monastery.

To help us understand what the early church was driving at in the millions of theological words it produced, Christian History talked with Thomas Oden, who teaches theology at Drew University. He is author of the three-volume systematic theology: The Living God, The Word of Life, and Life in the Spirit (Harper San Francisco, 1992).

Christian History: Why did the early church spend so much energy trying to understand precisely how Jesus was human and divine, especially since ultimately it’s a mystery how he is both?

Thomas Oden: All ancient Christian writers and councils knew that it’s impossible to fathom fully the Incarnation. Attempts to articulate this mystery always fall short of absolute precision. On the other hand, they discovered that you can talk about the Incarnation in ways that fail to do justice to what we do know.

The early church had to deal with the apostolic testimony of the New Testament, and the New Testament clearly portrays Jesus as the Savior, as Mediator between God’s holiness and human sin. It portrays him as truly God and truly human. Any teaching that failed to do justice to the full witness of the Scriptures had to be challenged.

For example, Arianism failed to understand that in Jesus we meet the Uncreated One. Arius thought Jesus was a creature. That runs counter to the apostolic testimony, particularly in John’s and Paul’s writings. Theological definitions are precise because they look for language that rules out heretical interpretations—interpretations that fall short of the wholeness of biblical faith.

If these ecumenical councils hadn’t done the hard labor of working out the precise language, we would have had, not less, but more trouble understanding Jesus Christ.

Why did many early church fathers, like Athanasius, argue for orthodoxy in ways that seem harsh, even nasty?

I don’t think Athanasius’s responses, to take that example, were simply pugnacious. He knew that more than theological opinions were at stake—nothing less than the integrity of the New Testament, the apostolic testimony to Christ. In the case of Arianism, if the church taught that Christ was somehow less than God incarnate, then it would have given the whole game away. You cannot speak about reconciliation the way the New Testament does—a reconciliation of a holy God and sinful humanity—without a full incarnation. For Athanasius, the issues were too important to discuss calmly.

Some in the early church who were branded as heretics—like the Monophysites—are today reconciling with the Orthodox Church. Are Monophysites heretics or not?

Clearly some of the more radical Monophysites were, but in some cases, the two parties agreed on fundamentals.

The Monophysites, in trying to protect the deity of Christ, asserted that Christ had one nature (monophysis) rather than two. But the word physis, or “nature,” was used differently by Monophysites and the Orthodox; in many cases, they were not disagreeing as much as talking past one another. In the last two years, the Coptic, Syrian, and other Monophysite churches have moved significantly towards reconciliation with Eastern Orthodoxy, though some serious differences still remain.

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