The Divine And Christ In The Council Of Chalcedon

The Council of Chalcedon established an agreement on providing a better depiction of the relationship between the divine and human nature with Christ, which pleased the Christians, but not the Nestorians or Monophysites. The dispute first began between Arius and Athanasius. Arius did not believe Christ was begotten from the father. He believed they were two separate beings and did not believe that Christ was divine. Athanasius disagreed with Arius; he believed that Christ was fully divine. This disagreement was settled at the Council of Nicaea, where Constantinople and three hundred bishops worked together to form the Nicene Creed. Following this was the Council of Constantinople, whom rejected Apollinaris’ teachings. Apollinaris was an Alexandrian …show more content…
Apollinaris responded by dividing the human mind into two parts – the lower part of the mind deals with feelings and emotions, whereas the higher part deals with reason (Placher and Nelson, 2013). Apollinaris says that Christ does have the lower part of the human mind but the higher part is what is replaced by the divine nature (Placher and Nelson, 2013). Theodore did not believe Apollinaris understood him and wanted to emphasize that the overall issue was about redemption. Christ saved his people by uniting with God and only those parts that were combined with God are saved, so if Christ was truly divine, them his human aspect was not united with God so he was not saved (Placher and Nelson, 2013). The Council of Constantinople disagreed with Athanasius, but that did not change much. Theodore created an alternative belief of Christ, in which he “had two natures (physeis) in one person (prosopon)” (Placher and Nelson, 2013). Theodore had a strong belief in Christ being fully human, whereas most people focused on his divine nature. He believed that Christ too was just a normal person and experienced many emotions people