We have been living in an age characterized by it’s aversion to metaphysics and anthology, an aversion whose roots could be traced back to the failure of nerve of European Philosophy, especially following the collapse of German idealism. The metaphysical extravagance of Hegel, Gichte and Schelling had only precipitated the reaction against what Kant had strictly taught to be impossible-the effort to know ultimate reality as it is. Hume and Comte had also made their contribution to the undermining of metaphysics. Comte especially made metaphysics unfashionable by calling it “primitive” an intermediary stage in the advance from the ever more primitive theological stage towards the stage of positive science.
Herbert Spencer had given expression to the view already in the last century that all thinking bring only relating, thought cannot express more than mere relation. Bergson accused “substance metaphysics” of implying too inert and static a view of the world.
But all metaphysics is not substance metaphysics. Metaphysics is an attempt to state our intuitions about certain ultimate aspects of reality ion language which by nature is inadequate for the task. Not to state these intuitions at all may however mean that we lose even our necessarily inadequate grasp of that intuition.
Christology is a case in print. We cannot state who Christ is with any sense of finality. What we say we know we will have to revise when we see Him in His glory some day. But we do have Christian traditions, some basic intuitions about Christ. Christological formulas are meant primarily as vehicles for the conservation of these intuitions. They are also warnings about certain ways of understanding the reality of Christ which could lead us astray.
The revolt against metaphysics has therefore to be taken seriously. For it is in the language of Wittgenstein, a revolt against the misuse of language. If we make a Christological statement and presume that it is of the same order as saying “There are some men who have two feet and two eyes”. We would be misunderstanding the Christological formula. It is not a statement of fact derived a posteriori from experience or a priori from logical necessity. There is no satisfaction technique or verification of a Christological statement.
If neither experience nor logical necessity is the basis on which we make Christological statements, the only conceivable alternative in secular terms is that it is a poetic, a moral or a historical statement. But before we reject the idea that it is not a statement of fact or a statement of logical necessity, let us observe the form of the statement which begins:
“Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach man to acknowledge one and the same son………”etc.
It could be argued that the formula is a simple statement of fact – it implies first that the holy fathers taught these and also that following them those present at the council teach the same thing about “Our Lord Jesus Christ”. In this sense it could be tested by the falsification technique at two points.
(a) Would it be true to say “not following the holy fathers”? Some of us would answer “yes” to that question, and argue that one of the most important fathers – St. Cyril, Alexandria, whom the Council claims to follow, did not and would not say “in two natures.” In that sense if “not following the holy fathers” which is the negative of “following the holy fathers” is also true in a significant measure, it follows that “following the holy fathers” is not true.
(b) Is it true to say: “We do not all with one accord teach men” etc. That depends very much on the meaning of the word, “we”. If it is used only to indicate the signatories of the document, it would be formally true to say that they do all teach the same thing, in as much as they have signed the document? The negative statement would not be true, for if they did not agree they would not have signed, and could argue (Though we all know that signatures could often be the consequence of psychological or other pressures and not necessarily of substantial agreement) If the negative is proved to be false a priori (i.e., in so far as a statement say that it’s signatories agree to something it should be taken for granted that they do not disagree), the positive may then be regarded as true.
But if we mean the participants at the Council of Chalcedon, it is very clear that the negative is true, namely that many of them verdantly and passionately disagreed with the “in two natures” formula. If the negative i.e., that “we (meaning members of the Council) do not all with one accord teach men” etc. is so patently true, then the positive is falsified and the Chalcedonian formula does not grand the formula as a vehicle within which a transcendent insight is preserved and borne witness to, it may be of some use to us. Christological formula should not therefore be regarded as a description of the nature of Christ, but rather as a testimony to the mystery of Christ whose identity cannot be described either in classical or modern metaphysical terms, and as a warning against certain erroneous ways of bearing witness to the identity of Jesus Christ.
It is a formula within the tradition of the Church and cannot be understood in isolation from the rest of that tradition. It is a landmark by analyzing which alone, we cannot find the way, but the proper understanding of which is essential for us to find our way forward.
The coming together of the divine and the human in Christ belongs to an order of reality that cannot be dealt with by logical categories. Neither the one united nature formula by which my tradition bears witness to Christ nor the in-two-natures formula by which the Latin and Byzantina traditions been witness to Christ can explain the mystery of the Incarnation.
The chief warning here is that we should resist the temptation to assimilate--------------
But by thus formally testing the propositional form of the Chalcedonian formula, we do not do justice to it’s content. For us we have said, it is not to be taken as a simple statement of fact. It has all the elements of linguistic statements:-
(a) it is based on experience – the experience of Jesus Christ in the Church
(b) it is partly based on logical necessity in so far as the Church recognized Jesus to be God and had to reconcile this with the fact that He was also man;
(c) it is a poetical statement in so far as it uses language which goes beyond the merely description
(d) it is moral in the sense that it implies that all Christians ought to believe what it says and
(e) it is historical in so far as it is a statement about the identity of a person who lived four centuries before their time.
But none of the methods used to analyze these five categories of language are adequate for the analysis of the Chalcedonian formula. This is so because the logical language uses all the five categories, but always goes beyond them to make affirmation about a reality that transcends our time space world and it’s logic.
The danger, however is that we may try to treat the formula as statement which falls exclusively within one or more of the above five categories and seek to
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