Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc.: The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is pleased to bring you the following message from the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology. Since its start in 1974, this conference has attracted audiences to its biblical expository approach to Christian doctrine. The Alliance is a listener-supported ministry. Our purpose is to promote a biblical understanding and worldview.

Guest (Male): The first of the church-history-ish talks is cleverly titled "The Early Creeds of the Church" because it's about the early creeds of the church. Every textbook on the early church will tell you that the church was born in a world that was politically Roman, culturally Greek, and religiously Jewish.

In Jesus' day, the Mediterranean world was governed from Rome. Romans ruled the empire of about 60 million people. Roman law unified the Western world, and Christian missionaries found themselves traveling down Roman roads. Yet while Rome ruled the world, the old Greek or Hellenistic culture that the Roman troops had conquered remained a Greek-speaking and a Greek-writing culture.

Greek ideas were often dominant, and that's why the New Testament itself is written in Greek, due to the prevalence of that culture. But it must not be forgotten that the church was born within Judaism. Our Lord was a Jew. The apostles were Jews. Many early Christians were Jews. Christian evangelism often began in synagogues and was centered in Jewish communities.

There were millions of Jews, many of them in the Roman Empire and in the West, but millions too in the East, often beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, Christianity could not remain Jewish or become Greek or Roman. In the ancient world, only Judaism offered a thoroughgoing monotheism, a belief that there is just one God.

But the Christian faith could not remain Jewish because our Lord had said that he came to interpret and fulfill Jewish law and custom. The Apostle Paul argued that with the death and the resurrection of Jesus, the old ceremonial laws died too. Jesus claimed to be the Savior, and such a claim, such a reality as we know, was a stumbling block to the Jews; indeed, they considered it blasphemy. The Christian church couldn't be Jewish.

The church was no longer Jewish, but neither did it become Greek. Yes, the Bible was written in Greek, but the church was open to people speaking any language from any country, rich or poor, and all were to be treated alike. Christians belonged to the church. Pagans only attended temples. The church had a ministry that served a membership. The Greeks had a priesthood that served a clientele.

More than any of those differences, the main thing is that the core message of Christianity, with its talk about a Savior who rose from the dead, was considered foolishness to the Greeks. Not exclusively Jewish then, or Greek, the church was manifestly not Roman. And this caused the church no end of trouble for the first three centuries of its existence.

Roman religion was linked to politics in at least two ways. First, a handful of Roman emperors considered themselves to be divine. Prayer to the emperor was in those cases required. Non-conformity or dissent was understood to be subversive, even treasonous. Second, while flexible in their broad religious outlook, Romans would always worship as the state required.

If there was a drought and the emperor decreed that people pray to pagan gods for rain, it was assumed that loyal citizens would do that. One could have preferences in religion, especially private ones, but one was never allowed to be religiously exclusive. Claims on behalf of any one god, such as Isis, to be the true and living God, as sometimes the followers of Isis would say, such claims were just rhetorical.

They were just words. A pagan god may be supreme and in that sense be the one god, but the Romans knew that any god or goddess could never really be alone. There were others. Likewise, tight-knit groups, what Christians called congregations, were seen by the Roman state to be subversive and dangerous.

The Roman government's persecution of a pagan group, the Bacchanalians, in the second century after Christ probably had a lot more to do with disbanding organized groups than stopping drunken orgies. After all, the Roman Senate told the Bacchanalians not to meet in secret and not to have large meetings. It did not tell them to give up their religion or their religious practices.

What is my point in all of this? Christians, claiming one God and being organized and meeting in increasingly large groups, were considered dangerous by the Romans for a variety of reasons. The earliest statements of faith offered by Christians were intended to distinguish the Christian faith from Judaism, Greek culture and philosophy, and from Roman religion.

Irenaeus, a second-century Greek bishop who served in France, offers famous examples in two of his books. He offers three-point summaries of the Christian faith centered around what the church believes about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Irenaeus calls these statements "Rules of Faith."

He says the Christian rule of faith is a brief statement that can be confirmed and would be affirmed by a new convert at baptism. This is what we believe about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is what we believe about the way of salvation. In teaching these new converts and other Christians about what was true, the early church was also rejecting what was false.

In saying who God is, who the Savior is, and also who we are, they were rejecting those other expressions of religion. It was clear that no person holding to those kinds of rules of faith, those baptismal declarations, could also hold to, say, a plurality of gods, a belief so common in paganism. Each statement used by Christian churches, including the Christian churches that Irenaeus pastored, confesses one God.

It is clear that one baptized into such a rule of faith could not hold that matter, that things are evil. This was a very common view at the time, very common in Greek philosophy, because each one of these rules of faith would emphasize that God is a Creator. God makes physical things; therefore, they are not bad. Each rule of faith would speak about Christ's birth, about his death and his resurrection in a body.

There is all different kinds of ways in which these rules of faith, once you read them carefully and are aware of what is being said in the world around them, is not only a statement about Christian belief but also a statement of what Christians rejected. Early statements of faith were produced during times of persecution, and they distinguished Christians from paganism.

Later statements of faith produced in times of peace would often distinguish Christian truth from alleged Christian truth. It would distinguish between Christian orthodoxy, straight teaching, from Christian heterodoxy, false teaching. Roughly speaking, historians label heresies a little bit like vintners label wines. Work with me here.

If you drink wine and pay attention to what you are drinking, you will know that Old World wines from Europe are described by the source of the wine. They take their names from the region where the wine is grown: Chianti, Bordeaux, Montepulciano, Cote du Rhone. New World wines take their names from the content of the wine, from the grapes themselves: Syrah, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot.

Roughly speaking, there is a reason why I am telling you this this morning, roughly speaking, heresies, old heresies I should say, take their name from the source. Seminary students learn about Sabellianism, taught by Sabellius; Arianism, properly blamed on Arius; Nestorianism, credited to Nestorius; Pelagianism, of course, the fault of Pelagius.

Newer errors tend to describe the doctrinal content of the error: Anabaptism, Antinomianism, Anti-trinitarianism, Deism, and so on. Now, of course, this does not work perfectly; nothing ever does. I wish it would. There is Socinianism in the 16th century, which is a kind of Arianism that takes its name after Socinus. And then there is like, do we call it Barthianism or Neo-orthodoxy?

What are we going to do, source or content? At any rate, I think the generality of my observation holds, and it may help one of you this morning to remember this lecture better. I mention this now because the story of the early creeds and councils is the story of Old World heresies named after their sources.

During the first three centuries of the church, during the time of Irenaeus and other courageous Christians, there were frequent widespread persecutions. There was not persecution in all places and certainly not at all times. Some were local in different places and they varied in degrees, but persecution was one of the features of the life of the early church.

In spite of the suffering of the church, in spite of this persecution, and long before Emperor Constantine's famous rise to power in the early 300s, regional churches in Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, and Europe held synods or mini-councils. Churches were connectional rather than independent. And even in the age of the apostles, church leaders would gather together to discuss difficult issues.

We see that in Acts 6. We see that in Acts 15. It is difficult to know how many synods or councils met during the first three centuries after the Jerusalem Council. It is hard to know because persecution does not allow for good record-keeping. What we tend to have are anecdotal references in letters and books to this council or to that council.

It appears that very early in the history of the church in many locales, there were these gatherings that met at least twice a year. When especially important questions arose, what were sometimes called provincial synods were summoned. Ancient historians mention very large councils in the late second century and the early third century.

But we are not told what very large means, which I find inconvenient as a historian. Is very large 50, 100, or 200 people? During the third century, we know about an African synod that had 71 bishops, there is a real number, and another that had 87. A historian named Eusebius, to whom we will return, speaks of multitudes at one synod and exceeding many bishops at another, with attendance dropping dramatically, of course, during times of persecution.

The number of bishops, sort of moderators who had become kind of permanent fixtures and then sort of supervisors over other ministers, the number of bishops doesn't even tell the full story of attendance because although the early synods or councils might count the number of bishops, there would also be many other presbyters, many other elders who would be there voting and speaking.

As well, there were also audiences of lay people watching, and sometimes theologians who were not ordained as ministers would also participate. A famous early church theologian named Origen was sometimes at synods, not counted among the membership but still given permission to speak. Well, what is my point?

These synods, these gatherings, are almost unique in the first 16, no they are unique, in the first 16 centuries of the church because they were not summoned or controlled by the state. They did not have overpowering bishops telling them what to do because, in spite of the claims of Rome, the Roman bishop did not enjoy a particularly powerful position in these first three centuries.

And so they were free synods able to do their work without these complicating factors. And we don't know too much about what they did. They often did administrative things. They would elect people to different positions. But when I talk about a big council in a few seconds' time, I just want you to know it is not the first council. There is others, and some of them were bigger.

The church was connectional from the beginning. But these connections take on a different tone when Constantine did, in fact, become emperor, first of the western half of the Roman Empire. Constantine legalized Christianity. He also became the first known or recorded secular authority to summon an ecclesiastical meeting. In fact, many meetings.

And the first of the synods that Constantine called dealt with the subject of Donatism, a split in the church that had started in North Africa and had kept growing. Constantine believed, as most Christian rulers would for many centuries, that if you want to keep the political world united, you need to keep the church united because there is so many people in the church.

When Constantine eventually became the emperor of the eastern half of the empire also, he confronted an additional problem, an urgent problem that required again a large, in fact, a larger synod. A presbyter, a teaching elder named Arius, had defied his heavy-handed bishop of Alexandria, whose name conveniently is Alexander. Arius defied Alexander of Alexandria in more than one way, but one of the ways was in his teaching.

The most scholarly study of Arius's theology is done by a scholar, at one time the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a man named Rowan Williams. Williams acknowledges that there is difficulty in determining the nuances of what Arius taught and what must have alarmed Alexander. But certainly, Arius was opposing Sabellianism. Sabellianism, of course, named after Sabellius, denies real distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

For Sabellius, the Father, Son, and Spirit are but sort of personalities of God, modes in which he appears or acts. It is like God is a sort of grade-B movie without enough actors, and so one character plays three different parts. Arius found this offensive and wanted to offer what he thought was a better form of monotheism.

You understand, Sabellius is a monotheist; there is just one God, but that God is just acting in different ways. Arius says, no, that is not how monotheism works. God doesn't act in three ways; no, actually only the Father is God. Only the Father is self-sufficient. Only the Father is self-existent. The Father creates a creator named the Son, but it is only the Father who exists from eternity.

The Son does not. The Father is the source of the Son and prior to him chronologically. And the Son remains who he is not because of something in him, but just because of the will of the Father. The Holy Spirit is unimportant to Arius; he is certainly not divine. So for Arius, only the Father is God. The Son, although a creator, is himself created and is a creature of time.

And so it was again that Jesus, for Arius, was not of the same substance as the Father. The Father is of a divine substance, not the Son. Not in the same way for sure. This is a form of monotheism that is very different than the monotheism taught in the Bible, arguably. It denied Sabellianism, in which God simply acts or appears as different persons, but it corrects Sabellianism at a great cost and arguably offers an error that is just as bad.

Well, unfortunately, his opponent, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, was not actually a very good theologian himself. He may have even tended towards modalism. What is more, Arius, like many heretics old and new, excelled at things like public relations, circling the wagons, and doing other things that would protect himself and give himself some kind of a following.

Now as soon as I mention Arius's following, I need to already qualify what I've just said because that story is a little bit too simple. Lewis Ayres, in a magnificent study of the theology before and after Nicaea, has demonstrated that Arius himself does not obviously have a group of disciples that followed him around and taught what he said. There were people sympathetic to him.

But every time you study what they wrote or what survives of what they've written, or that survives of accusations about what they taught, we find that there is these different shades of difference and meaning and position between so-called Arians. And few if any would defend everything that he said or would defend it in the same way.

It is often said that winners get to write history. In the case of Arius and his co-belligerents, Arius and his friends, our most important sources about the story actually come from one of the losers, somebody who did not win in this dispute, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. He was a theologian who supported Arius and his friends and is one of those who writes the most about the controversy.

Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, for what it's worth, it's not worth very much, but his history was my first history text. When I was a teenager, a ruling elder in my church said he would give me a book every time I read through the Bible. My first round through, he gave me Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History and also Josephus, just threw in an extra one.

That's how I began building my little theological library. Well, Eusebius in his history tells of hundreds of bishops meeting in Nicaea in 325. Different historians offer different numbers of how many people were present. And Eusebius tells how this first council in the East, so soon after the end of one of the worst of all persecutions, how this council was very deeply moving for people arrived crippled and maimed by what their tormentors had done to them.

Also stirring are the stories, not stirring as Eusebius tells it, but stirring from other sources, also stirring are the stories of a prominent opponent of Arius, a young assistant to Bishop Alexander who was a good theologian named Athanasius. Well, that is a story for another time. Here it is enough for me to say that the council produced 20 canons or statements and a few letters to be circulated and one creed.

The Creed of Nicaea was the most important and enduring of this cluster of documents. Some of its key statements directly contradict the teachings of Arius. And you will know them or something like them if you are in a church that sometimes recites creeds. "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible." Arius would like that; that is a great start to a creed.

"And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten." He would still be okay. "That is of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance—homoousion—consubstantial, of one substance with the Father." Well, Arius could not like all of that.

Where Arius held that Jesus was the Son of God, the creed says the same. But Arius could not have accepted that Christ was God of God, Light of Light. In English, what does that sound like? They sound like intensives, right? He is God of God, he is really God. That is what it sounds like it means. He is Light of Light, he is really Light.

But actually, the Greek prepositions here, you knew there would be grammar sometime this weekend, the Greek preposition—Theos ek Theou—God of God can be translated "God of God" or "God from God," "Light from Light," "very God from very God." The point is that the divine Son is of the Father, connected to the Father, intimately so.

And that is emphatically stated in these phrases. Jesus is really God is what is being stated. The Son is of or from the very essence of the Father. They share the same divine essence because they are both God. Furthermore, where Arius thought that Jesus was a creature of God, the creed says he is not made. And finally, the creed insists that the Son is of the same substance as the Father.

What could be more clear? Well, that is a good question. Arius and two Libyan bishops who supported him were condemned and banished to the Balkans. When they continued to support those banished Arians, the Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and Bishop Theognis of Nicaea were eventually banished to Gaul or France. I mean some of you would be like, I'd love to be banished to France, but it wasn't quite as easy back then.

It seemed as though the Nicene Creed had the potential to become the benchmark for orthodoxy, that it had done everything right. But while many Greek fathers did not like the theology of Arius, they were also not happy with everything in the Creed of Nicaea. The creed, for example, stated, if you remember, that the Son is of one substance, right? I've emphasized that a couple times.

Of one substance with the Father, homoousion in Greek. To say that Jesus was of the same substance of the Father, as the creed does, definitely refutes Arianism. But some would worry, some did worry, that it could sound as though Jesus isn't distinct, that the Son is not distinct from the Father. I mean might this still leave open the door for Sabellius?

For an inadequate theologian like Bishop Alexander of Alexandria who wasn't clear enough about the distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that is exactly what many Eastern theologians worried. So the controversy did not end at Nicaea. It did not end with the Creed of Nicaea.

Some bishops who signed or subscribed to the creed almost immediately lobbied for those expelled bishops to be permitted back into the church, suggesting they didn't see the problem as so significant after all. And what's more, Athanasius, appointed Bishop of Alexandria after the death of Alexander only three years later, Athanasius actually spent much of his life in hiding or in banishment for defending the theology of the creed.

One of Athanasius's contributions, by the way, was to see that arguments over terms, over words and phrases, was not as important as arguments over their meanings. It is not enough just for someone to say the right words; we need to know what they mean. And sometimes people might use different phrases and mean the same thing.

Of course, anyone who is already familiar with the substantive nuanced exchanges that we can find online on X, TikTok, and so on, we already know things like this, where we see people getting to the bottom of what someone actually means, not just latching onto their phrases but trying to understand. Yes, I'm being sarcastic. It is not working. None of you are sarcastic. That is good; don't learn that from me today.

Athanasius in his day thought it was important to explain that the words substance or person can be used in different ways, different orthodox ways. And that may sound obvious to someone who knows Greek; it may sound archaic to those of you who don't. But Athanasius's insistence that people try to understand each other's teachings and not just their terms offered what historian and theologian Robert Letham has called a major breakthrough.

It is just that not enough people made enough of the breakthrough. It was largely through the life and writings of Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers, a collective term given to a trio of brothers and friends, it was largely through Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers that the Nicene position slowly eventually triumphed at the second ecumenical council of the church, this time held in Constantinople.

Gregory of Nazianzen, or Gregory Nazianzus, one of these Cappadocian Fathers, was the bishop of Constantinople at the time. So effective were Gregory and his allies in their arguments that the Arians who felt under attack, who were under attack, hired a contract killer to eliminate Gregory. But the plan was foiled, and Gregory was unharmed.

And in the end, it was Gregory's friends who were able to witness the council pounding theological nails into the Arian coffin. That is a little premature and dramatic. I mean Arianism did not die right then and be buried; it would kind of come back up again elsewhere. But the main purpose behind this second ecumenical council was actually to combat the Macedonians.

You will be surprised to hear that they are named after Macedonius. The Macedonians, also called the Pneumatomachi, literally the fighters against the Holy Spirit, these teachers accepted the divinity of the Son. Jesus is divine, but they believed not in a Trinity but a duality: only the Father and Jesus were divine and not the Holy Spirit.

To combat this error, the Council of Constantinople created a new creed or expanded an old creed, the Creed of Nicaea from 325. Of a special importance, a new paragraph confessed the person, work, and full divinity of the Holy Spirit. The new statement, what historians call the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. He too is of the same essence as the Father. Notably, side point, important side point, still later Western theologians would change the wording of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to express the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

It was good theology. It was not particularly good churchmanship because they did it without discussion with Eastern fathers of the church. Well, it is this Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed that is commonly recited in Western churches, in Presbyterian and Reformed churches too.

In obvious recognition of its borrowing, heavy borrowing from the Creed of Nicaea, in a tacit admission that those who prepare orders of services in Reformed churches are probably going to spell Niceno-Constantinopolitan incorrectly, and in a sort of gracious concession to pastors and worship leaders who would find it difficult each Sunday to say "would you please rise with me to stay the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed," we just call it the Nicene Creed.

But it is in fact the work of 381 and not the work of 325. It is the revised statement that we call the Nicene Creed and not the original. It is the improved version, I'd like to say, and I believe is true, rather than the original. Well, the Council of Constantinople kept after the Arians, addressed the Macedonians, but also had to deal with a Christological error.

So far what have we been talking about? Trinitarian errors, how the doctrine of the triune God was misunderstood or mistaught. But there were also errors regarding the second person of the Trinity in particular, errors regarding who he is as the one incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The fourth-century bishop of Laodicea named Apollinaris was lukewarm about what I would and you would consider to be orthodox expressions of the doctrine of Christ.

He argued that Jesus was truly God, distinct from the Father, of the same essence with the Father but distinct. But he wondered if Jesus should be described as human in the way in which we have conventionally understood it. Apollinaris thought it was kind of irreverent to think that the Son of God would add to himself a mere human nature.

He thought surely the Son of God, in taking to himself a humanity, would take to himself some kind of special humanity, a better humanity. Not our human nature just as it is, not even our human nature just as it was created in the garden. Of course, this view is called Apollinarianism.

And Apollinaris argued that Jesus had a human body, but the way in which Christ's human nature was improved or supercharged is that the divine Word or Logos took the place of Jesus' human spirit. He didn't have a normal human spirit and soul like we do; something divine replaced that. Well, he intended this as a kind of upgrade, maybe as a reverent and respectful upgrade.

But leading theologians in Apollinaris's day, such as Gregory Nazianzen, recognized that this was a problem. The Apostle Paul, you will know, builds much of his theology of redemption on the idea that the incarnation of the Son entails the second person of the Trinity who was always divine and always had a divine nature, what we believe is that this eternal Son of God who had a divine nature took to himself a true human nature.

He became the last Adam. He was as real an Adam if you will as the first Adam was real. The fault of Apollinaris is that he made Jesus someone who couldn't be a last Adam, a last human. He made Jesus less than human by trying to make him more than human. He made him unhuman. Indeed, this view of Apollinaris, however well intended, contains a grave error.

Gregory explained that whatever is not assumed, whatever is not taken on by the Son of God, cannot be healed. If Christ did not take on real humanity, then he is no substitute for real humanity. A superhuman Savior is fantastic news for all the superhumans who need saving. But if you are not a superhuman, if you don't have a humanity that is sort of better than everyone else's, this is not a gospel for you; it offers nothing for the human race.

The denunciation of Apollinaris by the Council of Constantinople is significant in that it is the first council to really clearly articulate what people already believed: the importance of the true humanity of Christ and the relationship between the two natures of Christ. He is one person with an eternal divine nature who in time takes to himself a true human nature.

Apollinaris is only the first in a long string of Christological errors. He is the first to teach a mistaken Christology; others would follow him and we would see this at subsequent church councils. The third ecumenical council offers an example. The third ecumenical council, meeting in Ephesus in 431, would address an error attributed to Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople.

His opponent was Cyril, the jealous Bishop of Alexandria, yet another Bishop of Alexandria. Cyril was the jealous bishop of Alexandria in Northern Africa who envied the way in which the Bishop of Constantinople, now that the emperor had moved from Rome to Constantinople, all of a sudden the Bishop of Constantinople had so much more importance than other bishops.

And he didn't like this. He didn't like the way in which Nestorius was now given more prominence than him. Nestorius was not altogether innocent of theological error. He certainly avoided the error of Apollinaris; he didn't make those rookie mistakes. But what Nestorius was not able to see or not able to state clearly is that the divine person of the Son of God had taken to himself a human nature.

Let me emphasize that word: he had taken to himself a human nature. And thus the incarnate Son was, is, is, one person with two natures. Nestorius was understood to be saying that the incarnate Son is the union of two persons together. Not one person with two natures, but a divine person taking to himself somehow a human person.

Sometimes someone is in the position of being a teacher but is not a clear teacher. They are constantly misunderstood, they say. And yet what they do say seems to be kind of clear to others, or at least occasionally clear, and when the moment of occasional clarity comes, it worries them; that seems to be a clear error.

A teacher in the church must not just speak in a way that allows him to be understood on the most important matters; a teacher in the church should speak in such a way that they cannot be misunderstood. Nestorius never got to that level of teaching clarity. Whatever his intentions, Nestorius in effect made Apollinaris's doctrine kind of worse.

As understood by others, Nestorius taught that the divine nature of the second person of the Trinity sort of appears in a human body. Jesus has both natures simultaneously, but the one is kind of a shell for another. The one nature, the human, is a shell for the other nature, the divine. The one person is a shell for the other person.

The Word didn't so much become flesh; the Word sort of wears flesh. There is different ways in which Nestorius's error has been articulated, sometimes articulating error clearly is about as hard as teaching truth or actually harder than teaching truth clearly. Nestorius was heard by others to be turning the God-man into a God-in-man but where there was not a proper distinction and relation between the humanity and the divinity of Christ.

Regardless of the details, Nestorius's two natures in Christ functioned so independently, the two natures in Christ were so carefully held apart that they function like two separate persons in Christ. You'll probably not be surprised by this point to hear that Nestorius's theology is called Nestorianism and that it is often summarized as the heresy of a two-person Christology because of the way in which he talked about the two natures of Christ so independently, so crassly.

Well, that is the theological story. Sorry to say the political story is much more complicated and messy. Cyril made himself both the prosecutor and the judge of Nestorius. And from distant Alexandria announced that Nestorius was a heretic. Nestorius said that is not fair, appealed to another bishop, the Bishop of Rome, as a neutral party, and the Bishop of Rome said Cyril's right.

Bishop of Rome was also jealous of Nestorius's power. Cyril's right, and then the Pope in Rome or the bishop in Rome, better described as the bishop in Rome, called a synod which denounced Nestorius or gave him 10 days to recant or he'd be excommunicated. Well, they didn't really have that authority and 10 days is pretty tight timing in the ancient world.

Google Maps provides estimates for driving, walking, and public transport between Rome and Constantinople. It doesn't have an equestrian option so we are not sure how long it'd take for a fast horse to get there, but it does seem like a week and a half would be inadequate to get a message to Nestorius and for Nestorius to reply.

Well, in frustration, the emperor called a council at Ephesus, and nothing was done, sorry Presbyterians, nothing was done with decency and good order. Bishops raced to get there first so they could condemn others before a sort of a proper quorum had established itself. The local bishop of Ephesus for good measure incited the townspeople to violence so that they could coerce Nestorius's party to stay away.

Cyril behaved so badly when he arrived that the emperor eventually put him in jail, from which he escaped. And Nestorius at the end of this whole debacle was banished to the outer edges of the empire. All orthodox theologians condemn the theology of Nestorianism. But it's long been a commonplace to add that Nestorius himself might not have been guilty of the error of which he is accused.

He certainly is guilty of not teaching very clearly, but maybe he did not hold to what Cyril says he does or did. I remember hearing about or reading a story about a Westminster divine who was, as Puritans sometimes were, in prison for their faith. And there he debated a lay preacher about the doctrine of Christ.

And when the lay preacher was done explaining his position, this Westminster divine said, yeah, that is Nestorianism. But then as he tells the story he says, not that everyone believes Nestorius taught Nestorianism. This has just been an old qualifier. And astonishingly in 1895, this old qualifier, Nestorius might not have been a Nestorius might not have believed in Nestorianism, in 1895 this old qualifier kind of gained some new energy.

Because a document by Nestorius was found, penned at the end of his life, and he said I don't believe this; this is what I do believe. It's hard to kind of unravel exactly how that works. Is that true? Did he never believe this or did he was he just protesting? Well, the truth is it's a sad story. Cyril was a bully.

And the proper response to bullies is opposing bullies, not getting a bigger bully on our side, which is kind of what the Bishop of Rome was. God cares about what we think and how we teach. He also cares how we think and how we speak. The Council of Ephesus stands as a warning to all of us that rough-and-ready justice that only cares about the end conclusion never does a job well.

It is hard with injustice in procedure to conclude really what someone believes, to convince anyone treated that way of the gravity of their error or to lead a brother to repentance. Well, in 451, 20 years later, another council met in Chalcedon to deal with another error, that of Eutyches, called Eutychianism.

And Eutyches kind of fused together the two natures of Christ. And the council helpfully, and in the end, offered a series of negations to give greater clarity and advance the church in crystallizing our Christology. Eutyches also by the way was a thug. I mean he hired people to oppress his opponents. He's sort of the exception to the rule that all heretics are nice guys; there's Eutyches, not a nice guy and a heretic.

But the Council of Ephesus in 431 offered what it called a definition or a statement, and part of it goes like this and I'll end here. Christ is recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence. Not parted or separated into two persons, Nestorius, but one the same Son and only begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.

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