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Created?

OneSleeve
edited July 2022 in Faith Issues
Is the one nature of Jesus Christ created? Or is it not created?

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  • ShareTheLordShareTheLord
    Terminology is always a difficult thing and for this reason there is a creed. When it comes to the person of Jesus Christ, the creed teaches us: ‘He was incarnate and became man’.

    In the end, in his book the Divinity of Christ, HH Pope Shenouda clearly says and illustrates why Christ is not created. Hope that helps!
  • OneSleeve
    Do you know the chapter that he talks about this topic?
  • Dioscoros
    edited July 2022
    The one nature of our Lord, the Word incarnate, Jesus Christ the Son of David, the Son of Mary, is both created and uncreated, because after the union of hypostases, the composite hypostasis of Christ retains natural propriety.  Divine properties remain to be from/in virtue of being divine, and human properties remain to be from/in virtue of being human.

    When we speak of our own human nature, do we say this nature is the passible body, or the impassible soul?  Clearly, it is both as one.  If our soul and our body were enumerated distinctly, then this would be a way of saying that we have died, for our soul would have then left our body and become a separate thing.

    This is why the Orthodox doctrine is that Christ is One Nature - this is the patristic way to maintain that Christ is the enhominated Word, and the member of the Trinity enfleshed and made man.

    See how St Severus explains that we affirm this distinction, while still anathematizing all who distinguish Christ in two natures after the union:

    "Flesh does not renounce its existence as flesh, even if it has become God’s flesh, nor has the Word departed from His nature, even if He has been hypostatically united to flesh which possesses a rational and intelligent soul: but the difference also is preserved, and the propriety in the form of natural characteristics of the natures of which Emmanuel consists, since the flesh was not converted into the nature of the Word, nor was the Word changed into flesh […] We therefore anathematise not those who confess the properties of the natures of which the one Christ consists, but those who separate the properties and apportion them to each nature apart." - Letter 1, St Severus of Antioch. From Selected Letters of Severus of Antioch (EW Brooks), pg 16-17
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