Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in ChristologyLuce, A. A. (Arthur Aston)
Religion
Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in Christology
Luce, A. A. (Arthur Aston)
Monophysites
Christ's mission is misunderstood to-day as well as His cosmic work.
In certain religious quarters where zeal is not balanced by learning,
His mission as the founder of a religious society is forgotten. To
those who are deficient in historic sense the continuity of the Church
down the centuries seems unimportant, and institutional religion a
hindrance rather than a help to the spiritual life of the individual
Christian. Pietism of this kind has always been present in the church;
to-day it is prevalent. It nominally associates its piety with the
historic Christ, but actually it worships an ideal constructed by its
own ethical imagination. Such pietists spiritualise the faith. The
facts of the historic creed are to them little more than symbols of
religious truth. Spiritual resurrection, spiritual ascension are the
only miracles for them. This tendency to spiritualise everything is a
phase of monophysitism. It results from losing sight of the person of
the historic Christ, and resolving His assumption of human nature into
the assumption of a title.
CHRISTOLOGY A DETERMINANT OF SACRAMENTAL THOUGHT
Errors in sacramental teaching necessarily accompany misconceptions of
the person of Christ. The incarnation is a cosmic sacrament, the
meeting-point of divine and human, and the sacraments of the church are
types of the vaster mystery. In both type and antitype it is all
important to give due weight to divine and human, and not to exalt one
element at the expense of the other. Those who undervalue the human
nature of Christ are disposed to undervalue the outward sign in the
sacraments. Not appreciating the hypostatic union of divine with
human, they misunderstand the sacramental union of the same elements.
Blind to the significance of Christ's humanity in the economy of
redemption, they fail to see how matter can be the channel of
sacramental grace. Yet the discipline of faith is the same in both
cases. The Christian enterprise is not merely to believe in the
divine, but to believe in the divine manifested in the human.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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