Chalcedon’s Leftovers

In his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge Companions to Religion) (p. 274) , Robert Jenson remarks on the unfinished business of the Council of Chalcedon: “It is an agreed foundation for all Christian theology: as ‘one and the same’ identifiable person, Christ is both ‘one of the Trinity’ and one of us. In the standard language of Christology after the Council of Chalcedon, the incarnate Christ is ‘one hypostasis,’ of ‘two nature,’ one ‘divine’ and the other ‘human.’”

The problem, Jenson says, is that there is “no general agreement about material consequences of this ‘hypostatic union’” because “Chalcedon failed to say what sort of ontological category ‘hypostasis’ might be, and nor therefore could it say what the hypostatic unity of two different natures might mean for them.” It is possible, he says, to “read the text to suggest that the ‘one hypostasis’ is nothing actual, and that the natures’ union in on hypostasis has no material consequences for the state or activity of either nature.”

The “vacuum at the heart of Chalcedon’s analyses” left the church open “for the subsequent succession of christological controversies in the Eastern church, and for development in the Western church which has tended to honor Chalcedon by faithfulness to a merely notional analysis of ‘one hypostasis.’”