The Nestorian Shuffle

In his book on Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (St. Vladimir’s, 2004), John McGuckin describes the Nestorian reading of the gospels. The gospels describe the birth and growth of the man Jesus, and also describe a person whose powers are beyond human powers – the power to raise the dead and to walk on the sea, for instance. At the same time, there is a unity to the character of the gospels, which Nestorius labels “Christ.”

McGuckin puts it this way: “For Nestorius, we are speaking about three central faith experiences: (a) Here is a man, limited by his humanness; (b) Here is also God the Logos, untrammelled in all his power; (c) Here is one and the same figure presenting thi bi-polar reality to the eyes of faith and experience.”

Nestorius insisted that the language of theology, piety, and worship must observe these distinctions: “Statements of type (a), for example, refer properly and strictly to the man Jesus of Nazareth. ‘Jesus’ should be the grammatical subject for all such sentences. Statements of type (b) refer strictly and properly to the divine Logos. Statements of type (c) which attempt to remind the hearer of the single and yet bi-polar compositeness of the Lord, are to be referred neither to Jesus, nor to the divine Logos, but to an appropriately bi-polar set of confessional titles, which Nestorius specified to be: Christ, Only Begotten, Son, or Lord.” By these rules, it would be a mistake to say that “Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead,” for that is an act beyond human power; it is strictly the Logos that raised Lazarus.

As a result, “For Nestorius the language scheme of christological utterance was all revealing. Many of the traditional expressions of Christian piety such as ‘God wrapped in swaddling bands’ would be far better laid aside, or rephrased with regard for theological exactitude as ‘Jesus was wrapped in swaddling bands’ (if one wished to consider the pathetic humanness of the Lord), or ‘The Son of God was wrapped in swaddling bands (if one wished to articulate a sense of the divine condescension involved in the incarnation). For Nestorius the phrase ‘God wrapped in swaddling bands’ was at worst blasphemous nonsense, or at best evidence of simple-mindedness and theological ineptitude.”

Whatever the merits of Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine as a set of grammatical rules may be in general, it offers an important perspective on the orthodox response to Nestorianism. The orthodox insistence on the “single subjectivity” of the Incarnate Son (something that Nestorius himself confessed in principle) was among other things a hermeneutical rule: Instead place of the Nestorian reading the gospels as now about the man Jesus and now about the Divine Logos, the orthodox insisted that the whole of the narrative was about none other than the Incarnate Logos. The orthodox response was an effort to correct the Nestorian shuffle, which, unhappily, is still quite popular.