Quotes About Chalcedon

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the main body of the church defined Christ as having two natures, divine and human.

How do we reconcile the fact that Jesus was fully God with the fact that Jesus was fully human? It is an issue that has been discussed in Christian circles throughout the church's history. All Christians believe that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. This doctrinal belief was formalized with the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 and became one of the central beliefs of Christianity.

Aristotelianism and the theology of Chalcedon enter here into an unbreakable alliance: they preserve the rights of nature against the rampages of an unchecked supernaturalism.

The Council of Chalcedon was an important event—and a critical turning point—in the history of Christianity both because it clarified orthodox Christian teaching and also because of the way that it accomplished that clarification.

Although it telescopes much history to put it this way, Chalcedon may be said to have marked the successful translation of the Christian faith out of its Semitic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by the revelation of the Old Testament) into the Hellenistic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by traditions of Greek thought and Roman might).

Because the work of Chalcedon faithfully translated scriptural teaching, the Hellenistic world could now express the wonders of God in its own conceptual language. Both synthesis and translation would need to happen again and again and again.

We in the West, perhaps ever since Chalcedon or even Nicaea, have read as the main text what the gospels treated as presupposition. In all four gospels, Jesus is the embodiment ("incarnation") of Israel's God. But this is not the gospels' main theme. Not even, I think, John's. The main theme is that, in and through Jesus the Messiah, Israel's God reclaims his sovereign rule over Israel and the world.