Home Physiognomy of the face Christ of Faith: Two Natures. Christology Consequences of the Fall to Human Nature

Physiognomy of the face

Christ of Faith: Two Natures. Christology Consequences of the Fall to Human Nature

The nature and purpose of Jesus' coming to earth raises many questions. Why did Jesus come to earth the way He did? Why did He appear to the human race, live among us and die on the cross? Why would the heavenly Son of God be humbled to the point of becoming completely human? All of these questions can be answered with a single sentence: “He came to call in His name a people through His ministry, death and resurrection, which He will call His church” (Mark 10:45; Luke 19:10). In other words, the result of His coming to earth is the church. The only organization that Jesus ever promised to create was a spiritual body, which He called "the church" (Matt. 16:18), and it was on this church that He laid the foundation of His ministry. Therefore, it can be said that the church is the only creation of Christ during His sojourn on earth. When studying the life of Christ from the gospels, three points in connection with his ministry involuntarily attract attention: First, the gospels indicate that Jesus did not set himself the task of evangelizing the world during his personal ministry. Having chosen the apostles for himself, he did not instruct them to preach all over the world; on the contrary, he even tamed their zeal, saying: “Do not go on the path to the Gentiles and do not enter the Samaritan city; but go especially to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:5, 6). To our surprise, during His ministry, Jesus limited Himself to Palestine. He never went to other countries of the Roman Empire. He carried out his task by preaching and teaching in a very small area. If Jesus had intended to evangelize the world during His earthly ministry, He would have done things very differently, using a different strategy and tactics. Second, the gospels indicate that the deeds and death of Jesus were preparations for something that was to come. Jesus admonished, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). He taught His apostles to pray, "Thy kingdom come" (Matt. 6:10i). Jesus tried not to let the crowds, stunned by His miracles, rally around the idea of making Him their earthly king. He did not allow the masses to interfere with His 2 plans. When performing a miracle, Jesus sometimes asked the person on whom he performed this miracle to “tell no one” (Matt. 8:4).! He chose twelve apostles and personally trained them, but it appears that He was preparing them for the work they were to do after His departure (John 14:19). Thirdly, the gospels portray the ministry of Jesus in such a way that it feels incomplete, Jesus did what the Father sent Him to do, but at the end of His life He told the apostles to expect more events and revelations after His death and resurrection. Jesus said to them: "But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of everything that I have told you." (John 14:26). He also said, “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth; for he will not speak from himself, but he will speak what he hears, and he will announce the future to you” (John 16:13). After the resurrection and just before the ascension, Jesus instructed the apostles to wait in Jerusalem until they received power from on high. And having received power, they were to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations, starting from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-49). These distinctive features Our Lord's ministries before and after His death clearly show that the purpose of His ministry on earth was to gather together all that was needed to establish His kingdom, that is, the church. In (Matthew 16:18) Jesus announced to His disciples the purpose of His earthly work: "And I say to you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Thus, Jesus did not come to preach the gospel; He came for a gospel to be preached. Acts, one of the books of the New Testament, confirms the truth that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus contained the planned purpose of establishing the church, or bringing in the kingdom. The Gospels directly proclaim this truth, and Acts confirms it with illustrations. Ten days after the ascension of our Lord, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4); the good news of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus was preached for the first time; people were invited to respond 3 to this good news with faith, repentance, and baptism for the remission of sins (Acts 2:38; Luke 24:46, 47); and three thousand accepted the invitation by heeding the preached Word and being baptized (Acts 2:41). Thus, as a result of the ministry of Jesus, as day turns into night, the church of our Lord was born. And then in Acts follows the story of the spread of the church, like a flame of sacred love, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and further everywhere, to all corners of the Roman Empire. Every time they heard an inspired sermon, people responded to it, obeying the gospel and adding to the church. And every time the missionaries went on the road, they left churches behind them in more and more corners of the earth. As a result of Paul's three missionary journeys described in Acts, churches were established throughout the world, from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Rom. 15:19). Reading Acts again and again, you come to the stunning conclusion that the church is the result of the coming of Christ to earth. We do not see in Acts that the apostles and other inspired men used the same techniques as our Lord. They did not surround themselves with twelve disciples to train them in the same way as the Lord, diligently imitating His methodology. Through their preaching and teaching, the apostles and other inspired men brought people into the church. These converts were then by the church and as part of the church nurtured, instructed, strengthened in the faith, and prepared to serve and evangelize others. Acts shows us the life of the church as the result of Jesus' earthly ministry. The Epistles show us how to live in Christ as a church, that is, His spiritual body. The epistles were written for people who came to Christ in faith and obedience. They lived at a time when the memory of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was still quite fresh. Inspired men taught to honor Christ as Lord and to honor His earthly life by becoming His church. Each message contains a call to the followers of Christ to live and serve in the spiritual body of Christ. The messages, collected together, are a "reference guide" on 4 questions on how to be and live the church of Christ under any circumstances and in various places. They teach us how to actually use the ministry of Christ on earth. We submit ourselves to Jesus as Lord by entering His body in faith and obedience. Paul compares the final act of this sincere response to putting on Christ (Gal. 3:27). According to the Epistles, no one can be considered subject to Jesus until they enter His body, the church, through baptism preceded by faith, repentance, and recognition of Jesus as the Son of God. We honor the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus by living and worshiping together as the family of God in His spiritual body, which is the church. Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile; There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). “For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have one and the same work, so we who are many are one, a body in Christ, and one by one members of another” (Rom. 12:4, 5). “... So that there is no division in the body, and all members equally take care of each other. Therefore, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Cor. 12:25–27). “On the very first day of the week, when the disciples were assembled to break bread, Paul…conversed with them” (Acts 20:7). The whole teaching of the New Testament boils down to the fact that the purpose of the incarnation of Christ, His offspring, is the church, His spiritual body. The Gospels confirm this by promising it, Acts by describing it, and the Epistles by applying it to life. How indisputable is that New Testament gives us God holy word salvation, just as it is undeniable that Christ came to earth in human form, so is it undeniable that anyone who has not entered His body will discover at the end of his life path that did not understand the reason for the coming of Christ to earth. This conclusion is the main teaching of the entire New Testament!

When Christ came to the end of His short earthly life, He could say, “Father, I have done what You asked Me to do. I have fulfilled the mission which 5 You have entrusted to Me.” It is better to live a few years following God's will, fulfilling His purposes, than a long life in a palace, ruling over the realm of selfish pursuits. By the end of life, many people are only able to say: “Lord, I lived the years that You let me go on this earth, doing only what I wanted to do, and pursuing only those goals that I myself set for myself.” May it be better that at the end of our lives we can say, “Lord, I found out from the Scriptures what You wanted me to be and what You expected of me, and I dedicated myself to this holy work. I sincerely tried to glorify You on earth and live according to the plan You gave me. I lived in the church of Christ." Amen.

Composition

CONTROL WORK No. 1
Give evidence from Holy Scripture that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true God by nature (testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself).
After healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, the Jews rebuke Him for disturbing the rest, to which Jesus answers: “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). In response, the Jews “sought even more to kill Him”, because He makes “Himself equal to God” (John 5: 18). Without denying this, Jesus Christ affirms His equality with the Father:

“Whatever He does, the Son also does” (John 5:19);

“as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so the Son gives life to whomever he wants” (John 5:21);

“The Father does not judge anyone, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that everyone would honor the Son as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:22-23);

“As the Father has life in Himself, so He gave to the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:26).

In addition, the very miracles performed by Jesus testify to His divinity (John 5:36; 15:24) and unity with the Father (John 10:30,38).

Jesus repeatedly quotes the Scriptures announcing the coming Messiah. The Jews trusted in the letter of the Law as a source eternal life, but Scripture only points to this source, which is Christ (John 5:39), who, like the Father, is able to give “eternal life” (John 10:38) to His sheep.

Jesus Himself appropriates to Himself the properties inherent only in the Deity:

Eternity (“before Abraham was, I am” (John 8: 58); “And now, Father, glorify me with you with the glory that I had with you before the world was” (John 17: 5)) ;

Omniscience (“As the Father knows Me, so I know the Father” (John 10: 15); referring to Nathanael, Jesus says: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you” (John 1 : 48; see John 4: 17,50)) ;

Christ is “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33), the “bread of life” (John 6:48), the fountain of life, from which water flows, “flowing into eternal life” (John 4 : 14; 5: 24.40). It is in His will to resurrect a person “on the last day” (John 6:40) and give him “eternal life” (John 10:28; 11:25).

Christ speaks more than once of the closest, exclusive relationship with the Father, unrepeatable by anyone else: “Everything is delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father but the Son, and to whom the Son wants to reveal” (Matthew 11:27).

One of the most common names of Jesus Christ in the body of Scripture is 0 Son of God. At the trial of Caiaphas, in the face of impending death, Christ confesses Himself to be the Son of God (Mark 14:62). Throughout His entire earthly ministry, He invariably manifests His unity with the Heavenly Father in word and deed (Matt. 7:21; 10:33; 18:35), calling Himself “the only begotten Son” (John 3:16), i.e. . To those whose place in the universe is exclusive and unique by definition, “by the true God from the true God”.

How do you understand the terms nature (essence) and hypostasis (person)?

We owe the Cappadocian fathers the introduction of a clear distinction and opposition of “hypostasis” to nature. "Essence" and "hypostasis" were already known to Origen and St. Dionysius of Alexandria, but at the same time, the imperfection of dogmatic formulations led to the violation of “not only the unity of being, but also the unity of honor and glory.” During the formation of trinitarian theology, the terms "upostasiz" and "ousia" were almost synonymous, for example, in Aristotle, whose metaphysical scheme was taken by St. Basil the Great for the philological basis of the doctrine of Pr. Trinity, the term "primary ousia" meant individual existence, and "hypostasis" simply existence. In the IV century. there was an urgent need to counter the emerging false teachings with a coherent theological system with an original conceptual dictionary. And the emergence of trinitarian terminology served as the starting point for the development of the Christological teaching, and hence the solution of the anthropological issue.

Therefore, the terms “hypostasis” and “essence”, worn out by long philosophical and everyday use, needed to be filled with a new meaning. Sts. The Fathers understand “essence” as “general or generic being”, inherent in all representatives of a given genus without exception, “such, for example, is the name: man. For he who uttered this word meant by this naming the general nature, but did not define by this utterance any one person, actually signified by this person, ”says St. Basil the Great. This is “what is” in contrast to the specific mode of existence of nature - “as is”. The means, method and mode of existence of nature is determined by hypostasis. It includes private character traits applicable to one single person. A hypostasis is that which is actually named and thereby pulled out of the general mass of faceless natural material.

“The name of the “essence” outlines a certain circle of characteristic definitions”. Hypostases break this circle into sectors by increasing the number of features that are unique to this individual and do not apply to the entire genus.

In connection with the fragmentation of human nature, the hypostasis of a person approaches the concept of “individual”. To describe the divine being, the “hypostasis” must be limited, both from the “modus” - the three-faced guise of the one God, and from the “individual” - indivisible -, claiming the right to sole possession of his nature, since. here we are talking about the trinity. None of the Hypostases, fully possessing His divine nature, pulls her out of the trinity, does not interrupt the flow of mutual communication. Therefore, with the absolute unity of the Three, in the possession of an indivisible simple nature that belongs to the full extent to Everyone, the personal creative being, based on the absolute unconditional hypostatic difference, is most realistically and fully manifested.

Give evidence of the Holy Scriptures about the sinlessness of the Savior.

It is known from Christian ponirology that sin is disobedience to the will of God; it is in Him that all the contradictions of this world are resolved, then it is superfluous to talk about the possibility of His violating His all-good will.

But after the Incarnation, the question arises: to what extent the Lord Jesus Christ controlled his human nature, to what extent in Christ the human will is subordinated to the will of God. All these doubts are contained in Christ's rhetorical question to the Jews: "Which of you will convict Me of iniquity?" (John 8:46). Throughout His entire earthly life, the Lord was subjected to external temptations and overcame them (Matt. 4:1-11; Matt. 16;21-23; John 7:5; Luke 20:22-25; Matt. 11:3; Matthew 27:42, etc.), demonstrating complete submission to His human will - the will of God.

Christ Himself speaks more than once of nonparticipation in sin. Before suffering on the cross, Christ testifies: “The prince of this world is coming, and has nothing in me” (John 14: 30) - the devilish rust that eats away the world did not touch the Savior, who came into the world to sanctify it with His redeeming feat. The closest disciple of Jesus, Peter, speaks of the Lord: “He did not commit any sin, and there was no deceit in His mouth” (1 Pet. 2: 22). John the Baptist, bowing before Jesus, calls Him “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The lamb is a symbol of primordial perfection and purity (1 John 3:3), Christ, according to St. Peter, - “a lamb without blemish and purity” (1 Peter 1: 19) and only such can bear and atone for the sins of mankind: “You know that He appeared to take away our sins, and that in Him there is no sin ”, - says the apostle (1 John 3: 5). App. testifies to the same. Paul: “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The sinlessness of the Savior is also recognized by people who did not know Him closely: Pilate, following his wife, calls Him “Righteous” (Matt. 27: 19.24), the Jews treat Him with respect, calling Him Teacher (Matt. 22: 16), the sighted Judas recognizes his sin and the innocence of the Savior (Matt. 27: 4), Cornelius the centurion, being a witness of the sufferings of Jesus, “glorified God and said: “Truly this man was a righteous man” (Luke 23: 47).

The image of the union of natures in a single Hypostasis of the Lord Jesus Christ. Meaning of terms: inseparable, inseparable.

God the Word, after the incarnation from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, became a true man in everything like us, except for sin, without at the same time being separated from His Divine nature. Jesus is simultaneously fully God and man, therefore He has the right to say that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and that “My Father is greater than Me” (John 14:28). Oros of Chalcedon Cathedral 451 confesses “one and the same Christ, the Son of the Lord, the Only Begotten, in two natures”. Moreover, the properties of His human nature are absolutely identical to us, with the exception of sinful corruption, and at the same time everything that relates to God refers to Jesus Christ.

“Double consubstantial” of the God-man - to the Father according to Divinity; and the human race according to humanity” is united in one Divine Hypostasis (1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:5-6). That. The “non-hypostatic nature” of man is en-hypostatized by God the Word. And in Christ there is one Person, one Person - the Face of God. How in the Son of Man there are simultaneously limited, created humanity, identical to Adam's nature before the fall, and the absolute Deity is a “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16).

But Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition tell us that the Blood of Jesus is the Blood of God (Acts 20:28); The Lord from heaven is the second man after Adam (1 Cor 15:47); God the Son - died (Rom. 5:10), and the Son of Man "ascended into heaven" (John 3:13); A baby in a manger is beginningless and eternal.

“Nonconfluence” in the oros of the IV Ecumenical Council refers to the relationship of the two natures of Christ present in Him without any mixing, interpenetration and transformation into another, third “God-human” nature; without the dissolution of humanity in the boundless Divinity, according to the teachings of the Monophysites.

At the same time, we confess the inseparability of two natures, which are united in a single Divine Hypostasis of Jesus Christ. And there is no only man or only God Jesus. This is one Personality Who feels Himself both God and man at the same time.

God the Word, having descended into the bosom of the Virgin Mary, formed for Himself animated human flesh. And from this moment on, our nature forever and continuously abides in God and is always enriched by “Divine powers”. The “flesh of the Lord,” without losing any of its own properties, became partaker of Divine dignity, and not of nature. “The flesh, with deification, was not destroyed, “but remained in its own limit.”

The Sixth Ecumenical Council, 680, determined to confess two wills in Christ and two actions: “two natural wills are not opposed to one another, but His human will is subsequent - not opposed, but wholly subordinate - to His Divine and almighty will.”

Accordingly, the human will in Christ, like His humanity, “did not change into the Divine and was not destroyed, but remained intact and active. The Lord completely subordinated her to the will of God, which is one with Him with the will of the Father” (John 6:38).

According to the teachings of Rev. I. Damaskin, the transfigured humanity of Christ, remaining “intact” and “unmixed,” was enriched by Divine actions. It is precisely the enrichment of humanity that takes place in Christ without depriving it of its natural properties. “For even after the union, both the natures remained unmixed, and their properties were undamaged ... For red-hot iron burns, owning the power of burning not due to a natural property, but acquiring it from its union with fire” - an image that gives an idea of \u200b\u200bwhat happened on Tabor - then the body of Jesus shone with uncreated divine light, while remaining real human flesh.

Why did Nestorius refuse to call the Virgin Mary the Theotokos? What is his delusion?

The theology of Nestorius is a logical continuation of the teachings of the Antiochian theologians Diodorus and Theodore of Mopsuetia, the essence of which can be characterized as anthropological maximalism. Nestorius outlined his system of views in a work written already in exile after excommunication - in the “Book of Heraclitus”. Here all attention is focused on the moral feat of the man Jesus Christ. By His asceticism and victory over temptations, He earned the favor of the Trinitarian God. “When He has finished the feat of his own perfection in the midst of all sorts of temptations,” Nestorius writes, “He acts for us and works to save us from the dominance of the tyrant.” That is, Christ, in his opinion, is a kind of Buddhist Bodhisattva who has achieved enlightenment, but does not go to Nirvana because of love for perishing humanity.

Nestorius' delusion stemmed from an incorrect vision of the image of the union of Divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. His Christology is based on the central concept introduced by Nestorius himself - "natural face". For him, only the individual beginning is real; general and generic, nature or Aristotle's “second essence” are abstract concepts, ousia and hypostasis are inseparable. Therefore, in Christ there must exist two individualities, two personal natures united in a moral, volitional unity. Nestorius has such a concept as “the unity of a house-building person”, but this unity is a consequence of the combination of “natural persons”. Here, the person is understood not as the hidden essence and ultimate goal of the existence of the world, not as the center and meaning of the universe, but only as a “legal entity”, “role” and even a mask, a mask”. Therefore, Christ cannot be the God-man, the abstract, from the point of view of Nestorius, the nature of man and God cannot be united in one Divine Hypostasis.

Being completely consistent in his conclusions, Nestorius had every right to repeat the words of his predecessor Theodore of Mopsuetia: “It is madness to say that God was born from the Virgin, the one who is from the seed of David was born from the Virgin.” Mary can be called not the “Mother of the Lord” (Luke 1: 41-43), but only the Mother of Christ, the Mother of Man, who gave birth to Emmanuel - “the temple of the Godhead”. God the Son is born from the Father, and not from Mary, i.e. the baby Jesus is not God, but a temple prepared for the descent and incarnation of the Word. God the Son is not “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), the great “mystery of godliness: God has appeared in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16) is debunked by Nestorius. The soteriology of Nestorius is minimized and reduced to moral and volitional human efforts following Jesus Christ. Nestorius could not speak about the perception of human nature by God, about “deification” as the meaning of the Christian life. According to the teachings of St. Cyril of Alexandria, the great fighter against Nestorianism, human nature is healed from the ulcer of sin, sanctified and deprived of corruption precisely through the leadership of the one Divine Hypostasis of the Lord Jesus Christ. The path of mankind's salvation lies through communion with the life-giving flesh of Christ, with deified human nature, accepted by God the Word and abiding "at the right hand of the Father".

The nature and purpose of Jesus' coming to earth raises many questions. Why did Jesus come to earth the way He did? Why did He appear to the human race, live among us and die on the cross? Why would the heavenly Son of God be humbled to the point of becoming completely human? All of these questions can be answered with a single sentence: “He came to call in His name a people through His ministry, death and resurrection, which He will call His church” (Mark 10:45; Luke 19:10). In other words, the result of His coming to earth is the church. The only organization that Jesus ever promised to create was a spiritual body, which He called "the church" (Matt. 16:18), and it was on this church that He laid the foundation of His ministry. Therefore, it can be said that the church is the only creation of Christ during His sojourn on earth. When studying the life of Christ from the gospels, three points in connection with his ministry involuntarily attract attention: First, the gospels indicate that Jesus did not set himself the task of evangelizing the world during his personal ministry. Having chosen the apostles for himself, he did not instruct them to preach all over the world; on the contrary, he even tamed their zeal, saying: “Do not go on the path to the Gentiles and do not enter the Samaritan city; but go especially to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:5, 6). To our surprise, during His ministry, Jesus limited Himself to Palestine. He never went to other countries of the Roman Empire. He carried out his task by preaching and teaching in a very small area. If Jesus had intended to evangelize the world during His earthly ministry, He would have done things very differently, using a different strategy and tactics. Second, the gospels indicate that the deeds and death of Jesus were preparations for something that was to come. Jesus admonished, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). He taught His apostles to pray, "Thy kingdom come" (Matt. 6:10i). Jesus tried not to let the crowds, stunned by His miracles, rally around the idea of making Him their earthly king. He did not allow the masses to interfere with His 2 plans. When performing a miracle, Jesus sometimes asked the person on whom he performed this miracle to “tell no one” (Matt. 8:4).! He chose twelve apostles and personally trained them, but it appears that He was preparing them for the work they were to do after His departure (John 14:19). Thirdly, the gospels portray the ministry of Jesus in such a way that it feels incomplete, Jesus did what the Father sent Him to do, but at the end of His life He told the apostles to expect more events and revelations after His death and resurrection. Jesus said to them: "But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of everything that I have told you." (John 14:26). He also said, “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth; for he will not speak from himself, but he will speak what he hears, and he will announce the future to you” (John 16:13). After the resurrection and just before the ascension, Jesus instructed the apostles to wait in Jerusalem until they received power from on high. And having received power, they were to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations, starting from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-49). These distinctive features of our Lord's ministry before and after His death clearly show that the purpose of His ministry on earth was to gather together all that was needed to establish His kingdom, that is, the church. In (Matthew 16:18) Jesus announced to His disciples the purpose of His earthly work: "And I say to you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Thus, Jesus did not come to preach the gospel; He came for a gospel to be preached. Acts, one of the books of the New Testament, confirms the truth that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus contained the planned purpose of establishing the church, or bringing in the kingdom. The Gospels directly proclaim this truth, and Acts confirms it with illustrations. Ten days after the ascension of our Lord, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4); the good news of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus was preached for the first time; people were invited to respond 3 to this good news with faith, repentance, and baptism for the remission of sins (Acts 2:38; Luke 24:46, 47); and three thousand accepted the invitation by heeding the preached Word and being baptized (Acts 2:41). Thus, as a result of the ministry of Jesus, as day turns into night, the church of our Lord was born. And then in Acts follows the story of the spread of the church, like a flame of sacred love, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and further everywhere, to all corners of the Roman Empire. Every time they heard an inspired sermon, people responded to it, obeying the gospel and adding to the church. And every time the missionaries went on the road, they left churches behind them in more and more corners of the earth. As a result of Paul's three missionary journeys described in Acts, churches were established throughout the world, from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Rom. 15:19). Reading Acts again and again, you come to the stunning conclusion that the church is the result of the coming of Christ to earth. We do not see in Acts that the apostles and other inspired men used the same techniques as our Lord. They did not surround themselves with twelve disciples to train them in the same way as the Lord, diligently imitating His methodology. Through their preaching and teaching, the apostles and other inspired men brought people into the church. These converts were then by the church and as part of the church nurtured, instructed, strengthened in the faith, and prepared to serve and evangelize others. Acts shows us the life of the church as the result of Jesus' earthly ministry. The Epistles show us how to live in Christ as a church, that is, His spiritual body. The epistles were written for people who came to Christ in faith and obedience. They lived at a time when the memory of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was still quite fresh. Inspired men taught to honor Christ as Lord and to honor His earthly life by becoming His church. Each message contains a call to the followers of Christ to live and serve in the spiritual body of Christ. The messages, collected together, are a "reference guide" on 4 questions on how to be and live the church of Christ under any circumstances and in various places. They teach us how to actually use the ministry of Christ on earth. We submit ourselves to Jesus as Lord by entering His body in faith and obedience. Paul compares the final act of this sincere response to putting on Christ (Gal. 3:27). According to the Epistles, no one can be considered subject to Jesus until they enter His body, the church, through baptism preceded by faith, repentance, and recognition of Jesus as the Son of God. We honor the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus by living and worshiping together as the family of God in His spiritual body, which is the church. Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile; There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). “For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have one and the same work, so we who are many are one, a body in Christ, and one by one members of another” (Rom. 12:4, 5). “... So that there is no division in the body, and all members equally take care of each other. Therefore, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Cor. 12:25-27). “On the very first day of the week, when the disciples were assembled to break bread, Paul … talked with them” (Acts. 20:7). The whole teaching of the New Testament boils down to the fact that the purpose of the incarnation of Christ, His offspring, is the church, His spiritual body. The Gospels confirm this by the promise of it, the Acts by its description, and the Epistles by its application in life. Just as it is undeniable that the New Testament gives us God's holy word of salvation, just as it is undeniable that Christ came to earth in human form, so is it undeniable that anyone who has not entered His body will discover at the end of their life's journey that did not understand the reason for the coming of Christ to earth. This conclusion is the main teaching of the entire New Testament!

The image of the union of two natures in one Divine Hypostasis of the Logos is set forth in the oros of the IV Ecumenical Council:

unfused- two natures retain their difference even after the union;

invariably– in Christ, neither the Divine became human, nor the human into Divine;

inseparably- none of the two natures exists by itself, but only in one hypostasis of God the Word Incarnate;

inseparably- this combination of two natures from the moment of the Annunciation will never stop.

Protecting yourself thus. dogmatic definitions, we can now move on to further reflections.

Consequences of the fall for human nature.

The holy fathers did not tend to consider human nature separately from a specific person, hypostasis, as some kind of abstraction. Therefore, it is better and more correct to talk about how the Adam after the fall and how his descendants began to differ from their forefather before the fall.

There is one significant difficulty in this matter. The fact is that we know almost nothing about the state of Adam before the fall; Holy Scripture says almost nothing about this, but in the total volume of the patristic heritage, the testimony of St. fathers occupy a very small place.

There are several important aspects to the question of the consequences of the Fall.

1. Aspect of death as separation from God.

At the moment of the fall, when he deviated from obedience to God, and his death occurred: the soul of Adam “died, separated from God through a crime; according to the body he continued to live from that hour onwards until nine hundred and thirty years. But death, which arrived through a crime, not only made the soul indecent and the person under an oath, but also the body, making it painful and many-passionate, finally betrayed to death, ”says the saint. Gregory Palamas.

The estrangement of the soul from God entailed both passion - as a susceptibility to suffering, and passion as an internal discord of the forces of the human soul, and mortality as the separation of the soul from the body, and decay as the decomposition of the body into material elements.

2. Aspect damage or organic disorder.

In the Fall, there is a “perversion of human nature. Sin was a loss of spiritual health. Man fell into corruption, death and suffering. The original state of man was in itself a source of bliss. The distorted nature itself received a source of suffering.

Appears in a person lust, the essence of which "is nothing but enmity between the natural constituents of man in his integral nature, but in moral terms - the struggle between the proper and the improper, the disorder and inharmony of the movements of the will, or, as St. John Cassian defines this lust, disease of perverted will" .

“The nature of primitive man and the nature of fallen man are in themselves one and the same in their constituent parts and abilities, and the whole difference is only in the relationship of these constituent parts and their qualities; and the difference in the moral state of a primitive and fallen man depends on this difference. "").

3. Aspect demonic subjugation.

After the fall, Satan and demons enter a person and enslave him to themselves: “Satan, the powers and princes of darkness, from the time of the transgression of the commandment, sat down in the heart, in the mind and in the body of Adam, as on their own throne.” Macarius the Great speaks of “the leaven of vice, i.e. sin" as "some smart and mental strength Satan."

4. Aspect inoculation of sin.

In human nature, as a result of the fall, sin settles as a kind of essence. "The devil produced, planting him in the rational and spiritual nature of man." “Sin, having entered the soul, became its member, it clung even to a corporeal person, and many impure thoughts flow into the heart.”

As we can see, different fathers built different schemes of the consequences of sin:

death of the soul (deprivation of grace) - perversion (passion) of nature - sinfulness - of the body;

perversion (passionateness) of nature - sinfulness - of the soul - death of the body;

submission to Satan - perversion (passion) of nature - sinfulness - death of the body.

However, under any scheme, human nature in the fall acquires the following qualities that were not there before the fall:

1 . Mortality as the inevitable separation of the soul from the body.

2 . Decay like the disintegration of the body into the elements.

3 . Passion as susceptibility to suffering and irreproachable passions."

4 . Passion like exposure reproachful passions - a perverted direction of development of the natural properties of the soul

5 . Inclination to sin.

6 . Disintegration forces of nature, "dissection", fragmentation of the former unity into many parts, enmity between spirit and body.

7 . Enslavement to the devil.

Let us now take a closer look at the above consequences of the fall into sin.

1. Mortality and perishability

In general, the holy fathers never considered a person in some kind of static nature: the anthropology of the fathers is dynamic, it always pays main attention to what a person himself aspires to - to life or non-existence in death. holy Gregory Palamas says that the state of human nature before the fall “suggested life in God, for which she was created though this life belonged not to her, but to God; after the fall, having lost her life in God, she was left to her own powers, which was an essential contradiction with her appointment and led to her death" .

2. Passion

What is the "passion" of nature, which became characteristic of man after the fall? The concept of "passion" is often applied equally to both reproachful and unreproachable passions. Because of this, confusion often arises, because with a certain desire, the same words can be understood in senses that are directly opposite to each other.

1 . Unreproachable passions, or, better said, "the suffering states of man." What is meant when we speak of “irreproachable infirmities”? We follow Rev. John of Damascus: “Natural and immaculate passions are not in our power, who entered human life as a result of a conviction resulting from a crime such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, labor, tears, smoldering, evasion of death, fear, death throes, from which sweat, drops of blood come ... and the like, which is inherent in all people by nature.

Unlike reproachable ones, unreproached infirmities do not depend on the will of a person. Whether a person wants it or not, he cannot help hungering, thirsting, dying, indulging in decay.

Are irreproachable infirmities natural to human nature? It all depends on what will be accepted as the starting point of "naturalness" for a person. The irreproachable passions can also be regarded as qualities of the created human nature and having no source of life in itself. In this sense, they are originally inherent in human nature and natural to it. Since before the fall man was in constant communion with God, these qualities did not manifest themselves and were only in potency.

But in any case, for a fallen person, irreproachable infirmities become necessary and, moreover, useful and saving: hunger and thirst as a necessary condition for the life of an organism that has descended to the natural (animal) level of being; mortality as a necessary limit to the existence of an organism damaged by sin; corruption as a way of destroying the body into the elements for future restoration into incorruption. (In the same row, one can also place the desire for reproduction as a compensation for mortality - this is not about prodigal passion, but about the instinct of reproduction inherent in any animal being, which became natural for human nature after the fall).

2 . Reproachful passions are not some new nature that has arisen in human nature. The passions are only misdirected natural faculties and powers of the soul, which are good in themselves. The reason for this wrong direction or perversion of the forces of the soul is the so-called. "religious autonomy" of man, his desire to establish himself in his own being, or in other words, egocentrism as opposed to theocentrism, and the desire for pleasure associated with this. In man, passions arise only and exclusively on the basis of selfishness, a certain orientation of the human will. Rev. Isaac the Syrian says: "Above all passions - pride." Vicious passions rest solely on the free will of man: passions are an adjunct, and the soul itself is to blame. For by nature the soul is impassive. Therefore, we must be sure that passions, as we said above, not in the nature of the soul". However, through the skill of passion, they permeate nature, and thus, as it were, turn into nature: “As a result of the disobedience of the first person, we took into ourselves something strange for our nature - harmful passions, and by habit, long-term assimilation, turned them for ourselves as if in nature; and again, unusual for our nature - by the heavenly gift of the Spirit, it is necessary to expel this strange thing from us and restore us to our original purity. These passions, precisely because of their arbitrariness, and, therefore, responsibility for them, are called “reproachful”: “Passion are the sores of the soul, separating it from God,” says Abba Isaiah.

3 . Inclination to sin. If passions are nothing more than a perversion of the direction of the forces of the soul, where does it come from? What is the inclination to sin? It is personal consent to pleasure (to sin) after a previous struggle of motives, or, to use the terminology of St. Maximus the Confessor, this is the "gnomic will", which was not in the original Adam. Gnomic will appears with the fall; more precisely, it is the Fall in the proper sense of the word. Gnomic will is personal a way of manifesting the natural will, which belongs already not nature, but personality, the hypostasis of a person, and therefore, depends entirely on this personality. Since the gnomic will appears only when the will of the individual goes against the natural will, which in itself strives only for good, the gnomic will is a perversion of the natural will and is sinful. Let us pay attention to the fact that inclination to sin, in contrast to the first two concepts of "passionateness", is not a property of the nature (nature) of a person, but his personality, his incarnations.

3. Distortion of nature

The disintegration of the forces of nature, the "dissection", the fragmentation of the former unity into many parts, the enmity between the spirit and the body - all this is often called the "damage" of human nature. This is a perversion of the forces of the soul, the lust of the flesh for the spirit, the struggle between the proper and the improper, the disorderly expression of wills - that is, disease of corrupted will (St. I. Cassian) or gnomic will (St. Maximus the Confessor). The condition of the damaged human nature is beautifully depicted by the Apostle Paul: “For I do not understand what I am doing: because I do not what I want, but what I hate, I do. If I do what I do not want, then I agree with the law, that it is good, and therefore it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that lives in me. For I know that no good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; because the desire for good is in me, but to do it, I do not find it. The good that I want, I do not do, but the evil that I do not want, I do. But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin living in me»(). Two aspects must be singled out in the distortion of nature: the aspect of guilt and responsibility, and the aspect of communion with God.

In distortion as a susceptibility to sin and the splitting of spiritual forces, a person becomes personally guilty insofar as the personal free will of a person participates in the development and strengthening of this perversion; if a person is born with a predisposition to one or another passion (for example, alcoholism or fornication), the person himself will be considered only from the position of consent or opposition of his personal will in relation to sin: “ lies at the door; he draws you to him, but you dominate him" ().

However, in any case, this distortion is vicious and reprehensible, because. is a perversion of nature, whether voluntarily produced or inherited, and is an obstacle to communion with God: “The passions are the door closed in the face of purity. If someone does not open this enclosed door, then he will not enter into the immaculate and pure region of the heart,” says St. Isaac Sirin. Without purity of heart, it is impossible to see God.

At St. Fathers have another important and essential remark in relation to disintegration: the passion of human nature is also associated with subordination to demonic forces, which through passions began to possess human souls, and so on. enslaved the entire human race. At prp. Maximus the Confessor has statements in which he speaks of demonic forces, " hidden invisibly in the forced law of nature”, which influence a person through passions. Those. in this context, a person, being born from passionate parents and taking on a passionate nature, from the very first days of his life was under the power of the devil. Here, passion is already considered without regard to the personal will of a person: whether a person chooses to, or he opposes him, he still remains to a greater or lesser extent in the power of Satan, and, therefore, is separated from God and condemned: “ The whole sinful race of Adams secretly bears this condemnation: groaning and shaking, you will be disturbed in the sieve of the earth by Satan who sows you. How from one Adam the whole human race spread on earth; so some kind of passionate corruption has penetrated the entire sinful human race, and the prince of malice alone is able to sow everyone with fickle, material, vain, rebellious thoughts. And how one wind can cause all plants and seeds to sway and whirl; and how one night darkness spreads over the whole universe: so the prince of deceit, being a kind of mental darkness of sin and death, some kind of secret and cruel wind, overwhelms and circles the entire human race on earth, catching human hearts with fickle thoughts and worldly desires, darkness of ignorance, blindness and oblivion fills every soul unborn again.

Answering the question of how unclean spirits can unite with the human soul, St. John Casian replies: "The spirit can be insensitively combined with the spirit and has the power to covertly incline to whatever pleases them." Rev. Macarius the Great also says that after the fall, “spirits of malice bind the soul with some kind of bonds of darkness, why it is impossible for her to love God, or to believe in Him, or to use prayer, as she wished.. For from the time of the first man's transgression, resistance to everything, both in the visible and in the invisible, has entered into all of us..." .

Genesis of sin in man

The appearance and development in a person of reproachful passions, which make a person guilty of the judgment of God and deprive him of participation in the Kingdom of Heaven, based on the above premises, can be represented as follows.

Immaculate passions, being in themselves immaculate, turn out to be the basis or soil for reproachable passions. Although, according to Rev. Maximus the Confessor, irreproachable infirmities were introduced to punish suffering for pleasure, to condemn pleasure as the law of sin, but the egoistic (gnomic) will of man uses them in order to get as many pleasures as possible and avoid suffering. Saint speaks well of this. Gregory of Nyssa: “The slave of pleasures turns the necessary needs into the path of passions: instead of food, he seeks pleasures; prefers ornaments to clothes, to a useful arrangement of dwellings - their treasure; instead of bearing children, he turns his gaze to lawless and forbidden pleasures. That is why the wide gates entered into human life - covetousness, effeminacy, pride, vanity and the most diverse debauchery. Here we see a very clear indication of the genesis of sin: the sinful personal egoistic will (“slave of pleasures”) turns the irreproachable infirmities of human nature (“necessary needs”) into the path of sin (“reproachable passions”), as a result of which a person becomes completely estranged from God. The same is said by Rev. John of Damascus: “The suggestion of the evil one, that is, the law of sin, entering into the members of our flesh, through it attacks us. For once, having voluntarily transgressed the law of God and approved the advice of the evil one, we provided him (i.e. the council) with an entrance, being ourselves sold to sin. Therefore, our body is easily attracted to it. Therefore, the smell and feeling of sin in our body, that is, the lust and pleasure of the body, is also called the law. in comfort our flesh."

What nature does the Logos perceive in the Incarnation - the original Adam or the fallen one?

Now let's move on to the main issue of the report. As we have already said, the question - what was the nature of Christ - the nature of Adam before or after the fall - is profoundly wrong. One cannot completely identify the human nature of Christ with either one or the other. There is no such thing as a “pure”, “self-existing” human nature – neither primordial nor fallen. It is always necessary to talk about nature incarnated, because " nature is the content of personality, personality is the existence of nature".

For better clarification, it is better to put the question in another way: what properties did the human nature of Christ possess and how did it correlate with the state of Adam's nature before and after the fall?

To understand this issue, it is necessary to return again to the above consequences of the fall, and see how they apply to Christ, namely:

1 . Decay

2 . Mortality

3 . Passion as susceptibility to suffering

4 . Passion as a perversion of the forces of the soul (reproachful passions)

5 . Inclination to sin

6 . Disintegration of nature

7 . Enslavement to the devil

1. The Corruption of the Body of Christ

In this regard, the question arises: was there any difference in the properties of the Body of Christ before the Resurrection and after? Directly connected with this question is the question of the deification of human nature in Christ - when did it happen - wholly and completely at the moment of the Annunciation, or finally only in the Resurrection?

Here, again, there is confusion. When we talk about the deification of human nature, for a better understanding it is necessary to distinguish two sides. The first is deification compound human nature with divine. According to the Chalcedonian definition, this connection is "immutable and inseparable", i.e. The Divinity has always been the same with the humanity of Christ, from the moment of the Incarnation, the same in the Incarnation, the same on the Cross, the same at death, the same at the Resurrection. (“Although Christ died as a man, and His holy soul was separated from the immaculate body, yet the deity remained not separated from both, that is, soul and body, and even under such circumstances, the one hypostasis was not divided into two hypostases ... For although in relation to the place the soul was separated from the body, yet in relation to the Hypostasis it was united with it through the Word.

The second meaning of the deification of human nature is the change of its properties from perishable to incorruptible. Of course, these two meanings are inextricably linked with each other, but they must be distinguished. In Christ, deification as an unchanging and complete union with the Divinity took place in the Annunciation, but deification as a change in the properties of human nature took place only in the Resurrection: only after the Resurrection does the flesh of Christ become absolutely immortal, no longer due to union with the Divine, but due to the qualities of nature itself. The same miracles and actions that the Lord performed during earthly life are not the actions of His deified (in the sense of changed) humanity, but the actions of His deity through humanity. This is clearly stated by Rev. John of Damascus: “For, for the reason that the Word became flesh, He did not go beyond the boundaries of His deity and did not lose His inherent adornments, corresponding to the dignity of God; nor the deified flesh, of course, has changed in relation to its nature or its natural properties. For even after the union, both the natures remained unmixed, and their properties were intact.. The flesh of the Lord, due to the purest union with the Word, that is, hypostatic, was enriched divine actions, no way without being deprived of their natural properties, because she performed divine works, not by her own power, but by reason of the Word connected with her, since the Word through her revealed His power.. For red-hot iron burns, possessing the power of burning, not as a result of a natural condition, but having acquired it from its union with fire. And so, one and the same flesh was mortal by its nature (literally, because of itself) and life-giving because of its hypostatic union with the Word. After the Resurrection, the body itself began to possess new properties, which had not previously been inherent in it by nature, but were manifested only by virtue of the hypostatic union with the Divine. These new properties have already become inseparable from human nature. “The Resurrection of the Lord was the union of the body, already made incorruptible and souls" - that is, before the Resurrection, according to Damascus, the body of Christ was not incorruptible, but acquires such qualities only in the Resurrection. The difference of the body of Christ after the Resurrection is that it passed through locked doors, became not tired, did not need food, sleep and drink. (St. Maximus the Confessor: “just as in Adam the tendency of his personal will to evil deprived the nature [human] of general glory, since God judged that a person who mistreated his will is not so good as to possess an immortal nature, so in Christ the inclination of His personal will to the good has deprived all of [human] nature of the general disgrace of corruption, when, at the time of the Resurrection, nature was transformed through the immutability of will into incorruption, since God has reasonably judged that a man who does not change his will can again receive back his immortal nature. “Man,” I mean the incarnate God the Word, Who, through the Incarnation, hypostatically united rational and animated flesh with Himself. For if a change in the will introduced passion, perishability and mortality into [human] nature, then the immutability of will in Christ again returned to this nature through the Resurrection impassivity, incorruptibility and immortality").

However, in fairness, it should be noted that sometimes the holy fathers make statements about the qualities of the body of Christ that are consonant with the opinions of the Aphthartodocets (for example, St. Ignatius - “One should not think that the body of Christ received such properties only after the resurrection. No! It as the body of the all-perfect God, always had them, and after the resurrection only constantly manifested them". St. Hilary of Pictavia: “The divine life-giving forces that overwhelmed the body of Christ overcame all the weaknesses of human nature. The weakness of the created nature was also characteristic of the body of Christ, but it was overcome by the power of a higher nature and could be revealed only if the Divine forces, as if moving away, left Him to His own nature. Therefore, all acts of humiliation of Christ, such as hunger and death, were His voluntary states. not in the sense that, having voluntarily accepted the nature of man, he voluntarily took upon Himself the consequences of the incarnation, i.e. weaknesses of a created being, but in the fact that in the ordinary state he was inaccessible to these weaknesses and experienced them when, in order to renew man, he allowed their discovery. Since Christ is not only a man, but also, then He did not need food ... And during fasting He did not experience hunger").

How then to understand the statements of the fathers, which say that the body of Christ possessed all these qualities even before the Resurrection? The only way out is to recognize these statements as a tribute to the “anthropological minimalism” characteristic of the Alexandrian school, to see here the emphasis of the holy fathers on the voluntariness of the suffering states of Christ, which were perceived by Him arbitrarily, and not by the necessity of nature.

If, however, we assume that even before the Resurrection, the humanity of Christ already possessed all the qualities of a deified nature—i.e. imperishability, lack of need for food, rest, etc., then all manifestations of these human properties in Christ are something done, artificial, some kind of game or performance: if you wanted, you began to experience hunger, if you wanted, you began to get tired, and "in the normal state, he was inaccessible to these weaknesses", as Hilarius Pictavisky says. In other words, Christ makes His human nature to experience what he in the normal state(i.e. in the natural) was not characteristic. And this is Aphtartodocetism, which spoke of the manifestations of corruption as "acts of supernatural indulgence", "edifying deceptions". “So,” writes Rev. John of Damascus, - like the mad Julian and Gaian, to say that the body of the Lord, in accordance with the first meaning of corruption, was incorruptible before the resurrection, is impious. For, if it was incorruptible, then it was not the same essence with us, and also ghostly what happened, says the Gospel, happened: hunger, thirst, nails, perforation of the rib, death. If this happened only illusory, then the sacrament of Dispensation was a lie and a deceit, and He apparently only, and not truly, became a man, and illusory, and not truly, we are saved; but no! and those who say this, let them forfeit their part in salvation!” .

2. Mortality of the Body of Christ

On the issue of the mortality of the body of Christ, there is a completely clear position of the Church, which denied the illusory nature of the suffering and death of Christ and insisted that Christ really and not ghostly suffered and really died. The reality, and not the "appearance" of the death of Christ, flowed from the fullness of the perceived human nature. All the early apologists constantly paid attention to this - svshmch. Ignatius the God-bearer, St. torment. Justin the Philosopher and others.

However, the holy fathers also unanimously say that Christ died voluntarily, not out of necessity. And this is where the difficulty arises: how to understand this voluntariness Christ's death?

According to one point of view, Logos voluntarily perceives mortal human nature, "which could not help but die," as St. Athanasius the Great, - and so. death is a natural consequence of perception mortal human nature and the natural completion of His earthly life. But due to the combination in one person of the Savior of human nature with the Divine, death cannot hold the Most Pure Body in its power, and Christ rises from the dead.

But there is another view of the voluntariness of Christ's death. As a result of the deification of the nature He assumed, the human nature of the Savior could no longer die. But Christ accepts death voluntarily for the purposes of the economy of our salvation. According to this point of view, Christ in the Incarnation already had an incorruptible and immortal nature, but kenotically diminished not only in terms of Divinity, but also in terms of humanity, leaving his human nature to follow its natural necessity. In this sense, Rev. John of Damascus says that “our natural passions were in Christ… both in accordance with nature and above nature. For, according to nature, they were aroused in Him then, when He allowed the flesh to experience what was natural to it; and above nature, because in the Lord that which was natural did not precede His will, for in Him nothing forced is contemplated, but everything is voluntary. For desiring - He was hungry, desiring - thirsty, desiring - he was afraid, desiring - he died" .

For clarity on this issue, it is necessary to separate the concept of "mortality" as the need to die and "mortality" as the opportunity to die. Otherwise, it may seem that the fathers contradict each other, saying that the flesh of Christ could not help but die, others - that it could not die. When they say that Christ's flesh had to die as mortal, they emphasize the reality, and not the illusory nature of the Incarnation and death of Christ, as opposed to the Docets (including the Aphthartodocets) and the Gnostics. When it is said about the voluntariness of death and the possibility of not dying, the emphasis is placed on the image (or more precisely, the way, method - τρόπος) of the economy of our salvation - the death of Christ is saving because it was accepted not out of the necessity of a sinful nature, but arbitrarily, not for the sake of Himself, but for us and for us. Christ, as the true God, could not die - for "All things are possible with God"(), about His death, the Lord Himself says: “No one takes it (life) from Me, but I give it myself. I have power to give it, and I have power to receive it again. This commandment I received from my Father»(). These last words of Christ about the commandment given by the Father, as well as the words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane ( “Or do you think that I cannot now implore My Father, and He will present Me more than twelve legions of angels? how will the Scriptures come true, that it must be so?”()) clearly show that the economy of our salvation had to be accomplished only through the death of Christ - and for this Christ comes into the world to die and rise again. The divinity of Christ could give immortality to the body of Christ and deliver him from irreproachable infirmities, but this is the indulgence, the kenesis of the Divinity, that, having no need or need, God the Word arbitrarily places Himself in the conditions of the life of fallen humanity, mortal and infirm, and being able at any moment to manifest His Divinity (and manifesting it when He considered it necessary and useful, as, for example, in the Transfiguration, walking on the waters, healings and resurrection of the dead ), does not want this, but, on the contrary, wants to remain with human limitations, and not only the one “with which man was created, but also the limitation that appeared to a much greater extent in the nature of man after his fall” . If, however, we imagine that Christ dies not for the sake of accomplishing the work of salvation, but out of necessity, that is, death for Him is the only possible completion of earthly life, but not according to economy, but according to the state of nature, then from such an assumption the recognition of Christ necessarily follows. sin, because of which He became guilty of death and subject to the power of the devil. However, the Lord Himself before His sufferings says: "For the prince of this world is coming, and in me there is nothing"(). John of Damascus speaks of the voluntary death of Christ: “Our Lord, being sinless, as if you did not create iniquity, take away the sins of the world, rather than finding flattery in his mouth, was not subject to death, for death entered the world through . And so, He dies, suffering death for us, and offers Himself to the Father as a sacrifice for us.

That. mortality for the human nature of Christ was not natural (as the Severians claimed), since. human nature received its being only in the divine hypostasis, and therefore, due to the communion of properties, it could no longer die. But, on the other hand, death for Christ was not unnatural (as the Aphthardodoketes claimed), since. It is precisely in order to suffer and die that Christ is born a mortal and corruptible man, but without sin.

However, His mortality is fundamentally different from ours: for us, mortality is a necessity; for Christ, it is only an opportunity, the ability to die, but by no means a necessity by nature - but a necessity according to economy our salvation. We die for ourselves, for ourselves - so that be born through death into eternal life; Christ did not die for himself, but for us. This is the main difference between Christ's mortality and ours, and the mortality of our forefathers.

Exposure to passions, disintegration of nature and enslavement to the devil

As was shown above, due to the confusion of the concepts of “impeccable passions” with “reproachable”, there is a great confusion in the question, what kind of nature did Christ take on - the original Adam or damaged after the fall, passionate or impassive?

To what extent is passion applicable to Christ as an inclination towards sin and the perversion of spiritual forces (lust)?

If we assume that there was such passion in Christ, but His will was never inclined to commit sin, then we are faced with the heresy of Theodore of Mopsuet.

According to Theodore, the Lord during His earthly life “mortified in the flesh sin and tamed her lust... he instructed the soul and encouraged his passions to conquer and curb carnal lusts"Man Jesus" enjoyed the cooperation of the Word in proportion to His desire for good" .

“The Lord was indignant and fought against illnesses more spiritual than bodily, and, with the assistance of the Divine to his perfection, he more readily conquered passions. Therefore, he himself fights mainly with them. For neither being seduced by a passion for wealth, nor being carried away by a desire for glory, he attached no importance to the body... and a benevolent victory over them; but he instructed the soul and urged his own passions to conquer and curb carnal lusts; for this was done by the deity who dwelt in him, who healed both sides.

“Because (God the Word) loved him much, and he took all of him to himself and endured everything: that, Accompanying him in all his sufferings, He by His power made him perfect through them.; and he rises from the dead not according to the law of his nature, but God the Word, by his presence, by his action and by his mercy, frees him from death and from those bitter consequences that come from here - he resurrects him from the dead and leads him to a higher goal.

"He was justified, and appeared blameless, partly through moving away from the worst and striving for the best, partly through gradual improvement" .

From Theodore's point of view, it is only at death that Christ achieves "perfect integrity" and "immutability in mind."

If we assume that the "passion" that Christ perceives was the result of His personal sins, then there can be no question of any righteousness of Christ. It is clear that such an assumption is blasphemy, and nothing more.

However, in any case, if there was a reproachful "passion" in Christ, it means that He had vicious nature and was also in the power of the devil, like the rest of the human race. Then, of course, He couldn't be any Savior.

This concept is an extreme of the "anthropological maximalism" (prot. G. Florovsky) of the Antioch school. Christ is understood as a completely independent person, autonomous, with his own will and action, with a change and growth of his nature. For Theodore, although God dwells in the man Jesus, the humanity of Christ by itself performs its feat of struggle against sin in Himself. Theodore's heresy was strongly condemned by the Orthodox V-th Ecumenical Cathedral. Anathematism 12 anathematizes the teaching that Christ “I was overwhelmed with spiritual passions and carnal lusts, and moved away from more evil little by little, and thus, prospering in business, improved, and by the way of life became blameless... And after the Resurrection, he became unchanging in thought and completely sinless". "Anthropological maximalism" inevitably leads to the need to recognize in Christ one's own human hypostasis, and, consequently, to "ascetic humanism", which exposes itself (Prot. G. Florovsky).

The Holy Fathers unanimously and categorically denied depravity; corruption of nature in Christ. Rev. John Casian: “Our Lord ... was tempted in everything, like us, except for sin, i.e. without passion, exactly He did not at all experience the sting of carnal lust, with which we unconsciously and inevitably sting.; because His conception is not like that of a human.” “Although true flesh was in Him… her sinful inclination, which produced the crime, He did not have". Gregory the Theologian: "Christ took upon Himself my soul and all my members, took that Adam, initially free (i.e., he accepted the natural, and not the gnomic will - P.V.), who has not yet clothed himself with sin until he recognized the serpent (that is, he did not acquire the gnomic will - P.V.), and did not taste the fruit and death, but fed the soul with simple, heavenly thoughts, was the bright secret of God and the divine. In other words, in Christ there was the same "incorruptibility of will", the integrity and purity of nature, the absence of a gnomic will, as Adam had before the fall, on the one hand, and on the other, mortality, passion as susceptibility to suffering and irreproachable infirmities, i.e. everything that he began to possess after the fall - but apart from sin. Moreover, the Holy Fathers associated the properties of the original Adam in Christ with the seedless conception and the special, supernatural way of the birth of Christ. That is why the Fathers say that in the womb of the Virgin Mary God “re-creates” human nature. (St. Ch. 1, p. 339: “It was not marriage that built the divine flesh for Christ, but He Himself becomes a stone cutter of His own flesh, inscribed with the Divine finger” ...). On the need for seedless conception, St. Gregory Palamas: “Conception ... was not produced by the will of the flesh. But the influx of the Holy Spirit; Archangel's Annunciation and Faith of the Blessed Virgin were the cause of the dwelling of God, and not agreement and experience lust... (in order for Christ) - The conqueror of the devil - Man, being the God-man, accepted only the root (i.e., the very nature) of the human race, but not, being the only one who was not conceived in iniquities, and not in sins pregnant, that is - in the carnal pleasure of passion, and the impure thoughts of (human) nature ... - in order to be in the full sense of the word completely pure and blameless. “If He came from a seed, then He would not be the Head and Leader of a new and by no means ageless life, and being an old coinage, it would not be possible for Him to perceive in Himself the fullness of pure Divinity, and to make (His) flesh an inexhaustible source of sanctification, so in order to wash away the ancestral defilement with an excess of power, and become sufficient for the sanctification of all subsequent ones.

The human nature of Christ was immaculate, i.e. uncorrupted by anything, undefiled, full-fledged not only in the sense of the fullness of human nature, but also in the sense of uncorruption. Pieces of a shattered vase cannot be called a "perfect vase", even if there are every single piece of the vase. Also, the humanity of Christ is called "perfect" not only because He was a full-fledged man, without any deficiency (as Apolinarius taught, for example), but also because there was no internal splitting and no inferiority in Him. Mortality and other manifestations of corruption Christ accepts voluntarily, not according to the forced law of nature, as happens with every person, but voluntarily, for the sake of the economy of our salvation - therefore, what in an ordinary person causes sin, in Christ became saving for the human race - above all His suffering and death. “Thus, both the Deified and the Deified are one. Therefore, what has undergone both? As I reason, One entered into communication with the stout, and the other, like a stout one, shared my infirmities, except for the infirmity of sin"- i.e. here Gregory the Theologian clearly points to two types of infirmities (damage) - the infirmities of nature and the infirmities of sin: Christ accepts the first, he does not have the second.

"For this it is taken sheepdog out of malice and as a garment of ancient nakedness; for such is the Sacrifice offered for us, which is and is called the garment of incorruption. Absolutely, not only according to the Divinity, in comparison with Whom nothing is more perfect, but also according to the accepted nature, which is anointed by the Divinity, became the same with the Anointed One and, I dare to say, moreover - God ... immaculately and not bad; because it heals from disgrace and from the shortcomings and defilements produced by injury; for although he took our sins upon himself and bore our sicknesses, yet Himself not subjected to anything requiring healing" .

In man, the very inconsistency of the will, its fluctuations are evidence of sin, because. this instability occurs due to lack of affirmation in goodness and (and) due to ignorance of goodness: a person can hesitate in his decision not only because his will is not affirmed in goodness, but also because he does not know what is good in a given situation, and what - evil and In Christ, of course, there was no hesitation, since, according to the testimony of Isaiah the Prophet, “Before, before you understand, Defeat good or evil, reject the evil one, or choose the good”(). If we use the terminology of St. Maxima, "in Christ for humanity there was no γνώμη, that is, a spontaneous will inclined towards one or another decision after choosing various motives, after fluctuating between good and evil. Such a (gnomic) will could not exist in Christ, for otherwise a special human person would be introduced along with it, personally deciding on certain actions and at the same time gradually developing in the determinations of his will.

In order to better understand the state of the human nature of Christ, it is necessary to dwell on the meaning of His temptations.

Inclination to sin and the meaning of the temptations and death of Christ

As was shown above, in human nature, irreproachable passions are a kind of gates of sin and passions, through which evil forces enter a person and, through a person’s inclination to pleasure, enslave him to themselves.

In Christ these “gates of sin”—the unreproachable passions—were also open to attacks by evil spirits. But, as Basil of Seleucia says, Who could save a person without incarnation, “ wished to show the nature diminished by sin in Himself stronger than sin, in order to condemn sin in the flesh, Spread His righteousness to all and abolish “he who has power, i.e. the devil." St. Gregory Palamas says the same thing: “It was necessary that the vanquished become the winner over the victorious, and that the one who outwitted was outmaneuvered.”

How this happened is perfectly described by St. Maxim the Confessor:

When he says that the evil forces, seeing the natural (unreproachable) passion in Christ, believed that He with compelling necessity brought upon himself the law of nature and therefore attacked him, hoping to convince and instill into His imagination, by means of natural passions, unnatural passions, and thereby do something pleasing to them. He, at the first test, by temptations with pleasures, allowing them to play with their machinations, He drew them from Himself and cast them out of nature, Himself remaining inaccessible and inaccessible to them....Thus Christ at the temptation in the wilderness far drives away demons from human nature, healing the passion of nature in relation to pleasure and erasing in Himself the handwriting, which consists in voluntary consent to the passion of pleasure.

During the death on the Cross, Christ allows Satan to make a second attack through the test of suffering - so that, having completely exhausted the pernicious poison of their malice in Himself, as it exhausts the fire, completely destroy it in human nature and remove from Himself during the death of the cross the beginning and power. So the Savior expelled from human nature passion for pain, from which the will of man cowardly fled, due to which he was constantly and against desire oppressed by the fear of death, adhering to the slavery of pleasure in order to live.

He drew them from Himself at the time of death, triumphing over them when they came to Him for intrigues, and making them a laughingstock on the Cross at the exodus of the soul, after they found nothing at all in his passion of anything inherent in nature, although especially expected to find in Him something human in view of the natural passion for the flesh .

Thus, Christ took upon Himself those consequences of the fall, which were an insurmountable obstacle between God and man: “natural irreproachable passions” according to human nature - according to natural assimilation, quite real, as something inherent in Him by nature; and "reproachful passions" - i.e. human sins and vices - by relative assimilation, by philanthropy, by "sympathy" - compassion - for a person, having experienced, as if a sinner, sin, an oath, disobedience, ignorance, God-forsakenness, but at the same time not being involved in any sin. Thanks to the immutability of volition and hypostatic unity with the Divine, all these passions and sins were destroyed, demonic attacks were repelled, and death itself was unable to hold the pure soul of the God-man in its power.

Conclusion

The work of salvation accomplished by Christ can be represented in two ways or paths—descending and ascending.

The first vision is the downward path of salvation. Christ is born perfect in humanity and divinity, His humanity is like the original before the fall in its purity and sinlessness. In order to accomplish salvation, in the Incarnation, He takes upon Himself the consequences of the fall into sin - irreproachable infirmities, assimilating them to His nature in essence. He accepts reproachful passions according to relative perception. In Christ there was no struggle with reproachful passions in Himself, no hesitation between doing good and sin, no struggle of thoughts. But He arbitrarily places Himself in all the conditions that accompany human sin, in which people live and fall, arbitrarily exhausts Himself, experiences (really!) all those causes and consequences of sin, by which a person is kept in the power of sin and the slavery of the devil, up to to Godlessness. Gradually, Christ is more and more immersed in the element of human sin, but accepts it not with an essential, but relative perception, remaining completely alien to personal sin, He perceives on the Cross the very limit of sin - God-forsakenness, and in His Resurrection becomes the head of a new humanity - reborn and saved .

Another vision of the economy of salvation is the ascending path. Christ is born with those consequences that became characteristic of human nature after the fall, and which in man serve as the cause of personal sins and enslavement to the devil. By the immutability of His will, Christ heals the passion of nature in relation to pleasure and suffering, drives evil spirits away from human nature, and so on. Gradually, a process of increasing deification of human nature takes place, which finally ends in the Resurrection of Christ, when a new nature rises from death, without those infirmities and passions on which every person, but not Christ, was rooted.

These two visions can be contrasted one with the other. But is it not possible to consider them as two views from different points of view on the same subject? Both points of view are only a tribute to the "anthropological maximalism" of Antioch or the "anthropological minimalism" of Alexandria. After all, any analogy, any scheme can never be identical to that great secret the dispensation of our salvation, into which the angels cannot penetrate (), but only helps to approach it somewhat, to see it from different angles. However, the main motive of the Eastern Fathers is not crime and inevitable punishment, but life and death, being and non-being, God and the devil. Therefore, the redemptive feat of Christ is not in the satisfaction of Divine justice in the legal sense, but in the return of the lost sheep to the flock of His sheep, in the return of people from slavery to the devil into the freedom of the sons of God.

THE TWO NATURES OF JESUS CHRIST

John said, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). What profound truth is contained in these words! The incarnation of God the Son is a mystery. Scripture says, "The great mystery of godliness is that God has appeared in the flesh" (1 Tim. 3:16). The Creator of the worlds, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwelt, became a helpless baby in a manger. He, far superior to any of the angels, equal to the Father in dignity and glory, yet condescended to put on human nature! A person can only lightly touch the veil of this sacred mystery, and even then only by calling on the help of the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. When trying to comprehend the incarnation, a person must remember that “the hidden belongs to the Lord our God, but the revealed belongs to us and to our sons forever” (Deut. 29:29). Jesus Christ is truly God. What is the proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ? What did he think of himself? Did people recognize His divinity?

His Divine Attributes.

He is omniscient. According to app. Paul, in Him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and vision” (Col. 2:3). Jesus is omnipresent, and He proclaimed this by saying: “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). ) and “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). He chose to be present everywhere through the ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-18). Hebrews affirms His immutability: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Jesus has life in Himself. He Himself said this (John 5:26), John testified to this: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). Christ's words, "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25) confirmed that "Christ had in Himself the original, original, unborrowed life." 6 Holiness is part of His nature. In his announcement, the angel said to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). At the sight of Jesus, the demons cried out: "Let me go!... I know who You are, O Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24). He is love. “In this,” wrote John, “we knew love, that he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). He is eternal. Isaiah called Him "the everlasting Father" (Isaiah 9:6). Micah said that He was "from the beginning, from the days of eternity" (Micah 5:2). According to Paul, “He is before all things” (Col. 1:17), and John expressed the same thought thus: “It (the Word) was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being” (John 1:2, 3) 7 . 2. His divine power and exclusive rights. The works of God are inherent in Jesus Christ. He is called both the Creator (John 1:3; Col. 1:16), and the Preserver or Almighty - "all things stand by Him" (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3). He can raise the dead by word (John 5:28, 29). He will judge the world at the end time (Matt. 25:31, 32). He forgave sins (Matt. 9:6; Mark 2:5–7). 3. His divine names. The names given to Jesus reveal His divine nature. Emmanuel means "God is with us" (Matthew 1:23). Both believing people and demons addressed Him as the Son of God (Mark 1:1; Matt. 8:29; cf. Mark 5:7). The sacred Old Testament names of God are Jehovah or the Books of Isaiah: “prepare the way of the Lord” (Is. 40:3) to describe the work of preparing for the mission of Christ (Matt. 3:3). And John showed that Jesus and the Lord of hosts sitting on His throne are one and the same Person (Isaiah 6:1, 3; John 12:41). 4. His divinity is recognized. John described Jesus as the Divine Word who "became flesh" (John 1:1, 14). Thomas recognized the resurrected Christ as God, exclaiming: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). Paul called Him “God over all, blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5), while Hebrews speaks of Him as God and Creator (Heb. 1:8,10) 8 . 5. His personal testimony. Jesus himself claimed to be equal with God. He called Himself "I AM" (John 8:58), that is, the name of God Old Testament. He spoke of God as "My Father", not "our Father" (John 20:17). His words, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30) show that He considered Himself "of the same essence" with the Father and "possessing the same attributes" 9 . 6. His equality with God is implied. His equality with God the Father is taken for granted in the words usually spoken at the moment of baptism (Matt. 28:19), in the full apostolic blessing (2 Cor. 13:13), in His farewell wish (John 14-16) and in Paul's description of spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12:4–6). Scripture calls Jesus the radiance of God's glory and "the image of His person" (Heb. 1:3, Eng. trans.). When Jesus was asked to show God the Father, He replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). 7. He is worshiped as God. People worshiped Jesus (Matt. 28:17; cf. Luke 14:33). “Let all the angels of God worship Him” (Heb. 1:6). The apostle Paul wrote that “at the name of Jesus every knee bowed... and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Some apostolic blessings give Christ “glory forever and ever” (2 Tim. 4:18; Heb. 13:21; cf. 2 Pet. 3:18). 8. Necessity of the Divine nature. Christ reconciled humanity with God. People needed a more perfect revelation of God's character in order to develop a personal relationship with Him. Christ made this possible by showing the glory of God (John 1:14). “No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made manifest” (John 1:18; cf. 17:6). Jesus testified, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Being completely dependent on the Father (John 5:30), Christ used divine power to reveal the love of God. By this power He revealed Himself to us as a loving Savior, sent by the Father to forgive sins, restore, heal (Luke 6:19; John 2:11; 5:1-15,36; 11:41-45; 14:11; 8: 3–11). However, He never performed a miracle to protect Himself from the deprivation and suffering that other people would endure if they were in similar circumstances. Jesus Christ is “one in nature, character and purpose” with God the Father 1 0 . He truly is God. Jesus Christ is the true man. The Bible reveals that, in addition to the Divine nature, Christ has a human nature. Whether we accept this teaching or not will be decisive for us. Every person who “professes Jesus Christ who has come in the flesh is from God,” and everyone who does not confess “is not from God” (1 John 4:2, 3). The birth of Jesus, His development, His character and personal testimony prove that He was truly human.

His human birth.

It is clear from Christ's genealogy that He was the "Son of David" and the "Son of Abraham" (Matt. 1:1). According to the flesh He was “born of the seed of David” (Rom. 1:3; 9:5) and was “the son of Mary” (Mark 6:3). Although He was born of a woman, like other earthly children, there was a big difference that made His birth unique: Mary was a virgin, but the Child was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:20-23; Luke 1:31-37) . As the son of an earthly woman, He could claim His actual belonging to the human race.

His human development.

The thorny path to the cross was a path of constant spiritual growth through those sufferings that played an important role in His development. He acquired “the skill of obedience” and “having been made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb. 5:8, 9; 2:10, 18). At the same time, having passed the path of growth, He did not sin.

He was called "The Man".

Seventy-seven times in the Gospel Jesus called Himself by His favorite name: "Son of Man" (Matt. 8:20; 26:2). The name Son of God focuses on His relationship with the Persons of the Godhead. The name Son of Man emphasizes union with humanity through His incarnation.

His human properties.

Christ was to become truly man. This was part of His mission. He had to have the characteristics of human nature, and therefore became "flesh and blood" (Heb. 2:14). Christ "in all things became like" His brothers the people (Heb. 2:17). His human nature was mentally and physically vulnerable, like all people. He felt hungry, thirsty, tired, and restless (Matt. 4:2; John 19:28; 4:6; cf. Matt. 26:21; 8:24). In His service to others, He showed compassion, righteous anger, and sadness (Matt. 9:36; Mark 3:5). Sometimes He worried, regretted things, and even wept (Matt. 26:38; John 12:27; 11:33, 35; Luke 19:41). He prayed with wailing and tears, and one day His suffering was so severe that bloody sweat broke out on His forehead (Heb. 5:7; Luke 22:24). Jesus lived a life of prayer. This life showed His complete dependence on God (Matt. 26:39–44; Mark 1:35; 6:46; Luke 5:16; 6:12). Jesus suffered death (John 19:30, 34) , and after His resurrection He appeared before the disciples not as a spirit, but in a glorified body (Luke 24:36–43).

To what extent did Christ become a man?

A. He lived "in the likeness of sinful flesh." The serpent lifted up on a pole in the wilderness, as described earlier, helps to understand the human nature of Christ. The copper image, made in the likeness of poisonous snakes, was raised to heal people. So the Son of God, who had the “likeness of sinful flesh,” was to become the Savior of the world. Before His incarnation, Jesus was “the image of God,” in other words, He had a divine nature from the beginning (John 1:1; Phil. 2:6– 7). By taking on the “form of a servant,” He forfeited divine privileges. He became His Father's servant (Isaiah 42:1) to do the Father's will (John 6:38; Matt. 26:39–42). He clothed His divinity in human nature and appeared in "the likeness of sinful flesh" (see Rom. 8:3) 1 1 . But this does not mean at all that Jesus Christ was a sinner or that He did sinful deeds and had sinful thoughts. Although Jesus took the form or likeness of a man, He was sinless, and His sinlessness is beyond doubt. B. He was the second Adam. The Bible draws a parallel between Adam and Christ, calling Adam "the first man" and Christ "the last Adam" or "the second Man" (1 Cor. 15:45, 47). But Adam had the advantage over Christ. Before his fall, he lived in paradise. He was perfect, in the full bloom of his physical and mental powers. Jesus was different. When He took upon Himself human nature, 4,000 years of sin on the planet had already led the human race to degeneration. In order to save people who had degraded to the extreme, Christ took upon Himself human nature, which, in comparison with the nature of Adam before the fall, was weakened both physically and mentally. However, Jesus did not sin. 12 When Christ took upon Himself this nature, which showed the results of sin, He became subject to the infirmities and weaknesses common to all people. His human nature was "overlaid (encircled) with infirmity" (Heb. 5:2; Matt. 8:17; Isa. 53:4). He felt His weakness. He was to "bear prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who is able to save him from death" (Heb. 5:7). Thus, He united Himself with the needs and weaknesses inherent in people. Consequently, “Christ's human nature was not in the full sense of Adam's nature, that is, the nature of Adam before the fall. Nor was it a fallen nature, that is, in all respects, the nature of Adam after the fall. It was not Adam's, because it had the involuntary weaknesses of the fallen. It was not fallen because it never descended to moral defilement. Therefore, in the most literal sense, this nature was our nature, but without sin” 1 3 . C. Christ and temptations. How did temptations affect Christ? Was it easy for Him to resist them? The way Christ endured temptation proves that he was truly a man. "Like us, tempted in everything." That Christ was "tempted in all things like us" (Heb. 4:15) shows that He had a human nature. The temptation and possibility of sinning were real to Christ. If He could not sin, He would not be a man or an example for us. Christ accepted human nature with all its weaknesses, including the ability to succumb to temptation. How could He, like us, be tempted “in everything”? In the end, in every temptation, a basic question arises before a person: to submit to God's will or not? In the face of temptation, Jesus always maintained His faithfulness to God. With the help of Divine power, He successfully resisted the most severe temptations, although He was a man. Having overcome temptations, Christ can sympathize with human infirmities. We gain victory over temptation if we keep our dependence on Him. “God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond your strength, but when tempted will give you relief, so that you can endure” (1 Cor. 10:13). Ultimately, it must be admitted that "for mortals it will remain an inexplicable mystery how Christ could be, like us, tempted in everything and yet remain without sin" 1 4 . "He endured being tempted." Christ suffered when he endured temptation (Heb. 2:18). He was "made perfect through suffering" (Heb. 2:10). Since He Himself endured the power of temptation, He knows how to help those who are tempted. Like all people, He endured temptations that permeate human nature. How did Christ endure temptation? Although He had the “likeness of sinful flesh,” He was spiritually free from the slightest stain of sin. Therefore, His holy nature was highly sensitive. Any contact with evil wounded Him. The intensity of Jesus' suffering was proportionate to the perfection of His holiness. As a result, Jesus suffered more torment from temptations than anyone else on this earth. How much did Jesus endure? His experiences in the wilderness, Gethsemane, and Calvary show that He resisted temptation to the point of blood (Heb. 12:4). Christ suffered in proportion to His holiness, experiencing stronger temptations than ours. BF Wescott notes: “Compassion for the sinner in his trial does not depend on participation in sin, but on transferring the power of temptation to sin, which only a sinless being can fully know. The man who falls actually gives up before he has exhausted all his strength of resistance.” 16 faith in God and not departing from obedience to Him. He endured more, not less, than an ordinary person” 1 7 . Christ faced such a strong temptation as man never knew, the temptation to use His divine power for His own sake E. White writes: “Christ was honored in the courts of heaven, and He knows what absolute power is. It was just as difficult for Him to remain in the position of a man, as it is difficult for a man to rise above the level of his corrupted nature and partake of the Divine nature” 1 8 . D. Could Christ have sinned? Christians disagree about whether Christ could have sinned. We agree with Philip Schaff who said: “If He (Christ) had been endowed from the beginning absolute infallibility or impossibility to sin, He could not be truly a man or our role model: His holiness, instead of being His own acquisition and inherent dignity, would be an accidental and external gift, and His temptations a counterfeit” 1 9 . Carl Ullmann adds: “The story of temptation, however interpreted, would have no meaning, and the expression in Hebrews: “He is tempted like us in everything except sin” would be meaningless” 2 0 .

The sinlessness of the human nature of Jesus Christ.

The Bible depicts the sinless and human nature of Jesus. His birth was supernatural: He was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:20). He, the newborn Baby, is called "Holy" (Luke 1:35). He took on human nature in its fallen state, with the consequences of sin, but not with its sinfulness. He was united with mankind in everything, except for sin. Jesus was “like us, tempted in everything except sin”, “holy, free from evil, blameless, separated from sinners” (Heb. 4:15; 7:26). The Apostle Paul wrote of Him as "knowing no sin" (2 Cor. 5:21). Peter testified that “He committed no sin, and there was no deceit in His mouth” (1 Pet. 2:22), and compared Him to “a lamb without blemish and without blemish” (1 Pet. 1:19; Heb. 9: 24). “In Him,” John said, “there is no sin... He is righteous” (1 John 3:5–7). sin. He declared to His adversaries, "Which of you will convict Me of sin?" (John 8:48, English translation). Faced with the most severe test, He proclaimed, "The prince of this world is coming, and has nothing in Me" (John 14:13). Jesus did not have vicious inclinations, inclinations and sinful passions. In the midst of an avalanche of temptations, nothing could shake His faithfulness to God. Jesus never confessed sins or offered sacrifices. He did not pray, "Father, forgive me," but "Father, forgive them" (Luke 23:34). Always striving to do the will of His Father, and not His own, Jesus constantly maintained His dependence on the Father (see John 5:30). In contrast to the fallen nature of people, the “spiritual nature” of Jesus was pure, holy, sin" 2 1 . It would be a mistake to think that He is "just the same person" as we are. Jesus is the second Adam, the unique Son of God. We must never regard Him as "a man who had an inclination to sin." Although His human nature was subjected to all kinds of temptations, He did not fall or sin. He never had sinful inclinations. 2 2 Indeed, Jesus is the highest and most holy model of human nature. He is sinless. In all His works, perfection is revealed. Indeed, He was the perfect example of sinless human nature.

Why Christ had to take on human nature.

A. To be the High Priest for the human family. As the Messiah, Jesus had to take the position of high priest, or mediator between God and man. (Zech. 6:13; Heb. 4:14-16). Human nature was required to perform this ministry. Christ met the following conditions: He could “condescend to the ignorant and erring,” because He Himself was overlaid with infirmity” (Heb. 5:2); ); He can "help those who are being tempted" because "He himself endured when he was tempted" (Heb. 2:18); He sympathizes with weaknesses because, "like us, he is tempted in everything, except sin" (Heb. 4:15). B. To save fallen man himself. In order to enter into the position of people and save the most hopeless, He descended to the level of a servant (Philippians 2:7). C. To give His life for the sins of the world. The divinity of Christ cannot die. In order to die, Christ needed to have human nature. He became a man and paid the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23; 1 Cor. 15:3). As a man, Christ experienced death for each of us (Heb. 2:9). D. To be our example. In order to leave men an example of how to live, Christ, being a man, had to live a sinless life Himself. How the Second Adam He Dispelled the Myth that Humans Cannot Obey God's law and overcome sin. He showed that man can be faithful to God's will. Where the first Adam fell, the second Adam conquered sin and Satan and became our Savior and perfect example. And so, clothed with His strength, we can be victorious. By looking to Christ, people are “transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.... Think of him who endured such opposition from sinful men, lest you become weary and faint of heart.”—Heb. 12:2, 3. Indeed, “Christ suffered for us, leaving us an example to follow in His footsteps” (1 Pet. 2:21; cf. John 13:15).

UNITY OF DIVINE AND HUMAN

THE NATURE OF CHRIST

The person of Jesus Christ has two natures: divine and human. He is a God-man. But note that in the incarnation the eternal Son of God took on human nature, not the man Jesus clothed in divinity. Movement comes from God to man, not from man to God. In Jesus two natures were united in one person. Notice how the Bible testifies to this. Two natures were united in Christ. All the Persons of the Triune God are not represented in Christ. The Bible describes Jesus as one Person, not two. Various texts speak of His Divine and human nature, but everywhere - as of one Person. The Apostle Paul described Jesus Christ as the Son of God (divine nature) who was born of a woman (human nature; Gal. 4:4). Thus, Jesus, (Divine nature), “but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and becoming in appearance like a man” (human nature; Phil. 2:6, 7). The dual nature of Christ does not consist of an abstract Divine power or Divine influence combined with His humanity. “The Word,” said John, “became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14). Paul wrote that God "sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom. 8:3); “God appeared in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16; 1 John 4:2). A combination of the divine and the human. Sometimes, when describing the Son of God, the Bible emphasizes His humanity. God purchased His Church with His own blood (Acts 20:28; cf. Col. 1:13, 14). In other cases, it depicts the Son of Man and at the same time emphasizes His divine nature (cf. John 3:13; 6:62; Rom. 9:5). When Christ came into the world, a “body” was prepared for Him (Heb. 10:5). Taking upon Himself human nature, He clothed His divinity with it. This was not accomplished by the transition from the human to the Divine, or from the Divine into the human. He did not pass into another nature, but took human nature upon Himself. Thus, His divinity and human nature were united. When Christ incarnated as a man, He did not cease to be God, and His Divinity did not diminish to the level of a human being. Each nature has retained its dignity. “In Him,” says Paul, “dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). At the crucifixion, His human nature died, but not His Divine nature, because it cannot die. The two natures of Jesus were to be united. Understanding the connection between the human and divine nature of Christ helps us understand the essence of Christ's mission and our very salvation, which is vital for us.

To reconcile humanity with God.

The divine and human natures of Jesus, combined together, give strength to His atoning sacrifice. No sinless being, not even an angel, could atone for the sins of mankind. Only the Creator, the God-man, could do this.

To hide Divinity by human nature.

To live a victorious life.

The victorious life of Christ is not His exclusive privilege. He did not use the power that people cannot use. We can also “be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). Through Christ's divine power, we have access to everything necessary, "necessary for life and godliness." This can only be experienced by faith in the "great and precious promises" through which we can become "partakers of the divine nature, escaping from the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Pet. 1:3, 4). Jesus offers people the same power with which He Himself overcame, so that each, obeying in faith, would live a victorious life. The comforting promise of Christ is the promise of victory: on his throne” (Rev. 3:21).