Transcript

Howdy, folks.

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Hope you enjoy this.

So let's talk about Jesus.

Now the theme of the conference is "Who do you say that I am?"

And they wanted me to kind of give you a basic overview of the Christian and Catholic view of Christ, who he is, how to answer this question.

So it's meant to be a kind of basic introduction to the subject of our conference.

And if I was putting the schedule together, I would put the basic introduction, you know, at the beginning of the conference.

But here we are almost at the end, and now you're being given the basics.

Cy Kellett, host of Catholic Answers Live, suggested they did that so that I could correct anything that the others had said.

But I'll leave that to you to figure out.

Now, "Who do you say that I am?"

is a question that Jesus asks in the Gospels.

In which Gospel does he ask that?

Matthew.

In which chapter of Matthew does he ask that?

16. So which chapter of Matthew are we about to talk about?

Matthew 16, that's right.

So, in Matthew 16, now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?"

And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets."

He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"

Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

So that's the key confession that Peter makes.

You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Remember it because there will be a quiz later.

In thinking about this passage, I'm reminded of this old game show that they used to have called "You Bet Your Life."

And it starred Groucho Marx.

It wasn't so much a game show as an opportunity for Groucho Marx to make snide comments about the contestants.

But in every episode of "You Bet Your Life," they had a secret word that nobody knew.

None of the contestants knew it.

But if they happened to say the secret word by chance, then a duck that looked like Groucho would come down and you'd win $100. And so one of the catchphrases of "You Bet Your Life" was, "Say the secret word and win $100." Well...

Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

That's kind of the "say the secret word, win $100" moment.

Only he didn't get $100. He got the keys to the kingdom.

And those have to be, you know, worth at least $100. It worked out well for him.

Now, he had two key elements in his confession.

The first one, he said, "You are the Christ."

The second, he said, "You are the Son of God."

So, that's what we're going to talk about.

If you want to understand Jesus, you need to understand those two things.

What does it mean for Jesus to be the Christ?

Well, Christ is an English word.

But it's not the only English word that we have for this concept.

There's another.

Who can think of the other English word that we have that means Christ?

Okay, let's try it.

The Hallelujah Chorus is part of Handel's Messiah, right.

So that's another English word that also means Christ.

Where did we get these words?

Well, we got them from Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

And they're all really fun to say.

In Greek, the word for Christ is Christos.

And that's fun to say because it's got that sound in it.

We normally don't get to do that in polite English.

However, if you want to, you can go to Scotland and visit Loch Ness.

But normally, we don't get to say that sound.

If we didn't all have COVID in here, I'd encourage us to all just say it together.

But it can generate a little spray, so be safe.

In any event, the Greek word for Christ is Christos.

The Aramaic word is Mshiach, so it's got that same sound in it.

And the Hebrew word is Mshiach.

So that's where we get Christ from Greek and Messiah from Aramaic and Hebrew.

But what do all of these words mean?

Anointed, right.

Anointed or anointed one.

But that only raises a question.

What is anointing?

I mean, we don't anoint a lot of stuff these days.

When was the last time you anointed anything?

It's not a word that people who weren't raised Christian will frequently even know.

So here, from the online etymological dictionary, we have where it comes from.

Anoint entered the English language in the 14th century.

And it meant to pour oil upon or smear with ointment.

And you might wonder, why would you pour oil on something?

Why would you do this?

Well, what they were doing in the 1400s was...

smear grease or oil on something for medicinal purposes, like ointment.

That's what we have today.

It's related to the same word.

Eventually, though, the word anoint got used in the Coverdale Bible with reference to Christ as the anointed one, and so that's resulted in the word becoming spiritualized.

So now people in English will talk about they have an anointing from God to do something.

But originally, in the first century, it didn't have this spiritualized meaning necessarily.

Here is a scene from Luke 7 where Jesus is at the house of Simon the Pharisee and a sinful woman anoints his feet.

Putting slippery stuff on his feet doesn't sound really particularly spiritual, does it?

Also, his feet weren't the only place that you would expect an anointing.

In fact, there's another part of the body you would expect an anointing even more, and Jesus points it out.

He talks to his host and he says, "You, Simon the Pharisee, did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment."

And you might wonder, well, why would anybody want oil poured on their head?

You know, it seems kind of strange.

If you walked into your kitchen and one of your family members took some olive oil and just dumped it on you, how would you react?

It probably wouldn't be something that you would be very pleased with.

But here, Jesus seems to expect it.

So it's something that a host might do for an honored guest.

So why would someone in the ancient world want oil poured on them?

Well, there's something we have today that they didn't have then.

You couldn't just go on Amazon and buy a case of deodorant.

And so what they would do is they would take oil and they would put fragrances and perfumes in it.

And so it would then, when they would pour it on you, it would smell really good.

And so this was an item of personal care that they would do.

It's kind of like putting on cologne or perfume or something like that.

And it was something they looked forward to.

It was considered a very pleasant thing.

As we can see here from Psalm 133, where the psalmist is making a comparison involving anointing.

He says, "...behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity.

It is like the precious oil upon the head running down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes."

So Aaron was the high priest in Israel, the most important religious figure in Israel.

And so he would have this precious oil poured on him, and it would smell really good.

And the psalmist is comparing that to how good it is when brothers are not fighting like siblings.

Now, it turns out this oil on the beard thing, that's come back into style, at least with hipsters.

These days you can also buy this.

And beard oil comes in a bunch of different fragrances.

This one is tobacco vanilla.

They also have orange cream and cherry and a whole bunch of other fragrances.

Sometimes people have asked me, do I use beard oil?

And the answer is I have tried it, but, you know, using it regularly would be kind of expensive.

Maybe I could get a bulk discount, I don't know.

But in any event, that's what anointing is.

But it wasn't just an item of personal care in ancient Israel.

It also had an important significance.

This is a story, this is a scene from 1 Samuel.

And at this point in 1 Samuel, Saul is hunting David in the wilderness because he wants to kill him.

And David and his men are holed up in a cave, and Saul doesn't know that.

And by himself, without even a bodyguard there, he goes into a cave.

Now, this is a family-friendly picture where the artist has depicted Saul sleeping.

But if you're a king, would you really go into a cave without a bodyguard to take a nap?

No, but there is one thing that a king might go into a cave to do without a bodyguard.

The one thing he might do is a number two.

And that's actually what's happening in the text.

And so while he's relieving himself, as most modern Bibles put it, David sneaks up behind him and cuts off the hem of his garment.

And then, after Saul leaves the cave, David comes out, now that he's at a safe distance, and says, "The Lord gave you into my hand in the cave, and some bade me kill you, but I spared you.

I said, I will not put forth my hand against my Lord, for he is the Lord's anointed."

And in Hebrew, the word is Mashiach.

So, he's the Lord's Messiah.

And then he holds up the hem of the garment and says, "Remember this?

You recognize this?

It's proof that I could have killed you and I didn't." But the point I want to draw from this is that you have Saul as the Lord's Messiah.

And it's not just Saul.

Elsewhere, the prophet Samuel anoints David to be king over Israel, and so David is also one of the Lord's anointed or one of the Lord's messiahs.

And you don't even have to be a Jew to be one of the Lord's messiahs.

This is a carving of Cyrus the Great, also known as Cyrus the Persian.

He was a Persian emperor in the 500s BC, and he was one of the Lord's messiahs.

It says so right in Isaiah 45, where God is talking and he says, "Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus."

And again, it uses the word Mshiach.

So Cyrus is one of the Lord's messiahs.

Why?

Why would this pagan be one of the Lord's messiahs?

Well, it's because—or at least in part, it's because Cyrus is the guy who ends the Babylonian exile.

He's the one that lets the Jews go back to their land and start rebuilding their temple.

So he's a good guy.

And as a result, Isaiah refers to him as the Lord's Messiah.

God raised him up in history to end the Babylonian exile and let the temple be rebuilt.

So you don't have to be a Jew to be one of the Lord's messiahs.

And over the course of time, even though there were these multiple messiahs in the Old Testament, these multiple Christs, there came to be an expectation that there would be one in particular, that there was this coming Messiah.

And the Roman historian Suetonius talks about this in his Lives of the Caesars.

He says that it was fated for the empire of the world at that time to devolve on someone who should go forth from Judea.

So someone was going to come forth from Judea and inherit the empire of the world.

But remember, you don't have to be a Jew to be a Messiah.

And so Suetonius thought that this prophecy applied to a Roman emperor.

He said this prediction referred to a Roman emperor as the event showed.

But the Jews, applying it to themselves, broke out into rebellion.

So in the AD 60s, the Jews revolted against Roman rule.

The Romans sent in the general Vespasian and his son Titus to put down the rebellion.

But while they're doing that, the legions acclaimed Vespasian, the emperor.

So he comes forth from Judea, goes back to Rome, and inherits the empire of the world.

So Suetonius thought this prophecy was fulfilled in Vespasian.

Josephus, the Jewish historian, says the same thing, though Josephus is probably lying about his own view.

Because Josephus lies a lot.

But there was this real expectation in the first century that there would be a Jewish leader who would kick out the Romans and revolutionize the world order.

And we see that in the Gospels.

In John 6, for example, we're told that Jesus perceives then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.

So he withdrew again to the hills by himself.

So Jesus was having to evade this expectation that people had that he would be a political Messiah that would lead a rebellion against the Romans.

And other people were concerned about this too.

The Jewish ruling council also was.

They looked at things that Jesus had done, like clearing the temple.

And they said, "If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place, meaning our temple, and our nation."

And that's what happened in the AD 60s and 70s.

But Jesus was not planning on being this type of Messiah.

When Pontius Pilate asked him if he was king of the Jews, Jesus replied by saying, "My kingship is not of this world.

If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews.

But my kingship is not from this world."

So Jesus was not planning on being a political Messiah.

He was planning on being this kind of Messiah, which is not what most people were expecting.

But he made an impression, and as Mark's gospel tells us, at the crucifixion there was a Roman soldier who was very impressed, and he said, "Truly this man is the Son of God."

Say the secret word and win $100. That's the second thing that is part of Peter's confession.

So now we need to talk about what it means to be the Son of God.

Well, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that in the Old Testament, "Son of God" is a title given to the angels, the chosen people, the children of Israel, and their kings.

It signifies an adoptive sonship that establishes a relationship of particular intimacy between God and his creature.

So you can be an ordinary creature of God, a created being that God nevertheless adopts so that you become a son of God.

And the Catechism says that the Old Testament applies this to angels, to Israel as a whole, as the chosen people, also to individual Israelites, the children of Israel, and to the Israelite kings.

So where does it do that?

Where does it do that?

Yeah.

Well, in Job 1, we have this scene in heaven where God is in his heavenly court, and it says, "...now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them."

In Hebrew, Satan means the accuser.

And so Satan is basically the prosecuting attorney in God's heavenly court.

It's his job to find people doing bad stuff and then accuse them before God.

But what we're interested here in is the sons of God that are there.

Well, there are no saints, no human saints in heaven at this point.

So who are these sons of God?

They would be the...

The angels, right.

So what do you know?

The catechism was right.

Okay, what about Israel as the chosen people?

Well, in Hosea, we find God saying, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son."

So Israel as a nation is also understood as God's Son.

And here we have a picture of Charlton Heston having led some actors through a special effect.

And if you look carefully, you'll see the special effect is collapsing on some other actors.

I don't know what the Screen Actors Guild would have to say about Charlton Heston killing a lot of their members, but I assume they've worked that out by this point.

What about individual Israelites?

Well, in Deuteronomy, they are told, "You are the sons of the Lord your God," and so don't do pagan practices.

You know, don't cut yourself for the dead or make any baldness on your forehead for the dead.

I mean, come on, use it while you got it.

But the Israelites were sons of God.

How about their kings?

Okay, well, in 2 Samuel, God is talking to David about his son Solomon.

And God says, "I will be his father, and he, Solomon, shall be my son."

And here we have Solomon photobombing a painting of the temple, which, you know, he built it, so I guess.

In any event, the Catechism was right.

In the Old Testament, sons of God get applied to angels, to Israel as the chosen people, to individual Israelites, and to Israelite kings.

What about the New Testament?

Well, the Catechism goes on to say, when the promised Messiah King is called Son of God, it does not necessarily imply that he was more than human, according to the literal meaning of these texts.

Those who called Jesus Son of God as the Messiah of Israel perhaps meant nothing more than this.

Like this guy.

Remember him?

Well, he's a Roman.

He recognizes that Jesus is the king of Israel.

You know, I mean, it says so right above him.

And so he could think perhaps, well, maybe he's a son of God like Solomon, as a king was son of God, or David, or Saul, or even Cyrus.

And so he didn't necessarily think that Jesus was more than human, although he might have also.

Well, the Catechism says this isn't the case for Simon Peter.

He recognizes Jesus is more than human.

When he confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus responds solemnly, "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven."

So the Father has revealed to Peter that more is going on here than just the kind of sonship that Solomon or David had.

And we find that confirmed elsewhere in the New Testament.

In John, in the first chapter of John, for example, we read, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

And we're also going to learn a few verses later that Jesus is the Word John is talking about.

So Jesus is superhuman.

Jesus is God.

What does it mean to say he's the only begotten Son of God, though?

That's what some Bible translations will say, some older ones.

"Only begotten Son" is kind of an interesting phrase.

You know, what is...

what does it mean?

Well, it can often be helpful to look at the Greek.

So here's the Greek.

Does that help?

How about that?

Is that a little better?

In Greek, the word for only begotten is monogenes.

And you might say, well, what does monogenes mean?

One way to try to figure it out would be to look at the parts of the word or its etymology, where it comes from.

And monogenes comes from two terms in Greek.

Monos means things like only, isolated, single, or unique.

Genea means things like race, generation, origin, birth, and some other stuff.

So you could pick only in birth and say, okay, maybe monos plus genea or monogenes, maybe that means only born or only begotten.

That would be a safe conclusion, right?

Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

The robot is popping up to alert us to the fact we may be on the verge of committing what's known as the etymological fallacy.

The etymological fallacy involves confusing a word's origin with its meaning.

I'll give you a nice example of the fallacy.

The English word "nice" comes from the Latin word "nescius."

In Latin, "nescius" means ignorant or foolish.

Nice does not mean ignorant or foolish.

If you say, "That's a nice dress," it does not mean that is an ignorant or foolish dress.

Usually.

You never know what you're going to find on a Paris fashion runway.

By the way, if any ladies would like to get this dress, it's part of the Comme Les Garçons Fall-Winter 2017 collection.

And since every designer should take responsibility for his mistakes, the designer was Rei Kawakubo.

But the etymological fallacy involves confusing a word's origin with its meaning.

So how do you find out its meaning if it's not its origin?

Well, usage, not origin, determines meaning.

The origin of the word "nice" may be ignorant or foolish.

But we use nice to mean pleasant or attractive.

So nice means pleasant or attractive.

Well then, how did first-century Greek speakers use the word "monogenes"? You'll find the answer by looking in Greek dictionaries.

The most famous dictionary of New Testament Greek is known as BDAG. It's a nickname from the editors Bauer, Denker, Art, and Gingrich.

And according to BDAG, "monogenes" means things like the only one of its kind, one and only, only, or unique.

And you'll find the same thing in other Greek dictionaries.

In Milligan and Moulton's vocabulary of New Testament Greek, it says that "monogenes" is literally one of a kind, only, or unique.

And they even add not only begotten, which would be a different Greek word.

Instead of "monogenes," only begotten would be "monogenetos."

And you'll see this awareness reflected in more recent Bible translations.

For example, I'm not a huge fan of the New American Bible, but in the revised edition, they get this right.

They'll translate John as saying, "We saw his glory, the glory of the Father's only Son."

The English Standard Version similarly has "the only son from the father."

And the Lexham English Bible, which is a very recent, very literal translation, says that we saw his glory, glory as of the one and only from the father.

And that's the most literal because the Greek word for son, "huios," is not in this text.

It literally just does say we saw the glory of the one and only or the unique one from the father.

So if Jesus is uniquely the Son of God, that may leave you with a question.

Aren't we sons of God too?

And the answer is yes, and John knows that.

If you look back in John 1, John says that to all who did receive Jesus, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And then the very next thing he says is, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father."

So John is aware that there's a sense in which Christ is the one and only Son, but there's another sense in which we are all Christians, children of God.

So we can add to what the Catechism said.

In addition to the various Old Testament figures that could be described as sons of God, in the New Testament, Jesus is recognized as the Son of God in a unique sense, but then Christians are as well.

So how is Jesus unique as God's Son?

Well, back to John.

The Word was God.

Okay, are any of us here God?

I'm going to have another stab at that.

Are any of us here God?

No. Okay, good.

Glad we're clear on that.

So, that's one way in which Jesus is unique.

John also says he was in the beginning.

Were any of us here in the beginning?

No. No, good.

I like the enthusiasm.

All things were made through him.

Did any of y'all make all things?

No. No. Okay, so Jesus is unique in that he's eternal because he was there in the beginning.

He's co-creator because he made all things.

And he is God because the Word was God.

So Jesus is unique in these respects.

Now really, being eternal and being co-creator are part of what it means to be God.

So that's the key one.

Jesus is God.

But the New Testament says something else.

Paul tells us there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man, Jesus Christ.

So just because Jesus is God, we shouldn't refrain from saying that he's also man.

He is.

Paul says so.

So this is how Jesus is unique as the Son of God.

We may be men...

Women, you know, they get to be men too.

And be sons of God.

But Jesus is unique in that he's both.

He's both God and man.

And that seems pretty simple.

You know, you might wonder, how could you get that wrong?

Well, it turns out there are a bunch of ways, and here are some of them.

These are ways that people got it wrong in the early centuries.

They're heresies, and they also have been with us down through the ages.

The first of them is known as ditheism or tritheism.

Someone's a ditheist if he thinks there's two gods, which would be Jesus and the Father.

Or he's a tritheist if he thinks there's three gods, which would be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This heresy misunderstands the nature of God, because there's only one, but a ditheist or a tritheist thinks there's more than one.

Adoptionism says he wasn't God; he was just a man, but he was adopted by God.

Just like Solomon and David and Saul and Cyrus were.

And they'll even say, okay, the moment when he was adopted was at his baptism.

Because that's when the Holy Spirit descends on him and that's when God first says, "This is my beloved Son."

So they'll say that's the moment of the adoption.

And they were wrong.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from adoptionism, which says Jesus is just a man, you have docetism.

Docetism says Jesus is God and he only appeared to be a man.

So he had like a ghost body or a temporary body like angels can assume or something like that.

But he wasn't really a man; he was just really God and he appeared to be a man.

In the second century, a view got started called modalism.

And modalism reasoned like this.

It said, okay, we know there's only one God.

We're clear on that.

Therefore, if there's only one God, there must be only one divine person.

So if there's only one divine person, how do we explain the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?

And they would say, well, being modalists, they would say this one divine person acts in different modes.

Kind of like water.

If you have a given volume of water, it could be solid at one point and then it could be a liquid at another point, and then it could be a gas at another point.

And they'll say that's how God is like.

The one divine person sometimes acts as the Father, sometimes acts as the Son, and sometimes acts as the Holy Spirit, but really it's just one divine person playing different roles.

So, unfortunately, that contradicts the actual understanding of the Trinity, which is that the Father is a different person than the Son, who is a different person than the Spirit, who is a different person than the Father.

So God is three persons, not three modes, according to Trinitarianism.

But some folks have a problem with that.

How can there be one God who is three persons?

Well, something that can help us understand it is thinking about God as the supreme being.

A being is something that be's. Something that exists.

Okay?

And God, does God exist?

Yeah.

Okay, so God is a being, but God is different from other beings because he's the ground of all being.

He's what makes it possible for everything else to exist.

He's the creator.

But you will find God described as supreme being in various church documents and in a lot of philosophical literature.

So let's talk about the category of being.

Anything that bees is a being, and lots of stuff bees.

So snowflakes exist, right?

So they're beings.

We've got a nice picture of a snowflake there.

Rocks exist.

So they're beings.

We've got a nice picture of a rock there.

Human beings.

Kind of a giveaway in the name, isn't it?

Their beings.

And so we've got a photo of a snowflake, a rock, and a human.

And then we have some stained glass of the angel Gabriel.

Angels, do they exist?

Yeah, so they're beings.

Sorry I couldn't get you an actual photograph of the angel Gabriel, but Google Images didn't have one.

And then lastly, we've got God as the supreme being.

Now let's talk about that other category: persons.

If you have a snowflake in your hand, how many persons do you have in your hand?

Zero, or none, or as we'll put it here, you've got less than one person there.

Okay, suppose you climb up on this stone.

How many persons have you climbed up on?

Zero.

Zero or less than one.

Suppose you meet this guy at the mall.

How many persons have you met?

One or exactly one in this case.

And then if the angel Gabriel appears to you and tells you you're going to give birth to the Messiah, how many persons have come and told you you're going to give birth to the Messiah?

Exactly one.

Exactly right.

Correct.

So we see this pattern emerging here where it looks like being and person are two different categories that don't match up to each other in a one-to-one fashion.

Some beings are less than one person.

Some beings are exactly one person, and if that's true, then some beings can be more than one person.

And that's the case with God.

Being and person are just different categories that don't match up one to one, and God is one being who is three persons.

Modalism is therefore wrong.

That's the mistake it makes.

It confuses the category of being with the category of person.

But there are more ways to get Jesus wrong.

Aren't you excited?

The next one is called Arianism.

Arius was a priest from Egypt in the early 300s.

And sometimes you'll hear people say that Arians believe that Jesus is only a man.

Wrong.

That's not what Arius believed.

What view is it that holds Jesus is only a man that we talked about a minute ago?

Adoptionism, right.

So we already know what that's called.

What Arius said is that Jesus is the first created being and then God used Jesus to create everything else.

So Jesus is kind of a super angel.

Years ago, they would talk about supermodels, and they were frequently German for some reason, and a friend of mine would always refer to them as Zupermodels.

And so Jesus is, I guess, kind of a Zuperangel on this view.

But we have Arians with us today.

I mean, hopefully not in this room.

But Jehovah's Witnesses are Arians.

And in fact, this is a piece of Jehovah's Witness art.

And you can see it's got, up in the right-hand corner, it's got God on the throne there.

And then it's got Jesus down in the foreground.

And you can see he's an angel because the artist has put wings on him.

And so that's essentially Arianism.

Jesus is the first created being, and he's basically a kind of super angel.

But that heresy from the 300s got condemned.

By the 400s, there was this other guy named Nestorius.

And Nestorius did not want to call Mary Theotokos, or the God-bearer, or the mother of God.

He didn't want to say that God was in Mary's womb.

And so they held a council at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and they condemned Nestorianism.

They condemned his view.

Because it's really not so much about Mary.

It's about Jesus.

Because if he's saying God wasn't in her womb...

what is he saying?

Because clearly something was in Mary's womb, and Nestorius would be happy to say Christ was in her womb or a man was in her womb, but if God wasn't, then you've got a problem because it sounds like you're saying Jesus is two different persons, one of whom is divine and one of whom is human.

So Nestorianism runs the risk of splitting Jesus into two persons.

Now, given that it was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, that means we're safe in saying that Nestorius was just a heretic and all of the so-called Nestorian churches that he inspired, they're all a bunch of heretics, right?

Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

This time, the robot is alerting us to two important things.

The first one is that after the Council of Ephesus, Nestorius accepted the church's judgment.

He said, actually, no, I don't think Jesus is two persons.

Let me clarify.

And he did.

He clarified his views.

He didn't like calling Mary mother of God, but he clarified that he didn't think Jesus was two persons, and he accepted the church's judgment, and he died in communion with the church.

Arius died a faithful Catholic.

Should we be calling faithful Catholics heretics?

No. Wish some people would think about that in connection with the Pope.

But, in addition to Nestorius clarifying that he meant what he said in an orthodox way, if he could clarify his view in an orthodox way, so can the Nestorian churches.

And they did.

In the reign of Saint John Paul II, they signed a joint declaration on Christology with us, where both they and us said, even though we express ourselves using different language, we agree on the substance.

So we don't want to be triumphalistic or accusing the so-called Nestorian churches of being heretics.

It's an irony that the guy the heresy is named after wasn't actually a heretic.

Nestorianism is a heresy.

It's just that Nestorius and modern Nestorian churches don't understand it in a heretical sense.

Now kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum from Nestorianism is a view called monophysitism.

Monos means single or alone.

We talked about that.

Phusis means nature.

And so monophysitism is the view that Jesus has only one nature.

He is one person, and according to monophysitism, he's got basically one nature that is a fusion of the divine and the human.

So in some versions, he would kind of like be 50% God and 50% man.

In other versions, the human nature is basically eliminated.

It gets absorbed by his divine nature.

And this view is also going to be heretical because he's not truly man or truly God if he doesn't have a full divine nature and a full human nature.

So we would be right to accuse the monophysite churches of being heretics, right?

Right?

Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

This time the robot is alerting us to the fact that, again, in the reign of St. John Paul II, the monophysite churches clarified what they meant by their language, and they actually agree with us these days.

So, we have a joint declaration on Christology with them, too.

So, be careful who you're calling a heretic.

Now, next, the last way of getting it wrong we're going to talk about is called Apollinarianism.

How many people have heard people suggest that humans have three parts, a body, a soul, and a spirit?

How many people have heard that three-part view?

Right.

Well, the ancient Greeks had that.

And there was this guy named Apollinarius who had that view.

And he was prepared to say, okay, Jesus, he's got a human body.

He's got a human soul, meaning the sensitive part that lets him feel things.

But he didn't want to say that Jesus had a human intellect.

So he said that the divine logos stood in for Jesus' rational mind.

So he didn't have a human spirit or a human intellectual spirit.

He had the divine logos instead.

And so Apollinarius wouldn't say Jesus is a man.

He would say Jesus is a flesh-bearing God.

Because he's God, but he's also got flesh.

Or, as one of my old instructors put it back in the day, Apollinarius' view is God in a bod.

But again, he's not fully man on this view, so that's a problem.

The last one we're going to look at is a related view called monothelitism.

Monos means what?

We've said it twice.

Monos.

One, single alone, good enough for ICEL. Thelema, that's the International Commission on English and Liturgy; you can thank them whenever you have a clunky translation at Mass.

But thelema in Greek means will.

And so what the monothelites reasoned was, okay, Jesus can have a human body, and he can have a human spirit, but if he's got a human will, how does that relate to his divine will?

I mean, if he's got two different wills, they could be in conflict with each other.

And we don't want to say Jesus is in conflict with himself, or you could say if he's got two wills, he might be two different people.

So to prevent saying things like that, the monothelites concluded he must have only one will, and it's divine.

So they'd say he's got a complete divine nature and almost all of a human nature, but not the will.

The will is coming from God.

The will is the divine will.

But again, that robs Jesus of being fully a man.

So, it’s wrong.

Now, the way to get it right, those are some ways to get Jesus wrong.

The way to get it right is to recognize, as the Catechism says, that he's true God and true man.

That means he's fully God; he has a complete divine nature, and he's fully man; he has a complete human nature.

If you want to put it a little more elaborately, you could say Jesus is one person.

But he has two natures.

One is a divine nature, one is a human nature.

And in his human nature, it's complete, so he has a complete human spirit and a complete human body.

That's a fairly lengthy way to say the truth about Jesus, but if you want to say it more simply...

you could say, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

That's the confession you want to make.

So if you go up to heaven and you meet Jesus, and I told you there was going to be a quiz, and he says, "Who do you say that I am?"

You say, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

Say the secret word, win $100. You may not get the keys to the kingdom, but at least St. Peter will use the keys to let you into the kingdom.

Thank you so much.

And before we go, just one more reminder that if you like what you've watched, you can help me out by liking, commenting, and especially by subscribing.

I'm trying to grow my channel, and I'd really appreciate your help.

Thank you, and God bless you.