Beyond All Conceptual Forms

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

I Know the Thoughts I Have Toward You 2024

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

7. The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)

8. Jesus is Not Christ without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)

9. Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Williams, On Christian Theology)

10. Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)

11. He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)

12. The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified (McCabe, “The Mystery of the Cross”)

13. The Cross Enfolds All Possible Love (Nicholas of Cusa, “Moreover, For Our Sake He Was Crucified”)

14. I Let Him Hold My Hands Up (C.H. Mason, “Testimony”)

15. The Image of a Man, the Likeness (Jacob of Sarug, Homily on the Chariot)

16. With No Qualification? (T.F. Torrance, Incarnation)

This passage is from Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Christology lectures, the second selection from those lectures included in this series. It comes earlier in the work in a section called “Critical Christology,” which deals with the monophysite and Nestorian heresies and the meaning of the Chalcedonian definition.

What is being said with the Chalcedonian formula is this: that all options for thinking of all this together and in juxtaposition are represented as impossible and forbidden options. Then there is no longer any positive assertion that can be made about what happens in Jesus Christ. In him we are to think of all possibilities about God and human being at once. Thus the matter itself is left as a mystery, for we cannot enter into it within the parameters of positive thinking. We can only enter in faith. All forms of thought are outside the realm of possibility. This means that from the Council of Chalcedon onward, it is no longer permissible to talk about the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ as about things or facts. Thus one cannot think of a concept of God and draw a line there. To draw such a line is not permitted. These negative formulations started a movement in theological thought, for theology had to abide within these conceptual tensions. That simply made things hard for the struggling theologians. 

In its peculiar form, Chalcedon cancels itself out. The Chalcedonian formula itself reveals the limitations of its own concepts. It works with the concepts regarding the natures and demonstrates that these concepts are inappropriate and heretical forms. It brings the concept of substance that underlies this thinking to its high point and immediately goes beyond it, by saying that from now on assertions about the substance of Jesus Christ will no longer be permitted. If here a continuation of Chalcedon is conceivable, it is no longer a continuation of the thinking about relationships between natures, but rather something else, which we will take up later. The Chalcedonian formula is an objective, living assertion about Christ that goes beyond all conceptual forms. Everything is encompassed in its very clear yet paradoxical agility…¹

At this point in the lecture, Bonhoeffer turns to the defining contrasts between Lutheran and Reformed Christologies, briefly sketching what is at stake in the controversies. He sides with Luther against the Reformed objections and critiques. But he distances himself from the Lutheran scholastics, because they, no less than the Calvinists, treat the divine and human natures as static realities known in abstraction. “None of these attempts succeeded,” Bonhoeffer says, because they “diminish the divinity of Jesus” and make his humanity into something neither divine nor human, giving him “the form of a demigod living on earth.” Instead of recognizing Jesus for who he is, which is theology’s only true calling, the scholastic theologians, Lutheran and Reformed alike, constructed an image of what a divine-human being must be—an act forbidden by the second commandment.² The entire purpose of the definition, the reason the Spirit led the church to recognizing it, is to keep us from attempting such a construction. Bonhoeffer continues:

The Chalcedonian formula is an answer to the “how” question, but it is an answer in which the “how” question has already been surmounted. In the Chalcedonian formulation, the doctrine of the two natures has itself been surmounted. We must carry on in this Chalcedonian sense. This can only happen when we have overcome our way of thinking about the divinity and humanity of Christ as objects that are before us, when our thinking does not begin with the two natures in isolation, but rather with the fact that Jesus Christ is God. The is may not be interpreted any further. It has been established by God and is therefore the premise for all our thinking and not subject to any further constructions… [T]he relation between God and human being should be understood never as the relation between two things but [only as that] between two persons. Nothing can be known about God or human being until God has become a human being in Jesus Christ.³

A few reflections:

1. In the passage immediately preceding the portion I’ve quoted, Bonhoeffer explains that Chalcedon became necessary because the struggle over the two natures had led to an impasse: “The Monophysites taught the mystery of the unity of the divine and human nature; the Nestorians made a plain distinction between them, emphasizing the rationality of two entities over against the mystery of their unity. With the former, the mystery of the deification of the human; with the latter, the ethos of the servant’ s will gradually raising itself toward God yielding itself to the will of God. In the one, the brighter glow of passion, the greater fervor, the more tenacious insistence; in the other, greater clarity and sobriety of thinking…”⁴ These ways led to a dead end, Bonhoeffer concludes, because they had begun with the mistaken notion that human beings can and do already know what the divine and human natures are.

2. Bonhoeffer critiques in no uncertain terms the liberal tendency to reject Chalcedon as the corruption of Christian doctrine by Hellenistic philosophy, a critique that, ironically, many conservatives have come to take as fact. “It must be said in opposition that nothing is further from being a product of Greek thinking than the Chalcedonian formula…”⁵

3. Bonhoeffer recognizes that the Chalcedonian formula is philosophically unfinished and so intellectually unsatisfying. In his words, “Chalcedon cancels itself out.” But he maintains that that negation is exactly what the Spirit knows we need. The “no” it speaks to our abstract thinking draws us into the darkness “beyond all conceptual forms” in which the eyes of our heart can be opened to the light of the glory of God in the face of the condemned and crucified man from Galilee.

4. Jesus, Bonhoeffer wants us to see, draws us into the nearness of God precisely by bringing us to the end of ourselves. And the Chalcedonian formula forces us to own those limits and the inadequacy of all our rationalizing. As Bonhoeffer says in an earlier passage, “Christ is not timelessly and universally accessible as an idea; instead, he is heard as Word only there where he allows himself to be heard.”⁶ I tried to make this point in The Fire and the Cloud: faith, trained by confession, allows us to recognize the living image of Jesus in the texts of Scripture rather than fashioning a graven image of him and stamping that likeness onto the texts. Bonhoeffer reminds us that our constructions, however well-intentioned, however well done, always cut Jesus down to the size of our fears. The good news, however, is that he is always and in every way better than we’ve figured or fancied him to be—and he cannot be “manhandled.”

5. Bonhoeffer believed that the purpose of the definition was to prevent us from thinking that we know what things are and how they work apart from Jesus and the singularity of his life. Following Bonhoeffer’s lead, then, we can see how NT Wright’s suggestion that Chalcedon is “the de-Israelitization of the canonical picture of YHWH and Israel into the abstract categories of ‘divinity’ and ‘humanity’” is exactly wrong, turning the meaning of the confession upside down and inside out. To confess that the natures are not things, to refuse to use abstractions about God and human being in the shaping of our way of life, is to learn what it means to trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord whose name must be revealed to be known.

6. “It is what it is.” This statement is essentially true only of the incarnation. But because of who it is that is incarnate, all things become and remain what they are. In other words, the integrity and vitality of each creature, earthly and heavenly, seen and unseen, depends on its having been at-one-ed with Christ and in him. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, nothing—truly nothing—can be known about either God or creation apart from Christ and his divine humanity, his Godmanhood. So, Kate Sonderegger is right—“not all is Christology.” But all is Christological, because, as the Scripture says, “Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3.11).

1. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, pp. 342-343.

2. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, p. 349.

3. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, pp. 352-353.

4. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, p. 341.

5. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, p. 352.

6. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, p. 317.