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(From 2008) Highlighting the Connection Between the Council of Ephesus’ Christology, Liturgical Worship and the Real Presence

By: Jay Dyer

For all serious students of theology and Church History, John McGuckin’s “St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,” is a must-read. McGuckin provides not only a few hundred pages of new analysis of the stormy controversy of Ephesus, but also a few hundred pages of new translations of St. Cyril and others involved. I recently had lengthy conversations with two Baptists who argued that they accepted Ephesus and the proper Cyrilline formulation as over against Nestorius. However, for one of these individuals, his theology was overtly Nestorian, in that he was unwilling to admit any worship towards the human nature of Christ. As we have shown in the article against Rushdoony, this is precisely the opposite of what St. Cyril and Ephesus teach. Christ must be worshipped as a single divine subject with a human nature. Since the Incarnation, there is no dividing of the worship. This is why St. Thomas worships Christ Incarnate standing before him as “my Lord and my God.” Note that it’s a single subject, the Eternal Person of the Logos, enfleshed in a human nature.

My other friend stated that he accepts the title Theotokos without any qualms and the divine nature of Christ’s Personhood, but was hesitant as well to say that worship is rendered to the human nature as well. We see in Ephesus the following statement:

“Jesus Christ is considered as One, the Only-begotten Son, to be honored with one-adoration together with his own flesh.”

Thus, there is no splitting of the natures in adoration, towards which my Protestant friends tend. In fact, we see an insight missed by many Protestants that occurred in the process of this formulation much like in the formation of the canon of Scripture: the Liturgy itself.

McGuckin writes:

“For Cyril, this economy [of the Incarnation], or transaction that constitutes the incarnation is nothing less than a wonderful transformation of human nature. He points, in the Person of Christ to the paradox of a true human nature (the historically concrete Christ who is genuinely human with all the human emotions, human fatigue, and human passibility) that is at the same time transformed in divine glory (the radiant figure of Christ on Mount Tabor, or the Christ who shows unlimited authority against the forces of evil even in his human limitations ). The transformation which happens ‘naturally’ in Christ because the divinity has appropriated a human nature to itself, makes the flesh of Christ ‘Life-Giving,’ replete with all the glory and majesty of the Godhead. Indeed, for Cyril, the flesh of Christ is the worthy object of the Christian’s most profound worship and adoration.

[Note that if you believe in the Real Presence, this applies to the Eucharist as well -Jay]

McGuckin continues:

“Always being careful to secure himself against the Apollinarist sense of the confusion of natures, Cyril frequently presses the point of this paradox home with great vigour: the flesh of Christ is divine flesh, inherently life-giving, though evidently and necessarily human, that is ‘flesh,’ for if it were not given in a material fashion, as for example, the Christian’s food in the Eucharist, the transforming blessing could not be communicated to material creatures. Cyril appeals, among other ideas, to the stick that has just caught alight from the fire. In that moment, the wood of the material reality is perfectly preserved, and yet the fire has become at one with it. Likewise, the divinity plays through the flesh of Christ like a lancing flame to deify his own body in a most natural and intimate way, and yet also fires out from this source to restore and heal his contemporaries in Galilee, and thence to the redemption of the whole human race. What Christ has naturally deified in his own flesh he ‘gratuitously’ deifies in the human race at large. The appropriation of the human nature in the particular, that is, in his own birth in time and space, is also a real sacrament of the Logos’ appropriation of human nature at large. And his appropriation of it gives to human fallibility a new-found infinite worth.”

“For Cyril, salvation is offered universally, the ‘deification by grace’ that amounts to the restoration of mankind to union with God in and through Christ, is the cosmic gift of the metaphysical transformation effected in the act of the Incarnation. In other words, Christology is the paradigm of all salvation, and that salvation is understood as the ontological rescue of the race. What Christ was and did naturally, he transfers to humankind as an inheritance (kata thesin). This, quite simply, is the reason why the Eucharistic elements, unarguably material, and unarguably humble, are also for Cyril, unquestionably divine and adorable. The physical interchange that occurs when the believer communicates with His Lord in the Eucharistic Mysteries is no less than a metamorphosis-healing and salvation are given. The believer is deified by the encounter, for the counter brings him into life-giving proximity with the Logos, and this proximity (for all the Alexandrian theologians) was the metaphysical root and sustenance of all being. Eucharistic theory is a key element of Cyril’s anti-Nestorian thinking, and can be observed explicitly at several points of his correspondence.”

“We might sum up Cyril’s predominate Christological vision, then, as a ‘mysterious’ transformation of the human race according to the paradigm of the appropriation of a human nature in the Incarnation….The repeated reminders of the ‘ineffable mystery’ give this thought a doxological character…the biblical sense of that mystery which is Christ’s redeeming presence in the Church, as transcendent Lord of time, and following from that, his presence as Risen Lord in the Church’s timeless Liturgy-the Church’s mysteries. This theme of the ineffable mystery marks a significant difference in theological methodology between Cyril and Nestorius. The former appeals to tradition and the Church’s sense of the mystery of Christ that quells human voices in the sense of the numinous presence (in fact, the two things are really as one for him because the ‘tradition of the fathers’ is predominantly a tradition of the inspired saints of Christ).” Mcguckin, pgs. 186-188.

It becomes evident, then, that the various Protestant traditions are clearly in error in wanting to extract the supposed definitions of the councils, while rejecting the entire patristic spirit which gave birth to them. But on top of that, they don’t even accept the definitions of these councils anyway, since if they knew what they actually taught, they would realize they teach all the things they despise. It is within the context of the Liturgy and the Tradition of the previous Orthodox Fathers that St. Cyril did his blessed work. Nor can theology properly be done outside of this same framework today. It can in no way be divorced from this Sacred History and appropriated by a Baptist or a Presbyterian. Once one immerses himself in this patristic milieu, it is evident what Faith it was that gave birth to this grand Christological scheme adopted by the Council of Ephesus. It was not Baptist, nor was it anything like what we see in contemporary Protestantism. In fact, in so many ways, Protestantism comes much closer to Nestorianism on numerous accounts.

This is why St. Cyril can write the following in his Letter to Nestorius:

“Proclaiming the death, according to the flesh, of the Only-begotten Son of God, that is Jesus Christ, confessing his resurrection from the dead, and his ascension into heaven, we offer the Unbloody Sacrifice in the churches, and so go on to the mystical thanksgivings, and are sanctified, having received his Holy Flesh and the Precious Blood of Christ the Saviour of us all. And not as common flesh do we receive it; God forbid: nor as of a man sanctified and associated with the Word according to the unity of worth, or as having a divine indwelling, but as truly the Life-giving and very flesh of the Word himself. For he is the Life according to his nature as God, and when he became united to his Flesh, he made it also to be Life-giving, as also he said to us: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood. For we must not think that it is flesh of a man like us (for how can the flesh of man be life-giving by its own nature?) but as having become truly the very own of him who for us both became and was called Son of Man.”

But virtually no Protestant will confess this because they are not Orthodox.

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