the State had too often to take a definite position, to make a choice. And it was asked to do so by the Church itself. And it is too normal, alas, that the Roman Empire too often chose not so much the argument of Truth but those of political pragmatism.

Chalcedon was the critical point, the climax of that long and tragic process. All the political and the national problems of the Empire were implied in the dogmatic question about the two natures in Christ. It took centuries to realise the value and true meaning of the dogma formulated there. Contemporaries realised above all that the Council meant the defeat of old ecclesiastical centres - Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus - by Constantinople, the victory of the imperial Church over the Copts and the Syrians, the challenge of the new Rome to the old Rome. Paradoxically enough Chalcedon, which proclaimed the most universal of all dogmas, at the same time became the end of Roman Christian Universalism. Syria, Egypt, Armenia, Persia did not accept it because the dogma of Chalcedon carried with it an Imperial seal, and all the efforts of the Roman Empire to balance it by all kinds of compromises did not avail to bring back these Christian bodies to the Orthodox Byzantium.

Historical failure was as I have said. And yet in this human weakness of Church history the greatest victory of the Truth was won, and Chalcedon became an ever-living symbol and foundation of living theology for subsequent generations of Christians. “For my strength is made perfect in weakness.’’ We must always be loyal to the strength of God as revealed at Chalcedon, and it is this same loyalty that must compel us to an ever-renewed repentance for our historical weaknesses and shortcomings.

CHALCEDON AND THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE

by JOHN DILLENBERGER

The Reformers, Luther and Calvin, accepted the traditional Chal- cedonian formula without further elaboration. They were concerned far more with other issues of Christian faith. Calvin does provide one of the most succinct and clear statements of the importance of Chalcedon in the Institutes. Luther, in writing about the Councils, even accepted the concept of the communicatio idiomatum as a way of showing the unity of the person of Christ. The elaboration of this concept by Luther- an theologians, particularly its relation to the presence of Christ in

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the Lord’s Supper, resulted in considerable controversy with reformed theologians, who were equally insistent upon an understanding of the communication of attributes, which diverged significantly from that of the Lutherans. The development on both sides, in fact, was such that the relations between the human and the divine, which Chalcedon had simply affirmed without defining too carefully, were here developed in such detail and with such precision that more was said concerning the relation of the human and divine than is possible. Such is usually the situation of Orthodox theology.

It was then not unnatural that Pietists and Rationalists, whether Socinian or Armitiian, reacted against this development and outrightly rejected formulations such as Chalcedon. The great liberal theologian Schleiemacher subsequently attempted to understand the early Christolo- gical developments, but found them to be impossible metaphysical formulations. This motif received its classic expression in the work of Harnack and Ritschl, who felt that the Greek categories of the Early Church were the unfortunate co-mingling of the religious and the secular. They felt that the alliance of religion and philosophical speculation had to be laid aside in favour of other structures of thinking more in line with the religious. Little did they realize that they themselves were the products of Kant’s xcond Critique, and that their own classical formulations said infinitely less than that of either Chalcedon or the New Testament.

The contemporary revival of theology has brought into Protestantism a new respect for Chalcedon and the early theological period of the Church. Admitting that the Greek and Latin formulations presented difficulties for formulating the mystery of the relation of the human and the divine, contemporary theologians, such as Barth and Brunner, nevertheless feel that the intent of Chalcedon was that of expressing the necessary conjunction of humanity and divinity. They are sympa- thetic to Chalcedon as a formula which meaningfully characterizes the mystery of the God-Man, without formulating the mystery in such a way as to either dissolve it into rational categories which destroy its meaning, or which leave it so mysterious as not to be sufficiently explicit in its meaning. Moreover, contemporary Protestantism believes that each age must find its way of expressing and working out its own theological affirmations. This must always be done in relation to the history of the Church and the New Testament.

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