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What God Has Not Revealed

The exact manner of the union of God and man in Christ was never revealed to us in detail. Nobody was told. So nobody is entitled to divide the Church over an explanation of it.

The principle

“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Deuteronomy 29:29

There are two categories, and Scripture draws the line between them plainly. There is what God has revealed, which is ours, and we are accountable for doing it. And there is what He has kept to Himself, which is His.

The trouble begins when men take something from the second category and treat it as though it were in the first.

What was revealed about Christ

A great deal, and it is enough:

That He is the Son of God. "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Matthew 16:16.
That He is God. "In the beginning was the Word... and the Word was God." John 1:1. "My Lord and my God." John 20:28.
That He truly became man. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." John 1:14.
That He was born of the Virgin, suffered, was crucified, died, was buried, rose the third day, ascended, and will come again. The whole Creed.
That He is one. Not two Christs, not two sons. "I and My Father are one." John 10:30.
That in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Colossians 2:9.

Every one of those is confessed identically by the Coptic Church and by the Greek Church. Not one is in dispute between us.

What was not revealed

The mechanism. The internal arrangement. How exactly divinity and humanity are joined in one Person, whether that union is best described as one nature incarnate or as one Person in two natures.

God did not tell us. Christ did not explain it. No Apostle wrote it down. There is no verse anywhere in Scripture that resolves the question the Council of Chalcedon was convened to settle.

That is not an accident and it is not an oversight. Some things are not given to us:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9

And to Job, out of the whirlwind: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). God’s answer to a man demanding explanations was not an explanation. It was a question about the limits of the man.

Why this matters more than anything else on this site

If the exact manner of the union had been revealed, then getting it wrong would be a real heresy and the division would be justified.

But it was not revealed. Which means that every formula on either side, one incarnate nature, or two natures in one hypostasis, is a human attempt to guard a mystery, not a transcript of a divine disclosure. Both are fences. Neither is the field.

And a human attempt, however holy and however careful, is not the kind of thing that can rightly cut a man off from the Body and Blood of Christ.

St Paul warned against exactly this: “that you might learn in us not to think of men above that which is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). And: avoid foolish questions and strivings about words, for they are unprofitable and vain (Titus 3:9; 2 Timothy 2:14, 23).

This is not agnosticism, and it is not indifference

We are not saying the question does not matter, or that the Fathers wasted their lives, or that words about Christ are unimportant. St Athanasius was right to fight over a single letter, because what was at stake there had been revealed, whether the Son is God, and denying it emptied the Gospel.

We are saying something narrower and, we think, unanswerable: what was revealed, both our Churches confess. What was not revealed, both our Churches have tried to describe, in different vocabularies, both intending to protect exactly the same revealed truths.

The Fathers knew the limits better than we do. The most rigorous theologians the Church ever produced were also the most insistent that God in Himself is beyond what any mind can contain. St Gregory the Theologian said it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive Him. St Basil said we know God from His operations, not from His essence. St John of Damascus began his exposition of the faith by saying that the divine nature is incomprehensible. St Isaac the Syrian warned against the mind that pushes past what it has been given.

Every one of those men is a saint in both our Churches.

The rule this site follows

Speak confidently about what God has revealed. Both Churches already do, and they say the same thing.
Speak carefully and provisionally about what He has not. Human formulas are servants of revelation, not extensions of it.
Never divide the Body of Christ over category two. That is the error, and it is the one we have made.

Whoever has a private explanation of God’s nature may be wrong, and probably is. It is better to hold on to what we received from God Himself, and to refuse the rest of the argument.

We should talk about what we know. We should not assume we know better.