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Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology. Be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other. And the hope, Lord willing, is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters. We're continuing this week with the topic of Christology. The person of Christ need to introduce an important term. Sounds hard to understand, but it's understandable. Hypostatic union. So just take those union. We understand that the coming together of two things and hypostatic, as we'll see in a moment, refers to person. So we're talking about the union of two natures in one person, a human nature and a divine nature in the one person, Jesus Christ. That's what we mean by the hypostatic union. Union. So let's talk about some of these particular terms. Nature. By nature we mean the essential qualities of a thing. So the dogginess of a dog is its nature. The nature of a thing refers to the substance possessed in common with the other things of that same nature. So a dog can be brown or white or spotted. It can be big or tall. It can be shaggy or or short haired. Those things are not essential. That is, you can have varieties and you still have a dog. But there is a dogginess to a dog, whatever that might be. That is the nature, the thing it shares with everything else that is rightly called a dog. Consequently, the hypostatic union affirms that Christ possesses a real and full humanness in common with other human persons. So that's the nature, same nature as ours, and possesses a real and full divinity in common with all other divine persons. So having a human nature shares in common with others with a human nature. And divine nature shares with all other divine persons. So let's talk about the word person. We've encountered this word before when talking about the Trinity Here this stress is on the Incarnate Son as one Person there with the Trinity, of course, one God, three persons here one person. Christ has one self, you might say, not two selves. So we talk about human nature, divine nature, not two selves coming together, but one self, a unified person. That's the word hypostasis or hypostasis, whichever, emphasis on whichever syllable, the hypostasis. That's what we mean by a person. And that person has two natures in perfect union, such that there is a single agent in all that Christ did and suffered and felt. Certain qualities can be predicated, that is, can be said of one nature or the other. But what Christ did, he always did as one person. So we might speak of certain things. We might say Christ took a nap according to his human nature, because a divine nature doesn't nap. But we want to be clear. He's not toggling back and forth between like a Siamese twin or something. He. He is one person, one self, a union of two natures. Now that the union of the divine and human nature in the incarnate Son is not like the oneness of the three Persons of the Trinity, it's important to understand, lest we think, okay, one God, three persons. Yep, same way. One person, two natures. No, there is an I, thou relation in the Trinity. That is the. The Father we see all throughout the Gospels. The Father talks to the Son, the Son talks to the Father. There is. We don't want to think of them as people the way we think of a, you know, a father and a son and a brother. Three people standing in a circle that. So it's hard to come up with an analogy that works. But there is this I, thou, or I, you. They can talk to each other. We don't have the human nature, and nature doesn't talk to another nature. They. They don't act upon each other as the Father does with the Son. Francis Turretson puts it, well, the union, talking about the Son, Jesus Christ, the union is personal, but not of persons, as the union of nature, not natural. So it's a personal union in one person, but not of persons. It's not a human person coming together with a divine person. So to just make this a little more confusing, in the hopes of getting to some clarity, we need to steer clear of some other theological problems related to this. So the first term here, we've been talking about hypostatic union, hypostasis, meaning a person. So in order to understand what we do and do not mean by this, two other terms. The first, an hypostasia, that prefix an or a is a prefix in Greek which often acts as a negation. Think of an atheist, is someone who does not believe in God, is not atheist. So here an hypostasia means that the Logos, talking about the second person of The Trinity, the word became flesh. That Greek word Logos, the divine Logos was not united with a human person, but with a human nature. That's what we mean by an hypostasia. That this, this union was not with another person. That's the negation there. Jesus Christ is the name of the incarnate Son of God. Jesus is not the name of a free floating human person who is joined to a deity. We need to be really clear on this thought that there was, okay, you got the divine Logos and then here's a first century Jewish man named Jesus. We'll grab Jesus and we'll put him together with God and now this Jesus is God man. No, the union was not of persons. There was not a human person who then was infused with the divine. The human nature received from the Virgin Mary was personalized in its union with the Logos. The Son of God took upon himself a human nature, not an individual. Hypostasis. Hypostasis, that's what we mean by anhypostasia. That this union was not with an individual person. It was not some guy named Jesus just waiting at the bus stop. All right, you're gonna, you're gonna be made one with the Son of God. It's not what happened. The second term necessary following on this one is the term in hypostasia. So en. In hypostasia, this affirms that the human nature of Christ only ever subsisted in the single person of Christ. That is, there was no independent existence of Christ's human nature. That would entail some form of adoptionism. So here we're saying that again, to put it crassly. So an hypostasia is saying that the union of human divine is not, here's a guy named Jesus, let's give him a divine nature. Bada boom, bada bing. This in hypostasia is saying the human nature was only ever made personal in the union. So it, to use a crass concrete metaphor, it's not like the divine Logos is looking through a closet of human natures. All right, I'm gonna just get this human nature that's here. As if natures just sort of exist. No, the human nature was in personal. While we must say that Christ's human nature was an hypostasia, we must also be clear that the human nature never existed as a generic nature. So an hypostasia is saying it wasn't a person, Jesus, that got co opted into being the Son of God. And this in hypostasia is saying, well, it's not that the generic nature was just existing somewhere. You just went into a cave where all the natures hang out. Christ's human nature was never impersonal. If anhypostasia safeguards that the Logos was not united to a human person, then en hypostasia safeguards that the Logos was not united to humanity in general. Put simply, and I know nothing here is very simple. The humanity of Christ exists only as the humanity of the Son in the Incarnation. Now, we've talked about how we can speak of the human and the divine knowledge nature. There's another phrase, yes, lots of phrases here called the communication of idioms. Communicatio idiomatum in Latin, communication of idioms. Idioms is, is a word that doesn't really register with us. It's. It's better to think of a communication of properties or communication of attributes. And this goes all the way back to the, to the early church. Cyril of Alexandria in particular. Calvin made great use of it. And this doctrine helps us to think how can we speak of each nature? And it gets very complicated. But in basic form, the communication of idioms provides a way of thinking about the two natures. And according to this, this doctrine, the communication of properties, let's call it what can be said about either nature can be said about the person of Christ. But what can be said about the person of Christ cannot necessarily be said about either nature. And what can be said about one nature cannot necessarily be said about the other. Now, this is really key as we try to talk about the person and the nature. So, for example, it's easiest to understand this with some examples. We can say Christ took a nap in the boat. We would not say the divine nature gets sleepy. We can say the world was created through Christ. We should not say the world was created through the human nature. What Christ did, he did as a single person, the union of two natures. What we can say about either nature, we can say about the person. So if you're just thinking of a crude diagram, you have person, and then going down, you have two lines going to nature's. What you can say about the natures can go up to the person. But what you can say about the person doesn't necessarily go down to both natures. So we say the Son of God died on the cross because the Son of God is the name for Jesus Christ. It's a title. And in a way, since he is the Son of God, he is God. You could say God died on the cross, God being the title in the name of the second Person, the Divine Logos. So long as we don't mean the divine nature ceased to exist or the divine nature died on the cross. So you think of Anne, can it be that Thou, my God, should die for me? Some hymnals have even changed it to say that Thou my Lord should die for me. And it is a little risky to say God died on the cross. And yet there is a proper way to say God died on the cross. If we're saying not that one person of the Trinity spun out into oblivion, but we're saying the incarnate Son of God, whom we call God, certainly died a real death on the cross. Think of Acts 20:28 speaks of the blood of God. Now God as God does not have blood, but God that is the incarnate Son of God, that divine being, that divine human being called by a divine title, then we can speak of the blood of God. By the same reasoning, the term Theotokos, which means God bearer, some translated it as Mary the mother of God, which is problematic. But really Mary Theotokos, the one who bore God, that this was a early controversy in the Church. Can we say that Mary gave birth to God? You can understand why some people would say, ah, I don't know really, she gave birth to Jesus or gave birth to maybe one part of his nature. But no, she. She gave birth to a divine human being to a theanthropos to. To a. To the God man. Now that does not make Mary divine. To say Mary the. Then Mary is somehow God as the mother of God. But I. And even mother is not really the best translation for Theotokos, but bearer, she's the one who gave birth to. So we mean to communicate. And that's why the. The Church ultimately, through Cyril and others, defended that Theotokos language. Because we don't want to say Mary just gave birth to a nature or she gave birth to part of the divine Son of God, but she gave birth to a person. And in this person, in a hypostatic union, it is the union of these two natures. So here's the mystery of the hypostatic union, a wonderful mystery that the person of the Incarnate Son is visible and invisible, passable and impassable, mutable and immutable, temporal and eternal, mortal and immortal, the coming together of human nature and divine. And so we put out of bounds any other conception, a heresy whereby God only reveals himself in modes of being, or that Jesus only appeared to be human, or that Jesus was not God in the same way that the Father was was God, or that he was merely adopted or later infused by the Spirit with some kind of divine presence, or that Christ only has one nature, or that he only has one will, because will is a property of nature, and therefore there are two wills. He can say, nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. God worked through the Scriptures in the early church to shape and refine and and even these heresies to help provide greater clarity for the truth in order that we might ultimately know and see and savor and worship Jesus Christ for who he is and who he is for his people. Thanks again for joining us on Doctrine Matters. I'm your host Kevin DeYoung. Our hope and prayer is that this has been helpful to you as you look at Scripture and try to understand the best of our theological tradition as Christians. Please consider subscribing to Doctrine Matters and if this has been encouraging, consider passing it on to others. If you'd like to learn more about this week's doctrine can ask your pastor for good resources or check out my year long mini systematic theology book called Daily Doctrine to Available in print or audio from Crossway.org the doctrine matters podcast is produced by Crossway. To learn more, visit Crossway.org.