Chalcedonian Creed

“Who, being in the form of God, … emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

— Philippians 2:6-7

The Chalcedonian Creed, also called the Chalcedonian Definition, is the statement on the person of Christ adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. It confesses one Christ, “truly God and truly man,” existing in two complete natures, divine and human, joined in a single person “without mixture, without change, without division, without separation.”¹ The Definition settled the fifth-century dispute between Nestorius, who was read as dividing Christ into two persons, and Eutyches, who taught that the two natures merged into one after the incarnation, the error known as monophysitism.²

Text of the Definition

We teach that Jesus Christ is perfect as respects Godhead, and perfect as respects manhood; that He is truly God, and truly a man consisting of a rational soul and a body; that He is consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity, and consubstantial with us as to his humanity, and like us in all respects, sin excepted. He was begotten of the Father before creation as to his deity; but in these last days He, for us, and for our salvation, was born of Mary the Virgin, the mother of God as to his humanity. He is one and the same Christ, Lord, only begotten, existing in two natures without mixture, without change, without division, without separation; the diversity of the two natures not being at all destroyed by their union in the one person, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved, and concurring to one person, and one subsistence.¹

Confessional Definition

The Second Helvetic Confession names the Chalcedonian Definition directly, receiving it alongside the creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, plus the Athanasian Creed, as a summary of “whatever things are defined from the Holy Scriptures concerning the mystery of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and stating why: “nothing is contained in the aforesaid symbols which is not agreeable to the Word of God.”³ The same confession makes plain that this reception is not an appeal to conciliar authority as such: “we do not admit any other judge than God himself, who proclaims by the Holy Scriptures what is true, what is false, what is to be followed, or what to be avoided.”⁴ Elsewhere it states the Definition’s own content in its own words, rejecting by name the errors Chalcedon was convened against: “we heartily execrate the madness of Eutyches and of the Monophysites and the Monothelites, expunging the property of the human nature.”⁵

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name Chalcedon, but its Christology chapter states the same substance in language that tracks the Definition clause for clause: Christ’s two natures “were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion.”⁶ The Westminster Confession states the identical formula almost word for word.⁷ A doctrine three confessional traditions state in nearly identical terms, five centuries apart, is the wider Reformed church’s shared inheritance of Chalcedon’s own wording, not a distinctively Baptist position.

Historical Development

The controversy that produced the Definition began over how to describe Mary. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople from AD 428, objected to calling her Theotokos (“God-bearer”), preferring Christotokos (“Christ-bearer”) on the grounds that the eternal God could not have been born of a woman.⁸ Cyril of Alexandria answered that if Christ is God, “the holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother,” and that denying her the title implied only a “superficial” joining of the divine Logos to an ordinary man, emptying the incarnation of its saving power.⁹ The Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius in 431 for what was read as dividing Christ into two persons.¹⁰

The opposite error followed. Eutyches, an abbot at Constantinople, held that Christ had two natures before the incarnation but only one afterward.¹¹ Condemned at a synod in Constantinople, he found a powerful defender in Dioscurus, bishop of Alexandria, who used his influence to convene a general synod at Ephesus in AD 449. There the opponents of Eutyches were forcibly excluded and his one-nature Christology formally sanctioned, a council remembered in history as “the robber council.”¹² Emperor Theodosius sanctioned its decisions, but he died the following year, and his successor, hostile to Dioscurus, summoned another general synod, which met at Chalcedon in AD 451.¹²

The Council of Chalcedon deposed Dioscurus and adopted a letter Pope Leo the Great had written to Flavian of Constantinople, known as Leo’s Tome, as “a true exposition of the faith of the Church.”¹² Leo had written that “the properties of each nature and substance were preserved entire, and came together to form one person… an inviolable nature was united to a nature that can suffer,” so that Christ “was able to die in respect of the one, unable to die in respect of the other.”¹³ Working from that letter, the council framed the Definition quoted above.

Reception was not immediate or universal. The Latin church accepted the Definition readily, but it “met with great opposition in some parts, and especially in Palestine and Egypt,” producing “great disorders and bloodshed” there and even revolution in Constantinople, where one emperor was deposed and another enthroned.¹⁴ Roughly two centuries later, Emperor Heraclius tried to reconcile the remaining parties by proposing that Christ has two natures but only one will and operation, called Monothelitism. The orthodox majority and the more determined Monophysites both refused the compromise, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in AD 680, settled the matter by affirming that two natures implies two wills.¹⁰ Charles Hodge counts Chalcedon among “the six general Councils in whose doctrinal decisions all Protestants, at the time of the Reformation, professed their agreement.”¹⁴

Objections and Responses

The Definition’s four negatives (“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”) describe what the union of Christ’s two natures is not, without explaining how it is possible. This is by design rather than evasion: the church’s controlling concern was to rule out the specific errors on either side, Nestorius’s apparent division and Eutyches’ fusion, not to resolve the metaphysics of the union further than Scripture warrants. Hypostatic union traces how the church arrived at exactly these four guardrails and what each one rules out.

The Monophysite churches of Egypt and Syria rejected the “two natures” language as itself a return to Nestorius’s division of Christ. This was the immediate cause of Chalcedon’s uneven reception and the “great opposition” and bloodshed Hodge records in Palestine and Egypt.¹⁴ Eutychianism and monophysitism treat this objection and the church’s answer to it at length; the Second Helvetic Confession’s own verdict was to “execrate the madness of Eutyches and of the Monophysites,” siding with Chalcedon’s two-natures language as the Scriptural one.⁵

A confession built on Scripture alone should not bind conscience to a fifth-century council’s wording. The Second Helvetic Confession answers this directly rather than simply asserting Chalcedon’s authority: councils and creeds are received only so far as they agree with Scripture, and “we do not admit any other judge than God himself.”⁴ The Definition is received because its content is judged Scriptural, not because a council decreed it.

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 401-402. ↩ ↩²
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 8, “Truly God and Truly Man,” 86. ↩
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of the True Faith,” under “The Creeds of Four Councils Received.” ↩
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 2, “Of Interpreting the Holy Scripture; and of Fathers, Councils, and Traditions.” ↩ ↩²
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of the True Faith.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 390. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 80-81. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 81. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 94. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 400-401. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 402. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 87. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 402-403. ↩ ↩² ↩³