Historical Theology
William Cunningham
Still Waters Revival Books
1253 pages, two volumes

The great theological controversies and debates of the church's history did not, of course, occur in a vacuum. Always they were surrounded by a particular set of cultural assumptions, and were preceded and followed by other related events. If we do not know the context of a theological controversy, we do not yet understand it.

This is very clear to us when we consider the great battle Athanasius fought over the question of the Trinity. To this day, we are enjoying the fruit of that particular victory. But what is not as clear to many Christians is that this particular victory set the stage for the next great battle-the doctrinal questions surrounding the person of the divine Christ in relation to His humanity.

In seeking to understand the nature of these debates (as well as many others), these two volumes of Historical Theology by William Cunningham fit the need precisely. The subtitle describes the nature of the work very precisely. It is "A review of the principal discussions in the Christian Church since the Apostolic Age." It hardly bears mentioning that such a review would necessarily involve a thorough discussion of the debate surrounding Nicea and Chalcedon.

When Arius taught that Christ was, in some sense, created, he did not do so in a flippant or disparaging way. Athanasius, however, saw what was genuinely at stake and was willing to stand for the sake of the truth, if necessary, contra mundum. It is common for modern men to assume that this fourth-century uproar, this theological fracas, if you please, was really a battle over a bunch of nothing. A mere iota separated the verbal ensigns of each party. Why should they have had such a big fight over the use of homoousios versus homoiousios?

Although Arius was not seeking to mock Christ, he was seeking to accommodate the church's teaching about Christ with the sophisticated, pagan, philosophical understanding of the world. He was trying to make Christ acceptable to man. (In this endeavor, incidentally, his spirit is imitated by countless modern evangelicals.) A Christ who was not fully deity is comprehensible and acceptable to natural man. Athanasius, however, was not interested in accommodating the bankrupt pagan philosophers. He wanted to remain faithful to Christ as He is, and not the Christ the pagans would have agreed to worship. By the grace of God, that battle was won.

But while the deity of Christ was settled at Nicea, the pressure to water down biblical Christianity remained. There was now an agreed-upon answer to the question, "Who is Christ?" The orthodox and biblical answer was that He is both God and man. But the human and divine natures are two completely different natures. How can they be found in one person?

This is how Cunningham introduces this obvious question:

But when the mind dwells upon this great truth, with the view of more fully comprehending and realizing it, the questions almost immediately arise, whether, after this assumption of human nature, by one who had been from eternity possessed of the divine nature, the two natures still continued to retain each its own entireness of completeness; and whether, if so, each of the two natures did not form or constitute a distinct person, so that in Christ there should be two persons as well as two natures. And these are just the topics involved in the Nestorian and Eutychian controversies.

The Eutychian heresy involved confusion about what happened to the human nature of Christ in the incarnation. The response to this by Chalcedon was that the two natures were united together without "conversion, composition, or confusion." In other words, the fact that Christ is God does not alter the fact that He is truly a man. The divinity of Christ did not absorb the humanity of Christ.

The Nestorians, on the other hand, wanted to say that within the Christ there were two persons-one human and one divine. The problem here was that it left the gulf between God and man unbridged; the gulf remained infinite. In short, it would leave us without a mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. It leaves us without a true Savior. Again, Cunningham writes:

There is no appearance in Scripture of anything like a distinction of persons in Christ, of a divine person saying or doing some things ascribed to Him, and of a human person saying or doing other things ascribed to Him.

Another valuable feature of Cunningham's writing is that he places such controversies in both their immediate and remote contexts. For example, in this instance he shows how these specific battles are acknowledged and referred to in later church history, particularly in the work of the Westminster theologians.

All this is not to say that these two volumes are limited to a discussion of the person of Christ. Cunningham thoroughly covers other important subjects as well-the era of the postapostolic fathers, the Pelagian controversy, the iconoclastic controversy, the various debates about the relationship of the church to the state, as well as giving a wonderful treatment of the Reformation. In short, these volumes not only review and explain the assorted controversies, they also place each of them in their historical context.

These two large volumes are highly recommended for all who wish to understand the development of doctrinal understanding historically.