By John M. Grondelski
This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first of the seven ecumenical councils, accepted by Catholics and Orthodox alike. The Council met from May to June 325. Pope Francis wanted to go to Turkey (within which Nicaea now sits) for the occasion. His extended illness and death made that trip impossible, though it remains likely that Pope Leo XIV will go to Turkey this Fall, his first international pilgrimage.
The early Councils were dominated by Christological and Trinitarian controversies: how Jesus's human and divine natures fit together and how the three Persons of the Trinity were related. Modern people, unaccustomed to thinking in terms of "natures" and "persons" (in a technical theological sense), perhaps imagine those Councils were preoccupied with much ado about nothing. However, contemporary cultural and political debates about what a human being is and gender ideology reveal that the "nature/person" question is alive and well, even if we have forgotten the terminology that could help clarify things.
On the Christological side, the councils have repeatedly returned to the relationship of Jesus's divine and human natures. Could a being simultaneously be human and divine? If so, how? Was it a question of inverse proportionality: the more divine, the less human? Or a theoretical equality that, nevertheless, shut off certain practical dimensions of one nature (usually the human), e.g., was Jesus's human nature in some kind of suspended animation, some frozen sleep?
Eventually, by the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, orthodox Christian faith affirmed that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. . . fully, actively, completely, simultaneously, and truly divine and human. Yet I fear that for many Catholics still, the raw, sobering truth of the Incarnation isn't fully appreciated.
That is why we would benefit from recalling a central element of St. John Paul II's theological anthropology. He lifted it from Vatican II and set it front and center in his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis. He never tired of repeating it throughout his papacy.
That central element is the truth that, if human beings want to understand themselves, their model is Jesus. As John Paul put it:
Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. (Redemptor hominis, 8, emphasis added)
Reread that text carefully. Jesus Christ "fully reveals man to himself." John Paul did not write Jesus "fully reveals God to man." Yes, Jesus Christ is the Self-Revelation of God. But that's not where John Paul put stress. Jesus Christ is the revelation of man and his vocation.
In other words, if you want to know what it means to be human, you have one (actually, two) models. Jesus Christ. And the Blessed Virgin Mary (because, if you take seriously Our Lady's Immaculate Conception due to the prevenient grace won by her Son, she also reveals what a human being should be).
As Scripture reminds us, Jesus Christ is "like us in all things but sin." (Hebrews 4:15) That "but" might at first seem like a really important exception, given that we are all sinners. But it requires us to think about it.
God did not make man sinful. Sin was not part of the design of Creation. God made man good, indeed, "very good." (Genesis 1:28) Which means that it is not Jesus but us - all of us - who misrepresent what it means to be truly human as God made human beings. It is us, not Christ, who deviate from the norm. We are not what we are supposed to be. Sin may be universal, but it is a self-inflicted, not congenital, deformity. The truth is that, in Jesus (and Mary) we see what man - obedient to the Father - should be.
"But I'm not Jesus," you object. True. But Jesus died for you. In the Redemption, He offers you the graces needed, in the life in which you ate now, to live as God wants, to be "holy and pleasing in His sight." (R...
