Report on my first teaching session:

Warning:  This post is kind of heavy, and a bit long.  It is a report, and somewhat of a review of my first class session in Theo. 200 here at PIU.

I taught my first class session this morning.

I used the picture of a stick chart to introduce our class.  Before the islanders in this region had access to modern navigational tools the mariners of Micronesia navigated by means of the stars, currents, winds, and other features in the vast Pacific.  As an aid for remembering these important factors, and as a means for teaching apprentices, master navigators would create stick charts.

Here is an article about Marshallese stick charts.  One of the students in my class is from the Marshall Islands.

In Theology 200, a survey of Bible Doctrine, this week's subject is the Person and Work of Christ.
It took the early church about 400 years to sort out how to adequately express the Biblical revelation about Jesus Christ.  We are spending about two and a half hours.  This morning the students constructed a stick chart to help us safely navigate the complex waters of Biblical Christology.  We want to make sure that we avoid the rocks of heresy.  We basically reproduced what has been called the Chalcedonian Box.

What do you get when you cross a Micronesian Mariner with a Chalcedonian Theologian?
A Chalcedonian Stick Chart for effectively navigating the Theological waters of the Person of Christ.
Those are my feet on the left.

Four boundaries define orthodoxy.  Inside the box is Biblical truth, orthodoxy.  Outside its boundaries are various heresies.  We dealt with six of them.
One side of the box represents the Divine nature of Jesus.  (I think that is the top stick in our chart.)  The Bible teaches that Jesus is fully God, in the same sense that God the Father and the Holy Spirit are God.  "God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity."  The proponents of two of the heresies we looked at err by locating themselves on the wrong side of this boundary.  The Ebionites deny the real deity of Jesus.  They claim he was a man, conceived and born in the usual manner, upon whom the "Christ" descended, at his baptism.  The Christ withdrew from Jesus before his death on the cross.  Thus Jesus was a man upon whom the power of God, to an unusual extent, dwelt for a time.  He was not God.  This website is posted by a group that lays claim to the ancient Ebionite title.   The heresy known as Ariansim, represented in our day by Jehovah's Witnesses, likewise belongs on the wrong side of the boundary of Jesus Divinity.  Arius taught that Jesus was a creature, above the rest of creation, but not God.  Only the Father is God.
The opposite boundary on our chart, or box (the bottom stick), is the humanity of Christ.  The New Testament abounds with evidence that Jesus is fully human.  The Docetists denied this, claiming that Jesus only appeared human--sort of a ghost or apparition.  Apollinarius, and those who follow him see Jesus as having a human body, but missing some of the human soul-ish parts.  His soul was Divine, not human. 
So the Bible's teaching about Jesus lies between boundaries on the top and bottom.  Jesus is both fully God and fully man.  How exactly does that work out?  The classic statement that came out of the Council of Chalcedon (451) emphasizes two natures, one person.
So the other two sides of the box, or chart, leave two heresies that don't get the answer to the above question right, on the outside.
Nestorianism is on the outside because it splits the person of Christ. While Nestorius may not have actually been guilty of being a Nestorian (But, hey cut him slack.  You try answering the question, "Is Mary the mother of God?"), the movement that bears his name "split the God-man [Jesus Christ] into two distinct person.  This heresy was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431)."  (Erickson, 236)   The opposite boundary shields from errors like Eutichianism, that confuse, or combine the two natures.  Between the two lies the truth:  "God and man in two natures, and one person forever."  (Westminster Shorter Catechism)

It was an interesting class.  I hope the students view of the Marvelous Christ we worship was expanded as much as mine was.

(One of the texts for our class is Millard Erickson's Introducing Christian Doctrine, 2nd Edition, Edited my Hustad.  This post draws on that volume.)