Christology
Theological note: Volume IV of the Pohle-Preuss Series of Dogmatic Text-Books (2nd ed., St. Louis: B. Herder, 1916). Structured, like the treatise on the Trinity before it, on the pattern of the Athanasian Creed: a real Trinity of Persons in a unity of Nature is mirrored, inversely, by a duality of natures in a unity of Person.
Christology asks: who is Jesus Christ? Pohle answers in two movements. First, 'Duality in Unity' — Christ possesses two complete natures, one divine and one human, each fully intact. Second, 'Unity in Duality' — those two natures subsist in a single Divine Person, the Word. The whole treatise works out what that union means and what it does not mean, against the ancient errors that denied Christ's true divinity, His true humanity, or the real unity of the two.
Jesus Christ is true God — the Son of God, or Logos, and so the Second Person of the Divine Trinity. As son of the Virgin-Mother Mary, He is also true man. Pohle divides the treatise accordingly into two parts.
Part I — Duality in Unity, or the Constitutive Elements of Christ
What Christ is, considered in His two natures.
- Chapter I. The Divinity of Christ — the Scriptural and Patristic case that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Logos, true God.
- Chapter II. The Humanity of Christ
- §1. Reality and Integrity of Christ’s Sacred Humanity (against the Docetae; against Arianism and Apollinarianism)
- §2. The Adamic Origin of the Human Nature of Christ — against Valentinus and Apelles
- §3. The Passibility of Christ’s Human Nature
Part II — Unity in Duality, or the Hypostatic Union
How the two natures of Part I come together in one Person.
- Chapter I. The Dogma of the Hypostatic Union
- §1. The Hypostatic Union of the Two Natures in Christ (against Nestorius)
- §2. The Inconfusion of the Two Natures in Christ (against Monophysitism; against Monothelitism)
- §3. The Inseparability of the Two Natures in Christ
- Chapter II. The Effects of the Hypostatic Union
- §1. The Attributes of Christ According to His Divinity (Perichoresis; the Communication of Idioms; Divine Sonship, against Adoptionism)
- §2. The Attributes of Christ According to His Humanity (the holiness, knowledge, and adorableness of Christ’s human will)
Pohle draws the analogy — and the essential disanalogy — with the Trinity explicitly in his introduction: in the Blessed Trinity, one Divine Nature subsists in three Persons; in Christ, two complete and distinct natures, one divine and one human, subsist in a single Person, the Logos. The Trinity is a real Trinity of Persons in an absolute unity of Nature; Christ is a duality of Natures in an absolute unity of Person.