Apollinarianism

As the new covenant church wrestled with various heresies during its first few centuries, it ever strove to maintain the true and complete deity and the true and complete humanity of Christ against those who would deny either of those truths. Most Christological heresies emphasize the deity of Christ at the expense of His humanity or His humanity at the expense of His deity. We have seen that Docetism and Eutychianism end up denying the true humanity of Jesus. Another heresy that falls into this category is called Apollinarianism.

Those who hold to Apollinarian teaching deny the complete humanity of the Lord Jesus. Apollinarius, for whom the heresy is named, stated that the incarnation consisted in the divine Son or Word of God’s taking the place of a human mind and soul in a human body. Thus, the only thing that the Son assumed in the incarnation was physical flesh. This turns the incarnation into something like the Son of God’s wearing a human body instead of a union of the divine nature and a human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ.

A true incarnation of the Son of God requires that He assume an entire human nature, but a human nature without a human mind and soul is an incomplete humanity. After all, human nature was incomplete until God breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of Adam and he became a “living soul” (Gen. 2:7, KJV). Moreover, given that human nature in all its aspects has been thoroughly corrupted by sin (Rom. 3:9–20), the Son of God must assume and sanctify all aspects of human nature to save us from our sin and misery. This was an important principle for the early church fathers. A church father named Gregory of Nazianzus, who helped the church develop an orthodox language for the Holy Trinity, famously said of the incarnation, “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.”

The New Testament will not allow us to deny that Jesus possesses a true human mind and soul. In today’s passage, for example, Jesus Himself speaks of His soul (John 12:27). Therefore, in summarizing the incarnation, the answer to Westminster Shorter Catechism question 22 says that “Christ, the Son of God, became man, by taking to himself a true body, and a reasonable soul.” When the Son became incarnate, He assumed everything that makes us truly human, including a human body, mind, and soul, yet none of these were tainted by sin.