Interpreting Christ’s Weakness: On Partitive Exegesis

For today’s post, I’m going to focus a bit more on some of the theological frameworks I have been working on for an article– a “first look”, as it were, at the full article that’s due out this year. It may be a bit more theological than usual, but in thinking about how figures in the fourth century talk about Christ and how to read scripture, there’s still a lot for us to think through.

Throughout the Gospels, Christ’s weaknesses are on display—he hungers and thirsts, he weeps over the passing of his friend, and he begs for his coming torture and crucifixion to be taken from him. This, of course, is because Jesus is fully human and thus experiences all of human life, at least life without sin. But, according to the scriptural witness and the tradition, he is not just human. From the inception of the church, it has been a core affirmation that Christ “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Christ of the Gospels is also fully divine, the one in whom the “fullness of deity dwells” (Colossians 2:9) and retains all of what it means to be God—omnipotence, immutability, impassibility.

The question, of course, is how to hold these realities together, the paradox at the center of the Christian faith. How do we interpret the human weakness of Christ, if he does not have any weakness as the Son of God? Through debate amidst controversy, the early church developed a particular way to read the Bible which might guide us on these questions, namely partitive exegesis.

Partitive Exegesis

Partitive exegesis is a hermeneutical strategy which organically developed during the first four centuries of the church, especially through the works of figures like Origen of Alexandria, and later in the writing of Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Cyril of Alexandria. Essentially, this type of reading ‘parts’ the stories and sayings about Christ and assigns them to his divinity or humanity, while still trying to uphold a single subject (the Son of God). Take this definition by John Behr: “Scripture speaks throughout of Christ, but the Christ of the kerygma, the crucified and exalted Lord, and speaks of him in a twofold fashion, demanding in turn a “partitive” exegesis: some things are said of him as divine and other things are said of him as human—yet referring to the same Christ throughout” (Behr, The Nicene Faith I.14)

Amidst the Arian Controversy (which you can read more about here), this hermeneutic was clarified and honed through extreme interpretations from opposing theological positions. One side (represented by Arius and Asterius the Sophist) assigned all of Christ’s weaknesses to the eternal Son of God, while the other (represented by Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch) assigned the weakness to the human Christ as a distinct subject from the eternal Word.

A Weak Jesus is a Weak Son of God—On Asterius’ Interpretation

Asterius the Sophist was a theologian from the early fourth century who allied himself with Arius (the so-called ‘arch-heretic), perhaps even contributing to Arius’ theology (See: Mark DelCogliano, How Did Arius Learn from Asterius?). Asterius reflects on the weaknesses of Christ displayed his ministry, collecting a host of passages which indicate his creaturely needs. Thus, he quotes Jesus calling out to the Father before the passion (John 12:27-28; Matthew 26:39), his troubled spirit (John 13:21), and his growth in wisdom (Luke 2:52; John 11:34; Matthew 15:34) to deny the eternal divinity of the Son:

If the Son were, according to your interpretation, eternally existent with God, He had not been ignorant of the Day, but had known as Word; nor had been forsaken as being coexistent; nor had asked to receive glory, as having it in the Father; nor would have prayed at all; for, being the Word, He had needed nothing; but since He is a creature and one of things originate, therefore He thus spoke, and needed what He had not; for it is proper to creatures to require and to need what they have not (Recorded in Athanasius, Against the Arians III.26.26).

For Asterius, God could not have needs, be ignorant, or have received anything—these are attributes of creatures. Since Christ’s life records his needs and limitations, it demonstrates that he is not fully divine.

This is what John Behr calls ‘univocal exegesis’ (The Nicene Faith I.14), which reads all of human experiences of Christ directly onto the Son of God. Because Christ hungered in the wilderness, this indicates the divinity of Christ hungered. In other words, the weaknesses of Jesus demonstrates that the Son of God is not fully divine.

A Weak Jesus is Other than the Son of God—On Marcellus’ Interpretation

In response to Asterius, several contemporary theologians employed an alternative reading of this passage. Marcellus of Ancyra, for instance, wrote directly against Asterius in the late 320s or early 330s. Importantly, while he supported the council of Nicaea, his vision of the Triune God led to his condemnation like Asterius, but for very different reasons. Rather than reading the weaknesses of Christ onto the divine Son, he claims the weaknesses of Christ only apply to the human Christ. In reading the apparent disagreement between Jesus and the Father in the prayer in Gethsemane (Yet not my will, but yours be done), Marcellus argues:

For if there should seem to be a certain disagreement, this ought to be referred to the weakness of the flesh, which the Word assumed, not having it before. But if the oneness were to be spoken of, this appears to apply to the Word’. (Marcellus, Fragment 75; Eusebius, Against Marcellus 2.2.24–5.)

For Marcellus any weakness of Jesus is assigned to his humanity, the ‘weakness of the flesh’, rather than the Word of God. This is foremost to uphold the unity of the Son with the Father, but he does so in such a way that strains the unity of the human Christ with the Godhead. For this, he highlights the disagreement of this passage, arguing that it means there is no unity in will between the human Christ and the eternal Son of God: the unity of God is only between the triune persons, not between the human Christ and the Godhead. The weaknesses of Christ indicates two distinct subjects, the passible Christ and the impassible Word of God.

A Weak Jesus is the Omnipotent God—The Partitive Solution

Both of these readings have kernels of truth that were adapted by later writers, especially by the ‘Pro-Nicenes’ such as Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus. With Asterius, they desired to uphold that it is the same Son of God who becomes the human Christ—we must not read the Gospels as if Jesus is a separate subject from God. With Marcellus, they upheld the divine attributes of Christ by assigning weakness to the humanity of Christ, thus protecting the Son’s omnipotence, impassibility, etc. Take Athanasius’ description of this hermeneutical strategy:

Let no one then stumble at what belongs to man, but rather let a man know that in nature the Word Himself is impassible, and yet because of that flesh which He put on, these things are ascribed to Him, since they are proper to the flesh, and the body itself is proper to the Saviour. (Athanasius, Against the AriansIII.26.34)

Athanasius ‘parts’ the life of Christ by assigning the weaknesses to the ‘man’ and upholding the impassibility of the Word, while still referring to the body of Christ as ‘proper to the savior’. In this, we see one subject, with two natures (to use fifth century Chalcedonian language). It is the responsibility of the biblical scholar and theologian, then, to maintain these theological assumptions while reading the biblical text, assigning “the more sublime expressions of the Godhead, of the nature which transcends bodily experiences, and the lowlier ones of the compound, of him who because of you was emptied, became incarnate and (to use equally valid language) was ‘made man’” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.18)

There are lots of related questions about whether partitive exegesis is a valid reading of Scripture (for an argument that it is, see: Jamieson and Wittman, Biblical Reasoning, 153-178), when to apply it, and what the spiritual implications are, but let me leave you with an insight that we can draw from this hermeneutic and its development: There is no such thing as a non-theological reading of Scripture. Whether one argues they have a ‘literal’, ‘critical’, or ‘deconstructionist’ approach to the Bible, we are all reading the text with assumptions about God in mind, many of which dictate how we read the text. The question is whether our theology and interpretation of the text conforms to God himself, or a false impression. May we continue to read, pray, and dialogue in our efforts to interpret the Scriptures, praising the omnipotent God who took on the weaknesses of human flesh along the way.