ABSTRACT
Theodore describes the unified relationship that Christ’s humanity possesses with God the Word as an “indwelling of good pleasure in one proso¯pon” (130). He means this as a way to solve the dilemma he faced on how to express the unity of two natures in one “person.” He blends a scriptural description with a common Greek word for “person.” He was keenly sensitive here to the task of steering between two extremes. First, he had to explicitly reject the opinion of Paul of Samosata: “An angel of Satan is Paul of Samosata, who says Christ our Lord is a mere man and denies that the Only-Begotten [Son] who exists before the ages is a divine person (qno¯mă/hypostasis)” (165). The other extreme he sought to counter was the christological stance of Apollinaris, his primary christological adversary in the late fourth century:
An angel of Satan is also Apollinaris who undermines our [faith] confession in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Under his outward guise of orthodoxy, he has rendered our salvation incomplete, when he asserts that our intellect (nous) has not been assumed and does not participate as the body does in the reception of grace.
