ABSTRACT
The Christological debates that followed the Council of Chalcedon continued intermittently throughout most of the seventh and the early eighth centuries, right up to the time Bede was writing the Historia Ecclesiastica. In his homilies and biblical commentaries, Bede repeatedly relates the Incarnation to the moral and spiritual response required of the faithful: that they seek to imitate the example of Christ’s humanity in order to share in his divinity. His exegesis of Solomon’s temple, for example, reveals the means by which the spiritual temple may be built up or renewed in the life of the Church, particularly by its pastoral leaders. The Christology that 1 Timothy 2.5 succinctly embodies was central to the spirituality of Gregory the Great, who often recapitulated Pope Leo’s teaching, and the defence of Chalcedon on the divinity and humanity of Christ remained very much a live issue for Leo’s papal successors in the controversy over monothelitism in the seventh century.
