Page 134 - Prayer Book

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Prayer B o ok
person or “hypostasis” to express the unity of the divine
and human natures in Christ. They declared that Jesus is
one and the same person with two complete and integral
natures—divine and human. These two natures, in their
fullness, coexist indivisibly, without alteration or confu-
sion, in the one and only hypostasis of the Lord Jesus!
But what is a “person”? How is the concept of “person”
defined?
The Person in Human Experience
To define the concept of the “person” both conceptu-
ally and linguistically, we need the observations and in-
sights of Metropolitan John of Pergamon regarding the
theology of the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus the
Confessor. However, we must first examine the universal
human experience, where the “person” is lived and experi-
enced. The concept of “person” existed as an experience, as
a reality in human society— particularly in the early
Church—before it was ever used as a theological or philo-
sophical term by the Fathers.
To understand this, let us use the following example:
If we were to tell a mother who lost one of her three chil-
dren not to be sad because she still has two other children,
we would become the most hated of comforters. Her de-
ceased child cannot be replaced by another! That child is,
in an ontological and existential sense, irreplaceable! This
mother will grieve inconsolably for the rest of her life over
the loss of that one child, even if she has two, three, six, or
even ten other children. Each of her children is unique and
irreplaceable!