“In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
John von Neumann
The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno offered up this intriguing and playful paradox: To travel any distance—say, one mile—you must first reach the halfway point. After that you must cross half of the remaining distance, then half of that, and so on. According to Zeno, since the journey requires reaching an infinite number of halfway points, you can never complete the task and will never arrive at your destination.
Of course, Zeno’s paradox would hold true if you were going only halfway each time. But you are going all the way and will eventually reach your destination. It’s the total distance that matters, not the increments. One mile is one mile, no matter how many times you divide it.
Not all mathematical conundrums are illusory, however. An irrational number is a real number that cannot be written as a ratio (fraction) of two integers: for example, √2 and π. The common fraction approximating the value of pi (π) is 22/7 which is accurate to two decimal places. Even the more precise 62832/20000 is accurate only to four decimal places. The decimal expression of pi never ends and never includes a repeating pattern, even under the brute force of supercomputers, one of which recently calculated pi to an astonishing 314 trillion decimal places. The absolute value of pi eludes us because no mathematics can represent it. We simply can’t get there from here.
But pi does have an absolute value. For instance, the volume of a sphere is calculated using the formula A=4/3πr3 or four-thirds pi times the radius cubed. However, because pi is irrational, it is impossible to calculate the sphere’s precise volume. Yet we can fill the sphere—with water, say—to full capacity and even to overflowing. This would be impossible if pi did not have an absolute value. Although we cannot pin it down, pi is an exact number; its proliferating decimal places are merely signposts marking our meticulously deficient way.
In 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon issued a definitive statement concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. The Chalcedon Creed is precisely worded and carefully nuanced:
Our Lord Jesus Christ
perfect in Godhead
and also perfect in manhood,
truly God and truly man . . .
to be acknowledged in two natures,
without confusion, without change,
without division, without separation;
the distinction of natures being by no means
taken away by the union,
but rather the property of each nature being preserved,
and concurring in one person and one subsistence,
not parted or divided into two persons,
but one and the same Son, and Only-begotten.
The declaration begins with its subject and, through successive clarifications, seeks to converge upon the singular Son. It is akin to a Christological pi chart, advancing through increasingly refined elements, aiming for a definitive capture of Christ’s essential nature.
3. Our Lord Jesus Christ
1 perfect in Godhead
4 and also perfect in manhood,
1 truly God and truly man . . .
5 to be acknowledged in two natures,
9 without confusion, without change,
2 without division, without separation;
6 the distinction of natures being by no means
taken away by the union,
5 but rather the property of each nature being preserved,
3 and concurring in one person and one subsistence,
5 not parted or divided into two persons,
8 but one and the same Son, and Only-begotten.
Of course, the convergence is never realized. Only the language exhausts itself; the Son and Only-begotten remains unquantifiable. The more he is elucidated, the less clearly he is revealed.
Fifty years later, the Athanasian Creed reaffirmed orthodox Christology, but in simpler, more direct language:
We believe and confess
that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son,
is both God and man, equally . . .
completely God, completely man . . .
Although he is God and man,
yet Christ is not two, but one . . .
certainly not by the blending of his essence
but by the unity of his person.
For just as one man is both rational soul and flesh,
so too the one Christ is both God and man.
Rinsed of the earlier creed’s loftier philosophical language, the Athanasian statement is a bare-boned numbers puzzle. It reads like Zeno’s paradox: In order to arrive at the one Jesus, we must first pass through two mutually exclusive natures, neither of which we can get past. Our way is punctuated by an endless parade of distinctions that do not distinguish, divisions that do not divide, and unities that cannot be unified. We never arrive at our singular destination.
Both creeds attempt to tabulate the biblical testimony about Jesus, but his nature cannot be represented by ratio or iteration. Jesus is not half God and half human. Nor does it make sense to say that Jesus is all God and all human any more than to say that a child is all his mother and all his father.
The New Testament writers affirm but do not quantify Christ’s nature or explicate his personhood, which can be summarized in two succinct assertions from John’s gospel:
The Word was God
and
The Word became flesh
Jesus Christ is exactly this. But what this is, exactly, we cannot calculate. There is no math for it. Subverting every formulation is an irrational being whose value is absolute but beyond measure.
singularity
at the center
an abased god
self-shunted
and marred
whose shame
swallows all things
and emits
a radiance
even einstein
could not cipher
