Two Natures, Two Qnome, One Parsopa

The Church of the East confesses that in Christ there are two kyane, natures, divine and human, and two qnome, united in a single parsopa, the term used for the one subject who is Christ. The "Nestorian" Church: A Lamentable Misnomer stresses that qnoma, the individual concrete reality a nature takes in an existing thing, is not the same idea as the Greek hypostasis that the Chalcedonian formula uses, even though translators have often rendered both as person, a choice that produced the charge that this church teaches two separate sons, one divine and one human, joined only loosely. The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity records that the church has always denied teaching any such thing, insisting that the one parsopa is the single subject, the single Christ who acts, suffers and is worshipped, so that two qnome describes what each nature concretely is rather than describing two persons standing side by side. The formula sits apart from both major alternatives that dominate the history of the fifth century christological controversies, neither the Chalcedonian statement of two natures in one hypostasis nor the miaphysite statement of a single incarnate nature, making it a genuinely third position rather than a variant reading of either.