A Formula Cleared of the Charge That Named It

For centuries the two qnome formula was read by its critics as confirmation of Nestorianism, the teaching, attributed to Nestorius though scholars increasingly regard the attribution as unfair to what he actually taught, that Christ is effectively two persons loosely conjoined rather than one. The "Nestorian" Church: A Lamentable Misnomer argues at length that the label misdescribes both Nestorius's own theology and the Church of the East's later formula, which never asserted two subjects but always insisted on the single parsopa as the one who is Christ. The dispute stood formally unresolved until 1994, when the Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East stated plainly that the two churches confess the same faith in the Son of God in different theological formulations and traditions of language, developed independently across centuries of limited contact, and that the ancient controversies were to a real extent a conflict of terminology rather than of substance. The declaration did not ask the Church of the East to abandon two qnome in favour of Chalcedon's language, treating both as legitimate, historically conditioned ways of stating a shared confession rather than declaring one formula the winner and the other a heresy corrected. That settlement gives the two qnome christology a standing today that the charge attached to its older name never allowed it.