Two Qnome in One Parsopa, the Christology of the Church of the East

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.

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.