Theopedia

Nature

Definition

A nature is what makes a thing the kind of thing it is: the specific properties that make gold gold and silver silver, or a human being human rather than something else.1 It answers “what is it?” rather than “who is it?”, which is why theology distinguishes nature from person: a nature is the “what,” a person the particular, complete subsistence that bears it.2 This lets orthodox theology say the one God has three persons sharing a single divine nature, and the one person of Christ has two complete natures, divine and human.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states, of the incarnation, “so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.”3 “Whole” and “perfect” rule out either nature being partial or diminished by the union; “distinct” rules out the two blending into a third, composite nature; and the whole clause depends on the prior distinction between nature and person that makes the statement coherent in the first place, one person, two natures, rather than a contradiction.

Historical Development

Boethius’s fourfold definition (c. AD 512)

The Latin theologian Boethius gave the classical analysis of the term in A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, written after a delegation of eastern bishops proposed language, “Christ exists both from and in two natures,” that risked blurring the very distinction Chalcedon had drawn between person and nature.4 Boethius found that “nature” (natura) was used in four different ways, and worked through them in reverse order of their scope. Most broadly, nature belongs to “those things which, since they exist, can in some way be apprehended by the intellect,” a definition wide enough to cover both substances and their accidents.5 Narrower, when nature is predicated of substances specifically, “nature is either that which can act or that which can be acted upon,” a definition Boethius says is interchangeable with “substance” itself.5 Narrower still, restricted to bodies alone, Aristotle’s own usage defines nature as “the principle of movement, per se, and not accidental,” the sense in which fire’s nature is to rise and earth’s is to fall.1

None of these three, Boethius concluded, was the sense theologians actually needed for the Christological debate. For that he gave a fourth: nature as “the specific difference that gives form to anything,” the set of properties that make one kind of thing differ from another, as gold’s properties differ from silver’s.1 “Although nature is predicated or defined in so many ways,” he wrote, “both Catholics and Nestorius hold that there are in Christ two natures according to our last definition, but the same differences cannot apply to God and man.”1 Having fixed what nature means, Boethius turned to person, and to how the two terms relate: nature, he held, “is a substrate of person, and that person cannot be predicated apart from nature.”2 But the relation is not symmetrical. Not every nature is a person. Boethius excluded lifeless bodies, non-rational living things, and non-rational souls from personhood in turn, concluding that “person” applies only to a complete, particular, rational subsistence, “we say there is a person of a man, of God and of an angel,” never of a stone, a tree, or an ox.6 A nature, in other words, can be real and complete without itself being a person, which is exactly the relation Christ’s human nature bears to the one person of the eternal Son.

Reformed scholastic reception

Reformed orthodoxy inherited Boethius’s person/nature grammar and applied it directly to the Trinity. Francis Turretin held that “nature” is the broader, communicable term and “person” the narrower, incommunicable one: nature “encompasses the essence and all three persons,” while a person is “the consideration of one subsistence in the essence.”7 On this account there are three persons in the Godhead precisely because there is one nature held in common, not three; the persons are distinguished from one another, and from the nature they share, only by their “modes of subsisting,” not by dividing the nature itself into parts.7 The same grammar, applied to Christ rather than to the Trinity, yields the opposite arrangement: two natures, one person, rather than one nature, three persons.

Opposing Views

Nestorianism. Reasons from Christ’s two distinct natures to two distinct persons, on the assumption that a complete nature requires its own person to bear it. Boethius’s own analysis rules this out: nature is the substrate a person bears, but a nature can subsist without being itself a person, as Christ’s human nature subsists in the one person of the Word rather than constituting a second person.2

Eutychianism and Monophysitism. Deny that Christ’s two natures remain “whole, perfect, and distinct” after the incarnation, holding instead that the human nature is absorbed into, or blended with, the divine to produce a single composite nature. This collapses Boethius’s fourth sense of nature, the specific differences that make one kind of thing not another, since a divine-human hybrid nature would no longer be fully identifiable as either.3

Objections and Responses

If nature just means “substance that can act,” and Christ has two natures, doesn’t that make him two substances, and so two beings rather than one? No. Boethius already distinguished this general sense of nature, nature as equivalent to substance, from the specific sense operative in the Christological debate, nature as the differentiating properties that make one kind of thing not another.5 Two complete natures joined in one person is not the same claim as two separately subsisting substances; the substances are complete not by existing on their own but by their properties being fully, unconfusedly present in the single person who bears them both, exactly as the confession states.3

Doesn’t saying a nature can be real without being a person mean that Christ’s human nature is somehow less than fully human? No. Boethius’s point is not that Christ’s human nature lacks anything human natures normally have; it is that “person” names a further fact about a nature, that it subsists on its own, complete and particular, rather than in union with another subsistence, and Christ’s human nature simply does not subsist that further way.6 The nature itself remains, in the confession’s words, “whole” and “perfect.”3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Chapman, “Boethius and the Definition of Person,” 82-83, quoting Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, 81. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Chapman, “Boethius and the Definition of Person,” 84, quoting Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, 83. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Darron Thomas Chapman, “Boethius and the Definition of Person,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 81, quoting Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 77. ↩

  5. Chapman, “Boethius and the Definition of Person,” 82, quoting Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, 79. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Chapman, “Boethius and the Definition of Person,” 85, quoting Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, 85. ↩ ↩2

  7. Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin, the Trinity, and the Incarnation,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 172-173, citing Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology 3.27.1. ↩ ↩2