One of the struggles of the early church was how to make sense of troublesome Scriptural passages. How do we talk about Jesus, who is supposed to be God, suffering? Dying? What about the cry of dereliction? To frame it in more modern terms, how can passible emotions describe an impassible God?

To make sense of these questions, Gregory of Nazianzus offers a suggestion: the Scriptures ought to be read partitively—in two parts, to be specific. We uphold the divine and the human natures of Christ when we attribute some texts to the Son in his divine nature, while attributing other texts to the Son in his human nature for the sake of accomplishing salvation. In this lies Gregory’s “partitive rule.” Perhaps no example of partitive exegesis from the first five centuries of Christian theology remains as articulate as the partitive rule established by Gregory of Nazianzus in Oration 29.18.[1]

In sum: you must predicate the more sublime expressions of the Godhead, of the nature which transcends bodily experiences, and the lowlier ones of the compound, of him who because of you was emptied, became incarnate and (to use equally valid language) was “made man.” Then next he was exalted, in order that you might have done with the earthbound carnality of your opinions and might learn to be nobler, to ascend with the Godhead and not linger on in things visible but rise up to spiritual realities, and that you might know what belongs to his nature and what to God’s plan of salvation.

For Gregory, this twofold interpretation of particular sets of biblical texts is the way we understand God’s holy self-revelation in Scripture. God’s very essence is without cause; as such, any text that attributes causality, subordination, or lowliness must be attributed to the Son in his human nature for the sake of our salvation. God’s revelation of himself reaches its climax as the Son of God is sent as a man to secure salvation and reconcile us to him, and it is only through this lens of reading-theology-by-means-of-economy that we can truly know the Triune God of the Bible as he is revealed in the God-man Jesus Christ.

A defining characteristic of Gregory’s partitive rule is that it is primarily unitive. Gregory’s model of partitive exegesis does not apply biblical texts between one of two “subjects” (the Son’s eternal nature pitted against the Son’s incarnate nature).[2] Instead, he counts the distinction between these two natures as central to the very composition of the one who partakes in the fullness of the divine substance. Gregory’s hermeneutic seeks to explain where Jesus the God-man fits into the “single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action, and the convergence towards their source.”[3] In simpler terms, Gregory’s partitive rule does not divide the man Jesus Christ into two; it seeks to unite qualities of both human and divine in the one man. Scholar Christopher Beeley says Gregory’s partitive rule is “as much a definition of the unity and unchanging identity of the Son of God in his eternal and incarnate states as it is a distinction between those states.”[4] To put it crudely, the partitive rule is the means by which Gregory unites the vocabulary of Holy Scripture with his own theological conception of Jesus the Son of God.

In describing the “more sublime expressions,” Gregory says their nature “transcends bodily experiences.” This brings up an important implication of Gregory’s partitive exegesis: what is predicated to the Son in his divine nature must be predicated to the very substance and nature of God the Son—both in his preincarnate and his incarnate natures. Because there is no change in the Son’s essence even when he takes on flesh, any and all expressions applicable here must necessarily be incorporeal in nature—thus, “God,” “Word,” “he who is in the beginning,” and so on. Were these descriptions of the Son associated to any degree with Jesus’s human nature, it would be incorrect to argue “none of them is a later acquisition,” as Gregory does in Or. 29.17. As Gregory considers the Son’s human nature, however, the converse holds true: what is predicated specifically to the incarnate Son must not necessarily be predicated to the very substance and nature of the Godhead.

Gregory addresses something similar in Or. 29.15, where he writes, “For it is not the case that all the predicates affirmed of someone can be affirmed without further qualification of his basic being,” demonstrating how opposing logic failed to recognize how some things are affirmed “in some particular respects.” Plainly, we could restate Gregory’s argument here like so: There are some things that are proper to divinity and other things that are proper to humanity. Jesus Christ unites both divine and human natures in one person, but what is said of Jesus’s human nature must not necessarily be said of his divine nature—and because Jesus unites these two natures in his one person, we can rightly speak of the Father as “greater” than Jesus the Son.[5] In this regard, Gregory provides his audience with more than mere doctrinal affirmations and denials—he gifts them a hermeneutic through which they can understand Holy Scripture.[6] Exegeting Scripture utilizing the skills of the greatest linguists, philosophers, thinkers, or rhetors is fruitless if the text is read according to a wrong hermeneutic. As Behr summarizes Gregory, “Our knowledge of the divine of Christ is derived from reflection on what he. Has done, the divine works wrought by him that enable us to confess him as ‘Almighty Lord.’ Theology, properly speaking, derives from the economy.”[7]

To read Scripture rightly, then, one must read from economy toward theology—not the other way around, as Gregory evidently felt his opponents were prone to doing. According to Gregory’s partitive rule, the work of Christ in his becoming compound, being emptied, becoming incarnate, being made man, and being exalted was accomplished “in order that you might have done with the earthbound carnality of your opinions and might learn to be nobler, to ascend with the Godhead and not linger on in things visible but rise up to spiritual realities, and that you might know what belongs to his nature and what to God’s plan of salvation.” The acts of the Son that effected salvation give us the capacity to move from dwelling on what is revealed about God as man and to move instead to truly understand God in himself (insomuch as our human limits allow).

The partitive rule serves as a critical turning point within the Five Theological Orations, forming the foundation for Gregory’s Christology as it unfolds in the rest of Oration 29 and Oration 30. Beeley notes the importance of this section in his analysis of Gregory’s Christology: “Gregory’s doctrine of the unity of Christ is so deeply embedded that he appears to have reframed the Eunomians’ positions in terms of his own, unitive scheme . . . There is no indication that Eunomius ever appealed to Jesus’ lowly, human status per se, in the way that Gregory portrays it in Oration 29.18–19.”[8] By stating his partitive rule with clarity, Gregory subverts his opponents’ theological method to such a degree that he is able to restate their arguments within his own understanding of the Trinity. Doing so enables him to then show the weaknesses in their logic by partitively exegeting the Scriptural texts.

All in all, partitive exegesis is important because it reorients the way we understand the biblical witness. Gregory’s use of partitive exegesis reveals what it means for Christians to read the Scriptures distinctly as Christian Scriptures. Gregory articulates this idea elsewhere in a theological poem on Scripture: “Always be revolving, in speech and in your mind, upon the words of God: for God gave this to be a prize for labors, a little light for seeing something hidden; or else, to be a blessing.”[9] For Gregory, there remains a reciprocal relationship between the work of interpreting Scripture in regard to its grammar, syntax, canonical locus, and cultural context (our “labors”) and the theological conclusions drawn from the interpretation of the passage (our uncovering “something hidden”). Likewise, the knowledge that the Scriptures contain a divine word with an underlying spiritual truth behind their literal and historical realities changes our approach to them. It reminds us of the centrality of redemption. Indeed, it is only by looking through the Scriptures that we may understand how Jesus’s hunger is the means according to which he would feed us—and how, in the same way, God the Son’s death in his human nature is the means according to which he will one day vivify those whom he resurrects. To read the Christian Scriptures partitively is to read the Christian Scripture as Christian. Partitive exegesis teaches us how to read from economy toward theology—to “rise up to spiritual realities”—and in doing so, we find the truth of the gospel.

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[1] John Behr calls Gregory’s partitive rule “the clearest statement of the principle of partitive exegesis from the fourth century” (The Nicene Faith, 349). Often credited to Athanasius, Ayres argues the lineage of partitive exegesis begins with Marcellus who passed the technique to Athanasius (Nicaea and its Legacy, 106).

[2] Discussing the way Gregory applies his partitive rule Andrew Hofer explains, “The comparison of two actions in Oration 29.20 is not between the divine nature and the composite of the God-human, nor between humanity and divinity as separate subjects, but between considering the one Christ as human, from a natural point of view, and then considering him through the economy as God (who is that same on considered as human.” See “Scripture in the Christological Controversies,” in The Oxford Handbook on Early Christian Interpretation, 462.

[3] Oration 29.2.

[4] Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and Knowledge of God, 133.

[5] The example of the Father being greater than the Son is the example Gregory uses in Oration 29.15.

[6] Others have, elsewhere, hinted that affirmation of ὁμοούσιος was more than a pro-Nicene badge of doctrinal honor; instead, it was a wider-scoped hermeneutical approach. Though a full defense of this idea is outside the scope of this article, it is worth considering how doctrinal conclusions were, for some pro-Nicenes, as important as the method by which theologians had arrived at them. For examples, see Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 127–131 and Matthew Y. Emerson, “The Role of Proverbs 8: Eternal Generation and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern,” in Retrieving Eternal Generation, eds. Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain.

[7] Behr, 349–350.

[8] Beeley, 134.

[9] Poem 1.1.12, De veris Scripturae libris (PG 37, 471–474) in On Man and God: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, 85.