Two natures, two qnome, one prosopon.
The divine and the human in Christ are each complete and each concrete — that is what qnoma means — and they are united in one person of sonship. The formula is not the two-natures language of Chalcedon and not the one-nature language of Alexandria; it is an older Antiochene vocabulary that both sides eventually stopped speaking.
Qnoma is a Syriac term with no clean Greek or English equivalent; it sits between nature and person, and the difficulty of translating it is a substantial part of why this church was judged heretical by people reading it in Greek. The Antiochene concern was to protect the completeness of Christ's humanity — a real human mind, a real human will, not a divine actor wearing a body. The 1994 Common Christological Declaration signed by John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV concluded that the two churches confess the same faith in the incarnation using different formulations. The Assyrian church prays to Mary as Mother of Christ our God and Saviour rather than Theotokos, and the declaration records that phrasing explicitly.
Therefore our Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man, perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, consubstantial with the Father and consubstantial with us in all things but sin.
Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, signed by John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, 11 November 1994The declaration ended fifteen centuries of mutual condemnation without either side changing its formula.
The same ground, other faiths
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