A true Christology will bring God in at the beginning, realizing that in the life of Jesus from the start there was no independence of God.[1]
For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and
immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far
from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while
ever abiding with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered
the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to
us.[2]
The Deity And humanity, in One Glorious
Person, is a concept that I cannot grasp or understand. Though, if I could, I
suppose He would not be God. For how can one fathom God? How can one understand
Him? The Advent season the time we await the Christ child, the one born in a
manger in the quiet of the wee hours of the night in a cave for livestock in
Bethlehem many moons ago, while the world slept. A few sleepy shepherds. A
multitude of angels. The God of the universe left the glorious position of
heaven to become a man for the world which He loved so much. He did not appear
in glorious triumph, but in the lowly human coat of flesh and bones like those
He came to save.
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God is not ashamed of human lowliness.
He enters right into it. He chooses a human being to be his
instrument
And works his wonders where they are least expected.
Where else are we to seek mercy
For all our betrayals, all our weak faith, all our failures,
But in the lowliness of God in the manger? ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
John’s Gospel account eloquently describes the mysterious incarnation,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it…And the Word [God the Son] became flesh [incarnate], and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1-5, 14 NASB emphasis added).
Jesus of Nazareth was—and is— the Son of God, who while remaining fully divine, took on human nature so that He could redeem the world. How did this once and for all union of God and man happen? Can the divine nature and human nature coexist within one person? How can our glorious Lord Jesus be both God and man at once? First, Scripture tells us that Jesus is God and that He has all the divine attributes of God:
He is the image of
the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things
were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and
invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all
things have been created through Him and for Him. He is
before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He
is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will
come to have first place in everything. For it
was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to
dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile
all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His
cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things
in heaven (Col.
1:15-20).
This
union of the divine and human natures (the hypostatic union) have the
personal subsistence in the Godhead, as
distinguished from their common essence or substance (ousia) as God.[3]
The hypostatic union is not a conflation or a mixture of two people. Jesus is not
part human and part divine. The biblical teaching on the full deity and full
humanity of Christ has been believed from the earliest times in the history of
the church.[4]
Both
the Old and New Testaments, present Jesus Christ as having the divine nature
and human nature in a single undivided
personality (John 1:1–18; 9:48–59).[5]
The Apostle Paul rightly taught that “In Christ
all the fullness of the Deity lives in
bodily form” (Colossians 2:9 NIV). This means that the divine nature
penetrates and perfects every aspect of the human, and the human is permeated
by the divine. In the Son, the divine participated in the human and the human in the divine without blurring or
confusing either. The idea of Jesus being both fully human and fully divine is
not a concept that can be understood logically, because it is an event that can
only be performed by a transcendent God who exists outside of time and space.
The Incarnation is truly a mystery that our human, finite mind cannot grasp. This
mystery of true divine nature and true human nature is the very heart of our
faith. It is definitely the heart of my faith, which without, I would be very
lost.
“In Christ, something has taken place which is so new that it is
related to our ordinary knowledge only at its extreme edges; if it is to be
apprehended by us it must be apprehended from outside the limits of our
ordinary human experience and thought.” [6]
Any theology or ideology that diminishes His humanity or His divinity is denying the Incarnation of Christ. For thus is the Incarnation of the Word of God—that He took on flesh yet with all His divine attributes of God.
The Christian story is precisely the
story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond
all space and time, which is uncreated, eternal, came into Nature, into human
nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing Nature up
with Him.
~ C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle
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[1] D.M. Baillie, God
Was In Christ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 93.
[2]
Athanasius, On
The Incarnation (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press., 2011), 33.
[3]
Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 1992), 306.
[4] Wayne Grudem, Systematic
Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 553.
[5] Ibid., 302.
[6] Thomas F.
Torrance, Incarnation: The Person And Life Of Christ (Downers Grove: IVP
Academic, 2008), 83.
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