The Paradox of Jesus, Human and Divine!

Presentation on Christology and Incarnation

Given to Tutor Group 6^th June 2011

For many in the church the creeds are where they look to for some kind of definitive “Statement of Faith”. Each Sunday most of us recite the Nicene Creed, setting out an outline of what is widely considered to be the most basic tenets of our Christian faith. In fact the largest part of the Nicene Creed itself actually speaks about the person of Christ himself. Pretty unsurprising I suppose, given that at the very core of what Christianity is all about, the person of Jesus Christ takes centre stage. The Athanasian Creed also, though used much less than the Nicene Creed, speaks a great deal about who Christ is and how he relates to the other two persons of the Trinity. I want to take the creeds as a framework by which to examine different aspects of Christology and Incarnation, how the view of the church was developed, and how it fits into the church we are part of today. When we study Christology we examine the nature and person of Christ himself, rather than the work he does through salvation and the atonement.

The section about Christ in the Nicene Creed makes a big deal of both the divinity and humanity of Jesus in equal measure. We say the words week by week, yet how often do we actually take time to think through exactly what it is that we are saying? At one and the same time he was both God, and man! The main discussion in Christology centres on this one point....the union of the divine and human in one person, Jesus Christ.

One of the earliest protagonists that brought the subject into the debate was Arius, who gave his name to what later became known as Arianism. His basic train of thought was that the Son and the Father are not of the same essence, and that the Son was created by the Father. The Son however is the foremost of all creation, but being a creature himself, there must have been a time when he did not exist. For Arius there was no real sense in which Jesus could be divine, as that particular attribute could only be applied to the Father. God was so “other” that it was absolutely unthinkable to Arius for him to enter into the messiness of human history and take on our humanity for himself. Jesus, as one who had been created experienced emotion, fear, pain and change just as we do. This, according to Arius is something that was impossible for an unchanging, essentially non-interventionist God to do.

 The two main schools of thought, one from Alexandria and the other from Antioch had very different views on the matter. In simplified terms the Alexandrian view was one that emphasised the union of the human and the divine in Christ, while the Antiochian view saw much more of a distinction between the two natures.

McGrath devotes a section to describing both these opposing ways of looking at who Christ was. He speaks (p227) of the Alexandrian emphasis of the Logos assuming human nature. He gives the example of how in the writings of the Old Testament prophets, the Logos was seen as “dwelling within humanity” as though he is somehow separate, yet at the same time a part of humankind. In John’s gospel (Jn 1:1) we see the “Word”, the “Logos”, who was there at the very beginning of time described in terms that immediately identify him with God. There is no separation evident here between the two. The entirety of this prologue is about setting the scene, so that the reader is completely aware that the Logos and God are one and the same, and that in contrast to simply dwelling within humanity, he actually took on the very nature of humanity (Jn 1:14) in becoming flesh. Jesus was the eternal “Word” who was already fully united with the Father before the Incarnation.

It is useful at this point to speak of “homiousios” (of like substance), and “homoousis” (of same substance). In 381 when the Nicene Creed was formally agreed upon the idea of the Father and Son as being of the “same” substance rather than merely similar became the accepted orthodoxy. This joining together of the two natures of Christ, both the divine and the human became known as the “Hypostatic Union”.

In Antiochian thought however this emphasis on the union of the two natures of Christ by the Alexandrians, the divine and the human led to too much mingling of the two. There needed to be a way to draw a distinct line between them. Again, McGrath speaks of how these two aspects of Christ are almost like two “watertight compartments” (p 219), not interacting with each other in any way. So God in the Antiochian view did become human, but it was only in the specific individual person of Jesus that this humanity was manifest rather than God actually assuming a general innate human nature himself.  According to this way of thinking Christ was a single, unified human being, apart from his relationship to God.

The Christology that we see in the three synoptic gospels tends to concentrate on the humanity of Christ, his way of relating to those around him. John’s gospel on the other hand places the emphasis more on his divinity, and while not ignoring his interactions with others, his miracles or his story-telling focuses more on his divinity. He does not focus so much on the “how” Jesus came into the world as the other gospels do. Put together though, the four gospels as a whole help us to a fuller understanding of who Jesus is, in a way that just looking at them individually can’t do.

The early church spent years debating the nature of Christ before eventually reaching a general consensus, which we now see in creeds such as the Nicene Creed. Alternative Christologies such as Arianism, which saw Christ as a subordinate creation of the Father or Gnosticism, which spiritualised him to the extent of almost denying his physical reality were defeated in the process and were so far as the early leaders concerned, heresies to be stamped out.

As well as our understanding Jesus coming from the creeds, for many people, particularly perhaps those who are not always as familiar with the language and ideas that the church uses, an image is often built up in the use of hymns or carols. The carol “Once in Royal David’s City” is, I think a good example of this. Especially in the second verse it speaks very clearly of the Incarnation, making very clear that this child that had been born was no ordinary person, but also at the same time God in human form. He was born of a human mother just as any other person is, yet he was also something beyond that. The hymn speaks of both his humanity and his divinity, as it traces his childhood in a pattern that is probably not unfamiliar to us today. Yet it also speaks of him as being “God and Lord of all”, and of being the one who redeems us. Maybe rather than the complex words of theologians and scholars, and even the creeds this is where the ordinary person in the street, who doesn’t come to church too often gets their image of who Jesus is. Often though it ends up with a slushy, romanticised image of Jesus as some kind of sanitised, meek and mild individual who though he may be human in a nice fluffy kind of way doesn’t seem to have too much of the divine about him.

Migliore tells us that “God acts, suffers and triumphs in and through Jesus”, a concept that brings to mind the paradox between the human and the divine. In not simply identifying with, but actually being fully human Jesus was able to suffer, yet how could this be so if he was also God? It brings us back to the Arian view that God cannot experience suffering without it diminishing his own divinity. Yet it follows that if, as we state in the creeds, Jesus is just as fully God as he was human, then it is God himself who was crucified, and God himself who died, fully experiencing, albeit in the most extreme form, what it is to be human.

There is a definite tension between a God who is all powerful and divine, and a God (in Christ) who experienced what it is to be human more fully than even we can appreciate. It is almost seems as though there are two competing and opposite personalities each trying to be as prominent as the other. It may well seem to be a bit of a cop-out, but it truly is a mystery how both these natures of Christ can remain distinct, yet at the same time fully joined and inseparable. Our human instinct is to continue to search for answers even when they are not always as forthcoming as we would like.

(Discussion followed)