Contemporary Issues in Christological Method
Chapter Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, the learner should be able to do the following:
- Demonstrate an understanding of the current issues in christological methodology.
- Identify and describe the historical christological concepts from all viewpoints.
- Evaluate traditional and liberal christological methodologies and determine their coherence to biblical precepts.
- Determine the procedure for studying the person and work of Jesus Christ.
- Examine and refute the current trend of viewing the incarnation as mythology.
Chapter Summary
In the history of the church, the most heated debate in Christology has been over the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Some theologians have researched the life of Jesus based on their determination that Christ cannot be both human and God. Others either have understood Christ from above, grounded in the church’s proclamation, or from below, basing their view of Christ on historical investigation. More recently, a number of popular but flawed attempts to reconstruct the life and teaching of Jesus have emerged. However, a perspective utilizing faith to interpret the history of Jesus, found through reason, may provide the most adequate christological methodology.
Study QuestionsA
- What are the contemporary issues concerning christological methodology, and how do they concern the church?
- What is the “search for the historical Jesus,” and how important is it for understanding the person and work of Jesus Christ?
- How has Rudolf Bultmann’s understanding of Christology affected views of Christ and his work?
- How should a study of the person and work of Jesus Christ progress? Why is it necessary to operate in a particular order?
- How should one react to the growing tendency to view the incarnation of Jesus Christ as mythological and irrelevant for modern religious practice?
Outline
The Search for the Historical Jesus
A Third Search for the Historical Jesus?
The Person and the Work of Christ
Incarnation Viewed as Mythology
We have seen that humans were created to love, serve, and fellowship with God. We have also seen that all humans fail to fulfill this divine intention; in other words, all humans sin. Because God loved the human race, however, he chose to act through Christ to restore them to the intended condition and relationship. Thus, our understanding of the person and work of Christ grows directly out of the doctrines of humanity and of sin.
The study of the person and work of Christ is at the very center of Christian theology. For since Christians are by definition believers in and followers of Christ, their understanding of Christ must be central and determinative of the very character of the Christian faith. Consequently, particular care and precision are especially in order in the doing of our Christology.
There are certain perennial problems of Christology. These arise at various times. There are also specific issues that appear only at one point in history. It is important that we survey and form our own conclusions regarding certain of these matters. In this chapter we will examine three contemporary issues regarding the methodology of Christology: (1) the relationship between faith and history, (2) the relationship between study of the person of Christ and study of the work of Christ, and (3) the literalness of the idea of incarnation. To frame these questions differently, (1) Can a proper understanding of Christ be based strictly upon historical data, or must it be posited by faith? (2) Should we first determine our understanding of Christ’s nature and then apply it to our investigation of his work, or should we approach the subject of his nature through a study of his work? (3) Is the idea of the incarnation of God inherently mythological and hence untenable? The first two of these questions deal with the method of Christology; the third concerns the possibility of doing Christology at all. To understand the contemporary environment of christological construction, it will be necessary to examine its historical background. For the present approaches to the doing of Christology represent the culmination of a long process involving reactions and counterreactions.
History and Christology
For a long period of time, theologians limited their discussion of Christ to the views set forth in their respective denominational or confessional traditions. These traditions in turn tended to follow the positions worked out in the ecumenical councils of the early centuries of the church. The problems of Christology were posed largely in terms of metaphysics: How can the divine nature and the human nature coexist within one person? Or, to put it differently, how can Jesus be both God and man at once? In the twentieth century, however, the focus changed. In some circles theology is hostile (or at least indifferent) to metaphysics. So the study of Christ is now carried on largely in historical terms. In part, this shift has been motivated by a suspicion that the Christ of the theological tradition is different from the actual Jesus who walked the paths of Palestine, teaching and working among his disciples and the crowds.
The Search for the Historical Jesus
The quest to discover what Jesus was actually like and what he did came to be known as the “search for the historical Jesus.” Often underlying this search was the expectation that the real Jesus would prove to be different even from the Christ who appears within the Scriptures and who is in some sense the product of the theologizing of Paul and others. Among the more famous early “lives of Jesus” were those produced by David Strauss and Ernest Renan. Increasingly, the earthly Jesus was depicted as basically a good man, a teacher of great spiritual truths, but not the miracle-working, preexistent Second Person of the Trinity.
Perhaps the best-known and most influential picture of Jesus is that of Adolf von Harnack, which in many ways represents the pinnacle and the end of the search for Jesus. He notes that the Gospels do not give us the means of constructing a full-fledged biography of Jesus, for they tell us very little about Jesus’s early life. They do provide us with the essential facts, however. Four general observations lead Harnack to set forth a nonmiraculous Jesus:
- In Jesus’s day, a time when there was no sound insight into what is possible and what is not, people felt surrounded by miracles.
- Miracles were ascribed to famous persons almost immediately after their death.
- We know that what happens within our world is governed by natural laws. There are, then, no such things as “miracles,” if by that is meant interruptions of the order of nature.
- There are many things that we do not understand, but they should be viewed as marvelous and presently inexplicable, not miraculous.
Harnack’s assessment of the message of Jesus has been considered the classic statement of the liberal theological position. He contends that Jesus’s message was primarily not about himself, but about the Father and the kingdom:
If, however, we take a general view of Jesus’s teaching, we shall see that it may be grouped under three heads. They are each of such a nature as to contain the whole, and hence it can be exhibited in its entirety under any one of them.
Firstly, the Kingdom of God and its coming.
Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul.
Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.
As the search for the historical Jesus proceeded, there was a growing uneasiness that the Jesus found within the Gospel account was being unconsciously fabricated by those searching for him, and was amazingly like the searchers. George Tyrrell, a Catholic scholar, possibly put it best: “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.”
Two writings in particular spelled the end of the liberal search for Jesus. In his Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer shared the basic historical method and goals of the liberal searchers but differed with their conclusions, seriously questioning their objectivity. He felt that they approached the study of Jesus’s life with their own preconceptions and then proceeded to accept or reject material on the basis of whether it fit these preconceptions. When Schweitzer examined the Gospels, he did not find the reflection of a typical nineteenth-century liberal. Rather, he found in Jesus a thoroughly eschatological figure who believed and taught that the end of the world was coming soon, and that his own parousia would take place in connection with that end. Jesus, however, was wrong, according to Schweitzer. The chief point for our purposes here is Schweitzer’s contention that as an eschatological figure, Jesus is not to be remade into a thoroughly modern person.
Martin Kähler’s So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ struck new ground in its analysis of the problem. Kähler was dubious about the utility of the efforts that had been made to develop a picture of Jesus. Not only was the search for the historical Jesus unsuccessful; it was actually counterproductive. Kähler summarized his “cry of warning in a form intentionally audacious: the historical Jesus of modern authors conceals from us the living Christ. The Jesus of the ‘Life-of-Jesus movement’ is merely a modern example of human creativity, and not an iota better than the notorious dogmatic Christ of Byzantine Christology. One is as far removed from the real Christ as is the other.” In answer to the search for the historical Jesus, Kähler proposed a major distinction. He noted that the Jesus of history, the Jesus behind the Gospels, had relatively little influence. He was able to win only a few disciples, and these to a rather shaky faith. The Christ of faith, however, has exercised a very significant influence. This is the risen Christ, believed in and preached by the apostles. This historic Christ, rather than the historical Jesus, is the basis of our faith and life today. We can never get behind the Gospel accounts to Historie, the objective, actual occurrences. We instead build our belief on Geschichte, or significant history, which pertains to the impact Jesus made upon the disciples.
This distinction was in many ways the greatest influence upon Christology during the first half of the twentieth century. Increasingly, study was focused not upon the actual events of the life of the historical Jesus, but upon the faith of the church. This shift is seen most clearly and fully in Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologization, but it is also apparent within the Christologies written by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.
Eventually, a reaction to Bultmann’s skeptical approach set in. Thus began a new twentieth-century quest for the historical Jesus. Ernst Käsemann officially sounded the trumpet indicating this turn of events. Others, too, have been and are at work attempting to formulate a sketch of what Jesus actually said and did. Ethelbert Stauffer and Joachim Jeremias have been among the more prominent persons engaged in this new search. We will take up this development shortly, under the heading “Christology from Below.” But first we need to examine another approach that dominated much of the early history of twentieth-century Christology.
“Christology from Above”
“Christology from above” was the basic strategy and orientation of the Christology of the earliest centuries of the church. It also was, to a large extent, the Christology of orthodoxy during the precritical era when there was no question as to the historical reliability of the whole of Scripture. In the twentieth century, this approach to Christology was associated especially with Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Emil Brunner in his early book The Mediator. Several key features of Christology from above are evident in that writing:
- The basis of the understanding of Christ is not the historical Jesus, but the kerygma, the church’s proclamation regarding the Christ. Brunner asserts:
We are bound to oppose the view that the Christian faith springs out of historical observation, out of the historical picture of Jesus of Nazareth. Christendom itself has always known otherwise. Christian faith springs only out of the witness to Christ of the preached message and the written word of the Scriptures. The historical picture is indeed included in the latter …; but this picture itself is not the basis of knowledge.
- In Christology from above, there is a marked preference for the writings of Paul and the fourth Gospel over the Synoptic Gospels. The former contain more explicitly theological interpretations, whereas the Synoptics are basically matter-of-fact reporting of Jesus’s actions and teachings. This principle is closely tied to the first:
If once the conviction is regained that the Christian faith does not arise out of the picture of the historical Jesus, but out of the testimony to Christ as such—this includes the witness of the prophets as well as that of the Apostles—and that it is based upon this testimony, then inevitably the preference for the Synoptic Gospels and for the actual words of Jesus, which was the usual position of the last generation, will disappear.
- Faith in the Christ is not based on nor legitimized by rational proof. The content believed lies outside the sphere of natural reason and historical investigation and consequently cannot be conclusively proven. While historical investigation may serve to remove obstacles to various beliefs (e.g., belief in the deity of Jesus Christ), it cannot succeed in establishing those beliefs. “Jesus taught a group of disciples beside the sea” is a statement open to historical research; “Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity” is not. We accept historical statements by being rationally persuaded. We accept proclamation by faith.
Brunner draws a distinction that clarifies the sense in which, for him, Christology is historical and the sense in which it is not. This distinction is between the “Christ in the flesh” and the “Christ after the flesh.” By “Christ in the flesh” Brunner means that God became incarnate, the Word became flesh and penetrated history. The “Christ after the flesh” is the Christ known by the historiographer, the chronicler, with his methods of research. To know “Christ in the flesh” is to know something more than the “Christ after the flesh.” The believer knows Christ
as the One who has come in the flesh, as Him of whom the chronicler and the humanist historian must have something to say. But he knows this “Christ in the flesh” in a way of which they can know nothing; he knows Him therefore as someone quite different, and this is what matters. For the knowledge of others—of the chronicler and of the humanist historian—is not yet knowledge of Christ, of the “Word made flesh,” but is itself “after the flesh.”
Brunner emphasizes the Christ in the flesh, but does not ignore the Christ after the flesh. For although faith never arises out of the observation of facts, but out of the witness of the church and the Word of God, the fact that this Word has come “into the flesh” means that faith is in some way connected with observation. The witness of the church and Scripture always includes the picture of Jesus.
“Christology from Below”
With the publication of Bultmann’s Jesus and the Word, Christology from above reached its zenith. Here in effect was a statement that faith in the kerygmatic Christ cannot with certainty be connected with the actual earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth. In Bultmann’s view this did not really matter. The stream of negative reaction to Bultmann’s view grew into an enunciation of methodology. Probably the most significant of the early reactions was Ernst Käsemann’s “Problem of the Historical Jesus,” originally published in 1954. Käsemann asserted the necessity of building belief in Jesus upon a historical search for who he was and what he did. While this was not a resumption of the nineteenth-century search, it was dubbed “the new search for the historical Jesus.”
It might be said that the nineteenth-century searches scarcely were real Christologies. It would be better to call them “Jesusologies.” The Jesus who emerged from those studies was a human being and little more. It seemed to some in the “new quest” that this was a result of antisupernatural biases within the historical method itself; in other words, there was a methodological inadequacy. In the new quest for the historical Jesus, there is the possibility of a genuine Christology. That is, it is possible that the historical investigation might arrive at belief in the deity of Jesus Christ, as a conclusion, not a presupposition, of the historical investigation.
The most instructive example for us of a recent “Christology from below” is undoubtedly that of Wolfhart Pannenberg. In Jesus—God and Man Pannenberg has produced a thoroughly christological treatment, as indicated by the title. While recognizing certain benefits in the approach of Christology from above, he indicates three basic reasons why he cannot employ this method:
- The task of Christology is to offer rational support for belief in the divinity of Jesus, for this is what is disputed in the world today. Christology from above is unacceptable in that it presupposes the divinity of Jesus.
- Christology from above tends to neglect the significance of the distinctive historical features of Jesus of Nazareth. In particular, his relationship to the Judaism of his day, which is essential to understanding his life and message, is relatively unimportant in this approach.
- Strictly speaking, a Christology from above is possible only from the position of God himself, and not for us. As limited, earthbound human beings, we must begin and conduct our inquiry from the human perspective.
Pannenberg constructs from the life of the man Jesus of Nazareth a full Christology, including his deity. The positive features of Pannenberg’s approach make clear the basic contour of Christology from below as contrasted with Christology from above:
- Historical inquiry behind the kerygma of the New Testament is both possible and theologically necessary. Form criticism has demonstrated that an exact chronological sequence of Jesus’s life cannot be constructed. It is nonetheless possible to discover from the apostles’ witness Jesus’s major characteristics. Such knowledge of Jesus is necessary. If we rest our faith upon the kerygma alone, and not upon the historical facts of Jesus’s life as well, we may find ourselves believing not in Jesus, but in Luke, Matthew, Paul, or someone else. A further complication if we rest our faith upon the kerygma alone is that these New Testament witnesses do not give us unity, but diversity, and on occasion even antithesis. We must penetrate beyond these varied witnesses to discern the one Jesus to whom they all refer.
In Pannenberg’s judgment, it is extremely important to bring an openness to the task of historical investigation. Because many earlier searches for Jesus were governed by certain rather narrow conceptions of what is historically possible and what is not, it is imperative to approach the horizons of biblical times without our modern-day naturalistic prejudices. Only then can a Christology from below be properly constructed.
- History is unitary, not dualistic. The life, teachings, and ministry of Jesus, including his death and resurrection, are not part of a unique type of history distinct from history in general. There is no special realm of redemptive or sacred history, be that Geschichte, Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), or whatever. For Pannenberg, the history of the Christ cannot be separated or isolated from history in general. Consequently, it need not be approached by a method different from that used to gain a knowledge of ordinary history.
- While a Christology from below can give us a fully human Jesus, can it also establish the deity of Jesus? The evidence most commonly adduced by Christology from below in trying to establish Jesus’s unity with God is his pre-Easter claim to authority through declaration and deed, pointed out by theologians such as Werner Elert and Paul Althaus. Pannenberg comments, “The basic agreement is striking. Dogmatics seems in this case to have preceded historical research.”
This effort to demonstrate Jesus’s divinity through his pre-Easter claim to authority must inevitably fail, however, for this claim to authority is related to a future verification of his message, which will not take place until the final judgment. “Rather,” Pannenberg says, “everything depends upon the connection between Jesus’s claim and its confirmation by God.”
This confirmation is to be found in the resurrection of Jesus. Pannenberg believes that the resurrection is a historical fact. Having examined separately the evidences—the empty tomb and the appearances of the resurrected Lord—Pannenberg concludes that the Gospel accounts of the appearances are so strongly legendary in character that one can scarcely find in them a historical kernel. Consequently, he turns to Paul’s summation in 1 Corinthians 15:1–11 and concludes:
Thus the resurrection of Jesus would be designated as a historical event in this sense: If the emergence of primitive Christianity, which, apart from other traditions, is also traced back by Paul to appearances of the resurrected Jesus, can be understood in spite of all critical examination of the tradition only if one examines it in the light of the eschatological hope for a resurrection from the dead, then that which is so designated is a historical event, even if we do not know anything more particular about it.
Pannenberg similarly attributes validity to the empty tomb accounts. If this tradition and the tradition of the Lord’s appearances came into existence independently of one another, then, “by their mutually complementing each other they let the assertion of the reality of Jesus’s resurrection, in the sense explained above, appear as historically very probable, and that always means in historical inquiry that it is to be presupposed until contrary evidence appears.”
While many possible meanings might be attached to the fact of the resurrection, from Pannenberg’s perspective this is not so. Given its place within the history of traditions and cultural expectations, the resurrection carried with it a definite meaning. The idea of resurrection occurring apart from the will and activity of God is unthinkable for a Jew. The resurrection of Jesus means, then, that God gave his approval to the claims of Jesus and that these claims, which would be blasphemous unless Jesus really is the Son of Man, are true. Thus, not only the historical fact of Jesus’s resurrection, but also the theological truth of his deity, have been established.
Evaluation
This is a dispute of continuing importance. Lest we think this is merely an intramural debate among European theologians, a cross-cultural study reveals the same issues. Latin American theologians tend to do Christology in a more historical framework, thus emphasizing the approach from below, while Asians work in a more metaphysical orientation, favoring the approach from above. These two types of Christology, from above and from below, have their own distinctive strengths and weaknesses. In some cases, the statement of one position has also constituted a criticism of the other approach.
Christology from above has the strength of recognizing that the real aim and value of the incarnation were the effect of Jesus’s life upon those who believed in him. Their testimony deserves our closest attention, for they of all people knew him most intimately and were in the best position to describe him to others. Further, this approach is committed to a genuine supernaturalism, something that has not always been true of Christologies from below. It leaves open the possibility of a divine, miracle-working Jesus.
The basic problem for a Christology from above is the substantiality of the belief. Is the Christ of faith really the same person as the Jesus who walked the paths of Galilee and Judea? Is commitment to the kerygmatic Christ based on what really is, or is it an unfounded faith? The problem of subjectivity in one form or another always plagues this type of Christology. How can we be sure that the Christ whom we know from the witness of the apostles and encounter in our own experience today is Jesus as he really is and not merely our own feelings? A second problem relates to the content of faith. While it is all well and good to say we take something on faith, how do we determine what it is we are taking on faith? Without an empirical referent, the Christ of faith is somewhat unreal and vague.
Christology from below, on the other hand, blunts the charge that at best Christian theology (and specifically Christology) is based upon faith and at worst it may be completely vacuous. This approach has attempted to eliminate undue amounts of subjectivity. Recognizing the need for a subjective involvement (or commitment) by every believer, Christology from below avoids filtering it through the subjectivity of other believers, namely, the first disciples.
There is one persistent problem, however. Especially in Pannenberg’s version, the success of Christology from below depends upon establishing its historical contentions with objective certainty; but this is difficult to achieve. If the facts of Christology are matters of genuinely objective history, then it ought to be possible to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus to any honest objective inquirer. In practice, however, some who examine the evidences remain quite unconvinced. In addition, Paul Althaus maintains that Pannenberg’s unitary view of history makes faith a function of reason. Pannenberg has responded that while faith is indeed a gift of the Spirit, not a product of reason, nonetheless, knowledge of the historical revelation is logically, although not psychologically, prior to faith. Reason in its essential structure is sufficient to grasp God’s revelation and recognize its truth. Human reason, however, has fallen into an unnatural state and needs to be restored. This restoration is not a case of being supernaturalized, but of being naturalized through the aid of the kerygma and the Spirit.
This distinction, however, is not very helpful. Regardless of whether human reason needs to be supernaturalized or merely naturalized, the same specter of subjectivity, which this theology attempts to avoid at all costs, still raises its head. Although the Spirit employs the historical evidences to create faith, there is still the problem of whether this faith is veridical. May not someone else, on the basis of the same evidences, come to a different conclusion? Are we not again, at least to a small extent, driven back to the Christ of faith in the attempt to arrive at the Jesus of history? The real point of Christology from below has been compromised when one begins to appeal to such concepts as the need to naturalize reason. Although the gap between objective historical evidences and the conclusions of faith has been narrowed a bit, it is still there.
An Alternative Approach
We have seen that each of these two seemingly mutually exclusive positions has certain strengths and weaknesses. Is there some way to unite Christology from above and Christology from below so as to preserve the best elements of both while minimizing the problems of each? Can the kerygmatic Christ and the historical Jesus, faith and reason, be held together? Evangelicals are concerned to retain both. This concern stems in part from the evangelical understanding of revelation as both the historical events and the interpretation of them. These are two complementary and harmonious means by which God manifests himself. Both are therefore sources of knowledge of him. We will propose here a conceptual analysis and model that may enlighten the issue.
Since the Jesus of history is approached through reason and the kerygmatic Christ is seized by faith, we are apparently dealing with a case of the classic faith-reason dichotomy. Whereas in the traditional form faith and philosophical reason are involved, here it is faith and historical reason. In both cases, the question is the utility and value of reason as grounds for faith. In the philosophical realm there are three basic positions regarding the relative roles of faith and reason. There are three similar positions in the historical realm:
- Christology from above is basically fideistic. Particularly in the form expounded by Brunner and other existentialist theologians, it draws heavily upon the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. According to this position, our knowledge of Jesus’s deity is not grounded in any historically provable facts about his earthly life. It is a faith based upon the faith of the apostles as enunciated in the kerygma.
- Conversely, Christology from below is primarily Thomistic. It attempts to demonstrate the supernatural character of Christ from historical evidences. Hence, the deity of Christ is not a presupposition but a conclusion of the process. The appeal is to historical reason, not to faith or authority. As faith predominates in the former model, reason does here.
- There is another possible model, namely, the Augustinian. In this model, faith precedes but does not remain permanently independent of reason. Faith provides the perspective or starting point from which reason may function, enabling one to understand what otherwise could not be understood.
When this model is applied to the construction of a Christology, the starting point is the kerygma, the belief and preaching of the church about Christ. The content of the kerygma serves as a hypothesis to interpret and integrate the data supplied by inquiry into the historical Jesus. According to this position, the early church’s interpretation of or faith in Christ enables us to make better sense of the historical phenomena than does any other hypothesis. Thus, our alternative model is not Christology from below, which, ignoring the kerygma, leads to conundrums in attempting to understand the “mystery of Jesus,” as theologians often referred to it in the nineteenth century. Nor is our model an unsupported Christology from above, constructed without reference to the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth; rather, it is tested and supported and rendered cogent by the ascertainable historical facts of who and what Jesus was and claimed to be.
Our model entails following neither faith alone nor historical reason alone, but both together in an intertwined, mutually dependent, simultaneously progressing fashion. Increased familiarity with the kerygmatic Christ will enable us to understand and integrate more of the data of historical research. Similarly, increased understanding of the Jesus of history will more fully persuade us that the apostles’ interpretation of the Christ of faith is true.
There is biblical basis for this contention. Some of those who knew Jesus’s words and deeds very well did not arrive at an accurate knowledge of him thereby. For example, the Pharisees saw Jesus perform miraculous healings through the power of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:22–32; Mark 3:20–30; Luke 11:14–23). Although they certainly were familiar with the Jewish traditions and presumably had observed Jesus for quite some time, their appraisal was, “By the prince of demons he is casting out demons.” Somehow they had failed to draw the right conclusion, although they possessed a knowledge of the facts. Even those closest to Jesus failed to know him fully. Judas betrayed him. The other disciples did not realize the significance of his crucifixion and even his resurrection. The religious authorities obviously knew that the tomb was empty, but did not interpret this fact correctly.
On a more positive note, there are also indications that when one comes to a correct perception of Jesus, it is on the basis of something more than natural perception. For example, when in response to Jesus’s question, “Who do you say I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus commented, “this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 16:15–17). While the meaning of “flesh and blood” in the original has been debated, it is clear that Jesus is contrasting some sort of direct revelation from the Father with some purely human source such as the opinions of others.
Another case in point, proceeding from the other side of the dialectic, is John the Baptist. In prison he began to wonder about Christ. And so he sent two of his disciples to ask the Lord, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Luke 7:19). John may have been expecting some concrete historical event as evidence that Jesus was indeed, as John knew him to be, the Christ. Jesus’s answer was to point to the deeds he had been performing: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (v. 22). The historical Jesus was the confirmation of the Christ of faith.
In this model the two factors are held in conjunction: neither the Jesus of history alone, nor the Christ of faith alone, but the kerygmatic Christ as the key that unlocks the historical Jesus, and the facts of Jesus’s life as support for the message that he is the Son of God. Faith in the Christ will lead us to an understanding of the Jesus of history.
A Third Search for the Historical Jesus?
The original modern search for the historical Jesus took place in the nineteenth century. The second search was a more modest one, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a number of attempts have been made to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus. Many of these have been on the popular level. An early example was Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot. A best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, although not claiming to be historical, had a considerable influence on the popular view of Jesus and was even made into a movie. A more scholarly and sustained phenomenon has been the work of the Jesus Seminar. Founded by Robert Funk in 1985 and cochaired by him and John Dominic Crossan, it began meeting semi-annually and publishing the results of its work in a series of books. The meetings consisted of papers presented to, discussed, and debated by the members of the group. The professed aim was to get at the actual words and deeds of Jesus, as indicated by the titles of the works produced. A system of voting with colored beads enabled each member of the group to indicate his or her judgment of the degree of authenticity of a passage.
Unfortunately, these endeavors have been marred by significant flaws. They have been based in many cases on rather antisupernatural presuppositions and unusual historical assumptions. For example, the members of the seminar tended to give to the Gospel of Thomas credence equal to or greater than the four traditional Gospels, even though it is later and has less historical support. The result of these presuppositions was a Jesus much like the personal convictions of the researchers themselves. Beyond that, however, these searches have often sensationalized the reconstructed picture of Jesus. The idea that Jesus may have fathered children is an extreme instance of this type of thing.
Parallel to this endeavor have been more sober and careful researches into the life of the historical Jesus. We noted some of these developments in the consideration of biblical criticism in chapter 5. Seeking to apply sound principles of historical research but without the naturalistic bias sometimes found in such an endeavor, these have gone far toward establishing the accuracy of the Gospel accounts as we have them. Thoroughly familiar with the best of historical methodology, these scholars have not made the type of conclusive claims for their conclusions that the Jesus Seminar has made. They present a solid basis for confidence in the traditional picture of Jesus found in the Gospels.
The Person and the Work of Christ
A second major methodological question pertains to the relationship between the study of the person and the work of Christ. May they be separated, and if so, what is the logical order of Christology? Should the understanding of the person of Christ, his nature, be developed first, and then applied in order to give us an understanding of the work of Christ? Or should we begin with the work of Christ and then deduce what type of person he is?
In the early history of the church, the two were held together in rather close connection. This approach changed during the medieval period, however. Scholastic theology separated the doctrine of the person of Christ (his divinity, humanity, and the unity of the two) from the offices and work of Christ. As a result, Christology was no longer relevant to most believers. The debates over Jesus’s deity, the extent of his knowledge, and his sinlessness, as well as questions like whether he had one will or two, were very abstract. It was difficult for average Christians to see what effect such issues had on their lives.
An opposite tendency developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, built on a famous sentence of Philipp Melanchthon: “To know Christ is to know his benefits.” This in turn is linked to Luther’s reaction against the scholastic concentration on the being of Christ. Luther emphasized instead Christ’s saving activity for us. This emphasis on the work of Christ is explicitly realized in the Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher more than two centuries later. In keeping with his general thesis that religion (or piety) is not a matter of dogma or ethical activity, but of feeling, for Schleiermacher the prime element in Christology is our experience of what Christ does within us. In theory, however, the person of Christ and his work are inseparable, and Christology can be approached from either angle.
This correlating of the two considerations, but with priority given to the work of Christ, was picked up by Bultmann and perhaps even more explicitly by Paul Tillich, who asserted that “Christology is a function of soteriology. The problem of soteriology creates the Christological question and gives direction to the Christological answer.” In Tillich’s method of correlation, the theological answer is correlated with the existential question. Accordingly, we should concentrate upon the symbolism of the biblical materials, since it stresses the universal significance of the Christ event.
There are two major reasons for approaching the person of Christ through the work of Christ. One is the desire for greater coherence between Christology and soteriology. It is possible to treat the former in isolation from the latter. But it is not possible to speak of what Christ does in our lives without relating that work to the nature of Christ, which it presupposes. The second reason is the desire to demonstrate the relevance of the doctrine of Christ. It is difficult for most persons to take an interest in the discussion of some of the issues concerning the nature of Christ unless they see how it affects them.
Certain difficulties emerge from this approach, however. One is that when the emphasis is placed upon what Christ’s work does for humanity, the human’s self-perception of need tends to dictate or set the agenda for construction of the understanding of Christ’s person or nature. There is, then, a dilemma: either one considers Christ’s work first and then applies the findings to the human situation, or one examines the situation first and then moves back to the biblical materials regarding Christ’s work. In the former case, there is still the danger of potential irrelevance; in the latter case, of tailoring the understanding of Christ’s work to the human perception of need.
One problem with the concern for relevance is that it assumes that the person is asking the right questions. But is this assumption always valid? Some questions not being asked perhaps should be. Analogous to this situation is the difference between telling one’s doctor about some specific symptoms and having a complete physical examination. The physical may reveal some facts of which the patient is unaware, but which are important nevertheless. Likewise, significant issues of Christology may never be considered if the agenda is set by our subjective awareness of need. Another problem is that a particular conclusion in soteriology may leave open more than one possible position on Christ’s nature. Therefore, basing one’s Christology upon “felt needs” will prove inadequate.
In spite of all these difficulties, there is an acceptable way of beginning Christology with Christ’s work. While it must not be allowed to set the agenda, it can be used as the point of contact for more elaborate discussions of his nature. These discussions will in turn give answers in the area of his work. We should be aware that if we are to build a complete Christology, we must look at considerations in each area to find answers to questions in the other.
Incarnation Viewed as Mythology
Another issue of growing concern in Christology is whether the idea of incarnation is mythological. According to some, the idea that God became human and entered human history, which the doctrine of the incarnation has historically signified, is not to be taken literally. Indeed, according to this contention, it is neither necessary nor possible to do so. A number of factors have fostered this theory.
One is Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologization. Bultmann concluded that much of the New Testament is myth, by which he meant an attempt by human beings to give expression to the otherworldly in terms of symbolism drawn from the this-worldly. These conceptions are simply culturally conditioned conceptions of the nature of reality. In many cases, we can identify the sources from which they were taken: Hellenism, Judaism, Gnosticism. Bultmann insisted that these conceptions must be “demythologized,” not meaning to eliminate, but rather to reinterpret, them. The Scripture writers used myth to express what had happened to them existentially. Consider as an example the story of Jesus’s walking on the water (Matt. 14:22–33). Taken literally, it purports to tell us of an actual event, a miraculous occurrence. But when demythologized, it is seen to tell us something of what had happened to the disciples. Whatever actually happened is of little concern. The point is that Jesus had made a profound impact upon the Twelve, and the way they sought to give expression to the fact that Jesus had made an impression on them unequaled by anyone they had ever known was to tell this and other “miracle” stories about him. Jesus was the sort of person of whom one would have to say: “If anyone could walk on water, it would be Jesus!”
A second influence contributing to the contention that the incarnation is mythological is the rise of a more generalized view of God’s relationship to the world. Traditionally, orthodox theology saw God’s contact with and involvement in the world as related especially to the person of Jesus during a thirty-year period in Palestine. By contrast, movements such as the short-lived Death of God theology posited an ongoing process through which the primordial God has become fully immanent within the world. This has taken place in steps or stages, with the most complete step occurring in Christ. From that point onward, the process has been one of diffusion outward from Christ into the rest of the human race, as his teachings and practices come to be adopted. The primordial God has ceased to exist; he is now totally immanent within the human race.
This particular conception shows a great deal of similarity to the thought of Georg Hegel. For Hegel, the event of Christ is not singularly significant in itself. It is merely a symbol of the greater abstract truth of God’s going forth into the world, representing a more philosophical truth.
There are many variations within the Christologies that view the incarnation as mythological. In spite of the variety and diversity, there are several points of agreement:
- The idea that God literally became man is quite incredible and logically contradictory.
- The Christology of the New Testament represents the faith of the disciples rather than Jesus’s teachings. The disciples sought to give expression to the profound impression Jesus had made on them. In so doing, they utilized titles and conceptions common in that day, such as the idea of God’s coming to earth. These titles and ideas were not used by Jesus of himself. His message was about the kingdom of God, not about himself. The disciples were attempting to express that they had found in Jesus a man who lived a model life of trust and faith in God. They were also giving expression to their sense that God is involved with the world, with its pain and tragedy. The theological conceptions found in the Gospels, and especially the fourth Gospel, represent their meditations upon the person of Christ, not teachings that he gave. The message of Jesus and the original, earliest faith of the disciples were in no way ontological. In particular, there was no idea of a metaphysical Son of God. If there was any sort of similar idea at all, it was that God had adopted Jesus.
- The traditional type of Christology stems not from the New Testament, but from the church’s theologizing, particularly in the fourth and fifth centuries. In so doing, the church utilized then-current philosophical conceptions. As a result, the doctrines formulated resembled the philosophical dogmas of the time. These prevented the church from correctly understanding the New Testament witness to Christ. Furthermore, many of these formulations (e.g., that Jesus had two natures but was one person) are themselves internally self-contradictory and actually lacking in content. They are vacuous formulas. The church never really spelled out what was meant by these expressions; every attempt to do so was pronounced heretical.
- The idea of Jesus as the incarnate one is not as unique as has usually been supposed. For example, Gautama Buddha also represents the coming of God to humans, evidencing God’s desire to be involved with his creation, and the essential unity of God and humanity. Jesus is, then, not the only expression of this religious truth. To think that Jesus is the only way, and that only those who believe what the church teaches about him will be saved, is at best parochial and at worst abhorrent. It is to say that the vast majority of all those who have lived have not been saved, indeed, had no opportunity to be saved. Rather, we must realize that Christianity’s basic affirmation—that God loves the world and desires to be reconciled to it—is also believed and expressed in differing forms in other religions. God is present in other religions as well, but under differing names. “Jesus” is the distinctively Christian term for the presence of God.
- Incarnation may be understood in a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrow sense, it is the belief that at one point in time and space God entered the world, in the person of Jesus Christ, as he had never done before and has never done since. In the broad sense, incarnation signifies God’s immanence in the world. Thus, the means by which humanity is to approach God lies in the physical world, not in escape from it. The physical world is a carrier of spiritual value. This broad sense is not unique to Christianity, but is also found in Judaism. Relating not only to Christology, but also to the doctrines of creation and providence, the doctrine of incarnation means that God is in the world and is at work there.
These two senses, God’s immanence in the world and the absolute uniqueness of the God-man Jesus Christ, are not inseparable. While the latter meaning of incarnation has been used by the church during much of its history to communicate the former, the former can be maintained without the latter. This is parallel to the church’s ability to maintain the Eucharist without belief in transubstantiation, and to maintain the authority of the Bible without belief in inerrancy.
It is necessary to outline a reply to the contention that the incarnation is mythical. The following three chapters will clarify and elaborate the real meaning of the incarnation. Nonetheless, some suggestions need to be offered at this point.
- The idea of the incarnation of God is not inherently contradictory. Brian Hebblethwaite has argued that the belief that the incarnation involves a contradiction stems from taking the incarnation too anthropomorphically. To be sure, there is a paradox here, a concept that is very difficult to assimilate intellectually. The function of a paradox, as Ian Ramsey has shown, is to force our minds beyond the natural to the supernatural. In this case, we are not predicating divinity of Jesus’s humanity, or suggesting that God became an entirely different kind of God, or that one person was both limited and unlimited at the same time and in the same respect. Rather, we are simply claiming that God voluntarily assumed certain limitations upon the exercise of his infinity. He had similarly limited his options when he created humans.
- There is historical evidence that the Christology of the New Testament goes back to Jesus himself rather than merely to the faith of the disciples. A number of considerations are involved here. For one thing, the theory that the disciples might have borrowed from similar myths the idea of a god’s becoming incarnate is doubtful. That they had access to such myths has been shown to be highly questionable at best. Further, the pre-Pauline Hellenistic congregations that are alleged to have fused Hellenistic ideas with the story of Christ are now known not to have existed. Finally, there is indication that a “high” Christology is present in the earliest of the New Testament writings.
- The suggestion that the incarnation of God in Jesus is paralleled in the teachings of other religions cannot be sustained. The doctrine of the incarnation is radically different from the doctrine of divine immanence. Further, it is inconceivable that, if God is one, more than one person could be God incarnate. When the full biblical meaning of the doctrine of the incarnation is understood, the incarnation of God in Jesus simply cannot be compared with, for example, Buddhism’s view of Buddha.
The doctrine of the incarnation requires much fuller development. We will continue in that investigation, assured that the task we are undertaking is not an impossible one.
31
The Deity of Christ
Chapter Objectives
At the conclusion of this chapter, the student should be able to achieve the following:
- Demonstrate a full understanding of the deity of Jesus Christ and the importance it has for the Christian faith.
- Identify and explain the biblical teaching regarding the deity of Christ.
- Recognize and describe Ebionism and Arianism, two views about Jesus Christ, and how they deviate from the historical and biblical understanding of the deity of Jesus Christ.
- Understand the limited nature of “functional Christology” and how its presuppositions affect the conclusions that are drawn about the biblical and early church writers.
- Formulate implications concerning the deity of Christ for the purpose of developing a balanced Christology.
Chapter Summary
The deity of Christ sits at the pinnacle of controversy and belief concerning the Christian faith. While some have overemphasized the deity of Christ, others, such as the Ebionites and the Arians, have portrayed Christ as a unique human not possessing a divine nature. Relevant biblical passages clearly indicate that this is not the case. More recently, “functional Christology” has developed, focusing on the actions of Jesus rather than his nature. Again, biblical evidence does not support this view. The deity of Christ has real value to the believer concerning knowledge of God, new life, personal relationship with God, and the ability to worship Christ for who he is.
Study Questions
- Why is the deity of Christ so important to the Christian faith? Use biblical references to support your answer.
- Why did Jesus not speak of his divinity overtly? What did he say that would support his divinity?
- What views have developed that diminish the deity of Christ, and are they still effective today?
- What are the main elements of a “functional Christology,” and how would you respond to them?
- What implications may be drawn concerning the deity of Christ, and why do you think they are important?
Outline
The Evidence of the Resurrection
Historical Departures from Belief in the Full Deity of Christ
Implications of the Deity of Christ
One of the most controversial and yet crucial topics of Christian theology is the deity of Christ. It lies at the heart of our faith. For our faith rests on Jesus’s actually being God in human flesh, and not simply an extraordinary human, even the most unusual person who ever lived.
During the history of the church, different challenges to Jesus’s deity have arisen, with Islam recently having become an aggressive challenger. Islam maintains that Jesus was one of the great prophets, that he did not die on the cross, someone else taking his place there, and was not raised from the dead. While the larger issue of the proper authority divides Islam and orthodox Christianity, it is important to understand clearly what the Bible teaches about Jesus.
The Biblical Teaching
As with other doctrines, our primary source is the witness of Scripture. Here we find a wide variety of material and emphases, but not a divergence of opinion. While it is not possible to investigate every reference that bears on this consideration, we may at least sample the data.
Jesus’s Self-Consciousness
In looking at the biblical evidence for the deity of Christ, we begin with Jesus’s own self-consciousness. What did Jesus think and believe about himself? Some have argued that Jesus did not himself make any claim to be God. His message was entirely about the Father, not about himself. We are therefore called to believe with Jesus, not in Jesus.
It is true that Jesus did not make an explicit and overt claim to deity. He did not say in so many words, “I am God.” What we do find, however, are claims that would be inappropriate if made by someone who is less than God. For example, Jesus said that he would send “his angels” (Matt. 13:41); elsewhere they are spoken of as “the angels of God” (Luke 12:8–9; 15:10). That reference is particularly significant, for he spoke not only of the angels but also of the kingdom as his: “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.” This kingdom is repeatedly referred to as the kingdom of God, even in Matthew’s Gospel (12:28; 19:24; 21:31, 43), where one would expect to find “kingdom of heaven” instead.
More significant yet are the prerogatives Jesus claimed. In particular, his claim to forgive sins resulted in a charge of blasphemy against him. When the paralytic was lowered through the roof by his four friends, Jesus’s initial comment was, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5). The reaction of the scribes indicates the meaning they attached to his words: “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (v. 7). Robert Stein notes that their reaction shows that they interpreted Jesus’s comment “as the exercising of a divine prerogative, the power to actually forgive sins.” Here was an excellent opportunity for Jesus to clarify the situation, to correct the scribes if they had indeed misunderstood the import of his words. This he did not do, however. His response is highly instructive: “ ‘Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up, take your mat and walk”? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.’ So he said to the man, ‘I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home’ ” (vv. 8–11).
Jesus claimed other prerogatives as well. In Matthew 25:31–46 he speaks of judging the world. He will sit on his glorious throne and divide the sheep from the goats. The power of judging the spiritual condition and assigning the eternal destiny of all people belongs to him. Certainly this is a power only God can exercise.
Jesus made other direct claims. We note, in examining the Gospels, that in the beginning of his ministry, Jesus allowed the people to draw inferences about him from the power of his moral teaching and his miracles. Thus this segment of Jesus’s ministry lends some support to the theories of Harnack and others. In the later portions, however, the focus is much more upon himself. We might, for example, contrast the Sermon on the Mount with the discourse in the upper room. In the former, the message is centered upon the Father and the kingdom. In the latter, Jesus himself is much more the center of attention. Thus the contention that Jesus directed our faith to the Father, but not to himself, is difficult to sustain.
The authority Jesus claimed and exercised is also clearly seen with respect to the Sabbath. God had established the sacredness of the Sabbath (Exod. 20:8–11). Only God could abrogate or modify this regulation. Yet consider what happened when Jesus’s disciples picked heads of grain on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees objected that the Sabbath regulations (at least their version of them) were being violated. Jesus responded by pointing out that David had violated one of the laws by eating of the bread reserved for the priests. Then, turning directly to the situation at hand, Jesus asserted: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27–28). He was clearly claiming the right to redefine the status of the Sabbath, a right that belongs only to someone virtually equal to God.
We see Jesus also claiming an unusual relationship with the Father, particularly in the sayings reported in John. For example, he claims to be one with the Father (John 10:30), and that to see and know him is to see and know the Father (John 14:7–9). There is a claim to preexistence in his statement in John 8:58, “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” Note that rather than saying, “I was,” he says, “I am.” Leon Morris suggests that there is an implied contrast here between “a mode of being which has a definite beginning” and “one which is eternal.” It is also quite possible that Jesus is alluding to the “I am formula” by which the Lord identified himself in Exodus 3:14–15. For in this case, as in Exodus, the “I am” is a formula denoting existence. The verb is not copulative (as in, e.g., “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”). Another allusion to preexistence is found in John 3:13, where Jesus asserts, “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.” There is also a claim to simultaneous and coterminous working with the Father: “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23). While some of Jesus’s statements may seem rather vague to us, there is no doubt as to how his opponents interpreted them. The Jews’ immediate reaction to Jesus’s claim that he existed before Abraham was to take up stones to throw at him (John 8:59). Certainly this is an indication that they thought him guilty of blasphemy, for stoning was the prescription for blasphemy (Lev. 24:16). If they attempted to stone him merely because they were angered by his unfavorable references to them, they would, in the eyes of the law, have been guilty of attempted murder.
In some respects, the clearest indication of Jesus’s self-understanding is found in connection with his trial and condemnation. The charge, according to John’s account, was that “he claimed to be the Son of God” (John 19:7). Matthew reports the high priest to have said at the trial, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God” (Matt. 26:63). “You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (v. 64). This is as clear a declaration of his deity as one can find in the Gospels. Some have argued that Jesus was speaking satirically, and saying in effect, “You said that, not I.” It is true that the personal pronoun is used here to supplement the second-person singular of the verb, suggesting that the emphasis of the sentence falls on the subject—“You said that!” However, two additional observations need to be made: (1) Jesus went on to speak of his power and second coming, thus confirming rather than contradicting the charge; (2) Jesus had an ideal opportunity here to correct any misconception that may have been involved. He could have avoided execution simply by denying that he was the Son of God, but he did not do that. Either he desired to die, albeit on a false charge, or he did not respond because the charge brought against him was correct. The Jews’ reaction is instructive. The high priest said, “ ‘He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ ‘He is worthy of death,’ they answered” (Matt. 26:65–66). The crime was that Jesus claimed what only God has the right to claim. Here we have Jesus in effect asserting, through acquiescence, his equality with the Father.
Not only did Jesus not dispute the charge that he claimed to be God, but he also accepted his disciples’ attribution of deity to him. The clearest case of this is his response to Thomas’s statement, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Here was an excellent opportunity to correct a misconception, if that is what it was, but Jesus did not do so.
There are additional indications of Jesus’s self-estimation. One is the way he juxtaposes his own words with the Old Testament, the Scripture of his time. Time and again he says, “You have heard that it was said, … But I tell you …” (e.g., Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28). Here Jesus presumes to place his word on the same level as Old Testament Scripture. It might be argued that this was merely a claim to be a prophet of the same stature as the Old Testament prophets. The prophets, however, based their claim to authority upon what God had said or was saying to and through them. Thus, one finds the characteristic formula, “The word of the Lord came to me …” (e.g., Jer. 1:11; Ezek. 1:3). Jesus, however, does not cite any such formula in setting forth his teaching. He simply says, “But I tell you …” Jesus is claiming to have the power in himself to lay down teaching as authoritative as that given by the Old Testament prophets.
Jesus also, by implication, direct statement, and deed, claims power over life and death. Hannah in her song of praise credits God with having the power to kill and to make alive (1 Sam. 2:6). In Psalm 119, the psalmist acknowledges about a dozen times that it is Jehovah who gives and preserves life. In John 5:21 Jesus claims this power for himself: “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.” Perhaps the most emphatic statement is found in his words to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25).
Jesus specifically applied to himself expressions that conveyed his self-understanding. One of these is “Son of God.” Form critics find this title in all the Gospel strata—clear proof that Jesus used it of himself. While the title is capable of various meanings, Jesus “poured into it a new content to describe His own unique person and relationship to God.” It signified that Jesus had a relationship to the Father distinct from that of any other human. The Jews understood that Jesus was thereby claiming a unique sonship differing “not merely quantitatively but qualitatively, not merely in degree but in kind.” We read in John 5:2–18, for example, that they reacted with great hostility when, in defense of his having healed on the Sabbath, Jesus linked his work with that of the Father. As John explains, “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (v. 18). From all of the foregoing, it seems difficult, except on the basis of a certain type of critical presupposition, to escape the conclusion that Jesus understood himself as equal with the Father and as possessing the right to do things that only God has the right to do.
The Gospel of John
When we examine the whole New Testament, we find that what its writers say about Jesus is thoroughly consistent with his own self-understanding and claims about himself. The Gospel of John is, of course, noted for its references to Jesus’s deity. The prologue particularly expresses this idea: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What John actually says is, “Divine [or God] was the Word” (θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος—theis ēn ho logos). By placing θεὸς first, in contrast to the word order of the preceding clause, he makes the term particularly forceful. He has both identified the Word as divine and distinguished the Word from God. He is not describing a simple monotheism or a modalistic monarchianism here. The remainder of the Gospel supports and amplifies the thrust of the prologue.
Hebrews
The book of Hebrews is also very emphatic regarding Jesus’s divinity. In the opening chapter the author speaks of the Son as the radiance of the glory of God and the exact representation of his nature (χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ—charaktēr tēs hupostaseōs autou, Heb. 1:3). This Son, through whom God created the world (v. 2), also upholds (or carries) all things by his word of power (v. 3). In verse 8, which is a quotation of Psalm 45:6, the Son is addressed as “God.” The argument here is that the Son is superior to angels (1:4–2:9), Moses (3:1–6), and the high priests (4:14–5:10). He is superior, for he is not merely a human or an angel, but something higher, namely, God.
Paul
Paul frequently witnesses to Jesus’s deity. In Colossians 1:15–20 Paul writes that the Son is the image (εἰκών—eikōn) of the invisible God (v. 15); he is the one in whom and through whom and for whom all things hold together (vv. 16–17). In verse 19 Paul brings this line of argument to a conclusion: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness [πλήρωμα—plērōma] dwell in him.” In Colossians 2:9 he states a very similar idea: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”
Paul also confirms some of the claims Jesus had made earlier. In the Old Testament judgment is ascribed to God. In Genesis 18:25 Abraham refers to God as “the Judge of all the earth.” In Joel 3:12 Jehovah proclaims, “for there I will sit to judge all the nations on every side.” Paul confirms Jesus’s claim (Matt. 25:31–46) that he will judge the nations. Although he on occasion refers to the judgment of God (e.g., Rom. 2:3), he also speaks of “Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead” (2 Tim. 4:1) and of “the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10).
One Pauline passage that addresses the status of Jesus has become a subject of considerable controversy. On the surface Philippians 2:5–11 is a clear assertion of the deity of Christ Jesus, since it speaks of him as being or existing in the “form” (μορφή—morphē) of God. In biblical and classical Greek this term refers to “the whole set of characteristics that makes something what it is.” In recent scholarship, however, this view of the passage has been questioned. Much modern interpretation of Philippians 2:5–11 goes back to Ernst Lohmeyer, who proposed that what we have here is actually a quotation of a liturgical hymn—the passage can be divided into two strophes, each consisting of three stanzas of three lines. Further, according to Lohmeyer, the hymn is not Hellenistic but Aramaic in origin; that is, it can be traced back to the early Hebrew Christians. As proof he points out four parallels with the Old Testament:
- “In the form of God” (v. 6 RSV)—“in our image, in our likeness” (Gen. 1:26).
- “Made himself nothing” (v. 7)—“poured out his life” (Isa. 53:12).
- The image of Jesus as a servant—Isaiah 53.
- “In human likeness” (v. 7)—“one like a son of man” (Dan. 7:13).
The major point for our purposes is that “in the form of God” has come to be equated with an Old Testament reference to the image and likeness of God. That the Septuagint sometimes uses μορφή in the sense of εἰκών is presented as evidence that the “form of God” is to be understood as the image of God that is found in all human beings. Accordingly, some scholars hypothesize that the early Christian hymn Paul borrowed did not depict Jesus as preexistent God, but merely as a second Adam. They interpret “[he] did not count equality with God something to be grasped” (v. 6 NIV 1984) in light of Adam’s attempt to become like God. Unlike Adam, Jesus did not attempt to seize equality with God.
There are numerous problems with Lohmeyer’s interpretation:
- There is no agreement as to the specific division of the passage into stanzas.
- Even if the passage does represent a hymn, interpretation cannot be governed by form.
- The origin of a portion of material is not the sole factor explaining its meaning. To proceed as if it were is to commit a genetic fallacy.
- Interpreting μορφή as an equivalent of εἰκών is tenuous at best. Based on a few rare occurrences of μορφή in the Septuagint, this argument ignores the fundamental classical sense of the word—the substance, the genuine nature, of a thing.
We conclude, then, that Philippians 2:6 does indeed teach an ontological preexistence of the Son. And the whole passage, as Reginald Fuller maintains, presents a “threefold christological pattern”: Jesus, being God, emptied himself, became man, and then was again exalted to the status of deity or of equality with the Father.
In cultures where age is seen as a positive rather than a negative, some theologians have found the preexistence of Christ to be a helpful support in presenting his deity. For example, some African theologians, such as Charles Nyamiti, have seen in the doctrine of Christ’s preexistence an opportunity to relate Christology to Africans’ strong respect for their ancestors. Other African theologians, however, have not regarded this as a wise tactic.
The Term “Lord”
There is a more general type of argument for the deity of Christ. The New Testament writers ascribe the term κύριος (kurios—“Lord”) to Jesus, particularly in his risen and ascended state. While the term can most certainly be used without any high christological connotations, several considerations argue that the term signifies divinity when it is applied to Jesus. First, in the Septuagint κύριος is the usual translation of the name יְהֹוָה (Jehovah) and of the reverential אֲדֹנָי (Adonai), which was ordinarily substituted for it. Further, several New Testament references to Jesus as “Lord” are quotations of Old Testament texts employing one of the Hebrew names for God (e.g., Acts 2:20–21 and Rom. 10:13 [cf. Joel 2:31–32]; 1 Pet. 3:15 [cf. Isa. 8:13]). These references make it clear that the apostles meant to give Jesus the title “Lord” in its highest sense. Finally, κύριος is used in the New Testament to designate both God the Father, the sovereign God (e.g., Matt. 1:20; 9:38; 11:25; Acts 17:24; Rev. 4:11), and Jesus (e.g., Luke 2:11; John 20:28; Acts 10:36; 1 Cor. 2:8; Phil. 2:11; James 2:1; Rev. 19:16). William Childs Robinson comments that when Jesus “is addressed as the exalted Lord, he is so identified with God that there is ambiguity in some passages as to whether the Father or the Son is meant (e.g., Acts 1:24; 2:47; 8:39; 9:31; 11:21; 13:10–12; 16:14; 20:19; 21:14; cf. 18:26; Rom. 14:11).” For the Jews particularly, the term κύριος suggested that Christ was equal with the Father.
The Evidence of the Resurrection
To some, the approach we have been taking in our effort to demonstrate Jesus’s deity may appear uncritical, using the Bible without taking into consideration the findings of the more radical methods of biblical investigation. There is, however another way to establish Jesus’s deity, a way that will not enmesh us in contesting critical issues point for point. We noted in chapter 30 the methodology known as “Christology from below.” We now turn again to the Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, especially as it is developed in his book Jesus—God and Man. The trend in recent years, both among evangelical and nonevangelical scholars, has been to conclude on purely historical grounds the probability of Jesus’s resurrection having occurred. Pannenberg follows this same path but goes on to show how the fact of Jesus’s resurrection argues for his deity.
Pannenberg sees a strongly eschatological dimension in Jesus’s ministry. Together with Bornkamm, Rudolf Bultmann, Heinz Eduard Tödt, and others, he maintains that the oldest stratum of the New Testament sayings about the Son of Man, who will come on the clouds of heaven to judge men, is from Jesus himself; they are not a formulation of the early Christian community. All of Jesus’s ministry had a proleptic character. Like the prophetic utterances of the apocalyptic background, his claims required future confirmation.
Pannenberg’s argument can be understood only in light of his view of revelation and of history. To Pannenberg, the whole of history is revelatory. Thus, revelation can be said to have fully taken place only when history has run its course, because only then can we see where it has been going. One would therefore expect that history has no revelatory value for us now since we have only incomplete parts, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The resurrection, however, because it is the end of history, having taken place proleptically, does give us revelation, even within time.
Pannenberg holds that the resurrection must be understood from the viewpoint of the historical traditions of which it is a part. Whereas it has become commonplace to regard an event as a constant and its interpretation as a variable changing with time, he unites the two. The meaning of an event is the meaning attached to it by the persons into whose history it comes, his Jewish contemporaries:
- To a Jew of the time, Jesus’s resurrection would have meant that the end of the world had begun. Paul expected that the resurrection of all people, and particularly of believers, would quickly follow that of Jesus. Therefore he spoke of Jesus as the “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20) and the “firstborn from among the dead” (Col. 1:18).
- The resurrection would have been evidence that God himself confirmed Jesus’s pre-Easter activity. To the Jews, Jesus’s claim to authority, putting himself in God’s place, was blasphemous. If he was raised from the dead, however, it must have been the God of Israel, the God who had presumably been blasphemed, who raised him. Hence, contemporary Jews would have regarded the resurrection as God’s confirmation that Jesus really was what he claimed to be.
- The resurrection would have established that the Son of Man is none other than the man Jesus. Before Easter, Jesus was understood to be a man who walked visibly upon the earth; the Son of Man was a heavenly being who would come in the future on the clouds of heaven. After Easter, however, the two were regarded as identical.
- The resurrection would have meant that God has been ultimately revealed in Jesus. Only at the end of time can God be fully revealed in his divinity. In Jesus, God has already appeared on earth. While this concept lacks the precision found in later orthodox Christology, “Jesus’s divinity is already implied in some way in the conception of God’s appearance in him.”
As evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, Pannenberg points to the emergence of Christianity, which Paul traced back to the appearances of the resurrected Christ. If the emergence of Christianity can be understood “only if one examines it in the light of the eschatological hope for a resurrection from the dead, then that which is so designated is a historical event, even if we do not know anything more particular about it.”
Pannenberg agrees with Paul Althaus that the proclamation of the resurrection in Jerusalem so soon after Jesus’s death is very significant. Within the earliest Christian community there must have been a reliable testimony to the empty tomb. Pannenberg also observes that in the Jewish polemic against the Christian message of Jesus’s resurrection, there is no claim at all that Jesus’s grave was not empty.
In Pannenberg’s judgment, the evidence of 1 Corinthians 15 is really more significant than that of the Gospels. He concedes that some legendary elements may have filtered into the Gospel accounts. An example is Jesus’s eating fish after his resurrection. Yet, for the most part we have adequate evidence to establish the historicity of the resurrection, which is proof in itself of Jesus’s deity.
Evangelicals have been especially concerned about the resurrection, since Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 made it such a crucial matter. In the fundamentalist-modernist debate, it was a crucial point of contention. More recently a number of very competent arguments have been developed, often as part of a formal debate, based on a more conventional use of the historical sources.
Historical Departures from Belief in the Full Deity of Christ
As the church struggled to understand who and what Jesus is, and particularly how he is related to the Father, some deviant interpretations arose.
Ebionism
One group, known as the Ebionites, solved the tension by denying the real or ontological deity of Jesus. The name “Ebionite,” derived from a Hebrew word meaning “poor,” was originally applied to all Christians; later, only to Jewish Christians; and then, to a particular sect of heretical Jewish Christians.
The roots of Ebionism can be traced to Judaizing movements within the apostolic or New Testament period. Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written to counter the activity of one such group. Judaizers had come to the Galatian Christians and were attempting to undermine Paul’s apostolic authority. They taught that in addition to accepting by faith the grace of God in Jesus, it was necessary to observe all the regulations of Jewish law, such as circumcision. The Ebionites were a continuation of or offshoot from the Judaizers. Being strongly monotheistic, they focused their attention upon the problematic deity of Christ. They rejected the virgin birth, maintaining that Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary in normal fashion.
Jesus was, according to the Ebionites, an ordinary human possessing unusual but not superhuman or supernatural gifts of righteousness and wisdom. He was the predestined Messiah, although in a rather natural or human sense. At the baptism, the Christ descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove. This was understood more as the presence of God’s power and influence within the man Jesus than as a personal, metaphysical reality. Near the end of Jesus’s life, the Christ withdrew from him. Thus Jesus was primarily a human, albeit a human in whom, at least for a time, the power of God was present and active to an unusual degree. The Ebionites maintained their position partly through a denial or rejection of the authority of Paul’s letters.
The Ebionite view of Jesus had the virtue of resolving the tension between belief in the deity of Jesus and the monotheistic view of God, but at a high price. Ebionism had to ignore or deny a large body of scriptural material: all of the references to the preexistence, the virgin birth, and the qualitatively unique status and function of Jesus. In the view of the church, this was far too great a concession.
Arianism
A much more thoroughly developed and subtle view sprang up in the fourth century around the teaching of an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius. It became the first major threat to the views implicitly held by the church regarding Jesus’s deity. Because Arianism arose in a period of serious theological reflection and represented a much more thorough and systematic construction than Ebionism, this movement had a real chance of becoming the official view. Although it was condemned by the church at the Council of Nicea in 325 and at subsequent councils, it lingers on to our day in various forms, most notably the movement known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
A central conception in the Arian understanding of Jesus is the absolute uniqueness and transcendence of God. God is the one source of all things, the only uncreated existent in the whole universe. He alone possesses the attributes of deity. Further, he cannot share his being or essence with anyone else, for he would then be divisible and subject to change; that is, he would not be God. If any other being participated in the divine nature, it would be necessary to speak of a duality or multiplicity of divine beings. But this would contradict the one absolute certainty of monotheism, the uniqueness and oneness of God. Nothing else that exists, then, can have originated as some sort of emanation from God’s essence or substance. Everything other than God has, rather, come into being through an act of creation by which he called it into existence out of nothing. The Father alone is uncreated and eternal.
The Father, however, while creating everything that is, did not directly create the earth. Rather, the Father worked through the Word, the agent of his creation of and continuing work in the world. The Word is also a created being, although the first and highest of the beings, a fiat creation out of nothing. The word γεννάω (gennaō—“beget”), when used in reference to the Father’s relationship to the Word, is to be understood as a figure of speech for ποιέω (poieō—“make”). While the Word is a perfect creature, not really in the same class with the other creatures, he is not self-existent.
From this, two other conceptions regarding the Word followed. First, the Word must have had a beginning at some finite point. The Arians’ slogan therefore became “There was a time when he was not.” It seemed to the Arians that if the Word were coeternal with the Father, there would be two self-existent principles. This would be irreconcilable with monotheism, the one absolute tenet of their theology.
Second, the Son has no communion with or even direct knowledge of the Father. Although he is God’s Word and Wisdom, he is not of the very essence of God; being a creature, he bears these titles only because he participates in the word and wisdom of the Father. Totally different in essence from the Father, the Son is liable to change and even sin. When pressed as to how they could then refer to the Word as God or the Son of God, the Arians indicated that these designations were merely a matter of courtesy.
The Arians did not formulate their view only upon an a priori philosophical or theological principle. Rather, they based it upon a rather extensive collection of biblical references:
- Texts that suggest that the Son is a creature. Among these are Proverbs 8:22 (in the Septuagint); Acts 2:36 (“God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah”); Romans 8:29; Colossians 1:15 (“the firstborn over all creation”); and Hebrews 3:2.
- Texts in which the Father is represented as the only true God. Most significant is Jesus’s prayer in John 17:3: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
- Texts that seem to imply that Christ is inferior to the Father. The most notable of these is John 14:28, where Jesus says, “the Father is greater than I.” The fact that this verse and the one cited in the preceding point are from the book of John, the most theological of the Gospels, and the Gospel containing the most frequently cited proof-texts for the deity of Christ, makes the argument the more impressive.
- Texts that attribute to the Son such imperfections as weakness, ignorance, and suffering. One of the foremost is Mark 13:32: “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
The result of all this was that the Word was given the status of a demigod. Although the highest of all the creatures, he was still a creature. He was an intermediate being between God the Father and the rest of the creation, the agent by whom the Father had created them and continued to relate to them, but not God in the full sense. He might be called God as a courtesy, but he is at most a god, a created god, not the God, the eternal, uncreated being. Somewhat less extreme were the semi-Arians, who stressed the similarity rather than the dissimilarity between the Word and the Father. They were willing to say that the Word is similar in nature (or essence) to the Father (ὁμοιούσιος—homoiousios), but not that he is of the same essence as the Father (ὁμοιούσιος—homoousios).
There are two major responses to Arian theology. One is to note that the types of evidence appealed to earlier in this chapter in substantiating the deity of Christ are either ignored or inadequately treated by the Arians. The other is to take a closer look at the passages that have been appealed to in support of the Arian view. In general, it must be said that the Arians have misconstrued various biblical statements referring to the Son’s subordination during his incarnation. Descriptions of his temporary functional subordination to the Father have been misinterpreted as statements about the Son’s essence.
It will be seen upon closer examination that the passages that seem to speak of Jesus as made or created teach no such thing. For example, the references to Jesus as the “first-born” of creation are assumed by the Arians to have a temporal significance. In actuality, however, the expression “firstborn” does not primarily mean first in time, but first in rank, or preeminent. This is indicated, for example, by the context of Colossians 1:15, for the following verse notes that Jesus was the means of origination of all created beings. Paul certainly would have qualified this statement (e.g., by writing “all other things” instead of “all things” were created in him) if the Son were one of them. Further, Acts 2:36 does not say anything about creation of the Son. It says that God made him to be Lord and Christ, references to his office and function, the fulfillment of his messianic task.
John 17:3 must also be seen in context. We must evaluate it in the light of the numerous other references in this Gospel to the deity of Christ. In speaking of the Father as the only genuine (ἀληθινός—alēthinos) God, Jesus is contrasting the Father not with the Son, but with the other claimants to deity, the false gods. Indeed, Jesus links himself very closely with the Father here. Eternal life is not only knowing the Father, but also knowing the one whom he has sent, Jesus Christ.
John 14:28, the passage in which Jesus says that the Father is greater than he is, must be seen in the light of the Son’s functional subordination during the incarnation. In his earthly ministry Jesus was dependent upon the Father particularly for the exercise of his divine attributes. But when he states that he and the Father are one (John 10:30) and prays that his followers may be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21), he is expressing a great closeness, if not an interchangeability, between the two. Further, the baptismal formula (Matt. 28:19) and the Pauline benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:14 indicate a linking of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in equality; none of the members of the Trinity is superior to the others.
Finally, the passages referring to weakness, ignorance, and suffering must be seen as statements confirming the genuineness of the incarnation. Jesus was fully human. This does not mean that he ceased to be God, but that he took upon himself the limitations of humanity. During the earthly stay of his first coming he genuinely did not know the time of his second coming. His deity was exercised and experienced only in concert with his humanity. While the problem of the relationship of his two natures will be closely examined in chapter 33, it needs to be observed at this point that a temporary limitation, not a permanent finitude, was involved. For a short period of time Jesus did not have absolute knowledge and physical ability. Thus, while on earth it was possible for him to develop physically and grow intellectually.
The church, forced to evaluate the Arian view, came to its conclusion at the Council of Nicea in 325. On the basis of considerations such as those we have just cited, it concluded that Jesus is as much and as genuinely God as is the Father. He is not of a different substance or even of a similar substance; he is of the very same substance as the Father. Having decided on this formulation, the council condemned Arianism, a condemnation repeated by later councils.
Functional Christology
Not all modifications of the doctrine of the full deity of Jesus are found in the first centuries of the history of the church. One of the interesting christological developments of the late twentieth century was the rise of “functional Christology.” By this is meant an emphasis upon what Jesus did rather than upon what he is. Basically, functional Christology claims to work on the basis of purely New Testament grounds rather than the more metaphysical or speculative categories of a later period of reflection, which are viewed as rooted in Greek thought.
One clear example of functional Christology is Oscar Cullmann’s Christology of the New Testament. He points out that the christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries were concerned with the person or nature of Christ. These concerns centered on two issues: first, the relationship between the nature of Jesus and that of God; second, the relationship between Jesus’s divine and human natures. The New Testament, however, is not concerned with these issues. If we do not discard these later issues from our examination of the New Testament, we will have a false perspective on Christology from the very beginning. This is not to say, according to Cullmann, that the church did not need to deal with those issues at that later time, or that its treatment of them was improper. But we must remember that the fourth- and fifth-century church was wrestling with problems resulting from “the Hellenizing of the Christian faith, the rise of Gnostic doctrines, and the views advocated by Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches and others.” These problems simply did not arise in New Testament times.
Cullmann presses us to ask, “What are the orientation and the interest of the New Testament with respect to Christ?” His own response is that the New Testament hardly ever speaks of the person of Christ without at the same time speaking of his work. “When it is asked in the New Testament, ‘Who is Christ?’ the question never means exclusively, or even primarily, ‘What is his nature?’ but first of all, ‘What is his function?’ ”
In seeking to combat the views of heretics, related primarily to the nature of Christ or his person, the church fathers subordinated the discussion of Jesus’s work to that of his nature. While granting the necessity of these efforts by the church fathers, Cullmann nonetheless warns us to be alert to the shift: “Even if this shifting of emphasis was necessary against certain heretical views, the discussion of ‘natures’ is none the less ultimately a Greek, not a Jewish or biblical problem.”
Cullmann’s approach is to use “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) as an organizing principle for his examination of the various New Testament titles for Jesus. His Christology, then, is centered on what Jesus has done in history: “It is characteristic of New Testament Christology that Christ is connected with the total history of revelation and salvation, beginning with creation. There can be no Heilsgeschichte without Christology; no Christology without a Heilsgeschichte which unfolds in time. Christology is the doctrine of an ‘event,’ not the doctrine of natures.”
There are two ways in which advocates of a functional Christology interpret its role:
- A functional Christology of the New Testament, as opposed to an ontological Christology, is the truly biblical view, but it can be used to construct a more ontological Christology, since ontological concepts are implicit within the functional.
- It is neither necessary nor desirable to go beyond the functional approach taken by the New Testament. The New Testament Christology is normative for our Christology.
Although Cullmann does not explicitly state that he holds the second position, one might draw such an inference. A similar inference can be drawn concerning those who maintain that the theology necessitated by the present milieu has a far greater affinity with the functional approach than with fourth- and fifth-century Greek metaphysics.
Space does not permit a complete and thorough exposition and evaluation of the whole of Cullmann’s or any other functional Christology. Several observations need to be made by way of response, however:
- It is true that the biblical writers were very interested in the work of Christ and that they did not engage in sheer speculation about the nature of Jesus. However, their interest in his nature is not always subordinated to their interest in his work. Note, for example, how John in his first epistle refers to the humanity of Jesus: “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God” (4:2–3). It may, of course, be maintained that the coming of Jesus is his work, but the primary thrust in this passage is that he came “in the flesh.” Recall also the prologue of the Gospel of John. Cullmann counters that even here “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” is connected with “through him all things were made.” But while it is one thing to claim as evidence that in asking “Who is Christ?” the New Testament never means exclusively “What is his nature?” it is quite another thing to claim, as Cullmann does, that the New Testament never means this primarily. In the light of passages like John 1:1 and 1 John 4:2–3, it is impossible to maintain that in the New Testament the functional always has priority over the ontological.
- The assumption that the discussion of natures is “ultimately a Greek, not a Jewish or biblical problem,” reflects the common presupposition of the biblical theology movement that there is a marked difference between Greek and Hebrew thinking, and that the Hebrew is the biblical mentality. James Barr’s monumental work Semantics of Biblical Language demonstrates that this and several other conceptions held by the biblical theology movement are untenable. Brevard Childs maintains that the loss of credibility of these conceptions constitutes the “cracking of the walls” of the biblical theology movement. Whether or not one accepts Barr’s evaluation, we cannot simply ignore it and mouth uncritical statements about the Hebraic mentality.
- Consequently, the assumption that the mentality of the Hebrews was nonontological or nontheoretical must be called into question. George Ladd considers Paul’s use of mar in 1 Corinthians 16:22 very significant: “That Paul should use an Aramaic expression in a letter to a Greek-speaking church that knew no Aramaic proves that the use of mar (Kyrios) for Jesus goes back to the primitive Aramaic church and was not a product of the Hellenistic community.” This text, as well as Didache 10:9, “testifies to a worship of Jesus as Lord in the Aramaic speaking community which looked for his coming rather than that of the Father.” Clearly, then, there was an ontological element in the Hebrew concept of Christ.
- There is broad agreement that the fourth-century Christologists were influenced by Greek presuppositions as they came to Scripture. No doubt they believed that those presuppositions reflected what was within the minds of the Hebrew Christians. But one searches in vain for any admission by Cullmann and other functional Christologists that they bring to their study of the New Testament presuppositions colored by the intellectual milieu of their own day. Even less do they acknowledge what those presuppositions might be. The assumption throughout is that from their vantage point in the twentieth century they are better able to understand the mind of the first-century writers than were the fourth- and fifth-century theologians. Presumably the possession of superior historical methods enables them to gain special insight. But may it not be that the Chalcedonian theologians, standing so much closer to the time of the New Testament, actually understood it as well as or better than do modern theologians?
In particular, one should scrutinize the work of functional theologians to see whether categories drawn from contemporary functionalism (i.e., pragmatism) may not be coloring their interpretation of the Bible. The conclusion of Barr and others that the mentality of the Hebrews was not as nonmetaphysical as it is sometimes thought should prompt us at least to consider this possibility.
- Cullmann warned against distorting the biblical perspective by analyzing it under the categories of a later period. But what of his basic organizational principle of Heilsgeschichte? It is noteworthy how few times that concept appears in either the Old or the New Testament. Of course, the concept is there, but does the Bible so enlarge on it as to warrant using it as an organizing principle? Cullmann answers yes and documents his contention by appealing to his Christ and Time, but that work has also been severely criticized by Barr. This is not to say that Barr’s case is conclusive, but it should warn us against uncritically assuming that Cullmann uses no category extraneous to the biblical text. In practice, Cullmann appears to work in a circular fashion: Heilsgeschichte validates functional Christology, and functional Christology validates Heilsgeschichte. But the statement that “Christology is the doctrine of an ‘event,’ not the doctrine of natures,” needs more evidence from outside the circle.
- Even if we grant that the early Christian church was more concerned with what Jesus had done than with what kind of person he is, we cannot leave our Christology there. Whenever we ask how something functions, we are also asking about the presuppositions of the function, for functions do not happen in abstraction. Function assumes some sort of form. To fail to see this and to rest content with a functional Christology is to fall into a “Cheshire cat Christology.” Like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, which gradually faded away until only its grin remained, functional Christology gives us formless functions. Whether or not the early Christians asked ontological questions about Jesus, we cannot afford not to, if we wish to be responsible and contemporary. To fail to do so is to fall into one of Henry Cadbury’s categories of “archaizing ourselves”: the substituting of biblical theology for theology. We simply do not live in the first century. We must go on, as Cullmann suggests the theologians of the fourth century properly did, to pose questions concerning the nature of Jesus.
To sum up: because functional Christology overlooks some features of the biblical witness and distorts others, it is not an adequate Christology for today. It is questionable whether, as Cullmann maintains, the New Testament puts far more stress on Jesus’s function or work than on his person or nature. Ontological concepts are implicit if not explicit in the New Testament. Any Christology to be fully adequate must address and integrate ontological and functional matters.
Implications of the Deity of Christ
In introducing this chapter, we contended that the deity of Christ is of vital importance to the Christian faith. The dispute between the orthodox (who maintained that Jesus is homoousios—of the same nature as the Father) and the semi-Arians (who contended that Jesus is homoiousios—of a similar nature) has at times been ridiculed. It is but a dispute over a diphthong. Yet a very small change in spelling makes all the difference in meaning.
There are several significant implications of the doctrine of Christ’s deity:
- We can have real knowledge of God. Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Whereas the prophets came bearing a message from God, Jesus was God. If we would know what the love of God, the holiness of God, the power of God are like, we need only look at Christ.
- Redemption is available to us. The death of Christ is sufficient for all sinners who have ever lived, for it was not merely a finite human, but an infinite God who died. He—the Life, the Giver and Sustainer of life, who did not have to die—died.
- God and humanity have been reunited. It was not an angel or a human who came from God to the human race; rather, God himself crossed the chasm created by sin.
- Worship of Christ is appropriate. He is not merely the highest of the creatures, but is God in the same sense and to the same degree as the Father. He is as deserving of our praise, adoration, and obedience as is the Father.
One day everyone will recognize who and what Jesus is. Those who believe in the deity of Christ already recognize who he is and act accordingly:
Beautiful Savior!
Lord of the nations!
Son of God and Son of Man!
Glory and honor
Praise, adoration,
Now and forevermore be Thine!
32
The Humanity of Christ
Chapter Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
- Assess the importance of the doctrine of the humanity of Christ.
- Probe the biblical material for the physical, emotional, and intellectual evidence for the humanity of Christ.
- Understand the early church heresies, Docetism and Apollinarianism, that denied or limited the humanity of Christ.
- Comprehend the more recent tendencies of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann to devalue Jesus’s humanity.
- Examine and affirm the sinlessness of Jesus.
- Assess six implications of the humanity of Jesus.
Chapter Summary
While the doctrine of the humanity of Christ is less controversial than the doctrine of his divinity, there have been several ancient heresies and more modern views that deny or diminish his humanity. The issue of the sinlessness of Jesus creates a special problem. Some maintain that Jesus could not have been human if he did not sin. This conclusion does not necessarily follow. There are several implications that follow from accepting the orthodox position of Jesus’s humanity.
Study Questions
- How would you describe the doctrine of Jesus’s humanity?
- Why is the doctrine of Jesus’s humanity important?
- How would you explain the heresies of Docetism and Apollinarianism so they would be understandable to a person who has not studied doctrine or church history?
- How would you explain the problems with the positions of Barth and Bultmann on the humanity of Christ?
- Assume that you have been asked to defend the concept of Jesus’s sinlessness, particularly with the possibility that he could have sinned. What would you say?
- If you were preaching or teaching about the humanity of Jesus, what points would you want to make?
Outline
The Importance of the Humanity of Christ
Early Heresies regarding the Humanity of Jesus
Modern Depreciations of the Humanity of Jesus
Implications of the Humanity of Jesus
The topic of the humanity of Jesus Christ does not, in some ways, arouse quite the attention and controversy that his deity does. It seems on first glance to be something of a self-evident matter, for whatever Jesus was, he most surely must have been human. In the twentieth century, Jesus’s humanity did not receive the close and extensive attention paid to his deity, which was a major topic of dispute between fundamentalists and modernists. For what is not disputed tends not to be discussed, at least not in as much depth as are major controversies. Yet, historically, the topic of Jesus’s humanity has played at least as important a role in theological dialogue as has his deity, particularly in the earliest years of the church. And in practical terms, it has in some ways posed a greater danger to orthodox Christianity.
The Importance of the Humanity of Christ
The importance of Jesus’s humanity cannot be overestimated, for the issue in the incarnation pertains to our salvation. The human problem is the gap between us and God. The gap is, to be sure, ontological. God is far superior to humans, so much so that he cannot be known by unaided human reason. If he is to be known, God must take some initiative to make himself known to humanity. But the problem is not merely ontological. There also is a spiritual and moral gap between the two, a gap created by humans’ sin. Humans cannot by their own moral effort counter their sin in order to elevate themselves to the level of God. If there is to be fellowship between the two, they have to be united in some other way. This, it is traditionally understood, has been accomplished by the incarnation, in which deity and humanity were united in one person. If, however, Jesus was not really one of us, humanity has not been united with deity and we cannot be saved. For the validity of the work accomplished in Christ’s death, or at least its applicability to us as human beings, depends upon the reality of his humanity, just as its efficacy depends upon the genuineness of his deity.
Furthermore, Jesus’s intercessory ministry depends upon his humanity. If he was truly one of us, experiencing all of the human temptations and trials, then he is able to understand and empathize with us in our struggles as humans. On the other hand, if he was not human, or only incompletely human, he cannot really intercede as a priest must on behalf of those whom he represents.
The Biblical Evidence
There is ample biblical evidence that Jesus was a fully human person, not lacking any of the essential elements of humanity that constitute each of us. First, he had a fully human body. He was born. He did not descend from heaven and suddenly appear upon earth, but was conceived in the womb of a human mother and nourished prenatally like any other child. Although his conception was unique, not involving a male human, the process from that point on was apparently identical to what every human fetus experiences. The birth in Bethlehem, although under somewhat remarkable circumstances, was nonetheless a normal human delivery. The terminology describing his birth is the same as that used of ordinary human births. Jesus also had a typical family tree, as is indicated by the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. He had ancestors and presumably received genes from them, just as every other human being receives genes from his or her forebears.
Not only Jesus’s birth but also his life indicates that he had a physical human nature. We are told that he grew “in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). He grew physically, nourished by food and water. He did not have unlimited physical strength. Yet his body may have been more nearly perfect in some respects than ours, because there was in him none of the sin that affects health.
Jesus had the same physiology and the same physical limitations as other humans. He experienced hunger (Matt. 4:2), thirst (John 19:28), and fatigue (John 4:6). Thus, he was justifiably dismayed when his disciples fell asleep while he was praying in the garden of Gethsemane, for he experienced the same type of weariness they did (Matt. 26:36, 40–41).
Finally, Jesus suffered physically and died, just like everyone else. This is evident in the entire crucifixion story, but perhaps most clear in John 19:34, where we read that a spear was thrust into his side, and water and blood mingled came out, indicating that he had already died. Surely he had felt physical suffering (as genuinely as would you or I) when he was beaten, the crown of thorns was placed on his head, and the nails were driven through his hands (or wrists) and feet.
Jesus’s contemporaries had a genuine physical perception of him, indicating that he had a physical body. John puts it vividly in 1 John 1:1: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” John is here establishing the reality of the human nature of Jesus. He actually heard, saw, and touched Jesus. Touch was thought by the Greeks to be the most basic and most reliable of the senses, for it is a direct perception—no medium intervenes between the perceiver and the object perceived. Thus, when John speaks of what “our hands have touched,” he is emphasizing just how thoroughly physical was the manifestation of Jesus.
Rudolf Bultmann, among others, objected to the idea of a physical perception of Jesus. Citing 2 Corinthians 5:16—“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view [κατὰ σάρκα—kata sarka]. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer”—Bultmann argues that we cannot know Jesus through ordinary human means of perception or empirical historical research. However, as we have already seen (p. 546), “flesh” is not used of bodily physiology in Paul’s writings, but of humanity’s natural orientation away from God. It is the unregenerate human’s way of doing or viewing things. So what Paul is speaking of is best rendered, “from a worldly [or human] point of view.” The phrase κατά σάρκα does not refer to a possible way of gaining knowledge about Jesus, but rather to a perspective, an outlook, an attitude toward him. In contradiction to Bultmann, then, the possibility of acquiring historical information about Jesus cannot be excluded on the basis of this particular text of Paul.
If Jesus was a true human being physically, he also was fully and genuinely human psychologically. Scripture attributes to him the same sort of emotional and intellectual qualities found in other men. He thought, reasoned, and felt.
When we examine the personality of Jesus, we find the full gamut of human emotions. He loved, of course. One of his disciples is referred to as the disciple “whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23). When Lazarus was ill and Mary and Martha sent for Jesus, their message was, “Lord, the one you love is sick” (John 11:3). When the rich young man asked about inheriting eternal life, Jesus looked upon him and “loved him” (Mark 10:21). Jesus had compassion or pity on those who were hungry, ill, or lost (Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34). The Greek word is σπλαγχνίζομαι (splanchnizomai), which literally means “to be moved in one’s internal or visceral organs.” Jesus was stirred by human predicaments.
Jesus reacted to differing situations with appropriate emotions. He could be sorrowful and troubled, as he was just before his betrayal and crucifixion (Matt. 26:37). He also experienced joy (John 15:11; 17:13; Heb. 12:2). He could be angry and grieved with people (Mark 3:5), and even indignant (Mark 10:14).
Some of these emotions, of course, do not in themselves prove that Jesus was human. For God certainly feels love and compassion, as we observed in our discussion of his nature, as well as anger and indignation toward sin. Some of Jesus’s reactions, however, are uniquely human. For example, he shows astonishment in response to both positive and negative situations. He marvels at the faith of the centurion (Luke 7:9) and the unbelief of the residents of Nazareth (Mark 6:6).
Instructive as well are the references to Jesus’s being troubled. Here we see his peculiarly human reaction to a variety of situations, especially his sense of the death to which he had to go. He acutely felt the necessity and importance of his mission—“how distressed I am until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50 NIV 1984). Awareness of what it would entail troubled his soul (John 12:27). In the garden of Gethsemane, he was obviously in struggle and in stress, and apparently did not want to be left alone (Mark 14:32–42). On the cross, his outcry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), was a very human expression of loneliness.
One of Jesus’s most human reactions occurred at the death of Lazarus. Seeing Mary and her companions weeping, Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (John 11:33); he wept (v. 35); at the tomb he was “once more deeply moved” (v. 38). The description here is vivid, for to depict Jesus’s groaning in the spirit, John chose a term that is used of horses snorting (ἐμβριμάομαι—embrimaomai). Jesus possessed a human nature capable of feeling sorrow and remorse as deeply as we do.
When we turn to the subject of Jesus’s intellectual qualities, we find that he had some rather remarkable knowledge. He knew the past, present, and future to a degree not available to ordinary human beings. For example, he knew the thoughts of both his friends (Luke 9:47) and his enemies (Luke 6:8). He could read the character of Nathanael (John 1:47–48). He “did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person” (John 2:25). He knew that the Samaritan woman had had five husbands and was presently living with a man to whom she was not married (John 4:18). He knew that Lazarus was already dead (John 11:14). He knew that Judas would betray him (Matt. 26:25) and that Peter would deny him (Matt. 26:34). Indeed, Jesus knew all that was to happen to him (John 18:4).
Yet this knowledge was not without limits. Jesus frequently asked questions, and the impression given by the Gospels is that he asked because he did not know. Of course some persons, particularly teachers, ask questions the answers to which they already know. But Jesus seemed to ask because he needed information he did not possess. For example, he asked the father of the epileptic boy, “How long has he been like this?” (Mark 9:21). Apparently Jesus lacked this information, necessary for the proper cure.
The biblical witness goes even further. In at least one case Jesus expressly declared that he did not know a particular matter. In discussing the second coming, he said, “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).
It is difficult to account for the fact that Jesus’s knowledge was extraordinary in some matters, but definitely limited in others. Some have suggested that he had the same limitations we have with respect to discursive knowledge (knowledge gained by the process of reasoning or by receiving piecemeal information from others), but had complete and immediate perception in matters of intuitive knowledge. That does not seem to fit the facts completely, however. It does not explain his knowledge of the past of the Samaritan woman, or the fact that Lazarus was dead. Perhaps we could say that he had such knowledge as was necessary for him to accomplish his mission; in other matters he was as ignorant as we are.
Ignorance and error, however, are two very different things. Some modern scholars contend that Jesus actually erred in some of his affirmations, such as his attribution of the books of the Pentateuch to Moses (Mark 12:26) and his assertion that he would return within the lifetime of some who heard him. Among the predictions singled out are Mark 9:1 (“some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power”; cf. Matt. 16:28; Luke 9:27) and Mark 13:30 (“this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened”; cf. Matt. 24:34; Luke 21:32). Since these predictions were not fulfilled as he claimed, he obviously erred. In the former case, Jesus’s attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses does not conflict with any statement in the Bible itself, but only with the conclusions of critical methodologies, which many evangelical scholars reject. In the latter case, it is not clear that the reference is to the time of his return. His statement in Mark 9:1, for example, precedes the transfiguration by just six days, and in the Mark 13 passage Jesus interweaves references to the second coming and the destruction of Jerusalem. While he confessed ignorance, he never made an erroneous statement.
As James Orr has pointed out: “Ignorance is not error nor does the one thing necessarily imply the other. That Jesus should use language of His time on things indifferent, where no judgment or pronouncement of His own was involved, is readily understood; that He should be the victim of illusion, or false judgment, on any subject on which He was called to pronounce, is a perilous assertion.” Of course, we humans not only are subject to ignorance, but also commit errors. Part of the wonder of the incarnation is that although Jesus’s humanity involved his not knowing certain things, he was aware of this limitation and did not venture assertions on those matters. We must be careful to avoid the assumption that his humanity involved all of our shortcomings. Rather, as Leonard Hodgson has observed, “it is Christ who is the one perfect man, and we must measure our manhood by the standard of His.”
We must note also the “human religious life” of Jesus. While that may sound strange and perhaps even a bit blasphemous to some, it is nonetheless accurate. He attended worship in the synagogue, and did so on a regular or habitual basis (Luke 4:16). His prayer life was a clear indication of human dependence upon the Father. Jesus prayed regularly. At times he prayed at great length and with great intensity, as in the garden of Gethsemane. Before the important step of choosing his twelve disciples, Jesus prayed all night (Luke 6:12). Jesus felt himself dependent upon the Father for guidance, for strength, and for preservation from evil.
Further, we note that Jesus used of himself terminology denoting humanity. When tempted by Satan, Jesus replies, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). Jesus is applying this quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3 to himself. A clearer statement is found in John 8:40, where Jesus says to the Jews, “You are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things.” Others also use such language in reference to Jesus. In his Pentecost sermon Peter says, “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22). Paul, in his argument regarding original sin, compares Jesus and Adam and uses the expression “one man” of Jesus three times (Rom. 5:15, 17, 19). We find a similar thought and expression in 1 Corinthians 15:21, 47–49. In 1 Timothy 2:5 Paul emphasizes the practical significance of Jesus’s humanity: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.”
Scripture also refers to Christ’s taking on flesh, that is, becoming human. Paul says Jesus “appeared in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16). John said, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). John was particularly emphatic on this matter in his first letter, one of the purposes of which was to combat a heresy that denied that Jesus had been genuinely human: “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2–3). In these cases, it is apparent that “flesh” is used in the basic sense of physical nature. The same idea is found in Hebrews 10:5: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.” Paul expresses the same thought in more implicit fashion in Galatians 4:4: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.”
It is apparent, then, that for the disciples and the authors of the New Testament books, there was no question about Jesus’s humanity. The point was not really argued, for it was scarcely disputed (with the exception of the situation to which 1 John was addressed). It was simply assumed. Those closest to Jesus, who lived with him every day, regarded him as being as fully human as themselves. They were able to verify for themselves that he was human; and when, on one occasion after Jesus’s resurrection, there was some question whether he might be a spirit, he invited them to ascertain the genuineness of his humanity for themselves: “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). He did everything they did, except sin and pray for forgiveness. He ate with them, he bled, he slept, he cried. If Jesus was not human, then surely no one ever has been.
Early Heresies regarding the Humanity of Jesus
Early in the life of the church, however, there came several departures from the understanding of Jesus as fully human. These heresies forced the church to think through thoroughly and enunciate carefully its understanding of this matter.
Docetism
We see such a denial of the reality of Jesus’s humanity already in the situation John’s first letter vigorously opposed. In addition to a specific group of Christians known as Docetists, a basic denial of Jesus’s humanity permeated many other movements within Christianity, including Gnosticism and Marcionism. In many ways, it was the first full-fledged heresy, with the possible exception of the Judaizing legalism Paul had to combat in Galatia. Whereas Ebionism denied the actuality of the deity of Christ, Docetism denied his humanity.
Docetism is in essence a Christology heavily influenced by basic Greek assumptions of both the Platonic and Aristotelian varieties. Plato taught the idea of gradations of reality. Spirit or mind or thought is the highest. Matter or the material is less real. With this distinction of ontological gradations of reality, there came to be ethical gradations as well. Thus, matter came to be thought of as morally bad. Aristotle emphasized the idea of divine impassibility, according to which God cannot change, suffer, or even be affected by anything that happens in the world. While these two streams of thought have significant differences, both maintain that the visible, physical, material world is somehow inherently evil. Both emphasize God’s transcendence and absolute difference from and independence of the material world.
Docetism takes its name from the Greek verb δοκέω (dokeō), which means “to seem or appear.” Docetism’s central thesis is that Jesus only seemed to be human. God could not really have become material, since all matter is evil, and he is perfectly pure and holy. The transcendent God could not possibly have united with such a corrupting influence. Being impassible and unchangeable, God could not have undergone the modifications in his nature that would necessarily have occurred with a genuine incarnation. He could not have exposed himself to the experiences of human life. Jesus’s humanity, his physical nature, was simply an illusion, not a reality. Jesus was more like a ghost, an apparition, than a human being.
Like the Ebionites, the Docetists had difficulty with the idea of the virgin birth, but at a different point. The Docetists had no problem with the belief that Mary was a virgin; it was the belief that Jesus had been born to her which was unacceptable to them. For if Mary had truly borne Jesus, as other mothers do, she would have contributed something material to him, and that would have been a perversion of the moral goodness of deity. Consequently, Docetism thought more in terms of a transmission through Mary than a birth to her. Jesus merely passed through her, like water passing through a tube. She was only a vehicle, contributing nothing.
This particular Christology resolved the tension in the idea that deity and humanity were united in one person. It did so by saying that while the deity was real and complete, the humanity was only appearance. But the church recognized that this solution had been achieved at too great a price, the loss of Jesus’s humanity and thus of any real connection between him and us. Ignatius and Irenaeus attacked the various forms of Docetism, while Tertullian gave particular attention to the teachings of Marcion, which included docetic elements. It is difficult today to find pure instances of Docetism, although docetic tendencies occur in varied schemes of thought.
Apollinarianism
Docetism is a denial of the reality of Jesus’s humanity. Apollinarianism, by contrast, is a truncation of Jesus’s humanity. Jesus took on genuine but not complete human nature.
Apollinarianism is an example of taking a good thing too far. Apollinarius was a close friend and associate of Athanasius, the leading champion of orthodox Christology against Arianism at the Council of Nicea. As so often happens, however, the reaction against heresy became an overreaction. Apollinarius was very concerned to maintain the unity of the Son, Jesus Christ. Now if Jesus, reasoned Apollinarius, had two complete natures, he must have had a human νοῦς (nous—soul, mind, reason) as well as a divine νοῦς. Apollinarius thought this duality absurd. So he constructed a Christology based upon an extremely narrow reading of John 1:14 (“the Word became flesh”; i.e., flesh was the only aspect of human nature involved). According to Apollinarius, Jesus was a compound unity; part of the composite (some elements of Jesus) was human, the rest divine. What he (the Word) took was not the whole of humanity, but only flesh, that is, the body. This flesh could not, however, be animated by itself. There had to be a “spark of life” animating it. This was the divine Logos; it took the place of the human soul. Thus Jesus was human physically, but not psychologically. He had a human body, but not a human soul. His soul was divine.
Therefore, Jesus, although human, was a bit different from other human beings, for he lacked something they have (a human νοῦς). Thus in him there was no possibility of any contradiction between the human and the divine. There was only one center of consciousness, and it was divine. Jesus did not have a human will. Consequently, he could not sin, for his person was fully controlled by his divine soul. Loraine Boettner draws the analogy of a human mind implanted into the body of a lion; the resulting being is governed, not by lion or animal psychology, but by human psychology. That is a rough parallel to the Apollinarian view of the person of Jesus.
Apollinarius and his followers thought that they had discovered the ideal solution to the orthodox view of Jesus, which appeared to them to be grotesque. As Apollinarius interpreted orthodoxy’s Christology, Jesus consisted of two parts humanity (a body and a soul [this is an oversimplification]) and one part deity (a soul). But 2 + 1 = 3, as everyone knows. Thus, as a two-souled person, Jesus would have been some sort of freak, for we have only one soul and one body (1 + 1 = 2). As Apollinarius saw his own view, Jesus was a composite of one part humanity (a body) and one part deity (a soul). Since 1 + 1 = 2, there was nothing bizarre about him. The divine soul simply took the place occupied by the human soul in ordinary human beings. As orthodoxy saw its own Christology, however, Jesus did in fact consist of two parts humanity (a body and a soul) and one part deity (a soul), but the resulting formula is 2 + 1 = 2. The orthodox felt constrained to accept this paradox as a divine truth beyond their human capacity to understand. The underlying idea is that Jesus lacked nothing of humanity, which means that he had a human soul as well as a divine soul, but that fact did not make him a double or divided personality.
Apollinarianism proved to be an ingenious but unacceptable solution to the problem. For since the divine element in Jesus not only was ontologically superior to the human element, but also constituted the more important part of his person (the soul rather than the body), the divine was doubly superior. Thus, the dual nature of Jesus tended to become one nature in practice, the divine swallowing up the human. The church concluded that while not as thoroughgoing a denial of the humanity of Jesus as Docetism, Apollinarianism had the same practical effect. The church’s theologians challenged the assumption that the human and the divine, as two complete entities, cannot combine in such a way as to form a real unity. They noted that if, as Apollinarius claimed, Christ lacked the most characteristic part of humanity (human will, reason, mind), it hardly seemed correct to call him human at all. And specifically, they concluded that the Apollinarian rejection of the belief that Jesus took on the psychological components of human nature clashed with the accounts in the Gospels. Consequently, the Apollinarian doctrine was condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
Modern Depreciations of the Humanity of Jesus
We noted earlier that outright theoretical denials of Jesus’s humanity tend to be quite rare in our time. In fact, Donald Baillie refers to “the end of Docetism.” There are, however, Christologies that, in one way or another, minimize the significance of the humanity of Jesus.
Karl Barth
As developed in his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth’s Christology is related to his view of revelation as well as to his Kierkegaardian understanding of the role of history for faith. Kierkegaard maintained that from the standpoint of Christian faith, it is believers, not eyewitnesses, who are Jesus’s real contemporaries. Thus, there was no advantage in being an eyewitness to what Jesus did and said. Kierkegaard spoke of the “divine incognito,” meaning that the deity of Christ was thoroughly hidden in the humanity. As a result, observation and even detailed description of the man Jesus and what he did and said yield no revelation of his deity.
Barth fully grants the humanity of Jesus, though he sees nothing remarkable about it. He observes that it is difficult to get historical information about Jesus, and even when we do, it has no real significance for faith: “Jesus Christ in fact is also the Rabbi of Nazareth, historically so difficult to get information about, and when it is got, one whose activity is so easily a little commonplace alongside more than one other founder of a religion and even alongside many later representatives of His own ‘religion.’ ” To Barth, the human life of Jesus, what he both said and did, is not very revealing of the nature of God. Indeed, the information we obtain about Jesus by the use of the historical method serves more to conceal than to reveal his deity. This is, of course, consistent with Barth’s view of revelation, according to which the events reported in Scripture are not revelatory per se. Each event is revelatory only when God manifests himself in an encounter with someone who is reading or hearing about it. The events and the words recording them are the vehicle by which revelation occurs; they are not objective revelation.
According to Barth, then, even if we were to ascertain correctly everything Jesus said and did, we would not thereby know God. Some popular forms of apologetics attempt to argue from Jesus’s miracles, conduct, and unusual teachings that he must have been God. These items are set forth as indisputable proofs of his deity, if one will but examine the evidence. In Barth’s view, however, even if a complete chronicle of Jesus’s life could be constructed, it would be more opaque than transparent. Evidence of this appeared within Jesus’s own lifetime. Many of those who saw what he did and who heard what he said were not thereby convinced of his deity. Some were merely amazed that he, the son of Joseph the carpenter, could speak as he did. Some acknowledged that what he did was supernatural, but they did not meet God through what they observed. On the contrary, they concluded that what Jesus did, he did by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of the demons. Flesh and blood did not reveal to Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God; rather, it was the Father in heaven who convicted Peter of this truth. And so it must also be with us. We cannot know God through knowledge of the Jesus of history.
Rudolf Bultmann
With regard to the significance of the history of the earthly Jesus for faith, the thought of Rudolf Bultmann is even more radical than that of Barth. Following the lead of Martin Kähler, Bultmann divides the history of Jesus into Historie (the actual events of his life) and Geschichte (significant history, i.e., the impact Christ made upon believers). Bultmann believes that we have very little chance of getting back to the Historie through the use of the normal methods of historiography. That does not really matter, however, for faith is not primarily concerned with either cosmology, the nature of things, or with history in the usual sense of what actually happened. Faith is not built upon a chronicle of events, but upon the record of the early believers’ preaching, the expression of their creed.
Bultmann’s Christology, therefore, does not focus on an objective set of facts about Jesus, but on his existential significance. The crucial matter is what he does to us, how he transforms our lives. Thus, for example, the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion is not that a man, Jesus of Nazareth, was put to death on a cross outside Jerusalem. It is rather to be found in Galatians 6:14—“the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” The question faith asks is not whether the execution of Jesus actually took place, but whether we have crucified our old nature, its lusts and earthbound striving for security. Similarly, the real significance of the resurrection has to do with us, not the historical Jesus. The question is not whether Jesus came to life again, but whether we have been resurrected—lifted from our old, self-centered life to an openness in faith to the future.
The views of Barth and Bultmann have characteristic features that distinguish them from each other. But both agree that the historical facts of the earthly life of the man Jesus are not significant for faith. Then what is significant or determinative for faith? Barth says it is the supernatural revelation; Bultmann says it is the existential content of the preaching of the early church.
We should note that Barth’s Christology suffers at this point from the same difficulties as does his doctrine of revelation. The basic criticisms are well known and were summarized in an earlier chapter of this work. In Barth’s Christology there are, in terms of accessibility and objectivity, problems concerning our knowledge and experience of Christ’s deity. Further, the force of the statement “God became a human” is severely diminished.
In the case of Bultmann, there is a separation of Historie and Geschichte that scarcely seems justified on biblical grounds. Paul’s statements connecting the fact and impact of Christ’s resurrection are especially pointed (1 Cor. 15:12–19). And both Bultmann and Barth appear to disregard Jesus’s post-resurrection statements calling direct attention to his humanity (Luke 24:36–43; John 20:24–29).
A different type of concern has been expressed by some Latin American evangelical theologians. From their perspective, it appears that even traditional orthodox theology has concerned itself too much with philosophical issues, thus emphasizing the deity of Christ. The result, in their judgment, has been a depreciation of the historical considerations and the humanity of Jesus, thus removing the dogma too far from the social problems the church must wrestle with.
The Sinlessness of Jesus
One further important issue concerning Jesus’s humanity is the question of whether he sinned or, indeed, whether he could have sinned. In both didactic passages and narrative materials, the Bible is quite clear that he did not sin.
Among didactic or directly declaratory passages, the writer to the Hebrews says that Jesus “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (4:15). Jesus is described as “a high priest [who] truly meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens” (7:26), and as “unblemished” (9:14). Peter, who of course knew Jesus well, declared him to be “the Holy One of God” (John 6:69), and taught that Jesus “committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth” (1 Pet. 2:22). John said, “In him is no sin” (1 John 3:5). Paul also affirmed that Christ “had no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21).
Jesus himself both explicitly and implicitly claimed to be righteous. He asked his hearers, “Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?” (John 8:46); no one replied. He also maintained, “I always do what pleases him [who sent me]” (John 8:29). Again, “I have kept my Father’s commands” (John 15:10). He taught his disciples to confess their sins and ask for forgiveness, but there is no report of his ever confessing sin and asking forgiveness on his own behalf. Although he went to the temple, we have no record of his ever offering sacrifice for himself and his sins. Other than blasphemy, no charge of sin was brought against him; and, of course, if he was God, then what he did (e.g., his declaring sins to be forgiven) was not blasphemy. While not absolute proof of Jesus’s sinlessness, there are ample testimonies of his innocence of the charges for which he was crucified. Pilate’s wife warned, “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man” (Matt. 27:19); the thief on the cross said, “This man has done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:41); and even Judas said, “I have sinned … for I have betrayed innocent blood” (Matt. 27:4).
Jesus’s sinlessness is confirmed by the narratives in the Gospels. There are reports of temptation, but none of sin. Nothing reported of him is in conflict with God’s revealed law of right and wrong; everything he did was in conjunction with the Father. Thus, on the basis of both direct affirmation and silence on certain points, we must conclude that the Bible uniformly witnesses to the sinlessness of Jesus.
One problem arises from this consideration, however. Was Jesus fully human if he never sinned? Or to put it another way, was the humanity of Jesus, if free from all sin of nature and of active performance, the same as our humanity? For some this seems to be a serious problem. For to be human, by their definition, is to be tempted and to sin. Does not sinlessness then take Jesus completely out of our class of humanity? This question casts doubt on the genuineness of the temptations of Jesus.
- E. Taylor has stated the case directly and clearly: “If a man does not commit certain transgressions … it must be because he never felt the appeal of them.” But is this really so? The underlying assumption seems to be that if something is possible, it must become actual, and that, conversely, something that never occurs or never becomes actual must not really have been possible. Yet we have the statement of the writer of the letter to the Hebrews that Jesus was indeed tempted in every respect as we are (4:15). Beyond that, the descriptions of Jesus’s temptations indicate great intensity. For example, think of his agony in Gethsemane when he struggled to do the Father’s will (Luke 22:44).
But could Jesus have sinned? Scripture tells us that God does no evil and cannot be tempted (James 1:13). Was it really possible, then, for Jesus, inasmuch as he is God, to sin? And if not, was his temptation genuine? Here we are encountering one of the great mysteries of the faith, Jesus’s two natures, which will be more closely examined in the next chapter. Nonetheless, it is fitting for us to point out here that while he could have sinned, it was certain that he would not. There were genuine struggles and temptations, but the outcome was always certain.
Does a person who does not succumb to temptation really feel it, or does that person not, as Taylor has contended? Leon Morris argues that the reverse of Taylor’s contention is true. The person who resists knows the full force of temptation. Sinlessness points to a more intense rather than less intense temptation. “The man who yields to a particular temptation has not felt its full power. He has given in while the temptation has yet something in reserve. Only the man who does not yield to a temptation, who, as regards that particular temptation, is sinless, knows the full extent of that temptation.”
One might have questions about some points of Morris’s argument. For example, “Is the strength of temptation measured by some objective standard or by its subjective effect?” “Is it not possible that someone who has yielded to temptation may have yielded at the point of its maximum force?” But the argument that he is making is nonetheless valid. One simply cannot conclude that where sin has not been committed, temptation has not been experienced; the contrary may very well be true.
But the question remains, “Is a person who does not sin truly human?” If we say no, we are maintaining that sin is part of the essence of human nature. Such a view must be considered a serious heresy by anyone who believes that the human has been created by God, since God would then be the cause of sin, the creator of a nature that is essentially evil. Inasmuch as we hold that, on the contrary, sin is not part of the essence of human nature, instead of asking, “Is Jesus as human as we are?” we might better ask, “Are we as human as Jesus?” For the type of human nature that each of us possesses is not pure human nature. The true humanity created by God has in our case been corrupted and spoiled. There have been only three pure human beings: Adam and Eve (before the fall), and Jesus. All the rest of us are but broken, corrupted versions of humanity. Jesus is not only as human as we are; he is more human. Our humanity is not a standard by which we are to measure his. His humanity, true and unadulterated, is the standard by which we are to be measured.
Implications of the Humanity of Jesus
The doctrine of the full humanity of Jesus has great significance for Christian faith and theology:
- The atoning death of Jesus can truly avail for us. It was not some outsider to the human race who died on the cross. He was one of us, and thus could truly offer a sacrifice on our behalf. Just like the Old Testament priest, Jesus was a human who offered a sacrifice on behalf of his fellows.
- Jesus can truly sympathize with and intercede for us. He has experienced all that we might undergo. When we are hungry, weary, lonely, he fully understands, for he has gone through it all himself (Heb. 4:15).
- Jesus manifests the true nature of humanity. While we are sometimes inclined to draw our conclusions as to what humanity is from an inductive examination of ourselves and those around us, these are but imperfect instances of humanity. Jesus has not only told us what perfect humanity is; he has exhibited it.
- Jesus can be our example. He is not some celestial superstar but one who has lived where we live. We can therefore look to him as a model of the Christian life. The biblical standards for human behavior, which seem to us to be so hard to attain, are seen in him to be within human possibility. Of course, there must be full dependence upon the grace of God. The fact that Jesus found it necessary to pray and depend upon the Father is indication that we must be similarly reliant upon him.
- Human nature is good. When we tend toward asceticism—regarding human nature, and particularly physical nature, as somehow inherently evil or at least inferior to the spiritual and immaterial—the fact that Jesus took upon himself our full human nature is a reminder that to be human is not evil; it is good.
- God is not totally transcendent. He is not so far removed from the human race. If he could actually live among us at one time as a real human person, it is not surprising that he can and does act within the human realm today as well.
With John we rejoice that the incarnation was real and complete: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
33
The Unity of the Person of Christ
Chapter Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
- Describe the significance of the unity of two natures, divine and human, in one person, Jesus, and the complexities involved with this unity.
- Demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of the biblical material related to the unity of the person of Jesus Christ.
- Identify and explain the view that the natures, divine and human, were distinct (Nestorianism), and the view that at the point that the incarnation occurred, only one nature existed (Eutychianism).
- Recognize and describe four other attempts to explain the person of Jesus Christ.
- Express a full understanding of the doctrine of two natures in the one person, Jesus Christ, and the relevance it has for Christian theology.
Chapter Summary
The doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ does not end at the point of describing his divine and human natures. The unity of these two natures has extensive implications for the understanding of Christian theology. Through anthropological understanding, humans have attempted to disclaim or overemphasize the view of the unity of Jesus Christ. However, the biblical and historical material supports the view that Christ has both a human and divine nature united in one person. This does not come directly from a human perspective, for humanity cannot comprehend such a joining of two natures.
Study Questions
- How is it possible to bring together a human and divine nature into one person, and why is it necessary?
- How does the Bible explain the unity of the person of Jesus Christ?
- What do Nestorianism and Eutychianism have to say about the person of Jesus Christ, and how are they different from each other?
- How has Philippians 2:7 been misused concerning the person of Jesus Christ, and how would you respond to that interpretation?
- What elements are necessary for understanding the doctrine of two natures in one person?
Outline
The Importance and Difficulty of the Issue
Other Attempts to Solve the Problem
The Doctrine of Dynamic Incarnation
Basic Tenets of the Doctrine of Two Natures in One Person
The Importance and Difficulty of the Issue
Having concluded that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, we still face a large issue: the relationship between these two natures in the one person, Jesus. This is one of the most difficult of all theological problems, ranking with the Trinity and the relationship of human free will and divine sovereignty. It is also an issue of the greatest importance. We have already explained that Christology in general is important because the incarnation involved a bridging of the metaphysical, moral, and spiritual gap between God and the human race. The bridging of this gap depended upon the unity of deity and humanity within Jesus Christ. For if Jesus was both God and a human but the two natures were not united, then, although smaller, the gap remains. The separation of God and the human race is still a difficulty that has not been overcome. If the redemption accomplished on the cross is to avail for humankind, it must be the work of the human Jesus. But if it is to have the infinite value necessary to atone for the sins of all human beings in relationship to an infinite and perfectly holy God, then it must be the work of the divine Christ as well. If the death of the Savior is not the work of a unified God-man, it will be deficient at one point or the other.
The doctrine of the unification of divine and human within Jesus is difficult to comprehend because it posits the combination of two natures that by definition have contradictory attributes. As deity, Christ is infinite in knowledge, power, and presence. If he is God, he must know all things. He can do all things that are proper objects of his power. He can be everywhere at once. But, on the other hand, if he was a human, he was limited in knowledge. He could not do everything. And he certainly was limited to being in one place at a time.
The issue is further complicated by the relative paucity of biblical material with which to work. We have in the Bible no direct statements about the relationship of the two natures. What we must do is draw inferences from Jesus’s self-concept, his actions, and various didactic statements about him.
In view of what we have said, it will be necessary to work with particular care and thoroughness. We will have to examine very meticulously the statements that we do have, and note the various ways different theologians and schools of thought have sought to deal with the issue. Here theology’s historical laboratory will be of particular significance.
The Biblical Material
We begin by noting the absence of any references to duality in Jesus’s thought, action, and purpose. There are, by contrast, indications of multiplicity within the Godhead as a whole, for example, in Genesis 1:26, “Then God said [singular], ‘Let us make [plural] mankind in our [plural] image.’ ” Similar references, without a shift in number, are found in Genesis 3:22 and 11:7. There are instances of one member of the Trinity addressing another in Psalms 2:7 and 40:7–8, as well as Jesus’s prayers to the Father. Yet Jesus always spoke of himself in the singular: this is particularly notable in the prayer in John 17, where Jesus says that he and the Father are one (vv. 21–22), yet makes no reference to any type of complexity within himself.
There are references in Scripture that allude to both the deity and humanity of Jesus, yet clearly refer to a single subject. Among these are John 1:14 (“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, … full of grace and truth”); Galatians 4:4 (“God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law”); and 1 Timothy 3:16 (“He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory”). The last text is particularly significant, for it refers to both Jesus’s earthly incarnation and his presence in heaven before and after that.
There are other references that focus upon the work of Jesus in such a way as to make it clear that it is the function not of either the human or the divine exclusively, but of one unified subject. For example, Paul says of the atoning work of Christ that it unites Jew and Gentile and “in one body [reconciles] both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit” (Eph. 2:16–18). And in reference to the work of Christ, John says, “But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1–2). This work of Jesus, which assumes both his humanity (4:2) and deity (4:15; 5:5), is the work of one person, who is described in the same epistle as the Son whom the Father has sent as the Savior of the world (4:14).
Further, several passages in which Jesus is designated by one of his titles are highly revealing. For example, we have situations in Scripture where a divine title is used in a reference to Jesus’s human activity. Paul says, “None of the rulers of this age understood it [the secret and hidden wisdom of God], for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). In Colossians 1:13–14, Paul writes, “For he [the Father] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Here the kingly status of the Son of God is juxtaposed with the redemptive work of his bodily crucifixion and resurrection. Conversely, the title “Son of Man,” which Jesus often used of himself during his earthly ministry, appears in passages pointing to his heavenly status; for instance, in John 3:13, “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.” Another reference of the same type is John 6:62: “What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before?” Nothing in any of these references contradicts the position that the one person, Jesus Christ, was both an earthly human and a preexistent divine being who became incarnate. Nor is there any suggestion that these two natures took turns directing his activity.
Early Misunderstandings
Reflection upon the relationship between the two natures arose comparatively late in church history. Logically prior were the discussions about the genuineness and completeness of the two natures. Once the church had settled these questions, at the Councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381), it was appropriate to inquire into the precise relationship between the two natures. In effect, the matter at issue was, “What is really meant by declaring that Jesus was fully God and fully human?” In the process of suggesting and examining possible answers, the church rejected some of them as inadequate.
Nestorianism
One of the answers was offered by Nestorius and those who followed his teachings. Nestorianism is particularly difficult to understand and to evaluate. One reason is that this movement arose in a period of intense political rivalry in the church. Consequently, it is not always clear whether the church rejected a view because of its ideas or because of political considerations. Further, Nestorius’s language was somewhat ambiguous and inconsistent. It is clear that the view condemned by the church as Nestorian fell short of the full orthodox position, and was probably held by some of Nestorius’s followers. It is the judgment of leading scholars, however, that Nestorius himself was not a “Nestorian,” but that some poorly chosen terminology, coupled with the opposition of an aggressive opponent, led to an unjust condemnation of his views.
Two main types of Christology had emerged in the fourth century—the “Word-flesh” and “Word-man” Christologies. The former regarded the Word as the major element in the God-man and the human soul as relatively unimportant. The latter, less sure that the Word occupied a dominant position in the God-man, affirmed that Jesus assumed complete human nature. This difference in views is the ideological background to the Nestorian affair.
Soon after Nestorius was installed as the patriarch of Constantinople in 428, he was obliged to rule upon the suitability of referring to Mary as theotokos (“God-bearing”). Nestorius was reluctant to do this, unless theotokos was accompanied by the term anthropotokos (“human-bearing”). While his ideas were not unique in that time, the choice of some rather unfortunate language caused problems for Nestorius. He observed that God cannot have a mother and certainly no creature could have generated a member of the Godhead. Mary, therefore, did not bear God; she bore a man who was a vehicle for God. God simply could not have been borne for nine months in a mother’s womb, nor been wrapped in baby clothes; he could not have suffered, died, and been buried. Nestorius felt that the term theotokos contained implicitly either the Arian view of the Son as a creature, or the Apollinarian concept of the incompleteness of Jesus’s humanity.
The statement of Nestorius alarmed other theologians, among them Cyril of Alexandria, who was Nestorius’s rival. Eusebius, later bishop of Dorylaeum, upon hearing that Mary was reputed to have borne a mere man, concluded that Nestorius was an adoptionist (i.e., one who believed that the man Jesus became divine at some point in his life after birth, probably at his baptism). From the statements of Nestorius and the reactions to his views came the traditional picture of Nestorianism as a heresy that split the God-man into two distinct persons. It was this heresy that was condemned. Cyril was the leader of the opposition, and at the Council of Ephesus (431) proved his skill in political maneuvering. The papal legates approved the position of the group of bishops dominated by Cyril.
It is virtually impossible to determine exactly what Nestorius’s view was. This is particularly so in light of the twentieth-century discovery of the Book of Heracleides, which Nestorius apparently wrote some twenty years after his condemnation. In this book he professed to agree with the Chalcedonian formulation (two natures united in one person). It is true, however, that he was impatient with the “hypostatic union” Cyril taught, feeling that this concept eliminated the distinctness of the two natures. Nestorius preferred to think in terms of a “conjunction” (συνάφεια—sunapheia) rather than a union (ἕνωσις—henōsis) between the two. Perhaps the best possible summation of Nestorius’s thought is to say that while he did not consciously hold or overtly teach that there was a split in the person of Christ, what he said seemed to imply it.
Eutychianism
Similarly difficult to ascertain is the Christology of Eutychianism. After the Council of Ephesus (431), a document was produced in an attempt to arrive at healing within the church. Actually originating with the Oriental (Antiochene) bishops who had supported Nestorius at Ephesus, this document was sent by John of Antioch to Cyril. Cyril accepted it in 433, although it contained some language favorable to the Nestorian position. Thus, something of a compromise appeared to have been reached.
Some of the right-wing supporters and allies of Cyril felt, however, that he had conceded too much to Nestorianism. The compromise’s strong emphasis upon two natures seemed to them to undermine the unity of the person of Jesus. As a result, the idea that he did not possess two natures, a divine and a human, but only one nature, began to grow in popularity among them. After Cyril’s death in 444, the disaffected group launched an attack upon the teachings of Theodoret, who had probably drafted the compromise document, and who was now the leading theologian of the Antiochene school. Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor, led the opposition to the teaching that Jesus had two natures. Dioscorus believed that the church fathers overwhelmingly supported the idea of but one nature in the person of Jesus and that Cyril had compromised it in a moment of weakness. Whether this was a correct understanding of Cyril’s position or whether he himself had actually espoused the belief that Jesus had only one nature is debatable. In any event, there was a growing insistence upon the “one-nature formula.”
An elderly archimandrite named Eutyches became the focus of the controversy. All who had been displeased with the compromise agreement of 433 and who rejected the idea of two natures in Jesus made Eutyches the symbol of their position. He was denounced at a meeting of the standing Synod of Constantinople. This led to formal discussions culminating in the condemnation and deposition of Eutyches. At this final session Eutyches did not defend himself, but only heard his sentence pronounced.
It is not easy to ascertain exactly Eutyches’s doctrine. At a preliminary examination before the synod, he declared that the Lord Jesus Christ after his birth possessed only one nature, that of God made flesh and become human. Eutyches rejected the idea of two natures as contrary to the Scripture and to the opinions of the fathers. He did, however, subscribe to the virgin birth and affirmed that Christ was simultaneously perfect God and perfect human. His basic contention seems to have been that there were two natures before the incarnation, one after.
Eutyches was apparently not a very precise or clear thinker. Historically, however, his views constituted the foundation of a movement that taught that the humanity of Jesus was so absorbed into the deity as to be virtually eliminated. In effect, Eutychianism was a form of Docetism. There was a variant interpretation of the nature as a fusion of Jesus’s deity and humanity into something quite different, a third substance, a hybrid as it were. It may be that this is what Eutyches himself held, although his thought was confused (at least in the way he expressed it). In 449, a council meeting at Ephesus reinstated Eutyches and declared him orthodox. At the same time, the idea that there were two natures after the incarnation was anathematized. This council has come to be known as the “Robber Synod.”
The Robber Synod had not been held under proper imperial authority, however. The succession of a new emperor sympathetic to the position that Jesus had two natures led to the convening of yet another council, in Chalcedon in 451. This council affirmed the Nicene Creed and issued a statement that was to become the standard for all of Christendom. Regarding the relationship between the two natures, this statement speaks of
one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means removed by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence—not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only-begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of our holy Fathers has handed down to us.
This statement avoids both the heresy of Nestorianism and that of Eutychianism, insisting on both the unity of the person and the integrity and separateness of the two natures. But this only serves to heighten the tension. For what is the precise relationship between the two natures? How can both be maintained without splitting Jesus into two persons, each having a separate and unique set of attributes? And how can we maintain that Jesus is one person, with one center of consciousness, without fusing the two natures into a mixture or hybrid?
We should note that the Chalcedonian conclusion is essentially negative—“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” It tells us what “two natures in one person” does not mean. In a sense, Chalcedon is not the answer; it is the question. We must ask further what is to be understood by the formula.
Other Attempts to Solve the Problem
Before we attempt to elucidate the formula “two natures in one person,” we need to note some of the other attempts at understanding this union that have been made since the Council of Chalcedon. Once again, the verdict of history will be helpful to us. Four attempts or strategies are representative: (1) the idea that the man Jesus became God (adoptionism); (2) the idea that the divine being, God, took on impersonal humanity rather than an individual human personality (anhypostatic Christology); (3) the idea that the Second Person of the Trinity exchanged his deity for humanity (kenoticism); and (4) the idea that the incarnation was the power of God present in a human being (the doctrine of dynamic incarnation).
Adoptionism
An early and recurrent attempt to solve the problem of “two natures in one person” is adoptionism. Put in its simplest form, this is the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was merely a human during the early years of his life. At some point, however, probably Jesus’s baptism (or perhaps his resurrection), God “adopted” him as his Son. Whether this adoption was an act of pure grace on the part of God, or a promotion in status for which Jesus had qualified by virtue of his personal attributes, it was more a case of a human’s becoming God than of God’s becoming human.
In support of their position, adoptionists concentrate on the scriptural idea that Jesus was begotten by God. He is even referred to as the “only begotten” (μονογενής—monogenēs, John 3:16). When did this “begetting” take place? Adoptionists point out that the writer to the Hebrews twice quotes Psalm 2:7, “You are my son; today I have become your Father,” and applies it to the Son of God, Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:5; 5:5). They note the considerable similarity between this statement and that of the Father at Jesus’s baptism: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). So it is assumed that the Spirit’s descent upon the Son at this point represents the coming of deity upon the man Jesus.
This position gives the human Jesus an independent status. He would simply have lived on as Jesus of Nazareth if the special adoption by God had not occurred. This was more a matter of God’s entering an existent human being than of a true incarnation. Sometimes this event is regarded as unique to the life of Jesus; sometimes it is compared to the adoption of other human beings as children of God.
Adoptionism has made recurrent appearances during the history of Christianity. Those who take seriously the full teaching of Scripture, however, are aware of major obstacles to this view, including the preexistence of Christ, the prebirth narrative, and the virgin birth.
Anhypostatic Christology
Another attempt to clarify the relationship between the two natures might be termed “anhypostatic Christology.” This view insists that the humanity of Jesus was impersonal and had no independent subsistence, that is, the divine Word was not united with an individual human person. Originally, anhypostatic Christology was intended to guard against the Nestorian division of Jesus into two persons and the related belief that Mary was mother of only the human person. It also served to negate adoptionism, which posited that Jesus as a human being with independent existence was elevated to deity. The major point of anhypostatic Christology is that the man Jesus had no subsistence apart from the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. It supports this thesis by denying that Jesus had any individual human personality.
The problem with this position is that to think of Jesus as not being a specific human individual suggests that the divine Word became united with the whole human race or with human nature; taken literally, this idea is absurd. It is true that we occasionally say that Jesus was united with the whole of the human race, but we do so figuratively on the grounds of basic characteristics shared by all its members. We do not have in mind a literal physical uniting with the whole human race. In attempting to avoid one heresy, anhypostatic Christology may fall into another. The insistence that Jesus is personal only in his divine dimension manifestly excludes something vital from his humanity. Denying the individual humanness of Jesus intimates that he was predominantly divine. And that smacks of Apollinarianism.
Kenoticism
The modern period has produced one distinctive attempt to solve the problem of the relationship between the two natures. Particularly in the nineteenth century, some propounded that the key to understanding the incarnation is to be found in the expression “[Jesus] made himself nothing” (Phil. 2:7). According to this view, what Jesus emptied himself of was the form of God (μορφὴ θεοῦ—morphē theou, v. 6). The Second Person of the Trinity laid aside his distinctly divine attributes (omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.) and took on human qualities instead. In effect, the incarnation consisted of an exchange of part of the divine nature for human characteristics. His moral qualities, such as love and mercy, were maintained. While this may seem like an act of the Son alone, it actually involved the Father as well. The Father, in sending forth his Son, was like a father who sends his son to the mission field. A part of him went forth as well.
What we have here is a parallel in the realm of Christology to the solution offered by modalistic monarchianism to the problem of the Trinity. Jesus is not God and man simultaneously, but successively. With respect to certain attributes, he is God, then he is a human, then God again. The solution to the Chalcedonian formula is to maintain that Jesus is God and a human in the same respect, but not at the same time. While this view solves some of the difficulty, it does not account for the evidence we cited earlier to the effect that the biblical writers regarded Jesus as both God and human. Moreover, the indications of an apparent continuing incarnation (see, e.g., 1 Tim. 3:16) militate against the maintenance of this theory, innovative though it may be.
The Doctrine of Dynamic Incarnation
A final attempt to resolve the problem of two natures in one person might be termed the doctrine of dynamic incarnation. This holds that the presence of God in the divine-human Jesus was not in the form of a personal hypostatic union between the Second Person of the Trinity and an individual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, the incarnation should be thought of as the active presence of the power of God within the person Jesus.
This view is akin to dynamic monarchianism. The power of God entered into the man Jesus. Thus, the incarnation was not so much a case of Jesus’s being united with God in some sort of hypostatic union as it was an indwelling in him of the power of God.
A twentieth-century form of this view is found in Donald Baillie’s God Was in Christ. Baillie bases his theology upon 2 Corinthians 5:19: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.” Note that instead of saying, “Christ was God,” this verse emphasizes that “God was in Christ.”
To explain the paradox of the incarnation, Baillie uses the model of God’s indwelling the believer in what is called the paradox of grace. When the believer does the right thing, or makes the right choice, he or she typically says, “It was not I, but God that did it.” In Galatians 2:20 and Philippians 2:12–13 Paul speaks of the internal working of God. Baillie’s statements imply that the incarnation of Jesus is actually an instance, albeit the most complete one, of the paradox of indwelling grace:
This paradox in its fragmentary form in our own Christian lives is a reflection of that perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation on which our whole Christian life depends, and may therefore be our best clue to the understanding of it. In the New Testament we see the man in whom God was incarnate surpassing all other men in refusing to claim anything for Himself independently and ascribing all the goodness to God.
Given this interpretation of the incarnation, the difference between Christ and us is only quantitative, not qualitative. But, it must be noted, this interpretation conflicts with several emphases of Scripture: the fullness (πλήρωμα—plērōma) of God dwelling in Jesus bodily (Col. 2:9); the preexistence of Christ (John 1:18; 8:58); and the uniqueness of his sonship (μονογενής—monogenēs, John 3:16). While the doctrine of dynamic incarnation lessens the tension suggested by the Chalcedonian formula, it encounters difficulty because of its implicit reduction of the deity.
Basic Tenets of the Doctrine of Two Natures in One Person
We have reviewed several attempts to resolve the difficult christological problem of two natures in one person and noted the deficiencies of each. We must, then, present an alternative statement. What are the essential principles of the doctrine of the incarnation, and how are they to be understood? Several crucial points will help us understand this great mystery.
- The incarnation was more an addition of human attributes than a loss of divine attributes. Philippians 2:6–7 is often conceived of as meaning that Jesus emptied himself of some of his divine attributes, perhaps even his deity itself. According to this interpretation, he became human by becoming something less than God. Part of his divinity was surrendered and displaced by human qualities. The incarnation, then, is more a subtraction from his divine nature than an addition to it.
In our interpretation of Philippians 2:6–7, however, what Jesus emptied himself of was not the divine μορφή, the nature of God. At no point does this passage say that he ceased to possess the divine nature. This becomes clearer when we take Colossians 2:9 into account: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” The kenosis of Philippians 2:7 must be understood in the light of the plērōma of Colossians 2:9. What does it mean, then, to say that Jesus “made himself nothing”? Some have suggested that he emptied himself by pouring his divinity into his humanity as one pours the contents of one cup into another. This, however, fails to identify the vessel from which Jesus poured out his divine nature when he emptied it into his humanity.
A better approach to Philippians 2:6–7 is to think of the phrase “taking the very nature of a servant” as a circumstantial explanation of the kenosis. Since λαβών (labōn) is an aorist participle adverbial in function, we would render the first part of verse 7 “he made himself nothing by taking the very form of a servant.” The participial phrase is an explanation of how Jesus emptied himself, or what he did that constituted kenosis. While the text does not specify of what he emptied himself, it is noteworthy that “the very nature of a servant” contrasts sharply with “equality with God” (v. 6). We conclude that it is equality with God, not the form of God, of which Jesus emptied himself. While he did not cease to be in nature what the Father was, he became functionally subordinated to the Father for the period of his earthly life. Jesus did this for the purposes of revealing God and redeeming humanity. By taking on human nature, he accepted certain limitations upon the functioning of his divine attributes. These limitations were not the result of a loss of divine attributes but of the addition of human attributes.
- The union of the two natures meant that they did not function independently. Jesus did not exercise his deity at times and his humanity at other times. His actions were always those of divinity-humanity. This is the key to understanding the functional limitations the humanity imposed upon the divinity. For example, he still had the power to be everywhere (omnipresence). However, as an incarnate being, he was limited in the exercise of that power by possession of a human body. Similarly, he was still omniscient, but he possessed and exercised knowledge in connection with a human organism that grew gradually in terms of consciousness, whether of the physical environment or eternal truths. Thus, only gradually did his limited human psyche become aware of who he was and what he had come to accomplish. Yet this should not be considered a reduction of the power and capacities of the Second Person of the Trinity, but rather a circumstance-induced limitation on the exercise of his power and capacities.
Picture the following analogy. The world’s fastest sprinter is entered in a three-legged race, where he must run with one of his legs tied to a leg of a partner. Although his physical capacity is not diminished, the conditions under which he exercises it are severely circumscribed. Even if his partner in the race is the world’s second fastest sprinter, their time will be much slower than if they competed separately; for that matter it will be slower than the time of most other human beings running unencumbered. Or think of the world’s greatest boxer fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Or a softball game in which parents, competing with their children, reverse their usual batting stance (i.e., right-handed batters bat left-handed, and left-handed batters bat right-handed). In each of these cases, ability is not in essence diminished, but the conditions imposed on its exercise limit actual performance.
This is the situation of the incarnate Christ. Just as the runner or the boxer could unloose the tie, but chooses to restrict himself for the duration of the event, so Christ’s incarnation was a voluntary, self-chosen limitation. He did not have to take on humanity, but he chose to do so for the period of the incarnation. During that time his deity always functioned in conjunction with his humanity.
- In thinking about the incarnation, we must begin not with the traditional conceptions of humanity and deity, but with the recognition that the two are most fully known in Jesus Christ. We sometimes approach the incarnation with an antecedent assumption that it is virtually impossible. We know what humanity is and what deity is, and they are, of course, by definition incompatible. They are, respectively, the finite and the infinite. But this is to begin in the wrong place—with a conception of humanity drawn from our knowledge of existential rather than essential humanity. Our understanding of human nature has been formed by an inductive investigation of both ourselves and other humans as we find them about us. But none of us is humanity as God intended it to be or as it came from his hand. Humanity was spoiled and corrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Consequently, we are not true human beings, but impaired, broken-down vestiges of essential humanity, and it is difficult to imagine this kind of humanity united with deity. But when we say that in the incarnation Jesus took on humanity, we are not talking about this kind of humanity. For Jesus’s humanity was not the humanity of sinful human beings, but that possessed by Adam and Eve from their creation and before their fall. He was not merely as human as we are; he was more human than we are. His was, spiritually, the type of humanity that we will possess when we are glorified. His humanity was certainly more compatible with deity than is the type of humanity that we now observe. We should define humanity, not by integrating our present empirical observations, but by examining the human nature of Jesus, for he most fully reveals the true nature of humanity.
Jesus Christ is also our best source for knowledge of deity. We assume that we know what God is really like. But it is in Jesus that God is most fully revealed and known. As John said, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). Thus, our picture of what deity is like comes primarily through the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
We sometimes assume that divine nature simply cannot be assimilated with human nature, but that assumption is based on the Greek conception of the impassibility of deity rather than upon the Bible. If, however, we begin with the reality of the incarnation in Jesus Christ, we not only see better what the two natures are like, but recognize that whatever they are, they are not incompatible, for they once did coexist in one person.
In connection with the possibility of unity between deity and humanity, we need to bear in mind the distinctive picture of humanity given us in the Bible. As the image of God, the human is already the creature most like God. The assumption that humans are so dissimilar from God that the two cannot coexist in one person is probably based upon some other model of human nature. It may result from thinking of the human as basically an animal that has evolved from lower forms of life. We know from the Bible, however, that God chose to become incarnate in a creature very much like himself. It is quite possible that part of God’s purpose in making humanity in his own image was to facilitate the incarnation that would someday take place.
- It is important to think of the initiative of the incarnation as coming from above, as it were, rather than from below. Part of our problem in understanding the incarnation may come from the fact that we view it from the human perspective. From this standpoint, incarnation seems very unlikely, perhaps even impossible. The difficulty lies in the fact that we are in effect asking ourselves how a human being could ever be God, as if it were a matter of a human being’s becoming God or somehow adding deity to one’s humanity. We are keenly aware of our own limits, and know how hard or even impossible it would be to go beyond them, particularly to the extent of deification. For God to become a human (or, more correctly, to add humanity to his deity), however, is not impossible. He is unlimited and therefore able to condescend to the lesser, whereas the lesser cannot ascend to the greater or higher. (It is possible for us as human beings to do many things a cat or a dog does; for instance, to imitate its sounds or behavior. To be sure, we do not actually take on feline or canine nature, and there are certain limitations, such as a less acute sense of sight or smell; but it is still much easier for us to imitate animals than for them to imitate human behavior.) The fact that a human did not ascend to divinity, nor did God elevate a human to divinity, but, rather, God condescended to take on humanity, facilitates our ability to conceive of the incarnation and also effectively excludes adoptionism. It will be helpful to keep in mind here that the heavenly Second Person of the Trinity antedated the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, there was no such being as the earthly Jesus of Nazareth prior to the moment he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
- It is also helpful to think of Jesus as a very complex person. We know some people who have straightforward personalities. One comes to know them fairly quickly, and they may therefore be quite predictable. Other persons have much more complex personalities. They may have a wider range of experience, a more varied educational background, or a more complex emotional makeup. When we think we know them quite well, another facet of their personalities appears that we did not previously know existed. Now if we imagine complexity expanded to an infinite degree, then we have a bit of a glimpse into the “personality of Jesus,” as it were, his two natures in one person. For Jesus’s personality included the qualities and attributes that constitute deity. There were within his person dimensions of experience, knowledge, and love not found in human beings. This point serves to remind us that the person of Jesus was not simply an amalgam of human and divine qualities merged into some sort of tertium quid. Rather, his was a personality that in addition to the characteristics of divine nature had all the qualities or attributes of perfect, sinless human nature as well.
We have noted several dimensions of biblical truth that will help us better understand the incarnation. It has sometimes been said that there are only seven basic jokes, and every joke is merely a variation on one of them. A similar statement can be made about heresies regarding the person of Christ. There are basically six, all of which appeared within the first four Christian centuries. They either deny the genuineness (Ebionism) or the completeness (Arianism) of Jesus’s deity, deny the genuineness (Docetism) or the completeness (Apollinarianism) of his humanity, divide his person (Nestorianism), or confuse his natures (Eutychianism). All departures from the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ are simply variations of one of these heresies. While we may have difficulty specifying exactly the content of the doctrine of incarnation, full fidelity to teaching of Scripture will carefully avoid each of these distortions.
34
The Virgin Birth
Chapter Objectives
Following this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
- Illustrate the significance of the virgin birth for developing an understanding of the supernatural, Jesus Christ, and Christian theology as a whole.
- Identify and describe the biblical and historical evidence, specifically from the early church, for the virgin birth.
- Recognize and understand five objections to the virgin birth.
- Refute five objections to the virgin birth, using biblical and rational evidence.
- Formulate a theological doctrine about the virgin birth based on the evidence presented, both pro and con.
Chapter Summary
After the resurrection, the virgin birth is the most contested event in the life of Jesus Christ. Near the turn of the twentieth century, the virgin birth became an issue that tested people’s belief in the supernatural. While the terminology “virginal conception” more accurately explains the meaning of a conception that is supernatural than does “virgin birth,” the latter has become the most common expression in referring to this doctrine. The two biblical references that discuss the virgin birth, Matthew 1 and Luke 1, satisfy Scripture’s consistency in the belief of the virgin birth. As a key element of Christology, belief in the virgin birth is necessary for Christian theology.
Study Questions
- Why is the virgin birth important to Christian theology?
- What evidence is found for belief in the virgin birth from the early church?
- What objections have been raised against the virgin birth, and how would you respond to them?
- How would you defend the belief in the virgin birth, using Matthew 1 and Luke 1?
- How does belief in the virgin birth contribute to Christology?
Outline
Objections to the Virgin Birth
Unexpected Ignorance regarding the Virgin Birth
The Possibility of the Virgin Birth Precluding Full Humanity
Incompatibility with the Preexistence of Christ
The Theological Meaning of the Virgin Birth
The Significance of the Issue
Next to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, perhaps the one event of his life that has received the greatest amount of attention is the virgin birth. Certainly, next to the resurrection, it is the most debated and controversial.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the virgin birth was at the forefront of debate between the fundamentalists and modernists. The fundamentalists insisted upon the doctrine as an essential belief. The modernists either rejected it as unessential or untenable, or reinterpreted it in some nonliteral fashion. To the former it was a guarantee of the qualitative uniqueness and deity of Christ, while to the latter it seemed to shift attention from his spiritual reality to a biological issue.
One reason why there was so much emphasis upon this teaching that is mentioned only twice in Scripture is that there were shifting conceptions of various other doctrines. The liberals tended to redefine doctrines without changing the terminology, as John Herman Randall Jr. observed. As a result, subscription to those doctrines was no longer positive proof of orthodoxy. Thus it was no longer possible to assume that what a theologian meant by the “divinity” or “deity” of Christ was a qualitative uniqueness distinguishing him from other humans. W. Robertson Smith, a nineteenth-century Scottish theologian, when accused of denying the divinity of Christ, reportedly said, “How can they accuse me of that? I’ve never denied the divinity of any man, let alone Jesus!” In the face of such views, assent to the doctrine of Jesus’s deity did not necessarily entail the traditional meaning—that Jesus was divine in the same sense and to the same degree as the Father, and in a way that is not true of any other person who has ever lived. Thus, not surprisingly, the deity of Christ does not appear in some lists of the fundamentals of orthodoxy. Instead, the bodily resurrection and the virgin birth are found there. The fundamentalists reasoned that one who could subscribe to the virgin birth probably accepted other evidences of Jesus’s deity, as these are generally less difficult to accept than the virgin birth. That is why one’s position on the virgin birth was asked of candidates for ordination, for it was a relatively quick and efficient way of determining whether they held Christ to be supernatural. In more recent times, the Asian theologian Choan-Seng Song has interpreted Christ’s incarnation to mean that God is at work in every situation of suffering, diminishing the uniqueness of the person Jesus. Thus the virgin birth is still important to the uniqueness of Christ’s incarnation at a specific point in time.
An even larger issue was involved, however. For the virgin birth became a test of one’s position on the miraculous. Anyone who could subscribe to the virgin birth probably could accept the other miracles reported in the Bible. Thus, this became a convenient way of determining one’s attitude toward the supernatural in general. But even beyond that, it was a test of one’s worldview and, specifically, of one’s view of God’s relationship to the world.
As we noted earlier, the liberal or modernist tended to see God as everywhere present and active. God was believed to be at work accomplishing his purposes through natural law and everyday processes rather than in direct and unique fashion. According to the conservative or fundamentalist, on the other hand, God is outside the world, but intervenes miraculously from time to time to perform a special work. The fundamentalist saw the virgin birth as a sign of God’s miraculous working, whereas the liberal saw every birth as a miracle. The virgin birth was, then, a primary battleground between the supernaturalistic and naturalistic views of God’s relationship to the world.
The virgin birth means different things to different theologians. What we are speaking of here is really the “virgin conception.” By this we mean that Jesus’s conception in the womb of Mary was not the result of sexual relationship. Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus’s conception and continued so up to the point of his birth, for Scripture indicates that Joseph did not have sexual intercourse with her until after the birth of Jesus (Matt. 1:25). Mary became pregnant through a supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit upon her, but that does not mean that Jesus was the result of copulation between God and Mary. It also does not mean that there was not a normal birth. Some theologians, particularly Catholics, interpret the virgin birth as meaning that Jesus was not born in normal fashion. In their view, he simply passed through the wall of Mary’s uterus instead of being delivered through the normal birth canal, so that Mary’s hymen was not ruptured. This was a sort of miraculous Caesarean section. According to the related Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, she at no point engaged in sexual intercourse, so that there were no natural sons and daughters born to Joseph and Mary. Certain theologians, for example, Dale Moody, in order to distinguish their interpretation of the virgin birth from that of traditional Catholicism, have proposed the use of the expression “virginal conception” or “miraculous conception” in place of “virgin birth.” However, because of the common usage of the expression “virgin birth,” we will employ it here, with the understanding that our interpretation differs from the traditional Roman Catholic dogma.
There are also disagreements regarding the importance of the virgin birth, even among those who insist that belief in the doctrine must be maintained. Some have argued that the virgin birth was essential to the incarnation. If there had been both a human mother and a human father, Jesus would have been only a man. Others feel that the virgin birth was indispensable to the sinlessness of Christ. Had there been two human parents, Jesus would have inherited a depraved or corrupted human nature in its fullness; there would have been no possibility of sinlessness. Yet others feel that the virgin birth was not essential for either of these considerations, but that it has great value in terms of symbolizing the reality of the incarnation. It is an evidential factor, in much the same way that the other miracles and particularly the resurrection function to certify the supernaturalness of Christ. On this basis, the virgin birth was not necessary ontologically; that is, the virgin birth was not necessary for Jesus to be God. It is, however, necessary epistemologically, that is, in order for us to know that he is God.
On the other hand, some have contended that the doctrine of the virgin birth is dispensable. It could be omitted with no disruption of the essential meaning of Christianity. While few evangelicals take this position actively, it is interesting to note that some evangelical systematic theology texts make little or no mention of the virgin birth in their treatment of Christology. In fact, much of the discussion of the virgin birth has come in separate works that deal at length with the subject.
It will be necessary for us, once we have examined the positive arguments or evidence for the virgin birth, to ask what the real meaning and importance of the doctrine is. Only then will we be able to draw its practical implications.
Evidence for the Virgin Birth
Biblical Evidence
The doctrine of the virgin birth is based on just two explicit biblical references—Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38. There are other passages in the New Testament that some have argued refer to or at least allude to or presuppose the virgin birth, and there is the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, which is cited by Matthew (1:23). But even when these passages are taken into consideration, the number of relevant references is quite few.
We might simply stop at this point and assert that since the Bible affirms the virgin birth not once but twice, that is sufficient proof. Since we believe that the Bible is inspired and authoritative, Matthew 1 and Luke 1 convince us that the virgin birth is fact. However, we must also be mindful that inasmuch as a claim of historical truthfulness is made for the virgin birth, that is, it is represented as an event occurring within time and space, it is in principle capable of being confirmed or falsified by the data of historical research.
We note, first, the basic integrity of the two pertinent passages. Both of the explicit references, and specifically Matthew 1:20–21 and Luke 1:34, are integral parts of the narrative in which they occur; they are not insertions or interpolations. Moreover, Raymond Brown finds that between each of the infancy narratives and the rest of the book in which it appears, there is a continuity in style (e.g., the vocabulary, the general formula of citation) and subject matter.
In addition, it can be argued that the two accounts of Jesus’s birth, although clearly independent of one another, are similar on so many points (including Mary’s virginity) that we must conclude that for those points both draw independently upon a common narrative earlier than either of them; having greater antiquity, it also has a stronger claim to historicity. Brown has compiled a list of eleven points that the accounts in Matthew and Luke have in common. Among the significant items in which they differ, Brown notes Luke’s references to the story of Zechariah, Elizabeth, and the birth of John the Baptist, the census, the shepherds, the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple, and Jesus’s teaching there at age twelve. Matthew, on the other hand, has the story of the Magi’s being guided to the child by the star, the slaughter of the infants by Herod, and the flight into Egypt. That despite this diversity both accounts specifically refer to the virginal conception is a strong hint that for this particular item both depended on a single earlier tradition. An additional point of authentication relates to the Jewish character of these portions of the two Gospels. From the perspective of form criticism, then, the tradition of the virgin birth appeared within the church at an early point in its history, when it was under primarily Jewish, rather than Greek, influence.
Whence did this tradition derive? One answer that has been given is that it arose from extrabiblical, extra-Christian sources, such as myths found in pagan religions and pre-Christian Judaism. We will examine these suggestions a little later (pp. 680–81). We note here, however, that the parallels with other religions are rather superficial and the alleged sources differ from the biblical accounts in very significant ways. Further, there is real doubt whether most of them would have been known or acceptable to early Christians. Thus, this theory must be discarded.
In the past it was common to attribute the tradition to Joseph and Mary, who, after all, would have been the only ones with firsthand knowledge. Thus, Matthew’s account was attributed to Joseph, and Luke’s to Mary. When looked at from the perspective of what is mentioned and what omitted, this hypothesis makes considerable sense. But Brown argues that Joseph, who was apparently dead by the time of Jesus’s public ministry, cannot be considered a source for the tradition. And Mary does not seem to have been close to the disciples during Jesus’s ministry, although she apparently was part of the post-resurrection community. Brown states that while it is not impossible that she was the source of the material in Luke’s infancy narrative, it is most unlikely that she supplied the material for Matthew’s account, since it does not seem to be told from her standpoint. So Brown concludes, “we have no real knowledge that any or all of the infancy material came from a tradition for which there was a corroborating witness.”
Despite Brown’s arguments, it is difficult to accept his conclusion. The argument that Joseph cannot be considered a source of the tradition of the virgin birth because he was already dead by the time of Jesus’s ministry, while an argument from silence, is probably technically correct. He was not a direct source. It does not follow, however, that there is no way in which his personal experiences in connection with Jesus’s birth could have become known to the early community. Did Joseph have no acquaintances in whom he might have confided and who might have eventually become believers and part of the Christian community? And did he and Mary never talk with one another? There also is a too hasty dismissal of the role of Mary. If, as Brown concedes, there is New Testament evidence that she was part of the post-resurrection community (Acts 1:14), is she not a likely source of the tradition?
Nor should we too easily dismiss the possibility that other members of Jesus’s family may have played a role. It has been observed that the Protevangelium of James, supposedly an account of Jesus’s birth written by one of his brothers, is highly folkloric and makes elementary mistakes about matters of temple procedure. But does it follow from the undependability of this apocryphal writing that the actual James, who is conceded by Brown to have survived into the 60s, could not have been a reliable source of an accurate tradition? Brown himself made a cogent suggestion in this regard in an earlier writing:
A family tradition about the manner of Jesus’s conception may have lent support to the theological solution [to the problem of how Jesus could have been free from sin]. While there is no way of proving the existence of such a private tradition, the prominence of Jesus’s relatives in the Jerusalem church—e.g., James, the brother of the Lord—should caution us about the extent to which Christians were free, at least up through the 60s, to invent family traditions about Jesus.
If we exclude the family as the source of the tradition, we have the knotty problem as to where it in fact did come from. We have noted that the hypothesis of an extrabiblical source will not suffice. We therefore conclude that “it is difficult to explain how the idea arose if not from fact.” While it is not necessary for us to establish the exact source of the tradition, Jesus’s family still seems to be a very likely possibility.
Apparently there was an early questioning of Jesus’s legitimacy. Celsus’s anti-Christian polemic (about 177–80) contains a charge that Jesus was the illegitimate son of Mary and a Roman soldier named Panthera, and that Jesus had himself created the story of his virgin birth. That Celsus’s work is believed to be based upon Jewish sources argues for an early tradition of the virgin birth.
Even within the New Testament, however, there are indications of a questioning of Jesus’s legitimacy. In Mark 6:3 Jesus is identified by his fellow townspeople as “Mary’s son” whereas we would expect to find the designation “Joseph’s son.” This is considered by some to be a reference to a tradition that Joseph was not Jesus’s father; their view is fortified by the statement that the townspeople took offense at Jesus. Generally, when a man in those times was being identified, it was in terms of who his father was. A man was identified in terms of who his mother was only if his paternity was uncertain or unknown. Brown argues that the fact that Jesus’s brothers are also mentioned in Mark 6:3 as a sign of his ordinariness militates against understanding the designation “the son of Mary” as evidence that Jesus was regarded as illegitimate, for the legitimacy of his brothers and sisters would thus be called into question as well. Whether or not Brown’s inference is valid, it is apparent that the evidence of the text is not conclusive. The existence of variant readings (e.g., “the son of the carpenter”) is another warning against drawing hasty conclusions.
One other text bearing upon this issue is John 8:41, where the Jews say to Jesus, “We are not illegitimate children.” The use of the emphatic pronoun ἡμεῖς (hēmeis) could be construed as an innuendo: “It is not we who are illegitimate.”
It would not be surprising if there was a rumor that Jesus was illegitimate, for according to both Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts, Jesus was conceived after Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they had officially come together. Therefore, he was born embarrassingly early. Matthew in particular may have included the story found in 1:18–25 because a rumor of illegitimacy was in circulation. He may well have been motivated by a desire to preserve both respect for Jesus’s parents and the conviction of Jesus’s sinlessness. Certainly the indications that Jesus may have been thought illegitimate cohere with the virgin conception. They do not, of course, verify it, since another option consistent with those indications would be that he indeed was illegitimate. But at the very least we can assert that all the biblical evidence makes it clear that Joseph was not the natural father of Jesus.
Early Church Tradition
Another evidence of the virgin birth is its strong tradition in the early church. While this tradition does not in itself establish the virgin birth as a fact, it is the type of evidence we would expect if the doctrine is true.
A beginning point is the Apostles’ Creed. The form we now use was produced in Gaul in the fifth or sixth century, but its roots go back much farther, to an old Roman baptismal confession. The virgin birth is affirmed in the earlier as well as the later form. By shortly after the middle of the second century, the early form was already in use, not only in Rome, but by Tertullian in North Africa and Irenaeus in Gaul and Asia Minor. The presence of the doctrine of the virgin birth in an early confession of the important church of Rome is highly significant, especially since such a creed would not have incorporated any new doctrine.
One other important early testimony is that of Ignatius, bishop of Syrian Antioch, who was martyred not later than 117. Arguing against Docetists, he produced a summary of the chief facts about Christ. Adolf von Harnack called Ignatius’s summary a kerygma of Christ. It included a reference to the virginity of Mary as one of the “mysteries to be shouted about.” Several observations make this reference the more impressive: (1) inasmuch as Ignatius was writing against Docetism, the expression “born of a woman” (as in Gal. 4:4) would have been more to his purpose than was “born of a virgin”; (2) it was written not by a novice, but by the bishop of the mother church of Gentile Christianity; (3) it was written no later than 117. As J. Gresham Machen has observed, “when we find [Ignatius] attesting the virgin birth not as a novelty but altogether as a matter of course, as one of the accepted facts about Christ, it becomes evident that the belief in the virgin birth must have been prevalent long before the close of the first century.”
Of course, there is also early evidence of denials of the virgin birth, some of them, naturally, by pagans. More significant, however, are the objections from Jews, who were in a better position to be aware of the facts and might reflect a more accurate picture of the tradition. Some who claimed to be Christian believers also raised objections. Among these various types of opponents of the doctrine were Celsus, Cerinthus, Carpocrates, and the Ebionites. Significantly, we do not find anyone who is otherwise orthodox denying the virgin birth. Machen aptly summarizes the negative testimony from the second century: “The denials of the virgin birth which appear in that century were based upon philosophical or dogmatic prepossession, much more probably than upon genuine historical tradition.”
By contrast, the existence of strong positive testimony from the second century, coupled with the other types of evidence already cited, argues forcefully for the historicity and factuality of the virgin birth. While not unambiguous or overwhelming, the evidence is sufficient to support belief in the biblical testimony on this important topic.
Objections to the Virgin Birth
Unexpected Ignorance regarding the Virgin Birth
One of many objections raised to the virgin birth is the argument that persons close to Jesus, most especially Mary, but also his brothers, had no knowledge of a miraculous birth. On the basis of Mark 3:21, 31, it is assumed that they were the ones who came to take him away, believing that he was beside himself. Awareness of a miraculous birth would certainly have gone a long way toward explaining his behavior, which appeared so bizarre to them here.
It has also been pointed out that most of the New Testament is silent on the subject of the virgin birth. How could Mark, the author of the earliest and most basic of the Gospels, omit mentioning this subject if he was aware of it? And why would John’s Gospel, the most theological of the four, be silent on an important issue like this? Further, it is incredible that Paul, with all of his exposition of the significance of Christ and with his strong orientation toward doctrine, should be ignorant of this matter if it really was a fact and part of the early church tradition. For that matter, the preaching of the early church, recorded in the book of Acts, is strangely silent on this subject. Is it not peculiar that only two books make mention of the virgin birth, and then only in brief accounts? Even Matthew and Luke do not make any further use of or reference to the virgin birth. If taken at face value, these objections undercut or neutralize the claim that there was early testimony to the virgin birth.
We must look first at Mark 3. There is no assurance that Mary and Jesus’s brothers (v. 31) were the persons who thought him to be beside himself (v. 21). Literally, the Greek reads “the ones from his,” presumably a reference to persons from his own home. Just who these individuals were, however, is by no means clear. And it is noteworthy that in verse 31 there is no mention of the incident of verse 21. It is likely, then, that the one is not a sequel to the other. Rather the two verses are reporting disconnected occurrences. There is no indication that when Mary and Jesus’s brothers came seeking him, they were concerned about his mental condition or the stability of his actions. No connection is established with the terminology of verse 21, nor is there any hint that this was a second approach by Jesus’s mother and brothers. Moreover, a verbal exchange with scribes from Jerusalem intervenes between the two verses. And Jesus’s reference to “my mother and my brothers” contains no hint of an unfavorable reflection upon them (vv. 33–35).
Even if Mary had been among those who thought Jesus to be beside himself, however, that surely would not be incompatible with knowledge of the virgin birth. If Mary had expected that Jesus was someday to sit upon the throne of David, there might easily have been perplexity on her part. For the ministry in which Jesus was now engaged seemed to produce opposition and rejection. Yet she may also have been mindful of the fact that, during the period from Jesus’s infancy to adulthood, she had been in a position of superiority over him—caring for him, training him, teaching and counseling him. She may have regarded this episode as simply another occasion when her guidance was needed.
Regarding the brothers, some of the same considerations apply. In their case, however, we also have an explicit indication that they did not believe in Jesus during his ministry, or at least at some point during his ministry (John 7:5). Their lack of belief has been cited as evidence that they had no knowledge of a virgin birth and therefore it had not occurred. But we have no reason to assume that they had in fact been told of the virgin birth by Mary and Joseph. While that truth may well have been shared with them at a later point, and may even have had something to do with their coming to faith in him, it is quite possible that they, being younger than Jesus, at the time of their unbelief knew nothing of his unusual birth.
But what of the silence of the other books of the New Testament? The Gospel according to Mark is thought to be particularly significant in this respect, since it presumably is an early and basic document upon which the other Synoptic Gospels build. Mark, however, does not give any account of Jesus’s birth and infancy. The very design of the book seems to have been to provide a report of the events that had been a matter of public observation, not the intimate details of Jesus’s life. In writing as relatively compact a book as he did, Mark inevitably had to make selections from the material available. Mark reports no extended discourses such as we find in Matthew or the type of incident that would be known and reportable by only one or two persons. The tradition that Mark based his Gospel upon information supplied by Peter suggests that Mark may have chosen to include only what the apostle had personally observed. These considerations, if accurate, would account for the absence of any reference to the virgin birth. They do not imply either that Mark did not know of it or that the tradition was spurious.
There is, indeed, one item in Mark’s Gospel that some see as a hint that the author did know about the virgin birth. That occurs in 6:3. In the parallel passage, Matthew reports that the people of Nazareth asked, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” (Matt. 13:55); and Luke has, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” (4:22). However, the report in Mark reads, “Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” It is as if Mark is taking pains to avoid referring to Jesus as the son of Joseph. Unlike Matthew’s and Luke’s readers, who had been made aware of the virgin birth in the opening chapter of each of those Gospels, Mark’s readers would have no way of knowing about it. So he chose his words very carefully in order not to give the wrong impression. The crucial point for us is that Mark’s account gives no basis for concluding that Joseph was the father of Jesus. Thus, although Mark does not tell us of the virgin birth, he certainly does not contradict it either.
John also makes no mention of the virgin birth in his Gospel. As with Mark, it should be observed that the nature of John’s Gospel is such that there is no birth narrative. True, the prologue does speak of Jesus’s origin, but this passage is theologically oriented rather than historical, and is followed immediately by a picture of Jesus and John the Baptist at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. There is nothing even approaching a narrative account of the events of Jesus’s life prior to the age of thirty. While some have sought to find an allusion to the virgin birth in John 1:13, that interpretation depends upon a disputed textual reading.
As we observed earlier, there are no references to the virgin birth in the sermons in the book of Acts. We should note, however, that those sermons were delivered to hostile or uninformed audiences. It would therefore have been unnatural to include references to the virgin birth, for they might introduce an unnecessary obstacle to acceptance of the message and the one on whom it centered.
The remaining consideration is Paul’s writing. Because of his dominant role in the formulation of the theology of the early church, what he says or does not say is of considerable importance. A close reading will find nothing in Paul’s writings or speeches that deals directly with the question of the virgin birth, from either a positive or a negative perspective. Some have seen evidence for and others evidence against the virgin birth in Galatians 4:4, but their arguments do not carry much weight. Some have found Romans 1:3 to be inconsistent with the idea of virgin conception, but it is hard to see any definite contradiction.
The absence of any reference to the virgin birth is nonetheless of concern to us, for if it is a matter of great importance, it seems strange that Paul did not make more of it. We need to see Paul’s writings for what they were, however: not general discourses of a catechetical nature, but treatments of particular problems in the life of a church or an individual. If the occasion did not call for exposition or argument on a particular topic, Paul did not deal with it. Among the great issues about which he did argue are grace and the law, the nature of spiritual gifts within the body of Christ, and personal morality. He did not go into detail on issues concerning the person of Christ, for they were evidently not matters of dispute in the churches or for the individuals to whom he wrote.
To sum up our point: there is nothing in the silence of many New Testament writers on the subject of the virgin birth to militate against it. Somewhat later, however, in view of all this silence, we may have to ask about the exact importance of the doctrine. Is it indispensable to Christian faith, and, if so, in what way?
The Possibility of the Virgin Birth Precluding Full Humanity
Some have questioned whether Jesus was fully human if he had but one human parent. But this confuses the essence of humanity with the process that transfers it from one generation to another. Adam and Eve did not have a human father or mother yet were fully human; and in the case of Adam, there was no prior human from whom his human nature could in any sense have been taken.
It may be objected that the absence of the male factor would somehow preclude full humanity. This, however, with its implicit chauvinism, does not follow. Jesus was not produced after the genetic pattern of Mary alone, for in that case he would in effect have been a clone of her and would necessarily have been female. Rather, a male component was contributed. In other words, a sperm was united with the ovum provided by Mary, but it was specially created for the occasion instead of being supplied by an existent male human.
Parallels in Other Religions
Some have suggested that the biblical accounts of the virgin birth are nothing more than an adaptation of similar accounts occurring in the literature of other religions. Plutarch suggests that a woman can be impregnated when approached by a divine pneuma. This remark occurs in his retelling of the legend of Numa, who after the death of his wife withdrew into solitude to have intercourse with the divine being Egeria. There are stories of how Zeus begat Hercules, Perseus, and Alexander and of Apollo’s begetting Ion, Asclepius, Pythagoras, Plato, and Augustus. These myths, however, are nothing more than stories about fornication between divine and human beings, which is something radically different from the biblical accounts of the virgin birth. Dale Moody comments: “The yawning chasm between these pagan myths of polytheistic promiscuity and the lofty monotheism of the virgin birth of Jesus is too wide for careful research to cross.” The similarity is far less than the differences. Therefore, the idea that pagan myths might have been incorporated into the Gospel accounts must be rejected.
A variation of this view connects the biblical accounts with Judaism instead of with pagan religion. The accounts in Matthew and Luke are considered too Jewish to have allowed any direct pagan influence. What we must recognize, however, say proponents of this variant theory, is that in Judaism there was an expectation of a virgin birth. Somehow Judaism had picked up this idea from paganism and incorporated it. It then was transmitted into the Christian documents in its Judaized form.
The problem with this theory is that there is no substantive evidence that Judaism espoused a belief in a virgin birth. It appears that the theory has been constructed on the presupposition that virgin birth is a pagan idea and that, since it would not have been accepted directly, it must have come to Christianity through Judaism. Therefore, it is assumed that such a belief must have existed within Judaism.
Incompatibility with the Preexistence of Christ
An additional major objection to the idea of virgin birth is that it cannot be reconciled with the clear and definite evidence of the preexistence of Christ. If we hold the one, it is claimed, we cannot hold the other. They are mutually exclusive, not complementary. The most articulate recent statement of this objection is that of Wolfhart Pannenberg.
Is this objection valid, however? In the orthodox Christian understanding, Jesus is fully divine and fully human. His preexistence relates to his divinity and the virgin birth to his humanity. The Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, always has been. At a finite point in time he assumed humanity, however, and was born as the man Jesus of Nazareth. There is no reason why the preexistence and virgin birth should be in conflict if one believes that there was a genuine incarnation at the beginning of Jesus’s earthly life.
Conflict with Natural Law
A final objection to the virgin birth results from a fundamental resistance to the possibility of miracles and the intrusion of the supernatural into the realm of history. This objection may actually lie behind some of the others. Here, however, it can be seen overtly: normal human birth always requires sexual reproduction involving both a male and a female parent.
We considered the subject of miracles in our chapter on God’s providence. We will here simply point out that one’s position on the possibility of miracles is largely a matter of basic worldview. If one believes that all that happens is a result of natural forces, and that the system of nature is the whole of reality, then there cannot be any “miraculous” occurrences. If, on the other hand, one is open to the possibility of a reality outside our closed system, then there is also the possibility that a supernatural power can intervene and counter the normal functioning of immanent laws. In an open universe, or one that is regarded as open, any event and its contradictory have an equal possibility of occurring. In such a situation, one’s position on particular issues like the virgin birth is a matter of determining on historical grounds what actually happened, not a theorizing as to what can or cannot happen. Our contention is that there is an adequate amount of historical evidence that Jesus was indeed the son of a virgin who conceived without the normal human sexual relationship. If we have no antecedent objection to the possibility of such an event, we are driven to the conclusion that it did indeed occur.
The Theological Meaning of the Virgin Birth
Having examined the evidence for and against the virgin birth and concluded that there is adequate basis for holding to the doctrine, we must now ask what it means. Why is it important?
On one level, of course, the virgin birth is important simply because we are told that it occurred. Whether or not we can see a necessity for the virgin birth, if the Bible tells us that it happened, it is important to believe that it did because not to do so is a tacit repudiation of the authority of the Bible. There is then in principle no reason why we should hold to its other teachings. Thus, rejecting the virgin birth has implications reaching far beyond the doctrine itself.
But, we must ask, is not the virgin birth important in some more specific way? Some have argued that the doctrine is indispensable to the incarnation. Without the virgin birth there would have been no union of God and man. If Jesus had been simply the product of a normal sexual union of man and woman, he would have been only a human being, not a God-man. But is this really true? Could he not have been God and a man if he had had two human parents, or none? Just as Adam was created directly by God, so Jesus could also have been a direct special creation. And accordingly, it should have been possible for Jesus to have two human parents and to be fully the God-man nonetheless. To insist that having a human male parent would have excluded the possibility of deity has some common elements with Apollinarianism, according to which the divine Logos took the place of one of the normal components of human nature (the soul). But Jesus was fully human, including everything that both a male and a female parent would ordinarily contribute. In addition, there was the element of deity. What God did was to supply, by a special creation, both the human component ordinarily contributed by the male (and thus we have the virgin birth) and, in addition, a divine factor (and thus we have the incarnation). The virgin birth requires only that a normal human being was brought into existence without a human male parent. This could have occurred without an incarnation, and there could have been an incarnation without a virgin birth. Some have called the latter concept “instant adoptionism,” since presumably the human involved would have existed on his own apart from the addition of the divine nature. The point here, however is that, with the incarnation occurring at the moment of conception or birth, there would never have been a moment when Jesus was not both fully human and fully divine. In other words, his being both divine and human did not depend on the virgin birth.
A second suggestion frequently made is that the virgin birth was indispensable to the sinlessness of Jesus. If he had possessed both that which the mother contributes and what the father ordinarily contributes, he would have had a depraved and hence sinful nature, like the rest of us. But this argument seems to suggest that we too would be sinless if we did not have a male parent. And this in turn would mean one of two things: either (1) the father, not the mother, is the source of depravity, a notion that in effect implies that women do not have a depraved nature (or if they do, they do not transmit it), or (2) depravity comes not from the nature of our parents, but from the sexual act by which reproduction takes place. But there is nothing in the Scripture to support the latter alternative. The statement in Psalm 51:5, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” simply means that the psalmist was sinful from the very beginning of life. It does not mean that the act of conception is sinful in and of itself.
We are left, then, with the former alternative, namely, that the transmission of sin is related to the father. But this has no scriptural grounding either. While some support might be found in Paul’s statement that it was the sin of Adam (Rom. 5:12) that made all humans sinners, Paul also indicates that Eve, not Adam, “was the [one] who was deceived and became a sinner” (1 Tim. 2:14). There are no signs of greater sinfulness among men than among women.
The question arises, If all of the human race is tainted by the original sin, would not Mary have contributed some of its consequences to Jesus? It has been argued that Jesus did have a depraved nature, but he committed no actual sin. We would point out in reply that the angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). It seems likely that the influence of the Holy Spirit was so powerful and sanctifying in its effect that there was no conveyance of depravity or of guilt from Mary to Jesus. Without that special sanctifying influence, he would have possessed the same depraved nature that all of us have. Now if the Holy Spirit prevented corruption from being passed from Mary to Jesus, could he not have prevented it from being passed on by Joseph as well? We conclude that Jesus’s sinlessness was not dependent on the virginal conception.
We noted earlier that the virgin birth is not mentioned in the evangelistic sermons in the book of Acts. It may well be, then, that it is not one of the primary doctrines (i.e., indispensable to salvation). It is a subsidiary or supporting doctrine; it helps create or sustain belief in the indispensable doctrines, or reinforces truths found in other doctrines. Like the resurrection, it is at once a historical event, a doctrine, and an evidence. It is quite possible to be unaware or ignorant of the virgin birth and yet be saved. Indeed, a rather large number of persons evidently were. But what, then, is the significance of this teaching?
- The doctrine of the virgin birth is a reminder that our salvation is supernatural. Jesus, in telling Nicodemus about the necessity of new birth, said, “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:5–6). John stated that those who believe and receive authority to become children of God are born “not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13). The emphasis is that salvation does not come through human effort, nor is it a human accomplishment. So also the virgin birth points to the helplessness of humans to initiate even the first step in the process. Not only is humanity unable to secure its own salvation; it could not even introduce the Savior into human society.
The virgin birth is, or at least should be, a check on our natural human tendency toward pride. While Mary was the one who gave birth to the Savior, she would never have been able to do so, even with the aid of Joseph, if the Holy Spirit had not been present and at work. The virgin birth is evidence of the Holy Spirit’s activity. Paul wrote in another connection, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor. 4:7). The virgin birth is a reminder that our salvation, though it came through humanity, is totally of God.
- The virgin birth is also a reminder that God’s salvation is fully a gift of grace. There was nothing particularly deserving about Mary. Probably countless Jewish girls could have served to give birth to the Son of God. Certainly Mary manifested qualities that God could use, such as faith and dedication (Luke 1:38, 46–55). But she really had nothing special to offer, not even a husband. That someone who thus could not have a child on her own should be chosen to bear God’s Son is a reminder that salvation is not a human accomplishment but a gift from God, and an undeserved one at that.
- The virgin birth is evidence of the uniqueness of Jesus the Savior. Although there could have been an incarnation without a virgin birth, the miraculous nature of the birth (or at least the conception) serves to show that Jesus was, at the very least, a highly unusual human singled out by God in particular ways.
- Here is another evidence of God’s power and sovereignty over nature. On several occasions (e.g., the births of Isaac, Samuel, and John the Baptist) God had provided a child when the mother was barren or past the age of childbearing. Surely these were miraculous births. Even more amazing, however, was this birth. God had pointed to his tremendous power when, in promising a child to Abraham and Sarah, he had asked rhetorically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son” (Gen. 18:14). God is all-powerful, able to alter and supersede the path of nature to accomplish his purposes. That God was able to work the seemingly impossible in the matter of the virgin birth symbolizes his ability to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of granting a new birth to sinners. As Jesus himself said in regard to salvation: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).
PART 8
THE WORK OF CHRIST
- Introduction to the Work of Christ
- Theories of the Atonement
- The Central Theme of the Atonement
- The Extent of the Atonement
