Jesus… Fully God & Fully Human
“We believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures. Jesus—Israel’s promised Messiah—was conceived through the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead, ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father as our High Priest and Advocate.”
– EFCA Statement of Faith Article #4 – Jesus Christ
Have you ever sat and thought about the centrality and the importance of Jesus to our faith? I know that probably sounds like a silly question. As Christians, Jesus is the cornerstone of our faith; without him, there is no Christianity! But, if you are like me, you often get so caught up in the doing of our faith that you don’t sit long enough to marvel in the mystery and beauty of God becoming flesh (the incarnation). That is an absolutely powerful and completely unheard of thing when it comes to religions or philosophical systems. Every other religious faith is built upon the premise that if humanity does enough good (moral and religious actions), then the god(s) will relent and periodically bless humanity. Some religious scholars call this an “N” shaped religion. Praise, adoration, and acts of service start with man and go up and appease the god(s), then blessings come down, and the cycle repeats, making an “N” shape. This was the normal way of going about religion in the first century, and for most of human history to that point.
Then Jesus arrived.
See, with the arrival of Jesus, God demonstrated that he was actually all about something different the whole time. The true of God of the universe didn’t make man clamor and clang for “approval,” God intervened and interceded for humanity because it was in his nature to do so. God initiates the relationship because he wanted to, not because humanity earned it. Powerful and gracious! This is what scholars call a “U” shaped religion. It begins with God, who comes down to humanity and brings humanity into fellowship with himself. Uniquely, Christianity is the only religion that looks like this, and it is Jesus who, in his Advent (arrival), has made it undeniably true for us. Truly amazing and praiseworthy!
However, Jesus isn’t just a god who came down to earth, he is the true God who entered fully into the human world (except for sin – Phil 2:1-11). Amazing! The Bible teaches us that Jesus, in his incarnation, was both fully God and fully man. He wasn’t a god pretending to be a man. He wasn’t a man who became a god. And he wasn’t just a really good man, who was confused for a god. He was fully God and fully human all at the same time. One person with two natures. This is an essential belief in Christianity, and you can see it reflected in our EFCA statement of faith above. Why is this so important to you, me, and our faith that we should take time to think about it? Because our salvation actually hangs in the balance. As God, Jesus is our substitute, doing for us what we could never do on our own. As man, Jesus is our representative, standing in place for us where our predecessor Adam sinned and failed. Jesus’ dual nature (God and man) isn’t just a theological curiosity; it is an essential of our faith because it means that what Jesus promises he can deliver on.
Here is a helpful excerpt from the EFCA’s primer on our statement of faith on this topic.
One Person in Two Natures
But how could Jesus Christ be both fully human and fully divine? This is certainly a great mystery. After the rejection of the teaching of Apollinaris, a popular preacher in Antioch and later Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius (died c. 451), suggested a model in which Christ the divine Logos was joined to the man Jesus. However, this view seemed to assert that Christ consisted of two persons, instead of just one. Another model, which came to be known as monophysitism, came through Eutyches (d. 454), the spiritual leader of a monastery near Constantinople. Eutyches taught that Christ had only one nature, in which the human appeared completely absorbed by the divine, just “as a drop of honey, which falls into the sea, dissolves in it.” This view blurred Jesus’ humanity, creating a confused amalgamation of the two.
Through these debates the early church sought to do justice to the picture of Jesus found in the Gospels. Finally, an acceptable formulation emerged from the work of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Chalcedonian Creed declared that at the incarnation the eternal Son of God—that divine Person—joined his divine nature with human nature to become the God-man Jesus Christ. Only in the incarnation did the collection of qualities that constitute human nature become realized in this divine Person as Jesus of Nazareth. In the language of the Chalcedonian Creed, “[W]e all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man …the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and coming together to form one person.” Jesus Christ is thus one Person in whom two distinct natures are united.
Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. He is fully and completely both at the same time, showing us the true nature of each. He is not some mixture of humanity and divinity, creating a third kind of being, like a horse and donkey producing a mule. The Son of God remained God—he never gave up being God, but he added to his divinity real humanity. As God incarnate, the divine subject made real human experience his own, and since the incarnation, the Son of God will forever be human.
Against Arius, the Chalcedonian Creed asserts that Jesus was truly God. Against Apollinaris, it asserts that he was truly man. Against Eutyches, it asserts that Jesus’ deity and humanity were not changed into something else. And against Nestorius, the Creed asserts that Jesus was not divided but was one Person and in this one Person are two distinct natures, which are divine and human in all their fullness.
Why Does It Matter?
Why is the true humanity of Jesus so important? Most of all, because our salvation depends upon it—the humanity of Jesus is an essential element of the gospel message. The Epistle to the Hebrews speaks to this issue: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity…. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (Heb. 2:14,17). The humanity of Christ is also central to Paul’s argument that Jesus has overturned the work of Adam: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).
Only as God did Christ have the power to bear our sins and conquer them, but only as man was he qualified to do so. This understanding was the driving theological force which led the early church to press so hard against those like the Docetists and the Apollinarians who denied Christ’s full humanity. As the early church father Irenaeus put it, “He became like us so that we might become like him.” In Christ, God was acting to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19), and at the same time, as a real human being just like us, Jesus Christ could truly serve as our representative before God. “[T]here is one God and one mediator between God and mankind—the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).[1]
[1] EFCA. Evangelical Convictions, 2nd Edition (pp. 119-121). (Function). Kindle Edition.