“The Lord Jesus Christ, God's incarnate Son, is fully God; he was born of a virgin; his humanity is real and sinless; he died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth.”
What are we affirming in this statement?
Jesus is both fully God and fully man. The incarnation of the Son of God is a mystery at the centre of the Christian faith. We don’t follow a great human teacher or itinerant Jewish prophet, the leader of an apocalyptic cult. We don’t follow a special man who was chosen by God to host his presence for a time and exalted from his human position to a position of divinity. Nor do we believe that God only ‘appeared’ as a phantom – that Jesus was an apparition of God who wasn’t really human though he looked that way. We follow Jesus the incarnate Son of God, God really made flesh and dwelling among us. We follow the saviour who died a real human death, was raised to life again, ascended to heaven and is now reigning over all things.
In agreement with the testimony of Scripture and the confession of the creeds, Jesus’ nature as fully God and fully man – the real incarnation of the Son of God – is essential to the good news that God has done all that is required for our relationship with him to be restored. It is essential for a gospel that is rooted in who God is, in his gracious move towards us before we had done anything to deserve him.
"The Lord Jesus Christ, God's incarnate Son, is fully God,"
There isn’t a new person created at the incarnation. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, second person of the Trinity. John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son.” He loses nothing of his divinity in the incarnation, he does not set it aside or ‘empty’ himself of God-ness to become human (against kenotic Christology). Instead, in the person of Jesus, humanity is brought into union with God.
He is, in the incarnation, ‘fully God’. The Son keeps all that it means to be God in the incarnation. Similarly, Jesus is not a creature exalted to god-like status, but eternally God, who came down to us (against adoptionism Christology). As it was affirmed in the Chalcedonian Definition, “the man Jesus after the incarnation is the same person as the eternal Son of God before the incarnation” (Donald Fairbairn, ‘The Chalcedonian Definition’, Credo Magazine).
"he was born of a virgin; his humanity is real and sinless"
Jesus did not come about by a natural conception, but was conceived in the virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. Unlike pagan myths about gods having sexual relations with humans and producing demigods as a result, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit ‘overshadowing’ Mary (Luke 1:35). This act of creation in Mary’s womb didn’t conceive a half-God-half-human hybrid, but was God’s means of becoming incarnate, fully human and yet fully God, fully the person of the Son. For some patristic writers, the virgin birth was also crucial for confirming the sinless nature of Christ’s humanity. He does not carry on the ancestry of Adam in his body, but instead is the beginning of a new humanity.
God didn’t just ‘appear’ to be human in Jesus, he actually took on human nature in the person of Christ. While the Son kept everything that it means for him to be the second person of the Trinity when he became incarnate, he also took upon himself everything that it means to be genuinely human. He even faced temptation as a human being, but was without Sin. Paul describes the significance of Christ’s perfect humanity in his fulfilment of the requirements of the law on our behalf (Romans 8:3-4). Similarly, Hebrews describes Jesus true yet sinless humanity as the condition for his ability to overcome sin and death in his sacrificial death (Hebrews 2:14-18) and his ability to sympathetically help us in our weakness and temptation (Hebrews 4:14-16).
"he died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth."
Here we reaffirm the earliest of Christian confessions: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
There is much to say about the significance of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension. Key aspects of the death of Christ will be unpacked in relation to the next article of the Doctrinal Basis (DB). But it is significant that Christ rose bodily. As we are united with him in his life and death, we are also united with him in his resurrection. He has not just been raised in spirit, but raised in body with a perfected human body that prefigures our redeemed existence as real human beings in the new creation.
Where is this challenged or a challenge when studying theology at university?
A key objection to this understanding of Jesus is to claim that it is the later invention of Christians, particularly from gentile believers who were influenced by Greek myths and philosophy, rather than a reflection of the authentic, Jewish Jesus. This is often expressed within academia as an evolution of belief in Jesus from who he ‘really’ was as a Jewish preacher to gradually more and more exalted understandings of him until he was eventually worshipped alongside God and understood to be God. This view is most clearly laid out by Bart Ehrman in How Jesus Became God, but it is representative of general currents of thought that challenge this Christian view of who Jesus is.
This is a clear denial of what the bible teaches about Jesus. The strongest defence comes from a thorough understanding of how the New Testament throughout teaches the divinity of Jesus (not just the portions that were written later). An able defence of Christian belief about Jesus in relation to the historical claim of Ehrman is made in the multi-author volume, How God Became Jesus. Likewise, Steven Duby makes a good argument that later definitions around the two natures of Christ are in line with the biblical picture in Jesus and the God of Classical Theism.
How does this help us do Evangelical Christian theology better?
At a very basic level, our faith in Christ is grounded in who Christ is. Confidence in who Christ is and what he has done is a crucial starting point for theology that is shaped by the gospel. An evangelical focus on the person of Christ as the focal point of theology and worship absolutely depends upon this orthodox view of the person of Christ as fully God and fully man, and a recognition of his death, resurrection and ascension to the heavenly throne.
A careful study of who Christ is, who the bible clearly presents him as and who the church has confessed him to be has significance for every area of theology. Gaining precision and a depth of appreciation in this area cascades down into all of our theology. Who Christ is has implications for our understanding of God, sin, salvation, what it is to live as a human and a follower of Christ now, and on and on. It is one area of theology that will never leave you coming back empty. And it is so significant for those who ‘just want to focus on Jesus’ to be clear on who Jesus is and what he has done.
This is also the basis for us speaking confidently about Jesus to our friends and coursemates. The historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a central and fruitful apologetic for the truth of the gospel.
