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Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

CHRISTOLOGY*

The study of the person and work of Jesus Christ. The confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, first ventured by Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Mt 16:16), is the heart of the Christian faith. It is this confession that makes one a Christian, and all Christian theology is thinking, in the light of this confession, about the meaning of this confession. The first major theological decision of the church resulting from such believing thought was the affirmation of the essential deity of Jesus as the Son of God. As such he was declared to be of one essence with the Father and the Spirit (the dogma of the Trinity promulgated at Nicaea, AD 325). Since this affirmation was made with reference to the man Jesus of Nazareth, it forced upon the church, inescapably, the further question: How could one and the same person be both God and man? How could he who is infinite become finite; he who is eternal become temporal; he who is God become man?

To answer this question, the church embraced the doctrine of the Incarnation. The statement of the doctrine was arrived at only after much controversy. In the course of the debate the church rejected all efforts, on the one hand, to preserve the deity of the Son at the expense of his humanity (docetism), and on the other, to preserve his humanity at the expense of his deity (adoptionism). In the former category were the doctrines of those who claimed that the Son only seemed to have a human body, or (like the Apollinarians) that while he had a true body and soul, the divine Logos took the place of the human spirit. In the latter category was the doctrine of those who claimed that the man Jesus, through the process of moral development, was elevated to divine sonship and so adopted into the Godhead. Some placed great stress on Jesus’ endowment with the Spirit at baptism as the moment of his adoption, while others, citing Acts 13:33—“today I have begotten thee”—believed Jesus became the unique Son of God at the resurrection. The church also rejected all attempts to resolve the problem of the Savior’s divinity and humanity by suggesting that he was both a divine person and a human person (Nestorianism) or, contrariwise, that the unity of his person implied a fusion of the divine and human in one nature (monophysitism).

The Chalcedonian Creed

At the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), the position was adopted that the Lord Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man (vere Deo, vere homo). The creed said:

[He is] consubstantial with the Father as to his Godhead, and consubstantial also with us as to his manhood; like unto us in all things, yet without sin; as to his Godhead, begotten of the Father before all worlds; but as to his manhood, in these days, born for us men and for our salvation, of the virgin Mary, the mother of God, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, known in two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division; the distinction of the natures being in no wise abolished by their union, but the peculiarity of each nature being maintained, and both concurring in one person and subsistence. We confess not a Son divided and sundered into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only-begotten, and God-Logos, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This confession was adopted in all its essential features by the Reformers at the time of the Protestant Reformation.

Chalcedonian Christology does not remove the mystery of the Incarnation but rather indicates, as it were, the boundaries of believing thought about the person of the Redeemer, boundaries that have proved significant in the history of Christian thought. As for the key terms in the creed, the following should be noted: the word “nature” (physis) as used by the church fathers does not have reference to the physical, material order that is the object of investigation by the “natural” sciences. “Nature” rather refers to being or reality in distinction from appearance. To say that Jesus Christ has a divine nature is to affirm that all the qualities, properties, or attributes by which one describes the divine order of being pertain to him. In short, he is God himself, not like God, but just God. So also with the affirmation that Christ has a human nature. Christ is not God appearing as a man; he is a man. He is not only a man nor only God; he is the God who became a man. He did not cease to be God when he became a man; he did not exchange divinity for humanity. Rather, he assumed humanity, so that he is now both divine and human. He is the God-man.

The term “person” (hypostasis) was used by the fathers to describe Jesus Christ as a self-conscious, self-determined Subject, one who designates himself by the word “I” over against a “thou.” The Mediator between God and man is a person who has a divine nature and a human nature. While there can be no “person” where there is no “nature,” it does not follow that there is no distinction between the terms, for there can be a “nature,” as defined above, where there is no “person.” (An object may have the properties of “nature” of a stone: grayness, hardness, roundness, smoothness. But this object, which has the “nature” of a stone, is not a “person”; it is not self-conscious and self-determined.)

The distinction between the “person” and the “nature” of the incarnate Christ speaks of him as being a “person” with a “divine nature” and a “human nature.” The fathers were teaching through this that while we must ascribe to Christ all the qualities that belong to the divine order of being and to the human order of being (including bodily, physical, objective being—the Word “became flesh,” Jn 1:14), we cannot say that he is “two persons.” He is a divine person with a human nature, not a human person as such. All human persons have a first moment. Wheresoever and whensoever we may identify that first moment for a human “I,” whether at conception or at fetal quickening in the womb, whether at the moment of birth, or even as late as the first moment of self-awareness in the young child, no human “I” is aware of himself as a “subject,” as an “I,” before he is conceived in the womb of his mother. The man Jesus of Nazareth, however, unlike any mere man, could say, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). This affirmation is neither the late theological invention of Christian fancy nor the claim of a man suffering from delusions of grandeur, but rather the sober truth. This person sitting on a mountainside preaching, this person standing by the sea calling fishermen to be his disciples, is a person who always was a person, even before there were any fishermen by the sea to call or any people to preach to on the mountainside—in fact, before there was any sea or any mountain.

Christ is not the divine Logos, who inspires and uniquely endows the man, Jesus of Nazareth, with moral and religious insights. Rather, this man Jesus is the eternal Son of God, and God’s eternal Son has become this man, Jesus. The Son of God did not assume a man’s person to his own nature, but a man’s nature to his own person. He continues to be the same person, though he now assumes our humanity. Hence, he can speak both as a Subject consciously in history and as a Subject consciously transcending history, even in one and the same sentence. “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (Jn 17:4-5, KJB, emphasis added). Here the same person, Jesus, speaks as a person in the world, an “I” who has done certain things in the world, and as a person before there was any world, an “I” who shared his glory with a “thou” whom he calls “Father” before all time. All efforts at rational analysis of this mystery, which the church designates by the word “incarnation,” run the risk of losing the truth by explaining it. One arrives at a position in which Christ is a divine being who appears human (docetism) or a human being who either achieves divine status for himself (adoptionism) or divine worth for us (Ritschlianism).

In order to preserve fully both our Lord’s deity and his humanity, the creed employs four terms in which we are told what did not happen in the Incarnation. The union of the two natures is declared to be “without confusion,” “without conversion,” “without separation,” and “without division.” Some have ridiculed these “four bald negatives,” but they are by no means wholly without value. Should any of these basic negatives be violated, we would lose what is essential to Christian faith, the “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete as to his Godhead, and complete as to his manhood.”

But the creed contains not only a negative affirmation—what did not happen in the Incarnation; it also contains a positive affirmation. The union of the two natures concurs in one Person, who is the eternal Son of the Father. The union, then, of the divine and the human in Christ is a personal one; more specifically, the union is the act of the divine Person who is the Son of God. Here we approach the very heart of the mystery of the Incarnation. No one can say how the infinite God could become a finite man. Naturally, however, theologians have thought a great deal about the matter; Chalcedon does not mark the end of all inquiry.

In theological parlance it has become customary to speak of the union of the divine and the human in the Person of the incarnate Redeemer as the “hypostatic” union (unio hypostatica), from the Greek word for “person.” It is important to note not only that the union is personal, but also why it is so. Theologians speak of the union as personal because it is the act of a Person, namely the Son of God, the Word who became flesh. This means that the Person of the incarnate Redeemer is divine, the object of Christian worship. He cannot, then, be a mere human being as other men are mere human beings. To worship one who is a man and only a man would be idolatry. And because this personal union of the divine and the human is truly a union, the Redeemer is one Person, not two. If to worship a human person would be idolatry, to worship two persons—one human, one divine—would be an absurdity. This Person, who unites in himself the divine and the human, is often described by theologians as a “theanthropic” person, the God-man. If one does not mean that he is a hybrid—half God, half man—then this mode of speaking is unobjectionable inasmuch as it simply says that this Person, Jesus Christ, is both divine and human, which is what the creed intends.

Christology after Chalcedon

Matters become more difficult and unanimity less in evidence, however, when the question is raised as to the personal qualities of Christ’s humanity. The formulation most consistent with Chalcedon and generally held by Protestants speaks of the “impersonal humanity” of our Lord. It has also been defended in modern times by the Swiss theologians Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and by G. C. Berkouwer of the Netherlands.

Actually the meaning of the phrase “impersonal humanity” (impersonalitas) is not that in the case of the incarnate Son there is no manifestation of the personal at the human level. Rather, it means that this humanity, of itself, has no independent existence apart from the divine Person who assumed this humanity in the act of becoming incarnate. So far as Jesus of Nazareth is concerned, that which is human exists in and through the Word who is God himself. There is a sense in which God is present to all created reality (the doctrine of the divine immanence). But howsoever we may conceive of this divine presence of power (providence) and of grace (salvation), there can be no thought of identity between God and the creature. Even when the church, following the usage of the NT, speaks of the Christian as “indwelt by the Holy Spirit,” there is no identity of being affirmed; there is no ontological union of the human and the divine. But in the case of the man Jesus Christ, something absolutely unique is affirmed: this man is declared to be identical with God because he, the Person, is the “Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us.” “Therefore,” says Barth, “he does not only live through God and with God; he is himself God. Nor is he autonomous and self-existent. His reality, existence and being are wholly and absolutely that of God himself, the God who acts in his Word. His manhood is only the predicate of his Godhead, or better and more concretely, it is only the predicate, assumed in inconceivable condescension, of the Word acting upon us, the Word who is the Lord.”

In other words, Jesus our Lord is, as man, so united with God that he exists as man only and insofar as he exists as God. The doctrine of anhypostasy states this truth negatively. It affirms that the human nature of our Lord does not possess the mode of its being as personal in and of itself. The doctrine of enhypostasy states this truth positively. It affirms that the particular human nature that is our Lord’s acquires its personal mode of being by union with the personal Son of God. It is not Jesus of Nazareth who becomes the Son of God (adoptionism) but the Son of God who becomes Jesus of Nazareth. The Incarnation is a unique act of a divine Person, not a unique experience of the divine on the part of a human person. The Subject of the Incarnation is a divine Subject who acts, not a human subject who is acted upon. But inasmuch as the divine Subject, the eternal Son, so acts as to become this man, Jesus of Nazareth, this man is—not just symbolizes, but is—the Son of God as no other man is or ever can be the Son of God.

The scriptural basis of the doctrine of the Incarnation includes, of course, the entire range of data in the Gospels as well as several passages in the Pauline Epistles, especially Philippians 2:6-8, which is, perhaps, the single most important christological passage in the NT. Here Paul, using the words of a primitive Christian confession, speaks of him “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (rsv).

The Chalcedonian Creed does not resolve the mystery of the Incarnation, and theologians have made many efforts to better understand the mystery. One of the best known is based on an inference drawn from the passage quoted above. It is known as kenosis, the theory that when the Son became man, he emptied himself of some aspect of his divinity. The text of Philippians does not say that he emptied himself of anything, but only that he emptied himself, a striking figure of speech denoting condescension (“made himself of no reputation,” KJB). In spite of the exegetical difficulties in this statement, kenotic theory has persisted, in one form or another, especially in British theology. Another effort at understanding suggests that our Lord’s humanity was the incognito (Kierkegaard’s term) that hid his identity as a divine person from all but the eyes of faith. Thus, the Incarnation was a revelation that veils as well as discloses the truth.