I know I said that I don’t usually post my seminary papers here on my site, but I’m making another exception for this paper too, for much the same reason that I did for my paper on the Trinity. I believe I was able to take a pretty complex theological topic in the incarnation, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and make it wildly practical for you, my readers. It also felt appropriate as we celebrate Easter to share these thoughts on the importance of Jesus to our everyday lives. I pray it blesses and encourages you, like it did me when I wrote it.
Christology is the very core of our faith. It is our belief in the incarnation, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah in the first century in Judea that separates Christianity from every other faith out there. We sing songs declaring the victory that we have because of Christ. We gather regularly to celebrate and remember the importance of what Jesus accomplished for us. And yet, somehow still, the practical implications of an orthodox Christology are often left unexamined. Instead, we wallow in shallow living, unmet goals, or quietly dissatisfied existences. It is one of these dissatisfied existences that my paper will delve into. My ministry situation is that a deeply depressed and passively suicidal man came to me about four weeks ago and asked how he can continue to hope in a God who left him in such a state. To make matters worse, this same God brought his wife to the point of end-stage cancer. How in the world, the man we’ll call Bob asks, is he supposed to stand firm in believing that a God who allowed such things is to be considered good, relevant, or meaningful to him? While I obviously didn’t quote Barth or Athanasius to him, this paper represents in a more academic form of the answers that I gave him.
The Hope of the Incarnation
The very center of why we can hope in God, regardless of our personal circumstances— even if they include suicidality and end-stage cancer—is that God looked down upon the destructive lives humans were living and chose to act. He did not stand silently up in the heavens, complaining to the angels about the wickedness of humans, and do nothing. The entire narrative of the Bible is that God acted in correlation to the darkness of men, but the pinnacle of his action was demonstrated in the incarnation. We will discuss the motivations behind the incarnation momentarily, but let’s start with considering the fact of the incarnation. “Christ the Lord, God’s eternal Son, enters into the fullness of our humanity. He is born and is, like us, bodily . . . he knowns human limits, weakness, tiredness, and suffering.”[1] There is a mystery involved in the incarnation, one that resulted in several early church heresies we will discuss shortly, but there is also a glorious hope in it.
God in the Person of Jesus Christ did not choose to stay on the sidelines of the brokenness of humanity. Instead, he chose to enter into our struggles, our sorrows, and our difficulties. He took on a body with everything that means and engaged in suffering directly. He learned obedience to God as every human must learn. By doing this perfectly, he paved the way for us to have a better future. This is perhaps captured best in Hebrews 4:15, which so beautifully states, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”[2] We see in the life of Jesus that he was tempted in the desert by the devil, which aligns with our experiences in this world. We see that he was overcome by sadness at the death of Lazarus, even though he knew Lazarus would be raised from the dead. We see that Jesus experienced loneliness and abandonment from his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane.
These experiences remind us that we do not have an aloof God, but we have a Jesus who knows what it means to be human in nearly every way. He knows the pain my friend Bob is going through with his wife because Jesus had friends die. Grief is no mystery to him. He knows the sadness of wondering why things are sideways and feeling alone because of his Gethsemane experience, in which not only was he abandoned by his closest friends, but he was also betrayed by another close friend at nearly the same time. We can know then that the God we have has walked every path we have walked before us and knows the way through to victory.
Why Early Church Heresies Empty the Incarnation of its Power
Let’s turn briefly to two early church heresies, Docetism and Eutychianism, and discuss how they remove the power of God’s with-ness from us by presenting a Jesus who is not fully human. Docetism holds that Jesus did not actually have a human nature, but only appeared to be human. “Gnosticism was often bound up with oriental views of matter: the body as inherently impure, unclear. For God to be human, to be mixed up in matter – that was demeaning disgusting, unthinkable to the Greek mind; and for God to suffer was a contradiction in terms.”[3] While admirable in its desire to protect God from the messiness of matter and humanity, in the end, the heresy falls short of orthodox beliefs precisely because of this desire. The Gospel is in essence the indescribable truth that an ineffable, inscrutable God entered into the disaster of humanity in a body to rescue us from death.
Eutychianism falls short in a similar way. Eutychianism held that there were not two natures in Jesus, the divine and the human. “Put in a nutshell, Eutychianism is the view that the union between God and humanity in Christ is so complete that his humanity is no longer distinguishable from his divinity. We must, therefore, speak of one and only one nature in Christ. Christ’s humanity is not of the same nature as ours.”[4] In its attempt to again protect the triune God from entering into humanity with all its dissimilarities from divinity, Eutychianism leaves us with a Jesus who is not a high priest who was like us.
Both of these early church heresies empty Christ of his capacity to understand the fullness of what it means to be human. As a result, people like Bob cannot connect to the experiences of Jesus, for the simple reason that Jesus did not fully experience a human life. People like Bob and us are therefore reduced to a place of loneliness, despair, and isolation. Even worse, this is a place that God cannot rescue us from because he does not know what it feels like, because his bodily experience is distinctly different from ours.
The Joy of the Hypostatic Union
Instead, we should lean into the orthodox beliefs defined at the Council of Chalcedon and described in the term hypostatic union. Jesus Christ from the moment of his incarnation until today stands as the perfect and perfectly confusing union of God and humanity in one person. He has two complete natures, the human and the divine, and engages both equally. Barth summarized this well when he said: “In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved, and fulfilled by them. Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s.”[5]
God in Jesus became fully human while retaining his divinity, specifically in order to save humanity from its fallen nature. We must take these irreconcilable differences between divinity and humanity by faith and trust in the completeness of the incarnation. “He who was above all creation was in our human condition; the invisible one was made visible in the flesh; he who is from the heavens and from on high was in the likeness of earth things; the immaterial one could be touched; he who is free in his own nature came in the form of a slave; he who blesses all creation became accursed; he who is all righteousness was numbered among transgressors; life itself came in the appearance of death.”[6] We can have no response but joy to the beauty of the incarnation. This truth offers hope to those in the throes of despair like Bob because it shows that God in Christ is interested and engaged in the goings-on of man, and that he does not leave us to suffer in silence and aloofness. Instead, we have a God who acts and bridges the gap between divinity and humanity in its brokenness through the life of Jesus.
Why the Incarnation?
Let us now turn to the motivation for the incarnation. In this, there is great hope for men and women like Bob who find themselves walking through dark seasons and feeling abandoned. As we turn to the reasons that God chose incarnation, we will find the courage to push forward into our tomorrows. It was the love of God for us that compelled the incarnation. “It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body.”[7] When Bob recognizes the depth of the love God has that motivated him to become human, with all the mess and sorrow that entails, he can find a source of hope to carry on for another day.
But there is even more. God was moved to compassion because of how death was reigning over us: “He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father’s Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression . . . All this He saw, and pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.”[8] God looked at the sorrow we were experiencing and chose the incarnation specifically to give us hope and new life.
Again, God entered into a rescue mission for humanity. “He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep.”[9] Jesus saw that humanity was being destroyed by sin and transgression and acted. He knew there was more available for us, and he made the only choice he could make to facilitate bringing us back into whole communion with God and with our original purpose for life in the first place.
The Death and Resurrection of Christ Offers Hope
The death and resurrection of Christ offer hope to the mentally ill man too, because there is never a place that is bereft of hope, not even in the darkest moments. Even in the cry of dereliction that Jesus issued on the cross, he was never alone. God the Father did not abandon him then, and we will never be abandoned either. Even more, death has been abolished for this life and the next. “It was by surrendering to death the body which He had taken, as an offering and sacrifice free from every stain, that He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent.”[10]
There is more than the abolishment of death though found in the death and resurrection of Christ. “For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.”[11] This hope of the resurrection is not simply a forward-looking event but can imbue our daily existence with hope. This is the hope that Bob needs in his life as he faces the dual specters of his own suicidality and his wife’s impending death. He needs to know that God has created more for this life than he is seeing right now and that there is some grander purpose to make sense of it all.
Greater Purpose Revealed in Jesus
There is a call to a greater purpose, greater than any depression or suicidality can quench. “He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God. He manifested Himself by means of a body in order that we might perceive the Mind of the unseen Father. He endured shame from men that we might inherit immortality.”[12] This is a far greater message than you hear on a typical Sunday morning. Typically, the call is to live a purer life, a life more devoted to Jesus, or even to follow the clear keys of Scripture to personal fulfillment. Yet the call to theosis is far greater than this. This invitation to become [like] God is startling in its simplicity and its power. Theosis is the revealed will of God in the Person of Jesus Christ. On a personal note, this invitation to theosis is in part what rescued me from my suicidality and deep depression. As I understood the call of Christ to step into something grander than I was experiencing, I found the courage to step out of my darkness and listen more closely to the murmurings of the Holy Spirit within me. I am confident that my friend Bob has the same opportunity before him. I hope he chooses to step into the hope that is offered in the incarnation, the purpose that is found in the death and resurrection, and the call that is prepared for him in theosis. This is the power found in the implications of a deep christology.
[1] Beth Felker Jones, Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), 120.
[2] All scripture references are from The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), unless otherwise indicated.
[3] Ben Quash and Michael Ward, eds., Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 25.
[4] Quash and Ward, Heresies, 43.
[5] Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Westminster John Knox:1960), 46, italics in original.
[6] Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ trans. J.A. McGuckin, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 61.
[7] Athanasius, On the Incarnation trans. Sister Penelope Lawson, (Wantage, England: Blue Letter Bible, 2012), 4.
[8] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 7.
[9] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 12.
[10] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8.
[11] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9.
[12] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 43.