Incarnation And Christology

Later church reflection, especially at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), affirmed that we cannot do justice to Scripture without confessing that Jesus of Nazareth was fully God and fully man. God the Son, who gave personal identity to the human nature he had assumed and did so without putting aside or compromising his divine nature, must be confessed as one person who now exists in two natures. Additionally, Chalcedon affirmed that we must not think that the incarnation involved a change in the properties of each nature so that some kind of blending resulted which was neither divine nor human, as the Eutychians wrongly affirmed. Rather, we must affirm that the properties of each nature (human and divine) were preserved so that Jesus is all that God is in all of his perfections and all that we humans are except in terms of sin.

This affirmation entails at least two important points. First, the man Jesus from the moment of conception was personal by virtue of the union of the human nature in the person of the divine Son. At no point were there two persons or two centers of self-consciousness, as the Nestorians wrongly affirmed. That is why in our Lord Jesus Christ we come face-to-face with God. We meet him, not subsumed under human flesh, not merely associated with it, but in undiminished moral splendor. The deity and humanity coincide, not because the human has grown into the divine, but because the divine Son has taken to himself a human nature for our salvation. He is the divine Son who subsists in two natures, who has lived his life for us as our representative head, died our death as our substitute, and been raised for our eternal salvation. This is why the Lord Jesus is utterly unique and without parallel and thus the only Lord and Savior. Second, since in the incarnation the eternal Son took to himself a human nature, he can now live a fully human life. Yet he was not totally confined to that human nature as if for a period of time the divine nature was divested of its attributes or function. That is why Scripture affirms that even as the incarnate One, the divine Son continued to uphold and sustain the universe (Col 1:15-17; Heb 1:1-3) even while he lived out his life on earth as a man dependent upon the Father and empowered by the Spirit (Jn 5:19-27; Ac 10:38).

Our affirmation of the biblical Jesus is beyond our full comprehension, but it is only in such a Jesus that we have One who can meet our every need. Apart from him as God the Son incarnate, we do not have a Redeemer who can stand on our behalf as a man, let alone satisfy God’s own righteous demand upon us due to our sin. After all, it is only God who can save us. By becoming one with us, our Lord not only becomes our sympathetic Savior, he also accomplishes a work that saves us fully, completely, and finally.