The Person of Christ
I. The Messianic Heir
All of God’s covenantal purposes converge in Jesus Christ. The Son is the eternal Mediator of the covenant of redemption which already in eternity rendered him, by anticipation, the one who would become incarnate and give his life for his people (1 Pe 1:20–21; Eph 1:4–5, 11). He is also the Last Adam, who undoes the curse of the first Adam and fulfills the covenant of creation for his elect, thereby winning the right to be not only the risen head but the resurrection-life-giving Lord. Therefore, the covenant of grace of which Christ is the mediatorial head is secured eternally in the covenant of redemption. “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Co 1:20).
A. The Faithful Adam and True Israel
B. Messianic Savior: Son of David
Like the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant is an unconditional adoption. It is not David who will build a house for God, but God who will build a house for David. In spite of the unfaithfulness of David and his heirs, God unilaterally pledges to give him an everlasting dynasty (2 Sa 7:11–17).
The royal son of David would not be a puppet of the Roman Empire. According to the common eschatological expectation of Second Temple Judaism, N. T. Wright explains, “the long night of exile, the ‘present evil age,’ would give way to the dawn of renewal and restoration, the new exodus, the return from exile, ‘the age to come,’ ” and the messianic king would somehow fulfill this
However, according to the terms of first-century Jewish expectation, Jesus was just another disappointment. To be sure, he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem with great fanfare (claiming fulfillment of Zec 14:21), but in his last week he brought growing confusion and consternation.
C. Son of Man - Second Adam
Under the rubric of Messiah appear related designations. As the Lord’s earthly representative, the Messiah figure is also designated “Son of Man/Adam.” While in the canonical texts of Psalm 8:4, Ezekiel, and Daniel, “one like a son of man” appears as a description, by the time of Enoch it appears to become a messianic title (see 1 Enoch 46 and 62; 2 Esdras 13).
However, among others, Craig A. Evans has offered a persuasive argument for interpreting Daniel 7 and its New Testament interpretations as referring to one representative person, as understood even by Second Temple sources. Wright renders a similar judgment.21 In Daniel 7 especially, “the picture is very sharp: this Messiah-figure will bear the brunt of gentile fury, and will be vindicated.” He adds, “The last Adam is the eschatological Israel, who will be raised from the dead as the vindicated people of God.”23
On one hand, we recognize this title, Son of Man, as the fulfillment of Adamic sonship; on the other hand, it is a reference to his divine identity—his unity with the Father. Therefore, we cannot neatly correlate “Son of Man” and “Son of God” with his p 455 humanity and deity, respectively. As we will see, “Son of God” is as much a reference to his humanity as “Son of Man” is to his deity. His humiliation is not simply a predicate of his humanity: it was the Word who humbled himself to become flesh, recover what was lost in Adam, and raise it to heaven in glory. And his exaltation is not simply a predicate of his divinity; as the victorious Last Adam, the Son of Man takes his throne in our name. The Son of Man is the Lord who is Servant and the Servant who is Lord.
I have suggested that we cannot assume that “Son of Man” refers to Jesus Christ’s humanity while “Son of God” refers to his deity. The Son of Man is God as well as human and the Son of God is a human figure who is also Lord. Jesus Christ is both the one who speaks the divine law and the one who answers the summons with full and perfect obedience as our representative.
D. The Servant of the Lord
II. The Son of God: The Son of the Father in the Spirit
A. Sonship: Ontological and Official
In the New Testament, as in much of the Second Temple literature, the messianic concept brings together the Adamic and Abrahamic bases of sonship, the former stressing adoption by obedience, the latter underscoring his sonship as unconditional and everlasting. What is different, however, especially in the case of the New Testament, is that Jesus’ sonship in this second sense comes not by adoption but by eternal generation. He is the monogenēs theos—“the only begotten God,” “the only begotten [Son] from the Father” (Jn 1:18, 14; NASB)
To summarize this point, then: Jesus Christ is the Son of God in both senses: (1) as the eternally generated Word of the Father and (2) as the true image-bearer, the faithful Adamic “son” and the loyal “firstborn son” that Israel was intended to be. Therefore, to say that Jesus is the Son of God because he is divine is true, but it is also to say that he has fulfilled his office as a human representative, in the place of Adam and Israel.
B. Preexistent Son
The liberal trajectory leading from Reimarus’s Fragments to D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Adolf von Harnack’s Essence of Christianity is essentially Arian p 465 (or Adoptionist).
First Quest
1788–1906
Reimarus to Schweitzer. The Christ of faith (confessed by the church in the creeds) is fundamentally different from the real Jesus of history. In his Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) argued that the high Christology found in the New Testament is mythological. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) ended this initial quest by arguing that Jesus expected an imminent establishment of a kingdom that failed to arrive.
No Quest
1906–1953
Schweitzer to Bultmann. Following Martin Kähler (supplemented by Martin Heidegger’s existentialist categories), Bultmann argued that the Jesus of history is of no significance to the Christ of faith.
Second (or New) Quest
1953–present
Especially associated with Ernst Käsemann but also with the Jesus Seminar.
Third Quest
1980s to present
The phrase was coined by an advocate of this quest, N. T. Wright. With the work of G. B. Caird, E. P. Sanders, and others, interest arose in contextualizing Jesus within his Jewish (Second Temple) milieu.
As we have already seen, the Synoptics report the charge against Jesus of blasphemy for claiming to be equal with God; Jesus and the evangelists call people to place their faith in Christ and to receive forgiveness of sins through Christ. Jesus himself calls his people to invoke his name in prayer, in baptism, in receiving forgiveness of sins, and in worship throughout the Gospels. Given the covenantal freight of that phrase “in the name of,” there is no doubt that Jesus was claiming to be no less than Yahweh incarnate. We have already encountered the conundrum Jesus presents to the religious leaders in Matthew 22:41–45: How can David call “Lord” one who will be his future descendant? At least implicitly, Jesus is claiming to have existed as the Lord prior to David himself.
III. Two Natures in One Person: The Incarnation
With the preceding lines of development in view, we arrive at the center of Christology: the doctrine of the incarnation. The faith of the church, summarized by the Chalcedonian Creed (451), is directed to “one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably …”
A. Exegetical Summary
B. Dogmatic Development
1. The Frist Controversies
The first reported challenges within the church itself from Jewish influences denied the deity of Christ. Emphasizing the continuing significance of the Mosaic law for Gentile converts, the Ebionite heresy (ʾebeyônîm, Hebrew for “the poor ones”) also regarded Jesus Christ as the Messiah but as an exclusively human person who justified himself by the works of the law and by his example leads his followers to do the same. According to Eusebius, some Ebionites held that he was supernaturally conceived though not preexistent. Similar was the heresy of adoptionism, p 471 which held that although Jesus was essentially nondivine, he was adopted by the Father—perhaps at his baptism or even his birth. As we will see, the effect (perhaps even the motive) of rejecting Christ’s divinity is the reduction of his work to that of providing a superior moral example.
If the challenge from a Jewish perspective was attributing full deity to Jesus Christ, the Hellenistic (Greek) problem was with his full humanity. How could God become flesh, which in Greek thought was tantamount to saying that the Good became trapped in evil matter?
2. Two Natures in One Person
Based on its view of human beings as composed of three parts—body, soul, and spirit (trichotomy), Apollinarianism taught that Jesus’ human spirit was replaced with the divine Logos.
Nestorianism (named after the fifth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, a student of the Antiochene theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia) held that the Logos indwelled Jesus morally rather than essentially. Therefore, he differs from us only in degree. Refusing to use the liturgical expression Theotokos (God-bearer) for Mary, Nestorius insisted that she was only the mother of Jesus’ human nature.
CHRISTOLOGICAL HERESIES SPECTRUM:
Denying Christ’s Divinity
Ebionitism Subordinationism Adoptionism Arianism/Semi-Arianism
Denying Christ’s Humanity
Docetism/Gnosticism Apollinarianism Monothelitism
Confusing the Two Natures
Monophysitism/Eutychianism
Dividing the Two Natures
Nestorianism
Nicaea
325
Formal statement on the Trinity
Constantinople I
381
Rejection of Apollinarianism, Monophysitism (also known as Eutychianism), and Nestorianism
Chalcedon
451
Consolidation of “one person in two natures”
Constantinople III
681
Monothelitism condemned; two intelligences and wills: one human, one divine, united in one person
Luther had introduced the novel view (though similar in some respects to Cyril’s formulation) that the characteristics (or attributes) of Christ’s divine nature are communicated to the human nature. Therefore, Christ can be present bodily at every altar because his human nature shares in the omnipresence of his divine nature. “Even as the one who is exalted at the right hand of God, Jesus Christ is still present on earth according to his divine and human natures.”58 Not only is Jesus Christ in his humanity omnipresent; he is also omniscient.
From a Reformed perspective, this view threatened to roll back the ecumenical consensus achieved at Chalcedon. While affirming Christ’s presence in the Supper, the Reformed held that he could not be present bodily anywhere on earth until his p 477 return in glory
To Lutheran ears, talk of Christ being omnipresent as God but not omnipresent according to his humanity sounded like a Nestorian division of natures. Yet Reformed theologians heard in the Lutheran doctrine a Monophysite confusion of natures: allowing the humanity to be absorbed by the divinity.
First, the Lutheran-Reformed debate turns on the question of the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum). From the Reformed perspective, this refers to the fact that by virtue of the hypostatic union the attributes of either nature belong to the one person.
Second, differences between these traditions can be discerned on the question of whether the deity of Christ can be contained (i.e., circumscribed) by his humanity. Reformed Christology strongly affirms the strictest identification between Jesus and God in the incarnation.
Like other Reformed pastors, Calvin articulated a more paradoxical formulation: “Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!”
In short, the Reformed acknowledge a communication of attributes (both divine and human) to the person, while Lutherans teach a communication of attributes of one nature to the other. It should be observed that in the Lutheran view (contra Monophysitism) the natures do not become fused into one. However, the specter of confusing the natures is raised by the insistence that whatever is done by the human nature is done by the divine nature rather than, as the Reformed would say, by the one person.
Only in the distinctiveness of each nature, united in one person, do we find the complete Savior who can bring complete deliverance from sin and death. All Christians share the conclusion expressed by Warfield: “No Two Natures, no Incarnation; no Incarnation, no Christianity in any distinctive sense.” As a fact of history it is the heart of the gospel, the basis of any legitimate talk of God’s redemption of the world in his Son.