JESUS
CHRIST-HYPOSTATIC UNION
We should
settle it firmly in our minds, that our Savior is perfect man as well as
perfect God, and perfect God as well as perfect man. If we once lose sight of
this great foundation truth, we may run into fearful heresies. The name
Emmanuel takes in the whole mystery. Jesus is "God with us." He had a
nature like our own in all things, sin only excepted. But though Jesus was
"with us" in human flesh and blood, He was at the same time very God.
Commentary: Matthew 1.
It is by far
the most amazing miracle in the whole Bible-far more amazing than the
resurrection and more amazing than the creation of the universe. The fact that
the infinite, omnipotent, eternal Son of God could become man and join Himself
to a human nature forever, so that infinite God became one person with infinite
man, will remain for eternity the most profound miracle and the most profound
mystery in all the universe.
Systematic Theology, Zondervan, 1994, p. 563.
Emmanuel. God with us. He who resided in Heaven, co-equal and
co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit, willingly descended into our world.
He breathed our air, felt our pain, knew our sorrows, and died for our sins. He
didn't come to frighten us, but to show us the way to warmth and safety.
Charles Swindoll
At the heart
of Christian faith is the good news of redemption for sin through one who would
stand in the sinner’s place bearing his guilt and satisfying the debt of God’s
eternal just wrath. Only God could do this; the great Judge of mankind was
judged for us. However, only a human being should stand in the place of humans;
yet he had to be perfect himself. Who could do that? One who is God and yet, at
the same time, perfect man, the Lord Jesus Christ.
John Hannah
Tabletalk, v. 28, n. 8, p. 10, Ligonier
Ministries, Used by Permission.
Man was added
to Him, God not lost to Him; He emptied Himself not by losing what He was, but
by taking to Him what He was not.
Augustine
The Word of
the Father, by whom all time was created, was made flesh and was born in time
for us. He, without whose divine permission no day completes its course, wished
to have one day for His human birth. In the bosom of His Father He existed
before all the cycles of ages; born of an earthly mother, He entered upon the
course of the years on this day. The Maker of man became man that He, Ruler of
the stars, might be nourished at the breast; that He, the Bread, might be
hungry; that He, the Fountain, might thirst; that He, the Light, might sleep;
that He, the Way, might be wearied by the journey; that He, the Truth, might be
accused by false witnesses; that He, the Judge of the living and the dead,
might be brought to trial by a mortal judge; that He, Justice, might be
condemned by the unjust; that He, Discipline, might be scourged with whips;
that He, the Foundation, might be suspended upon a cross; that Courage might be
weakened; that Security might be wounded; that Life might die. To endure these
and similar indignities for us, to free us, unworthy creatures, He who existed
as the Son of God before all ages, without a beginning, deigned to become the
Son of Man in these recent years. He did this although He who submitted to such
great evils for our sake had done no evil and although we, who were the
recipients of so much good at His hands, had done nothing to merit these
benefits.
Augustine
Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, Trans.
Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney, R.S.M., v. 38 in The
Fathers of the Church, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, New
York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., p. 28.
Nowhere does
the Bible ever declare that Jesus' deity makes Him something more than a man or
something other than a human. Scripture never allows the divine nature of
Christ to overshadow or diminish His human nature
Phil
Johnson
Not My Will, but Thine, GraceLife
Pulpit. www.thegracelifepulpit.com/philsermons.htm.
Our Savior must be fully man in order
to take the place of men and die in their stead, and He must be fully God in
order for the value of His sacrificial payment to satisfy the demands of our
infinitely holy God. Man He must be, but a mere man simply could not make this
infinite payment for sin.
Bruce Ware
The One Way, Tabletalk, June 2008, p. 19,
Used by Permission.
He is the
King of kings, the radiance of His glory, the Lord of the spaceless,
fabulous, infinite universe, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, unspeakable
holy, dwelling in light, unapproachable, changeless...and yet He condescended
to be enclosed in lowly human flesh, to be born a despised Judean, in a filthy
stable, in the womb of a simple Israeli woman and without fanfare or pomp.
Author Unknown
The wrong
that man had done to the Divine Majesty, should be expiated by none but man,
and could be by none but God.
John Howe
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA.
2000, p. 30
Jesus Christ,
the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks
If we had been told that God
was coming into a man's life…that must be something very terrible and awful.
That certainly must rend and tear the life to which God comes. At least, it
will separate it and make it unnatural and strange. God fills a bush with His
glory, and it burns. God enters into the great mountain, and it rocks with an
earthquake. When He comes to occupy a man, He must distort the humanity He
occupies into some inhuman shape.
Instead of that, this new life
into which God comes seems to be the most quietly, naturally human life that
was ever seen upon the earth. It glides into its place like sunlight. It seems
to make it evident that God and man are essentially so near together that the
meeting of their natures in the life of a God-man is not strange. So always
does Christ deal with His own nature, accepting His divinity as you and I
accept our humanity, and letting it shine out through the envelope with which
it has most subtly and mysteriously mingled, as the soul is mingled with and
shines out through the body.
Phillips Brooks
He is not
humanity deified. He is not Godhead humanized. He is God. He is man. He is all
that God is, and all that man is as God created Him.
C.H. Spurgeon
30.28.
Jesus was God
and man in one person, that God and man might be happy together again.
George Whitfield
Although
Christ was God, He took flesh; and having been made man, He remained what He
was, God.
Origen
And we know
how necessary it was that Christ should come forth as God and man; for
salvation cannot be expected in any other way than from God; and Christ must
confer salvation on us, and not only be its minister. And then, as He is God,
He justifies us, regenerates us, illuminates us into a hope of eternal life; to
conquer sin and death is doubtless what only can be effected by divine power.
Hence Christ, except He was God, could not have performed what we had to expect
from Him. It was also necessary that He should become man, that he might unite
us to Himself; for we have no access to God, except we become the friends of
Christ; and how can we be so made, except by a brotherly union?
John
Calvin
Commentary, Jeremiah 23:5-6.
Touching His
human nature, Jesus is no longer present with us. Touching his Divine nature,
He is never absent from us.
R.C. Sproul
The Purpose of God, An
Exposition of Ephesians, Christian Focus Publications, 1994, p. 22.
A brief
history of Christian discussion concerning the Christological incarnation:
1.
Greek
Gnosticism suggested Jesus only “appeared" to be human” – Docetism.
2.
Ebionites
(Jewish Christians) asserted Jesus was fully human, and Holy Spirit descended
upon Him at baptism - Adoptionism.
3.
Arius
(c. 250-336) argued that Jesus was subordinate to God the Father. “There was a
time when the Son was not” – Subordinationism; denial
of pre- existence.
4. Council
of Nicea (325) affirmed that Jesus was fully God and
fully man in homoousion.
5.
Apollinarius
(c. 310-380) posited that human rational soul of Jesus was replaced by divine logos
in single nature – Monophysitism.
6.
Gregory
of Nazianzus (330-389) stated, “the unassumed is the unhealed”
7.
Nestorius
(c. 380-451) suggested that there were two separate beings in Jesus Christ; no
real union.
8.
Eutyches
(c. 378-454) indicated that the human nature was absorbed into the divine in a
synthesis – Absorption.
9. Tome
of Pope Leo (449), Council of Chalcedon (451) established
orthodoxy as “two natures (divine and human) in one hypostasis or Person
(Lat. personae).”
10. Leontius of Byzantium (c. 500-560) introduced
concept of enhypostasia, that human nature of
Jesus did not have independent existence.
11. German theology of 18th and 19th
centuries – quest for “historical Jesus.” Led to R. Bultmann’s
“demythologization.”
12. Nineteenth century theology – argument
of kenotic theories of Christology.
13. Karl Barth (1886-1968) – Christocentric revelation of God. Humanity of God-
assumption of humanity into Deity, leading to universalism.
James Fowler
Excerpted from: Christology, Study Outlines, 1999, www.christinyou.net.