Protecting God From Himself

Have you ever heard someone answer a question about Jesus’s nature or his activities by starting with one of these two phrases: “Jesus in his divinity …” or “Jesus in his humanity…”? It may be easy to speak of Jesus this way, but it is unbiblical.  None of the biblical authors speak of Jesus this way.  Also, the ecumenical councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451 AD) did not recognize it as orthodox.

Instead of getting into the weeds and nuances of the various Christological heresies that the church has produced and rejected, let me offer possibly one of the major reasons for this continued problem—the rational notion of incommensurability.   The concept assumes God is a completely different kind of substance than his creation and so he must always be absolutely separate from it.  Just as an artist cannot share her being-ness with her statue, Greek philosophy would have us assume that the “Ingenerate” (God) therefore cannot share his being with the “generated” (creation). Yet a fundamental belief for the Christian faith is that God completely “infleshed” himself in Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered, died, and rose again.

Do you see the clash of human reason and the Bible?  Can you feel the danger of the logical notions of incommensurability?  It clouds the very nature of the Triune God and his love for his people.  But why play with such fire when there’s no biblical reason to protect God’s nature from Jesus Christ?

Let me offer one historical anecdote to answer my rhetorical question.  Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople (428-431), in one sense happily separated Jesus’s two natures.  For instance, Nestorius angrily protected the nature of God’s attributes when he responded to a simple question of why a Christian could not simply call Jesus God, “We must not call the one who became a man for us God … I refuse to acknowledge, as God, an infant of two or three months.”  Yet at the same time he insisted:

Christ is indivisible in His being Christ, but he is twofold in His being God and Man . . . We know not two Christs or two Sons or Only-begottens or Lords, not one and another Son, not a first and a second Christ, but one and the same, who is seen in his created and His increate natures. (JND Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, 314)

In the classical sense of “Nestorianism” Nestorius did not follow the heresy named after him, the idea that the two natures of Christ are separable.  He envisaged that the divine nature of the Word and human nature subsisted in the nature of “Christ” voluntarily.  That is, the two natures are in union through a free and mutual love, not natural or hypostatic as Chalcedon would conclude. Nestorius avoided the confusion of the two natures yet held natures as indissolubly one.  But the manner in which he spoke of this union in order to protect both natures seemed to protect God from the cross in an unbiblical fashion.

Nestorius’s Christology was formed by two concepts: (1) the incommensurability and impassibility of God; and (2) the need for Christ to be both fully divine and fully man if he is to save us.  Consequently, one must hold to a single nature in Christ for salvation but at the same time protect God from Christ.  Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting that the Father suffered and died on the cross (patripassionism), but the New Testament does not allow for incommensurability because Jesus, the infleshed-God, died on the cross.  Look at Colossians 1:15-23:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,  if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

In Paul’s thought there’s no notion that fullness of the divine must be protected from the suffering that took place on the cross.  Without the God-Man on the cross reconciliation doesn’t happen.

It’s the commensurate God who shares his being with his creation in Christ that makes salvation possible.  Without it we distort the Gospel.  We need God to define his nature in the Bible.  The methodology of human logic only misshapes the Triune God and the Gospel into something that isn’t Christianity.

To hold to the incommensurability of God logically you must protect God from Jesus Christ so that you can protect God from humanity. Such protection makes it impossible to call Jesus, who was an infant, God. You cannot call Jesus, who righteously felt anger, God.  You cannot call Jesus, who wept, God.  You cannot call Jesus, who was tempted, God.  You cannot call Jesus, who prayed in Gethsemane, God. You cannot call Jesus, who died on the cross, God.  And therefore we who worship Jesus Christ misrepresent God, are still dead in our sins, and are people who should be most pitied.

Thankfully this isn’t the case, the story of the Bible is about the commensurate God who came and dwelt among us in order to raise us up to be seated with him in glory!  We worship the God whose exact imprint is seen in Jesus of Nazareth!

So the next time you hear that “Jesus in his humanity did a, b, or c” maybe a good question to follow would be, “Do you think God cannot share his nature with his creation?” Or if you’re not convinced by what I’ve said here, perhaps in your next read through of the Bible you could keep this question in mind.  I trust you’ll enjoy seeing the unprotected God.

Don't you find Jesus boring?

Boredom. It can set in for all different kinds of reasons. I remember as a kid, it was usually because what had previously entertained me became predictable. Overuse (or abuse) of that entertainment meant that playing video games, shooting hoops, watching TV, riding my bike, etc., began to grow stale.   Somehow, in some way, I had exhausted the excitement of that object to the point that I became hopelessly bored.

With no desire to get into all the cures for boredom for kids, I want to ponder why many who call themselves Christians get bored with Jesus.

You might say, I've never been bored with Jesus, how could you say such a thing?

Well, let me answer with a couple questions that I think the vast majority of us can relate to. Have you ever struggled to read your Bible? Have you ever found sport, TV, video games, your job, or whatever, easier to engage than have a conversation with God in his word? I'm assuming you could easily have experienced this at least once in your life, if not consistently. And maybe one of the reasons for this is that your relationship with Jesus has become flat from "overexposure."

Again maybe you've never said this out loud but maybe you've believed the unspoken voice that you know everything there is to know about Jesus. That somehow you've exhausted all that can be known of Jesus in the Bible.

Maybe you grew up in church listening to the same stories every Sunday. Perhaps you had a Christian education from kindergarten to post-grad. Maybe you have heard and even taught all the stories about Jesus. Jesus is boring to you because he's predictable: you know what he's going to say or do next. It is as if your heart says, "Yep, Jesus always seems to heal the sick, love 'the-wrong-kind-of-people,' and offend 'the-right-kind-of-people.' "

Or what about the feeling that you've heard the "Gospel" a thousand times so that now it has grown stale? Again, maybe you never say this, but in your heart you've thought, "How many more times do I have to see or hear about Jesus building a cross-bridge over the gap between myself and God?" Maybe you feel that the "Gospel" is just a juridical get-out-of-eternal-torment card and not much else. And then we are supposed to autonomously self-generate a life of holiness and obedience by our gratitude for this paper-thin gospel.

Is this either the Jesus, or the Gospel, we find in Scripture?

What we find is a Jesus who's utterly shocking and jaw-dropping astonishing.

In Mark 2:1-12, we find a familiar story for anyone who has spent any time in church at all. Jesus heals a paralytic who was lowered through a hole in roof of a home by four men because so many people were crowded in the house to hear Jesus teach that they couldn't get the paralytic to him. It's tragic that so many kids have been bored over and over with this amazing story and are taught that we must do whatever we can to get people to Jesus, primarily by bringing them to church.

But is this really the story or the application? I'd say no! Jesus actually is quite alien to those in the story. Not only does Jesus give of himself and teach people when he'd just returned from a road trip (how many of us would do this?), but he shocks everyone when he sees the faithfulness of the paralytic and his friends. He doesn't heal him, the assumed greatest need of a man who couldn't walk, but rather forgives his sins.

No one in that house was expecting Jesus to say, "Son, your sins are forgiven," not one of them. This is where you can imagine wrinkled foreheads, raised eyebrows, jaws on the floor, and utter silence. They were there to hear Jesus teach with authority and see a miracle. Now with the first one out of the way (they might have thought), it was clear to them what Jesus would say when the paralytic had finally reached the floor, "Stand up and walk." Instead he said, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

Now, the scribes were starting to make connections in their minds. "Who does this guy think he is? Only God can forgive sins, right? Does this mean that Jesus is calling himself God? And if so, what do we need to do about it?" Jesus sensing this in his Spirit, meets the needs of the skeptics. He says, "So you can know that the Son of Man has authority from heaven to forgive sins on the earth" he turns to the paralytic and says "Rise up, take your bed, and go home." It's Jesus offering the tangible to prove the intangible.

I think most of us, if we had the authority of the Son of Man in Daniel 7, the last thing we'd do would be to prove our authority with meeting a need. Instead we would send the doubters away to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Jesus doesn't do this. He meets the needs of the skeptics and the entire room is gob smacked! Then they give God praise as they watch the man stand up, pick up his bed and walk home.

Jesus redefines all the expectations of those first century people. Without a doubt, the effect would be the same in the twenty-first century. The cultural standards of today would be turned upside down and the expectations of so many in our churches would be sadly redefined.

So let me encourage you: if your relationship with Jesus has grown stale, flat and he seems predicable, then ask God to give you a deep sense of curiosity for him and for his Word. Challenge him to shock you. Plead with him to engage your deepest needs, needs you may not even know you have. Tell him you desire to find him more thrilling at any cost. I believe he'll gladly answer and you'll discover that the goodness of our God will never grow stale.