Thou Art The Christ

God and man? Can that be true? The man, Jesus, is God? Yes! This is the confession of the Christian Church. Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man in one person.

The Church confesses that “Our only comfort in life and death” is not found simply in God. God the Almighty, the Omnipotent, the Holy One in His existence as deity, is no comfort to us. If we turn directly to Him with no mediator, what we find is not comfort, but wrath; not justification, but condemnation; not peace, but terror.

Neither can we find comfort in man alone. No man could ever atone even for his own sins, let alone for the sins of others. Even a perfect man could do us no good as far as our relationship to God is concerned. What sinners need, and what God has provided in Christ, is a mediator who is truly man but much more than a man—a man who is at the same time the true God.

It is good for us to be aware of what has gone on in the history of the church with respect to this article of our confession. Some of the fiercest battles within the church have taken place over the question of whether Jesus is really God. Already in the first century after Christ a sect arose which denied the deity of Christ. Called Ebionites, they were Jewish Christians who held that, on account of his strict obedience to the law, Christ was the Messiah, yes, but he was not divine.

In the second century the bishop of the city of Antioch, a man whose name was Paul, gained followers by teaching that the power of the Godhead progressively penetrated the humanity of the man Jesus so that he was, in a sense, deified; the same process, Bishop Paul taught, though in a lesser degree, must occur in all of us. But Jesus, he claimed, was not God.

In the early 300’s the controversy became even more sharp. The whole church was in turmoil as a bishop named Arius gained many followers by teaching that the pre-existent Christ was not really God, but was, instead, the first being that God created. Though not eternal, he was the Logos; he created the world, and he became incarnate as the man Jesus. But this Jesus, Arius taught, was not truly God. The Council of Nicea, in 320 AD (or CE, Common Era), the first of the seven ecumenical councils in the early church, condemned this view, but the controversy raged on for many years after that.

In the next century the controversy took another form. The issue bacame the relationship between the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ. Is Christ really two persons—a divine person and a human person? The then-bishop of Antioch, a man named Nestorius, said so. The man Jesus is not God, he taught, but in Jesus Christ the man Jesus and God work so closely together that their work can be called one. But Jesus himself was not God.

In the year 451 AD the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth great ecumenical council, adopted the now professed canon which asserts both the true deity and the true humanity of Jesus Christ and the unity of His person. This famous declaration of faith states, “We...teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and also truly man…, begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseperably, the distinction of nature being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, the only-begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Orthodoxy has continued to defend this confession—that Jesus Christ is one person, but He has two distinct natures, divine and human--in spite of controversies that continued until about 700 AD when the whole church eventually came to accept the true and full deity of Christ without any questions. During the next nine centuries, however, the church became so embroiled in political battles between popes and emperors that it sank deeper and deeper into worldliness and corruption, foreshadowing the need for a reformation.

And then, in 1517, came the break with Rome. The Roman Catholic Church continued to confess the true deity of Christ, and so did most of the Reformation; the Calvinists certainly did, and so did the Lutherans, the Anglicans, and the Anabaptists. One group, however, the Socinians, denied the deity of Christ. They were the forerunners of the liberalsm, or “modernism,” that became widespread in the 19th century. Liberalism taught that Jesus was essentially just an ideal man who was closer to God than any other, or who had a higher degree of the divine spark in him than the rest of us do, so that we do well to learn from him, but inherently all men are good, and are getting better all the time.