Part 1: Like No One Else | Part 2: Deity 1 | Part 3: Deity 2 | Part 4: Deity 3 | Part 5: Deity 4 | Part 6: Deity 5 | Part 7: Deity 6 | Part 8: Deity 7 | Part 9: Deity 8 | Part 10: Deity 9 | Part 11: Humanity 1 | Part 12: Humanity 2 | Part 13: Humanity 3 | Part 14: Humanity 4
Now we get to the hard part. It’s not difficult for us to think of Jesus as human; he walked among us. It’s a little more difficult, but not impossible, to think of him as God, given the Trinity, the miracles, the ascension. But what’s really difficult is to think of him as both, at the same time. How does God exist in a human body? How does that even work?
Some of the greatest minds in history wrestled with that question over a span of four centuries, and at the end of a complex and tumultuous process, they said, “Well, here’s what we think happened, but we’re not even going to try to explain how.”
You see, the whole idea seems fraught with contradiction. God is omnipotent; Jesus was beaten by evil men. God is omniscient; Jesus said he didn’t know when he would come back (Mk 13.32). God is omnipresent; Jesus traveled from place to place, even speaking of his need to go someplace else (Lk 4.43; Jn 14.1-2). God is eternal and immortal; Jesus died.
What?!
And again I say, how does that even work?
Let’s start with some basics.
As both God and man, Jesus must have had a divine nature, one that existed from all eternity past. He has always had all the attributes of God. I’ve mentioned the four standard non-communicable attributes above, but he also has all the communicable attributes as well—grace, mercy, peace, love, justice, and so on.
Then, at a point in time, he became human, and at that moment he added all the attributes that make someone human—most importantly mortality, but also corporality (being limited to a body). As I’ve noted in an earlier post, he did not add the attribute of sinfulness, but that is not a necessary human attribute, since Adam and Eve were not initially sinful.
Now, the problem comes in that some of these attributes appear to be contradictory, most obviously immortality and mortality, but also corporality and omnipresence. And as we noted above, Jesus appears to demonstrate lack of knowledge, which seems to contradict omniscience.
The standard way of dealing with this is with the following carefully worded proposition: When he became incarnate, Jesus added to his eternal divine nature a human nature, thereby voluntarily (and temporarily) setting aside the independent exercise of his divine attributes and placing himself in dependence upon the Father.
Note that he did not set aside the divine attributes—say, his omnipotence—for then he would no longer be God. He set aside the exercise of those attributes.
Now, that helps us a little, but it still doesn’t solve our conundrum. I can understand how he might choose not to use his infinite strength, for example, but how does he set aside the exercise of his omniscience? How do you not know something that you know?
Have you ever been stumped doing a crossword puzzle and looked up a single answer in the back? And when you did that, you accidentally saw another answer that you hadn’t gotten to yet? And then you went back to the puzzle and tried to disremember what you saw?
Didn’t work, did it?
It’s fine to say that Jesus knew certain things—say, what people were thinking (Jn 2.25)—because the Father revealed that to him; but how can we say he’s omniscient at the same time?
We’ll continue this puzzlement in the next post.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
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