Christians believe that Jesus is the "Son of God," a simple phrase that opened a profound theological question early in the church's history.  "Son" suggests something human;  "God" refers to the divine.  So the question became, "How were divinity and humanity together in Jesus?"  It is a question that can still puzzle Christian believers.

    The official answer—official, that is, for the early church and most of its descendants—was determined in the fifth century by a meeting of bishops from all over the Christian world, based on their understanding of what Christians had traditionally believed.  In that era, all basic Christian doctrine that fell into dispute was determined in that way.

    In order to understand the "correct" answer to our question, we need to begin with the "wrong" answers, or heresies.  The intellectual value of heresy lies in its forcing us to clarify our thinking, to define that which is essential to our ideas.  In the fifth century, two opposing heresies were in broad circulation and demanded to be engaged.

    The first of the heresies was that Jesus was merely human.  There is truth in that statement, for Jesus was human.  Heresies usually contain some truth; they often become heretical because they exaggerate the truth that they contain.
 
    This first heresy, of which there were several variations, offered five arguments.  The first is that God is one, not many.  One of the reasons for the argument that Jesus was only human is the Christian belief in the oneness of God and Christianity's consequent opposition to polytheism.  To oppose polytheism adequately (the proponents of this heresy argued), Christians could not very well talk about God in Heaven and God on earth in Jesus.  That would appear to endorse polytheism by dividing God, placing God in two locations.  Therefore, Jesus could not have been fully God.

    It was a short step from this argument to the second, that Jesus was a human being with a special, indeed unique, relationship to God.  Nestorius, who occupied the powerful position of Bishop of Constantinople, argued that the Word of God (the Logos) was joined to the individual personality of Jesus; in effect, that meant that the Word continually inspired Jesus and he went around doing good. Nestorianism has some affinities with the heresy known to historians as "Adoptionist Christology," according to which Jesus was an ordinary, finite man, who was inspired and used by God, but in a higher degree than Moses and Elijah were inspired and used by God.  As a result, he was adopted as Son of God at his Resurrection. 

    There is a verse in the Bible that provides a basis for thinking this way.  Romans 1:3-4 speaks of "the gospel concerning [God's] Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power [… ] by resurrection from the dead […]." Jesus and God were united, according to this argument, through moral will; that is, Jesus agreed with God's standards of what was morally right and he was able to carry them out.  He had the will to do God's will. (A related claim held that God's Spirit motivated Jesus and led him to become divine.)     
   
    A third argument was that Jesus did not have the same "essence" as God.  (The essence was the permanent, core, distinguishing nature of a particular type of reality. The Greeks distinguished between a divine and human essence, in addition to the essence of horse and tree and every other category of thing.)  Contradicting the Nicene Creed, this heresy held that Jesus was not "of one substance (or essence or nature or being) with the Father."  Divinity cannot be shared.  Only God is God.  Therefore, according to Arius (fl. 325), who presented this argument, the best that could be said about Jesus, even as Son of God, was that he was "like" the Father.

    A fourth argument:  If God was not in the earthly Jesus, then Jesus could not have been God, and that means that Jesus could not have existed eternally, sharing existence and eternity with God.  Arius pithily encapsulated this point by saying that there was a time when the Son was not.  At the ecumenical council that dealt with this issue, different factions had different campaign slogans, such as we might find in contemporary political contests.  Arius had dancers and drummers going around chanting Ein pote hote ouk ein, "There was when he was not"—there was a time when the Son of God did not exist. Arius argued that even if the Son was begotten and not made (we make things out of something that is not ourselves, such as a carpenter making something out of wood, whereas we speak of begetting children, since something of each parent is in the child), begetting implies that there was a time when the Son did not exist, since he had not yet been begotten by the Father.  Arius left a loophole in his argument, however, since he was willing to say that the Son was begotten before time began.

    Finally, there was the argument that God is transcendent, and that God would not be fully transcendent if God were in Jesus on earth.  Furthermore (according to this argument), one could not be completely secure in believing in and relying on God unless God were free from risk, harm, and danger.  If God were in danger of getting hurt, God would not be fully reliable—yet God would be in danger if God dwelt in Jesus.  So God's reaching out and going out of Himself into Jesus would be contrary to God's own best interest and alien to Himself, since it would endanger Himself.  So to insure that God would not get hurt by the world, God could not have been in the world in Jesus.

    On the other side of this theological debate over how to understand the humanity of Jesus was the towering figure of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt.  He said that final religious security lies in believing that God was willing to be incarnate, risking Himself for the world.  The kind of God to believe in is one who is willing to get involved.  God risked coming into the world and triumphed over it.

    God is Love, Athanasius argued, and love involves risk.

    Another argument against the heresy was that humanity is not redeemed or saved or brought back to God unless God is involved with humanity.  To paraphrase Tertullian, another theologian at that time, "What God has not been part of cannot have been redeemed."
   

    Another heresy maintained that Jesus was primarily God.  Those who espoused it were called "Monophysites," from the Greek mono, one, and physis, nature.  They believed that Jesus was best understood as having just one nature, a divine nature.  The Monophysite position became orthodox in the Coptic Church in Egypt, the Syrian Orthodox Church, and the Armenian Orthodox Church, although recent statements from two of those churches have moved toward blurring the disagreements.

    Monophysites hold, as do most Christian traditions, that Jesus was God's full and final revelation to humanity.  Furthermore, if Jesus was the revelation of God, then God was fully present in Jesus and Jesus had to share in God's essence—again, there is wide consensus on this point. If Jesus were not "of one substance with the Father," then, at best, only part of God would have been present in him and he would not have been the full and final revelation of God, as Christians claim that he was.

    Besides, via ancient Greek metaphysics, God's essence is simple, which means that God does not have parts.  Therefore, God is always fully present in His revelation.  (Orthodox, catholic Christianity believes all of the above, too.)

    The claim is then made that Jesus is God in the flesh.  Accordingly, the Incarnation is a mode of God's existence.  Therefore, Jesus has no independent existence as a human being but is the Father made flesh. Stated another way, Jesus is God in a human envelope.  His essential core and his personality are God, covered by an exterior "envelope" of human flesh.  Accordingly, it was not really Jesus who was tempted and suffered.  It was God Who had suffered.

    The Monophysite position had some important advocates, the most important probably being them Cyril, one of the successors of Athanasius as Bishop of Alexandria.

    In 451 an ecumenical council of 500-600 bishops was convened at Chalcedon, near what is today Istanbul, to deal with this issue.  They decided that neither Nestorius, on the one hand, nor Cyril, on the other, had it right. They came up with the doctrine of the union of the two natures, divine and human, in one person. (This is the crux of the famous "Definition of Chalcedon.") They affirmed one hypostasis or identity, one Jesus Christ, in two natures.  To use their wording, they said they believed in "one and the same Jesus Christ acknowledged in two natures," without mixing them, changing them, dividing them, or separating them.  Then they went home.  Basically, they said we cannot explain the mystery.  The best that human beings can do is to acknowledge and be content with paradox.


    When seeking a solution to a problem, paradox is less than an ideal stopping place.  But since we are dealing, here, with a genuine mystery about divinity, we should not expect our limited human minds to provide any better explanation.  Nevertheless, let me close by presenting three modern approaches to this topic.

    The first goes like this:  If God is perfect, then it would not be inappropriate to say that perfection is a manifestation of God.  God is present whenever there is perfection.  That is how divinity and humanity were together in Jesus.  Not because there were two natures or essences in him, but because he was a perfect and fully human being.  The human nature was his humanity; the divine presence accounted for his perfect humanity.  Christians believe that Jesus made use of all his potential and was related to everyone in the most appropriate way, so that, in comparison with everyone else, he certainly was extra-ordinary. 
 
    But his extraordinariness is, at least theoretically, one that we can share, through the mysterious power—i.e., the power of God—that enables us to do what is appropriate and to trust in an ultimacy that is outside ourselves, and therefore to love as fully and as widely as Jesus loved.  When that is the case, then God can be in all of us, as St. Paul envisioned.  Until then, Christians believe that the divine incarnation has taken place fully only in Jesus.

    Another modern approach is to say that God is our Ultimate Concern.  God is whatever each of us as individuals is most basically concerned with.  Perhaps such a concern should not fully qualify as God, but we sure treat it as though it were God.  Now, God is what always concerned Jesus ultimately, in that Jesus always wanted to do the will of his Heavenly Father.  As a result, the human and the divine were together in Jesus.  Jesus' every concern always reflected his Ultimate Concern, which was to be oriented toward God, the highest and the best.

    Yet another approach was suggested by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theological spokesman in Nazi Germany for the "Confessing Church," which resisted Hitler's pressure for the Church to acknowledge the Third Reich as the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth.  Bonhoeffer said that an appropriate understanding of Jesus is not based on explanation but on relationship.  Instead of asking how humanity and divinity can be together in Jesus, you should ask who?  Who is Jesus for you?  What is your relationship to him?  Granted that Jesus was human, he becomes God when he is God for you.  Not when you decide to ascribe divinity to him, but when something about him "grabs" you in such a way that you accept his standards and values and his way of life, and when you yield your life to him.

    I think that Albert Schweitzer, with doctoral degrees in music, theology, and medicine, anticipated Bonhoeffer's position in the last paragraph of a book he wrote entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Speaking about Jesus, it says, "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside He came to those people who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the same word:  'Follow me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."


Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Christ the Center. John Bowden, trans. 1960. New York: Harper & Row, 1996.

"Chalcedon, the Definition of." The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.  F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

"Hypostatic Union," in Cross and Livingstone.

"Monophysitism," in Cross and Livingstone.

Schweitzer, Albert.  The Quest for the Historical Jesus. W. Montgomery, trans. 1906. New York: Dover, 2005.


     Roland Zimany retired at the end of 2003 after five years as pastor of Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa. For the previous thirteen years, he had been professor of Philosophy and Religion at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois.

     With an AB from Princeton, an MBA from New York University, an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and a PhD in Religion from Duke, Roland first worked for twelve years as a management consultant, with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and finally with National Urban League before embarking on his academic career in 1980.

     His paper was presented to the Des Moines Torch Club in December 2010.