Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Was Christ only a human or also God in the flesh?

". . . assuming the existence of God and human souls, in fact accepting the Bible as the inerrant revelation of divine truth, we approach the main topic: the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. The approach, however, requires a statement of what the problem is. Since God is omnipotent, the question is not how such a stupendous event could be possible, but, rather, what precisely was this event.
The Scriptural assertions are clear enough as far as they go. In the Gospel of John (1:14) we read 'The Logos was made flesh.' John also says, 'Jesus Christ is come in the flesh . . . every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, but this is the spirit of the anti-Christ.' Paul too, in 1 Timothy 3:16, insists that 'God was manifest in the flesh.' Nearly every verse in the Gospels presupposes an Incarnation. Similarly the epistles of Paul: Philippians 2:6-8; also 1 Peter 1:19, and by clear implication dozens of others.
But, (do you notice?) that while the flesh or body of Jesus is so frequently mentioned, these verses say nothing about the mind or soul of the person. That God wanted to impress us with the fact that the Second Person assumed a body is perfectly clear; but did he also wish to obscure the fact that the incarnate Christ had a human mind? That Christ assumed a body causes no difficulty to anyone who believes the Bible; but to understand how the Second Person could have a human soul and a be a human person (which virtually all orthodox Christians deny), and how that mind or soul was related to the divine Person is perhaps the most difficult problem in all theology. No one, Catholic, Calvinist, or atheist can deny that the Bible teaches an Incarnation. But an 'in-psuch-ation' troubled the church fathers over a period of 400 years. The results of their labors are at best woefully incomplete. Yet there is no better way to begin the subject than by tracing its history."

- Gordon H. Clark, The Incarnation

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