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CHAPTER 2

THE BIRTH OF THE KING

Jesus became controversial the day He was conceived! But Matthew (1:18-25) and Luke (1:26-38) explicitly state the early Christian claim that Jesus’ very conception and birth were unique, i.e., that He was born of a young Jewish virgin Mary. Over the centuries of Church history orthodox Christians have insisted upon the truth of Christ’s virgin birth and the NT interpretation of what this miraculous event secured. Heretics and unbelievers, on the contrary, have made it a point to deny either its reality or its NT interpretation. One might be tempted to minimize the entire virgin birth debate as just a mere theological “fine point” if he did not understand the great doctrinal consequences that result from the orthodox position. When he appreciates these consequences, he remains indifferent to the importance of the virgin birth claim. Thus in the following sections the event of the virgin birth will be studied, and then the unbelieving responses to that event and the doctrinal consequences of the virgin birth will be given. The latter part will be a summary of the six-century discussion about the doctrine of Christ’s nature. Read here Matthew 1-2; Luke 1-2.)

THE HISTORICAL INCIDENT OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

The acceptance of the virgin birth is contingent upon one thinking in terms of the biblical framework we have been studying in Parts II through IV. Given the creation, fall, and other events together with their associated revealed truths, the virgin birth in not only possible, it is absolutely necessary to God’s plan. The necessity of the virgin birth can be seen on three grounds—the prophetic, the legal-moral, and the spiritual. All three reasons, of course, refute the common liberal idea that the virgin birth is a mere “minor point” depending upon only two isolated NT passages without any other biblical backing.

THE PROPHETIC NECESSITY.

The first reason for the miraculous birth involves the biblical custom of proving God’s faithfulness because He keeps His prophetic promises to man. Prophecy must be fulfilled that man may know that God has spoken (Isa. 41:22-23) and that man may therefore believe (John 14:29). Hence, if the virgin birth is contained in OT prophecy, then it had to occur, regardless of the supposedly “isolated” references in Matthew and Luke. At least two OT prophecies require a virgin birth for Jesus to qualify as Israel’s Messiah. In Isaiah 7:14 the context deals with a political-military crisis in the southern kingdom of Judah in the days of King Ahaz. The apostate

northern kingdom had entered into an alliance with Syria to destroy Judah and the house of Ahaz (Isa. 7:1-2). Yahweh, through Isaiah the prophet, assured King Ahaz that this alliance would fail within one generation (7:7-9). To confirm His promise, Yahweh asked Ahaz to choose a miracle for Yahweh to do to prove that God was really behind His promise (7:10-11). After Ahaz hypocritically refused (7:12), Yahweh then addressed the entire royal house of David (7:13 where “you” is plural), commanding it to “behold” “the” virgin (“behold” in Hebrew with a present participle refers to a future event) would conceive and bear a son to the Davidic line and that in the time span it would take such a child to mature, the alliance of the North would be doomed (7:14- 16). In giving this assurance of a quick demise of the hostile powers God, therefore, introduced also the idea that the Davidic royal line would survive well into the future until the virgin appeared. Thus Ahaz had a second assurance—not only a repeated promise of a quick demise for his enemies but also a promise of the survival of Judah’s royal family.

You often will hear skeptics, even evangelical skeptics, say that the meaning of the Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14 isn’t “virgin” but simply “young woman.” It was the Christian church, they say, that added the specialized meaning of virgin to the Hebrew word almah. The traditional Jewish view, they claim, is that almah means “young woman.” However, the fact that the translators of the Septuagint (ca. 250-150 B.C.) deliberately translated the Hebrew word almah by the Greek word for virgin, parthenos, indicates that the miraculous virgin birth interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 is the traditional Jewish one. Consequently, when Matthew cites Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23, he was not inventing the interpretation; he was merely applying the traditional Jewish interpretation to Jesus.[1]

Later, when Christianity flourished, Jewish authorities in their own interests attacked this interpretation of Isaiah 7:14. One of these Jewish authorities, Rashi (ca. 1040-1105) denied the traditional interpretation and made the text refer to a young woman. As Fruchtenbaum notes, however:

“It is true that Rashi interpreted Isaiah 7:14 to mean a young woman, perhaps for the same reason that he made Isaiah 53 refer to Israel and not to the Messiah. But this is not enough to prove Rashi always made almah to mean a young woman. This Hebrew word is also found in the Song of Solomon 1:3 and 6:8. In these passages Rashi admitted that many Jewish scholars of his day made Isaiah 7:14 to refer to a virgin. It can easily be seen that Rashi was trying to counteract Christian polemics with his interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 rather than being honest with the text itself.”[2]

If, therefore, in the OT God promised a virgin birth in David’s line, such a virgin birth eventually had to come to pass, or God would be unfaithful. A second OT prophecy also requires a virgin birth. In Jeremiah 22:30 God decrees that a member of the royal house of David descended through Solomon and the rest of the Southern Kingdom’s royal line would never again sit on the throne of Israel. This prophecy which we discussed in Part IV of this series had to come to pass. If Jesus is the Messiah and is to sit on Israel’s throne in the future, then He cannot be physically descended from David through Solomon and the Judean kings; Jesus must be descended from David through some other line than Solomonic. Thus, when Matthew’s genealogy traces Joseph to David through Solomon (Matt. 1:2-17), Joseph is clearly disqualified from being the physical father of Jesus. By mentioning Joseph’s lineage Matthew sets up his readers for the following passages in which he describes the virgin birth. It is the virgin birth which resolves the problem with Jesus’ earthly father being in a cursed line.

Luke, on the other hand, traces Jesus’ lineage back to David through Nathan (Luke 3:23-38). This genealogy has been understood to refer to Mary’s ancestry. Note in 3:23 the qualifying phrase “being supposedly the son of Joseph.” Fruchtenbaum tells us the Jewish background of using a husband’s name in his wife’s genealogy:

“If, by Jewish law, you could not mention the name of a woman but you wished to trace a woman’s line, how would you go about doing so? The answer is that you would use the name of her husband. That raises a second question. If you were to use the husband’s name. . .how would [you] know whether the genealogy is that of the husband or that of the wife. . . ? . . . .In the Greek text of Luke’s genealogy, every single name mentioned has the Greek article the, with one exception, and that is the name of Joseph. Joseph’s name does not have the definite article the in front of it, while all the other names do. What that would mean to someone reading the original is this: When he saw the definite article missing from Joseph’s name, while it was present in all the other names, it would then mean that this was not really Joseph’s genealogy but rather it is Mary’s genealogy. But in keeping with Jewish law, it was the husband’s name that was used. We have two examples of this is the Old Testament: Ezra 2:61 and Nehemiah 7:63.”[3]

The virgin birth, therefore, is necessary to fulfill the OT prophetic pattern about the Messiah. Isaiah 7:14 and Jeremiah 22:30 set up a situation in which the virgin birth is the only option that avoids violating God’s promises.

THE LEGAL-MORAL NECESSITY.

A second necessity for the virgin birth likes in the creation design of the human race. Man was created with a legal-moral unity in Adam by which later generations, not yet born, somehow “participate” in the actions of earlier ones. In particular, the Bible says that all men fell in Adam in the Garden of Eden (Rom. 5:12-14). Adam’s original sin is credited or imputed to all his descendants as we studied in Part II of this series. All humanity, including Eve (note her unique creation in Genesis 2:21-22), are descended from Adam. Another well-known biblical illustration of mankind’s legal-moral unity is Hebrews 7:4-10. Levi, who lived many

generations after Abraham, is considered by the author of Hebrews to have been “in the loins of Abraham” and to have thus participated in Abraham’s actions with Melchizedek. If the human race is bound together with its past history, how can Jesus acquire true humanity without also participating in this legal-moral sin?

The legal-moral unity appears to be caused by only the father, not the mother, of a child. In Hebrews 7 this unity is a feature involving only the males, Levi and Abraham, not their wives. Imputed sin seems to be credited through the father alone. The virgin birth, therefore, involving only Mary, not Joseph, avoids the imputation of sin to Jesus. Jesus thus acquired true humanity from His earthly mother without acquiring imputed sin from any earthly father. Again the virgin birth is required for reasons quite apart from the NT announcements.

THE SPIRITUAL NECESSITY.

Still yet another implicit reason for the virgin birth exists. Jesus is God incarnate. How can God in all His holiness fully dwell in sinful human flesh and at the same time provide the maximum possible revelation of His nature in mortal history? Obviously He cannot. (We speak here of a “full” indwelling of humanity through which He fully reveals Himself and fully accomplishes His work—unlike His present indwelling of sinful believers.) For that reason the Bible very consistently notes that Jesus was sent “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3) rather than in sinful flesh itself. The revelation of glory observe through Jesus was glory “as of the only

begotten from the Father” (John 1:14), superior to every other revelation in history (Heb. 1:1-3). Jesus could claim in His true humanity: “I do always the things that are pleasing to [the Father]” (John 8:29). He could also claim to be wholly sinless (John 8:46). Jesus Christ, having a sinless through genuine humanity, could qualify as the sacrificial lamb “without spot” (I Pet. 1:19). The exact problem is how Jesus could gain true humanity without the indwelling sin nature (inherent sin to be distinguished from the previously-mentioned imputed sin [cf. Gen. 5:3; 8:21; Pss. 14:2-3; 51:5; Jer. 17:9; Eph. 2:3]). The Canadian physiologist, Dr. Arthur Custance has produced a fascinating study of the transmission of inherent sin from Adam to all humanity. He points out that the prophecy in Genesis 3:15 speaks of a “seed of the woman”, not the seed of Adam, which is a strange usage for “seed.” He utilizes modern anatomical research that points to the conditional immortality of the female ova. He writes:

“The seed of the woman is the only remnant that has retained the original immortality possessed by our first parents. By contrast, the seed of man and the body cells of both the man and the woman have been mortalized. Furthermore, even the seed of the woman is fatally poisoned by fusion with the male seed. However, this poison affects only that portion of the woman’s seed which will develop into body cells: the remainder of her seed continues to form the immortal stream of germ plasm. Only if an ovum from this germ plasm reservoir can be fertilized by some means not natural to man can a body with the original endowment of potential immortality be recovered again.”[4]

Since the sin nature is transmitted from the moment of conception (Psa. 51:5), a supernatural intervention is required for the seed of the woman to produce

fruit independent of fallen man.

An analogy thus exists between the creation of the first Adam and the creation of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ. The female embryo was structured to bring forth mankind just as the original ground in the Garden of Eden was structured to bring forth Adam (note the language of Psa. 139:15 that utilizes the narrative of Gen. 2:7). The Second Adam was a special object of the Father’s direct creative work upon the womb or “earth” just as the first Adam was (Heb. 10:5). Moreover, it is fitting that just as the woman first brought sin into the world so she would first bring salvation into the world (Gen. 3:6, 20; I Tim. 2:13-14). Even today this prominent role of the woman is remembered in the Jewish Passover each year as the woman of the house initiates the actual seder by lighting the candle before the rest of the service proceeds.

The virgin birth is a spiritual necessity for the incarnation of God. Morris is right when he says:

“It is not surprising, therefore, that the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ has always been a watershed between true Christians and either non-Christians or pseudo-Christians. Without such a miraculous birth, there could have been no true incarnation and therefore no salvation. The man Jesus would have been a sinner by birth and thus in need of a Savior Himself.”[5]

UNBELIEVING RESPONSES TO THE VIRGIN-BIRTH CLAIM

Now that we’ve seen that the virgin birth is an integral part of the biblical framework—a requirement flowing out of prophecy, the created structure of mankind in Adam, and the effect of the fall—we want to look at why men reject it. First, let’s look at how they reject the claim, and then we’ll examine why such rejection is a necessity for unbelief to be consistent with itself.

ANCIENT AND MODERN REJECTION OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH.

On the surface rejection of the virgin birth in modern times seems to be of a different kind that the rejection that occurred in NT times. Actually, it turns out, that at

bottom both ancient and modern rejection flow out of the same cause. Ancient Jewish Rejection. Within a few years after Jesus’ birth, Jewish unbelievers were already calling the virgin-birth claim a fraudulent cover-up for Mary’s alleged fornication. (John 8:41 may be an allusion to this kind of thinking.) In the Mishnah there is a suspicious passage about a certain rabbi who defined a bastard as “the offspring of any union for which the partakers are liable to death at the hands of the court,” a passage which scholars believe refers to Jesus’ birth because it is immediately followed by another cryptic passage:

“R[abbi] Simeon b[en] Azzai said: I found a family register in Jerusalem and on it was written, ‘Such-a-one is a bastard through [transgression of the law of] thy neighbor’s wife.”[6]

Joseph Klausner, a Jewish scholar, writes of this Mishnaic section: “That Jesus is here referred to seems to be beyond all doubt.”[7] Klausner notes that throughout the Jewish Talmud, including its Mishnaic section, Jesus is known as “Yeshu ben Pandera” (Jesus son of Pandera), a title which may refer to Mary’s alledged paramour or to the virgin-birth claim itself (virgin in Greek is parthenos). Another Talmudic scholar, Herbert Danby, summarizes the entire Talmudic reference to the virgin-birth claim.

“A Yeshu, called Notsri, so Son of Stada, or Son of Pantera [or Pandera] was born out of wedlock. His mother was called Miriam. She was a woman’s hairdresser (the word here is M’gadd’la, a pun on the name Mary Magdalen). Her husband was Pappus, the son of Yehudah, and her paramour a Roman soldier, Pantera.”[8]

Thus ancient Jewish unbelief very clearly contradicted the actuality of the virgin birth by the clear counterclaim that Mary fornicated. Unwittingly, however, this very kind of reaction refutes the later unbelief among Gentile critics that the virgin-birth claim came later when the Church made it up to go along with a “deification” of a mere human Jewish rabbi. Ancient Jewish fornication theories testify that the virgin-birth claim occurred at the very beginning of the Church history.

Modern Gentile Rejection. After the Renaissance, unbelief became more clearly defined and widely expounded. A new breed of biblical scholars arose who followed the humanist philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and G. F. Hegel (1770-1831). These biblical scholars were no longer trying merely to express Christianity in up-to-date language (as John and Paul had done in the NT); they were trying to reconstruct wholesale the entire set of Christian beliefs after contemporary thought. Unlike John and Paul they presupposed the validity of their contemporary unbelieving thought. One of the earliest victims of this tailoring process was the virgin-birth claim. Professor J. W. Bowman, for example, a faculty member of Presbyterian Western Seminary in Pittsburg, wrote:

“If Jesus knew of the tradition of his virgin birth, he never pressed it. After all, who should have decided between him and any number of demigods and heroes for whom such a birth was claimed. It was the Church that added these mundane traditions to its Gospels. [8].26

This revisionist or “Modernist” movement, as it is called, triggered great controversy in many American denominations in which thousands of orthodox believers opposed the denial of the historic Christian faith. These loyalists and conservatives were called Fundamentalists; and they vigorously defended, among other points, the belief in Jesus’ virgin birth. Finally, one Sunday morning in June, 1922, in the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City, a famous Baptist clergyman and author, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, delivered a guest sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” a sermon which ignited a full public exposure of the simmering Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. Fosdick’s sermon specifically attacked the Fundamentalist defense of the virgin-birth claim:

“Here, for example, is one point of view: that the virgin birth is to be accepted as historical fact; it actually happened; there was no other way for a personality like the Master to come into this world except by a special biological miracle. That is one point of view, and many are the gracious and beautiful souls who hold it. But, side by side with them in the evangelical churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the virgin birth is not to be accepted as an historic fact. . . .

Here in the Christian Churches are these two groups and the question which the Fundamentalists raise is this, Shall one of them throw the other out? . . .

Is not the Christian Church large enough to hold within her hospitable fellowship people who differ in points like this. . . ? The Fundamentalists say not. They say the liberals must go. . . .”[9]

Of course, the Fundamentalists failed in their attempt; instead they themselves were thrown out. Godly, Bible-believing scholars like the great Greek expert, J.

Gresham Machen, were actually defrocked, disciplined, and kicked out of these denominations by the Modernists.

The same battle has occasionally flared up since the 1920s. In 1977 in England a group of Oxford-Cambridge scholars published The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1977). Very quickly the conservatives responded with The Truth of God Incarnate, ed., Michael Green (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977). Debates have occurred over the past century in many churches as they aligned themselves with one side or the other.

The unbelieving responses to the virgin-birth claim have been strong and consistent from the ancient Jewish “fornication” theory to the modern Gentile “Church spin” approach. Always, at bottom, they share the rebellion against God’s authority over His creation and its implication for our personal, eternal responsibility before Him. Let’s look further at why unbelief must deny the virgin-birth claim of Christianity.

UNBELIEF’S NEED TO REJECT THE VIRGIN BIRTH.

Unbelieving responses, both ancient and modern, flow out of a world-view that has definite presuppositions about God, man, and nature, the same presuppositions we have studied in previous parts of this series. This is especially apparent in modern rejection of the virgin-birth claim. Modern thought has increasingly adopted stronger versions of the basic pagan idea of the Continuity of Being and the normalcy of the presence of evil. Let’s listen to Charles W. Eliot, the famous Unitarian president of Harvard, who presented the following ideas to the Summer School of Theology of 1909 in his closing address, “The Religion of the Future”:

“The new thought of God will be its most characteristic element. This ideal will comprehend the Jewish Jehovah, the Christian Universal Father, the modern physicist’s omnipresent and exhaustless Energy, and the biological conception of a Vital Force. . . .[Note here the Continuity of Being, treating the personal God as basically the same “stuff” as impersonal forces.] The new religion rejects absolutely the conception. . .that God is alienated from the world. It rejects also the entire conception of man as a fallen being. . . [Note here the insistence upon the normalcy of the present fallen world with its good and evil.] In all its theory and all its practice it [the religion of the future] will be completely natural. It will place no reliance on any sort of magic, or miracle, or other violation of, or exception to, the laws of nature.” [Note here the consequence of the abolition of the Creator/creature distinction] [10][Comments supplied.]

Clearly, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the modern intellectual world had become thoroughly re-paganized at its fountain—the universities and seminaries. By 1930, for example, the Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Shailer Mathews wrote: “The Modernist starts with the assumption that scientists know more about nature and man than did the theologians who drew up the Creeds and Confessions.”[11]

Because the virgin-birth critics have been committed to the pagan notion of the Continuity of Being, there can be no supernatural birth. Because they have believed in the normalcy of a world with evil in it, there need be no such act to produce a spiritually pure Messiah. As proponents of the “new religion”, to use Eliot’s words, who tolerate no “exception to the laws of nature,” they have had to deny the biblical report of the virgin birth. Moreover, to be consistent, they have had to deny every other miracle in the Bible. During the great Modernist-Fundamentalist debate in 1923, the great Bible-believing NT Greek Scholar of Princeton, J. Gresham Machen, pointed out this fact:

“The overwhelming majority of those who reject the Virgin Birth reject also the whole supernatural content of the New Testament. . . .The issue, does not concern individual miracles, even so important a miracle as the Virgin Birth. It really concerns all miracles. And the question concerning all miracles is simply the question of the acceptance or rejection of the Savior that the New Testament presents.”[12]

Following quickly on the heels of the denying the virgin birth, of course, came the denial of the incarnation, i.e., the God-man nature of Jesus Christ. The virgin birth, we will see shortly, is the only means of establishing that mysterious union of the essence of God and the essence of man in Christ. Denial, therefore, of the so-called “peripheral” virgin birth has to lead to denial of the central doctrine of the Christian faith!

In opposition to this logical conclusion liberals have tried repeatedly to assure Christians that one could deny the virgin birth without affecting in the least the deity of Christ. As Machen says:

“The liberal preacher insists on the possibility of believing in Christ no matter which view be adopted as to the manner of his entrance into the world. Is not the Person the same no matter how He was born? The impression is thus produced upon the plain man that the preacher is accepting the main outlines of the New Testament account of Jesus, but merely had difficulties with this particular element in the account. But such an impression is radically false. It is true that some men have denied the Virgin Birth and yet have accepted the New Testament account of Jesus as a supernatural Person. But such men are exceedingly few and far between.”[13]

The fact, therefore, of the virgin birth claim is clear; the early Jewish claim of Jesus’ illegitimacy points to the fact that such a claim was known. The interpretation of this fact differs radically, however, depending upon one’s world-view. Because unbelief requires the Continuity of Being and the ethical normalcy of the present world as its foundation, it must deny the truthfulness of the virgin-birth claim. Biblical thinking, in contrast, readily accepts the virgin birth as necessarily flowing out of God’s previous revelation. Figure One illustrates the controversy:

Unbeliever believer

Pagan worldview of God, man, nature

Biblical worldview of God, man, nature

Virgin-birth, NT claim

Rejected!

Accepted!

Figure 1. The fact of the virgin-birth claim is interpreted in accordance with one’s worldview of God, man, and nature.

The question previously cited from the Modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick is a clear example of what Machen means. Fosdick repeatedly spoke of “the personality of the Master” rather than the God-Man Savior of Christian orthodoxy. This Baptist liberal simply could not question the virgin birth without simultaneously transforming the divine Christ into a merely human “Master.” The negative responses to the birth of Jesus Christ, therefore, represent no theological “quibble” or “fine point.” Things are more serious than calling Mary a fornicator and Jesus a bastard. Denial of the virgin-birth is tantamount to a complete denial of all miracles and the deity of Christ. Fundamentalists who have used the virgin birth as a theological touchstone since the days of great controversy have been absolutely correct. Your view of the virgin birth is a “litmus test” of your view of who Christ is.

DOCTRINAL CONSEQUENCE OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH: THE HYPOSTATIC UNION

The virgin birth, when understood and interpreted in its biblical context, is seen to have given rise to the most complex person of all time, the God-man King. The doctrine of Christ is so complex that in modern times certain ill-informed cultists like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, have insisted that the doctrine was made up by men and does not come from the Bible. Others, even Christians in ignorance of Christ’s true nature, naively accept dangerously erroneous views of who Christ really is. For these reasons the present study of Christ’s nature will cover, first, the biblical data pointing toward Christ’s divine-human makeup, and then the careful formulation from those data of the doctrine of the hypostatic union itself.

BIBLICAL DATA INVOLVED.

When the wise believers of the early Church sought ways of describing Christ’s nature, they found masses of revelatory data in both Old and New Testaments. For ease of study these data are grouped below into three categories: the two OT streams of revelation, the NT Christ-for-Yahweh substitutions in OT citations, and the NT Christ-for-God substitutions in historical roles.

The Two OT Streams of Revelation. The data of OT revelation concerning God and man in relationship to each other flow in two parallel streams. One stream emphasizes that God’s ultimate place is with man, i.e., that God and man could have face-to-face fellowship at a definite place in the universe. In Genesis 3:8 God “walked” in the Garden of Eden, and in Genesis 3:23-24 He excluded man from this garden and its tree of life, thereby picturing how very literally sin separates man from the presence of God. We studied in Part Three of this series the days of the Tabernacle when this same theme of man’s fellowship with God on a face-to-face basis reappeared in connection with the dwelling of God’s glory in Israel’s worship cultus (Exod. 25:22; 33:7-11; 40:34-38). Later, in Part Four, we saw God’s glory indwell the Solomonic temple (I Kings 8:10-11).

In the bleak days of the pre-exilic prophets, when Israel’s sins seemingly would forever separate God and man from any face-to-face fellowship, Isaiah.30 spoke of a future time that would see God swelling again among men. That day would come when at last God Himself, rather than any sinful human king, would reign over Israel (Isa. 52:7). The report of that future event when God would become Israel’s king was called “good news” or a “gospel” (cf. Isa. 52:7; Rom. 10:15). In the OT the final gospel of history would be the climatic announcement that “God reigns!” To celebrate that future end of history a number of Psalms were written, known as Enthronement Psalms (Pss. 47; 93; 97; 98; 99), which, in the words of the OT scholar Franz Delitzsch, speak “not of the advent of a human king, but of Jahve Himself, with the kingdom of God manifest in all its glory.” [14]

The insistence that history can end justly only when God and man are restored to face-to-face fellowship is clearly one OT revelatory stream, but another stream runs parallel to it. This second stream insists that Israel’s King in that final restoration will be a descendant of David and, therefore, truly human. By the Davidic Covenant the Davidic Dynasty is to last forever (II Sam. 7:12-16; Psa. 89:4, 36). OT prophets like Isaiah developed the picture of this future son of David and linked him definitely with the coming golden era (Isa. 11:1-10). The idea of this millennial reign of David’s son was reiterated during the exile by Ezekiel (34:23-24; 37:24-25). Many ancient rabbis believed that Psalms 2 and 72 also spoke of this same event. [15]

In addition to OT passages speaking of a future glorious King, other OT passages spoke of a suffering servant of Yahweh who was also involved in the end of history. Rabbis saw Psalm 22:1-10 and Isaiah 52:13-53:12 in this light. While they artificially separated the suffering figure from the reigning king, calling the former the son of Joseph and the latter the son of David, they agreed with ancient Christian commentators that all of these OT passages spoke unambiguously of a real human being, not of some half-angel, half-phantom. In the OT revelation there was some evidence that these two streams—the one speaking of God’s future place on earth and the other of a great human leader—would converge in one person. A hint of such convergence occurs in Psalm 2 where the future king is called the Son of God rather than merely the son of David. Another hint occurs in Proverbs 30:4. Fruchtenbaum notes:

“When we look at the events described in these four questions, it is obvious that only one person could possibly do all those things: God himself. . . . We first had four questions asking who did these great things. The answer was: God did all those things. The fifth question was: What is God’s name? The answer: YHVH, the great I AM is his name. . . .The [sixth] question is: “What is his son’s name, if you know?” The obvious meaning here is that this great God, the great I AM, has a

son. . . .No one knew the name of the Son of God throughout Old Testament Judaism. But Old Testament Judaism did know that God had a son.”[16]

In some way this mysterious person is linked to both of the previously mentioned streams of prophecy. In Isaiah 7:14 the virgin’s human son is called Immanuel, a term meaning “God-with-us” and speaking clearly of that future era when, in Zephaniah’s words:

“The King of Israel, even Jehovah, is in the midst of thee: thou shalt not fear any more. In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Fear thou not; O Zion, let not thy hands be slack. Jehovah thy God is in the midst of thee, a mighty one who will save. . . .(3:15-17a)

Thus the human child is linked in name to the future era when God will come to dwell in Israel face-to-face. In Isaiah 9:6-7 a child is “born,” but a son is “given,”

and His nature is that of God because He is called by names used only of God. The term “mighty God”, although interpreted by amateur critics like the Jehovah’s Witnesses as “god-like” but not wholly God, clearly refers to Jehovah as a simple check of the context in 10:21 shows. Thus again a human child is related to God’s ultimate reign on earth.

In Jeremiah the Davidic descendant and king of Israel is called “Jehovah our Righteousness!” (Jer. 23:5-6). As further evidence of a convergence in the two streams of prophecy, note that the human king appears with a divine name. Micah 5:2 gives the birthplace of the Messiah (note that this interpretation of the passage was commonly accepted in Israel, even by Herod himself—Matt. 2:4-6); it also states that He has pre-existed His human birth. Thus He is presented as born truly human, yet having the eternal nature of God.

Finally, the most famous OT passage pointing to a convergence of the future Messiah and Yahweh Himself is Psalm 110, which is cited directly or alluded to many times in the NT (e.g., Matt. 22:41-45; Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44; Acts 2:34-35; Heb. 1:13; 10:12-13). In Psalm 110 David calls the future king not “my son” but “my lord,” signifying that this future human king in some way has divine authority over even David, who himself had the highest earthly authority in the state. The venerable OT scholar Delitzsch points out:

“The fact that among all the Davidic psalms there is only one, viz., Ps. 110, in which David. . .looks forth into the future of his seed and has the Messiah definitely before his mind, can only be explained by the consideration, that he was hitherto himself the object of Messianic hope, and that this hope was first gradually. . . separated from himself individually, and then transferred to the future.”[17]

The two OT streams of revelation, therefore, speak of real deity and real humanity, and, while not explicitly stating a meeting, imply convergence in prophecy concerning the future end of history and the reign of Messiah king. In Jesus’ day these two streams were not thought to actually meet; consequently the Messiah was believed to be only human. Messiah would be a human king reigning in the end time when God would meet men again face-to-face. Jesus taught the nation otherwise: the two streams actually did meet in Himself. He thus clarified what was only hinted at in the OT, viz., the Messiah is both the human king reigning in the final days and God Himself living with mankind. This convergence Paul called a “mystery” which meant a new revealed truth hidden until NT times (I Tim. 3:16). (Further discussion of Jesus’ method of revealing this truth is given in Appendix B.)

NT Christ-for-Yahweh Substitutions in OT Citations. Whereas the first category of biblical data concerns OT evidences, the second category displays NT evidences. The way NT authors so easily substitute Christ for Yahweh in their citations from the OT proves these writers indeed are claiming full deity for Christ. This point is especially significant in view of the strong monotheistic atmosphere in Israel during NT times. When, for example, Jesus set forth His claims to deity, there was a sharp monotheistic reaction (Mark 14:61-64; Luke 18:19; John 5:18; 8:58-59; 10:33). Elsewhere in the NT whenever men worshipped anyone less than God in the NT, they were quickly rebuked (Acts 14:11-18; Rev. 19:10; 22:8-9), yet Jesus accepted worship of Himself. This monotheistic NT atmosphere is a vital “background” for understanding these Christ-for-Yahweh substitutions.

These substitutions weren’t careless religious talk in a pagan environment where the Creator-creature distinction was fuzzy; they were made in exactly the opposite environment where that distinction was crystal clear. The silly opinion, often voiced in classroom discussions, that claims of Christ’s deity developed from the pagan world outside Israel is refuted by Michael Green:

“The plain fact is that there is no parallel whatever in the Graeco-Roman world to the exclusive claims to deity made for Jesus Christ. What is more, there could not be because their religion was sychretistic and polytheist. How could it give birth to a faith in an incarnate Lord which was passionately monotheist. . . .?[18]

To teach about Christ by substituting Him in Yahweh’s place in OT citations and allusions was a method the apostles apparently learned from Jesus Himself (Luke 24:44-48). During the first days of the Church the apostles developed Christian doctrine and wrote the NT under Jesus’ authority using His method of interpreting OT texts about Himself. Six illustrations of this teaching system are given in Table One below. Half of them come from the Apostle Paul, who wrote first among the apostles, showing how early this method of OT citation became public in the Church. One must wonder how the apostles could have taught in this manner so easily

in a heavily monotheistic environment unless they were deliberately trying to assert full deity for Jesus Christ.

NT Location of Citation	OT Passage Cited	Christ-for Yahweh Substitution
Acts 2:17-21,33,38-39	Joel 2:28-32	Christ/Yahweh pours out the Spirit Christ/Yahweh called upon by men
I Corinthians 10:9	Number 21:5-6	Lord (Jesus)/Yahweh test by rebellious people
Ephesians 4:7-11	Psalm 68:18	Christ/Yahweh descended and arose
Philippians 2:9-11	Isaiah 45:23	Christ/Yahweh object of oathing
Hebrews 1:8a,10-12	Psalm 102:25-27	Christ/Yahweh the immutable Creator
Revelation 1:8; 2:8; 22:13	Isaiah 44:6; 48:12	Christ/Yahweh the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of history

Table 1. – Six sample OT citations and allusions in the NT showing the apostolic method of substituting Christ

for Yahweh in crucial passages.

NT Christ-for-God Substitutions in Historic Roles. Very similar to the second category of biblical data about the hypostatic union is the third remaining category. NT authors show their apprehension of Christ’s full deity by unashamedly and courageously reporting Christ in roles which God alone could perform. John says Christ is the Creator of all things (John 1:3). Paul claims He is the “firstborn of all creation” which refers not to the first created here, as the Jehovah’s Witness try to claim (who ignore the fact that had Paul wanted to say that he would have used the term “protokristos” that means the first created), but to the first in rank (cf. Psa. 89:27), i.e., Christ is heir of the universe.

Moreover, Christ is said to forgive sins (not merely to pronounce forgiveness of sins as a priest would do), an act which once prompted Jewish onlookers to remark, “Who can forgive sins but one, even God?” (Mark 2:5-7). Only the one offended can do the forgiving. To forgive sins, therefore, Christ was identifying Himself with Yahweh Who was the One Offended. Christ identified His teaching with God’s Word in contrast to the prophets to whom the Word of God only sporadically came (cf. Isa. 40:8; Mark 13:31; John 7:16). Furthermore, at times Jesus indicated He was omniscient (John 8:48), omnipotent (Matt. 8:23-27; cf. Ps. 89:9), omnipresent (John 3:13), and eternal (John 8:58).

In addition, Jesus’ free use of the very intimate OT title for God, “I AM,” (which we studied in Part III of this series) expressed in the Greek OT (LXX) as ego eimi (Exod. 3:14) is a strong claim. Examples of Jesus’ claiming this title for Himself are John 8:58 and 18:5-6. In the same vein, when Jesus was confronted with a would-be worshipper, He, unlike other biblical monotheists, permitted the worship to occur with no rebuke (Luke 5:8; John 20:28; cf. Acts 14:11-15; Rev. 19:10; 22:8-9). Jesus even claimed the divine glory of the Father (John 17:5 cf. I Cor. 2:8), a glory which was, according to the OT, the exclusive property of Yahweh (Isa. 42:8; 48:11).

Finally, in at least three, and perhaps five, passages in the NT, Jesus is very clearly and unambiguously called God. John 1:1 teaches his full divinity (predicate noun of quality defined by theological context of NT). Titus 2:13 c laims that Jesus is both God and Savior (Granville Sharpe Rule: whenever single person is referred to with two nouns of the same case and the article precedes the first noun but not the second, then both nouns apply to the same person). I John 5:20 calls Him God in an immediate context where false gods or idols are mentioned (5:21), signifying that Jesus was deliberately called the one true God. A fourth explicit reference to Jesus’ full deity could be Romans 9:5 if one of the several acceptable punctuations is taken. Hebrews 1:8 is a possible fifth passage, but the full force of meaning of the word of God in this OT citation could more easily be questioned by a determined skeptic than the other verses cited.

The biblical data, therefore, are sufficient to show Jesus’ full deity and real humanity. The early Church fathers, contrary to modern ill-informed critics, knew quite well what they were doing in formulating this doctrine, called the “hypostatic union.” Every possible combination of ideas, including those suggested by modern heretics, was tested by the Scripture and found wanting save the one orthodox statement to be studied presently.

FORMULATION OF THE DOCTRINE.

The Church took nearly six hundred years to summarize all the Scriptural data about Christ into a consistent doctrinal statement. The story of that struggle will now be briefly surveyed from the perspective of four great conclusions that were eventually reached concerning the nature of Christ. To attain these conclusions the early

Christians discarded one false concept of God after another in their search to explain all the NT revelation in a logically consistent manner. To argue, as liberals and cultists do, that the Trinity was “imported” from Greek philosophy by the early Church is quite contrary to historical fact. On the contrary, the Trinity was an original concept coming from within the Church only after all the “imported” concepts of God from outside the culture had failed to correlate with NT revelation.

Christ as Son is a Divine Person Distinct from the Father. The first erroneous attempt to describe Christ doctrinally was known as Monarchianism. Monarchianism failed because it approached the NT data with a wrong concept of God, a concept that saw God not as only one in essence but one in person, too. God was thus conceived by Monarchianists as later Judaism and Islam were to conceive Him: a lone, solitary being. Monarchianists at bottom saw God as a “monarch” who reigned over all other persons, including the Son.

One version of Monarchianism, known as Modal Monarchianism, held that all three persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—were not really separate persons but only appearances or masks that the solitary God put on Himself to meet man. Sabellius, for example, taught that “He himself is the Father; he himself is the Son; he himself is the Spirit—as I say there are three names in one object. . . .”[19] God, therefore, had three labels, noen of which expressed what God was really like. Man saw Him in one situation as the Father, in another situation as the Son, and so forth; but man never saw Him as he really is. Modal Monarchianism tried to maintain the truth of monotheism, but it used a defective monotheist “model” and thus failed to fit the obvious NT data that speak of the Father and the Son as two distinct persons. As one instance, consider Jesus’ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was He talking to Himself in a sort of make-believe monologue put on for man’s benefit? Modal Monarchianism can’t escape this conclusion, whether in it s ancient form or in a modern form (like the Local Church movement of Witness Lee—see Table Two). NT data about these two distinct persons had to be taken seriously as telling man something real concerning the nature of God.

When a second version of Monarchianism arose, it came to be known as “Dynamic Monarchianism.” This new version took the NT distinction between the Father and Son seriously, but it failed to correct the same faulty monotheism of Modal Monarchianism and thus incorrectly described Christ. Since God was one in person, the Dynamic Monarchians reasoned, both the Father and the Son could not be this one person. They made the Father the real God, leaving the Son as a mere human vessel of an impersonal divine power (Greek word: dunamis). The Dynamic Monarchian Theodotus taught that Jesus, born of a virgin, was a true man, into whom at His baptism a divine power called Christ entered. Although this version of Monarchianism better explained the NT data concerning the Father-Son distinction, it left unexplained other NT data affirming Christ’s deity, His role in salvation, and His authority to reveal directly God’s Word. Interestingly, this second version of Monarchianism corresponds to modern liberal ideas about Jesus. The renowned Roman Catholic Christologist, Karl Adam, has commented: “Modern liberal assessments of Jesus as the great, unique, but purely human means of divine revelation are remarkably close of this heretical dynamism. . . .”[20] (see Table Two.)

These two Monarchian, erroneous attempts to describe Christ, therefore, failed because of their common starting assumption of a personal, solitary

monotheistic God. NT data demand a multiplicity of persons in the Godhead. After rejecting these two versions of Monarchianism, the Church recognized

that Christ is a divine person—wholly God--distinct from the Father. Left unsolved at this point, however, is the inner relationship between the Father and the Son.

Ancient Heresy	Title	Modern Counterpart Error
Modal Monarchianism	“Local Church” of Witness Lee	Solitary monotheism: three persons only masks of appearance.
Dynamic Monarchianism	Unitarianism; old liberal theology; later Judaism; Islam	Solitary monotheism: only the Father is God.
Arianism	Jehovah’s Witnesses	Pure Ideal called “God” that can only communicate with non-ideal world through an intermediary being: Son less in essence that the Father.
Docetism	Extreme Calvinism	Only the Pure Ideal called “God” is real: physical history, including Christ’s humanity, not “real” existence; only an illusion.
Nestorianism	Neo-orthodoxy	God limited by His creation: Son’s divine nature only loosely associated with his human nature.
Monophysitism	Oriental claims of “incarnations” of Krishna; modern liberal/pagan theology	God and Creation are basically one (Monism): Son’s two natures mixed together into one nature

Table 2.—Six ancient Christological heresies with their modern counterparts listed. Unbiblical

presuppositions about God’s being are underlined.

Christ’s Subordination to the Father is Not One of Essence. NT references such as Matthew 19:17; Mark 13:32; Luke 18:19; John 14:28; I Corinthians 11:3, 15:28, as well as Paul’s use of the term God (theos) for the Father and the term Lord (kurios) for the Son, argue for some sort of subordination of the Son to the Father. Other NT data discussed earlier in this chapter, however, equally demand full deity for the Son. Thus the question is the nature of that subordination, and the new debate which followed the Monarchian concerned the tension between Christ’s deity and His subordination to the Father.

The Arian heresy, the most popular answer to the dilemma, dominated the Church for a limited period. Arians taught that Christ’s subordination to the Father was a subordination of essence. Christ was made of like substance (Greek: homoiousion) as the Father but not the same substance (homoousion) as the Father. The Arians, however, like the Monarchians before them, had imported an outside, unbiblical idea of God into the discussion. They relied upon Platonism in which “God” was the name for pure essence, above and separate from the world. In Platonic tradition this one “God” could communicate with the world only through some intermediary being, a half-god/half-man, called the Logos (unfortunately, the very word used in John 1 to describe Christ). When Arians borrowed this Platonic concept of God and used the intermediary being idea to solve the subordination dilemma, they naturally identified Christ the Son as this intermediary being, making Him “divine”, but not in the true biblical sense.

By ignoring the NT data supporting Christ’s full deity and, therefore, His role in revelation and salvation, Arians were led by their error into a serious problem. They so separated God the Father in the Ideal world from God the Son Who spoke in this world that neither the Son nor mankind who listened to Him could really “know” God. Nor could God the Father, isolated in His Ideal world, touch mankind and redeem it. By the resistless force of logic, the Arians were driven into making God unknowable and unredemptive. The founder of Arianism, Arius, made this result very clear in his official writings:

“God Himself, then, in His own nature, in ineffable, unknowable by all men. Equal or like Himself He alone has none, or one in glory. . . .The Unbegun made the Son a beginning of things originated; and advanced Him as a Son to Himself by adoption. He has nothing proper to God in substance. For He is not equal, no, nor one in essence with Him. . . .God is ineffable, unknowable, to His Son. For He is to Himself what He is, that is, unspeakable. So that nothing which is called comprehensible does the Son know to speak about; for it is impossible for Him to investigate the Father, Who is by Himself. For the Son does not know His own essence, for being Son, He really existed, at the will of the Father.”[21]

Denial of Christ’s full deity had to lead the Arians into a morass in which God is unknowable, in which revelation about Him is only historically relative,

and in which salvation is impossible from the Son. The anti-Arians who insisted on the sharp Creator/creature distinction without any such “intermediary” being, asked why Jesus Christ was being worshipped if He were not full deity: “Who said to them that, having abandoned the worship of the created universe they should proceed again to worship something created and made?”[22] They further argued that if the semi-divine Logos/Christ were not fully God, he had to be mutable. “How can he who beholds the mutable think that he is beholding the immutable?”[23] In short, the anti-Arians, led by Athanasius, the Alexandrian Christian deacon, argued that if Jesus be not God, then Christians are not saved. Karl Adams summarizes the debate:

“The dogmatic result of the Arian disputes could be summarized thus: Christ is not a god of secondary order. . . . He is God himself. . . . This was the basis of the formulation “God-man”. . . . What Christ does, thinks, utters, works, has absolute validity. All Christianity is thereby exalted above the mere human and historically conditioned.”[23] To oppose Arianism, the Nicene Creed was adopted. In its original form it reads:

“We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, begotten, not made, being of the same substance with the Father. . . .[24] (Emphasis supplied.).

In this creed the Church used every vocabulary word that it could find to deny the Arian heresy that Jesus’ subordination to the Father was one of essence. The Son was of the same essence (homoousion) as the Father; He was not merely of like essence (homoiousion). The mere difference of one little Greek letter, iota, between these two terms in the debate gave rise to a sarcastic footnote in Gibbon’s famous history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which he ridiculed the whole discussion. From his sarcasm there arose the expression “it doesn’t matter one iota.”[25] According to this creed man could, through the fully divine Son, meet God, know Him, and be saved. In rejecting Arianism the Church rejected all modern resurgent versions of Arianism such as that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (see Table 2).

The Church’s answer to Arius, therefore, was a strong “no!” It stated what the Son’s subordination is not, but did not state positively what it was. To illuminate the nature of the subordination, the Church had to look further than the short history of Christ’s early life for a full model of the Trinity relationship. The Father-Son relationship had to be viewed from eternity. When this was done, the fact became clear that the subordination is two-fold and is not one of essence. First, it is an eternal subordination of role. The Son is begotten or proceeds from the Father as the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son (see Appendix A). Second, it is also a subordination of One Who has a human nature to One Who is God His Father. This latter aspect of subordination results from the virgin birthand the incarnation. When the Church realized that the subordination observed in the NT data is a special case of involving the complexities of incarnation, it faced new possibilities of understanding the subordination in a positive way.

Christ Has Full Humanity. The debate then shifted to the matter of Christ’s incarnation. If Christ is of the same essence as the Father, how was this divine nature incarnated? Did God acquire full human nature? One early failure to answer this question was the heresy of Docetism. Docetism answered the question very simply by denying that Christ ever had any humanity at all—body, soul, or spirit. In this view He had only what appeared to be a human nature. Docetism arrived at this wrong answer by importing from the pagan culture a Platonic and oriental dualism that believed the empirical world was not real. Once again we observe a vital biblical question answered wrongly because concepts from outside the Bible were brought into the discussion. NT revelation, of course, requires a real humanity for Christ regardless of such pagan dualism in order for Christ to generate legitimate historical righteousness (e.g., Heb. 5:7-9), His priestly qualifications (e.g., Heb.

4:14-16), His representative position as the Second Adam (see Appendix B), His efficacious death (e.g., John 19:33-35), His absolute revelation of God (e.g.,

John 1:14; I John 1:1), and His fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant (II Sam. 7:12-16). The function of the virgin birth was to introduce Christ’s human nature into

the world. In opposing Docetic interpretations of Christ the Church opposed in principle all tendencies to downgrade and make illusory real physical history (such as sometimes occurs in extreme Calvinism in which there is so much focus on God’s decrees that their historical manifestations are of no account)(see Table 2).

Later, more sophisticated versions of Docetism occurred which held that although Jesus’ body was real, He did not have a true human soul (Arius’s idea) or a true human spirit (Appollinaris’ idea). The former error challenged Matthew 26:38; and the later, John 13:21. The Logos, according to these schemes, actually replaced the “higher” parts of Jesus’ humanity. All such schemes were rejected by orthodox theologians. The famous Church historian Philip Schaff wrote:

“The Church could not possibly accept such a half Docetistic incarnation, such a mutilated and stunted humanity of Christ, despoiled of its royal head, and such a merely partial redemption has this inevitably involved. The incarnation of the Logos is His becoming completely man. . . .This was the weighty doctrinal result of the Appollianarian controversy.”[26] The conclusion of this stage of the controversy was that Christ is not only fully divine; He is also fully human. This conclusion was not arbitrarily determined; it was required by a full, centuries-long consideration of all NT data.

Christ’s Two Natures Are United Without Mixture in One Person. With Christ’s divine and human natures firmly recognized, early Church discussion concentrated more and more upon the matter of how these two natures were brought together. The person who is a casual student of the subject will dismiss such discussion as impractical “theological quibbling “ or as “irrelevant to my life” because he fails to see what is at stake. The issue is ultimately nothing less than God the Creator’s relationship with His created universe. It concerns the vital Creator-creature distinction that sets biblical though apart from all pagan thought. A wrong answer here will distort all other truths. This final phase of Christological controversy, therefore, was no “theological quibble” nor was it “irrelevant” to everyday life. Literally everything was at stake: the doctrines of God, man, and nature.

One erroneous attempt to define the union of Christ’s two natures was the heretical Nestorian position. Nestorianism erred by starting at the wrong point with the wrong question. Nestorius and his followers began to analyze the union problem from the creature’s limited viewpoint within history. Nestorius thought that the question was how the divine nature united with Jesus’ humanity after than humanity had already come into existence. History, rather than God’s plan for history, was the starting point, according to his error. The issue was then how God’s plan fitted into this pre-established history. Nestorianism viewed the matter as one of God’s accommodating himself to the so-called “limitations” of history. According to this error Mary bore Jesus the anointed one as a human baby, not as God already united with humanity in one person. Nestorianism held that Jesus was a human person; God was a divine person. They came together after Jesus’ birth in moral union but not in physical union. The two persons with two natures formed a sort of company that could be viewed as two parallel lines that never physically met. Schaff summarizes Nestorianism:

“It asserted indeed, rightly, the duality of the natures, and the continued distinction between them; it denied, with equal correctness, that God, as such, could either be born, or suffer and die: but it pressed the distinction of the two natures to double personality. It substituted for the idea of the incarnation the idea of an assumption of . . .an entire man into fellowship with the Logos. . . .Instead of God-man, we have here the idea of a mere God-bearing man. . . .The two natures form not a personal unity, but only a . . .conjunction.”[27]

The logical results of the Nestorian conjunction of natures in Christ rather than the real union of natures would have been disastrous to Christianity, Everything Jesus did, thought, and said, on this basis, would have been mere creaturely activity, only accompanied by God but not in any way done by God. God would have been forever distant from His creation; for if this event of Jesus Christ were not a union, no other event in history could have been any closer. Moreover, mankind would be found worshipping a man rather than a God-man. Nestorianism is similar to the modern heresy of neo-orthodoxy which separates God so strongly from the world that He can never verbally speak to it (see Table 2).

The other erroneous attempt to define the union of Christ’s two natures—monophysitism (meaning “one nature”)—went in the opposite direction from Nestorianism. Where Nestorianism exaggerated the duality of the two natures into a duality of persons, Monophysitism exaggerated the unity of Christ’s person into a unity of one nature. Eutyches, the leading Monophysitist, used the slogan: “before the incarnation two natures. . .after it one nature.”[28] Adam describes this heresy:

“Eutyches. . .defended the doctrine that both natures were transformed into the divine, which implied a unity and a homogeneity in the nature of Christ. Like Gregory of Nyssa, Eutyches made use of the metaphor of the sea and the drop of vinegar to illustrate his doctrine of transformation. Jesus as a drop of vinegar poured into the sea will take on the nature of the sea, just so human nature was transformed into the divine. So Christ was certainly made up out of two natures originally, but

after the union he no longer persists in two natures, but only in one.”[29]

Obviously Monophysitism destroyed the Creator-creature distinction which is the basic distinction underneath all truth. Biblical thought differs from all pagan religion and philosophy at precisely this point. Adam adds to his previous statement the critical observation: “This Monophysite heresy recalls the Indian myth of the god Krishna, who has the power to transform himself into men, or even into beasts.”[30] Oriental so-called “incarnations” far from being parallel examples of the biblical God’s incarnation in Christ, are in reality examples of the old Monophysitist heresy. In the 1960s, when eastern religious influence came strongly into the American culture, it was no accident that George Harrison’s then popular song “My Sweet Lord” alternated the use of the words “Halleluyah” and “Halle Krishna”. It was pure oriental Monophysitism, but naïve evangelical Christians, lacking a knowledge of biblical truth, thought it was a wonderful hymn!

The Nestorian and Monophysitist controversies finally led to one of the most important Church councils in history, the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. The Council molded its terminology by the requirements of NT revelation rather than by the imported viewpoints and terms of Greek thought. Of chief importance are the terms nature and person (hypostasis) which carefully distinguish what it is that unites in Christ from what it is that remains separate. The Creator’s divine nature which Christ has could never be mixed with His created humanity after the fashion of Monophysitism. One the other hand, there has to be a real physical unity to avoid the problem of Nestorianism. The solution comes in recognizing that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos or Son, can be distinguished from the Divine Essence because all three persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—share the same Essence and, therefore, are distinguished within the Trinity. The Second Person,

therefore, can be distinguished from both the Divine Essence and the human nature; and it can become the real focal point for unity in Christ. The Chalcedon

Creed states the matter thusly:

“Following the holy fathers, we unanimously teach. . .one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, known in two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division; the distinction of natures being in no wise abolished by their union, but the peculiarity of each nature being maintained, and both concurring in one person and hypostasis. . . .”[31]

In summary, the doctrine of the hypostatic union is that Christ is

“UNDIMINISHED DEITY UNITED WITH TRUE HUMANITY WITHOUT CONFUSION IN ONE PERSON FOREVER.”

As Table Two illustrates, this doctrine denies liberalism, the Modalism of Witness Lee, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ recycled Arianism, neo-orthodoxy, and Oriental imitations of the incarnation. For six hundred years students of the Scripture fought to summarize without contradiction all the NT revelation about Christ. The doctrine of the hypostatic union is the only view that has survived the greatest theological discussion man has ever undertaken. It is the only one that has no

contradiction with the NT revelation. This doctrine alone does not complete one’s understanding of Christ’s nature, but it forms the basis for other doctrines to be discussed in the next chapter. One must remember that Christ’s nature is an infinite mystery only partially revealed (I Tim. 3:16) and is rooted in the fundamental incomprehensibility of God (see Part II discussion of incomprehensibility).

IMPLICATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE.

A doctrine as important and central as the doctrine of the hypostatic union carries overwhelming implications. We will now study four of these. First, the hypostatic union implies that the Creator-creature distinction is eternally fundamental. If in the Person of Christ there is no confusion of these categories, how much more so must it be true of any other Creator-creature relationship! The OT position is thus reinforced powerfully by the hypostatic union of Christ. There can be no intermingling, no evolutionary upward development in which a creature can merge into the Godhead, or no new intermediate existence. Christians, therefore, who point to I Corinthians 13:12 as indicating their future acquisition of omniscience are fundamentally in error. The OT doctrines of God and man are preserved in the hypostatic union of Christ.

A second equally powerful implication of this doctrine is that the Creator cannot meet His creation any more fully than he does in man. When He appeared to His creation, He did not incarnate Himself in a rock, a tree, or an animal. As we studied in Part II man was created as a finite replica of God, an analog in both the material and immaterial parts, a “theomorphism.” This original design was established for the ultimate incarnation that would occur thousands of years later. Remember the words of the ancient Church father Tertullian as he wrote of God creating man in Eden: “Whatever was the form and expression which was then given to the clay by the Creator, Christ was in his thoughts as one day to become Man, because the Word, too, was to be both clay and flesh. . . .”[32]

The two OT streams of revelation thus converge into the Person of Jesus Christ. He is “God with us” and He is the ideal human king. The universe is scheduled to be ruled by a human from planet earth, not an angel from heaven or some extra-terrestrial being from Star Trek! With all due apologies to science fiction writers’ imaginations and certain popular cosmologists, the ultimate truth will be found in Christ and nowhere else.

A third implication of the hypostatic union doctrine is that history has eternal significance. By the incarnation the Trinity has acquired a new aspect: not a change in Its essence, but union with a created human nature in Christ. God the Son now bears in His Person not only the created human nature but a nature with the marks of historical experience, including scars from His atonement work (John 20:27; Rev. 5:6). History is real and outside of the Godhead and has significance. It is not just a dream in the mind of God as eastern thought sometimes espouses and as some rationalistic hyper-Calvinist seem to maintain. God’s sovereign plan doesn’t exist outside of His Omniscience until it comes about historically. History then has eternal significance because it is the arena of the activity of the God-man.

Finally, a fourth implication of this doctrine was mentioned by Paul in Colossians 2:8. Paul elevates Christ as the God-man to a status over all

philosophical reasoning of man. He specifically urges believers to replace the basic presuppositions of human thought (stoicheia) with Christ. Why and how? We have just studied how the revelation of Jesus Christ forced a radical revision in the categories of Church theology. Every basic idea of God and man was challenged until finally the Church had to confess the Creator-creature distinction and the Triune nature of God. All human words and thoughts had to be remolded by the revelation of Christ. In Appendix A we will examine some more implications of the doctrine of the Trinity that correlates with the doctrine

of the hypostatic union.

SUMMARY

In this chapter you have viewed the first event in Christ’s life—His virgin birth. You have studied how the hypostatic union doctrine flows out of this historical union of man and God. The virgin birth and the full deity of Christ have been accepted by mainstream Christianity from the NT era, through the great Christological creeds, through the Reformation, until the recent century. Those who are truly regenerate and who pause to study the revelatory data of the NT will recognize the truth. They will rejoice in the virgin birth and trust in the Christ of the hypostatic union, aware of the powerful implications this truth has on human thought and life.

What is your response? Are you in league with the modern ridiculers of the virgin birth and deniers of the incarnation, or do you stand in the ranks of those myriad of saints who have confessed that Christ, the God-man, was born to a virgin in Bethlehem 19 centuries ago? By now you should understand better the vast difference between the two positions.

END NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2

1. Matthew simply repeated the Septuagint translation’s rendering of “virgin.”

2. Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Jesus Was A Jew (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), p. 52.

3. Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Messianic Christology (Tustin, CA: Ariel Ministries, 1998), p. 138.

4. Arthur C. Custance, The Seed of the Woman (Brockville, Ontario: Doorway Publications, 1981), p. 277..44

5. Henry M. Morris, Impact Series No. 30, “Creation and the Virgin Birth.” (San Diego, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1975), p. ii.

6. Mishnah, Yebamoth 4,13, trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 225.

7. Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Macmillan Co., 1925), p. 35.

8. Herbert Danby, The Jew and Christianity (London: Sheldon Press, 1927), p. 8.

8a. Ernest Gordon, The Leaven of the Sadducees as cited by George W. Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University

Press, 1973), p. 100.

9. Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” reproduced in abridged form in H. Shelton Smith et al, American Christianity (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963) I, 297f.

10. Charles W. Eliot, “The New Religion,” reproduced in Smith, pp. 234-5.

11. Shailer Mathews, “The Faith of Modernism” reproduced in Smith, p. 241.

12. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1968 [1923]), pp. 108-9.

13. Ibid., p. 108.

14. Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms, I, trans. Francis Bolton (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, n.d.[1867]) 67.

15. See Fruchenbaum, Jesus Was A Jew, pp. 57-60.

16. Ibid., pp. 61-2.

17. Delitzsch, I, 66.

18. Michael Green, “Jesus in the New Testament,” The Truth of God Incarnate (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), pp. 38f.

19. Cited in Reinhold Seebert, Text-book of the History of Doctrines, trans. Charles E. Hay, I (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1964), 168.

20. Karl Adam, The Christ of Faith (New York: Mentor Omega Books, 1962 [1957]), p. 36.

21. Arius. Thalia, cited in Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1972), p. 12.

22. Cited in Seeberg, I, 207.

23. Ibid., Athansius asked, “How, if the Logos was a creature, would he be able to dissolve a decree of God and forgive sin?”

24. Cited in Rushdoony, p. 15.

25. Ibid., p. 14.

26. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, III (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1950), 739.

27. Ibid., III, 746.

28. Cited in Rushdoony, p. 42.

29. Adam, p. 240.

30. Ibid.

31. Schaff, 768