The Incarnation: Three Important Distinctions
The Incarnation: Three Important Distinctions
Having reviewed some of the biblical evidence, I would like to explore what I find to be a fruitful, reasonable, and biblically rooted model that helps us make sense of God's becoming man. Again, this is not an attempt to eliminate the incarnation's mystery but to argue that it isn't illogical. In unpacking this model, I want to make three distinctions.
1. The distinction between nature and person. A thing's nature or essence makes it what it is; it wouldn't exist if it lacked these features. We all have human-making features—the capacity to choose or act, to be conscious, to communicate, to feel, to hold beliefs—even if we aren't presently using those capacities, say, when we're asleep or comatose. God has characteristics that make him God. By person, we mean a center of (self-)consciousness, will, activity, and responsibility. Those who are persons include human and angelic individuals as well as the maximally great divine Persons within the Trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit.
What then is the relation between person and nature? A person has a nature; you and I possess something that makes us what we are, the same human nature. Jesus of Nazareth, though one Person, is fully God and fully human. He uniquely possesses two natures—one identical to our human nature and the other nature divine.
2. The distinction between what is “fully” (essentially) human and what is “merely” (commonly) human. Humans commonly have arms, legs, hair, and eyes; but even without these we can still be fully human. Also, humans commonly, even universally, commit moral wrongs; but despite Alexander Pope's statement: “To err is human,” sinning isn't essential to being human. After all, Adam and Eve were created sinless; Jesus was sinless; and in the afterlife believers will be sinless as well. Death, too, though common, doesn't define or partly define human beings. Enoch (Gen 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kgs 2:11) didn't die even though death has touched all other human beings. You get the idea.
This essentially/fully human and commonly/merely human distinction reminds us that certain human features we assume to be essential (part of our nature) often aren't essential after all; they may just be common. This distinction can help us see that a divine-human incarnation is possible: what is essential to human nature doesn't exclude the possibility of being fully divine. The image of God figures into our discussion at this point: human beings were made “a little lower than God?” (Ps 8:5) to co-rule creation and to commune with God (Gen 1:26–27). Christ Himself, the new Adam, is the image of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). As our representative, He both fulfills the human vocation in reflecting God's image and also graciously empowers us to live as humans were intended to live.
In limited form we share in certain attributes or properties with God—personality, relationality, rationality, morality, freedom, creativity—that enable us to fulfill our vocation. Certain essential human characteristics are derived from divine characteristics: human nature is thus a subcategory of the divine.
So the divine-human union in Jesus of Nazareth becomes possible. Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce puts it well: “It is because man in the creative order bears the image of his Creator that it was possible for the Son of God to become incarnate as man and in His humanity to display the glory of the invisible God.”10 According to one theologian, “If human beings are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–7), there must be something divine about every human being. If, and this is our case, the divine Logos could assume a humanity, there must be something human about God.”11 Even though the essentially human and the divine are poles apart in terms of greatness, they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Though we are limited or finite in ourselves, finitude doesn't define us as human: Jesus aside, this common/universal human characteristic isn't a necessary one.12
3. The distinction between Jesus' two consciousnesses or levels of awareness—His developing first-century Jewish, human consciousness and the eternal, divine consciousness. Imagine a spy on a dangerous mission, carrying in his mind top-secret information valuable to the enemy. To avoid divulging answers in case he's caught and tortured, he takes along a limited-amnesia producing pill with an antidote for later use. If the spy uses the amnesia pill, he would still possess the vital information in his mind; given these temporary conditions required to carry out his mission, he chooses to limit his access to the information that's stored up in his mind.
Similarly, during Jesus' mission to earth, He still possessed the full, undiminished capacities of divine knowledge and power, and He had access to those capacities as necessary for His mission. But before the foundation of the world, Father, Son, and Spirit freely determined together that the Son would limit or restrain the use of those powers to accomplish His overall mission (John 17:5,22–26). So (1) Jesus gave up having access to knowing, say, the time of His return (Matt 24:36) and, as we'll see, knowing that it was impossible for Him to sin or to be vulnerable to temptation (cf. Jas 1:13). However, (2) He didn't lose essential divine attributes; rather, He voluntarily, temporarily suppressed or gave up access to using certain divine capacities and powers He possessed all along. Like a father holding back the full force of his powers while playing soccer or baseball with his kids, so the Son of God, before coming to earth, determined to restrain His divine capacities.13
To illustrate how we can coherently talk about two levels of awareness, consider what it's like to come out of a dream in which we're simultaneously still dreaming but also conscious that it's a dream, at once “within” the dream and “outside” it. Or think of the two levels of awareness involved in self-deception: a person knows what's right but convinces himself to suppress his conscience. These examples of two levels of awareness—not two egos or selves, however—working together or overlapping in one person can perhaps give us some idea of the workings of the incarnate Christ's mind.
We can usefully compare Jesus' two levels of awareness (“minds”) with our two levels of awareness—the subconscious and conscious: Jesus' human awareness can be likened to our conscious, and His divine awareness is analogous to our subconscious. When God the Son took on human form, His fully aware eternal, His divine consciousness, His (comm)union with Father and Spirit, and His sustenance of the universe didn't cease but rather continued uninterrupted. Yet in His limited, developing human consciousness, Jesus grew and developed with an earthly, first-century, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish awareness of the world. Reading the Scriptures, He saw with increasing clarity His messianic status. He struggled, experienced the range of human emotions, and deepened in obedience and submission to His Father's will (cf. Luke 2:52; Heb 2:18; 5:8).14
Jesus' human consciousness significantly interacted with His divine consciousness and wasn't cut off from certain heavenly illuminations like the glow of divine light that streams through a cloth curtain.15 Jesus, however, didn't regularly rely on His divine consciousness while on earth but primarily operated in His human consciousness, just like us, with the added depth of divine awareness. Being fully human, Jesus freely and fully depended on the Spirit's power as He sought to carry out His Father's purpose.
These three distinctions provide a helpful framework for addressing questions such as: (1) If Jesus was God, who was running the universe when He was a baby or on the cross? (2) How could God die? (3) If God “so loved the world,” why did He send His Son rather than come Himself? This two-levels-of-awareness incarnational model helps us see that Jesus experienced the ongoing mutually indwelling trinitarian life, still governing the universe as a baby while dying on the cross. And He died as a mere, not essentially, human being; the divine nature wasn't crucified but the divine person, who is also human.16 The mutual life of the Trinity suggests that each divine person experienced pain at the crucifixion; Jesus didn't suffer alone. Rather, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19).