and under suspicion of the Roman colonial occupation. Knowingly risking arrest and execution for the sake of his message and mission, he was arrested, tried, and cruelly executed, but raised from the dead to a new life that has provided enlightenment and empowerment for his followers ever since. Jesus is savior; he stands in a unique relationship to the transcendent God.
Some important questions are not answered uniformly by all Christian traditions: What is meant by the claim that Jesus is divine? Did he himself make that claim before his death and resurrection? Does any divinity claim apply to his whole life from the first moment of his human existence, or does it refer to the time after his resurrection from the dead? Does the divinity claim begin with his baptism by John in the Jordan, or is it in some sense progressively realized? Is he the savior of all who are in good faith or only for those who explicitly acknowledge him as savior? And finally, in quite recent times, is he the definitive and only savior given for all peoples at all times, or might there be other saviors for other peoples and cultures?
The claim that Jesus saves is basic to the whole structure of Christology, and it assumes that there is something very wrong from which all human beings need to be saved. The Hebrew scriptures (beginning with Genesis 3) describe what is wrong as an estrangement from God that causes confusion in all aspects of human life and relationships, requiring new intervention of God the creator to restore the balance and focus. The New Testament, particularly in the letters of Paul, makes the claim that moral law and religious observances have never been enough to accomplish this restoration, but that in the person, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus there has been a radical reversal of the fate of the human community. Those who first proclaimed this did so on the grounds of their own experience of radical change for the better in their lives as individuals and as communities. For all subsequent Christians, who were brought to faith in Jesus Christ by the testimony of others, it has been important to ask why Jesus makes this radical difference.
One approach is through the theme of Adam in the Genesis story of creation and sin: Jesus is the “new Adam” who by the providential will of God assumes the corporate identity of the human race, and in that identity reverses the disobedience of Adam by his own perfect obedience to the will of the heavenly Father and creator of all. This approach describes the identity of Jesus with reference to the human race and its history, acknowledges the full humanity of Jesus, and simply does not need to address the divinity claim. Another approach is through the theme of Messiah, the anointed of God, promised as savior and champion in God’s name to redeem God’s people as promised in the Hebrew scriptures. This is the origin of the name “Christ,” from the Greek term meaning anointed. Christians have given the concept of messiah a more specific and univocal meaning than it had in Hebrew tradition. However, by using this term, Christian preaching was able to suggest both a mediating function for Jesus between God and the human community and a mysterious identity for Jesus, placing him above the ordinary human sphere and calling for reverence and worship. This approach defines the identity of Jesus in a dynamic way in relation to human history as seen by the Hebrew tradition, and it avoids an ontological or essential definition of his identity. It casts a certain aura of divinity about him without having to define exactly what that means.
A third approach, one that has caused grievous arguments and divisions among Christians, defines Jesus as uniquely and essentially the Son of God, one with God from eternity, sent from the Father into the world and its history to assume a human life. This approach is found in a poetic, suggestive way in the New Testament in the writings of John, especially in the prologue to John’s Gospel. Jesus is identified in John as having an existence prior to his human life—a preexistence as the Word, the speaking or uttered thought by which God created in the beginning. That speaking or thought is something that is always with God and is God, but that speaking has now been realized, made concrete, enfleshed in a particular human being. The letters of John suggest a parallel in the thought that God is essentially love, that Jesus is wholly love in his attitude to the Father and in his relationship to other human beings, and that Jesus is therefore an incarnation or personification of the love of God. Sooner or later, however, this approach is bound to raise questions about what exactly is meant by equating Jesus with the Word, Wisdom, Image, or Love of God, and by adding that Word, Wisdom, Image, and Love of God are God and not other realities outside God. That, in turn, raises the question how there can be two who are the one God, which led historically not only to a highly developed Christology, but also to the inclusion of the Holy Spirit or Breath of God, and to the development of a trinitarian theology.
Some Christians regard the divinity terms used in relation to Jesus as courtesy titles, not intended to be taken literally. The Arian controversy that was settled at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. left the majority of the churches with a commitment to take the divinity of Jesus literally; those who did not agree were labeled Arian heretics. The majority, however, faced further questions about how one individual could be at the same time divine and human. One obvious possibility is that we are speaking not exactly of a double personal identity, but of a very close union of another sort. For instance, we might think of Jesus as essentially a human person, so wholly attuned to God’s will in everything that his presence is in effect the presence of God, and his impact on the world in effect the Word or utterance of God. Again, however, representatives of the then existing churches (local rather than denominational in definition) met in council at Ephesus in 431 C.E. to discuss a proposal to this effect, and vehemently rejected it, forcing those who still held this explanation into schism from the other churches, and designating them Nestorians. Most Christian churches today accept the authority of that council and therefore are committed to the explanation that Jesus is personally and literally divine.
Of course, anyone who thinks about the matter carefully has to probe further: If Jesus is personally and literally divine, is he really a human being like the rest of us, or is he really a divine being appearing to us as a man so that we might see him and relate to him? Or is he perhaps a divine being somehow expressing himself in a human body but not really subject to our limitations? For instance, did Jesus really suffer? Were there things he did not know? Did he have to consider situations, think about them, pray about them, and struggle to come to a decision? Or did the divine fullness of being, omnipotence, and omniscience preclude all this? That certainly is a very important set of questions because these issues relate immediately to what we understand by redemption and how we see our own role in accepting and responding to the divine initiative in redemption. Here again, Christians today are heirs of an answer given long ago. In 451 C.E. representatives of the churches still in communion with one another gathered at Chalcedon and hammered out a formula that was supposed to answer these persistent questions: There is one person, Jesus, who is truly of the same being as God the Father and creator in his divine aspect and truly of the same being as we are in his human aspect; when Jesus acts it is always God acting and man acting. Almost all the Christian churches still consider this the orthodox formula of Christian faith.
Nevertheless, many ordinary believers, preachers, and theologians wonder whether the Chalcedonian formula is adequate to describe the nature of Jesus. For example: If Jesus acts simultaneously as God and man, and invariably does the Father’s will, can he seriously be said to have a human will at all? If as God he knows everything, does he really have a human mind that learns things progressively? And so on. To all such questions the considered answer of the churches after debate and reflection has always been: Whatever is integral to being human must also be predicated of Jesus. Contemporary Christian scholars have pointed out that the formula of Chalcedon with its subsequently agreed corollaries is not so much an answer that rationally explains the nature of Jesus, but rather is an answer that suggests a way of accommodating a mystery that we can know in some sense but never fully comprehend.
A good question, of course, is why there should need to be such concern and endless debate on this topic. Over the centuries various authors have given answers to the question of Jesus’ dual nature that still hold today, and others that we find quite strange. From Athanasius of the fourth century we get the answer, gathered from many voices in the earlier tradition, that what we see in Jesus is a kind of exchange whereby the divine enters into our experience and our problems, providing a point of entry at which
