Bible Stories

Jesus Christ is the heart of the Christian faith. What has the Christian church believed about Jesus down the centuries? Who was, who is Jesus Christ? Man, or God, or both? If he is both, how are his manhood and his ‘Godhood’, or divinity, related to each other?

These are questions about the person of Christ - who he is. As a subject of Christian belief it has traditionally been distinguished from the work of Christ-what he did and does for humanity as saviour and Lord. This article traces the development of Christian beliefs about the person of Christ. ‘Christ°logy’ is the name theologians use for this subject.

New Testament conviction

The first Christians were Jews and therefore firmly believed in the unity of God. They shared the basic faith of the Jews that ‘the Lord our God is one Lord‘. Yet by the time of the birth of the Christian church at thePentecost festival in Jerusalem, the apostles had come tohonour Jesus also as ‘Lord‘. We see this, for example, in the way they applied Old Testament statements about ‘the Lord (Yahweh)’ to Jesus.

The Gospels show clearly that this conviction about Jesus was reached only slowly and uncertainly. But gradually, through his teaching and life and finally through his resurrection, the first followers of Jesus realized that he was the Christ (Messiah), the Son of the living God‘. The writings of the New Testament illustrate the different ways in which the first Christian preachers expressed this message.

• Normally they presented Jesus in terms of Old Testament figures, such as Messiah, redeemer, saviour, Lord, Son of God.
• But some of the titles they used, such as Son of God, Lord and Word (Logos) of God, were more easily understood in the Gentile world.

The New Testament teaching about the person of Christ builds towards a high point: the proclamation in John’s Gospel that Jesus is the Word and Son of God.

One God or two?

Some of the earliest church fathers strongly asserted that Jesus was both human and divine. Ignatius of Antioch (died about 115) affirmed that Jesus was a real man of flesh and blood. He was attacking the Docetists, who claimed that Jesus only ‘appeared’ to be human; he was really a divine visitor in human disguise. (Throughout the history of the church ordinary Christians have often been tempted to think of Jesus in this way.) On the other hand, Jewish- Christian groups such as the Ebionites saw Jesus as an outstandingly holy man who was ‘adopted’ as God’s Son at his baptism by the gift of divine power. Others with similar views were called Adoptionists. Some Jewish Christians regarded Jesus simply as the supreme prophet.

Thus Christian teachers found themselves declaring that Jesus was both true God and true man. But until the fourth

Century little close attention was paid to the relationship between the divine and the human in Christ. More urgent questions arose about the divinity (or deity) of Jesus Christ. Both pagans and Jews accused Christians of not being real monotheists but of worshipping two Gods - the Father and Christ. A common response to this charge fell into another serious error. This was known as Monarchianism and was popular around AD 200. The Monarchians safeguarded the oneness or singleness (’monarchy’) of God by making ‘Father‘, ‘Son‘ and ‘Spirit’ into merely different names for a single person. God used different names at different times for his different roles or ‘modes’ of life. The names did not refer to persons really distinct from one another.

Three persons, one nature

The church fathers of the second and third centuries grappled with these and other false teachings. Among them Tertullian and Origen were outstanding. Both used words not found in the Bible to explain their teaching about Christ. Words like ‘person‘, ’substance’ and ‘nature’ came into use as technical terms to help explain it. Against the Monarchians, Tertullian and Origen stressed that Father, Son (or Word) and Spirit were three ‘persons’, eternally distinct from each other. Origen also taught that, when Christians spoke of the Son of God, they did not mean that the Son had no existence until he was born from the Father. This way of speaking focussed on Jesus Christ’s relationship to the Father; the Son was eternally dependent upon the Father.

The question of the person of Christ was on its way to becoming the most critical issue of Christian belief in the early church. It had two main aspects:

• The oneness of God: what was the relation between God the Father and the Son of God (and also the Spirit of God)? This became known as the doctrine of the trinity
• The person of Christ: how could he be both true man and true God, yet really one person?

Both of these questions involved the divinity of Christ. Christian thinkers of the second and third centuries, especially Justin Martyr and other defenders of the faith (known as the Apologists), developed the idea of Christ as the Logos (Word or Mind) of God. This presented Christ as the intermediary between God and the world. But it lacked a strong personal flavour, and it seemed to give Christ the status of second-grade divinity. It was not until the fourth century that Christian theology overcame this tendency to make Jesus Christ’s divinity somehow inferior to the Father’s.

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