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Christological Soundings on Being Human

Christological Soundings on Being Human

MICHAEL J LEYDEN

 

Jesus Christ is the only person of whom the Church has universally confessed, ‘this one is fully human.’ The Christological controversy that culminated in the fifth century sought to make sense of this particular human’s life and work for the Church’s understanding and articulation of the nature of God. The goal of the debates was to settle two seemingly irreconcilable positions: that Jesus Christ was both a specific, nameable, narratable human being born in contemporary time and space to a human mother and raised in a human family, and concurrently he was (and is) the one through whom and in whom God’s plan of salvation for the world – ‘to restore all things’ (Acts 3:21) – was and is actualised. And since salvation is a divine performance, it follows that it must be accomplished by a divine agent (see, for example, Psalms 27, 37, 40, 62, 103, 109). The results of the debates are the formulae still used today: the Nicene Creed (325CE and 381CE) and the Chalcedonian Definition (451CE). For those early theologians, Christ was the imago Dei – the human being in whom God is fully seen and known (see Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4; Heb. 1:3) precisely because he was with God and equal to God in eternity (see John 1:1-4; Phil. 2:6-11). Christ occupies the overlapping centre of the theological terrain between God and not- God, between Creator and creature (see Col. 2:9; Heb. 2:17; Heb. 4:16). In committing to the union of two natures in Christ’s singular personal identity (what would later be called the Hypostatic Union), the Church also gave a central role to Christology in its account of what it means to be human. In the incarnation, Christian tradition suggests, the second person of the Trinity does not learn humanity from human beings, but rather human beings are to learn from him: ‘Jesus discloses what it is to be human’ (Watson, 1997: 300). In other words, Christ’s humanness is paradigmatic – providing the grammar and vocabulary of theological anthropology (See Waters, 2010). But more than simple exemplarism, the Christian tradition suggests, Christ is also the one in whom and through whom other people may come to experience fulness of human life for themselves, the means by which (fallen) humanity is transformed and liberated from all that limits and damages the image of God in us and thus prevents our flourishing: ‘Christ is the one in whom true humanity is fully realized’ (WCC Faith and Order Paper 199, 2005:2).

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