IS JESUS 100% GOD? 
IS HE 100% HUMAN?

© 1998, 1999 by Orchid Land Publications

[10-12-99]

     To begin with, the Orthodox have always answered "yes" to both questions in the title of this page; but it took seven centuries to work out the details of a rational account able to stand throughout the following 1300 years.  Indeed, believing that both questions have a positive answer is such a difficult matter than many people claiming to be Christians, including a large number of academics on theological faculties, reply "no" to the first or the second.  One thing that a "yes" reply is not is a logical contradiction--as it would be if one maintained (as no one has) that the three Persons of the Trinity are three and one in the same respect.  On the other hand, a person able to think matters out can hardly say "yes" to both of our initial questions without some rational account of the matter--onr that avoids the difficulties and dilemmas inherent in assenting to a single-Personed unity of two natures.  There is something that the m.h. Logos (the Son of God) is not:  He is not a "Word"; and the cosmos was not created by a Word.   Lógos in Greek usage at the time when Jesus lived (read Philo!) referred (metaphorically) to the divine Reason,  Rationale, or Rational Principle--which was closely related to the divine Wisdom of the Old Testament.
    We begin our following remarks by making it clear that if Jesus is one Person in two complete natures, as the Orthodox maintain, that single Person is the divine Logos and Wisdom--God the Son, eternally begotten by the Father, the sole Source of all Being (though the Essence of the three divine Persons is "beyond being").  Those who set out from the assumptions that Jesus's Person is human and that this Person somehow acquired or got adopted into the Godhead are of course heretics in the traditionalist view.  They are Nestorians or the like.  Orthodoxy begins with the Person Who preceded all creation--the Person (according to several places in the Gospels and Epistles as well as a statement in the Creed) "by Whom all things were made"--and "apart from [Whom] not one thing that got made was made."
      As for Jesus's human nature, it began with his birth by "the Mother of 'my Lord'" (Luke 1:43) or--since 'my Lord' was the way Jews pronounced the name of God (YHWH)--"the Mother of God."   In most theologies--however "judicial" (as in the West) or "latreutic-sacrificial" (as in the East) they may have been--it has been regarded as necessary for Jesus to have shared our nature in order to save it and us--i.e. in order that we might become partakers of the divine Nature (2 Pet. 1:4).  Denominationists, however--not least those who translate sárx "flesh" in the Bible as "sinful nature"--are in a sort of bind--and  in fact are faced with an insuperable dilemma--in maintaining that human nature is "sinful" or even "totally depraved" . . . though it is obvious that natures cannot sin; only individual persons can . . . in short, that sin is not natural (of nature) but individual.  Christ wouldn't fully share human nature if it were sinful; for Scripture tells us He is sinless.  (On the lineage of the contrary Gnostic ideas, CLICK HERE; also HERE; for further on this, CLICK HERE.)   Christianity teaches that the en-fleshment or incarnation (ensárkosis) and human-becoming (enanthrópesis) of the Logos, God the Son.  It is a notion anathema to Gnostics--those who reject the rôle of creation (matter and time) in religion, viz. those who reject that Jesus is a Mystery or Sacrament (cf. Col. 2:2), that Mysteries are a necessary part of a soterial religion, those who reject, that Worship involves the body as well as with the soul, those who reject tradition along with icons, relics, etc.--in short, all who do not believe that the Incarnation of the Son of God was a cosmic event that ennobled the material, temporal cosmos.  None of this is comprehensible to the Gnostic who thinks that the Incarnation (and of course the only human necessary to it--the all-holy Theotokos) was just a stepping-stone necessary on the way to the Crucifixion.
     Should it be true that our nature is "sinful" or "depraved," as Western theologians contend, it would be logically necessary to concede one of two unacceptable ideas:   Either one of Jesus's natures was "sinful" (though Scripture asserts that he was without sin; see Heb.  4:15, 1 Pet. 2:22, 1 John 3:5; but see 2 Cor. 5:21) OR  He has not saved us by assuming our whole nature and participating in it.   Further, if His Mother, the m.h. Theotokos, is not the Mother of God (i.e. the Mother of the human Who is GOD), as many Denominationists maintain, then Jesus is obviously not God.  (No one claims that she is mother to His Divinity.)
     Denominationists who accept that Jesus is somehow not sinful, while maintaining that our nature is sinful, also believe in inherited guilt--the guilt of us all for acts committed by Adam and Eve.  It's not that they think that an innocent baby has willed to sin; rather, God has attributed  Eve's and Adam's sins to the baby and to all humans.  Calvinists go so far as to say that God attributes (imputes) our sins to Jesus and then His Act of Reconciliation on the Life-Giving Cross back to believers.   (Jesus's bodily Resurrection is hardly mentioneed in this connection for two reasons:  (1) It is will, not a change of being, that is salvific; bodily reality plays little role in Denominationist theology, which is spiritualistic or Gnostic.  See HERE to understand the will-based outlook in the history of human thinking.)  The Reformers and their heirs insist that no being--no condition that IS--gets changed in Salvation, which is not a process (time is excluded along with matter).  What happens in Salvation is simply that God says or pronounces that humans are unrighteous, that the only Righteous One is unrighteous, and then the unrighteous become righteous through His declaring it so. 
     (That God is no liar [Heb. 6:18] is no problem IF His will can rightly overrule what is and what is therefore true--in accord with the axiom of late Mediæval "modernism" (via moderna):  justum quia jussum ("right because commanded" or "might makes right".  This perhaps helps such believers deal with the fact that in Gen. 2:19 animals were made later than Adam [which in Hebrew means  "humanity," not a particular "man"], whereas in Gen. l:21-25 animals get created before human beings; such believers don't tell us which sequence is the true order--or how they know that it is.) 
     Why are Denominationists forced into the untenable notion of inherited guilt and the belief that babies are guilty of things they've never willed?   The answer lies in the failure of the West to differentiate the Icon (Image) and Likeness of God with which God endowed Adam and Eve; according to Gen. 1:26, humanity was created in the Icon AND Likeness of God.   Orthodox theologians (e.g. St. Eirenaios and St. Maximos the Confessor) have held that the Likeness of God (the uncreated Energy of Grace to live according to the divine will) was what got lost in the sinning of our first ancestors; the Icon of God--reason and freewill--were not lost--or we would be robots not responsible (or therefore punishable) for any of our actions, good or bad.  The Orthodox teach that death and decay resulted from the Fall; our reason and will were damaged by the loss of the Likeness, but not to the point where normal people have lost responsibility for what we do.  And we certainly don't inherit the guilt of our first ancestors.   Without the distinctions just made, the dilemmas of Western theology--especially inherited guilt--seem insoluble to reason. 
      Obviously, 'tis no easy matter in the Denominationist framework to maintain Jesus's humanity AND Divinity.  One can hear preachers on television expressing a modalist view of the m.h. Trinity:  God acted now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, functioning in the different ways of a Father, a Son, and a Paraclete.  This is just one more early heresy--by which term one means an interpretation that, in the sifting process of history and the holy tradition, has turned out to contradict the basis of the true Faith.  We can omit discussion of those who are so benighted as to hold that religions which say that Jesus is God and those which say that Jesus is not God "are really saying the same thing,"  since such ill-logic is too high a price to pay for a religious allegiance and makes religion laughable in the eyes of others.  (Anyhow, such persons rarely, one assumes, accept payment of $150 to satisfy a $500 debt on the grounds that both amounts are really the same thing!)
      To hold an honest view of the all-holyTrinity requires working at an understanding of it.  Only one view has stood the test of time--that upheld by the almost 2000-year-old holy Orthodox tradition.  This is not the place to lay out that teaching; and, anyhow, it requires this caution:  The Essence of God is so transcendent as to be quite unknowable by finite intellects; we can, however, conceive of how God is NOT to be thought of, and we can accept what Jesus and his Apostolic successors have perceived as revealed truth.  And one other thing:  We should beware of falling into the Western error of accepting Augustine's view that the relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are "substantial" and alone differentiate the three divine Persons; for that requires the Paraclete to proceed from the Son as well as from the Father--to keep Him different from the Son, Who alone in the Latins' view is  "related to" in His Being to the Father alone.  Leaving this formidable error of Western Christianity aside, we need to take a different view of being, one that refuses to conclude that accepting the reality of relations among beings entitles us to regard each of those relations themselves as something that IS.    We need to see tha being is energy.  (CLICK HERE for energy.) 
     Against  Western teachings, the Orthodox hold that the ways of eternally conveying Being beyond being from the Father to the Son and from the Father to the Holy Spirit are different--and sufficient to differentiate them--though They All jointly participate in everything that the m.h. Trinity does.  These ways of deriving personal Being from the Father, the sole Source of all being are respectively called generation in the case of the Son and procession in the case of the Holy Spirit:  The Son is generated by the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.  We cannot define "generation" and "procession" except analogically; but we can and do specify that they are not the same way of coming into being.
      Those who base their beliefs on reason as well as on revelation (which is interpretable in the 28,000 thousand ways of the world's Christian denominations) will abandon the contradictions and dilemmas of the West and embrace doctrines that have stood the test of two millenniums.   They will not base their beliefs on sentiment (to the despite of reason) or on personal inclinations about what revelation should or must mean (having  no acquaintance with ancient culture and thus needing to invent what that must have been like).   Mystery is not contradictory nonsense--though it indeed helps to avoid rationalism.  We thus need mystery as much as we need to avoid subjectivity and relativism.  The beliefs that have stood the test of two millenniums are the teachings of the Orthodox Church. 
     Orthodoxy is God-oriented--which is why our temples are focused on the Altar, where Christ's Body and Blood become the true Offerings of His members to God.   Most Denominationist places of assembly are human-oriented--which explains why they are focused on the pulpit, where the preacher addresses messages to human beings rather than offering to God That Which alone is worthy of Him.   This all being so, Orthodoxy and Denominationalisms are bound to be incompatible religions.  For the Orthodox, it is having a proper view of God--and therefore of Jesus--that take priority over having a proper view of human Salvation--however necessary an interest in the latter may be for developing an interest in the former.  For us, Christ is the Creator Logos; and pious Worship comes before all else except belief--which is presupposed by acceptable and adequate Worship.  (Of course, enormous attention is also paid to other kinds of piety--morals, ascetic practices, etc.)  For those who say that Christ is a Word, and that "the word" (preaching) is the primary Christian activity--that which makes any "sacraments" accepted as valid and worthwhile--Christianity is a very different "trip."  If one wishes to be a Christian, one has got to choose which activity--acts addressed to God or acts addressed to humans--is primary (both cannot be); others will not be the primary focuses. 
      It is a terrible irony that the Reformers, in avowing the goal of making belief primary ("faith alone") nevertheless, by defining "faith" in terms of will ("the assent to certain things"), in the end made subjective human will superior to objective reason and objective belief.   Truth thus becomes whatever the individual "believer" DECIDES to assent to.  So there are 22,000 denominations (five new ones each week!) in the USA.  In the eyes of objective reason, it is at most possible for one to be "true" among contradictory points; but in the eyes of subjective will, any single (or, if one is a relativist, every) belief can be "true"--including the teaching that God is right to call the unjust "just" and so on.  Unless we are robots who are not responsible for our vices and virtues but nevertheless inherit the guilt of our first ancestors, we are responsible for pursuing the truth in a way that, say, animals are not.   Time has allowed  every possible view of the most holy Trinity and the two natures of the one Person of the Logos to be put forward; and time has found, in the holy tradition, the single answer to each query that has been able to stand the test of so many centuries.   But if you reject time, with the holy tradition, nothing is left but to go off on your own, imagine (and re-interpret) the thinking of the Apostolic era, and finally--if you reject the innovations of an "infallible" pope--invent a new denomination in the absence of finding one that agrees with your sentiments--or join a denomination that would have had to have been invented by (and will often have been named for) some individual earlier than yourself.   You may even claim that you accept an infallible Bible (one whose contents have been defined by yourself or someone other than the holy tradition), and that you accept it "literally"--while  in the same breath contending that John 6:48-58 is not to be taken literally!!   You will sit to worship, even though those of the holy tradition follow the biblical example of worshiping by prostrating themselves--an example that is very clear in the New Testament as well as in the Old. 

Beware of some dispensers of religious goods!

SEE HERE HERE & HERE