You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Who is Jesus Christ? This is the central question of Christian theology, and the AQA specification frames it around the authority of Jesus: his authority as the Son of God (his divine status, the incarnation, and the orthodox settlement at Chalcedon), his authority as a teacher of wisdom, and his authority as a liberator of the marginalised and oppressed. Cutting across these is a fundamental contemporary question: is Jesus to be understood as God incarnate, or as only a human being — an inspired teacher and reformer, but not divine? This lesson sets out the incarnation and the Chalcedonian definition, examines Jesus as teacher, liberator and moral exemplar, and weighs the divine-authority and only-human readings against one another.
Key term: The incarnation (from the Latin in carne, "in flesh") is the central Christian claim that the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, took on a full human nature and lived a genuinely human life as Jesus of Nazareth, "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). It is not the claim that a man became a god, but that God became man without ceasing to be God.
The scriptural roots of the claim are dense. John's prologue identifies the pre-existent Logos who "was God" with the one who "became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:1, 1:14). Paul, in the great hymn of Philippians 2:6–8, says that Christ Jesus, "though he was in the form of God," "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness," and "humbled himself... to the point of death — even death on a cross." Colossians 1:15–20 calls him "the image of the invisible God" in whom "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."
Key term: Kenosis (Greek kenōsis, "emptying," from Philippians 2:7) is the theory that in becoming human the Son voluntarily "emptied himself" — on some versions, set aside the independent exercise of certain divine attributes (such as omniscience or omnipotence) in order to live a truly human life. Kenotic Christology tries to explain how Jesus could be ignorant of some things (Mark 13:32) or grow in wisdom (Luke 2:52) while remaining divine. Critics worry it risks implying the Son ceased to be fully God.
Why does the incarnation matter? For the tradition, only if God truly became human can humanity truly be reconciled to God: "what is not assumed is not healed," as the Fathers put it. The incarnation is therefore not an isolated marvel but the hinge of salvation.
The kenotic question repays a little more attention because it is where the doctrine feels most pressing. If the Son is omniscient, how can the Gospels show Jesus genuinely not knowing the day of the end, or genuinely learning and growing? Strong kenotic theories (developed especially by nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians) answer that, in becoming human, the Son set aside the independent use of the so-called "relative" attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — while retaining the "essential" moral attributes such as holiness and love. Milder versions speak instead of the Son exercising his divine powers only through and within the limits of a human life, so that nothing is truly "given up," only veiled. Critics from the classical side object that any genuine setting-aside of divine attributes would mean the Son was, for a time, not fully God — violating the principle that God is immutable — and so they prefer to locate the limitations in the human nature alone, with the divine nature undiminished throughout. The debate is unresolved, but it shows that taking Jesus' humanity seriously is not a modern liberal innovation; it was forced on the Church by its own scriptures.
Anselm's question Cur Deus Homo? — "Why did God become man?" — gives the incarnation its purposive shape: God became human not arbitrarily but to do for humanity what humanity could not do for itself. Whether one accepts Anselm's particular satisfaction model or not, the conviction that the incarnation is for us and for our salvation (as the Nicene Creed puts it) is shared across the tradition, and it is the reason the person of Christ cannot finally be separated from his saving work. The Eastern tradition expresses the same conviction in a complementary way through the idea of theosis or deification, captured in Athanasius's striking summary that "God became man so that man might become God" — meaning not that humans turn into deities, but that, through the incarnation, human nature is taken up into the life of God and remade. On every account, then, the who of Christ (his identity) and the why of Christ (his purpose) are bound tightly together, which is why a merely human Jesus would, for Christians, undercut not only worship but the very hope of salvation.
Key term: Christology is the area of theology concerned with the person and nature of Christ. Christology "from above" starts with Jesus' divinity — the pre-existent Logos who descends — and asks how God became human. Christology "from below" starts with the historical, human Jesus and asks how he came to be confessed as divine.
| Approach | Starting point | Representative | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| From above | The pre-existent Logos (John 1:1) who descends from heaven | Karl Barth (1886–1968) | Begins with God's self-revelation; the incarnation is God's initiative |
| From below | The Jesus of history reconstructed by critical scholarship | Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) | Begins with what can be known historically; the resurrection vindicates Jesus' identity |
Barth insisted that Christology must begin with God's free decision to reveal himself in Christ; human reason and historical research cannot, by themselves, discover who Jesus is. Pannenberg, in Jesus — God and Man (1964), argued the reverse: Christology must be grounded in history, and the resurrection (which he regarded as historically defensible) retroactively confirms Jesus' divine identity. He criticised Barth's method as fideistic — faith unsupported by evidence. The "below" approach takes the human Jesus with full seriousness, which connects directly to the modern "only human" reading examined below. Neither approach is obviously superior: "from above" risks asserting Jesus' divinity by fiat and bypassing the evidence, while "from below" risks never reaching genuine divinity at all, since no quantity of historical data about a man can by itself yield the conclusion "this man is God." The tension between them mirrors the wider divine-or-human debate that runs through the whole topic.
The Gospels present Jesus' teaching as carrying its own immediate authority. He taught "as one having authority, and not as their scribes" (Matthew 7:29), and in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) he reframes the Law on his own word.
The authority claimed here is striking: not "thus says the Lord" (the prophet's formula) but "I say to you," placing Jesus' word alongside, and in some sense above, the Law of Moses. For Christians this is part of what it means to call him Son of God; for those who read him as only human, it marks him as a uniquely original moral teacher.
At the heart of his teaching is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God (or "Kingdom of heaven" in Matthew): "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news" (Mark 1:15). The Kingdom is not primarily a place but God's active reign breaking into the world — already present in Jesus' own ministry of healing and forgiveness, yet still awaited in its fullness. Many of the parables are "parables of the Kingdom," disclosing its surprising character: it grows secretly like a mustard seed, it welcomes the undeserving, it overturns conventional rankings of righteous and sinner. This teaching is inseparable from the question of Jesus' authority, because he does not merely describe the Kingdom but claims that it arrives in and through himself — which is, again, either the insight of a supreme prophet or the self-understanding of one who is more than a prophet.
A central strand of the specification, and of modern theology, is Jesus as liberator — the champion of the poor, the outcast and the oppressed.
This "liberator" reading can be held alongside a high Christology (Jesus as God acting to liberate) or can shade into a purely human, political picture (Jesus as a prophet of social revolution) — another route into the "only human" debate.
Closely related is the picture of Jesus as the supreme moral exemplar — the pattern of the perfectly God-centred and self-giving human life, whom Christians are called to imitate (the imitatio Christi). His washing of the disciples' feet (John 13:1–15) and his forgiveness of his executioners ("Father, forgive them," Luke 23:34) model the love he commands. Peter Abelard's moral influence theory of the atonement (examined below) makes this exemplary love the very heart of salvation: the cross supremely demonstrates God's love and so inspires a transforming response. The strength of the exemplar model is that it grounds ethics in a living person rather than abstract rules; its risk, critics note, is that on its own it can reduce Jesus to a good example and lose the claim that he is also God acting for us.
| Role | What it emphasises | How it reads on a "divine" view | How it reads on an "only human" view |
|---|---|---|---|
| Son of God | Jesus' unique divine status and authority | God incarnate, rightly worshipped | A title misapplied or developed later by the Church |
| Teacher of wisdom | The radical ethics of the Sermon and parables | The very Word of God instructing humanity | A supremely original moral and religious genius |
| Liberator | Solidarity with the poor and oppressed | God acting decisively to set creation free | A prophet of social and political justice |
| Moral exemplar | The pattern of self-giving love to imitate | The God-man whose love also redeems | An inspiring model of human goodness |
The point of the table is that the four roles are not rival options but facets of one figure — yet how each is cashed out depends on the prior question of whether Jesus is God incarnate or only human. The same Sermon is either God teaching or a man teaching; the same liberation is either divine rescue or human reform. This is why the "Son of God" question is not one role among four but the hinge on which the meaning of the others turns.
The Council of Chalcedon was the fourth ecumenical council and produced the most authoritative statement on the person of Christ in the history of the Church.
By the fifth century, the Church had affirmed that Jesus is fully God (Nicaea, 325 CE) and fully human. But how do the divine and human natures relate within the one person?
| Heresy | Claim | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Apollinarianism | Jesus had a human body but a divine mind/soul — the Logos replaced the human rational soul | If Jesus lacked a fully human mind, he was not truly human, and humanity is not fully redeemed |
| Nestorianism | Jesus had two natures so separate that he was effectively two persons — a divine person and a human person loosely conjoined | Divides the unity of Christ; makes salvation uncertain |
| Eutychianism (Monophysitism) | Jesus' human nature was absorbed into the divine nature, like a drop of wine in the ocean | Denies true humanity; if Jesus was not truly human, he cannot represent humanity |
The council declared that Jesus Christ is:
Key Definition: The hypostatic union is the doctrine that in Jesus Christ, the divine nature and the human nature are united in one person (hypostasis) without being mixed, confused, or separated. This is the orthodox Christological position defined at Chalcedon.
The Chalcedonian formula has been described as a boundary marker rather than an explanation — it tells us what we must not say about Christ (the four negatives) without fully explaining the mystery of the incarnation.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.