Does it really matter whether we believe Jesus was fully God and not fully human, or whether he was fully human and not fully God? I don’t see how a being could be partly God, though being partly human could have more possibilities. There is, of course, the possibility that he was a minor God, created before this universe by God the Father, a view similar to the held by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, I don’t believe that fits the picture we are presented with in the New Testament, and when we look at all that was achieved by the cross, it seriously diminishes much of what Christians understand about God’s grace and love. These are issues I explore in Part 2 of my book Why Did Jesus Die? Unearthing the meaning of the Cross. The way I propose to deal with it here is to look at two alternatives to the biblical understanding of who Jesus was.

Suppose Jesus was God, the Second Person of the divine Trinity, but was not fully human. First, it would seem to contradict all that the disciples observed of his human characteristics—his desire for friendship, his weariness, his hunger, his tears, and his expressions of emotion such as joy and distress.

Second, this would mean that the life that he lived on earth would have been lived without the limitations and temptations that we humans face daily. For us to live such a compassionate, dedicated and morally blameless life would be something altogether beyond our reach. After all, we are not God. To set him up as an example as to how we should live, to say “Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did” (1 John 2:6), would be a mockery. However, the Bible declares that he “has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Hebrews 4:15). It also declares that it is “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18—the Greek word translated “temptation” can also have the meaning of “test” or “trial”).

One of the great benefits of being a Christian is in knowing that there is no trial or experience of suffering that I may have to face with which he is not in some way personally acquainted. It is true that he performed remarkable miracles of healing and of power over nature. However, he made it clear that this was not done from his own resources, but the result of his Father performing the miracles through him, and in doing so, bearing witness as to who he really was (John 5:36). He declared that he could do nothing of himself but was totally dependent on his Father to do these works (John 5:19,30). In other words, though eternally God, he chose to live on earth with all our human limitations, dependent on his Father to do what needed to be done though the Holy Spirit within him, the same Spirit we receive when we commit our lives to him (Matthew 12:28; Ephesians 1:13,14).

There is a third and more serious consequence of his not being fully human. The New Testament constantly and consistently declares that it was through what Jesus achieved for us on the cross that we are saved from the consequences of our sins and reconciled to God. It was only as a human being that he could die as our representative and bear the weight of our rebellion against God. The writer of Hebrews spells this out: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death…For this reason he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (2:14-17). In a later passage in the same letter, he quotes from Psalm 40:6-8 and refers it to Jesus: “When Christ came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, “Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God” ’ ” (Hebrews 10:5-7). As he explains elsewhere in the letter, the sacrifices of the Old Testament were not effective in dealing with sin, but were signposts looking forward to the cross. But note what Jesus says: “a body you prepared for me”. It was in this human body that God prepared for him in the womb of Mary that he was able to offer himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

James Denny rightly insisted, in his significant book The Death of Christ:

The New Testament knows nothing of an incarnation which can be defined apart from its relation to atonement…not Bethlehem, but Calvary is the focus of revelation and any construction of Christianity which ignores or denies this distorts Christianity by putting it out of focus.

I explore this theme in greater detail in my book on the cross, mentioned above. As Mary Ashcroft put it in an article in Christianity Today, ‘Gift Wrapping God’, “The naked baby must be flesh so that God can be stripped again, trading his dusty garments for the splinters of the cross.” Or as Martin Niemoller, the German pastor who spoke up against the Nazis, expressed it, the cradle and the cross were hewn from the same tree.

The New Testament places some emphasis on Jesus becoming “flesh” (John 1:14). In fact, John says in his first letter, “This is how you can recognise the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:2,3).

In an article in Christianity Today, ‘Incarnate Forever’, the noted theologian James Packer says, “Without diminishing his divinity, he added to it all that is involved in being human.” It is this truth—that Jesus, though fully divine, became fully human—we describe as the “Incarnation”, a word derived from Latin meaning “in the flesh”. And the picture given us in the New Testament is of a Jesus who is still both human and divine. C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, says, “The man in Christ rose again, not only God. That is the whole point.” John Stott, in Authentic Christianity, writes:

The Incarnation was a historical and unrepeatable event with permanent consequences. Reigning at God’s right hand today is the man Christ Jesus, still human as well as divine, though now his humanity has been glorified. Having assumed our human nature, he has never discarded it, and he never will.

Job in his distress cried out, “If only there were someone to arbitrate between us, to lay a hand on us both, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak up without fear of him” (Job 9:33-35). It is in Jesus’ capacity as both fully human and fully divine that he is able to be the perfect high priest and advocate for us in the presence of God. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and human beings, Christ Jesus, himself human” (1 Timothy 2:5).

The noted journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge eloquently expressed what this truth meant personally to him:

Surveying the abysmal chasm between my certainty that everything that human beings try to achieve was inadequate to the point of being farcical, and my equal certainty that human love was the image of God’s love irradiating the whole universe, I grasped a cable-bridge, frail, swaying, but passable. And this bridge, this reconciliation between black despair of lying bound and gagged in the tiny dungeon of the ego and soaring upward into the white radiance of God’s universal love—this bridge was the incarnation.

Suppose Jesus was fully human, but not divine. First, it would mean that the testimony given in the New Testament from so many different angles indicating his divine status, some of which we have mentioned above, was a false testimony. Second, it would mean that he must have been such a remarkable human being that God chose him for the special mission of bringing salvation to the world, which is what the Bible is all about. At his baptism God spoke from heaven and spoke of him as “my Son whom I love”(Matthew 3:17). We could perhaps imagine that he had led such a devoted life that God chose to adopt him into this special relationship and for this special mission. However, this would mean that Jesus was not speaking the truth when he spoke of the special relationship he had with his Father before he entered human existence (e.g. John 8:58; 17:5).

The greatest disadvantage of such a view is that it would contradict all that the New Testament declares about the amazing depth of the love of God revealed in the cross and how it could be an event that brings such hope to a suffering world. How could God be such a wonderful God, as the Bible declares him to be, if he had chosen an ordinary human being, or even some kind of archangel or minor god to do his suffering for him? Is God so busy or detached from ordinary human experience that he must delegate the rather troublesome business of saving the world to an underling? How could one who was merely human, die for the sins of others? And how could the death of such a human set in motion a process that would finally result in the renewal of the whole of creation, as the Bible declares is achieved by the death and resurrection of Jesus (e.g. Romans 8:21; Colossians 1:19, 20). George Carey, in God Incarnate, says, “In a way we have to risk speaking of an incarnate-atonement, because it is one movement, one action, of God who redeems.”

Also, our Christian understanding of God’s attitude to the incredible suffering that is experienced in this world is so much dependent on the fact that Jesus was himself God. Peter Keeft, in Making Sense out of Suffering, makes this point clearly when considering the question of how we could get God off the hook if he is a truly loving God and yet created a world where there is so much suffering. He says:

God’s answer is Jesus. Jesus is not God off the hook but God on the hook. That’s why the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is crucial: If that is not God there on the cross but only a good man, then God is not on the hook, on the cross, in our suffering. And if God is not on the hook, then God is not off the hook. How could he sit there in heaven and ignore our tears?

And if Jesus was merely human, how do we explain his influence in history? How do we explain the fact that so much of our greatest art is devoted to the theme of Jesus—Jesus born, Jesus worshipped by shepherds and wise men, Jesus teaching, healing, dying and rising again, Jesus in glory? How is it that Jesus is the theme of so much of our greatest works of music and literature? How is it that it is Jesus who has been the inspiration for millions of acts of love and sacrifice over the last 2,000 years? As Jesus dared to say to some of the religious leaders of his day, “one greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42). Charles Gore wrote in The Incarnation of the Son of God (1891):

I do not think it can be reasonably [said] that Christianity has meant historically, faith in the person of Jesus Christ, considered as very God incarnate, so much so that if this faith were gone, Christianity in its characteristic features would be gone also.

Dorothy Sayers, the celebrated writer of crime fiction who had a passion for theology, and was a very clear thinker, summed up the importance of this truth very bluntly in a lecture she gave during the Second World War:

The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life.

It is the fact that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human that provides the foundation for the message the New Testament declares, a message so remarkable and transforming that it is worth proclaiming to all the nations (Matthew 28:19; Luke 24:47) and taking to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

The purpose of his coming was not merely to communicate God’s message to us, nor even to share friendship with us on our level, but to share his very nature with us by transforming us from within. This is what the New Testament teaching about the Holy Spirit is all about, the Spirit we receive when we put our faith in Jesus (e.g. Romans 8:15,16; Galatians 4:6,7).

In a very real sense, Jesus was beginning a new race. Griffith Thomas expressed it like this in The Principles of Theology:

The first Adam had failed, and a new race was necessary, of which Jesus Christ was the new Head. This necessitated a fresh creation, and the Virgin Birth meant this.

The second-century bishop and theologian Irenaeus expressed it well: “He became what we are that he might make us what he is.” Or as Augustine said of Jesus, “the one who, already Son of God, came to become Son of man, so as to give us who were already sons of men the power to become sons of God.” Calvin filled that out further still: “The Son of God became Son of Man, and received what is ours in such a way that he transferred to us what is his, making that which is his by nature to become ours through grace.”