THE GOSPELS 193
The Christ the Redeemer statue
on the Corcovado mountain in Rio
de Janeiro was built in the 1920s,
reputedly in response to a rising
tide of godlessness in the city.The supreme act in support of
Jesus’s claim to be divine is His
resurrection. After His execution
by the Romans for being a rebel,
Jesus’s resurrection would have
stood as God’s vindication of
Jesus’s words and deeds. When
Thomas finally sees the resurrected
Jesus, he addresses Him as “My
Lord and my God” (John 20:28).The incarnation
Jesus of Nazareth is a man who
eats and sleeps, yet He also claims
to be God. Affirming these two
ideas together is the doctrine of the
incarnation: the Word becoming
flesh. Some early teachers tried to
resolve this paradox by saying
Christ was fundamentally human,
but had been “adopted” as God’s
Son. Others, affirming the genuine
deity of Jesus, taught that He only
“seemed” to be human. Yet othersinsisted that Jesus could really be
God because He was the Father in
disguise. Later teachers affirmed
the humanity and deity of Jesus,
but struggled to find a consistent
explanation for how He could be
both. In the 5th century some
teachers affirmed that Jesus had a
human body and soul, but that the
divine Word took the place of His
human spirit. Others taught that
the human and divine had merged
in Jesus, and that He was neither
purely divine nor human.
In 451 ce, Church leaders at
the Council of Chalcedon in Turkey
affirmed that Jesus possessed two
natures, one divine and the other
human, in His one person. Each
of these natures was complete,
not lacking any attribute proper
to being either divine or human.
The Chalcedonian Creed became
the affirmation of the incarnation.The doctrine of the incarnation
arose as a recognition of the
validity of Jesus’s claim to be God;
an assertion vindicated by His
resurrection. Yet it also protected
Christianity from the possibility of
a fatal internal contradiction. Jesus
accepted worship as God from His
followers and commanded them
to trust in Him for their salvation.
If Jesus were not God, then His
followers were guilty of idolatry,
an offense for which there was no
atoning sacrifice under the Law of
Moses. But worship of and trust in
Jesus would not be idolatry if Jesus
were God, and salvation in His
name would not be blasphemy. ■US_190-193_Divinity_of_Jesus.indd 193 25/09/17 11:19 am