On the Incarnation of Jesus Christ Christology is the studying of the person of Jesus Christ as proclaimed by the Church, in the New Testament, and in the Fathers to gain knowledge and to understand Jesus Christ. Such a Christology that is concerned simply with knowledge about Christ is useless if the intent is not to either declare Jesus Christ on the side of the author or to know Jesus Christ on the side of the reader. For what Christ is for creation is not merely epistemological, nor theological, nor anthropological but is concerned with an event in the world where God meets man; where Creator unites creation to himself and through himself – God declaring himself as God in man for man through becoming what we are in order that we can partake of what he is. Here in Jesus Christ God meets man on his own realm of existence, in space, in time, God declaring in Jesus Christ that the Creator is the Redeemer of the world. It is in Jesus Christ that the theological and anthropological questions must arise but not because we have decided to commit ourselves to the task of theology and anthropology but only since we are committed to knowing Jesus Christ, the Emmanuel (which means God is with us). Because Jesus Christ is God in man we can know not the essence but both the nature of God and the nature of man simultaneously through fixing our eyes steadily on the image of the invisible God who reveals true God and reveals true man. But if we end here only to have knowledge of the concepts to be held as abstractions we will only have gone as far as to know of God though Jesus Christ but not as far as knowing God through Jesus Christ. The former knowledge is entirely useless. This is the regular mistake of both the theologian and the reader of theology. For here we have missed the significance of Jesus Christ in a way that is likened to acquiring knowledge of a person or about a person without knowing the person. We must not merely think about him but rather we must commune with him through prayer. In Jesus Christ humanity relates to God since God chose to relate to our humanity. The declaration that Christ is Emmanuel, that Jesus is incarnate deity, is to proclaim that God is with us, that God is for us, that God can be known as he is. For here the substance and sustenance of Life resides. It is here in Jesus Christ, who reveals God and reveals man that in abundance grace and truth overflow from God through Jesus Christ to man. It is here and nowhere else that the very Life of God becomes the very Life of man originating from its Source - God through Jesus Christ and then unto humanity by the Holy Spirit who gives out of the abundance of what God is for the purpose that we humans can be not mere creatures but sons and daughters of God partaking of the grace that he bestows out of the Love that he is. Christ who made the profession continues to profess - not just then but now by the Spirit of grace and truth testifying that, Christ Jesus is the Way, the Truth, the Resurrection, and the Life; God with man and God for man so that we may know true Life and may live in him as new creation. Revelation occurs at God’s will through the giving of himself. Thus the testimony that we receive is greater than the testimony of man since it is the testimony of God himself. God is not the abstract tower we erect in our minds by which we so often tend towards committing idolatry, generating in our minds a God in our image. Though the evidence supports our belief, our belief will never be content through resting on it. Rather it will be content through resting in God himself. For faith is to believe God. For when the Gospel is declared, it is God who speaks and acts; God declaring himself by his word, by preaching, and in both cases by his Spirit that Jesus Christ is Lord so that the testimony is properly the declaration of God himself. When Christ is believed, the substantiated testimony of God himself presides in us so that we know that Jesus is the Son of God. Not from the weakness of man to God but from the power of God through the weakness of man does God testify of himself through himself and by himself that Jesus Christ is God in man for us in the demonstration of his Cross and Resurrection. And so even now the mediator between God and man through whom we call God “our Father,” is the one Lord Jesus Christ who speaks by his Spirit of grace. God the Father declares himself through the Son and by the Holy Spirit through which we respond by believing in God himself and thus come to know him as he is. That is our faith. In Jesus Christ, who is the exact representation of his Father, we see the light, the knowledge, the wisdom, and the glory. In him truly we receive grace upon grace.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:20:56 +0000