O come, all ye faithful

"God of God, Light of Light,

lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb;

very God, begotten not created."

’O come, all ye faithful’- Popular Carol

Since this is the season during which the majority churches commemorate the 'incarnation' of 'God the Son', maybe it would be a good time to share a few of my own thoughts regarding this.

For starters, don't try looking for the title 'God the Son' in the Bible. You won't find it, neither can you expect to discover this version of Jesus anywhere between Genesis and Revelation. He is a product of the thinkers who sprang up after the deaths of the apostles and set about redefining the faith. These men were schooled in Greek philosophy and their aim was to make the Jesus of the gospels fit their preconceived ideas.

The Jesus of the Bible is described as the man who "indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you." (1st Peter 1.20) This dramatic change, from being an idea in the mind of God, the cornerstone of his foreordained plan, to actually being manifested as a real, flesh and blood human person, took place when he was made in the womb of Mary.

The story of the Trinitarian Jesus begins very differently. Before time he was 'eternally begotten'. This strange phrase means a sort of beginningless beginning. It became necessary for 'orthodoxy' to invent it because they insisted, contrary to the New Testament, that it is heresy to believe that there was a time when the Son did not exist. The Bible clearly says he was both made (Matthew 1.1 & Galatians 4.4) and begotten (Psalm 2.7, John 3.16, Hebrews 1.5)

So, long before he ‘assumed flesh’ and ‘became a man’, 'God the Son' was already a heavenly being. He had been the second person in a godhead of three forever. Hence words of the Christmas carol above, straight out of the Athanasian creed. The virgin birth then becomes the point at which something was added to him- a human nature. Yet, in spite of this transformation, he did not cease to be what he was before.

Is it not reasonable to ask where this doctrine is clearly expressed in scripture? Certainly none of the terminology used to describe it is found in the Bible. Indeed the fact that the individuals who developed this dogma had to resort to extra-biblical language in order to articulate their creed would seem to indicate that the beliefs it expresses are themselves extra-biblical.

It results in some glaring contradictions between the statements Jesus makes about himself in the Bible and what that same Bible says about God. Indeed it carries those contradictions into the very being of the Triniarian Jesus himself. It is not possible to be both mortal and immortal, to have limited knowledge and yet know all things, be superior and inferior to yourself, tempted but also utterly unable to be tempted all at the same time.

The solution orthodoxy offers to this dilemma is the theory that Jesus had a 'dual nature' (AKA the hypostatic union for all you lovers of long words). It is something like the attempt to mix oil and vinegar. The result is a potent and colourful mythological dressing for Trinitarian Christology but the trouble is that the ingredients simply will not hold together. It is neither biblically correct nor logically possible to say that a person can be both truly God and truly man. The proposition raises more problems than it solves.

In fact, this teaching even manages to turn the fundamental premise of the Trinity itself on its head. The triune God is supposed to consist of 3 persons in 1 nature. Yet the dual nature states that 2 natures dwell in 1 person! As a result, not only is the godhead divided but Jesus as well.
It makes the prayer life of Jesus irrelevant to believers. After all when he prayed to God saying, for example, 'My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?' it was really a matter of one aspect of his nature communicating with the other. But is this really consistent with the way the scriptures define prayer? Certainly, it is very different from what happens when everyone other than ‘God the Son’ prays.

Not only that but the very biblical affirmation that Jesus is exactly like us- an authentic human being whose struggles we are encouraged to relate to, is also jeapordised. This is because the addition of a divine nature to the Son also adds the slight exception that he was, whilst being a man like us, at the same time (and for a considerable period before), God Almighty, as though the one statement need not have any impact upon the other.

But I ask you, in such a being how could the God-nature not entirely overwhelm the mere human nature? How can we who are only human relate to a person who is also fully divine? How could he genuinely relate to our struggles? Surely the greatness of what Jesus achieved would be diminished if he had such an enormous hidden advantage.

What example could Jesus’ faith in God be to us if all he was doing was trusting in another aspect of himself?

Adolf Harnack, hailed by evangelicals as the 'prince of church history', has observed:
"The Catholic Church has learned but little from the Gnostics, that is, from the earliest theologians in Christendom, in the doctrine of God and the world, but very much in Christology; and who can maintain that she has ever completely overcome the Gnostic doctrine of the two natures, nay, even Docetism?" (Docetism is the mistaken belief that Jesus wasn't really human but only appeared to be) History of Dogma Volume 1 p.261


Our personalities are molded by the conditioning we receive from our experience of life here on earth. It would be hard to avoid the conclusion that Jesus was like other men only in appearance, if, at this very important point, he was entirely different. Harnack again:"The appearance of a Divine being on earth, but the person divided and the real history of Jesus explained away and made inoperative is the signature of Gnostic Christology".

Who could deny that, in the case of the dual-natured Jesus, the historical, physical, earthly life is eclipsed by the eternal, spiritual existence enjoyed by 'God the Son' in heaven. He already was what he was before he ever came to be a man. Then he assumed flesh for relatively brief moment, lived in it, and returned back to what he had always been.

Because of this every significant detail the scriptures give us about the historical Jesus fade into the background. His birth, ministry, crucifixion- none of these apply to the person he originally was but only to the temporary human form which he adopted for a time. Even the resurrection is merely a case of him reverting back to what he was before. His death on the cross, seen in this light, is less a sacrifice of total surrender and more like a liberation from the confines and limitations of his lower, temporary, self.

The God of the Bible knows all things, yet Jesus had limited knowledge. For example he was in the dark about when he would return. But surely if Jesus really had a dual nature the God part of him would have known. So how does this work then? Did he alternate between knowing and not knowing from one moment to the next, as the opposite sides of his double nature took turns to come to the fore? Or was it a case of him simultaneously both knowing and not knowing at the same time?

This poses a grave epistemological problem by implying that when, for example, Jesus said 'my Father is greater than I', he meant something other than the plain sense of those words because he was, in reality, his Father's equal. It calls into question whether Jesus can be taken at his word.

In conclusion, all this theological moonwalking isn't enough to get round the elephant in the room. The unavoidable truth that there is a difference between mystery and contradiction. The reality that, according to this formula, the qualities that made Jesus’ being what it was were incompatible with... what his being also was. Consequently, far from a fusion of two natures, the result is actually a juxtaposition of two complete and distinct beings of entirely opposite qualities.

Put another way, a person's nature is the sum of all that they are. So to speak of a double nature is rather like speaking of a double individuality. Amazingly, orthodoxy doesn't even flinch from this stating with brazenness of face that Jesus is '100% God and 100% man'. Such language only lays bare the contradiction at the heart of the issue.

If we want to celebrate the virginal birth of God’s only begotten Son Jesus let’s do it all year round, carefully studying the scriptures to make sure that we are doing so according to what they tell us about him.