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January 6 - March 16, 2020
Jesus assumes—he takes on—the fullness of the human condition and, in doing so, saves whole human beings.
Jesus is no subhuman, no false human, and—most tempting of all—no superhuman.
Eutychianism presents a Jesus whose humanity has been undone by God.
monophysitism, because it sees the incarnate Jesus as having only one nature (physis). The error here is to assume that when divinity and humanity meet, divinity must trump humanity.
God’s saving work in our lives is with us, not against us.
The mercy of God’s salvation is to redeem his good work in us.
Nestorius (c. 386–c. 450), bishop of Constantinople, saw that Jesus is divine and human, but he wanted to keep the two natures separate in important ways.
Nestorian Christology looks at Jesus’s actions and tries to sort out which nature is responsible for each.
The fight between Cyril and Nestorius centered on a title for Jesus’s mother: theotokos, the one who gave birth to God.
Our desperate need is for God with us, not God associated with us.
Jesus’s humanity has no existence outside of the incarnation. It was not sitting around, waiting for the possibility that God might enter into partnership with it. Jesus’s humanity came into existence only because God the Son came among us.
The council affirmed that Jesus Christ has two natures, fully divine and fully human, and that those two natures are truly united in one person.
The Second Person of the eternal Trinity became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
We cannot explain the mystery, but we can affirm the beauty, love, and mercy that are here: God has become one of us.
In Jesus, we see divinity in its divine integrity, in no way less than truly God. In Jesus, we see humanity in its human integrity, in no way inhuman.
to his humanity, being like us in every respect apart from sin.
Thus, when Christians talk about the two natures of Jesus Christ, we affirm that he is both divine and human.
To affirm the integrity of the natures, of Jesus’s divinity and humanity, is to reject any Christology (including Apollinarianism and Eutychianism) that would see Jesus’s humanity as anything less than human or that would regard Jesus’s divinity as anything less than divine.
hypostatic union
The term hypostatic union describes only the incarnation, and there is no other unity just like it.
All that Jesus does, he does as God and as a human being.
God saves. Humans suffer.
God cannot suffer. Humans cannot save.
In the hypostatic union, the attributes appropriate to the divine nature must be attributed to the person Jesus.
Human attributes that usually cannot describe God are true of Jesus.
Nestorius wanted a Jesus with a separation of divine and human attributes, a Jesus whose divine nature did divine things, like miracles, and whose human nature did human things, like crying.
God suffered. Jesus saves.
This word, particularity, is used in theology to point to the goodness of a God whose love extends to particulars. Jesus does not come among us as a generic human being; he comes as we do, with particulars.
God’s love for us is not some idealized longing for a sanitized, universal idea of humanity. It is real love for real people: male and female, gentile and Jew, Middle Eastern and African and European and American and Asian—people from every nook of the planet.
God’s love is big enough to love specifics.[22]
Because God is with and for us, we are
freed to be with and f...
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In a continent where hunger, thirst, and homelessness are the continuous experience of millions, Jesus of Nazareth is a comrade.
The practice of Christology is not about moralism and is not just about following in the footsteps of Jesus. Our Christology is incomplete if we do not follow in those footsteps, but we cannot hope to do so unless we are empowered by Christ’s own work.
And so the doctrine and practice of Christology leads us, by necessity, to the doctrine and practice of soteriology, the good news of salvation and power, which is ours in the person of Jesus Christ.
Soteriology, treating matters of salvation, attends to the interconnections between who Jesus is and what he has done, especially in the cross and the resurrection, to bring about salvation.
As we become practiced in the doctrine of salvation, we see that Christ’s saving work is as rich as Christ Jesus himself.
Scripture gives us a dense, layered, and rich account of God’s saving work, and our gratitude for salvation can only grow if we make it a practice to attend to this many-layered goodness in soteriology.
Scripture shows us salvation as an inheritance we receive as God’s children, and as citizenship in God’s kingdom. These overlapping images carry
“an important corrective to a me-centered view of salvation.”[2]
Salvation is about reconciliation between human beings and God; it also reconciles human beings “with other spiritual forces, with one another, and with the rest of creation.”[3]
soteriology as he notices the way that salvation is discussed not just at one moment in the biblical story but throughout that story as a whole.
(1) the work of the cross, (2) the resurrection and Pentecost, and (3) the new life in the Holy Spirit. Weinandy names three subthemes in the first category, Jesus’s work on the cross:
salvation in terms of a number of parts or moments.
Salvation begins with God, who works in the world at large, in the church, and in the lives of individual people long before we are aware of what God is doing.
We may speak of the beginnings of salvation in terms of conscience, contrition, election, and repentance.
the drawings of ‘the Father,’ the desires after God, which, if we yield to them, increase more and more . . . all the convictions which his Spirit from time to time works”[6]
John Wesley insists that the idea that we often call “natural conscience” is not really natural at all.
Instead, even a sense that something might not be right is the work of God’s grace.
Contrition is that step on the way of salvation when we feel sorry for our sin, when
