God the Son Incarnate

The Doctrine of Christ

Stephen J. Wellum, John S. Feinberg

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781433517860
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie et éthique systématiques

Nothing is more important than what a person believes about Jesus Christ. To understand Christ correctly is to understand the very heart of God, Scripture, and the gospel. To get to the core of this belief, this latest volume in the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series lays out a systematic summary of Christology from philosophical, biblical, and historical perspectives—concluding that Jesus Christ is God the Son incarnate, both fully divine and fully human. Readers will learn to better know, love, trust, and obey Christ—unashamed to proclaim him as the only Lord and Savior.

Part of theFoundations of Evangelical Theologyseries.

Introduction to Part I

In general, epistemological warrant in the realm of theology amounts to a well-reasoned account of how humans can know God. Epistemological warrant for Christology should provide sound reasoning for how we can know God in the person of Jesus Christ.

In our current Christological climate, we cannot take it for granted that everyone agrees on how we can and do come to know who Jesus is. In fact, the possibility of objective truth is questioned openly in today’s epistemological culture. It would not serve the reader, then, to jump into propositional statements about the identity of Jesus Christ without first providing a well-reasoned account for how we can know anything about him at all. Moreover, we must be able to connect how we can know about Jesus with what we say about him.

Since this is not a work on epistemology itself, the attempt at epistemological warrant here will not address the core issues and breadth of concerns related to the nature of knowledge and the means by which it can be obtained. As the Christology volume in the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series, this work begins with certain presuppositions regarding epistemology: e.g., the existence of the visible world we experience; the existence of an invisible world beyond our direct experience; the ability to know about these worlds in truth; the objectivity of truth, which is unchanged by the way we experience or know about the visible and invisible worlds. Yet building on these evangelical assumptions in epistemology, we need to give a well-reasoned account of how we can know God (invisible) in Christ (visible).

Chapter 1 will unearth the epistemological roots of current confusion regarding the identity of Jesus Christ. Epistemology shapes theological method, which then determines what we say about God. The post-Reformation changes in epistemology and method are largely responsible for the divergent views that persist in Christology today. Chapter 2 will then reach back to the insights of the Reformation to return to a Christology “from above.” Revelation from God is the only way we can know anything about God. And this requires a certain attitude toward his word in Scripture and a particular method for reading it.

Chapter
One

Contemporary Christology

Jesus of Nazareth has been and still is an enigma to many people. Even though he has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries, a majority of people are still confused regarding his identity. A famous poem once tried to capture something of the enigma and significance of Jesus:

He was born in an obscure village,

the child of a peasant woman.

He grew up in still another village

where he worked until he was thirty.

Then for three years

he was an itinerant preacher.

He never wrote a book.

He never held an office.

He never had a family or owned a home.

He didn’t go to college.

He never traveled more than 200 miles

from the place he was born.

He did none of the things

one usually associates with greatness.

He had no credentials but himself;

he was only thirty-three

when public opinion turned against him.

His friends ran away.

He was turned over to his enemies

and went through the mockery of a trial.

He was nailed to the cross

between two thieves.

While he was dying

his executioners gambled for his clothing,

the only property he had on earth.

When he was dead

he was laid in a borrowed grave

through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen centuries have come and gone

and today he is the central figure

of the human race,

the leader of mankind’s progress.

All the armies that ever marched,

all the navies that ever sailed,

all the parliaments that ever sat,

all the kings that ever reigned,

put together,

have not affected

the life of man on earth

as much as that

One Solitary Life.1

Who do we say that Jesus Christ is? The question itself is not new; it has been asked ever since Jesus’s earthly ministry. The writers of the four Gospels labored to impress upon us the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth, and they persist in pressing the point of his identity: Who is this Jesus? Who is he who is born the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1)? Who is he who announces the dawning of the kingdom (Matt. 4:12–17)? Who is he who resists every temptation of the Devil (Luke 4:1–13)? Who is he who commands wind and water and turns water into wine (Luke 8:22–25; John 2:6–11)? Who is he who pronounces the forgiveness of sins (Mark 2:1–12)? Who is he who raises the dead and rises from the grave (John 11:38–44; 20:1–18)?

Even Jesus himself asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (Matt. 16:13). Similar to our own day, the responses of the people then were diverse and confused. Some identified him superstitiously with John the Baptist come back from the dead, while others thought of him as one of the great Old Testament prophets. So Jesus asked his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” (v. 15). Speaking for them, Peter answered correctly, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). But even then, Peter did not fully grasp Jesus’s identity. Immediately after his confession, Peter objected to Jesus’s prediction and explanation of his own suffering and death. Peter could not yet conceive of a suffering Messiah, thinking instead of a victorious king. It was not until after the resurrection that Peter and the disciples began to understand who Jesus truly was as the Son and the Messiah. The question of Jesus’s identity could not be fully answered until all of the great events of redemptive history were fully aligned with Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection.

Even after Easter, the first-century question remains today, and unfortunately so does the confusion. Similar to the answers of old, a wide variety of responses are given today to Jesus’s question about his identity: he is a sage, a prophet, a revolutionary, a cynic, and, for some, simply a failed religious leader.2 Almost without fail, every Christmas and Easter (at least in North America) popular magazines (e.g., Time, U.S. News & World Report, Maclean’s) and cable networks (e.g., A&E, History Channel) devote time to the question, Who is Jesus of Nazareth? Repeated Gallup polls show that people often affirm some kind of belief in Jesus, but probing deeper usually reveals that their belief is ill-informed, confused, and often contradictory to other beliefs they affirm.3

For Christians, this kind of confusion and uncertainty is not a benign issue. Scripture presents Jesus of Nazareth as God’s own eternal Son and as a man who is appointed by God the Father to judge the living and the dead. As Stephen Clark rightly notes, Scripture is unified in its presentation of who Jesus is. As he notes, despite the diversity of the biblical material, there is a “uniform conviction that Jesus Christ is God and man.”4 In light of Scripture, the church has confessed consistently that to identify Jesus correctly we must affirm that he is the divine Son who has become incarnate, that to know him is life eternal, and that to know him not is judgment unto death. Biblically speaking, getting Christ right is a matter of life and death.

Yet even with this urgency, we must resist the temptation to move directly to the biblical foundations, historical formulations, and contemporary discussions of Christology within evangelical ...