But the questions persist, and the Holy Spirit disturbs the mind at his sovereign command. The church from earliest times struggled to settle its conviction on the very same points. The early heresies regarding the Person of Jesus Christ, and the ecumenical councils of the church that addressed them and reached a firm christological settlement, warrant careful attention. The issues under debate had to do essentially with what was to be understood in relation to the being of the divine Godhead, and in that context focus fell pointedly on the question of the identity of the Second Person of the Godhead, God the Son. Four principal controversies and four councils of the church deserve recognition and will be noted briefly, though they cannot detain us at length at this time.
Controversies and Councils
A clear and sustainable response to the question, “Why did Jesus Christ come into the world,” makes it necessary to proceed with some care on two fronts. First, as we have anticipated, we must consider the doctrinal basis of what is to be held regarding the divine personhood of Jesus Christ; and second, it is necessary to encapsulate in biblical terms the meaning and significance of his coming.
It has unfortunately to be said that confessing evangelicalism has historically, and notably at the present time, varied in its responses to the questions we have raised and it does not present a uniform confession in its statement of the evangel. For what was accomplished, it has to be asked, by the life and by the death of the man Jesus Christ who appeared among men for their eternal benefit? Is unique significance and efficacy to be attributed to his life as well as to his death? What, then, were the benefits that accrue to those for whom Christ lived and died, if, in fact, the extent of the efficacy that his life and death projected can be specified? If the apostolic deliverance in 1 Corinthians 1:30 is to be relied on as definitive, in what respect does the fact that Jesus Christ is our sanctification as well as our righteousness convey meaning to the way in which our questions are answered? In short, and quite apart from a fuller expansion of their biblical grounding, what are we to say of the place that must finally be occupied in our confession by the arguments to which we drew attention in the preceding chapter of such luminaries as Augustine versus Pelagius, Calvin versus Pighius, the Synod of Dort versus Arminius, the Amyraldians and their attempts at theological-doctrinal mediation, Whitefield versus Wesley, and their contemporary Reformed and evangelical offspring among whom the historical controversies find re-expression?
Considerations of personhood are necessarily prior to those of office and function. Being is prior to act and behavior. It is for that reason that the early church was at pains to settle the question of the identity and Person of Jesus Christ before, on the basis of its settlement on that level, it could proceed with its fuller confessional articulation. The heresy of Arianism, for example, argued that the Person of Jesus Christ did not possess a true and full divine nature. He existed before his birth in this world, it was claimed, but not from eternity. He was a creature of God, but he was not eternally divine. “Arius admitted that the Son was produced before all other beings, and held that He was God’s agent or instrument in the creation of them all.”44 But he did not exist in eternal consubstantiality with the Father. The heresy of Arianism was rejected by the church at the Council of Nicea in the year 325, and in the following years the worthy Athanasius argued strongly in support of what had then been agreed as the orthodox position on the doctrine of the Person of Christ.
But further debates on the question followed. Sabellius, a presbyter of the church in the third century, taught that what the orthodox church held to be the Second and Third Persons of the divine Trinity were, in fact, only two different powers of the one God, emanating from the divine essence.45 Other heretical doctrines troubled the church. Eutychianism argued that two natures did not exist as distinct natures in Christ, but that at the incarnation the human nature was absorbed into the divine. The result was that Christ existed as one person with one nature. An opposite error was held by the Nestorians who held that the two natures, divine and human, existed in Jesus Christ as what were, in effect, two separate persons.46 The debates continued at the Councils of Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 435, and a definitive conclusion on the doctrine of the Person of Christ was reached at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.47
At that time it was resolved that the two natures were united in the Person of Christ “without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation.”48 The first two of those defining characteristics state that there was no communication of properties from the one nature to the other. The divine nature remained divine, and the human nature remained human. Neither nature took on the properties of the other. At the incarnation there was no commingling of the eternal (divine) and the temporal (human). At the incarnation the Second Person of the Godhead took into union with his divine nature a created, finite, and temporal human nature. He now lives in the heavens in his divine and human natures, not having divested himself of his humanity at his resurrection and ascension. In his divine and human natures he ever lives to make intercession for those who are the subjects of the redemption he accomplished. In the context of the doctrine of the being and essence of God as it is held by the Christian confession, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are fully and eternally God in their own right. The Second and Third Persons of the divine Trinity, that is, are autotheotic. The full essence of the Godhead resides in each of the three distinguishable Persons of the Trinity. The realities of the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, and the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son are well-established elements of the orthodox Christian confession.49
Consider, against that background, what is to be said of the coming into the world of Jesus Christ. “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). And “God loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). He was not always and from eternity Jesus Christ. He came into the world to become Jesus Christ for our redemption. It is therefore necessary at that point to recognize the twofold mystery of his incarnation. Two divine miracles were involved. First, it was said to the virgin that “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35), intimating that as the human womb was prepared for the reception of divine impregnation the entailment of sin was broken, and the child to be born was without sin.50 The second miracle was the Holy Spirit’s act of impregnation of the sanctified egg of the mother and the consequent emergence of a created, finite, and temporal human nature. God the Holy Spirit did not create a fetus for implantation in the womb of the virgin. For Christ, as to his human nature, was born of the substance of the mother. If that had not been so, he could not have been truly human and thereby an acceptable and effective substitute for sinners. That necessity and fact indicate, first, that the divine Person who came into the world did, in fact, possess a full human nature, with all the faculties of soul and body that characterize humanity, yet without sin. And second, the actual impregnation of the egg of the virgin, that was necessary to establish true human nature, actually occurred.
The human nature that our Lord possessed, therefore, is to be understood and recognized as a created, finite, and temporal human nature. It was created, but only by impregnation; it was finite in that it was truly human and not divine; it was limited to the capacities of humanness in its scope and function, except, as we shall see, as it was supported in its human experience and act by the Holy Spirit; and it was temporal in an important respect. The deity of our Lord was, of course, atemporal, meaning that God exists in full essence outside of time, and that time itself is a created entity, created as a mode of finite existence. So, therefore, given what has been declared as the oneness and unity of the Persons of the Godhead, the divine nature of Christ is characterized by atemporality. But the human nature in view in the Person of Christ is, in its restriction to true human finitude, bound to the temporal character of finite existence.
But it is to be carefully guarded, as the Chalcedonian settlement implies, that the man Jesus Christ was not, as a result, a human person. The misstatement