A third approach, one that has caused grievous arguments and divisions among Christians, defines Jesus as uniquely and essentially the Son of God, one with God from eternity, sent from the Father into the world and its history to assume a human life. This approach is found in a poetic, suggestive way in the New Testament in the writings of John, especially in the prologue to John’s Gospel. Jesus is identified in John as having an existence prior to his human life—a preexistence as the Word, the speaking or uttered thought by which God created in the beginning. That speaking or thought is something that is always with God and is God, but that speaking has now been realized, made concrete, enfleshed in a particular human being. The letters of John suggest a parallel in the thought that God is essentially love, that Jesus is wholly love in his attitude to the Father and in his relationship to other human beings, and that Jesus is therefore an incarnation or personification of the love of God. Sooner or later, however, this approach is bound to raise questions about what exactly is meant by equating Jesus with the Word, Wisdom, Image, or Love of God, and by adding that Word, Wisdom, Image, and Love of God are God and not other realities outside God. That, in turn, raises the question how there can be two who are the one God, which led historically not only to a highly developed Christology, but also to the inclusion of the Holy Spirit or Breath of God, and to the development of a trinitarian theology.
Some Christians regard the divinity terms used in relation to Jesus as courtesy titles, not intended to be taken literally. The Arian controversy that was settled at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. left the majority of the churches with a commitment to take the divinity of Jesus literally; those who did not agree were labeled Arian heretics. The majority, however, faced further questions about how one individual could be at the same time divine and human. One obvious possibility is that we are speaking not exactly of a double personal identity, but of a very close union of another sort. For instance, we might think of Jesus as essentially a human person, so wholly attuned to God’s will in everything that his presence is in effect the presence of God, and his impact on the world in effect the Word or utterance of God. Again, however, representatives of the then existing churches (local rather than denominational in definition) met in council at Ephesus in 431 C.E. to discuss a proposal to this effect, and vehemently rejected it, forcing those who still held this explanation into schism from the other churches, and designating them Nestorians. Most Christian churches today accept the authority of that council and therefore are committed to the explanation that Jesus is personally and literally divine.
Of course, anyone who thinks about the matter carefully has to probe further: If Jesus is personally and literally divine, is he really a human being like the rest of us, or is he really a divine being appearing to us as a man so that we might see him and relate to him? Or is he perhaps a divine being somehow expressing himself in a human body but not really subject to our limitations? For instance, did Jesus really suffer? Were there things he did not know? Did he have to consider situations, think about them, pray about them, and struggle to come to a decision? Or did the divine fullness of being, omnipotence, and omniscience preclude all this? That certainly is a very important set of questions because these issues relate immediately to what we understand by redemption and how we see our own role in accepting and responding to the divine initiative in redemption. Here again, Christians today are heirs of an answer given long ago. In 451 C.E. representatives of the churches still in communion with one another gathered at Chalcedon and hammered out a formula that was supposed to answer these persistent questions: There is one person, Jesus, who is truly of the same being as God the Father and creator in his divine aspect and truly of the same being as we are in his human aspect; when Jesus acts it is always God acting and man acting. Almost all the Christian churches still consider this the orthodox formula of Christian faith.
Nevertheless, many ordinary believers, preachers, and theologians wonder whether the Chalcedonian formula is adequate to describe the nature of Jesus. For example: If Jesus acts simultaneously as God and man, and invariably does the Father’s will, can he seriously be said to have a human will at all? If as God he knows everything, does he really have a human mind that learns things progressively? And so on. To all such questions the considered answer of the churches after debate and reflection has always been: Whatever is integral to being human must also be predicated of Jesus. Contemporary Christian scholars have pointed out that the formula of Chalcedon with its subsequently agreed corollaries is not so much an answer that rationally explains the nature of Jesus, but rather is an answer that suggests a way of accommodating a mystery that we can know in some sense but never fully comprehend.
A good question, of course, is why there should need to be such concern and endless debate on this topic. Over the centuries various authors have given answers to the question of Jesus’ dual nature that still hold today, and others that we find quite strange. From Athanasius of the fourth century we get the answer, gathered from many voices in the earlier tradition, that what we see in Jesus is a kind of exchange whereby the divine enters into our experience and our problems, providing a point of entry at which we might in turn come to share the clarity and power of the divine life, which offers the resolution of our problems. If Jesus were not truly divine and truly human at the same time then this exchange would not be open to us. From Anselm, around the year 1100 we get a different answer that has been very influential in the past, although it does not appeal to most Christians today: Jesus had to be divine to be truly the savior because what we needed to be redeemed from was the wrath of God who in infinite majesty had been infinitely offended by sin and therefore could only be appropriately compensated by obedience and worship of infinite value, such as could be offered only by one who was truly divine and truly human.
In twentieth– and twenty–first-century Christian theology, there has been a strong tendency to return to the Gospels and other early testimonies. The exclusively “descending” style of Christology (beginning with dogmatic formulations declaring the divinity of Jesus and then fitting his humanity and the facts of his earthly life into the picture) has come under heavy criticism, first of all because it moves from the unknown (the being of God) to the known, which is bad method, and second, because it takes a later stage of development in Christian doctrine as the starting point, and tends to read those later positions back into the earlier sources, which is also bad method. Today’s Christology has insisted on ascending approaches (those which begin with our knowledge of what it is to be human and with the available testimonies about the human life of Jesus and then consider what it might mean to speak of this man as divine), because biblical, historical, and patristic scholarship offers us much better access to the historical Jesus and his society, culture, and religious circumstances than was available for most of the Christian centuries. Today’s Christology has also insisted on an ascending approach because recent philosophies such as existentialism, phenomenology, and process thought have opened up methods of reflection better suited to an ascending approach than were the classical philosophies. Since these possibilities have been opened up, attention in Christology has turned to some questions that did not really come into focus before. One of these is how the death of Jesus is the outcome of the choices and decisions he made in his life, and what that tells us about his own understanding of salvation and of the process of redemption in the history of the world. In a descending Christology it was easy to assume that the death of Jesus was redemptive because the Father had decreed it in eternity and therefore it constituted the infinitely valuable radical act of obedience that turned the scales. An ascending Christology does not claim to know what the Father decrees in eternity, but