Who is This Jesus?

Questions from the Unsettled Mind

After Jesus rose from the dead, the Church started thinking about everything Jesus had said, what he had done, what God had said about him, and what the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) had prophesied about him as Messiah. They recalled how Jesus had called himself both the “son of man” and the “son of God,” and they were accordingly struck both by how human he was and also how divine he was. They quickly realized that you cannot be part-god the way Hercules was, because God is infinite. You’re either God or you aren’t. Being the “Son” of God didn’t diminish that, of course. On the contrary, it established that he was nothing other than the perfect image of the Father, hence “true God from true God.” But likewise, the Church realized that you cannot really be part human either. So, the Church mulled this over and eventually came to the conclusion that Jesus can only be fully God and fully man! The technical formulation is that while the Trinity is three persons in one substance/nature, so Jesus is one person in two natures. How that can be and what that ultimately signifies is the point of this question on the significance of Jesus in the Incarnation.