With regard to the article on our Lord’s incarnation in the November number of PRECIOUS SEED, one reader (speaking perhaps for others) has suggested that it is difficult to avoid seeing our Lord as in some sense a ‘dual personality’ or as acting in some capacities as God and in others as Man.
The perfection of His Godhead and Manhood, on the one hand, and the unity of His person, on the other, can best be safeguarded by the classical Christian recognition of the two natures in one person. That in some cases His deity is more prominent, and in others His humanity, is true. Yet the humanity is never entirely excluded from the former, nor the deity from the latter. To take one crucial example: God is immortal, but Jesus died. We have scriptural warrant for believing that He became Man in order that He might die, Heb. 2. 14. The statement that ‘God died’ belongs to the poetic licence of hymns and not to sober theological prose. Yet, while it was the Man Christ Jesus who died, it remains true that He never revealed God more fully than in the hour of death: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’, 2 Cor. 5. 19. We must in the end recognize with humility that the poverty of our thought and language will never do justice to the person of Him whom ‘no one knoweth … save the Father’, Matt. 11. 27.
