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I recently read a survey of Catholics which indicated a significant number of the respondents did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and is not divine.
We may rightfully distrust the full accuracy of surveys, yet this data point troubles me greatly.
If one does not affirm the divinity of Jesus, our entire Catholic faith is deceptive and illusory.Everything we read in the New Testament, profess in the Creed, and affirm in the Catechism rests on the identity of Jesus Christ as both God and man.
If Jesus is simply a good and holy man, even the most holy individual who has ever lived, then His teachings might be helpful, His example of compassion and service may be inspiring and “What would Jesus do?” may guide some of our moral choices, but there would be nothing redemptive or saving about the Christ event.
If Jesus is not God, then His death would simply be the tragic end of a well-intentioned social activist, and the narrative of His Resurrection a pious myth to make the apostles feel better about how things turned out.
We are saved from the weight of our sins and the power of death because God came to our rescue in the Person of His Son, who assumed our human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and took upon Himself the full experience of our humanity with the exception of sin.
One Divine Person with two natures, one divine and the other human, Jesus begins to heal the rift between God and us already in the wonder of the Incarnation.
This belief is an extraordinary tenet to embrace.
No wonder it took the Church many centuries of heresies, conflicts, prayer, theologizing, and councils to articulate the proper language to express such a mystery.
Arriving at the Christian belief in Christ
In early Christianity, some people denied the full humanity of Jesus, positing that His bodily form was simply an appearance of being human.
For them, the shock of affirming that the universal, mysterious, invisible God would take on the lowliness of our human condition was an impossible scandal.
This heresy is Docetism, embraced by many in the Church, especially in the time of St. Augustine.
Docetists could not accept the startling truth that God has fully united Himself to our humanity in Jesus Christ.
The First Council of Nicaea condemned Docetism in 325.
That same council also condemned Arianism which denied the divinity of Jesus.
In this view, Jesus was a “creature,” begotten of the Father and adopted as a son.
Followers of this heresy affirmed the unique role of Jesus in creation and redemption, but firmly rejected that Jesus Christ was indeed God, unbegotten and eternal as are the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Arianism grievously divided the Church with significant social and political implications.
Many bishops and saints experienced both exile and even martyrdom for their refusal to accept it.
The Nicene Creed we recite every Sunday is the definitive, theological articulation of Christian belief in God and more specifically, the identity and truth of Jesus Christ.
Coeternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Son freely and fully united His divine nature with our human nature in the hypostatic union.
In this way, Jesus Christ fully identifies with our humanity, embracing the effects of our sin, namely death, without ever having sinned Himself.
As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He who knew no sin was made sin for us.” By embracing our sin and death as God, Jesus redeems us, cancels out the ancient curse of death and offers us eternal life and forgiveness.
Only as both God and man, does Jesus Christ accomplish this marvelous deed which is the very center of our faith.
Resisting the errors
Why do old heresies and theological arguments matter today?
Precisely because they are still with us.
We still need to resist the surprisingly common errors that, on the one hand, Jesus was simply a good man and nothing more, and on the other hand, that His humanity was simply play acting.
With great effort and prayer, the Church has always clung to the orthodox conviction that Jesus Christ is both God and man, one Divine Person with a divine nature and a human nature.
This belief is central and essential to our Catholic faith and practice.
How consoling to ponder that God loves us so much, that He sent His Son to free us from the sadness of sin and the alienation of death, precisely in His power as God but fully within our human nature as well.
This truth reveals the startling compassion of the Lord, who can fully identify and understand every aspect and experience of our humanity without ever having sinned.
While remaining transcendent, all-powerful, and omniscient, God is also now, through Jesus Christ, embodied in our flesh, close to us through the intimacy of sanctifying grace, given through the sacraments and completely one with us as we make our pilgrim journey to the Father’s House.
God is so beyond us that we can never fully possess Him; God is so close to us that we can never fully avoid Him.
In the mystery of Christ, human and divine, we come to know both who God is and who we are.
Jesus offers us all we need!