Human, Body & Soul

Let’s re-think the Humiliation of God becoming Man

Are you a Docetist?

by Greg Johnson

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efore I became a Christian, I was under the influence of a cult that presented itself as the true church. Among the weird things I was taught, I was told that Christmas was unbiblical, since Jesus wasn’t born on December 25. Christmas wasn’t Jesus’ real birthday.

I think that group was wrong to throw out Christmas, but they were probably right about the date of Jesus’ birth. When the Church first instituted the feast of Christmas, however, it never did so on the assumption that December 25 was Jesus’ birthday! Rather, Christmas was instituted as a celebration, not of a birthday, but of the incarnation of the Son of God. It matters not when God became man, but that God become man: both body and soul.

The Creator humiliated

Paul tells us in Philippians 2:6-8 that Jesus, who was God’s very nature (that is, 100% Jehovah), made himself nothing by joining us hereon earth. He took on a servant’s nature, becoming the likeness of a man. We think of Jesus’ great sacrifice as the cross, and rightly so. But the cross was over in a few hours. The incarnation was not.

We speak of Christ having two natures: one human, the other divine. Our Lord wasn’t half God, half man, but completely both. Through the ages, many heresies have arisen that deny this mystery. You’re familiar with some of the more recent ones. The Jehovah’s Witnesses deny it was God who became incarnate—Jesus was the archangel Michael. This is really a modern renewal of the ancient Arian heresy—the heresy that caused the church to compose the Nicene Creed in 325 AD.

But perhaps the earliest of all these heresies about the Incarnation was Docetism, a heresy that denied not Jesus’ divinity but his humanity. I’m convinced that many Christians today practical Docetists, and they don’t even know it. Docetism taught that Jesus was a phantom. He was God, sure and certain, but not really a fleshy, deteriorating, physical human being like us.

Docetists get nervous when we really consider Christ’s humanity. They want a clean, safe, spiritual Savior—someone more philosophical, less like the real Jesus. Indeed, the apostle John warns that the deceiving spirit is the very one who denies the human nature of Jesus, noting that “every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2).

Diagnosing Docetism

Are you a Docetist? Do you have trouble with the incarnation? Chew over these facts and find out if the humanity of Christ makes you nervous:

1. God had body odor for you.

Now don’t misunderstand me here, O Docetist reader. I’m not saying that the second person of the Trinity emitted the smell. But the body of the human person to whom he was united was a body like any else—and there’s a lot of humiliation that accompanies a body. Bodies take in food and water, and in return produce finger nails and toe nails, phlegm, that crusty stuff in your eyes, urine, blood, ear wax, bile, skin cells that die and flake off, and other things we need not discuss.

The body, though a good creation of God, is hardly a noble container for the fullness of deity—all the more so after our expulsion from Eden. Nevertheless, God united himself to a human person, body and all. Jesus had to let Mary change his diaper. He went through puberty. He was susceptible to disease. He was capable of dying—and did. Jesus got hungry when he fasted (Matthew 4:2). He became thirsty, too (John 19:28). His brothers grew up with Jesus, and had trouble at first accepting him as the Messiah. He was a normal man, who grew tired and weary like the rest of us (John 4:6), all so that he might resurrect our bodies on the last day.

2. God had emotional problems for you.

Don’t think that God incarnate was an impersonal force, a stoic and distant instructor. Jesus entered into close relationships with other people and loved them deeply, suffering as he came close to them. We know that Jesus loved particular people. John was the disciple Jesus loved (John 13:23), implying a companionship stronger than the other disciples had. Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus (John 11:5).

This is more than just generic love for the human race. Jesus became deeply stirred emotionally. When Lazarus died, Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (John 11:33), even weeping at the sight of a friend in death (11:35). The Lord experienced joy (John 15:11) and anger (Mark 3:5) and even surprise (Luke 7:9; Mark 6:6). In Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the kind of emotional turmoil that dreads being left alone (Mark 14:32-34). Jesus’ humanity was full, normal humanity—a humanity he took on so that he could redeem our full humanity.

3. God went to school for you.

Jesus did this both literally and figuratively. Yes, he actually went to school as a child. I know some people love school—they become teachers. But most people hate it. It feels like a prison. Jesus went through it. And don’t think that little Yeshua sat in the front row with all the answers going in. Within the person of the incarnate Jesus, the eternal Son of God humbled himself by denying himself his own knowledge.

There’s great mystery here, and most folks who try to explain it end up in heresy. Certainly Jesus had some knowledge that only God could have—he knew that Lazarus had died before being told, for example, and he knew the pain that he would suffer. But Jesus also said there were some things he didn’t know, but only the Father (Mark 13:32, the day and hour of his return).

The Scripture says that Jesus learned. “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52). He even got scolded by his mom when he was twelve for doing what she should have assumed he’d be doing—hanging around the Temple (Luke 2:48). No kid likes to be wrongly rebuked, how much more when you’re God! Yet the King of kings learned for us.

4. God faced temptation for you.

And God incarnate learned to overcome temptation, too. Remember the struggles Jesus experienced in Gethsemane, and the temptations years earlier in the desert. Though he never sinned, a life of obedience was a life Jesus had to learn to live—and he learned it the hard way, by suffering. “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hebrews 5:8-9). As the same author told us in 2:18, it is “because he himself suffered when he was tempted”—and tempted by real sins like the ones that tempt us— that “he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

It would not be enough for Jesus to simply appear and be crucified. He can relate to us when we’re fighting to stay out of the gutter precisely because he fought the same fight first. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). To help you when you’re struggling against your sins, he had to fight those same sins himself, and he came out the champion.

Lots of theologians like to insist that Jesus wasn’t “really” tempted, that he couldn’t have possibly sinned. I understand their concern to affirm the full deity of Christ. But the Bible explicitly states that Jesus faced real temptation. Jesus humanity was normal humanity. Sure, Jesus had no sinful nature—but neither did Adam, and he blew it royally. While it was always certain that Jesus wouldn’t sin, he nevertheless was capable of sin, being a human being. The only reason Jesus did not sin is because Jesus didn’t want to sin. Rather, he always did the Father’s will, passing the test (for us) that Adam failed (for us).

Does this mean that Jesus never really felt the full force of temptation, being sinless? I don’t think so. As Leon Morris has observed, “The man who yields to a particular temptation has not felt its full power. He has given in while the temptation has yet something in reserve.” By triumphing in his struggle against sin—in both his actions and his desires—Jesus enables us, in mystical union with him, to find his strength to do so again in our hearts.

5. And the incarnation was permanent.

God took on body odor, emotional problems, school, and temptation. And this incarnation was not temporary. Sure, God had appeared to his people at times throughout history—the cloud during the exodus, the burning bush, Isaiah’s vision in the Temple. But the incarnation was different from all of these. These were what theologians call theophanies—appearances of God. But the incarnation was no theophany. The incarnation of Jesus Christ was permanent. Jesus continues to this day to stand beside the Father’s throne, interceding on our behalf. Jesus is still a man (Acts 17:31; 2 Timothy 2:5), albeit a man who has ascended in glory to rule the nations with an iron scepter.

Christmas is a celebration of the singular most unlikely miracle in the history of the universe. God united his person to a human person: a human body and—yes—a human soul. He did this for his people. For us. Don’t think that the cross alone secured your salvation. God became man so that God’s image in you might be restored—in your body as well as your soul. Christmas is no more about Jesus’ birthday than it is about presents and mistletoe. It’s about the exaltation of our humanity through the humiliation of the Son’s deity. And I am convinced that God will always seem distant until we really grapple with the fact that pray with the mediation of a human who is God, to a God who is united forever to humanity. Does this make you uneasy? Perhaps you’ll join me in thinking of yourself as a recovering Docetist.