Deutero Q

I have been reflecting this week on the two natures of Christ, especially as understood by the Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D. The framers of that creed rightly pointed out that in Jesus Christ we behold two natures in one Person.

"The great truth enunciated [by the Chalcedonian Creed]," says Louis Berkhof in his Systematic Theology, "is that the Son of God took upon Himself our humanity, and not, as Brunner reminds us, that the man Jesus acquired divinity." The Chalcedonian Creed speaks of Jesus Christ as truly God and truly man who is "to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably."

The Scots Confession (1560), written more than a thousand years later by John Knox and five other Protestant ministers, railed against heretical views of Jesus Christ. Affirming that Jesus Christ is true God and true man--two natures in one person--the confession states in its sixth chapter:

"When the fullness of time came God sent his Son, his eternal wisdom, the substance of his own glory, into this world, who took the nature of humanity from the substance of a woman, a virgin, by means of the Holy Ghost ... whom we confess and acknowledge to be Emmanuel, true God and true man, two perfect natures united and joined in one person. So by our Confession we condemn the damnable and pestilent heresies of Arius, Marcion, Eutyches, Nestorius, and such others as did either deny the eternity of his Godhead, or the truth of his humanity, or confounded them, or else divided them."

Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith and so it is crucially important to be right in our beliefs about Him. As I recently explained to a Jehovah's Witness, if religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Muslims, etc., are wrong about who Jesus Christ is, their other beliefs will be out of balance.

Theology matters, especially as it pertains to Jesus Christ--who is the very center of God's self-revelation in history and in Scripture!