The person of Jesus has been the source of debates within and without the Church for around 2,000 years. C.S. Lewis in his work Mere Christianity popularized a formula for determining the person of Jesus that narrows our options down to lord, liar, or lunatic. The formula predated Lewis but his explanation is perhaps the best written when he states:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. (Mere Christianity 55-56)
Another option has been proposed by William Lane Craig in Reasonable Faith that perhaps Jesus didn’t say these things about himself at all. Perhaps his followers intended these stories as legend rather than history or fact. Nevertheless, C.S. Lewis has an explanation for that option as well which you can find in his essay “What Are We To Make of Jesus?” Since the topic of Scripture and its purpose will be covered more in-depth in a later series, let’s assume for now that the Gospels at least are not intended as legend. My purpose here is not to argue with you about whether you must accept that Jesus is lord, liar, lunatic, or legend—but rather that it is the clear teaching of Christianity that without the lordship and divinity of Jesus we have no faith.
With the assumption that they are not intended as legend, how does Jesus speak of himself in the narrative of the Gospels?
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
Matthew 16:14-17
Here we see Peter says that Jesus is the “Messiah” and the “Son of the living God” but before even that we see Jesus refer to himself as the Son of Man. This title is used by Jesus talking about himself eighty times in the gospels. In Matthew’s gospel alone he refers to himself as the Son of Man thirty-two times. The Jewish audience of Matthew’s gospel, as well as the Jews who heard him refer to himself in this way, would have immediately made the connection to the prophet Daniel and his words in Daniel 7:
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
Daniel 7:13-14
Now some of us could point out that this person who “was like a son of man” is not clearly called God in this passage nor a member of the Trinity, but this would be completely against an understanding of the Torah. No one is ever to be worshiped as God is worshiped except God himself. Only God has an everlasting dominion. What Jesus is saying by using this phrase is that he is God and also Lord over all Creation. He is claiming to have complete dominion. Yet in Matthew’s gospel we see there is some confusion about who the Son of Man is. Perhaps he’s a prophet or a teacher like John or Elijah? But Jesus affirms Peter’s words that he is more than that, he is the “Son of the living God”—God made flesh to dwell among us and rule over us.
What Jesus is claiming is to be God and to have the authority of God over satan, sin, and death. We see this clearly in several passages from the gospels themselves. His power over Satan is clearly seen when he casts a demon out of a mute man in Luke 11. The Pharisees accuse him of being in league with the Beelzebub, the prince of demons, and he makes clear that it is only by the power of God that he could drive out demons. He shows clearly that he has the power to forgive sins in Luke 5, again in a confrontational moment with the pharisees.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man,
“I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”
Luke 5:20-26
And prior to his own resurrection we see his power even over death in his resurrection of Lazarus (John 11) and the Jairus’s Daughter (Mark 5), but we will cover the significance of his power over death in more detail in another post. For now it’s most important that we see, both through his own words and actions, Jesus is claiming to be God himself. He even goes so far as to state that he is co-eternal with God when he states “before Abraham was, I AM.” Using not only clear language that he is pre-existing, he calls himself by a name reserved only for God (John 8:58). The Jews in the Temple understood his claim and attempted to stone him for it.
Here it would be easy to jump into explaining how Jesus was also fully man, but for now we can affirm what the criminal on the Cross affirmed first—that Jesus is acting with the power and authority of God because he is God. In the next section we will show how Jesus is being punished for something he didn’t do because he has done no wrong but for now we should take a moment to pause and reflect on who Jesus is in his full divinity. He is, as the creeds have said, “very God.”
We must ask ourselves the question: could he have saved us if he were not fully God? The answer is undoubtedly no. Athanasius, writing in the 4th Century AD, explains it well and his argument is that God created us good and incorrupted through the Word, that is, his Son Jesus. Through the temptation of Satan and the disobedience of God’s law corrupted us. Because of our sin their corruption was the just and right consequence of their action because we had rebelled against the good communion we had with God.
While our repentance would have turned us back towards obedience it would not have corrected our corruption nor in our corruption are we willing to repent. Nor would this re-create the world without the corruption we have cause, nor could we recreate the world in our own corruption. Nor would this pay the appropriate consequences of our disobedience and destruction of the world. But we are God’s creation and bear his image and in his mercy he is not willing that our corruption should lead to our ultimate destruction not that his image should be corrupted. So just as he created through the Word he would also recreate and save us through the Word, but first the consequences of death and destruction would need to be paid.
As through one man, Adam, sinned entered the world and death and corruption by sin, so they passed to all of us but through Christ, who was born as a man but without the corruption of sin, all of us can be pardoned because Christ died in our place. Further, because he has died in our place but is the creator in his divine nature and is not corruptible, death could not hold him and he was resurrected. In his resurrection, he is the example of perfect humanity, the firstfruits of those risen from the dead because he will also resurrect us in re-creation, and he is the only advocate that can speak both to us in our humanity and God in his divinity.
So the story of creation, our fall, and our redemption is inherently physical because we were always intended to partake is God's physical dwelling place. His eternal plan was to redeem a people for himself to dwell in the temple he has made for himself and enjoy the perfect communion he shares within himself in the Trinity (On the Incarnation). This being true, how can our faith not also be inherently physical? But before we go there, let's continue in our understanding of the criminals words to Jesus tomorrow.