Polaris said:
Does it suggest anywhere in scripture that Jesus was fully human and fully divine?
It doesn't say it outright, but I can't imagine any reason why scripture should be the sole basis of theology or anything else.
Polaris said:
What does that even mean anyway?
Do you really want to know?
There's no brief answer. This post is a condensed version of my original response, which was too long to go into one post.
Basically, the early Jesus communities and Christ communities about which we know anything fall into three categories, which we may call, for purposes of convenience (sacrificing a little precision), Christian, Ebionite, and Gnostic.
Gnosticism was (and is) extremely diverse. It's really a pre-Christian tradition, some forms of which were able to find meaning in Christ and adapt the Christ-myth to Gnostic thought. It's rash to try to make a brief summary of Gnosticism both because it's so diverse and because most forms of it have an extremely complex theology. Gnostic theology makes Christian theology look as simple as a child's alphabet book. So I'm going way out on a limb here, but for the sake of brevity we can say that those Gnostics who were interested in Christ regarded him as a higher emanation of the divine than humans are. The human race was created by the Demiurge, whom we can think of here as sort of a defective emanation of the divine. In this way of thinking, Christ's humanity, if any, is pretty much irrelevant, and some Gnostics made a distinction between Jesus and the Christ. Understand that I'm simplifying to the point of being offensive to Gnostics, here, but I'm trying to avoid writing a book.
Moving on to the Ebionites: They didn't consider Jesus God at all, but just a man. An exceptional man, to be sure; for the main body of them he was the prophet promised by Moses:
And the LORD said unto me [Moses], They have well spoken that which they have spoken. I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.
In Christian -- i.e., Pauline -- thought, there are different ways of looking at the person of Jesus.
For
Arian Christians, Jesus was not God but a pre-existent creation of God who was incarnate as a man. For
Trinitarian Christians, Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity. This is the first really important division in Christian thought.
For Trinitarians, the question is, what does it mean that Jesus is God? What are the implications for his humanity? Is Jesus really entirely human?
For
Nestorians,
Christ and
God were distinct entities. The Second Person of the Trinity was to be distinguished from the son of Mary, and one could not pretend that God had been born or shared any of other universal experiences of humanity. God was way above and beyond such mundane human existence, and the man Jesus Christ was a sort of vessel for the Second Person of the Trinity. So it was impermissible to call Mary the
Theotokos (Birthgiver of God). Nestorians called her instead the
Christotokos (Birthgiver of Christ). For the Orthodox-Catholics, this was intolerable. Naturally, they accepted that there was nothing heretical about the title Christotokos in and of itself; what was heretical was the belief that Mary was not the Theotokos. For the Orthodox-Catholics the Incarnation meant that God actually
had been born as the child Jesus; Mary's son was not just a vessel of divinity but was actually divine himself -- he
was the Second Person of the Trinity. To deny that Mary is the Theotokos, or to deny that she is the Mother of God, (in Orthodox-Catholic thought, she bears both titles) is to deny the Incarnation. This is the reason, by the way, that traditional Orthodox and Catholic Christians are so shocked by the Protestant refusal to call Mary the Mother of God. They see it -- quite rightly, in my view -- as a refusal to commit to the doctrine of the Incarnation.
(It should be noted that the surviving body of "Nestorian" Christians, the Assyrian Church of the East, is not committed to a full-blown Nestorian theology, and denies that Nestorios himself was, either.)
The next big controversy was between the
Monophysites and the
Dyophysites, and the question was, What is the
Nature of Christ? The Dyophysites (Dual Naturists) -- what we may think of the as Orthodox-Catholic party -- said that Christ had both a human nature and a divine nature. The Monophysites (Single Naturists) said that he had but one nature, the divine nature.
For
some Monophysites, Christ was in effect a man whose soul was divine. They didn't say soul; they said
nous, and that's not the same thing, really. You could just as well say mind, soul-mind, or reason. Nous doesn't translate very neatly into English; but I'm trying phrase this to mean something to people used to thinking in Protestant terms.
Other Monophysites said that Christ may technically have had both a human nature and a divine nature, but the human nature was so insignificant in comparison to the divine nature that it was meaningless to think of him as having anything but the divine nature. Say an Icelandic settler in Newfoundland a thousand years ago fathered a child with a Native woman, and that child remained in Newfoundland and has living descendants today. And say one of those descendants is otherwise a "full-blood" native, with no futher admixture of non-Native ancestry. For these Monophysites, saying Christ has both a human nature and a divine nature would be even more preposterous than saying that Native person with one Icelandic ancestor a thousand years ago is both Native and Icelandic. For them, the human nature doesn't amount to enough to count.
So there were differing currents in Monophysite thought, but they agreed in rejecting the idea that we should think of Christ as having both a human nature and a divine nature.
The
Dyophsysites, or Orthodox-Catholics, could not accept this rejection of the human nature of Christ. They maintained that for the Incarnation to mean anything, Jesus must have a complete human nature
and a complete divine nature. If he was anything less than fully human
and fully divine, the Incarnation was meaningless. This is the position today of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
The Oriental Orthodox Churches, on the hand, embrace
Miaphysism, which is the teaching that Christ has one nature which is both fully human and fully divine.
To most Protestants (and even to some Orthodox and Catholics), the distinction between
Dyophyism and
Miaphysism is all but meaningless. Arguing about whether Christ united the full divine nature and the full human nature in one person, or, alternatively, united full divinity and full humanity in one nature, seems to be splitting hairs. Nevertheless, it's an important distinction to theologians. But we'll leave the discussion to them, because we've outlined, in broad strokes, the main ways of thinking about Christ.
James mentions
Modalism, which is an ancient idea revived by some present-day Protestant sects, and
Monothelitism, which was an ingenious attempt to compromise between Diophysism and Monophysim, but never really got off the ground. Monothelitism was popular with some theologians, but never really won any popular support, and for our purposes we here can assume that the will(s) of Christ go hand in hand with the nature(s) of Christ.
Polaris said:
I believe the important point is that he possessed both human and divine qualities: human so that he could fully understand our trials and sufferings and lead by example, divine so that he could do for us what we could not possibly do for ourselves.
All Pauline Christians, even the Arians, have believed that Jesus possesses both human and divine qualities -- the Arians less so than the rest. The question is, what does that
mean? That's one of the main questions that has exercised Christian theologians over the ages.
Polaris said:
If Katzpur and I are right -- that part of Jesus' genetic makeup was actually inherited from God making them literally Father and Son -- then two important points of religious debate are resolved: 1) God is indeed Jesus' father and the two are separate beings, and 2) God must be a physical being.
Well, that's one of the things that so original about Mormonism, and one of the things that makes it so shocking to other Christians. Mormonism is the first really radical innovation in Christian theology in many centuries.
On the face of it, it may not seem so unthinkable that God the Father is a physical being. After all, Trinitarian Christians must believe, in light of the Resurrection, that God the Son has a body. But the idea that God the Father has a body is such a radical departure from traditional Christian thought that most Christians can't bring themselves to consider Mormons Christians at all. (Though that's not the only reason.) From the point of view of Orthodox, Catholic, and traditional Protestant Christians, you might as well embrace Satanism or Norse heathenism. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian might not think that a Jehovah's Witness is a "real" Christian, but he'll think the Jehovah's Witness is far closer to being a real Christian than a Mormon is.
Non-Mormon Christians don't even have any frame of reference for discussing theology with Mormons. All they can say, in effect, is "Where did you get
that?" Then you say, "Well, God revealed this to the Prophet Joseph Smith," and they say, "Sure. Whatever. Get out of my house." There's just not enough common ground for a discussion.
