Let me continue this article by sharing some thoughts about the Church’s understanding of Who Christ Is. Put simply, the Church confesses about Christ that He is the Son of God become human, become man, without ceasing to be God. By stating this I know that one of the immediate questions must be: Who is God. I shall wait, however, to address that question after I share more about the Church’s idea of Who Christ is.

The history of Christology is the history of the attempt to preserve this basic confession, namely that Jesus is the God-Man. Perhaps the first problem was to square the attribution of some kind of divinity to Christ with the monotheism of the Hebrew religion in the bosom of which Christianity was formed. I think I have already shared that thought with my readers.

In the first century or so, Christians came to realize that what distinguished them from other Jews was their belief that the promised Messiah, the Christ, had come. For the early Christians Jesus was the person for whom the Jewish People were waiting. For the early Christians the messianic age had dawned. But this messiah manifested his power on the cross. He was no political champion of Israel’s hopes. Rather, what he achieved was something much deeper: it was the overthrow of death and all the ways in which death has corrupted human life, and the life of the world as a whole. This was never within the scope of the expectations that the Jewish people had of their messiah. Already one can see a revision of what divine power looks like – not coercion, but love – which further entails that the anointed one of the Jews, the Messiah, was the fulfillment of the hopes of all humanity: ‘a light for revelation to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel’, in the words of Symeon, who carried the child Jesus in his arms when he was presented in the temple (Luke 2:32). Ideas about the real meaning of divinity – of who or what God is – subverted the normal expectations of both Jews and Gentiles: love and faithfulness revealed the nature of God, not power and dominion. In other words, Jesus did not meet Jewish expectations of what the Messiah would do and what He would be like. The Expected Messiah was to free the Jewish people from the domination and subjugation that was imposed on them by Rome.