How Can Jesus Be One Person in Two Natures?

God and Man

Christians have always believed that Jesus is both God and man. The traditional way of putting this in more theological language is that in Christ we meet one person in two natures. The one person is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. The two natures are his fully divine nature (in which he always existed) and, from the incarnation onward, his fully human nature. Question 35 of the Heidelberg Catechism gives a great summary:

Q. 35. What does it mean that he “was conceived by the Holy
Spirit and born of the virgin Mary”?
A. That the eternal Son of God,
who is and remains
true and eternal God,
took to himself,
through the working of the Holy Spirit,
from the flesh and blood of the virgin Mary.
a truly human nature
so that he might also become David’s true descendant,
like his brothers in every way
except for sin.¹

Let’s dig a little deeper.

One Person

When you ask the question “Who is Jesus?” the fundamental answer is that he is God the Son. Like God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, he has always existed. He is the Creator of all things. John’s Gospel begins with a striking statement:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Man of Sorrows, King of Glory

Jonty Rhodes

In Man of Sorrows, King of Glory, Jonty Rhodes uses the traditional categories of Jesus as prophet, priest, and king to enhance the Christian understanding of his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

As the story unfolds, Jesus will claim to be one with the Father (John 10:30), will tell Philip that “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and will accept Thomas’s acclamation of him as “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28). And John’s Gospel is hardly alone in presenting us with Jesus as God. Matthew introduces Christ as “Immanuel (which means, God with us)” (Matt. 1:23), Paul describes him as “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), and the author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). We could multiply verses almost endlessly. We could look at descriptions of Jesus doing things that only God can do. But I suspect you’re on board: Jesus is God. The person in one person, two natures is God the Son.

Two Natures

That means, of course, that we’re halfway to answering the two natures question. If Jesus is the Son of God, then he has a fully divine nature. Anything that is true of God is true of Jesus. God knows all things, so Jesus knows all things. God is all-powerful, so Jesus is all-powerful. God is omnipresent, so Jesus is omnipresent. The only difference between God the Father and God the Son is that one is Father and one is Son. Jesus is, to use the language of the Nicene Creed, “of one substance with the Father.” Jesus is not like God the Father or similar to him. They are one substance— because there is only one God.

And now, perhaps, questions are beginning to stir. We remember that Jesus didn’t know when he was returning, yet God knows all things. We see him asleep in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, yet we have read in the Psalms that God “will neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4). We see Jesus getting hungry and thirsty, but God suffers neither of these weaknesses (Ps. 50:12–13). Most significant of all, we see Christ crucified, dead, and buried, but God himself is immortal, incapable of dying (1 Tim. 1:17).

At this point, various perversions of orthodox Christianity spring up and claim that this is proof that Jesus isn’t really God, at least not in the truest, fullest sense. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Christadelphians all, in different ways, deny that Christ is “of one nature” with the Father. But Christians from the earliest centuries have understood the kinds of verses above as evidence that the Son of God became man. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels, the Jesus who sits on the throne of heaven, is fully human. In addition to his divine nature, when Jesus came to earth, he took on a second nature, a human nature.

When we looked for evidence that the Bible presents Jesus as fully divine, we began with John 1:1, “The Word was God.” But look how John continues: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). And again, we can look beyond John’s Gospel. Paul speaks of “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), and Hebrews tells us that since “the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things. . . . Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Heb. 2:14, 17). The children here are God’s people. Jesus became like us in “every respect” (apart from sin, of course, Heb. 4:15), sharing our “flesh and blood.” Perhaps most striking of all, Jesus refers to himself as “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (John 8:40).

Jesus is really, fully human. The Son of God added to himself a human nature. Everything it means to be human is true, now, for Jesus. He didn’t just “slip on a skin suit,” as I once heard a preacher say. He didn’t just appear like a man. He really is one of us.

The Son of God added to himself a human nature. Everything it means to be human is true, now, for Jesus.

The God-Man

The coming of the Son of God to earth is known as the incarnation. Carnis is Latin for flesh, so incarnation simply means “in flesh.” This incarnation was an addition, not a subtraction: the Son didn’t give up any of his divine powers when he became man. For a start, this is impossible. God does not change (Mal. 3:6; James 1:17). He is also not made up of “parts.” As human beings, we’re made up of arms plus legs plus brains plus souls plus . . . I won’t go on. But God isn’t like that. He is simple, to use the theological term. Simple here doesn’t mean “easy to understand” but rather that he’s not constructed of different bits like we are. God’s various attributes and characteristics aren’t like slices of a pizza, as if we could remove a few easily enough and still say we had a pizza left. He is one simple being; he is truly one. Jesus remains this one true God, never losing any of his powers: if he had given up any of his attributes when he came to earth, he would have ceased to be God.

In fact, even talking about “coming to earth” is to use picture language. Using picture language to describe God and his work is okay, of course—necessary even. But we need to recognize it for what it is, lest we draw the wrong conclusion from the picture. With regard to the Son of God leaving heaven, John Calvin writes,

The Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!²

This is hard—impossible—to comprehend. Gavin Ortlund asks us to imagine J. R. R. Tolkien writing himself into his Lord of the Rings story and going on the journey to Mordor with Frodo. Would Tolkien therefore cease to be in Oxford? Would his Oxford existence be changed in any way by his appearance in the book, his creation? No. As Ortlund concedes, this could, like any illustration, be pushed in an unhelpful direction, but it perhaps helps us glimpse something of how Jesus could remain what he was while also taking on flesh in the realm of creation.³

It’s worth noting that some have tried to claim that in becoming man, Jesus did give up some of his more spectacular powers. Often this is based on a rather unhelpful reading of Philippians 2:7, which in some translations tells us that Jesus “emptied himself.”

The Greek word for “empty,” kenoō, has given its name to what’s known as kenosis theory. Those who hold to it teach that while Jesus retained his mercy, love, wisdom, kindness, and so on, he emptied himself of his omnipotence, his omnipresence, and his omniscience. Some of the more extreme advocates of this idea even claim that this is why Jesus makes (what they view as) mistakes, such as claiming that Moses wrote Genesis.

But Paul’s point in Philippians is not that Jesus emptied himself of certain abilities, chopping off bits as he came to earth. If we read the verse carefully, we see that the text never mentions any contents that are “emptied”; we’re not told that Jesus emptied himself of certain things. No, the next clause explains what this emptying means: the Lord of glory became a servant, became a man like us. In fact, in some modern translations, the verse above is helpfully translated as “made himself nothing.” Jesus emptied himself by “taking,” taking the form of a servant. The king threw on a beggar’s cloak, concealing his true glory.

So when you think of the incarnation, think of an addition, not a subtraction. The Son of God took to himself a truly human nature. Or as one early theologian, Gregory of Nazianzus, wrote, “Remaining what he was, he became what he was not.”⁴ Keeping everything it means to be God, he became everything it means to be man.

Notes:

The Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive, 1988), 23.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 806 (2.18.4).
Gavin Ortlund, “He Lay in a Manger without Leaving Heaven,” The Gospel Coalition, December 14, 2017, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/he-lay-in-manger -without-leaving-heaven/.
For versions of this line, see Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion according to the Reformed Confession (Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 306; St. Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, Popular Patristics (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 86.

This article is adapted from Man of Sorrows, King of Glory: What the Humiliation and Exaltation of Jesus Mean for Us by Jonty Rhodes.

Jonty Rhodes is minister of Christ Church Central Leeds, a congregation of the International Presbyterian Church in Leeds, United Kingdom. He has spent the last ten years planting churches in England and is the author of Covenants Made Simple. Jonty is married to Georgina, and they have four children.