Paul claims that the incarnation...
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Paul claims that the incarnation has long been kept a mystery. It still is hard to believe. On this matter Martin Luther wrote:
Christian faith and Christian life stand in the single literal revelation of God, for where this is not so, no heart can ever rightly be aware of this mystery, which hath been hidden from the world. No creature can come to this knowledge, Christ himself alone revealeth it to it in the heart itself. There all merit falls to the ground, all powers and abilities of reason, and count nothing with God, Christ alone must give it.
(quoted by Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I/1, p. 134)
In fact, when we look from the perspective of faith at the question of how Jesus can be divine and human and still be one, the mystery begins to make a little more sense. Famed modern theologian Karl Barth helps us by drawing on an activist Hebraic ontology and its idea that a person is what he does. Thus Christ is said to have a human nature because he does all the things humans do and has a divine nature insofar as he does what only God can do (Ibid., Vol. IV/3, pp. 39ff). And the Lutheran Confessions speak of the mystery as a glowing iron, with the iron distinct from fire yet inseparable from the fire (The Book of Concord [200 ed.], p. 510).
Christian faith and Christian life stand in the single literal revelation of God, for where this is not so, no heart can ever rightly be aware of this mystery, which hath been hidden from the world. No creature can come to this knowledge, Christ himself alone revealeth it to it in the heart itself. There all merit falls to the ground, all powers and abilities of reason, and count nothing with God, Christ alone must give it.
(quoted by Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I/1, p. 134)
In fact, when we look from the perspective of faith at the question of how Jesus can be divine and human and still be one, the mystery begins to make a little more sense. Famed modern theologian Karl Barth helps us by drawing on an activist Hebraic ontology and its idea that a person is what he does. Thus Christ is said to have a human nature because he does all the things humans do and has a divine nature insofar as he does what only God can do (Ibid., Vol. IV/3, pp. 39ff). And the Lutheran Confessions speak of the mystery as a glowing iron, with the iron distinct from fire yet inseparable from the fire (The Book of Concord [200 ed.], p. 510).
