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Podcast: How to Explain the Hypostatic Union to a Fifth Grader (Stephen Wellum)

July 17, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Jesus Is Not Half God and Half Man

In today’s episode, Stephen Wellum explains where we see the hypostatic union taught in Scripture, reflects on the many heresies related to Jesus through the centuries, and highlights why all Christians would benefit from taking time to think carefully about Jesus being fully God and fully man—even if we’ll never fully comprehend that fact.

God the Son Incarnate

God the Son Incarnate

Stephen J. Wellum

Laying out a systematic summary of Christology from philosophical, biblical, and historical perspectives, this book leads to the ultimate conclusion that Christ is God the Son incarnate.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:08 - What Is the Hypostatic Union?

Matt Tully
Steven, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Stephen Wellum
Matt, it’s great to be with you.

Matt Tully
Before we get into the meat of our conversation today, I wonder if we could take a step back and just answer the So what? question. Why is it important for all Christians—not just theologians and not just pastors, but all Christians—to understand the hypostatic union to some extent?

Stephen Wellum
The big picture would be to not understand the hypostatic union is to not fully understand who Jesus is, and to not understand him in terms of who he is in the way the Bible presents him, as the one who is truly God and truly man—one person, two natures. That’s really getting at the hypostatic union. Without that, we don’t have a savior. So, we don’t understand who God is, because God is triune, and Jesus is the eternal Son of God. But we also, with the incarnation, need a redeemer. And what’s necessary to understand the nature of the hypostatic union is to give us that redeemer who can meet our needs. So that’s the biggest picture of why this is so important: we do not have the Jesus of the Bible, and we do not have a savior.

Matt Tully
So this doctrine gets to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.

Stephen Wellum
Absolutely. Christian faith is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re justified by grace, through faith in him. And if we don’t understand who he is, we don’t have the Jesus of the Bible. And if we don’t have the Jesus of the Bible, we do not have Christian faith and we do not have salvation.

Matt Tully
Let’s dive in. If you were sitting down with a fifth grader and you were given the task of explaining the doctrine of the hypostatic union (and we’ll get into those terms and why we use those terms in a little bit), how would you try to explain this idea to that young person?

Stephen Wellum
Obviously, everyone’s at a different age and now you’re dealing with someone very young. So I think what you need to do is to stick closely to the biblical teaching and the biblical parameters, and then sort of start fleshing that out. I think of John’s Gospel, the beginning of John 1, as you think of the hypostatic union: “In the beginning was the Word.” And, of course, Word in John would be tied to the Son of God. It’s a title for the Son. He’s the Son of God in relation to the Father. So, we want to communicate to the fifth grader that the Son of God, the Word of God, is one who’s from eternity. He’s the eternal Son. And then you’d have to start unpacking Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relations. “In the beginning was the Word. The word is with . . . .” So, automatically he’s with God. We’re working through the eternal Son, who is the one who is in relation to the Father, and then in John’s Gospel, the Spirit. And then you have “The Word was God.” This Word who is from eternity, this Son who is from eternity, who is in relation to the Father, is God—equal with the Father. So, we’re now unpacking the one true God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those are the foundational building blocks to get to the triune nature of God. And then, of course, as you work through the text, this Son, this Word who is from eternity, who is truly God, who is God equal with the Father, the one true God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, this Word, this Son, became flesh. The Son of God took to himself—language that we would also use is he assumed—a human nature. What does flesh mean? Well, he became human. This Word from eternity now is human. And, of course, what you have to communicate to a fifth grader, or anyone, is that we have to preserve from the very beginning of Scripture and all the way through the Bible that God is God and creatures are creatures—what we call the creator-creature distinction—so that when the Son, the Word, assumes flesh, we then have to start speaking about him being truly God, truly man. Two natures. We’re introducing concepts and vocabulary that the text itself gives us.

Matt Tully
Extra-biblical terms, though, sometimes.

Stephen Wellum
Extra-biblical terms, but they’re coming right from how do you explain the Word, the Son, in relation to the Father, assuming our humanity without then saying the Bible says God is God, humans are humans, creatures are creatures. They’re two different things. We then speak of him assuming a human nature that is different than his divine nature. And so we then start working from there. We’re working through the biblical parameters, taking them to the text, and then showing how the text then moves to theological understanding.

Matt Tully
Why start with the text and not with a historical confession or a creed, where Christians throughout the ages have tried to synthesize the text in a way that’s really easy to understand and really concise. Why do you think, with a young person or even maybe just a young Christian of any age, why would you prefer going right to the biblical text?

Stephen Wellum
Well, you could start with the confessions and then work to the text. Obviously, we are not coming to the text independent of the whole history of the church and the confessions of the church. That’s impossible, yet what I want to communicate, whether it’s to a fifth grader or anyone, is that our confessions are grounded in Scripture. Again, picking up the priority. The great Reformation principle of sola scriptura—Scripture is our final authority. Confessions are secondary authorities, and they become authoritative for us as they are consistent with Scripture. So, eventually you have to work from the confessions to Scripture, Scripture to the confessions. My experience with people is to take them to Scripture, to show them that this is a Biblical truth, and then bring in the confessions. So even as I just discussed John—the Word who is with God, who is God; and I’m starting to unpack Father, Son, and Spirit—I’m already doing so in light of the confessions. But it’s also that I’m trying to show that this is true to Scripture, because eventually if you start with the confessions, you’ve got to show it’s true to Scripture. If you work from Scripture, you’ve got to show that the church actually understood this correctly. And so it’s a both/and, but I do think that people will resonate better to say, Oh! There it is! It’s there in Scripture!

Matt Tully
I think one of the dangers with starting from the text only and maybe ignoring the testimony of church history and these confessions is that one response to the textual evidence that we have would maybe be to say, This is just inconsistent. Scripture is confused. There are different things being said about this person, Jesus, all over the place. They don’t actually fit together. But the church has wrestled with these things and actually found a way that they do fit together.

Stephen Wellum
Even in saying how the Scripture maybe is confused and people could have that impression, again that tells you, even as you are thinking about approaching the text, you already have to have a proper view of Scripture in place. So this is where you can’t separate exegesis from sound theological conclusions that are tied to the history of the church. Sound theological conclusions have to be shown to be true to Scripture. We have to have a doctrine of Scripture in some sense, even as we approach the text to say, This isn’t inconsistent. It is coherent. Thus, we have to make sure we then put all the pieces together in a consistent, coherent fashion. It’s not acceptable to say, Well, this text contradicts this one, and we’re going to ignore it or say it’s just hopelessly contradictory. That’s not an option for us. That’s how the church has said we have to take all of the biblical data, put all of it together, and the church’s confessions help us do that. Again, if we want to start with the confession, that’s fine; but we still have to show how this is grounded in the text, and then go back and forth. So we need both/and. You can’t just sort of say text alone without the confessions. That would be almost trying to reinvent the wheel. There’s no sense in doing that. But it’s on these issues of particularly Trinity and Christology that we have most agreement and we are most convinced that the Nicean Creed or the Caledonian Definition and so on that gives us our Christology is true to Scripture.

09:35 - One Person, Two Natures

Matt Tully
So you’ve already referenced a couple of these terms, but when it comes to the hypostatic union, the key terms there are person and nature. We talk about Jesus having, or the Son, being one person with two natures. And I want to just talk through what we mean by those words, because those are technical terms in the history of theology that have a particular meaning that might not be intuitive to people today. So, when we say that Jesus, the Son of God, is one person, what does that mean?

Stephen Wellum
That’s a question that the church has wrestled with, and I think there’s been a pretty good consensus on what person means, but these are very, very difficult areas. When we speak, first of all, of the hypostatic union, just that word hypostatic comes from the Greek that is what we now translate in English as person. When we speak of the hypostatic union of Christ, we’re referring to the person of the Son, who has now assumed a humanity. But to the concept of person, person and nature is a necessary distinction to uphold. Think, first of all, in terms of the triune God. There’s one true and living God who is one being. And that’s the concept of nature. So, nature refers to God in all of his Godness.

Matt Tully
Essence is another term.

Stephen Wellum
Essence, nature, being—the one being of God, the one essence of God. And when we think of nature, we often think in terms of what God is, in the case of God, or we could apply to anything what a thing is, but what God is. And usually we describe that in terms of God’s being, in terms of his attributes. Person is referring to the threeness in God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So, we could just stay with the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are three who share the same nature, the same essence of God. Person is the term that was trying to describe what the Father is, what the Son is, and what the Spirit is. I think the best way to understand person is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three subjects of the nature. Now, you have to be careful with that term subject that we don’t load into that what we think of they’re having individual minds and wills and actions and so on. No, the three—

Matt Tully
Those are Trinitarian heresies that the church has rejected through the centuries.

Stephen Wellum
That’s exactly right. The Trinitarian formulation would be the Father, Son, and Spirit are persons, defined in terms of their relations to one another. The Father’s the father because he’s in relation to the Son. He is the one who begets the Son. The Son is the Son in relation to the Father because he is the one who is from the Son, or generated or begotten. And the Spirit is the one who’s from Father and Son. So, it’s speaking of them as subjects, yet the subjects exist in, or subsist, in a nature. The nature is where you have all of the attributes, will, and so on so that the Father, Son, and Spirit share the same divine nature. The nature is undivided. So the Father has the same identical nature as the Son. The Son has the same identical nature as the Father and the Spirit. Yet they are distinguished by their relations to one another. So, they are subjects of the nature, or the technical term would be the way that they are subsistent in nature. Sometimes the language of "modes of subsistence"—but you have to be careful. This is not modalism, that the Father, Son, and Spirit are just the same thing in a different phase. No, the Father is real. The Son is real. The Spirit is real. They’re in relation to one another, and they share the same identical divine nature. So, you’re upholding, threeness and oneness. The one true God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit. The Son is the second person of the Godhead. The Son is the one who has the same divine nature, so he is fully God. He has all that the Father has, all that the Spirit has, all of the attributes; yet he is distinguished by his relation to the Father and the Spirit. And that’s the language of person. Subject, I think, is the best way of getting at that. The Son acts, but he acts through the divine nature, in relation to the Father and Spirit. And the same is then said of the Father and the Spirit. And so that’s how person is being conceived. Now, let me just add quickly that we have to be careful that when we speak of person, we don’t bring in contemporary conceptions of person. If I look at someone and say, Look at that person, I’m referring to an entire individual. In theological categories, just refer to an individual, we would be referring to their person and nature.

Matt Tully
Both.

Stephen Wellum
Both, yes. But we now have person referring to the individual. Or, sometimes people think of person in terms of their soul or personality traits. That’s not what we’re meaning in the Trinity or in Christology. The person is the subject of the nature; the persons are in relation to one another; yet they are God-equal. They share the same attributes and the same divine nature so that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. They’re distinguished by their relations to one another.

Matt Tully
As you’ve just laid out, with the Trinity we have one nature, three persons. But then when you go to that second person, the Son, he then has one person still, but two natures. In terms of how we understand these terms, would the two expressions of nature be consistent there, where when it comes to God’s nature in the Trinity is the same kind of thing as the two natures—is the term in both of those contexts meaning the same thing?

Stephen Wellum
Well, it’s not meaning the same thing in the sense that a divine nature is not the same as a human nature. Yet the term nature is referring to, in the case of God, what is God? We then say here is the being of God. Now, God’s being is utterly unique. It’s singular. He’s the God who is independent, self-sufficient. He is simple, in the sense that he has all of his attributes. He is the undivided God, so that there’s no classification of God that he fits into and then you can have other sort of examples of God.

Matt Tully
There’s no other being that has a single nature but multiple persons.

Stephen Wellum
Right, and there’s no other nature of God that God shares in. You and I, when we come to human nature, we’re using nature in the sense of, What is a human? So in the case of a divine nature, What is God? But we have to distinguish him and his utter uniqueness. When we come to a human nature, we’re asking, What is a human? But in the case of us, we then are particular instances of humans. So, you and I are human, yet there’s two of us, and we’re two separate humans. That’s not the case when we speak of God’s nature. There are no two separate divine natures and so on. There’s one that is unique and so on. So, when we then say that the Son of God—the word became flesh—all that God is in the Son. The Son is the one who is the second person, the subject of the nature. So it’s the Son, not the Father or the Spirit, who takes to himself—assumes—a human nature. It’s a human nature that is now what we are. And that’s why you have two natures that even in the Son of God, in the incarnate Son, there’s still a Creator-creature distinction. God is not blended with the human nature. It remains distinct. You can’t have, in biblical thought, the blending of God and humanity. This is not pantheism.

Matt Tully
Because Jesus’s human nature was created. That’s a hard-line distinction between that and his divine nature. Is that correct?

Stephen Wellum
Yeah. In the human nature, it comes to exist. The virgin conception—at the moment of the conception where the Spirit of God overshadows Mary—what is created that comes to exist is a human nature. We often identify human nature with, What is a human nature? We often speak of something that is body—material—and also immaterial. We often will speak of body and soul. What does the Son of God take to himself, or assume, in that moment of conception? He assumes a human body and a human soul, a human nature. And in that human nature, the Son of God acts. The Son of God is able to live. He is able to act as a human. Think of Luke 2:52: the Son of God grows in wisdom and in stature. So in that human body, he grows. He was an embryo, and then nine months passed and he was born, in terms of that humanity. But it’s a distinct nature from his divine nature. It’s not as if the divine nature is growing. God remains all that he is, yet the Son of God, the person of the Son, now has two natures. He’s always acted and lived as the divine Son. Now he’s able to, in assuming a human nature, act through that human nature and have a full human life, full human actions—which becomes very, very important for us. We need that kind of redeemer. We need one who will act on our behalf and represent us, obey for us, and ultimately redeem us.

19:30 - Was Jesus Half God and Half Man?

Matt Tully
We need a human redeemer. Maybe to help us understand a little more of what you’re saying here, why would you say it’s incorrect for us to say that Jesus was half God and half man?

Stephen Wellum
Well, because you have some notion that half God means he’s not fully who he is as God. Well, no, he is with the Father and Spirit, all that God is. Half God sort of implies something’s missing there.

Matt Tully
He’s half as God as the Father is or something.

Stephen Wellum
No, he’s all that God is. The fullness of deity resides in him. Colossians 2 picks these truths up. He’s not just half God; he is fully God. So, the language of the confessions are saying truly or fully. All that God is, he is, and he shares that with the Father and Spirit. So there’s nothing half. And then when you say half man, you sort of imply he’s the God-man, but he’s fully human. He’s truly human. Again, that notion of half I think conveys that he is not fully human. So what you’re saying is he is the one who is fully God, truly God, and truly man. All that we are, he is (obviously, other than sin); all that God is, he’s always been. And so that’s why the language of the church is not half/half; it’s truly, fully, all that God is, and all that we are.

Matt Tully
I think this is where we start to get to the mind-bending stuff where you start to try to figure out the question, What does it mean to be fully human and what does it mean to be fully God, and how can those two things coexist in the same person? It feels like there are qualities of those two natures that are contradictory with each other. We’ll get into that more as we go. Theologians sometimes say that the incarnation was an act of addition, not subtraction, and that is relevant here. What do they mean by that, and why does that help us to make sure we’re thinking rightly about this idea?

Stephen Wellum
Philippians 2 is often a text for this, and even John 1:14: “the Word became flesh.” Or, Philippians 2: “the one who is in the very form [nature] ofGod, did not consider that to be clung onto, but he humbled himself.” The humbling, the emptying language there is that he took to himself. So, this idea of taking. So what they mean by taking is that he adds to himself. And what does he add? He adds a human nature. He adds a second nature. What he’s always, always been from eternity as the divine Son, he now, as the divine Son, assumes that humanity. The language of taking is tied to the language of assumption—he assumes. He takes that to himself, and in that humanity he then lives, acts, and so on.

Matt Tully
But he’s not getting rid of his divinity in doing that.

Stephen Wellum
No. No. There are some in the history of the church that have rightly been rejected as out of the bounds or heretical, where he in the incarnation the Son of God sets aside his divine nature, which is an impossible concept because you couldn’t be God anymore. Or, you have him setting aside maybe certain attributes of God.

Matt Tully
Or the use of those attributes.

Stephen Wellum
Well, that gets into a different area, and I would reject that too. But the first sense of the Son of God—this is the Kenotic view that showed up in the 19th century—he sets aside his divine nature. That was rare, but some will say he sets aside his omnipresence, or he sets aside his all-powerfulness (his omnipotence), or his omniscience (his all-knowing). Yet, the problem is that the divine nature is not something that you can set attributes aside. God is all of his attributes.

Matt Tully
God is simple. That’s this doctrine of simplicity.

Stephen Wellum
God is all of his attributes. You can’t turn them off, turn them on. He is all of it.

Matt Tully
It’s not a switchboard where he can flip off that omniscience attribute for a little while.

Stephen Wellum
That’s exactly right. In the assumption, or the taking to himself, he’s not setting aside anything. He remains fully who he’s always been from eternity in the fullness of the triune life, yet he now takes to himself, he assumes, the humanity, and so there’s two. Now, those natures don’t compete with one another. You have what God is, what the creature is, yet the Son of God as the person, the subject and the second person in that way, now becomes the subject of the human nature.

23:49 - Did Jesus Lay Aside His Immortality?

Matt Tully
Going back to the idea of not setting aside any attributes, let’s go right to that core attribute that Jesus and what he did on this earth seems to mess up in some ways—that idea of immortality. God cannot be killed and God cannot die, and yet Jesus dies on a cross. Take that as an example to explain the question, How could Jesus the Son die and yet still be God and not have laid aside that immortality?

Stephen Wellum
Well, in fact, you have in Acts 20 where Paul can refer to God shedding his blood.

Matt Tully
He says, “God.”

Stephen Wellum
It says “God” and, of course, it’s referring to the Son of God. But you then say, Well, how does God, who doesn’t have blood, shed his blood? So these are crucial issues, and this is why the two natures is so important to affirm and why when it says “the word became flesh,” he’s assuming a human nature that has its own integrity. It’s not blended with the divine nature. When you come to understand such things as Jesus dying for us as God the Son, what does that mean? Well, the Son of God, because he takes to himself a human nature, it’s in that human nature that he now experiences death. And, of course, when we experience death, we have a body, soul separation. Our bodies are put in the grave. We continue to exist. It’s not that his human soul doesn’t exist; he continues even as the divine Son to exist in that human soul. Yet, he sheds his blood through his humanity. Now, as the church has put that together, we have to affirm not only the two natures—full deity, full humanity—but it’s important (and this is a phrase that comes back, which is very important for us to understand) to be clear that there is a communion, or a communication, of who he is in his natures to his person. So, the subject, the person of the Son, is the subject of both natures. What’s true of those natures is true of the Son of God, because he’s the subject of both natures. This is how Scripture can say “God shed his blood.” Who is dying for us? The Son of God, who is God. He’s God the Son, yet he dies for us and sheds his blood in his humanity. But what’s true of his human nature is true of him as the person. So, the Son of God experiences death, dies for us, accomplishes our redemption in his humanity. The phrase that has come through the history of the church is in Latin called the communicatio—the communion or communication—idiomatum. You get the word idioms from this, but it’s the idea of attributes or properties. What is true of his deity is true of him as the person. What’s true of his humanity, because the person has assumed his humanity, a human nature is true of his person. Think of John 8:58. Jesus can stand before the religious leaders and say, “Before Abraham was, I am.” And that “I am” is picking up the name of Yahweh. And they look at him and say, You’re not even fifty years old yet!

Matt Tully
We remember when you were born.

Stephen Wellum
He was born, he assumed a human nature that came to exist. He does have a birth certificate, if they did birth certificates in the first century in Bethlehem. But what’s true of his human nature’s true of him; what’s true of his divine nature is true of him. He can truly say, I am Yahweh.

Matt Tully
But what’s true of his human nature is not true of his divine nature.

Stephen Wellum
That’s exactly right.

Matt Tully
So there’s a distinction there, but because the person is singular, through his person he can have both of those things be true about himself. He both preexisted, and he also was born.

Stephen Wellum
That’s right. The Chalcedonian Definition is clearly saying the person now, in assuming a humanity, exists/subsists in two natures. Those natures are not blended. There’s a creator-creature distinction. You could not have a human nature and a divine nature blended. They’re two different things.

Matt Tully
That might be the intuitive way we think about this, especially when we read the Scriptures and there are terms like “he became flesh”; “the word became flesh.” That has this idea of transformation or something. And then we see the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, and he does seem human but not exactly like us. He’s performing miracles, he’s rising from the dead, and so it’s easy to kind of fall into that idea that there’s this third nature that he seems to have.

Stephen Wellum
I think you’re exactly right, and I think people think of Jesus as a kind of hybrid. The early church rejected that as one of the major christological false teachings, or heresies, and it was known as Eutychianism or Monophysitism, where there’s mono (one) physis (nature). It said there’s a blended one nature, so as a result of the incarnation now you have a kind of hybrid. Well, no, that denies Creator-creature distinction. That makes him, then, no longer God.

Matt Tully
And also no longer human.

Stephen Wellum
And no longer human. And so the church has been very, very careful to preserve from the whole Bible that God is God, humans are humans, and yet the Son of God assumes a humanity. And even the language is helpful. You have to be careful with it, but the Son of God, in that humanity, it almost functions as a kind of instrument for him. He’s fully human, but he’s acting through it. And so when he’s acting through it, you have to maintain simultaneously that he’s acting through both natures. Now, that’s hard for us to grasp. But you do have biblical warrant for this. You think of Colossians 1:15–17. Who is this Son? Well, he is “the image of the invisible God.” I think that’s referring to as deity.

Matt Tully
His divine nature.

Stephen Wellum
He’s the “firstborn over all creation.” In that context, it means he’s the creator of all things, he’s the ruler of all things. He’s not part of the creation; he’s that which is over it, because in him and through him all things have come to exist. Yet, then you have him sustaining all things. “He sustains all things” by providence. Well, the emphasis in Colossians 1:17 is found in the perfect tense. So, he has not only sustained all things from the beginning of creation (the past), but he continues to sustain all things, which is tied now to him even as the incarnate one. So, this Jesus who is truly God, truly man, in his deity he sustains all things with the Father and Spirit. He doesn’t do that in his humanity; he does that in his deity. He still continues to be all that he’s been. There’s no change there in terms of his divine nature and who he is in terms of his divine life. Yet, in assuming a human nature, he’s now able to live a fully human life. We have to bring both of those together. And if we don’t hold both of those together, we either have some kind of hybrid or we have him setting aside his divine attributes. Some may even have setting aside the function of those attributes, but that doesn’t jive well with Colossians 1:17 because obviously the Son continues to sustain the universe. He’s doing that outside of his humanity, in the sense of he’s fully God. This is known in the history of the church as the extra—he’s outside of, yet he continues to live and all that he does is also through his human nature. So you have truly one who is God the Son, who’s incarnate, or the God-man.

31:38 - Are Theological Terms Necessary?

Matt Tully
Theologians and scholars will sometimes talk about the Son in terms of “according to his human nature or his divine nature.” They’ll say the Son died according to his human nature, the Son upholds the universe by the word of his power according to his divine nature. How important is it for Christians to speak like that, to make sure we’re including those kinds of words? It seems like Scripture is less careful or less precise sometimes in how the language is used. What advice would you give to Christians who want to keep straight on these things but maybe don’t always know how they should talk about it?

Stephen Wellum
Excellent point, because we do have to keep them distinct. Yet, I think your observation is that often in Scripture it is keeping it distinct, yet it’s presenting it. So, Scripture’s presenting us with Jesus. Who is this Jesus? Well, Jesus is the one who is the Son from eternity, who is with the Father and the Spirit, who is fully God, who assumes our humanity. The word became flesh. The Son took on our humanity. He is presented all the way through the Gospels as the divine Son who’s human—the divine Son incarnate. So it doesn’t always parcel out for us, Oh, here’s deity; here’s humanity. That’s now, rightly so, us stepping back and saying, Well, if he is the eternal Son who has assumed our humanity, we do have to speak now in terms of truly God, truly man. So we do have to say “according to his divine nature” and “according to his human nature.” It’s the Son who acts through both natures, yet the Son acts in both natures differently. So that what we call “according to” or “true to” his divine or human nature is called reduplication, because you have two natures.

Matt Tully
Another technical term.

Stephen Wellum
But it’s very important. “Before Abraham was, I am.” Well, who’s speaking? The Son of God is speaking. The person of Christ is the eternal Son of God from eternity. He’s speaking, but he’s speaking through human vocal chords; he’s speaking through a human nature. But he’s speaking not in terms of his humanity, for his humanity came to exist. He’s speaking as the Lord who is the eternal Son, who is Yahweh, from eternity. So, you’d have to say that’s according to his divine nature—“Before Abraham was, I am.” Yet, he can turn and say to his disciples, Let’s get some food. I’m a little hungry, and I need to take a nap. Who’s speaking? The Son of God is speaking. But he’s speaking not in terms of he’s tired in his divine nature or he’s hungry in his divine nature. He’s speaking as the one who is truly man and who lives a fully human life simultaneously with living ultimately a fully divine life. Yet it’s the one person who’s doing so. We don’t have two persons; we have one subject, one person, the divine Son, who is acting through both natures. And so the reduplication is very, very important. The term that’s often used is that when we come to the text, we have to sometimes do what’s called partitive exegesis. Simply, picking up the idea that he has two natures, so this is according to his deity, and this is according to his humanity. That’s perfectly legitimate and absolutely necessary, but we also are reminded that it’s the one Son—the one person of the Son—who’s acting in both natures.

Matt Tully
So it’s okay to say Jesus does this, the Son does all of this, and not always, even if we need to be able to do it, we don’t always have to speak in a way that partitions out which nature this is according to?

Stephen Wellum
Yeah, I think that’s right, and I think that’s the way Scripture often is presenting him. He’s presenting here’s Jesus—he’s acting, he’s saying to Lazarus, “Come forth” and raises the dead. We try to understand the text as we do theology in the sense of faith seeking understanding. We’re receiving all that Scripture says, but we say, Well, how do I make sense of how a human raises the dead? And particularly in that context, he’s not just acting as Elijah of old, who the Spirit of God was just sort of acting upon him. This is the eternal Son, in relation to the Father and by the Spirit, who’s speaking. Just before he raises Lazarus, he says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is in a different category than just sort of a prophet of old.

Matt Tully
He’s claiming that it’s his own power that’s doing this.

Stephen Wellum
Yes. It is his own power that is doing it. When we think of Trinitarian, he’s doing it in relation to the Father, by the Spirit. So it’s not as if we don’t say he’s not acting in relation to the other persons of the Godhead, yet it’s the Son of God who’s acting in power to say, “Lazarus come forth.” But he’s acting in both natures. And it’s a divine act, yet he’s speaking in human vocal chords. He’s gesturing, possibly, his hand and saying, “Come forth.” He’s human. He’s the human one who is acting and speaking, yet he’s doing so as the divine Son, because the divine Son is the subject of both natures.

37:02 - Why Did God Reveal Himself in This Way, and Why Should I Care?

Matt Tully
We’re talking here and we’ve introduced a lot of somewhat technical terms. But as you’ve said before, those are helpful and those are important for understanding these things. I wonder if you could explain, briefly, and make the case for why it is worth it for Christians—normal Christians, lay Christians who go to church on Sunday, go to some secular job during the week, have kids, they’ve got soccer practice—why is it worth it for them to take the time and hard work to understand some of the language we’ve been using today and actually try to parse out these different nuances in order to be as accurate as possible?

Stephen Wellum
Great question. You have to take the time to do it because this is what’s necessary to know God properly, according to his word—to have the kind of, as we began, with the kind of redeemer. Without thinking through these issues, inevitably you’re going to end up in error. You’re going to draw false conclusions. Why is that so serious? Well, because it eventually, if it doesn’t give us the Jesus of the Bible, it doesn’t give us the kind of redeemer that we need. Why must we take our time to do this? Because faithfulness to God’s word, faithfulness to understanding who God is, and faithfulness in understanding who Jesus is requires that we do so. The very Scriptures themselves demand that we reflect upon them. They’re, in some sense, forcing us, or sometimes the language today is that they’re pressuring us. I have two texts that stand side by side. How do I put those together? How do I say that he’s the eternal Son, yet he grows in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and man? I have to introduce, and the church has found it necessary, to introduce vocabulary. We often call it language, grammar, or extra-biblical terminology that helps us put the pieces together so that we rightly understand the whole council of God. If we don’t do that, inevitably we pick and choose certain biblical teaching, which leads us to error. And that’s why it’s absolutely necessary. And the church has done this carefully, faithfully, and as with any kind of discipline, you think of even just at the sciences. If you are learning physics or you’re learning calculus, there’s a language that one has to learn. There’s a discipline that has to be studied. If we are willing to do that at the creaturely level to understand how God has made his world, how much more should we be willing to do that at knowing God himself and knowing who the Son of God is and knowing who our redeemer is. It’s absolutely necessary. And if we don’t do it, inevitably error creeps in.

Matt Tully
My sense is that some people, maybe including some Christians, might view this somewhat hard to understand mystery—what is, arguably, the core mystery of the Christian faith—as maybe a bit of a liability for Christians. They might wonder, Why would God choose to do it this way? Why would he ordain that this was how salvation would be accomplished? It feels so confusing. It feels so counterintuitive, and maybe even contradictory in some ways. Have you ever wondered that? Have you ever asked that bigger question, Why would God do it this way? And what have you found?

Stephen Wellum
Well, that question has been asked from the very beginning. The church has reflected on that, and there’s a good answer to it. Athanasius, early on in the history of the church, on the incarnation is really asking a number of things, but he’s asking, Why did the Son of God take on our humanity and become incarnate? Anselm, in the Middle Ages, his famous book Why the God-Man? is asking that very question. This isn’t going to be solely everything we could say, but at the heart of the answer is unless there is the divine Son who becomes human, we have no redeemer, and the salvation that the Bible describes would not be possible. This is what’s necessary for us to experience justification before God, reconciliation with God, and so on. Let’s flesh that out a bit more. This is why it’s so important to go back to the storyline of the Bible, the parameters of the Bible. And so we begin in a garden and we begin with Adam. Adam, I would argue, is the representative of the human race. I would say there’s a covenant here. People dispute that, but I would say there’s a covenant relationship here. He defines our humanity. In Adam, unfortunately, due to his sin, we all die.

Matt Tully
Side note: you wrote a book about this, in case anyone’s interested in it.

Stephen Wellum
That’s right.

Matt Tully
It’s called Kingdom through Covenant.

Stephen Wellum
Trying to work through these areas, and Reformed theology has done this as well. But Adam was called not only as our representative, but the entire human race is called to know God, to be in relation to God, and to obey God. Obedience isn't without love and worship. It’s our full devotion to God. God demands from us perfect obedience. He demands that we obey him, that we love him. Think of the great commandment: love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Adam doesn’t do that. We don’t do that. God doesn’t set aside that command and that demand. So, in the end, Genesis 3:15 gives us a hint that in order for sin to be reversed, in order for redemption to come, there must come a seed of the woman. There must come a human. There must come a greater Adam. That whole storyline runs right through the entire Bible. A seed. Why must he be human? Because Adam, as our covenant head and representative, did not obey. We need obedience. We must obey, and, ultimately, we need one to obey for us. Think of this in terms of the priestly theme. The priest is the one who represents us, the one who’s from us. All of that is very, very important. The Son of God must take on our humanity. He must, in that humanity, obey for us, render covenantal obedience, do for us in obeying what we could not do and did not do right. So that really picks up strongly. He must, as a human, represent us. It’s tied to the new covenant relationship. He must act as our covenant head. He must obey for us. He must keep the law. He comes under the law to obey the law. Those are crucial themes. We need a great high priest who is from us, identifies with us, and also able to represent us. That’s a crucial theme. But you say, Why deity? We have to think of what sin is. Sin is violation of God’s command and not rendering perfect obedience, but sin also is before God. Our sin before God is a debt. It’s a penalty. God cannot just say, Well, the Son of God has obeyed for you. We’ll just let your sins go. No, God is the judge. God is holy and just and righteous. We’ve sinned against him. We’ve violated his very moral character. He is the judge of the universe, the law of the universe in that sense. We’ve sinned against him, and only God can solve his own problem, in the sense of how does he forgive us apart from fulfilling and satisfying his full demand for satisfaction for sin? We call this, in the end, penal substitution. Christ must become our substitute to pay our penalty, our penalty before God, which is an absolute demand. Only God can forgive sins. Only God can meet his own demand. And so we need a divine redeemer to, in his humanity, obey for us, to keep the covenant. And we also need one to take his own demand upon himself. Even if you had a perfect representative, he couldn’t pay for the sins that we owe God. And, of course, this is what Anselm and the early church thought this through as well—Athenasius, Anselm, the Reformers, post-Reformers—we need one who is truly God, truly man. The one who can bring about a justification before God because he meets God’s own demand because he’s God, he’s God the Son, and also is able to represent us. That’s its importance. Without God the Son incarnate—without the Son of God from eternity who’s taken our humanity—we have no redeemer. And the Bible gives us an exclusive Savior. Why alone can Jesus save us? Because this is the one who alone can meet our need. And that’s why the gospel is exclusive. The gospel says there is no redeemer other than this one who, in terms of hypostatic union, one person, two natures. Part from this, what we would say seemingly abstract theology (it’s not abstract), and there is no savior that can meet our need that’s suitable for us. And that’s why salvation is found in no one other than Christ alone.

Matt Tully
Stephen, thank you so much for helping us understand perhaps a little bit more deeply this beautiful doctrine that we have as Christians. We appreciate you taking the time.

Stephen Wellum
Always a delight to speak about the glory of Christ.

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