Does Christ have two natures?

Answer

The Bible does not explicitly address whether Jesus Christ has two natures or only one. However, understanding that Christ has two natures is the most biblically and theologically consistent position, as explained below. The issue arose in church history as theologians grappled with and codified the information provided in the New Testament about Jesus.

According to the New Testament, Jesus is truly a man, born into the human race, yet He is also fully God. John 1:1 states that the Word is God, and in verse 14, we see that the Word John speaks of is Jesus, who took on human flesh and “tabernacled” among us. Both Matthew and Luke recount Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary and provide His human lineage. While challenging to understand and explain, this is the teaching of the New Testament: Jesus is God who incarnated as a man.

Some early groups attempted to explain Christ’s nature by suggesting that the divine “Christ spirit” descended upon the man Jesus. Early Gnostics proposed that the Christ spirit came upon Jesus at His baptism and departed at the crucifixion. While this might imply two natures for Jesus, a closer look reveals otherwise. In this scenario, the man known as Jesus would essentially be two persons sharing a body, each with only one nature: Jesus the human and Christ the divine. Here, God would appear to interact with humanity but not truly become human.

Another approach to interpreting the New Testament data is to argue that Jesus Christ was a single person with only one nature. However, the challenge with this view is that His nature would be a blend of divine and human, resulting in Him being more than fully human due to the mixture of divine and human natures.

Jesus could not be fully God because the human nature has mixed with the divine nature, making Him something less than divine. We see parallels to this idea in Greek and Roman mythology where a god has a child with a human woman. The offspring is more than human and less than a god—a superhuman or a demigod. Hercules was one such person, the son of Zeus and the woman Alcmene.

An illustration may be helpful. Like most illustrations, it is far from perfect and cannot be pressed on every point. Suppose a king wants to identify with the poorest in his country. One way he could do it would be to disguise himself as a beggar and move among them. However, in this situation, he is only pretending to be a beggar; he can go back to the castle at night, and he still has all the resources of a king. On the other hand, the king could renounce his throne and give away everything and become a beggar. But in this case, he would cease to be a king. A third option is that he could, for a time, give up the use of all his resources for a set period of time—let’s say 3 years—knowing that at the end of that time he would once again resume the throne. In this last situation, he is both truly a beggar and truly a king. Jesus became man, but He remained God.

The only way to adequately explain the biblical data is to say that Jesus is one Person with two natures—a human nature and a divine nature. He is both God and Man. His two natures are inseparably united (not mixed) in what theologians term the “hypostatic union.” The New Testament affirms that Jesus Christ, who walked the earth, died on a cross, and rose again, was fully a member of the human race with a fully functioning human nature (without sin). At the same time, Jesus was fully God. He willingly humbled Himself and gave up His glory and the right to use His divine attributes apart from the direction of God the Father, but He never ceased to be God. Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God—He has the nature of both. He is a man, but He is more;

He is also God. He is divine, yet He has eternally united Himself with a human nature. A concise term to convey this concept is to call Jesus the God-Man. He is the Human who is also divine, and He is the divine who took on human form.