Evangelicals often speak of the Christian faith as being about a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”  While this is often reflective of warmed over emotionalism and sentimentalism, it isn’t far from what the Gospel actually teaches when correctly understood. Indeed, we have the most personal and intimate of relationships with the God of the universe because of the fact that Jesus Christ is our mediator!

“Cur Deus Homo?” – or “Why did God become Man?” – is perhaps one of the most important questions posed in the history of the Church.  It is a question that is not only critical to correctly understanding the doctrine of God, as well as the doctrine of Christ, but it is also critical to our understanding of the Gospel itself.  In fact, it can be argued that most of the debates between the Patristic Fathers were, at the very least, indirectly related to this question. However, the direct question of “Why did God become Man” would come at end of the 11th Century when Anselm of Canterbury would write a book entitled with this very question, thus laying the groundwork for the further clarification of Christology in the Western Church.  Indeed, over five centuries later, and fifty miles to the northwest of Canterbury, the Westminster Assembly would pick up Anselm’s mantle and carry it forward as they sought to reform the Church that Anselm called home.

As we conclude our introduction to Westminster Christology – having previously examined our need for a mediator as well as the eternal generation of the Son – we are going to consider two questions in the vein of Anselm; “how the God-man?” and “why the God-man?”  

“How” the God-man?

The end of Larger Catechism 36 answers this question by saying:

Q36: Who is the Mediator of the covenant of grace?

A36: The only Mediator of the covenant of grace is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal Son of God, of one substance and equal with the Father, in the fulness of time became man, and so was and continues to be God and man, in two entire distinct natures, and one person, forever.

As we recounted in our previous installment on Christology, the person of the Son of God is eternally generated out of the subsistence – or the “person” – of the Father, thus making it fitting for Him to likewise be temporarily generated in a human nature when the “fulness of time” came.  Orthodox Christians have always recognized that Jesus was both God and man from his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary; yet “how” this is so, was a question that the early church continually wrestled with. Was Jesus “partly” God, and “partly man?” Did the natures blend together, making Jesus a sort of composite being?  Or was Jesus simply a human person who was in the most perfect of unions with the divine Son of God/Logos?

If you are new to Christology – or are unfamiliar with the debates of the Church fathers – the answer to all of those questions is decidedly no.  And, yet, to those who haven’t studied the doctrine of Christ, these might sound like reasonable ways of framing the question. It is at this point that the value is found in catechism, as the mature reflections of the Church are simplified and clarified, often into a few simple sentences.

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