Jesus, in the incarnation, took a human nature upon the deity, but without mingling or mixing the two. It brought no change upon who He is as God. The human nature did not change the God nature, and the God nature did not change the human nature. Yet, at the same time, these two natures are not at all opposed to one another. He possesses two distinct natures in one person; thus, He is truly the God-man. 

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

During Christmas, I often find myself thinking about the miraculous nature of Jesus as the God-man. Early on in the Church, there were a number of theories that popped up regarding the nature of Jesus’s humanity and Godhood. Unfortunately, many of these theories were quite heretical. For example, when it came to a proper understanding of how the two natures of Jesus were united in the incarnation, two heresies were Nestorianism and Eutychianism.

Nestorianism was the belief that Jesus, when He was born, was just an ordinary, average, regular human being with no deity. It was not until His baptism that He became both God and man, when the Holy Spirit indwelled Him, and He became two different people sharing one body—Jesus, the son of Mary, and Jesus, the Son of God. If this were the case, though, then the atonement would be impossible. Jesus would be like every other Christian who is indwelled by the Holy Spirit, hardly capable of purchasing salvation for sinners.

Eutychianism denied that Jesus was two different people sharing one body and wanted to insist upon the unity of His personhood. The problem here, however, was that Eutychianism taught that the humanity of Jesus was swallowed up by the divinity of Jesus, in the same way “a drop of wine disappears into the sea.” But, if this were the case, Jesus could not be our high priest, tempted in every way we are, yet without sin. He would just be a man who became a god. If this were the case, it would also create an extreme problem wherein every Christian would need to strive to lose their humanity in order to become a god.

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