If Jesus isn’t God in the flesh then we are of all people most to be pitied. I recently was reminded of how important it is that we affirm and understand how significant not only the humanity of Christ is for us, but his deity. Unless we are confronted with competing beliefs sometimes it is all too easy to get lulled to sleep by the insularity of our confessional and orthodox Christian understandings (even if those entail internecine tempests at levels). I came across a learned person (he has a PhD in philosophy, and likes to write about the Trinity [which is ironic since he rejects it]). This guy claims, apparently, to be a Unitarian monotheist evangelical (which is as oxymoronic as you can get). As I am prone to do (continuously) in my TF Torrance readings (I’m rererereading his Incarnation right now) I’ve come across an apropos summary in regard to the significance of Christ’s deity and humanity.

To subordinate Christ to an elevated creature (like Arians and this guy I’m referring to do) status severely fails to understand how soteriologically oriented (salvation central) the Incarnation of God in Christ is; this was how the early Fathers like Irenaeus, Athanasius et al. understood the significance of the Incarnation, and it’s advisable (and downright required) for this ‘guy’ and the Arians et al to repent and understand this as well. To help squash the confusion (for some) here, Torrance writes this:

If Christ is not God, if God is not fully and wholly present in Christ, and identical with Christ, then God does not reconcile the world to himself, and the work of Jesus is not eternally valid, but is only temporal and contingent and relative. If Christ is not God, then the love of Christ is not identical with God’s love, and so we do not know that God is love. We may know that Christ is love, but if he is not really God in the complete sense, then all we have in Jesus Christ is a revelation of man, of humanity at its noblest reaching up into the clouds. If Christ is not God, then we do not have a descent of God to man. Thus as the obverse of the fact that Christ’s real humanity means that God has actually come to us and dwells among us, Christ’s deity means that God himself has come to save us. The dogma of the humanity of Christ asserts the actuality in our world of the coming of God, and the dogma of the deity of Christ asserts the divine content of our knowledge and salvation, the objective reality of our relation to God himself. The dogma of the deity of Christ means that our salvation in Christ is anchored in eternity: that it is more sure than the heavens.[1]

God is holy, we are not. God is One (de Deo uno) in multiplicity (de Deo trino). In order  for humans—who are not holy—to have  fellowship (koinonia) with God it requires that we have the same holiness that God has (for he cannot look upon or abide with unholiness in his inner-life). If creatures are to have a relationship with the Holy God, and no creatures share a univocal status of holiness of God’s kind, and God wants to have a relationship with humans, then it requires God (not a creature even of elevated status) to enter into our status so that we might be elevated (by grace not nature) to his status; so that an unholy people might have an eternal and abiding relationship with the Holy God. This is who and what we get in the Logos ensarkos, the ‘Word enfleshed’, in the Incarnation of God. He has reached down to us, God has humbled himself that he might exalt humanity; and this nexus finds intercise precisely in the humanity of God in Jesus Christ.

It is actually the spirit of anti-Christ, according to I John, to deny that Jesus is God’s Son come in the flesh; that Jesus is the Logos of God who is God, according to John the theologian (John 1.1). Repentance is still possible; there’s still yet time for some.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 188.