JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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humanity and is made on the basis of 'like is known by like'; it is a confession
of faith which recognizes God's humanity in the dehumanized Christ on the
cross. At the same time the confession says Ecce deus! Behold God on the
cross! . . .
The nucleus of everything that Christian theology says about 'God' is to be
found in this Christ event. The Christ event on the cross is a God event. And
conversely,the God event takes place on the cross of the risen Christ."13
Theology, if it is to be biblical, can only be hammered out in the light of the cross. Any
kind of Christology that does not find its center in the cross is heretical.
Paul, the apostle, summed up his preaching ministry this way:
"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior
wisdom [like the Greeks] as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ
and Him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:1-2).
To separate the person of Jesus from His death is to tear apart the very fabric of Holy
Scripture which centers its message in this momentous Event. As Paul Althaus stated,
". . . the full and undiminished deity of God is to be found in the complete
helplessness, in the final agony of the crucified Jesus, at the point where no
'divine nature' is to be seen."14
This is the paradox of the Christian God who is both God and Man—the God-Man.
This is a very serious issue since if the liberals were to be successful the very essence of
the Christian Message would be at stake.
If the incarnate Christ (1 Jn 4:1-15) can be uprooted from His redemptive purpose in
history then He cannot be the Mediator between God and man (1 Ti 2:15) but is reduced
to a mere man whose well intentioned mission was aborted. Thus, as Scottish theologian
Thomas F. Torrance put it, "the whole Gospel of Jesus' saving mediation between God and
man collapses."15
Christ's sacrifice on the cross was of infinite value only because Jesus Christ is God.
Only as God would He have eternal attributes. A mere man, no matter how good, would not be
good enough to pay the price man owed God for his sin. The psalmist put it:
"No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him—the
Ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough—that he should live
on forever and not see decay" (Ps. 49:7-9).