THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

THE MAN 397(5)The Hebrew-Christian doctrine is that the first soul (Adam) to pass through the creative (evolutionary)process to become fully a man was disobedient, fell into sin, and became lost, in which failure the entirehuman race was involved. From that failure or sin, mankind needed to be redeemed, which, because of its'lost' state could not be achieved without a Saviour. In the specific Christian doctrine the infiniteconsciousness as the Son of God incarnated as the Second Adam in the name of Jesus Christ as Redeemer ofmankind. As defined in Christian theology the Incarnation is the assumption of human nature by the divinenature for the sake of the redemption of human nature. There is a single person or ego, not two persons oregos in one body but a single person in a single body. Thus there is no separation between 'Jesus', the man,the 'Christ', the divine being, the God-Man, and, as I understand it, Avatar in the exact sense, certainly asBaba uses the word, means the same. This Christian doctrine of Jesus Christ as God-Man was defined in thefifth century at the Council of Chalcedon.This important definition was made because of the difficulty in the early centuries of Christendom inunderstanding the human nature of Christ. That he was divine presented much less of a problem; it was theassociation between divinity and humanity that raised the most anguished questions. The great danger wasthat Jesus Christ should be thought of as the descent of a divine being into the body and soul of a humanbeing, the possession of one personality by another. There were even those who thought it possible todistinguish in the sayings of Christ between those that belonged to the divine person and those that belongedto the human person; even St John Damascene declared that it was the human nature that wept at Lazarus'stomb, and the divine nature that raised him. What was aimed at in the Chalcedon declaration was to state asunequivocally and positively as language would allow that Christ was a single person who spoke with asingle voice. In other words that he was really a man, not a possessed being, nor a phantom. They solved thedifficulty by declaring that he was wholly God and wholly man, a single person with two natures, one 'theonly begotten, the divine Logos', the other 'a rational soul and body'. The two 'natures' were not mixed, theywere 'two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference ofthe natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of