How Can Jesus Be Both God and Man?

The Church confesses that in Jesus Christ there is one person with two natures—fully divine and fully human—united without being mixed, confused, divided, or separated. He is not half-God and half-man, nor a man who was especially close to God, nor God merely disguised as a man. He is one person who is, at once, everything God is and everything a true human being is (apart from sin).

This is not a contradiction, because a contradiction would require saying Jesus is both God and not-God in the same respect. The confession does not do that. It says he is God according to his divine nature and man according to his human nature—two complete natures belonging to one person. We meet something faintly similar nowhere else, so it stretches the imagination; but “hard to picture” is not the same as “impossible” or “illogical.”

Scripture simply holds the two together without embarrassment. The Word who “was God” also “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). The one who was “in the form of God” took “the form of a servant” and died (Philippians 2:6-8). In him “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9), and yet he grew tired, wept, hungered, and bled. He had to be “made like his brothers in every respect” to be our high priest (Hebrews 2:17).

And the reason for all this is salvation, not speculation. Our rescue required both natures: only God could conquer sin and death, and only a real man could stand in humanity’s place and die. So the two natures are not an abstract riddle to be solved. They are the shape love had to take to save us—God reaching all the way down into our flesh, to lift us all the way up to himself.