JOHN 1: 14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

It is called the “God or a bad man” argument.

Legendary Claims

First, let’s look at two different arguments to the effect that he never claimed to be God incarnate.

The first argument insist that Jesus’ divine claims are merely legendary, the stuff of pious fiction and not of historical fact. Jesus himself never claimed deity. Rather, this claim was foisted on him by overly zealous disciples who wanted to give him a posthumous metaphysical compliment.

It is true that some merely human religious teachers—who claimed to be nothing more—have been deified or otherwise valorized over time by their rambunctious followers. The Buddha is the prime example, since texts attributing to him any supernatural elements come hundreds of years after his death. This process takes many decades or even centuries to occur.

The primary documents concerning Jesus were written only a few decades after his death by eyewitnesses or those who consulted eyewitnesses and other reliable sources.

Jesua as a Guru a Great Teacher

Others deny Jesus’ claims of incarnation by reinterpreting them according to a nondualistic or pantheistic worldview. To them, Jesus was a guru, adept or avatar, but not uniquely God incarnate, since the concept of incarnation requires a distinction between God and the creation not allowed by pantheism.

They say that Jesus was a man who awoke to the divinity that was within him and in everyone. As such, he was part of a long line of enlightened beings who transcended their ignorance and affirmed their oneness with a universal and impersonal force, power or consciousness.

They teach, Once we see Jesus as a teacher of enlightenment, faith changes its focus. You don’t need to have faith in the Messiah or his mission. Instead, you have faith in the vision of higher consciousness.  By “higher consciousness,” means an awareness of the universal deity.

Pantheistic gurus typically use an esoteric method of teaching that shrouds the meaning of their beliefs in mysteries, paradoxes and riddles. Their words have veiled meanings, and they only reveal the inner secrets to a small group of the initiated, usually through a nonrational mystical experience.

Jesus, on the contrary, taught openly and clearly to all who “had ears to ear.” At his trial, Jesus declared: “I have spoken openly to the world,” Jesus replied. “I always taught in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why question me? Ask those who heard me. Surely they know what I said.” (John 18:20–21)

While the God of Eastern mysticism is beyond thought and language, the God of the Bible speaks and makes himself known through actions and language.

Jesus was a rigorously monotheistic Jew. His teaching is steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, which brook no other God than the one personal, moral and transcendent Creator of heaven and earth. “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

“Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9), emphasizing God’s personality and relationality.

Jesus as a Deceiver

They say, maybe Jesus knew full well he was not “one with the Father” (John 10:30) but claimed to be such nevertheless.

What possible motive would Jesus have to make such claims that he knew were false?

To claim oneself divine in ancient Israel was no public relations formula for a successful career. No religious culture in the history of the world has been more militantly monotheistic than the Jews.

The Jewish legal penalty for blasphemy was stoning, and we find several instances in the Gospels where people try to stone or otherwise kill Jesus even before his crucifixion (see John 8:58–59).

Jesus emphasized truth-telling, honesty and humility in his teachings (see Matthew 5–7). These emphases are absolutely at odds with any theological prevarication about being Yahweh when one is not.

Jesus as Deceived or Mad

They say that Jesus was sincere in his theological beliefs about himself, but sincerely wrong. Those who claim this option believe either that (1) he was merely mistaken but otherwise sane or (2) that he was totally insane. In both cases, Jesus would have been a psychological failure.

Perhaps Jesus was a brilliant teacher and reasoned well with his adversaries’, he just happened to be colossally wrong about his own identity, thinking he was divine when he was merely human.

This magnitude of deception would certainly spill over into many areas, introducing erroneous beliefs and practices across the board.

If Jesus were wrong about this all-encompassing fact of his own identity, his entire worldview would be skewed, thus revealing that he was radically out of touch with reality.

John Montgomery, “What greater retreat from reality is there than a belief in one’s divinity, if one is not in fact God? But Jesus’ teaching on love, mercy, justice and character are not radically out of touch with reality. He has been the most influential moral teacher in the history of the world.

Yale historian Kenneth Scott LaTourette said, “no other life ever lived on this planet has been so potent in the affairs of men.”

Jesus backed this up with a life of radical compassion and courage through multiple miracles that are well-attested. Even non-Christians resonate with many of his claims, as did Gandhi. The idea that Jesus was wrong about his deity but right about most all other things—even brilliant on moral matters—is extremely unlikely.

Jesus’ moral teaching is all that counts; the question of his divinity is irrelevant.  Some argue  that Jesus could be both a good moral teacher and quite wrong about his identity.

Certainly one can be a mere human and give good moral teachings. What is highly questionable, is that one could be a mere human, think oneself divine and still give good moral teaching at the level of Jesus’ teaching, and also exhibit all the other strengths of character we find in Jesus: compassion, intelligence, courage, wisdom and so on.

Lewis said, Jesus “was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects, Hatred, Terror, or Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.”

He wisely and cannily saw into people’s hearts, behind their words [see Matthew 12:25; Mark 2:8]. He solved insolvable problems [see Matthew 22:15–33].

In his own defense Jesus marshals a powerful reductio argument. Further, those who were demon-possessed in the Gospels were invariably sick, self-injuring or out of their minds in some other way. Jesus was nothing like that.

The Gospel writers do not shy away from reporting that some thought Jesus was insane. They had such confidence in his overall character that they were willing to record these contrary opinions without fear of tarnishing Jesus’ reputation.

Historian Will Durant makes this point about the Gospel writers’ honesty.

Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed, the competition of the apostles for high places in the kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them.

A Rational Coherence of the Incarnation

Even if we grant the argument for the deity of Jesus, some still complain that the very notion of Jesus as divine and human is logically incoherent.  John Hick denies the incarnation, he rightly says that “the orthodox task is to spell out in an intelligible way the idea of someone having both a fully divine nature, i.e. having all the essential divine attributes, and at the same time a fully human nature, i.e. having all the essential human attributes.”

The specific metaphysics of Jesus as God incarnate was worked out over several centuries through the creeds and councils of the church in the statement of the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. All three branches of Christendom (Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant) affirm this creed. It is called the hypostatic union, which essentially means that Jesus is one person with two natures.

The Incarnation as  a Paradox

Some have argued that the properties of deity and the properties of humanity could never be conjoined in one person.

Some Christian thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, have embraced the incarnation as an irresolvable paradox. He called it “the absolute paradox” and a necessary offense to human reason.

We hold to it by passionate faith, not because it is reasonable.

If it were reasonable, there would be no occasion for faith, given Kierkegaard’s fideism.

if we allow ourselves to affirm what appears to be a logical contradiction (Jesus is both finite and infinite), labeling it a paradox is too kind. A paradox appears contradictory, but need not be. When Jesus said that “many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first” (Matthew 19:30), he was not affirming a contradiction such that a person possesses incompatible properties.

Gordon Clark said, a paradox is “a charley horse between the ears.” It needs to be worked out, not lived with.

If we affirm a hopeless paradox (which amounts to a contradiction) at the very heart of Christian faith, we lose more than a coherent account of the incarnation; we also lose noncontradiction as a necessary and negative test for evaluating other worldviews

The paradox of the God-man is better taken as a hopeful paradox, or a puzzle, a unique and arresting claim about a being whose identity has no clear analogy with anything else in existence.

This sense of Christ’s uniqueness comports with the biblical affirmation that the incarnation is singular, unrepeatable, unparalleled and awe-inspiring.  (Luke 2:52).

God is transcendent in his omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, but God is also personal: a moral agent who knows, intends, feels and acts. Therefore, it is not unseemly for a personal God, who made humans in his own image, to take on that very image for his once-for-all mission for his creation.

The Metaphysics of the Incarnation

The incarnation does not mean that Jesus possesses only divine attributes and only human attributes. These claims are contradictory and are, therefore, necessarily false. For example, an object cannot be only a circle  and only square. An object could be a circle and have a square within it. As Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest write:

As a circle encompasses a square the two figures together form a more complex geometrical design. The whole complex pattern has two natures with both the attributes of the circle and the attributes of the square. We need not contradict ourselves in reference to the complex design if we affirm that some of the attributes of the complex design are those of a circle and some those of a square. The holistic unity of the design is not thereby divided. The two “natures” need not be confused. The circle remains a circle; the square within it remains a square. The one “circle-square design” has two distinct natures.

The relationship between Jesus’ deity and humanity is better understood as a subcontrary relationship of assertions, not a contradictory relationship of assertions (which would be necessarily false).

Humans have both a material and an immaterial nature, but they are not thereby two persons. My brain weighs a certain amount, but my mind weighs nothing. This is not a contradiction, because I am speaking of two different aspects of my personhood.

Both my body and mind are finite. There is no union of the divine and the human in my person, as in the case of the incarnation, since I am entirely human.

We now need to consider how Jesus could retain his divine attributes while becoming a truly human being. For the incarnation to be “God with us,” Jesus could not have relinquished his divine attributes, as some have claimed

Christ temporarily suspended the employment of some of his divine attributes, but without ontologically losing these attributes. For example, a  famous basketball player might play a pickup basketball game with some junior high children. In order to have fun with lesser players, he would voluntarily suspend the use of some of his exemplary basketball skills. He would continue to possess those powers, but they would be held in check in order to play basketball with the children.