Making sense of God incarnate: a neglected biblical resource

Abstract

The doctrine of the Incarnation raises important questions about the person of Christ and the nature of God. The John 5 discourse where Jesus speaks about what it means to be ‘the Son’ is a neglected source of insight into these questions. The article presents a case for reading this discourse as a statement about the eternal dependence of the Son. This interpretation is backed up by reference to the Synoptic Gospels, the writings of Paul and the work of Augustine. The article does not advocate an Arian ontological subordinationism but a proposal concerning the personhood of the Son. The conclusion sets out some of the gains of this approach.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

So we are told in the Gospel of John. John’s statement about this ‘Word made flesh’ raises many questions, two of which will concern us here. In the first place, if the Divine Word has become a human being, how do deity and humanity come together in one person? How do limitless knowledge, power and wisdom dwell harmoniously with the limitations of a human life? This is the arena of inquiry known to theologians as Christology. Second, if the one God is now revealed as having a ‘Word’ who is also God, and this ‘Word’ is capable of assuming human flesh, what are the implications for our understanding of the one God? Is there in fact more than one God? Surely not, but then we have to find a way of conceptualizing what John is telling us about God. We are approaching what became known as the doctrine of the Trinity.

The theologians of the early Church wrestled with and did their best to resolve these questions, their conclusions enshrined, with respect to the Trinity, in the Nicene Creed of the fourth century, and, with respect to Christology, in the Chalcedonian definition of the fifth century. But the questions didn’t go away. Reflection and further refinement continued. In the last two hundred years the questions have surfaced again, initially the Christological ones and more recently the Trinitarian ones. ¹ The quest for scriptural insight into these questions has focused mainly on the hymn in Philippians 2 where Paul speaks of Christ ‘emptying’ himself in the Incarnation. What is this ‘emptying’ and how, if at all, does it throw light on Christology and the Trinity? A vast amount of theological literature is dedicated to these and related questions.

My contention in this article ² is that the Christological and Trinitarian questions are greatly illuminated if we take account of a scriptural passage that has often been ignored: the discourse in John 5 where Jesus speaks ³ at length about what it means to be ‘the Son’:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing … just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomsoever he wishes. The Father judges no one but has given all judgement to the Son, so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father. Anyone who does not honour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him …

… just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; and he has given him authority to execute judgement, because he is the Son of Man … I can do nothing on my own … (John 5.19–30)

This is the first occasion when the question of Jesus’ identity becomes a public issue with the Jewish leadership. Up to this point his interactions have been mainly with sympathetic individuals: the first disciples, the wedding party in Cana, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and the official whose son he heals. (The exception is the cleansing of the Temple, but that incident did not lead to a full-scale confrontation about Jesus’ identity.) Now, however, at the beginning of Chapter 5, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath, an act that brings him into open conflict with the Jewish leadership; and at this point he chooses to raise the issue of his identity. When they challenge him about healing on the Sabbath, he makes the (deliberately?) provocative statement:

My Father is still working, and I also am working. (John 5.17)

John goes on:

For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God. (John 5.18)

The scene is set. Jesus has claimed that God is his Father, and this is correctly interpreted by the Jews as a claim to equality with God. With that, Jesus proceeds to talk about the nature of his relationship with God. He makes no attempt to mitigate the claim to equality with God, but he explains that, within that equality, his relationship to the Father is one of unqualified dependence. It is a striking juxtaposition of apparently contradictory ideas.

Jesus’ emphatic assertion of his dependence on the Father is not an isolated case; rather, it is the first instance of a theme to which he will revert throughout the rest of the Gospel. ⁴

How are we to understand what Jesus says?

The passage is bookended with equivalent statements in the third person and the first person: ‘the Son can do nothing on his own’ and ‘I can do nothing on my own’. The first is prefaced by Jesus’ regular assertion of special emphasis: ‘Very truly, I tell you …’ His dependent status is to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

What is Jesus talking about? Is he describing the conditions imposed on him by the Incarnation? Or is he saying something about his eternal relationship with the Father?

The title ‘the Son’ features very prominently in this passage. It is important to make clear that the titles ‘the Son’ and ‘the Son of God’ are not always exactly equivalent. ‘The Son of God’ is a Messianic title that does not necessarily imply deity. When the Psalmist tells us that the Lord said to him ‘You are my son’ he is not claiming divine status for himself. ⁵ Likewise, when Nathanael acclaims Jesus ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ (John 1.49), John is not suggesting that Nathanael has miraculously intuited the doctrine of the Trinity. Nathanael is using accepted terminology to designate Jesus as Israel’s long-expected anointed king, her messiah.

Thus it is reasonable to assume that the phrase ‘the Son’ in this absolute form carries more theological weight than ‘the Son of God’. ‘The Son’ occurs some 16 times in this Gospel, half of which are in this passage. The implication is that this passage is intended to be definitive for the meaning of the title. The characteristic formula ‘Very truly, I tell you …’ underlines this. The exclusive use of the third person (‘the Son’ rather than ‘I’) in verses 19–29 lifts the discourse out of the immediate context of the Incarnation ⁶ and again implies the intention to deliver a definitive statement: this kind of dependent relationship to the Father is what it means to be the Son.

Is there any control – any independent evidence – that this is the correct reading of the discourse in John 5? Outside the Johannine literature, ‘the Son’ is not widely used of Jesus. But there are two instances of its use in the Synoptic Gospels. Both occurrences feature in Matthew. The first is this:

All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Matthew 11.27; cf. Luke 10.22)

This is a statement of radical dependence. The Son exercises initiative and authority at the behest of the Father, but this is not reversible. Jesus is not saying that he has no room to manoeuvre. Having received ‘all things’ from the Father, he has some freedom of choice in his revelation of the Father. But he leaves no doubt about who is in charge. The saying is fully in line with the portrait of Jesus in John’s Gospel.

The other Synoptic occurrence of Jesus speaking of himself as ‘the Son’ comes in the discourse in Matthew 24 where he is talking about ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’:

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Matthew 24.34–36; cf. Mark 13.32)

Nowhere else in the Synoptic Gospels do we find Jesus confessing ignorance in such stark terms. For Jesus explicitly to tie his ignorance to his status as the Son is strong confirmation of the dependence of the Son; again, this is fully in line with John’s portrait of Jesus.

Paul refers to Jesus as ‘the Son’ only once in the entire corpus of his writings – in his exposition of the meaning of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:

The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’ But when it says, ‘All things are put in subjection’, it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15.26–28)

When the mission of the Son is complete and all the enemies of God have finally been defeated, then even the Son will be subjected to God. This is a remarkable statement. Twice already in the same letter Paul has strongly suggested some kind of subordination of Jesus to the Father. On both occasions Paul refers to ‘Christ’. On this occasion, however, he refers to ‘the Son’ and makes the reference emphatic by adding ‘himself’.

Many commentators have struggled to reconcile Paul’s use of ‘the Son’ here with the ontological unity and equality of the first two persons of the Trinity. Some, however, have been willing to take the text at its face value and allow it to speak of the unchanging relationship of the Son to the Father. For instance, C. K. Barrett comments on 1 Corinthians 15.28:

Obedience was and would through eternity continue to be part of the divine virtue of the Son. ⁷

To summarize: the only occurrences of ‘the Son’ in the Synoptics and Paul deal with the submission of the Son to the Father. That seems to me strong confirmation that my interpretation of John’s use of ‘the Son’ is correct. The relation of the Son to the Father in the Godhead is, from all eternity, one of submission and dependence.

Most of the commentaries on John which I have been able to access do not even discuss the possibility that in John 5 Jesus is talking about the essential, eternal nature of his relationship to the Father. ⁸ They assume that he is talking about the Incarnation. So is the understanding of John 5 I am suggesting a new idea – an interpretation hitherto never considered – and therefore likely to be a mistake?

Definitely not. Let’s consider Augustine. In On The Trinity ⁹ he alludes to John 5.19 as illustrating his doctrine that the Son is ‘from the Father’.

In his homilies, Augustine expounds the text from John 5 to show that being ‘from the Father’ is to be understood in terms of the Nicene declaration that the Son is ‘eternally begotten of the Father’.

Augustine has a carefully considered way of approaching texts that deal with the relationship of the Father and the Son. In On The Trinity, ¹⁰ he puts them into three categories:

There are statements about the Father and Son that indicate their unity and equality.

There are statements about the Son that relate to his Incarnation only and mark him out as less than the Father.

There are statements about the Son that ‘mark him neither as less nor as equal, but only intimate that he is from the Father’.

Augustine puts John 5.19 firmly in the third category and summarily dismisses the suggestion that this verse relates to the ‘creaturely form he took’.

In homily number 20 ¹¹ on John’s Gospel, Augustine asks what it means to say that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. If the Son is a son, he says, then he must have been born: ‘[the Father] uttered the Word from himself’, ‘equal begot equal, eternal begot co-eternal’.

The question is: how does eternal beget eternal?

Augustine proposes the analogy of a flame and the light that flows from the flame. From the moment the flame is lit, it begins to emit light. The flame does not precede the light: the two are simultaneous. So too with the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father: ‘Give me a flame without light, and I will give you God the Father without the Son.’

Then he asks what Jesus means when he says that the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. What does this ‘seeing’ consist of? His answer is this:

[S]eeing for the Son is the same as being born of the Father.

In homily number 21, ¹² he elaborates. He paints the picture of a son observing his father in his workshop, the father making something so that the son can then copy what his father has made. It is a strictly sequential and separable operation: the father makes, the son observes, the son copies.

But, says Augustine, this won’t do for what we’re talking about. If the Father shows the Son what he himself is doing, does that mean that during this time the Son is doing nothing? No. We know, says Augustine, from the opening verses of John’s Gospel, that all things were made by the Father through the Son, and ‘without him nothing was made that has been made’. Did the Father make a world and show it to the Son so that he too could have a go at making a world? Of course not. If that were true, says Augustine:

Give us the world, then, which the Son has also made.

Augustine’s point is that the works of the Father and the Son are not separable and sequential because the Trinity is inseparable. All the works of the Trinity involve all the persons of the Trinity at the same time.

Finally, Augustine wraps up his exposition:

[W]here does the Father show the Son what he is making, if not in the Son himself through whom he does the making?

And again:

[I]t is not outside of himself that [the Father] shows him something to see, but it is in his very self that he shows him what he is doing.

Augustine brings together the creedal statements about the Son being ‘eternally begotten’ of the Father and Jesus’ own statement that the Son can do nothing of his own accord but only what he sees the Father doing. He is saying that these two ways of stating the facts describe the same reality. Being ‘eternally begotten’ means being eternally dependent. When parents beget a child, that is an event in time that then belongs to the past. The ‘begetting’ of the Son by the Father is not a temporal event that then belongs to the past. It is the eternally present reality.

Augustine takes Jesus’ discourse in John 5 with full seriousness as a window into the inner reality of the relationship between the Father and the Son. He thinks it through all the way to integrating John 5.19 with the creedal affirmation of the eternal generation of the Son. But he stops short there. In particular, he is unable to integrate Jesus’ statement ‘the Father is greater than I’ (John 14.28), ¹³ or what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 about the ultimate subjection of the Son to the Father, with his understanding that the Son is ‘from the Father’. ¹⁴ He has to look for ways round the plain meaning of the texts. Sadly, despite a full and nuanced understanding of the John 5 discourse as an account of the eternal Father–Son relationship, Augustine was unable to put this at the centre of his Trinitarian understanding. Had he done so, the history of Trinitarian thinking might have been different.

I began by raising the twin questions of Christology and Trinity as arising from the Johannine claim that ‘the Word became flesh’. How does the interpretation of the John 5 discourse set out in this article contribute to making sense of the Incarnation?

In the first place, the Johannine doctrine of the dependence of the Son helps to make sense of the Christological question by explaining how the infinite God can be united with finite humanity. The Son knows what he knows and does what he does in dependence on the Father, not merely in time but from all eternity. He receives what he needs in and out of that dependence. That dependence enables him to be united with humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth without overwhelming or nullifying Jesus’ human nature. Divine omniscience and omnipotence are so restrained in the eternal person of the Son as to be compatible with human limitations.

Second, the Johannine doctrine of the dependence of the Son also throws light on the doctrine of the Trinity. The dependence of the Son fills out the doctrine of three persons in one God by giving content to the differentiation between the persons. The person of the Son is differentiated from the person of the Father by the relationship of dependence one upon the other. Hence it is necessarily the Son who takes on human flesh, not the Father. This is fully in line with the Nicene Creed, amplifying the statement that the Son is God from God, light from light, eternally begotten of the Father.

By this time some readers will be thinking that I am advocating a kind of subordinationism. This was the heresy of Arius, condemned at the Council of Nicaea in ad 325. But Arius was proposing ontological subordination of the Son, making him a creature, albeit a superior kind of creature. My proposal relates entirely to the personhood of the Son. As I have tried to demonstrate, I believe that understanding the Son as eternally dependent on the Father illuminates what it means for the Son to be the Son – in fact, it gives real content to that assertion. To the charge of subordinationism I would reply that my proposal achieves several things that the traditional understanding of the relation of the Son to the Father does not: it gets in all the facts of Scripture (the Synoptics, John and Paul in particular); it does so with appropriate simplicity and elegance; and it makes much better sense of the creedal doctrines of Christ and the Trinity. ¹⁵

A final question: if we affirm that the Son is dependent on the Father, are we diminishing him, even dishonouring him? Do we think less of him because we take at face value his own testimony to himself? Let the last word go to C. S. Lewis. Commenting on John 5.19, Lewis said that Jesus’ words served ‘greatly to enrich my conception of the Divine sonship’. ¹⁶