Second (see below), I've been thinking lots lately about the significance of confessing Jesus as "fully God, fully man." For a long time I haven't given much weight to such theological affirmations (scary, I know), because I could not see how they mattered or were essential to the Scriptural gospel. I wrote them off as fourth century Greekified aberrations from (or at least unnecessary formulations of) New Testament truth. But thanks to some suggestions from I don't remember where, I came to see that confessing this means that Jesus becomes determinative for our portrait of true divinity and our paradigm of true humanity.

That is, believing that Jesus was fully God means that any picture of "God" that isn't congruent with Jesus is not (faithfully) describing the One True God. (In my estimation, this would include the Calvinist God, as well as the God who can't allow sinful people into his presence, or who must punish people even though he doesn't want to.)

Moreover, believing that Jesus was fully human means that his whole life is a model of what it means to be truly and faithfully human. We should therefore pattern our entire lives after his life - including the so-called public or political parts - which I of course think means renouncing the use of violence even in defense of justice (among many other things).

In addition to confirming the convictions that were already developing in me, Carter highlighted a totally new thought for me in this regard. It is often said that Nicene Christology (i.e. Christ as fully God and fully man) is more Greek than Hebrew in that it separates thinking about Jesus from the actual Christ of history. That may in some ways have been the case, but Carter argues the opposite: by affirming that it was in the form of a fully human life that God embodied Godself, we can never separate our thinking of God from the specific life of this Jew from Nazareth. (This is important because otherwise Jesus becomes part of some "god" totally disconnected from us and our real lives.) Taken this way, Nicene Christology, at least in theory though often not in practice, totally affirms and protects the humanness and thus the Jewishness of our Messiah-Savior-Lord.

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