Who Is Jesus?

Perhaps the most significant theological question the church wrestled with in its early days  was "Who is Jesus?". Many of the heresies on our standard laundry list in church history involved questions about Jesus. Was He merely human, totally divine, or something combination? Were His human and divine natures mixed or separate? Was He eternally existent or created? Was He God like God the Father, or some kind of different divine essence?

We look back at those controversies and wonder why it took so long to resolve them. Put in their historical context, however, the consensus that was stated in orthodox teaching came together fairly quickly. Given that Christians were an often oppressed and periodically persecuted minority, theological controversy had to take a back seat to survival. By the time the church became tolerated, moving toward official status, teaching about Jesus came together as essentially what we believe today at Nicaea.

This doesn't mean everyone agreed immediately, and some never did agree to the Nicene formulation. Many more controversies and clarifications were still to take place. Some of the heresies of the ancient church, like Arianism, remain in the teachings of certain groups today. But for the majority of the church, the question of who Jesus is was pretty much settled.

Is this question still settled today? While we expect that those outside the church would see Jesus as just a specially gifted man or as some kind of mystical figure, even among those who call themselves Christian the teaching that Jesus is uniquely God and man is often obscured if not denied. It seems awkward to those who want to be thought of well by the world's standards to teach that Jesus is God, and even more embarrassing to teach that He is the only way to God. So new formulations are sought to ease these beliefs, and some of these look a lot like those rejected in the earliest days of the church.

So who is Jesus? An orthodox answer- that He is the unique God-Man, second person of the Trinity, come in the flesh- is a start, but not a finish. We each must ask ourselves who Jesus is in our own lives. Do we honor Him as our Lord, or treat Him like a tenet of our philosophy? Is He our Savior, or just a stained glass figure we think about on Sunday morning? There may be no more important question we ask ourselves in this life than "Who is Jesus?".