The maddening thing about computer software is that they’re always coming out with new versions. No sooner have you gotten the latest version of a program, than they have come out with another.

e.g. Windows 3.1; 95; 98; ME; XP – no wonder Bill Gates is rich
e.g. 1984 - Mac System 1; 2001 – Mac OS-X

The latest version of software always promises

to have exciting new features
to fix those aggravating bugs that were in previous versions
to be faster, powerful, and more user-friendly

Q. Why hasn’t the same thing happened with the Christmas story? Here we are, after 2000 years, and we’re still on Version 1 – the version that was given to us in the NT. Surely, if we want more people to become Christians – to buy into Christianity – can’t we find a way to “spruce up” the story, or to take out the “bugs”, because there are a lot of “bugs” and troublesome issues in Version 1 of the Christmas story. And I want to focus in on the biggest one today.

The Christmas story that we have in the NT starts with a particular orientation: a historical orientation. It’s almost obsessively historical in that way!

Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth begins with a genealogy – a family tree made up of real people who really lived. (You can read about many of them in the OT)…
- Matt. 1:1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ
- a list of Jesus’ human ancestors.
- Can’t get much more historical than that!
Luke’s story begins with an historical byline…
- Luke 2:1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)
- Luke carefully establishes the historical setting for the events he is about to recount, so that we can know the time and the place.
- And these details have been corroborated by extra-biblical sources – we know these rulers really existed; we know the length of their reigns, etc.

The thing about the Christmas story is that it DOESN’T begin “Once upon a time…” Quite the opposite. But then, what happens next is weird! Into that nice tight historical matrix drops an unexpected bomb. Or rather, several bombs…

you have supernatural visitors start showing up - angels starting to appear to people
other folks start having strange prophetic dreams which turn out to be true
later on, you have unexplained astronomical phenomena suddenly appearing in the heavens
to top it all off, an unmarried teenaged girl who has never had sex suddenly gets pregnant.

What are we to make of all this? Reading the Christmas story is like being in a library, and walking from the non-fiction section into the fiction section. You go from “ho-hum” to “Holy Cow!” in about two pages. There’s something disconcerting about all this.

You have a blurring of distinctions between what is plainly “history” and what we can only describe as “mystery”. And Version 1 of the Christmas story places both of these realities side by side, and asks us to believe them and hold them in tension.

And that is something we’re not very good at. As human beings, we do not like to live with a tension between history and mystery. We don’t like it when the lines between the two realms get blurry. We tend to think that something has got to be either history or mystery, but it can’t be both – it can’t straddle that divide.

And so we try to reconcile this tension. We tend to push things into either one category or the other. We ask: Is it history? or Is it mystery? Because it can’t be both – it has to be one or the other.

We see this in the way that people living in our post-modern world think of religion. Religion belongs to the realm of mystery. It’s something supernatural that they tend to keep in that special compartment of their life. It’s not something that they bring into the other compartment – the history compartment, where things have to be logical, where 2 + 2 = 4, where some things are true and others are not.

People nowadays get nervous when you suggest that the mystery compartment might have a lot to do with the history compartment. They don’t like it when one gets mixed up with the other.

Another example is the way we deal with seemingly unexplainable things that happen in our everyday world. Because we can’t explain them, we sort of intuitively feel that they belong to the realm of the supernatural; the realm of mystery. But then that makes us nervous, because mystery isn’t supposed to get mixed up with history!

For a long time, many people believed that the Bermuda Triangle was a unsolved mystery – real ships were being lost at sea, airplanes were disappearing without a trace in a particular section of the Atlantic
- something supernatural must be going on
- but others did a study of it and found that that section of ocean contained no more disappearances than any other
- i.e. there was a rational explanation – it wasn’t mystery; it was just history that had been exaggerated

What does all this have to do with Christmas? Over the first four centuries of church history, people looked at the Christmas story, and specifically they looked at the person of Jesus Christ, who is the center of the Christmas story, and they said: “Look, we’ve got a problem here. If we expect people to believe this story; if we expect people to become followers of Jesus Christ, then we’ve got to clear up this question about who exactly Jesus is…

Is he a man? Or is he God?
Is he human? Or is he divine?
Is he natural? Or is he supernatural?
Does he belong to the realm of history? Or mystery?

In other words, people tried to edge Jesus into either one category or the other, because they felt that he couldn’t possibly belong to both. That was NOT an acceptable alternative – not something that prospective believers would find very easy to swallow.

So the first four centuries of the history of Christianity were taken up with a journey - a Long and Winding Road – as people tried to figure out and explain who Jesus really was. You might say that…

Christman Version 1 was up for review.
it was in the shop for debugging

One of the earliest explanations was one that has probably lasted the longest, and is quite possibly the most popular view today. It is a view called…

Ebionism – Jesus was just a man

“ebion” comes from the Hebrew word for “poor”
these were poor, humble Jews, who in the years following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, became followers of Christ
in spite of the fact that they had become Christians, they clung tenaciously to their Jewishness
- they held tightly to the concept of the oneness of God
- had a strong view of the Mosaic Law;
these people were ready to acknowledge that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, but their Jewishness prevented them from even contemplating the idea that Jesus might be God
they said that Jesus himself never claimed to be God, and they rejected the claims of anyone to the contrary, including and especially, the Apostle Paul, who in his writings said that Jesus was God.
Jesus Christ, in their view, was just a man; a godly, gifted, holy man – but just a man
And as a man, he was an example to us: an example of obedience and faithfulness to God – but he was certainly NOT God.
There are a huge number of people who believe this today: that Jesus was just a man – a good man, a great man even – but just a man. They place Jesus solidly in the category of history. There was nothing mysterious about him.

But then there were other people back in the early days of the church who, when they looked at the NT records of his life, came to the conclusion that Jesus couldn’t possibly have been JUST a man. In fact, given their understanding of the way the universe worked, they suspected that Jesus wasn’t even a man AT ALL! These were the Docetists (notice I’m not following the order I’ve given you on the study notes!)

Docetism

this was a very early attempt to explain who Jesus really was. In fact, it is so early, that it is even mentioned in the NT documents themselves, in John’s epistles (1 John 4:2; 2 John 1:7)
The Docetists denied that Jesus Christ had truly come in the flesh
They said that Jesus was really a mirage; a ghost who looked like a man. Why did they think that?
Because they were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy; particularly a brand of Greek philosophy called Gnosticism
Gnosticism taught that the “spiritual world” was good, and the “material world” was bad. Therefore, everything that was made of matter was bad – it was inherently evil. That included human flesh. Since human flesh was material, it was evil.
If God wanted to come to earth and appear to us, he certainly wouldn’t have taken upon himself human flesh. God would not become something that was evil, therefore Christ could not have been truly human
Christ only “seemed” (dokeo) to be human; he was like a ghost or an apparition, but he was not a real human being
so the view of the Docetists was that Jesus was not a man at all – he was just God masquerading as a man. So that put Jesus completely in the category of “mystery”.

But that view wasn’t satisfying to many people, because it put Jesus too far “out there”. If Jesus Christ wasn’t a human being at all, how could we identify with him; how could we have any connection with him? So there was another suggestion called…

Adoptionism – Jesus was a man who became God’s Son

Adoptionists believed that Jesus started out as a man – a man who lived a godly, righteous life. And because he did, God chose to adopt him as his Son.
And as they read the stories of Jesus’ life, the adoptionists suggested that this adoption took place at Jesus’ baptism, when God said “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.” From that point on, Jesus became the Son of God; he was no longer just a man. And they see the Holy Spirit’s coming upon Jesus in the form of a dove as the symbol of that.
So, rather than God becoming a man, Christmas is the beginning of the story of how a certain special man became the Son of God.
if God hadn’t adopted him, Jesus of Nazareth would have lived and died just like anyone else, because he started out as just a man.
he started out in history, but got promoted to mystery.

This view was held onto for along time among some Christians. We see it in Spain in the eighth century, and there are even hints of it in later medieval theology. But there are real problems with it.

What do you do with all those Scriptures that seem to indicate that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, existed prior to his actual human birth. What about those NT passages such as Col. 1 that state that Jesus was involved in creating the world? Why was it important that he be born of a virgin, if he was just a man to begin with?

No, he must have been more than a man. But could he truly be God? That’s the question that a man named Arius wrestled with in the early fourth century AD. He knew from the NT Scriptures that Jesus was more than a man. That was quite evident to him. But he was troubled by the idea that Jesus was God himself.

Perhaps he was somewhere in between: more than a man, but less than God?

And this is the view that we call…

Arianism – Jesus was a superman

Arius was a learned man - he was presbyter of Alexandria; died 336 AD
and he used to get into long discussions with his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, about the nature of Jesus Christ
Arius held strongly to monotheism: the indivisible nature of God. God cannot share his being or essence with anyone else. If he could, he would no longer be God. And so Arius came to reject the idea of the Trinity.
So who was Jesus? Well, if he was more than a man, but less than God, God must have created him at some point. And Arius found some NT verses that seemed to support this.
In verses like John 1:14, 3:16, and Hebrews 1:5, Arius fastened on the term “begotten” to argue that Jesus Christ must have had a beginning. “There was a time when he was not” Arius would say. Although a mighty being, a supernatural being, Jesus Christ was less than God.
He was a supernatural mediator between man and God, He was even the agent through whom God created the world, but he wasn’t God.
Even so, he belonged in the category of mystery, because he certainly was more than a man.

The interesting thing about Arius is that his view became very popular in the 4^(th) century AD. In fact, it appeared for a time that it might even become the official view of the Christian church.

And his view is still popular in some circles. For example, Arianism is the official view of the Jehovah’s Witnesses today. JW’s do not believe in the Trinity; they do not believe in the deity of Christ.

But there were some fundamental flaws in Arius’s reasoning. The term “begotten” as it is used in Scripture in reference to Christ, is not analogous to the way that a human father begets, or sires, a son. The term has more of the meaning “unique” or “one and only” or “special”. And the term “firstborn” that is sometimes used of Christ refers not to his birth order in God’s family, but to his full right of ownership; all that belongs to God the Father also belongs to Jesus Christ. So, far from it proving inferiority, it proves equality.

So for this and other reasons, Arianism was rejected by the church at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. And that church council was really quite pivotal in the history of the Christian church. It marked a turning point.

Prior to this council, people were trying to reconcile who Christ really was by putting him into one category or the other:

either he was fundamentally just a man and nothing else
or he was fundamentally NOT a man – he was something higher
- a supernatural being like an angel
- God disguised as a man.
He was either history or he was mystery.

But after the Council of Nicea, the debate shifted. It had become pretty obvious by then that the New Testament – the source code of Christmas Version 1 – wasn’t going to let anyone get away with assigning Jesus to one category or the other. You couldn’t jam him into one or the other without doing violence to what the NT was really saying— that Jesus belongs to BOTH categories. As much as we might feel uncomfortable with it…

he is history AND he is mystery
he is man AND he is God

So after Nicea, the debate shifted. People started trying to figure out how this could be. How could someone be part of BOTH worlds? How could someone be BOTH man and God? And, over the next century or so, some very learned theologians took some good runs at this question.

There was a man named Apollinarius, who was the Bishop of Laodicea, from 361-375 AD. Apollinarius, as a mature Christian, was well aware of his own sinful tendencies as a human being. He knew that within all of us resides a fallen human nature. We have a will that actively chooses to follow the way of sin.

As he pondered how God might be united with man in the person of Jesus Christ, he was troubled by the possible presence of that fallen human will. And so he arrived at a position that we now call…

Apollinarianism – Jesus was an empty man filled by God

Apollinarius maintained that Christ must have had only one will – the divine will, because if he had also had a human will, Jesus would have been bound to sin
So Christ mustn’t have had a human will. In his humanity, he had the capacity for experience, he had the capacity for thinking and for feeling, but he didn’t have the capacity for initiative as a human being.
Apollinarius felt that that would have led, potentially, to a volitional conflict between Christ’s human will and his divine will.
Apollinarius saw Christ’s humanity as being similar to Solomon’s Temple in the OT – the Temple was an empty, passive building; a repository for the presence of God. It had no independent will of its own
Apollinarius’s view is sometimes known as Monophysitism (from “mono” = “only” and “fusis” = “nature”). Jesus only had ONE nature – this divine nature. He didn’t have a human nature.

But that is what troubled people about Apollinarius’s view. If Christ didn’t have a human nature, how could we say that he was genuinely human? How could he truly experience things as a human being if he didn’t have the ability to make choices as a human being?

Heb. 2:17 says that Jesus was like us in every way.
Heb. 5:8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered – how could Jesus obey God if he had no human will?

So clearly, Apollinarius’s attempt to reconcile Christ’s human and divine natures, though noble, was inadequate. It robbed Jesus of his true humanity, and that’s why it wasn’t accepted by the majority of Christians.

Along came a monk from Antioch named Nestorius. He eventually became quite an influential leader in the Christian church. He became the Patriarch of Constantinople in 428 AD.

As he grappled with the humanity and deity of Jesus, he did not agree with Apollinarius, who said that Jesus only had one nature. No, Nestorius said that Jesus definitely had two natures. But how were those natures related?

He felt that if you combined the two natures, the divine nature would swallow up the human nature, so he felt that, in order to protect the human nature in Jesus, it was necessary to hold the two natures as being separate and distinct. Otherwise, he felt, you lose the human nature, and Jesus would be only God and not man.

But the problem with Nestorianism is that it makes Jesus a man with a dual personality.

He almost becomes two separate people inhabiting one human body – not a very attractive prospect, and certainly not someone we can identify with.
In fact, nowadays there is a psychological diagnosis called Multiple Personality Disorder.

But when you look at the Scriptures, you see a magnificent unity in Jesus. He does not appear to be acting here, from his human personality and there, from his divine personality. His personality, indeed his personhood, is totally integrated – it is one.

So while we may commend Nestorius for trying to safeguard and maintain the human nature of Jesus, he came up with an odd and unsatisfying solution.

Just by way of historical footnote, Nestorius views were declared to be heretical by the Council of Ephesus, and he was deposed as the Patriarch of Constantinople in 431 AD. He was sent into exile – actually back to his monastery in Antioch.

Many of Nestorius’s followers in the Eastern Church could not accept the decision of the council, so they split away and formed their own church – the Nestorian church, centered in Persia. And over the next few centuries, they sent missionaries into Arabia, India, and Turkestan. The Assyrian Orthodox Church, at its peak, may have had as many as 80 million adherents, but it suffered severely during the invasions of Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane. There are a few Assyrian Orthodox Christians remaining in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as a few churches in North America.

Another monk, a man named Eutyches, did not agree with Nestorius’s view. He felt that the idea of two natures needlessly split the personality of Jesus Christ. So he began to champion the idea that there was just one nature in Christ – and it was a blend of his human and divine natures.

He said that Jesus’ divine nature absorbed his human nature “like a drop of honey in the sea”. So what you ended up with was…

Eutychianism – Jesus was a man whose human personality was absorbed into God’s

Eutyches was a pretty shrewd politician, and he put together a renegade church council at Ephesus in 449 to endorse his views and eliminate everyone else’s – a council that became known as the “Robber Synod”

Quite apart from this little maneuver, Eutyches view was lacking. If Jesus’ human nature was swallowed up by God’s divine nature, how can we say that Jesus was fully human? Although theoretically, you have two natures, Jesus’ humanity was lost in the process.

To sort things out, the church met in another council at the little town of Chalcedon in 451 AD. One of the wisest things the church leaders did at Chalcedon was to refrain from getting into any philosophical speculation about how the two natures of Jesus co-exist.

Any attempt to do that, as we have seen, ended in losing one or the other – usually it was his human nature that was lost.

The Council of Chalcedon declared that Jesus was one person who had two natures – a human nature and a divine nature. And they further said “we do this without confusing the two natures, without transmuting one nature into the other, without dividing them into two separate categories. The distinctiveness of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead the properties of each nature are conserved and both natures concur in one person. They are not divided or cut into two persons, but are together the one and only Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

And that has been the classic understanding of the person of Christ ever since. He belongs to both categories – he is history, and he is mystery. The Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas is that awesome point at which Time intersected Eternity; at which the supernatural realm invaded the natural realm; at which God became a man.

And it matters that Jesus is both man and God. It matters because if

Jesus were not a man…

he couldn’t serve as our substitute
he couldn’t be our high priest
he couldn’t be our Savior

And if he were not God

he couldn’t be a sinless, perfect substitute
he couldn’t die for all of us
he couldn’t give us eternal life

It’s tempting to want to make him all one or all the other, and we constantly feel pressured to do that. But the genius of the Gospel and the message of Christmas is that he is both. And that is why there is no need for Christmas Version 2.