We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Isn’t it contradictory to say Jesus is “fully God” and “fully human”?
READER: God is, by definition, eternal, having neither beginning nor end. Human beings are, by definition, finite, beginning at a certain point in time. How, then, can Jesus be both God (eternal) and human (finite)? Isn’t that a contradiction? Similarly, while God is omniscient, humans aren’t. How could Jesus be both omniscient God and non-omniscient human? When Jesus was a little zygote in the womb of Mary, did he also know what was happening on some planet at the other end of the universe?
GREG: Great question! Theologians have worked through the paradox of Jesus being “fully God and fully human” in a number of different ways. The most traditional way is sometimes called a “two minds Christology.” This view affirms that Jesus was, on some level, aware of what was happening on every planet in the universe while he was a zygote in the womb of Mary, even while he was completely unaware of everything outside the womb on another level. I myself have never been able to render this view coherent.
A different approach to this paradox has been labeled “kenotic Christology,” based on the word kenosis, which is Greek for “to empty.” It’s used in Philippians 2 when Paul says Jesus didn’t cling to his divine prerogatives, but instead emptied himself and became a human. The kenotic Christology says that what the Son of God emptied himself of was the exercise of all the divine attributes that are incompatible with being a human. So the Son of God divested himself of his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence to become a genuine human who had limited knowledge, took up limited space, and had limited power.
This view obviously means that God doesn’t need to always exercise his divine attributes to be God. Anyone who believes that humans are created with free will, as I do, should have no problem with this notion, for the only way God could give humans free will is by limiting his omnipotence. Creating a world with free agents thus involves a sort of “kenosis” in God. The kenotic Christology simply takes this logic a bit further and applies it to the incarnation. Just as God limited his power when he created free agents, so too the Son of God limited his power, knowledge, and presence to become a full human being. What the Son of God did not set aside is his perfect divine love, for there’s nothing contradictory about a human loving others perfectly. To the contrary, teaching and empowering humans to love like God is one of God’s central goals for creation.
To me, the kenotic Christology makes more sense and fits the biblical data better than the traditional “two minds” Christology. I offer it in hope that it will help you understand how there is no contradiction involving in affirming Jesus to be fully God and fully human.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Incarnation, Jesus, Q&A, Theology
Topics: Christology, Jesus: Lord or Legend
Related Reading

What is the significance of Psalm 106:23?
“Therefore he said he would destroy them— had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.” Moses (on several occasions, we have seen) persuaded God to change his mind regarding his plan to judge Israel. This inspired verse explicitly says that God “would destroy…

Modern Theologians and the Centrality of Christ
During the twentieth century the development of a Christocentric reading of the Scriptures—which is crucial to understanding what I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—surged in the wake of Karl Barth’s publication of his Romans commentary in 1916. It was justifiably described as a “bombshell” that fell “on the playground of the theologians,” demolishing…

Isn’t Open Theism outside of historic orthodoxy?
The Church has never used one’s view of divine foreknowledge as a test for orthodoxy. And while the open view has always been a very minor perspective, it has had its defenders throughout Church history and it has never been called “heresy” (until in mid 1990s when some started using this label). According to some…

The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…

The Cruciform Center Part 4: How Revelation Reveals a Cruciform God
I’ve been arguing that, while everything Jesus did and taught revealed God, the character of the God he reveals is most perfectly expressed by his loving sacrifice on the cross. Our theology and our reading of Scripture should therefore not merely be “Christocentric”: it should be “crucicentric.” My claim, which I will attempt to demonstrate…

Incarnation and Covenant
The most distinctive aspect of Jesus’ identity, according to the faith of the historic-orthodox Church, is that Jesus is fully God and fully human—“God Incarnate,” to use the Church’s creedal phraseology. To accurately reflect on the Incarnation, we must avoid the temptation to think abstractly, treating the doctrine of the Incarnation as a mere metaphysical…