Q

Does it bother you that Paul calls Jesus a human? “There’s just one God. And there’s only one go-between for God and humans. That mediator is a human: Jesus the Messiah” (1 Timothy 2:5).

A

It’s a little unsettling for some Christians. They like to think of Jesus as 100% shimmering deity, when Paul portrays him here as 100% red-blooded flesh and bone. Some historians find it a bit of a chuckle that Chris­tians today often have trouble with the humanity of Jesus, while the earliest Christians struggled with the deity of Jesus, since he had lived among them. The biggest theological struggle for the first 300 years of the Christian movement was trying to figure out who Jesus was. A lot of the early Christians taught that God the Father is God in heaven, Jesus was God on earth, and the Holy Spirit is God talking to our spirit. The brightest minds among Christians met in church councils during the AD 300s and drafted statements of faith such as the Apostles Creed. Even they couldn’t figure out Jesus. At the end of the debate they declared him fully human and fully divine. Christian scholars simply agreed to an idea they couldn’t understand, the idea they called the Trinity. A scholar named Ambrose (about AD 340-397) put it this way: “We don’t confuse Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with each other. Instead, we believe they are distinct. We don’t understand the mystery of how this can be, or what causes it. But we trust the evidence of this truth.” They read in the Bible about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They couldn’t understand it. But they believed it anyhow, because it was in the Bible.

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