Christ's Incarnation

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cih1355

Puritan Board Junior
I have heard that saying "Jesus is 100% God and 100% man" is a contradiction and that it is more preferable to say that Jesus is truly God and truly man. I don't see how saying "Jesus is 100% God and 100% man" can be contradictory.
 
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Maybe the "percentage" definition fails the logic test somewhere? But the purpose for that expression is to affirm the FULL humanity and FULL divinity of the God-man.

"Truly" doesn't convey the idea of "completeness" very well, in my opinion. "Fully" does a better job, I think. Plus, "truly" seems to me could include some kind of "ethical" angle, which only inserts an unnecessary wrinkle.

The Second Person isn't half-this/half-that, or some other percentage distribution. His divine nature is complete and entire, and suffers nothing diminuted or increased by the association to it of a complete and entire human nature--a properly subordinate nature that also retains its own exclusive properties, and is not transmuted by its association. "Without conversion, composition, or confusion," is taken from the Definition of Chalcedon, AD 451.
 
It would only be a logical contradiction if someone were to say that Christ is 100% God and 100% non-God in his Divine Nature. But, as Christians we do not say that- we say He is simultaneously 100% God in His Divine Nature and 100% Human in His human nature. There are two distinct natures in the one Christ.

The law of non-contradiction says that A cannot be simultaneously be A and ~A in the same way and in the same sense. So it does not fail the logical consistency test to say Christ is 100% God and 100% Man.
 
This means that Christ was omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in His divine nature while in his state of humiliation, while none of these things in his human nature. In His state of exaltation His human nature remains none of these things, but has access to them all through His divine nature in a way that it didn't while He was on Earth.
 
Well said Richard- the heathen scoffers who try to point out contradictions needs to actually study what the Christian church has taught about Christ from the first century, spelled out in the creeds and councils. Also, they could use an intro course to logic.
 
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