What is the relationship between God and man? How and to what extent are they connected to each other? All philosophical and religious views have varied in speaking about this. But the Christian answer to this subject is very unique. And it is the person of Jesus Christ. God and man are not only connected, they have become united!
Just as the name of Christ divided history into two parts, the person of Jesus Christ divided human thought about Him into two thoughts. The incarnation of Christ became a stumbling block on which ideas and religions were shattered, and the Apostle Paul called it “foolishness” to the Gentiles and a “stumbling block” to the Jews.
The scientific mentality, represented by Hellenism in the time of Christ, and by applied sciences in our time, depends primarily on defining things and identifying them by their essence and characteristics. For example, for an ear of wheat to be an ear of wheat, it must consist of a root, a stalk, and grains of wheat. If, for example, an eye, a nose, or two feet enter it, it is no longer an ear of wheat, but something else. And so God, for religions and philosophies, must be absolutely unlimited, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-powerful. If something else, such as a body, enters into God, He cannot remain God. This is for religions and philosophy. A God who eats, drinks, is hungry, thirsty, and bears the weaknesses of our weak human body, and what is worse than that is to be slapped, spat on, weep, and suffer, this is not God. And such a situation is impossible! Religious and philosophical thought in general do not accept the idea of the God-man, according to the scientific and applied analytical method.
When Jesus Christ, God and man together, came, human thoughts clashed with him. Faced with their intellectual dilemma and according to their intellectual backgrounds, they split into two directions in solutions. Since the union of God with man is impossible, the first solution is that Jesus the man is the truth, but we can add to his attributes some special attributes, energies and graces; and this trend crystallized in Nestorian thought. Or there is a second solution, that Jesus is God, but since God does not unite with the human body, then he carried it in appearance and not in reality; and this thought crystallized among the advocates of the one nature. Both parties start from the principle of denying the possibility of divine incarnation, that is, the union of man with God.
The Church has struggled for four centuries to establish the truth of the possibility of the divine being united with the human. The issue is not just a theory! Rather, it is an anthropological fact that explains our entire view of man and his life.
With the divine incarnation, the religious theories that consider that man’s connection with God occurs only within the realm of the law were invalidated. For them, God is very transcendent, and man in his skin is very small. The covenant between the two parties is a link. “You shall keep my commandments, and I will be your God, and you shall be my sons.” With the divine incarnation, the philosophical ideas that place God in the realm of principle and link Him to man only through moral teachings were invalidated. The gap between the divine and the human in philosophies and religions still exists and is great.
However, Jesus in the New Testament declared that “where He is, there we will be,” and “the glory that He has will be given to us”! Nestorianism and Monophysitism (advocates of one nature) are only two sides of the same coin. That is, God cannot be united with man.
The first intellectual trend - Nestorianism - we see alive in the trend of logic, scientific precision, pure rationality, the literalness of laws and commandments, and the appreciation of scientific data more than it deserves when it takes on an absolute dimension while it is a research fact, and also in the analysis and deconstruction of metaphysics, the deification of human achievements and social systems, and the absolute reliance on economic progress, which constitutes the key and goal of everything.
While the second intellectual current - the one nature - we see it living in the deification of ideas, so the idea is God or God is just an idea, and in the contempt for what is natural, even in man himself, without that meaning not rushing towards it. The body here is humiliated or weak, so the “fall” into sex becomes an imposed reality and the body with its weaknesses becomes an inevitable evil. On the other hand, this current goes to the extreme in the face of the humiliation of what is natural by deifying values, ties and leadership, moving from both sides to the realm of unreality.
In both currents, human life remains subject to death, but some religious moral solutions are adhered to or aspire to a superman with divine qualities.
Thus, it is as if this human body was destined to remain in its humiliation, so that God cannot bear it, and he who bears it cannot unite with God. This body has been united with death from the moment of its birth, such that death grows in it as it grows, until death finally destroys it. All religious solutions, like the heresies of Monophysitism and Nestorianism, believe in only a moral salvation and not in an ontological salvation that includes sanctifying the body and liberating it from its mortal nature.
However, the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, nullified those philosophies and heresies. He achieved for humanity what philosophies and religions could not have imagined. He granted our skin to wear immortality and granted our race to gain the life of God, by grace and not by nature. He made it clear that the source of sin is the will and not the body and skin. God loved His creation and created it good, and carried it in its weakness to heal our spiritual weaknesses.
The relationship between God and man is the relationship of the vine and the branches, the head and the body, as the Bible says. It is not the relationship of the absolute with the limited, the judge with the servant! The incarnation of the Lord Jesus proved that this is a possible reality, even if it is not possible for the minds and nature, it is possible because it is a divine gift and grace. The divine incarnation revealed that Christian perfection is not the completion of duties and keeping all the commandments! Rather, it is the completion of our stature to the full stature of Christ. As God truly became incarnate, man becomes deified by grace.
Amen