St Luke's Church Eccleshill

How could God become human?

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Jesus - God come to dwell as man

How could God the Lord
have a human mind?
The unchanging word
in a skull be confined?
If God is the same
all ages long,
how was it he came
in bodily form?

Yet, Jesus, you are God come to dwell
in full human form to seek and to save us from hell.
What you did not assume you could not save,
so you took all our nature, freely gave
new life to all who believe
and come to you to receive.

How could God be God
and a human too?
Would this make him odd
and his manhood untrue?
For people must learn
and change, feel pain,
grow older, and yearn:
yet God stays the same.

But Jesus, you are God ...

For you laid aside
all your majesty,
and came to abide
in our humanity.
You humbly obeyed
as was foretold:
our ransom you paid,
to death you were sold.

For Jesus, you are God ...

Story behind the song

I wrote this song as a mental exercise after writing "Our God is one" based on Gregory of Nyssa's works, and it was prompted by a comment from Michael Lehr: "I commend you for attempting this - the Fathers might not be very accessible now, but they rarely got their doctrine wrong." I had never taken much interest in the writings of the Fathers before this, but I wondered if maybe they could be made accessible by trying to turn them into songs. So I went on holiday and took Stevenson's "Creeds, Councils and Controversies" with me.

In fact some of the Fathers did get their doctrine wrong: Apollinarius was one - it seems he believed that if Jesus was to be truly God, the divine mind in him must replace the human mind. Philosophically he believed the divine power must preserve its impassibility - it's changelessness and untouchability by suffering. Verses 1 and 2 try to summarise this point of view: how could God have a human mind, how could he change and suffer as a man?

Against this, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote a long passage, in which comes his famous quote "For that which he has not assumed he has not healed, but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved." (This is the same principle as in Hebrews 2:17 - Jesus had to be like us in every respect so that ... he could make atonement for our sins. The word "assumed" means "took on" - it doesn't mean the thought process we think of nowadays.) Although it might be difficult to understand how this is, God the Son must be fully man including having a human mind, and be completely human in nature. Only so can the salvation of mankind be possible. The chorus tries to summarise this.

And verse 3 comes from St Paul's explanation of this in Philippians 2:5-11, that Christ emptied himself taking the form of a servant, and being humble he also submitted to death for us. Is it too simplistic for me to think that the trouble with Apollinarius is that he hadn't read Paul's letters carefully enough? The incarnation is God's own answer to the philosophers' questions about the characteristics of divinity.

I wrote the song because modern Christians also need to think hard about the nature of Jesus whom we worship. The questions posed by Apollinarius are still good questions, and we have a duty to wrestle with them in our own thinking. How else can we answer people who question us about Jesus?

John Hartley