Trinity and Humanity

Our youngest daughter is thrilled and apprehensive about her involvement in her local high school’s cultural exchange program. That’s understandable considering the fact the she will fly 14 hours away from our home in America to China for two entire months, staying with a “strange” family, eating “strange” food, and visiting “strange” places – including her temporary high school that contains 20,000 students! I’m sure you can see how our entire family is thrilled and apprehensive – thrilled by the educational opportunity, adventure and travel abroad, and apprehensive about her safety, the cost, (did I mention the cost? Yowsa, we signed up to pay what?!?! Ha-Ha!)

Of course, this exchange program also involves a young person from China coming to stay in our home for two months and taking in all of the “strangeness” of American culture, and being thrilled and apprehensive, too! Imagine calling our American culture “strange”! hmmpf! (Tee-hee…)

As we sat in one of the many meetings last night, thoroughly discussing the details and careful preparations for the exchange, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between this high school cultural exchange and the cultural exchange of the Gospel emphasized at Christmas – AND THE VAST AND ASTONISHINGLY AWESOME DIFFERENCES!

Some similarities between a high school cultural exchange and the Son of God given to us at Christmas in Jesus are:

None!!!

Because, in the first instance, it would have never crossed our minds to think of anything this good apart from God thinking it up and sharing it with us! HaHa! Second, the high school cultural exchange is temporary – only two months, and God was not just interested in visiting with us temporarily and then going back home – ever. At Christmas we are reminded that God was interested in making our flesh His home, sharing His Life and Love with us forever as we are! Plus, it’s one thing for God to get to us, but how are we going to get to Him – the created life to the uncreated Life? As the Apostle John writes, “No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man.”

In other words, we CAN’T get to God apart from God Himself so we need the “impossible” to happen if we are going to get all of the goodness of God! We need someone who can be both God AND man. We need One who can share the things of man with God and who can share the things of God with man so that there is real, abiding, eternal union and cultural exchange with God and Man forever!

In fact, much of the early Church fathers speak of the coming of the Son of God into our humanity as an exchange.

As reaffirmed on a Wikipedia article entitled “Divinization”:

According to Jonathan Jacobs, there were many and varied appeals to divinization in the writings of the Church Fathers.^] As what he asserts is “just a small sample”, he lists the following:

• St. Irenaeus of Lyons stated that God “became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.”
• St. Clement of Alexandria says that “he who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him . . . becomes a god while still moving about in the flesh.”
• St. Athanasius wrote that “God became man so that men might become gods.”
• St. Cyril of Alexandria says that we “are called ‘temples of God’ and indeed ‘gods’, and so we are.”
• St. Basil the Great stated that “becoming a god” is the highest goal of all.
• St. Gregory of Nazianzus implores us to “become gods for (God’s) sake, since (God) became man for our sake.”

Referring to such declarations by the Fathers, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that the central tenet of deification is that, through the incarnation of his Son, God has called human beings to share God’s own life in the Son. It quotes Athanasius: “The Word became flesh … that we, partaking of his Spirit, might be deified” (De Decretis, 14); and Cyril of Alexandria: “We have all become partakers of Him, and have Him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason we have become partakers of the divine nature” (In Ioannem, 9).

In his book “The Mediation of Christ”, p.64, Thomas F. Torrance clarifies that, “The Greek Fathers used to speak of that experience as theopoiesis or theosis which does not mean ‘divinisation’, as is so often supposed, but refers to the utterly staggering act of God in which he gives himself to us and adopts us into the communion of his divine life and love through Jesus Christ and in his one Spirit, yet in such a way that we are not made divine but are preserved in our humanity.”

Wow!

At our cultural exchange meeting last night, one of the American hosts spoke of how awkward the first two weeks of having a Chinese student in their home was, but that at the end everyone was crying and saying “I love you” to each other as the student headed back home! How sad! BUT what the Gospel says to us at Christmas (if we are willing to listen) is that the cultural exchange of God giving Himself to us and ourselves to Him in his Son, Jesus, and by the Spirit, is Love, Relationship, Fellowship, Communion and Conversation that will never end! How Glad!

Torrance again, “Because in Jesus Christ human nature is perfectly and indivisibly united to God the Creator, he constituted in his humanity the ontological source and ground of the being of every man and woman, whether they know him or not, but to those who receive and believe in him he is the One in whom and through whom they may be born anew as sons and daughters of the heavenly Father”. I’m receiving Him (Who has already  received us!) this Christmas, how about you?

~ Timothy J. Brassell