Written by Kenneth Gage
An exposition of the view that in the Incarnation Jesus took the nature of fallen Adam.
What backgrounds do the early church councils provide for our current debate on the nature of Christ? What do the key New Testament passages indicate about the kind of human nature He took? Why did He take human nature, and what does this reveal about the kind He took?
In the early Christian centuries, thinkers generally agreed that Jesus had a preexistent life as God and lived a sinless life as man. But differences of opinion arose when certain Church Fathers (mostly the Alexandrian school) tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity at the expense of His full humanity.1 Equally earnest theologians (the Antiochene school) stressed His full humanity, fearing that the Alexandrians were doing great damage to the meaning of Christ’s role as man’s Saviour.2 In their counterresponses, these two schools of theological thought tended to overemphasize their positions.