Chapter 10 — The Preexistence of Christ
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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"Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58)
With those words, Jesus claimed to have existed before one of history's greatest patriarchs — a man who had lived some two thousand years earlier. The Jews listening to him picked up stones to throw at him. Not because they found the claim philosophically puzzling, but because they understood exactly what he was saying: he was claiming to exist outside the normal limits of human time. He was claiming to be eternal.
The doctrine of the preexistence of Christ — the belief that Jesus, as the divine Son, existed before his birth in Bethlehem — is one of the most foundational and most contested claims of orthodox Christianity. It separates historic Christianity from virtually every alternative Christology on the market today.
Why Preexistence Matters
If Jesus of Nazareth began his existence in a stable in Bethlehem, he is, at most, a human being touched by God in a special way. His death might be heroic or inspirational, but it is simply one man's death — meaningful, perhaps, but not cosmically significant.
If, on the other hand, Jesus is the eternal divine Son who entered into human existence as a man — if his human birth was not the beginning of his existence but a new mode of it — then everything is different. His death is not just a man dying. It is God, in his own person, absorbing the weight of human sin and death. His resurrection is not just a remarkable resuscitation but the victory of the eternal over the temporal, the divine over the mortal.
Richard Bauckham puts it well: of all God's attributes, eternality is the one most consistently emphasized in Jewish literature as uniquely belonging to God. "God alone is inherently eternal, existing from eternity to eternity." To claim that Christ is eternal is to claim that he belongs in the category of the one God — not in the category of creation.
What the Alternative Views Say
Most of the alternative Christologies we've been surveying reject the preexistence of Christ in one form or another:
- Skeptics, Muslims, and progressive Christians believe Jesus began to exist when he was conceived or born.
- Biblical Unitarians agree, and uniquely argue that the New Testament doesn't teach preexistence at all.
- Jehovah's Witnesses and Latter-day Saints accept that Jesus (as Michael the archangel or as the firstborn spirit child) existed before his human birth — but deny that he existed eternally before creation.
That last distinction matters enormously. There's a difference between a preexistent creature (which would make Jesus an angel, essentially) and an eternal divine Son (which is what orthodox Christianity teaches). The evidence from the New Testament, as we'll see in the coming chapters, supports the latter.
Evidence Across the New Testament
Chapter 10 surveys the theme of preexistence across the full breadth of the New Testament, finding it in Paul's early letters, the Gospels, Hebrews, and Revelation. Some of the key texts:
- Galatians 4:4: "God sent forth his Son, born of a woman" — the sending implies prior existence.
- Philippians 2:6-8: Christ "was in the form of God" before he "emptied himself" and was "born in human likeness."
- 1 Corinthians 10:4: Paul refers to the spiritual rock that accompanied Israel in the wilderness as "Christ."
- Colossians 1:17: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
- John 1:1-2: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
- John 17:5: Jesus prays, "Glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed."
Unitarians try to explain away many of these passages by arguing they describe God's foreknowledge or purpose, not actual prior existence. But as the authors point out, when you have this many passages, from this many different authors, all pointing in the same direction, the cumulative weight is difficult to dismiss. "When all the evidence is considered together, the non-preexistence conclusion is radically unwarranted."
The Implication
If Jesus preexisted his human birth, then the question becomes: what was he before that? An angel? A created spirit? Or the eternal, uncreated Son of God?
The New Testament doesn't leave us guessing. As we'll see in the next two chapters — looking closely at Paul, Hebrews, and John — the New Testament presents Christ not as a created being who was later elevated to cosmic significance, but as one who belonged on the Creator's side of the line between God and creation from the very beginning.
Jesus wasn't born into the divine family. He came down from it — to bring us in.
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