Chapter 16 — The Paradoxical Person
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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Some critics don't bother with proof texts. They just argue that the incarnation is impossible. Logically incoherent. Self-contradictory. You can't have a person who is both infinite and finite, both all-knowing and limited in knowledge, both eternal and born in time. The idea itself is a contradiction, they say, so there's nothing left to argue.
Unitarian author Anthony Buzzard puts it bluntly: "Someone who was fully God and fully man cannot be totally human. It is a sheer impossibility, in biblical terms, to confuse the One God with a human being."
Muslim apologist Shabir Ally agrees: "It is impossible for Jesus to have been perfect man and perfect God at the same time, for this would mean that he was finite and infinite at the same time, that he was fallible and infallible at the same time. This cannot be."
These are serious objections, and chapter 16 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics takes them seriously rather than waving them off. How one person can be both fully God and fully human isn't a side question. It sits at the center of everything Christianity claims.
The Problem with the Objection
Before we look at the biblical evidence, let's pause on the logic of the objection itself.
Buzzard and Ally are making what philosophers call an a priori argument, one that rules out the possibility before even looking at the evidence. The incarnation cannot be true because it's impossible. But how do they know it's impossible? They're assuming that human nature and divine nature are so incompatible that they can't coexist in one person. That assumption is exactly what's at stake, and simply asserting it doesn't settle anything.
Here's an analogy. You might argue that a single thing can't be both a wave and a particle, since waves and particles behave in mutually exclusive ways. And yet quantum physics shows us that's exactly what light is. The impossibility was in our categories, not in reality.
Could the same be true of the incarnation? Maybe our categories of "God" and "human" aren't as mutually exclusive as we assume. Maybe God could, without ceasing to be God, genuinely become human.
Orthodox Christianity says yes. Not because it's philosophically comfortable, but because the biblical evidence demands it.
The Biblical Portrait
The New Testament presents Jesus with characteristics that belong to both categories.
As fully human: Jesus was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4). He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52). He got hungry (Matt. 4:2), thirsty (John 19:28), and tired (John 4:6). He grieved (John 11:35), felt fear (Luke 22:44), and died (John 19:30). He prayed to the Father. He was "tempted in every way as we are" (Heb. 4:15).
As fully divine: He knew what was in human hearts without being told (John 2:24-25). He forgave sins (Mark 2:5-7). He accepted worship (Matt. 14:33; 28:9). He claimed to exist before Abraham (John 8:58). He raised the dead (John 11:43-44). He received the honors due to God alone and carried the names of God.
These aren't two stories stitched together awkwardly. They're one story, one person, fully present in both realities. That's the mystery the New Testament presents, and it's what the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) tried to articulate carefully: Jesus Christ is "truly God and truly man ... in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation."
A Hypothesis to Be Tested
The authors suggest something helpful: treat the incarnation as a hypothesis to be tested, not a claim you either accept or reject sight unseen.
A good hypothesis has to account for all the data. What accounts for both Jesus' genuine human limitations and his apparently divine knowledge, power, and authority? What explains him being genuinely tempted while remaining genuinely sinless? And what about him growing in wisdom as a child while also knowing the hearts of strangers as an adult?
The explanation that fits all the data is the one the church has confessed for two thousand years: he was genuinely both. The paradoxes in Jesus' life aren't errors in the record. They're exactly what you'd expect from someone who was genuinely divine and genuinely human at the same time.
Why the Paradox Is Good News
I want to close with something that goes beyond the argument.
The paradox of the God-man is the shape of grace, not just a theological puzzle. If God became human, all the way human and not partially or symbolically, then everything human has been touched by the divine. Your struggles, your pain, your mortality, none of it is beneath him, because he lived through it.
And because he was fully divine, not just a wise teacher or a spiritual genius, his death carries infinite weight. It wasn't one human life laid down for others. It was the eternal God entering into death so that death would lose its hold on us.
The paradox isn't a problem to be solved. It's the shape of the love that saved us.