Conclusion — The Case for the Incarnate Christ
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
The belief that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, the eternal divine Son who entered human history as a human being, wasn't smuggled into Christianity by ambitious bishops in the fourth century. It wasn't the invention of councils or creeds. It was the bedrock confession of the first generation of Christians, men and women who had known Jesus personally, who had seen him die, and who staked everything on the claim that they had seen him risen.
We've come a long way in this series. Let me take a moment to sum up what the biblical evidence has shown.
The Five Hands
The authors of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics organize the evidence under five categories, the acronym HANDS.
H: Honors
The New Testament directs toward Jesus every religious honor that the Old Testament reserves for God alone. He's worshiped (Matt. 28:9, 17; John 20:28). He receives prayer (Acts 7:59; Rev. 22:20). Hymns are sung to him (Phil. 2:6-11; Col. 1:15-20). His name is invoked in baptism (Matt. 28:19) and in healings (Acts 3:6). The early church confessed "Jesus is Lord," a title that stood in for the divine name YHWH in everyday Jewish life.
These honors were given to Jesus by Jewish believers raised with the conviction that giving such honors to anyone other than God was idolatry. They gave them to Jesus anyway. Not out of confusion, but out of conviction.
A: Attributes
Jesus shares the characteristics that belong to God alone. He's preexistent; he existed before his birth (John 1:1; Phil. 2:6; Gal. 4:4). He's eternal; before creation began, he was (John 8:58; 17:5). He's omniscient; he knows the hearts of human beings (John 2:24-25; Mark 2:8). He's sinless, morally perfect in every way (Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5). He's the agent of creation, since all things were made through him (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2). And he sustains all things by his powerful word (Heb. 1:3; Col. 1:17).
No creature possesses these attributes. They belong to the one who is uncreated.
N: Names
Jesus bears the names of God. He's called "God" outright in multiple places (John 1:1; 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8; 2 Pet. 1:1; 1 John 5:20). He's called "Lord" in contexts where the same word stands for YHWH in the Old Testament, meaning the New Testament is identifying Jesus with Israel's God (Acts 2:21, 36; Rom. 10:9-13; Phil. 2:9-11). He uses the self-declaration "I am" in ways that echo God's revelation to Moses (John 8:58; 18:5-6) and Isaiah (John 8:24, 28; 13:19). He's called "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" (Rev. 22:13), the same title applied to the Father in Revelation 21:6.
D: Deeds
Jesus does what only God does. He forgives sins on his own authority (Mark 2:5-10). He calms storms, walks on water, multiplies food (Matt. 14:22-33; Mark 4:35-41; 6:30-44). He raises the dead (John 11:38-44). He's the agent through whom the universe was created (Col. 1:16). He exercises final judgment over all humanity (Matt. 25:31-46; John 5:22-29; 2 Cor. 5:10). And he receives worship for all of it, and accepts it.
S: Seat
Jesus occupies the position that belongs to God. He sat down at the right hand of the Father after his resurrection (Heb. 1:3; 10:12-13). He shares the divine throne (Rev. 5:6, 13). He'll return as the final judge on the clouds of heaven (Matt. 24:30; Mark 14:62), as the Son of Man whose kingdom will never end (Dan. 7:13-14). He's King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 19:16), the title that belongs to the one who reigns over all other rulers.
Not Proof Texts, but a Pattern
Here's what matters most about all of this evidence: it doesn't rest on a few texts that must be read in a very particular way. It's a pattern running through every layer of the New Testament, from every author, from the earliest writings (Paul's letters in the 50s AD) to the latest (Revelation in the 90s AD).
The case for the incarnation is built not on isolated verses but on the convergent testimony of an entire collection of documents written over half a century by multiple authors with different backgrounds, styles, and concerns. All of them, without exception, present Jesus in terms that only make sense if he's God.
The popular notion that early Christianity was simple and human-centered, that "Jesus as God" was the invention of later Gentile Christians who had lost touch with the original Jewish faith, doesn't survive contact with the actual evidence. The earliest documents we have, Paul's letters, already present a fully divine Christ. The Jewish community that wrote them would have been the last people to make this claim casually.
The Frame That Holds It All
Orthodox Christianity has always insisted on four truths simultaneously:
- There is only one God
- Jesus is not the Father
- Jesus is a genuine human being
- Jesus is fully divine
The doctrine of the Trinity isn't a philosophical puzzle invented to confuse people. It's the framework that lets us hold all four of these biblical truths at once without sacrificing any of them. Critics have offered alternatives for two thousand years, but every alternative either collapses the distinctions (making Jesus identical to the Father) or sacrifices the deity (making Jesus a creature of some kind).
The orthodox doctrine isn't the most philosophically comfortable option. But it's the one that does justice to the full range of biblical evidence.
A Final Word
I started this series with a question from Matthew 16: "Who do you say that I am?"
Everything we've covered in these weeks of posts is an attempt to answer that question, not with our own speculations or preferences, but with what the people closest to Jesus said, what they wrote, what they died for.
They said: he's the eternal Son of God, who was in the beginning with God and who was God. He became a human being, lived a sinless life, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and now reigns at the right hand of the Father. He'll come again to judge the living and the dead.
They said: he's Lord. Not a lord. The Lord, YHWH, the God who made us and loves us and rescued us.
And they invited us to confess the same thing, not as an intellectual assent to a doctrine, but as the living trust of a person who has met the risen Christ and found that he's exactly who he claimed to be.
Who do you say that he is?
"I am redeemed in him." That's the only answer that changes everything.