Here’s a little something to blow your mind

The Church teaches that Jesus is fully God and fully man.

He’s not half-God/half-man.

He’s not God in a man suit.

He’s not a human balloon full of God gas.

He is 100% God and 100% human.

Got that?

Now here is the mind-blowing part.

The Church also teaches that Jesus is not a human person.

No. Really:

466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God’s Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council at Ephesus in 431 confessed “that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man.” Christ’s humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: “Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh.”

(Pausing to wait as the dull, meaty thuds of countless heads exploding subsides.)

Think of it this way: If the Trinity can be described as three “Whos” (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) but one “What” (God), Jesus is one “Who” but two “Whats.” He is a divine Person who has assumed a human nature. He has not stopped being that divine person, nor has he turned into another—human–person. He is one divine person with two natures, divine and human. The same person who created the world–who made promises to Abraham and gave the Law to Moses–is the Son of Mary, laid in a manger, baptized in the Jordan, crucified, and raised to life again.

I mention this because Catholic theology is like physics. It is constrained to describe the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. It is not prescriptive, but descriptive. The Church does not teach stuff she needs to be true. She teaches stuff that describes reality in all its weirdness and (often) inconvenience, whether she likes it or not.

Now and then, people get this, as in the case of original sin, for instance:

The Church arrived at the doctrine of original sin, not because anybody likes it, but because a) it’s what Jesus reveals about us and b) the revelation explains our experience that there is something wrong with us. In other words, it accounts for the fact that we are not sinners because we sin but, more profoundly, that we sin because we are sinners. If it were the former we could, as Pelagius thought, just grit our teeth real hard and save ourselves. But Jesus tells us we require a Savior: that “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5) and that he and he alone is the source of the salvific divine life that makes it possible to participate in the life of the Blessed Trinity. We can, of course, only know the latter by faith in his word. But we experience the former–namely our brokenness and talent for sin–all the time. As G.K Chesterton notes:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

The resurrection is another example of a teaching of the Church that is obviously descriptive and not prescriptive. It would have been a million times easier (had the Church just been making stuff up) to say that Jesus was some sort of ethereal spirit living on after death. Everybody already believed in stuff like that anyway. It is, indeed, the first thing the apostles themselves reached for to account for their encounter with the Risen Christ,

As they were saying this, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you.” But they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit. (Lk 24:36–37)

A nice vaporous ghost would have done very nicely if you were just making up a story to say, “We saw him alive and know that his Spirit lives on and will be with us to the end of time.” Indeed, some variation on that theme is what millions of people are ready to make of the Easter story to this day. And the best part, for the disciples, is ghosts posed no threat to the Empire.

But the disciples were constrained by actual experience to report what they actually witnessed: a risen, glorified, and *bodily* resurrection that nobody, least of all themselves, were at all prepared for.

In every account of the Resurrection the New Testament gives us, the glorified Jesus remains, in some sense, doggedly physical. Not, of course, physical in the sense we are, but also not ghostly. He is, perhaps, best described as transphysical: embodied, but not with a body like ours anymore, the same but not the same:

And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. (Lk 24:38–43)

It’s all very weird and awkward and unnecessary if you are just making it up. But if you are offering eyewitness testimony and you are honest, this is the kind of thing you get.

Anyway, I just thought I’d remind you of the weirdness of the gospel.

I now return you to your regular programming.