Fully God and Fully Human

      What does it mean that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully Human, the orthodox doctrine handed down by Ecumenical Church Councils since the fourth century, and upon which so much modern Christian theology rests?

     I wrote something the other day, and a friend posited a query about it in relation to Jesus being, as the orthodox teaching goes, fully God and fully Human. His line of thinking followed that, logically, Jesus could be one or the other, but not both, and if Jesus was any different from any other human being, He could not be fully human.

      What does it mean to be "fully human"? This is a question that has serious ramifications for how we see other people. Does fully human mean representative of the average or "normal" human being? If this was the case, one might exclude those with Down's Syndrome from being fully human, or anyone born with a deviation from normality. In truth, this is a question many people have tried to answer repeatedly over the centuries and millennia, and failed with damaging and disastrous results. It might actually be a question that goes back to when there were other species of hominid in addition to homo sapiens. Our ancestors didn't answer that question well then either, at least in my opinion, as we are the only remaining species of hominid left.

     If one were to define "fully human" as having human DNA which matches the DNA of other human beings within the same tolerance which we would use for the rest of us regardless of physiological abnormalities, if we consider His being born without the malfunctioning survival response system an abnormality, then there's a good bet that Jesus Christ was in fact fully human. It's clear from observations written about Him that He was in fact born from a woman, He grew up, had a childhood, ate, drank, needed to sleep, could be physically touched, and had His own, independent free will, intellect, and emotions like every other human being does. When injured He bled. He appears to have had a heart condition possibly related to the circumstances of His parthenogenesis. I think it can be presumed that if He ate and drank, He would need to eliminate those waste products as well. So, clearly, from all observable evidence, any reasonable definition, and within the tolerance we would show for anyone who might have been born different from the average, Jesus Christ was fully human.

     And fully God? How was He fully God? this is where we get truly hung up, because this is human beings trying to explain or define what we simply don't have the language tools or experience to explain or define. In John's Gospel, he describes Jesus as being the Logos, both existing right next to God and being itself God, having taken on human flesh. The Logos in the ancient Roman world was similar in concept to the Tao or even the Hindu Om. It was divine in nature with a relationship to the God, as the ancient Greeks and Romans used the term, which at times seemed distinct and at times overlapped. A standard definition might be the "divine principle which was used to create everything, and which also resides in every human being in some form." According to John and the other New Testament authors, this divine principle was born as a human being, was either identified as "I Am" Himself or "I Am" spoke through Him so frequently as to be indistinguishable from His own personality, was before everything else, the "firstborn of all creation," and was responsible for creating everything.

     It occurs to me that without the inherited malfunction, when Jesus Christ was born, His brain would not have been born in the same "panic mode" which the rest of us are born with. His brain would not have jury rigged an "emergency OS" so to speak. It wouldn't have needed to. He would have been born with His own name, His own free will and intellect, His own set of experiences, preferences, biology, and so on, but without the malfunctioning EMI which plagues the rest of us. He would have been born with full connection to, submission to, and cooperation with that Consciousness of I Am which is also the Foundation, the base upon which all of creation is coded or shaped. He would have been born enveloped in His Father's presence and love from the start without any kind of resistance to it. His personality, aside from the clearly human experiential and biological component, would have been otherwise entirely shaped by this unbroken connection with the Father, the Source. And these two non-competing components of His individual personality, Human and Source, if you will, can be observed from the Gospel writings.

      Jesus Christ represents a human being the way a human being was meant to function, with full connection and cooperation with the Source Consciousness, if you will, the Father from the start. According to the Scriptures, He was meant to be the "Firstborn among many brothers," that is, He was meant to set the rest of us right so that we could be like He is, free from the malfunction which causes all of our problems and separation. He was and remains fully Human as well as fully God, and invites the rest of us to become as He is through union with Him.