7. Faith: We Can Truly Become Like Christ
Some people begin with theology. Others begin by asking what a theology makes possible in an actual Christian life. I believe Scripture must come first: my experience cannot establish who Jesus is. But once I became convinced from Scripture that Jesus is genuinely human rather than God incarnate, the change in my faith surprised me.
I had already been taught many profoundly good things about Jesus. He was my Savior, Lord, Messiah, teacher, example, and the one I was called to follow. None of that disappeared. In many ways, it became more meaningful. Jesus did not become smaller to me. What God accomplished in Jesus became more extraordinary—and what I believed God could accomplish in humanity became greater too. For the first time, I found myself able to take the Christian promise of Christlikeness with a new literalness: by God’s grace, we can truly become like Christ. Jesus became not an unreachable divine exception to humanity, but the perfected human being who shows us what God intends His children to become.
The full article linked below explains that fruit in much greater depth. It compares traditional divine-human Christology with the fully human Christology I now believe Scripture teaches. There is much good in traditional Christianity, and Christians who hold divine-human Christology have produced beautiful fruit throughout Christian history and in the lives of sincere, God-loving and Jesus-loving Trinitarian Christians—I just don’t think that good is lost if we embrace a fully human Christology. It explores how my understanding has affected Christlikeness, prayer, worship, my relationship with God and Jesus, and even my posture toward minority Christian groups and people of other faiths. My central question is whether understanding Jesus more fully as the human Messiah allows some of Christianity’s own most beautiful promises to become clearer, deeper, and more hopeful—and, if that understanding is biblically true, whether it may also remove unnecessary barriers in ministry to non-Christians.
The Greek word translated “faithfulness” in many versions of Galatians 5:22 is pistis, which can also mean faith. And the fruit I most strongly associate with understanding Jesus as fully human is precisely that: FAITH—greater confidence, by God’s grace, in what He can actually accomplish in us.
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