C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 73 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The final session of the course moves from history to the Bible: what does Scripture itself say about the humanity of Christ? The teachers handle the virgin birth with unusual honesty, admitting what the text leaves unexplained, and then defend a striking reading of the kenosis: that Christ, though able at any moment to access his divine attributes, never once did. Listen for how that reading changes the meaning of the wilderness temptation, and notice how it makes Christ more worthy of worship, not less.
The session opens by rehearsing where the last one landed. The Definition of Chalcedon confessed Christ one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man, natures that can be neither divided nor commingled, each retaining fully what it was. The class recalls the three failed options: Nestorianism, which split Christ into two persons; Apollinarianism, God in a body without a human mind; and Eutychianism, the blended mixture that could represent no one, since no one else has a mixed nature. The conclusion carried forward is the test for everything that follows: we had to be represented one hundred percent, all of who we are, and that is what Christ became.
The teachers open the biblical study with a saying they admit they cannot source: many people have sought to be God, but only one God has sought to be man. That, they insist, is the issue at the heart of every gospel conversation; what a person does with Christ, God and man, is the foundation that separates Christian belief from everything else. Incarnation means in the flesh, the eternal Son of God become flesh, and John 1:14 anchors it: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. Under the incarnation the session takes up two subjects in turn: the virgin birth and the kenosis, closing with the question of whether Christ could sin.
The virgin birth means that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit in a woman who had never had a sexual relationship, with no male seed contributing to his humanity. When the angel answered Mary question, how can this be, since I am a virgin, he said only that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her; taken at face value the text is not purporting to explain what happened in the womb, only that something miraculous did. The teachers then lay out facts that surprise many students: the miracle is in the conception, not the birth itself; only Matthew and Luke explicitly mention it, never Paul or John; the birth narratives give no theological explanation of why Christ was to be born of a virgin; and the virgin birth was not part of the earliest Christian preaching, which centered on the death and resurrection. None of that questions whether it happened; it marks how much the text leaves open.
Matthew says the virgin birth fulfills Isaiah 7:14, and the teachers slow down over how. In context, Isaiah gives King Ahaz a sign to be fulfilled in Isaiah own lifetime: a young woman will conceive and bear a son, and before the child grows up, the two nations Ahaz fears will be destroyed, which is exactly what history records within about fifteen years. The Hebrew word almah has a wide semantic range: it can mean virgin but need not; it is chiefly a term of age. A reader before Matthew would rightly say the prophecy had already been fulfilled. But when Matthew quotes the verse in Greek, he uses a word with only one meaning, biological virgin, and applies it to Mary. The prophecy is refulfilled in a way far more magnificent than originally seen. The teachers note that the old litmus test, by which translating almah as young woman marked one a liberal, has faded now that a thoroughly evangelical translation renders it exactly that way, and they ask the class to hold the passage with honest tension rather than naive certainty.
Matthew does this more than once. When Joseph carries Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod, Matthew says it fulfills the prophecy, out of Egypt I called my son; but the text he cites is not predictive at all, it looks back to the Exodus, God calling Israel out of Egypt. Matthew is using a typological, even Jewish pesher, way of reading that finds Christ in texts their own prophets would not have seen as prophetic. The teachers are frank about the difficulty: if we interpreted the Old Testament the way Matthew does, we would be laughed out of town, because our method is historical, grammatical, and literal, reading texts in context. They resolve it carefully: Matthew apostolic office carried an authority, and God stamp of approval rests on what he wrote, but that hermeneutic is not ours to copy.
Since the text is silent on the why, the teachers walk through the candidate reasons, grading each. To fulfill Isaiah 7:14: yes, but only as the deeper fulfillment Matthew alone could see. To point to the uniqueness of Christ: certainly it does that, marking him from birth as someone different. To substantiate his deity: possible, but the teachers resist turning a miracle into a genetic mechanism, as if deity required the Spirit for a father. The most theologically defensible reason is to substantiate his humanity: to give Christ an ancestral lineage, linking him to Adam and to us. Had he simply appeared, a whole new creation like a reverse of Enoch, he could have died only for creatures like himself; to redeem us he had to be connected to us, which also throws light on the strange early promise that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent head.
A further proposal is that the virgin birth spared Christ the sin that travels through the male line, and to weigh it the teachers define two concepts the next course will develop. Imputed sin is the guilt of Adam sin credited directly to us, so that we are held guilty as if we had sinned in the garden; inherited sin is the tendency toward sin passed down through our nature. It is theologically conceivable that both come through the father, so that a virgin-born Christ carries neither, but the teachers hold this gently: it is not explicit in the text, and it carries the startling corollary that a sin nature descends only from fathers, never from mothers. What must be affirmed either way is that Christ, like Adam before the fall, began without imputed or inherited sin and yet fully represents us, since Adam did. The Roman Catholic solution, the immaculate conception, actually concerns Mary, not Jesus: she was preserved from sin at her own conception so that Christ would be protected in her womb; the teachers observe that this only pushes the problem back a generation, and God could as easily have done for Christ directly what the doctrine claims he did for Mary. Anselm is quoted on the fittingness of it all: as death entered by the disobedience of man, life is restored by the obedience of man; as sin began from a woman, the author of salvation is born of a woman; as the devil conquered man by the fruit of a tree, he is conquered by a man through the suffering of the tree, an indescribable beauty in the manner of our redemption.
The kenosis, from the Greek verb meaning to make empty, names what Philippians 2 describes: Christ, existing in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself to obedience unto death on a cross. Four options are laid out. Did he divest himself of his divine attributes, no longer possessing them? That theory is simply wrong; God cannot cease to be God. Did he merely veil his glory, everything still functioning underneath, as the transfiguration momentarily unveiled? Did he lay aside the prerogative to exercise his attributes, retaining the ability but forgoing the use? Or does emptying speak simply of taking on an additional nature and dying? The teachers position is the third: for the entire time of his earthly mission, Christ laid aside all access to his divine attributes, able always, accessing never, living in complete submission to the Holy Spirit.
On this reading, Christ lived as the prophets lived: knowing dependently and knowing partially, receiving from the Spirit what his mission required and no more. It explains the hardest verse in the Gospels, that of the day and hour of his return no one knows, not the angels, nor the Son, but the Father alone: the time of his coming was not revealed to him because it was not something he needed to know. It transforms the wilderness temptation: there is nothing intrinsically evil about turning a stone to bread, so the real temptation was to access his deity, to disavow the conditions of the incarnation and draw on omnipotence to relieve the discomforts of self-abasement, and he would not. A christology volume the teachers commend from the Contours of Christian Theology series argues just this: Christ had to obey without knowing the facts, believe without full information, and forego the comforts omniscience would have brought, refusing to let go of the rules of engagement. The teachers add a crucial distinction: divine prerogatives are not divine attributes. When Christ forgave sin he exercised a prerogative of his divine person, and that evidences his deity; his miracles, by contrast, were the Spirit attestation of a prophet message, which is why the prophets before him did similar works. Far from lowering Christ, this reading raises him: at every moment he could have turned on the deity, and for our sake he never did.
The prayer in Gethsemane, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done, seems to have Christ seeking a loophole he had just condemned: only days earlier, when Peter suggested he would never suffer, Christ answered, get behind me, Satan, and moments after the prayer, when Peter swung a sword, he asked, shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me? The teachers read the question as didactic, a teaching question: in effect, Father, if there were another way, and I know there is not, your will be done. Prayed alone yet preserved by the Spirit for the church, it is the one passage that assures us there was no other way for redemption to be accomplished; had the cup been able to pass, it would have passed. The suffering was utterly real, and the reading takes nothing from it; but a Christ hunting a loophole would have gone anywhere except the garden, the one place Judas knew to find him. He set his face toward Jerusalem, and he went to the garden.
The final question of the course: was Christ able to sin? The peccability side answers yes, he was able to sin, but able not to, and he made it through without sinning. Its arguments come from real texts. Hebrews 2 says he was made like his brethren in all things, tempted in what he suffered, so that he can come to the aid of those who are tempted; how can he aid the tempted if his own temptation carried no possibility of falling? Hebrews 4 says we have a high priest able to sympathize with our weaknesses, and our greatest weakness is the possibility of falling. Luke 4 says he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness and tempted by the devil for forty days, and temptation seems real only if one can succumb. Syllogisms follow: humanity is able to sin, Christ was fully human, therefore Christ was able to sin.
The impeccability side answers no, he was not able to sin. James 1 says God cannot be tempted by evil, and God cannot sin; if Christ is God, there could be no inward temptation rising from a sinful nature, whatever assaults came from outside. The teachers press the hidden assumption in the other side case: being able to sin is not what makes a person human. Adam was fully human, and it was not the tree in the garden that made him so; our propensity toward sin belongs to inherited nature, not to humanity as such. Christ never told a lie to cover a previous lie and never had a sinful desire produce temptation from within, so in that sense he does not identify with the sinner every experience; yet as Grudem has argued, only the person who resists temptation to the end ever feels its full weight, the way only the lifter who raises the bar all the way knows how heavy it is. We give in early; Christ never gave in, and so was tempted beyond anything we have known, including temptations unique to him, like stones into bread. Patton lands where many theologians have: it was theoretically possible for Christ as man to sin, and actually impossible because he was God. And with that, the course of trinitarianism closes.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Which New Testament writers explicitly mention the virgin birth?
2. Where is the miracle of the virgin birth actually located?
3. What place did the virgin birth have in the earliest Christian preaching?
4. What was the near fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14?
5. Why does Matthew quotation of Isaiah 7:14 say more than the Hebrew original?
6. What is the difficulty with the prophecy, out of Egypt I called my son?
7. Which reason for the virgin birth do the teachers call the most theologically defensible?
8. Why could Christ not simply have appeared as a whole new creation?
9. What is the difference between imputed sin and inherited sin?
10. What do the teachers observe about the immaculate conception?
11. Which kenosis option do the teachers reject outright as wrong?
12. What is the teachers own understanding of the kenosis?
13. On this reading, why did Christ not know the day and hour of his return?
14. What was the real temptation in the wilderness, since there is nothing intrinsically evil about turning stone to bread?
15. What distinction do the teachers draw between prerogatives and attributes?
16. How do the teachers read the prayer, let this cup pass from me?
17. Where does Patton land on whether Christ could have sinned?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 10 is complete.
The teachers model holding the virgin birth firmly while admitting how much Scripture leaves unexplained. Where else in your faith do you need to distinguish between what you affirm and how well you can explain it, and why is that honesty a strength rather than a weakness?
If Christ never accessed his divine attributes, then he faced every day as you do: with partial knowledge, dependent on the Spirit. How does that change the way you read his temptations, his prayers, and his obedience, and the way you approach your own?
The wilderness temptation was the pull to turn on the deity, to escape the limits he had accepted for our sake. What are the shortcuts you are tempted to take out of the limitations God has assigned you, and what would it look like to keep your own rules of engagement?
Grudem picture says only the one who resists temptation to the end feels its full weight. How does it change your view of Christ to say he was tempted beyond anything you have known, and how does Hebrews turn that into comfort for the tempted?
Looking back over the whole course, from worldviews to the attributes of God to the Trinity to the God-man: which session most changed how you think about God, and what will you do with it?
The passage the whole session turns on, from Philippians 2: have this attitude among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself in obedience as far as death, even death on a cross.
The course of trinitarianism ends here. The lecture own directions for the close: meet with others over the group discussion questions; read Philippians 2 and Hebrews 2 and 4 slowly in light of the session; and carry the Chalcedonian Christ into your reading of the Gospels, watching him keep the rules of engagement all the way to the cross. The Theology Program continues in its next course with the doctrine of humanity and sin, where several questions deferred in this session, imputed and inherited sin among them, are taken up in full.