CELIBACY OF JESUS COMMUNICATING THE GOSPEL IN TODAY'S WORLD THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST

THE FIRST FOUR COUNCILS GNOSTIC AND OTHER NON-NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH

OPUS DEI MARY MAGDALENE NEW TESTAMENT WOMEN IN THE CHURCH

The Catechism of
the Catholic Church

Readings from the New American Bible

The Divinity of Christ

New Catholic Encyclopedia

3. DIVINITY

Christ’s divinity is in a true sense the basis of the Christian faith: with it stands or falls the religion named after Him. Of this central mystery this article (1) states the meaning as expressed in the Credo, (2) sketches the growth in the awareness of the Church, from Scripture to Credo, and (3) indicates the bearing on Christ’s mission and men’s salvation.

Meaning of the faith. When the Catholic Church confesses that Jesus Christ is God, it states a mystery be­yond men’s comprehension, yet it knows definitely what it means and does not mean to say. Christ is truly God: He is not a divinized or heavenly creature, as Gnostics said; or the first and greatest of God’s creatures, Word of God, as Arius held; or a God subordinate to the Father, as Semi-Arians said. He is not a man adopted as son of God, however unique and excellent adoptionists fancied His adoption to be. He is not a mere man, God’s minister of salvation, as Socinians and Unitarians felt compelled to say. Nor is the Jesus of history different from the Christ of faith, a man made into God by a process of APOTHEO­SIS, as Modernists and liberals once said and the de­mythologizers of the New Testament say today. The Church repudiates all such attempts at eluding the mys­tery, as it also discarded the view of ancient modalists, who, misunderstanding the Trinity, believed that Christ is not only consubstantial but identical with the Father.

The Church believes that Jesus Christ is true God, Son of God made man, the Second Person of the Trinity, who took unto Himself a human nature and so exists not only in the divine but also in a human nature: one divine Person in two natures. The man who in His earthly life was known as Jesus of Nazareth was not a human person made one, as Nestorius said, in a unique way of moral unity, with the Person of the Son of God. He was God, Son of the Father, made man for men’s salvation.

Reason and history are unable to prove the mystery as a fact. The eyewitnesses of Christ’s life saw the man in Jesus but did not see God; they saw only signs, the mir­acles, and on the strength of them believed in the divine power He claimed. Historical evidence about Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection can make His divinity rea­sonably acceptable or credible; it cannot prove it with logical stringency. To accept the divinity of Christ re­quires a free assent of faith assisted by the light of grace and justified before reason by guarantees of its truthfulness. Only so can one enter into the mystery of Christ’s divinity. No wonder rationalism rejects it and endeavors to explain “rationally” the facts of the life of Christ and of the history of Christianity.

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