Why this is useful to know: The language we use about Jesus creates a picture in the mind. If that picture presents God merely occupying a human body, Christ’s humanity becomes an instrument rather than a complete human life. If it presents God joining Himself to an independently acting man, the one Christ begins to divide into two. Learning to speak carefully is not dry conformity to a council. It helps us know and trust the Jesus whom Scripture actually reveals.
Suggested excerpt: A metaphor can remain in the imagination long after its qualifications have been forgotten. The question is not merely whether a teacher intends to say that Jesus is fully God and fully man. What Christ do the teacher’s words actually teach the hearer to imagine?
Primary passages: John 1:1–3, 14; Luke 2:40, 52; Matthew 26:38–39; Colossians 1:15–17; Philippians 2:5–8; Hebrews 1:1–3; 2:14–18
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The incarnation is often explained through pictures.
God put on humanity as we put on a garment. God entered a body as a driver enters a vehicle. God filled a human body as a hand fills a glove.
Such comparisons are memorable. That is precisely why they require care.
A theological statement may be qualified in the next sentence, but a picture can remain in the imagination long after its qualifications have been forgotten. The listener may remember that Jesus was called “fully God and fully man,” yet continue to picture an active divine person operating a passive human shell.
That matters because the picture will begin interpreting Scripture. Who prayed in Gethsemane? Who grew in wisdom? Who felt sorrow? Who obeyed? Was Christ’s humanity a complete human life, or was His body simply the visible instrument through which God acted?
The problem is not confined to careless modern preaching. Christians were struggling with its underlying questions in the early fourth century, even as they defended the eternal deity of the Son. Eustathius of Antioch saw one danger with unusual clarity: if the divine Word merely took the place of a human soul inside Christ’s body, then Jesus did not possess complete humanity. The Gospel’s descriptions of His fear, sorrow and suffering would also appear to belong directly to a changeable divine nature.
Eustathius’s answer protected something essential. It also exposed another difficulty. Once the Word and Christ’s complete humanity were carefully distinguished, how should Christians confess their indivisible unity? How could they avoid turning Jesus into a divine person dwelling within a second human subject?
This is sometimes called “underdeveloped Christology.” The expression can be useful, provided it does not mean that the early Christians simply knew less Bible or believed in an unfinished Christ. The biblical realities were already present. What remained underdeveloped was the language capable of preserving all of them together.
What must be held together
John does not say that the Word began to exist in Mary’s womb:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1
Nor does he say that the Word merely visited or controlled a man:
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
John 1:14
The One who became flesh is the eternal Word through whom all created things came into being (John 1:3). The incarnation therefore did not create the person of the Son. The eternal Son Himself entered a genuinely human history.
Scripture is equally insistent that His humanity was real.
Jesus was born. He grew. Luke says that He “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). He became hungry and weary. He experienced grief and anguish. In Gethsemane He said:
“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”
Matthew 26:38
Hebrews says that He was made like His brethren, suffered when tempted and became a merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:17–18). The same epistle says that He was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).
These are not scenes performed by God behind a human mask. The Son truly lived them as man.
At the same time, incarnation did not mean subtraction from deity. The Son did not cease to possess what belongs eternally to God. During the same saving mission in which He humbled Himself and took the form of a servant, all things continued to consist by Him (Colossians 1:17), and He continued to uphold all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3).
The confession must therefore hold together four truths:
- Jesus Christ is one personal subject, the eternal Son.
- He possesses the complete divine nature and never ceases to be God.
- He assumed complete humanity, not merely a body.
- His deity and humanity remain distinct without separating Him into two Christs.
Most inadequate pictures preserve one or two of these truths by quietly sacrificing another.
Nicaea answered one question and opened another
The Council of Nicaea met in AD 325 principally to answer the claim that the Son was a creature. Its confession that He is “begotten, not made” and “of one substance with the Father” placed Him decisively on the Creator’s side of the Creator–creature distinction.
But saying who the Son eternally is in relation to the Father did not by itself explain everything involved in His becoming man.
How much of human nature did He assume? Did He possess a human rational soul and mind? Were His suffering and obedience experiences of His divine nature? Was the Word spatially enclosed within His body? When He acted, did God act, did a man act, or did two subjects act together?
Nicaea had not produced a complete technical grammar for answering those questions. That is not a criticism of the council. It is a reminder that theological controversy usually advances by asking one precise question at a time. A formula written to exclude one error does not automatically resolve every related problem.
Eustathius stood near the beginning of this next stage.
He was bishop of Antioch and a vigorous opponent of Arius. His surviving theological writings are frustratingly incomplete: one substantial work survives, while much of the material relevant to his Christology comes through fragments quoted, translated or preserved by later authors. Some texts once assigned to him have been disputed, and modern reconstructions have changed as new material has been edited. We should therefore resist turning him into a perfectly tidy representative of an “Antiochene school.”
Nevertheless, one feature of his thought is clear. Eustathius insisted that Jesus possessed a human soul.
The problem of the soulless Christ
Some fourth-century Christians described the incarnation according to a pattern scholars call Logos–sarx Christology—“Word–flesh” Christology. In its starkest form, the components looked like this:
divine Word + human body
The Word supplied the body’s directing principle in place of a human rational soul. This made the unity of Christ easy to picture. There was one controlling subject. But it achieved that simplicity by removing something essential to being human.
It also supplied an argument against the full deity of the Word.
The Gospels attribute weakness and suffering to Jesus. He grows weary, becomes troubled, experiences sorrow and undergoes death. If the Word occupies the place of the human soul, those changing experiences appear to reveal the condition of the Word Himself. Arians could point to them as evidence that the Son was passible and mutable—not the unchangeable God, but a lesser heavenly being capable of alteration and suffering.
Eustathius saw that the argument depended partly upon an incomplete account of Christ’s humanity. The sorrowful soul of which Jesus spoke was not a poetic name for the divine Word. It was genuinely human. Christ’s body was of the same human reality as our bodies, and His rational soul was of the same human reality as our souls.
This was not an attempt to protect God from close contact with humanity. It was an attempt to take the incarnation seriously. Christ came to save human beings, not human bodies considered apart from their inner life. He assumed what He came to heal.
That principle would later be stated memorably by Gregory of Nazianzus: what has not been assumed has not been healed. A Christ without a human mind cannot redeem the human mind by living a complete human life of faithfulness and obedience.
The distinction also helps us speak of the cross. The Son of God truly suffered and died; Christians must never turn the crucifixion into the suffering of someone other than the Son. Yet He suffered and died according to the humanity He had assumed. The divine nature did not become mortal or cease to sustain creation. The person who died in the flesh is the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8).
That sentence requires care, but it is not evasion. It identifies both who suffered—the eternal Son—and how He could suffer—in the mortal humanity that was truly His.
Was the Word confined inside the body?
Eustathius also resisted the idea that the infinite Word was enclosed within Christ’s body.
Every human body has dimensions. During His earthly ministry Jesus could be in Nazareth or Jerusalem, in a boat or on a mountain. He travelled from one place to another. According to His humanity, He lived a local and measurable life.
But the divine nature is not a material object. When the Son assumed humanity, deity was not compressed into the dimensions of a body. The Word did not stop sustaining the universe outside the boundaries of Christ’s flesh. He remained what He eternally is while beginning to live what He had not previously lived: a truly human life.
This gives us an important distinction:
Christ was locally present according to His humanity while remaining unlimited according to His deity.
The distinction does not place two Sons in different locations. It tells us that the one Son possesses two different orders of existence. What is true of His human nature need not therefore become a limitation upon His divine nature.
The incarnation was addition, not reduction. The Son took the form of a servant; He did not surrender the form of God (Philippians 2:6–8). He accepted the conditions of a human life without ceasing to be the One in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9).
God was not confined within Christ. God the Son was personally and inseparably united to the humanity He made His own.
Where Eustathius still leaves a question
Eustathius was right to distinguish Christ’s human experiences from the properties of the divine nature. He was right to confess a rational human soul. He was right to deny that the Word became spatially restricted when He assumed a body.
But the language used to protect those truths could create a different picture.
Some Eustathian fragments speak of “the human being of Christ,” the “God-bearing man,” or the Word dwelling in and operating through the humanity. In their anti-Arian setting, those expressions identify the genuinely human subject of hunger, sorrow and death. They prevent every Gospel description of weakness from being transferred without distinction to the divine nature.
Yet they can also sound as though the eternal Word assumed or inhabited an already personal man. If the humanity is pictured as its own acting subject and the Word as another, have we preserved one Jesus or placed two agents side by side?
Older scholarship sometimes answered by calling Eustathius a forerunner of Nestorianism. That description is too confident. The evidence is fragmentary, the later controversy had not yet supplied its settled meanings, and recent scholarship has challenged the old habit of dividing early Christology into two neatly opposed “Antiochene” and “Alexandrian” schools. A writer should not be condemned retrospectively for failing to use vocabulary developed through controversies that had not yet occurred.
The concern is not entirely imaginary, however. Sophie Cartwright’s close reading of the anti-Arian fragments finds that Eustathius sometimes distinguishes the Word and “the human being of Christ” as agents, assigning the saving action principally to the humanity strengthened by the indwelling Word. In one especially unusual interpretation of John 3:13, he appears to place Christ’s human soul simultaneously in heaven and on earth. If that reconstruction is correct, Eustathius was doing more than using language that merely sounds awkward to later ears. His determination to protect the human agent and the impassible Word placed extraordinary weight upon the humanity while leaving their personal unity unclear.
Nevertheless, the pressure is real. Eustathius could distinguish the Word from the complete humanity more readily than he could explain how the two are the one Christ. His Christology was not underdeveloped because he lacked conviction. It was underdeveloped at the point of personal unity.
The later Church would need to say that Christ’s humanity was complete but did not constitute a second human person alongside the Son. The eternal Son is the personal subject of both the divine and human life. He does not merely dwell within another person. The man Jesus is the Son living as man.
A modern hand inside a glove
This ancient problem has not disappeared. It survives in many of the simple images Christians use when explaining the incarnation.
Ray Comfort has sometimes said that God created a human body for Himself and filled it “as a hand fills a glove.” I happen to love Ray Comfort and his ministry. His zeal for evangelism, his clarity about sin and judgement, and his desire to bring people to Christ have helped an enormous number of Christians. I am not suggesting that he consciously denies Christ’s complete humanity, and I am certainly not attempting to label him a heretic.
I am using one repeated expression as an illustration of a much wider modern pattern.
The hand-and-glove comparison is memorable because it is easy to visualise. The hand is the living agent. The glove provides the visible form through which it acts. But that is also the problem. A glove has no mind, will, emotion or life of its own. It contributes nothing except a passive material covering.
Taken literally, the image does not present a divine person assuming complete human nature. It presents a divine person animating a human body:
divine hand + bodily glove
That is closer to the ancient Logos–sarx or later Apollinarian danger than to Nestorianism. Nestorian-sounding language tends to suggest two active subjects joined together. The glove picture has only one active subject, but the price of that simplicity is a humanity emptied of its human soul, mind and will.
Again, this does not establish what Ray Comfort privately believes. A person may intend an orthodox truth while choosing an image that communicates something less than that truth. We must distinguish:
- what the teacher intends;
- what the words or image actually depict;
- what the hearer may consequently learn to imagine.
The third concern is pastoral, not merely academic.
The Christ created in the imagination
Words about Christ matter because they form the Christ whom people imagine they are trusting.
If I repeatedly say that God “wore” a body, my hearers may imagine the humanity as a costume. If I say that God “moved into” Jesus, they may imagine a holy man inhabited by another person. If I divide every Gospel scene between “the God part” and “the human part,” they may imagine two centres of action. If I say that the infinite God squeezed Himself into a body, they may imagine that the Son ceased to uphold the universe while He lay in the manger.
None of those pictures may be what I consciously intend. But a metaphor teaches by presenting something to the mind, not merely by carrying the private intention of its speaker.
This is why precision matters.
The point is not uniformity to confessions and councils as an end in itself. Technical formulas can be repeated without understanding, charity or worship. A person can pass an examination in Christology while remaining cold towards Christ.
But the best doctrinal formulas arose because Christians discovered that familiar words could conceal radically different pictures. Arians could call Jesus “Son,” “Lord” and even “God” while placing Him among created beings. Others could say that the Word “became flesh” while denying Him a human rational soul. Still others could confess complete deity and complete humanity while describing their conjunction so loosely that Christ appeared to divide into two.
The councils did not make Jesus into what He is. At their best, they placed verbal guardrails around the apostolic witness so that one biblical truth could not be affirmed by sacrificing another.
Precision-driven theology need not be dry theology. Dry theology catalogues approved terms without showing why they matter. Living theology asks what reality those terms protect and how a distorted picture would change our knowledge of Christ.
When the incarnation is mocked
The distinction also equips Christians to answer the deliberately crude questions used by some sceptics and religious polemicists: “Did God die?”, “Did God use the toilet?” or even, “Did God wet the bed?” Muslim street apologetics is one setting in which Christians may encounter them, but the objections are not uniquely Islamic. Their force comes from making incarnation appear absurd by transferring every human experience directly to the divine nature. The Qur’an uses a more restrained form of the argument when it stresses that Christ and Mary both ate food (Qur’an 5:75).
The simplest response is to ask two questions: Who acted? And according to which nature?
Did God die? The divine nature did not cease to exist. Yet God the Son truly underwent human death in the humanity He had made His own. We should not say that “only the human nature died,” as though a nature were a separate person. The person who died was the Son; the nature in which death was possible was His humanity.
Did He experience ordinary bodily functions? Jesus possessed a complete and functioning human body, so ordinary digestion belongs to the reality He assumed. That does not mean the divine nature has a digestive system. It means that the eternal Son did not pretend to live a bodily life. Normal bodily processes are neither sinful nor an argument against His deity.
Did He wet the bed? Scripture does not say, and complete humanity does not require Christ to have experienced every event that can happen to a human being. We need neither invent the event nor act as though morally innocent infant dependence would disprove the incarnation.
The Christian need not be embarrassed by Christ’s humiliation. The manger, hunger, weariness and cross are not details the gospel accidentally permits; they belong to its wonder. The objection succeeds only against the claim that the divine nature was converted into a needy body. Christianity teaches instead that the divine Son remained what He eternally is while making a complete human life truly His own.
Speaking more faithfully
No analogy can contain the incarnation. If one is used, its limits should be identified immediately.
It is better to begin with the biblical confession itself:
The eternal Son assumed a complete human nature—body, rational soul, mind and will—without ceasing to possess the complete divine nature. The one person Jesus Christ is therefore truly God and truly man.
Several clarifications protect the meaning:
- The Son did not become a human person by joining Himself to someone who already existed. His human life began in Mary’s womb, but the person living that life is the eternal Son.
- His humanity was not a costume, shell or instrument. It included everything essential to sinless human existence.
- His human development, obedience, sorrow and suffering were genuine, not appearances performed by an impassible actor.
- His divine nature did not become finite, changeable or mortal. The Son experienced genuine human limitation according to His humanity without ceasing to be unlimited according to His deity.
- Divine and human are not blended into a third kind of nature. Each remains real and distinguishable in the one Christ.
The later Definition of Chalcedon expressed these boundaries with four famous negatives: without confusion, without change, without division and without separation. Those words do not explain the mystery away. They tell us which imagined solutions would destroy something Scripture requires us to confess.
“Without confusion” and “without change” protect the reality of both natures. Humanity does not become deity, and deity does not become a reduced or passible form of itself.
“Without division” and “without separation” protect the identity of the one Son. The miracles do not belong to one Christ while the sufferings belong to another. The same Lord acts through the capacities proper to each nature.
That is why Christians may say that the Lord of glory was crucified, that God purchased the Church with His own blood, and that the man Christ Jesus mediates between God and humanity (1 Corinthians 2:8; Acts 20:28; 1 Timothy 2:5). The person is one. The natures remain distinct. The blood is human blood, but the One whose blood it is is God the Son.
Not an empty glove
Jesus Christ is not an empty body moved by a divine hand.
Nor is He a human person accompanied, inspired or inhabited by the Word.
He is the Word made flesh: the eternal Son living a complete human life while remaining everything He eternally is as God.
The soul that was exceeding sorrowful in Gethsemane was a genuinely human soul. The will submitted to the Father was a genuinely human will. The body nailed to the cross was a genuinely human body. Yet the “I” who sorrowed, obeyed and gave Himself was no one other than the eternal Son.
His humanity does not stand between us and Him. It is His humanity.
His deity does not remain at a safe distance from the manger, the wilderness or the cross. The divine Son personally entered all of them in the nature He assumed.
And while He lay in the manger, walked the roads of Galilee and slept in the boat, He did not cease to be the One through whom the worlds were made and by whom all things consist.
The incarnation did not limit God by changing the divine nature into something finite. It revealed the astonishing freedom and humility of the Son: without ceasing to be unlimited God, He made a limited human life truly His own.
That truth deserves language as clear, warm and precise as we can make it—not to satisfy an historical council, but so that those whom we teach may see the biblical Christ rather than a memorable substitute created by our metaphors.
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Study notes and historical references
- Our knowledge of Eustathius is limited by the condition of his surviving corpus. His only substantially complete work is On the Witch of Endor; much of the Christological evidence survives in fragments preserved by later authors and in several languages. For a survey of the textual and interpretative difficulties, see Sophie Cartwright, “Eustathius of Antioch in Modern Research”.
- The older English monograph is R. V. Sellers, *Eustathius of Antioch and His Place in the Early History of Christian Doctrine* (Cambridge University Press, 1928). It remains useful, but its reconstruction should be read alongside newer scholarship rather than treated as final.
- For a recent extended treatment of Eustathius’s understanding of body and soul, see Sophie Cartwright, *The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch* (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially the discussion of Christ’s human soul and the anti-Arian context.
- A late-fourth- or early-fifth-century epitome preserving Eustathian material strengthened the evidence that his opponents denied a human soul to the incarnate Christ. See Karl-Heinz Uthemann, “Eustathios von Antiochien wider den seelenlosen Christus der Arianer”, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 10.3 (2006), 472–521.
- The terms Logos–sarx (“Word–flesh”) and Logos–anthrōpos (“Word–man”) are scholarly descriptions of recurring Christological patterns. They can clarify different emphases, but they should not be used to force every ancient writer into one of two fixed schools. Recent Eustathian scholarship particularly cautions against treating “Alexandrian” and “Antiochene” Christology as two uniform systems already complete in the early fourth century.
- Eustathius’s references to “the human being of Christ” and the “God-bearing human being” occur in anti-Arian fragments. In context they distinguish Christ’s genuine human experience from the unchangeable divine nature of the Word. Their potentially divisive sound explains both later accusations and the need for caution before calling Eustathius a proto-Nestorian.
- Cartwright’s fuller reconstruction argues that the distinction between divine and human agency became sharper in Eustathius’s anti-subordinationist writings and discusses his unusual application of John 3:13 to Christ’s human soul. See *The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch*, especially pp. 338–42. This interpretation strengthens the concern about personal unity while also showing why simple retrospective labels remain inadequate.
- Gregory of Nazianzus’s statement that “what has not been assumed has not been healed” appears in Letter 101, *To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius*. His target was the denial that Christ possessed a human rational mind.
- Ray Comfort’s hand-and-glove wording appears in published Living Waters material: “God created for Himself a human body and filled that body as a hand fills a glove.” See Ray Comfort, *How to Battle Depression and Suicidal Thoughts*, p. 37. The present article evaluates the picture produced by that sentence, not Comfort’s personal orthodoxy or the value of his wider ministry.
- Qur’an 5:75 reasons from the fact that Christ and Mary “both ate food” within a denial of Christ’s deity. See Qur’an 5:72–75. Christian teaching agrees that Jesus ate while rejecting the assumption that a divine person cannot assume a nature possessing genuinely human needs. The same underlying objection is also made outside Islamic apologetics.
- The Definition of Chalcedon confesses one and the same Christ “in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.” See The Definition of the Council of Chalcedon. Its terminology is later than Eustathius and should not simply be projected backwards as though the earlier controversies had already settled every word.
- Saying that the Son suffered “according to His humanity” does not assign the suffering to someone other than the Son. Nature answers what Christ is and identifies the capacities through which He acts; person answers who acts. The one who suffered is God the Son, while the nature in which suffering is possible is His humanity.