Christianity: Incarnation and Redemption

A surface look of Jesus’ life would produce an overview such as this. Jesus’ mission on earth was to redeem humanity but there are many aspects of His ministry that can be understood at a deeper level. The events which transpired in His ministry could not be attributed to the man Jesus but to the divine side of his person. Without the intervention of God in Jesus the restoration and miracles would not have been possible. Working with Jesus was the Holy Spirit, in whom Jesus was led by in His life.

In the book On the Incarnation by Saint Athanasius many challenges of why God is the only God are confronted. It is justified that God is the one and only God through examples, parables and scripture. The covenant in which God came to the Earth in human form as Jesus Christ to bring salvation to all His people is known as the Incarnation and was unquestionably accomplished through Jesus Christ. The human race needed salvation because of one sin that affected the rest of humanity. God reached out through Jesus to guide us, “He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men” (Athanasius 2).

A surface look of Jesus’ life would produce an overview such as this. Jesus’ mission on earth was to redeem humanity but there are many aspects of His ministry that can be understood at a deeper level. The events which transpired in His ministry could not be attributed to the man Jesus but to the divine side of his person. Without the intervention of God in Jesus the restoration and miracles would not have been possible. Working with Jesus was the Holy Spirit, in whom Jesus was led by in His life.

In Romans, Paul said that God sacrificed his only son so that humans could be saved from sin: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The whole doctrine of this religion is based on a god sacrificing something dear to him for someone else as proof of his love for them, not because he expects anything in return. In this way, the concept of the sacrifice is very important in Pauline Christianity. It is not surprising that the sacrifice repeatedly appears in the texts of the New Testament.

Jesus was crucified on the cross so that our sins would be wiped clean and we could have another chance of eternal life with the Lord. Without Christ there would be no Christianity, which is why Jesus is so important to the Christian

With this Original Sin, corruption entered humanity never to leave until God the Father imposed His Word onto us so that we could be saved. This damaging corruption blinded us from seeing God in His own creation and in His own people. Never the less, God refused to abandon His people in a time of such great need for salvation. He chose to save them, but how? How could he destroy death and pay the debt of all humanity while remaining God?

What options did God have? Certainly, He could not just destroy the humans, for they were fashioned in the likeness of God Himself, and He could not simply decimate his creation (Athanasius 6). Repentance would not do either because through it the humans might return to their corruption, and it does not recall men from what is according to their nature (Athanasius 6). The human race owed a debt that had to be paid, and they paid that debt through death (Athanasius... ... middle of paper ... ...eternal life with Him in Heaven. Jesus, the Savior, was needed mainly because humanity was being led astray from the path of righteousness.

Showing that it was important for Jesus to be a human and spread his knowledge among us; to help us learn and be able to teach other through oral and written tradition. It was now necessary for Jesus to come for our salvation because “had he surrendered his body to death and then raised it at once…which showed him to be not only a man, but also a God the word” (Athanasius 14). This connects back to by why Jesus wants humans to believe that he died a human death. When God created the world “by faith is we understand that the world were framed by the word of God, so that the things which we see how did not come into being out of things which had previously appeared” (Athanasius... ... middle of paper ... ...ons. Jesus is the most qualified of the three Divine persons because Jesus wants to be on with us and with the world.

The early church fathers regarded Jesus as fully divine first, and then worked their way ‘down’ to his humanity. Their approach is considered to be Christology ‘from above’; wherein they presuppose the divinity of Jesus, seemingly disregarding the historical life and context of Jesus of Nazareth. Wolfhart Pannenberg was not comfortable with this interpretation of Jesus, thus he created his own theology, holding to the ‘from below’ approach. He argues that Christology must begin with the historical Jesus and center upon his resurrection, not his incarnation, as proof of his deity. It is through his resurrection that he is the Second Adam and is able to bring salvation to the world.

Believing that Jesus is the Lord not only at our time of death but through every aspect of our lives. We believe that we are all created from God and follow the word and fellowship beside him. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:27). You base everything around what is right and wrong in Gods eyes. And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).