Jimmy Akin explains how we can say that Jesus, who shares in the eternal Divine nature, took on a finite, created body in the Incarnation.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Russell in Traverse City, Michigan. Russell, you’re watching on YouTube! Russell, you are on with Jimmy Akin.
Caller: Thank you so much, guys. First of all I wanna say, Jimmy, that Matt Fradd and I hung out a while ago, a few years ago, and he said how much you and I would get along because of our love for comic books, so I’m super excited right now.
Jimmy: Is that a pun? “Super excited?”
Caller: It’s totally a pun, you’re welcome. I just want to try to wrap my head around something, and I’m so glad I get to talk to you cuz I’m a big fanboy.
Jimmy: Another comic book term.
Caller: Yeah, exactly! So, I’m trying to wrap my head around God being eternal, Jesus being God, and the fact that He was incarnate, and I’m trying to, like, it seems to me–and I am totally open to being wrong–that His human nature is not his Eternal nature, so I’m trying to reconcile, like, did He have a body before He had a body in time? Or how–what’s the language I can use to explain that Jesus took on a body and that body is not something He had before He came into time? And so if you have anything to help it would be greatly appreciated.
Jimmy: Yeah, sure. So it doesn’t make any sense to talk about having a body that’s outside of time, because bodies are created entities, and they therefore occupy time, like all created entities.
And so God–being uncreated–in His Divine Nature does not have a body. He exists in the Eternal “now,” which is both spaceless and timeless, it exists outside of space and time; and actually, the way the Church conceives of eternity, it’s just another word for God Himself, He’s spaceless and timeless. And that means that every moment in history is equally present to God.
Now, at some moments in history, if you were, let’s say, way before the time of Christ, a thousand years before the time of Christ, then in 1000 BC, God did not have a body in time, because He had not yet incarnated. Then if you advance forward, and you get up to, let’s say, the year 3 BC, the year that the Incarnation likely happened at Jesus’ conception, then, all of a sudden, God has a body in time in that year. And then as you move forward in time, He–because Jesus continues to be incarnate–He has a body at every moment in time after that point.
So from God’s eternal perspective, God–outside of time–God has always been incarnate, starting in the year, let’s say, 3 BC and moving forward, but not previously. From God’s point of view, that’s the way it is now and always has been and always will be, because there’s no passage of time where God is. In the Eternal “now,” where God exists, God has always been incarnate in 3 BC or so and forward, but not previously.
Caller: And so does that mean that like, so, in the eternal now, was–totally–I feel like I’m on track here–so like, at 3 BC there was the human nature, hundred percent human, hundred percent divine, that all came together in that time period, and then from then on out He has both…then I have to say that union exists.
Jimmy: So Jesus’s divine nature has always existed, and his human nature came into existence somewhere around 3 BC, and has continuously been united with his Divine Nature since then.
Caller: This was really super helpful, thank you so much.