IMAGE OF GOD IN THE PERSON OF JESUS

A Christian author explores the duality of Jesus’s nature in this nonfiction theological study.

For centuries, Christians have grappled with their faith’s conception of the duality of Jesus—one who is both fully human and fully divine—and the contemporary church still struggles to articulate this central, yet mysterious, doctrine. (“Postmodern people live in a materialist world,” writes Hiemstra, “where the only things thought to exist are those that we can touch, taste, smell, hear, or see.”) The final volume in a three-part series that focuses on the image of God, this book builds upon Image of God in the Parables (2023) and Image of the Holy Spirit and the Church (2023) to provide readers with a biblical study of Jesus’ humanity and divinity (referred to as “transcendence” throughout the book). Introductory chapters contextualize “The Transcendence Challenge,” highlighting, for instance, the conflicting Hebrew and Greek worldviews regarding the heart and the mind: While the Greek world, and its philosophical descendants in the West, emphasized a schism that separated the heart and mind into distinct spheres, the author suggests that the Bible’s Hebrew context saw a “unity of heart and mind,” which informed early Christian notions of a “Triune God” (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Divided into three sections, the book’s main body explores questions about the personhood and divinity of Jesus through the lenses of Old Testament prophecies, Pauline letters, and the Gospels.

While the text’s theology reads as distinctly Protestant, especially in its emphasis on the inerrancy and primacy of the Bible, its orthodoxy is balanced by an ecumenical approach that references sources across the denominational spectrum. One passage on healing, for instance, references the writings of Francis MacNutt, one of the leading figures within the Catholic Church’s Charismatic Movement. Most of the book’s teachings are conservative in nature, including warnings against sexual sins and an undefined “Cultural Marxism.” Liberal Christians may not agree with the book’s traditional takes; Catholic readers may similarly bump against the lack of engagement with their own, millennia-old theology. The omission of a discussion of transubstantiation in the presence of the Eucharist is particularly glaring, given the centrality of the body and blood of Jesus—aspects directly related to Jesus’s personhood, a focus of the book—in Catholic doctrine. This eliding of Catholic and Orthodox traditions leads to occasionally head-scratching claims, such as Hiemstra’s observation that the “transcendence problem facing postmodern people that fixates on the humanity of Christ is something new.” The existence of Ebionites—a Christian sect denounced by Irenaeus and other second-century Christians as heretical due to its preoccupation with Jesus’s humanity—points to the longevity of a debate that predates postmodernism. Doctrinal quibbles, however, are bound to occur in any work centered on Christian theology. Backed by a solid network of references and scholarly, if distinctly conservative, sources, this book offers an accessible introduction to a fundamental question of the Christian faith. While it delves deeply into complex theology, the book is written in a devotional style that includes not only biblical exegesis but also an abundance of relevant anecdotes and prayers that conclude each chapter. The text also includes questions for small group discussions and personal reflections.

An engaging study of the duality of Christ limited by its own theological biases.