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Originally Posted by mizpeh
What do you mean when you say "God WAS the man"? How did God become a human spirit? Did he inherently cease to be God in the context of becoming a man?
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John says the Word was made flesh. Did the Word cease to be the Word when it was made flesh? He also says the Word was God, and was made flesh. Did the Word cease to be God when it was made flesh?
Obviously not. God cannot cease to exist, or cease to be whatever He is. God however can become a man, because that does not involve ceasing to be something, but rather taking on a new way of being. God 'took on himself human nature', isn't that what everyone says? So God became a man - that is what 'assuming to himself human nature' means, indeed, that is all it CAN mean because a Person, who has human nature, is a MAN (ie human being). So when God 'took human nature to himself' he began to exist as a man, a genuine human being. Yet, God did not cease to exist as God, such a thing is a logical impossibility.
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I have my own way of looking at this but I do not deny that the person who became flesh was God and I can without equivocation say that God walked on the earth, God died on the cross, and God rose from the grave as the man, Jesus Christ. And not like any of the examples you gave above using Dulle and Bernard. I'd like to hear your answers to my questions before I propose and explain another way to look at the incarnation of God.
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God did all those things, as a human being, did he not? Therefore, he did them 'as a man'. It was God who did them, via the human nature (the human existence). Dulle and Bernard seem, to me, to be trying to express a Biblical truth via trinitarian christological terminology, which derives from Greek pagan metaphysics. My point is that going that route, instead of simply sticking to the Biblical data and statements, leads to unnecessary complication of a simple fact - God became a man, died for us, rose again, and demonstrated to us in living technicolor the very character and will of God.
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