God as Man: Armstrongism Missed the Mark on the Incarnation

 

Joseph, Jesus, Mary

God as Man

Armstrongism Missed the Mark on the Incarnation

By Scout

When he was born as Jesus Christ, he was flesh and blood, materialistic and could be seen, touched and felt.

― Herbert W. Armstrong, Mystery of the Ages, p.41, First Edition, 1985

We are in the Advent season and for many Christians the mind turns to the Incarnation.  I do not like the term incarnation.  It’s fine after you come to understand what it really means.  But at first cut it sounds like a narrow reference to the physical flesh.  Like the Advent is all about fleshliness.  But the incarnation isn’t about metabolism, cellular structure and endocrine secretions.  I would rather see the term “humanization” be used.  Humanization encompasses a larger span of meaning.  But who am I to meddle with church terminology?

An abstract of this essay, if you don’t want to read the rest, is that the Christian doctrine of Incarnation means that Jesus was fully God and fully man when he was on this earth.  And now he is still fully God and fully man.  The Armstrongist doctrine is that Jesus was fully God as the Logos but was transformed fully into the flesh as Jesus.  Then Jesus was resurrected and glorified as God. Jesus was never, ever fully God and fully man.  He was always one or the other.  And the Armstrongist model of the incarnation is in error.  And the erroneous view is not supported by exegesis. That is my theme in brief.  

Disclaimer: Before I start, I have to say that I am not really sure what Armstrongism declares concerning the incarnation.  I searched an archive of Armstrongist literature and only found the term “incarnation” in connection with pagan belief or purported pagan belief.  One would have to conclude that Armstrongism does not really have a strong doctrine of the incarnation.  There are just some scattered statements.  Denominationally, Armstrongism takes great pride in its rejection of Christmas and its meaning based on the illogic of pagan connections and calendar calculations but theologically and exegetically the denominations seem to be absent from class. 

The Conjectural Armstrongist “Model” of Incarnation

Armstrongism does not have a well-defined, comprehensive model for the Incarnation.  I am surprised by this hole in their theology.  The Incarnation may seem peripheral but it is directly related to the Antichrist.  In 2 John 1:7 we have: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.”  Since Armstrongists are interested in all things prophetic, it seems like they would have a finely parsed doctrine of the Incarnation. Lacking a clear, coherent statement of the doctrine, the most I can do is develop a “strawman” that I believe represents the Armstrongist view.  The strawman is built on the pre-1995 writings of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG).  My strawman may not reflect what current Armstrongism intends.  If there are counterpoints, I would welcome the debate.  I just do not know who credibly speaks for Armstrongism at this time.  This underscores the fact that Armstrongism is no longer a monolithic doctrine but a decentralized collection of somewhat divergent beliefs.

My guess is that it is safe to start by saying that Armstrongism rejects the orthodox Christian view of the Incarnation.  The orthodox view is that Jesus was fully God and fully human and remains so to this day – in a nutshell. The Armstrongist belief is that Jesus was fully God in the pre-existence.  Then he was made flesh, that is, he became human. And this means that his ontology changed.  He no longer had a divine ontology but rather a human ontology.  His essence was now different.  In authority, he was yet God.  But he no longer had the divine capabilities of God because he had emptied himself of the divine ontology.  If he did anything miraculous during the period his was flesh, it was done through angels or the Holy Spirit.  Then when Jesus died, he was resurrected and glorified and regained his divine ontology.  So, Jesus was fully God, then became fully man instead and then back to fully God. 

It would be naïve of me to believe that all the denominations of Armstrongism now on the land would agree with this characterization.  It is likely that there will never be among Armstrongists a single view of the Incarnation.  Page 41 in the First Edition MOA is as close as we can ever get to a doctrine-like statement.  

Fully God and Fully Man: Where Armstrongism Misses the Mark

In brief, the orthodox view of the Incarnation is that Jesus was fully God as the Logos, then when he came to live with us he limited himself and became fully human but without losing his full divine ontology and when he was resurrected he became a single Person with two natures, one divine and one human.  This dual nature in one being is referred to as the hypostatic union.  We can make up a term to refer to the state and operation of these two conjoined natures but nobody knows how it happens.  To our eyes, it is a miracle. 

In critiquing the Armstrongist view, the first question that comes to mind is whether it is even existentially feasible.  Can someone undergo a change in ontology and still be identified as the same being?  If the Logos somehow were re-made as the human Jesus, would that not be like destroying the original and making a scaled down replica?  And could the human Jesus really be remade as God – the finite becoming infinite?  This idea would fit well with the Armstrongist concept of humans becoming God-as-God-is-God, but I have my doubts that ontology can be flipped back and forth.

We have no laboratory where we can conduct experiments concerning changes in ontology.  Such change is not known in the Nature that we are familiar with.  What we do have are the non-experimental and pre-emptive declarations of God himself.  In Malachi 3:6, we have the statement, “For I am the LORD (Yahweh), I change not.”  The way this is couched verbally, one receives the distinct impression that one of the attributes of Yahweh is that he does not change.  This presents a problem to the Armstrongist view which posits that God did change in his very essence.  The Logos changed from God to a human being and then back again.  The Christian view is that God does not change and is immutable.  And when the Logos became incarnate, he did not change his Deity but limited it and acquired an additional nature – that of a human being. But human ontology is created and Jesus was the Creator.  So, it is not like subsuming the human ontology is really a change in the divine ontology.

There are other inconsistencies.  Jesus came to earth as a King.  He was the King of the Kingdom of God.  He stated in John 18:36, “My Kingdom is not of the world.”  But if Jesus were only a flesh and blood human as Armstrongism asserts, he could not be the King of the Kingdom of God.  Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:50, “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”  If Jesus were only human then he was totally corruptible.  So, one is inevitably led to the conclusion that he was much more than just a human being and Armstrongism was wide of the mark. 

HWA said many times that the reason that Jesus could pay for the sins of the entirety of humanity is because he is God our Creator and is worth more than all of us.  I agree with this.  It only makes sense.  But if Jesus were nothing more than a corruptible human being at his death, if he had lost his ontology as God, he was worth only one person and HWA’s arithmetic fails.

In the last analysis, the scripture states that Jesus was still God when he was on this earth.  Not just by designation but by ontology, by his existential essence.  Paul states in Colossians 2:9, “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead (Greek, theotes, the state of being God) bodily.”  Even while in a human body, Jesus was carrying with him inherently all the fulness of the Deity.  And if all this still seems equivocal, there is the explicit statement of Doubting Thomas in John 20:28.  Thomas explicitly refers to Jesus as “ho theos.”  This is a Greek locution that uses the phrase “the God” to refer to the one and only great God.  It does not refer just to someone who may be heroic or god-like. If Jesus were just a human, he might have rebuked Thomas for this faux pas.  But Jesus accepted the language in reference to himself.  And you can be sure that Jesus knew his own ontology. 

Summation

There are many more arguments that could be made that support the Christian view of the Incarnation and they are found in most systematic theologies.  I like the ones I have presented above because they tend to be on the minority side – not often cited, if ever.  But if you happen to have been an Armstrongist at one time, these ideas stand out.  The unavoidable conclusion is that Christianity is right about the Incarnation.  Jesus was fully God and fully man when on this earth.  And Armstrongism needs to go back to the drawing board.  It’s not like Armstrongism actually made a mistake about the Incarnation.  They never really enunciated the doctrine it seems to me.  So, I find the quote of John Stuart Mill apropos to this case, “"They have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them... and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess."