Christology

The Person and Work of Christ — A Position Paper

Bruce Mitchell

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A Brief Statement

I hold that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, who for us and for our salvation became man — conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary — taking a complete human nature into union with His divine person, so that He is now and forever one person in two natures, fully God and fully man. He is the Word through whom all things were made; He lived a sinless life of perfect obedience, died a substitutionary death for sinners, rose bodily and victorious, ascended, and now ministers for His people as Prophet, Priest, and King.

He is even now our great High Priest, the Head of His church, and our Intercessor at the Father’s right hand; and He will come again, personally and visibly, to reign and to make all things new. Every other doctrine leans upon this one. The whole of theology, and the whole of salvation, turn finally on the answer to His own question: “Who do you say that I am?”

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A Detailed Exposition

The Eternal Son

Christ did not begin at Bethlehem. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1); He prayed to be restored to “the glory that I had with You before the world existed” (John 17:5). The Son is eternal, sharing fully the divine nature and standing in perfect communion with the Father from before all time.¹ He is also the agent of creation: “all things were made through Him” (John 1:3); “by Him all things were created … and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17; Hebrews 1:2–3). He did not merely watch the world come to be; He spoke it into being and upholds it still by the word of His power.² And He was active in redemptive history long before His birth. The mysterious figure of “the Angel of the LORD,” who appears to Hagar, to Abraham, to Moses at the bush, and to many others — distinct from God yet speaking as God and receiving worship as God — is best understood, I think, as a preincarnate appearance of the Son.³

The Incarnation: The Word Made Flesh

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). At the appointed time, the eternal Son took to Himself a true human nature, conceived in the virgin Mary not by a man but by the power of the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:18–23; Luke 1:26–35). The virgin birth is no incidental marvel: it is the manner God chose to bring His Son into our race, genuinely human yet without the taint of sin.⁴ In becoming man, the Son did not cease to be God. Paul says He “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) — but the emptying was not the laying aside of His deity or His divine attributes, as some have wrongly taught; it was the veiling of His glory and the taking of our humanity, adding what He was not without subtracting anything He was.⁵ He was no mere appearance of a man, as the earliest heretics imagined; He grew weary and hungry, He wept and bled, and He was in every respect truly one of us — yet without sin.

One Person, Two Natures

Here, the church has had to speak with great care, for the truth is easier to confess than to state. Jesus Christ is one person in two natures — fully God and fully man. He is of one essence with the Father as touching His deity, and of one essence with us as touching His humanity; and the two natures are united in His one person without being mixed, changed, divided, or separated. This is the hypostatic union, defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and confessed by the church ever since.⁶ The formula is not theological hair-splitting; it fences a narrow path between a row of precipices. To deny His full deity (as Arius did), or His full humanity (as Apollinaris did), or the unity of His person (as Nestorius was charged with doing), or the distinction of His natures (as Eutyches did, blending them into one) — each of these, however subtle, finally undoes the gospel. Only one who is truly God and truly man, in one undivided person, can be the Mediator who saves us.⁷

His Earthly Ministry

On earth the Son lived a life of flawless obedience to His Father: “I always do the things that are pleasing to Him” (John 8:29). This was not merely the avoidance of sin but the positive fulfilling of all righteousness — an active obedience offered on our behalf, which becomes, by faith, the very righteousness reckoned to us (see my paper on Soteriology).⁸ His ministry blazed with divine authority. He forgave sins — a thing only God can do — and proved His right to do so by healing the paralytic (Mark 2:5–12); He taught “as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:29); He commanded the wind and the waves; and His miracles were not mere displays of power but signs, given that we might believe (John 20:30–31). In all of this He fulfilled the threefold office promised of old — Prophet who declares God, Priest who offers the sacrifice, and King who reigns — the Messiah, the Anointed One, long awaited and now come.⁹

The Cross: Substitutionary Atonement

At the center of His work stands the cross. There the sinless Son bore the penalty due to sinners, dying in our place and for our sin: “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); “the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6); “for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is penal substitution: Christ satisfied the just demands of God’s holy law as our substitute, turning aside the wrath we deserved — a true propitiation (Romans 3:25; 1 John 4:10).¹⁰ Other dimensions of the cross are real and precious — there Christ also triumphed over the powers of darkness, and there the love of God is most fully displayed — but these are the fruit and the radiance of the substitution at its heart, not substitutes for it. The cross is where the justice and the love of God meet, and where both are perfectly satisfied.

The Resurrection and Exaltation

The cross was not the end. On the third day Christ rose bodily from the grave — the “firstfruits” of the resurrection, the first to rise to a deathless, glorified life never to die again (1 Corinthians 15:20). Death, our last enemy, He met and mastered; He now holds “the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18).¹¹ The resurrection is also the Father’s public vindication of His Son: by it He was “declared to be the Son of God in power” (Romans 1:4), every claim He made confirmed by the empty tomb. And the risen Christ did not remain among us; He ascended, and is seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high — the state of His exaltation, from which His present ministry flows.

His Present Ministry

Our Lord’s work did not cease at His ascension; it entered a new phase. He is our great High Priest, who has “entered … into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24), and who is therefore able “to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him” (Hebrews 7:25).¹² He is the Head of His church, her living Lord, from whom the whole body draws its life and its direction (Ephesians 1:22–23; Colossians 1:18). And He is our Intercessor and Advocate, who “is at the right hand of God … interceding for us” (Romans 8:34) and who pleads our cause with the Father when we sin (1 John 2:1). His intercession never fails, for the Father always hears Him; and so we may come with confidence to the throne of grace.¹³

His Future Work

The story is not finished. The same Jesus who ascended will return — personally, visibly, and in glory — not as a symbol or a feeling but in His own glorified body, every eye beholding Him (Acts 1:11; Revelation 19:11–16).¹⁴ He will establish His kingdom and reign as King over the whole earth from Jerusalem for a thousand years, making good at last the covenant promises, before delivering the kingdom to the Father. And beyond the millennium lies the eternal state — a new heaven and a new earth in which God dwells with His people and “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:3–4) — where the Son reigns as the exalted Head of a redeemed creation, and God sums up “all things in Him” (Ephesians 1:10; 1 Corinthians 15:24–28). I hold the premillennial and dispensational understanding of these things, and treat them more fully in my paper on Eschatology.¹⁵

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Practical Implications

Ministry Emphasis: Knowing Christ and Making Him Known

First, who Christ is calls forth worship. That the eternal Son should take our flesh, live our life, die our death, and rise again is the wonder the angels long to look into. Christology is never a cold catalog of natures and offices; rightly held, it ends in adoration. We worship Him without reserve, for He is God.

Second, His person grounds our salvation. Only one who is fully God could bear the infinite weight of sin and satisfy divine justice; only one who is fully man could stand in our place and represent our race. Take away either nature, and the bridge between God and man collapses. And because His work is finished and His intercession unceasing, He is a complete Savior — we add nothing; we rest in Him alone.

Third, we have a High Priest who understands. He “was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin,” and so is able to sympathize with our weakness (Hebrews 4:15). This is unspeakably precious in ministering to those who are hurting and broken: the men I long to serve do not need a distant deity but a Savior who has felt what they feel and bids them “come boldly” to the throne of grace to find mercy and help (Hebrews 4:16).

Finally, He is coming again. The One who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8) will return for His own, and that hope steadies us and sends us. We live faithfully because He reigns; we proclaim Him to the nations because He saves; and we wait for Him because He has promised. The question that began this study is the question every soul must answer: “Who do you say that I am?”

Fully God and fully man in one person forever — and on this union the whole of our salvation hangs.

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Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes

1. John opens his Gospel by naming the Son the Logos (λόγος), “Word”: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). His eternal preexistence is asserted throughout — “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), and the glory He had with the Father “before the world existed” (John 17:5). He is the monogenēs (μονογενής), the “one and only” Son (John 1:14, 18).
2. The Son is the agent of creation and its sustainer: “all things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3); “by Him all things were created … and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17); He “upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). Creation through the Son is itself a witness to His full deity.
3. The “Angel of the LORD” (malʾakh YHWH) in the Old Testament is both identified with the LORD and distinguished from Him, speaks as God, and receives worship (Genesis 16:7–13; 22:11–18; Exodus 3:2–6; Judges 13). Many, and I among them, take these Christophanies to be preincarnate appearances of the Son, who alone makes the invisible God known (John 1:18). The identification is an inference, not a stated equation, and is held with that caution.
4. The virgin conception is taught in Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–35, and foretold in Isaiah 7:14, where almah (עלמה) denotes a young woman of marriageable age and is rendered as parthenos, “virgin,” in the Greek Old Testament and is quoted so by Matthew. Conceived by the Holy Spirit rather than by a human father, the Son entered our race truly human yet without inheriting the guilt and corruption of Adam (Luke 1:35, “the holy One”).
5. Philippians 2:7 says the Son “emptied Himself” (ekenōsen, ἐκένωσεν) by “taking the form (morphē, μορφή) of a servant.” Orthodox theology has always insisted that He emptied Himself not of His deity or divine attributes, but by adding human nature and veiling His glory, voluntarily refraining from exercising His divine prerogatives. The so-called kenotic theory — that the incarnate Son divested Himself of omniscience, omnipotence, and the like — is to be rejected: He remained fully God throughout.
6. The hypostatic union (from hypostasis, ὑπόστασις, “person,” and physis, φύσις, “nature”) is the union of full deity and full humanity in the one person of the Son. The Definition of Chalcedon (451) confessed Christ “to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” each nature retaining its own properties and concurring in one person. He is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father as to deity and with us as to humanity.
7. Chalcedon’s careful language guards against a series of errors: Docetism (Christ only seemed human); Arianism (the Son a created being, not fully God); Apollinarianism (Christ lacked a human mind or soul, so not fully man); Nestorianism (the natures so divided as to make two persons); and Eutychianism or monophysitism (the two natures blended into one, a third kind of thing). Each, in its own way, would leave us without a Mediator who is both truly God and truly man.
8. Christ’s active obedience — His perfect, positive keeping of the law throughout His life — together with His passive obedience in suffering and death, is the ground of the righteousness imputed to believers (Romans 5:19; 2 Corinthians 5:21; cf. Matthew 3:15, “to fulfill all righteousness”). See my paper on Soteriology.
9. Christ’s authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:5–12), His teaching “as one who had authority” (Matthew 7:29), and His power over nature and disease were signs of His divine identity and Messiahship (John 20:30–31). The church has summarized His work under the munus triplex, the threefold office of Prophet (revealing God, Deuteronomy 18:15; Hebrews 1:1–2), Priest (offering sacrifice and interceding, Hebrews 7–10), and King (reigning, Psalm 2; Luke 1:32–33). “Christ” (Christos, Χριστός) and “Messiah” (mashiach, משיח) alike mean “Anointed One.”
10. The cross is, at its heart, penal substitution: the sinless Christ bore the penalty of sin in the place of sinners, satisfying divine justice (Isaiah 53:4–6; 1 Peter 2:24; 2 Corinthians 5:21) and serving as the propitiation (hilastērion, ἱλαστήριον) that turns away wrath (Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 4:10). Other models — Christ’s victory over the powers (Christus Victor), the moral example of His love, the satisfaction of God’s honor — each capture a real facet, but as the fruit and outshining of the substitution, not as replacements for it.
11. The bodily resurrection is the linchpin of the faith (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17). Christ is its “firstfruits” (1 Corinthians 15:20) — not the first ever raised, but the first raised to immortal, glorified life never to die again — and He holds “the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18). By the resurrection He was “declared to be the Son of God in power” (Romans 1:4). His ascension and session at the Father’s right hand (Acts 1:9–11; Hebrews 1:3) constitute the state of His exaltation, from which His present ministry proceeds.
12. Christ’s heavenly high-priestly ministry is the theme of Hebrews: having offered Himself once for all (Hebrews 9:24–26; 10:12), He “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). His priesthood is “after the order of Melchizedek” — royal, personal, and permanent (Hebrews 7).
13. Christ is Head of the church, the source of her life and her sovereign Lord (Ephesians 1:22–23; 4:15–16; Colossians 1:18; see my paper on Ecclesiology). As Intercessor and Advocate He pleads for His people: “Christ Jesus is the one who died … who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34), and “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). His intercession cannot fail, for the Father always hears Him (John 11:42).
14. The second coming is personal, bodily, and visible — “this same Jesus … will come in the same way” (Acts 1:11) — in power and great glory (Matthew 24:30; Revelation 19:11–16). He will then reign as King over the earth from Jerusalem in the millennial kingdom (Revelation 20:1–6), fulfilling the covenant promises. I hold the premillennial, dispensational understanding; see my paper on Eschatology.
15. After the millennium and the final judgment comes the eternal state: “a new heaven and a new earth” where God dwells with His people and “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:1–4). There the exalted Son reigns as Head of a redeemed humanity, and the Father’s purpose “to unite all things in Him” (Ephesians 1:10) is consummated, the Son at last delivering the kingdom to the Father “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:24–28).

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Select Bibliography

Athanasius. On the Incarnation.

Berkhof, Louis. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Chafer, Lewis Sperry. Systematic Theology. Dallas: Dallas Seminary Press.

The Definition of Chalcedon (451).

Letham, Robert. The Work of Christ. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Macleod, Donald. The Person of Christ. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Morris, Leon. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Ryrie, Charles C. Basic Theology. Wheaton: Victor Books.

Stott, John R. W. The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Walvoord, John F. Jesus Christ Our Lord. Chicago: Moody.

Warfield, Benjamin B. The Person and Work of Christ. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R.

Wellum, Stephen J. God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ. Wheaton: Crossway.