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Thursday, December 27, 2012

The Supposed Dual (Double) Nature of Christ

Was Jesus a Spirit or Wasn't He?
by Hal Flemings - Jehovah's Witnesses United, May 1990

In their zeal to discredit Jehovah’s Witnesses, many writers inadvertently create irreconcilable difficulties for themselves.

Mainstream Trinitarians believe that when Jesus Christ was on the earth in the First Century of our Common Era that he was totally man and totally god. Everyone seems to agree with Jesus at John 4:24 where he stated, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (King James Version) Because God is a spirit and Trinitarians are certain that Jesus is God, they argue that while on earth Jesus was God incarnate, that is, a spirit being enclosed with flesh. Because Jehovah's Witnesses reject this view, literally volumes of books, magazines, tracts, cassette tapes, etc., have been produced to challenge them on the doctrine of the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

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This paper is not concerned with defending the Witness stand on the nature of Christ at his resurrection or the question of Christ being the Almighty God or not; those matters have been effectively addressed elsewhere. (See: What does Luke 24:36-39 mean regarding the body in which Jesus was resurrected? and Was Jesus raised in a body of flesh, and does he have such a body in heaven now?)

What we are considering here is a serious contradiction.

That contradiction is as follows: these antagonists go to great lengths to establish that while on earth Jesus was God incarnate - a spirit clothed in flesh - but then deny that he was a spirit at all at his resurrection. Either he was a spirit or he was not a spirit. If he was God in the flesh - experiencing two natures simultaneously - then he was a spirit at his resurrection since God is a spirit. On the other hand, if indeed he was, in reality, not a spirit but a "glorified body", then he was not a God-man in the sense Trinitarians understand it, since a God-man is a spirit clothed in flesh. They cannot have it both ways. One of the attacks on the Witnesses has to be abandoned.


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