A View into the Temptation via the Two Natures of Christ

The two great doctrines that drove the formation of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Christ. We must know that there is one God and that He consists of three equal Persons. We must also know that this Holy Trinity worked out our salvation by the Second Person becoming a full and true man without giving up His divinity. He has not always been a man, and yet He has always been God. Now, however, He is always and forever a man, while also being God, and we do not know God apart from the flesh of that Man. He is begotten of and yet equal, in His divinity, to the Father, and also equal to the Holy Spirit who proceeds from Him and the Father.

In my ministry, I have not seen my members struggle with questions about either the Holy Trinity or the divinity of Christ. They love those doctrines. For the most part it seems almost easy for them to accept both.

Nonetheless, year after year, during Lent, some of them raise concerns and discomfort with the temptation of Jesus. They can’t figure out how it is a legitimate temptation if Jesus can’t sin. Since they do not doubt Christ’s divinity, their discomfort is likely caused by a lack of familiarity with the relationship between the two natures in Christ. Not all of us have spent a lot of time thinking about how the two natures of Christ exist, in fullness, without being diminished or being fully united, so that there is neither a corruption of either nature nor are there two Christs side-by-side. This is a mystery every bit as difficult and essential to our faith as the doctrine of the Trinity.

It boils down to confessing the single Christ and His two natures. Lutheran theologians have usually spoken of the relationship of the two natures as being communicated or shared with one another in three, overlapping ways.

Communicating Attributes

The first way describes the whole Christ. What belongs properly to either the divine or the human nature is rightly attributed to the whole person of Christ (genus idiomaticum). The natures each retain their own attributes. Christ does not morph into a new substance that is somehow different or greater than human or different and less than divine. He is true God and true man, nothing less and nothing more. Yet these two natures share their attributes in the single Person of Christ. When Christ suffered and died on the cross, all of Christ suffered and died, that is to say, both natures died, including the divine. It was not just part of Christ, but all of Him that was offered up for us. Thus, it is not inappropriate, if rightly understood, to speak of “God dying on the cross” or of Mary being the “mother of God” even though God is immortal and eternal.

The second way recognizes that the divine and human nature are not equal. His human nature is perfect, indeed, but as the Athanasian Creed states, Jesus is “equal to the Father with respect to His divinity, less than the Father with respect to His humanity.” The divine nature’s attributes have been given to the human nature of Christ without changing the human nature (genus maiestaticum). The divinity of Christ is found in every hair on Christ’s head, in His bones, and blood. Thus, we rightly and necessarily worship the human nature of Christ, and, apart from His flesh, we do not and cannot know Him.

The third way overlaps greatly with the first. Christ’s acts are never simply according to one nature or the other. Christ always acts according to both natures together, at the same time, in the single Christ (genus apotelesmaticum).

There is one other piece to this. While the communication of attributes begins at the conception and never ends, there was a time when the Christ denied Himself, as a Man, and did not always and fully use His divine rights and attributes. He could have, in a sense, but He didn’t as an act of will. We call this His state of humiliation. If He had not denied Himself, then He could not have been hungry while fasting for forty days or ever grown weary, and He could not have been killed. But if He hadn’t done all of that, how could we be saved? We couldn’t have been. Thus, He denied Himself in order to suffer as we suffer and to make Himself a sacrifice for the sins of the world. We should note that His incarnation was not part of His humiliation, since becoming a man was an exercise of His divine power. Furthermore, He didn’t completely deny Himself all the time. He performed miracles. Those, too, were exercises of His power, albeit a partial and not a full use of His divinity.

Then, when it was finished, He descended into hell to declare His victory, and He began — and forevermore now — to fully and always use His divine rights and attributes as both God and man. We call this His exaltation. He does not deny Himself. This how the Christ, true God and true man, walked through the stone that sealed the tomb and through the door that was locked for fear of the Jews. He is also now present in His risen human body on more than one altar at a time, and we eat His body and drink His blood without destroying it. Once joined, His two natures are never separated. They were not separated at His death, and they are not separated now.

Divine Temptation

All this together and carefully considered leads us to recognize that when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, there was no possibility that He might fail the test and sin. The Man Jesus is God. He is holy and cannot sin. For a time, He denied Himself, as a man, His divine rights and attributes but not His essence. Why then the temptation? As cruel as it sounds, the point was for the devil to torture and mock Him. It was not an even match. The devil was destined to lose. He could not have won. The Christ, holy and set on His path, willed to suffer. He willed to withstand all that we suffer and try to withstand, but He did so without failure. Thus He demonstrated that it can be done. He is a true man, as Adam was in the garden before the Fall, but Christ withstood the devil. He did this for us, in our place. He defeated the devil for us and put an end not only to accusations but also temptations.

In the end, we come to see that His temptation is part of His redeeming work, His sacrifice for us. If we peer deeply into it, we see both natures at work together in the single Christ.

Further reading:

Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures of Christ (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1971): For those who are highly motivated and interested in this topic. It is a full and important treatment of the two natures of Christ.

David Scaer, Christology (Fort Wayne: The International Foundation for Lutheran Confessional Research, 1989): A short and slightly easier read than Chemnitz.

Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, vol. II (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951): For those who do not want to make a financial investment, your pastor surely has a copy on his bookshelf and would lend it out to you.