When it comes down to it, is Christianity simply an incoherent set of belief systems?

Christians believe that the Bible was written by real people who lived thousands of years ago and yet we believe that God is the author of those same Scriptures. Christians also believe that the God we worship is one and yet three at the same time—one being in three persons, or three persons in one being. Also, Christians believe that a man was killed by being nailed upon a cross and then came back to life three days later.

Finally, Christians believe that Jesus was somehow God and man at the same time. This is where the creed comes in. It reads: Now this is the true faith: that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is both God and man, equally.

According to the authors of the creed, they believe that the true faith is believing that Jesus is both God and man equally. That last word in the sentence is interesting. I think, for most of us, when we talk about Jesus being God and man, we like to say that he’s fully God and fully man. That’s helpful, but it also it’s less precise than we might be able to be.

When we think of things as being full, there’s only one sense in which they can be full. They can’t be full twice. If a cup is full of water and then you pour milk in it, some of the water will overflow out. This then is applied to Jesus and his humanity and divinity. Jesus is fully God and then some humanity is dumped in, which causes some of his divinity to overflow out. This, however, is now what the creed, nor the Scriptures say.

The Scriptures do not present a Jesus who is partly God and partly human that somehow make up a new being. Instead, they present a Jesus who is equally God and human at the same time. We cannot say that he is God over and above him being a human. Neither can we say that he is a human over and above him being God.

The same Scriptures that present Jesus forgiving sins in Mark 2: “But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10a, NIV)—doing only what God can do—also present Jesus as eating food: “While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him” (Mark 2:15, NIV)—doing what humans do.