Last week we looked at the paradoxical nature of the gospel. This week we turn to see that the paradoxical gospel reveals the paradoxical nature of God’s very being. 

The gospel is not a side project for God. The story of the gospel is God’s revealing of himself. This is who he is. The gospel is God and God is the gospel. And the God we meet in the gospel story is a God who is humble in his very being. His humility is his glory.

Diagram (from Ray Anderson)

Bonhoeffer’s Christology Lectures

In his Christology lectures Bonhoeffer argues that the incarnation is not a humiliation for God. It is not humiliating for God to become human. 

The typical (mis)understanding of the sequence of the incarnation would be:

The Son of God→Humiliation→Human

In this (mis)understanding, the Son of God must lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He must stoop from what he actually is in order to become what we are. Seen this way it is not fitting for God to become incarnate.

But Bonhoeffer suggests the sequence should be understood like this:

The Son of God→Human→Humiliation

Understood this way we can see that the Son’s taking humanity to himself is not a humiliation. Rather it is fitting for him precisely because God is humble. Jesus doesn’t have to change himself to take on humanity. That’s who he is! This is the paradoxical nature of God: God is God as a human!

But, Bonhoeffer says, there is a humiliation for God in the incarnation. It is in becoming sin for us. The cross is a humiliation for God. But because he is humble, he endures this humiliation (which is our own) for us.

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