No topic or series of biblical texts could possibly be more important than this week’s lesson. Even if we devoted thirteen weeks to this topic, we would not exhaust the enormous meaningfulness of getting the “reality of his humanity” right! This is far more than a theological exercise. The personal experiences of every man, woman, and child breathing on this planet today is directly affected by his or her grasp of how “real” Christ’s humanity was! And is!

Over the centuries, Christians have understood Scripture’s claim that in Jesus Christ the Word was made flesh in a variety of ways. We Seventh-day Adventists have revisited this territory in our much shorter history. Early on, the first Christians eventually prevailed against Arianism, the view that the divinity of Jesus is secondary and subsequent to God’s. So did the first Adventists.

"There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him” (G. K. Chesterton). And the smaller Christs are plentiful and contradictory. Jesus has been portrayed as a celibate (J. D. Crossan), a homosexual (Gene Robinson), a lustful philandering heterosexual (Martin Scorsese), or a married family man (W. E. Phipps). He's been a guerrilla leader (S. F. G. Brandon), a pacifist (J. H. Yoder), and a political innocent (Oscar Cullmann and Martin Hengel).