Dear Friends,
I’ve been teaching a class on the Doctrine of Christ. This week we’ve been focused on the humanity of Christ (having previously treated his deity). To close out our session today I shared a story I’ve told many times over the years. But it occurs to me that I’ve never shared it publicly in writing.
Let me give it a little setup. The early church took a long time to figure out how to best articulate the truth of Christ’s two natures, divine and human, and how he can be the “God-Man” (theanthropos). One of the most persistent temptations is to downplay the humanity of Jesus. It can go like this:
“Well, he’s the divine son of God, so all his apparent lack of knowledge (‘No one knows the day or hour…not even the Son’), his ‘growth’ in wisdom and stature, his hungering, thirsting, temptations, sufferings, agonies in the Garden of Gethsemane, and so forth, must be a kind of ‘play-acting.’ Right?”
In modern times we see this sort of thing in religious art. I think it’s fair to say that up until Mel Gibson’s gritty Passion of the Christ, almost all film portrayals of Jesus were like this: he floats three feet above the ground, a gauzy glow around his face, and he speaks with an ethereal, otherworldly voice. Is he even human? He has awfully soft, white-collar hands for a carpenter and general contractor!
Some of the really serious heresies of old (at least, as the orthodox Christian church rightly viewed it) were ones that all but obliterated Christ’s humanity because of his deity. Monophysitism is the most persistent: that Christ only had one (divine) nature. Other’s blended the two natures into a sort of “third-thing” hybrid. Others thought that he had a human nature but only a single (divine) will: that’s called monothelitism, and, believe it or not, is a view espoused currently by a well-known evangelical Christian philosopher (kinda yikes)! By the way, monothelitism means that—just think about this for a moment—Christ’s obedience (an act of the will) was not the obedience of a man. Read Romans 5:12-21 and ponder what that would mean for the Christian gospel.
In the face of all these varying misunderstandings of the person of Christ, the early church insisted on the true humanity of Christ. He had a real human nature, and he had a whole human nature. He had to be, as Hebrews puts it, “made like his brothers in every way” (Heb. 2:17). So the ancient church formed a rule: “What is not assumed cannot be saved.” That is, if Christ took to himself (“assumed”) anything less than human nature, then human nature cannot be saved.
Flipping through the channels in a hotel room many years ago, I saw a news magazine segment on “modern medical miracles.”
And I had an epiphany.
Jesus Has Our DNA
In December of 2003 6-year old Jenny Cowan of Lynn Haven, Alabama, found herself struggling for life. An explosion in the fireplace in her family home left her with severe burns over 80 percent of her body. Transferred to the Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, doctors placed her on a ventilator for five days while trying to find a way to save her life. The problem was simple. Jenny needed skin. And lots of it. Exposed to the elements she would almost certainly become fatally infected and die. Jenny did not have enough salvageable skin to perform a normal skin graft. Her treating physician, Dr. William Hardin, thought about trying to grow her own skin in a laboratory, but that would take, at minimum, two weeks, probably more, to get enough of it. It was highly unlikely Jenny would survive that long.
Jenny’s father, Will Cowan, pleaded with the doctor to donate his own skin to Jenny. However, Dr. Hardin sadly explained to the anguished father that person-to-person skin grafts simply do not work. Donor skin, for unknown, mysterious reasons, is rejected by the body. As time passed, Jenny’s condition worsened. The doctor gravely told Will and Sherri Cowan that their daughter would very likely not survive. Sherri said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. What am I going to tell Sydney?” In the course of the short conversation Sherry explained that Sydney was Jenny’s best friend. She was, in fact, Jenny’s twin sister.
It took a full hour until the words hit Dr. Hardin in what he described as a thunderbolt. He called down to the waiting room. “Did you say Jenny has a twin sister?” “Yes,” came the reply, “and Sydney is going to be just devastated.” “Is Sydney … an identical twin?” “Yes.” That was what he wanted to hear.
It took two emergency legal hearings; one, before a district judge, and the second before a medical ethics committee. How could they ask 6-year old Sydney to undergo the extremely painful and damaging procedure of removing large amounts of skin from her head, her back, and her backside? Was she competent to consent to such thing? For Sydney’s part, she was only too eager to do what she said, the morning of the surgery, was “the greatest thing in my life.” She had felt so distressed by her sister’s accident that she had said: “I wish it had happened to me.” Now she was to get her wish. It would happen to her, voluntarily. The ethics committee was satisfied, as was the Judge after a personal interview with Sydney.
They went forward with the extremely rare procedure, a person-to-person skin graft. They removed large amounts of skin from happy and healthy Sydney and grafted it on to the severely burned Jenny. The ardent hope and desire of Dr. Hardin was that the skin would not be rejected by her body. He had good reason to believe it would not be rejected. Sydney and Jenny share identical DNA.
Sydney and Jenny are alive still, the latter saved by the former’s voluntary suffering because of their unique, shared, biological bond.
This is but an analogy, a glimpse, a pointer, a sign to that greater wondrous truth about not only our bodies but our souls. What is not assumed cannot be saved. We can be saved, we can be healed, we can be made right, made whole, made pure, made alive because Christ Jesus voluntarily came into the world and assumed everything that we are. And he, in the most costly way imaginable, restores us. And his sacrifice for us cannot and will never be rejected. He was a perfect match.
He has our DNA.
Miscellany
Here’s ABC’s original report on this story, so you don’t think I made it up.
Some legal scholars think the surgery was unethical. You can read about that by clicking here. It’s a very interesting debate, but doesn’t matter for my storytelling purposes.
If theology and all those technical terms intimidates you, Dr. Brannon Ellis and his wife just launched a new YouTube series called, “Theology Is Awesome.” I enjoyed the first episode.
A few years ago Ryan T. Anderson wrote an excellent book on transgenderism entitled, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. It’s a thoughtful, empathetic, and scholarly work and has been praised by many in the academy. Well, you might notice that that link takes you to Barnes & Noble. That’s because Amazon quietly (as in, no notice whatsoever) deleted his book from their marketplace. It disappeared without a trace.
Target did the same with Abigail Shrier’s important book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Better click on that Amazon link before it disappears.
Looks like cancelation for anyone and anything that doesn’t bow down to the new cultural gods. Dare to be one of Daniel’s friends (Dan. 3). It appears depressing, but Alan Jacobs notes a silver lining:
Amazon is flexing its muscles, but muscles are all it has. Its censors don’t want anyone to read Anderson’s book because they know that they can’t refute it. They have no thoughts, no knowledge — only reflexes. And reflexes will serve their cause. For now.
Have you ever wondered about the Bible’s teaching on slavery? Historian Thomas Kidd wrote an excellent and accessible essay on it.
When they make another film about the Exodus, I think this would be cooler than using CGI:
You really have to watch this. I still cannot believe this encounter is real.
If you didn’t see it, I recommend watching NASA landing the Perseverance rover on the distant planet of Mars. Just amazing what humans do.
Baseball is just around the corner. To get ready, you might enjoy watching Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays battle it out on Home Run Derby! Have a great weekend.