Wholly human

Logan Geen over at The New Unitarian Universalist has an interesting post on The Humanity of Jesus . This is an issue I wrestled with as a teenager some forty years ago, eventually deciding, in the words of former All Souls minister Ed Harris, that wholly God and wholly human was one too many wholly's for me.

For me, one of the bigger convincers was doubt. It is basic human nature to doubt- and the question of the existence and nature of God is the greatest source of doubts. Mighty cathedrals are monuments to doubt, not faith- grandeur to convince followers they backed the right horse. Even if you have no doubts whatsoever about the existence of some God, you will have doubts about your understanding of God- in the Bible, even prophets who had conversations with God had moments of doubt. Even Jesus had doubts on the way to the cross, and said "Why have you forsaken me?" while on the cross. To me, these doubts made Jesus wholly human.

But wholly God? How can God doubt God's existence, purpose, and plan? I have never said, "Me, me, why have I forsaken me?" Did Jesus, perhaps while meditating alone in Gethsemane, induce a state of autohypnosis and plant a posthypnotic suggestion to forget himself for a while to experience human doubt and fear? Why did God have to die to satisfy a law that he himself had written? I could not believe that Jesus was wholly God.

Was Jesus special? Certainly. Was he a conduit of God? Yes- as are we all. Of course, conductors come in large capacity and small, with more or less resistance... he was a transcontinental high-voltage line, where most of us are the wire that connects the battery pack in the back of the radio. But God? No. To me, there was clearly a reason the word "trinity" does not appear in the Bible- that Jesus was wholly human.