That branch of theological study that deals with the person, attributes, and mission of Jesus Christ. The Greek word Christos ,”Christ,” was originally a title, equivalent to the Hebrew Mash"ach , “Messiah,” but came to be used as a name, or surname, of Jesus. Hence, while Christology might be expected to deal more specifically with Jesus’ Messiahship, in actual use it includes every phase of His person and work. Seventh-day Adventists hold that “forever truly God, [Jesus] became also truly man. . . . He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He lived and experienced temptation as a human being, but perfectly exemplified the righteousness and love of God” ( Church Manual [1990], p. 24).
The role of Jesus Christ is suggested by the title “Lord,” which is frequently applied to Him. NT scholars commonly recognize that the simple declaration “Jesus is Lord” was the earliest confession of Christian faith ( Acts 2:36 ; Rom. 10:9 , 10 ; 1 Cor. 12:3 ; Phil. 2:11 ), made, perhaps, by every convert at baptism. But this simple declaration by no means implies a simple Christology. The Greek-speaking Jews referred to God as Kurios , “Lord.” In the Septuagint, Kurios is not only a translation of the Hebrew word ’Adonai , “Lord,” but also of God’s covenant name Yahweh, or “Jehovah.” Therefore to any reader of the Septuagint, Kurios , “Lord,” was a common title for the God of the OT , denoting His power over the world and humans as Creator, Ruler, and Giver of life. By designating Jesus as “Lord,” Christians attributed deity to Him, and ascribed to Him supreme authority and power.
It is evident in the NT that Jesus was regarded as both God and human being. But no attempt was made to interrelate these two phases of His nature. The NT stresses Jesus’ mission and work, and attempts no explanation of the mystery of His nature. But the historical Christ is set forth as at once fully God and fully human.
By the second century, however, the church felt compelled by one-sided distortions to work out the philosophical implications of the Incarnation. The heretical Ebionites, for example, conceived of Christ as a merely human Messiah and denied His divine nature. The Docetists and Gnostics, on the other hand, denied the reality of His humanity, for they believed that matter is evil. The church had to meet these heresies.
The Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries centered on two main problems: the relation of the nature of Christ to that of God, and the relation between the divine and the human nature in the person of Christ. Arius (250–336) denied the eternity and absolute deity of Christ, and made Him the first and highest of created beings. The Council of Nicea (325) adopted a creed asserting that Jesus is of one substance ( homoousios ) with the Father. Apollinaris the Younger ( d.c. 390), on the other hand, being especially concerned to maintain the deity of Christ, denied the integrity of His human nature. He taught that in the Incarnation the divine Logos was united with the purely animal elements present in human nature, without the mind or soul. Theodore of Mopsuestia ( d. 428) and his pupil Nestorius ( d. after 451) separated the divinity and humanity in Christ almost to the point of making Him into two persons, a view that was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431. Eutyches ( d. after 454) held that although before the Incarnation there were two natures in Christ, at the Incarnation they were coalesced into one. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 formally defined the church’s position, that in the person of Christ there was an abiding union of Godhood and humanity without the integrity of either being impaired: “one . . . Christ . . . in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”
Some of the earliest Seventh-day Adventists—for example, James White and Joseph Bates—had formerly been members of the “Christian Connection” (later part of the Congregational Christian Church, now merged into the United Church of Christ), a church that at that time held to a form of the Arian belief concerning Christ’s nature. These people did not deny that Christ was divine, the Creator of heaven and earth, Son of God, Lord, and Saviour; they mostly argued that the terms “Son” and “Father” indicated that the Son had a beginning, even though in the inconceivably remote past. Upon becoming SDA s they retained this belief, which found expression in their writings. But not all Seventh-day Adventists held this view, and it was not an essential part of the SDA doctrine. For nearly a half century, difference of opinion on this point persisted, but open controversy was avoided and the anti-Trinitarian view died a natural death. The two leading anti-Trinitarians, James White and Uriah Smith, changed their opinions considerably. James White, for instance, had at first rejected the “old trinitarian” idea “that Jesus Christ is the very and Eternal God” ( Review and Herald 3:52, Aug. 5, 1852), although he believed in Christ’s divinity ( ibid. 4:66, Sept. 8, 1853); he later wrote that SDA s “hold the divinity of Christ so nearly with the trinitarian” position that very little real difference existed ( ibid. 48:116, Oct. 12, 1876), and that the Son “was equal with the Father in creation, in the institution of law, and in the government of created intelligences” ( ibid. 56:56, July 15, 1880). Uriah Smith, in the first edition of his Thoughts on Revelation (1867, p. 59), called the preexistent Christ “the first created being.” But he soon came more nearly into harmony with his brethren by modifying this statement by the time the first combined edition of Daniel and the Revelation came out (1882), in which he explained ( p. 488) that the Only-begotten of God could hardly be “any being created in the ordinary sense of that term.” He later spoke against degrading Christ to a created being ( Looking Unto Jesus , [1898], p. 12). Other early Adventist leaders who showed Arian tendencies were J. H. Waggoner, his son, E. J. Waggoner, and W. W. Prescott, who, as late as 1896 ( Review and Herald 73:232, Apr. 14, 1896), spoke of Christ as having had two births—one in eternity, and one in the flesh.
Early SDA anti-Trinitarians opposed the Trinitarian concept on the basis that such a belief was contrary to common sense and to NT statements indicating Christ’s subordination to the Father, that it was of pagan origin, and that it depreciated the personality of Christ and the importance of His vicarious death. It was largely through the writings of Ellen White that the Trinitarian view finally prevailed. Although never trained in the intricacies of theology, she carefully avoided, through the years, the pitfalls of the Christological controversies of past generations.
She apparently did not find it necessary to take issue with her close associates on Christology, but she repeatedly asserted Christ’s equality with God, as early as 1869, and increasingly in the 1870s and 1880s (1869: 2T 200; 1875: 3T 566; 1880: 4T 458; and many other statements). She described Christ as “the Majesty of heaven, . . . equal with God” (1883: 1SM 69); “Sovereign of heaven, one in power and authority with the Father” (1888: GC 459); “of one substance, possessing the same attributes” with the Father ( Signs of the Times 20:54, Nov. 27, 1893); “the only-begotten Son of God, who was with the Father from eternal ages” (1895: FE 382); “The Lord God . . . clothed with the habiliments of humanity” (1895: FE 379); “Infinite and omnipotent”; “the eternal, self-existent Son” ( Ev 615). In her masterpiece The Desire of Ages (1898) she wrote: “In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived” ( DA 530; also in an article of the year before, Signs of the Times 23:214, Apr. 8, 1897). Later, she said: “He did not cease to be God when He became man. . . . The Godhead was still His own” (1903: Ellen G. White, in SDACom 5:1129). In 1906 she wrote: “Christ was God essentially, and in the highest sense. He was with God from all eternity,” “a distinct person, yet one with the Father” ( Review and Herald 83:8, Apr. 5, 1906).
With reference to the relationship between the two natures, she declared that Christ “did not cease to be God when He became a man. The human did not take the place of the divine, nor the divine of the human. . . . The two expressions . . . were, in Christ, closely and inseparably one, and yet they had a distinct individuality” ( Signs of the Times 25:2, May 10, 1899).
Overemphasis on the deity of Christ is sometimes pressed to the point that it obscures His real and true humanity, with the result that He ceases to be an example of how we in our humanity can, through Him, overcome as He overcame.
“It would have been an almost infinite humiliation for the Son of God to take man’s nature, even when Adam stood in his innocence in Eden. But Jesus accepted humanity when the race had been weakened by four thousand years of sin. Like every child of Adam He accepted the results of the working of the great law of heredity” ( DA 49).
“Our Saviour took humanity, with all its liabilities. He took the nature of man, with the possibility of yielding to temptation. We have nothing to bear which He has not endured” ( ibid. 117).
Christ was tempted by Satan as we are tempted, but “on not one occasion was there a response to his manifold temptations” (Ellen G. White, in SDACom 5:1129).
“He took upon Himself human nature, and was tempted in all points as human nature is tempted. He could have sinned; He could have fallen, but not for one moment was there in Him an evil propensity” ( ibid. 5:1128).
He was tempted “like as we are, yet without sin” ( Heb. 4:15 ).