“Why did Jesus Christ have to be God?” the potential ordinand was asked. And, at least so it seemed to me, he muffed it: “It took God to offer perfect obedience.”

Well, no.

The perfect obedience Christ offered for us he offered because he was human. Jesus Christ came as the Last Adam, the “Son of God, the Son of Adam,” who undid in a wilderness and on a cross the harm done in a garden and by the eating of forbidden fruit (see 1 Corinthians 15:45; Romans 5:12-19; and Luke 3:38-4:13). To offer perfect obedience was why Jesus Christ had to be human.

My puzzlement at the potential ordinand’s stumbling over the necessity of our Savior’s divinity sent me back to Robert Webber’s cogent discussion of the incarnation in his Ancient Future Faith. Even as I write, my late-in-life friend battles terminal cancer, and I find myself especially prizing the economy with which he says profound things.

Webber notes that the early church settled on (or perhaps groped towards) two axioms:

One: “only God can save.” The other: “only that which God becomes is healed.”

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