Quote for the Day

"The issue in the question of the deity of Jesus Christ is the deity of the man Jesus. We are not dealing, then, with the divine nature considered in isolation . We must discover the contours of the divine sonship of Jesus in his human reality, which as eternal sonship precedes his historical existence on earth and must be regarded as the creative basis of his human existence. If the human history of Jesus is the revelation of his eternal sonship, we must be able to perceive the latter in the reality of the human life. The deity is not an addition to this reality. It is the reflection that the human relation of Jesus to God the Father casts on his existence, even as it also illumines the eternal being of God. Conversely, the assuming of human existence by the eternal Son is not to be seen as the adding of a nature that is alien to his deity. It is the self-created medium of his extreme self-actualization in consequence of his free self-distinction from the Father, i.e., a way of fulfilling his eternal sonship. It is this precisely because in it he has left the sphere of deity in order that in the medium of creaturely existence, he might be bound to the Father as the one God in his self-distinction from him, and that he thus might fulfill our human destiny as creatures and deliver us from the confusion of sin."

Wolfhart Panneberg, On the Theme of "Unity," Chapter 10 of his Systematic Theology