In his book on the Apostles’ Creed, Louis Evely wrote the following about the ever-present risk of downplaying/perverting the humanity of Jesus in one’s Christology, as well as the importance of Christ’s humanity:
There is the modern appolinarianism so common among ill-instructed christians of believing Jesus appeared in a body with no human soul, and taking the word flesh to mean no more than meat. In biblical language, however, flesh means the whole human reality with all its pitiful weakness, but also with its possibility of being elevated by the Spirit of God. In this case, the soul is the most ‘carnal’ part of man, for it is the soul that commits the greatest ‘carnal’ sin of all, pride.
There is also the Docetism of the theologian who, in the charming simile of a friend of mine, represents Christ as someone on a motorised bicycle pretending that it is an ordinary push-bike to encourage the other cyclists. He makes a pretence of pushing hard on the pedals, he gives an occasional sigh to suggest fatigue, he mops his face because others are sweating. Of these is the pious exegete who said that Jesus prayed ‘to give us a good example’; or this comment of Bossuet on the text of Lk. 2:52 (‘Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature’): ‘Jesus possessed all perfection from the first, but only let it appear gradually, so that he would seem like a real child.’ There is the monophysitism of those who think Jesus was once a man, but is now only—and for ever—God. There is, above all, the Nestorianism (in practice) of the innumerable christians who exclude Christ from the world. They put him in heaven, and burn incense to him to get him out of the way, and then they can make fraternal charity at the most a commandment, a ‘test’ of love for God, a trial, an opportunity for merit, a springboard to heaven. For there is a docetist doctrine of charity as well as of the incarnation: Christ looked upon the good done to the least of his little ones ‘as if’ it were done to him . . . the incarnation is final. The redemption will always continue to operate through the same means with which it began—the body of Christ. Christ is still man today, not only because his glorified human nature sits at the right hand of the Father, but because it continues for ever being embodied in other men, who complete it. As von Balthasar has written:
The historical life of the historical Christ and the historical life of the mystical Christ are thus not two distinct lives, but a single life under two aspects, the one symbolic and exemplary, the other symbolised and real. Never separate Christ and the church, for they are one flesh. [Hans Urs von Balthasar, Recherches de sciences religieuses 1936, 543f.] (Louis Evely, Credo [trans. Rosemary Sheed; Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides Publishers, Inc., 1967], 62-63, 70)
