Postincarnate Christ

 I think that we Christians – like everyone else – have a hard time of thinking outside the box, so to speak. Or outside the body, I should say. It is hard to see beyond our own frame of reference. However I do not think that the body that Christ showed immediately post-resurrection is the same body He had – has now – post ascension. I think the locked door encounter, John 20:24-29, was still part of His Incarnational mission, the “days of His flesh”, as Hebrews 5:7 puts it. I think there is a hint of this also in 1 Tim. 3:16 (ESV)


“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:
He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated by the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.”

These are all in the past tense, or at least, because the last of the six events is clearly in the past the preceding five ought to refer to events before it.

In the light of Hebrews 2:14 I am convinced that Christ being in the flesh was mission-specific. I do not believe that Christ is flesh and blood now. The purpose for that, according to Scripture, is long gone.

“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,”

He became flesh and blood - and suffered in His flesh and shed His blood. I doubt we can fathom the depths of what He did to rescue us and to destroy the one who had the power of death.

However some people assert that Christ is flesh and blood now because of 1 Tim. 2:5

“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς),”

But this does not prove that Christ is flesh and blood, but that He is the God-Man.

And this begs the question: What does it mean to be human? Is flesh and blood required for that? I do not think so. If it were, then my Christian father ceased to be human five years ago when he died. And all the saints who died in Christ also lost their humanity. But I cannot accept this. I believe, rather, that they joined “the spirits of just men made perfect”, Heb. 12:23.

Our goal is to be like Christ, Christlikeness, not that the Second Person of the Godhead should from the time of His incarnation onward stay flesh and blood. Scripture has no proof of this.