Bruce Ware on 'The Man Christ Jesus'

The Man Christ Jesus:
Theological Reflections on the Humanity of Christ
Bruce A. Ware
Crossway 2013
ISBN 978-1-4335-1305-3

As a boy, Bruce Ware thought it unreasonable that in 1 Peter 2:21-23 we sinners are taught to ‘follow [Christ’s] steps’, the steps of one who was God and ‘who did no sin’. In later years he came to the passage with new questions, principally, ‘Could it be that even though Jesus was fully God, he lived his life fundamentally as a man? Could the command to follow in his steps be legitimate because he lived a human life in obedience to his Father as we also are called to do?’ One wonders why he does not similarly reflect on Peter’s earlier exhortation, citing Lev.11:44, ‘ ”You shall be holy, for I am holy”’ (1 Pet 1:16), and Paul’s ‘Be imitators of God therefore...’ (Eph 5:1) and the Lord’s ‘…be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt 5:48). How are these injunctions to be rendered ‘legitimate’? In any event, is there not enough of a gap between my sinful humanity and the Lord’s sinless humanity to make me despair quite apart from his deity? Is not this mode of trying to understand these commandments misconceived?

Ware also believes that evangelicals generally understand Christ’s deity better than his humanity and he wants to redress the balance. He is not presenting a ‘complete’ Christology, he tells us, but longs for Jesus to be ‘honored through reflections upon his humanity’. So, for example, the assertion that Jesus ‘lived his life fundamentally as a man’ appears repeatedly. But what does that mean? That Jesus lived as a man at a deeper level than as God? That his life reflected more humanity than deity?

As one would expect of a theologian of Ware’s calibre there is much that is helpful in the book and it is winsomely written. His chapters cover the incarnation, Christ’s ‘empowerment by the Spirit’, his growth in wisdom (Luke 2:40,52) and faith (Heb 5:7-9), his temptations, death, resurrection, reign and return, and seek to expound the importance of his humanity in each case. There is also a helpful chapter on why Christ had to be a man rather than a woman. Each chapter ends with applications, and questions for discussion.

There are, however, problems. Although Ware makes enough statements to show that he is an orthodox Chalcedonian in his christology, his mode of expressing himself is often puzzling, not to say misleading. This is no doubt because of the agenda he has set himself – to establish that Christ lived fundamentally as a man (and this agenda is further, as his applications often indicate, to make it more feasible for us to claim the resources Christ in his humanity relied upon and to obey his commandments). The main weakness is a repeated tendency to divide the natures and obscure the unity of the person in his attempt to do justice, as he sees it, to Christ’s humanity. For example:

1. He concedes that there ‘are a few times when we will examine some aspects of the deity of Christ simply because these must be seen to understand aspects of his humanity’ (p 13). The assumption seems to be that for the most part we can understand Christ’s humanity without reference to his deity.

2. He says that while the eternal Son obeyed the Father prior to the incarnation, ‘it was only the God-man, the human Jesus, who could obey in this way [i.e obedience to death, in Phil. 2:5-9]’ (p 26). Why not leave it at the ‘God man’, or perhaps ‘God-as-man’? This is one of a number of places where ‘the human Jesus’ is insisted upon almost in contradistinction to the divine nature or the divine person of the Son. Who is the subject of obedience throughout Christ’s life? ‘’In the whole sweep of mediatorial history, from pre-existence through humiliation to exaltation, the person acting and affected is the same. This means that whenever we look at the life of Christ and ask Who did this? Who suffered this? Who said this? the answer is always the same: ‘The Son of God!’ We can never say ‘The divine nature said this!’ or ‘The human nature did this!’ We must say, ‘He did this: he, the Son of God!’ (Macleod, The Person of Christ p189).

3. Ware deals with the anointing of Christ by the Spirit as something virtually exclusively to give Jesus the power to function as a human. He quotes Peter in Acts 10:38, ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth…’ Yes, but this verse says that the person of Christ is anointed, not his human nature, and it is not only for the purpose of empowering Jesus, it is a declaration of who the Messiah is. Elsewhere also Ware seems to equate the Messiah with the ‘human’ Jesus e.g ‘…the Christ of the Great Commission is the human Jesus, the Messiah, who has won the right to reign over the nations’ (p139). In arguing, quite rightly, that Christ was really human, Ware seems to overbalance into saying that he was more human, or more fundamentally human, than divine.

4. In dealing with Jesus’ miracles, Ware says in a footnote, ‘Certainly some of Jesus’ miracles may have been done out of the divine nature. Indeed it seems in John’s gospel, in particular, this may well be the case. But here [Matt 12:28, where Jesus says ‘it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons’] Christ states specifically that the miracle performed was done in the power of the Spirit, and so we should accept this for what it says… So it seems reasonable to conclude that the norm for accounting for the miracles that Jesus did is not through an appeal to his divine nature, per se, but rather by an appeal to the power of the Holy Spirit who indwelt him’ (p 37). Yet in Matt 12:28, Jesus says ‘if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons…’ It is the divine person, not the human nature, who performs the miracles. Moreover, if, as Ware rightly says, these miracles are ‘confirmatory’ (p 43), they must ‘confirm’ and indeed reveal, something of his deity (see eg Mark 4:41; John 2:11), so is it not confusing to try to examine them solely in relation to the humanity of Jesus? What could they reveal if they are simply the works of a man empowered by the Spirit? Examining the work of the Spirit in the life of Christ is not new (see e.g. chapter 3, ‘The Spirit of Christ’ in Sinclair Ferguson’s The Holy Spirit) but if it is divorced from his deity it is misleading. Charismatics have argued ‘if Christ was a man empowered by the Spirit, we can do the same miracles he did’. Ware’s argument points in the same direction. ‘The resources given to Christ for his obedience are given to us’ he writes (p 45). Then why not to perform miracles?

5. The temptations of Christ are discussed without mention of their unique nature and role in Jesus’ ministry as God-man and Messiah. There is certainly much help to be gained in my struggle against temptation from Christ’s example, but that is not the heart of what is happening in the wilderness. ‘If you are the Son of God…’ is the issue – Jesus is tempted to use his divine prerogatives to overcome the struggles he must face as God-man, as Geerhardus Vos says, ‘how can Messiahship and submission to the ethical obligations of common human conduct go together?’ (Biblical Theology p 335). The force of this, so important in asserting the union of Christ’s natures and the integrity of his personality, is entirely lost in Ware’s treatment which majors on Christ being unable to sin because he was God, but actually not sinning because as a Spirit-empowered man he resisted to the end. This is helpful so far as it goes but the emphasis on the ‘Spirit empowered man’ obscures the fact that it is the God-man who acts in all of Christ’s life, not one nature or the other. Ware’s application and discussion focus on the resources Christ used being available for me. But even if I consider only his humanity, does it help sinful me to know a sinless Saviour resisted? Did he not have the Spirit ‘without measure’ (John 3:34). Is his empowerment really the same as mine?

6. Ware’s treatment of Christ as the second Adam tends to equate it with Christ’s humanity (‘Although sent by the Father, and although possessing the divine nature, he nonetheless carries out his work in the power of the Spirit and does so as the man, the second Adam, whom God made him to be’ p. 137). But ‘Last Adam, Second Man’, is to do with his Person, not his human nature; it is to proclaim him head of a new humanity, not simply to describe him as coming in human weakness, even sinlessly.

7. In his discussion of Christ’s death, Ware says ‘We can rightly say (a) the human nature of Jesus bore our sin and died on the cross, or (b) Jesus the God-man bore our sin and died on the cross. But we would err were we to say (c) the divine nature of Jesus bore our sin and died on the cross’ (p 125). Option (b) is surely correct but can (a) be right ? Can a nature bear the load of guilt as a penal substitute? Can sin be imputed to a nature? Why divide the natures? It is surely wisdom to say that whatever Christ did in his earthly life, whether raising Lazarus, eating bread at the last supper or dying on the cross, he did as God-man. ‘The more we study the gospels, the less inclined we are to say that our Lord did any particular action by virtue of his being God, or another by virtue of his being man. We do not see him sometimes as God, and at other times as man. What strikes us is the unity of his person. Before long we can only think of him for what he is – the God-Man, who acted in all things as a single person’. (Olyott, Jesus is both Man and God, p130).

Bruce Ware has written a book that is in many ways helpful. He does not avoid however the pitfalls in such an enterprise, of dividing the natures. This is not because he is not orthodox in his views – he makes enough statements to make that clear. But his agenda and his mode of expression (not helped by the fact that he does not make even a passing reference to Chalcedon, which Warfield called ‘a very perfect synthesis of the biblical data’) open the door for error, even if he doesn’t himself step through it. One review I have read charges the book with having a ‘Nestorian flavour’ – separating the natures, suggesting two persons in Christ. I can understand why, even though Ware is not a Nestorian. He disclaims the attempt to write a complete christology; the trouble is he has given us an incomplete christology and a rather imbalanced one.


I am grateful to Martin Wells of Welcome Hall Evangelical Church, Bromsgrove, for sight of his critique of Ware’s book but responsibility for what is written here is entirely mine.