Three Minute Theology 1.6: Physics and the Incarnation

In physics, a particle is an object with a specific mass and location in space—think cannonballs and baseballs, specks of dust or atoms.

A wave, on the other hand, is an oscillation of energy through matter or space: think of sunlight, or a radio wave, or your microwave oven.

In traditional physics, these two things are mutually exclusive; that is to say something is either one or the other: if it’s a particle, by its very nature it can’t be a wave, and vice versa.

But in the early 1930s, as scientists began experimenting with smaller and smaller particles, they made a mysterious discovery: at its most basic level, matter exhibits characteristics of both a wave and a particle, at the same time.  In experiments with electrons, for instance, sometimes these particles would exhibit the properties of a wave and other times the properties of a particle, depending on the method of observation. 

The term “wave-particle duality” describes this conundrum, that the most basic particles of matter have the nature of a wave and the nature of a particle at the same time, even though classically these two ideas are incompatible.  Albert Einstein put it like this:   “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither [the wave theory nor the particle theory] fully explains the phenomena, but together they do.”

The concept of “wave-particle duality” is a helpful analogy for talking about the Incarnation—what happened, that is, when God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Christians have always maintained that in Jesus, two distinct and different natures, our human nature and God’s divine nature, came together in one person.

Traditionally, theologians have used the term hypostatic union to describe this conundrum.  Hypostasis is an ancient Greek word that means “existence” or “substance”; and the “hypostatic union” refers to the idea that two natures—the human and the divine—were united together in one individual existence: the God-man (as he’s sometimes called), Jesus Christ.

But how should we understand this?  Was Jesus some sort of half-God-half-human-hybrid?  Was he only sometimes God and other times human?  Did the coming together of the human-and-divine natures create some new, third nature that had never existed before?

 None of these suggestions will “work”; but then: what will?

And this is where the analogy of “wave-particle duality” comes in handy, because just like in the smallest particles of physics, two incompatible natures—the wave and the particle—coexist inseparably and without contradiction in a single entity; so too with Jesus Christ.

In him the divine nature and the human nature were always fully present in the same person; every activity of the human Jesus was also, at the same time, an action of God, and anything God did in, through and as Jesus Christ, was something that the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, did. 

Sometimes his human nature and other times his divine nature was more evident, depending on the “method of observation,” but even so, at his most human moments he was still fully God, and he was always fully human, even at his most divine.  

To modify what Albert Einstein said about the wave-particle duality:  “neither his human nature nor his divine nature separately explains the phenomenon of Jesus Christ, but together they do.”

This is difficult to grasp, how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time, but the ancient theologians continually stressed it as something essential to our relationship with God.

One theologian said: “what has not been assumed has not been redeemed”; and what he meant was: humans could only be fully redeemed if God had taken our full human nature onto himself in Jesus Christ. 

Another theologian said:  “He became like us, so that we might become like him.”  And what he meant was that because Jesus was fully God and fully human, human beings can now share fully in his life with the Father.

In the Gospel of John, it says it like this: “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”