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.”
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