God is unchanging. In Christ He is fully God, and fully Man. Christ is preexistent. Was His body created, and is He still human in heaven? [closed]

Question

"Include all the information someone would need to answer your question." I'm, uh, asking it cause I'm not sure of the answer? John 8:58 reads "Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." I believe in the infallibility of Scripture, and that Christ is coequal to the Father and the Spirit. That all three persons are eternal, and fully embody the attributes of God, and they together are God. The difficulty is that if Christ's body was created, and He is in heaven in a resurrected body, then has God changed? A possibility I'm working through is that the title "Son of Man" is descriptive, and that Christ is bound to humanity by His own will. That Christ was always, and has always, been sacrificed in time on the Cross. This is a particular reading from Revelation 13:8, which says He was slain "From the founding of the earth."

Answer 1

Biblical contradictions a Trinitarian faces who believes there are three coeternal, coequal, and coeval persons which are all "God" go well beyond the fact that the Bible says God does not change. Indeed, the Bible says God is not a man--so if God had become a man, this would no longer be true.

In order to believe as you do, you must find ways to re-interpret the scriptures; i.e. to explain them in terms of symbolism, or poetry, or to narrow their meanings to just a smaller window of application.

Some Common Trinitarian Claims	It Is Written
Three persons/beings in the Godhead	"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:" (Deuteronomy 6:4, KJV) "And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:" (Mark 12:29, KJV)
Father, Son, Holy Spirit all omniscient	"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." (Mark 13:32, KJV)
All three coequal	"Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I." (John 14:28, KJV) "But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God." (1 Corinthians 11:3, KJV)
All three coeternal	"And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." (Mark 8:31, KJV)
All three coeval (same age)	"And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli," (Luke 3:23, KJV)
Jesus, the Son of Man, is God	"God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19, KJV) "And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent." (1 Samuel 15:29, KJV)
The Holy Spirit is God but is not the Father	"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: . . . And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John 17:1-3, KJV)

Beyond these things, you must also explain how it is that the Bible says God is invisible (see 1 Timothy 1:17; 6:16) and yet people saw Jesus; and how it is that the Bible says God cannot be tempted with evil (see James 1:13) and yet the Bible says Jesus was tempted (see Matthew 4:1); or how it is that God is immortal (see 1 Timothy 1:17) and yet Jesus died (see Romans 5:8).

In fact, the Bible does not teach that Jesus was God, but that God was in Christ.

To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:19, KJV)

"Why," one might ask, "should it not say 'God was Christ', or that 'Christ was God'?"

Yet the Bible never says Jesus was God. Jesus himself taught that the Father (God) was in him.

Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. (John 14:10, KJV)

And it was the words of the Father that Jesus spoke.

For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. (John 12:49, KJV)

Jesus told us to worship the Father.

²¹ Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. ²² Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. ²³ But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. (John 4:21-23, KJV)

He also taught that the Father was both his God and our God.

Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:17, KJV)

Conclusion

If we listen to Jesus' own teachings, we will know how to properly understand these things. We will know that the Father is the true God whom we are to worship. Jesus' humanity was indeed created, as Hebrews 10:5 teaches, but the Father has always existed and has never changed; nor has He ever been human.

Answer 2

Christian God is paradoxical for He entails a notion of change, unlike the Platonic god, the One or the Good, or the Aristotelian god - the Thinking of Thinking (νόησις νοήσεως), i.e. perfectly actualized thinking about this very thinking, i.e. about itself. Such a philosophical first deity that is devoid of Hypostasis/Person, does not and cannot change.

On the contrary, the Trinity creates the world out of will and decision, thus the world is in a way arbitrary, pending upon Trinity's will and decision. Now, when God created the universe, which was not, did there happen a change in God through this very act of creation, for He did what He had not done before? If one denies the creatio ex nihilo doctrine, one will run into a Platonic-Aristotelian heresy of uncreatedness of the world with God; but if one asserts the eternal creation theory, then again obtains co-eternity of the world with God, which is a heresy also.

Thus, did Trinity change when created the world?

It is the same to ask, did the eternal Logos change after adoption of human nature some two thousand years ago? Did He change after the Logos experienced the first candy of His human childhood, the first offense coming from His classmates, the first nail that pierced physically His hand?

Yes, the Trinity changed but changelessly, and we cannot even say that Trinity actualized the potentiality of creation through this creation, for then we shall have to assert that the Trinity was not fully actualized before creation and that which is not fully actualized cannot be even God. So it is beyond human logic and a mystery to be embraced by faith.

The same with Christology: the Logos changed with the Incarnation, but changelessly, for nothing in His divine nature changed, but He changed in the sense that His divine nature became incofusedly and also, due to His will and benevolence, inseparably united now with His divine nature in one divine Hypostasis of Logos, and now even this divine Hypostasis cannot be thought any more without His human intelligent soul and human body that He adopted. And yet, it is the very same Hypostasis of eternal Logos, that was there always with the Father even before the Incarnation and even the creation of the world, and now continues being with the Father called no more only Logos, but always the Logos united with the human nature, that is to say, Jesus Christ. A poet can pray to Him in both ways: "Oh, coeternal Logos of the Father, help me to finish this poem", or "Oh, Jesus Christ, my Lord, help me to finish this poem" - the same Person will be addressed.

So, yes, there is a mysterious changeless change in Christian theology and Christology, change of a new and special union of divinity/uncreatedness with the humanity/creatureliness; but neither creation ceases to be creation with this union, nor divinity suffers being tarnished or changed a little bit by it.