By Nathaniel Marino
Hope and healing are both prominent themes throughout the Christian scriptures and core to Christian theology. The Lord God has given us a hope for a better future, but that hope is not suspended somewhere beyond us, waiting on the last day to become real. It is bound up with a person who has already come near. The healing we long for finds its ground in the same event that grounds our very humanity: the incarnation. If Christ is the one in whom we discover what it truly means to be human, then he is also the one in whom our hope for healing is secured, for we do not merely have a diagnosis of what has gone wrong in us. We have a Great Healer who became like us, who entered our condition in flesh and blood so that he might heal it from within. But healing of that kind depends on rightly answering a prior question: what is a human being, that this healing should even apply to them?
Everyone who sits with a suffering person is already working with an answer to that question, what may be called their anthropology. The answer may never be spoken, but it is never absent. Every person carries with them their own image of the human, an image that has been formed explicitly and implicitly by their community and culture and their own experiences. The question is therefore not whether we bring an anthropology into the work of healing, but whether the one we bring is true.
This matters more than it may first appear. What our assumed anthropology tells us about what it means to be human affects every aspect of our being and psychological functioning, and what we understand about Christ, the perfect human, radically changes our understanding of ourselves. Get the human wrong and everything downstream bends—how we read suffering, what we call health, what we dare to hope for.
Christian faith locates the answer to that question in a particular event. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1–5, 14) [1]. In the incarnation, what was eternally true of the Son as the very image of God became historically actual: the presence of God now dwelling in bodily form among his creatures. In this man we see true humanity unspoiled by sin, and in his unbroken faithfulness to the Father we see what human existence was actually meant to be. Dane Ortlund in his seminal book “Gentle and Lowly” put it this way: “Jesus came to do in flesh and blood what God had done only in wind and voice in the Old Testament.” [2]
It would be easy to hear this as repair language only, as though Christ were simply the remedy applied to a humanity that went wrong. But the incarnation is not a divine afterthought prompted by the fall. Before creation, the meaning of human existence was already grounded in the humanity the Son would assume. His humanity is not one instance of human nature that happened to be taken up into God; it is the pattern after which we were made. We are not merely rescued by Christ. We were made after Christ.
That is why the incarnation is a word of hope and not only a point of doctrine. Our healing does not rest on a technique, a framework, or even a body of true teaching. It rests on a person who became like us. To quote Ortlund again, “We do not come to a set of doctrines. We do not come to a church. We do not even come to the gospel. All these are vital. But most truly, we come to a person, to Christ himself.”
The incarnation means everything for understanding what it means to be human and therefore undergirds understanding humans psychologically. If Christ is the perfect human, then who we say he is determines who we understand ourselves to be. That is the question I will dive into in my next post: not what Christ has done for us in the abstract, but who he actually is—and why the answer is the paradigm for everything we call true humanity.
[1] All scripture references taken from the 2011 New International Version of the Holy Bible.
[2] Dane C. Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Crossway, 2020), 153.
Nathaniel (Nate) Marino, MA, is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Houston Christian University, with graduate degrees in Research and Experimental Psychology (Rutgers University–Camden) and Theological Studies (Houston Christian University). His research centers on social and personality psychology, with particular focus on moral cognition and behavior and the development of character and virtue. He is also deeply interested in the philosophical and methodological foundations of modern psychology, particularly in reframing them through a distinctly Christian worldview. Flowing from this, Nate is committed to pursuing psychological inquiry that is Christ-centered and biblically and theologically grounded. In future work, he hopes to explore how a Christ-centered psychology might shape Christian culture and church life, including discipleship, spiritual formation, church governance, evangelism, and practical theology.
