“What if God was one of us…”
Some days back I was driving an listening to the radio, when the DJ decided to play Joan Osborne’s version of Eric Bazilian’s song One of Us. After some lines from an American folk song, the song starts and the first line of the chorus is a supposed potentiality: “What if God was one of us.” Listening to the song, which was huge when I was a late tween and early teen, the first thing that popped out of my mouth was, “He is one of us!”
That’s the secret, the mystery, that has been revealed to us from God: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).1 That Christ is our saviour and that He is that precisely because He is God in the flesh, is the central truth of the Christian faith. Nothing is more fundamental to the Christian faith, qua Christianity, than the fact that God became one of us, that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).2
We don’t have to wonder what it would be like if God was one of us; we know, because God is one of us! And in the God who is man, we are lifted up. Because God became one of us, we might be partakers of the divine nature. That is the Gospel, that is our goal, our telos. God is one of us. And because of that, we might be partakers of Him.
If not otherwise noted, all quotations from Scripture follow the anglicised Catholic edition of New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
See Knut Alfsvåg, “The Centrality of Christology: On the Relation between Nicholas Cusanus and Martin Luther” (Studia Theologica—Nordic Journal of Theology 70:1, 2016): 22-38; Knut Alfsvåg, “Unknowability and Incarnation: Creation and Christology as Philosophy of Science in the Work of Nicholas Cusanus” (International Journal of Systematic Theology 21:2, 2019): 141-156.