Christ’s Eternal Body and the Incarnation in Time
Question: My question has to do with your Sunday presentation about Christ having an eternal physical body. If this is the case, what happened to that eternal physical body while Christ was conceived, born, lived, died, and resurrected in the physical body recorded in the New Testament? How do we deal with the prospect of Christ having two different physical bodies?
If the Son has an eternal bodily existence, we must ask how that eternal body relates to the incarnate body of Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot posit two distinct, enduring physical bodies for the one Christ—one eternal body "before" and "after," and a separate body for Bethlehem and the earthly life—without fragmenting His personal identity. Christ is one person, with one enduring bodily existence.
The New Testament affirms that the incarnate body is not temporary. After His resurrection, Jesus ascended bodily, and Scripture says that "this same Jesus" will return. The bodily identity of the risen Christ is continuous: the one who was born, crucified, raised, and ascended is the one who will come again. The incarnation, therefore, did not involve taking on a disposable shell that is later abandoned; it is bound up with His ongoing identity.
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To address how this relates to the eternal bodily existence, we must consider key Christological texts. Philippians 2:6--7 speaks of Christ Jesus, "who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men." The term translated "form" (Greek morphē) is used both of His preincarnate state ("form of God") and His incarnate state ("form of a servant"). It refers to the mode of existence or appearance by which He is perceived.
The language suggests a transition, or "morphing," of mode rather than the creation of a second, unrelated body. The eternal Son, existing in the form of God, takes upon Himself the form of a servant. He does not cease to be who He is; rather, He assumes a new way of being present—truly, physically, as man—without abdication of His eternal identity.
Galatians 4:4 adds, "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law." Significantly, the text says "made of a woman," not simply "born of a woman." This may indicate a unique mode of entrance into humanity, distinct from the ordinary pattern. It suggests that the preexistent Son is "made" in and from the woman’s substance without losing His prior existence. The eternal person is now present in a genuinely human way.
On this basis, a plausible understanding is that the eternal bodily existence of the Son is not annihilated or shelved during the incarnation. Rather, the eternal body is, in some manner beyond our full comprehension, translated or "morphed" into the incarnate mode. The same personal subject, the same bodily reality, now appears in the likeness of men, under the conditions of human development, limitation, suffering, death, and resurrection.
This avoids the notion of two simultaneous or sequentially unrelated bodies. Instead, there is one continuous bodily identity of the Son: eternally existent, then genuinely incarnate, then glorified in resurrection. The incarnation is not the abandonment of an eternal body in favor of a new one, but the adaptation of His bodily existence to the purposes of redemption and revelation in history.
We must admit that we do not have exhaustive technical detail in Scripture about the metaphysics of this transition. The biblical language of "form," "likeness," and being "made of a woman" provides the conceptual boundaries: one eternal person, one enduring bodily identity, manifested in different modes across redemptive history. Within those boundaries, it is safest to say that the eternal body of the Son is the very reality that appears in Bethlehem, walks in Galilee, is nailed to the cross, rises from the tomb, ascends to heaven, and will return in glory.