That Jesus Christ is true God and true man is an article of faith, a revelation of God to his people. Christology, strictly speaking, is not a quest to determine the veracity of this article, but an exercise of the fides quaerens intellectum. Our quest is to determine how this divine revelation impacts upon us and upon our salvation. Quests to determine the truth of the article are more likely to suffer the fate of Zechariah, who questioned Gabriel’s revelation of God’s will, than that of the Virgin Mary, who pondered these things in her heart.

Christology, then, begins with the revelation of and has as the proper object of its study the Incarnate Word of God, who is one person with two natures: human and divine. Though we use various formulae to speak of this mystery, for example, the hypostatic union, the communicatio idomatum, and the Christological perichoresis, the reality of the unicity of the person of Jesus is not limited by our definitions. We must turn again and again to Sacred Scripture in the light of the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum.

Indeed, it is through Sacred Scripture, especially the gospels, that Jesus the Christ is most readily revealed to us. With the assurance of the inspiration and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, we find the sure affirmation of the humanity and divinity of Jesus—both within the same person—and both equally affirmed by the biblical witness. If this biblical witness is a priori called into question, if either the humanity or the divinity of Jesus as it is attested to in the Bible is considered dubious, if one of his two natures is uncertain, then the totality of the biblical witness of Jesus is cast into doubt. And we know nothing of him.

Our quest today is neither for an historical Jesus, who does not exist apart from the preexistent Logos, nor is it for a gnostic logos, who does not exist apart from the enfleshed Jesus. Our quest is the same in the beginning and in the end: Jesus the Christ. Our quest in Christology is to know more and more about the Christ, and to ponder these things in our hearts.