Was für eine herrliche Beschreibung:
Jesus is truly man, like unto us in everything, except for sin. Having completely fulfilled the law, it is a part of his innermost being. There is thus no tension in him between being and consciousness, between word and deed, since, as the truth itself, he is what he says. All the requirements of the law, knowledge and trust, righteousness and holiness, and love to God and to man, are incarnate in him. In him the law itself became personified and lived among us. All the virtues are found in him in complete harmony. While all of us, classified by age, sex, disposition, ability, character, and temperament, are one-sided, some dominated by feeling, others by intellect, some activists and others cerebral and contemplative, Jesus cannot be neatly categorized and classified. He is both lion and lamb, powerful as a man and soft as a woman, simple and humble as a child. Never carried away with passion, yet far removed from any cold, stoical, dispassionate indifference. He experienced even more deeply and purely than we do, both sorrow and joy, anger and affection, indignation and compassion, yet always maintained the inner harmony of his being. While all his words and deeds are characterized by a complete and perfect freedom, everything that he says and does is a commandment of the Father. At all times and in all places, as a child and as a man, when the crowds shout “hosanna”[327] or scream “crucify him,” he remains constant; he is Son of God and Son of Man, the fairest of all children of men, the true and perfect man.
Herman Bavinck. The Imitation of Christ (1885). Trans. John Bolt, in: John Bolt. A Theological Analysis of Herman Bavinck’s Two Essays on the Imitatio Christi. S. 395.
