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Both McCready and Gathercole seem to regret that the New Testament does not do a better job of defining preexistence, and thus they set out to show how this concept can be pieced together from the broken bits of its biblical expression. The New Testament does not provide the level of clarity that these scholars seek because it presupposes the preexistence of Jesus Christ as a given that makes sense of everything else. Preexistence is the forest that makes sense of the trees.
The title Jesus most frequently gives himself in the Gospels is the somewhat mysterious Son of Man, which evades scholarly efforts at a precise definition. McCready and Gathercole agree that this designation does not offer much help in thinking about preexistence, but to me, it is utterly decisive. By calling himself the Son of Man, Jesus was alluding to the brotherhood of all humanity in his personal identity. Just as God the Father is the Father of all men, so God the Son is the Son of Man. By being the son of both God and man, Jesus demonstrates that God chose to be with us from the very beginning of time. Jesus Christ is not a man but the man, which is a crucial distinction.
If McCready and Gathercole are right that the earliest Scriptures affirm personal preexistence, then why do so many modern theologians deny it? According to McCready, there are two main reasons. The first is that preexistence can appear to downplay Christ's humanity. Docetism was an ancient heresy that taught that Jesus only appeared to be human. He was really a divine being who used a human body like a costume, discarding it at will. Liberal theologians in the 20th century liked to argue that docetism had returned as a hallmark of evangelical Christianity. They alleged that evangelical Christians overemphasize Christ's divinity at the expense of his humanity. That charge, which was rarely substantiated, provided liberals with the cover they needed to sacrifice Christ's divinity to his humanity. For liberal theology, preexistence is incompatible with a fully human Jesus.
What liberal theologians miss is how the eternity of Christ is the only guarantee of the reality and perfection of his human form. The Son of God became incarnate; he did not fill somebody else's body with the invisible spiritual fluid of divinity. He took a role in his own production. The Word does not put on flesh like a man who gets dressed in the morning, although, if we were to use this unsuitable metaphor, we would have to say that God's clothing is a perfect fit. The highest honor we can give to the humanity of Jesus is to recognize that his body is not unconnected to his identity as the Son of God. Otherwise, he would not have been resurrected in his human form.
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