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This is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: that there is one all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful God, who exists simultaneously in three separate and distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians believe that 2,000 years ago the second person of the Godhead, God the Son, took on a human form without diminishing his divinity.

What Christians celebrate on December 25 is the miracle of the Incarnation, the idea of an infinite and eternal spiritual being who created the entire cosmos taking the form of a frail human child, born into a family of nobodies, in a backwater country, on a speck-of-dust of a planet.

It gives new meaning to King David’s statement in Psalm 8, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”

Christian theologians refer to the Incarnation as resulting in the “hypostatic union.” The idea is that Jesus is both 100 percent God and 100 percent man. Not any sort of hybrid, but two distinct natures that are fully manifest simultaneously in one person forever. Trying to explain it to the world, works such as On the Trinity by Augustine of Hippo and the ancient Athanasian Creed strove to find language to convey this concept that defies human reason.

This is perhaps the most revolutionary claim of the Christian faith. The world has been fascinated by two millennia by this contention at the core of Christianity: that in the words of Philippians 2, to achieve a mission that Christians say no mere man could accomplish, Christmas celebrates that:

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Thus began a life in a small town in the Middle East that would thirty-odd years later end in death by crucifixion and that Christians believe was shortly thereafter followed by a physical resurrection on Easter Sunday.

But the question remains: Who was Jesus?

Some Christian apologists refer to this “trilemma” of incredible choices. If Jesus thought he was God but was not, and gave his life for that delusion, then he was certifiably insane. If Jesus was not God and knew it, but led countless people astray with a deliberate lie and encouraged them to be willing to suffer for it, then he was a cruel and sadistic man. The third option is that he was who he claimed to be: the divine Son of God. For Christians, the only three choices are that Jesus must be Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.