God in the Flesh: Incarnation Reflections

Last week, I had the great privilege of participating with Mark Thompson and Charles Cleworth in EV Church’s third theology seminar on the Incarnation. We had a good discussion and the staff and visitors asked us excellent questions. I will provide a link to media from the even as it becomes available. But in the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to draw together some of the theological ideas that I tried to stress, both in my paper, and which seemed significant in conversations before and after.

There is a little bit of theological terminology here. But if it seems too academic, you can just cut straight to the final exhortation.

1. God is not part of our spacetime

It is hard for us to stop thinking that the persons of the Trinity live in our universe. We imagine that heaven is their native environment, and that it is more or less joined to our space and time. But, as I have argued at greater length elsewhere, this is fundamentally wrong. “Heaven” is not God’s true home but another created realm sustained by the Word of God (Gen 1:1; Neh 9:6). At the dedication of the first temple, Solomon makes it clear that God doesn’t really live in temples and that “even the highest heaven, cannot contain [God]” (1Ki 8:27).

We need a bigger view of the God and a more radical understanding of his sovereign rule over this world.

This means we need a bigger view of the God and a more radical understanding of his sovereign rule over this world. If God is outside our space and time, sustaining it all by his own power, then he is completely transcendent. He’s not a powerful being who lives “out there” somewhere but the writer of the story that we are living in.

Remembering this radical transcendence of God can save us from quite a few theological problems, especially when it comes to the Incarnation. For example:

• It might save us from kenoticism where we imagine that the coming of God the Son means leaving one place and going to another for a while (leaving someone else to do the God stuff for a while).
• It might help us avoid Nestorianism, where Jesus and God the Son become different agents in two places at the same time.
• It might inoculate us against Apollinarianism (and other forms of Monophysitism) where God’s divine nature is thought of as something that might be a part of our world, or part of a human being (we’ll come back to this below).

None of these ideas can be right if God is truly transcendent. When the author writes himself into the play, he doesn’t disappear from his study. His real-world body and soul don’t become mixed with the paper and ink. He is not threatened or altered by the things that happen in his story.

Similarly, the events of God’s reality are not on the same timeline as events in ours. Divine reality is completely incommensurable with creation.[1]

2. Christ’s humanity does not contain his divinity

One common confusion about the Incarnation comes from what we think of when we hear the (Chalcedonian) expression “two natures in one person”. We think, naturally enough, that since Jesus is a human person, the saying must mean that the man Jesus has those two natures inside of him. But the “person” that orthodoxy refers to here isn’t the human individual but the Second Person of the Trinity. Wait, aren’t they the same person, you ask? Yes, but not in the way just described. It’s not that Jesus the man has a divine nature and human nature inside his human body/mind/soul, rather the eternal Son of God has now added a human body and soul to his eternal existence. Thomas Goodwin helpfully likens Jesus’ human existence to ivy growing on an oak tree; it’s the oak (the divine Son) that supports the two natures, not the ivy. [2]

3. Jesus is a work in progress

Wait, what?! Isn’t Jesus perfect?

Yes, Jesus is (and always was) morally perfect, but there are other aspects to his perfection. Jesus’ life on earth involved change, testing and growth. He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:40), he learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8), and that suffering made him “perfect” (or completely suitable) to be our Great High Priest (Heb 5:9-10).

As he exists in the story of this world, Jesus is a hero on a quest.

We could go on. In his dying and rising, Jesus became the saviour of us sinners and the vanquisher of Satan. His faithfulness earned him the name above every name, and gained him “all authority in heaven and earth.”

Thinking about these changes in Jesus’ human life reminds us once again that his life as a creature is different from his eternal existence. In the latter he has no need for anything because he possesses all things. Yet as he exists in the story of this world, he is a hero on a quest. He gains a kingdom and glory and rescues his bride. He goes from humiliation to vindication; ignorance to wisdom; weakness to power. [3]

4. Christ’s human life expresses his divine Sonship

Jesus’ two natures are not the same, and yet the human life of Jesus does express and reveal his eternal identity. Although many aspects of God’s nature do not translate (the incommunicable attributes of as omnipresence and omniscience, for example), others do. His human life translates God’s holiness, wisdom, love and grace (etc.) into forms that are appropriate for creatures.

Other aspects of Jesus’ life-story re-express his eternal relationship to God and the world. For example:

• The “sonship” he receives through his human birth and through his ascension is not the same as his eternal Sonship (e.g. Heb 1:2 vs Heb 1:5), but it is a fitting expression of it.
• His sovereign rule as risen king (Matt 28:18) is not the same as the divine power he wields as he sustains all things by the word of his power (Heb 1:3), but it is an echo of it.
• The obedience of his human life (Heb 5:8) is different from his eternal conformity to the Father (Heb 1:3), but there is a correspondence between the two.

5. God has a plan for his beloved Son

The modern resurgence of classical theism, alongside many good things, seems to have created two philosophical difficulties with the incarnation.

The first problem pertains to a wider problem with God and creation. If God is perfect in himself, why does he create? What does it matter to him? A strict adherence to this principle insists that God must gain nothing by it and that the only ones who benefit from either creation or the incarnation are creatures.

The second problem is that, for theologians who want to stress the oneness of God, it can also sometimes be difficult to affirm that the Father and Son really love each other. Such a “relationship” smacks of a social trinitarianism where the Persons of the Trinity are like different gods.

Within the theatre that he constructs to display his glory, God appears and operates within time and space to create new modes of his presence.

Principle 1 helps us with the first problem. The things that happen within Creation do not change who God is in himself, but they do create new opportunities for God’s glory, and new relationships between God and creatures. Within the theatre that he constructs to display his glory (to use Calvin’s expression), God appears and operates within time and space to create new modes of his presence—in Eden, in the Temple, in the new Jerusalem and so on.

The incarnation is the ultimate expression of this—not just an appearance of God, but God living as a character in his own story; God the Son playing the role of the hero, redeemer, judge and avenger.

Problem 2 is a failure to appreciate the limits of our intellect. It says that if we cannot imagine how love works for a God who lives outside our time and in all perfection (and, let’s be honest, we can’t) then we need to tone it down to avoid dividing God. But let’s allow Scripture to speak:

• If God truly is love (1John 4:8);
• If the Father truly loved his Son before the creation of the world and planned this world as his inheritance (John 17:24; Heb 1:3; Col 1:13);
• If God’s means of saving us was truly so that we would honour the Son as we honour the Father (John 5:23),

If these things are true, then God’s love for his Son is not less real than we can comprehend but much more.

A Final Exhortation

Do you want to be filled with joy this Christmas? Then be amazed at the privilege of being born into a world that God devised for the honour of his Son. Be astonished that God’s way of glorifying his Son (and himself) was through him coming into the world and dying for sinners like us. Think deeply about the fact that the story of Jesus’ glory is still being told and that you have a place in it. Marvel in the prospect of a world transformed by the perfected man who is God’s own Son. Here is a quote from Puritan John Owen to finish with:

This is that glory which God designed unto his only Son incarnate … that the whole creation, especially that which was to be eternally blessed, should have a new head given unto it for its sustentation, preservation, order, honour, and safety … There is no contemplation of the glory of Christ that ought more to affect the hearts of them that do believe, with delight and joy, than this of the recapitulation of all things in him. One view by faith of him in the place of God as the supreme head of the whole creation, moving, acting, guiding, and disposing of it, will bring in spiritual refreshment unto a believing soul.
– John Owen, “Christologia”

Photo by “Alicia”, pexels.com

[1] To use a catch-cry of reformation theology finitum non capax inifiti (finitude cannot contain infinity).

[2] The technical terms for this are anhypostasia and enhypostasia—the ivy isn’t a separate tree (another person), rather it exists in (en-) the oak (i.e. God the Son).

[3] Remembering the “progression” of Jesus’ human nature is important for conversing with Muslims (and others) who like to insist that Jesus should be X (e.g. omniscient) or shouldn’t be Y (e.g. mortal) because he is God. Jesus is God. But his human body and mind aren’t divine–they are part of the way he reveals himself in our world. And, just as the written word of God didn’t come to us all at once, so Jesus, the living Word of God came to us through time.