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Incarnation |
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The New Testament teaches certainly that the Word became flesh. The eternal Son of God, taking human nature from his Mother, Mary, united it to his Divine Person and lived a human existence on this earth, with all the limitations such a life entails. “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14) so that he could be our resurrection and life. There are some presuppositions that apply here. These include a benevolent God who is concerned enough about his creatures to enter into this union with them. Also presupposed is a human being with the capacity for becoming one with God as required in the Incarnation. We are, moreover, dealing with the preexistence of a Divine Person who at a certain moment of time takes human flesh for our salvation. This teaching allows the Church to profess the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ. Major scriptural sources are the prologue of John’s Gospel and the Letter to the Philippians 2:6-9. Faith in the Incarnation results from the perspective that Jesus offers on his mission: “I have come not to abolish them [i.e., the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17); “Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth” (Mt 10:34); “The Son of man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk 19:10); “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (Mt 10:40; cf. Lk 9:48). Christology and the Incarnation • The prologue of John brings out the identity and difference in speaking of God the Father and of the Word who was God and who “became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father. . . . No one has ever seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:14, 18). Here we observe the need for a “descending” Christology in order to understand the mystery of the Incarnation. The evangelist realized that without such a clear statement the Gospel would lack its proper starting point. He who in his eternal being is the cause of the becoming of creatures now begins a life of becoming on his own. For the Word incarnate, becoming marks his involvement with his creatures. To become flesh is a stronger term than just taking on flesh or putting on flesh. To become points toward an involvement of the person. We find a similar teaching in St. Paul. Consider the Letter to the Galatians: “He [God] was pleased to reveal his Son to me in order that I might preach him to the Gentiles” (1:15-16); and, “When the fullness of time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (4:4). This thought also appears in the Letter to the Romans: “[S]ending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:3). In a powerful summary, St. Paul opposes Christ’s poverty to the riches that Jesus brings us: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Here we have clear reference to the Incarnation. Christ abandons his heavenly riches (the metaphor for glory and divine goods, the state of Christ in his divine existence as Son) and becomes poor (in his humanity) in order to procure heavenly goods for human beings. The Preexistence of Christ • In 2 Corinthians 5:21 we find a teaching that brings together these two ideas (God sending his Son in the flesh in order to make us rich): “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the justice of God.” The focus is on the cross and Resurrection, but the Incarnation is the way in which the Son can make his death and Resurrection the source of our justice (holiness). The Incarnation allows all this to happen. He “who knew no sin” refers to the preexistence of the Son of God. He “made him sin” means that the Son embraces both the Incarnation and the cross. Paul insists on the antithesis between what Jesus was in his preexistence and what he became in time. The Incarnation allows this antithesis. With this background we can reflect upon the pre-Pauline hymn that we find in Philippians 2:5-11, which covers this same ground. Incarnation means the voluntary humiliation that is expressed in the two degrees: (1) the state of man as servant before God, and (2) the servant’s obedience to death, even death on the cross. “He emptied himself” means that Christ emptied himself, impoverished himself in his divine prerogatives. The self-stripping does not consist in abandoning the “form of God” in order to take on another form, that of a “servant”; it consists in taking on the form of a servant while continuing in the form of God. While there is no direct speculation about Jesus’ preexistence, still the fact of being in the form of God with the features of God presupposes his full and total participation in the divinity of the Father. Form relates to the essence or substance in its manifestation or self-expression. This is the reason why the Father exalts the incarnate Son and gives him the exercise of the dominion over created reality, the role of God, which he had earlier renounced. Paul does not seem to be interested in the metaphysical problem of how a Divine Person can assume a human nature. The question that interests him concerns the fact that Christ the Lord is servant, while normally we would expect him to show the divine prerogatives in his human nature. For St. Paul, Resurrection gives Christ his sovereign functions in the kingdom of God. The risen Christ in his role as sanctifier is the Son of God, now vested with power, according to the Spirit of Sanctification. In Romans 1:4 we meet this in shortened form, Christ “according to the Spirit.” Finally, we have what St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:18: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” In the light of what has been noted above in St. Paul, it is clear that this means that the Son who is God came in the flesh to reconcile us with his Father. The Incarnation is the grounding of the efficacy of the cross. This is not an exhaustive study of the Gospels and of the Pauline corpus. It is a brief attempt to suggest the agreement of Paul and John on Jesus’ preexistence as the source of Church teaching on the Incarnation. The early New Testament does not “progress” in its ways of presenting the Lord, from an eschatological prophet in “Q” to the Son of God when we reach the Gospel of John. Paul emphasizes the Incarnation in various ways, followed by the Gospels including the last of these, St. John. Paul’s discussion of the first Adam (cf. Gal 4:4) refers to none other than the Son of God made man. What we find in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians sets up a sure context for interpreting the second chapter of Philippians in terms of preexistence and Incarnation. It is difficult to see any basis for the assertion by some scholars that the Incarnation does not necessarily mean the preexistence of a Divine Son who, at a certain moment of time, takes flesh. We cannot admit with J.A.T. Robinson that “one who was totally and utterly a man – and had been nothing other than a man or more than a man – so completely embodied what the meaning and purpose of God’s self-expression in terms of the Word or the Spirit that it could be said of him, he was God’s man or that he was God for us.” The Pontifical Biblical Commission, in a statement headed Scripture and Christology, gives useful guidance: “The New Testament authors, precisely as pastors and teachers, bear witness indeed to the same Christ, but with voices that differ as in the harmony of one piece of music. But all these testimonies must be accepted in their totality in order that Christology, as a form of knowledge about Christ rooted and based in faith, may thrive as true and authentic among believing Christians.” The Incarnation took place without any lessening of the Person of the Son. God showed the surprising capacity of his freedom and love. “If he was also weak, this was due to his own fullness of power,” St. Augustine comments in the City of God (VIII, 17). The Gospels also highlight the risen Lord appearing to his disciples in his humanity. They can look at him, touch him with their hands, listen to his words. They witness his Ascension into heaven. In this way we can ascertain that the union of the eternal Son with his human nature continues in the state of glory.
See: Fatherhood of God; God, Nature and Attributes of; Hierarchy; Holy Spirit; Hypostatic Union; Jesus Christ, God and Man; Jesus Christ, Life of; Redemption; Trinity. Suggested Readings: CCC 456-483. L. Bouyer, The Eternal Son. R. Kereszty, Jesus Christ, Fundamentals of Christology. R. Cantalamessa, Jesus Christ, The Holy One of God. J. Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century. Richard Malone
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