The Incarnation of God

The Mystery of the Gospel as the Foundation of Evangelical Theology

John Clark, Marcus Peter Johnson

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781433541902
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

It's the defining reality of all existence, the central fact of human history, and the heart of the Christian faith: God became a man and lived among us. More than just part of the Christmas story, the doctrine of the incarnation radically affects our understanding of God, humanity, life, death, and salvation. In The Incarnation of God, theology professors John Clark and Marcus Johnson explore this foundational Christian confession, examining its implications for the church's knowledge and worship of God. Grounded in Scripture and informed by church history, this book will help Christians rediscover the inestimable significance of the truth that the Son of God became what we are without ceasing to be the eternal God—the greatest mystery of the universe.

1

The Supreme Mystery at the Center of the Christian Confession

THE INCARNATION OF GOD

“Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.”¹ With characteristic playfulness, G. K. Chesterton makes an observation about which he is deadly serious, a profound point that none of us can afford to miss. All forms of fiction, no matter how skillfully, creatively, and compellingly crafted, are shaped by and limited to the confines of our imaginations. It simply cannot be otherwise, given that fiction is, at bottom, the product of human ingenuity. Truth, on the other hand, shares neither the origin nor the inherent limitations of fiction. It does not follow, of course, that the two are innately adverse. On the contrary, truth and fiction can sometimes coexist in harmonious and complimentary ways, as long as no illusions are cherished as to which is which. But whenever fiction is accepted as truth, whenever nonreality is confused with reality, dangers and difficulties inevitably ensue.

Due to the inclinations of our hearts and the prevailing convictions of our cultural milieus, it is all too easy for us to live under the influence of deeply seated and rarely challenged assumptions. Among the most basic and common assumptions of contemporary culture is that the nature, meaning, and goal of human existence is self-explanatory, that one’s self-understanding is the proper starting point and controlling principle for understanding all of reality. Thus, as J. I. Packer notes in his modern Christian classic Knowing God, “It is no wonder that thoughtful people find the gospel of Jesus Christ hard to believe, for the realities with which it deals pass our understanding.”² Such “thoughtful people” pose manifold questions: How could Jesus of Nazareth have performed the numerous miracles recorded in Scripture? How could the sufferings of this man, culminating in his death between two criminals on a Roman gibbet, result in God’s forgiveness of sinners? How could the same pierced, pummeled, and ruined body that was lowered from the cross and placed in a tomb have been raised to incorruptible life? How could this man have ascended into heaven, reconciling the redeemed to the God from whom they were alienated? Questions of this sort could certainly be multiplied.

Packer observes, however, that such questions arise when difficulties are found in the wrong places, when we fail to identify and apprehend “the supreme mystery” of the gospel. That mystery is not found in the Good Friday event of Christ’s crucifixion or even in the Easter Sunday event of his resurrection. Rather, the Christmas event of Christ’s birth is where “the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. . . . Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.”³ This same point is stressed by C. S. Lewis, who remarks:

The Central Miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. . . . Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. . . . The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile.⁴

These observations by Packer and Lewis are neither new nor novel. They merely echo a conviction deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Christian church from her inception. Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Reformer, notes that the “church fathers took particular delight” in the apostolic testimony that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Luther himself wholeheartedly shared the early church’s delight in the incarnation, exulting:

He [Jesus Christ] condescends to assume my flesh and blood, my body and soul. He does not become an angel or another magnificent creature; He becomes man. This is a token of God’s mercy to wretched human beings; the human heart cannot grasp or understand, let alone express it.⁵

Yet while Packer and Lewis show considerable continuity with their Christian predecessors, they seem somewhat out of step with many of their Christian contemporaries. In 1937, Dorothy Sayers laments, “The Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered into the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.”⁶ Bewilderment would be understandable, even expected, if Sayers were describing only the reactions of non-Christians or if by “bewilderment” she meant something akin to the sense of wonder Luther exhibits. Regrettably, this is not the case. Moreover, the situation Sayers describes has not shown signs of widespread improvement since she wrote. The supreme mystery that the Word became flesh, that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, participates unreservedly in the same human nature that we ourselves possess, is at the very center of the Christian faith. All too often, however, modern Christians view the incarnation with something closer to consternation than wonder, and as a result, they tend to push this grandest of realities from the center to the periphery of their confession.

Our contemporary situation notwithstanding, the incarnation must ever remain what John Webster calls “the primary affirmation of the church,” for Jesus Christ can never be other than “the incomparably comprehensive context of all creaturely being, knowing and acting, because in and as him God is with humankind in free, creative, and saving love.”⁷ This is an astoundingly bold declaration in that it situates the knowledge of all things in the context of our knowing Jesus Christ as the divine self-exposition of God and man, identifying the incarnation as the watershed between truth and fiction. The apostle Paul says nothing less when he announces that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together . . . that in everything he might be preeminent” (Col. 1:17–18).

This book is a sustained yet necessarily nonexhaustive exploration of the incarnation, a subject as rich and unfathomable as the incarnate God himself. The aim of this chapter is to give this exploration some needed background and vocabulary, contours and context, a broad and sturdy skeletal structure to be filled in by the chapters that follow. We shall pursue this aim by discussing: (1) the nature and function of doctrine; (2) Trinitarian and christological developments regarding the incarnation in the early centuries of the church; and (3) several core convictions that characterize our approach to this supreme mystery of the gospel.

THE PERIL AND EXCITEMENT OF CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY

It is not the case, of course, that modern Christians are in the habit of explicitly denying or overtly repudiating the incarnation. Rather, it is that modern Christians routinely find themselves in a subtle state of malaise regarding the enfleshment of God in the person of Jesus Christ, in that their ongoing affirmation of this essential feature of Christian orthodoxy is coupled with an ever-increasing vagueness as to its significance and implications. Among the most salient reasons for this malaise is the perception among many modern Christians of the doctrines that constitute Christian orthodoxy. In their assessment, doctrine in particular, and orthodoxy in general, suggest something petty, pedantic, outmoded, and irrelevant. Matters of doctrinal orthodoxy, including a doctrinally orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ, are thus met with exasperation, irritation, or, worse still, that most subtle and chilling form of contempt, indifference.

To be sure, such perceptions and responses are not completely lacking in warrant, given that the doctrinal expositions of some theologians possess all the winsomeness, clarity, and pastoral warmth of an electrical diagram for a nuclear submarine. It is altogether good and wise to be repelled by that which distorts and perverts, and caricatures of orthodoxy are certainly no exception to this rule. Yet it appears that modern Christians need to exercise a greater degree of discernment when experiencing such repulsion, because in rejecting caricatures of orthodoxy, many have come to undervalue and overlook the very nature and function of doctrine itself.

Chesterton makes an apt observation when he quips, “People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe.” More insightful still is his retort to this tired and ultimately unfounded sentiment: “There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.”⁸ In other words, anything but tedious and benign, orthodoxy enriches, sustains, and heals precisely because its doctrinal substance enshrines the triune God of the gospel—singing to Jesus Christ and drawing the church ever more deeply into the inexhaustible wonders and innumerable implications of new life in him.

Yet what exactly is orthodoxy? In the sense it is used here, orthodoxy refers to a set of key doctrines articulated by the early church and, from that time forward, embraced by all major expressions of Christianity—Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. Though all doctrines are considered important, these particular doctrines are deemed to be so essential to the integrity of the church’s confession that to deny them is tantamount to denying the triune God of the gospel, and thus to departing from the Christian faith. Significantly, the term orthodoxy is a combination of two Greek words, orthos, which means “right” or “true,” and doxa, which means “belief” or “worship.” Thus, the etymological structure and meaning of the term orthodoxy indicates that right belief and true worship are inextricably and symbiotically related, so that whenever one falls down, the other is certain to follow. In other words, because the church is first and foremost a worshiping community, she can exist with authenticity and vitality only when her worship is informed and impelled by sound doctrine. It is for this reason that whenever the church has been most robust throughout history, she has been marked by a passion for doctrine, not an aversion to it. For this same reason, the diminished and confused sense of worship all too common to the modern church is invariably attended by a failure to appreciate the importance of doctrine.⁹

Lest we make an idol of doctrine, however, we must clearly grasp that doctrine is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an infinitely greater and grander end. Doctrine is neither a substitute for God nor a set of preconceived notions about God, as doctrine does not possess an abstract reality and truth independent of the God to whom it refers.¹⁰ Because the Christian faith is not a theory about God, it never has been, nor ever could be, merely a matter of formulating the right combination of words about him. The Christian faith is about the living Word. Thus, the substance and sum of the Christian faith is not a well-ordered series of factually true propositions, but a person who is himself the embodied Truth of both God and man, the Truth who is God as man. This person gives rise to doctrine the moment we begin to wrestle with the questions of who he is and what it means to be encountered, claimed, and redeemed by him.¹¹

Clearly, then, it is crucial to discern the nature of the relationship between the person who is the embodied Truth (John 1:14; 14:6) and doctrinal truths about the Truth. On the one hand, we acknowledge that there is a categorical, qualitative distinction between the living person of Jesus Christ and the propositional pronouncements the church makes about him; the two must never be confused or conflated. On the other hand, we recognize and embrace the living person of Jesus Christ as the Truth only as he comes to us clothed in his gospel, only as the propositional pronouncements of the church accurately describe the living Word for us and commend him to us. These truths about the Truth, these words about the Word, constitute the God-given, Spirit-vivified vehicle in and through which Jesus Christ gives himself to us and forges himself within us; thus, the two must never be sundered, severed, or set against one another. Doctrine, rightly understood, concerns both the propositional and the personal. That is because factually true propositions, apart from the living person of Christ, become dry, doctrinaire, and dead, just as the living person of Christ, apart from biblically sourced and normed propositions about him, becomes ambiguous, malleable, and unintelligible. As such, Christian orthodoxy sets itself sharply against arid rationalism and idiosyncratic subjectivism by the settled conviction that the Truth is always both living person and living Word.¹²

Consequently, the peril of orthodoxy is determined by nothing less or other than the service these doctrinal truths render to the Truth; disregard for them is, quite simply, disregard for him. Yet the excitement of orthodoxy lies in the reality that the living Truth claims and masters us precisely as we continue to immerse ourselves in the truths by which he enhances our knowledge of him, intensifies our affections for him, quickens our trust in him, and enlivens our obedience to him.¹³

WHO DO MY PEOPLE SAY THAT I AM?

As Jesus traveled with his disciples to a district of Galilee called Caesarea Philippi, he posed a monumental question regarding his identity and significance: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Then, as now, there was no shortage of speculation on this matter. Thus, the disciples answered, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Pressing the matter further, Jesus replied, “But who do you say that I am?” Speaking for his fellow disciples, and setting apostolic precedent for the church ever since, Peter proclaimed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:13–16).

Looking more broadly at the New Testament, we find two apostolic exclamations that affirm and develop Peter’s statement. Together they constitute not only the earliest recorded witness of the Christian faith, but also the doctrinally orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. The Supreme Mystery at the Center of the Christian Confession—The Incarnation of God
• 2. Knowing the Father through the Son—The Incarnation and Knowledge of God
• 3. Beholding God in the Face of Jesus Christ—The Incarnation and the Attributes of God
• 4. Becoming Human, Becoming Sin—The Light Shining in Our Darkness
• 5. Christ for Us, Christ in Us—The Mediation of Our Incarnate Savior
• 6. The Abundant Blessings of Salvation—Our Union with the Incarnate Savior
• 7. Christ’s Body and the Body of Christ—The Incarnation and the Church
• 8. The Gospel of Christ and His Bride—The Meaning of Marriage and Sex
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover