Ministerial Reflections

Hour by hour; resolve firmly to do what comes to hand with dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice. ~Marcus Aurelius

Incarnation

The Rev. Jeffrey D. Lang, minister at The First Presbyterian Church of Glendale, Ohio

God, the Creator of all that is, and the source of all good, is the object of Christian worship. Worship is to “center our lives around something, to see it as the proper focus of our ultimate commitment.”1 And yet the Scriptures tell us, “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). God is “the King eternal, immortal, invisible” (1 Timothy 1:17), dwelling “in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Timothy 6:16). The Westminster Shorter Catechism in The Book of Confessions gathers the various currents of Scripture into a single, coherent sentence when it explains: “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”2 It is this God who made all things and whose wise purpose works itself out in time and eternity.3

That this God became human is the audacious claim of the Christian faith.

John completes his thought in 1:18 by adding, “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” Which is to say, the God no one has seen, in point of fact, has shown us His face.4

Christians have made this confession from the very beginning. It is rooted in Scripture. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Church explained in creeds what the Scripture taught. The Nicene Creed (381 AD) in the Book of Confessions confesses one Lord Jesus Christ, “true God from true God,” who “For us and for our salvation . . . came down from heaven . . . and became truly human.”5 The Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) taught that Christ, as the incarnate Son of God, was one person in two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”6

Bringing the doctrine into focus, Louis Berkhof notes that “it was not the triune God but the second person of the Trinity that assumed human nature.”7 The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each played a part in the incarnation (Luke 1:35; Gal. 4:4).8 In the incarnation, the Son, whom John’s Gospel calls the Logos or Word, did not cease being the Word. Rather, the Westminster Shorter Catechism asserts that He took upon Himself what He was not, namely, “a true body, and a reasonable soul,” which He received from the Virgin Mary.9 The Word entered an estate of humiliation in a world fallen into sin, taking on its weakness and the full human condition, yet “without sin” (Heb. 4:15).10

In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury put the question plainly in Cur Deus Homo: Why did God become man? Anselm answered that human beings owed a debt of justice because of sin, but because of the nature of the debt, only God could pay it. So, the one who paid the debt had to be both God and man.11 Long before Anselm, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.”12 That is, human nature could be redeemed only if God took that nature upon Himself.

Robert Shank, writing out of the Arminian tradition, gets at the same idea in more contemporary evangelical terms. He puts it this way: “Since by man came the Fall, by Man came also the Reconciliation.”13 Christ was tempted in every way that Adam was. He set right what went wrong with Adam, and He died under sin’s penalty, so that God might be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).

While Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants speak with different accents, they testify with one voice that there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).

In a world of competing truth claims, not all accept the incarnation. The Qur’an says that God “begets not, nor was He begotten.”14 The Jewish philosopher and theologian Maimonides held, as a basic axiom, that there are impossibilities even for God, including that He “cannot transform Himself into a body.”15 Materialism, obviously enough, has no God to become anything at all. Even the avatars of Vishnu in Hinduism, the divine appearing to human beings in many forms on numerous occasions, are not really making the same claims as the Christian doctrine of the incarnation.16 The Christian faith says something stranger, and perhaps more profound: the eternal Son took on a full human nature once for all, lived without sin, submitted to suffering and death, defeated sin and death on our behalf, and has never set that human nature aside.17

The incarnation is an idea whose meaning and importance matter even to those who deny not just the doctrine, but the existence of God. Don Cupitt, a theological non-realist, contributed to the seminal work The Myth of God Incarnate (1977). In his later The Meaning of the West, Cupitt argued that the West, and Western humanism, grew out of and was shaped by the idea of God coming down and entering into humanity.18 If a theological non-realist understands how powerfully this concept shaped Western civilization, the believer has all the more reason, I might suggest, to take seriously its claim to be true.

In Christ, God and humanity intersect and meet, forever. Shank explains that in the incarnation, the Son entered “a circumstance from which He can never withdraw in all eternity to come.”19 Jesus Christ is, and will forever remain, Emmanuel, God-with-us. The risen Christ, who still carried the nail marks in his glorified body (John 20:24-31, cf. Philippians 3:21), reigns now in human flesh at the right hand of God (Luke 22:69), until the final defeat of all evil (1 Corinthians 15:25). Even then, He will not lay aside the human nature He assumed for our sake.

The incarnation, as a doctrinal affirmation, makes this announcement: the God no one had seen has made Himself known, and He did so as one of us, a person of flesh and bone and blood. God is not just the Creator, but also the Redeemer who has entered the human condition to seek and to save, to redeem and restore, to make whole and set right all creation, including you and me. He accomplishes that mission by taking on our flesh. That is the incarnation in sum and why it matters.

  1. C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1993), p. 15. ↩︎
  2. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), The Book of Confessions (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly, 2016), 7.004. ↩︎
  3. Arthur Walkington Pink, The Sovereignty of God (1929; repr., n.p.: Watchmaker Publishing, 2011), p. 41. “The Lord God omnipotent reigneth. His government is exercised over inanimate matter, over brute beasts, over the children of men, over angels good and evil, and over Satan himself. No revolving world, no shining of star, no storm, no creature moves, no actions of men, no errands of angels, no deeds of Devil – nothing in all the vast universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally purposed. Here is the foundation of faith. Here is a resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate, unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own good pleasure and for His own eternal glory.” ↩︎
  4. James R. White, The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998), 32: “In John 1:1b, John says the Word was eternally face-to-face with God, that is, that the Word has eternally had a relationship with God. . . . the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ↩︎
  5. Book of Confessions, 1.2. ↩︎
  6. “The Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.),” Semper Reformanda, accessed November 7, 2026, https://www.semperreformanda.com/creeds/the-definition-of-the-council-of-chalcedon-451-a-d/. ↩︎
  7. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 333. ↩︎
  8. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 333. ↩︎
  9. Book of Confessions, 7.022. ↩︎
  10. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 336. ↩︎
  11. Williston Walker et al., A History of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), pp. 325–27. ↩︎
  12. Gregory of Nazianzus, “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius” (Epistle 101), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (1894; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), p. 440. ↩︎
  13. Robert Shank, Elect in the Son: A Study of the Doctrine of Election (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1989), p. 63. ↩︎
  14. Qur’an 112:3 (Sincerity), in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al. (New York: HarperOne, 2015), p. 1579. ↩︎
  15. Emad Masroor, “Chapter 1,” Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, July 21, 2026, https://emadmasroor.github.io/Guide-Perplexed/summaries/I/ch1/. ↩︎
  16. Kenneth Samples, “How Christ’s Incarnation Differs from the Hindu Idea of Avatar,” Reasons to Believe, December 22, 2015, https://reasons.org/religions/belief-systems/how-christ-s-incarnation-differs-from-the-hindu-idea-of-avatar. ↩︎
  17. Shank, Elect in the Son, p. 61. ↩︎
  18. Don Cupitt, The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity (London: SCM Press, 2008), pp. 6–7: “So I conclude that it was above all the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in its old-Western version, that supplied the necessary background conditions that have made possible the emergence of the modern West. . . . I am suggesting that the emergent ‘West’ is simply Christianity itself. . . . Christianity is the religion in which God himself is a secular humanist: he becomes human in the world. Notice the contrast: Islam likes certainty, and is convinced of its own right to establish the rule of divine Law over all of human life. It has no respect for the secular; whereas Christianity—especially in the West—always allowed and respected the autonomy of the secular sphere of life.” ↩︎
  19. Shank, Elect in the Son, p. 61. ↩︎

Scripture taken from The Holy Bible: 21st Century King James Version (Gary, SD: 21st Century King James Bible Publishers, 1994).

Rev Jeffrey Lang