On the Incarnation: A Recommendation

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At the very center of Christianity is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the anointed one of Israel. He humbly chose the virgin’s womb and opened the kingdom of Heaven to all believers. He was in the beginning with God and he was God. Through him, everything was created. These truth claims are repeated by Christians daily. Despite their shocking and astonishing power, it is very easy for us to take them for granted. Anything repeated daily may become familiar and even ordinary. These facts should be familiar to us, but they should never cease to astonish us.

Trying to recapture the sense of wonder is notoriously difficult. Books and films that do so unsuccessfully can be described accurately as “twee” and dismissed for not taking life seriously enough. The feeling of awe comes easily to children, so much so that it is often described as “childlike.” Jesus himself says that true believers must become like children, and      he invited children to himself. Scripture uses the language of adoption and birth to describe the process of salvation. Our goal in recovering childlike awe is not to become naïve but to abandon our guile. In other words, to begin yet again to appreciate the Gospel we must repeatedly do the hard work of becoming humble.

There are a few ways we can train our habits of humility with the Gospel. The most basic is to try to explain the “why” behind the “what.” Rather than merely reciting, the practice of sitting down and thinking through the implications and consequences of the Gospel is an exercise in humility. During that process, familiar facts may break over our minds again as profound and mysterious intellectual questions. Why did God become man? Why was he born to a virgin? Did Jesus really fight demons? Why did he die for me? What does it mean that he died for me? Another way to practice humility is to try to explain the Gospel to an interested unbeliever. Often, they have questions that can humble Christians by their plain and unadorned curiosity. 

On the Incarnation is a theological classic in which Saint Athanasius the Great sets out to answer these kinds of questions. (You can find an excellent edition by Popular Patristics here). It takes an extraordinary human being to try to answer such questions honestly and generously. Athanasius was an extraordinary individual. Present as a young man at the first ecumenical council, Nicaea I, Athanasius spent his career watching others challenge and undermine the good work of that council. It was convened to settle questions about the nature of God. A church leader named Arius was teaching that the only logical way of understanding Scripture was to deny that Jesus was really God, and although Nicaea decreed that Arius was wrong, his beliefs only spread after the council. Within a few years, even the Roman Emperor was an Arian. Athanasius, however, was not willing to give up orthodoxy and worked tirelessly to defend it. His willfulness was not without consequences. He was repeatedly exiled for his defiance. Athanasius stood in front of a world who said that it makes no sense to say that Christ is God, and he proved them wrong. 

On the Incarnation was Athanasius’ greatest work. In it, he tackles the thickest questions raised by claiming that Christ is God. In my previous article on this topic, I said that a theological classic must be three things: doxological, intellectual, and pastoral. Athanasius achieves all of these qualities with his Christology. The main body of his work consists of a question and an answer. The question, expressed a few different ways, is the human condition. The answer is Jesus Christ, and his life, death, and resurrection. Accordingly, the Apostle Paul says: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15, ESV). Athanasius looks to Jesus as the way of knowing God and the sign of humanity’s future.

Athanasius first draws the reader into a deeper wonder of the incarnation by correctly describing the human condition, which is rife with problems. First, humans die, and death comes to define human life, degrading it. Second, humans are ignorant, not knowing what is good and what is evil. What Athanasius grasps about death and ignorance is that while they afflict humanity, it is God who bears responsibility to do anything about them if indeed anything is to be done. Indeed God, as a good creator, is working to undo these problems.

The work describes the divine process in detail. God intended his creatures to live, but he finds his creation afflicted by death and suffering. “What should God, being good, do? Permit the corruption prevailing against them and death to seize them?” (Incarnation 63). No, instead God the Son did something unique. “Being the Word of the Father and above all, he alone consequently was both able to recreate the universe and was worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to intercede for all before the Father” (Incarnation 65). Note the powerful pastoral implications of this teaching. Athanasius has proclaimed the true gospel: we do not have a God who is unfamiliar with our suffering. Rather than dismissing the horror and sadness of human suffering, Athanasius shows God’s concern and care for his creation.

God gave humanity his image so that they could know him. Humanity, being dead in sin, made idols in order to ignore their God. In response, God offered the law and the prophets of the Old Testament. These also were not sufficient to cure human ignorance, but God in his compassion anticipated human weakness and loved us anyway. “For this reason the lover of human beings and the common Savior of all, the Word of God, takes to himself a body and dwells as human among humans and draws to himself the perceptible senses of all human beings… yet comparing the works of the Savior with theirs, the Savior alone among human beings appeared the Son of God” (Incarnation 83). Athanasius describes Jesus with undisguised reverence and piety. We may be accustomed to intellectual writing being scientific and objective, but Athanasius held none of these prejudices. He seeks to analyze the deepest recesses of the human condition while fully acknowledging Christ as his savior.

In fact, the solution to both death and ignorance is the Incarnation. Through the life of Christ, humanity receives life and knowledge. Athanasius is clear about how this takes place: resurrection.

Indeed, with the common Savior of all dying for us, we, the faithful in Christ, no longer die by death as before according to the threat of the law, for such condemnation has ceased. But with corruption ceasing and being destroyed by the grace of the resurrection, henceforth according to the mortality of the body we are dissolved only for the time which God has set for each, that we may be able ‘to attain a better resurrection’ (Heb. 11.35). For as seeds sown in the ground, we do not perish when we are dissolved, but as sown we shall rise again, death having been destroyed by the grace of the Savior” (Incarnation, 95).

Notice how he refers to death for the Christian as merely being “dissolved” for a certain time. What was the great enemy has now become the means of the greatest triumph. Incarnation is suffused with passages like these, purest doxology. If you ever find yourself struggling to find words for a sermon or devotional that do justice to our Savior, you could do far worse than borrowing from Athanasius.

So far, I have described how Athansius takes the familiar facts of the Gospel and imbues them with wonder by drawing out the inner workings of the divine mind. In the latter part of the work, he takes a different tack. The concluding paragraphs set out to answer objections to the Gospel while bolstering the intellectual credentials of the work. The first set of objections are from the “Greeks,” who largely object that the cross and resurrection are not reasonable. The second set of objections are from the “Jews,” who object that the events of the New Testament diverge from Jewish tradition. The former set of objections are answered by a slew of narrow arguments that aim to show that belief in the Incarnation is perfectly reasonable. The latter are answered by extensive quotations from the prophets, with the aim of showing that God long intended the Incarnation and began revealing Christ even in the Old Testament prophets. 

The importance of this work for Christian theology is beyond dispute. A further witness to this fact comes from C. S. Lewis, who wrote an introduction to the work encouraging it to be read more generally. He aptly captures both the work’s classical status and its capacity to renew the Incarnation in our imagination, though he does so in a way fitting his peculiar style.

When I first opened his [Athanasius’] De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression… The whole book indeed is a picture of the Tree of Life–a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence”(16-17).

Teagan McKenzie is a Master of Divinity and Master of Theology Student at Asbury Theological Seminary.