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The doctrine of the Incarnation
is one of the major cornerstones of the Christian faith although this
term is never used in scripture.
The
common understanding of the incarnation
of Christ is the idea
that the Son of God, the second member of the trinity and claimed to
be God, united himself with human nature making himself both
truly God and truly man.
The theological term is called a “hypostatic
union.”
Most
of us are familiar with the Christmas song, Mary
Did You Know? Did
Mary know that when she kissed the face of baby Jesus that she was
kissing the face of God? The song echoes pagan mythology. (The word
“Pagan” is described by Cambridge
Dictionary as:
“belonging or relating to a religion that worships many gods,
especially one that existed before the main world religions.”)
The
theory that God became a baby is not in agreement with biblical
truth. Nowhere does the bible speak of the incarnation
of Christ, and thus a
literal pre-existing
person/God who needed to occupy a body of flesh as
commonly taught in this idea of incarnation.
This doctrine was not
formulated from the scriptures. It derives from pagan mythology that
has crept into the church several hundred years after
Christ. The Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church
verifies that:
The doctrine, which took classical shape under the influence of
the controversies of the 4th-5th centuries, was formally defined at the
Council of Chalcedon of 451. It was largely molded by the
diversity of tradition in the schools of Antioch and
Alexandria...further refinements were added in the later Patristic and
Medieval periods.11
This
doctrine took hundreds of years to develop. Why? Because it had to be
explained how God, without ceasing to be God, was a man since He had
to become a man in order to save mankind. Because of this belief,
what follows is all the nonsensical teachings about Christ having a
dual nature,
a pre-existence,
hypostatic union,
and all other kinds of unbiblical ideas and terminology.
The
mythological idea that the gods
could come down in human form was not uncommon in the New Testament
times. Note what the crowd says after Paul healed a man who was
crippled from birth in Acts 14:11-13:
And when the crowds saw what Paul
had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, “The
gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” Barnabas
they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief
speaker. And the priest of Zeus, whose temple was at the
entrance to the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates and
wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds..
However,
if the incarnation, as commonly understood, were true, Paul and
Barnabas had the perfect occasion to explain that Jesus was God who
came down in human form. Instead, they argued against the
mythological basis of
such pagan beliefs of their time:
But when the apostles Barnabas
and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into
the crowd, shouting: “Men, why are you doing this? We too are only
men, human like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to
turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made
heaven and earth and sea and
everything in them. (Acts 14:14,15)
Personally,
I do not like the term “incarnation” and wish the word never
existed because of the common misconception surrounding it and
emphasized as every Christmas season approaches.
If
we want to insist on using the term the incarnation
of Christ, we should
at least explain it in a biblical
sense,
and
not think of it in
terms of a mythological
figure of
a god up in heaven who comes down in the form of human nature,
but rather, to view Christ in the sense of a person sent by God to
represent Him and to do His will. Biblical scholar John A.T. Robinson
perfectly relates this biblical understanding:
Jesus is a man who incarnates in
everything he is and does the Logos who is God. He is the Son, the
mirror-image of God, who is God for man and in man. The “I” of
Jesus speaks God, acts God. He utters the things of God, he does the
works of God. He is his plenipotentiary, totally commissioned to
represent him—as a human being. He speaks and acts with the “I”
that is one with God, utterly identified and yet not identical, his
representative but not his replacement—and certainly not his
replica, as if he were God dressed up as a human being. He is not a
divine being who came to earth, in the manner of Ovid’s
metamorphoses, in the form of a man, but the uniquely normal human
being in whom the logos or self-expressive activity of God was
totally embodied. 12
Jesus makes no claims for himself
in his own right, and at the same time makes the most tremendous
claims about what God is doing through him and uniquely through him.
Jesus never claims to be God personally; yet he always claims to
bring God completely.13
None
of the prophets of God ever said that God intended to come down as a
man in order to save mankind. The people anticipated the arrival of
the promised Messiah
who would completely represent
God on this earth.
We are told that “That the Spirit of the LORD will rest on him…”
(Isa. 11:2).
We
read in Deut: 18:15-19 where Moses said:
The LORD your God will
raise up for you a prophet like me
from among you,
from your brothers—it is to him
you shall listen—just
as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the
assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the
LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And
the LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken.
I
will raise up for them
a prophet like you
from among their brothers. And I
will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them
all that I command him. And whoever will not listen
to my words that he shall speak in my name,
I myself will require it of him.
Again, the incarnation, as
commonly understood, has nothing to do with Jesus physically
literally pre-existing
before he was born on this earth. We must discard these myths, just
as we have discussed in the previous chapter in keeping with the
Hebraic way of thinking. God created (brought into existence) the
life of a human being
in the womb of Mary by the creative power of the holy spirit (Matt.
1:18; Luke 1:35). It was not a mystical
incarnation. God
Almighty did not incarnate Himself as a man.
And as Forest Gump would say,
“And that’s all I have to say about that."
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