catholicism 101 / part 16

Catholicism 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy
Cross

June 15, 2008

Part 16

Christian Duty:  Christian Belief: The Three Great
Creeds: Concerning God:  Jesus
Christ: The Incarnation

-      The Doctrine of the Incarnation

o   The Apostles’ Creed puts it this way:

And [I believe] in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary.

o   The Nicene Creed is a bit more expansive:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

o   In considering the doctrine of the Trinity, we saw how the Father eternally begets the Son, because the essence of God is love.

§ The first part of the above quote from the
Nicene Creed expands a bit on the significance of this.

·    It means that Jesus Christ is “God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.”

·     The “from” which is repeated three times has the sense of “out of” or “from the substance of”.  It means that the Son shares what the Father is, they are of the same “stuff” (that stuff is divinity).  And it means that Jesus is God.

§ St. Hippolytus (born about 170 AD) said:  “When I say that the Son is distinct from the Father, I do not speak of two Gods, but as it were, light from light, and the stream from the fountain, and the ray from the sun.”

·     These particular images were frequently deployed
by the Fathers to speak of the relationship between the persons of the Trinity (particularly of the Son’s being begotten from the Father).  The Cappadocians, for example, use them (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzan).

o   The word “incarnation” means “taking flesh” or “becoming enfleshed”.  You will recognize “carne” as for example the Spanish word for meat.  So it was in Latin (carne is the ablative of carnis – meat / flesh).

§ It became the word for the event described in the Bible most succinctly in the Gospel of St. John:  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1.14).

·     You can see the word in the Latin Vulgate version of this verse:  Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.

o   Father Staley says “It is most important that the Christian should be well instructed in the doctrine of the Incarnation, for the whole scheme of redemption circles round this great foundation truth of our religion.  We shall not give God the loving gratitude which is his due, nor will our hope of salvation rest secure, until we have grasped the truth concerning the person and office of the Saviour [sic].”

§ And he points out that the Athanasian Creed highlights the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation when it says “Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation, that we also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ."

o   And the Incarnation IS the central mystery of Christian faith.  It is the coming of the Kingdom, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, the summary of the Law, the manifestation of things to come, the fulfillment of God’s promise, etc. etc. etc. etc.  All of Christianity indeed “circles round” this greatest and most important of mysteries.

o   And the right faith is this:  that God loved the world so much, that in order to deliver us from the curse under which we had brought ourselves through our rebellion against him, he sent his only and eternal Son, himself also God, who out of love for us and in great humility, took our nature upon himself in the womb of Mary and from her substance (her humanness).  Mary’s conception of Jesus was miraculous. The Apostles’ Creed says “He was conceived by the power of the Holy
Spirit”.  This is a bad translation.  The Latin original says: Qui conceptus est de spiritu sancto, and the older versions (e.g. Rite I in the BCP) of the Apostles’ Creed say merely: “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit”.

§ This last point is important because everyone might in a sense be said to be conceived “by the power of” the Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Spirit, uniquely in the case of Jesus, took the place of a Human Father at this conception.  When Mary asks how she will conceive, as she “knows not man” -- The Angel Gabriel says to her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1.35).  This is a unique event, and its miraculous character is attested in Mary’s being a virgin before and after she conceived and bore Jesus.  And one of the Blessed Virgin’s traditional titles is therefore “Spouse of the Holy Spirit”, likewise an expression of the uniqueness of Jesus’ birth (and
therefore her conception of him).

o   This supreme act of humility and condescension, that God himself should stoop to our level in this way, is literally the substance of our redemption, and the end of God’s plan.

o   It is important to say:  God the Son did not cease to be God when he became a man.  He always was God, he always is God, he will always be God.  But at the incarnation, in the womb of the Virgin, God began to be a man. 
That is the mystery.  God the Son united a perfect human nature to his perfect divine nature, and ever after that moment inside the Virgin’s womb, God the Son had two inseparable natures, God and human.

§ The Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon) put it this way (against the “Monophysites”): “We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person [prosopon] and one hypostasis.”

§ This is important because it means that the life, the power, the immediate influence of the Godhead was in all that Christ did and said, every moment of his life on earth; it means that the words and
actions of Jesus of Nazareth are the words and actions of God himself, and that they are therefore salutary in an ultimate way:  they save us.