This is the second in a three-part series of essays by John Clark and CPT fellow Marcus Johnson. You can read part 1 here and part 3 here. Content in this article has been adapted from Johnson and Clark’s book, The Incarnation of God: The Mystery of the Gospel as the Foundation of Evangelical Theology (Crossway, 2015).
In our previous essay on the significance of the incarnation, we noted that the Word become flesh deserves a central rather than peripheral place in Christian faith and witness. In this essay we elaborate on the significance of the incarnation by highlighting its direct relation to salvation. It is not uncommon for modern Christians to think of the incarnation of our Lord as not much more than a necessary prerequisite, or precondition, for his atoning death. There is no doubt that the crucifixion and death of Christ would have been powerless had He not been truly and fully human. But there is indeed more we can, and should, say about the atoning implications of the incarnation. For, when God became incarnate He began a comprehensively astounding work of reconciliation that healed and saved every last aspect of our fallen humanity, from cradle to grave.
The incarnation is a monumental rebuke of our misguided aspirations. For the incarnation accomplishes the severe mercy of rendering absurd any notion that rapprochement between God and humanity is accomplished from the side of humanity. We do not seek and find a reclusive God; he pursues and overtakes a rebellious people. We do not perforate his unapproachable light; he penetrates our unsearchable darkness. We do not interrogate the Jesus of history to excavate the God of eternity; that infinite and eternal God storms space and time to confront us face to face in the face of Christ. The incarnation scandalizes our desire for heroism without humility, for glory without grace, for human ascent without divine descent. That is because the incarnation sets before us the unsettling yet liberating reality that rapprochement between God and humanity is accomplished only and ever from the side of God.
“God has done the impossible, the incredible thing in Jesus Christ,” announces T. F. Torrance, “but it is only now that he has done it that we see how utterly impossible it actually is, impossible for us to accomplish from the side of humanity.”[1] Indeed, God is fond of shattering the puny notions we harbor about him, and the grand delusions we cherish about ourselves. He shatters both simultaneously in his incarnation. For in ironic and astonishing fashion, God brings about reconciliation between God and humanity from the side of God not by repudiating our humanity, but by assuming it. From the moment of Christ’s conception in Mary’s womb, the infinite and eternal Son of God has deigned to live out his divine life forevermore in our human nature. Accordingly, John Calvin wisely warns that “if you want to have anything in common with Christ you must especially take care not to despise His flesh.”[2]
Calvin’s point is that anything and everything Christ shares with us results from the humanity we share with him. This is simply to say, with the apostle Paul, that “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). The implications of these words from Calvin and Paul warrant pause: God and man, long alienated, have been brought together, reconciled, in the very person of Christ. God has made the body of our Lord the place where God and men meet. God gives himself and all his saving benefits to us in and as man in our incarnate Savior. God draws near to us, and we no less draw near to God, in and through the God-man. The saving acts of Christ secure ‘at-one-ment’ between God and the redeemed because those acts occur within the being and life of our Mediator, within the very incarnate constitution of the One who unites God with man as the God-man. God the Son healed and saved the corrupted, estranged humanity he assumed from us so the incarnate Christ might himself be the ground and source of every aspect of our salvation—so the one Mediator of salvation might mediate the salvation that is his alone to give in and through the very humanity he healed and saved.
Christian orthodoxy as articulated by the Nicene Creed confesses “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…of the same essence [homoousion] as the Father, through whom all things came into being, both in heaven and in earth.”[3] Jesus of Nazareth is not similar to but identical with the eternal Word, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. His coming in our flesh is the unprecedented and radical inbreaking of God himself into the universe he created. What is more, his coming in our flesh is the taking of our humanity into his own divine life, that he might humanly mediate the very life of God to us in and as man. It is crucial to grasp that God the Son did not merely become man in a human being, as if his assumption of our humanity were in any sense less than true and full. For the church’s confession allows for neither a deistic disjunction between God and creation nor a Nestorian disjunction between the divine and human natures of her Lord. Rather, God the Son became man not just in a human being, but as a human being. The incarnation is thus internally, necessarily, dynamically related to salvation, insomuch that the incarnate Christ is himself the very substance and sum of that salvation.[4] Athanasius exquisitely expressed the relationship between Christ’s incarnation and our salvation as follows:
For if the Word were in the Body putatively, as they say, and by putatively is meant imaginary, it follows that both the salvation and the resurrection of man is apparent only… But truly our salvation is not merely apparent, nor does it extend to the body only, but the whole man, body and soul alike, has truly obtained salvation in the Word Himself. That then which was born of Mary was according to the divine Scriptures human by nature, and the Body of the Lord was a true one; but it was this, because it was the same as our body, for Mary was our sister inasmuch as we all are from Adam.[5]
We must now hasten to add that mediation, by definition, cannot be only one-directional. The very purpose and point of the incarnation is such that the mediation of the God-man is always and ever bi-directional. For as Paul tells us, that mediation is not merely from God to men, but between God and men (1 Tim. 2:5). Just as surely as Christ humanly mediates God to men in and as man, therefore, he humanly mediates men to God in like manner. Assuming our humanity, body and soul alike, the man Christ Jesus personally lives and acts in our name, in our place, and on our behalf. Born of Mary to live out his divine life forevermore in our human nature, all Christ is and does as our incarnate Savior he is and does for us—that is, in solidarity with us as one of us. Consequently, all he renders to the Father in our humanity as our Mediator he renders ours. Stating the matter clearly and concisely, Christ works out our salvation within the constitution of his own vicarious humanity. To speak of the vicarious humanity of Christ is thus to say that he assumed our humanity and made it his own in order to be for us who we could not and would not be, and to do for us what we could not and would not do.
Most modern evangelicals understand Christ’s crucifixion in vicarious terms—that is, as an act of penal substitution whereby Christ dies in our name, in our place, and on our behalf. Yet many modern evangelicals fail to understand that Christ’s assumption of our humanity is the grand and glorious reality whereby he became the One who is and acts vicariously for us from his incarnation thereafter, undertaking one comprehensive work of redemption that includes his birth, baptism, life, death, resurrection, and ascension.[6] Grasping the immense soteriological significance of the vicarious humanity of Christ, therefore, cannot help but deepen and broaden common notions of what it means for us to be reconciled to God by every aspect of our incarnate Savior’s embodied existence. Of this reality our evangelical forbearers were well aware, as this rich and impassioned flourish from Calvin displays:
We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ [Acts 4:12]. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’ [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:2]. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.[7]
What better time than this Advent season to retrieve, and rejoice in, the comprehensive and monumental significance of the eternal Word become flesh, who left no aspect of our sin-ravaged humanity untouched and un-reconciled. Put in the melodious voice of the Church: “He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found.”
Notes:
[1] Torrance, The Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. Edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL.: IVP Academic, 2008), 10.
[2] Comm. John 6:56, CNTC 4:171.
[3] “The Creed of Nicaea (325),” in Creeds of the Churches, 30-31.
[4] Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation (Eugene, OR.: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 127-28.
[5] Athanasius, Letters of Athanasius, to Epictetus, no. 59, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 4:572-73.
[6] Oliver D. Crisp, “By His Birth We Are Healed: Our Redemption, It Turns Out, Began Long Before Calvary,” in Christianity Today 56, no.3 (March 2012), 32.
[7] Inst. 2.16.19.
This resource is part of the series God in Flesh – Reflections on Advent and Incarnation. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Marcus Johnson is a Professor of Theology at the Moody Bible Institute. He also serves as an Associate Rector at St. Mark’s Church in Geneva, IL. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. He is the author of One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation and the coauthor (with John Clark) of The Incarnation of God: The Mystery of the Gospel as The Foundation of Evangelical Theology. He and John Clark will release a second book, A Call to Christian Formation: How Theology Makes Sense of Our World, in July 2021. He is a member of the St. Peter Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
John Clark is a Professor of Theology at the Moody Bible Institute. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. He has written two books with Marcus Johnson (see above).
