This is the first in a three-part series of essays by John Clark and CPT fellow Marcus Johnson. You can read part 2 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).
The death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus occupy a central place in the doctrine and doxology of the Church. This is just as it should be. These two redemptive events in the life of the Savior mark his climactic entrance into, and final triumph over, the forces of sin, death, and the devil. And so Christians rightly register a deep sense of awe and amazement when contemplating a crucified God on Good Friday, or an empty tomb on Easter Sunday. It must be admitted, however, that many of us do not register the same sense of awe when it comes to Christmas Day, the day on which we commemorate the most staggering and stupefying miracle that ever came to pass: the miracle of God becoming a human being. When the eternal Word and Son of God “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), God decided in his omnipotent freedom to become who we are, without ever ceasing to be fully who He has always been, and always will be. In the miracle of Christmas, God became a fully human being in swaddling clothes, even as He remained the Lord of the universe. When God the Son became incarnate he entered into the deepest ground of our human existence, to forever live his divine life in our human nature. He did this in order to grant us a life-giving, life-transforming share in His communion with the Father through the Holy Spirit, the glorious first-fruits of his reconciling all things in heaven and earth in Himself (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20). The nineteenth century Reformed theologian and churchman John Williamson Nevin thus exclaims:
“The Word became flesh!” In this simple, but sublime enunciation, we have the whole gospel comprehended in a word … The incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s revelations. It is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s work’s, and brings to light the true meaning of the universe … The incarnation forms thus the great central fact of the world.[1]
We do no injustice to our Savior’s death and resurrection if we pause for a (Christmas) season and reflect upon the glorious truth of a God who loved us so much that He was willing to become who we are. For in this great and all-consuming divine condescension, we peer into the supreme mystery of Christian faith. This will require an exercise in sanctified imagination and deep reflection upon a mystery that changed the world forever, a truth that grounds and guides Christian thought and life.
“Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.”[2] With characteristic playfulness, G. K. Chesterton makes an observation about which he is deadly serious, a profound point which none of us can afford to miss. All forms of fiction, no matter how skillfully, creatively, and compellingly crafted, are in every instance shaped by and limited to the confines of our imaginations. It simply cannot be otherwise, given that fiction is, at bottom, the product of self-styled human ingenuity. Truth, on the other hand, shares neither the origin nor the inherent limitations of fiction. It does not follow, of course, that the two are innately adverse to one another. On the contrary, truth and fiction can sometimes co-exist in harmonious and complimentary ways, so long as no illusions are cherished as to which is which. But whenever fiction is accepted as truth, whenever non-reality is confused with reality, dangers and difficulties inevitably ensue.
Due to the inclinations of our hearts and the prevailing convictions of this or any cultural milieu, it is all too easy for us to live under the influence of deeply-seated and rarely-challenged assumptions. Among the most basic and common assumptions of contemporary culture is that the nature, meaning, and goal of human existence is somehow self-explanatory, that one’s own self-understanding is the proper starting point and controlling principle for understanding all of reality. Thus as J. I. Packer notes in his modern Christian classic, Knowing God, “It is no wonder that thoughtful people find the gospel of Jesus Christ hard to believe, for the realities with which it deals pass our understanding.”[3] How could Jesus of Nazareth perform the numerous miracles recorded in Scripture? How could the sufferings of this man, culminating in his death between two criminals on a Roman gibbet, result in God’s forgiveness of sinners? How could the same pierced, pummeled, ruined body that was lowered from the cross and placed in a tomb be raised to incorruptible life? How could this man ascend into heaven, reconciling the redeemed to the God from whom they were alienated? Questions of this sort could certainly be multiplied. Packer observes, however, that such questions arise when difficulties are found in the wrong places, when we fail to identify and apprehend “the supreme mystery” of the gospel. That mystery is not found in the Good Friday event of Christ’s crucifixion, or even in the Easter Sunday event of his resurrection. Rather, the Christmas event of Christ’s birth is where “the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie…. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.”[4] This same point was stressed by C. S. Lewis, who remarked:
The Central Miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation…. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this…. The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile.[5]
These observations by Packer and Lewis are neither new nor novel. They merely echo a conviction deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Christian church from her inception. Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Reformer, noted that the “church fathers took particular delight” in the apostolic testimony that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and the early church’s delight in the incarnation was whole-heartedly shared by Luther himself, who joyously exalted:
He [Jesus Christ] condescends to assume my flesh and blood, my body and soul. He does not become an angel or another magnificent creature; He becomes man. This is a token of God’s mercy to wretched human beings; the human heart cannot grasp or understand, let alone express it.[6]
Yet while the likes of Packer and Lewis show considerable continuity with their Christian predecessors, they seem somewhat out of step with many of their Christian contemporaries. In 1937 Dorothy Sayers lamented, “the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered into the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.”[7] Bewilderment would be understandable, even expected, if Sayers were describing only the reactions of non-Christians, or if by bewilderment she meant something akin to the sense of wonder just exhibited by Luther. Regrettably, this was not the case. Moreover, the situation Sayers described has not shown signs of widespread improvement between then and now. At the very center of the Christian faith is the supreme mystery that the Word became flesh, that in the person of Jesus Christ, God participates unreservedly in the same human nature that we ourselves possess. All too often, however, modern Christians view the incarnation with something closer to consternation than wonder, and as a result, they tend to push this grandest of realities from the center to the periphery of their confession.
This Christmas season is as good a time as ever to renew our sense of awe and astonishment at the miracle of the incarnation, to return our confession of the Word become flesh to the very center of the Church’s life, worship, and witness.
[1] John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (Philadelphia: J.B.Lippencott, 1846), 199.
[2] Chesterton Day by Day: The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, ed. Michael W. Perry (Seattle, WA.: Inkling Books, 2002), 99.
[3] J. I. Packer, Knowing God, 20th Anniversary Edition (Downers Grove, IL.: IVP, 1993), 52.
[4] Ibid., 52-53.
[5] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 143.
[6] LW 22:102-3. All references to Luther’s writings are cited by volume and page number as found in Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-).
[7] Dorothy Sayers to Father Kelly, October 4, 1937, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 2, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1997), 43.
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).
