History turned on the hinge of one birth, when the “Son of God . . . of one substance with the Father . . . for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was made incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made man.” If Christianity does not confess, with the Nicene Creed (381), that God became man as a historical fact, it forfeits whatever good news it claims to offer. God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccl. 3:11), but apart from his descent as our divine deliverer, fallen flesh is doomed to grope for heaven without ever grasping it. So also, sin reigns over flesh until it is condemned “in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3) by the sacrifice of a fellow man who has truly “borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4). Anything less than a divine and human Christ leaves us in darkness. But at the birth of the God-man in Bethlehem, hope breached.
As an exercise of gratitude and respect for our fathers in the faith, who met at Nicaea 1,700 years ago, we can reflect further in this article on the incarnation by using the Council’s particular formulation of the doctrine as our launching point. As readers of this edition will have learned by now, the commonly used version of the “Nicene Creed” is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 (quoted above). The First Council of Constantinople in 381 would have had many sources at its disposal—early baptism symbols (short summaries of the Christian faith to be professed by new converts before baptism), early versions of what we call the “Apostles’ Creed,” other lesser-known fourth-century creeds, including a handful of heretical ones, and a few other attempts to revise the Creed of Nicaea (325). In 381, the gathering sought to perpetuate the faith summarized in 325 with clarifying additions (especially regarding the Holy Spirit) and a few subtractions of words (but not of substance). The phrasing on the incarnation is one example of expansion.
The Creed of Nicaea (325) reads, “who, for us men and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and became man.” The Nicene Creed (381) reads, “who, for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and became man” (the additions marked in italics). Why did the fathers in 381 add mention of heaven, the Spirit, and Mary? Well, in one sense, they did not add the phrases. They were already found long before 325 in the baptismal symbols and earlier versions of the Apostles’ Creed, and they had been included in other versions since 325. However, some of the other versions described Jesus’s birth by Mary, while they associated the Spirit with “incarnation.” For example, at least one version known by the First Council of Constantinople read, “…came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and became man and was born of the virgin Mary.”
But if we need to be emphatic about the historicity of our faith, if the details of Christ’s life are crucial to our confession, if they are so important that the Apostles’ Creed is keen to even insist on Jesus’s suffering “under Pontius Pilate,” then why would the fathers in 381 keep the mention of Mary but decide to do so without referencing that momentous and sweetly humble beginning to Jesus’s life—his birth? One possible answer is that the fathers in 381 were simply economizing the Creed’s language. The greater likelihood, however, is that they did so to out-maneuver a particular false teaching held by some Apollinarians (more on that below)—namely, that the Son had taken a pure, eternal human nature to himself before his birth by Mary in human history. So, in response, by confessing that the singular act of incarnation took place “by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,” the First Council of Constantinople disallowed a distinction between the manner of the Son’s becoming human and the historical event of Mary’s supernatural conception and birth.
Anything less than a divine and human Christ leaves us in darkness.
Is there anything useful for theology today that can be learned from this overlooked reply to a forgotten heresy? Certainly. The confession that Jesus became incarnate by the virgin confronts straight-on the idea of an eternal or transcendent incarnation, a central component in the theological system of Karl Barth and many of his followers today. Barth reacted strongly against the merely human, finite Jesus of Protestant Liberalism. In turn, however, he promoted the radical transcendence and otherness of God, going so far as to re-define the incarnation. Barth does not describe the incarnation as the Son descending and taking on human nature in history and in the sphere of the created world. Rather, he describes it as an event in God’s own eternal life, outside of created history and space, in which he “assumed a being as man into His being as God” (Church Dogmatics, IV/2). He famously calls this “the Christ event.” In this event, God unites the whole of humanity to his own eternal being (which naturally leads to a universalist view of salvation). For Barth, the whole history of the God-man relationship depicted in Scripture is the expression of this one event that transcends created time. So also, the historical birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was only an embodiment of, but was not itself, the Christ event that reconciled God and man. So, Barth—in his own exposition of the Apostles’ Creed—argues that the church does not ultimately look back in history at its redemption. Rather, by “faith” the church accesses the transcendent revelation of the Christ event and “lives contemporaneously with the divine act depicted” in the historical events of Jesus’s life. One can see how Barth draws a distinction between the substance of his faith—his “credo”—and the events of history. But the fathers at Nicaea and Constantinople entertained no such distinction.
The swing in Christology from liberalism to Barthianism is something of a modern analog to the swing from Arianism to Apollinarianism. That is, both “swings” reflect the struggle to hold the immanence of Christ together with his transcendence. Although Arius (unlike liberalism) was concerned to keep a distinction between the Creator and his creation, he erred by placing Christ on the side of creation, denying the Son’s transcendence and eternal equality with the Father. Hence the strong emphasis on the divinity of Jesus in the second article of the Creed of Nicaea. The Nicene Creed slightly shortened that section, without sacrificing substance, and balanced it with the subtle response to Apollinarius’s transcendent incarnation. Now, aside from suggesting a pre-birth incarnation, the key error that brought Apollinarius infamy as an overcorrection to Arianism was the teaching that the divine Logos only assumed human flesh, but not a human mind. He wanted to insist that the eternal Son animated Jesus’s flesh, not a rational human soul. This is a problem because, as the orthodox have always confessed, Jesus can only save what he assumes—he needed to become completely human to save humanity completely. We need a truly human mediator (Heb. 7:26) who was “made perfect” (Heb. 5:9) as a sacrifice for our salvation (Heb. 10:1–14) by living a sinless life in both mind and body (Heb. 4:15; 2 Cor. 5:21; Matt 4:1–10).
So, as Arianism was formally rejected at the Council of Nicaea in 325, Apollinarianism was denounced as heretical at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Nicaea was reaffirmed. Jesus is both fully God and fully man. However, aside from re-using the phrasing already found among orthodox confessions (“by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary”), the revision in 381 added nothing to address the emerging questions surrounding the relationship between the person of Jesus and his divine and human natures (such as what “person” and “nature” even mean). Things were further complicated by another problematic thinker, Nestorius. In 431, he was deemed heretical at the Council of Ephesus for teaching that Jesus had two persons (one divine, one human) rather than one person with two natures.
The Bible, not Greek philosophy, provides the metaphysical framework for what Christians confess.
More than a century after Nicaea, the Council of Chalcedon (451) produced the Chalcedonian Definition, which emerged as the orthodox summary on these issues. It affirms that Jesus is “complete in manhood,” which consists “of a reasonable soul and body.” In his incarnation he is “begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer.” He is “recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.” A mouthful. But it represents the theological triumph of the Council of Nicaea. It is the same faith but clarified in response to false teachings and theological questions that the fathers in 325 could not have anticipated. So also, for as far as future generations may inquire into the mystery of the incarnation, for as many swings take place between the poles of transcendent deity and humble humanity, may faithful confessors never bend, equivocate, or hedge on the clarity of 325. Jesus Christ is God and man.
What about the addition of “from heaven” in 381? It is unclear whether anything specific motivated this inclusion; it already appears in several older creeds. However, the significance of “heaven” is worth discussing due to the Platonism that prevailed during that time period. Rather than a created place for humans (and angels) to dwell in God’s presence, the platonic idea of heaven is an eternal realm of ideas, where souls reside before their enfleshment, and to where they may return if they strive for pure virtue and knowledge. In their book, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Baker, 2020), Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves argued that the language of “came down from heaven” is at the heart of the Creed, particularly as a defense of the biblical view of God and salvation over against a philosophical one (88). They suggest that Arius’s indebtedness to Platonism can be seen in his depiction of a savior with an essentially upward trajectory: the obedient life of the Son paves the way for his followers to rise up to God (63). Accordingly, it is unsurprising that an Arian-friendly council in 357 at Sirmium dropped the “descent” language. The confession that our Lord “for us men and for our salvation, came down” is indeed a unique claim among religions, including false versions of Christianity. The Christian view of salvation begins with God’s self-giving condescension, his rescue mission from heaven. Christians make this confession out of our utter bankruptcy of any worth or work that would earn us an ascent to immortality.
Of course, an implication of the full divinity of Jesus is that he did not abandon heaven when he “came down,” or even set aside his omnipresence. The eternal, divine Logos never stops being the eternal, divine Logos. Neither, then, should the Creed’s language recall a platonic idea of the Logos as one uniquely endowed soul among others in pre-existent heaven becoming enfleshed. With the mention of “heaven,” the Creed seeks to reflect the language of Scripture. In the OT, heaven is portrayed as the dwelling place of God, from which he looks down on his people to bless them and rule over the nations (e.g., Deut. 4:39; 26:5; Ps. 2:4; 33:13–14; Ps. 103:19). From heaven, God reveals himself and his mysteries (Deut. 4:36; Dan. 2:28). Jesus himself speaks about the Father residing in heaven (Matt. 5:16; 6:9) and even speaks about dwelling there with the Father until his descent (John 3:13; 6:38; 62) and after his ascent (20:17). The Bible, not Greek philosophy, provides the metaphysical framework for what Christians confess.
Thus far, we have primarily considered how later developments of the Creed of Nicaea (325) contributed to the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation. But we must emphasize something else that the fathers at Nicaea captured about the Son’s incarnation, something important, but something easily overshadowed by all the historical interest in heretical portrayals of the Son’s relationship to the Father or the metaphysics of incarnation. That is, we should pay special attention to where the incarnation appears in the structure of the Creed. The three articles of the Creed correspond to the three persons of the Trinity. Naturally, we find the incarnation mentioned in the second article, “And in one Lord Jesus Christ…” As the article describes the Son, it moves seamlessly into describing who he is with reference to what he did—“And in one Lord Jesus Christ…who…came down…was crucified…rose again….” We cannot separate Jesus’s person from his work. Indeed, the singular word “Christ” at the opening of the second article immediately refers to both the person and his mission as Messiah. In fact, our doctrine of salvation will be weakened when it is not tied immediately to Christology. G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “In human relationships it is possible—out of ingratitude—to isolate the gift from the giver and still enjoy it, and there are also ‘unknown’ givers who remain in the background. But Christ is not such an unknown giver. He gives himself, and therefore his gift is never an isolated richness” (The Work of Christ, 20). Berkouwer’s point is that Christianity does not announce to people that God has simply gifted them with happiness or immortality or righteousness or glory, if only they would say “yes” to him. No, the concrete substance of our salvation is a person, our Savior. The Father sent the Son, and the Son gives himself in all of his blessedness and life. Righteousness, holiness, sonship, glory, and life belong properly to Christ himself, and he mediates them to us as saving gifts when we receive his gift of self and are insolubly united to him by the Holy Spirit. There is no enjoyment of God’s saving gifts apart from a personal familiarity with the One who became like us, that we may know “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
We can look even closer at the Creed’s structure. At the transition to describing Jesus by his work, we confess, “who for us and for our salvation, came down…” Notice that the incarnation is the first action named in Jesus’s saving accomplishments. The Creed does not say that Jesus became incarnate and then accomplished saving deeds (i.e., crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascent). As Berkouwer puts it, the church sees “the incarnation in historical unity with the cross” (The Work of Christ, 33). Perhaps it has become all too easy for Christians to regard the incarnation as context or background information for the “real” work of salvation rather than as an essential step. It is not merely “essential” in the sense that Jesus could only go about saving us if he first had a humanity to do it with, but in the sense that the incarnation is part and parcel of what we mean by the accomplishment of redemption.
One aspect of NT teaching that can especially highlight the saving character of the Son’s descent is his identification as the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45). In Romans 5:12–21, Paul points to Adam and Christ as the two, unique, one-for-the-many individuals. All men are either condemned to death because they remain in Adam and his disobedience, or they have justification and life because they share in Christ’s obedience. “As by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (5:19). The obedience of Christ mentioned in Romans 5:19 especially has the cross in view, but the NT consistently emphasizes that Christ lived a whole life of obedience (e.g., Phil. 2:6–8; Heb. 4:15; 5:8–9). The Gospels even comment on Jesus’s obedience in childhood (Luke 2:51–52). The synoptic Gospels all portray the temptation of Christ in ways reminiscent of Adam’s own interaction with Satan in Eden, highlighting Jesus’s victory by contrast (Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13; cf. 3:28). Jesus’s whole incarnate life and ministry was a necessary aspect of his redemptive work because we who believe in him depend upon his perfect, vicarious obedience for our righteousness.
The Father sent the Son, and the Son gives himself in all of his blessedness and life.
We can summarize the crucial significance of Christ’s identity as the last Adam for our doctrine of the incarnation in this way: the Son did not take on a generic humanity. It has become popular for modern theologians (often influenced by the ideas of Barth, discussed above) to emphasize God’s for-us-ness in joining humanity to himself and sharing in our sufferings. But the biblical logic is not that Jesus took on humanity, as such, and suffered in and with humanity, as such, so that humanity, generically or universally, would be saved. Rather, Jesus came down from heaven as a unique and specific man, God’s chosen “servant” (Isa. 52:13) to save Israel. He is the federal or representative individual from whom stems a new humanity (Eph. 2:15); he is the “firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18) and the “head over the church, which is his body” (Eph. 1:23). God’s people are part of God’s new creation by the Spirit (2 Cor. 5:17), being enfolded under a new and perfect Adam. So, Christ does not merely take on a humanity like ours (Heb. 4:15; Rom. 8:3); his life is determinative or vicarious for our lives. In sum, the incarnation is not salvific by a purely ontological but a federal, covenantal logic. Christ does not simply identify with human suffering but suffers as the representative head of a new humanity. In turn, by their union with Christ, when believers suffer for righteousness’ sake they do so in solidarity with their Savior (Phil. 3:10), just as they also partake in their representative’s vindication and ascension (Rom. 4:25; 6:4–5; Eph. 2:6; Phil. 3:11, 21).
From the beginning, Scripture foretold salvation by a man. In Genesis 3:15, God promised that a human—a seed of the woman—would defeat Satan and bring rest. Though, when Jesus was conceived by the Spirit in the womb of young Mary, Joseph was not involved (though he did obediently serve as Jesus’s civil and legal father).
We needed a seed of the woman, but we needed him to stand outside of Adam’s covenant headship and guilt. We needed a divine deliverer from heaven to restore our status as the children of God. Paul himself neatly captures the sum and substance of our topic in Galatians 4:4–5: “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons.” Thanks be to God for the labors of the early church and for their courage to stand under Scripture and defend it in the face of temptations to de-mystify or rationalize the incarnation according to human cunning or philosophy. And we too submit ourselves to God’s word when we confess, with Nicaea, that God was enfleshed “for us men and for our salvation.”