Unlike what you usually hear on social media from today’s Christian bloggers and influencers, this vlog will not be a rah-rah session of punditry. Put on your thinking cap because we’re going to dive deep into what Christmas and the Incarnation are really all about. I am going to quote from church father Athanasius. First, what’s a church father? The term refers to early theologians of Christianity who developed Church doctrine in the first centuries after Christ. What we as evangelical Christians believe today was shaped by these men of God of great intellect and devotion, such as St. Augustine, St. Jerome (who first translated the Bible into Latin), and others including St. Athanasius, whom I am going to quote.
I am releasing this blog on Christmas day, when we celebrate the birth of our Savior, even though he was likely born in the Spring. It is today that we commemorate Christ becoming God in flesh, the Incarnation. This is the divine initiative of God the Son becoming flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ. The term comes from the Latin word “incarnatio” which mans “to become flesh.” It defines that Christ was both human and God, that he was conceived by virgin birth, and that through Him we could be reconciled to God. As Romans 5:10 says, “We were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”
Now listen carefully to these words of Athanasius, of Alexandria (the most important center of learning at that time in history) regarding the Incarnation:
The Word was not hedged in by His body, nor did His presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might. No. The marvelous truth is, that being the Word, so far from being Himself contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself. In creation He is present everywhere, yet is distinct in being from it; ordering, directing, giving life to all, containing all, yet is He Himself the Uncontained, existing solely in His Father. As with the whole, so also is it with the part. Existing in a human body, to which He Himself gives life, He is still Source of life to all the universe, present in every part of it, yet outside the whole; and He is revealed both through the works of His body and through His activity in the world. It is, indeed, the function of soul to behold things that are outside the body, but it cannot energize or move them. A man cannot transport things from one place to another, for instance, merely by thinking about them; nor can you or I move the sun and the stars just by sitting at home and looking at them. With the Word of God in His human nature, however, it was otherwise.
As Man [Jesus] was living a human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life of the universe, and as Son He was in constant union with the Father.
To this I can only add, “Amen, and Merry Christmas.”
