Theology of Christmas needs more emphasis, profs & pastor say
by David Roach
NASHVILLE (BP) – No matter how many times Michael York preaches on Christ’s incarnation, it never ceases to amaze him.
“The eternal God, the second person of the Trinity, entered into humanity as a baby in His mother’s womb and was born without the musculature in His neck to even hold up His own head,” said York, pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Ashland, Ky. “He had to be cradled, and He had to be fed. Jesus was fully human. He is just like we were except without sin. All the struggles and weaknesses of our physical flesh – Jesus experienced that.”
For York, the incarnation isn’t just a Christmas emphasis. It’s a tool to help Christians grow in godliness year-round.
“The incarnation gives me the opportunity as a pastor to say to a congregation that Jesus knows and has experienced the kind of things they are going through,” he said.
York hopes more pastors will join him in explaining and applying this doctrine throughout the coming year.
The term “incarnation” refers to the biblical teaching that Jesus is one, undivided person who is both fully God and fully human. He has existed as God eternally, possessing all the same divine attributes as God the Father – omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and more. He became human when God the Father sent Him into Mary’s womb, and He remains human forever, possessing all the same attributes other humans possess only without sin.
A classic statement of this doctrine was made by a gathering of Christian leaders in A.D. 451 in the city of Chalcedon, in modern-day Turkey.
Jesus is, according to the Council of Chalcedon, “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body.”
But should explaining the theological ins and outs of Jesus’ incarnation concern pastors? Isn’t it enough to appreciate the sentimentality of the Christmas season? Theology professor Malcolm Yarnell’s answers are emphatic: yes to the first question, no to the second.
“The incarnation is absolutely necessary for the totality of our salvation, from justification through sanctification to glorification,” said Yarnell, research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Without the incarnation, there is no saving power in the Christian faith.
“Only one who is truly the perfect man could die for our sins, and only one who is truly God could raise His humanity from death,” he said. “After His death and resurrection, Christ took our humanity to His eternal throne so that we could approach the throne of grace in our every time of need.”
The incarnation also dignifies our lives in human bodies, says Michael Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“We’re not just souls,” he said. “The body is to be redeemed. We believe in the redemption of the body and the resurrection of the flesh because Christ became man.”
Because Jesus is a human being with a body, believers should consider “the importance of the human body,” the “importance of the material realm” and the “use of the body in worship,” including baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Earlier generations seemed to understand the implications of Christ’s incarnation more fully than some modern evangelicals, Haykin said. The early centuries of church history saw numerous Christian books and sermons on the incarnation because believers in that era battled false teachers who claimed Jesus was not truly human.
In the Middle Ages, theologians began emphasizing that Jesus became man in order to redeem humanity on the cross. Anselm of Canterbury made that argument famous in his book “Why God Became Man.” Emphasis on Jesus’ incarnation as background for the cross continued into the Reformation era and beyond.
Haykin urges today’s Christians to return to early Christian writings on the incarnation to understand the full breadth of that doctrine’s significance. His favorite book on why God the Son became human is “On the Incarnation of the Word,” written by Athanasius of Alexandria in the 300s.
For Athanasius, “the incarnation is a victory over the devil in many respects,” Haykin said.
Yarnell agrees that today’s preachers have much to learn from early Christian preaching and writing on Christ’s incarnation.
“In modernity, evangelicals have not always paid sufficient attention to the fundamental doctrines of God the Trinity and Christ as truly God and truly man,” Yarnell said. “Instead, we have had to spend significant time defending the truthfulness and authority of Scripture, a doctrine which other periods were able to take for granted. But we must pay attention to the basic truths of the faith again.”
Apologist C.S. Lewis urged modern Christians – laypeople and pastors alike – not to fear early Christian books on theology.
“The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face,” Lewis wrote in an introduction to “On the Incarnation of the Word.” “He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”
“The only palliative” to repeating the same errors as other preachers in our time, Lewis wrote, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
York’s church feels the breeze of his preaching on the incarnation year-round, sometimes at unexpected moments when people realize Jesus’ humanity comforts them in a trial. Preaching on the incarnation, he said, is “equipping people for what’s to come.”
“This information goes into their minds,” York said. “Then sometime afterward – maybe February, maybe March – they go through something, and the idea that Jesus entered into humanity, taking on the frailty of our human nature, hits them in that moment.”
This Article first appeared in Baptist Press. David Roach is a writer in Mobile, Ala.