The Incarnation

John's prologue makes three claims in its opening line and holds them together without explanation. The Word was in the beginning, which places him before the creation the verse is about to describe. The Word was with God, pros ton theon, which distinguishes him from the one he is with. And the Word was God, which refuses to make him a lesser being alongside the first. Any christology that drops one of the three is easier to state and is not what the sentence says.

The third clause has carried an argument for a century, so know how it runs. In the Greek of 1:1c the noun theos has no article and stands before the verb, which is why some readers, most visibly the New World Translation used by Jehovah's Witnesses, render it a god. E. C. Colwell's 1933 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature observed that definite predicate nouns standing before the verb usually drop the article, and his rule has often been quoted backwards, as though it proved that such a noun must be definite. It does not; the rule runs the other way. The reading most Greek scholars now give, set out by Philip Harner in the same journal in 1973, is that the noun is qualitative: the Word has the nature that God has, without being identified with the person he is with. That reading is what the rest of the prologue then acts on, since verse 3 says that all things were made through him, which puts him on the maker's side of a line John has just drawn.

Preexistence is not a Johannine specialty, and a student should be able to show that with a Bible open. Jesus himself says at John 8:58 that before Abraham was born, I am, and at John 17:5 asks for the glory he had with the Father before the world existed. Paul, writing in the fifties, says at 1 Corinthians 8:6 that there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came, which rewrites Israel's confession that the LORD is one around two figures. Colossians 1:15-17 calls the Son the image of the invisible God and the firstborn over all creation, then says that all things were created through him and for him. Hebrews 1:2 says God made the universe through his Son, and 1:3 that the Son upholds all things by his powerful word.

Take the hardest of those texts seriously rather than quoting it as though it settled everything. Firstborn in Colossians 1:15, prototokos, was the Arian proof text in the fourth century and is used the same way now, and the word can mean first in a sequence. Notice also that the BSB prints firstborn over all creation: the English over has already chosen the ranking sense of the Greek genitive, while a reader who wants the Arian sense takes it as firstborn of creation, one member of the set. The grammar alone does not decide between them, which is why the reply below matters more than the preposition. The reply is not a lexical trick, it is the context: verse 16 begins with for, and gives as the reason for the title that in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, which is a strange reason to give for his being the first created item. Scripture also uses firstborn for rank rather than birth order, as at Psalm 89:27, where God says of David, 'I will indeed appoint him as My firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth,' and David was the youngest of eight. That is an argument, and arguments can be answered. Learn to state it rather than to assert the conclusion.

What the incarnation adds to all this is the word John uses at 1:14: the Word became flesh. Not appeared as flesh, not inhabited flesh. Sarx is the ordinary word for meat and mortality, the word a Greek reader would least expect next to logos, and John chose it. He then says the Word tented among us, eskenosen, which puts the reader at the tabernacle in Exodus 40, where the glory settled on a tent in the middle of a camp. The prologue's climax is not that God spoke to us from a distance but that the glory moved in.

Here is the passage, and it is worth writing out. In the BSB it reads: 'Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.' The BSB's existing is one translator's choice for the participle in verse 6; other English versions say being or though he was, and the participle does not by itself decide whether Paul describes a state before the incarnation. Hold that in mind when you reach the Adam reading below. Notice before anything else that Paul introduces it at verse 5 as a reason for the Philippians to stop looking to their own interests. The most exalted christological passage in his letters is deployed to settle a quarrel in a congregation.

Whether the passage is a pre-Pauline hymn quoted by Paul has been debated since Ernst Lohmeyer's study of 1928, and Ralph Martin's Carmen Christi in 1967 made the hymn hypothesis close to standard. It has since been questioned from several directions: Gordon Fee argued that it is exalted prose rather than a hymn, and recent work on what first-century readers meant by a hymn has weakened the confidence with which the label was applied. The question matters less than it looks. If Paul composed it, it is Paul's christology; if he quoted it, the christology is older than Paul and he endorsed it. Either way it is early, and either way he assumed the Philippians would accept it without argument.

Morphe, translated form, is the first crux. J. B. Lightfoot argued in the nineteenth century that morphe denotes the essential attributes of a thing, so that morphe theou means the divine nature. Others have argued from Greek usage that morphe is closer to visible form, appearance or glory, so that the phrase describes the splendour proper to God rather than the essence. The control on the argument is inside the sentence: whatever morphe theou means, morphe doulou two lines later must mean something parallel, and Christ did not take on the mere appearance of humanity. That parallel is the strongest reason for reading morphe as a genuine mode of being rather than a costume, and it is an argument available to readers on both sides of the lexical question.

Harpagmos, the word behind the BSB's something to be grasped, is the second crux and the evidence is thin: it occurs once in the New Testament. The BSB's own footnote offers something to be exploited as the alternative. Three readings are on the table. It may describe something already possessed and clung to, so that Christ refused to hold on to what was his. It may describe something not possessed and to be seized, so that Christ refused to snatch at what was not yet his, which is how an Adam reading takes it. Or it may be idiomatic. Roy Hoover, in the Harvard Theological Review in 1971, examined the construction in which harpagmos stands with a verb of regarding and argued that the idiom means to treat something as a matter to take advantage of, and N. T. Wright developed this in the Journal of Theological Studies in 1986. On Hoover's reading the sentence says that Christ, who did possess equality with God, did not regard it as something to exploit for himself. That reading is widely followed and it is not unanimous.

Kenoo, emptied, is where doctrine has been built on a verb. Observe what the sentence does and does not say. It gives no genitive of content: Paul does not say emptied himself of anything. The other four Pauline uses of the verb, at Romans 4:14, 1 Corinthians 1:17, 1 Corinthians 9:15 and 2 Corinthians 9:3, are all metaphorical, meaning to make void or drain of force (the BSB's useless, emptied of its power, nullify and prove empty). And the participle that follows, taking the form of a servant, is most naturally read as the means of the emptying. On that reading, which is the majority one, the self-emptying happens by addition rather than by subtraction: he emptied himself by taking, the way a king empties himself of royalty by becoming a servant without ceasing to be the king's son. Readers who find a real subtraction in the verse are not being perverse, since humbling oneself normally means giving something up, and the exaltation in verse 9 implies a preceding loss of something. But the grammar does not hand them an object, and that is the fact every account has to start from.

One further reading has to be stated because it is held by serious scholars and because it changes what the passage proves. James Dunn argued in Christology in the Making in 1980 that the passage is Adam christology from start to finish: Adam, made in the image of God, grasped at equality with God and was humbled; Christ, in the same image, refused to grasp and was exalted. On that reading the whole thing describes the human Jesus and does not require a decision made before his birth. The replies are substantial and come from across the field. Taking the form of a servant and being made in human likeness read as a transition into the human condition rather than as a description of someone already in it, and a man who is already human cannot be said to have become so. The exaltation in verse 9 hands him the name above every name, which verses 10 and 11 fill out with Isaiah 45:23, a passage where the LORD swears by himself that every knee will bow before him. Whatever one concludes, a student should be able to state Dunn's reading as he states it, and to say which parts of the text press hardest against it.

The word kenosis is now used loosely for any talk of divine self-giving. In the nineteenth century it named a specific and daring proposal, and it deserves to be met in its own terms rather than as a label. The problem it set out to solve was real and is still real: the Gospels show Jesus growing in wisdom (Luke 2:52), being ignorant of the day and hour (Mark 13:32), being tired, hungry, astonished and afraid. If he is God, and God is omniscient and omnipotent, how are those sentences true of him and not merely true of a part of him that was carrying on separately?

Gottfried Thomasius, a Lutheran at Erlangen, gave the fullest early statement in Christi Person und Werk, published in the eighteen-fifties. His move was to divide the divine attributes. The relative attributes, those God has in relation to a world, namely omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, the Son laid aside in becoming incarnate. The immanent attributes, holiness, truth, love, he retained, because they are what God is in himself. So the Son remains fully God in everything that constitutes deity, while living a genuinely limited human life. Wolfgang Friedrich Gess pressed further, to a version in which the Logos so surrendered the divine mode of existence that he became the human soul of Jesus, with the divine self-consciousness itself given up and recovered in the course of the human life.

In England the proposal took a more cautious form. Charles Gore argued for it in the 1889 volume Lux Mundi and in his Bampton Lectures of 1891, partly under pressure from biblical criticism: if Jesus spoke of the Psalms in ways a critical scholar would not, a kenotic account allowed one to say that his human knowledge was genuinely of his own time without impugning his person. P. T. Forsyth's The Person and Place of Jesus Christ in 1909 recast the idea, pairing the kenosis of the Son with a plerosis, a progressive filling of the human life with what had been retracted; and H. R. Mackintosh's The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ in 1912 gave the position its most careful British defence. These were not marginal writers, and kenoticism was for a time close to the reigning christology in English-speaking Protestantism.

The objections, stated by their own advocates, are heavy. First, if the Son can set aside omnipotence and omniscience and remain God, then those attributes are not essential to deity, which revises the doctrine of God rather than the doctrine of Christ; and if they are essential, then the Son during those years was not God. Second, Colossians 1:17 says that in the Son all things hold together and Hebrews 1:3 that he upholds all things, which raises the awkward question of who was holding the universe together between Bethlehem and the empty tomb. Third, the exegetical base is weak, since Philippians 2:7 names nothing that was emptied and the verb elsewhere in Paul does not mean subtraction. Fourth, the classical christology already has an answer to the ignorance texts that does not require a divine self-mutilation: the one person acts and suffers through two natures, so ignorance is really predicated of him according to his humanity, which is what Chalcedon's grammar exists to license. Fifth, critics from Donald Baillie onward have argued that a temporarily reduced God is a different figure from the God of the New Testament, and closer to the Greek stories of gods who come down for a while.

Kenoticism did not die. A modern version, argued by Stephen Davis, Ronald Feenstra, C. Stephen Evans and others, and gathered in the 2006 volume Exploring Kenotic Christology, accepts the force of the first objection and answers it by redefining the attribute: what is essential to God, they propose, is not bare omniscience but omniscience unless freely choosing a state of incarnate limitation, so that the limitation is an exercise of divine freedom rather than a loss of divine nature. Critics reply that this rescues the theory by writing the theory into the definition of God, which is a real charge. What a student should carry away is that the question kenoticism asked has not been answered to everyone's satisfaction by anyone, and that the alternatives are not one careful position and one reckless one. Thomas Morris's proposal of two minds in one person in The Logic of God Incarnate (1986), and the classical two-natures account, are also answers to the same problem, and they have their own critics.

Two Gospels narrate it and they do so independently. Matthew tells it from Joseph's side: Mary is found to be with child through the Holy Spirit before they come together (1:18), Joseph plans a quiet divorce, and an angel tells him that the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit (1:20). Luke tells it from Mary's side: the angel comes to a virgin pledged in marriage to a man named Joseph (1:27), Mary asks how this can be since she is a virgin (1:34), and the answer is that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her (1:35). The two accounts share little else. They have different genealogies, different supporting casts, and different sequences of events, which is why the agreement on this one point is evidence rather than repetition.

Matthew then quotes Isaiah 7:14, and in the BSB his wording at Matthew 1:23 runs: 'Behold, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call Him Immanuel.' Isaiah 7:14 in the BSB has will call Him Immanuel with a singular subject, and the BSB footnote says the Hebrew literally reads and she will call His name Immanuel, with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek Old Testament each differing again (the Greek has you will call). So compare the verses side by side before quoting either. The Hebrew of Isaiah has almah, a young woman of marriageable age. The word does not lexically specify virginity, which is why the Revised Standard Version of 1952 printed young woman and provoked one of the loudest translation controversies of the twentieth century. The BSB goes the other way: it prints the virgin in its text and puts young woman in a footnote. That puts the traditional reading in the text and the lexical reading in the margin, and the order is the translators' decision, not the Hebrew's; each reading deserves its full weight. Two further facts belong in an honest account, and they pull in different directions. Hebrew has a more specific word for a virgin, bethulah, which Isaiah could have used, though bethulah itself sometimes needs a qualifier to make the point, as at Genesis 24:16. And almah is nowhere in the Old Testament used of a woman known to be married, so the presumption of virginity is natural even where the word does not state it. The Greek translators of Isaiah, Jews working in the second century before Christ and with no Christian axe to grind, chose parthenos, which ordinarily does mean virgin. Matthew is quoting them.

Now the harder half, and it is not a modern invention. Isaiah 7 is set in the Syro-Ephraimite crisis of the eighth century. Ahaz of Judah is terrified of Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel, and the sign is addressed to him. Verse 16 says that before the boy knows enough to reject evil and choose good, the land of the two kings Ahaz dreads will be laid waste. That ties the child to a timetable measured in a few years, in Ahaz's own lifetime. Any reading which makes the verse refer only to a birth seven centuries later has to explain what use the sign was to the king it was given to.

Three families of answer exist, and this course has already taught you the framework for judging them, in the Hermeneutics track's module on the New Testament's use of the Old. A double fulfilment or typological reading holds that a child born in Isaiah's day was a genuine sign, and that the pattern is completed in a birth that answers the prophecy more fully than it was first answered. A sensus plenior reading holds that the divine author intended a meaning in the words that the human author did not see. And a reading focused on Matthew's method holds that Matthew, working from the Greek text, found in the word parthenos a description that had come true in a way no one had anticipated, and that fulfilment for Matthew means a pattern brought to completion rather than a prediction ticked off. These are not equally satisfying to everyone, and each has a cost: the first has to identify the eighth-century child, the second has to say how such a meaning could be controlled, the third has to account for Matthew's insistence that this happened to fulfil what the Lord had spoken.

One thing should be said flatly, because careless argument on both sides has obscured it. The doctrine does not stand or fall with Isaiah 7:14. Matthew and Luke each state the fact of the conception in plain narrative before any prophecy is cited, and Luke cites no prophecy at all. A reader who concluded that Matthew's use of Isaiah is typological rather than predictive would still have two independent narratives to account for. A reader who thinks Isaiah predicted it directly still has to say what the sign meant to Ahaz. The question of the prophecy and the question of the event are two questions.

Ask what work the doctrine does in Christian theology, not only whether it happened, because the church has confessed it in every creed it possesses and has meant something by it. Both the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds carry it: born of the Virgin Mary; incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. It is one of the very few historical particulars the creeds bother to name, alongside Pontius Pilate.

First, it marks the incarnation as God's act and not humanity's achievement. Luke's annunciation has Mary consenting but not contributing, and the initiative is from outside. Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics I/2, built his treatment on exactly this: the virgin conception is a sign that the Word entered history from the side of God, that this is a new creation and not the next step in an old one. Emil Brunner, who held the incarnation as firmly as Barth did, rejected the doctrine as a doctrine, on the grounds that it is nowhere used by the New Testament writers who never mention it and that it risks making Jesus a hybrid rather than a man. Barth answered him at length. Two of the most serious Protestant theologians of the century disagreeing in print is worth knowing about, and the disagreement is not between a believer and an unbeliever.

Second, it secures the humanity as much as the deity. This cuts against the popular instinct, which treats the virgin conception as the miracle that makes Jesus divine. It does not: the New Testament grounds his deity in his preexistence, not in the manner of his conception. What the conception secures is that he is genuinely one of us, descended from Mary, from David, from Abraham, from Adam, born under the law, taking his humanity from the race he came to save. Take the doctrine away and the incarnation is not obviously endangered; make it the basis of his deity and you have said something the New Testament does not say.

Third, the doctrine is often tied to sinlessness, and here a careful teacher slows down, because the traditions genuinely differ. Some Protestant accounts have argued that original sin is transmitted through the male line, so that a conception without a human father breaks the chain. That argument is weak and few defend it now, since scripture nowhere teaches such a transmission and Mary would have passed on whatever she had. Roman Catholic theology addresses the question differently, holding that Mary herself was preserved from original sin from the first moment of her conception, defined as dogma by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus in 1854. Eastern Orthodoxy venerates Mary as Theotokos at least as highly and rejects that definition, partly because it works with a different account of ancestral sin in which inherited guilt is not transmitted in the way the Western formulation assumes. The Orthodox position is not a weaker form of the Catholic one; it follows from a different anthropology, and students in Orthodox countries should not be taught otherwise. What all these traditions share is that the sinlessness of Christ is asserted in scripture directly, at Hebrews 4:15 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 and 1 Peter 2:22, without being derived from the manner of his conception.

Fourth, the related question of Mary's perpetual virginity, which is not the same doctrine and is where Christians divide most visibly. The Gospels mention brothers and sisters of Jesus (Matthew 13:55-56, Mark 6:3). Three readings have names. The Helvidian, from Helvidius in the fourth century, takes them as later children of Mary and Joseph, and is the usual Protestant reading today. The Epiphanian, from Epiphanius, takes them as Joseph's children from an earlier marriage, and is the Eastern Orthodox reading. The Hieronymian, from Jerome, takes them as cousins, and is the usual Roman Catholic reading. It is worth Protestant readers knowing that Luther and Zwingli held to the perpetual virginity, and that Calvin rejected the argument that the Gospels' brothers of Jesus disprove it, reading them as kinsmen, while declining to affirm the doctrine on the ground that scripture does not settle the question. So the modern Protestant consensus is a later development within Protestantism rather than a Reformation principle.

What the doctrine finally asserts is the thing the whole module depends on. The one through whom all things were made has a mother, a birth certificate of sorts in Luke's census, a body that got tired, and a death. Docetism, the ancient instinct that this was all appearance, is not a dead heresy; it is the default setting of religious sentiment, which would rather have a God who visits than a God who becomes. John wrote his first letter against people who denied that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:2), and the word he used was the perfect tense: come and still in it. That the humanity was permanent, and not a costume laid aside at the ascension, is what the next four lessons of this module are about.