The Incarnation of Christ: Now and Forever!

Previously I wrote an article titled Incarnation; The Only Path to God’s Mercy wherein there exists a number of heresies the Church had to dwell with.  Here let us consider just what the CCC teaches about the human nature of Christ and what its impact on our belief is factual.

“Taking up St. John’s expression, The Word became flesh, (John 1: 14) the Church calls “Incarnation” the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it.”  CCC 461.  Assume means to authenticate by means of belief.  

Gnostic Docetism denied the true humanity of Christ.  The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 AD confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is begotten, not made, of the same substance as the Father, and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God came to be from things that were not  and that he was from another substance that that of the Father.”  see CCC 465.

“The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God’s Son.  St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council at Ephesus in 431 confessed that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man.”  CCC 466

“The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God’s Son assumed it.  The fourth ecumenical council of Chalcedon, in 451, some made Christ’s human nature a kind of personal subject.  The Church thus confesses that Jesus is inseparably true God and true man.  He is truly the Son of God, who without to be God and Lord, became a man and our brother.”  CCC 467, 468, 469.

“Because human nature was assumed, not absorbed, in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ’s human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body.  In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that Christ’s human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it.  Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from “one of the Trinity”.  The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity.  In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity.”  CCC 470.

The list of heresies is lengthly and shows how too many directives taught to disprove the reality of Christ’s humanity which caused much confusion in the early church.  This is why the CCC becomes the official interpreter of God’s Word.  Some may say “so what”.  Are we more concerned about the 21st century and emulating what the younger generation may want to believe than to understand God doesn’t change and neither do his commands?  

Even now there are movements with errors popping up as to the official teaching of the Church with too many clerics reinterpreting the directives of the Magisterium and the consequences facing Christ’s flock. 

This takes us back to teaching the Incarnation was not a circumstance in human history that fit the beginning of Christianity and left the future to self-indulgent prophets who would make the rules as they chose.  The chronology of the Church became such that the Grace of God added on to each chapter of Sacred Scripture, one intervention at a time.  The growth was never meant to be a new beginning or a different theological premise without the adherence to the spirit’s achievements of that grace.  If one reads the bible as it is presented, they will notice the Books of Kings did not exist before Genesis, or Deuteronomy was not a narrative that the designers of the Bible Cannon just happened to place it in a position for interest in reading history.  

So it is with understanding how God meant the continuance of his directives to be explored in a chronological order that promotes the divine instructions.  Who of us is able to change God’s Law to fit our own desires which will subvert the intent of God’s purpose for all of humanity?  

Is the current exodus of many clerics becoming the “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden, except the tree of knowledge of good and bad.”  The teaching of adherence to whatever satisfies one is ok so long as you acknowledge that God allows it.  This is what appears to be the new theology by far too many who are leading the innocent down a primrose lane, where pleasure and seduction will end up in destruction of souls.

All this is counter-productive to the reason for the Incarnation of Christ.

Ralph B. Hathaway, June 2021