: John Clark, Marcus Peter Johnson
: The Incarnation of God The Mystery of the Gospel as the Foundation of Evangelical Theology
: Crossway
: 9781433541902
: 1
: CHF 14.00
:
: Religion/Theologie
: English
: 256
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
It's the defining reality of all existence, the central fact of human history, and the heart of the Christian faith: God became a man and lived among us. More than just part of the Christmas story, the doctrine of the incarnation radically affects our understanding of God, humanity, life, death, and salvation. In The Incarnation of God, theology professors John Clark and Marcus Johnson explore this foundational Christian confession, examining its implications for the church's knowledge and worship of God. Grounded in Scripture and informed by church history, this book will help Christians rediscover the inestimable significance of the truth that the Son of God became what we are without ceasing to be the eternal God-the greatest mystery of the universe.

John C. Clark (PhD, University of Toronto) is associate professor of theology at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife, Kate, live in Chicago with their two children.

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Knowing the Father through the Son

THE INCARNATION AND KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

The incarnation of the eternal Word of God is indeed the greatest and most profound mystery there is, for it leads to the following absolutely unique confession of the Christian church: God, without ever ceasing to be God, actually became what he created in order to reconcile us to himself. God’s love is so great, his mercy and grace so persistent, and his desire to have us as his own so unrestrained that he performed an act of unparalleled condescension. According to Cyril, the fifth-century archbishop of Alexandria, the incarnation shatters the bounds of credulity:

Indeed the mystery of Christ runs the risk of being disbelieved precisely because it is so incredibly wonderful. For God was in humanity. He who was above all creation was in our human condition; the invisible one was made visible in the flesh; he who is from the heavens and from on high was in the likeness of earthly things; the immaterial one could be touched; he who is free in his own nature came in the form of a slave; he who blesses all creation became accursed; he who is all righteousness was numbered among the transgressors; life itself came in the appearance of death. All this followed because the body which tasted death belonged to no other but to him who is the Son by nature.1

The “incredibly wonderful” mystery the church confesses when we say Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man is that God has joined himself to us forever. As the eternal Son of God, the incarnate Jesus is fully God without reserve and fully man without reserve, and he is fully God and man in his one person. In the words of the Chalcedonian Definition, the Lord Jesus Christ is “of the same reality as God . . . as far as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we are ourselves . . . as far as his humanness is concerned.”2 The incarnate Son of God is, in other words, exactly as God is and exactly as we are. By becoming human, the eternal Son of the eternal Father took our humanity into union with himself in order to bridge the divide between God and man; thus, God and man are united in the incarnate One. This is why the starting point for all theological reflection is the incarnation.

We will explore the implications of this staggering reality for our understanding of God’s character and attributes, sin, salvation, the church, and marriage and sex in the chapters that follow. But before we do so, let us pause in this chapter to reconsider the mystery of Christ’s person from a perspective that is often overlooked.

THE INCARNATE SON AND KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

It is commonplace in evangelical theology to tie the incarnation directly to Christ’s reconciling and atoning death and resurrection—that is, to assert, rightly, tha