The Doctrine of the Incarnation ........................................................

Lecture 11

Incarnation and reincarnation are two entirely different things.

Incarnation is also not the same thing as embodiment. All of us human

beings are embodied, but only one human being is the Incarnation

of God.

I

ncarnation in the Christian doctrine concerns who Jesus Christ really is.
The doctrine is about Jesus and no one else: It has nothing to do with the
concept of reincarnation, which comes from a whole different religion,
and it is not the same thing as embodiment, which happens to all humans.
For Christian theology, there is only one Incarnation, and that is Jesus Christ.

Trinity and Incarnation are the fundamental doctrines of orthodox
Christianity. The Eastern church calls these two doctrines “theology” and
“economy” (theologia and oikonomia), the doctrine of who God is and the
doctrine of his plan or dispensation of salvation. In the West, the doctrine of
the Incarnation is the centerpiece of the subdivision of Christian theology
called “Christology,” which concerns the person and work of Christ.

Two key points about the Incarnation were resolved within Nicene orthodoxy
in the 4th century. In becoming incarnate, the divine word of God did not
cease to be fully God. As Gregory of Naziansen put it, “remaining what he
was, he assumed what he was not.” The implication is that the Word retains
all the divine attributes of eternity, impassibility, and immortality, even while
he takes up human attributes of suffering and mortality. “Assumed” or “took
up” becomes a key verb for the divine act of Incarnation.

For Gregory, Christ was fully human, assuming a human soul as well as a
human body. The view, rejected by the orthodox, that Christ did not have
a human (rational) soul is called “Apollinarianism,” after the Alexandrian
theologian who espoused it. For Gregory, when the Word becomes À esh, this
does not mean he merely assumed a human body, as if the Word took the
place of the human soul.