It being Advent and all…

I thought I might take advantage of the season to do a bit of catechesis on the Incarnation of the Son of God. I have been working for some years on a book on the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (the one Catholics say on Sundays) and I have some interesting stuff assembled concerning the clause “He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

So, without further ado:

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Chapter 5 – He Came Down from Heaven

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate–
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem. – G.K. Chesterton

The Creed says of God the Son:

For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.

For Us Men

Many people these days think “for us men” is sexist because many English speakers read “men” as “males”.  But, of course, the Christian tradition has always insisted—as a matter of dogma—that Jesus died for all human beings, not just males.  As Paul tells us, “There is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

In both Greek and Latin (the primary languages in which the Creed was originally promulgated by the Church) the words we translate as “men” are Anthropos and Homo, which simply refer to human beings without reference to gender (as, for instance, in Homo sapiens).  The point of the Creed is that God became human for the sake of all people.  In the words of the Catechism: “The Church, following the apostles, teaches that Christ died for all men without exception: ‘There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer’” (CCC 605).

In short, the real point of these words has nothing to do with gender but, rather, with the universality of God’s saving work in Jesus. Christianity emerged from a Jewish matrix in which the concept of a Chosen People was primarily ethnic.  Jews were chosen.  Gentiles were not.  The shock of the gospel in the first century (and still today whenever it is applied to some class of people we dislike and wish to exclude) is that all have been chosen in the Beloved Son.  As Paul said, “the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” is this: “the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:4-6). 

This point strikes most people today, with our generally democratic and universal mood, as so self-evident that it is hardly worth making.  But that is entirely due to the fact that we mistake a mood for an eternal truth and therefore assume nothing is needed to guard that truth.  The Church, with much longer experience of the human capacity for mood swings, knows that dogma is required because all sorts of powerful forces can be brought to bear against this truth—racism not the least of them.

And not just racism.  Whole heretical movements in the past have denied that God the Son became incarnate for all human beings by means of complicated theories about “election” and “limited atonement” in which (it is supposed) Jesus only died for his special favorites: the elected ones he came to save. 

I once witnessed a three-way conversation on-line in which an innocent non-Christian inquirer, seeking to learn more about Christianity, asked a simple question: “Does God love me?”  Catholics, soaked in the Spirit of this line of the Creed, said, “Of course!”  A Calvinist, true to his diagram of theology, said, “I don’t know.  If you are Elect, then yes.  Otherwise, no.”  That is what those three words of the Creed exist to make war against in defense of every person—without any exception whatsoever.

Why Us?

The next difficulty with the Church’s proclamation that God has become man is that many post-modern people have a surprisingly physicalist view of our place in the cosmos.

One particularly crude argument is this: Man is infinitesimally small–indeed the entire solar system and even the entire Milky Way Galaxy is infinitesimally small–compared to the size of the universe.  All kinds of illustrations of that infinitesimal smallness are produced and they make wonderful gee whiz graphics for popular science shows.  The camera pulls back until the earth shrinks (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) to a “pale blue dot”.[1]  The solar system becomes a pinpoint and vanishes into an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Then the Milky Way itself becomes a mere indistinct smudge of light disappearing among trillions of other galaxies.  Finally, the Physicalist Creed is invoked: “How could God become man?  Man is utterly insignificant compared to the size of the Universe!  The supposition that specks of protein on a dust mote are special is the height of human arrogance!”

People set real store by such thinking.  But that’s not because they are hard-headed scientists looking at cold fact. It’s because they are poets who think they are philosophers.  It’s because they can’t refrain from supposing they know that immense differences in physical size mean something. They have never internalized the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who drily replied, “It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.”[2]

In short, size doesn’t matter.  In our sane hours, we realize this. A tall man does not have greater worth than a short one. Just because people are the size of ants compared to the Twin Towers does not mean the buildings were more important than the people killed in them on September 11, 2001. But when size differences become vast, the poet in us awakens and we start to forget these obvious facts.

More tomorrow.

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[1] Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011)

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy.