Christianity brought two startlingly new ideas into the ancient world: the one God is Trinity, and God the Son became incarnate. Regarding the latter, Augustine provides evidence of the newness of incarnation when he wrote his famous Confessions. In it, he recounts how the philosophers said the word was with God and was God but not that the word became flesh.¹Augustine, Confessions 7.9.13–14. However, he did read it in John’s Gospel 1:14.

This essay will explore the idea of incarnation in terms of both Old and New Testament witness. This will take us into the realm of the Old Testament’s rendering of God and Israel’s expectation of a divinely provided agent of deliverance for God’s people. The question, however, is whether Israel expected that deliverance would come by way of an incarnation.

1. The “Embodied” God: The Old Testament Witness

God in the Old Testament is portrayed as though incarnate in numerous places. Even Jewish scholars have noted this. Rabbinical scholar Jacob Neusner wrote:

On the basis of a large number of stories along these lines [with their anthropomorphic descriptions of God], we might well contemplate composing the story of God on earth—a kind of gospel of God incarnate, walking among human beings, talking with them, teaching them, acting among them, just as for the evangelists of the church received and venerated their writings, Jesus Christ, God incarnate, walked on earth, taught, and provided the example for humanity of the union between humanity and deity.²Jacob Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992), 17–18.

As a rabbi, he does not embrace the Christian view, but he sees why New Testament writers saw in Jesus the incarnation of deity.

Old Testament scholar Edmond Jacob recognized the importance of the relation between these stories and the incarnation when he wrote:

The God of the Old Testament is a God who seeks to manifest his presence in order to be recognized as the sovereign Lord; that is why the fear of God is at the basis of all piety and all wisdom. But God also and especially seeks to manifest his presence in order to save man. A line not always straight, but nonetheless continuous, leads from the anthropomorphisms of the earliest pages of the Bible, to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.³Edmond Jacob, The Theology of the Old Testament, trans. A. W. Heathcote and P. J. Allcock (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 32.

It is illuminating that Jacob highlights the manifestation of the divine presence. Theologians typically understand God as transcendent and immanent. But another category is needed: concomitance. The Bible presents the God who is with us, not simply above us or within us.

In the stories which Neusner refers to there are three forms of expression to consider: anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms, and anthropopraxisms— all evidenced in the text of the Old Testament. Anthropomorphisms describe God as having human-like physical characteristics. Examples abound. God is described as having eyes (e.g., Gen 6:8), ears (e.g., 2 Sam 22:7), nostrils (e.g., Ps 18:15), arms (e.g., Deut 33:27), fingers (e.g., Ps 8:3), and feet (e.g., Isa 60:13). These examples come from every part of the Old Testament: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Anthropopathisms ascribe human-like emotions to God. Again, examples abound. God rejoices (e.g., Jer 32:41), grieves (e.g., Gen 6:6–7), and is angered (e.g., Num 11:10). As for human roles, God is a king (e.g., Ps 95:3), a warrior (e.g., 15:3), a shepherd (e.g., 23:1), a potter (e.g., Jer 18:6), a gardener (e.g., Gen. 2:8), a father (e.g., Exod 32:8), and a mother (e.g., Isa 66:13). All these roles are well known in the ancient world.

The Old Testament thus provided descriptors and stories without which the incarnation would have been largely, if not wholly, inconceivable. Theologian T. F. Torrance comments: “They [Old Testament foreshadowings of incarnation] constitute the essential furniture of our knowledge of God even in and through Christ. If the Word of God became incarnate apart from all that, it could not have been grasped—Jesus himself would have remained a bewildering enigma.”⁴T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, new ed. (Colorado Springs: Helmer & Howard, 1992), 18.

It would be a mistake to think that the Old Testament writers had a crass materialistic understanding of God because of the use of anthropomorphic, anthropopathic, and anthropopraxist descriptors. Isaiah, for example, clearly distinguished between the material and the spiritual when he says of God: “But the Egyptians are mere mortals and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit” (Isa 31:3). The parallelism is to be noted. Again, the prohibition on image making in the Torah (e.g., Exod 20:4) and the prophetic critique of idolatry point in the same direction (e.g., Isa 46:1–7 and Jer 10:1–10).

2. The Incarnate God: The New Testament Witness

The New Testament clearly asserts that Jesus is God incarnate. The prologue of John provides the classic text: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). But turning to Paul we find that the incarnation was a secret now made known. The key text is 1 Timothy 3:16:

Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great:

He appeared in the flesh,     was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels,     was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world,     was taken up in glory.

So, what does Paul mean by “mystery” or “secret”? According to Gladd, “mystery constitutes an eschatological revelation that was previously hidden but now has been revealed.”⁵Benjamin L. Gladd, “Mystery,” in Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), 552 (further discussed in 551–55).

Given that the incarnation was a secret but now revealed, what is to be made of the varied expectations of the Old Testament? Those varied OT expectations include: a prophet like Moses (e.g., Deut 18:15–22), a Davidic king (e.g., Ezek 34:20–24), the Son of Man (e.g., Dan 7:13–14), the suffering servant (e.g., Isa 52:13–53:12), and God coming to Zion (e.g., Zech 8:3). But in these expectations, nowhere do we find an incarnation of deity portrayed.⁶Figures like the angel of the Lord may be a Christophany (i.e., an appearance of God the Son in human form) but a Christophany is not an incarnation. See my book, The God Who Became Human, 116–20. What we do find in the New Testament is that these expectations are realized in Jesus who is truly God yet truly human (John 1:14, Phil 2:5–11, and Heb 2:14–16).

3. The Manifold Purpose of the Incarnation

In the medieval period, Anselm famously raised the question of the rationale of the incarnation in Cur Deus Homo (“Why Did God Become Human?”). His own answer was an appeal to reason rather than to special revelation, but happily, the New Testament writers witness to the rationale of the incarnation without such a limitation.⁷Anselm wrote intentionally without recourse to revelation and as though he knew nothing of the incarnation. He argued from his analysis of the human situation that only a human could satisfy an offended God and that none were good enough. Hence, God provided the Godman to do what humanity could not do for itself: honor God. See the discussion in Justo L. González, A History of Christian Thought: From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation, vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), 158–67.

3.1. Revelation

The Prologue of John’s Gospel presents one of the rationales for the incarnation: revelation. It reaches its climax with this claim: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). The revelatory mission of Jesus is made plain in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prays to his Father: “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world” (17:4–5).⁸This is one of two places in the prayer where there is a window into the inner life of the Trinity before creation. The other is John 17:24: “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.”

3.2. Redemption

Redemption is another reason for the incarnation, as the Apostle Paul makes plain in Galatians 4:4–5: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” The “set time” (τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου) was the opportune time which not only could be understood as the Pax Romana in place—Roman roads everywhere which enabled the spread of ideas and Greek as the lingua franca—but also included the conceptual framework (as discussed in the foregoing) now available for an incarnation to be understood.

3.3. Victory

The protoevangelium (“first gospel”) of Genesis 3:15 is programmatic. The biblical universe is a dramatic one: good is at war with evil. Evil will not triumph. In the wisdom of God, the offspring of Eve will fatally wound the serpent, even though he himself should suffer in securing victory:

And I will put enmity   between you and the woman,     and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head,     and you will strike his heel.

The defeat of the serpent sounds a Christus Victor note. Dying in our place is integral to that victory and nestles within the Christus Victor framework.⁹I argue so in my God the Peacemaker: How Atonement brings Shalom, NSBT 25 (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), 233–39. I am further indebted to D. A. Carson for the invitation to contribute the above-mentioned volume on the atonement to his NSTB series.

The Book of Hebrews connects the victory to the incarnation: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb 2:14–15). The fear of death lies in the fear of judgement. That fear is nullified through the cross of Christ. First John also affirms Christus Victor: “The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). A sound biblical theology recognizes the programmatic importance of the protoevangelium for the unfolding plotline of Scripture.

4. The Significance of the Incarnation

The Word became flesh is an affirmation of the created order. Jesus was not merely human in appearance as ancient docetists claimed. He was truly human. The risen Christ does not cease to be incarnate but bears the scars of his historical experience, as his conversation with Thomas shows (John 20:26–29). Indeed, the world to come is not a purely non-material replacement of this one but its transfiguration (Rom 8:18–25). The Bible does not present a dualism in which spirit is good and matter is evil.

Human value is also affirmed by the incarnation. The Word did not become a monkey or a dolphin but a human. Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain rightly argued, “the sanctity of human life ultimately rests on the fact that Christ became incarnate as a human creature, not some other sort of creature.”¹⁰Quoted by Stephen Post. “Sanctity of Human Life”, Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapid: Baker Academic, 2011), 702. This is entirely fitting given the biblical testimony that humans are in the image of God and Jesus was and is quintessentially that image (cf. Gen 1:27 and Col 1:15). In fact, Jesus held a hierarchal view of the value of different creatures. He declared that humans were of more value than sheep or sparrows (cf. Matt 6:25 and 12:9–14). It is important to note in passing that this is a comparative judgment and not a dismissal of the value of other creatures.

The depth of divine love is also revealed by the incarnation. In John’s account the sending of the Son was the expression of divine love as John 3:16 shows: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son [identified in John 1:1–18], that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John’s first letter explicates the rationale of that sending and its implications:” This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:9–10). And the implication is then drawn out by John: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (4:11).

5. Conclusions

My wife is a dress designer and writer of fashion textbooks. She says that to sew a garment properly you need to listen to the fabric talk. Leather must be sewn with special leather needles, otherwise the needles will break. Biblical theology listens to the fabric of Scripture talk with particular attention given to its unfolding plotline. In this chapter we endeavored to listen to the fabric talk both in the Old and New Testament.

The Old Testament testimony rendered an “embodied” God. Anthropomorphisms portrayed a God in human form. Anthropopathisms presented God with a human-like emotional life. Anthropopraxisms portrayed God in roles analogous to human ones. In so doing, when the incarnation took place in time and space, there were concepts available for understanding the miracle that had happened whilst preserving its mystery and its saving purpose.

The New Testament delineated the rationale of the Word made flesh: a saving purpose with its revelatory, redemptive, and Christus Victor dimensions and how the varied figures of Old Testament expectation—a prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, the servant of the Lord, the Son of Man, God coming to his temple—coalesced in Jesus. Importantly, according to the Apostle Paul, the incarnation was a mystery, a secret now revealed that Jesus appeared in the flesh. Incarnation per se is generally not in the Old Testament witness.

Nineteenth century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard realized how stupendous the incarnation was. He wrote to startle because he was frustrated with the Lutheran clergy of his day and their complacency. (At least, that was his perception.) He wrote:

If the contemporary generation had left nothing behind them but these words: “We have believed that in such and such a year the God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,” it would be more than enough.¹¹Søren Kierkegaard, “The Disciple at Second Hand,” in Philosophical Fragments, ch. 5, Religion Online, https://tinyurl.com/49eshnys.

Enough perhaps for Kierkegaard but thankfully not enough for our New Testament writers with their many-sided witness to the significance of the “mystery of godliness that he [Jesus] was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim 3:16).

The significance of the incarnation lies in its revelatory and saving purposes as set out in the literature of the New Testament: the revelation of the Father in relation to the Son, redemption, and victory over evil exemplified in the devil. Theologically reflected on, that significance shows itself in affirming the goodness of the created order, the value of human life, and above all the depths of the divine love.

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