We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

jc

Incarnation and Covenant

The most distinctive aspect of Jesus’ identity, according to the faith of the historic-orthodox Church, is that Jesus is fully God and fully human—“God Incarnate,” to use the Church’s creedal phraseology. To accurately reflect on the Incarnation, we must avoid the temptation to think abstractly, treating the doctrine of the Incarnation as a mere metaphysical assertion that Christ is God and human. Rather, as T. F. Torrance has in particular stressed, the meaning of the Incarnation is inseparably wrapped up in the biblical narrative of God’s dealing with Israel, and through Israel, with the world. Indeed, he contends that, “the Old Testament is the revelation of the verbum incarnandum” (“word requiring to be incarnate”) while “the New Testament is the revelation of the verbum incarnatum” (“word incarnate”).[1] The doctrine of the Incarnation is thus not merely a claim that God became a human: it’s the claim that the God of Israel became the long-awaited Jewish man who was Israel’s Messiah, and therefore the Messiah for the world.

More specifically, the Incarnation is the fulfillment of both the God-side and human-side of Yahweh’s covenantal relationship with Israel, and therefore with the world. In the words of Torrance,

[Jesus] is himself the God of the covenant which we have broken, but he became man by taking upon himself the humanity of the men and women who broke the covenant, and in himself he is not only the turning of God to humanity, but the turning of humanity to God.[2]

In Christ, Yahweh definitively demonstrates himself to be Israel’s faithful covenant partner precisely by condescending to become a faithful human covenant partner before God on behalf of Israel, and therefore of the world. And it is as Israel’s faithful representative that Jesus not only fulfills the covenant by living a life that was free of covenant breaking; he also fulfills the covenant by appropriating as his own the covenantal curse that is a consequence of all covenant breaking.

Hence, by becoming a human and sacrificing himself on the cross, the God who had bound himself in a covenant relationship with Israel unilaterally fulfilled the promises and obligations of this covenant while unilaterally paying the price for Israel’s failure to live up to this covenant. The one man Jesus Christ becomes the representative suffering servant who thereby fulfills Israel’s roll as suffering servant (Isa. 53). Yahweh’s suffering covenantal faithfulness is thus an essential aspect of the full meaning of the Incarnation and therefore of the Crucifixion and every other aspect of Jesus’ identity and ministry.

[1] Torrance, Incarnation, 45.

[2] Torrance, Atonement, 148.

Photo credit: slack12 via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Category:
Tags: , ,

Related Reading

The Cross in the Manger

There has been a strand within the Western theological tradition—one that is especially prevalent in contemporary American Evangelicalism—that construes the significance of the cross in strictly soteriological terms. The cross is central, in this view, but only in the sense that the reason Jesus came to earth was to pay the price for our sin…

Topics:

Did Jesus Have Two Minds?

As I laid out in the previous post, I believe Jesus is fully God and fully human. The question is: How is this possible? How do we talk about the way that Jesus was fully God and fully man? The Creed of Chalcedon (451) tries to answer the question this way: We, then, following the…

Topics:

God and Our Political Platforms

Rachel Held Evans posted a blog today on the stir created when Democrats booed the passing of “an amendment to the party platform reinstating language that identified Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israel and that referred to people’s “God-given potential” in its preamble.” Of course this fed into the belief that if you’re a…

Podcast: What Causes Personal Transformation?

In this episode Greg talks about the important role of imagination in our prayer life and in our thought life. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0005.mp3

Giant Jesus

Yesterday’s post featured a video of Greg sharing about the role of the church in manifesting God’s character to the world. Here are some follow-up thoughts on that topic. The NT often uses the metaphor of “the body of Christ” to describe the church. When Jesus walked the earth, he did so in an ordinary…

Topics:

Was Jesus Fully God and Fully Human?

In the previous post I argued for the logical possibility of the Incarnation, so today I’d like to establish its biblical foundation. This will be review for some readers, but it’s important review because this doctrine is the absolute bedrock of the Christian faith. For example, this doctrine alone is what allows us to claim…