The doctrine of the incarnation, that God became man, is an essential teaching of Christianity. Beyond affirming the fact that Jesus is God made flesh, two questions are worth asking. First, is there an Old Testament basis for such a teaching or is this a truly new doctrine in the New Testament for Christians? In answering this, we should focus on what the New Testament authors said. Did they believe that Jesus’ incarnation was ‘Biblical’ (Old Testament)? Second, relatedly, what theological significance is there to the doctrine of the incarnation? I would like to explore John’s answers to these questions in his Gospel, focussing on John’s prologue (1.1-18) and Jesus prayer in chapter 17.
John affirms the preexistence of
Jesus by declaring the divine identity of Jesus such that, in the beginning
when all things were created, He was present and active (1.1-2). In various other statements and ways, this
Gospel continues to present Jesus as ‘one with the Father.’ To state that the preexistent Son was eternal
meant that He Himself was not created or ‘born’ in the sense of having a
beginning. Being the ‘Son’ had to do with
representation, as a ‘son’ represents the father: ‘what God was, so was the
Word,’ as John puts it (1.1c). Or, Jesus
was the ‘only begotten’ (monogenēs)
in the sense that He was the one and only representation of divine identity
(1.14, 18; 3.16, 18). Or, Jesus was ‘at
the Father’s side’ and therefore the ‘only begotten God’ (1.18).
This unwavering identity of Jesus
with the Father and therefore affirmation of His divine identity continues as a
theological theme for the rest of the Gospel of John. It is so firmly stated in the prologue
(1.1-18) in order that the humanity of Jesus throughout the Gospel might not undermine
this truth.[1] Jesus' identity was that of uniquely being fully God and fully human. Already in the prologue, however, the
doctrine of the incarnation is introduced, and that with an Old Testament
undergirding. We read,
And the Word became
flesh and dwelt [from skēnoō]
among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father,
full of grace and truth (1.14).
Jesus’ incarnation in this verse
captures two understandings in the Exodus narrative, with Israel dwelling in
the wilderness. The first is that God
dwelt in the midst of the Israelites in the ‘tent of meeting’ or tabernacle—the
precursor to the temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem. The Greek word translated by the ESV as ‘dwelt’
in this verse is the verbal form of the word for ‘tent’ (skēnē). The invisible God made Himself visible in the
cloud of glory in the most holy place of the tabernacle, and He whose Holiness
allowed only Moses to approach Him atop Mt. Sinai when He delivered the Ten
Commandments now dwelt with the Israelites.
The second Old Testament
reference in John 1.14 is in the wording ‘full of grace and truth.’ This is one of the ways to represent the
phrase appearing a number of times in the Old Testament and translated in
Exodus 34.6 by the ESV as ‘steadfast love and faithfulness.’ In Exodus 34, God reveals Himself to Moses, descending
in His cloud, standing with him, and proclaiming His divine name. He then expressed His divine character, using
this key phrase. God’s revelation of His
character explains to Moses why He, the holy God, would go with Israel, the
sinful people, and dwell among them in the tabernacle. He would do so because of who He is, full of
grace or steadfast love, and full of faithfulness or truth in His covenant
commitment to this people.
Both Old Testament references in John
1.14, then, point to the incarnation of the Son being an extension of God's incarnate presence among the Israelites. He who is the full representation of the
Father because of His divine identity has come to be among us. As God came in His glory shrouded in a cloud
and tabernacled among His sinful people because of who He is, so Jesus came in
His divine glory to tabernacle among us.
The significance of God’s presence in the tabernacle for His covenant
commitment to a sinful people was that here the people could come and confess
their sins, pray for forgiveness, and offer sacrifices for sin and
thanksgiving. The significance of Jesus’
coming to dwell among us was so that He could manifest the Father’s name among
His people (17.6) and offer Himself as a sacrifice for our sins that we might
share in His glory with the Father (17.22).
The unity for which Jesus prays in John 17 is not communal fellowship
and agreements among diverse peoples despite their different views, as is
sometimes suggested, but a unity in sharing in divine glory. This unity involves being ‘set apart’ or
sanctified in truth (17.19). It is not
any unity but unity in the truth. In
John 17, the words ‘glory,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘love’ appear several times as ways to
identify Jesus’ incarnational revelation with God’s incarnational revelation in
Exodus. The disciples—representing the
Church—in John 17 also are a divine, incarnational presence to the world. Jesus prays,
The glory that
you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are
one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one,
so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me
(17.22-23).
The incarnation, then, is
part-and-parcel with a doctrine of Christian unity: God, who is full of grace
and truth, comes to be amidst His sinful people that they might become set
apart through Him by means of sacrifice (Jesus’ being ‘lifted up’ on the cross
and at the same time glorified) in order to share His glory. The incarnation is a divine work in that it
is for salvation. Just as God made His
name known to Moses (Exodus 34.5), so Jesus has made the Father’s name known to
His disciples (John 17.26), and they make it known to the world.
[1] Rather famously—or infamously—a
mid-20th c. New Testament scholar, Ernst Käsemann, failed to
understand this basic theological point in John’s Gospel. See his The
Testament of Jesus: A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17 (Eugene,
OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017, orig. pub. 1966).
He stated that the character of Jesus in this Gospel floats above the
ground, as it were, meaning that He is presented as so ‘divine’ that He is not
very human. Käsemann continues to be
referenced in Johannine scholarship as a starting point for scholars to discuss
the humanity of Christ in the Gospel, thus correcting the
misunderstanding. Among any number of
scholars, one might pursue the discussion further with Marianne Meye Thompson’s
The Incarnate Word: Perspectives on Jesus
in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Pub., 1993).
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