Incarnation and humiliation

Incarnation and humiliation

 

Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary

Earlier forms of the creed seem to have read: “Born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.”

The primary affirmation of this article is that the Son of God, the Word, had become man or, as John's Gospel put it, “flesh” (John 1:14).

Preexistence and  Incarnation presuppose each other in the Christian view of Jesus Christ. Hence the New Testament assumed his preexistence when it talked about his becoming man; and when it spoke of him as preexistent, it was ascribing this preexistence to him whom it was describing in the flesh. It may be that the reference in the creed to the Virgin  Mary was intended to stress primarily her function as the guarantee of Christ's true humanity, but the creed also intended to teach the supernatural origin of that humanity. Although it is true that neither Paul nor John makes reference to it, the teaching about the virginal conception of Jesus, apparently based upon Isa. 7:14, was sufficiently widespread in the 1st century to warrant inclusion in both Matthew and Luke, as well as in creeds that date back to the 1st century. As it stands, the creedal statement is a paraphrase of Luke 1:35. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit was also involved in the baptism and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried

To a reader of the Gospels, the most striking feature of the creed is probably its omission of that which occupied a major part of the Gospels, the story of Jesus' life and teachings. In this respect there is a direct parallel between the creed and the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul. Judging by the amount of space they devoted to the Passion story, even the writers of the Gospelswere apparently more interested in these few days of Jesus' life than they were in anything else he had said or done. The reason for this was the faith underlying both the New Testament and the creed, that the events of Jesus' Passion, death, and Resurrection were the events by which God had accomplished the salvation of human beings. The Gospels found their climax in those events, and the other material in them led up to those events. The Epistles applied those events to concrete situations in the early church. From the way Paul could speak of the Cross (Phil. 2:6–11) and of “the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed” (I Cor. 11:23), it seems that before our Gospels came into existence the church commemorated the happenings associated with what came to be called  Holy Week. Some of the earliest Christian art was a portrayal of these happenings, another indication of their importance in the cultic and devotional life of early Christianity. How did the Cross effect the salvation of human beings? The answers of the New Testament and the early church to this question involved a variety of metaphors: Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to God; his life was a ransom for many; his death made mankind alive; his suffering was an example to people when they must suffer; he was the Second Adam, creating a new humanity; his death shows people how much God loves them; and others. Every major atonement theory of Christian theological history discussed below was anticipated by one or another of these metaphors. The New Testament employed them all to symbolize something that could be described only symbolically, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (II Cor. 5:19).

He descended into hell

This phrase was probably the last to be added to the creed. Its principal source in the New Testament was the description in I Pet. 3:18–20 of Christ's preaching to the spirits in prison. Originally the descent into hell may have been identified with the death of Christ,when he entered the abode of the dead in the underworld. But in the time before it entered the creed, the descent was frequently taken to mean that Christ had gone to rescue the souls of the Old Testament faithful from the underworld, from what western Catholictheology eventually called the limbo patrum . Among some of the Church Fathers the descent into hell had come to mean Christ's declaration of his triumph over the powers of hell. Despite its subsequent growth in importance, however, the doctrine of the descent into hell apparently did not form an integral part of the apostolic preaching about Christ.