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Ancient and Modern Reflections on Incarnation

Icon: St. Gregory“We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live.  We were put to death together with Him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with Him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with Him, because we rose again with Him,” Gregory Nazianzen, A Select Library, The Second Oration on Easter,” XXVIII.

S. Cyril of Jerusalem ; S. Gregory Nazianzen (A Select library of the Nicene and post-Nicene fathers of the Christian Church)
by: Cyril  publisher: Eerdmans, published: 1983  ASIN: B00071URCS

 

 

St Athanasius“For this was the very end and purpose of His Incarnation, that our human nature might in His Person obtain and receive whatever it could not otherwise have obtained, and that we might be partakers both of the same nature and of the same blessings within Him…  It was necessary, therefore, that God and man should be personally united, in order that human nature might be invested with power and exalted to glory…

“As, on the one hand, we could not have been redeemed from sin and the curse, unless the flesh and nature, which the Word took upon Him had been truly ours (for we should have had no interest by his assumption of any foreign nature); so also man could not have been united to the Divine nature, unless that Word, which was made flesh, had not been, in essence and nature, the Word and Son of God.  For that was the very purpose and end of our Lord’s Incarnation, that He should join what is man by nature to Him who is by nature God, that so man might enjoy His salvation and His union with God without any fear of its failing or decrease” The Orations of St. Athanasius Against the Arians

The Orations of St. Athanasius against the Arians According to the Benedictine Text: With an Account of His Life by William Bright
by: William Bright   publisher: Wipf & Stock Pub, published: 2005-05-25   ASIN: 1597522228

 

“With the Incarnation, God the eternal Son became Man, without ceasing to be God and without breaking the communion of the Holy Trinity within which God lives his own divine life.  In the birth and life of Jesus on earth human nature and divine nature were inseparably united in the eternal Person of God the Son.  Therefore in him the closed circle of the inner life of God was made to overlap with human life, and human nature was taken up to share in the eternal communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.  In this one Man the divine life and love overflowed into creaturely and human being, so that Jesus, Man on earth, received the Spirit of God without measure, for the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him bodily.  Jesus became the Bearer of the Holy Spirit among men.

“But who was Jesus?  He was very Man, our Brother.  In him the Holy Son of God was grafted on to the stock of our fallen human existence, and in him our mortal and corrupt human nature was assumed into union with the Holy Son of God, so that in Jesus, in his birth and sinless life, in his death and resurrection, there took place a holy and awful judgment on our flesh of sin, and an atoning sanctification of our unholy human existence.  It was only through such atonement that God in all his Godness and holiness came to dwell in the midst of mortal, sinful man.  Because that took place in Jesus who made our flesh of sin his very own and who wrought out in himself peace and reconciliation between man and God, he became not only the Bearer but the Mediator of the Holy Spirit to men.
“Now we may understand the distinctively new mode of the Spirit’s coming into the experience of men.  The inner life of the Holy Trinity which is private to God alone is extended to include human nature in and through Jesus.  This is possible because of the atonement that took place in him, for now that the enmity between God and man has been abolished, God the Holy Spirit may dwell in the midst of mortal sinful man.  This is the way that the divine love has taken to redeem man, by making him share in the holy power in which God lives his own divine life.  The pouring out of that power from on high took place at Pentecost, with the entry of the Holy Spirit in his new mode of presence and activity into the experience of mortal men.” – T.F. Torrance

Theology in Reconstruction
by: Thomas F. Torrance  publisher: Wipf & Stock Pub, published: 1996-12-01  ASIN: 1579100244

“Union. Union. Union!  Anything less than the true, real, and personal union of Jesus Christ—the Father’s eternal Son incarnate, anointed in the Holy Spirit—with the fallen human race is unworthy of the word ‘salvation.'”

Jesus and the Undoing of Adam
by: C. Baxter Kruger   publisher: Perichoresis, Inc., published: 2007-09-01   ASIN: 0964546558


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