Christmas and Incarnation: What Does It Mean? Christmas readings and thoughts

Christmas is about the Incarnation, the central mystery and most profound revelation of Christianity. God becomes a human person, Jesus / Joshua: Yeshu'a (Yehoshu'a: "Yahweh is salvation").

Stunning. We who grew up with it are too used to it, perhaps, and "pop" religion brings Jesus down to a magical free-escape ticket from Hell, an nonjudgmental hippie or guru figure offering the certainty of "rapture" or even a Pentecostal nirvana-state in which to lose one's self in here and now. But Christianity is not a "get out of jail card" for a Narcissistic self, and the Incarnation is the most stunning revelation – in any religion anywhere. If you don't "get" the Incarnation, you won't truly grasp the significance of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, both of which are dependent on the Incarnation.

The Incarnation is the most radical idea revealed to the world since Moses asked God His Name. The Incarnation is a teaching that stood Judaism on its head and split it in pieces from the moment Jewish leaders understood what Jesus of Nazareth was claiming, while Islam has ceaselessly – ceaselessly – fought against it with fire and sword and slavery and slaughter.

Christianity is unique to the three Monotheistic religions because it insists on the Incarnation, on God becoming Man. Judaism rejects this teaching with horror, as does Islam, to such an extent that Islam can be said to exist in order to deny the Incarnation. Islam exists on many levels, of course: politically as a Herrenvolk religion, designed to enable a few to rule masses of subjected peoples; it is an economy, too – and originally a slave economy: it emptied cites through slavery and closed trade in the Mediterranean except for slavery, in the process destroying the Late Ancient/Early Medieval European world, funding the Viking Age and reducing the Cradle of Civilization to a vast dustbowl; and finally Islam exists as a political and juridical system. But as a religion per se, from its oldest existent writings on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem down to its latest murder, Islam's main point is to deny the Incarnation.

Historical Christianity, traditional Catholicism and the Orthodoxies, teach that the Incarnation was necessary to transform our human nature by the Infusion of Grace the Incarnation made possible, for in taking on human Nature, God elevated it. God changed our natures. Transformed us – "pro multis", those of us participating in this Salvation through Baptism and the other Sacraments. In the process, the world itself and all that's in it is also transformed. The Lord God, through His Incarnation, is still creating, He is Re-creating. As St. Anselm (see further below) put it, Creation's "lost beauty [is] endowed with inexpressible new grace." Christians are re-created. This is Salvation. Faith isn't a "leap in the dark" of fevered belief, especially not belief against evidence, but one's conscious intellectual acceptance of the truths that the Universal Church, East and West, has taught from the beginning.

Christmas should not therefore be merely the celebration of "God's birthday", the birth of Yeshu'a in Bethlehem. It's nothing less than the source-point of Yahweh Is Salvation, the Re-Creation of Creation. As the 1962 Missal translates part of the Offertory from the Latin: "O God, who in creating human nature, didst wonderfully dignify it, and hast still more wonderfully restored it, grant that, by the mystery of this water and wine, we may become partakers of His divine nature, who deigned to become partaker of our human nature."

And the Incarnation must necessarily be about Mary, too, whose fiat made the Incarnation possible. Mother and Child are inseparable. Then, and now, at Christmas. And the Cross.

The God Whom earth, and sea, and sky
Adore, and laud, and magnify,
Whose might they own, whose praise they tell,
In Mary’s body deigned to dwell.

O Mother blest! The chosen shrine
Wherein the Architect divine,
Whose hand contains the earth and sky,
Vouchsafed in hidden guise to lie.

Blest in the message Gabriel brought;
Blest in the work the Spirit wrought;
Most blest, to bring to human birth

The long desired of all the earth.

O Lord, the Virgin-born, to Thee
Eternal praise and glory be,
Whom with the Father we adore

And Holy Ghost for ever more.

Text: Venantius Fortunatus 530-609 (As found in my Little Office of the Blessing Virgin Mary; see also: https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/god_whom_earth_and_sea_and_s.htm for sheet music, etc.)

A few of the Incarnation's meanings as found in the New Testament: The Elevation of the human race, Theosis as the Greeks call it, is what Saint Paul calls being made a new creation in Christ. More than a metaphor, it is absolutely necessary and central to salvation.
•    God’s Incarnation didn’t lower God but rather elevates human nature, enabling…
•    "Theosis" (Divinization) which by grace – not by nature – is our incorporation into Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1.4). Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, our natures are changed, whereas Protestantism teaches Imputation of Grace: i.e., God assigns or imputes grace to us but doesn’t actually divinize or change our nature. (Luther explained the Protestant teaching via his famous "manure pile covered in snow" metaphor. C.S. Lewis carefully disagrees with this central Protestant idea in the 10th of his Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer.)

This Theosis teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:

•    John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation)
•    2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

•    St. John refers to it explicitly. Gospel of John 3:3-8, the famous "born again" passages, read from the Historical Church's understanding instead of the Protestant one. One is born anew in Baptism, via the water and the Spirit, a new creation, born of the Spirit.

•    Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26

•    Much is asked of this New Man, this New Creation. In general, note how Our Lord seems to demand the impossible of “ordinary” humans. In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount, Our Lord gives the Beatitudes, then says we are “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”, discusses how He has come not to do away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. Christ discusses elevated behavior regarding anger, adultery, divorce, making oaths and not retaliating (“turn the other cheek”) and love our enemies. He ends with "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (5:48) That is something manifestly impossible for “normal” human beings to do.

•   We are not "normal"; as St Paul puts it "And such some of you were; but you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of our God." (1 Cor 6:11; note the order: baptism first, then the work of sanctification/moral living, then justification.)

The New Testament shows what the first generation of Believers preached of this New Creation, while the Medievals repeatedly give a strong sense of the stunning quality of the Incarnation.

•    St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

•    St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

From a sermon by Saint Anselm, bishop (1033/4–1109)

Blessed Lady, sky and stars, earth an rivers, day and night – everything that is subject to the power or use of man—rejoice that through you they are in some sense restored to their lost beauty and are endowed with inexpressible new grace. All creatures were dead, as it were, useless for human beings or for the praise of God, who made them. The world, contrary to its true destiny, was corrupted and tainted by the acts of human beings who served idols. Now all creation has been restored to life and rejoices that it is controlled and given splendor by those who believe in God.

The universe rejoices with new and indefinable loveliness. Not only does it feel the unseen presence of God Himself, its Creator, it sees him openly working and making it holy. These great blessings spring from the blessed fruit of Mary’s womb.

Through the fullness of the grace that was given you, dead things rejoice in their freedom and those in heaven are glad to be made new. Through the Son who was the glorious fruit of your virgin womb, just souls who died before his life-giving death rejoice as they are freed from captivity, and the angels are glad at the restoration of their shattered domain.

Lady, full and overflowing with grace, all creation received new life from your abundance. Virgin, blessed above all creatures, through your blessing all creation is blessed, not only creation from its Creator, but the Creator Himself has been blessed by creation.

To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary.

God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Savior of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s son, nothing could be redeemed.

Truly the Lord is with you, to whom the Lord granted that all nature should owe as much to you as to himself.

And from Saint Lawrence Justinian, bishop (Lorenzo Giustiniani, 1 July 1381 – 8 January 1456)

While Mary contemplated all she had come to know through reading, listening and observing, she grew faith, increased in merits, and was more illuminated by wisdom and more consumed by the fire of charity. The heavenly mysteries were opened to her, and she was filled with joy; she became fruitful by the Spirit, was being directed toward God, and watched over protectively while on earth.

So remarkable are the divine graces that they elevate one from the lowest depths to the highest summit, and transform on to a great holiness. How entirely blessed was the mind of the Virgin which, through the indwelling and guidance of the Spirit, was always and in every way open to the power of the Word of God. She was not led by her own senses, nor by her own will; thus she accomplished outwardly through her body what wisdom from within gave to her faith.

It was fitting for divine Wisdom, which created itself a home in the Church, to use the intervention of the most blessed Mary in guarding the law, purifying the mind, giving an example of humility and providing a spiritual sacrifice.

Imitate her, O faithful soul. Enter into the deep recesses of your heart so that you may be purified spiritually and cleansed from your sins. God places more value on good will in all we do than on the works themselves.

Therefore, whether we give ourselves to God in the work of contemplation or whether we serve the needs of our neighbor by good works, we accomplish these things because the love of Christ urges us on. The acceptable offering of the spiritual purification is accomplished not in a man-made temple but in the recesses of the heart where the Lord Jesus freely enters.

"Imitate her, O faithful soul." Indeed.

Christmas. As with so much else that is from God, it is a bit more than perhaps we bargained for. Merry Christmas to all.

An Préachán

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part II Original Sin

Now, a bit about Original Sin on this Holy Feast Day, a Feast Day Pius XI instituted as a counter to the Protestants' Reformation Sunday. Protestants believed historically in Original Sin, and many still do, but definitely not in the way Catholicism does.

Original Sin: G.K. Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Church doctrine one could prove by merely opening the daily newspaper. This recent horror in Pittsburgh is an example of opening the daily paper (or accessing the Web) and seeing Original Sin.


Jews famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) don't believe in Original Sin. Classical Protestantism embraced it, but not in the Catholic way. Protestantism insisted that Original Sin meant people were worthless rags, utter failures, or "Totally Depraved" as Jean Calvin taught it in the famous Reformed Church acronym of "T.U.L.I.P". Thus, we're all miserable rats, fiends, selfish and savage. (And all too often, many people seem to want to be precisely so horrible as all that! Hell is their choice, and God always gives you what you want.) But through an act of faith, i.e., personal and then public acceptance of Jesus as Lord, God would then "cover" their sins -- and sinful nature -- with the snow of His Son's Righteousness. We would be made "right with God" even though sinners. Luther called this Justified but a Sinner. "Simul Justus et Peccator." This is defined as "imputed righteousness." Luther said we were thus like manure piles covered with snow. (I grew up on a dairy farm and this is quite a clever metaphor.)


Most traditional Protestants still believe this, though the more Modernist or Progressive ones don't (they don't believe in sin very much at all, unless being non-Politically Correct is a sin to them). In any event, such fallen wretches can not possible make good subjects for Christ as King of the Here and Now, so Protestants teach His kingship comes at the end of the ages. 


Contra this, the Orthodoxies (Catholicism, etc.) teach that Original Sin means we're not "plugged in" to God as we were when first made. We can thus go either way in life, in terms of being good people or bad, although usually we go the downward way. However, we're all far, far, far from worthless, and some can achieve profoundly all on their own (think of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle, etc., or the local "good atheist" who does great charity work and so on). However, no matter how good (or of course, bad) an individual may be, he or she cannot be "saved", made right with God; or to put it another way, a less Protestant way: our current, fallen, nature is such that as to prevent us from ever "seeing God" in the Beatific Vision.


Our natures, our very essence, thus must be remade, and this is what the Incarnation is all about. Eastern Orthodoxies -- whether in Communion with Rome, as many of the small ones are -- or not, all stress the Incarnation aspect of Salvation. They dwell on the mystery of the Incarnate God, ruling all history and creation as He is now, today, and as revealed in the Book of Revelation. Catholicism on the other hand, because of St. Augustine, tends to contemplate Christ as Crucified, hanging on the Cross, beaten, bloody, redeeming our sins through His sacrifice. These are two sides of the same Salvation coin, of course.


That is why when you walk into a traditional Catholics church, you're sure to see a large Crucifix. But when you walk into an Eastern liturgy church, you see Christ as Pantokrator, Ruler of All, on high (usually on its central dome).


Now, both Catholicism and the Orthodoxies are "orthodox" in that they teach the full Gospel, i.e., that the Incarnation and the Crucifixion go together. The difference is one of stress. But Catholicism's stress on the Crucifixion resulted in Protestantism, which is all about "Jesus died for my sins!" Protestantism focuses on the Cross to the point they can't really appreciate the Incarnation. The Incarnation is about the change in OUR natures ultimately. Protestants deny, however, as Luther went to great pains to deny, that there is any "change of nature." We're manure piles under beautiful robes. C.S. Lewis, in his 10th Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, refutes (very politely) this central Protestant teaching.


The question is: why the Incarnation? Why did God have to become Man? What is all that about, anyway? And the answer is that by the Incarnation, God elevated our natures so that we could then participate in the Divine Nature. That is what Salvation ultimately is. "We are new creations in Christ Jesus," as St. Paul says at least once in most of his letters, one way or another, "the old nature is gone; the new is here!" And this is the idea of Jesus' comments on to Nicodemus in St John about being "born again", i.e., literally receiving a new nature, born of the water and the Spirit, which is the Catholic / Orthodox understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism, and we receive the spirit of sonship (as St. Paul put it in Romans).


To rephrase it and bring in the help of angelic friends, angels by their inherent nature shared God's nature as pure spirit, and once they chose for or against God, they were locked in -- or locked out -- of God's presence for all eternity. This is simple to understand: if you are in Eternity and you make a choice, that choice is -- surprise, surprise -- eternal. One doesn't celebrate one's millionth year in Heaven or lament one's millionth year in Hell. There are no years in Eternity. Only what Boethius called the "Bound Now". (Thus anyone trying to make the argument that a good God would not consign someone to Hell forever is ridiculous -- there's no "forever" in Heaven or Hell, only the Boundless Present.


Humans are made in the image and likeness of God, as well, not in that the Lord of Hosts looked like Adam or had a physical nature in any way, but that we have minds that can comprehend, sort, catalog, figure out, project, extrapolate, and in general, be rational. These minds are eternal, mirroring God and the angelic minds. We're thus both the highest animals and lowest (sorta) angels, in the mind/soul sense. Original Sin locked us out of full participation in God, but the Incarnation opened the door for us that way, and opened it in a new and higher level entirely, so that now, incredibly, the Lord of Hosts Himself (Christians believe) is not pure spirit any more, but the Second Person is both God and Man, two natures, one Person. And we can share in that through the Sacrament, changed in our own very natures.


So, thus, Original Sin only means that an individual, no matter how good, can not be with God as God intended until that person participates in God's long-running plan of Salvation. We're not totally depraved, though many seem to want to go that way. But we're not sinless either, in the sense we don't have the supernatural help and cleansing all the Sacraments give, especially Baptism, which removes the Original Sin issue.


One final note: The Easterners don't believe unbaptized babies go to Limbo, and certainly not Hell. The Westerners (again because of St. Augustine to some large extent) believe unbaptized children can at best go to Limbo (or the Celtic Otherworld or Native Americans' Happy Hunting Grounds, or the Elysian Fields, however you wish to see it). St. Thomas Aquinas argued for the latter against those who taught the Hell destination idea. St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542 to 1621, was about the last important theologian who taught they went to Hell, if I recall correctly. The question today is generally held in abeyance, or to coin a phrase, Limbo. I've had children who didn't make it to birth and should I be blessed with Heaven, and they're in Limbo, I'm going to go be with them. We are made for the Beatific Vision, but as their father, I'm responsible for them. There are no angel families or clans, but there are with us. And God works through us for the general Salvation, to the extreme and astounding extent He became one of us Himself. 

Certainly the Lord of All Creation, the King of All, and a Father Himself, would understand, and fix it up to fulfill His glory and our destiny.

An Préachám

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part I

Here's a take on Original Sin and Christianity/Judaism that many of you are probably not familiar with. But today, on the Traditional and proper Feast of Christ the King, it is good to recall just how He is Lord of History and our True King -- not only of Heaven, but our Earth, our present, miserable, confused, and lost (even in so many persons in the Church itself, even Christ's Vicar!) as it seems to be. 

God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.

So:

The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).

To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.


What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)


What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.


Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.


Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.


Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.

 N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.

An Préachán