Incarnation Quotes

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.”
― Saint Augustine of Hippo

“The Self-revealing of the Word is in every dimension - above, in creation; below, in the Incarnation; in the depth, in Hades; in the breadth, throughout the world. All things have been filled with the knowledge of God.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“The Lord did not come to make a display. He came to heal and to teach suffering men. For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been just to appear and dazzle the beholders. But for Him Who came to heal and to teach the way was not merely to dwell here, but to put Himself at the disposal of those who needed Him, and to be manifested according as they could bear it, not vitiating the value of the Divine appearing by exceeding their capacity to receive it.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men...?”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“The body of the Word, then, being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed from a virgin, was of itself mortal and, like other bodies, liable to death. But the indwelling of the Word loosed it from this natural liability, so that corruption could not touch it. Thus is happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“The nativity mystery “conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary”, means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his “climbing down of God” is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.”
― Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline: Essential Christian Theology from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Theologian

“For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“Prayer is a moment of incarnation - God with us. God involved in the details of my life.”
― Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting With God In A Distracting World

“... without the incarnation, Christianity isn't even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. "Be nice to one another" is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.

The incarnation is an essential part of Jesus-shaped spirituality.”
― Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality

“...the incarnation is the complete refutation of every human system and institution that claims to control, possess, and distribute God. Whatever any church or religious leader may claim in regard to their particular access to God or control over your experience of God, the incarnation is the last word: God loves the world. God came into the world in the form of the people he created, the human race (including you and me), who bear his image. God's creation of humanity in his image gives hints of who he is, since we all are marked by his fingerprints.

But as flawed humans, we give only a vague hint of God. Our broken reflection of God's image is easily drowned out by our broken humanity. then, two thousand years ago, God came in his fullness. He came to all of us in Jesus. The incarnation is not owned, trademarked, or controlled by any church. It belongs to every human being. The incarnation is not something that requires a distributor or middleman. It is a gracious gift to every person everywhere, religious or not. God gave himself to us in Jesus.”
― Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality

“If Christianity was only about finding a group of people to live life with who shared openly their search for God and allowed anyone regardless of behavior to seek too and who collectively lived by faith to make the world a little more like Heaven would you be interested ’ ‘Hell yes ’ was his reply. He continued ‘Are there churches like that”
― Hugh Halter & Matt Smay, The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community

“There is only one all-pervading God. It has no religion, no incarnation. It is free from all contaminations.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“In the history of a soul’s evolution there is a critical point of the human incarnation that decides for us whether we stay there, go down or progress upwards. There is a knot of worldly desires impeding us; cut the knot by mastering desires and go forward. This done, progress is assured.”
― Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

“Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His nature;
it is not too difficult for us to also overthrow our evil will." Hymns of the Nativity, Hymn 1:97, pg. 74 in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989).”
― St. Ephrem the Syrian

“Action is always superior to speech in the Gospels, which is why the Word became flesh and not newsprint.”
― Colin M. Morris, Mankind my church,

“We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation.”
― Viv Grigg

“In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
― Andy Weir, The Egg

“the opposite of abstraction: incarnation”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“The Complete Incarnation

Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is so unique. Firstly, his uniqueness lies in the fact that although Krishna happened in the ancient past he belongs to the future, is really of the future. Man has yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna's. He is still beyond man's understanding; he continues to puzzle and battle us. Only in some future time will we be able to understand him and appreciate his virtues. And there are good reasons for it.

The most important reason is that Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking - like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing.

Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. If you set aside Krishna's vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born.

Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete.

Krishna has a great future. After Freud the world of religion is not going to be the same as it was before him. Freud stands as a watershed between the religions of the past and the religion of the future. With Freud a great revolution has taken place and man's consciousness has achieved a breakthrough. We shall never be the same again after Freud. A new peak of consciousness has been touched and a new understanding, an altogether new perspective, a new vision of life has come into being. And it is essential to understand it rightly.

With Freud a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If a man fights with himself he can only ruin and destroy himself. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win, but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself.

Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to man in the wake of Freud and his findings. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity Krishna alone is against repression.

That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow with the passage of time.

...when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, Krishna's flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance.

It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his blessings.”
― Osho

“All of the world religions have offered some means of bridging the distance between God and mankind, some by admitting various celestial beings such as demi-gods, angels, and saints, and others through scripture. But in at least two world religions, Christianity and Hinduism, there is a common belief that there has been a divine descent through which God has sent his surro- gate to the earth and graced us with His presence in a Being known as the God-man. The God-man is an extraordinary Being, compelling us to stretch our minds to the limit in order to grasp His presence. It is believed that the Christian and Hindu God-men have all the power and capacity of God, and share a portion of that omnipotence with us so that we may be able to gain a glimpse of that glorious power, brilliance, and splendour.”
― Daniel E. Bassuk, Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: The Myth of the God-Man

“One of the earliest attempts to portray the human embodiment of the divine was made by the ancient Hindus a few centuries before the Christian era. In the ancient Hindu scriptures, the sacred hymns called the Vedas, the god Indra wandered about in many forms, sometimes as a bull and sometimes as a ram, and the god Varuna is said to have come out of the point of an arrow and appeared as a bull. [...] The Sanskrit terms used to express the manifestation of God coming into this world evolved from rupa, vapus, and tanu, to pradurbhava (appearance), and gradually there came about the Sanskirt word avatara, composed of two parts, the verb root tr, meaning pass or cross, and the prefix ava, signifying down. The finite verb form avatarati means 'he descends'. This passing, crossing, or coming down is symbolic of the passage of God from eternity into the temporal realm, from unconditioned to conditioned, from infinitude to finitude the descent of the divine to our world. A variant of the word avatara is the Sanskrit word avatarana, a term used to describe the entry of an actor upon the stage making his appearance from behind a curtain, just as the God-man manifests himself upon the world-stage coming down from heaven. The Anglicization of the Sanskrit term avatara is the word avatar, the word designated to describe the advent of the divine, God appearing on earth.”
― Daniel E. Bassuk, Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: The Myth of the God-Man

“For it is a fact that the more unbelievers pour scorn on Him, so much the more does He make His Godhead evident. The things which they, as men, rule out as impossible, He plainly shows to be possible; that which they deride as unfitting, His goodness makes most fit; and things which these wiseacres laugh at as "human" He by His inherent might declares divine. Thus by what seems His utter poverty and weakness on the cross He overturns the pomp and parade of idols, and quietly and hiddenly wins over the mockers and unbelievers to recognize Him as God.”
― Athanasius of Alexandria

“When considering -the- event of history, namely the incarnation, Kierkegaard does not de-historicize this event to make faith more palatable to a sophisticated modern audience. Instead, employing contemporaneity he accentuates the historicity of the event, and then identifies our response to it as -either- faith -or- offence. In this way coming to have faith, and thus becoming a whole, authentic person, is essentially and inextricably tied up with the attitude towards an historical event.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard's Critique of Christian Nationalism

“And presently in the door stands the carpenter of Nazareth, and his mother and twelve more forby that have a smell of fish and seaweed and limpets on them from their trade, all known faces. Yet none guessed that here was the Incarnate Word (had they not bargained with him for cradles and chairs and roofbeams?).
(A Treading of Grapes)”
― George Mackay Brown, A Time To Keep and Other Stories