The Incarnation Quotes

“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message the world has ever heard, or will hear.
…the ‘Christmas spirit’…ought to mean the reproducing in human lives of the temper of Him who for our sakes became poor at the first Christmas. And the Christmas spirit itself ought to be the mark of every Christian all year round.
(~Knowing God, pps 55-56)”
― J. I. Packer

“I see in Jesus not only the supreme act of humility in God, but the supreme act of humanity in God.”
― William Porcher Dubose

“Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety

“What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters—as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed'—is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize—namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all?”
― Wesley Hill

“The full force and authority of the Kingdom of God came in a human body (Jesus Christ), with human DNA, with full legality, and therefore was able to make everything that was wrong right again.”
― Sebastien Richard, Kingdom Fundamentals: What the Kingdom of God Means and What it Means for You | A Thorough and Biblical Exposition of the Kingdom of Heaven as Preached by Jesus

“The Christian God came, not as a deus
ex machina to set everything externally in order,
but as the Son of Man in order interiorly to share
in the passion of mankind. And this, too, is precisely the task of the Christian: to share in the
passion of mankind from within, to extend the
sphere of human being so that it will find room
for the presence of God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI