Brian’s Reviews > On the Incarnation > Status Update

Such and so many are the Savior's achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves...when one wants to take in all the achievements of Christ in the body, one cannot do so, even by reckoning them up, for the things that transcend one's thoughts are always more than those one think that one has grasped.

It is, in fact, a sign and notable proof of the coming of the Word that Jerusalem no longer stands, neither is prophet raised up nor vision revealed among them [Jews]...and when the Truth had come, what further need was there of the shadow?

If anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certain does well to marvel at so great a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard plain facts.

How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched? Here, again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself.

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Savior, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind...He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those others His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced.

Thus it 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.

At one and the same time - this is the wonder - as Man He was living a human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life of the universe, and as Son He was in constant union with the Father.

The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image.

Plato...said that God had made all things out of pre-existent and uncreated matter, just as a carpenter makes things only out of wood that already exists...How could God be called Maker and Artificer if His ability to make depended on some other cause, namely on matter itself?...If He...did not Himself bring matter into being, He would be not the Creator but only a craftsman.

This distinctness of things [in creation] argues not a spontaneous generation but a prevenient Cause; and from that Cause we can apprehend God, the Designer and Maker of all.