Tag: Incarnation

We Receive What Christ is in Our Baptism

…we receive this personal gift of Christ’s own Spirit not only because we are Christ’s by faith and love, but because this faith and love have made us desire His life, to be in Him, and because in Baptism, having been baptized into Christ, we have put on Christ. Christ is the Anointed and we receive His anointment; Christ is the Son and we are adopted as sons; Christ has the Spirit as His Life in Himself and we are given participation in His Life.

Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 79

Prayer of St. Mary of Egypt to the Theotokos

O Virgin, Mother of God, who didst give birth to God the Word, I know that it is neither fitting nor seemly that one so defiled and so covered with guilt as I should look up to thy image, O ever Virgin. It is fitting that I should be hated and shunned by thy purity. Yet as He who was born of thee became man on purpose to call sinners to repentance, help me, for I have no other succour. Let me also find an entrance. Do not refuse me a sight of the wood on which God the Word, thy Son, suffered according to the flesh, who shed His own precious blood for me. Grant, O Queen, that I may be admitted to worship the sacred Cross, and I will promise thee as surety to the God whom thou didst bring forth that I will keep myself ever undefiled, When I see the Cross of thy Son, I will at once renounce the world and the things of the world, and forthwith follow wherever thou shalt lead.”

St. Sophronius of Jerusalem
The Life of St. Mary of Egypt

The Lord worked out our salvation through matter

It is not matter which I adore; it is the Lord of matter, becoming matter for my sake, taking up His abode in matter and working out my salvation through matter. For “the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt amongst us.” (Jn. 1.14) It is evident to all that flesh is matter, and that it is created. I reverence and honour matter, and worship that which has brought about my salvation. I honour it, not as God, but as a channel of divine strength and grace.

St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Part II

Our honor of the icon is honor to the original

The image of the King is also called the king, and there are not two kings in consequence. Neither is power divided, nor is glory distributed. just as the reigning power over us is one, so is our homage one, not many, and the honor given to the image reaches back to the original. What the image is in the one case as a representation, that the Son is by His humanity, and as in art likeness is according to form, so in the divine and incommensurable nature union is effected in the indwelling Godhead.

St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Quoted from Amphilochios, On the Holy Spirit

Christ has deified our flesh

From the time that God the Word became flesh He is as we are in everything except sin, and of our nature, without confusion. He has deified our flesh for ever, and we are in very deed sanctified through His Godhead and the union of His flesh with it.

St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Part I

Christ’s flesh was unchangeably also God

St John, who rested on His breast, says, that “we shall be like to Him” (I Jn. 3.2): just as a man by contact with fire becomes fire, not by nature, but by contact and by burning and by participation, so is it, I apprehend, with the flesh of the Crucified Son of God. That flesh, by participation through union with the divine nature, was unchangeably God, not in virtue of grace from God as was the case with each of the prophets, but by the presence of the Fountain Head Himself.

St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Part I

God worked out our salvation through matter

I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation.

St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Part I

Jesus’ sonship is eternal before His incarnation

But it is monstrous and unlawful to compare God the Father, in the generation of His only-begotten Son, and in the substance of the same, to any man or other living thing engaged in such an act; for we must of necessity hold that there is something exceptional and worthy of God which does not admit of any comparison at all, not merely in things, but which cannot even be conceived by thought or discovered by perception, so that a human mind should be able to apprehend how the unbegotten God is made the Father of the only-begotten Son.  Because His generation is as eternal and everlasting as the brilliancy which is produced from the sun.  For it is not by receiving the breath of life that He is made a Son, by any outward act, but by His own nature.

Origen
On First Principles, Book I
Chapter II

Jesus is the Word of God and man

But the truth is, we find that He is expressly set forth as both God and Man; the very psalm which we have quoted intimating (of the flesh), that “God became Man in the midst of it, He therefore established it by the will of the Father,”—certainly in all respects as the Son of God and the Son of Man, being God and Man, differing no doubt according to each substance in its own especial property, inasmuch as the Word is nothing else but God, and the flesh nothing else but Man. Thus does the apostle also teach respecting His two substances, saying, “who was made of the seed of David;” in which words He will be Man and Son of Man.  “Who was declared to be the Son of God, according to the Spirit;” in which words He will be God, and the Word—the Son of God. We see plainly the twofold state, which is not confounded, but conjoined in One Person—Jesus, God and Man.

…In like manner, again, the apostle calls Him “the Mediator between God and Men,” and so affirmed His participation of both substances.

Tertullian
Against Praxeas
Chapter XXVII