The Incarnation and the Church

“Thou art secretly born in a den, but heaven preaches Thee to all, like lips offering a star, O Saviour,” sings the Holy Church on the eve of Christ’s Nativity. The great mystery of piety: God appeared in the flesh was precisely a mystery. The heavens preached about the birth of God on earth, but this sermon was majestic and silent, because the mouth of heaven was a star. The event, which is now celebrated by the entire Christian world, passed almost completely unnoticed in its time. Did the Greco-Roman world know, did even the Jewish world feel that somewhere in a cave, in Bethlehem, the Divinity Itself, having become incarnate, united “unfused and inseparable, unchangeable and inseparable” with human nature? And how soon did humanity turn its attention to the greatest event in its history? Not years, but centuries passed before the time when high minds began to theologize about the incarnation and its meaning for humanity. The child grew, but we do not know His holy childhood. Only the apocryphal gospels try to fill the thirty-year void and fill it with the miraculous. The divine dignity of the Child is clearly revealed in the events about which the apocrypha speaks, but the Gospels are silent about all this. In the Gospels, on the contrary, we see a constant, as it were, concealment of the Divine. Christ was the hidden God on earth. He asks to remain silent about His miracles. He never says about Himself: “I am God.” Even in the den, the Divine admixture with human nature took place. Christ has already gone out to the work of evangelism. The fishers of men were also gathered. They left the fishermen's nets, but they had already sunk their gospel nets into the sea of ​​humanity. And the Divinity of their Teacher is only felt, but not yet realized in all the depth of its meaning. The incarnation of God and the meaning of this incarnation still remains a mystery. But here is the first time when Christ spoke with His disciples about the incarnation and pointed out to them its consequences. Where was it? Far from people, far from cities, in the far north of the promised land, within the borders of Caesarea Philippi. There Christ was alone with His disciples. Carefully, Christ asks the disciples: “Who do people say... the Son of Man”, that is, Himself? Showing how much he desires that His incarnation be confessed, he says: “Son of Man.” The disciples answer: “For John the Baptist, ... for Elijah, ... for Jeremiah, for one of the prophets.” This is not the opinion the Lord wants to hear about Himself from His closest followers. “Who do you think I am?” Your opinion must be different, higher. “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” the Apostle Peter hastens to answer before others (Matthew 16:13–16). What did Peter say? He confessed the incarnation of the Son of God. Peter said the same thing that John later wrote in his spiritual Gospel, when his mind, like an eagle, soared above the visible creation: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), although the glory, dignity, nature of this Word was the glory of “the Only Begotten of the Father.” The great mystery of piety, before it became generally accepted (confessed), was confessed through the mouth of Peter from the entire face of the apostle. These words: “You are the Christ, the Son of God” (Luke 4:41), mean the union of two natures, which the Son of God magnificently accomplished in Himself for our salvation. In Peter's confession one should see the grain of later church Christology. Many great church theologians revealed the Christological teaching in all its depth, but the Christological truth was expressed briefly and quite definitely much earlier than the Council of Chalcedon - when the apostles gathered around Christ Himself within the boundaries of Caesarea Philippi. It was not flesh and blood that, according to the word of Christ, revealed this great truth to the Apostle Peter. Jewish flesh and blood did not take incarnation. “We do not want to stone You for a good deed, but for blasphemy and because You, being a man, make Yourself God” (John 10:33). The high priest tore his clothes and said: “He is blaspheming! ...Now you have heard His blasphemy! What do you think? They answered and said, “I am guilty of death” (Matthew 26:65–66; Mark 14:63). “We all expect that the Messiah will be a man from men,” says the Jew in Justin. And long after, the Semitic element in the Church created Christological heresies. “The Ebionites... do not accept into their souls by faith the union of God and man,” complains Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. The ancient world taught a lot about the Word, about the Logos, but could not say: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). The Jew was a deist. Hellenus, speaking about the Logos, fell into pantheism. Alexandrian syncretism did not emerge from these two extremes either. A new era has begun in the doctrine of Logos. Philosophy was subordinated to theology. The incarnate Logos began to dwell in the world, in people. But Christ’s answer did not end there. He Himself spoke about the significance that the incarnation of the Son of God would have for humanity. “And I say to you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). Your name is Stone, and the incarnation you confessed will also be the stone on which My Church will be created. Isaiah prophesied about the stone, David prophesied. In the light of these prophecies, the apostles could easily understand the words of Christ. The apostles learned His words well. Both the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul call Christ Himself the Stone. Christ is the Rock on which the Church was created. But what does it mean to create the Church in Christ? Many holy fathers say that the Church was created on the confession of Peter, on the faith of Peter. What does it mean? How can you create anything based on the theoretical confession of some truth? After all, a new life for humanity is being created, a new humanity is being created. New life and new creation are not created by theoretical truth. Christ is the foundation of the Church in the precise sense in which He was confessed by the Apostle Peter. And Peter confessed the incarnation of the Son of God. The incarnate Son of God became the foundation of the Church. The confession of Peter can be called the foundation of the Church in its objective meaning, in its content, because it confessed the fact of the incarnation of God. It is not the idea of ​​the incarnation, but the very fact of the incarnation that lies at the foundation of the Church. The church is, as it were, a direct continuation of the incarnation, just as a building can be called a continuation of the foundation. Hermas saw the Church as a tower under construction. The individual stones fit so tightly together that it was impossible to notice where one stone ended and where another began. The tower seemed to be created from one stone. As soon as the stones entered the structure of the tower, they began to glow, they changed their usual appearance. According to the Apostle Paul, the Church is a new creation. But the new creation can be compared in some points with the first creation. Once upon a time, God took dust from the earth and created man. This man was from the dusty earth, and he fell into the dust, although he was created for incorruptibility. People wore the image of earthy Adam. In the Incarnation, dust is again taken, flesh is borrowed from the earthy nature, albeit from the Most Pure Virgin. A new man is being created because people have become partakers of the Divine nature. God once breathed the breath of life into man’s face, and man became a living soul. During the new creation, there was also a Divine breath with the words: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22) - and, “the breath of the storm” (Acts 2:2), everyone was filled with the Holy Spirit. The new Adam became the life-giving Spirit. The ancient has passed, now everything is new. The old man's former way of life is put aside and the new man, created according to God, is put on in righteousness and true holiness. The process of gradual transformation of human nature began with the incarnation of the Son of God, and the continuation and completion of this process - in the life of the church. Thus the incarnation and the Church are inextricably linked. “The Word, existing in the beginning and with God, and the Word, the very existing God, who in the last days, through communion with the humiliation of our nature, became flesh out of love for mankind and, uniting through it with man, took into Himself all of our nature, so that through dissolution with the Divine nature the human would be deified and the firstfruits of these would be sanctified together with the entire composition of our nature.” St. John of Damascus in his homily on the Transfiguration and Archbishop of Thessalonica Nile Cabasilas call Peter's confession theology. But the answer of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Apostle Peter should also be called high and very meaningful theology. Understood in their inextricable connection, the confession of Peter and the answer of Christ form an entire system of Christian theology, a single, integral and harmonious system. This system harmoniously combined the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ (Christology), the doctrine of salvation (soteriology), and the doctrine of the Church (ecclisiology). The incarnation is the beginning of salvation, and on the basis of the incarnation the Church is created, a new nature, which, through the action of grace, is healed from sinful corruption and reaches the full stature of Christ. By stone, Catholics mean Peter himself and with the words of Christ they justify the claims of the Bishop of Rome to lawless supremacy in the Church and even to infallibility. Our theologians argue a lot with this understanding of the words of Christ. But the religious feeling, living by the ideal of salvation and deification, turns away from the Catholic interpretation because this interpretation wants to buy and sell where the greatest religious mysteries are proclaimed. The theological ideological insignificance of Catholic thought is what turns us away from it most of all. About the ancient Ebionites, the church historian Eusebius writes that they were called Ebionites for the poverty of their minds; for this name among the Jews means “poor” (NE III, 27, 6). And Saint Epiphanius of Cyprus explains: “He who recognized Christ as a simple man is truly poor in understanding, hope, and deed” (Heresy. 30. Chapter 17). Catholics are the Ebionites of our time. Their ideological poverty is reflected in their interpretation of Christ’s answer in the sense of granting primacy and primacy in the Church to Peter, as well as to all his successors in the see of the Bishop of Rome. Catholics do not want to see anything other than the church structure, except external order and subordination, where, according to the Orthodox understanding, deep theological secrets about the natural unity of Christ with the Church have been revealed. Our theology also understands the Church too externally. The Church is some kind of human institution; its mystical connection with the fact of the incarnation is not the subject of theological speculation for us. But whoever on the day of Christ’s Nativity listens more closely to the church hymns will learn in what the Church sees the guarantee of its life and the beginning of the salvation of its members. It is today, according to the thought of the Church, that a glorious sacrament is being established: nature is renewed and God man becomes the Son of God, by His very unity and unification with human nature (in the incarnation) God made the earthly. In church songs for Christmas Day, we hear ideological echoes of the very theology that we spoke about above. According to the Church itself, in the Christmas service it brings to the born Christ “the Orthodox riches of theology, as to God and the Savior of our souls” (in Prakhitikh, “Glory”). And the wealth of this Orthodox theology lies in the same great truths that were originally expressed in the Lord’s conversations with his disciples within Caesarea Philippi. “The beginning of the salvation of human nature and the beginning of church life is laid in the very fact of the incarnation and incarnation of the second Hypostasis of the Most Holy Trinity,” - this is how we define the “Orthodox wealth of theology.” The ideological and theological content of the Christmas service was given in the north of Palestine, where the Lord was alone with His disciples, far from people. Christ was secretly born from the Most Pure Virgin in the south of the Holy Land; secretly in the north of this land the importance of this birth was theologically determined. For centuries afterwards, church theologians discussed the mystery of the incarnation. Which of them does not have a word about the incarnation? Sometimes people even argued about this secret in squares and markets. The mystery of the incarnation beckons humanity, because without this mystery, for humanity there remains only joyless decay in the lusts of the delightful and the dark gates of death. We glorify Christ's incarnation because, no matter how much we love our sinful nature, we still long to be consoled by re-existence. You might be interested in: