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I was asked to write a brief history of the Church of the Incarnation, in Highlands. North Carolina, for a local magazine. The piece was intended to be about the building itself, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and was built in 1896. But you cannot research the history of a church without also researching the history of the people who brought that church into being. Of the dozen people who formed the congregation for this church, one was Sarah Whiteside Norton. She was the first non-native American child born in the Highlands area, the daughter of...

Evangelicals, like all orthodox Christians, vigorously affirm the Doctrine of the Incarnation—the faith of all Christians that God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became Man. Evangelicals, like Catholics, believe this doctrine with every fiber of their being. But there’s more to it than this. In Evangelical culture “incarnation� has tended to get prefaced with the definite article—�The Incarnation.� It’s been primarily thought and spoken of as a single, albeit glorious, historical event that took place in the past, and its application in...

In a Blog entry entitled "The New Christology", Fr. John O'Keefe writes:Calling Jesus “Saviour” or “Redeemer”, to say that Jesus was sent by God to die for me, and that I should pray to Jesus is quite ludicrous. To take the literal meaning of most of the scripture texts as being absolute truth is to make the scriptures stories of complete fantasy...Was Jesus God? No, Jesus was a human being who had to learn about God in the same way that we learn... Jesus had no special privileges, no special knowledge, but the spark of divinity that is in all...

More than two centuries before the Reformation, a theological debate broke out that pitted theologian Thomas Aquinas against an upstart from Britain, John Duns Scotus. In essence, the debate circled around the question, "Would Christmas have occurred if humanity had not sinned?" Whereas Aquinas viewed the Incarnation as God's remedy for a fallen planet, his contemporary saw much more at stake. For Duns Scotus, the Word becoming flesh as described in the prologue to John's Gospel must surely represent the Creator's primary design, not some kind of afterthought or Plan B. Aquinas pointed to passages emphasizing the Cross as God's...

TREATISE ON THE LOVE OF GOD Book II, Chapter IV By St Francis de Sales Book II. The History Of The Generation And Heavenly Birth Of Divine Love. Ch 4. Of The Supernatural Providence Which God Uses Towards Reasonable Creatures. All God's works are ordained to the salvation of men and angels; and the order of his providence is this, as far as, by attention to the Holy Scriptures and the doctrine of the Fathers, we are able to discover and our weakness permits us to describe it. God knew from all eternity that he could make an innumerable multitude...

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662) seems to be the only Father who was directly concerned with the problem, although not in the same setting as the later theologians in the West. He stated plainly that the Incarnation should be regarded as an absolute and primary purpose of God in the act of Creation. The nature of the Incarnation, of this union of the Divine majesty with human frailty, is indeed an unfathomable mystery, but we can at least grasp the reason and the purpose of this supreme mystery, its logos and skopos. And this original reason, or the ultimate purpose,...

Franciscan (Scotistic) Thesis: Absolute Primacy Of Christ -Jesus Christ was absolutely predestined for grace and glory in His Incarnation quite apart from any question of sin. The elect (men and angels) were chosen and predestined in Him by an eternal decree. And this before the universe had been created. Supporters of this: -St. Maximus the Confessor: “This [the Incarnation] is that great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were created. This is the divine purpose foreknown before the beginning of creation… Really, it was for the sake of Christ, that is the mystery of...

INCARNATION GOD SENT HIS SON, TO SAVE US by J.I. Packer The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14 Trinity and Incarnation belong together. The doctrine of the Trinity declares that the man Jesus is truly divine; that of the Incarnation declares that the divine Jesus is truly human. Together they proclaim the full reality of the Savior whom the New Testament sets forth, the Son who came from the Father’s side at the...

Before I became a Christian, I was under the influence of a cult that presented itself as the true church. Among the weird things I was taught, I was told that Christmas was unbiblical, since Jesus wasn’t born on December 25. Christmas wasn’t Jesus’ real birthday. I think that group was wrong to throw out Christmas, but they were probably right about the date of Jesus’ birth. When the Church first instituted the feast of Christmas, however, it never did so on the assumption that December 25 was Jesus’ birthday! Rather, Christmas was instituted as a celebration, not of a...

KOLKATA (Reuters) - Thousands of people are flocking to an impoverished Indian village in eastern West Bengal state to worship a man they believe possesses divine powers because he climbs up trees in seconds, gobbles up bananas and has a "tail." Devotees say 27-year-old villager Chandre Oraon is an incarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman -- worshipped by millions as a symbol of physical strength, perseverance and devotion. "He climbs up trees, behaves like a monkey and is a strict vegetarian, but he is no god and his condition is just a congenital defect," says Bhushan Chakraborty, the local...

 Please join me in  remembering that special moment when  Jesus came to be with us, the miracle that was the incarnation.  I invite you to join me in answering the angel's call, to see the babe in the manger, if  only in your hearts and thoughts, that babe who was the greatest Christmas present of all. Light like a candle in the darkness, like hope in despair, like touch to the lonely, like water to a thirst, like a starry night filled with angels singing. Light, like the mysterious light filling a tomb to shatter finally the hold of the...

THE FIRST DAY AND FIRST CONTEMPLATION IT IS ON THE INCARNATION AND CONTAINS THE PREPARATORY PRAYER, THREE PRELUDES, THREE POINTS AND ONE COLLOQUY Prayer. The usual Preparatory Prayer. First Prelude. The first Prelude is to bring up the narrative of the thing which I have to contemplate. Here, it is how the Three Divine Persons looked at all the plain or circuit of all the world, full of men, and how, seeing that all were going down to Hell, it is determined in Their Eternity,7 that the Second Person shall become man to save the human race, and so,...

An Absolute Mystery    REV. KENNETH BAKER, S.J. The Incarnation (God became man in Jesus Christ) is the central mystery of Christianity. Involved are both the meaning of man himself and the revealed reality of the Holy Trinity, for when we say that "God became man", we mean that the Word of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, united to himself a human nature. So God became in Jesus as we are. It is the defined, official teaching of the Church that the Incarnation, as a term of the divine action, is the mysterious union of the divine...

John 8:43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.God having come as the Word He always was and is to those whom He made by His Word, those whom He had made did not know Him. For as Word, He says of Himself:John 1:1-5 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life...

All, two of my blogging friends, the Pontificator, and Will of the Prydain blog are posting wonderful Incarnation-themed material on their websites. Some links follow: Prydain:Hilary of Poitiers on the Incarnation;Hippolytus of Rome on the Incarnation;The Thirty-Nine Articles on the Incarnation;Cyril of Alexandria on the Incarnation Pontifications:“But Himself rose out of His place, and came after us”“He prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself”“By His flesh which He took of us receiving His Spirit which He imparteth to us” Enjoy these wonderful meditations by the Church Fathers!

Come now, Macarius (worthy of that name), and true lover of Christ, let us follow up the faith of our religion, and set forth also what relates to the Word's becoming Man, and to His divine Appearing amongst us, which Jews traduce and Greeks laugh to scorn, but we worship; in order that, all the more for the seeming low estate of the Word, your piety toward Him may be increased and multiplied. For the more He is mocked among the unbelieving, the more witness does He give of His own Godhead; inasmuch as He not only Himself demonstrates as...

Accoding to St. Catherine of Siena "The Dialogue" http://www.ecatholic2000.com/catherine/siena14.html "Wherefore I gave My Word, My only-begotten Son, because the whole stuff of human generation was corrupted through the sin of the first man Adam. Wherefore, all of you, vessels made of this stuff, were corrupted and not disposed to the possession of eternal life -- so I, with My dignity, joined Myself to the baseness of your human generation, in order to restore it to grace which you had lost by sin; for I was incapable of suffering, and yet, on account of guilt, My divine justice demanded suffering. But...

The Incarnation and the Human Person Among twentieth-century theologians, especially in the West, many discussions of christology have centred around what has to be said of Christ to affirm that he is truly human. An understanding of human nature is thus presupposed, probably based on aspects of our contemporary experience, and this becomes the yardstick by which to measure the authenticity of our Lord’s humanity. By such a standard, much of New Testament and traditional christology can too easily be dismissed as docetic, since it presents Christ as living and acting in ways that differ from what is possible in...