Astonished with the angels
Christmas with Charnock Day 6
Welcome to the final in a series of reflections from Stephen Charnock on the incarnation. As a way of expressing my gratitude for the support people have shown as I have set out on my PhD, I’m sending out a short excerpt each morning up to and including Christmas Day.
In the final part of his discussion on the incarnation, Stephen Charnock develops the point he finished with yesterday. You may recall that, in the last installment, Charnock was keen to stress that the divine and human natures are totally united in the incarnate Christ. It’s not like someone and their house, or someone and their clothes. These are separate things with distinct substances. But in the incarnation the divine and human nature are more like the way fire is united with iron. He wrote,
Fire pierceth through all the parts of iron, it unites itself with every particle, bestows a light, heat, purity upon all of it; you cannot distinguish the iron from the fire, or the fire from the iron; yet they are distinct natures. So the Deity is united to the whole humanity, seasons it, and bestows an excellency upon it, yet the natures still remain distinct.
We acknowledged yesterday that these are fine distinctions. But as small as they may appear, they are crucial ones. For, if the humanity was not united with the divinity, it could not be said that Jesus really suffered on the cross. But, if the divinity was not really united with the humanity, it could not be said that it was really God on the cross. Whether or not we realised it before, if there had been no uniting of the divine and the human in the incarnation, there would be no salvation. There would be no gospel. There would be no Christmas.
United, but not confused
Okay, got it. The uniting of the divine and human in the incarnation was essential for what Jesus came to do. But there was something else that was crucial in what Charnock said in that quote above. It’s was the final word: that, though they were united, Jesus’ divine and human natures remained ‘distinct’. And it’s this that he now explains.
The two natures of Christ are not mixed, as liquors that incorporate with one another when they are poured into a vessel; the divine nature is not turned into the human, nor the human into the divine; one nature doth not swallow up another and make a third nature distinct from each of them.
Though united, Jesus’ human and divine nature are not confused with each other. They remain distinct. And that is for at least one important reason. As Charnock goes on,
The Deity cannot be changed, because the nature of it is to be unchangeable. It would not be deity if it were mortal and capable of suffering. The humanity is not changed into the deity, for then Christ could not have been a sufferer. If the humanity had been swallowed up into the deity, it had lost its own distinct nature, and put on the nature of the Deity, and consequently been incapable of suffering. Finite can never by any mixture be changed into infinite, nor infinite into finite.
Just as it was essential that the divine and the human natures were united in the incarnation, it was no less vital that the divine and human natures remained distinct.
Light and air
It’s at this point that you might be thinking that this post should have come with a health warning. And I hold my hands up, contemplating the intricacies of the incarnation does have a tendency to make your head spin. Because, whilst Charnock is keen to stress that Christ’s natures aren’t confused, the same might not be able to be said about of us!
So we can be thankful that it was at this point that Charnock tries to help us with another illustration. He says,
This union in this regard may be resembled to the union of light and air, which are strictly joined; for the light passes through all parts of the air, but they are not confounded, but remain in their distinct essences as before the union, without the least confusion with one another. The divine nature remains as it was before the union, entire in itself, only the divine person assumes another nature to himself. The human nature remains as it would have done had it existed separately from the [pre-incarnate Christ], except that then it would have had a proper subsistence by itself, which now it borrows from its union with the [pre-incarnate Christ], but that doth not belong to the constitution of its nature.
I don’t know if that helps? Like light and air are united yet distinct, so are Jesus’ divine and human natures. The divine and human natures remain as they would have done had they existed separately from each other, except that they now subsist together in Jesus.
Astonished with the angels
I appreciate that my efforts to clarify the intricacies of the incarnation may be found wanting. Indeed, it couldn’t be any other way. Because that’s the thing about contemplating God, not least his coming to earth as a man. God is God and we are not. And that means that we can only go so far before we have no choice but to fall on our knees under the weight of the mystery. Under the weight of the wonder. Under the weight of the glory.
And, if it’s any reassurance, that’s where Charnock ends up too. In his closing lines on the incarnation he writes,
Now let us consider what a wonder of power is all this. The knitting a noble soul to a body of clay was not so great an exploit of almightiness as the espousing infinite and finite together. Man is further distant from God than man from nothing. What a wonder is it that two natures infinitely distant should be more intimately united than anything in the world, and yet without any confusion! That the same person should have both a glory and a grief; an infinite joy in the Deity, and an unexpressible sorrow in the humanity; that a God upon a throne should be an infant in a cradle; the thundering Creator be a weeping babe and a suffering man, are such expressions of mighty power, as well as condescending love, that they astonish men upon earth, and angels in heaven.
Thank you for joining me this week as we’ve followed Stephen Charnock in his reflections on the incarnation. I hope and pray that God may have used these posts to astonish you - whether for the first or the umpteenth time - at our dear saviour’s birth.
It only leaves me to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
P.S. Through the generosity of my local church, I have been given the time to study the life and thought of Stephen Charnock and share what I am learning through posts like these. If you know friends or family that might enjoy these posts - perhaps you might be seeing some of them this Christmas-, please share them with them too. After all, it’s what they’re for!
Once again, thank you for these reflections that have helped keep Christmas Christ-centred...
Thank you James for these past 6 days of illumination. Merry Christmas.