INCARNATION

(Lat. caxo, flesh.) A word in common use among theologians to expre the union of the Godhead with the Manhood in Jesus Christ. St. John says, " The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us;" a text sufficiently explicit, when coupled with other expre ions respecting the divine nature of the Word, to maintain the doctrine of the incarnation among the vast majority of the Christian world. But the subtle inquiries which men have instituted into the manner and nature of this union have given rise to many varieties of opinion, and to many sects which have incurred the reproach of heresy. Not the Socinians only, but the Arians and Sabellians also, are led nece arily by their premises into heterodoxy upon this point; the >f estorians, however, and Eutychians, may be considered the principal sects which have joined an orthodox belief, as to the relations of the three persons of the Trinity one to the other, with peculiar conceptions of the manner of the union of the two natures in Jesus Christ. (See the respective articles.) The real manner of this union, or indwelling of the God in the Man, is allowed to be a mystery such as cannot bo fully apprehended by the human intellect. It is easier to point out the errors which beset its investigation than to expre in words the true doctrine. The phrase, " The Word was made flesh," cannot imply that the divinity was lost and annihilated in becoming flesh; nor that it changed its own nature and was turned into humanity. In either of these cases, Christ would cease to be a divine being while on earth. Nor did the Godhead inspire the Manhood after the manner in which the Prophets had been inspired in earlier times; for the terras applied to Christ are of a very different kind. Nor, on the other hand, could the humanity be lost and absorbed in the divinity, which would seem to destroy the sympathy with which the man Christ regarded mankind, upon which so much of the superstructure of his religion is raised. [s. 602]