While preparing for a seminar I’m doing on the Psalms tomorrow, I ran across a profound reflection on the Creed and the ancient Christian understanding of the Incarnation. The reflection comes from Antiochian Orthodox priest and writer, Patrick Henry Reardon in his wonderful book “Christ in the Psalms”. Reflecting on Psalm 8, Reardon says this:
From the very earliest translations of the Creed into the English language, the mystery of the Incarnation has been expressed in a rather puzzling way, even if our long familiarity with the words has reduced our sense of their grammatical enigma. We say of the Son of God that He “became [or "was made] man.”
The puzzle posed by this construction is exactly how to classify the predicate nominative “man” in this instance. Is the sense of the expression indefinite–”a man,” much that we might say that “Fred became a farmer”? But if so, why didn’t the translators simply say that? “He became a man” would not only make sense; it would be both grammatically and theologically correct.
Or is the meaning of the expression merely descriptive–”he became human,” much as we might say “Fred became agrarian”? Here again, the translators could easily have said that, if that is what they meant, because God’s Son most certainly did become human.
No, neither of these translations were deemed adequate. Rendering very literally from the underlying Latin…the translators said that He “became man”, leaving us with this stylistic puzzle. One can hardly think of an occasion, after all, in which we might properly say “Fred became farmer.”
What the translators give us here is an idiom, which is to say a form of expression unique to a particular setting and standing outside of expected usage. On reflection, their recourse to idiom in this case is hardly surprising, for the event under discussion, the Incarnation, is itself “idiomatic” in the extreme, in the sense of being completely unique, utterly unexpected and standing free of normal patterns of acquiescence. How better, after all, to speak of an incomparable and unparalleled event than by recourse to an idiomatic improvisation.
God’s Son did not only ”become human,” though it is true that He did. Nor did He simply “become a man,” although this likewise is a correct statement of the fact. He “became man” rather, in a sense defying grammatical precision as thoroughly as it confounds also the expectations of biology, psychology, metaphysics, and other aspects of the human enterprise, thereby shocked and left reeling, all its vaunted resources now strained and overcharged at the infusion of unspeakable glory.
The most correct formulation of the Incarnation is the one to which we are accustomed: “He became man.” Christ is the archetype of man, bearing all of humanity in Himself. “It was for the new man that human nature was established from the beginning,” wrote St. Nicholas Kavasilas; “the old Adam was not the model of the new, it was the new Adam that was the model of the old.”
