The Incarnation: The Athanasian Creed

When you set out to know someone, you usually want to know where they came from and what they are like. Such information is far from trivial. Instead it becomes the blood that pulses through the heart of the relationship. When we ask the typical “get-to-know-someone” questions about Christ, we find the answers are given in the doctrine of the incarnation (a word that simply means “in flesh.”) Incarnation describes what happened when the second person of the Trinity left the bliss of heaven for some thirty-three years to enter, as one of us, the mess of the human condition.

The historic Christian doctrine of the incarnation can be expressed in a few simple phrases which the Western church codified in the Athanasian Creed, (hereafter: Ath. Cr.) around the sixth century. Read more