Saturday, December 24, 2011

"Don't give me God without his humanity."

I recently read the reprint of Carl R. Trueman’s Reformation: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Christian Focus, 2000, 2011). At one point, Trueman describes Luther’s “theology of the cross,” including these comments on the Incarnation:

[Luther] had a saying: Don’t give me God without giving me his humanity. The point was simple: it is in the incarnation, in the flesh of Christ, that God both is, and shows himself to be, gracious towards us. Luther rejoiced in the fact that he did not worship a God who was far away, a despot, an abstract and anonymous philosophical principle. No—he worshipped a God who had come close, so close that he even clothed himself in human flesh; a God who was so merciful that he was prepared to welcome sinners into his presence as if they had never sinned; a God who was so loving that he happily freed men and women from all manner of physical and spiritual bondage so that they might know true life; and a God who was so strong that he was prepared to make himself nothing and die that terrible death on the cross in order that human beings should never have to die (p. 47).

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