“The incarnation refers to the embodiment of God in human form. More specifically, in Christian theology the doctrine of the incarnation affirms that the divine Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, assumed a human nature and came to earth as the God-man Jesus Christ. The Bible describes the incarnation in several different ways: as the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 1:10), as Christ emptying himself and taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7), as Christ coming into the world with the body prepared for him (Heb. 10:5), and as manifestation of God in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16).
It is important to underscore that only the Son of God could have become incarnate. The Father could not become incarnate, for he is first in order and cannot be sent by anyone or act as a mediator to the Son or the Spirit. The Father could not take on human flesh and be born of a virgin without becoming a son in an earthly sense, which would undermine his divine Fatherhood. Likewise, the Spirit could not be sent to be born as a man without becoming, as it were, a second Son. We should stress too that the Godhead —the divine essence in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— did not become incarnate. As Aquinas writes, “It is more proper to say that a divine person assumed a human nature, than to say that the divine nature assumed a human nature.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3.2.1-2)
It is also critical that we understand what did and did not happen in the incarnation. The incarnation was not a transubstantiation, a transmutation, or a conversion. The incarnation was an assumption. Turretin explains that the communication of the hypostasis (the personal subsistence) of the Logos can be understood in three ways: effectively (the Logos was made in the flesh of another hypostasis), transitively (the Logos transferred his own hypostasis into the flesh), or assumptively (the Logos assumed flesh into the same hypostasis and united it to himself). The third sense, Turretin maintains, is true and orthodox.
In the incarnation, the divine nature did not undergo any essential change. The divine nature remained impassible, omniscient, and immutable. The incarnation was a personal act whereby the person of the Son became incarnate. This is better than saying that the divine nature assumed human flesh. In “becoming man” the second person of the Trinity did not cease to be God. He became what he was not without ceasing to be what he was. That’s what is meant by assuming a human nature rather than being transformed into something new.
To put things somewhat inelegantly, we should think of the divine nature, not the human nature, as the “base” nature. That is to say, a human person did not become divine; a divine person assumed a human nature. Christ is humanized deity, not deified humanity. The divinity, not the humanity, is dominant in Christ’s person.
All of this intricate theology is meant to explain and safeguard the astounding truth of John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Shedd’s summary is helpful: “The divine-human person, Jesus Christ, was produced by the union of the divine nature of the Logos with a human nature derived from a human mother.” (Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 617) The Son of God did not begin at the incarnation, but the incarnate personality of Jesus Christ did. There was no God-man until the moment of the incarnation. The second person of the Trinity descended as Logos and ascended as theanthropos.”
–Kevin DeYoung, Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 174-175.
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