Incarnation as reconciliation

From very early times the church has used the expression the ‘assumption of the flesh’, assumptio carnis, to describe egeneto in this fullness. The assumptio carnis means that God willed to coexist with the creature, that he the creator willed to exist also as a creature for the reconciliation of the estranged world to himself. Thus he the Lord of the covenant willed also to be its human partner, in order to fulfil the covenant from its side. But this very condescension of God, in which he humbled himself to enter into our lowly creaturely and fallen existence, means also the elevation of our creaturely existence, by the very fact of God’s will to unite himself to it and to bring the creature into coexistence with himself. Thus his very act of becoming man is itself an act of reconciliation.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 65