Theodoret of Cyprus on the incarnation

But Apollinaris, who values drivel more than truth, and who sets his homely prattle before the pious dogmas, says God the Word put on flesh and used it rather like a veil; and that, having no need of a soul, He takes the place of a soul in the body. But, my dear, someone may say to Apollinaris that God the Word had no need of a body either, for He had no lack at all. He was able even to carry out our salvation by a simple command; but He wanted also to have some properly arranged communion with us. To that end He assumed sinful nature and justified that nature by His own deeds. He set it free from the bitter tyrants, Sin and Devil and Death, and deemed it worthy of heavenly thrones, and through that which He assumed He gave to all the race a share in liberty.—Theodoret of Cyprus in William A. Jurgens, Faith of the Early Fathers, 3:242

Cyril of Alexandria on the incarnation

They are utterly stupid who represent, I know not how, that Christ was able to err, because of His having been made incarnationally into a form like us. . . . And if he wore the nature of man for this very reason, that just as that nature in Adam was weakened, in Himself it might prove most powerful and superior to sin, why do they waste their time vainly seeking what they cannot possibly find? . . . Just as in Adam we were condemned because of his disobedience and his transgression of the command, so too in Christ we have been justified because of His utter sinlessness and His perfect obedience and blamelessness; and it is in Him that human nature has its boast.—Cyril of Alexandria in William A. Jurgens, Faith of the Early Fathers, 3:236

Ambrose on the incarnation

Letter of Ambrose to Sabinus, a Bishop. ca. AD 390

Just as in the form of God, He lacked nothing of the divine nature and its fullness, so too in the form of man there was nothing lacking in Him, by the absence of which He might have been judged an imperfect man; for He came to save the whole man. It would not have been fitting for One who accomplished a perfect work in others to allow anything imperfect in Himself. If something was lacking in His humanity, He did not redeem the whole man; and if He did not redeem the whole man, He was a deceiver when He declared that He had come to save the whole man. But He did not deceive, because “It is not possible for God to lie. ” Because He came, therefore, to save and redeem the whole man, it follows that He took upon Himself the whole man, and that His humanity was perfect.—Ambrose in William A. Jurgens, Faith of the Early Fathers, 2:148

What got healed?

From the perspective of the incarnation the answer is clear: it is the distortion of the fall and of human sin that lies behind this disruption or dichotomy between knowing and being, word and event, theology and history, and it is that very rupture in our human existence that God has come to heal in the incarnation. When the Word was made flesh, the rupture between our true being in communion with God and our physical existence in space and time was healed. It is precisely about this that the sacraments have so much to say in the unity of word and physical elements in the ordinances of baptism and eucharist. The sacraments are designed in the midst of our brokenness and dividedness to hold together in one, spirit and flesh, word and event, spiritual and material, until the new creation. Sacraments are thus the amen to the incarnation, the experienced counterpart to the Word made flesh. Here, then, in the Word made flesh we have truth in the form of personal being, truth in the form of concrete physical existence, truth indissolubly one with space and time, with historical and physical being. To demythologise the truth of its physical and temporal elements is to try to disrupt the incarnation, to attempt to tear apart the Word from the flesh assumed in Jesus Christ. Thus demythologisation belongs to the essential distortion of sin — the sin that brought about the dichotomy in us, that refuses to accept the limitations of our creatureliness in speech and language and in the thought forms of space and time, that wants to conceive the truth in some imaginary form of pure being instead of the form of human flesh which it has assumed once and for all in the incarnation. The relation of the kerygma to history belongs to the very essence of the Christian faith, for it is grounded in the unity of reconciliation and revelation in Iesus Christ, in his unity of word and act, person and work, in the union of true God and true man.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 296

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That ends our quick jaunt through Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. I hope you enjoyed it. Maybe someday I'll tackle the next volume, but first, let's read through Scot McKnight's The Audacity of Peace. I'll start that tomorrow and go back to one post per day for it, since it's a shorter book.
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The self-giving of the incarnation

But if we really take the biblical view of God, then we must think of God the Father as sending the Son into our lost existence, into unutterable humiliation in order to be really one with us. We must think of God as determining himself freely to be our God, directing himself freely to share in the profoundest way in our frail life, in all its limitations and weaknesses, and even in its lostness, all in order to be our God, and to gather us into fellowship with himself. But in this act of unspeakable humiliation, God was not simply using the humanity of Christ as his organ or instrument, while he remained transcendent to it all. He himself actually came, the immutable God, humbling himself to become a creature and to suffer as a creature our judgement and death, and throughout all that to maintain his sovereign freedom and initiative, even when he gave himself up to the death of the cross, in an offering as unreserved in his self-giving as it was majestically omnipotent and free in its act of grace.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 227

The permanence of the incarnation

Therefore the hypostatic union means that Christ continues to exist as man, risen man and true man even now at the right hand of God, and that he will come again as man, and that it is through this man, as Paul said on Mars Hill, that God would judge the world. That preservation of the human nature of Christ in and through death, resurrection and ascension, is of fundamental importance for the doctrine of atonement, for Christ's heavenly sympathy and intercession, for the sacraments, and for his advent and final judgement. It is of absolute importance for the saving relevance of the gospel of the risen Christ to us who remain creatures of flesh and blood.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 209

The incarnation is an act of God's grace

The first thing to be said, is that the hypostatic union must be looked at only from the perspective of God’s amazing act of grace, in which God the Son freely descended into our human existence, and freely assumed human being into oneness with his divine being. That was an act of sheer grace. He did not need to do it. He did not owe it either to himself or to man to do it; it is an act grounded only in the pure overflowing love of God. It is in no sense a two-sided event, for even though there is within it, in the unity of divine and human natures, act of God and act of man, the whole act of incarnation, including all the divine and human acts within the hypostatic union, is grounded solely and entirely and exclusively in the act of God's grace.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 206

Assuming the whole nature of humanity

He who reveals God to man, and reconciles man to God, must be both God and man, truly and completely God, and truly and completely man. If the Son was to redeem the whole nature of man, he had to assume the whole nature of man; if in the Son man is to be gathered into the fellowship and life of God, it must be by one who is truly and completely God. Only he can be mediator who is himself the union of God and man, only he can be pontifex who is himself the pons.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 190

Why the incarnation matters

The stark actuality of Christ's humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us. If that humanity were in any sense unreal, God would be unreal for us in him. The full measure of Christ's humanity is the full measure of God's reality for us, God's actuality to us, in fact the measure of God's love for us. If Christ is not man, then God has not reached us, but has stopped short of our humanity — then God does not love us to the uttermost, for his love has stopped short of coming all the way to where we are, and becoming one of us in order to save us. But Christ's humanity means that God's love is now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 185

The heart of compassion

As the reality of the divine election of love, Jesus Christ was the mercy of God incarnate who saw the disobedience of man as the greatest need of mankind, and who hastened to meet that need by pouring himself out in compassion and self-giving to man. And yet the more he entered into man to gather human life into oneness with God, the more intensely he took this conflict into his own heart. In him who takes our place like that, God's heart beats for humanity, but in him who so joined himself to us, ‘touched with the feeling of our own infirmities’ and ‘in all things made like unto his brethren’, it is the judge who came to condemn sin in the flesh. In the ultimate self-giving of God in love to man in Jesus Christ, man is confronted with the ultimate things, the last things before which all the secrets and intentions of the heart are revealed. Here in Jesus, as the very heart of God is laid bare in compassion and mercy for man, the human heart is laid bare before God, in such a way that men and women are plucked out of their isolation and estrangement and alienation, out of their hiding place in themselves, and are placed before the light of the majesty and love of God where they must acknowledge the divine judgement upon them. ‘If any man would come after me’, Jesus said, ‘let him deny himself, and follow me!’,—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 112–13

The suffering begins where?

Jesus is the suffering servant Son right from Bethlehem. We must think of the work of the cross, therefore, as beginning immediately with his birth, increasing in his growth into manhood, and deepening in intensity as he entered his public ministry. His whole life is his passion, for his very incarnation as union of God and man is an intervention into the enmity between God and mankind. Jesus Christ steps into the situation where God judges mankind and where mankind contradicts God. He steps in not as a third party but as the God who judges man, and steps into the place of man who sins against God and is judged by God. The very union of God and man, and the living out of that union from day to day in the realisation of God’s gracious election, intensified that state of enmity, making it ultimate, that is, making it the eschaton.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 110–11

Positive righteousness vs. negative righteousness

This is supremely important, for it is only through this union of our human nature with his divine nature that Jesus Christ gives us not only the negative righteousness of the remission of sins but also a share in the positive righteousness of his obedient and loving life lived in perfect filial relation on earth to the heavenly Father. If we neglect this essential element in the vicarious humanity and obedience of the Son, then not only do the active and passive obedience of Christ fall apart but we are unable to understand justification in Christ as anything more than a merely external forensic non-imputation of sin. Moreover, if we neglect this essential element we are unable to see the humanity of Jesus in its saving significance, that is, to give the whole life of the historical Jesus its rightful place in the doctrine of atonement. It is necessary for us then to give the fullest consideration to the place of the union of the human and divine natures in the being and life of the incarnate Son, for it is that saving and sanctifying union in which we are given to share that belongs to the very substance of our faith. In other words, what we are concerned with is the filial relation which the Son of God lived out vicariously in our humanity in perfect holiness and love. He achieved that in himself in assuming our human nature into oneness with himself, and on that ground gave us to share in it, so providing us with a fullness in his own obedient sonship from which we may all receive.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 82 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
I have to admit that I don't recall ever having heard the terms positive righteousness and negative righteousness before, but I like the idea. I especially like this line: "If we neglect this essential element in the vicarious humanity and obedience of the Son, then not only do the active and passive obedience of Christ fall apart but we are unable to understand justification in Christ as anything more than a merely external forensic non-imputation of sin." So important!

to hear some people's theology, you get the idea that Jesus should have just come as a full-grown adult a week before the crucifixion. The life of Christ isn't important in their theology—they might say it is, but it isn't in there.
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Overcoming—but not by violence!

It is a movement of reconciliation through the Son of God, in which the Word of God came as Son of God, bowing himself to enter our flesh of sin and bondage, in order that he the almighty God entering within the compass of our estrangement and death might destroy sin and death, and deliver us from our estrangement and captivity in sin and self-will. The Son of God become man is the strong man of Jesus’ own parable who invades the tyrant’s house and by his power subdues him, binds him, and spoils him of all that he has unjustly usurped. But he enters the house of alienation and bondage under the power of evil and subdues the power of evil not by divine violence, but by obedience and steadfastness as the Son to the Father's holy will in the face of the contradiction of sin, and the attack of all the power of evil; and so he overcomes by patience and passion, and sheer faithfulness and holiness and love, by living out perfectly within all the conditions of our humanity the obedience of the Son to the Father.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 78

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Let those with ears to hear, understand! It is not by earthly powers or violence or culture war. It is by the blood of the lamb, by obedience to his call, and especially, by humility and patience.
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The mystery of kenosis

Kenosis refers to the self-abnegating, redemptive descent of God into human life. Kenosis and tapeinosis (humbling) both refer to the self-sacrificial self-communication of God to mankind. That is to say, there is no ground for saying that in becoming man the eternal Son emptied himself of some of his divine properties or attributes in order to come within our human and historical existence. It is God himself, he who was in the form of God and equal to God, who condescended to be very man of very man. Nothing at all is said of how that takes place. All kenotic theories are attempts to explain the how of the incarnation in some measure: how God and man are united in one Jesus Christ, how the Word has become flesh. All that is said is that this union is a way of incredible humiliation and grace. The New Testament does have a great deal to tell us about the incarnation, in telling us what the Word and Son of God actually did, but refuses to explain the mystery that lies at the heart of it; that is the miracle of the Holy Spirit. Even in speaking of the birth of Jesus through the Spirit, and of his resurrection through the power of the Spirit, the New Testament at no point offers us an explanation, but refers the mystery to the direct act of the eternal God, to the will and love of the Father.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 76

Incarnation as sanctification

But further, the assumptio carnis means also that God has joined himself to us in our estranged human life in order to sanctify it, to gather it into union with his own holy life and so lift it up above and beyond all the downward drag of sin and decay, and that he already does simply by being one with man in all things. Thus the act of becoming incarnate is itself the sanctification of our human life in Jesus Christ, an elevating and fulfilling of it that far surpasses creation; it is a raising up of men and women to stand and have their being in the very life of God, but that raising up of man is achieved through his unutterable atoning self-humiliation and condescension.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 66

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

Becoming flesh

However, while we must say all that about the flesh that the Word assumed, we must also say that in the very act of assuming our flesh the Word sanctified and hallowed it, for the assumption of our is itself atoning and sanctifying action. How could it be otherwise when he, the Holy One took on himself our unholy flesh? Thus we must say that while he, the holy Son of God, became what we are, he became what we are in a different way from us. We become what we are and continue to become what we are as sinners. He, however, who knew no sin became what we are, yet not by sinning himself. Christ the Word did not sin. He did not become flesh of our flesh in a sinful way, by sinning in the flesh. If God the Word became flesh, God the Word is the subject of the incarnation, and how could God sin? How could God deny God, be against himself, divest himself of his holiness and purity? Thus his taking of our flesh of sin was a sinless action, which means that Jesus does not do in the flesh of sin what we do, namely, sin, but it also means that by remaining holy and sinless in our flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh he assumed and judged it by his very sinlessness.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 63

The centrality of the incarnation

Now when we listen to the witness of holy scripture here we know we are faced with something we can never fully understand, but it is something that we must seek to understand as far as we can. One thing should be abundantly clear, that if Jesus Christ did not assume our fallen flesh, our fallen humanity, then our fallen humanity is untouched by his work — for ‘the unassumed is the unredeemed’, as Gregory Nazianzen put it. Patristic theology, especially as we see it expounded in the great Athanasius, makes a great deal of the fact he who knew no sin became sin for us, exchanging his riches for our poverty, his perfection for our imperfection, his incorruption for our corruption, his eternal life for our mortality. Thus Christ took from Mary a corruptible and mortal body in order that he might take our sin, judge and condemn it in the flesh, and so assume our human nature as we have it in the fallen world that he might heal, sanctify and redeem it. In that teaching the Greek fathers were closely following the New Testament. If the Word of God did not really come into our fallen existence, if the Son of God did not actually come where we are, and join himself to us and range himself with us where we are in sin and under judgement, how could it be said that Christ really took our place, took our cause upon himself in order to redeem us?—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 62

The mystery of the incarnation

None of them says anything about “how” the Incarnation took place: they simply witness to the fact of the Incarnation.

This might serve as a hint to the theologian not to want to know too much about “how” these things can be, and to abandon all subtle considerations and distinctions. It will be sufficient for us to say that the order of knowledge—that in the historical Revealer, we know the Eternal Son of God—corresponds to an order of being, which goes in the opposite direction: that the Eternal Son became man, that He who is from everlasting entered into human history, that it is precisely this entrance into history which constitutes the basis of His threefold work. All that goes further than this is useless speculation.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 351–52

A radical claim—even now

But surely not, a skeptical reader might say. I can agree that God ought to mean the one from whom all things come (1 Cor 8:6). But, Paul, certainly you don’t mean that the God who creates all things and is over all things acts most fully in the life of a singular human being, just one man? The meaning of “God” is that particular, that restricted in scope? The high point of the story that names who God is comes through a fleshly Jew? That can’t be the claim.

Au contraire, Paul might reply, God’s eternal majesty and glory as Creator leads precisely to this: “In the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman” (Gal 4:4). Indeed, Paul would continue, the glory of the God who made “the light shine in the darkness” is seen most fully “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). To see God’s glory, says Paul, one must believe in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son—that is, after all, what it is to look on the face of Jesus.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 88 (emphasis original)