Emmanuel (God with Us), Even Now
In John‘s prologue, we are given a transcendent perspective on the identity and mission of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
Unlike the other Gospels that begin the story of Christ with his genealogy and virginal conception (Matthew and Luke) or his public ministry (Mark), John guides us behind and above these events and history itself to the eternal ground of Jesus’s identity: The Son of Mary is the eternal Son of God.
This is the essential mystery of Christmas—that the babe of Bethlehem is Emmanuel, God with us. But to truly be God with us; he must remain God without us. In the Incarnation, the Divine Son assumes a human nature, taking on a unique relation to his creation, without undergoing change to his eternal relations with the Father and the Holy Spirit. One in substance with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit—Blessed Trinity, and one in substance with us—Emmanuel. In the following article, I will seek to show from Scripture and Church History that in becoming everything that we are, excluding sin, Christ remained everything that he was, including omnipresent. Then, in the spirit of Christmas, I will offer a word of comfort and joy as we reflect on this truth.
If Jesus Christ, in coming into our human nature, is the true way to the Father and the full revelation of God, he must remain one with the Father in divinity. John combines both Jesus’s coming and his unique relationship with the Father in John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” To grasp what John means here by the glory of Christ we must not look only to the manger but to the eternal foundation of Christ’s identity as the only-begotten Son. For Christ to be God in human flesh he must also be God beyond human flesh.
Learning from Church History
This recognition that Christ was wholly present in his human nature and yet simultaneously beyond (extra) that nature as the eternal Word of the Father, who is transcendent and everywhere present, is often named the extra Calvinisticum.[1] However, despite the Genevan Reformer’s name given to this idea (which is actually better called the extra Carnem [beyond the flesh]), ample support exists in the Church Fathers and across the Christian tradition for this biblical idea. For instance, Athanasius can say:
For [Christ] was not, as might be imagined, circumscribed in the body, nor, while present in the body, was he absent elsewhere; nor, while he moved the body, was the universe left void of his working and providence; but, thing most marvelous, Word as he was, so far from being contained by anything, he rather contained all things himself.[2]
One should not think that God the Son was shrunk down or limited himself by becoming a human being. Rather, he remained who he eternally was with the Father and continued as the upholder of Creation (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3), while also taking to himself human particularity and weakness. This is the mystery the angels celebrate when they cry before the Shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14).
Christ comes to dwell fully and physically amongst us as one of us without abandoning his eternal substantial oneness with the other Triune persons. Along with the Father and Spirit, Christ is infinite, immense, and omnipresent. Thomas Aquinas brings these two truths together in his Commentary on the Gospel of John:
He descended from heaven in such a way as yet to be in heaven. For he came down from heaven without ceasing to be above, yet assuming a nature which is from below. And because he is not enclosed or held fast by his body which exists on earth, he was, according to his divinity, in heaven and everywhere.[3]
As God, Christ is always everywhere as the One who transcends time and space, over which he is both Creator and Lord. Yet, without ceasing to be omnipresent, the Son is sent by the Father through the Spirit to take a nature like our own including a human body that is finite and limited in time and space. Thus, the person of Christ is both everywhere according to his divine nature and in a particular place according to his human nature.
The Incarnate Christ as the New Temple
Returning to John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ is the very presence of God, and yet he also transcends the manifestation of that presence. God has revealed types of this throughout redemptive history. And now those shadows find their substance in the Christ who is Emmanuel.
In John 1:14, John declares, the Word “dwelt among us.” The verb here is most literally rendered “pitched his tent among us” or “tabernacled among us.” Although the linguistic parallel is not direct, there is a typological relationship that can be drawn out here. Throughout Israel’s history, the tabernacle/temple manifested God’s presence among the people of Israel. So too, Christ as the tabernacle manifested God’s presence. However, Christ’s incarnation is no mere symbol of presence but its reality—the personal assuming of human nature. This closeness between God and Creation is unique and achieved nowhere else.
The tabernacle and the temple were merely God’s footstool; but the humanity of Christ, whether in the manger, walking the roads of Galilee, or on the cross, is God himself. Although the humanity of Christ is more than the temple, it is not less. And while wholly present in his humanity, Christ also transcends it as the Lord’s presence transcended the temple. As Solomon prays at the dedication of the temple:
But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O Lord my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day, that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which you have said, ‘My name shall be there,’ that you may listen to the prayer that your servant offers toward this place. (1 King 8:27-29)
As the shekinah glory of the Lord filled the temple, Yahweh remained beyond the highest heaven. When the Lord comes in Jesus Christ, the heavens and earth still cannot contain him. The Son’s advent into the virgin’s womb was not merely the manifestation of the Lord’s name but the personal presence that the name represented. The day for which Solomon and the saints of old prayed was here. The new temple of Christ’s flesh (i.e., his full human nature) fulfills the Old Testament promises and opens the way for the outpouring of the Spirit on all united to him.
The Good News of Christ Extra Carnem
Today, we stand on the other side of Christ’s first coming and long for his ultimate return. As we live in this time between Christ’s first advent and his second, the interadventum, we live in faith that although he is bodily absent from us, the ascended Emmanuel has not abandoned us. As the Heidelberg Catechism confesses in Question 46: “Christ is true man and true God. According to His human nature He is now not on earth, but according to His Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, He is at no time absent from us.”[4]
The eternal Son beyond his ascended flesh is near to us and with us as Emmanuel, the One who took on our flesh and tabernacled among us. This advent season we are called to rest in the grace and truth of his presence as we await the day when he returns in bodily form full of grace and truth so that we can see his glory face to face.
The name extra Calvinisticum was given to this idea because of dispute between the Lutheran and Reformed theologians over the relationship of Christ’s body, divine omnipresence, and the Lord’s Supper in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. For more on the name see E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the so-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 2 (Leiden: E J Brill, 1966); K.J. Drake, The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, trans. A Robertson, in Edwards R. Hardy (ed.), Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 70–71.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Books 1-5, trans. Fabian R. Larcher and James A. Weisheipl, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 177–78.
James T. Dennison Jr., ed., “The Heidelberg Catechism,” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 780.
This essay was previously published by: https://christoverall.com/article/concise/emmanuel-god-with-us-even-now/