CHRISTMAS is without a doubt the merriest time of the year. And even if, in our secular times, many hardly attend to the mystery it marks, the Incarnation is so profound an article of the faith, so central to what it is to be a Christian, and it is only in unraveling the depth of what it celebrates do we understand the reason for all the fanfare and the merriment.
The dogmatic pronouncements of the first Ecumenical Councils are the common patrimony of most Christian churches, and they maintain that the Wisdom of God, the Divine Logos, the Eternal Word of the Father, appropriated to itself the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth so that in the child born to Mary, the Virgin, betrothed to Joseph, a carpenter, God became part of the human race and inscribed himself into human history. There are, of course, myths of gods taking on human form and walking amidst humankind, but theology has always been quick to distance the story of the Incarnation and its theology from such myths. That there was a man from Galilee called Jesus, born to Mary who was the wife of Joseph is a historical fact. That in his humanity, he was the Word of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is a datum of faith and, as such, belongs to the realm of mystery. Now, "mystery" does not suggest what cannot be explained — as many are wont to think. Mystery is what reason, of itself, will never be able to prove, but it is something that is nevertheless intelligible. It can be understood. It makes sense, and it is the function of systematic theology to bring faith to understanding.
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