“ET INCARNATUS EST DE SPIRITU SANCTO EX MARIA VIRGINE”

Introduction

Pages 81-82: The Nicene Creed, like all the great creedal statements of the ancient Church, is most fundamentally a profession of faith in the triune God. Its essential content is a Yes to the living God, an avowal that he is our Lord, from whom our life comes and to whom it returns. It is a profession of faith in God. But what is the significance of calling this God a living God? The term is meant to express that he is not a conclusion of our reasoning, an inference we now propose to others with the certainty of our knowledge and understanding. If he were only that, this God would be a human idea, and any attempt to make personal contact with him might be a hope-filled, expectant groping, but it could never lead to anything definite. When we speak of the living God, we mean a God who shows himself to us, who looks out from eternity into time and establishes a relation with us. We cannot define him in any way we please. He has “defined” himself, and he thus stands before us, above us, and among us as our Lord. In manifesting himself, God shows that he is our Lord, not just our idea. His self-manifestation is thus rightly at the heart of the Creed. The confession of God’s history in the heart of man’s history is not a departure from the simple profession of faith in God; rather, it is its intrinsic condition. For this reason, the center of all our creeds is a Yes to Jesus Christ: “By the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” At this article of the Creed we genuflect, because now heaven, the veil surrounding the hidden God, is torn open, and the Mystery comes into immediate contact with us. The distant God becomes our God, becomes Emmanuel – “God with us”. In ever new ways, the great masters of Church music have reached beyond what words can express to give this sentence of the Creed a sound through which the ineffable touches our hearing and our heart. Such composers are an “exegesis” of the Mystery that penetrates more deeply than all our rational interpretations. Yet because it was the Word who became flesh, we must also go on trying to translate this creative, primordial Word, which was “with God” and “is God”, into our human words, so that in our words we may hear the Word.
Note: The purpose of Jesus Christ being born was to sacrificially die for the sins of the world.
Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 1 Corinthians 15:1-5.
Note: Mary is excluded from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Do you believe the Christian Gospel?

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