The Incarnation: A myth that is also a fact

By John F. Fink

Is Christianity based on a myth?

Yes, indeed. As the great Christian apologist and author C. S. Lewis wrote, “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”

His coming to realize that contributed to his conversion from atheism.

A myth, according to my dictionary, is “a traditional story of ostensible historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief or natural phenomenon.”

A second definition is “a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone.”

According to these definitions, the story of the Incarnation, which we Christians celebrate on Christmas, certainly is a myth. It’s a story that unfolds part of the world view of us Christians and is a belief centered on the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

However, unlike most myths of the ancient world that have come down to us, this myth actually happened. Before it became a myth, it was a historic fact.

The myth of the Incarnation is that the Son of God, while retaining his divinity, assumed our humanity, body and soul, and was born of the Virgin Mary to dwell in our midst in order to accomplish our redemption.

That person, both God and man, was also a historic person who was born in Bethlehem of Judea during the reign of King Herod the Great.

Yes, skeptics will acknowledge, a man named Jesus lived during the first century of our common era and performed great signs. However, they argue, that doesn’t mean that he was also God.

Perhaps not. For that, we must rely on what his first followers knew with certainty about him—that he performed signs which no human being could do.

No mere human being could change water into wine, multiply a few loaves and fish to feed thousands of people, walk on the Sea of Galilee, immediately cure the lame and the blind or, above all, rise from the dead.

These things, of course, were reported in the Gospels, but Jesus’ followers knew beyond a doubt, decades before the Gospels were written, that he did them.

St. Paul’s letters include Christian hymns and creeds that were already well known before he wrote the letters. He quoted one of them when he wrote to the Philippians that “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-7).

The earliest Christians, therefore, believed in the Incarnation.

What was to become the great myth of Christianity became fact when the Virgin Mary conceived Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. That, too, is often denied or doubted by modern thinkers because it’s against the laws of nature.

Well, yes it is. Joseph obviously realized that since his first inclination was that Mary had been unfaithful to him, and “since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly” (Mt 1:19).

It took a visit from an angel in a dream to convince him that “it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her” (Mt 1:20).

Both Matthew and Luke believed that Mary’s virginity was essential to the claim that Jesus is uniquely the Son of God. The fact that Jesus was conceived without the sperm of a man being involved was a miracle.

A miracle is the transcending of a law of nature resulting in an unexplained occurrence that glorifies God. By definition, it’s against the laws of nature, just as were those things mentioned a few paragraphs back that Jesus did while he was on Earth.

Miracles do occur whether or not you and I experience them. Of course, we do experience a miracle every time we see bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ during Mass.

C. S. Lewis loved myths and studied them carefully. In his essay “Myth Became Fact,” first published in the periodical World Dominion in 1944, he wrote: “Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder [central figure of a Scandinavian myth], not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.”

Furthermore, he concluded, “For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”

(John F. Fink is the editor emeritus of The Criterion.) †