Hail the Incarnate Deity? Celebrating Christmas Without the Trinity

How do you top God becoming a baby?

Is there a narrative quite as compelling or wondrous as the Almighty laying aside His Privilege and Power to be born into poverty as a human?

Since celebrating my first Christmas two years ago as an "arian" (I believe Almighty God is the Father alone and that Jesus is the first and greatest thing God brought into existence), I have twirled this question around and around in my mind.

Christmas after Christmas, I had affirmed (at differing levels of comprehension and clarity) that at the virginal conception, the Second Person of the Triune Deity, God the Son, added to his divine person and divine nature a human nature, a hypostatic union, becoming the God-Man.

Today, I read that sentence and shake my head, not in derision of my brothers and sisters for whom this is still a precious reality, or even of the description itself, but in disbelief at how something once so familiar feels now so foreign.

It’s like walking past a former friend, silent, eyes trained ahead, neither of you acknowledging the other, yet unable to stop your mind from flooding with memories of love and laughter shared, still stunned it’s all over. 

Only last Christmas, I was gut-punched when, mid-song, I realized I could no longer sing a favorite contemporary Christmas song of mine. 

“Someday I'm going to look back on this”, says the fictional Mary of Francesca Battistelli’s “You're Here,” “The night that God became a baby boy.” 

The night that God became a baby boy.

I cannot deny that the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God becoming a baby boy is a fantastic tale worth singing about, if true. 

But I no longer believe it is true. 

So, I ask myself, what do I do now with Christmas?

Approaching the eve of my third Christmas sans trinity, I find the answer in incarnation, a word unitarians shy from and which trinitarianism has filled with every manner of unbiblical speculation and assertion. 

No, Almighty God did not come in flesh (in caro, from the Latin) as a human, in my best reading of the biblical text, but His beloved Son did. 

The Word and Wisdom of God, who is Jesus Messiah, existed for ages in the form of his Father, God, glorious in splendor (John 17:3-5), but for our sakes adopted “the form of a slave, having come in the likeness of humans” (Philippians 2:5-9). 

While we walked in darkness, bereft of light and life, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” a gift we never asked for, didn’t deserve, refused to appreciate, but was lovingly extended without measure anway (John 1:9-14).   

For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light (Psalm 36:9).

Out of his matchless grace, this Jesus, “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)

The Heir to all things became a servant so that the servants of God may one day become heirs (Hebrews 1:1-2; Romans 8:17). 

In the fullness of time, God’s Son was born of a woman, living a perfect life in order to redeem us by his death. (Galatians 4:4-5)

Did God watch Abraham trek with Isaac his son to the place of sacrifice in Moriah and think of the walk He was making with His own Son?

God walked with Jesus from his very beginning before creation (Colossians 1:15, Revelation 3:15; cf. Proverbs 8:22) all the way to Christmas morning. 

And then He walked with him from Christmas to the cross:

Sacrifice and offering You did not will, but a body You prepared for me

A whole burnt offering and a sin offering You did not require." 

Then I said, "Behold I come 

(it is written of me in the volume of the book);

I willed to do Your will, O my God, 

And your law in the midst of my heart. 

(Hebrews 10:4-7; Orthodox Study Bible)

More Scriptures about the wonders of incarnation could be adduced to illustrate the grace and mercy of God and His Son that collided in an explosion of love that starry night in Bethlehem, echoing--resounding-- into the present and into my own life.

But I ask again: how do you top God becoming a baby?

Honestly, I don’t know.

And the idea of “my Christmas story can beat your Christmas story” seems like a tragic exercise in missing the point. 

More important is that together with all the children of God this Christmas, I celebrate the God who gave and the Son who came.

How great is the mystery of godliness.