Because Of The Manner Of Us

Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man

Now, when it says “for us men for our salvation,” I presume it signifies the manner of us men, for the Apostle said that it is a faithful saying and worthy of everyone’s acceptance, that “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners,” of whom I am the foremost (1Tim.1:15). Therefore, in this sense, and only in this sense, Christ is the Savior of all men (1Tim.4:10; Ps.36:6), for there is no manner of any man who is not a sinner except for the Man who is the Lord from heaven (1Cor.15:47). But there are men, because of the manner that is in them, who deny the testimony of sin and death (Rom.1:18-19; Eph.2:3). Therefore, those who deny that they are of this manner of sin (1Jn.1:6, 8, 10), deny the manner of love for which Christ descended (Jn.3:16), and thereby demonstrate themselves unworthy of the manner of God’s love for the world (1Jn.1:5, 7, 9; 2:1-2), for they have loved the manner of darkness rather the manner of God’s light (Jn.3:19-21). Therefore, the manner in which Christ descended to us in our rebellion demonstrates a new nature in us who are given the manner to see the things of God and enter in them by walking in the manner worthy of the things given to us from above (1Jn.3:1-3; Jn.3:3-8; 1Thess.2:12), and so only few find it and enter in upon the manner of this exclusive love for the glory of God in our salvation (Eph.1:3-6). Therefore, to deny one or the other manner is to deny them both in the manner by which Christ saved sinners (Jn.19:30; 1Cor.15:45), for Christ, being the last Adam, poured out (cheo [root of choikos]) the life of the first Adam (Isa.53:12), rendering him as dust (choikos) in victory over death (1Cor.15:55).

Therefore, Christ came in the flesh, who is the Word in the bosom of the Father (Jn.1:1-2, 18; 3:13), but conceived by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, to take on a body so that the Word incarnate would grow into a man born under the law and fulfill the righteous requirement of it in us who believe (Gal.4:3-5; Rom.8:3-4). In this, Jesus Christ is the one Mediator appointed by God to save His people from their sins (Gal.3:19-24). And in this, the Christ has to be man so that he may represent us in our sins and bear the just penalty for those sins in his body as the substitute under the curse of the law and receive the wages of death (Rom.5:5-11; 6:23), which fulfills the righteous demand against us (Col.2:13-15; Eph.2:14-16). But also in this, Jesus Christ is God (1Tim.2:5), for the “manner” of love that covers or “atones” for those sins (1Jn.2:15-17), created by us, must be perfect and of the same substance of the perfections of the Father who is in the glory of heaven’s image and of the honor of the divine economy of eternal life (Matt.5:48; 1Jn.4:18). Therefore, in this, Christ came in the self-sustaining life of the eternal Spirit whereby His soul was incorruptible to the corruption of the body of sin and the likeness of its death (Jn.5:26), for His life could not be held under the power and grip of death (Acts 2:27, 31). Therefore, this Christ was not like the manner of all men, for He was holy, harmless, and undefiled, separate from sinners in every way and superior at every point of temptation in the flesh (Heb.4:14-16; 7:26). There was no spirit of man that could corrupt Him (1Pet.1:18-19, 23; 2Pet.1:4; 2Cor.7:1).

Therefore, it was for men and not for angels that Christ came to give eternal life (Heb.2:16-18). The spirit or angel of a man is not redeemable when it is corrupted by the imputation of sin through the violation of the spiritual law of the promise of death (Acts 6:15; 12:15; 23:8), by which every man is born into under the realm of Death and Hades through Adam’s sin and kept under guard by Adam’s angel who has the power of death (Heb.2:14; Gen.3:24), which is why a redeemed soul is given a new spirit that is incorruptible and made responsible as the elected entity to sanctify and cover the soul through the Holy Spirit as the seal of the new creation until the redemption of the spiritual body of glory prepared for heaven’s economy (Ezk.36:26). This why the incarnation of Christ required a virgin birth, whose soul could not come into the world corrupted by the spirit of Adam’s sin, which passes on the likeness of death in the human soul joined to the body of death (Ps.51:5-6), whose life consists in its blood (Rom.7:24). And therefore to sustain the life of that soul, the soul requires the death of another life to be the substitute for the life of its soul when its life is in its own blood (1Cor.15:45). Therefore flesh and blood cannot inherit eternal life under this economy of the likeness of death in the soul (1Cor.15:50). It is this spirit of death by which man is reminded of original sin, for he is forced to think about death every time he must take life to save his life by the mercies hidden in the creation. But few men were led to repentance this way because the others worshiped and served the creation as the Savior in continuation of Adam’s manner of sin (Rom.5:12-21), demonstrating the loss of the likeness of holiness, truth, and righteousness in the great exchange for the wisdom of the world in the darkness and foolishness of their hearts (Rom.1:18-25).

St Augustine, for example, inquires, “Who is unaware that it is no true Christian baptism if the evangelical words of which the symbol consists are missing?”; and elsewhere5 speaks of “the necessary interrogation framed in a few words.” In the Gallican ritual, as we have seen, this was the only profession of faith made on the actual day of baptism.

And this leads us to a further point underlining the secondary role of declaratory creeds. They were not really part of the baptism itself at all. By right they belonged rather to the catechetical preparation preceding the sacrament: their recitation logically formed its concluding stage.

1 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Edition. (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), 39–40.