In the previous article, *Christ in the Temple of the Philosophers*, I argued that the Incarnation does not become absurd merely because it exceeds the limits of our created experience. The God who made the universe is not imprisoned by it. He is not merely outside our box; He is the reason there is a box at all.
That truth should do more than answer an objection. It should enlarge our worship. The Incarnation is not merely a difficulty Christianity can survive; it is glory Christianity alone can proclaim. The Maker entered His creation. The eternal Son made our nature His own. The One whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain was carried in human arms.
But what happens when a philosopher encounters that glory and tries to fit it back inside his own system?
A recent study by Matthew R. Crawford draws attention to a remarkable historical example. (See Note 1.) In the third century, the Platonist philosopher Amelius read—or at least knew—a clear account of the opening of John’s Gospel. He recognised the eternal Word, the creation of all things through Him, His coming in flesh and His appearance as man. Yet at the decisive moment, Amelius made the Gospel tell a different story.
The Word, he said, came down into bodies, clothed Himself in flesh, and then, after the body’s dissolution, was restored to deity. (See Note 2.)
At first glance, this can sound surprisingly Christian. Nearly every landmark is present. There is the Word. There is creation. There is descent. There is flesh. There is a return to divine glory.
But the road runs in the opposite direction—and the difference reveals just how astonishing the Christian confession is.
John does not say that the Word fell into flesh, lost His deity, or escaped the body in order to become God again. The eternal Word willingly became man without ceasing to be God. He did not borrow a body for a temporary appearance. He assumed a complete human nature, died in that nature, rose bodily, ascended bodily and remains the man Christ Jesus.
Amelius recognised the words while reversing the story. He read John, but he did not allow John to correct the philosopher.
John gives us something far greater. The Word did not tumble helplessly into the material world. He came willingly. He was not diminished by taking flesh. He sanctified our humanity by making it His own. He did not escape the grave by abandoning the body. He conquered the grave and raised the body in glory.
The truth is not merely that Christianity avoids the philosopher’s error. The truth is that the Son of God has done something more beautiful than the philosopher could imagine.
The Creator came among His creatures
Amelius was a disciple of Plotinus, the most influential thinker of what is now called Neoplatonism. Its many forms should not be flattened into a single crude slogan, but one recurring tendency is unmistakable: reality is arranged as a descent from higher, intelligible being toward lower, material existence. Salvation therefore looks like return—an ascent of the soul away from the bodily and changeable toward the divine source.
That framework could appreciate the language of the Logos. Greek philosophy already possessed its own ways of speaking about divine reason, intelligible order and mediating principles. John’s opening sentences could therefore sound familiar:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him.”
John 1:1–3
Then comes the sentence before which the Church can only wonder:
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
John 1:14
For John, this is not a divine intelligence sliding downward through the levels of reality. Nor is it a lesser heavenly being becoming entangled in matter. The One who became flesh is the same One who “was God” and through whom “all things were made.” Creator and creature are not points on one continuous ladder of being.
The eternal Son crosses that distinction, not by ceasing to be Creator, but by taking created humanity to Himself. The hands that fashioned man from the dust now possess human fingers. The voice that called light out of darkness now speaks through human lips. The One who gave breath to Adam now breathes the air of His own world.
This is not degradation forced upon Him. It is divine freedom displayed in love. No creature dragged Him down. No necessity compelled Him. He came because He willed to save.
Amelius could affirm something resembling incarnation only by making it conform to the cycle of descent and return. The Word comes into bodies, appears as a man, and after bodily dissolution is restored to what He was before. Flesh becomes a temporary station. Deity becomes the condition recovered when embodiment ends.
That is not the Gospel in philosophical dress. It is the Gospel turned inside out. Yet the error helps us see the truth more clearly: Christ’s coming was not a tragic descent from fullness, but the gracious revelation of fullness—“full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
He never ceased to be God
The most revealing element in Amelius’s account is the suggestion that after dissolution the Word “was restored to deity.” Restored implies deprivation. One is restored to a position, possession or condition that one had somehow ceased to enjoy.
John permits no such thought.
The Word did not stop being God when He became flesh. Even during His earthly humiliation, John presents Him as the Son who is in unique communion with the Father, who gives life, forgives sin, receives honour, commands the dead and declares, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).
His glory is veiled by the form of a servant, but His deity is not extinguished. Indeed, John says the disciples beheld His glory precisely in the Word made flesh. The Incarnation does not temporarily interrupt the divine identity of the Son. It reveals who the Son eternally is.
What a magnificent truth this is. The infant in Bethlehem did not need to become divine. He was the eternal Son. The weary traveller at the well upheld the world whose water He requested. The man sleeping in the storm was the Lord of wind and sea. The voice that cried outside Lazarus’s tomb was the voice by which all things had first received their being.
His lowliness was real, but it was chosen. His servanthood did not contradict His majesty; it revealed the moral beauty of that majesty. God’s greatness is not the brittle greatness of one who must guard his status from every act of humility. The Son is so completely secure in His divine glory that He can stoop to wash His creatures’ feet.
This is also why the KJV’s rendering of Philippians 2:7 remains theologically valuable:
“But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”
Philippians 2:7
The Greek says that Christ “emptied himself”—heauton ekenōsen. Read in isolation, that phrase has sometimes been treated as though the Son poured out His deity or surrendered divine attributes. Paul’s sentence explains the emptying differently. Christ made Himself of no reputation by taking the servant’s form and being made in human likeness.
His self-emptying is not subtraction, but assumption; not the loss of deity, but the taking of servanthood. The One who was “in the form of God” did not cease to be what He was. He humbled Himself by becoming what He had not been: genuinely human and obedient unto death.
Here is no shrinking deity, but immeasurable divine love. The wonder of Philippians 2 is not that the Son possessed less glory than we thought. It is that His glory includes a humility deeper than we thought possible.
The KJV does not reproduce the verb with wooden literalness, but it rightly protects the reader from imagining an emptied divine nature. Christ’s humiliation concerns the lowly condition He willingly embraced, not a metaphysical evacuation of Godhood.
Flesh became the dwelling place of glory
Nor did the Word merely appear to be human.
John’s choice of “flesh” is deliberately concrete. The Son did not put on a visible mask while remaining untouched by human existence. He became tired at the well. He thirsted. He wept. He was troubled. He bled. He died.
None of this makes Him less glorious. It shows us what perfect human life looks like when it is wholly yielded to the Father. His tears are not blemishes upon His reason. His compassion is not weakness. His anguish in Gethsemane is not rebellion. Every affection, appetite and action of His humanity is holy.
Yet His humanity was not a separate person standing beside the eternal Son. The subject of these experiences is the Word Himself. The One who was with God in the beginning is the One whose hands were pierced.
That truth must be expressed with equal care in both directions. Christ did not only seem to suffer; His suffering was real. But the divine nature did not become mortal, mutable or capable of being destroyed. The one divine Person truly suffered according to the human nature He had made His own.
Cyril of Alexandria stated the point with admirable precision: Christ suffered because His own body suffered and He was in it while it suffered; yet as God by nature, the Word is impassible. (See Note 3.) That is not verbal evasion. It is the necessary grammar of the biblical facts.
If we say that only an independent human person suffered, we divide Christ into two acting subjects. If we say that deity itself bled or died, we confuse the natures and turn God into a changeable creature. Scripture forces neither error upon us. The crucified One is truly the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8), and His death is truly a human death.
The mystery is not solved by weakening either side. Nor should it be approached only as a problem to be managed. This is the wonder set before us: the Son of God came near enough to be touched, heard, watched and wounded—and the One who came near was never anything less than the Lord of glory.
The risen Christ still bears our humanity
The resurrection is where the difference between Christianity and the philosopher’s version of incarnation becomes impossible to hide—and where Christian hope breaks into triumph.
Amelius imagines bodily dissolution followed by restoration to deity. The New Testament proclaims bodily resurrection.
After rising, Christ says:
“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”
Luke 24:39
The tomb is empty because salvation is not the liberation of Jesus from His humanity. The body that was crucified is raised and glorified. His wounds are not erased from the risen Christ’s identity; He shows them to Thomas. He eats before His disciples. He ascends from the earth before their eyes, and the angels promise that “this same Jesus” will return in like manner (Acts 1:11).
The risen body is not an unfortunate remnant carried into heaven. It is the trophy of His victory. Death took the body and could not keep it. Corruption claimed its right and was denied. The grave received the Seed of the woman and surrendered Him alive.
Nor does the New Testament speak as though His humanity expired once the saving work was complete:
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
1 Timothy 2:5
Paul writes of the risen and exalted Christ. Our present mediator is still “the man Christ Jesus.” Hebrews likewise grounds His continuing priesthood in His endless life: “this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood” (Hebrews 7:24).
The Son did not visit humanity and then retreat from it. The union is permanent. The eternal Word remains truly God and truly man.
There is now a man in the glory of heaven. Our great High Priest knows our frame not as a distant observer, but as One who has made human nature His own. He is not ashamed to call His people brethren. Our humanity has not been thrown away; in Christ it has entered the presence of God.
That fact alone overturns the idea that matter is a stain to be cleansed away. Christ does not save creation by abandoning it. His resurrection is the firstfruits of its redemption. Because He lives, the believer’s future is not to become a disembodied memory, but to be raised incorruptible and fashioned like unto His glorious body.
A descent unlike every myth
Ancient critics could point to stories of gods appearing in human form. Modern critics do something similar when they treat the Incarnation as merely another version of a widespread religious motif.
Cyril knew the argument. In answering the pagan emperor Julian, he referred to pagan claims about gods changing into human form and to stories surrounding Asclepius. But a superficial resemblance does not establish theological identity. (See Note 4.)
The differences are the substance of the matter:
- The Son is not one local deity among many, but the eternal Creator of all things.
- He does not undergo an involuntary fall into matter, but willingly takes humanity in love.
- He does not wear flesh as a disguise, but becomes truly man.
- He does not cease to be God, nor later recover a lost divinity.
- He does not discard the body after death, but raises it incorruptible.
- He does not descend for divine amusement, but to save sinners through the cross.
- He does not teach humanity to escape creation, but guarantees the resurrection and renewal of creation.
The Incarnation cannot be understood merely by filing it beside other stories of divine appearances. The question is not whether two accounts contain a descent, a body and a return. The question is who descends, why He descends, what He assumes, what He suffers and what happens to the body afterward.
On each of those questions, the Gospel contradicts the pagan pattern. But it does more than contradict. It replaces the old imagination with a better reality: not capricious gods playing at humanity, but the holy Creator giving Himself for His creatures; not escape from mortality by abandoning man, but victory over mortality by raising man from the dead.
The glory we are still tempted to diminish
It would be easy to treat Amelius as an historical curiosity. His instinct, however, remains with us.
We repeat it whenever we imply that Christ’s body was merely an instrument, that His emotions threatened His perfection, that the soul is the real person imprisoned inside disposable flesh, or that eternal life means escape from embodied existence. We repeat it whenever “spiritual” becomes a synonym for immaterial and “heavenly” means unconcerned with the created world.
Even Christians can affirm the Incarnation in doctrine while quietly retaining a philosopher’s suspicion of creatureliness.
Scripture does not permit it. God pronounced His creation “very good.” Sin corrupted the creature, but creaturehood was never itself the sin. The Son did not redeem us by demonstrating how to become less human. He came to restore humanity to its appointed end under God.
This is why His tears matter. This is why His hunger matters. This is why His obedience matters. This is why His resurrection body matters. The humanity of Christ is not the embarrassing packaging around the real spiritual message. It belongs to the message.
And what a message it is. The Son has dignified the humanity He created by assuming it. He has carried it through temptation without sin, through suffering without disobedience, through death into resurrection and from earth into heaven. What Adam ruined, Christ has begun to restore.
The Gospel does not say that salvation is the soul’s triumph over embodiment. It says that our vile body shall be fashioned like unto His glorious body (Philippians 3:21).
Come, let us adore Him
Amelius is valuable precisely because he came so close.
He recognised the eternal Word. He recognised that all things depended upon Him. He recognised John’s claim that the Word came in flesh. Yet his governing philosophy required incarnation to be a fall and salvation to be a reversal of embodiment. So the Christian proclamation was translated back into the categories it had come to judge.
That is always the temptation. Christ is welcomed so long as He can be made to confirm what we already believe about God, transcendence, matter and perfection. The language of Scripture is retained while its order is quietly rearranged.
But Christianity does not offer the philosophers a decorative religious symbol for their existing system. It announces a fact that overturns the system—and summons every creature to worship.
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant.”
Philippians 2:5–7
The movement is not from embodied degradation back into untouched divinity. It is from divine glory into willing servanthood, from servanthood unto death, and from death into bodily resurrection and public exaltation.
He is exalted not because He has finally escaped His humanity, but because the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord. The knees that bend before Him bend before the eternal Son who took the servant’s form. The tongues that confess Him confess the name of the One who humbled Himself unto death and now lives for evermore.
The philosophers imagined ascent. The Gospel begins with descent. They sought release from the body. Christ raised His body from the grave. They treated changeable matter as a problem beneath the divine. The eternal Son made human nature His own forever.
This is not a reluctant concession to be defended with embarrassment. It is the joy of heaven and the hope of earth. The angels praised God when Christ was born. The disciples worshipped when He rose. The redeemed will sing to the Lamb who was slain and lives again.
The Word did not fall into flesh.
He came down in love.
He did not cease to be God when He became man.
He did not leave our humanity behind when He rose.
And because the risen man Christ Jesus is coming again, the final word over His people will not be dissolution, escape or death.
It will be resurrection.
Notes
- Matthew R. Crawford, “Comparisons Ancient and Modern: Was Cyril of Alexandria a Good Reader of Paul?”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, published online 29 August 2026. Crawford compares Cyril’s account of Christ’s self-emptying with both ancient Neoplatonic interpretation and a modern kenotic criticism of divine impassibility.
- Eusebius preserves the passage in *Preparation for the Gospel*, Book XI, Chapter XIX. Eusebius explicitly identifies Amelius’s “Barbarian” source as John’s Gospel. The surviving wording is known through this Christian citation, so its transmission context should be acknowledged even though its dependence upon John 1 is unmistakable.
- Cyril of Alexandria, *That Christ Is One*. Cyril’s formula guards the unity of Christ’s Person without attributing mortality or change to the divine nature.
- Crawford discusses Cyril’s use of pagan incarnational claims in Against Julian. Cyril’s answer is not that Christianity has no remotely comparable vocabulary, but that the identity of the incarnate One, the reality of His humanity and the saving purpose of His descent radically distinguish the Gospel from pagan metamorphosis stories.