What God Is This?

Understood in this way, the Pietà reflects an important truth: The Incarnation paved the way for the death of Christ. Thanks in large part to the centrality of Anselm’s arguments in Why God Became Man, this is unlikely to be news to most orthodox Protestants. If anything, we tend to instrumentalize the Incarnation and thereby reduce it to little more than the necessary precondition for Christ’s death: If he was never born as a man, he could never die. But there is more to it than that. The Incarnation itself is part of the humiliation of Christ. While the biblical narrative indicates that his public ministry begins at his baptism, it is at his birth—in fact, at the moment of his conception—that Jesus Christ’s saving work began.