We don’t need the Son of God leaving heaven for earth in order for the incarnation to be worth singing about. Instead, we can exclaim with Calvin: “Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!”

When we think about the incarnation—about advent, about Christmas, about Jesus being born in a manger—we sometimes talk about the Son of God leaving one place to go to another. “Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown, when Thou camest to earth for me” is how E. S. Elliott put it in her 1864 hymn. In fact, it is often some form of “leaving behind the glories of heaven” that preachers and poets and parents stress as an indication of how much Christ loves us. If the incarnate Son of God was born of Mary in the earthly city of Bethlehem, then surely he must have left behind whatever heavenly dwelling he called home up to that point.

Despite the popular appeal of such notions of God’s Son leaving heaven to come to earth at Christmas, we would do well not to think or speak of the incarnation in these terms. We can speak of Christ descending to earth (John 3:13; Eph. 4:10). We can, as the Nicene Creed puts it, say that the Son of God “came down” (cf. John 6:50–51). We will certainly want to make much of Christ’s humiliation whereby he emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and condescended to be born in the likeness of men (Phil. 2:7). The problem is not with the language of coming down or exchanging the glory of heaven for the humiliation of earth (though, strictly speaking, the Son’s glory was not abandoned but veiled or hidden for a time; he did not divest himself of divine properties). The problem is with conceiving of the incarnation as spatial movement, of leaving one place for another.

The key is to understand that the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way as to still be in heaven. Christ’s incarnational descent did not involve a change to the divine nature or a change of location. If the Son of God had to leave heaven in order to come to earth, not only would that suggest a rift in Trinitarian communion, it would also imply that the Son no longer possessed the attributes of immensity and omnipresence, which means that the Son would cease to be something other than the fully divine Son. In the hypostatic union, the two natures—human and divine—are joined in one person, yet “without confusion” and “without change” (Chalcedonian Definition). That is, when the Son assumed a human nature, he became as we are, without ceasing to be what he was.

Extra, Extra!

So how do we make both the Nicene “he came down” and the Chalcedonian “without change” fit together? We need the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum. This is the idea that the divine Logos, even in the hypostatic union, exists beyond the flesh of the human nature.

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