Did the Son of God Leave Heaven When He Came to Earth?

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.

In their debates with Lutheran scholastics, Reformed theologians opposed the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body. Whereas the Lutherans said that Christ’s body could be everywhere (and consequently, Christ could be locally present in the Lord’s supper), Reformed theologians argued that no human body can possess the property of ubiquity and still be genuinely human.

But how, then, can Christ be with his people always and everywhere, to the end of the age? The answer is that the divine nature, even when joined to a human nature, is not circumscribed by that human nature but exists outside (extra) of it. As the Heidelberg Catechism teaches, “Since divinity is not limited and is present everywhere, it is evident that Christ’s divinity is surely beyond the bounds of the humanity he has taken on, but at the same time his divinity is in and remains personally united to his humanity” (Q/A 48). Or to quote from K. J. Drake’s excellent work on the extra: “Christ exists both wholly in the flesh and yet still transcends it.”[1]

This was plainly the teaching of Calvin:

In this way he was also Son of man in heaven, for the very same Christ, who, according to the flesh, dwelt as Son of man on earth, was God in heaven. In this manner, he is said to have descended to that place according to his divinity, not because divinity left heaven to hide itself in the prison house of the body, but because even though it filled all things, still in Christ’s very humanity it dwelt bodily, that is, by nature, and in a certain ineffable way.[2]

Calvin goes on to employ the scholastic totus/totum distinction, whereby the masculine noun totus refers to a whole person and the neuter noun totum refers to an entire nature. This was a common way of explaining how Christ the person can be entirely present with us, even though his human nature is bound by spatial constraints. He wrote:  “although the whole Christ is everywhere, still the whole of that which is in him is not everywhere.”[3]

Lutherans derisively called this way of thinking the extra Calvinisticum (i.e., the Calvinistic teaching of the beyond or outside), but the idea was not original to Calvin. We might better call it the extra carnem (e.g., Christ’s presence is beyond the flesh of his human nature) or even the extra Catholicum (i.e., the universal teaching about the beyond or outside) because the doctrine was widespread among early church and medieval theologians. In his impressive book on the extra, Andrew McGinnis points out that the doctrine was taught by a host of theological luminaries, including Origin, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John of Damascus, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Gabriel Biel.

In particular, McGinnis traces the extra back to the architect of Christological orthodoxy, Cyril of Alexandria. Arguing from texts like John 3:31 (“He who comes from above is above all”), John 8:23 (“I am from above . . . I am not of this world”), and John 3:13 (where some manuscripts says that the Son of Man who descended from heaven “is in heaven”), Cyril maintained that the Son’s descent did not entail divesting himself of divine attributes nor departing one place for another.[4] Even when a baby at the bosom of the Virgin Mary, the divine Logos, according to Cyril, “still filled the whole creation as God and was co-regent with the one who begot him.”[5]

Something Marvelous

So did the Son of God come down at Christmas? 

Yes. 

Was the Son sent by the Father? 

Yes. 

Did the incarnation entail the humiliation of the divine Word and the temporary veiling of his glory? 

Yes.

Did the Son of God leave his heavenly throne and his kingly crown in coming to earth for us? 

No. 

While writing this article I pulled out the Trinity Hymnal, with some fear and trepidation, to see if it retained Elliott’s hymn. It does, but with a significant change. The first line now reads “Thou dost reign on high with a kingly crown, yet thou camest to earth for me.” I’m not sure what Elliott would think of such a drastic change (though she’s in heaven, so she’s probably fine with it), but the revision is a welcome theological improvement. 

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!”[6]

[1] K.J. Drake, The Flesh of the Word: The extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford: OUP, 2021), 273.

[2] John Calvin, Institutes, 4.18.30.

[3] Calvin, Institutes, 4.18.30.

[4] See Andrew M. McGinnis, The Son of God Beyond the Flesh: A Historical and Theological Study of the extra Calvinisticum (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 31–32.

[5] Quoted in McGinnis, The Son of God Beyond the Flesh, 26.

[6] Calvin, Institutes, 2.13.4.

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.