The incarnation is the doctrine that explains that God the Son was born as the man Jesus Christ (the word means ‘becoming flesh’). The Bible tells us that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. This is shown to us most clearly by the nature of the virgin birth, as Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, not a human father (Luke 1:35) and is called ‘Immanuel’ (transliteration from the Hebrew v ‘Emmanuel’, transliteration from the Greek) which means ‘God with us’ (Matthew 1:23). This understanding of the incarnation is a key orthodox Christian belief. Indeed, the apostle John goes as far as to say that if people deny the incarnation then they are not from God at all (1 John 4:1-6).
