It is necessary that he also believe the Incarnation

The Text

The creed turns a corner here. For twenty-six verses it has confessed the God who is Trinity in Unity. Now, on a single sed, it announces its second subject: this God, the Son, became flesh. Verse 29 is the seam of the whole document — the hinge between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Christ — and it makes a claim modern readers almost always miss because the small word that carries it is so easily skipped: quoque. Also. It is necessary that he believe the Incarnation also.

That “also” is the creed welding its two halves into one faith. The Athanasian Creed will not let you have the Trinity without the Incarnation or the Incarnation without the Trinity. They are not two doctrines a person might hold separately, take or leave independently. They are two sides of one confession: the God who is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit is the God who, as the Son, was made caro — flesh. Subtract the Incarnation and the Trinity becomes an idea about God’s inner life with no purchase on ours. Subtract the Trinity and the Incarnation becomes a myth — a god briefly wearing a man. The creed’s quoque refuses both amputations. And note, again, what this seam does not say: it says “necessary,” it does not say “perish.” Like the hinge at verse 28, the interior of the creed states necessity without the thunder it reserves for its outer edges.

Translation Notes

sed — the pivot, not the protest. Here sed is structural rather than adversative: “but now, further.” It does not correct what precedes; it turns from the first subject to the second. The single word marks the architectural seam J. N. D. Kelly identified — Part I (Trinity) closing, Part II (Incarnation) opening.

necessarium est ad aeternam salutem — “it is necessary unto eternal salvation.” A necessity-clause, parallel in function to verse 1’s opus est. But the parallel is partial, and the difference is the point: there is no absque dubio, no in aeternum peribit. The creed has three clauses that threaten perishing — the prologue (1–2) and the close (42–44). Its two interior seams — verse 28 (“let him be thus minded”) and verse 29 (“it is necessary … believe faithfully”) — state necessity and stop. An honest reading notes the gradation rather than flattening all five into one undifferentiated threat.

incarnatio — the word names the scandal. From in- + caro (flesh): the en-fleshing. The Latin tradition’s anchor text is John 1:14, Verbum caro factum est — “the Word was made flesh.” Not the Word appeared as flesh (Docetism), not the Word dwelt near flesh (a loose indwelling), but was made flesh. The term itself is a doctrine: the becoming is real.

quoque — the load-bearing particle. “Also.” Right faith in the Incarnation is necessary as well as right faith in the Trinity — conjoined, not alternative. This is the verse’s whole theological weight: the creed’s two parts are one faith, and quoque is the hinge-pin.

fideliter credat — “let him faithfully believe.” The adverb is not decorative. The creed asks not for accurate belief merely but for faithful belief — fides in its full register: assent, trust, and fidelity together. Even at a “necessary to salvation” clause, the creed’s own grammar resists the reduction of faith to a passed examination.

Historical Context

The creed’s double subject. The Quicumque is the first major Western symbol to take both of the church’s great dogmatic settlements as its matter and to bind them. Part I distills the Trinitarian settlement of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). Part II, beginning at verse 29, distills the Christological settlement of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). The creed cannot be earlier than the mid-fifth century precisely because verse 29 onward presupposes Chalcedon’s two-natures definition. Where the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds narrate the economy (born, suffered, rose), the Athanasian Creed defines the hypostatic union — and verse 29 announces that this definition is coming, and that it is not optional.

Why the conjunction is historical, not merely tidy. The fifth-century Latin West, the milieu of Vincent of Lérins and the creed’s anonymous author, lived after both wars. It had watched the Trinitarian controversy settle and the Christological controversy erupt — Nestorius and the unity of Christ’s person, Eutyches and the integrity of his two natures, Ephesus, the Tome of Leo, Chalcedon. The creed’s quoque is the scar tissue of that double history: a church that had learned, twice over, that getting God right and getting Christ right are not separable tasks. The Incarnation is whose incarnation — the second person of the Trinity’s — or it is nothing the creed recognizes.

The admirabile commercium. Behind verse 29 stands the patristic logic of the “wonderful exchange”: the Word became what we are that we might become what he is (Athanasius); “what is not assumed is not healed” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101). The Incarnation is “necessary unto salvation” not as an arbitrary requirement but because, in the church’s reading, salvation simply is God’s joining of our flesh to himself in the Son. To deny the Incarnation is not to fail a test; it is to deny the thing salvation consists of.

Lines of Interpretation

The doctrine is uncontested among the catholic traditions. The live questions are the two the verse raises: the necessity of right faith in the Incarnation (here in its milder seam-form), and the inseparability of Trinity and Incarnation that quoque asserts.

Patristic

Tradition: Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101; the admirabile commercium

The Fathers read the Incarnation as the hinge of salvation itself: God assumes humanity to heal it; what the Word does not take, he does not save. Trinity and Incarnation are one economy — it is God the Son who is enfleshed.

Strengths

• Grounds the necessity in the logic of salvation, not in an arbitrary demand — to deny the Incarnation is to deny what saving is
• Holds the quoque tight: the one enfleshed is the second person of the Trinity, so the two doctrines are one

Weaknesses

• The admirabile commercium presumes the Trinitarian frame; severed from it, “God became man” can drift toward myth
• The patristic confidence assumes a participatory soteriology many modern hearers no longer share

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, Cur Deus Homo; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III qq. 1–4

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo gives the necessity its classic argument: only one who is both God (able to satisfy) and man (obliged to satisfy) can reconcile humanity to God. Aquinas treats the Incarnation’s fittingness and its necessity of the end — necessary as the means God appointed to the end of salvation, not by absolute compulsion.

Strengths

• Supplies a rigorous account of why the God-man is necessary — the Mediator must be both
• “Necessity of the end” rightly distinguishes the Incarnation’s necessity from caprice without weakening it

Weaknesses

• The Anselmian satisfaction frame, isolated, can make the Incarnation instrumental — a means to a transaction rather than the admirabile commercium
• “Necessity of the end” still presses the hard question about those who never heard

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.12 (the Mediator must be God and man)

Calvin states the necessity with characteristic clarity: our situation required a Mediator who could bring God to us and us to God, which none but the God-man could do. The necessity is soteriological and Mediatorial, and it is bound to the Trinity (it is the Son who mediates).

Strengths

• Keeps the Incarnation tethered to the actual need of sinners — not speculation but rescue
• Holds the conjunction: the Mediator is the second person, so Christology cannot be detached from the doctrine of God

Weaknesses

• The Mediator-frame, pressed alone, can make the Incarnation a function of the atonement rather than its own glory
• A heavily forensic register can underplay the participatory note (theosis, the commercium) the verse’s “necessary to salvation” also carries

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Athanasius and the Cappadocians; the Incarnation for theosis

The East reads verse 29’s necessity through deification: “God became man that man might become god” (by grace). The link between triadology and Christology is unbreakable — the enfleshed one is the eternal Son, and union with him is union with the Trinity’s own life.

Strengths

• Gives the necessity its deepest content: the Incarnation is necessary because salvation is participation in the divine life through the enfleshed Son
• The most uncompromising statement of the quoque: no Christ without the Trinity, no theosis without both

Weaknesses

• The theosis frame, loosely held, can blur the Creator/creature line the creed elsewhere guards (verse 6)
• Strongly participatory language is easily misheard by Western ears as divinizing the creature

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: the liberal-Protestant reduction (Harnack’s “kernel”); The Myth of God Incarnate (Hick, ed., 1977) versus The Truth of God Incarnate (Green, ed., 1977); the realist retrieval

The modern pressure produces two reductions verse 29 was built to refuse. One keeps Jesus the teacher and drops the Trinity and the metaphysical Incarnation (Harnack; the Myth essayists). The other keeps a generic, accessible “God” and drops the scandal of the enfleshment. The realist replies (the Truth volume; later Coakley, C. Stephen Evans) reassert the full Incarnation as the church’s non-negotiable confession — and as, finally, the only version that can save.

Strengths

• The reductionists rightly press a real pastoral concern: the offense of metaphysics to modern ears and the longing to make Jesus accessible
• The realist retrieval rightly shows that what survives the reduction — a teacher, or a vague benevolence — is not the gospel and cannot do what the gospel claims

Weaknesses

• “Jesus without the Trinity” and “God without the Incarnation” each violate quoque; each keeps the comfortable half and loses the saving whole
• Some realist defenses answer the metaphysical challenge while leaving the pastoral hunger that drove the reduction unaddressed — the doctrine defended but the questioner unmet

Wesleyan Voice

The decisive Wesleyan fact about verse 29 is the same as for the Christological verses that follow it: Wesley deleted the creed but kept its Christology word for word. The Methodist Articles of Religion, Article II — “the Word … took man’s nature … so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God and very Man” — is verses 29–37 of the Athanasian Creed, Chalcedon intact, transmitted to American Methodism in the same 1784 act that struck the creed itself. Whatever Wesley refused in the Quicumque, it was never its doctrine of the Incarnation.

The Wesleyan accent on verse 29 falls, characteristically, on for us. Wesley’s interest is never the Incarnation as bare metaphysics; it is the Incarnation as the ground of the gospel he preached. Sermon 5, Justification by Faith, presupposes the God-man: only one who is fully God (so that his merit is infinite) and fully man (so that he stands in our place) can be the Mediator in whom we are justified. The necessarium est ad aeternam salutem is, for Wesley, simply true — not as a threat but as a description of how salvation works: there is no being reconciled to God except through the God who became flesh to reconcile us. And the quoque is, for Wesley, why the Trinity is never abstract in his preaching. We know the Father because the Son was made flesh and poured out the Spirit; the triune God of Part I is knowable at all because of the Incarnation of Part II. Take away verse 29 and the Trinity Wesley defended in Sermon 55 becomes the speculation he always denied it was.

Charles Wesley made verse 29 the church’s Christmas voice. “Let earth and heaven combine, / angels and men agree, / to praise in songs divine / the incarnate Deity … our God contracted to a span, / incomprehensibly made man.” “Hark! the herald angels sing … veiled in flesh the Godhead see.” “And can it be … ‘tis mystery all! The Immortal dies.” Each is the quoque sung: the eternal God of Part I confessed as the enfleshed man of Part II, in one breath, by a congregation that learned the hypostatic union from a hymnbook before any catechism.

Hymnody

Verse 29 has no hymn of its own and needs none, because it is the doctrinal seam under the entire Christmas canon. Every carol that confesses the eternal God as the child of Bethlehem is singing the quoque.

“Of the Father’s love begotten” binds the parts explicitly: the Son “ere the worlds began to be” is “he the source, the ending he” — the eternal one now born in time. “O come, all ye faithful” presses the conjunction hard: “very God, begotten, not created … Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”: “Christ our God to earth descendeth.” “Hark! the herald angels sing”: “veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / hail the incarnate Deity.” Charles Wesley’s “Let earth and heaven combine” is the verse’s purest hymnic statement: “our God contracted to a span, / incomprehensibly made man.”

The hymnody does not argue verse 29; it does what the creed’s quoque requires — it never lets the church sing the Incarnation without confessing, in the same stanza, that the one incarnate is the eternal God of Part I. The carol is the seam.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This verse hands a pastor the single sharpest tool for diagnosing what a congregation actually believes — because almost every functional Christianity in the modern West is one of the two half-faiths quoque forbids.

Name the two amputations. On one side is the church of Jesus-without-the-Trinity: Jesus the great moral teacher, the model of compassion, the human face of values everyone already holds — with the Trinity quietly shelved as a technicality and the Incarnation softened to an inspiring symbol. On the other is the church of God-without-the-Incarnation: a warm, general, undemanding divinity, “spirituality” without the scandal of a particular Jewish man who is God in the flesh. Verse 29 says you may not have either. The two are not independent doctrines you can mix and match; they are one faith, and the quoque welds them. Subtract the Trinity and your Jesus is a creature you have no reason to worship. Subtract the Incarnation and your God never actually came, and the gospel is advice rather than rescue. The pastoral task is to name both reductions for what they are — not heresies of the wicked but the comfortable defaults of the modern church — and to refuse, kindly and clearly, to let the congregation keep the half it finds easier.

Read the seam by its mildness. For the congregant still wounded by the damnatory clauses, verse 29 continues the pastoral evidence of [[athanasian-creed/the-trinity-to-be-worshipped]]: the creed’s interior does not threaten. “Necessary to salvation … believe faithfully” — and then it stops. The thunder is reserved for the outer frame. The creed’s own structure teaches the reader to weigh the warnings by their gradations, and a pastor can say so honestly: at its seams the creed is grave but gentle, and “necessary” here means what Anselm and Calvin meant — that there is no road to God that goes around the God who became flesh — not that the church holds a list of who is lost.

Ask for faith, not a degree. The verb is fideliter credat — believe faithfully. Salvation, even on this strenuous creed’s own terms, hangs on faithful trust in the incarnate Lord, not on the ability to expound Chalcedon. That is a word of relief a pastor should say plainly to the anxious and the simple: you are not required to explain the two natures; you are asked to trust the One who has them — to believe faithfully that the God who made you came, in the flesh, to get you. And then the pastor can point at the place the congregation already confesses this without knowing it: every Christmas, when they sing the eternal God into a manger, they are believing verse 29 — the Trinity and the Incarnation, the also, the whole undivided faith — with their own mouths, and being saved not by their grasp of it but by the One it is about.

Further Reading

• John 1:1–14 — the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us
• Philippians 2:5–11 — the form of God, the form of a servant
• 1 Timothy 3:16 — great is the mystery: God was manifest in the flesh
• Hebrews 2:14–17 — he likewise took part in the same
• 1 John 4:2–3; 2 John 7 — every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh (the test)
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 (“what is not assumed is not healed”)
• Leo the Great, Tome; the Definition of Chalcedon (451)
• Anselm, Cur Deus Homo
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III qq. 1–4
• John Calvin, Institutes II.12
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article II
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 5; Explanatory Notes on John 1, Philippians 2
• Charles Wesley, “Let earth and heaven combine”; “Hark! the herald angels sing”
• John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate (SCM, 1977), read against Michael Green, ed., The Truth of God Incarnate (Hodder, 1977)
• C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford, 1996); Sarah Coakley, Christ Without Absolutes (Oxford, 1988)