Excerpt:
“… through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He’s talking about creation through our Lord Jesus Christ. Not the preincarnate Word who later becomes Jesus Christ. That’s mythology.
Just to put it in a very precise nutshell, just stop and think about this: we say repeatedly in our hymnography, “Jesus Christ was born outside of time from the Father, inside of time from the mother.”
… Does the first happen before the second? When people say “Yes,” I say, “How long before?” Was he born from the Father 5,000 years before he was born from the mother? 10,000 years? A million years? It doesn’t work like that! Eternity is timeless, not temporal.
What we want to do is make it quasi-temporal—“born from the Father and then later on did this.” In fact as soon as you do, you fall into Nestorianism. You’ve got a prosopon for the Word of God, a prosopon for Christ, and they’re distinct.
The way that Athanasius would do it: you’ve got the theological statement, “Jesus Christ IS God become man.” Fundamental confession: “Jesus Christ IS God become man.”
There’s a hierarchy in there, but is there a temporal narrative? Did he go from being God alone to being God Incarnate?
… No, Jesus Christ IS God, become man. There’s a logical priority to the “is” but not a temporal priority. “He IS” and this is what he has done: he’s become man. Epistemologically, it’s the other way around: “he became man. This is the one we know. And he’s the one we say IS the Word of God.
Edited by @creativeorthodoxy