The preexistence of Christ is denied by every Christology that begins ‘from below’ with the man Jesus and refuses to confess the eternal Son who took flesh. The ancient adoptionists held that Jesus was a mere man whom God adopted or upon whom the divine descended; the Socinians and their Unitarian heirs denied His deity and preexistence outright, making Him a uniquely good man and nothing more; and modern liberal theology, recoiling from the supernatural, treats the preexistence as mythology and Jesus as a Galilean teacher who began to exist like any other. In each case the Word did not become flesh; rather, a man simply came to be, and was perhaps later honored or indwelt. The incarnation, on these views, is no descent of God but the appearance of a creature.

Scripture forecloses these denials with statements of breathtaking clarity. The Word was in the beginning, and was God; before Abraham was, the Son says ‘I am’; He asks to be restored to the glory He had with the Father before the world was; He is before all things. These cannot be reduced to a man’s sense of mission or a poetic flourish; they assert real, eternal, personal existence as God prior to the incarnation. And the stakes are the gospel itself: if the Son did not preexist, the love that saves us is merely a man’s, not God’s; the incarnation is no condescension; and the One in the manger is a creature, not the Creator come to redeem. To confess the preexistence is to confess that the eternal Son, who was with the Father before time, stooped into our flesh and our poverty—that the everlasting God lay in a manger and hung on a cross for us.