I’ve encountered that lyric so many times in my life in the Church, “Word made flesh…takes our nature by his birth”, and as beautiful and true as so many of the other stanzas are, each time I am confronted with that specific lyric I nevertheless find myself viscerally repulsed. Because of what we can see from the hymn taken as a whole, as Crux_Sacra points out, the lyricist does not present an internally consistent Adoptionist message, but those orthodox stanzas that remain cannot justify, however beautiful and true, what is necessarily false, no matter even how great the utility might be to follow “earth” with “birth”. Would poetic license allow, in an exceptionally composed Marian hymn for example, the specific lyric, “Holy Mary, our very mother, made immaculate by her birth”? Yes, because the remainder of the hymn is so magnificently beautiful and true? Let us be faithful in small matters (Matt 25: 20-23)…“straining gnats”, pnewton?
For all the time and treasure that is invested in guarding and protecting the Sacred Deposit, why does it make sense to incorporate such a lyric into the universal prayer of the Sacrament of Salvation and make what is otherwise beautiful and true, blemished and distorted? “Word made flesh…SHOWS our nature by his birth” would solve the theological problem and conserve the integrity of the poetry (for “Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
“I agree with you about the words to the hymn “Sing of Mary” that state that the Word takes our nature by his birth. On the contrary, he takes our nature by his conception in the womb of Mary, by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Most Reverend John M. LeVoir
Bishop of New Ulm
May 29th, 2012 mail correspondence
Amen…Lex Orandi, lex credendi!
