Among the many voices that come together in a liturgical assembly to confess the Creed, you may hear some of the faithful pronounce that Jesus Christ \u201cbecame one of us,\u201d putting these voices slightly out of sync with the majority of the assembly that confesses that \u201che became man.\u201d I myself, most often, confess that Jesus Christ became \u201chuman.\u201d In the eucharistic assembly, I speak this confession by lowering my voice on the first syllabus \u2013 \u201chuman\u201d, so as not to cause others around me to stumble as we all strive, together, to speak the heart of our faith.<\/p>\n
My own confession is motivated, simply, by deep faithfulness to our tradition: I cannot bear to render the succinct beauty of the Creed\u2019s \u201cet homo factus est\u201d with the English \u201cand became man.\u201d The Latin homo, after all (as distinct from the term for a male [vir]), means human. The same holds true for the original Greek in which the Nicene Creed was crafted: the root of the term enanthrop\u0113santa, \u201cand became human,\u201d is the Greek word anthropos, i.e. human being. Any translation of enanthrop\u0113santa should capture this truth at the heart of our confession of faith: The Word took human form in the incarnation, rather than maleness alone. Maybe this strikes me as so obvious because in my mother tongue, rendering the Creed faithfully never was a problem in the first place. The German language has two quite different words for \u201cmale\u201d (Mann) and for \u201chuman being\u201d (Mensch). The translation of the Creed into German thus is unequivocal and clear: \u201cund ist Mensch geworden.\u201d God became human. In contradistinction, English for the longest time used the same term, \u201cman,\u201d to mean both the \u201cmale\u201d and the \u201chuman.\u201d Because of this linguistic particularity, our confession of faith, in English, remains ambiguous. And unfortunately, the translation of the Creed we will begin using on Advent I, does nothing to address this ambiguity (despite its claim to greater faithfulness to the Latin original texts). Which means I will simply continue my present practice of prefacing the confession that God became \u201cman\u201d with the two little letters \u201ch\u201d and \u201cu.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what about those who have chosen instead to confess that Jesus Christ \u201cbecame one of us\u201d? I do not know what they will do come Advent I, 2011. I want to suggest, however, that there is an unfortunate ambiguity in this rendition of \u201cet homo factus est\u201d also, which makes it quite problematic as an assembly\u2019s confession of faith in the Incarnation. And no, I am not worried here about the fact that \u201cand became one of us\u201d puts the speakers seriously out of sync with the rhythm of the congregation. What I am worried about is the ambiguity of the \u201cus\u201d that Jesus supposedly became a part of. When spoken by an assembly of mostly privileged, educated, white, First World Christians, the collective \u201cus\u201d might seem to invoke a perilously narrow segment of humanity. Who would know that this collective \u201cwe\u201d includes not only the small group of faithful who voice this confession (presumably as an act of protest against the ambiguity embedded in the English term \u201cman\u201d)? It seems to me that both ambiguities \u2013 the nature and scope of the collective \u201cus\u201d on the one hand, and the nature and scope of \u201cman\u201d on the other hand \u2013 fall short of the clarity of God\u2019s own redemptive movement, in taking on human form in the Incarnation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Among the many voices that come together in a liturgical assembly to confess the Creed, you may hear some of the faithful pronounce that Jesus Christ \u201cbecame one of us,\u201d putting these voices slightly out of sync with the majority of the assembly that confesses that \u201che became man.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,24],"tags":[1065,477],"class_list":["post-7320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sacramental-theology","category-translation-new-missal","tag-nicene-creed","tag-translation-issues"],"yoast_head":"\n