Quickening

The end of pregnancy, dumb sheep, and thoughts on the Incarnate One who makes Christian faith

Advent is fast passing away. We approach Gaudete, and I wonder to where December has flown. This is, no doubt, in part to the fast-approaching season of Christmas. It also comes from the physical changes of my body during the end of this pregnancy. “You’ve grown,” said a friend the other day who I’d just seen less than a week prior. My beach ball belly has begun to boast a shelf that might hold a coffee cup by itself —I have yet to try this and probably won’t, in case you wondered (the coffee might spill, and I don’t waste coffee or want burns). Just a week or so ago, the angle of my protruding front wasn’t even close to such a feat. I breathe, eat and sleep, wake and move, and this child grows and grows. So time and impending change come, and come quickly.

Last summer, I read a selection by the Rev. Paul Kretzmann from his Popular Commentary of the Bible that first appeared one hundred years ago¹. In it, Kretzmann severely criticized the social gospel, the idea popularized by Walter Rauschenbusch that took hold in Christian circles in the early twentieth century that, among other things, attributed the power of spiritual conversion to sinners. The social gospel touted practices, like choosing new habits over old, that would pivot people from sinful darkness to new life in Christ. This belief in acts of human will confessed that people could, themselves, voluntarily choose salvation. Of this suspect theology, Kretzmann dryly noted: “Not a word of God’s quickening power.”

You can see where this is going, or rather where it was from. Kretzmann’s words were written decades before the media spectacles of Billy Graham’s altar calls but long after those panting revivals of Charles Finney and Dwight Moody, other famous preachers of 19^th century America. This tempts people to be enthusiasts, or ones putting their hope in “the view that God reveals Himself and bestows His spiritual gifts to us apart from the objective and external Word and sacraments.”² This idea is actually far older than the 1800s, and Kretzmann, as a Lutheran, knew that. He was echoing Martin Luther’s words about the dangers of enthusiasm in the Smalcald Articles of 1538: “In a word, enthusiasm dwells in Adam and his children from the beginning to the end of the world. Its venom has been implanted and infused into them by the old serpent. It is the origin, power, and strength of all heresy…”³

Christians know that people who confess Christ as Lord for the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting will be saved, so please don’t read more into this than the answer to this simple question: how are Christians made? I think if we’re honest, we know that the quickening of our faith must originate externally. It works upon us independently of us. Theologians have made distinctions between our intellectual and spiritual maturity, I don’t know the terms, but basically our thinking consent to belief. But the belief itself, the actual gift of faith, comes from Someone Else working outside our frail and flawed flesh into our hearts and minds and souls. Lost we are, without even knowing we are lost, stupid sheep gone astray. I can’t think of this verse without hearing Handel’s setting of it in his Messiah, picturing a merry little flock traipsing gaily, stubbornly, and cluelessly toward a cliff, or a pack of wolves, or some other kind of complete destruction. We just love to think we know and do better, and then know and do best, and proceed to wrench away from God what He in His everlasting mercy has given us.

“Is that lunch? Or maybe something fun to play with!” Sheep Startled By a Hare, J.B. Hofner, 1865 (Source).

Nothing is new under the sun, as St. Paul knew. In fact, Luther actually sounded calm and somewhat gentle compared to Paul in the Smalcald Articles when he wrote, “In issues relating to the spoken, outward Word, we must firmly hold that God grants His Spirit or grace to no one except through or with the preceding outward Word.”⁴ He referenced Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where Paul eviscerates their prideful trust in themselves and their own work.

This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? Have you suffered so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?

Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?—just as Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”

Paul is reminding the Galatians, and Luther and Kretzmann and us, that God has come to us. The Good Shepherd has become incarnate, lowered Himself, sought us out and found us, and has taken us to Himself. Abraham believed this before Christ came in the flesh. Mary believed this when Christ was quietly stirring in her virgin form. So too we believe this because God has given it to us to believe.

When I first read Kretzmann’s line of God’s quickening power, I was just beginning to feel the first small flutters of movement of our youngest son within my body. This is also called quickening, a term little used now, but highly apt in various ways.

For the quickening of an unborn child in a mother is like the recognition of God’s work in a Christian. Of course, when a mother first physically senses her child turning within her, the child himself is already inside her; his physical body is literally contained within her form. She is feeling the later movements of many, many others that came before that first flutter.

The Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. Engraving by C. Lasinio. Source.

It seems strange to me that some early meanings of quickening ascribed the child’s personhood to the moment when the mother could actually feel him. But this echoes the misunderstanding of faith, too. A child does not exist or have a soul because his mother can feel him. Her feeling him merely confirms his existence. His body and movements occur independently from her and yet are within her. His life has preceded her feelings. He is himself, wholly unique and formed apart from her existence. I’d argue that the child is outside of her conception, her understanding, though she physically conceived him. He is outside of her at the same time he is inside her body. So too Christ has remade us Christians. For “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”⁵ We are made, separate from, and yet remade in Christ.    

I have rarely been able to encourage my children, when they have been within my womb, to kick their feet or press their hands against the inside of my body in such a way that I can feel them move. Especially when they are small, around the twenty-week mark of pregnancy, their fluttering movements happen surprisingly. Their quickening is apart from me, and I only feel them because God deigns for me to do so. To assert that I have anything but a very peripheral influence would be arrogant, if not downright foolish.

Now, nearing the end of this pregnancy, I can play little games with this small boy. I—or, lately, one of the kids—can press hands gently into my protruding belly and wait a moment, and invariably we’re rewarded with a kick or a roll, as though he’s turning to face us. Often we’re talking to him. “Hi, Baby. Hi, Brother. Can you feel us? Can you move? We love you.” Our three-year-old cowboy, who has a big swagger and a bigger heart, will pull up my shirt, place his chubby fingers and his tousled blond head upon my stretched-out skin, and say “Aw, Baby.” Then he’ll look at me imperiously and say, “I wanna see him.” Yes, honey. Us too.

We have some influence over this unborn child, but far, far less than we think, either of his momentary movements or of his appearing, let alone the kind or length of his days. And he is a great and mysterious gift to us, another one we do not deserve. God has made this child, has quickened him Himself. I can rest in the knowledge that his times are in His Creator’s hands, and we look forward with great eagerness to seeing him and bringing him to the waters of Holy Baptism, where he will receive, with the clueless, foolish dimness all sinful people have, immeasurable riches that will extend far past his mortal life. He will learn to look, with us, with great awe at the Babe who came to us, and through our quickening time toward the mighty day of His reappearing, when we will all see Him. Surely, He is coming quickly. E’en so, Lord Jesus, quickly come.⁶

1. The excerpt from Kretzmann’s commentary can be read here, reprinted in the Spring 2023 issue of Christian Culture: A Magazine for Lutherans.

2. From “The Lutheran Church and the Charismatic Movement,” published by the LCMS’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR), April 1977. See page 6, letter B.

3. See SA Part III, Article VIII, 9. Hat tip (HT) for this reference: Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller, “Live towards death, Die towards life.”

4. SA, Part III, Article VIII, 3.

5. The absolutely home run beginning to the meaning of the Third Article of the Apostle’s Creed in Luther’s Small Catechism.

6. I’ve been really enjoying the 2010 Advent in Winchester “O Come, Emmanuel” album from the Westminster Cathedral Choir, including this recording of Paul Manz’s piece based on the Revelation text.