Incarnation: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD
Often, when I speak of incarnational theology, I’m met with a slightly blank look before being finally asked, “You mean Christmas…right?”.
The early Church was not big on the celebration of Christmas or, more properly, The Feast of the Nativity, but they were consumed with incarnational theology. For them, as for the author of the fourth gospel, the good news of the coming of Christ is not by a child born in Bethlehem, not by a makeshift cradle in an outbuilding, but in the remarkable language of the Word of God becoming flesh. The Word – in Greek the divine Logos – is God’s expression of himself. In the era of the Hebrew scriptures, God’s will and purpose was made known by his word which came to the prophets and which they, in turn, declared to God’s people. In the Hebrew scriptures the wisdom of God was seen as God’s agent in creation. In the Greek world, the divine Logos held the world together as an integrated system and provided its meaning, order and purpose. These two streams of thought, Hebrew and Greek, come together in the Word, which John’s gospel proclaims was “with God and was God”.
That the “Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” was the proclamation of new creation and a fundamental redemptive act planned in eternity past and executed in human history. It is wholly “other” yet it is wholly “of us”. This is the fundamental meaning of the virginal conception of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is expressed in a different manner in the opening of John’s gospel with the words, “In the beginning…”, echoing the opening words of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis. The God who is the origin of all things acts in a new way to redeem all things. The Word, God’s own communication and expression of his being, becomes flesh. “Becoming flesh”, incarnation, is the shocking center of Christian faith. It asserts the claim that in the fragility and contingency of a single human life the Creator knew his creation, not from the outside, but from the inside. “He dwelt among us.”
Moreover, he was among us not in some ethereal, spiritual manner, but as a particular person who bore all humanity in his nature. As the poet Coleridge wrote, “The Almighty goodness does not dwell in generalities or abide in abstractions”. It is the particularity of a human life, at a particular time and in a particular place that provides meaning for all times and all places. The story of Christ does not begin with “once upon a time”. It is the time of Caesar Augustus. It is the Roman province of Judea. It is Herod. It is an unremarkable military governor, Pontius Pilate. God gives himself not to some fantasy world, but to this world. In incarnation, literally “enfleshing”, God comes down to earth fro heaven. He comes over to our side. He identifies himself with a world that is both his creation and, yet, is estranged from him. It is a fallen world. It is a world of darkness and sin. It is a world of frailty. As someone once commented, part of the carnality of the incarnation is that God comes to the carnage.
God comes to where we are. To the world which is ISIS and the Taliban, to a world of tyranny both political and domestic, to a world of refugees and migrants, to the world of imprisoning addiction, to the human darkness of depression, loneliness and bereavement, to the hell of relationships where love is distorted into hatred, to the prisons of poverty, injustice and abuse, God comes to us as one of us. As Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Philippi, Christ who was “in the form of God emptied himself, and took upon himself the form of a servant and was made in human likeness”.
The incarnation tells us that God does not hold back. In the incarnation God reaches out in love, emptying himself that he might not just stand alongside us, but that we may be gathered in to his heart, the place where creation itself began. It is a love that considers and judges the sin of the world and our complicity in that sin and yet, at the same time, touches us in forgiveness, and redemption, and healing, if we would have it. In the incarnation, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness is not able to overwhelm it”.
The truth of Christianity does not depend upon a system of apologetics, or a written corpus free from historical or scientific error, or textual variants. It does, however, depend upon the truth and implications of the incarnation. It depends upon a God that loves like this, not just as a metaphor or a way of speaking, but in reality. It is an affirmation that can be expressed in a moment and considered for a lifetime. It stretches our language to its limits, yet calls for worship and adoration when words fail.
The God who empties himself, the Word who becomes flesh, who takes on our nature, is a God of grace indeed. It is the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality. The early Church understood this and declared it as the ultimate truth and reality. Moreover, it made the claim that as the fullness of the love of God is shown in his self-emptying, so our human destiny is nothing less than sharing in his divine life. We are to “become by grace what Christ is by nature” and to be a part of that love which, “bears all things, endures all things, believes all things, and hopes all things”. We are invited to risk our lives on the truth of the incarnation – the truth of the Word of God who became flesh and dwelt among us.
So, no, it’s not just about Christmas… It’s about who and what we are because God came among us.
I remain stunned at how these truths are ignored for the most part in most churches.
You can’t understand the cross until you understand the Incarnation…
Michael,
I agree completely. This is really what the vast majority of patristic theology was about…
Thank you Duane. This is a gem. I’ve had a tendency to think of God in generalities and abstraction. That He’s doing things “out there” somewhere and not interested in the particulars of our daily mundane existence. I’m learning that He is a God of particulars and cares about the smallest things in our lives. The hard part for me is remaining aware of this in the relentless daily grind.
Thanks Joel…. Yes, it is in the particulars. He knows and cares about us “from the inside”…
Any church that understands the bread and wine to be the true – real – actual non symbolic body and blood of Christ, work solely in incarnational theology.
The rest may have an issue.
MLD
I would agree, but I would also contend that incarnational theology extends even further than what takes place on the altar. As a lay theologian said, it is “the heart of it all…… and brings essential meaning to all humanity. ” The lay theologian was my wife…
I’m not really sure what MLD just said, but I think I agree with what Duane said.
I love the quote by your wife, Duane. Jesus is present in the Eucharist and many other places. It makes all the difference in our daily lives if you think about it. Small acts of love and kindness toward the folks we interact with on a daily basis matter.
Joel,
Yes… we have to see Christ in all…
Dr. Duane is blessed ? While i would not have the label at the ready, the concept is what will make a Believer tick … or not tick
Sometimes i think we are like the old wind up watches… all the parts are in there, but it takes a little repeated effort to activate the mind of Christ in us (but then i think of the bread and wine as a means to an end – not an end in themselves).
Em
I have to disagree… YOU are the blessing to all of us here!
For me personally its easier to see the incarnation in the wonderful acts of kindness of the saints than with simply bread and wine. Jesus didn’t come to us as a loaf of bread or a glass of wine or did he? Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary not conceived to be an inanimate piece of bread or did he? When we talk about the two natures of Christ (God and man) where does it talk about Christ having the nature of bread like MLD talks about. I truly do try to understand the Lutheran way but I’m having a hard time with MLD’s understanding. Its much easier for me to see God in everything than to see him specifically coming as a piece of bread and wine. Now I do view the bread and wine sacramentally rather than simply ordinances but to me that’s a little bit different than incarnationally where Jesus came as a loaf of bread literally in the incarnation having the nature of bread. Jesus was just like us in his humanity without sin. Does that make us similar to a loaf of bread as well? I honestly thought the Lutheran understanding was that Jesus was in, with and under the consecrated bread but not the same as the bread itself. Am I mistaken?
Steve
I would not wish to answer for MLD. I believe that the sacraments are particular ways in which Christ is made known. For me, however, the Incarnation is far more. It is the assumption of all humanity and the potential for grace in all humanity.
“In, with and under,” is an attempt to capture the mystery in language. In my mind, however, language fails to fully communicate the mystery…
Steve,
You have the Lutheran position right.
I think that the point was that the Incarnation involved the spirit putting on physicality and God still blesses through the physical as well as spiritual.
So, Duane knows this is my favorite piece so far.
The fundamental question is what happened to humanity when God assumed it?
All the answers I come up with are game changers…
My position was not that the supper is the beginning and end of incarnational theology, but that if you do not hold to a real, bodily non symbolic view of Jesus in the supper that you may be coming up short in the proper understanding of the topic.
Steve, to clear up the Lutheran position about bread / body — wine / blood. It goes to this point – what are you taking in your mouth.
The Roman view is the bread and wine at the time of institution transform into body & blood and you no longer have bread and wine. Thus transubstaniation – You consume only body and blood.
The Lutheran position is that the bread and wine do not change, but Jesus’ body and blood (actual real, physical, non symbolic) join themselves to the elements so you are consuming bread, wine, body and blood. We do what happens, but we do not know how this happens but what we know is that Jesus promised that it does. To how, as Duane points out we are at a loss for words so we try to cover the bases with the terminology ‘in, with and under’.
The Baptist, evangelical mode is that nothing changes. You have bread and wine only and you consume bread and wine only.
So when the debate gets thick I usually ask not ” what is in your wallet” but more importantly “what is in you mouth?
I will start bread, wine, physical, actual, non symbolic Jesus.
How about some others, what was in your mouth last Sunday?
“The fundamental question is what happened to humanity when God assumed it?”
I will cheat and quote Gregory of Nyssa:
“For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.“
Christ unites humanity to God. Is he saying that all humanity is saved?
Never mind don’t answer that. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. It’s fascinating to just think about it.
MLD, if Jesus says this IS my body and blood and says we must eat His flesh and drink His blood then we should do it and be thankful.
JoelG,
I think he’s saying that something fundamentally changed in humanity when God assumed flesh.
How far we choose to speculate on that is left to our risk tolerance… 🙂
“Behold, I am making all things new.”
There’s a lot of hope in this proclamation.
MLD, thank you for your Lutheran clarification. Here is a good article I found that was helpful to me in understanding the Lord’s supper more from a Calvinistic understanding. I think from reading this, most Baptist and evangelicals are probably coming from the Zwingli understanding but it does seem that Calvin is closer to Luther than Zwingli in his understanding.
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/calvins-doctrine-lords-supper/
This issue is the reason I entered into the study of patristics 40+ years ago. It is the realization that we are not the first to travel this road. During the first almost 500 years of the Church, it was the incarnation and the implications of the incarnation that took pride of place. It shaped their theology, their worship and their practice. It was to this period that the reformers of the 16th century turned to again and again. We would do well to recover their perspective…