In my blog post "On Constantinian Christianity" immediately below I quote with general approval a passage on Christian nonviolence and the relationship of Christianity to the state by Philip Gulley, from his book If the Church Were Christian. In that helpful if imperfect book Gulley critiques several of the fundamental ways in which Christianity has lost its center and become inaccessible to sensitive, discerning people today. That book is a constructive contribution to the discussion of what is needed if Christianity is to survive. There is, however, one thesis in the book with which I profoundly disagree, and it is that disagreement that I wish to develop here.
Gulley contends that one of the ways in which the church today is not Christian is that it sees Jesus Christ as divine. It sees Jesus Christ as the incarnation in human form of God or, in more precise theological language, of the Son or the Logos of God. Gulley considers the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (in this piece “incarnation” is a generic term while “Incarnation” refers specifically to the Incarnation in Jesus Christ) to be un-Christian because the historical person Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly did not understand himself to be an incarnation of God. I accept as correct the contention that Jesus did not see himself as divine. As an historical matter it is highly unlikely that Jesus saw himself as the Word of God made flesh. He most probably saw himself as a Jewish prophet in the tradition of the great eighth century prophets Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Amos. He gave new voice to their call for justice, to their prophetic declaration that God desires from us not proper worship but proper living, not sacrifice but justice for the poor, the vulnerable, and the outcast. He proclaimed not himself but the imminence of the Kingdom of God, that earthly reign characterized by the justice of which the ancient prophets spoke. I take all of that as correct, and I am sure Gulley would agree.
Nevertheless I cling to the Incarnation, and I think that some understanding of the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express, if not necessarily the classical form of the doctrine itself with its concepts taken from Hellenistic philosophy, is vital for Christianity. It is what distinguishes Christianity from the other world religions, in particular from Judaism and Islam. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong about Judaism or Islam. The Christian way is not necessarily superior to their ways for everyone; but the Christian way is different, and it is largely our understanding of Incarnation that makes Christianity different. What then is that truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express?
It is that Christians see much more than a man in Jesus of Nazareth. It is that we experience him, and Christians have experienced him from his time to ours, as embodying the presence and the will of God in a way that is not only different in degree from the way any other human embodies that presence and that will but different in kind. It is unique. Christians see God in him in a way unlike how we see God in any other person. The classical creeds use obscure terminology to express this truth. They say he is homoousios, of one substance, with God the Father. They say that he has two natures—physis—in one person—prosopon. They are saying in the language of their time that in the human being Jesus of Nazareth we see God. That is the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express.
It is no wonder that people today flee from the language of the ancient creeds as fast as they can. The average citizen may have argued intelligently and passionately about those terms in the fourth century, as a famous quote from the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 says they did. No one does today. No one even understands those terms today. The pitched battles of the fourth century over whether Jesus was homoousios with the Father or only homooisios (of similar substance) strike us today as absurd. That the language of the creeds is obscure to us at best does not mean, however, that the truth that that language is trying to express is no longer valid. It certainly doesn’t mean that that truth is obscure or absurd. It isn’t. It is central to the way in which we Christians find our way to God in and through Jesus Christ. It expresses the truth that when we Christians follow Jesus we experience ourselves as following so much more than a man. We experience ourselves as following nothing less than God in human form. It expresses the truth that the way Jesus taught us is much more than the way of a man, however good a man he may have been. It expresses the truth that in the way of Jesus we Christians see the way of God.
One reason why so many people today have trouble accepting the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that, however much we may claim that we do not take the Bible literally, we are out of the habit of symbolic thinking. We have lost the art of symbolic thinking. Without even being aware of it we automatically understand statements, even theological statements like the doctrine of the Incarnation, literally, that is, factually. When we hear someone confess that God the Son became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth we immediately try to understand that confession as fact, and as fact we can’t make it make sense. We immediately try to understand the Incarnation as physical reality, and as physical reality we can’t make it make sense. If we can get ourselves at long last to understand statements like the statement of the doctrine of the Incarnation as symbolic most of the difficulty we have in accepting them falls away. A symbol is a thing or a word, or in the case of the doctrine of the Incarnation a concept, that uses the things of ordinary experience, in this case words, to point beyond itself to a transcendent reality to which it can point but which it cannot capture, cannot define. The statement “God the Son became human in Jesus of Nazareth” is not a literal, factual statement, it is a symbolic one. It expresses a spiritual truth not a physical one. There is no point in trying to figure out the mechanics of it for it is not a mechanical statement.
The question to ask of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not “did it happen” but “what does it mean?” What is the transcendent truth to which that statement points? That transcendent truth is that for us Christians God comes to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. We Christians know God in and through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ presents us Christians with as full a revelation of the nature of God as our human minds can possibly comprehend.
True symbols always point to and preserve mystery. How it is that God comes to us through Jesus Christ remains a mystery, but the symbol of the Incarnation both preserves that mystery and expresses the truth in the mystery. It invites us not to understand it cognitively but to enter into it spiritually. It invites us not to explain it but to celebrate it, not to parse it logically but to live into it. We are to approach it not with logic but with wonder, not with rational inquiry but with awe. We are not to dissect it but to worship God in and through it. If we can do that we just might feel its spiritual power. We just might feel God reaching out for us through it and find ourselves using it to reach back to God, to make our connection with God in it. As a factual statement the Incarnation is an impossibility. As a symbolic statement it has the power to save us, to heal us, and to make us whole.
There remains of course Gulley’s objection that the Incarnation is not how Jesus understood himself. We have already conceded that this is almost certainly true. The question we have to ask is: Does it matter? To put it another way, Is the meaning that Jesus has for the Christians who came after him, and for us, limited by what he himself understood? Or again, Is it necessary that Jesus have understood himself to be the Son of God Incarnate in order for him to be the Son of God Incarnate for us? It should be clear by now that my answer to those questions is and must be no, it doesn’t matter, the meaning Jesus has for us is not limited by what he himself understood. For modern people so deeply steeped in the notion that the only truth is factual truth that may be a difficult answer to accept, so let me try to explain.
Religious symbols are usually grounded in some historical fact. The founding figures of most of the world’s great religions were real, historical people. The Buddha, Lao Tzu (probably or at least possibly), Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all real people who lived real human lives. The stories people tell about them and the ways people understand them are grounded in those real human lives. What the adherents of the religions that follow them say about them isn’t pulled out of thin air, it begins with historical fact. But religion isn’t about fact, it is about meaning. The meaning of any religion lies not in the facts about the religion’s founding figure. Rather, it arises out of the encounter of the founding figure’s followers with, at first, the founding figure himself, then with the significance they continue to find in the founding figure’s story and teachings as time continues past the life of the founding figure. A tradition develops that began with the founding figure but that grows and evolves as the tradition’s adherents continue to experience more and more meaning in the tradition and in its founding figure. That meaning arises not out of the founding figure and his words alone but out of the experience of the community that looks to him as its founder.
The best example we can give of this process is the Christian Gospels. It is commonplace among scholars that the Gospels are grounded in some historical fact; but the purpose and function of the Gospels is not to record historical fact. The Gospels contain some historical fact, but mostly they contain a witness to the experience of Jesus in certain early Christian communities, with his story, and with his teachings. The Gospels use story form, that is, they use myth, to speak not merely of the facts about Jesus but about the meaning of Jesus for them and their communities. The earliest of the Gospels was written, by conservative estimates, more than thirty years after Jesus’ death. In the years that passed between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels, Christian communities had had decades of experience living with Jesus and his message. They had had decades of experience worshipping God in and through him. He had acquired great meaning for them, meaning that quite possibly he didn’t have for himself during his lifetime. The purpose and function of the Gospels is to express that meaning, not to give historical facts. They are not a journalistic product of the time of Jesus. They are a faith confession from a time decades later. The meaning found in them is not and cannot be limited to what the historical person Jesus of Nazareth thought about himself. As his followers continued to experience the reality of him after his death his meaning evolved. It grew. His followers so felt the presence of God in him that they began to speak of him as the very incarnation of God. He became the incarnation of God—for them, whether he was that for himself or not. The meaning that arose from their encounter with him was that he was nothing less than God Incarnate. That is true quite regardless of what Jesus himself may have thought.
So unlike Gulley I am not prepared to abandon the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. For me it is indispensible to the meaning of the Christian faith. Without it Jesus’ teachings are just the teachings of a good man, and there have been many good men with great moral teachings in human history. Without it Jesus’ death on the cross is just the death of another good person executed because the powers could not tolerate his truth telling, and many good people have been executed because the powers could not tolerate their truth telling. As any of you who have read Liberating Christianity know, I do not believe that the Incarnation is necessary in the way the classical theory of atonement says that it was necessary. I do believe that it is necessary to Christianity nonetheless. Gulley’s book If the Church Were Christian has much to recommend it. On this one point, however, I believe Gulley has gotten it wrong.
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