I have written in this blog before about the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Below you will find my post “On the Incarnation of Christ.” That post states a good deal about my beliefs concerning the Incarnation. Yet the matter seems to me so important, so central to a proper understanding of Christianity, and so widely misunderstood that I must say more about it. That is what I intend to do here.
What is the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation? It is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians confess to be the Christ, God’s Anointed One, is at the same time fully human and fully divine. It claims the impossible. It claims that God, Creator of all that is, who infinitely transcends anything in creation, who is beyond all human comprehension, came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, lived a human life as Jesus of Nazareth, and died a human death in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is true that the earliest Christian documents that we have do not contain an incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ. The earliest Christian documents that we have are the authentic letters of Paul. For Paul Jesus is a human being whom God raised from the dead and made Lord, that is, ruler, of the world. He is not himself precisely divine. Paul is not entirely consistent on the point, for in the kenosis hymn of Philippians he does seem to describe Jesus as divine in origin and as having given up divinity by becoming human. On the whole, however, for Paul Jesus is Lord and Savior without himself being or ever having been fully divine. Neither is Jesus clearly and consistently divine in the Synoptic Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus is the Christ, but that doesn’t make him divine.
The clearest biblical foundation for the doctrine of the Incarnation is found in the Gospel of John. In the opening verses of John we read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Then, a few verses later, John says: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” He is referring to Jesus of course. In the Gospel of John Jesus is identical with “the Father” throughout. John is the incarnational Gospel. John is also the latest Gospel. When we read the New Testament documents for what they actually say rather than what we have been told they say, and when we read them in chronological order rather than in their traditional canonical order, we see that a fully incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ, or at least a fully incarnational language about Jesus Christ, arose late in the New Testament period.
The clear fact that the earliest Christians did not use fully incarnational language when talking about Jesus but later Christians did raises the question of why. Why did the early Christian tradition develop the language of incarnation but do so only late in the New Testament period? The answer to those questions lies, I am convinced, in the experience of the earliest Christians of Jesus. Readers of Liberating Christianity, my book that was published in 2008, know that I believe that all human knowledge and all human truth is ultimately grounded in human experience. It is no different with the earliest Christians' experience of Jesus. It seems clear that those Christians who knew Jesus during his earthly life as well as those Christians who learned about him and experienced his spiritual presence after his death experienced in him the presence and the power of God in a unique way, a way unlike anything they had ever experienced before. They experienced God in a new way in Jesus, and they learned about God’s nature from him in a new way as well.
The earliest Christians were Jews, and Judaism wasn’t, and isn’t, at all comfortable with the idea that a human being could be God. To them incarnation sounds like blasphemy, so the earliest Christians did not jump immediately to the language of incarnation to talk about their experience of Jesus. They did mine the Hebrew Scriptures for language and images with which to express their experience of Jesus. They found the concept Messiah, and they called Jesus the Messiah or the Christ, the Greek equivalent of Messiah. They found the suffering servant songs of Isaiah, and they saw such parallels between Isaiah’s suffering servant and Jesus that they called those passages a prediction of Jesus. They took words from their religious tradition, their social milieu, and the political realm of the day, words like Lord (which means master, the one to whom one owes allegiance) and applied them to Jesus. They took terms that the Romans applied to the emperor, including the terms savior and son of a god or of a divine one, and applied them to Jesus as well. The early Christians clearly were searching for words and images to express their experience of Jesus.
They were struggling to understand where the intimate presence of God that they experienced in Jesus came from—and when it arose. As the decades of the first Christian century passed they kept pushing the beginning of Jesus’ unique, intimate relationship with God farther and farther back in Jesus' life, and beyond. For Paul that relationship arose only with Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. For Mark, the earliest of the Gospels but written after Paul, Jesus’ special relationship with God arose at his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptizer. For Luke and Matthew it arose at Jesus’ conception in Mary’s womb. For John, the last of the Gospels to be written, it arose, as we have seen, before the creation of the world. Once again we see the early Christians struggling to find words and images to express the experience they had of the powerful presence of God in Jesus. We see their language moving more and more toward an expression of Jesus as divine.
In the end the image that they settled on was Incarnation. Grounded in the Gospel of John, the doctrine of the Incarnation received its classical formulation in the symbol crafted by the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE. By then Christianity had separated completely and finally from Judaism. It had taken root in the Greek world, the Greek culture, of the eastern Roman Empire. The bishops who gathered at Nicaea, under the watchful eye of the Emperor, who had a strong political interest in a unified Christianity, were, mostly at least, Greek. It is therefore hardly surprising that they used the language of the Greek culture, of the Greek philosophy, of their time to express their understanding of who Jesus was and is. They were dealing with two undeniable but seemingly incompatible realities. Jesus had been a human being, a man, born of a woman and killed as a threat to the Empire. Like every human being his life had a distinct beginning and a distinct ending. He was human. Fully, completely, undeniably human. Yet they also experienced the very presence of God in him. It was the same experience Jesus’ followers had had since the time when he walked with them on earth. There was a significant theological dispute at Nicaea, the dispute between the followers of Arius and the followers of Athanasius over the ontological status of Jesus. It seems clear, however, that both sides were struggling to find appropriate and convincing language to express the two natures of the Christian experience of Jesus, the experience of him as human and as nonetheless somehow representing the presence of God.
In the end the Council of Nicaea sided with Athanasius and adopted what has become the classic formulation of orthodox Christian Christology. Using philosophical categories with which the people of their time were generally familiar (and with which the people of our time are not familiar at all) they said that Jesus Christ was of one substance (homoousious) with God the Father. They said that he had two natures (physis) in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis, an essentially untranslatable Greek word that means the essence or underlying reality of something. This language is mostly incomprehensible today, and the fact that millions upon millions of Christians speak it every week in worship doesn’t change that fact. Yet the experience that it seeks to express is not incomprehensible at all. It is the experience of the mysteriously powerful presence of God in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. It is the experience of the Incarnation.
The insight that what the New Testament writers and the bishops who formulated the classical statement of the Incarnation at Nicaea were struggling to find language with which to communicate an underlying experience of the presence of God in the human being Jesus suggests how we are to understand the language they chose. They weren’t trying to state facts. They were trying to express an experience. They were trying to express an experience that transcended ordinary human experience. On the one hand it was an experience of a human being like other human beings, but on the other hand it was an experience of God. Human language about humans can be factual, can be understood literally. Human language about God, however, can never be factual, can never be understood literally. God utterly transcends our finite human language. Language about God can only be symbolic and mythic. I discuss the symbolic and mythic nature of religious language more fully in Liberating Christianity. If the idea that language about God must necessarily be symbolic and mythic is new or foreign to you, I urge you to read my discussion of that issue in the book. It is widely available on line or from the publisher, Wipf and Stock, at wipfandstock.com.
The language of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is symbolic language, not literal, factual language. I am convinced that the difficulty many people have with the Incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ stems from the fact that we hear the language of the Incarnation literally. We hear it as a statement of alleged fact. Hearing the language of Incarnation as a statement of a fact, however, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of that language. It is not factual. It is symbolic.
The understanding of Incarnational language as symbolic rather than factual matters. It matters because it makes the Incarnation accessible and believable to people whose factual understanding of that language has led them to reject the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. It simply is true that the Incarnation makes no sense when it is understood literally. No one can literally be God. Certainly no one can be fully God and fully human at the same time if that claim is understood factually. However, it makes perfect sense when it is understood as a symbolic statement. As a symbolic statement it is grounded in the human experience of Jesus, but it points beyond its literal meaning to a transcendent, spiritual meaning. It becomes a means through which we find our connection with God. It allows us to see the reality of God in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus Christ. It gives us something we can understand, a human life, that points us toward, tells us about, and connects us with something we cannot otherwise understand, the nature and will of God. In the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ God becomes accessible to us. God becomes alive to us. God reaches out to us, touches us, and claims us as God’s own.
The symbolic understanding of the Incarnation makes it possible for us to retain and to preserve the basic Christian understanding that makes Christianity different from any other great religion. The Incarnation is that traditional Christian doctrine that, along with the Trinitarian understanding of the nature of God, makes Christianity unique among the world’s religions. When we lose the Incarnation, we lose the heart of what Christianity has always been. Understanding the Incarnation symbolically allows us to embrace it despite its factual impossibility.
More than that, the symbolic understanding of the Incarnation allows us to embrace it precisely because of its factual impossibility. The Incarnation is about God. It is also about humanity, but mostly it is about God. God so transcends our finite human cognitive capacities that God must always remain ultimately a mystery to us. Like the closely related symbol of the Trinity, the symbol of the Incarnation preserves the mystery of God through paradox. It says that two utterly incompatible things are both true at the same time. It says that the infinite was fully present in the finite. One of the great losses we experience when we lose the Incarnation is the loss of paradox. All profound truth about God is paradoxical. God is transcendent and imminent. God is three and one. God is infinite and present in finite creation. The symbol of the Incarnation is paradox, and its paradoxical nature makes it more true, not less true.
The symbol of the Incarnation makes Jesus’ death meaningful. I won’t restate here the theology of the cross that I set out in Liberating Christianity. If you are not familiar with theology of the cross and how it offers an understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death far superior to that given by the classical theory of atonement, that is, the theory of Jesus’ death understood as a substitutionary sacrificial atonement for human sin, I urge you to read chapters 8 and 9 of Liberating Christianity. The point I want to make here is only that without the Incarnation Jesus’ death has no more meaning than the death of any other human being whom the powers killed because they could not stand his or her truth telling. That the powers killed him and that they did so because they could not stand his truth telling certainly is true of Jesus, but it is also true of a great many other saints of the Christian tradition and of other great religious traditions. In our times it was true of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example. Christianity has always seen more meaning than that in Jesus’ death. True, the meaning that Christianity has seen in Jesus’ death has mostly been expressed in terms of substitutionary sacrificial atonement, a brutal theory that makes God a cosmic child abuser more concerned with God’s own honor than with saving humankind. Once again I urge you to read chapters 8 and 9 of Liberating Christianity if that statement puzzles or shocks you. Classical atonement theory is not, however, the only way in which Christianity has understood the meaning of Jesus’ death. The Incarnation is essential if that death, however it is understood, is to have more meaning than does the death of a merely human martyr. That theology of the cross requires Incarnation is indeed one of the primary reasons that I hold to the Incarnation.
Whenever I hear someone who self-identifies as a Christian deny the Incarnation and characterize Jesus as only human, albeit perhaps a very great and inspiring human, I want to ask at least a couple of pretty important questions. If Jesus is only human, why should we follow him and not another of the many men and women throughout history who have been great moral teachers and who have died as martyrs? If we understand Jesus as only human how does he reveal to us anything about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation? If Jesus is merely human how do we know that God is nonviolent, compassionate, forgiving? If Jesus is merely human how do we know that God is a God of justice, not justice for God but justice for God’s people, especially for the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast? Perhaps some Christians with a humanist Christology can give some kind of answer to these and other important questions, but I have never heard a convincing answer to them. To me these questions remain unanswerable.
Some Christians with what is essentially a Unitarian understanding of Jesus try to preserve a notion of divinity present in Jesus by saying that all humans contain a spark of the divine. That may be true. I will concede for our purposes here at least that it is. Yet I know that there is a vast difference between the way God was present in Jesus and the way God may be present in me or any other human being other than Jesus. Some may say that it is only a difference in degree, but differences in degree can become so great that they become a difference in kind. I believe that to be true of the difference between how God may be present in me and was present in Jesus. The doctrine of the Incarnation preserves that difference in kind, a difference without which Jesus becomes just another human being, one whom there is no particular reason for us to follow.
To me the Incarnation is indispensible for true Christianity, and to me a symbolic understanding of the Incarnation is indispensible to Christianity’s preservation of the Incarnation. Without the Incarnation Jesus has no more meaning than do a great many other great men and women. Without a symbolic understanding the Incarnation is incomprehensible and cannot be maintained. So let us cling to the Incarnation as essential to our Christian faith, and let us understand it symbolically so that it can be for us alive and life-giving, can be our very connection with God.
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