3 Incarnation: The Word Became Flesh
Incarnation: the Word became flesh
I began my academic career as a scientist, and I still have an active interest in the field. A few years back, I read a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 67), one of the twentieth century’s most colourful scientists. He was widely regarded during his lifetime as one of America’s greatest physicists. But he is now remembered mainly as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’. During the Second World War, Oppenheimer played a key role in the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atom bomb, and its use against Japan in the summer of 1945.
Two things remained in my mind after reading the biography. One was the moral ambiguity of science. It can be used to do some great things – like heal diseases, and extend human life. And it can also be used to create weapons of mass destruction, intended to obliterate human life. It is an uneasy thought for scientists. But what impressed me above all was a memorable remark Oppenheimer made after the Second World War, as he realized how important it was to meet and talk to people if you wanted to really understand them. ‘The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.’1 It’s a great quote – and it’s right.
Messages can easily go wrong. I love a story that goes back to the days of telegrams. A couple were getting married. A relative of the bride, unable to attend the ceremony, sent a telegram to be read out at the reception afterwards. To keep the telegram as short (and inexpensive) as possible, he simply referred to a biblical text: 1 John 4.18. It was a very appropriate text. He expected someone to find the text in a Bible and read it aloud to the assembled company at the reception. ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.’
Unfortunately, the telegraph company got the text wrong. They missed out the ‘1’. So it was not 1 John 4.18 that was finally read out to the astonished guests, but John 4.18. ‘You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.’ The moral is clear! If you want people to understand you, you don’t send messages. You go to speak to them yourself.
And that’s one of the core themes of the central Christian idea of ‘incarnation’. God doesn’t send messages. God doesn’t even send a messenger. God comes to us, dwells with us, and speaks to us. The letter to the Hebrews is especially helpful on this point. In the Old Testament, God spoke to people in various ways – for example, by sending messengers. Yet this is to be seen as a long process of preparation of human hearts and minds for something still greater – the coming of God himself, in person.
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.
(Hebrews 1.1–3)
It’s a theme that is reflected in the powerful theological punches we find in so many Christmas carols. Charles Wesley’s great carol ‘Hark! the herald angels sing’ – which was originally published with the title ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings’ (‘welkin’ being an old English word for ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’) – has a particularly compelling verse:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see:
Hail, the incarnate Deity!
Pleased as man with man to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel!
For Wesley, hymns were an important supplement to the somewhat terse and unappealing statements of the creeds. They could communicate the basics of the Christian faith to ordinary churchgoers, while at the same time providing spiritual nourishment to the theologically educated. Regular singing of these hymns imprinted words and phrases in people’s memories and imaginations. Preachers could then unpack the meaning of those words, helping congregations go deeper into their faith (and get more out of singing hymns).
So what does it mean to speak about ‘the incarnate Deity’, or ‘God incarnate’? The word ‘incarnate’ is derived from the Latin and literally means ‘in the flesh’. It expresses the insight of John 1.14: ‘the Word became flesh, and lived among us’. Let us unpack this a little. ‘The Word’ (the term used for one who is living, imperishable, creative and divine) ‘became flesh’ (the term used for what is creaturely, perishable, finite, mortal and human) ‘and lived among us’.
The Christian faith affirms the momentous truth that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, ‘holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.’ The stable in which Christ was born is ‘a place of dreams come true’. Things that we dared not hope for unfold before our eyes. The great hopes and longings of humanity can be seen, not as delusions, but as intuitions of the deeper structure of reality. Wesley himself caught this sense of expectation in his famous hymn ‘Come, thou long-expected Jesus’, written in 1744. The hopes of all humanity will find their fulfilment in Jesus, the incarnate God.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart.
The idea of ‘incarnation’ means that we are dealing with – and talking about! – a God who chooses to take on frail and mortal human nature, who humbly enters into human history and experiences deprivation and suffering as a human being. Jesus of Nazareth comes to offer us God’s unfailing love and abiding presence, not through the exercise of power but through his suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection. The Incarnation is about God breaking down the barriers between earth and heaven. By sharing our life on earth, Jesus – as God incarnate – brings heaven to our lives on earth and invites us to share his life in heaven.
We mustn’t think of the Incarnation just as some kind of theological shorthand for the events of Christmas, in which Christians mark the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and celebrate its deeper significance. Or even for the events of Epiphany, which is the main day of rejoicing and present-giving in many Christian countries, since it marks the moment when people first started to take notice of Jesus, sensing his glory and beginning to glimpse who he really is.2
The doctrine of Incarnation may indeed focus on the birth of Jesus, but it is not limited to it. In speaking about ‘God incarnate’, we are not simply affirming that God chose to enter history in Bethlehem. We recognize that ‘incarnation’ extends to embrace the person that the infant Jesus became, above all the crucified Saviour, and the risen and ascended Christ. That’s what the Nicene Creed is getting at in its clear and concise statement: ‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit.’ God’s entry into history begins the great story of salvation, which reaches its climax in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Why Christians believe in the Incarnation
Earlier we noted how the creeds are an invitation to discover aspects of our faith which we imperfectly understand, or perhaps fear are fundamentally irrational. For some, the doctrine of the Incarnation could come into one – or both – of these categories. Like the doctrine of the Trinity, it seems to be a blot of foolishness on the landscape of a perfectly reasonable faith. Couldn’t we do without it and keep things simple?
Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the greatest lay theologians of the twentieth century, had an answer for those who doubted the relevance of the Incarnation. It was there because it needed to be. ‘Dogmas are not a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling.’ Rather they defended vital insights which, if lost, would condemn the Church to irrelevance. The central dogma of the Incarnation is what keeps Christianity Christian. ‘If Christ was only a man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life.’3
Sayers brings out the point that Christianity is shaped by a theological logic that leads inexorably to the doctrine of the Trinity on the one hand, and the doctrine of the Incarnation on the other. This doesn’t make either of these doctrines any easier to understand. But it does help us appreciate that neither is some kind of optional extra, like our choice of topping on an ice cream. They are woven into the fabric of the Christian faith.
In part, our problem comes from the ideas we’ve absorbed from our cultural context. You can’t live in the West without being influenced by its assumptions. These have been shaped by the rationalist culture of the eighteenth century – above all, its belief that reality could be reduced to something that reason could master. As a result, God and Jesus have come to be trapped within rationalist cages, like majestic tigers imprisoned, and unable to show themselves for what they really are. The stereotypes of Christ as a ‘good religious teacher’ or ‘a prophetic voice’ reflect this development. They help us avoid intellectual discomfort by simply ignoring the bits that don’t fit this rationalist template.
That’s precisely what the creeds – especially the Nicene Creed – want to prevent us doing. They don’t give us the option of holding on to our preconceived ideas about what Jesus ought to be like. As Dorothy Sayers saw so clearly, no existing mould or template is good enough to do justice to the full significance of Jesus. The Church had to invent one specially for this purpose.
Now, of course, Jesus of Nazareth really was a teacher and a prophet, and there is nothing wrong in affirming that. The trouble comes when we try to limit him to just one of those categories and lose sight of the fact that there may be many more aspects to explore, and to weave into our thinking about Jesus.
With my background in the natural sciences, I try to keep up my reading in the field – especially in the fascinating world of the history and philosophy of science. I find it offers a liberating alternative to the simplistic understandings of science held by some recent atheist writers – such as Richard Dawkins’s insistence that science proves all its beliefs. As we saw in Faith and the Creeds, it doesn’t, and the reason it doesn’t is that it can’t! Now there’s a particular aspect of the philosophy of science which helps us when we think about the identity of Jesus of Nazareth: it’s the approach called ‘critical realism’.
The basic idea of critical realism is that reality has many levels and that in order to see things in full, all these levels need to be taken into account. Many scientists would argue that science is about looking for the ‘big picture’ – the one that makes most sense of experimental observations. Whether we’re considering the origins of the universe or the movement of the planets, the best theory is always going to be the one that weaves together the greatest number of threads, or fits the greatest number of snapshots into the panorama.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes was noted for his passionate search for an explanation that made sense of all the clues. In the same way, Christians try to assemble the various snapshots of Jesus – such as Jesus as healer, as teacher and as Saviour – in the way that best holds all these together (as mentioned in Chapter 1). What is the ‘big picture’ that makes most sense of all the clues? That tells the truth, and the whole truth?
Let’s think about this a little more. I love detective novels. I spent two years studying at Cambridge University, and would often go to the open-air market in the centre of town to see what the booksellers had to offer me. At that stage, I was a great fan of the detective novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, featuring his greatest creation, the lawyer Perry Mason. Although I had copies of most of his novels by that time, every now and then one would turn up that I hadn’t read. I remember how excited I was when I not only found a book that I had not yet read – I think it was The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink – but it was very cheap. I bought it, and went back to my room to begin reading it.
It was one of his best, and I soon got into the plot. As the suspense built up, I became more and more engaged with the clues that Mason had discovered, and wondered how he would weave them together in an exciting courtroom climax. As I turned over a page, I realized to my horror that the last thirty pages were missing. That was why it was so cheap!
A good detective novel grabs the reader’s attention as the detective searches for the murderer. We are set alongside the fictional detective, as he or she discovers clues, and gradually builds up a picture of what must have happened, in order to uncover the identity of the murderer in an exciting climax. It is only at this point that we readers find out whether we have noticed all the clues, and worked out their real significance.
But whereas detective novels are basically ‘whodunnits’, the Gospels are best seen as ‘whowasits’. They are interested in establishing the identity and significance of their central figure, rather than with picking out a murderer from a number of possible suspects. The Gospel writers allow us to see and hear what the disciples heard, and force us to ask much the same questions that they must have asked before us. What do these things mean? Just who is this man? And just as the writers of detective novels single out, or draw our attention to, significant things (in other words, clues) which we might otherwise have overlooked, so the Gospel writers do the same.
It is so easy to overlook clues. Something may take place which appears to be insignificant at the time, and yet assumes a much greater significance later, as its full meaning becomes obvious. A good example is Conan Doyle’s story ‘Silver Blaze’, which tells of how the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes investigates an attack on a valuable racehorse. One important clue is that the watchdog did not bark during the night of the attack. This fact is observed, but its significance is only grasped later, when Holmes points out that it could only mean that the dog knew the intruder.
Something similar can be seen in the Gospels, where the fact that something did not happen is often important. For example, Mark notes that Jesus was silent before his accusers at his trial (Mark 14.61), where he might have been expected to defend himself. The significance of this silence can be seen in the light of the silence of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53.7) before his accusers. This mysterious individual, who features prominently in the prophecy of Isaiah, is widely seen as a redeemer, bearing other people’s wounds and sins. Mark wants us to notice this clue, and draw us on to note other parallels between Jesus and this mysterious Old Testament figure.
So how were these clues to be understood? What was really going on? And what do they tell us about the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth? Now, when you’re looking for a tool for a job, you have two options. You can start from scratch and invent something that has never been used before, developing it with the needs of the task specifically in mind. The easier option, though, is to take something that’s already in use and hope it can be adapted for the new job.
As the first Christians struggled to find the best way of making sense of Jesus,4 they adopted ideas that were already in use. Some suggested he was like a wandering sage – a dispenser of wisdom – though this limited Jesus’s significance to his teaching. Others argued he was like a prophet – a person with an especially close relationship with God. This framework was familiar to many early Christians, and certainly accommodated some of the snapshots of Jesus of Nazareth. For example, there were parallels between Jesus’ teaching and healing ministries and those of the prophet Elijah. But events like the resurrection simply didn’t fit in at all.
In the end, Christian theologians realized that they couldn’t borrow models from Judaism or secular Greek culture. Yes, Jesus was a teacher; yes, Jesus was a prophet – but he was so much more than this. He was also a saviour. And a friend of sinners. And lots of other things as well. No existing way of thinking about the expected Messiah did justice to the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth. The old wineskins just couldn’t cope with this new wine (Mark 2.22).
And so the doctrine of the Incarnation was developed, not as a result of church politics or pressure from the Roman emperor Constantine, but simply because the weight of evidence demanded this verdict. The doctrine of the Incarnation provided the best ‘big picture’ that made sense of all the little pictures – such as Jesus as a teacher, or a healer. Each of these snapshots would turn out to be an essential part of the panorama of incarnation, but none was sufficient on its own.
Some suggest that the doctrine of the Incarnation isn’t really biblical. After all, they rightly point out, the word ‘incarnation’ is never used in the New Testament. The technical term may not be there, but the idea certainly is. Many New Testament scholars would argue that the idea of ‘incarnation’ is just a rephrasing of the core insight of John 1.14: ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ The doctrine of the Incarnation is what we get when we join up the dots – when we grasp the ‘big picture’ that underlies the New Testament’s rich witness to the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. All the pieces of the jigsaw are there for us to put together, allowing us to see the pattern that results.
Jesus of Nazareth: the big picture
One of the most obvious differences between the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed is the terms they use in talking about Jesus. The Apostles’ Creed sets out the basic framework of the story of Jesus, using titles such as ‘Son of God’ and ‘Saviour’. The Nicene Creed employs a much more developed vocabulary. It affirms that Jesus of Nazareth is ‘true God from true God’, ‘of one Being with the Father’, and ‘was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’. So why this striking difference?
The answer lies in the historical origins of the Nicene Creed. As we saw in Faith and the Creeds, the Council of Nicaea was summoned by the Roman emperor Constantine in 325. Constantine, who had recently converted to Christianity, declared that Christianity was now a legal religion, and called a gathering of Christian bishops to hammer out an agreed summary of their faith. They met in the town of Nicaea in Asia Minor (now Iznik, in modern Turkey).
Constantine’s reasons for convening this council of bishops were complex, but one of his major concerns was to secure unity within the Christian churches. Christianity was becoming the most important religious movement within the Roman Empire, and Constantine was concerned that disagreements within the Church could threaten the unity of the empire. Towards the end of the previous century a highly divisive debate, concerning how Christians should think about Jesus of Nazareth, had split the Church. Not surprisingly, Constantine wanted things sorted out. He had no intention of imposing his own solution. He just wanted Christians to agree among themselves, so that a consensus could be reached. And it was.
The Apostles’ Creed offers a positive statement of basic Christian beliefs, a summary of what Christians ought to think. The Nicene Creed is more expansive, and warns us off certain ways of thinking that are inadequate or downright misleading understandings of core Christian beliefs – such as the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. The Nicene Creed lays down some ground rules for thinking about Jesus of Nazareth. Certain ways of understanding him were declared to be inadequate, others were seen as orthodox.
If we think of the range of possible interpretations of Christ’s identity and significance as being like a field, the council simply placed a hedge around the good pastureland. It marked off and preserved the area of reliable interpretations of Jesus of Nazareth, and invited us to explore them. Other ways of thinking about him were declared to be inadequate, impoverished or misleading. These are what we would now call ‘heresies’.5
Heresies often gained popularity because they seemed easy to believe or because they resonated with the cultural values of the age. One that gained support in the third century was known as ‘Arianism’ after Arius, a popular preacher in the city of Alexandria. It is not entirely clear what led him to develop his way of thinking about Jesus; however, it seems that one of Arius’s concerns about the doctrine of the Incarnation was that it caused offence to Greek philosophers, who considered it illogical. Just how could someone be both God and a human being?
Arius came up with an approach that he thought avoided this problem.6 While acclaiming Jesus as the greatest of God’s creatures, surpassing every other aspect of God’s creation, Arius insisted that Jesus was not divine in any sense of the term. He was ‘first among the creatures’ but still part of the created order.
This view was much easier for Arius to reconcile with the ideas of God preferred by Greek philosophers; his critics, however, argued that the very few advantages of the theory were totally eclipsed by its drawbacks. Athanasius of Alexandria, who is often singled out as one of the early Church’s most important theologians, had no doubt what the problems with Arianism were.
First, he argued, it represented a serious distortion of the witness to Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. Arius argued that certain passages which spoke of Jesus in highly exalted terms had to be seen as polite or respectful exaggerations of his significance. Athanasius countered that they were to be taken seriously and given due weight. He had little difficulty in pointing to some of the texts that were stumbling blocks for Arius. What about the confession of ‘Doubting Thomas’ on seeing the risen Christ: ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20.28)? Arius insisted that Jesus was a genuine human being; Athanasius believed this was only part of the story.
Second, Athanasius pointed to the practice of worshipping Jesus which, as we have seen, was already taking place within the New Testament, and was a regular aspect of Christian worship in the second century and beyond.7 Was this an expression of respect, an indication of personal allegiance? Or was it something much deeper that reflected an awareness of Jesus’ true identity as God incarnate? Athanasius argued that the overall patterns of devotion evident in the New Testament fitted easily and naturally into the view that Jesus of Nazareth was truly human and truly divine.
Third, Athanasius noted that both the New Testament and the Christian tradition speak of Jesus of Nazareth doing things which only God can do, including judging us. He echoed the views of earlier Christian theologians, such as Clement of Rome: ‘We must therefore think about Jesus Christ as about God, as the judge of the living and the dead.’8 Athanasius was particularly anxious to emphasize that the New Testament portrays Jesus of Nazareth as the saviour of humanity. Only God can save, so if Jesus is, as Arius suggested, merely a particularly gifted or prestigious human being, he cannot be our saviour. And if Jesus is not our saviour, he is part of the problem, not a solution to the problem.
Athanasius took this point further. If Jesus is just another human being, no matter how exalted, in what way is he qualified to speak about God? How can he show us what God is like? Once more, Athanasius pointed to the rich witness of the New Testament and drew out its theological consequences. If Jesus is a human being, like us, then the quality of his knowledge of God is on the same level as ours. He can only speak to us about God from a human standpoint, no matter how enlightened.
But if Jesus is God – as the doctrine of the Incarnation affirms – everything changes. First, Jesus can show and teach us what God is like – because he is God. He can make promises on God’s behalf. To put it simply, the divinity of Christ establishes a firm and unassailable theological link between God and Jesus. One of Scotland’s greatest theologians, Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870 –1936), used to hammer home this point in his theological lectures at New College, Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Divinity for over 30 years: ‘When I look into the face of Jesus Christ and see the face of God, I know that I have not seen that face elsewhere and could not see it else-how, for he and the Father are one.’9
Jesus is both a lens that allows us to see God clearly, and a gateway that gives us access to the presence of God and insight into our own situation. As G. K. Chesterton once remarked, Christianity provides us with ‘that longest and strangest telescope – the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt’.
The two natures of Jesus
The classic Christian understanding of Jesus is often summed up in the phrase ‘two natures’. Like all theological slogans, this can sound a little too neat and slick, but it puts into words, however inadequately, the distilled essence of Christian reflection on the identity and significance of Jesus: he is truly human and truly divine.
In speaking about Jesus of Nazareth like this, Christians do not mean that the Incarnation is about God ‘becoming’ human in the sense that God stopped being God and started being a human instead. The Incarnation is not about God ceasing to be God, but about God additionally taking up human nature. To put this another way, Jesus of Nazareth was not God minus some elements of divinity, but God plus everything that resulted from God assuming a human nature, and entering into human history. The Incarnation is about an enriched, not a diluted, vision of God.
Nor do Christians think that the doctrine of the Incarnation means that God ceased to be in heaven, and became exclusively and totally located in Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament is clear that God did not relocate to earth. John Calvin (1509 – 64) is one of many theologians who tried to put this difficult idea into words.
While the Word in his immeasurable essence was united with human nature in one person, we do not imagine that he was limited as a result. Here is something marvellous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be born in the virgin’s womb, to go about on earth, and to hang upon the cross.10
It’s not an easy idea to grasp. Let me share an approach which helps me make sense of this. I can still remember the sense of excitement that I and countless others experienced when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July 1969. I stayed up very late to watch the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong becoming the first human being to set foot on the moon, and heard his words: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ The Apollo 11 team brought about 20 kilograms of moonrock back to earth with them, so that scientists could study samples of the moon for the very first time.
I often think about that event when reflecting on the Incarnation. The moon is still there in the sky. But we now have an authentic sample of moonrock on earth. Sure, it’s an inadequate analogy. But it helps us grasp one point. The moon remains where it is. But in 1969, we were able to hold part of the moon in our hands, touching it for the first time. As Germanus of Constantinople put it in an eighth-century hymn still sung to this day, ‘The Word becomes incarnate and yet remains on high.’
So far, so good. But the Nicene Creed uses more technical language to refer to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, it declares, is ‘true God from true God’ and ‘of one Being with the Father’. So why does it use these phrases? And what are we to make of them?
Let’s begin with the first of these. Why the emphasis on Jesus being ‘true God from true God’? The basic idea is simple: we can trust Jesus to show and tell us what God is like. Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the God of Christianity – the one true God who created the world before entering into it in order to redeem it. Those who want to know what God is like need only look to the face of Jesus. ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,’ he states (John 14.9). To put this in a dangerously simple way: Jesus is able to tell us about God and show us what God is like precisely because he is God. He is the lens through which we see God most reliably.
We all know people who are hypocritical – the colleague at work who praises the boss to his face and rubbishes him behind his back; or the friend who supports us when we make a difficult decision then tells other people how foolish she thinks we’re being. The problem with being ‘two-faced’ is not that a person is operating in two different environments or contexts. It’s that the ‘face’ being presented is totally different in each case – almost as if someone were two distinct people. The New Testament, however, portrays Jesus of Nazareth as a single person, rooted both in the reality of God and in the reality of human nature. Jesus faces two ways, but the ‘face’ presented is one and the same. He really does show us the face of God.
But what of the second statement? What does it mean to say that Jesus is ‘of one Being with the Father’? Here we need to spend a few moments in the technical world of Greek philosophy. The word translated as ‘Being’ (or, in a number of translations of the creed, ‘substance’) really means something like ‘essential nature’ or ‘inward identity’. As we noted earlier, the Nicene Creed resolved a debate within the Church over the best way of expressing the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. One option was to suggest that Jesus is like God; the other was to say that Jesus really is God. The Nicene Creed made its views clear: the best way of understanding Jesus is to affirm that he is the full embodiment of God.
The council had no time for the idea that a busy and overworked God might decide to send a deputy or delegate to be responsible for running the universe and saving the human race. Following precedents in classical Greek thought, such a ‘deputy’ could be thought of as a subordinate figure – some kind of divinity who wasn’t quite on the same level as God. But this does not fit at all well with the witness to Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament, where Jesus is clearly thought of as coming, not merely to bring us some kind of communication from God, but to enable us to have fellowship with God – and to show us what that life of fellowship with God looked like in practice. Jesus of Nazareth is thus both the foundation and an illustration of the redeemed life.
Let’s now consider the significance of the Incarnation in more detail.
The significance of the Incarnation
Which God lies at the heart of the Christian faith? The New Testament answer is clear: ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Ephesians 1.3). Christians believe and trust in the God of Jesus of Nazareth, that is, we believe in the same God as Jesus. The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926) found himself drawn to Jesus as he read the Gospel narratives. He began his pilgrimage of faith by believing in God as a mark of respect for Jesus. But as he reflected on the New Testament, he began to realize that there was a more complex relationship involved. Later in his career, he framed his approach in a slightly different way but one that remains helpful. ‘Christians believe in Jesus for God’s sake, and in God for Jesus’s sake’.11 What Moltmann is getting at is summed up beautifully in the ‘farewell discourses’ of John’s Gospel. ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me’ (John 14.1). To trust God is to trust Jesus.
Let’s explore this a little further. If we are to trust God, we must have trustworthy knowledge of God, and Jesus is not only the best image we have of God: he is an image of God that is authorized by God. We are meant to focus on Jesus of Nazareth – his life, death and resurrection – in reflecting on who God is, and what God is like. Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1.15), the ‘reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’ (Hebrews 1.3). The Christian idea of the Incarnation brings out this fundamental aspect of the identity of Jesus: he is the one who shows us and tells us what God is really like. To trust in God is thus also to trust in the one who makes God known.
Here’s a story that might make the idea of Jesus as ‘the image of God’ easier to grasp. Back in 1976, a colleague and I spent time travelling in Turkey and Iran. Border controls were much more relaxed in those days, and as I was waiting to present my passport at the desk, the person immediately in front of me got involved in an argument with the Iranian immigration official. His passport photo did not match his face. ‘You can’t trust cameras!’ the traveller protested. ‘It’s a bad picture. I don’t really look like that!’ And he gestured furiously at his passport photo. After a few moments staring at the photograph, the official shrugged his shoulders, stamped the passport and waved him through.
None of us wants to look like our passport photo. Sure, it’s an image of us. But it can be a bad and misleading image, bearing little relation to what we really look like. Remember Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves? Anne’s German family connections led Henry to think she might be worth marrying to secure an alliance between England and Germany. However, he had never met Anne, and had no idea what she looked like. As photography had not yet been invented, the artist Hans Holbein was commissioned to paint her portrait. Henry liked what he saw, and the marriage contract was duly arranged. When Henry met Anne for the first time, his courtiers reported that he did not like her looks. Holbein’s portrait was too flattering! In the end, the marriage was cancelled, although the two remained friends for the rest of Henry’s life.
Pictures matter in everyday life, and they matter just as much in the life of faith. The doctrine of the Incarnation reassures us that Jesus of Nazareth is the most trustworthy picture of God we possess. We simply do not have access to any better image than this. To trust in the Christian God is to trust the means by which we know this God – supremely, through the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the point of intersection between God and ourselves, the window through which we see God, and the highway by which we come to God. Jesus does not simply tell us about God; he shows us God. Jesus does not simply point out the way to God; he takes us to God. The Incarnation is all about bringing God to us, and us to God. That’s why the image of Jesus of Nazareth as mediator, which we looked at in the previous chapter, is so helpful.
Let’s now look at a classic statement of the doctrine of the Incarnation, found in the writings of the great theologian Athanasius of Alexandria. In his masterpiece On the Incarnation of the Word of God, written around 365, Athanasius set out its basic themes like this:
So the Son of God became the Son of Man, so that the sons of man, that is, of Adam, might become sons of God. The Word begotten of the Father from on high, inexpressibly, inexplicably, incomprehensibly and eternally, is the one who is born in time here below, of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, so that those who are born here in the first place might have a second birth from on high, that is, of God.12
The language is dense, but the basic idea is clear. God became incarnate – that is, God entered into human history as a real human being – in order to allow those born in time to be reborn eternally. God became incarnate, so that we might become the children of God. The doctrine of the Incarnation frames and safeguards one of the most dramatic insights of the Christian faith – namely, that the God who created the heavens and the earth chose to come and dwell among us human beings as one of us.
One of my recent research projects involved looking at the correspondence between a group of American pastors and their counterparts in England during the early seventeenth century. The letters had to be transported by sailing ships across the Atlantic Ocean. It was a long and dangerous journey and the letters often took months to arrive. Sometimes the ships never made it across the ocean at all. Yet today, I can send a message to an American colleague in seconds. I’ve got so used to this that I have lost any sense of amazement over being able to communicate so quickly.
Similarly, as Christians we can become so familiar with the idea of the Incarnation that we lose sight of its wonder. Paul’s astonishment and delight at the idea of God humbly entering into history in the form of a servant is evident from his letters – especially the famous ‘Christ-hymn’ of his letter to the Philippians:
Though [Jesus of Nazareth] was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.
(Philippians 2.6 – 8)
Paul clearly regards the idea of the sovereign and creator Lord choosing to enter the world in such a humble manner as too wonderful to capture properly in words. Not only does the creator of the world stoop down to enter our history: God enters the world as its servant, and is put to death by the most inhuman form of execution that human ingenuity could devise. The creator and redeemer of humanity willingly suffers the fate that civilized humanity reserved for its worst criminals. God did not send a deputy or representative into the world to bring us to our senses and redeem us. The Father himself set out into the ‘far country’ to call his lost and wayward children home, so that they might live for ever with him.
C. S. Lewis on the Incarnation
As we have seen, Christmas marks the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of the Christian faith. But some readers may still wonder whether there is a disconnection between the singular life of Jesus of Nazareth and the universal relevance of God. What has someone who lived long, long ago got to do with us today? Or with God?
That was the question that troubled C. S. Lewis in 1931. After a period as an atheist, Lewis had recently returned to belief in God. God, he concluded, offered a way of making sense of the world and of human experience, which appealed to both his reason and imagination. But Jesus of Nazareth did not seem to fit into this scheme of things. He seemed superfluous. Why did belief in God have anything to do with him? As he wrote to his close friend Arthur Greeves, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now’.13 How on earth could the life of someone who lived two thousand years ago impact on us now? It’s a question that many asked before Lewis, and one that many continue to ask today.
Lewis’s answer remains important. After a long conversation with his colleague J. R. R. Tolkien in September 1931, Lewis began to realize that Christianity was not primarily a set of ideas about God and the world. It was about a story – a ‘grand narrative’, which both captured the imagination and opened up new ways of thinking. The creeds arose from reflection on this true and trustworthy story, which centred and focused on Jesus of Nazareth. When rightly understood, the imaginatively compelling story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was about God entering the world, in order to redeem it. The Christmas liturgy and carols set out a powerful vision of a God who enters the world in humility, which is embraced by the imagination as much as it is analysed by reason. We would do well to reflect on Lewis’s emphasis on the ‘imaginative embrace’ of faith. The theme of the Incarnation is impoverished if it is reduced to a mere piece of cold and clinical theological logic.
Lewis explored the theme of incarnation in a highly imaginative way in a remarkable sermon preached in a London church during the Second World War. Lewis had learned how to dive in 1930. Although he initially saw this simply as an enjoyable and exhilarating experience, Lewis began to realize its potential as an analogy for what he was coming to see as a core theme of the Christian faith – the Incarnation. In his sermon, Lewis invited his audience to imagine a diver, who wants to rescue something precious that has fallen into the mud at the bottom of a deep lake. He asks us to imagine the diver plunging
down through the green and warm and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get.14
And just what is this thing that merited all that effort and risk? It is us, God’s wayward creatures! God ‘descended into his own universe, and rose again, bringing human nature up with him’.
For Lewis, the doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that God plunged into our world to perform a rescue operation. It can be summed up in the biblical affirmation that the ‘Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1.14). The Greek word translated here as ‘lived’ more accurately means ‘pitched his tent’. It presents us with a powerful image of Israel as a wandering people in the period looked back to by the prophets as a time when she was close to God. As the Israelites travel on the journey of faith, they find a new tent pitched in their midst. God himself has come to dwell among them. And God is with us, as our constant companion and consoler.
The doctrine of the Incarnation solidifies one of the great truths of the Christian faith – that God truly cares for us, not as a passive distant observer, but as an active fellow traveller on the road of human life. If life is a journey, God is our constant companion on that journey. And let’s remember where that word ‘companion’ comes from – a Latin root meaning ‘someone that you break bread with’ or ‘someone who shares your bread’. It’s hard not to see the connections with the story of the Road to Emmaus.
This is a theme which the Christian Church recalls every year at Christmas, as it rejoices in the knowledge that its Saviour has not dismissed us as insignificant or devoid of value. So much did our creator and redeemer love us that he chose to enter into his creation in the most lowly manner. One of the finest and best-known statements of this theme is found in Cecil F. Alexander’s Christmas carol ‘Once in royal David’s city’:
He came down to earth from heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all,
And his shelter was a stable,
And his cradle was a stall;
With the poor, and mean, and lowly,
Lived on earth our Saviour holy.
We do not have to climb a ladder into heaven in order to find and embrace God. God has come down that ladder in order to meet us where we are, and to embrace us. Our Saviour has come into our home in order to bring us to his home, where we may rest and feast with him. He abides with us, sharing our shame and pain, while making it possible for us to rise above this and one day join him in the halls of the New Jerusalem.
The Incarnation and the journey of faith
We have been opening a series of windows into the Incarnation in the present chapter. Let’s now consider how three of the insights we’ve gained may help us make sense of our faith and cope with our personal journey
First, the Incarnation allows us to picture God. To know Christ is to know God. To have seen Christ is to have seen God. ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14.9). To appreciate the importance of this, let’s think about what the love of God is like. We could say that it is infinite, boundless and beyond human telling. But that’s not much use. That’s saying what the love of God is not like. How can we speak of the love of God for us in a way that appeals to our imaginations, and enables us to picture it in action rather than as an abstract idea?
The doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that the love of God is like the love of someone who willingly lays down his life for his friends (John 15.13). This moving and poignant image drawn from human experience heightens our awareness of the wonder of what God has done for us. We can visualize the love of God as we picture Jesus Christ trudging to Calvary. He did not need to do this; he chose to do it – and he chose to do it for us. What Jesus says tells us what God is like; what Jesus did shows us what God is like.
Second, the Incarnation is about bringing our own stories into contact with the story of God. This idea may seem difficult to grasp, but it is worth taking trouble over. Each of us has our own, unique story, which nobody else shares. But bringing our story into connection with a ‘grand narrative’ gives it a new significance. It helps us realize our story is part of a greater one, and in one sense, faith is about embracing this ‘bigger story’ and allowing our own story to contribute to it.
We see this in the Chronicles of Narnia, where C. S. Lewis deftly shows how the children – particularly Lucy Pevensie, who is in many ways the central human character of the series – have their individual stories shaped by the story of the magnificent and noble lion Aslan. Lucy’s love for Aslan is expressed in her commitment to him. She wants to do what he wants; she wants to become part of his story.
Lewis thus develops a New Testament theme which has a long history of exploration within the Christian faith. Faith involves putting to death the old self (Galatians 2.20) and rising to a new life. We do not lose our individuality; rather, we gain a new identity, while remaining individuals who are loved by God. As Lewis makes clear in the Chronicles of Narnia, our own stories can become a prison. We can get locked into ways of thinking and acting that are purely self-serving.
Lucy and the other children realize that there is indeed a ‘bigger story’, and long to become part of it. Yet they are not gatecrashing someone else’s story; they were made and were meant to be part of it. So they surrender their self-centred stories, and replace them with Aslan-centred stories, which give them purpose, value and meaning. That’s what the Incarnation affirms – that God enters our history, so we can redirect our own stories to be part of the greater story of God’s loving process of putting the world to rights. We have a part to play in that story, and faith is partly about finding, accepting and embracing our God-given roles.
There are many examples of this from which we can learn. Ira Sankey (1840 –1908) was a fine singer, who was impressed by Dwight Moody, the greatest revivalist preacher of the second half of the nineteenth century. The two met in Indianapolis in 1870. The next day, Moody asked Sankey to meet him at a street corner. When Sankey arrived, Moody produced a soap-box, and invited Sankey to mount it and sing a hymn. Sankey – who had a magnificent voice – did so. A crowd gathered to hear him. When Sankey had finished, Moody got on the box and delivered a short sermon. Sankey’s singing drew many to hear Moody preach. As Sankey developed his ministry, he became one of the greatest writers and arrangers of hymns of his generation. His musical gift was put to new use. Sankey had become part of a greater story.
Third, the Incarnation assures us that God is with us – even in the darkest moments of life. This great theme of the doctrine of the Incarnation is summed up in the name given to Christ at his birth: ‘Emmanuel’ – ‘God is with us’ (Matthew 1.20 –23). But what exactly does ‘God being with us’ mean? Well, first it brings home to us that God is rooting for us. ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ (Romans 8.31–32). ‘God is with us’ thus means that ‘God is on our side’.
In the birth of the long-promised Saviour, in his death on the cross of Calvary, and in his resurrection from the dead we have a demonstration, a proof, a guarantee, that God stands by us. When Christians celebrate the Incarnation every Christmas, they are affirming that the God we are dealing with, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not a God who is indifferent to our fate. This God is passionately committed to our salvation, to redeeming us from sin, and to raising us to eternal life on the last day.
‘God is with us’ thus secondly means that we are dealing with a God who has entered into our human situation, who became a human being and dwelt among us as one of us – someone who knows at first hand what it is like to be frail, mortal and human, to suffer and to die. This is an important point for us to hold on to when we have to face suffering. Jesus has been there before us. God incarnate knows what it is like to experience anguish.
At times, we feel immensely lonely as we journey through life. We often long for companionship on that long and difficult road, especially when it appears dark and dangerous. The doctrine of the Incarnation assures us that the God who has called us to be with him has already travelled that road. The creator has entered the creation, and knows precisely the circumstances we face. Christ has shed tears on the road of human sorrow and suffering before us. God our shepherd journeys with us, even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23). We are not alone.
Finally, Jesus does not merely show us what God is like, important though that is; he also gives us a glimpse of what we could be. We shall explore this theme further in the final chapter of this book, as we consider how Jesus of Nazareth helps us shape and live the Christian life.
We now need to turn our attention to the full significance of what Jesus achieved and secured through his death and resurrection. In the next chapter, we will explore what are often referred to as ‘theories of the atonement’.