Conclusion
Chapter Six
The significance of the incarnation
This study thus far has yielded conclusions that are classically patristic. In terms of the Nicene Creed of AD 325, the Son of God came down from heaven to save us. In terms of the ancient hymn the Te Deum (fourth century AD), in so doing the Son of God overcame the sting of death and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. In terms of the famous Chalcedonian definition of AD 451, Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God is one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. The task now is to consider the question ‘So what?’ Or, put another way, what is the significance of the incarnation? Theologically considered, just how important is the incarnation? As we shall see, that significance is manifold but for the purposes of this discussion I shall divide significance into two kinds: theological and existential. I make no pretence to being exhaustive in so doing.
Theological significance
The theological significance of the incarnation will be explored in terms of its methodological implications for the doing of theology, its import for the question of God and change, for its affirmation of the value of creation, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for its importance in the Christian’s encounter with other religions in the world, for theodicy and defence in the face of evil, and for matters of the dogmatic ranking of doctrines.
For theological method
Paul G. Hiebert maintains that there are three types of theology. Systematic theology examines ‘the fundamental categories of and structures implicit in Scripture’ in a synchronic way. Biblical theology reads Scripture diachronically with sensitivity to its storyline as it unfolds in space and time. Narrative is to the fore. He then suggests a third kind of theology, which he calls ‘missiological theology’. This form of theology asks, ‘What does God’s Word say to humans in this particular situation?’ Others might call this ‘applied theology’. Whether the theology in view is systematic theology or biblical theology or missiological theology so called, theology cannot be done as though we do not live on a visited planet. In other words we ought not to do Christian theology as though Christ had never come.
Karl Barth draws out the methodological implications of Christ’s coming for theological thought in the following terms:
We must realize that the Christian message does not at its heart express a concept or an idea, nor does it recount an anonymous history to be taken as truth and reality only in concepts and ideas. Certainly the history is inclusive, i.e. it is the one which includes in itself the whole event of ‘God with us’ and to that extent the history of all those to whom ‘God with us’ applies. But it recounts this history and speaks of its inclusive power and significance in such a way that it declares a name, binding the history indissolubly to this name and presenting it as the story of this name. This means that all the concepts and ideas used in this report (God, man, world, eternity, time, even salvation, grace, transgression, atonement and any others) can derive their significance only from the bearer of this name and from His history, and not the reverse. They cannot have any independent importance or role based on a quite different prior interpretation. They cannot say what has to be said with some meaning of their own or in some context of their own abstracted from this name. They can only serve to describe this name – the name of Jesus Christ.
Barth is stating an important principle in the theological methodological realm that St Peter expressed in the soteriological one. Peter preached, ‘And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men [anthrōpoi includes both males and females] by which we must [dei, ‘of necessity’] be saved’ (Acts 4:12 ESV). In both cases there is in a pluralistic culture an unavoidable scandal in attaching so much methodologically, soteriologically and, I would add, epistemologically to that Name with its sufficiency, supremacy and finality. The scandal of particularity remains.
In a nutshell, as Barth realized, we cannot do theology as though Christ has not come in the flesh.
For the doctrine of God and change
If we indeed live on a visited planet, then did that event change God, and if so in what ways? After all, John 1:14 claims that the Word (logos) became (egeneto) something other than the Word, namely flesh (sarx).
There are several logical possibilities here. One is that the incarnation changed the very being of God. This seems to be an implication of kenoticist Christologies that argue that either the Son of God divested himself of his omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence in becoming incarnate (e.g. Gottfried Thomasius) or put them into abeyance. For the most radical kenoticist of them all, Thomas J. J. Altizer, in becoming incarnate God ceased to be God and thus the death on the cross was the death of God. He writes, ‘The radical Christian proclaims that God has actually died in Christ, that this death is both a historical and a cosmic event, and, as such, it is a final and irrevocable event, which cannot be reversed by a subsequent religious or cosmic movement.’ If that were so, it is utterly mystifying why a New Testament was ever written predicated as it is on the assumption of a living God. Taking another tack, perhaps God’s being per se was not changed by the incarnation. Rather God’s character has been changed by a matter of degree. God is now more loving and more compassionate because of the experience of incarnation. However, the fact that the divine love and compassion are more in view in the incarnate Son of God may be better understood as an epistemological claim, not an ontological one. Is there a better answer?
The better answer is the classical one. As in the Athanasian Creed (sixth century) the incarnation is claiming ‘not the conversion of Godhead into flesh, but the assumption of manhood into God’ (Lat. non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum). That is to say, the Trinity now relates to itself qua Trinity in a new way through the humanity of Christ. As Bruce Milne rightly argues, we are not talking about the triune Godhead and minus regarding the incarnation. As he states it, ‘At a theological level kenosis appears to move in the wrong direction. Its basic equation is: incarnation = God minus. The biblical equation is rather: incarnation = God plus.’ The plus is the new way the Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate through the assumed humanity of the Son. Rather we are speaking of the Trinity and plus. The change is relational and permanent.
For the affirmation of the created order
Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. Clearly he wasn’t suggesting that here is a faith interested only in materialistic pursuits. Rather his point was that Christianity affirms the material order. The Creator created matter. Indeed the world to come of Scripture and the classic creeds does not leave matter behind.
As Jason Byassee argues, ‘Grace does not destroy nature, nor does it leave it alone, but transfigures it.’ Romans 8:19–22 is eloquent testimony to this prospect. Creation has a future:
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
Paul personifies creation under the figure of a pregnant woman about to give birth. Creation’s destiny is intertwined with that of God’s children. The Christian hope is not for the individual alone but has cosmic implications. As for the individual, our material bodies likewise have a future, according to Paul in verses 23–24: ‘Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.’ Paul adds to the picture in his Philippians letter. He sees the incarnate Son of God’s own glorified body as the paradigmatic prospect for the believer: ‘But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (Phil. 3:20–21).
However, some in the early church period had difficulty embracing the affirmation of flesh, as 1 John 4:1–3 shows:
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
John is opposing a Christology that finds a real incarnation difficult to entertain. Jesus Christ may not have been rejected but the idea of his enfleshment, as in John 1:14, is rejected.
The erroneous view that John is contesting seems to be a precursor to the full-blown Docetist ones of the next century that are associated with Gnosticism. John Macquarrie writes of the challenge that a robust doctrine of creation and incarnation posed to some of the religious thinkers in the early church period. He states the threat in these terms:
Thus very early in Christian history the Church was threatened by the rise of various Gnostic and docetic sects. Sometimes these denied that the creation is the work of God and assigned it to demons; or in the case of Marcion, it was even claimed that the god of the Hebrew Scriptures is himself a demonic power. Likewise, the doctrine of the incarnation was explained away as mere appearance.
What provoked such responses to Christian claims? Mark A. Noll captures the conceptual challenge of incarnation to the Docetist in particular in these arresting words:
[I]t is obvious that early Christian writers were making unusually bold claims about the person and work of Jesus Christ. He appears on earth and appears to be human, but he is also said to possess – and to bestow – the glory of the one true God. Mysteries, conundrums, paradoxes and apparent contradictions abound… How could an apparently ordinary human born to an apparently ordinary Galilean woman be said to partake of what the one true God enjoyed as his sole prerogative? If Jesus somehow did embody the divine glory, why was it recorded that he seemed to lack the prerogatives of deity – that he needed to eat and drink, that he became weary, that he professed not to know everything, and (most counterintuitively) that he could die? But maybe, if testimonies about the glory of God in Christ were true, then the reports of human limitations were deceptive and Jesus never really experienced human weaknesses he only seemed to experience.
Noll’s last sentence captures the essence of ancient Docetism. Jesus only seemed (dokein, ‘to appear’) human.
How does the incarnation then affirm the material order? The Word really did become flesh. As Michael Williams states:
John 1:14 does not say that the Word became nous [mind]. It says that the Word became sarx [flesh] – the bodily stuff of God’s good creation. The Word became flesh not in some abstract realm of truth where only minds exist, but in history…. Dwelling among us, he was seen by flesh and blood, a particular human being. Pretty material stuff. Pretty historical. Glorious.
John in his letter adds his own testimony (1 John 1:1): ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.’ And the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, remains flesh albeit now glorified post-resurrection. Matter and spirit are not antithetical. A biblically informed Christianity is not Platonism in religious guise. The body is not a body-tomb (sōma-sēma) from which the soul must escape to some ethereal realm.
For the valuing of human life
In 1969 Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood summarized years of his own thinking about human life and its value in these ominous words:
A quarter of a century ago a few of us began to say that faith in the possibility of a cut-flower civilization is a faith which is bound to fail. What we meant was that it is impossible to sustain certain elements of human dignity, once these have been severed from their cultural roots. The sorrowful fact is that, while the cut flowers seem to go on living and may even exhibit some brightness for a while, they cannot do so permanently, for they will wither and be discarded. The historical truth is that the chief sources of the concepts of the dignity of the individual and equality before the law are found in the biblical heritage. Apart from the fundamental convictions of that heritage, symbolized by the idea that every man is made in the image of God, there is no adequate reason for accepting the concepts mentioned.
In his startling statement Trueblood did not exhaust the range of relevant ‘fundamental convictions’ made available through the biblical heritage.
The very fact that God became truly human underlines the value of human life. The Creator did not become a lion (apologies to C. S. Lewis) or a dolphin or a parrot. He became one of us. True, medieval divine and of nominalist fame William of Ockham, with his idea of the absolute sovereignty of God (potestas absoluta, ‘absolute authority’ or ‘absolute power’), did argue that God could have become incarnate as a stone or an ass or a wooden object. But his view has been judged rightly as absurd (e.g. John Macquarrie). As another philosopher, this time the eminent twentieth-century Roman Catholic Jacques Maritain, argued often, ‘the sanctity of human life ultimately rests in the fact that Christ became incarnate as a human creature, not some other sort of creature’. Protestant theologian Karl Barth adds to the chorus: ‘The respect for human life which becomes a command in the recognition of the union of God with humanity has an incomparable power and width.’ It is no surprise then to find in the Gospels that Jesus operated with a scale of creaturely value. Human life is more valuable (diapherō, lit. ‘carry through’, tr. ‘are of more value than’ in the context) than that of a sparrow, even a flock of them (Matt. 10:29– 31). Human life is more valuable (diapherō) than that of a sheep (Matt. 12:11–12). This valuing of human life over that of other creatures is criticized by some as ‘speciesism’ but is fundamental to a sound theological anthropology that factors in the reality of an incarnation.
The fact of the incarnation has profound implications for Christian ethical thinking and moral practice whether in view are the issues surrounding the beginnings of life (e.g. abortion) or the endings of human life (e.g. euthanasia). Regarding the beginnings of human life, Jürgen Moltmann points out:
If the Son of God became wholly and entirely human, and if he assumed full humanity, then this does not merely take in human personhood; it includes human nature as well. It does not embrace adult humanity alone; it comprehends humanity diachronically, in all its phases of development – that is, it includes the being of the child, the being of the foetus [sic] and the embryo. The whole of humanity in all its natural forms is assumed by God in order that it may be healed. So it is ‘human’ and ‘holy’ in all its natural forms, and is prenatally by no means merely ‘human material’, or just the preliminary stage of humanity.
Indeed if Christ were not incarnate at conception, then Christology becomes adoptionist, with an already fertilized human ovum becoming divinely endorsed, or even Nestorian, with an already fertilized human ovum becoming a vehicle for divine presence, resulting in both a human presence and a divine one.
For our understanding of mission
It is popular these days to make much of the incarnation as the model for Christian mission in the world – a balanced mission of word and deed. The second Lausanne Conference held in Manila in 1989 states in its manifesto, ‘True mission is incarnational. It necessitates entering humbly into other people’s worlds, identifying with their social reality, their sorrow and suffering, and their struggles for justice against oppressive powers.’ At the earlier Lausanne Conference held in 1974 the eminent John Stott in his addresses argued that the Johannine text below (John 20:19–23) is the ‘crucial form’ of the Great Commission:
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.’
This passage is widely appealed to in order to justify an incarnational model of mission to embrace, and not just by John Stott. The argument runs in general along the following lines. Just as Christ identified with us in becoming human, we too need to identify with those whom we are trying to reach with the love of God. James Davison Hunter expresses the point in this way as he teases out the implications of the incarnation: ‘For the Christian, if there is a possibility for human flourishing in a world such as ours, it begins when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us.’ We are to be a faithful presence in a broken world as a kind of incarnatus prolongus (the incarnation prolonged) in concert with the quintessential faithful presence of the Word who became flesh. However, the accent in Jesus’ words is not on identification but on the reception of the Holy Spirit and the promise of forgiveness. As Andreas Köstenberger rightly comments, ‘The fact that Jesus shows to his disciples his pierced hands and his side (cf. 20:19), as well as his commission to forgive or retain sins, ties the disciples’ mission to Jesus’ death (cf. chaps 18–20; cf. also 17:4 and 19:30).’ J. Todd Billings adds to the point by drawing attention to the reference to the Holy Spirit in the Johannine passage. He explores the implication of Jesus’ saying ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ as follows: ‘It is not our own “incarnation,” then, but the Holy Spirit who makes Christ present in us and beyond us.’ In his view the New Testament model for mission is not an incarnational one but ‘the much richer theology of servantwitness and cross-cultural ministry… in union with Christ by the Spirit’. Furthermore he contends that the popular slogan in some circles of ‘live the Good News rather than preach the Good News’ fails in the light of the biblical witness. He is right.
That Christ in the incarnation identified with humankind is a truth to affirm and prize. Who can deny that identifying with those one hopes to reach has no better exemplar than Christ? He came to the lost sheep of Israel as a Jew of the house of David. However, the question is where the emphasis falls in the New Testament literature in so far as mission is concerned. It is instructive that neither the Matthean version of the Great Commission nor the Lucan one thematize the incarnation. The accent in Matthew falls on disciplemaking, baptizing, teaching and obedience (Matt. 28:18–20). In Luke’s account we read, ‘The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things’ (Luke 24:46–48). These disciples were not witnesses of the Bethlehem manger but of Christ’s death and resurrection. And, as in John 20:19–22, the forgiveness of sins is to the fore.
Better then to speak of the Christological model for mission where the incarnation is an important facet yet not the centre of gravity but the presupposition for that centre’s cruciform shape.
For the encounter with other religions
I have lived in three countries. Most of my life I lived in Australia. Twice I lived in England and now for a number of years in the USA. The religious scene in the three countries is plural. Judaism, Christianity of various sorts, Islam, Buddhism and a host of others look for their place in the sun. Theology of religions is increasingly popular as a subject for publication. Yet for those Christians with a high view of scriptural authority encountering other religions cannot be done with integrity as though Christ had never come in the flesh. But the nature of that claim and its particularity is becoming increasingly problematical for many in a multifaith world. Our discussion at this point needs to be selective, so for our purposes only one other religion will be our focus: Islam.
To a Muslim the very idea of a God who could become incarnate and weep human tears is nonsensical. How can the transcendent Allah weep, let alone weep human tears? I made this point a few years ago in a conference and the question was raised about one of the names of Allah in the Qur’ān, namely al-Rahim (The Merciful). Indeed the Qur’ān opens with ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful [al-raḥim]’. However, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) argues in discussing this name:
Mercy is not without a painful empathy which affects the merciful, and moves him to satisfy the needs of the one receiving mercy. Yet the Lord – praise be to him most high – transcends that, so you may think that this diminishes the meaning of mercy. But you should know that this is a perfection and does not diminish the perfection of mercy inasmuch as the mercy depends on the perfection of its fruits. So long as the needs of those in need are perfectly fulfilled, the one who receives mercy has no need of suffering or distress in the merciful one; rather the suffering of the merciful only stems from a weakness and effect in himself.
Divine perfection and transcendence exclude suffering in this view. Furthermore the Christian claim that Jesus the Christ is God incarnate presupposes that God is Trinity and that God can become a human being. In fact to describe Jesus as the Son of God to a Muslim’s ear implies sexual intercourse between God and Mary. All these claims are problematical in the extreme for Muslims. In Islam, Allah is the only God there is and Allah’s transcendence is such that having a son is unthinkable: ‘Verily, God is only one God; too exalted (subhanahu) is He that He should have a son (walad).’ Islam has a Christology but it is a low one that sees Jesus as a human creature only – albeit the second greatest prophet. Only Muhammad is greater. In fact ascribing deity to Christ is to commit the sin of shirk (regarding someone as the partner of another). That is to say, another, namely Jesus, is being associated with Allah. This is idolatry and for Muslim thinker Shabbir Akhtar ‘blasphemous mythology’ and ‘only fantasy’.
By way of contrast, the classic Christian view of Jesus as expressed in the Chalcedonian definition of AD 451 is a high Christology. This definition affirms that Christ is one Person in two natures. He is truly human and truly God. Richard Bauckham makes this illuminating point about the early Christian creeds and definitions: ‘The Trinitarian definitions of the faith at Nicea and Constantinople and the Christological definition at Chalcedon are not, of course, in any sense substitutes for the apostolic witness to Christ in the New Testament. They are formulated essentially as guides to reading the Gospel story of Jesus.’ Of these definitions the Chalcedonian one that Bauckham cites is of particular importance for what it both said and left unsaid. It affirms that Jesus Christ is one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. It did so in categories not found in any Bible concordance (e.g. homoousios, ‘of the same being’). However, as B. B. Warfield argued in relation to the Trinity – and it applies to Christology as well – sometimes other than Bible words are needed to preserve the sense of Scripture. He argues:
A doctrine [of the Trinity] so defined can be spoken of as a Biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is Scripture. And the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such un-Biblical [better, ‘non-biblical’] language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.
The use of non-biblical terminology becomes all the more nonbiblical when deviant versions of Christology come quoting Scripture (e.g. the ancient Arians). What Chalcedon left unsaid was any theory of how metaphysically speaking Jesus Christ can be one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. This is one of its strengths in my view. Its great affirmations make it clear that to deny that Jesus Christ is one Person, as popular Nestorianism did, it seems, is to fall off a doctrinal cliff. To deny that he is truly God is likewise to go over the edge. This is the problem with Islam’s low Christology and many a liberal theology. To deny that Jesus Christ is truly human is to go into free fall likewise. One thinks here of Gnostics like the second-century Basileides. The mystery of Jesus Christ as the theoanthrōpos (the God-man) is not to be dissolved by a reductionism of his divine aspect: he was only human as in Islam. Nor is it to be dissolved by a reductionism of his human aspect: he was divine only. The Chalcedonian fathers read their Scriptures aright. Crucially this classic answer withstands biblical scrutiny.
Incidentally the story of the incarnation shows us why all religious stories cannot be equally true. Islam affirms that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin but is not the incarnate Son of God. Classic Christianity affirms both claims. Someone has clearly got the story wrong. If I may update an observation of the philosopher E. S. Brightman: a universe in which both Christianity and Islam were true would be a madhouse. The principle of non-contradiction needs to be observed. ‘A’ cannot be non-‘A’ at both the same time and in the same respect. A typewriter cannot be blue all over and red all over at the same time and in the same respect. For, make no mistake, both Christianity and Islam claim that their foundational stories are not merely useful fictions, or, to use Plato’s expression, ‘a noble lie’. Rather both religions assert that they are making truth claims.
For theodicy and defence
As I write, the war in Afghanistan continues and there is further violence in Iraq. Syria is in a particularly bloody period, and a friend has just been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. A few years ago one of my close friends died on Christmas Day. We went through theological college together. Every Christmas now reminds of that fact. Death, disease, destructive behaviour stalk humankind. In a world of so much manifest suffering what can the historic Christian faith say? John 11:35 tells us that ‘Jesus wept’. In other words, God incarnate wept. But what more might be said?
Following a helpful distinction found in the work of Alvin Plantinga, let me suggest that in the face of evil all that may be offered is a defence rather than a theodicy. A theodicy gives the reason God allows or does X, whereas a defence offers a more moderate proposal. A theodicy might argue that the reason is that God so prizes human free will that it was worth a creation that might have evils in it. The Creator desired a creature that could love its maker freely. In contrast, a strong defence would give reasons for trusting in God’s moral integrity (e.g. the love of God expressed through the cross) and also offer a theory of how that integrity is not compromised by the presence of evils in creation. A moderate defence would likewise give reasons for trusting in God’s moral integrity, but unlike the strong defence offer no account of how the existence of evil comports with that integrity. I would contend that because of the limitations in scope of special revelation – not all has been revealed (Deut. 29:29) – only some kind of defence is possible. Integral to any such defence would be the fact that God incarnate wept human tears. Outside Eden God in Christ knows human pain and grief from the inside of the human condition. More than that, God in Christ has acted to defeat evil through Christ’s coming and cross, as Hebrews 2:14–15 makes plain: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.’
On the one hand Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right to argue that ‘Only the suffering God can help.’ Historic Christianity of the Bible and the creeds says he has indeed helped. On the other hand Baron von Hügel was right to argue we need help, and not just a fellow sufferer. God in Christ instantiated both desiderata. As Kevin J. Vanhoozer argues, ‘God is not Whitehead’s “fellow sufferer who understands” but the “sovereign sufferer who withstands.”’
For dogmatic rank
The sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther was many things: a transformative leader, an engaging preacher, a pioneering Bible translator into the vernacular, a hymn writer and a still influential theological writer, among other contributions. He was also astute in judging his times. He argued:
If I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battle field beside is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
Church history illustrates Luther’s contention. Some examples are in order. In the first century the emphasis was on grace, not works of the law, contra the Judaizers. In the second century it was the reality of Christ’s humanity contra Gnosticism. In the third century it was the reality of the three eternal persons of the one God contra Sabellianism. In the fourth century it was the essential Trinity contra the Arians. In the fifth century it was the two natures of Christ, truly God and truly human, contra the Eutychians. And so forth. These days, as we have seen above, it is both Trinity and Christology contra Islam.
A good way to ascertain the dogmatic rank of a theological proposition is to ask what would be lost if the claim were untrue. In the case of the incarnate Son of God’s humanity a whole host of other key claims fall to the ground. If the Son of God had not become truly human, then he could not have served as the prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy 18:15–18, nor as the messianic Davidic king of Psalm 2, nor as the servant of the Lord of Isaiah 53, nor as the cursed substitute of Galatians 3:13, nor as our representative great high priest of Hebrews 4:14–16, nor as the role model of 1 Peter 2:18–25. In other words he could not have been the mediator of whom Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 2:5–6, where Paul accents Christ’s humanity: ‘For there is one God and one mediator [mesitēs] between God and mankind [anthrōpōn, pl.; includes males and females], the man [anthrōpos, sg.] Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.’ Clearly the incarnation is no minor doctrinal claim. Both its relevance and importance remain acute. Even so, it is significant that the two ordinances Jesus left with his disciples – baptism and the Lord’s Supper – focus on his death, resurrection and return, not his coming into the world in the first place. The latter is important, yes! All important, no!
Existential significance
By ‘existential significance’ I mean the significance of the incarnation for the individual living in the broken creation that longs itself to be remade. Two aspects of the significance will be explored: appreciating the depths of the divine love as seen in the incarnation, and cultivating a sense of wonder. Again this discussion is not exhaustive.
Appreciating the depths of divine love
This is not an easy world in which to believe in a God of love. Death stalks us all. Disease is humanity’s constant companion. And we destroy one another in war and crime. So to claim that God is not only there but is also good raises the questions ‘How do you know this? Where is the evidence?’ The New Testament tells us where to look.
The evidence provided by 1 John 4:9–10 is crucial for answering the questions posed above. John writes, ‘This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ The Christian is to look to the coming and cross of Christ to know that God is indeed love. The genius of Scripture is to offer narratival definitions of key terms. If we want to know what biblical forgiveness looks like, we go back to the story of how Joseph forgave his brothers who sold him into slavery (Gen. 50:15–21). If we want to know what repentance is, we think of the story Jesus told of the return of the prodigal son to his father (Luke 15:11–32). And if we want to know what divine love is in our sort of world and the evidence for it, we tell the story of the incarnation and the atonement: Christmas and Easter. Philosopher Roger Scruton captures in some measure the divine goodness in his Gifford Lectures when he writes:
God revealed himself on that occasion as we do – by coming to the threshold of himself. He came before Moses as a point of view, a first person perspective, the transcendental ‘I am’ that cannot be known as an object but only as a subject. This perspective can become a real presence among us only if it can be revealed in the world of objects, as the human subject in the human face. But how can this be?… Christianity’s answer to that question and that answer is the incarnation. God, in the person of Christ, is present among us. It is from the life of Christ that we can understand the true nature of God’s goodness.
Similarly Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, ‘But this love is no mere diffused, all-pervading medium, dissolving everything in vague sentiment; on the contrary, it becomes present in the exact features of one particular, historical Person…. It attains visibility in his very precise words, actions, sufferings and miracles.’ Without the incarnation the human story becomes a very dark one indeed. In Shakespearean terms, as Macbeth states it, humanity’s story becomes
a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
However, in Johannine terms the good news is that light – the light of life – has come into the world (John 1:4–9).
Cultivating a sense of wonder
Famously Aristotle maintained that philosophy begins in wonder. If that is true of philosophy, how much more so the Christian life? Wonder at what Paul described in Ephesians 1:7–8 as ‘the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us’. Lavished on us in Christ is Paul’s argument.
In this section we look at the wonder that quite properly stems from looking back to what God in Christ has done and then the wonder that flows from looking forward to what God in Christ will do.
Wonder in retrospect
To state the obvious, Christianity, unlike say Scientology, is not a new religion on the human scene. Generally speaking, for us as moderns the new has an attraction the old has not. C. S. Lewis even coined a phrase for it: ‘chronological snobbery’. For the chronological snob the new is always to be preferred over the old. As a consequence, for many in the West the Christian story is a very old hat and worthy only of satire, as in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. In the film Jesus’ words ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ gets misheard as ‘Blessed are the cheese makers.’ Brian and a host of others ultimately are crucified and happily sing on their crosses, ‘Look on the bright side of life.’ A hideously cruel form of punishment becomes a vehicle for comedy.
Someone who was aware of the loss of wonder at the stupendous nature of the Christian story was Christian essayist, playwright and lay theologian Dorothy Sayers. She had a deep appreciation of the nature of drama. Sayers expresses her wonder with a great deal of verve as she looks back to the coming of Christ into the world and to his cross:
So that is the outline of the official story – the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull – this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero… If this is dull, what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting?
In her conclusion she reinforces her point:
Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.
Sayers felt the wonder of it. And she rightly sees the drama is not reducible to the Christmas story. Easter is crucial as well. Significantly the drama has not ended. There is the world to come.
Wonder at the prospect
One of the great milestones in Christian history was the call and conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road as narrated in the book of Acts. He encountered the risen Christ and it transformed his life. However, in what form did he meet Jesus on that day? Was Jesus embodied in some post-resurrection sense or was he a disembodied spirit? Paul’s letters make it clear that Jesus was embodied in some way. He informed the Corinthians in his magnificent cumulative argument for the resurrection that he had seen the Lord, as had other apostles (1 Cor. 15:7–8): ‘Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.’ ‘As one abnormally born’ clearly has the Damascus road in view. In fact the very term ‘resurrection’ entails ‘embodiment’. Moreover he encourages the Philippians by reminding them of their citizenship in heaven and of the great prospect ahead of them (Phil. 3:20–21): ‘But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.’ The prospect of seeing the glorified incarnate Christ ought to fill the believer with longing, according to the apostle in 2 Timothy 4:8, ‘Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day – and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for [ēgapēkosi, ‘have loved’] his appearing.’
Paul was not the only apostle who lived sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). John in his first letter (1 John 3:1–3) spells out the prospect in an intimate way:
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
For John the end-time prospect is the transformation of the children of God. The visio Dei in this text is actually the visio Christi. There is an ancient epistemic principle that only like can know like. In the end, to see Christ there needs to be ontological transformation. Paul in his letters calls it ‘glorification’ (e.g. Rom. 8:30).
God-with-us (concomitance) will find its apogee in the consummation represented by the new heavens and the new earth of Revelation 21 – 22. In Revelation 21:1–4 (ESV) the seer reports:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’
The great covenant goal of God-with-us is now met. In the words of my biblical theology teacher Graeme Goldsworthy, which I heard in class so many times, ‘God’s people are in God’s place under God’s rule.’
All is now sacred space. Jürgen Moltmann sums up the end-time picture in these colourful terms: ‘With this the whole creation becomes the house of God, the temple in which God can dwell, the home country in which God can rest.’ Spatially speaking, the New Jerusalem like the Holy of Holies of Old Testament times is a cube (Rev. 21:16). Again, as Moltmann observes, ‘In this respect the city resembles no earthly city, and no earthly temple either. But it does correspond to the Holy of Holies in Israel’s temple, the inner sanctuary (1 Kgs 6:17–20).’ Any distinction between the sacred and the profane no longer applies. For this city is filled with priest-kings. As priests they worship God and the Lamb (Rev. 22:3), and as kings they reign with the Lamb on the throne (Rev. 22:5). As Augustine wrote in his classic work The City of God with reference to the world to come, ‘There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.’
Conclusion
Bernard Ramm reminds us that ‘The great theologian differs from the ordinary in the former’s ability to draw out these larger implications of the text. It was in men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth that the genius of theological exegesis came into its own.’ In this chapter I have endeavoured to draw out some of the larger implications of the texts dealing with the incarnation – texts we have explored in previous chapters. The incarnation has theological implications for theological method, the question of whether God can change in some way, for the value of the created order, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for the Christian encounter with other religions, especially Islam with its low Christology, for theodicy and defence, and for the weighting of doctrines in some kind of dogmatic rank. Christian theology cannot be properly done as though Christ had never come. The incarnation also has implications for the individual. The love of God as displayed in the entry of the Son of God into the world is, in the words of James Davison Hunter, ‘the most breathtaking demonstration in history of God’s love for his creation and his intention to make all things new’. What God has done is astonishing. John Murray states it well:
The infinite became finite, the eternal and supratemporal entered time and became subject to its conditions, the immutable became mutable, the invisible became visible, the Creator became the created, the sustainer of all became dependent, the Almighty infirm. All is summed up in the proposition, God became man.
Doxology is the appropriate response and also the cultivation of a sense of wonder at what God has done in the past and will do in the world to come.