The Incarnation is Everything
“Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary.” (Source)
Old heresies never die. They lie dormant in their coffins awaiting the night when Christians have forgotten about them. Then they rise and begin to drain the lifeblood from communities of faith, which in turn wander listlessly, unable to figure out exactly what’s wrong. Why are we so anemic? they ask. Why so lethargic? Where is the life we once had?
A recent article in Newsweek, citing a 2020 survey from Ligonier Ministries, reports that 52% of U.S. adults believe that Jesus is not God. Today only about 65% of Americans identify as Christian, so we should expect that Jesus-as-God is a non-starter for 35%. But how do we account for the other 17%?
According to the same article, “Nearly one-third of evangelicals in the survey agreed that Jesus isn't God, compared to 65 percent who said ‘Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.’” Beware the Arian heresy redivivus. Athanasius was exiled five times by four emperors for insisting that the Son is not a creation, but is co-eternal with the Father. The Son has no beginning. He is God--not a demigod, not an angel, but the one and only eternal God. Christians have died for this claim. They die for it even today.
But why? Why is it so important that Jesus is God? Were the titanic figures of the fourth and fifth centuries such as Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria simply stubborn? Did Maximus the Confessor (in the seventh century) have his right hand cut off and his tongue torn out over what amounts to an academic dispute over the nature of Christ’s will? Does the “orthodoxy” they established by their toil, and sometimes by their blood, amount to anything other than the exertion of power?
When I was in seminary I read John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Later, as a graduate student, I read his larger, more detailed The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. These works involve a potent, detailed, and potentially devastating critique, rooted in historical research, of traditional Christian claims about Jesus. It was also around this time that the PBS documentary “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians” came out (1998), featuring Crossan and many other prominent scholars. The documentary itself was a critical, and sometimes overtly skeptical, look at the life of Jesus and the rise of the early church. These were the days when Marcus Borg’s work was all the rage in mainline churches. The Jesus Seminar was going full speed ahead and its publications were flying off the shelves of bookstores (remember those?). The History Channel seemed to specialize at this time in sensationalistic exposés of the “real truth about the historical Jesus.” Time would offer each Easter a cover story featuring some classical European painting of Jesus emblazoned with a question like, “WHO WAS JESUS?”
In a completely different genre, Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code in 2003, and while most people recognized that he had taken liberties with his historical narrative, he wove fact and fiction together with sufficient skill that it could be difficult to determine which was which. The senior pastor of the church I was serving at the time asked me to offer a class for our congregation on the historicity of this novel. “Why?” I asked. “Are people taking this seriously?”
Indeed they were, he said, to my surprise and dismay.
God was in the dock, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, not now over theological questions like theodicy, but because the historical case for the Christian narrative of salvation seemed implausible.
Authors like N. T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson were a great help to me at this time. They drew attention to the historical, philosophical, and theological problems in much of this iconoclastic work. At the same time they showed the reasonableness of the set of historical claims upon which the church stakes its life. Craig A. Evans’ Fabricating Jesus is very helpful along these lines as well. Reading C. Stephen Evans’ The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, Basil Mitchell’s The Justification of Religious Belief, and William J. Abraham’s analyses of the work of Van Harvey and Ernst Troeltsch provided me with a philosophical critique of the deep skepticism that has so characterized historical criticism in the wake of the Enlightenment. I came to understand the extent to which historical works are also philosophical works. The presuppositions of a historian will exert considerable force upon his or her conclusions. In the case of much scholarship on the historical Jesus at this time, a governing presupposition was that any claims regarding what we might call the “supernatural,” no matter how well documented, were out of bounds. Allowing them as evidence would privilege Christianity and thus one’s investigation could no longer be properly termed “historical.”
As I read through Crossan’s work in particular, I was awestruck by the depth and breadth of his historical knowledge, his ability to argue persuasively, and his creativity. I learned a great deal. At the same time, I also had to confront the implications of his work for my own faith. Reading his books and the works of similar authors, in fact, forced me to a moment of important discernment: could it be that the church has, for two millennia, been so profoundly wrong about Jesus as Crossan and others argue? If Jesus was just a man, albeit a very gifted one, what happens to the Christian economy of salvation? To come to the point, if the church got it wrong about Jesus, then the church got it wrong about salvation. And if the church got it wrong about salvation, then its primary reason for being evaporates in an instant, a drop of water on a hot skillet.
It was the case at the turn of the century, and it is the case now. It was, likewise, the case when theologians and bishops fought over these matters in the early and medieval church. The person and work of Jesus Christ--or, put more technically, matters of ontology and the divine economy--are at the heart of our faith. We cannot avoid them. We cannot dispense with them without dispensing with everything else. There are many reasons for the long decline of mainline Protestantism, and now evangelicalism, but one of them is surely this: too many of our clergy, bishops, and teachers bowed the knee to the canons of modernity, and as a result we lost sight of the incarnate, crucified, and risen God who gives coherence to every aspect of our life together. Without the Lord proclaimed to us in Scripture and creed, the church is a false front. It is, in the words of Qohelet, simply vanity, breath, vapor.
At the center of Christian proclamation is this: the eternal God who called the universe into being looked upon this broken, sinful, rebellious world and had mercy upon us. In fact, he loved us. As 1 John teaches us, “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (4:9-10).
This Son, however, is not some poor scapegoat upon which God chose to heap the sins of all humanity. Rather, this Son is God, just as the Father is God, just as the Holy Spirit is God. In the incarnation, God took on all of our human frailty. Paul puts it this way: Christ, “though he was in the form of God, 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). In theological terms, we call this kenosis, a Greek word that means “emptying.” Christ had the form of God, but he took the form of a slave. He emptied himself, humbled himself, and took on flesh for us.
It’s no wonder that people have, from the earliest days of our faith, found this claim outrageous. To the pagan of the Greco-Roman world, this is not what gods did. They were capricious, sensual, at times noble, at times narcissistic. They could be inflamed by passion for good or ill, but motivated to kenosis? To die on a cross in self-giving love for feeble, ephemeral humans? No. This would degrade the very idea of deity. To the Greek mind formed by Platonism, it made no sense that God would become flesh. It would be a blight upon the perfection of the Divine to take on the frail and deceptive trappings of material existence.
The Christians, however, insisted that the perfection of God was expressed through his enfleshment because by becoming flesh, the same God who created all things brought about the redemption of all things. As Athanasius put it, “the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.” There is a perfect symmetry between God’s creation and God’s redemption. Both are effected through the divine Word--the Word who “became flesh and lived among us.” We have therefore “seen his glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
What is at stake in our claims about the incarnation is… everything. The incarnation reveals to us the character of God. The incarnation is the perfect expression of divine love. The incarnation is God’s self-emptying sacrifice. The incarnation is the means by which God has saved us from sin and death. The incarnation shows that this physical life we live matters, that our goal is not to escape the flesh but to present our bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom 12:1). Our enfleshed existence matters so much that God took it upon himself. Thus we care for the physical needs of others. We tend to the sick. We care for the dying. We feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And though these mortal bodies fail, there will come a day when we will be raised up in a new, incorruptible bodily existence. Through the incarnation, God has given us new, embodied life, now and forever.
The Western church must be recatechized. We must learn again who our God is and what this God has done for our salvation. Our commission as Christians is to baptize and teach, but we cannot teach if we ourselves are deceived. Old heresies may never die, but we don’t have to let them live among us.
David F. Watson is Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary. He serves as Lead Editor for Firebrand.