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Incarnation
The doctrine that God became human in Jesus Christ.
The incarnation (the word comes from a Latin term meaning ‘to enflesh’)
is the doctrine that, in Jesus Christ, God ‘took flesh’ to become a human
being. At the heart of the incarnation is a paradox: how God and a human
being can be one (see ‘Christology’). The rational explanations of the doctrine
soon give way to mystery.
In Christian visual art the reality of the incarnation is often emphasised
by depicting Christ’s nakedness and physicality: the contours of his body, his
wounds, his blood. Andrea Mantegna’s Crucifixion, for example, shows
Christ with a body identical to those of the two thieves beside him. Rubens’
Crucifixion shows the soldiers straining under the weight of Christ’s physical
body to lift the cross into its vertical position.
Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between restricted and general
theologies of the incarnation. The restricted versions of the incarnation argue
that God became flesh exclusively in the person of Jesus. Karl Barth, for
example, regarded the incarnation as a one-off event, a unique revelation of
God in Jesus that cannot be understood apart from an encounter with Christ.
By contrast, a general theology of the incarnation, such as that offered by
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, argues that although the incarnation is focused
and rooted in Jesus, the mystic reality of the incarnation is everywhere in the
cosmos. The world is ‘a divine milieu’ and the incarnation is the presence of
the Godhead in every moment of our existence. As Gerard Manley Hopkins
put it: ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’.
The mystics have tended to emphasise the reality of the incarnation as
present within the believer. Meister Eckhart argued that the incarnation must
be real within us: ‘What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?’ Eckhart’s
views were condemned in a papal bull of 1329. St Bonaventure’s meditation
on the ‘Five Feasts of the Child Jesus’ says that we must mystically ‘give
birth to Christ’ in our lives.
The idea that other people carry with them the reality of Christ became a
central theological insight in ‘Socialist’ Christian ethics. For example, the
nineteenth-century Christian Socialist Stewart Hedlam argued that ‘you are
literally … feeding, clothing, housing Jesus Christ when you are feeding,
clothing, housing any human being.’
The theology of the incarnation has been at the centre of the recent
interest in the ‘theology of the body’ (see also ‘Soul’) and theologies of
sexuality. The incarnation means that Christ must have been a sexual being,
dealing with all the normal aspects of human physicality. In Christ, the human
body – in all its aspects – became something sacred.
THINKERS
Thomas Altizer (1927– ) has argued that the incarnation should be
understood as a cosmic affirmation of the world of the flesh and human
history. By becoming human, God collapses the distinction between the
sacred and the profane: ‘Christian theology must affirm the union of the
sacred into the profane and affirm the profane as profane.’
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957): a Greek Christian philosopher whose
book The Last Temptation of Christ explored the more radical sexual
implications of the incarnation. If God truly became flesh, then he must also
have been a sexual being. Kazantzakis saw the incarnation as fundamental to
his view of life. Elsewhere he wrote: ‘within me even the most metaphysical
problem takes on a warm physical body which smells of sea, soil, and human
sweat. The Word, in order to touch me, must become warm flesh. Only then
do I understand – when I can smell, see, and touch.’
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61): a French philosopher who explored
the relationship between the twin human experiences of being ‘conscious’ and
being a body of ‘flesh’. Merleau-Ponty describes the experience of touching
oneself as a form of self-consciousness: a realisation that we are all incarnate
beings, and that the incarnation of God in Christ is just a special case of the
general human condition.
Michel Henry (1922–2002): a French phenomenological theologian who
explored the theme of incarnation in his book Incarnation, a philosophy of the
flesh. For Henry, our experience is a complex combination of our inner
awareness of having a body and the external encounter with our own bodies.
This self-conscious awareness of our own flesh and the flesh of others is quite
different from the experience of mere matter, and is the fundamental
revelation of the reality of Life. In the incarnation God becomes ‘flesh’, as we
are, and not merely a physical body. So the Logos, the Word of God, reveals
itself as Life. The incarnation is ‘the auto-affection of Life’: God celebrating
and loving the Life which is his.
IDEAS
Avatara: the Hindu concept that the gods occasionally take human or
animal form.
Sarx: the Greek word for ‘flesh’ used in New Testament.
Logos: see separate section.
BOOKS
Jeremy Begbie (ed.), Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts
(Baker Academic, 2000)
John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic
Age (Westminster/John Knox, 1993)
Brian Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology
(CUP, 1987)
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