Becoming Flesh
31 August 2008 - 1 אלול 5768 by Huw
Continuing with the series linked in the sidebar there, under the peace cross. Here is part two on Incarnation.
LOT OF Christians get this one wrong. Some, today, even deny it outright. Here’s the most important, radical, revolutionary thing about Christianity: God has a navel. I don’t know if it was an “inney” or an “outey”. But he has one. More than that, he’s got a penis: and God is a he. In fact, God is one specific man, born in one specific place, among one specific people - although in a melting pot of about many cultures. Surrounding God was Egyptian, Roman, Alexandrian (Ptolemaic), Silk Road, Persian, Fertile Crescent Babylonian, and 5 or 6 that called them selves “Jewish” or “Hebrew”.
More than that, God had diapers. God also probably ran around half-naked urinating and defecating on the ground while adults might have looked and giggled in either embarrassment or parental joy as the child grew up. God had a neighbourhood. God had an older half-brother - and therefore probably suffered from some bullying and maybe even fights like, “Dad loved my mother more than yours.” God had grandparents who spoiled him. God had a mother who doted on him. God had a Dad who - according to one version - was not too highly respected in his community (as a man who worked with his hands). According to another version God’s Dad was quite well respected. God went through puberty and, I have no doubt, suffered from embarrassing erections under his robe, girls flirted with him, and his voice cracked. God had acne and, after a while, back hair.
And for all of this I love him even more, just in the writing of it.
This is the logical outcome of my earlier post where I noted that the early Christians came to the conclusion that in Jesus, God was acting in a very specific way over and above just being a prophet. If I say - with Paul - that in Jesus the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell, well then, the fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to eat the lentils his Mom cooked. The fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to drink Goat’s Milk. The fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to go to Torah school. The exact implication of “the fullness of the Godhead” is that God had a specific colour of hair, of eye, a specific tone of voice, a specific sort of body odour, and even a certain, rustic lack of bathing.
And for all of this I love him even more, just in the writing of it.
This is where Judaism and Islam - emphasising God’s transcendence - and Christianity part the way. This is where the pious pagans of the first two centuries part the ways with the Christian community. This idea of the fullness of the Godhead being pleased to dwell in a backwoods, country preacher is a scandal. It is foolishness. It is a horror for Jews or Muslims today or Jews and Romans back then to contemplate this idea: not that God dwelled with us (certainly all religions teach that in one way or another) but rather that God was “dwelling” in this man.
God stopped relieving himself on the ground and, eventually, grew to - like the rest of his culture - learn how to wipe his dirty butt with his left hand.
You can’t make that sentence have any meaning in either Jewish or Muslim theology. You’d have a great deal of trouble having that make sense in •any* theology outside of the Church, although, as I say, a lot of Christians get this wrong, too.
I was listening to a very conservative preacher - LCMS - and seminary professor who kept assuming that Jesus’ Divinity meant his status as “Son of God.” Jesus’s divinity is related to his status as “God the Son” which is not the same as “Son of God”. The people calling Jesus the “Son of God” in the Bible are not calling him “God the Son”. These are two very different issues.
Others seem to confuse claims of Jesus’ divinity with issues like “virgin birth”, miracles or even Resurrection. The most extreme view seems to forget that Jesus was a mortal man as well as God. These people seem to confuse a lot of perfectly normal human realities with sin: I can imagine God hitting puberty and getting erections. Even some Christians would be shocked at that idea - assuming that erections, per se, are not “natural”. Some Christians write huge swaths of theology to imagine Jesus as somehow not normal: I’m thinking of the stories that, somehow, he just appeared next to his mother rather than passing in blood and water (and pain) through the birth canal. Some pious Romans go so far as to imply that it is SIN that causes such pain - and then they write the sin out of Jesus and out of his Mother - ergo there was no pain. These uber pioius sorts say that to teach Mary cried out in childbirth is to teach that Jesus wasn’t God.
Quite the contrary: One day, after visiting my parish for Confirmations (he had confirmed my own sister, actually) the Episcopal Suffrigan of New York, Walter Denis, gave me a ride back to NYC: I was attending NYU at the time. During the two hour ride we talked about a lot of things: I forget a lot of ‘em, actually. But at one point he said to me, “The Word became flesh, Anglicans wallow in it.” The incarnational theology of Anglicans cannot forget that Jesus was both, God and Man. I love him all the more because he had the same trauma. If he were born today he’d have the same red birthmarks many of us have from where the forceps pinched us.
God has a mother: Mary. Her Greek Title is “Theotokos” and her Slavonic title is “bogoroditsa”. Her Latin title is “Dei Genetrix” and they all mean the same thing “Birthgiver of God”. It parallels “Mother of God” but it means exactly what I’ve been saying here. Mary is the person through whose birth canal (in blood and water) God passed. She is called the one whose womb is “more spacious than the heavens”. I think today I believe in the Virgin Birth: there are many such stories in mythology and it seems to signify something important. But I don’t see Jesus’ divinity as hanging on that. Yet having pointed out the importance of Jesus’ Divinity, Mary underscores his humanity. Nothing I say above - navels, acne, puberty, etc - is possible without his mother. And his mother is unimportant without his divinity.
In later years the Church would debate (and split) over issues raised by this idea of the “fullness of Godhead” dwelling in Jesus. They would debate how much was God, when did he know? Could he sin? Did he sin? Can God sin? Can God think of sin? Could he will to sin? Did he have two wills? Two natures? What?
All of that seems unimportant to me - although I flatter myself by saying I understand the reasons behind each choice the Church made. These later decisions seem to hyper-define the mystery of it all. It seems much more important to me that God had a navel than that Jesus had two perfect wills. It seems to me more important that God had acne than to wonder over adoptionism or whatnot.
What is most important in all this scandal is not that God has done these lowly, fleshly things that we all do. Rather: that these things have been done by God. These are not “lowly, fleshly things” any more. From birth canal, through puberty and the horrors of middle age and death: this is the path of God. These things, from breast feeding to birthday breakfasts, from loving caresses to mourning for dead friends, from fear and doubt to triumphal joy are all tools of divine action in the world, and in our salvation - our making whole.
This carries back into our Eucharist: God is Bread. Bread is the “Staff of Life”. God feeds us on perfectly normal food: himself. God’s incarnation continues as we celebrate the rite of inclusion in feeding each other. But more on that in the next essay.
Thanks for this post– one picky correction though– bogomater’ would be “Mother of God”; bogoroditsa would be the equivalent of Theotokos, “Birthgiver of God.”
I do have a question of opinion for you though, as it is something I struggle with. I love incarnational theology– as soon as I discovered it I fell in love with it. But here’s the issue for me: it’s not present in the synoptic gospels, it probably wasn’t present in the first century of Christianity– it was a later Greek translation of whatever “theology” the earliest “Christians” had. How then can one claim it as the essence of Christianity, just because one finds it attractive? Sometimes I feel like theologians do this precisely for that reason– they like the idea, find it radical– so it must be the most important thing about Christianity. But it doesn’t seem logical to me to hold it as the fundamental standard of whether or not one is a Christian if it really is just a beautiful way of restating whatever experience some first century folks had with this guy named Jesus. How do you reconcile your own scholarly appreciation of the development of doctrine with the place incarnational theology has in your life?
Thanks for the correction - replaced: I should know not to use the Onion Dome as a resource :-)
As to the other:
Paul (pre-Gospel, of course) said that in Jesus the “fullness of Godhead was pleased to dwell”. I don’t think he had the foggiest idea about what this means in terms of our modern “incarnational theology” and I do think we’ve been evolving our understanding of it for 2000 years. We’re doing this in other places to: our understanding of Eucharist, and Trinity, too. I think this is ok - provided we are honest about it and we don’t project backwards. I doubt - sincerely - that Mary had any conception of Jesus (no pun intended) as the Divine Creator of All Things breast-feeding from her. Maybe. But I don’t think it important that she did or didn’t have such an idea.
But by the first generation of Christians they were thinking “fullness of Godhead”.
Our understanding of this idea has evolved from the vague, Pauline expression to the hyper-scholastic debate around iotas and minutea. In these essays I’m suggesting that that stuff is not as important as official theology likes to imagine. But I insist that rejecting that stuff doesn’t mean throwing out the incarnation - just as having trouble with the Virgin Birth (etc) *also* needn’t mean throwing out that simple, complex and important idea that the “fullness of the Godhead” dwells in Jesus.
Well even the “fullness of the Godhead” comment is from Colossians, the most Gentile-directed theologically of Paul’s epistles… although you are right that that is early. However I don’t know if the fact that there are examples of it early on proves that from the beginning it was the essence of Christianity, the most important thing. Paul used other metaphors more often. Now, I don’t think that earlier emphases are necessarily “better” simply because they are older, and I think it’s true that the main Christian revelation as it has been “fleshed out” (pun intended) over time has been that of the Incarnation. Not only that, but in some ways it is inevitable that a nascent religious movement that is so clearly a personality cult from the beginning would end up with an incarnational bent. The other example of this is Buddhism, which even in supposedly purist Theravada countries has a sort of “all goodness and truth and justice made present in this one very special person Siddhartha who existed physically and historically and whom we offer flowers too” thing going on. Still, it’s become harder and harder for me to see the incarnation in the logos made sarx sense as a non-negotiable part of Christianity. Of course, this is also my own thing, as I’ve been rediscovering my own Jewish traditions and trying to understand Jesus in that context.
“proves that from the beginning it was the essence of Christianity”
I don’t know one way or the other about that. The essays are from my own POV. I have trouble imagining Christianity without these three parts - Eucharist, Trinity and Incarnation. These three are the things that I think are uniquely important to Christianity. It makes no sense to me without these three, although your mileage may vary.
I’m willing to allow the label of “Following God in the Way of Jesus” to anyone who wants it, to fellowship and to commune, but there are places I look at and wonder: what’s the point - might as well be Neopagan or whatnot. These are the three necessary legs of the stool from where I sit. If Jesus isn’t the Logos made Sarx… I’d rather be a Reconstructionist Jew, to be honest.
Fair enough– and I certainly can’t question your own personal & beautiful approach to Christianity! It’s just a question I’ve been struggling with in my own life, how to incorporate an incarnational bent into my spirituality in a way that makes room for other approaches.
Am I missing something here? The incarnation is present in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament, so how can it not be present in the first century? Just off the top of my head I’m thinking of “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” and Jesus telling his scandalized hearers “before Abraham was, I AM,” echoing his self-identification to Moses via the Burning Bush many centuries previous. Then there’s all the Pauline corpus has to say about it, which Huw alluded to.
Gregory:
It’s actually pretty possible - with a combination of non-traditional (but very conservative) filters - to read the Gospel in such a way where even the texts you cited don’t mean God-in-the-flesh. There is such a movement among *some* Messianic Jews, for example.
Such a reading doesn’t make sense to me - as I’m trying to point out in this post: but increasingly, I’m made aware of the lenses through which I read the scripture.
Greg– I didn’t say it wasn’t present in the gospels. I said it wasn’t really present in the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke), which scholars view as earlier texts than John. And one can pick a few statements here and there in some of Paul’s epistles into which one can read incarnational theology, but John was really the first major formulation of it. This can be debated, but the mainstream scholarly opinion is that the Johannine texts are significantly later than the synoptics, or at least the sources of the synoptics.
Marjorie - my apologies for missing that crucial word, “synoptics”. And yes, you’d be right: the earlier texts don’t have it so present and, indeed, the story is that the earliest text was just a collection of sayings. You see, quite clearly, my own problem with the historical development. I agree with Dom Gregory Dix (as I noted in the first post on incarnation) that it was the telling of these stories to Gentiles that resulted in the evolution to where we are now. My solution - as I noted in that post - was a shift in scale rather than a shift in theology.
Judaism has no problem with a Holy Rabbi who raises the dead and heals the sick. “Fullness of God” in Paul’s world makes perfect sense. Paganism has no problem either - “Fullness of God” makes sense here, too- but would call such a holy man a demigod. HOWEVER Judaism has no such thing as a Demigod. Ergo Monotheism dictates semi-divine Rabbi become God, himself.
Is this a dictate, a revelation, if you will, of the Spirit - an evolution resulting from the cultures through which the Way traveled? I *think* I want to say yes. Sorta. I say “Sorta” because I don’t know how far I’m willing to let that rule carry as an excuse for evolution. And if it works then, why not now as we go through another cultural evolution?
Anyway… agreement with you on the synoptics: but only through Jewish eyes. At least one of them - maybe two - were written for eyes not schooled in pious Judaism. So, we need to wonder what the point was.