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)