The Incarnation of Christ

The earliest Christians called Jesus of Nazareth, “the Word made flesh”, in order to signify, and praise, how in the human person of Jesus, God and divine wisdom, or Logos, became incarnate in human form (Miles 2005: 1). Nowhere more than in Luke 1 and John 1, is the doctrine of the incarnation more clear, and in its most key feature, of how there is “a substantial presence of God within Christ” (McGrath 1994: 304). In the form of Jesus Christ, the incarnation “does not reveal the mystery of God as God, but rather God incarnate” (Jones 1995: 4). Of the two referents, God and Jesus, “neither one is known apart from the other” (Del Colle 1997: 123). The incarnation is, in a soteriological sense, the redaction of God’s wisdom in human temporality, in the flesh of Jesus.
In John 1, the divine Logos was in the beginning with God and was God (John 1:1), and then became flesh in Jesus Christ. Hence too, the pre-existence of Christ before his earthly life is asserted, beside how the “identity and differentiation between Christ and the Father are maintained” (Del Colle 1997: 124). With the incarnation, “what had been only an ideal [Wisdom] within Judaism was regarded within Christianity from the standpoint of the decisive fact of the incarnation” (Lohse 1985: 38-39). As a consequence of the doctrine of the incarnation, in order to know God, Christians have the example of Jesus, and Jesus Christ becomes the decisive fact of Christianity.
Theologians today such as Kathryn Tanner write how “Jesus Christ is arguably the centrepiece of every Christian theology” (1997: 245, italics mine), and Jesus incarnate does bring Christianity “certain definite theological and cultural characteristics as a historical religion” (McGrath 1994: 273). Luke 1 recounts and conjoins human and messianic history in the incarnation. First of all, a proleptic relation to Christ is recounted via Gabriel and John the Baptist’s eventual perspective, then an analeptic relation situated and derived from witnesses to when Christ in human flesh walked among men, and then another more profound proleptic relation to Christ, in the salvation finally promised by the knowledge and following of Jesus. Allied to the latter, Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics (Vol. I-IV, tr. 1936-62), speaks of how,
When Holy Scripture speaks of God, it concentrates our attention and thoughts upon one single point… from its beginning to its end, the Bible directs us to the name of Jesus Christ. (cited McGrath 1994: 274)
This insight from Karl Barth is already taken up in Luke 1, when, after Zechariah begins to speak and praise God, the people ask of John the Baptist as a child, “What then is this child going to be?” (Luke 1: 66) The answer of course is to be a prophet, or one who anticipates the Christ and who will “prepare the way for him” (Luke 1: 76). Luke’s incarnation and prolepsis is paradoxically timeless, forever directed to the name of Jesus Christ – Christians today should always prepare the way for Jesus’ entry in our lives and the world anew – and as well, Jesus incarnate and scriptural authority become inextricably linked, so that not ideals but the events of the life of Jesus oblige Christians and Christian theologians to respond in an enduring manner to these events, no matter contemporary history or speculation (McGrath 1994: 273).
When Luke’s prologue engages eyewitness accounts, “handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1: 2), salvation has been seen in this world and is knowable to us by our senses. In Luke 1:15, Jesus is “filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth”, emphasising how from the inauguration of Jesus in human form his flesh was pervaded by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, there is no impediment to the Holy Spirit in human flesh. Cyril of Alexandria further argued that if Jesus had not been born of Mary in the flesh, “he would not have freed the nature of humanity from the blame contracted in Adam” (cited Miles 2005: 110). Thus in the doctrine of the incarnation from the patristic period onwards, original sin may be counteracted, and considered together, Luke 1:2 and 1:15 are important for confuting the Gnostic proscription on our ability to know God and the Gnostic imputation that matter is evil and sinful (with which, if this were true, the Holy Spirit could not be joined).
As well, David Ferguson notes how Reinhold Niebuhr argued that “history after Christ is an interim between the revelation and the fulfillment of its meaning”, and as such, in the eschatological tension of the gap, “the kingdom can be revealed but can never triumph until the end of history” (Ferguson 1997: 236). Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (1:32-33), compels our understanding that there already has been in Jesus, and will finally, be an ultimate unification of divine will, human flesh, and human history. Zechariah, struck dumb and ‘barren’ of speech or the living word, once he has accepted God’s will and the name of ‘John’, is gifted words and breaks forth in song. As we are made of flesh, the doctrine of incarnation teaches us to await the coming, to name and praise God, and to be patient and await the kingdom, even as Jesus in earthly form, from birth to his suffering on the Cross, had to suffer and await his final ascension into the kingdom.
Not only has the Word become flesh, but as Margaret Miles explains, since the incarnation of Christ, Christians have “sought to make the flesh word” (Miles 2005: 1). This means learning the limitations and perils as well as the potential wholeness of the flesh. This might mean being at times caught by “the hand of all who hate us” or else, “the hand of our enemies” (Luke 1: 74).
At such times, and for Christians today, the injunction from Scripture is the same as that offered in Luke 1, to praise God and remember the covenant of God to his people (Luke 1: 72), to ask for the knowledge of salvation (Luke 1: 77), and to continue hoping and trusting in God even as we live “in the shadow of death” (Luke 1: 79). “Incarnation in times of terror demands that we flee from the temptation to hide in the comfort of metaphysics and commit to our flesh and the flesh of others as the sites through which redemptive praxis unfolds” (Isherwood 2005: 79). Isherwood’s call is to commit to all flesh, even that of our erstwhile enemies. Brent Waters warns against the direction of modern biology to transmute flesh into data in the name of self-transformation, instead of flesh transformed by the will of God into service of God (Waters 2005). Christians should not be distracted by any contemporary fetishisation of the body – the doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus highlights the perfect redaction of flesh into the timeless service of God.
John begins with a wonderful cascade of coalescent spatial and temporal deictic markers: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning” (John 1: 1-2). While in Luke human geography and time are foregrounded (Luke 1: 5), in John a fusion of the spatial and the temporal signifies how God made incarnate in the flesh of Jesus Christ still transcends both space and time, and indicates finally our ultimate fate beyond data, beyond death.