The Incarnation
The very central theological claim in all of Christian faith is that God himself has become incarnate (“in flesh”) in the man Jesus of Nazareth. When you boil everything down, when you dig past all of the philosophical debates and arrive at the one point on which every other Christian claim is made, you end up with this extremely important, and extremely offensive idea. Indeed, the only reason that this work did not start out with a discussion about the incarnation of God is because the incarnation is simply not intelligible apart from the Old Testament framework and the historical interaction of God with Israel. It will be argued that every point of Christian doctrine, every reflection on the Christian life, needs to be thought out from the point of view of the second Person of the Trinity made flesh. However, it must always be remembered that this is Christ within the context of Israel.
Of One Being With The Father
The Nicene Creed is the single most ecumenically affirmed statement of Christian faith.[1] By far, the longest section in the Creed is the article talking about Jesus. It reads, “And [we believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, by whom all things were made.” The point on which the entire Creed turns is on that phrase, “of one being with the Father” [Greek: ομοουσιος τω Πατρι, Homoousios to Patri]. This phrase states the firm conviction of the early church that Jesus of Nazareth is distinct from the God he called Father, but at the same time, so closely united to him that they are truly the same God. This statement overthrew both the view that Jesus and the Father were utterly different beings as well as the view that Jesus and the Father were absolutely one and the same (the argument was that nothing is of the same being with itself but of one being with something else).
This might be a difficult idea to grasp, and various thinkers have considered it to be nothing more than muddled thinking, but it truly lies at the core of Christian faith. The early church felt compelled, in light of who Christ is and what he did, to claim that he was nothing less than very God of very God. It is true that, as the Nicene Creed is not contained in the Biblical canon, it is always open (as are all theological statements) to revision in light of scripture, but let us reflect for a moment what would be implied in the other possible explanations.
First, Jesus is something other than God. The question we must ask is, “If Jesus is not God, how can he forgive sins, speak for God, etc.” The simple answer is that, in light of the entire Old Testament witness, only God can do these things. If Jesus is not God, then his words are nothing more than those of a creature who has no authority to promise such things. The New Testament does not say anything to overturn such a conviction. Second, Jesus is fully God, but a God that is separate from the God he called Father. This would overthrow the entire Jewish conviction (instilled by God himself) that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). If this explanation were maintained, the gospel would be severed from its mooring in God’s historical interaction with Israel.
The other possible explanation is that Jesus and the Father are completely indistinguishable and the distinction between Father and Son is rooted in our subjective experience and not in the being of God. This, at first, seems the best alternative, but it undermines the entire gospel because it claims that God is not in God’s own being what he is in his interaction with us. That is, though God reveals himself to us as both Father and Son (and indeed, also as Holy Spirit), those distinctions bear no relation whatsoever to who God really is. If this is so, then the gospel finally tells us nothing about God because it tells us about a God who is a community of Persons.
Building on this Nicene conviction, that the relationship between the Father and the Son is within the very being of God, Athanasius, the great Alexandrian theologian of the fourth century, wrote, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.” There are a few consequences of this statement that are worth raising at this point.
First, it means that the Father/Son relationship is internal to God while the Creator/creature relationship is external to God. Both of these ideas have far reaching impact on our theology. In regards to our understanding of natural theology as traditionally defined (that is, looking at nature to help us understand the nature of God), it affirms that there is no bond of being between creation and the Creator. This means that, while we can conclude that creation is consistent with God’s being, it finally does not give us any concrete knowledge about who God is. The underlying principle is that, in Christian faith, creation is contingent. That is, creation is not how it is because of any kind of logical necessity. It might have been different; it might not have been at all. God was always able to create, but was under no constraint to do so except as a manifestation of his free choice. In this way, creation is seen to depend entirely on God, both for its being and its continuation.
The Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) had an enormous impact on the Greco-Roman world at the time that we often do not notice because such an idea is so deeply engrained in our culture. According to Greco-Roman philosophy, it was not possible for God to change in any way. The argument was framed like this: Any change is either from lesser to greater or from greater to lesser. If God were to change, God would either be becoming greater (in which case, God was not perfect before the change) or else God is becoming lesser (in which case, God is not perfect now). Because of this understanding, if God is to be seen as Creator, it must be concluded that God must have always been Creator and, thus, creation is equally eternal to God.
Of course, this is not what the Judeo-Christian tradition has traditionally affirmed. Despite the arguments around whether creation took place exactly as the first two chapters of the book of Genesis or not, Christians are united that there was a time when creation came into being and that God was under no constraint to create. This means that, in a sense, God became Creator. There was, in some sense, a change in God. At this point, we are driven by God’s self-revelation to reject the Greco-Roman understanding of divine immutability (unchangeability) and interpret it more in terms of a Jewish idiom. The statement that God does not change does not mean that God is static or frozen, but that God is eminently faithful, reliable and trustworthy. This understanding of God’s immutability allows for a doctrine of creation out of nothing.
Because there is no bond of being between creation and God, creation must not serve as a source for our thinking about God. This means that we cannot reason from the gracefulness of an animal to the gracefulness of God, nor from the majesty of a mountain or a sunrise to the majesty of God. Any such reasoning would be interpreting nature according to categories not derived from God’s self-revelation. After we have allowed God’s self-revelation and self-communication to disclose God’s attributes to us, we can see nature as pointing beyond itself to the God that created it, but this is a bearing witness to God, not a direct communication of God.
Athanasius’ conclusion is no less significant when it comes to theology proper, or “revealed theology.” According to his affirmation, we ought to signify God from the Son and call him Father. Our reflections about God must not begin with abstract concepts about God arrived at independently of God’s complete self-revelation in Jesus Christ (such as using concepts of God borrowed from secular philosophy). When we apply this idea rigorously, we find that much of theology done throughout the years, particularly in the West, has leaned on such independently generated ideas. Many early theologians (including Augustine) were heavily influenced by a neo-platonic worldview and many medieval thinkers were methodologically more dependent on Aristotelian philosophy than on the Biblical tradition.
One might make the traditional argument that, if something is really true, it should not matter how one gets to it. The problem with this view is that it presupposes a dualism between form and content. More and more, it is becoming clear that content is impacted by the form it takes and that form should be determined by content. This means that if we want to know God, we must seek to know God in a godly way. In the case of Christian faith, where it is affirmed that God has revealed God’s self to us in and as the man Jesus, this is particularly clear. The content of God’s self-revelation is God’s own being. This has taken shape fully only in the man Jesus. We are not free to come to conclusions about who God is that bypass the actual form of God’s self-revelation and self-communication. Because of the oneness of being between the Father and the Son, we can rest assured that there is no God behind the back of Christ, but only the Triune God we see manifest in Jesus.
If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our reflection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”
In practice, this means thinking out things like the attributes of God, such as God’s love, power, mercy, etc., not in terms of our personal experience, or our culture, or in any other abstract way, but only in terms of the concrete reality of the Incarnation of God in our midst. This is because we cannot finally separate God from Christ; they are indeed the same God and the character of the Father is not finally different than the character of the Son. This kind of Christocentric thinking must also be the way we approach sin, sacrifice, the Christian life and even the church. As this idea will be reinforced over and over again throughout the rest of this work, no more will be said about it at present. Suffice it to say that the Incarnation forms the point on which all of Christian theology turns. [1] Ironically, even traditions that cannot agree which books should be in the Bible (whether to include the Apocrypha or nor) agree on the Nicene Creed as an accurate description of Christian faith.
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