The
Christian doctrine of the Incarnation has always been a difficult doctrine to
explain. It says that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Right off the bat we
can see that this is some kind of new math. It took over three hundred years
for a definition of Incarnation to be worked out by Church Councils, the
definitive one coming from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E.
But when you stop and think about it, those ecclesiastical
formulations are so foreign to what we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Jesus never claimed to be God. He actually never said that he himself was
divine. Jesus did speak of having a close relationship with God. He called God
“Abba,” which is equivalent to “Daddy.” In the more mystical gospel—the Gospel
of John—he said “the Father and I are one” (not, “the Father and I are the
same”). By speaking of such deep unity with God he was not speaking of identity
with God. He prayed to God; one does not pray to oneself.
It is clear in the gospels that Jesus was a man who was seized by the
Spirit of God, which is not the same as being God. Of course there is the
Prologue to John’s Gospel which asserts that “the Word was with God, and the
Word was God…And the Word became flesh.” These are not purported to be words of
Jesus himself; rather, they are the gospel writer’s theological reflection
about Jesus. And still, even here, we do not read, “Jesus was God.”
The concept of The Word (the Logos) had both Jewish and Greek
meanings. The term ‘Logos’ carries the freight of the Wisdom tradition in
Jewish thought and a broader Greek philosophical category of rationality. Logos
can equate with Wisdom and Reason and Rational Mind and Meaning and Universal
Order. To say that the Logos was God and that the Logos became flesh can
certainly be understood metaphorically.
It was back in the late 1970s that John Hick wrote the book The Myth of God Incarnate. After reading
that book I came away with the suspicion that he was right—that any talk of
Jesus as the incarnation of God had to be metaphorical. The fact is that much
religious language is metaphorical.
The Bible is full of figures of speech—similes, poetic language,
parables, symbolism, visual images (similar to cartoons), and so on. Literal
language has no moral advantage over non-literal language. In fact, metaphorical
language actually has a spiritual advantage over non-metaphorical because it is
metaphor that is able to draw on deeper, more profound and mysterious meanings.
To say that the incarnation of Jesus is a metaphor makes much more
sense to me than to assert that it is a literal fact. All of the theobabble
over how Jesus could be 100% God and 100% human at the same time is nice
attempt to define the mysterious, but me thinks it suffereth from an illogical
logos.
Jesus was a man. A human being. An inspired person. A prophet. A
Spirited man. But not God. “The Logos became flesh and lived among us” can
certainly mean that the very Purpose of God was lived out through a human
being. It can simply be saying that the love of God was embodied in the life of
Jesus. That makes sense, with no need for theobabble.
The very fact that Jesus never claimed to God should count for
something in our theological portrayal of Jesus. It’s like looking for a needle
in the hay stack of New Testament verses to find any hint from Paul or any
other writer that Jesus was actually God in the flesh.
Perhaps Jesus understood himself as the Messiah (Christ, Chosen One),
but never as God Himself. To be ‘God’s Son’ was not to be God, but to be God’s
representative on earth. To be the ‘Son of Man’—a term Jesus did use—was not to
be God, but to be a heavenly messenger from God (or the ‘Human One’). None of
the titles associated with Jesus mean ‘God.’
John’s Gospel is different. It is more mystical or metaphorical. In
that gospel Jesus identified himself with the great ‘I Am’—that is, Yahweh. But
again, he never said, “I am the I Am.” And the assertion of his pre-existence
is part of the metaphorical embodiment of the Logos.
I like the theology of Incarnation. It affirms all that is flesh and
earthy and material and sexual. If God became a human being, then humanness has
been affirmed and sanctified. Thus speaks Incarnational theology. But without a
literal Incarnation we still have Genesis one: everything that God made was
‘good.’ That’s enough for me. Incarnational theology might be seen as a
metaphorical affirmation of Genesis one.
The argument that God had to become what we are in order to save us
begs the question. Who says? It’s an interesting thought, but not necessarily
true. If God can create by the speaking of a word, then God can redeem by the
speaking of a word; there is no need to literally enflesh the word.
Well, I’ve been speaking the ‘insider’ language here. Let me step
outside the ecclesial walls. Here is how I would describe the situation… There
was a Jewish man named Jesus. People experienced in him a liberating power and
insight into the spiritual dimension of life. The religious structure felt
threatened by his liberal views and his large following. They plotted with
local officials to do away with him. The Roman government also saw a brewing
potential for revolution and finally executed him.
He was a good man; a spiritual man; he planted the seeds of
revolution. He stirred up hope in peoples’ hearts. After his death they kept
meeting together to keep his movement going. They symbolized his ongoing
presence in spirit by eating the Passover/Liberation bread in his memory. They
spread the ‘good news’ of the Spiritual Presence and the revolutionary purposes
of God throughout the Roman empire. It caught on. It crystallized. The organic
became the organized. It lost something, but also kept something of the
essence. It continues today.
All because of a man named Jesus, who was part of the Jewish religion,
a religion that held seeds of insight into the spiritual nature of our world. The
Jewish tradition called for justice; it taught individual responsibility and
collective accountability. It had a sense of the dignity of all human beings,
the goodness of all creation, and the absoluteness of freedom. Jesus became the
prism through which the richness of the Jewish tradition shined with splendor.
The fact that Jesus was not God does not take away from either Jesus
or God. It does not diminish the power or love of God. It does not thwart the
salvific reality of grace.
Perhaps we could say that Jesus was the Metaphor of God. The
statement, “The Word became flesh” is a poetic way of saying that the human
being named Jesus embodied the dream of God for the world.
In a pluralistic world where we see goodness and grace in people of
all religions and in folk with no religion we no longer have to defend our
religion as superior to others. The point is not whose religion is the true one
or the best. Nor is the point to defend ‘truth’ against error. The point is to
follow Jesus and be as welcoming as he was, allowing all people a place at the
table. It’s about our common humanity and God’s common gift to all. Using my
tradition’s symbolism I would say that when Jesus stretched out his arms on the
cross, he hugged the whole world and took in everyone, not as ‘Christians,’ but
as children of God. Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jew; a man; a person;
and perhaps a unique Metaphor.
In the beginning was the Mind of God. The Mind of God was with God;
and the Mind of God was God. That same attitude/mind we saw in a person—Jesus.
He was not only a figure of history; he was a figure of speech—the Word of God
in history. Yet, the still, small voice is everywhere.
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