Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 1

1. Every religion offers to help us finite creatures climb up to or dig deep into the infinite. Only Christianity contends that the infinite descended, taking the form of our finitude—Incarnation. This book is the good news that we need not climb up to God; in Jesus Christ, God comes down to us. God is inaccessible to us not only because God reigns in highest heaven and we are down here in the muck and mire of earth. God is inaccessible not only to human sight but also to human reason. Incarnation is the counterintuitive, not-believed-by-nine-out-of-ten-Americans assertion that even though we could not avail ourselves of God, God lovingly became available. God condescended to be God With Us.

- How does Incarnation theology stack up against modern forms of self-designed spirituality?

2. Not that Jesus Christ—as the visible image of the invisible God—is obviously, self-evidently God. From the first, most people who encountered Jesus said not, “That Jew from Nazareth is God!” but instead, “That’s not the way God is supposed to look.” A word of warning: most of us have been indoctrinated into the modern, Western conviction that we already have the ability to think clearly about anything. We have all we require innately, on our own, to think clearly and truthfully about whatever we choose. Our democratic sensibilities are therefore offended by the thought that the meaning of God is a gift given to some, a phenomenon that we lack the innate skills to comprehend on our own. God must reveal the truth to us or we can’t know it.

- “Why isn’t Jesus Christ’s divinity more obvious?”

3. The Scriptures tell us the truth about Jesus, who is in turn the truth about God. If any of us limited creatures is able to comprehend, to believe, and in believing to stake our lives upon the one who was “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), that believing is also a miraculous work of God among us. Thus we, by the grace of God in our lives, become living testimony of the truth of Incarnation. 

Theologian Karl Barth said that if you are able to believe in the strange, wondrous birth, your belief is a miracle akin to the miraculous birth of Jesus.

- Why is our faith in Jesus described as a miracle?

4. However, in the Incarnation, God (as Gregory of Nazianzus put it) “remained what he was and took up what he was not.” God became human without diminishment of God’s divinity; God’s divinity thoroughly embraced our humanity. Thus, our reconciliation to God is affected not by something we do (as in Mormonism’s theology of human ascent) but by something that God has done and continues to do in Jesus Christ (God’s gracious descent).

- How do you get your head around this truth and how does it shape your relationship with Jesus?

5. Jesus was no disembodied spirit fluttering above human life. Clearly, he cared about real people who were caught in real, earthly, human binds—babies to be birthed, children to be raised, bills to be paid, and an upper room to be prepared. He gathered disciples and embraced the hungry multitudes. He healed the sick, cast out demons, and invited ordinary folk to walk with him. When he noted hunger, he offered bread. When the wine ran out, he made more. Rather than providing people an escape route out of this world, he intruded into the full, tragic human condition, modeling a new way of living in this world. You can almost taste the dust as he walks along Galilee’s roads. The Gospels speak of him not in the fashion of a “Once upon a time in a faraway land,” but rather by locating him in real time, such as “during the reign of Caesar Augustus,” and in real places like Bethlehem and Golgotha. He not only brought a message that was addressed to real people and their real-people problems; he also fully embodied that message in his life in this real world. He thereby showed us that his “kingdom” was no dreamy fantasy but a place to be lived in here and now.

- In what ways is Jesus most “real” to you on a daily basis?

6. Even as I attempt to describe the basics of Hegel’s panentheism, you may be thinking that you have previously encountered Hegelianism and didn’t know it. Much of what passes for “Creation Spirituality,” or “New Age Spirituality” these days is panentheism in new garb. If we are thinking about God, or matters of the spirit, there must be a way to think without recourse to the grubby particularities of earthly matters, so Hegelians of every age have argued. Religion progresses (or more accurately, recesses) into ever more vague platitudes, ever more distant from the death and decay of worldly existence.

- Where have you encountered such pantheism?  What tipped you off?

7. There is no veil we must lift and peek behind, no set of undiscovered sacred texts, no archaeological discovery yet to be made that can tell us more than God has graciously revealed to us about Christ. Of course, knowing about Christ—facts and figures, the stuff of human knowing—is not enough. Post-Resurrection, we “know” Christ as fully human and fully divine by a way of knowing that is more adventurous than most of what passes for knowledge in the modern world. Only faith can lead us to be able to declare with the whole church down through the ages, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19).

- How is faith able to surpass knowledge?  

- Why is it preferable to the latter?

8. Faith is the name for what happens when human reason encounters and submits to the nature and reality of God as God is self-disclosed in Jesus Christ. Fortunately for sincere seekers after God, the Incarnation demonstrates that we have a God who relentlessly self-discloses.

- What does this insightful statement say to you about your own relationship with God in Christ?

9.  An aloof, allegedly caring but inactive, spiritual, vague deity is perfectly designed for modern Western people who have been conditioned to organize the world around themselves. A self-fabricated “god” (that is, idol) is always easier to get along with than the true and living God who is considerably more than a figment of our imagination. The shear strangeness of the Doctrine of the Incarnation makes it difficult to say that here is an idea of God that we came up with on our own.

- How does this assessment speak truth to cultural trends of idolatry?