Incarnation?

 How did we arrive at such a strange doctrine, foreign to the New Testament, even if some Pauline and Johannine theology might point in its direction?

There seem to be three factors at play: power, identity and origins.

From 327, the Emperor Constantine became the sole leader of the Roman Empire. His intention was to impose Christianity as the State religion. But to do this, he first had to unify a Church in which many different and contradictory doctrinal ideas were in circulation. One of the most popular movements was led by Arius, who rejected the idea that Christ could be worshipped, because he wasn’t God. Constantine took the initiative to convoke the Council of Nicea, triggering a controversy which culminated in the Trinitarian definitions of the Council of Constantinople of 381. Throughout this controversy, the interference of temporal power with spiritual, and the manipulation of spiritual power by temporal, were constant. Speculative thought cannot be protected from the strategems of the political arm…

The second factor is identity. At the beginning, Christians were dissident Jews who placed their Judaism on a universal vector in order to project themselves in the wider Mediterranean world of the day. But could they exist forever as a derivative of the mother-religion? No, they needed to create their own identity by effecting a complete break, such that there would be no confusion with the mother-religion. And what could be more scandalous to the Jewish conscience, indelibly marked with the utter prohibition of any representation of the Transcendent, than belief in a God become man? This belief, with its pagan allusions, made even Maimonides hesitate to describe Christians as monotheists. The flip-side of this scandalous doctrine was that it marked clear blue water between Jews and Christians, and so gave the Church a distinct identity.

The third factor is origins. All religion is relationship with the origin. The ultimate origin is the Absolute, God himself, without intermediary, without change. On Mt Sinai, Moses spoke with God “as a friend” (Exodus 33. 11). He received the Law and instructions about temple worship. So was it said that from the beginning the Transcendent spoke directly to Moses, Prince of Prophets, also according to Jewish tradition the author of the Pentateuch.

In a very similar way, the Incarnation allows Christians to claim the Absolute as their origin: if Jesus Christ is God, he has existed for all time, since before the creation of the universe. Following this, we have no real need for the Law, now relegated to one of history’s failed attempts; at Christmas and Easter, the Transcendent has revealed himself, demonstrating a radical new origin.

Dare I add that the third manifestation of monotheism, Islam, faithfully reproduces this scheme for more or less identical reasons? To the Incarnation of Christ Islam replies with the actualisation of the Word of God in the text of the Qu’ran, eternal, consubstantial with the Divine Being, who has nevertheless come down to the contingent world. The parallels are so similar that we can even see in the Islam of the Mu’tazilah School, very aware of the historicity of the Qu’ran, a form of Muslim Arianism.

We are left with the fundamental fact that the Transcendent always overflows the religious traditions which claim to organise it. The Incarnation is one attempt amongst many to nail down that which is infinitely free and open. Theology’s credibility would increase if we admitted that all such attempts to tie an infinite God down are automatically doomed to failure.

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