“Do you believe Jesus was God incarnate?” That was the question recently asked. It was not the first placing of that question before me. I am inclined to think that often when it is asked, it is in the hope I will confirm the interlocutor’s faith by replying either that he was just a man, or that he was indeed God incarnate. Unfortunately, the question is too vague because the term “God” is too vague in most minds, and the idea of “incarnation” too indefinite—even in those defining propositions of the official creeds that render Jesus a mystery of faith, a perfect and unconfused unity of human and divine natures with the term “natures” itself a philosophical idea that is open to debatable definition.
Thus, before I venture to answer the question, let us consider the word “God”. Whether in sacred writ or philosophical examination, God refers to a power beyond all understanding, comprehension, expression. Man cannot in mind, will or heart encompass or enclose the font of all that is. God is always the inexpressible and transcending. One may claim the cosmos is eternal, either beginning with a singular “big bang”, or a cyclical expansion and contraction, a pulsing out and collapse of one “big bang” after another. What, however, went bang and whence did it come? Where is the beginning, if not in time and space, then in principle? Man wants to name a point as the point of starting, even if that point is theoretical and ambiguous. We are built that way.[i] In terms of philosophy, God is the name we commonly put upon that indefinable first point beyond all points, all events, the primal cause. God is the platform of being beyond and ever receding from the grasp of our mind. But there is another sense in which we use the term God, and for that we need to look upon the nature and function of religion.
Religion exists to help man make sense of his life and his world by weaving tales about life, its origins, its joys, its trials, its purpose. Here the term God is not used as a philosophical principle denoting a first or formal or some other type of cause. Religion is about assigning a value to things, to actions, to places, to ideas, to ideals. The term God in religion presents the supreme value judgement. God is the creator who makes all and so imparts his divine creativity into being, imparts the print of his artistry as life, as reality. Even in religions where God is a demiurge arranging the eternal materiality into reality, the artist imparts a trace of “self” into the work. The foundational creative power that constitutes man and all of nature is read back to the initializing creative nature, to Creator-God. Christianity speaks of the indefinable, unconfinable Creator under the guise of those three great all-encompassing and defining ideals of human understanding—goodness, truth, beauty. Christianity also speaks of God as the fountain head of the great virtues, and thus God is temperate, just, prudent and strong. God is also, above these, faithful, loving, and the foundation and end of all hope. Of these, the greatest is loving, for love is taken as the highest power of will, the power to share and give of oneself. Love is creativity, or better put, to love is to be creative.[ii] In Christianity’s sacred writings and discourses, the divine love is spoken of from two perspectives: child and partner. The child finds in God the parent. The partner sees in God the lover. These “images” of, these ideas about God are foundational to the Christian vision of God. They are value judgements about the source of all life, the meaning of all life, the purpose of all life, the manner about how life ought to proceed, mature, find its satiation. They are acts of faith. They say: “This iconic form indicates, signs, symbolizes that which I trust to be the ultimate meaningfulness of life.”
Religion is never received as something made up by man. Religion begins in a revelation. It comes from beyond the everyday world. It comes from beyond the ordinary flow of thoughts and concerns, and yet it seizes them, addresses them, evokes them. Something happens that turns a light on inside man, illuminates the mind, animates the spirit. It reveals to man a depth of reality he had not noted, a depth of self he had not marked, a depth of life itself he had not yet encountered. It stirs reflection, wonder. It has a dynamic. It wants a response—in life, in action. It is simplicter, simply, life calling out the fulness of life, of creativity, integration, integrity.
The God of religion is revealed in the panoply of his creativity. Beyond moving rites and stirring words, beyond moments of awe and wonder, beyond the visions of hope and love, every power of life speaks of the power of God. Beauty, goodness, truth, virtue, and even evil and ill, in their varied ways, speak of God, reveal some face, some facet, of God, albeit, each only in part according to its kind. Christianity avers the existence of one true and living image that serves fully to reveal God to and for man—Jesus. In his life, his work, his preaching, his embrace of God as his father, this Jesus is the revelatory likeness of God, his nature, his purpose, his will. This Jesus is—in this—become for the believer “The Lord”, the Image of the Father, “God-for-us”, Emmanuel, “God-with-us”. Every bit of creation incarnates, enrobes in worldly vesture, the presence of God for God is the Power that makes, ever sustains and evokes forward creation to its full elaboration. In Jesus, claims the Christian, that incarnation crests as the revelation par excellence. Jesus both is and pre-sents as the event of “the fulness of time”, the moment of decision, the moment ever pregnant for self-alignment in a spirit of loving creativity. In the embrace of his “mission” to be the face of a loving parent to the world, his immediate world, the believer becomes a partaker of his “Christhood”, sharing with the “Father” in the venture of creation, and with their Spirit in the redemption and salvation, the fulfillment, of creation.
The above constitutes a preliminary answer. It is preliminary because there are re-fine-ments that need be added to the de-fine-ment of Jesus’ role as God-for-us. Digges may have made a telescope of some ability, but it took Galileo’s refinements to make it a viable instrument both commercially and scientifically. That instrument is still being refined. If we wish use any hagioscope, any scope into the Holy, we need set out not only the co-ordinates of our view point but adjust the lens such that that which we see and that which we therefrom relate to others be both viable and receivable—in every possible level of human comprehension.
First, we need to understand the mind-set of them that wrote out the sacred narratives. Judeo-Christian scripture is not literal. The men and women[iii] who wrote the sacred words were not Greek philosophers pounding out logical formulae about the construct of cosmic and human structure. They did not think of God as a prime cause. Notions of nature, person, substance, and essence were not part of their vocabulary. They spoke of God as related to them on an experiential level, of God as relative to the world, their world. They were religious people concerned with the human spirit, and the sacred nature and purpose of life, cosmic and human. They told stories that gave meaning to their history, their faith, their hopes. They told their stories from the vantage point of God, and thus they wrote not histories, but hopes. They spoke of the ineffable in images of the royal and commanding. They lived in a world wherein kings, priests, prophets were understood to be divine incarnations[iv], be it through their role in leading and protecting, in performing sacred rites, in calling out in word and deed the awareness and conscience of society. Unlike our ancient ancestors, we do not identify our great political, religious and moral leaders as “gods” or “sons of God”.[v] They lived with a world view older than Ptolemy’s with its notion that the heavens are a jumble of spheres in which move the five planets enclosed in that singular cosmic boundary, the great crystal sphere to which are attached the immobile heavenly lights, the stars.[vi] We no longer think God sits above the dome of the sky surrounded by clouds of celestial acolytes. Even they that painted such ancient portraits knew God is ever more than any picture, any image the feeble mind could find for so unutterable a power. We must realize even the notion of God as person is an anthropomorphizing, an attempt to say we find in our own personhood the trace of godly power and print. We mean it as an honour. We say it to make relatable the incomprehensible Power that is our source. Yet, set before that Power, it is a pittance at best, an insult at worst. This decidedly has impact on how, therefore, the title of “Son” is used.[vii] To them that object Scripture is the very word of God, I object that the Word of God is a living being attested to in a book. The Word is not a book, and if anyone claims it is a book, then get to a classroom and learn it as it is written—in Hebrew and Greek—and not secondhandedly, in a translation.[viii]
Second, we need understand the mind-set of the men who pounded out the great propositions of the creeds and the founding dogmas. They used the philosophical ideas of the Greco-Roman world to try to explain the great visions and iconic images of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The modern mind does not operate, as did theirs, in the confines of the minds of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus. And because of the terminological belligerence and religious bellicosity within which they did their work, it is virtually impossible for the ordinary Christian to now read scripture without reading it through a Greek philosophical lens. The modern mind needs constantly to be deterged of millennia of philosophical understandings that have compressed sacred visions into the lapidified propositions of church dogmatics, and rendered therein mute the artistry of scripture’s composers.
Third, any image or idea of God as all transcending is—in itself—merely a logical principle, a theoretical devise. It may be embraced, but its total transcendence will cause it—in practice—to become either irrelevant or oppressive. This we have encountered in the rise of the Enlightenment’s Deism that led to Existentialism’s atheism and the ennui curetting the churches. Any image of God as totally immanent within the cosmos will lead to a relativity. Admittedly, it will probably first flower some form of humanism, but that good sentiment will ever be the abandoned child in search of a parent to guide and ground. For a grounding, the pleasure principle will be grasped at, and ideas of the “greater good” will be proffered, but the wholistic icon of “Holy” will not be to it available as cynosure and goal. Factions and “parties” will form around competing goals and any ideal of a “common good”, a whole picture, a sacred unity of being will become lost amidst conflicting views of world, society, good. Any image of God as simply the dynamic into the future will end in anarchy, because futurity without a root is no more than sterility. Anarchy always opens the door to the hoards, the anonymous masses, and after their blind feasting, to the dictator. The brilliant insight, the sacred revelation, of Christianity is the social tri-unity of the Godhead, a God ever the all-transcending (the Father), knowable only in and through the experience of his work (the Son), and embraceable and livable only as the dynamic into novelty, into the new, into the yet-to-be (the Spirit). They co-inhere one in the other, defining each other, and operating as one. Before modern physics discovered it, here is captured the vitality of the two principles that issue the third, a third that binds the two and completes them.
Fourth, faith is not a passivity. From the non-religious perspective, it is a social virtue, for no personal growth, no firm personal relationships, no ventures into science and research, no entrepreneurship would ever emerge had we not trust that something good could come from our endeavours. From the religious perspective, faith is trust in the height of vision, the highest power, and as such is listed a theological virtue, the highest rank of virtues. Virtue is something one works upon. It may have its root in an enlightenment, a grace, an illumination, but it requires human effort to grow and mature. Like a muscle, faith needs be flexed, exercised. Without such, it will atrophy and fail to sustain both person and purpose. One will not be able to stand firm, move forward, arch, stretch. Faith is the foundational psychic muscle, and as such, the religious also.
Fifth, we do not speak in one singular fashion. We have varied modes of speech, varied nuances for words, and varied rules of usage for various settings. No one sets out to write a short story in iambic pentameter. No one would think to write a business letter or diplomatic communique in colloquialisms. No one of compos mentis greets a friend at the door with a flourish of rhetoric. The speech of religion has its own operational code, its own set of rules or propositions about how certain words and phrases are used and understood. Religious language is a sacred faith code meant for sacred use. It has its words of particular connotation, and a grammar about how one ought to speak of the sacred. To ask a question about the faith of the church requires one to enter into the sacred language of the church. That language may be as symbol laden as every other form of language, but it is not any other language. It is distinct, and needs be approached and understood as such. One cannot ask a “religious” question and expect the reply will come in the koine of secular language, just as one cannot carry on a dialogue with one person speaking French and the other German—not at least without that essential third interlocutor, a translator.
Sixth, we know things in different ways. The theoretical reasoning of the logical mind may tell us that we live in a deterministic cosmos, a world of mappable causes and effects. The mind, as knew Aristotle and Aquinas long before Kant, has powers other than making concepts out of sensations. Man can imagine, be inspired, touched by the infinite wells within and without and be stunned in awe and wonder, and out of such churn the forces of creativity, freedom, move into frontiers not before to be imagined. Man is not homo logicus, but homo sapiens, the “wise”, the one with a taste for reality beyond the exactitudes of being able to chart self and world as a causal nexus of mathematical precision. Man knows himself free in knowing himself answerable, responsible, communicable, open to possibilities, even possibilities yet to be dreamt. Man wants, craves, is constituted of a thirst for endless possibilities, and so man prays to not die, to be given life eternal. Most who look to an eternal life see not Dante’s vision wherein all the blessed sit forever in a stadium gazing upon the divine perfection at its centre. They want to be doing something. Of course, how or what one might “do” when there is by definition neither time nor space to do anything in is a question worth considering, and thus, often the image of eternal life given is that of being hidden in God or resting in the Eternal One.
Seventh, we need consider that which Jesus said and did that garnered to him the designation of God’s agent, God’s presence in and for the welfare of the world, in the terminology of his religion, God’s Messiah [Christ], or in its more ancient terminology, “God’s son”. He made religion and its morality relevant to the moment, to the person, to the event and encounter. He decided that which was proper, propitious. He overrode Moses, prophets, priests and learned theologians (the scribes and Pharisees). He acted as he saw his father acting—creatively, providentially, caringly. The father had love in his heart for all his children, all his work, and was not bound by a parenting book as to how to lead one from disastrous choices, mistakes or misfortunes. God could leap over the knots men tied into life—individual, communal, cosmic. God could fore(ward)give into a new place, a new moment, a moment open to something new where to him a new song could be sung. The Creator was not bound by his creation, he was bound to it—to its wellbeing, its good health (salvation), it recovery from every misstep (redemption), and he was of a heart and mind it ought reach its full purpose and find in his heart and mind its full meaningfulness, its oneness with him (at-onement) and in him (sanctification). In Jesus is shown forth the power to move beyond every impasse to integrity and integration, every type of death and exclusion-ism, to open this world and its ideals toward a “new” earth and heaven, not a new set of rules, but a reign, a universally potent sovereignty of creativity, redemption, sanctification.
Thus, in the fuller light of such given refinements, I acknowledge Jesus was a man, but not simply or merely a man, because there is attached to him a valuation about his life, his work, his meaningfulness. That non-logical, yet practical understanding, that moral and aesthetic valuation, finds in him the image of that which speaks of wholeness, creativity, the power to say “be” and “be well”. According to reason, Jesus is a man. According to inspiration, he signals that which men most sincerely mean when they utter “God”, for in him were seen and felt and touched a potent and extraordinary whole-ness working out the pathway for man’s maturation toward perfection. Yet, he is not inspirational, not exemplary, but something more, something more symbol laden. He is iconic, icon of God, a living icon of the living God, and in that descriptor there resides a lush commixture of symbols, portals into the meaning of man, world, God.
The secular mind sees in Jesus a mortal man, an item of history, perhaps a man of destiny. The eye of faith sees in all creation the incarnation of God, his care, his love, for all is seen as made in and by his Word, and it sees in Jesus the full flower of that revelatory Word, its very incarnation, its embrace of the divinely appointed mission to make patent in creation its truth-laden evolution toward satiation, its graced dynamic, its natural purpose and creative end. Such is not an empiric proposition. It is an act of faith, a judgement about the value of one man, his life, his vision, his journey.[ix]
In his role, his “mission” as God’s sent agent, God’s incarnation, God’s Christ, Jesus’ name is forever linked to the title of Christ. It is his by virtue of having both embraced it and opened it in inspiration to all. He, as man and the initiation of Christhood, is now “hidden” within the Godhead, but his Spirit endures, evoking all men, all times and places to partake in that Christhood and become co-workers in the great divine plan to bring creation to its full meaningfulness. As does every man, every moment, he endures in the fabric of time a psyche-power that pervades world. No longer material reality, but sunken into and risen within its very materiality, in concert with all men and those things we weave out as our lives, he remains to the psyche of each and all a force constitutive, open, available.[x] The icon of his cross stands a symbol both of the sacrifice of self that creativity encompasses, and of the transcendence, the resurrection into novelty, it allows. He is Christ not for his self-glorification says he, but that all may follow him, and live therein life, not for self, but for the sake of others, for the well-being of all God’s work, as says Aquinas “as gods”, as say Luther “as Christs”.
Postscript: To J. T. I reply in a tongue I believe you will find comforting: Credo Verbum caro factum est. C. V.
[i] We want to define things, put exacting and “finite” limits upon them. We are time-space beings. We cannot—intellectually, emotionally, physically, psychically—deal with things that do not fit into our time-space mind-frame. We speak of the spiritual or non-material as if occupying time-space, as being sensible, graphable. We have no other frame of reference with which to make reference, that fact we must keep in mind and not confuse, as it were, heaven and earth. Cf: on Heaven, January 2013.
[ii] Theology has usually been tied to one aspect of the creativity of love and underscored the pro-creation of offspring as a purpose of marital love. That, however, is less than the tip of the iceberg. To love is not to be bound, but to be free, open to discovery, the new, the possible. The sheer openness of love impacts universally, making the one who loves creative on every level personal—the moral, emotive, aesthetic, intellectual. God may be spoken of as “forever” only as God is Love, of unbounded openness to the possible and in that of inexhaustible creativity.
[iii] Some Hebrew wisdom works may well be by women.
[iv] To this end, let us note that the coins in my pocket still read “Elizabeth, D.G. [Dei Gratia, by God’s Grace] Regina [Queen]”. She was anointed in the style of ancient kings and emperors as the agent of God. Her Hebrew processors and many of their confreres had to the titles of divinely appointed and anointed agent added the title of “son of God”. On many levels we see the order and good governance of state and society as something, as say the Americans, “under God”, as providentially under the guidance and care of a supreme power of goodness and order. Such are, admittedly, socially embraced value judgements about what a society should be and toward which it ought ever move, and they are expressed and adhered to through the great symbols of state: a divinely anointed sovereign, a constitution that declares a people “under God”. Symbol and “sacred” narrative are not confined to religion. They open the subliminal wells of meaningfulness about life for man on sundry levels from the personal to the societal to the cosmic. Thus, we speak in symbols of the great visions we have and hold dear, the visions that move us, lead us, propel us forward. Dreams, images and imagining of ideals come from the churning of the depth of us. They are expressed and acted upon in every field of our endeavours, not solely in religions. Cf: The Serpent and the Symbol, January 2016.
[v] There was once some sentiment to name outstanding leaders in society “saints”, but that term the modern Western mind is wont to too harshly critique. Interestingly, we judge not them given to outrageous acts in search of celebrity, but they that attempt some good we call out for every misstep and misdirection. Recently, while admiring a friend’s garden, she wisely marked that the secret to a beautiful garden is to not look too closely. Indeed, when dealing with any finite incarnation of good, beauty or truth, the secret to appreciation, blessing, and joy is to begin with knowing its finitude, and thus, to look not too closely. Do not expect in any finite thing, venture, or person to find the absolutes of Good, Beauty, Truth. The Apostle Paul calls the Christians he continuously writes to redirect or admonish the “saints” because they have dedicated, devoted and adhered themselves (in and by grace) to God and his work in the world, and not because they have in themselves become a perfection beyond reproach.
[vi] Notably, we did not abandon Ptolemy’s inelegant farrago of formulae until the early 1700s and the investigations of Flamsteed. Plato’s ruminations, however, we still honour.
[vii] When the first disciples spoke of their experience of Jesus it was within the coordinates of their Hebraic religion. There is no confusion; he is not the all transcending God. He is not the “Father”. He is “Lord”, a divine title, as “God-for-us”, as the revelation of that which God is truly like, truly wills. He is the “image” of the Father, the new temple (the locus of God’s presence), the shekinah (the merciful presence of God). John has him the supplanting of every Jewish feast and action, for he replaces the Chosen people as the Chosen one of God. Israel is no longer God’s vine, God’s son, God’s delight, Jesus is, and through him is given God’s election, grace, and sonship to all that are grafted onto him. When John speaks of Jesus as the creative, sustaining and redeeming word of God he is attempting to depict the intensity of the intimacy that exists between Jesus and God. He, in concert with the other writers of Christian sacred texts, is not proposing identity, simply intimacy of will and action.
The writers of the Christian scriptures were Jews or “God-fearing” gentiles.* They were not Greek philosophers. They were not students of Plato or Aristotle, and they may not be read as if they were. They did not think in terms of nature, substance, hypostasis. They thought in terms of presence, power, mercy, grace. The efforts of early theologians to make relevant to their peers the great visionary sweep of Judeo-Christian scripture in Greco-Roman philosophical notions and terms cannot be used to reinvent scripture. If one would read scripture both faithfully and intelligibly, one must give due credence to the mind set of its composers, and not overlay upon them ideas that danced in the heads of men from another culture, another ethnos.
When the writers of scripture speak of Jesus as the Son of God, or the only begotten of God, they are not speaking as if God literally procreates or generates. They are trying to underscore that in Jesus they have found the living image of God, his power, his mercy, his will. They lived in a world wherein the son is the manifest of the father, carries forward for the father his authority and will, and acts in the place of the father. Applied to Jesus, it is a social idiom raised to the supernal level, and not a proposition regarding divine biology. The great prophets had known God in their visions, Moses had encountered God in his incandescent and thundering power. The disciples profess they have seen God in his “glory”, his full substantiality, in the “flesh”, in the concrete grace of Jesus’ presence, actions and words. They realized they had encountered God in action for the well-being of the world. It was a revelation of the unsearchable Sacred. It became their transformative faith. Faith, like the divine incarnation, is a living, evolutionary, and vitalizing relationship, a personal and personalizing bond. Faith is not, nor can it ever be, a list of dogmatic quasi-philosophical propositions. Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 23: Word Games, August 2015.
*The “God-fearers” were gentiles who were attracted to Judaism because of its monotheism and moral compass. They orbited the community, participated in services as they could, but did not become full members. Membership, in many cases, might well have required one to abandon both family and profession.
[viii] Jews and Muslims have no issue with learning the language of their sacred texts. Why are Christians so remiss, so apathetic?
[ix] Cf: Spirituality, Part 2, IV and VI, February 2017; Spirituality, Part 4, March 2017.
[x] Cf: concluding section, “An Excursus: Personal Reflections on Being and Time” in Occidental Ideas, Part 21: Schleiermacher and Existentialism, May 2015.