Incarnation

Thinking the Nicene Creed: Incarnation. Grosvenor Essay No. 7. Some Observations and Reflections.

The initiative of the SEC and its Doctrine Committee in producing a series of concise and accessible booklets on aspects of Christian teaching is to be welcomed. It is important also that these give rise to further reflection among clergy and laity, so that the wider Church can benefit from the learning and expertise of Committee members. Not for the first time since moving to Scotland, I have wondered whether wider discussion could not beneficially take place while the document is in draft, so that the final text can be amended in the light of critical scrutiny from outside the Committee.

As a New Testament scholar, and one who is perhaps more “modern” than “post-modern” in approach, but is also not without an opinion about ways in which Scripture is used in theology, particularly within Anglican contexts, I recognise that my response to Incarnation is not without presuppositions which at least some of the authors might wish to challenge.

I read with some alarm on p. 4 that

For Jesus of Nazareth the meaning of the incarnation is that God the Father grants him participation in his divine nature within the limitations of the human.

For a Biblical scholar the expression “Jesus of Nazareth” designates the person whose life, words, and deeds are the subject of historical enquiry, on the same methodological basis as any other figure of historical significance is subjected to critical scrutiny. Historical methods may, with varying degrees of confidence, recover something of who Jesus was, what he said and did, and of the circumstances surrounding his death. That the early Church emerged within Palestinian Judaism of the first century, as a response of Jesus’ disciples to their experience of encountering him risen from the dead, that this faith spread very rapidly beyond Palestine and beyond ethnic Israel, and that an increasingly elaborate theology developed, drawing upon Greek philosophical systems as well as reinterpretation of Hebrew Scripture, and the centuries old interaction between these, history can affirm, and scholars can debate quite vigorously much of the detail, working within the limitations imposed by their methodology and the data available. Much of what Christians believe about Jesus, however, cannot be ascertained on the basis of historical scholarship; questions to do with his ontological status, as well as claims to do with the circumstances of his birth or his resurrection as an historical event, are beyond the capacity of historical critical scholarship to adjudicate.

While theology needs to transcend the gulf between what history can ascertain and what Christians believe and the Church teaches, we nevertheless need to be aware of this distinction. Indeed, there are those, “modernists” and others, who would wish to challenge what Christians believe and what the Church teaches on the basis of what history can establish as “fact”. Any attempt to reduce Christian belief to what history and other academic disciplines can verify, in particular to what is consistent with the “laws” established by the empirical sciences, raises serious questions about both ideology and method. The purported “reconstructions” of Christian faith in accordance with the supposedly “scientific” outlook of one generation will almost certainly appear dated and inadequate, if not ridiculous, to the next. One particular contemporary effort at this, it seems to me, rests upon a very limited understanding of the natural sciences as well as comprehensive failure to appreciate the complexities of Biblical interpretation, and wilful ignorance of any culture other than that of North America during the second half of the twentieth century.

Orthodox Christian doctrine has, since the earliest centuries of the Church, affirmed the Incarnation as concerning God’s activity in the physical world, in and through the historical, human, person of Jesus of Nazareth. Belief systems which have rejected or relativised the historical, material, nature of Jesus in favour of abstract, esoteric, theories about disembodied spirits and principles have been repudiated, often quite vigorously. In teaching the historicity and physicality of Jesus, the doctrine of the Incarnation implicitly requires that we acknowledge the uncertainties and limitations of historical knowledge, just as it teaches of God in Jesus accepting the limitations of human, fleshly, existence.

In this light, to say that

For Jesus of Nazareth the meaning of the incarnation is that God the Father grants him participation in his divine nature within the limitations of the human

is problematic, ignoring as it does two centuries and more of biblical scholarship. Jesus’ self-consciousness is beyond all possibility of historical recovery, and can be reconstructed only on the basis of documents written from a perspective of developing Christian faith, and which to a greater or lesser degree retroject that faith into their account of Jesus’ teaching and their portrayal of his life. This is evident as much in the synoptic gospels, including Mark, as it is in John, and in the speeches of Acts and the letters of Paul and others, which do not recount Jesus’ life and ministry within a continuous narrative – even if they presuppose such a narrative. The extra-canonical gospels add nothing of historical value to our knowledge of Jesus, however well their narrative embellishments may reflect popular religiosity in at least some early Christian communities, and however much the sayings collections preserve ways in which the teaching of Jesus was reinterpreted and expanded in some Christian circles. Extant non-Christian Jewish and Roman writers transmit no independent historical information about Jesus at all. The most ancient of these, Josephus, makes mention of early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but no reference at all to the circumstances of his birth (AJ 18.63-64).

On historical critical grounds, there is no evidence whatever that Jesus thought in terms of incarnation at all, however that concept may be understood. Whether or not the historical Jesus was conscious of any exalted status, let alone ontological character, is at the very least debatable. On the basis of the evidence available, the most that can be surmised is that Jesus came to understand himself to be the messiah or christ, a vocation that entailed no divine character whatever: xy#m or xristov denoted a person anointed, i.e. chosen and spiritually endowed by God for a specific function, particularly but not exclusively that of king. Even if Jesus re-interpreted the notion of messiahship quite radically, by associating it with that of the suffering servant of Deutero-Isaiah, this would not imply any divine status. Furthermore, the notion of divine sonship implies no unique identity or ontological status in Judaism, but reflects the relationship Israel enjoyed with God, even when applied to particular, privileged or holy, individuals. Nor does the frequency with which Jesus is addressed as kuriov in the Gospels mean that any divine status was attached to him. kuriov is used to render the tetragrammaton (hwhy) in the LXX, translating the customary circumlocution thereof (ynwd)), but in other contexts may designate no more than elementary civility. The expression o uiov tou anthrwpou (Aram. )#n rb or #n) rb), which Jesus certainly used of himself, is ambiguous and enigmatic, and was undoubtedly intended to be. While in some contexts possibly no more than a circumlocution for the first person pronoun, in others it may be an esoteric reference to, though not the formal title of, a supernatural, heavenly, figure of immense eschatological significance. Even if Jesus did see himself as the earthly counterpart of such a figure, or as destined to be elevated to that position as Enoch is in some traditions, this could not be equated with incarnation as understood in Christian theology as there would be no implied sense of pre-existence or of eternal divine status.

The notion of incarnation is alien to the thought world of Jesus, in which God was transcendent and one. A clear distinction was maintained in Jewish piety between God and subordinate supernatural beings, however powerful; these latter were not incarnated as human beings, whatever the form in which they may have appeared on earth from time to time. It would therefore not be appropriate to attribute any consciousness of incarnation to Jesus of Nazareth. The origins of this notion are to be found, rather, in subsequent varieties of Christianity, still rooted in Judaism but located in more thoroughly hellenised intellectual milieux than pertained in the rural Galilee of Jesus’ historical ministry. The doctrine reflects early Christian conviction about Jesus, and even this needs some qualification. Beliefs about Jesus evolved at different times and in different places, under the influence of different missionary teachers, church leaders, and theologians, reflecting on different passages in Hebrew Scripture, reinterpreted in the conceptual framework of different philosophical movements, responding to different missionary and pastoral issues, and drawing upon different narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. There never has been uniformity in Christian doctrine, and attempts to impose orthodoxy, not least in the area of christology, during the centuries preceding the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) were political as much they were theological in agenda.

The definitive statement of the Incarnation is found in the johannine prologue: o logov sarc egeneto (John 1:14). This is quoted on p. 1 of the Grosvenor Eassay, but, curiously, not again until a passing reference on p. 25. Instead, it is the hymn cited by Paul in Phil 2:5-11 that is treated at some length (pp. 14-16), though without any recognition of the problems associated with this passage. Many scholars believe that Paul is citing, with or without emendation, an ancient Christian hymn or creedal formulary, which may therefore not be identical in all points with his own thinking at the time. A hymn, furthermore, is by its nature poetic, and therefore not necessarily precise or rigid in its theological expression, at least by the standards of modern systematic theology. Whereas John explicitly speaks of the Logos becoming flesh, incarnatus in the Latin, in Philippians we read of Christ Jesus who, though en morfh qeou uparxwn, being in divine form, en omoiwmati anqrwpwn genomenov, was born in likeness of human beings (note the plural of anqrwpwn with its potential for inclusivity). It is possible to read here a contrast between divine essence and human appearance, but morfh has a semantic range including outward appearance as well as essence, even if the latter would seem more likely in this context. omoiwma, on the other hand, clearly denotes outward appearance, and the text would be capable of docetic interpretation, were it not for the verb ekenwsen. The connotations of kenwsiv in eastern Christian theology should not be read anachronistically into this text. kenow means to deprive of power or meaning, and the reflexive form eauton ekenwsen denotes self-renunciation on the part of the pre-existent Christ, laying aside his divine nature to take human form. This may seem suspiciously heretical, but elsewhere Paul unambiguously associates Jesus’ exalted status, not with his birth or any pre-existent nature, but with his resurrection (Rom 1:4). The relinquishment of his divine essence to undergo a human birth, which the Philippian hymn implies, is not suggested at all by the johannine o logov sarc egeneto: in John Jesus is very much a divine being throughout the gospel narrative.

A text in the pauline corpus which comes very much closer to the johannine prologue is Col 1:15: ov estin eikwn tou qeou aoratou, prwtotokov pashv ktisewv. eikwn is commonly translated “image”, but this is accurate only insofar as the image is understood to embody and make present the reality it represents. This approximates very closely the concept of the Logos, most fully articulated in hellenistic Judaism by Philo of Alexandria, and also to hmkx in the Hebrew Wisdom tradition, e.g. Proverbs 8; Wisd Sol 9. In Philo’s allegorical interpretations of the Pentateuch, as in other writings, the Logos is the archetype of and divine agent in creation. The Logos mediates the presence and power of a transcendent God, and can be manifested in creation, in inanimate objects as well as in human or supernatural beings, of whom Moses is the most significant but not the only example. While the influence of Stoicism may be discerned, it is also clear that analogous concepts are deeply rooted in the Hebrew tradition, where they are dependent more on Persian (Zoroastrian) than Greek influence (cf. Gen 1; Ps 33:6).

Despite the richness of the tradition behind John 1, and its potential for articulating a sense of God’s presence in the world, the Grosvenor Essay begins with a digression on the subject of the virgin birth, or more correctly the virginal conception of Jesus. It is entirely correct in two key points:

(1) that hml( in Isa 7:14 does not imply sexual abstinence, and neither does parqenov; however Matthew or his source may have understood the verse, the connection between passages from the Prophets cited by Matthew and the birth of Jesus is at best tenuous, tendentious, and anachronistic;

(2) that the doctrine of the virginal conception is explicit only in Luke, but may be implicit in Matthew, even if unknown to Mark, Paul, the writer to the Hebrews, and other New Testament authors. It ought to occasion little surprise that the sex life of Mary was not deemed an appropriate topic for prurient investigation or theological speculation during the first Christian generation, however widespread the motif of gods seducing human women may have been in the mythologies of the eastern Mediterranean.

This does not imply, however, that Matthew and Luke found the christology of Mark adequate, or that any of them knew any doctrine approximating incarnation. Both Matthew and Luke suppress the adoptionism of Mark, not only with their nativity stories, but also in their redaction of the account of Jesus’ baptism. In Mark 1:9-11, Jesus’ status as beloved son of God is conferred in the descent of the Spirit, and this is emphasised quite forcefully in the Jewish Christian Gospel of the Hebrews (cited by Jerome) and Gospel of the Ebionites (cited by Epiphanius). It needs to be remembered that adoption was a common means of designating an heir in the Graeco-Roman world, to the extent that Titus (89-91 CE) was the first emperor to be the biological son of his predecessor (or, at least, his mother was married to Vespasian at the time of his conception); Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, and Nero had all been adopted heirs. An adopted son could inherit status and power irrespective of biological descent. Therefore, to the extent that a distinction can be drawn between functional and ontological Christology, the markan Jesus is able to function as son of God without any connotations of ontological divine status.

In Matt 3:13-17 John the Baptist recognises Jesus as already of higher status than himself, from whom he should seek baptism; in the Gospel of the Ebionites John attains this insight after baptising Jesus and witnessing the attendant apparitions. In Luke 3:21-22 the (undoubtedly historical) fact that John had baptised Jesus is all but airbrushed out of the narrative. For Matthew and Luke, the baptism of Jesus is not the occasion on which divine sonship is conferred on Jesus, but that on which his hitherto concealed status is revealed. This does not imply, however, that Matthew and Luke know any doctrine of incarnation, as the Grosvenor Booklet assumes. A consideration of the nativity narratives makes this clear.

Matthew stands in continuity with the motif of divine presence at the conception of key figures in salvation history, most notably Isaac, but also such lesser figures in the biblical narrative as Samson; a theme much expanded in the embellishments of the Old Testament stories widespread in the post-biblical Jewish literature. These accounts do not cast aspersions on the virility or even necessarily the fecundity of the father; even in Abraham’s case he was not without apparently immediate success once he diverted his attention to Hagar, just as Elkanah was fairly productive with Penninah before Samuel was born in answer to Hannah’s prayers (1 Sam 1). If anything, these interventions are in response to the women’s prayers at least as much as to the men’s, and concern their inability to bear children rather than male testosterone levels and procreative power. The stories testify to the conviction that children are a gift of God, and that God’s gracious care for God’s people was manifested in protective oversight of the conception and birth of those who were to play a particular role in Israel’s story. The account of the conception and birth of John the Baptist in Luke is an example of this. It remains the case, though, that Joseph’s paternity is implicitly denied in Matthew, without implying virginal conception. The identity of the father of the unborn child remains a mystery; Joseph resolves to withdraw from the impending marriage discreetly, so that the father could marry Mary and raise his child; the dream which prompts him to proceed with the marriage furnishes no explanation as to who had done that which Joseph had not done. That unanswered questions surround Jesus’ paternity is intimated in other passages in the Gospel tradition, where Jesus is referred to as Mary’s son (Mark 6:3; cf. Matt 13:55), which is highly unusual in a patriarchal and patronymic culture. The tradition that Mary had been raped by a Roman soldier (t Hullin 2.22-24; j Shabbat 14d) is certainly ancient, and is not historically implausible given that Sepphoris, the city in whose hinterland Nazareth lay, was besieged and destroyed by the Romans in 4 BCE, in the course of suppressing the uprising which followed the death of Herod. There would undoubtedly have been rape and pillage in the surrounding countryside as well as in the city. There is no evidence that Matthew knew or sought to rebut any such tradition. He places Jesus’ birth somewhat earlier, before the death of Herod, and in Bethlehem, and does not suggest that Joseph and his family lived in Nazareth until several years later. Whatever the nature of the mystery surrounding Jesus’ paternity, incarnation as proclaimed by John is nowhere suggested in Matthew.

Luke stands much closer to the notion of divine impregnation of human women common in hellenistic popular mythology. The offspring of such unions occupied an ambiguous status, between divine and human, mortal and immortal, which cannot be equated with the Christian doctrine of incarnation. On the contrary, the lukan nativity narrative nowhere suggests that Jesus is other than human, including his ascription by the angel as the son of God (1:35). The embellishment of the tradition in Christian popular mythology in subsequent centuries, even if reflecting a naïve docetic tendency, tended to focus on the magical aspects of Jesus’ conception and birth, with the baby ejected anally in order to preserve Mary’s hymen intact, and sceptics who presumed to examine the evidence having their offending limbs withered in retribution (Protevangelium of James; Infancy Gospel of Thomas, etc.). Whatever the christology implicit or explicit in these stories, such graphic speculations are far from the thought world in which the doctrine of incarnation is formulated and articulated in the johannine prologue.

Harmonisation of traditions is of course as inevitable as it is ancient. The New Testament Canon is in itself an exercise in harmonisation, achieved partly by excluding documents not deemed to reflect “orthodox” theology. The Lectionary governing the hearing of Scripture in worship, and the use of the Bible in Christian doctrine all depend on this to some extent. Nevertheless, there is a danger that the richness of some distinctive strands within the Christian tradition, including Scripture, may be overlooked if disparate, and often conflicting, motifs and theologies are uncritically harmonised, or interpreted in terms of each other. Without entering the Nestorian controversy of the fifth century, or the earlier doctrinal disputes which the Nicene Creed was intended to resolve, it may be worth observing that the perverse blend of theology and reproductive biology, ancient or modern, which interprets the synoptic nativity narratives in terms of the johannine prologue cannot realise a doctrine of incarnation without rendering Mary the surrogate mother of God’s test-tube baby.

I conclude by returning to the johannine prologue. As is clear from Philo and other Jewish writers interpreting their faith and heritage in the hellenistic world, the concept of the Logos, and its manifestation in human beings, is not about biology, and certainly not about genetics, DNA, and procreation. On the contrary, when the Logos is manifested in such figures as Moses, the transformation in their nature is not brought about through divine intervention in human procreation, still less by God’s committing adultery with some man’s wife. The divine presence is in no way empirically demonstrated, and is discernible only to those privileged with superior gifts of spiritual perception, and who respond appropriately to the manifestation of God’s Logos. God is visible to those able to perceive God’s presence in persons and events which may to others seem ordinary. In the narrative of John’s gospel, it is debatable whether any character, including the beloved disciple, fully appreciates Jesus’ status as expounded in the prologue. It is arguably Thomas who comes nearest to that apprehension when the risen Christ appears to him (20:29). The insight of the beloved disciple is as retrospective as that of any other Christian, whom he represents both in the narrative and in his affirmation of the reliability of its witness (21:24): they had been confronted with God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth in ways which they had not apprehended or appreciated at the time, but their response to Jesus had eventually brought them to discernment and faith.

In my heretical understanding of Christian doctrine, God is definitively incarnate in Jesus Christ, uniquely but not exclusively in the historical figure who lived and died, was buried, and rose from the dead. Derivatively, but no less significantly, God is incarnate in Christ’s Body, the Church, and therefore manifested in Christian people and communities active in God’s mission in the world. Jesus as Logos is also discerned in the exposition of Scripture and apprehended in the Eucharist, by those willing to perceive and to receive him in Word and Sacrament. Just as the early Church embraced some diversity of discernment and reflection on God’s presence in Jesus, so the Church today struggles to contain diversity of interpretation of the revelation of God in Scripture, as it has struggled for centuries with differences of perception as to how the Body and Blood of Christ are apprehended in the Eucharist. Just as the identification of Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate is beyond verification by historical means, while unambiguously testifying to an historical person, so the presence and image of God in Church, Word, and Sacrament is beyond empirical quantification, but nonetheless identifies who we are as the human institution which is God’s Church, proclaims God’s Word, celebrates the Sacraments of Christ’s saving work in the world, and seeks that others may discern in and through our witness the same God who was definitively revealed in Jesus Christ.