Looking Forward from Christmas: The Importance of the Incarnation

“He became Son of man, who was God's own Son, in order that He might make the sons of men to be children of God. … He in nothing diminished His own Nature by this condescension, but raised us, who had always sat in disgrace and darkness, to glory unspeakable.”

                                – St John Chrysostom

Christmas is over, sort of – the 12 days extend until the Feast of Epiphany on Jan. 6 for Western Christians, and Eastern Christians’ Christmas is coming up on Jan. 7.

For most of us in the United States, we’re recovered from our food comas and family gatherings, mostly headed back to work, and looking into the new year.

For churches things get pretty low key until Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter, the most important holiday and central event of the liturgical year.  The connection between Christmas and Easter seems to be mostly a technicality for many American Christians: Jesus had to be born so he could die – okay, done, let’s move on. 

What we celebrate on Christmas – the Incarnation, God becoming a human being – is important all year long, especially for Jesus’ death and resurrection we celebrate at Eastertime.  The Incarnation undergirds all of Jesus’ ministry, His dying and rising, and the life of His people from then until all eternity.

I’m not sure we reflect on this enough.

When we do so, however, we push the limits of our human understandings of God and His work in the world, running up against what theologians refer to as mysteries of our faith.  In The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware writes,

In the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.

Drawing from Scripture, Christian theology has long understood the incarnate Jesus to have two distinct natures: he is both fully God and fully human.  Needless to say, how that works definitely qualifies as a mystery, and so does what that means for us – not fully hidden but not fully comprehensible either.

I want to talk about Jesus as God incarnate in three ways:

1.       Jesus as God’s Word

2.       Jesus as victor over sin and death

3.       Jesus as the union of God and humanity

Each forms a key part of God’s all-encompassing work of redemption, transformation, and reconciliation.

Jesus as God’s Word

The Gospel of John begins with a reference to Jesus as God’s Word, using the Greek word logos, indicating a message or organizing principle:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. (John 1:1-5, 14, 18)

Thinking about Jesus as God’s Word to us encompasses the whole of His life and ministry.  That’s a lot to try to summarize, but Jesus Himself spoke constantly about it in terms of “the kingdom of God”, a renewed world both coming in the future and here now and being accomplished in His person and by the community of followers He established.  It turns the existing order of the world upside down: the first will be last and the last will be first, people are called to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors, and true leadership means becoming everyone else’s servant.  Not only did Jesus preach these things, but He lived them by honoring the poor and the outcasts, healing the sick and the handicapped, and willingly laying down His life for the salvation of others.

Jesus as Victor over Sin and Death

God sent His Son Jesus to die and rise from the dead in order to save humanity from sin, death, and hell and to give us everlasting life with Himself.

The Incarnation is an inseparable part of that mission.

Hebrews 2:14-17 says,

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,  and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.  For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.  Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

St Augustine puts it this way:

We need a Mediator who, united to us here below by the mortality of His body, should at the same time be able to give us truly divine help in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness of His spirit, whereby He remained heavenly even while here on earth.

Just how we understand this depends somewhat on how we understand the idea of atonement, i.e. how Jesus deals with sin and death on our behalf.  Most American Evangelicals hold to what’s known as the penal substitutionary theory that understands atonement in terms of a courtroom scenario in which human beings are guilty of sin, subject to God’s wrath, and must be punished, but Jesus saves us by being punished for our sins instead.  The Incarnation facilitates this in that only a perfect and sinless human being can be substituted to sinful human beings, and therefore, Jesus required a human body in which to sacrifice Himself.

Evangelicals tend to assume that penal substitution is THE biblical understanding of atonement, but it’s largely a product of the Reformation in the Western Church’s reinterpretation of St Anselm of Canterbury’s eleventh-century satisfaction theory of atonement.

Before this in the West and still today in the Eastern Churches, the predominant (but not only) theories of atonement are the closely related Christus Victor (Christ Victorious) and ransom theories, both of which see the defeat of sin, death, and the devil as powers that enslave humanity and keep it from God as the work of atonement, rather than the satisfaction of an angry deity.  In these views, it is only immortal God wrapped in mortal flesh who can bind us to Himself, die our deaths, and raise us spiritually and bodily with Him in His immortal life.

Whichever way you understand Christ’s work of atonement, the Incarnation is at its root.

Jesus as the Union of God and Humanity

Jesus’ binding us to Himself in His death and resurrection is not only to accomplish a one-time purpose, it’s both the beginning of a relationship and image of a future reality.  Like in the end of the book of Revelation, God dwells with His people, joining heaven and earth together. 

But in the relationship that God establishes in Christ, He not only dwells with humanity, we are also somehow joined as one in a relationship that can only be described as full of mystery.  Jesus even describes this relationship between God and human beings as being like the relationship between the very persons of the Trinity.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His disciples,

Because I live, you also will live.  In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (14:19b-20)

Later He prays to God the Father,

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23)

According to 2 Peter 1:4, through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature”.

Eastern Orthodox theologians think of this in terms of theosis, humans themselves becoming in some sense divine.  In the second century, St Irenaeus speaks of “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

The indwelling of “you in Me and I in you” doesn’t quite sound like the relationship we see in Genesis to me.  But that’s not all:

In a sermon on the “Word made flesh” in John 1:14 (see above), St John Chrysostom makes an observation I don’t know if I had really thought much about before: 

And observe I pray you, the awful and ineffable nature of the mystery. He inhabits this tabernacle forever, for He clothed Himself with our flesh, not as again to leave it, but always to have it with Him.

That blows my mind a little bit.  This is something beyond just taking away humanity’s sins and returning us to a previously lost state of being, this is a new and permanent reality.

This is not just a remaking of the Garden of Eden, this is the building of something greater yet.  It actually makes me wonder if there still would have been an Incarnation if sin never came into the world.  Maybe we were never meant to exist in some static state and instead made to move ever further into the life of God.  Here again, though, we run up against a great mystery.

Looking forward from Christmas, we celebrate that Christ as God’s Word made flesh, the victor over our sin and death, and the now and future union of God and humanity is all part of one large saving purpose on God’s part: the redemption and utter transformation of humanity in all senses and making all things new.  The Incarnation runs through it all.

5 Things I Want to Say to Depressed People like Me

Not long ago, I wrote a post aimed at the family and friends of people who suffer from depression like I do.  I didn’t mean bummed out people or friends having a bad day, I meant those of us who suffer (in the full sense of that word) from a medical condition in which our brains don’t work right and produce intense amounts of pain regardless of our outward circumstances.

This time I wanted to write one to us, the depressed.  Here are five things you and I all need to hear and keep hearing:

1.  Depression is a real disease.

Repeat after me: “You’re sick.”  You really are.  Just because it’s hard to see from the outside, doesn’t mean it’s not there.  You wouldn’t tell someone with a compound leg fracture to just walk it off.  You wouldn’t tell someone with lung cancer that it’s all in their head and that they just need to try to be more positive.  And yet that’s the kind of thing we hear day in and day out, not just from others (which is bad enough), but from ourselves too.  We need to accept that depression is a real illness with real debilitating symptoms that cause real, unimagined pain.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

2.  It’s not your fault.

This might seem a bit overdone by now, but the following is a clip from the film Good Will Hunting.  Matt Damon’s character Will is visiting his court-mandated therapist, Sean (Robin Williams*).  While for most of us, our psychic trauma isn’t the result of abuse like Will’s is, we all still need to hear Sean’s message.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had this conversation with myself in my head or how many times I’ve cried having it:

I think you probably get my point by now that we didn’t do this to ourselves and it doesn’t represent some failing on our part, but for those of us who are Christians, we can get somehow an even worse end of the stick. (How many ends does this stick have?)

For those of in an Evangelical (or other similar) environment, spiritual health tends to be equated with positive emotion – that is, if you’re in a good place with Jesus, you should be filled with enduring joy.  Needless to say, I wrote about how wrong and damaging that is in my last post.  That kind of theology, whether explicit or implicit, makes the pain of depression not just a failing, but a moral and spiritual one as well.  Thankfully, though, there are plenty of Christians now and through history who have called BS on that.  Suffering has long been understood by Christians as a part of life in general and therefore a very part of the spiritual experience itself to be embraced and meditated upon as we look for light at the end of some sometimes very long tunnels.

A few years ago, I had a major depressive episode that lasted over a year.  That was bad enough to begin with, but I was in India for nine months at the time, trying to do research for my PhD dissertation (you can probably guess how well that was going) with pretty much no support network aside from my wife who had come with me.  (She has been the best partner in the darkness I could ever have asked for, but even she can’t fix everything.)

While trying to cope by reading about depression and mental illness in general, I ran across the work of English poet and Anglican priest John Donne, who at one point had become so badly sick that everyone thought the was on his death bed.  Donne decided to write a book of spiritual meditations on his illness called Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.  Each devotion began by meditating on some aspect of his condition, after which he tried to see what he might learn from that mediation, and then proceeded to write a prayer in response to it all.

His very first devotion considered the spontaneous and seemingly senseless nature of his condition:

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of man!
 

No matter where you're at in your life, sometimes “in a minute a cannon [of our disease] batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.” 

You can’t control getting sick, the best you can do is decide what you do about it.

3.  Get treatment.

That brings me to my next point: get help, even if you think you could probably get by without it.  If you had emphysema or had a heart attack, I hope you would go see a doctor.  Clinical depression  is serious, and you’re probably not as good at dealing with it as you think you are.

Generally we need some combination of antidepressive medication and talk therapy.  If you start trying and it doesn’t seem to be working, hang in there.  A lot of antidepressants can take weeks to fully kick in, and not every type of medication works equally well for every patient.  Talk therapy can take time too.  None of this means this stuff is bunk or that your case is hopeless or that you’re never going to improve – it just means that your doctors are still working hard to hone in on the right treatment for you. 

One way or another, things are going to get better.

 

4.  Feel free to yell and swear sometimes.

Not at people, maybe just alone, maybe in your car.  There is a real cathartic value to not just yelling, but swearing your head off.  That’s not very “good Christian blog advice”, but it’s good actual advice.   Sometimes, you just need to let out your pain and frustration with one big, “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKK!!!!!!!!!!!” on the freeway.  I promise Jesus understands.

5.  Accept yourself for who and where you are.

      Your are who you are, and that’s fine.  It’s okay for you to not be okay. 

I’m not saying it’s acceptable to stay in an unhealthy place by avoiding treatment.  But wherever you are right now is where you are, and beating yourself up won’t change that.

Maybe the best you can muster today is to just get out of bed and watch television.  If that’s the case, then well done sir or madam, VICTORY IS YOURS!

     Seriously, be kind to yourself.  You’re sick, and this shit is hard.

* It hurt badly for me and a lot of other depressed people when Robin Williams took his own life in 2014.  Robin was deeply depressed and struggled mightily with substance abuse issues of the course of his life.  Like many of us, he told jokes and did his best to make people laugh in part to project an outward face to try and hide the depth of pain inside, but he was so much better at it than the rest of us.  I see so much of that in myself, and I really wish he was still with us.

5 Ways To Help Your Friends And Family With Depression

I could have written the title of this post a bit differently, “for your depressed family and friends,” but I want to be clear that when I’m writing about depression right now, I’m not talking about people who are “depressed”, as in sad, bummed out, or having a bad week.  I’m talking about those of us whose brains work differently, who have a very real medical condition that makes us feel devastated, like our insides have been torn out and stomped all over, day after day for months or even years, no matter what our outward circumstances may be.  Many of us manage our condition with a combination of medication and talk therapy, far too many of us suffer undiagnosed, as I did for years, and sadly, some of us just feel we can’t keep going and end our lives.  You, our friends and family, can help us out, but sometimes when you try to help, it can make things worse.  So here are a few things to do to help us out:

1.  Take our illness seriously.

You wouldn’t tell someone with a broken leg or diabetes or cancer to just suck it up, would you?  We may look fine on the outside, but depression is a real disease and you need to recognize that and treat us accordingly.

2.  Don’t tell us it could be worse or about how bad other people have it.

Our brains are messed up.  The pain we feel has little to no relation to our outward circumstances.  Sure I’m not starving to death or dying from an incurable disease, but I’m enduring unspeakable suffering inside anyway.

3.  Stop giving us advice on how to feel better if you haven’t experienced real depression yourself.

This is one of the absolute most frustrating things to me as a depressed person.  So many well-intentioned, non-depressed people suggest that we try things that help them feel better when they feel down.  It’s just not the same.  Even if your suggestion might help us a little, it’s still a drop in the bucket.  Encourage us to seek treatment, but beyond that, you’re really not helping.

4.  Let your Christianity be about more than positive emotion.

Having come out of conservative Evangelicalism, I spent a long time in a world where happiness and joy were signs of a healthy spiritual life.  A guy who went to the same campus ministry as I did and now directs a campus ministry himself recently posted on social media, “If you are truly being faithful you will be consistently joyful.”  As someone who has struggled with depression for years on end, I couldn’t disagree more.  Even the most faithful people can experience what St John of the Cross referred to as the “dark night of the soul”.  In Psalm 88, the poet says that despite his constant calling out to God, “Darkness is my only companion.”  It might be hard to find a more faithful person in the Bible than Job, but he suffered horribly nonetheless.  Our pain doesn’t mean that we’re far from God or that God is far from us, and it’s certainly not due to a lack of spiritual effort.  I brought another friend who also struggled with depression* to the campus ministry I attended in college, and she couldn’t stand being there.  Her words have stuck with me for over a decade: “It’s not a place where it's okay to not be okay.”  (Eventually, I stopped going there myself, although partly for other reasons.)  Our churches, ministries, Bible studies, and friendships need to be places where it’s okay to not be okay.  A Christianity that equates faith with positive emotion grinds down people like us, tearing us up inside even more than we already were and exacerbating the crises of faith that depression can already bring with it.

5.  Just be there.

No judgment, no advice (unless you yourself have struggled with depression), no pep talks, no expectations – just show up and be present with us.  Sit there, and acknowledge our pain, validate and try to empathize with our feelings.  We need you to try to understand our pain, gently check up on us, and accept us for who we are and where we’re at.

---

* I hadn’t really come to terms with my own depression yet at this point.

Christianity, American Nationalism, and DACA

I was originally going to write this post about the confusion of Christianity, patriotism, and American nationalism in the United States these days.  But President Trump has just decided to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that kept undocumented/illegal* immigrants who came to the US as children from being deported.  While many of these immigrants are now adults, they were brought here as children through no choice or fault of their own, and many don’t know any home but this country.  The US government is punishing children for the actions of their parents.

Aside from the justice or injustice of the American** immigration system, this whole thing should make those of who identify as Christians take a moment to think about our place in the world.

Here in America, Christianity and nationalism seem to go hand in hand for quite a lot of us – many Americans say that the United States is a “Christian nation” – a biblical “city on a hill” – and not so subtly imply that American patriotism is part of being a good Christian.  Of course, all of this presupposes that Christianity the a kind of thing that can have nations and national allegiances.  Regardless of the degree to which that is true or false, polities are a thing, and Christian people are a part of them.

In trying to understand nationalism, historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson writes about nations as what he refers to as “imagined communities”.*** These communities are “imagined”, not in the sense being fictional, but in the sense that their members do not interact face to face as in a family or small town.  While I might know and interact with a certain number of other Americans on a personal level, I have not and never will meet the vast majority of them.  The same can be said of every other American (unless you travel a lot and are really, really friendly), yet we have a sense that all of us are somehow the same kind of people: Americans.  Granted, there are always arguments about who’s really in and out of that or any other group, but the point is that we conceive of ourselves as common members of a meaningful community despite our lack of personal intimacy.  As such, these imagined communities are key to our sense of identity and the way we understand our place in the world, and they can motivate us to engage in a variety of actions and for reasons we might not otherwise.

Those of us who are American Christians need to think about three imagined or conceptual communities in particular right now:

1.  The Church broadly conceived; the great body of Christians throughout the world, whatever their theology, practice, or denomination; the Body of Christ****

2.  Humanity as a whole, and I mean everyone; the community of every single person on earth

3.  Our country: the United States of America

In what order do we rank the importance our membership in these imagined communities for ourselves?  The order above is my answer, but you have to answer for yourself.  But answer honestly, lip service does us no good.

We can be Americans and proud to be Americans, but we will always come to a point at which our faith demands that that identity take a back seat to our commitments to other communities. 

I find today’s slogan of “America First” to be fundamentally at odds with the Gospel of Christ, which calls us to emulate His sacrificial love.  What that might look like politically and internationally is complicated and without easy answers.

But when it comes to DACA, as well as how we view and act towards all manner of refugees from war, poverty, and violence, I can’t help but think of Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:31-46:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.  Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.  Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”  Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”  Then they also will answer, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”  Then he will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”  And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I hope I’ve given you something to think about.

* There’s lot of politics involved with how you refer to people who entered the country outside of legal immigration channels (which themselves have major problems that make them difficult to use), but I’m not sure the discussion makes a huge amount of difference in what I’m talking about here.

** “America” is obviously a problematic term here – North America, South America, Latin America, etc. – but I’m going to use it to mean the United States of America, as that’s where I and most of my readers live and how we refer to it.

*** Anderson, Benedict.  2006 [1983].  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  London: Verso.; I am in no way giving Anderson’s ideas the complex explanation they deserve, but such are the realities of blogging, I guess.

**** Like many other Christians, I believe that there is a very real spiritual dimension to this community that goes beyond the type of thing Anderson is talking about, but that’s beyond the scope of this type of analysis.

Reboot.

     I haven’t written here in a long time.  When I started, I wanted to make each post a fairly in-depth look at how a concept I interacted with in academia (in the humanities, really) could contribute to how we think about and practice Christianity.  I had some great ideas, but it turned out to be a good bit of work and, for various reasons, I didn’t do a great job following through with the project.

     I still have some of those same ideas, and I still want to write about them; but, there’s more to say, and not everything worth saying needs to be long.


     Beyond intellectual engagement, this blog is going to be about faith, doubt, struggle (including mine with depression), current events, social justice, and the idea that the Christian Gospel is about more than praying your way out of hell.