Bringing Christ Down to Earth

by

Dec. 19, 2021

The miracle of incarnation is in its particularity. God is most exalted when we recognize and preach the real depth to which the God humbled God’s self: just to save a single world of the countless worlds in the domain of the Divine. 

By contrast our efforts to exalt the event of Jesus' birth to universal significance reveals how diminutive our Christian concept of God really is: the tribal deity of a single species imprisoned by its puerile imperial claims.

The authors of scripture had no concept of the cosmos as we know it, and clearly saw the incarnation as a human event in human history for the salvation of humankind. Only when we recognize this can we realize what it means to worship a Transcendent God whose love is so great that he takes human form and suffers death on the cross to save just a microscopic portion of the uncountable creatures in God's boundless creation. And only when we recognize this can we preach a credible gospel to humans whose self-understanding is shaped by a contemporary view of the cosmos.

The biggest challenge of science to theology isn't the answers science gives, but the questions it asks. Let's take something simple. 

Here on earth we are discovering that the inner life of animals in some respects resembles our own. We see glimmers of something like us. Yet we have no means to "get inside their heads." If we have any common language it is far too limited to really understand what they are thinking. And if they have a desire to break the impasse they haven't shown any indication, any more than we have discovered the ability to do so. So a question: are animals intelligent? Do they have morals? Do they have feelings? 

At the same time we are creating what is loosely called "artificial intelligence." The most sophisticated of these speak to us in a language we can understand, or at least solve problems that we have set for them. But they are also a "black box;" self-constructing their own rules of logic, rules that they cannot explain to us and which we cannot interpret short of running backward through millions and millions of computational steps, and perhaps not even then. 

Looking beyond our planet, reasonable projections suggest that our galaxy, one of an uncountable number in the universe, has by itself billions of planets on which life based on the same chemical reactions as earthly life could occur. So it is equally reasonable that life has occurred, and in some cases has led to some form of intelligent self-awareness more like ours than that of our animal companions. And yet, like apparently intelligent animals and AI, there is no reason to assume that these so-called intelligences will reference the world in a logical framework like that of the culturally and socially formed human mind. So are they really "intelligent" in any meaningful sense of the word? Are they moral? Do they have feelings? At this point we cannot know.

And this raises question of whether and how our Christian story and its claims are truly universal.

Christians have always grappled with what the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus could mean for those humans who never heard of it purely by accident of birth or the failures of human evangelists. Was Jesus birth, life, death, and resurrection (the Christ event to use Tillich's term) an objective event in the life of God that changed every human relationship with God regardless of those humans' subjective knowledge and assent? Or does the Christ event only effect a change of relationship with God through subjective human assent? We wouldn’t still be arguing about these possibilities if our answers were satisfactory. 

But the problem is deeper than the fact that both Jesus and our evangelistic message are locked in space and time. 

Within cultures and among humans who had access to the gospel we always assumed that we shared a common mind. We could imagine subjective assent to Christian claims in some form or another even by those who never actually heard them. As we have become more and more aware of how both individual experience and culture shape each individual's self-understanding  the assumption of a common mind becomes more problematic. Differences in the "software" of the mind only increase across cultures in both space and time. Developing a common language and shared affirmations becomes increasingly difficult. 

So can Christian theological understandings of reality, stretched to their limit simply to describe the gospel in  accessible human terms, be meaningfully extended to alien intelligences? Are Adam and Eve not merely human parents, but cosmic parents? Can we assert that the Christ event, so deeply rooted in human history, can change the subjective attitude toward God of alien intelligences who have not and cannot ever hear it?  Or focusing on the objectie act: Is God reconciled with every one of the billions of intelligences in the universe through the single peculiarly human act on an insignificant planet on the outer edge of one galaxy among billions?

You can see that the questions raised by scientific understandings of the universe, not to mention increasing cross-cultural interactions and the rise of AI are far more difficult than a few scientific answers that contradict a literal reading of the Bible. They demand both the answer to how the event of Jesus can be cosmically relevant as an objective event in history, and how it can be cosmically relevant as a message of good news, of salvation. 

At the very least our Christian use of words like "universal" and "once and for all" seem desperately naive. Even when theologians leap from the language of immanence to the language of metaphysics we know we're still speaking analogically, and thus in human terms comprehensible only to humans. It isn't merely that language binds us to space and time. It binds us to our embodied brains here on earth, a tiny planet on the backside of beyond by universal standards. We have no idea if we can make our understandings of human language general enough to account for communication across the universe, and we have no idea if the Christ of earth is the savior of the universe.

Maybe we don't have to. 

Why not accept that the transcendent greatness of God is most manifest in the utter particularity of God's love for humanity and the earth for which we are charged to care? Instead of projecting the Christ event into the cosmos we can look forward to in some distant future discovering a universe of other stories of God's decisive acts of love. We may even find that in some sense they all intersect at a kairos moment of reconciliation between God and Creation. But to do that we to first embrace the distinctiveness of the story of Incarnation for us and release it from its  bondage to human conceptions of metaphysics masquerading as a universal theology. 

We need to call it what it is: a myth. It is a story of an event in time that illuminates our human lives with truths that cannot be articulated in any other form of language; including the languages of philosophy and theology. Aquinas quit while he was ahead, maybe we should as well. 

I don't say this to disrespect 2000 years of serious theology and metaphysics in a variety of forms. Theology serves us by creating the language through which we can share our experiences of the Divine in a coherent way and thus form human communities of worship, hope, and ethical ideals. 

Nor am I suggesting that classical theologies are entirely irrelevant now. The fact that our self-understanding is changing in the complex contexts of scientific understandings of other creature, the rise of AI, and a growing sense of the vast possibilities in the universe doesn't mean that our self-understanding has or will entirely change. Nor does it change the fact that the habits of intellectualization serve us in creating new and more relevant theological language. 

What I'm noting is the emergence of a new culture, indeed a new sense of what it means to be human in which many existing forms of theology may no longer be contextually relevant. Faith seeking understanding will need different approaches, approaches that may be more narrative than analytical, more enacted than articulated. There are many ways, even just looking across current human cultures, to seek and find a common mind. For the story of Jesus Christ to remain intelligible it needs to be retrieved from dissipation into metaphysics and cosmology and restored to its humanity and humility. And the best place to start is a child in a manger.

In this season of Advent that is a good enough reason to return to the story; to focus on reenacting the event in human history that binds us as humans irrevocably to God. It may well be that the most serious theology you will encounter this Christmas season will be children dressed as shepherds and angels gathered around a tattered creche with a plastic baby while a hesitant voice reads from the gospels an ancient human story. All that better that the guiding star is made of papier-mâché and gold paint; the better to represent the limits of the cosmos understood by shepherds and wisemen alike. 

It may well be that the most serious theology you will encounter will be at the intersection of kindly gifts of food, drink, shelter, healing, and release offered to relieve the deepest and most basic of human needs. Does the gift giving (depending on culture) come associated with an Anatolian bishop metamorphosed into a sleigh-riding elf or the charity of a Czech king? All the better to locate it within the vagaries and limitations of human cultural transformation.  

Because God was born in human history, in a lowly manger, to save a peculiar species on a lonely planet, God claims us for God's self. The child in the manger spares us the debilitating hubris of imagining that we have some claim on God.

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture.