IS THE INCARNATION A MYTH?
McCabe, Herbert
IS THE INCARNATION A MYTH? HERBERT MeCABE of the Christian faith which specifically denies this religious statement. This question is a little obscured by the fact that at least one of the...
...Now quite apart from the presence of grace and therefore of incarnation in the followers of other religion,it is really time we stopped and criticized this phrase...
...This requirement, I think Professor Hick must on reflection agree, is satisfied by the doctrine of the incarnation...
...Once again the theological mind boggles...
...She does not, however, hold it with much conviction for she rapidly switches to quite different talk of 'different models'—inevitably bringing up the example of wave particle models in physics...
...61) You would think that two thousand years of Christianity would have got this idolatry of a celestial Camp Counselor out of our system once and for all...
...No such necessity seems to have weighed upon these authors...
...For him the message of Jesus was the opposition and challenge of God to man...
...We require of such a doctrine not that it be clearly intelligible but that at least it should say something e.g...
...we are told, by Michael Goulder, about a fascinating, if somewhat hypothetical, 'Samaritan Christianity,' but of the Christian doctrine that Jesus was not a 'spiritual visitant' but a man who was God we are given no serious analysis at all...
...Aquinas begins his discussion of whether this doctrine can be true or not (Quaest...
...We should be able to avoid, for example, the grotesquely infantile picture offered, apparently seriously, by Michael Goulder: "Once the world was on its way God did not interfere with it...
...this God must be at the heart of every being, acting in every action (whether determined or free), continually sustaining her creation over against nothing as a singer sustains her song over against silence— and that too is only a feeble metaphor, for even silence presupposes being...
...Circles and squares and triangles and such occupy their mutually exclusive territories in the common logical world of shapes...
...hence to say that something is both a circle and a square is to say both that it is and is not a circle, and this (pace the Latin Averroists and, possibly, Frances Young) is to say nothing at all...
...sisted on the impossibility of treating God as a thing like other things about which factual statements can be made...
...At one point it is said that the incarnation means that Jesus was not a human person (they are not alone in thinking this: I have seen the same ntuddle in works of debased scholasticism...
...A literal incarnation doctrine expressed in however sophisticated a form cannot avoid some element of docetistn and involves 150 the believer in claims for uniqueness which seem straightforwardly incredible to the majority of our contemporaries...
...X, qua policeman, murdered his wife...
...For to say, without explanation, that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was also God is as devoid of meaning as to say that this circle drawn with a pencil on paper is also a square...
...There is no special mystery about this: it is no more than the logical difference between saying "A policeman murdered his wife" and saying "Mr...
...2) with- a useful parallel from the doctrine of the eucharist...
...There is no significant world religion except Christianity Every other religion, however many its adherents, has shown itself incapable of breaking free from a particular culture or even a particular peple Afteistic humanism is worldwide but not a religion...
...It may be part of the meaning of man that he is not any other creature...
...178) (It is not clear how any amount of 'explanation' could render meaningful something that begins by being devoid of meaning, but let it pass...
...Fran«j Young: "Modern discussions have jn...
...turies—and not much after that eitW until the nineteenth—e.g...
...It will perhaps be even more pleasant to watch the debate on fundamentals which surely ought now to arise between Don Cupitt and his fellow-symposiasts...
...The Greek term for a world religion is Catholicism...
...He disregards, however, the two quite distinct ways in which transubstantiation may be (and has been) dropped...
...Now in which of these senses do these authors propose to manage without the incarnation...
...any interference by the celestial Camp Counselor may well restrict man's freedom or compete with him for attention...
...It is, however, an altogether different matter to use the same terms and to deny the doctrine...
...People ask, then, did Jesus in Galilee assent to the Chalcedonian definition of himself...
...It has been dropped by, for example, transignificationists who think they have a better way of saying that the consecrated bread and wine are really the body and blood of Christ, on the other hand it has also been dropped by Zwingliam who want to say that the consecrated elements are not the real body and blood of Christ but mere representations of it...
...He says that just as many Christians manage without the doctrine of transubstantiation so they may manage without the doctrine of the incarnation...
...But just what or where is the common logical world that is occupied in mutual exclusion by God and man...
...It authorizes us to say, for example, because of the life of Jesus, that our God was whipped and spat upon and that God has experienced total failure and death itself (and, incidentally, not to say, as Frances Young carelessly does, that, in Jesus, God "bore the pain and the guilt" of evil...
...At the root of all this lies a deficient doctrine of God, and this must be partly due to the authors' otni^ of a thousand years of hard Chrktiathinking on the topic...
...on the contrary, for him the incarnation is all too palatable in that it proposes the humanity of God...
...Of course it does not...
...The mystery of the incarnation lies in the fact that while, alas, there is nothing in the least odd about someone happening to be both a murderer and a policeman, when we are dealing not with what someone happens to be but with what constitutes him as what he fundamentally is, with what it takes for him to be at all, with (if you will pardon the expression) his essence or nature, then it does seem extremely odd for him to be two kinds of thing at once...
...Maurice Wiles provides us (p...
...there is no need for all this ambiguous and misleading stuff about myths...
...I know that large claims have been made for Jesus's human knowledge, not only by Professor Mascall who is quoted here with proper disapproval by Wiles (p...
...It was such thinking that produced the Chalcedonian, and for that matter the Thomist, versions of the incarnation, and there is every reason to hope that similar work done by minds illuminated by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Heidegger and Wittgenstein will produce its own account of Jesus and his meaning...
...Frances Young p. 32) This is the central assertion of the book and no attempt whatever is made to show that the first part of it is true...
...God could not be an item in any universe...
...the other part in that this same identical person was and is divine...
...Apart from trivial reference to John Damascen* (Cupitt, p. 133) the book shows ^ understanding of any theological work between the fifth and the fifteenth cm...
...The former view may reasonably be claimed as a development of doctrine, recognizable in that it puts the whole matter in an entirely new light and calls for a new language...
...Christians managed without a doctrine expressed in these terms for quite a long time and they may turn out to do so again...
...And so on...
...They seemed 'appropriate' to Mascall and to Aquinas...
...it was not in the same ball-game with what he learned as man...
...it cannot be part of the meaning of man that he is not God...
...But, alas, not in this book: for it is in large part devoted to a docetist misunderstanding of the incarnation...
...From this perspective there is not the same anxiety about the 'uniqueness' of the incarnation in Jesus...
...A prominent symptom of misunderstanding the doctrine of the incarnation as telling us what, empirically, Jesus was or is like is confusion about Jesus's knowledge...
...This God cannot be a Top Person summoned to fill the gaps in the natural order...
...The motives of most of the authors of this book are to commend Christianity to men (including themselves) who cannot believe in a 'supernatural visitant' and cannot believe that God has remained silent except in the Judaeo-Christian tradition—I hope that I have shown that these ideas have nothing in common with orthodox traditional belief in the incarnation...
...140) Don Cupitt comes clean...
...The empirical content of what is understood to be involved in the incarnation"—Wiles...
...De Vnione Verbi Incarnati) by saying "In order to answer this question it is necessary first to consider what we mean by 'nature' and secondly what we mean by 'person...
...This does not mean that we actually understand what it means to say that Jesus is man and God...
...It is in this way that Chalcedon points to the mystery of Jesus...
...of course we do not clearly understand this any more than we clearly understand what it means to say that God created the world or that the consecrated elements are the body and blood of Christ or indeed that God exists or that I am a sinner...
...Let me repeat: we may well find other ways of articulating this mystery, but if we are to speak in these old-fashioned terms of essence, nature, person, then to deny the paradoxical proposition of Chalcedon is to fail to grasp in faith the mystery which is Jesus...
...Thus grace which, in Aquinas's view, was our personal openness in faith/knowledge and love to the divine life which is in any case always at the center of our being, finds its culmination in Jesus who is totally transparent to divinity in that the I which is the center of his being is not even created but simply known and loved into being by the Father...
...Only su& ignorance (which is quite standard k the theological departments of British universities) could account for the uiv, critical view of God manifest in these pages...
...Instead we are given accounts of how a docetist version of Jesus might have been expected to arise, accounts of 'divine or spiritual visitants' such as are to be found in literature roughly contemporary with the early Church...
...35) What could possibly be supposed to be meant by part of God...
...that it should not contradict itself...
...It is in this perspective (not in the perspective of the god that is rival to man) that developed Christian theology saw the incarnation...
...The word 'person' does not even figure in the index...
...What we expect to find in India or California is not an alternative Christ but alter Christus...
...they do not seem appropriate to Maurice Wiles (or to me), but anyway to deny them has nothing to do with denying the doctrine of the incarnation any more than to assert them has to do with docetism...
...It is part of the meaning of a circle that it is not a square or any other shape...
...With the idea of God as creator, as source of esse (roughly the being of the thing not just over against a world-without-it, but over against nothing, not even 'logical space') comes the idea of God as relevant to things precisely in virtue of transcendence...
...It is part of the meaning of being human that one is not a sheep...
...It follows that there is not, after all, 151 the same contradiction in saying that Jesus is both man and God as there would be in saying that a circle is a square or that Jesus is both man and sheep...
...the latter is a denial of the doctrine couched in approximately the same language...
...It is not, however, true to say "Jesus, qua God, died on the cross" for here 'God' belongs to the predicative part of the proposition and has the role of signifying a nature...
...The idea that Jesus, qua Son of God, constructed some special divinely authorized set of propositions such as the Christian creed is as anthropomorphic as the idea that God has a white beard...
...Disp...
...he no more accepted this than he accepted Newton's third law or the theory of surplus value...
...I am sure it is true, as France* Young clearly explains, that for many of the early Fathers there was a problem of the relation of God to the world and of Jesus to God which was seen in terms of platonist or neo-platonist puzzles about the One and the Many, but this was quite soon superseded by a more radically Christian understanding of God in terms of creation— a notion not available to Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus...
...It would have seemed preposterous to, for example, Aquinas, to say that Divinity ever assented to any proposition at all...
...153...
...It may be that Hick himself is groping towards such an idea when he says that the doctrine is intended to "express an evaluation and evoke an attitude...
...We would also avoid such hair-raising sentences as "To reduce all of God to a human incarnation is virtually inconceivable...
...Indeed the paradoxical concept of a religion (something tied to history and tradition and particularity) which is nonetheless worldwide transcending cultures and histories, is itself a peculiarly Christian and 'incarnational' notion...
...This question is a little obscured by the fact that at least one of the authors, (Frances Young) holds, part of the time, the doctrine (usually associated with the medieval Latin Averroists) of the Double Truth—that a statement can be false in philosophy but true in theology: this position is not open to rational discussion...
...Orthodoxy has never been able to give this idea any content"— Hick...
...In virtue of his human nature certain things can be asserted or denied about Jerse in virtue of his divine nature certain other things can be asserted on denied him, but all these assection are about one person...
...The mystery of Jesus is, like all mysteries, the mystery of what 'God' means...
...We are accustomed by now to Professor Wiles's wholly admirable plea for real theology—theology in the sense that it was practiced by, say, Thomas Aquinas (and by Wiles himself) which is not just exegesis of the Bible or the Fathers but the asking of radical questions and the application of critical intelligence to the formulation of our belief...
...If we are to explore it we shall have to explore what we can, and more particularly what we cannot, confidently assert concerning God...
...41, my italics...
...But what about Jesus's self-understanding as Godt There seems to be an idea that if we once admit (with Chalcedon) that Jesus was divine in Galilee—and hence living not merely in history but in eternity—he must, by the power of his divine nature, have foreseen the propositions of Chalcedon and assented to them...
...What matters in Jesus's message is his sense of the abrupt juxtaposition of two opposed orders of things . . . the doctrine of the incarnation unified things which Jesus has kept in ironic contrast to each other...
...Jesus's knowledge of history, as Son of God, was no different from the existence of the world...
...but he surveys it with loving care, triumphing in man's loving response, agonizing with his suffering...
...It is with statements like this that these theologians illustrate the perils of not having done much theology in Maurice Wiles's sense...
...To begin to grasp the Christian notion of God that was hammered out particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to recognize the crudity and utter irrelevance of Feuerbach's polarization of man and God...
...Whatever we can mean by speaking of God's knowledge, we know that it cannot mean that God is well informed, that he assents to a large number of true statements...
...God is not one of the items in some universe which have to be excluded if it is just man that you are talking about...
...Thomas Aquinas, but none of these claims has any logical connection with the incarnation...
...He lived in a time before the language of Chalcedon was formulated...
...It is not that Christians expect to find another God/ man in India or California (though Aquinas thought this perfectly possible in principle if not in the actual historical divine plan) but that the exclusive uniqueness of Jesus (Jesus-and-not-me instead of myselfin-Jesus) is simply the sin of the world...
...Of course it is, but this is at least part of what Holy Mother Church has been teaching since before Chalcedon...
...When some physicists bring out a book called "The Myth of Quantum Mechanics" we shall begin to think there might be a real parallel here...
...For the Christian, however, Divinity is creative of man's freedom, and the more man is himself, the more he is free, the more is the action of God manifest...
...Similarly being human and being, say, a sheep occupy mutually exclusive territories in the common logical world of animals...
...It is not so with the author of what seems to me the most lucid and perceptive chapter in the book...
...And nearly everyone nowadays says: No, he didn't...
...The point a logical (or, as these authors Prefer to call it, a 'metaphysione...
...A circle and a square make two shapes...
...it does not tell us of his life but of the significance of his life...
...a man and a sheep make two animals: God and man make two what...
...5) but by many other Christians, including St...
...Of course the doctrine that Jesus is one person in two natures is a theological interpretation of Jesus, and of course it may be replaced by another interpretation using quite different language...
...For Professor John Hick it is all rather simple: he writes as though no one had hitherto observed the oddness of ascribing two natures to Jesus...
...It may well be the case that the bigger place you give to some non-Christian god the less room is left for man, and 152 vice versa...
...Part of the doctrine of the incarnation is precisely that Jesus was and is a human person...
...Thus it is true to say "God on the cross" or "God suffered hunger andt thirst'' because in these sentences 'God' is a referring expression in strewson's sense,indicating the subject, the person, about whom the assertion is being made...
...The adjectives 'divine' and 'human' express what Jesus is (his nature), the name 'Jesus' refers to who (which person) he is...
...One of the concerns of these authose, particularly John Hick, is that the incarnation seems provincial in that it makes Christianity something ntterly different from all other world religions...
...Somewhere at the back of the minds of these authors lurks, it seems probable, the idea that the doctrine of the incarnation ought to tell us what Jesus was like, or what it was like to be Jesus...
...It is not that by grace we become extra incarnations of the Son of God but that by grace we belong to the one incarnation of the Son of God—we are 'in Christ" as Paul kept saying...
...A man accustomed to radical questioning of that kind would, of course, immediately ask: "Can it be that being divine is related to being human in the same way as being circular is related to being square...
...The doctrine of the incarnation, like the doctrines of creation or redemption, is not conveying information, it is pointing to a mystery in Jesus...
...his article is an outright rejection of Catholic Christianity and in particular of the Catholic idea that 'grace perfects nature.' It is good, vigorous, Protestant stuff which it would be a pleasure to answer had we but space—suffice for the moment to say that it seems to me to involve an antithesis of God and man (as distinct from an antithesis of the World and the Kingdom) appearing, despite much wisdom and insight, in Luther and made fully explicit in Feuerbach, an anti-thesis which is not to be found in the New Testatment...
...Don Cupitt's reason for rejecting the incarnation has nothing to do with making Christianity more palatable to modern man...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 5
