Understanding the Incarnation is vital

I became a Christian about 10 years ago. Perhaps unlike many of you reading this, my journey was not one from “I was brought up in a Christian home, etc.,” but rather one from “I was an atheist. And a pretty staunch one at that!”

The overarching reason for atheism, like all non-Christ affirming religions and philosophies is, as Paul tells us in the first chapter of Romans, suppression of the truth. But anyone professing atheism or any other religion or philosophical position, will of course have their “reasons” for believing what they believe. They will also have their “reasons” for not believing the doctrines of Christianity.

Of all my reasons for not accepting Christianity, I would say that the overarching one was that Christianity seemed to me to be little more than an escapist option. Here we all are, living in a world that is clearly problematic, and Christians seemed to be saying, “Come and join us in escaping it all. Believe in Jesus and you will go to Heaven.” This never felt to me like a very satisfactory or substantial philosophy for anyone actually having to live in this problematic world, with all its myriad of evils, difficulties, and challenges.

Ten years later and I firmly believe I was wrong to have perceived Christianity as an escapist religion—it most certainly isn’t—but it seems to me that I wasn’t far wrong in perceiving that this is how many Christians think. So though my view of Christianity has, of course, changed dramatically since those days, it still seems to me that many Christians actually do perceive the main message of the Bible in essentially “escapist” terms.

A little more than 2,000 years ago a baby was born in a manger. Of course, this wasn’t just any baby. This was incarnate Deity—God manifest in the flesh. Now all believers hold that His purpose in coming was to die for His people and to save them from their sins. But what happens when we flesh this out a bit, thinking about how it applies to our daily lives? Does the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection fit snugly into the view that the main point of Jesus’ work was to “rescue us and take us to Heaven”? Is that why Jesus came, died, and rose from the grave? Or was there something much bigger going on?

For much of the past century or two, Western Christianity has tended to become increasingly anti-Incarnational. This is not to say that believers are going about denying the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. But it is to say that in practice we often deny some of the ramifications of it. Western Christianity has been infested with Platonic dualism—spirit is good, matter is bad—and we often take our cue from this philosophy more than we do from the proclamation of God—all of His created order is Very Good.

The Incarnation refutes these Platonic assumptions. The Incarnation is, on one level, a celebration and testimony of the goodness of God’s physical creation. The Second Person of the Trinity became a real physical man living in the real physical world that He created.

The Incarnation is also an affirmation that—contrary to Plato and all forms of Gnosticism—the physical world is worth redeeming and indeed capable of being redeemed. The Incarnation is not about Jesus reluctantly becoming a physical being for a time, just because He had to become a man to pay for the sins of sons and daughters of Adam. Rather it is about Jesus wanting to put on human flesh and become one of us. This is why He is still incarnate flesh and blood, and why He always will be incarnate flesh and blood. If matter were somehow bad, He would have relinquished His humanity and His body as soon as the penalty for sin had been paid.

And God saw the Incarnation and behold it was Very Good!

We are entering the period of the church calendar when the Church generally celebrates the Incarnation of the Son of God. Some of you may not celebrate Christmas. My own church does not and in the past I have not. So I sympathize with some of the reasons some of you might have for this stance and know where you are coming from. Yet, whether or not you keep a feast on December 25, it really is good to remind ourselves of the Incarnation and all that it means.

It is a good thing to remember that God, the infinite, immortal, invisible Spirit became clothed with human flesh. It is good to remember because this—and more specifically the Resurrection—was the herald of a new creation. This world was not in need of escapism then and it is not in need of escapism now. What it did need and what it does need was and is a new creation, a new way of living, a new humanity. This is what Jesus is, this is what He inaugurated, and this is what we—His people—are meant to be and to become, beginning this side of death.

It is good to remind ourselves of the Incarnation for another reason. The Incarnation and the “Incarnation Resurrected” are doctrines that send shivers up the spines of wicked rulers. What was it that shook Herod? The idea that believers might get to Heaven? No, it was the fact that a Child was born, a Son was given. He knew what this meant. It meant that all the promises to Israel were about to come to pass. A new king—The King—was in the world. The Kingdom of God—as John the Baptist and Jesus later proclaimed—had indeed come. And this was a direct enough threat to Herod the tyrant that he had all the infants in Bethlehem slaughtered.

What was it that shook up the first-century world and disturbed the rulers of that age? Was it a doctrine that said “we’re going to be taken out of here”? Or was it the powerful witness that the Son of God had come in the flesh and after being put to death had risen physically from the grave—defying, defeating, and destroying even death itself? This was the doctrine that turned the world on its head. There is a new King and even death cannot contain Him.

I believe that this message is so much more powerful than the one I heard from many Christians when I was still an atheist. Did the Ruler of the Universe enter His creation in order to snatch a people out of a wicked and degenerating world into eternity? Or did the Ruler of the Universe enter His creation in order that a new creation might begin and the wicked and degenerating world might be redeemed and restored—beginning right there and then and continuing on through history, culminating in the resurrection of the entire physical creation at the end of time?

I believe that the second message is far more potent than the first. This is the message that would have challenged my atheism in ways which the more escapist view of things never could have done. And this is the message I will be telling my children this Christmas: Jesus Christ, the eternal God, the Savior of the world, the restorer of all things, entered His creation as a baby in order that He might slowly, yet inexorably, redeem it to Himself. Hail the incarnate Deity!

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine, Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.