The Incarnation as a Mystical Reality

The Incarnation as a Mystical Reality

The person of Jesus is the most important and influential historical figure the world has ever known. No other man or woman has left such a great legacy and impact as Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, he began a movement that would grow and evolve to change the face of the entire western world and beyond. Many people of every sex, race, culture, religion, and perspective affirm Jesus in some way. The Jews and Muslims claim him as a prophet, the Hindus deem him as a god, the Buddhists proclaim him as a buddha, and even many atheists see him as a great humanist and moral teacher. Christians, however, view and worship him as a divine reality within the scope of monotheism. To them, he is not just a divine figure or a god; he is the unique manifestation of the one, true, God. How did this group come to such a conclusion? This paper will examine the growth and progression of the early Christian views of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. When presented through a botanical metaphor, the seed of this thought is planted with the knowledge of Jesus as a prophet teaching the truths of God. This image soon sprouts into the understanding of Jesus’ messianic identity as the savior of Israel. As a young tree, the realization of the messianic identity grows into the understanding of Jesus as the Wisdom of God existing before the beginning of the world; and finally fully grown the Incarnation is viewed as the fullness of God in flesh. In the end, the paper will show the truth of the Incarnation, not as a genetic and literal truth, but as something of more value: a mystical and transcendent reality.

Introduction

Before discussing Jesus as the Incarnation of God, two brief arguments should be raised. First, this paper assumes (based on the majority of scholarly work) that the Incarnation was a developed idea. No reason exists to believe that the direct followers of Jesus and the early Christian community understood right away that Jesus was in fact God. Furthermore, many strong arguments claim that Jesus himself did not fully realize his identity as God. The earliest biblical texts suggest that he knew he was sent by God and that possibly he believed himself to be the Messiah, but they do not show that Jesus thought of himself as the Incarnation of God walking the earth and remembering his days in heaven before he came to earth—remembering the time when he created the world and all the people in it. Jesus made a clear distinction between himself and God: the synoptic gospels point to this fact. In Mark 10.18 Jesus asks, “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good-except God alone’” and in Luke’s gospel in chapter 10 Jesus explains ‘“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’”1 It is clear that Jesus knew God and even described himself with phrases such as “the Son” of God to show their intimate relationship, but there is no clear reference of himself claiming to be anything more than this.
The Gospel of John is an exception to this: here, there are numerous examples of direct claims that Jesus is in fact God. One such passage, John 8.58, demonstrates this when Jesus claims, "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" Although this is the case, any serious scholarship shows that these passages in John’s gospel are later developments of the early Christian church. This does not mean John’s gospel is incorrect in projecting ideas of divinity onto Christ, but simply that the ideas are too well developed in church theology to have been historically said by Jesus. The Gospel of John, in its entirety, is a later mystical version of the story of Jesus, and as such must be understood as being further along in the development of Incarnation theology. Marcus Borg discusses this point in his dialogue with N. T. Wright on the subject. He explains this by no means diminishes the reality of these statements; instead brings more value to them. “But if we think of these statements not as self-statements of Jesus but as the voice of the community, they become more powerful. If a community says about someone, ‘We have found in this person the light of the world who has shown us the way out of darkness,’...that is very impressive indeed.”2 The Gospel of John should be taken seriously, but it does not fully testify to the yet-to-be-developed beliefs of Jesus and his early followers: the Incarnation is a processed idea. This paper traces the process in four main steps, Jesus as Prophet, Messiah, the Wisdom of God, and God in flesh.
The second argument assumed holds the view of God as an omnipotent and present being. Much discussion on the theology of the Incarnation seems to assume that God looks down on the earth from some other place and only involves himself in certain events as some external being. Marcus Borg calls this kind of belief “supernatural theism.” “This view sees Jesus as the unique incarnation of an absent interventionist God, an unparalleled divine insertion into the natural order.”3 Opposed to this is what Borg calls “pantheism” or “dialectical theism.” This notion holds that God is a being present everywhere in creation. This God continually involves himself in creation, not as some external force, but as a participant in the life of men and women and all creation. Paul says it best when he quotes the Athenian poets, “For in him we live and move and have our being.4” The Incarnation is the embodiment of that God: the spiritual presence that can be found in all creation.

Jesus as Prophet

The earliest and most primitive notions of Jesus saw him as a prophet of God. In the botany analogy presented earlier, the seed of the Incarnation is planted at this step. Before any theology was formed about the function and identity of Jesus, it was obvious that he was a great teacher and prophet of God. The crowds proclaimed this at his triumphant entry into Jerusalem: “When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, "Who is this?" The crowds answered, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee."5 In his book, The Christology of the New Testament, Oscar Cullmann argues that the role of the prophet had died by the time of Jesus and had become an idea related to eschatology.6 As John the Baptizer began to teach in the desert, people began to view him as a prophet ushering in the end of the Roman domination of Israel. He preached that one after him was coming that would be still greater than himself. Jesus fulfills this, and people instantaneously see him as a great prophet as he began his public ministry. In a recent publication of collected essays from Southeastern University, Robby Waddell writes on the role of the prophet. He designates four major themes and roles to prophetic persons, Messenger, Minstrel, Madman, and Martyr.7 Every prophet from Israel’s past has fit into these categories and Jesus is no exception. Although Jesus was later understood and recognized as more than a prophet, at the earliest point he was nothing less than a prophet.
Jesus viewed himself as a messenger of God; “Not unlike the OT prophets, Jesus served as an ambassador of the divine message.”8 Indeed, the earliest of Jesus’ teaching demonstrates this: “After John was put into prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!’”9 All of Jesus’ teachings are summed up in this verse.
The poetic language of Jesus is one of the most striking features of the gospels. Almost everything he says seems to be said with a parable, metaphor, or quotation from Jewish poetic scripture. The prophets were great story tellers. The prophetic story, however, does not mean to entertain, but rather to provoke. In the Old Testament the prophet Nathan tells a story to David about a man who had a number of sheep yet found it necessary to steal the only sheep of a poor household. Only after David became furious and cast his judgement on the character of the story did Nathan reveal to him that the story had been about his affair with Bathsheba.10 Jesus has much the same effect when he tells his parables. People are left perplexed, frustrated, angry, and challenged.
All prophets are “madmen”. They often connect so strongly to the mission of carrying out the messages of God that they use extreme behavior to grab the attention of the people. The prophets were known to strip themselves of their clothes, lay on their side for extreme amounts of time, smash pots, and shave their heads. Jesus also performed extreme acts such as these. In Matthew 21, Jesus enters the temple and sees that it has been turned into a place of buying and selling rather than praise and worship. In a rage he overturns the tables and benches of the market workers and sets up base for a healing station. Just before this event, Jesus rides into Jerusalem not on a horse like any other important figure, but on a humble donkey. One could definitely classify Jesus as one of these “madmen” of prophecy.
The last image Waddell proposes is the Martyr. Almost all the prophets of Israel in the past had been killed. In fact this had become a theme central for Jesus’ criticism of the pharisees and religious leaders of his day. In Matthew 23.29-32 this is demonstrated:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!”

Of course it is quite obvious that the same fate was waiting for him when he said this to them, and later they hung him on the cross.
Jesus was a prophet in every sense of the word, and people understood him to be. It seems by reading the synoptics that a quiet rumor was going around that he could quite possibly be more than this, but on a public level people understood Jesus to be a prophet ushering in a new time when the kingdom of God would appear.

Jesus as the Messiah

While in the public world Jesus was known as a prophet, there came a notion that he could be even more than this. It was apparent that he had come from God and preached God’s message, but in the Jewish mind was an idea of a coming messiah that many had been expecting for some time. Many Jews of Jesus’ time projected their views of this coming figure onto Jesus, just as Peter confesses, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”11 This statement and claim had such significant that the title Peter places on Jesus would later become fused with his name: Jesus Christ.
Popular thought holds the Jewish idea of Messiah as a monolithic expectation, one clear and distinguished view. This however, is not the case. Oscar Cullmann writes, “In general it is true that the Jews expected a savior with certain nationalistic and Jewish characteristics. But this common form could hold the most widely varying content.”12 He goes on to speak about these varying ideas of the Messiah. The word Messiah simply means “anointed one” and was first used to describe anyone who had God’s blessing on them to be his representation to the people—especially the kings. The term was applied to prophets and even occasionally a neighboring country as in the case of King Cyrus in Isaiah 45.1. The concept of “the anointed one” was closely linked with God’s promise to David: that his kingdom would never end.13 When the people of Israel were gradually sent into exile, this promise turned into a promise of eschatological hope. Thus, the people of Jesus’ day were eagerly waiting for an earthly figure to come and restore Israel. Although there were many theories of what this figure would look like, he or she would have the same function. The terms Son of God and Son of David were synonymous with this figure, because the person would be God’s representation—the one who would fulfill the promise made to David.
There is some doubt as to whether Jesus understood himself in this way. Anytime someone refers to him as the Christ, he tells them to keep quiet about it. Even at the questioning of the High Priest after his arrest he seems to be hesitant to make such a claim. “Jesus kept silent And the high priest said to Him, ‘I adjure You by the living God, that You tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of God.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have said it yourself; nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.’"14 Here Jesus simply shows that the high priest said he was the Christ, not himself. Jesus is fond of another, parallel title, Son of Man. The Son of Man tradition is closely related to the
Messiah tradition, but they are not synonymous. Cullmann enters this discussion:
“His [Jesus’] saying about the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of God and coming again on the clouds of heaven is not derived from the concept of the Messiah we have described in the last section. The Son of Man is a heavenly being, not an earthly king who will conquer the enemies of Israel and exercise an earthly sovereignty. The contrast is clear in the form Matthew reports Jesus’ answer.”

Nearly every time that Jesus is referred to as the Christ in the synoptics, he changes the subject to the Son of Man as if he is correcting his hearers. It is quiet clear that many people of his day understood him to be the coming Messiah (a category that would be completely reinvented after his death and resurrection) but it seems that Jesus was partial to the earthly messiah tradition’s parallel, the divine Son of Man. The Son of Man tradition could quite possibly be the perfect link between Jesus’ identity as a human messiah and his identity as the divine Wisdom of God.

Jesus as the Wisdom of God

In Judaism there is a great tradition of spiritual and practical wisdom. A number of Jewish texts are encompassed within this tradition including Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, The Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and portions of the Prophets and other apocalyptic texts. The specific theme within this tradition that should be highlighted is the female personification of the wisdom of God. We see this beginning in Proverbs 8,
“Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights along the way, 

where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
beside the gates leading into the city, 

at the entrances, she cries aloud:
"To you, O men, I call out; 

I raise my voice to all mankind.
You who are simple, gain prudence; 

you who are foolish, gain understanding.”15
In Proverbs, the role of Lady Wisdom is to call men and women to abandon their foolish lifestyles and take up her ways, the ways of the wise. The unique thing about her is not her teachings, (many prophets and teachers throughout all the world’s religions and traditions have taught very similar concepts) but her claims of identity. Proverbs 8 sheds light on this.
From verse 22: “The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old,”
From verse 27: “I was there when he set the heavens in place, before the hills, I was given birth,”
From verse 30: “Then I was the craftsman at his side, I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence.”
These passages give the image that a woman was God’s companion during the creation of the world; of course, it is understood that here personification is a tool of poetry. These passages are not claiming that some feminine deity worked along side of God in the beginning; however, their meaning paints a picture of the Wisdom of God present at all times, calling out to the foolish. This image can be seen in a variety of Jewish wisdom texts as Marcus Borg points out in his book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time; the most striking of these texts being the Wisdom of Solomon.
“In the Wisdom of Solomon, a book written near the time of Jesus, the divine qualities of Sophia [Lady Wisdom] are most developed. Sophia is the ‘fashioner of all things,’ and the ‘mother’ of all good things. Then, in a remarkable passage, she is spoken of as:
...a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits....
Those are, of course, all attributes of God. Moreover, like God, she is everywhere present: ‘she pervades and penetrates all things.’ Sophia ‘is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty’ and ‘a reflection of eternal light.’ Like God, she is omnipotent and the sustaining source of life.”16
Richard Bauckham picks up on this point as well in the book of 1 Enoch: “The picture is of God’s Wisdom seated beside him as his adviser, constantly present to advise him in all the exercise of his rule.”17 A strong tradition of wisdom and her personification was very present at the time of Jesus and after.
At some point after Easter, the early church began to think of Jesus not just as a prophet or a messiah, but as a pre-existing being, side by side with God in the creation story, much like Lady Wisdom herself. This was probably developed because of the wisdom teachings of Jesus. The writings of Paul hint at this with passages such as 1 Corinthians 8:6. The strongest of these passage is Colossians 1.15-17, “He [Christ] is the image of the Invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” A strong parallel presents itself here between Colossians and the passages within the Wisdom tradition. The author of Hebrews makes the image even stronger, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.”18 The most important of these passages is in the Johannine tradition.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it....The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”19
This passage makes three significant connections. First, the “Word” spoken of here in John’s gospel directly links itself to the Proverbs version of Lady Wisdom. The passage does not quote from the Old Testament directly, but it uses enough of the same language to paint the picture in the early Christian and Jewish mind. Second, this passage specifically links the imagery of the preexistent “Word” (and “Wisdom”) to Jesus. “The Word became flesh.” This statement asserts that Jesus is the embodiment of this wisdom. Thirdly, it bluntly states that “the Word” is God. To sum up this connection, Lady Wisdom (or “the Word”) is a personification of God, and Jesus is an embodiment of Lady Wisdom. In the form of a syllogism, it was easy for the early Christians to make the connection that Jesus was in fact the embodiment of God—the Incarnation—thus in the words of the Nicene Creed, a personae (mask or person) of God.

Jesus as God

In conclusion, the understanding of Jesus’ identity being the same as that of God was a developed process that happened much in the way that a tree grows. This process began when a man from Nazareth 2,000 years ago entered the public eye with his great and challenging teachings. He was thought to be a prophet giving the message of God to the people. As this man, Jesus, continued to teach and speak, it became apparent to the people around him that he was much more than simply a prophet: he was the anointed one of God, the Messiah who had come to save Israel and fulfill the Davidic promise. Jesus himself hinted that his identity was hidden in something much more than this as he called himself the Son of Man. As the early Christian community grew, it recognized Jesus’ teachings and actions to be rooted in the Lady Wisdom traditions from the book of Proverbs and elsewhere, and it wasn’t long before they identified Jesus as the embodiment of this power and wisdom of God. Understanding that Lady Wisdom was an aspect and face of God, it was easy at this point for the early Christians to say that Jesus was the incarnation of the wisdom of God, God himself. Of course it took over 300 years to solidify this idea in the Nicene creed, making Jesus the same as God by developing the notion of the Trinity, but even at an early stage before the Bible had even been compiled, the early Christians worshiped Jesus and recognized him as God here on earth.
It is important to recognize that in this process God did not leave heaven and turn himself into a human to walk on the earth for 30 or more years before then going back to heaven where he had always been. Rather, the wisdom of God came down and was made manifest in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the perfect example of what God looks like because he was able to open himself to the will of God in a way that no other human being had ever done. He was the full embodiment of the wisdom of God, and with that, he was the full embodiment of God himself. The scriptures and this development do not indicate that Jesus was in some way physically and genetically different than any other human being. They also do not indicate that Jesus identified himself to be God, as if he remembered when he created the world. N. T. Wright says about this, “I do not think Jesus ‘knew he was God’ in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself, ‘Well I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!’” But rather Jesus, in his openness to God became a mystical reality of the Divine Presence. The Incarnation, then, is not a physical, genetic and literal fact, but rather a mystical reality that in the person, Jesus, the Wisdom and fullness of God became manifest.















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