The Incarnate God

I had the privilege to speak last night at the Eighth Day Institute, a speech titled, "Dorothy Sayers and the Artistry of the Incarnation." This is a time of year when the Incarnation comes to the forefront of our thoughts, though arguably for all we who hold to the Nicene Creed, it ought never recede from our consciousness. For Sayers the matter was simple:

"If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all."

Dogma is not, in other words, an intellectual add-on, a fussy distraction from the warm-tummy experience of singing praise songs and feeling the love of our sweet Jesus. It is essential to understanding who this Jesus is ("What think ye of Christ?" Sayers was fond of asking), and with that, the magnitude of his love.

Every professing, non-heretical Christian acknowledges the doctrine of a Christ who is fully God and fully man, though perhaps we fall short of embracing it. When Sayers wrote (at the request of the BBC, no less!) a play for children about the life of Christ, she ran into a British law forbidding in-the-flesh portrayals of Christ. She appealed to the prime minister, who granted an exception on the grounds that since the performance would only be going out over the radio waves, this was just a case of the vocal chords of Christ being portrayed, rendering it not so blasphemous.

Pietists attacking the play belittled the actor chosen to play Christ, asking him why he thought himself fit to portray God. At least they embraced, in this, the understanding that Christ is fully God, though they seemed to struggle with the notion that He was also fully man, nose hair and fingernails and dirty feet and all.

I was once in a debate with a Muslim, who found this doctrine of God-in-the-flesh abhorrent. "You think he walked in the dirt, and [defecated] in a hole?" he asked me, horrified.

It's scandalous, isn't it, that God Himself would fraternize with whores, drink with His friends, waste His first miracle turning water to wine at a party?

Yet when we embrace the Incarnation, we embrace the love of God. For this is God Himself, God in the flesh, Immanuel, who came to this place out of His great, abiding love for mankind. Not just a good man, not an angel, not even God wrapped in a fleshly outer shell, effectively still separated from man. This is the God-man, Christ Jesus, come to pour out the love of the Trinity, the other-abiding love that was and is and ever shall be, on His most treasured creation, though we were lost, though we would set ourselves to humiliating Him.

To understand Christ as the King self-humbled, the God crossed over from His Kingdom, is to begin to glimpse the great love that we cannot yet fathom. And to meditate on this is to feel one's heart overflow. "The dogma," as Sayers would say, "is the drama."