Mark Shea, Today

Fear of the Incarnation and its Discontents

December 24th, 2008 by Mark Shea Print This Article Print This Article ·

Evangelicals, like all orthodox Christians, vigorously affirm the Doctrine of the Incarnation—the faith of all Christians that God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became Man. Evangelicals, like Catholics, believe this doctrine with every fiber of their being. But there’s more to it than this. In Evangelical culture “incarnation” has tended to get prefaced with the definite article—”The Incarnation.” It’s been primarily thought and spoken of as a single, albeit glorious, historical event that took place in the past, and its application in everyday Evangelical life usually has the character of a doctrine which is believed very firmly. But the Catholic way, while affirming the uniqueness of the Incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, also tends to see “incarnation” as an eternal reality to be lived and breathed by the follower of Jesus. Catholics believe God, in becoming human, was not simply performing an isolated miracle: He was establishing an eternal principle. In the Incarnation, Catholics believe, God was committing Himself to revealing His power and grace in and through human things. And the unfamiliar ways Catholics express this belief tend to make Evangelicals very nervous.

manger4.jpgThe emphasis on seeing the Incarnation as a single event two thousand years ago on the other side of the earth often makes Evangelicals tend to vaguely see the Incarnation as an episode which ended with the Ascension of Christ into Heaven. Many tend to speak as though the grace of God now only reaches us in “spiritual” (read: “disembodied”) ways. Enfleshing that grace in people today is too much, too close.

This “That Was Then, This Is Now” pattern can be observed on many occasions as Evangelicalism and the Catholic faith meet. For example, it’s not hard for Evangelicals to grant that God could unite Himself with matter in the physical body of Jesus Christ, but the notion that He continues to do so through the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist is rejected out of hand as “unbiblical” and even “magical” or “idolatrous” despite the fact that Jesus declared “This is my body, this is my blood” as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul all record. Evangelicals find private confession of sins to God acceptable and even approve (generally) of “accountability and discipleship”. But they typically declare “unbiblical” the notion that a flesh-and-blood human being could have authority and power from Jesus to forgive sins in His name—even though Jesus conferred exactly this power on the Apostles with the words, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23). In the same way, Evangelicals delight in the biblical picture of Jesus healing at the Pool of Siloam (John 9) by means of water, but fret at the Catholic idea of holy water or blessed salts, which likewise seems somehow vaguely magical or fleshly. So do various other Catholic physical acts such as lighting candles to pray, or the gestures and prayers of the liturgy which can strike some Evangelicals as mere rote.

Because Evangelicalism tends to see the Incarnation solely as an historic event, but not as the establishment of an eternal principle, the Evangelical tends to reply to the Catholic confidence that God will use matter and people to communicate His grace by saying “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). The assumption is that spirit is spirit and matter is matter and never the twain shall meet (after the Ascension). So there can be a strong tendency to insist that all outward forms of what is generally termed “religion” are just distractions from “truly spiritual worship”.

This fear of Incarnation (and the growing Evangelical reaction to it) is on full display in the strange case of Truly Reformed[TM] author Bob DeWaay who berates fellow Protestants at Christianity Today and Wheaton College for daring to suggest we could learn something from the early Church. He complains:

The cover of the CT article reads, “Lost Secrets of the Ancient Church.” It shows a person with a shovel digging up a Catholic icon. What are these secrets? Besides icons, lectio divina and monasticism are mentioned. Dallas Willard, who is mentioned as a reliable guide for this process, has long directed Christians to monastic practices that he himself admits are not taught in the Bible.

DeWaay makes clear that directing modern Christians to these ancient Romish practices is apostasy from the True Faith because such practices are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture (unlike, say, terms like “sola scriptura”, “evidentialist and presuppositional apologetics”, “total depravity”, “limited atonement”, “unconditional election”, “salvation by faith alone” and “Bible”, which were constantly on the lips of our Lord and his apostles). He is especially at pains to make clear that if you want a living encounter with Christ, there is one and only one way to have it: through the Bible and a firm grasp of the various abstractions that constitute Truly Reformed[TM] doctrine. DeWaay’s horror mounts as Willard dares to suggest that a sola scriptura schema doesn’t work and is inhuman:

Willard pioneered the rejection of sola scriptura in practice on the grounds that churches following it are failures… The “failure,” according to Willard is that, “… the gospel preached and the instruction and example given these faithful ones simply do not do justice to the nature of human personality, as embodied, incarnate.”

Mark that: Willard actually believes the Scripture means it when it says that the Word is made flesh. This appeal to the Incarnation as an eternal principle and not merely a disembodied concept sets DeWaay’s warning bells clanging:

The remedy for “failure” says Willard is to find practices in church history that are proven to work. But are these practices taught in the Bible? Willard admits that they are not by using an argument from silence, based on the phrase “exercise unto godliness” in 1Timothy 4:7. Here is Willard’s interpretation:

“Or [the possibility the phrase was imprecise] does it indicate a precise course of action he [Paul] understood in definite terms, carefully followed himself, and called others to share? Of course it was the latter. So obviously so, for him and the readers of his own day, that he would feel no need to write a book on the disciplines of the spiritual life that explained systematically what he had in mind.”

But what does this do to sola scriptura? It negates it. In Willard’s theology, the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Biblical writers, forgot to inspire them to write about spiritual disciplines that all Christians need. If this is the case, then we need spiritual practices that were never prescribed in the Bible to obtain godliness.

What is curious here is the way in which the diagrammatic mind of the Truly Reformed[TM] polemicist suddenly requires the Bible to be the Big Book of Everything and enjoins us to believe and profess the creed “That which is not compulsory in Scripture is forbidden.” Note the semi-permeable intellectual membrane here. Even though Bible never says “sola scriptura” we are supposed to “connect the dots” and conclude the doctrine is implied there, because DeWaay embraces this particular human tradition as “biblical”.

But when Willard takes something that actually is in Scripture (namely the command to meditate on God’s word (Ps 143:5)) as the basis for lectio divina, DeWaay insists this is out of bounds because the specific technique of lectio divina is not “prescribed in the Bible”. One wonders what DeWaay makes of marriage since it, like scriptural meditation, is recommended in Scripture, but nowhere does Scripture prescribe specifics on how to do it. Evidently, we are only allowed to marry in theory, not in practice.

Now, in fact, there is nothing wrong with the spiritual disciplines Willard is rediscovering. As St. John Damascene is happy to point out, icons are simply an emulation of what God himself did in becoming an Icon in the person of Christ (Hebrews 1:3). Likewise, monasticism is simply the extension of what Jesus and John the Baptist did in their desert sojourns. In short, DeWaay’s entire complaint against Willard turns on the ambiguity of calling these traditions “unbiblical” when they are, in fact, extra-biblical but not anti-biblical. And the hypocrisy of DeWaay’s attack is only compounded by the fact that sola scriptura is a purely human tradition that even DeWaay does not believe, judging from his free use of Sacred Tradition when it suits him.

But devotion to sola scriptura is not really the core issue for DeWaay. Rather, it is terror of the Incarnation. That’s why DeWaay’s prescription to his fellow Evangelicals is to get away from the Incarnation as fast as they possibly can and return, not to the Bible Alone, but to the Sacred Diagrams and Mathematical Concepts of the Truly Reformed[TM]. To back up this exhortation DeWaay performs an exegesis of Hebrews that is extraordinarily strange.

The letter to the Hebrews is, of course, written to exhort early Jewish Christians who were tempted to abandon the Eucharistic Sacrifice and return to the Levitical sacrifices of their ancestors. It is chockablock with references to the priesthood, sacrificial bloodshed, and the insistence that Christ has inaugurated a priesthood and a sacrifice that is superior to the Levitical priesthood. Its conclusion could not be clearer to an ancient Christian who has been hearing the words “This is my body. This is my blood” for decades in the Liturgy: “We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat” (Hebrews 13:10). In short, “The blood of Jesus can save you and the blood of goats and bulls cannot. So stay at Mass,” says Hebrews.

But DeWaay, in his terror of the Incarnation, reads something entirely different:

The key problem for [Judaizing Christians] was the tangibility of the temple system, and the invisibility of the Christian faith. Just about everything that was offered to them by Christianity was invisible: the High Priest in heaven, the tabernacle in heaven, the once for all shed blood, and the throne of grace….

But the life of faith does not require tangible visibility: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The Roman Catholic Church has tangibility that is unmatched by the evangelical faith, just as temple Judaism had. Why have faith in the once-for-all shed blood of Christ that is unseen when you can have real blood (that of the animals for temple Judaism and the Eucharistic Christ of Catholicism)? Why have the scriptures of the Biblical apostles and prophets who are now in heaven when you can have a real, live apostle and his teaching Magisterium who can continue to speak for God? The similarities to the situation described in Hebrews are striking. Why have only the Scriptures and the other means of grace when the Roman Church has everything from icons to relics to cathedrals to holy water and so many other tangible religious articles and experiences?

Note the curiously telling confusion. DeWaay cannot tell the difference between the Eucharistic blood of Christ and the blood of goats and bulls. Why? Because they are both physical and therefore (curiously) “unreal”. For DeWaay, the “real” blood of Christ and the “real” altar is an invisible abstraction, a concept.

Similarly, the horror of the physical—in a word, of the Incarnation—suffuses all that DeWaay has to say. The entire Old Testament drama which God crowded with the physical and crowned with the Incarnation itself goes for nothing. All these things were prelude to the Real Thing: the Truly Reformed[TM] diagrams of Justification by Faith Alone, Substitutionary Atonement, Sola Scriptura, Predestination, and the various other computer models that constitute Truly Reformed[TM] Christian doctrine. Any helps such as icons, sacraments and so forth that might address us as physical incarnate beings are marks of “apostasy”. For DeWaay, the Word was made word. Period.

The problem is, once the 16th Century Reformer’s mood for abstraction, systematizing and disincarnation is past, normal people cannot live in the sort of universe the Truly Reformed[TM] mind demands we live in. That’s why folks like the people at Wheaton College, Christianity Today and Dallas Willard are exploring the things they are exploring. They recognize the gospel preached and the instruction and example they have been given “simply do not do justice to the nature of human personality, as embodied, incarnate.” And that’s why I have such great hope for the future of the Catholic faith among Evangelicals open to reality. The 16th Century is over. The 21st holds great promise for wonderful new growth in discipleship to our Incarnate Lord Jesus Christ!

Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange and a weekly columnist for the National Catholic Register. You may visit his website at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, or purchase his books and tapes here.

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  • DonHudzinski

    Dear Mark:

    By have the Incarnation, in and through our Eucharist, We restore marriage as to it true meaning and that is they are Incarnate.

    Mary and Joseph Incarnate marriage was the first, since Adam and Eve made marriage fallen by their disobedience in the garden.

    We know that many Catholic marriages are fallen instead of restored, like Adam and Eve they run away from the Incarnation of their marriage. They run away from the heart of their marriages, the Eucharist.

    They look for and find substitutes, for the true meaning of marriage, redefining it to anything they want it to be.

  • yblegen

    Once again, thank you, for taking something very complicated and making it understandable. I plan to share this with my evangelical friends.

  • terrygeorge

    Nice article Mark!
    And of course our atheistic/agnostic friends are even more closed minded to the Word become flesh. Let us pray for a renewal of our hearts and their souls.
    Merry Christmas

  • HomeschoolNfpDad

    DeWaay’s destination and means of travel are actually much older than the Reformation itself. In Christian history, one needs to go all the way back to the days of Simon the Magician (contemporary with Simon Peter himself) in order to get at the historical roots of what Mr. Shea discusses in his essay. And Simon the Magician’s philosophy – essentially that of separating the tangible, material, fleshy, dirty stuff from the clean mental and spiritual** world of the divine – is much older than Christianity itself. People were embracing gnosis long before they had any hope that a real Incarnation might possibly occur. Indeed, the Catholic Encyclopedia defines gnosticism as “[t]he doctrine of salvation by knowledge.” In the same article, it goes even further: “it is markedly peculiar to Gnosticism that it places the salvation of the soul merely in the possession of a quasi-intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulae indicative of that knowledge.”

    The most striking historical conclusion drawn by the followers of gnosticism was that the action of the flesh was immaterial because only the soul was eternal – and the knowledge of the soul was available only through the mind, and not the body. This juxtaposition of goodness of mind vs. goodness of body was a common theme of Greek philosophy well before the birth of Christ. Indeed, the whole of Plato’s Phaedo is permeated with a sub-text of this philosophical argument, which the text itself surfaces. Socrates walks his disciples through a clear definition of what death is (“the separation of soul and body”). And throughout the text, Socrates is resigned to his fate even as his disciples try to convince him to flee.

    There is one particularly striking exchange between Socrates and his disciples, in which they discuss the notions of absolutes (e.g. “absolute justice,” “absolute beauty,” “absolute good”). Socrates leads his disciples down a line of questioning that appears to culminate in the statement, “And he attains to the knowledge of them in their highest purity who goes to each of them with the mind alone.” This philosophical notion of “mind alone” appears to justify gnosticism – and modern anti-incarnationalism as well. But it does not end there. Almost immediately after making this observation, the line of questioning changes, albeit subtly. Socrates says to Simmias, “And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either money or power, or both?” Simmias assents, and then Socrates goes into a discussion of two primal virtues which philosophers must attain to: courage and temperance.

    At this point, the exchange seems to continue along the lines of measuring courage as the fear of something worse than death and of temperance as the fear of something worse than its lack: “For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another.”

    But Socrates is no fool. He is well aware of the internal contradiction of this line of reasoning. It is explicit in the text (“For the courage and temperance of other men, if you will consider them, are really a contradiction.”). But he is also hopeful for something better: “Yet the exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or pleasure or pain, which are measured like coins, the greater with the less, is not the exchange of virtue.” Virtue, it is to be hoped, can be attained to on its own account, without regard for the punishments due to those who lack virtue and even, ultimately, without regard for the rewards of those who do attain to it.

    The point of all this, however, is to observe the extremely ancient history of the body-vs.-mind mentality not only in religion but in philosophy as well. Plato was recounting the life of his mentor, Socrates. Socrates himself probably did not come up with his entire philosophy on his own but would have learned it from older folk, expanding upon it in his own turn (and rather significantly) but not inventing it completely on his own.

    Most of us know, of course, how the Phaedo ends: Socrates drinks the poison and dies. This final act demonstrates that towards which Socrates was guiding his disciples throughout the entire dialog: while it may be true that only the mind can perceive true philosophy, the mind can attain to that perception only if the body is willing to act. In the case of Socrates, as in the case of Christ, this act of the body required the ultimate sacrifice, death itself. Thus, the very basis of the Christian creed requires the body’s action in religious matters. No mere feeling for the incarnational (or the anti-incarnational) is really of any consequence. That which is incarnate (literally, “enfleshed”) must commit itself. Or else the soul cannot attain to anything.

    This is, in fact, the same conclusion drawn by the early Christians. How could one ever attain to a real spirituality unless one first disciplined the body, say, with a monastic life? How could one ever understand the Holy Writ unless the body participated, say, by reading the Scriptures out loud, perhaps with particular attention to the beauty of one’s surroundings and the discipline of the lectio, and in the prayerful company of one’s brethren? And how could one ever understand the motive and consequence of Christ’s redeeming act upon the cross unless one were truly drinking the blood – the same blood, albeit under different appearance – as that which was shed at Golgotha? The body must act in order for the mind to attain anything. This is the law of nature written not just upon our hearts but upon our hands and feet and mouths and noses and ears. The early Christians were no fools, either. These very simple observations were not lost on them.

    The juxtaposition of mind-vs.-body (or spirit-vs.-body, in the words of modern Calvinists) is thus revealed to be a false resolution of what is, in fact, a paradox***. There really is a contradiction between mind and body. That which is pleasure to the body is often revolting to the mind, and that which is painful to the body is often pleasing to the mind. These are the observations of no less an authority than Socrates. Conversely, that which is pleasing to the mind is often a terrible trial for the body. And the mind’s degeneration sometimes comes about even as the body frolics in joy. What better way to resolve this paradox than to do away with it? Now, the spirit alone can be of consequence and the mind can view purity without impediment from the body. But as Socrates rightly observes, such actions are vacuous – because all action is indeed impossible without the participation of the body. There can be no spirit-led religion, for the human body must lead all human acts. Modern science reveals that even in internal prayer, blood must circulate in the brain, and physical electrical connections must cross the nerve gaps. “Spirit-led,” therefore, is not just a misnomer; it is impossible.

    “Fear of the Incarnation” is therefore an apt title. To paraphrase Socrates, what is the virtue of spirituality if not the fear of the flesh – and of the Flesh? But surely we can attain to Christ in a better way. Spirituality need not – indeed must not – be separated from bodily action. For such a spirituality is always dead, as surely as the soul separated from its body.

    ** It is worth noting that to the ancients, the concepts of mind and spirit were unified. The Latin noun, anima means both mind and spirit and is itself derived from more ancient concepts.

    *** This isn’t the only paradox that is misunderstood by Calvinist thinking. The notion of predestination itself is a misapplication of God’s omniscience. We are predestined for Heaven or Hell because, after all, how could God not know? But the paradox here is really between God’s omniscience and God’s omnipotence. For if God is truly all powerful, how is impossible for Him to create humans with complete free will to choose either the good or the evil? And if he is really this powerful, then this power (expressed by granting the gift of free will) appears to overwhelm his omniscience (because if we are really free to decide, then God can’t really know). The Calvinists simply assert God’s omniscience as overwhelming to his omnipotence (without really saying so). Catholics have an easy resolution of this paradox: God exists outside of time and is not limited by it as we are. Thus, God simultaneously grants us free will and knows (because he is observing from outside time) how we will use at any particular moment and at all particular moments. The paradox is thus resolved in no small way through recourse to an understanding of God’s omnipresence: He is both everywhere at the same time and, if you will, everytime at the same where, precisely because of his eternal nature, which we need to understand primarily not as “forever” but as “outside of time.” And so he can know past, present, and future without ever compromising our gift of free will.

  • HomeschoolNfpDad

    The hyperlinks I embedded above do not seem to work. The Phaedo is available at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html . And the Catholic Encyclopedia’s page on gnosticism is at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm .

  • HomeschoolNfpDad

    “’Spirit-led,’ therefore, is not just a misnomer; it is impossible.”

    It is worth noting that much of modern atheist thought uses this basic idea as the thesis whose conclusion is, “The spirit does not exist.” This too is a false conclusion, but its proper resolution is the subject matter of another discussion.