God did not cram Godself into a human body the way Ralphie crammed himself into that pink bunny suit.

Christmas is not my favorite holiday. As a kid it certainly used to be, obviously, because presents…but as I’ve aged, getting gifts has become less of thing to look forward to (mainly because the only things I really like are boring books, which no one really wants to buy me) and as much as I like to surprise people with thoughtful gifts, the pressure of compulsory present buying gives me anxiety.

The other more important reason I’m not a huge fan of Christmas anymore is theological. As much as I like the concept of the incarnation, I also realize that by making such a big deal about it at Christmas we sort of subliminally imply that Jesus was somehow born ontologically unique or different which, as a religious naturalist, I find to be slightly problematic. Beside the fact that our evidence for Jesus’s “distinctiveness” comes from his adventures as an adult, it seems to me that making a big deal about the incarnation at Christmas sort of reinforces some weird metaphysical ideas that I’m not so sure need to be reinforced.

I’m constantly amused by the debates of the early Church, the ones about how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time. The early Christians presupposed that two things could not occupy the same space at the same time and that if God was in Jesus, obviously some feature of Jesus’s humanity had to be replaced. After running down the list of human qualities that could potentially spill out over the sides after God’s Holy Spirit dumped itself into Jesus’s body, the Church agreed to a paradox, insisting that Jesus was indeed both human and God at the same time. Great. End of story. Until, of course, the orthodox interpretation of Anhypostasis took center stage and refused to leave for quite a while. I agree with John Cobb and others who think that the doctrine of Jesus’s impersonal humanity has done great harm.

To be fair though, this impulse to want to minimize one side of a binary over the other is nearly unavoidable for Western thinkers. Logical principles like the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM) and the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) are so thoroughly ingrained in our psyches that we don’t think twice about them. For Western thinkers, “A is B” and “A is not B” cannot both be true at the same time. I remember one time reading a quote from Avicenna, the father of Medieval Aristotelianism, and thinking that it sort of summed up how serious folks were about PEM and PNC back then (and still are today, I’d argue):

“Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.”

Avicenna was very serious about PNC, and the early Church “Fathers” were serious about a God that was very different and not on the same plane as humans. Thankfully, contemporary advances in mathematical logic and physics can help us overcome the dreadful “paradox” that early Christians faced. Additionally, as thinkers like Catherine Keller might teach us, it’s quite possible that God and the universe (or pluriverse) are much more entangled, and connected, than any sort of binary, substance thinking allows, i.e. it’s seeming more and more likely that everything is partly composed of everything else. This should give us all hope. Additionally, we can take solace in the historical perspective that at the same time that Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic (fifth century BCE or so), there also existed in India a system called Catuskoti rationalism, which insists that there are at least four possibilities regarding any statement. All of this, to me, means that the “paradox” of Jesus being both God and human may not be (and may never have needed to be) such a paradox after all, at least not one that necessarily deserves special attention at Christmas time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of incarnation. I like the idea that God is imminently with us, in the flesh. I like the idea that, if you’re looking for God, surprise!, God looks like a tiny, weak, destitute, stinky and cranky, giggly and beautiful infant, born into an oppressed, enslaved, and persecuted people group. I like the societal/structural and historical dimensions of incarnation. But again, what I don’t like are the metaphysics behind it. The idea that Jesus was miraculously born ontologically unique is not the message we should be sending to kids at Christmas time. There was no “Christmas miracle” of God impregnating a virgin and then figuring out a way to jam Godself into the material body of a fetus. In other words (if you prefer more seasonal imagery), God did not cram Godself into a human body the way Ralphie crammed himself into that pink bunny suit. No. God is (and always was) present in the most literal sense in every creaturely occasion. The God whom we worship is an incarnate God, indeed, incarnate in the whole world. The miracle and message of Christmas should be, I submit, that there is no more paradox, and in this we can and should rejoice!

Originally posted on Freestyle Christianity.

Tags:ChristmaschristologydualismIncarnationlogicprocess theologytheology