Deep Incarnation: God’s Oneness with a Suffering Planet
Deep Incarnation is a refreshing new way to understand how Jesus’ life and suffering brings divine renewal not only for individual people, but for animals and indeed the entire cosmos. I say Deep Incarnation is new. Deep Incarnation is the coinage of the Danish theologian, Niels Gregersen. In 2001, he used the term in a theological paper about the work of Christ. Gregersen saw in Christ’s work a much greater achievement than is usually taught in Christian churches. Not only did Christ come for and save lost persons, he also came, died, and rose again for all living beings. The Christian good news is not that redeemed people are evacuated from an abandoned world. The good news is that all that God created, animals and the biosphere included, are brought into perfection and joy in the coming Kingdom.
My own, probably simplistic, way of describing deep incarnation would be something like this: When God came to the world in Jesus, God not only became a human being, but also an animal being, and a living being and a material being. As Jesus saved human beings, so he also saves animals and for that matter the whole of the created world.
I write this and I am thinking, “This is momentous!”
It is indeed a very big, macro thought. What I’m learning as I study Deep Incarnation is that the scope of salvation reaches farther and deeper than I realized. And that thought is a bit embarrassing for me, a retired minister who spent my 40-year working life as an every-Sunday preacher. Why hadn’t I noticed the ideas of Deep Incarnation before? Why would it take until this late in my life to be able to say so plainly that Jesus saves the whole world?
Enter Climate Change
I’m not just thinking about myself. Why would it take until 2001 for someone like Niels Gregersen to recognize what appears to be so important in biblical faith?
I’ll venture an answer to my own question. The answer is that we have never been worried about the fate of the entire planet before. We’ve never faced the prospect of massive extinction of the living creatures, including humans, before. But in the last few years, thoughtful people worldwide are becoming frantic about the climate crisis and the mass dying of wild animals, birds, and fish. In turn, I’ve begun to wonder about what biblical faith has to say about so huge a crisis. I’ve been looking for just the kind of thinking that deep incarnation embodies. Gregersen’s idea of Deep Incarnation fulfills a need to understand what God may be thinking about what is happening to Creation.
A Christianity Big Enough
A single sentence buried in an old article about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal religion jumped off the page for me a few days ago. Here it is: [FDR’s childhood religion] “…was a faith perhaps too naïve to process the world crises of the 1930s and 40s.” I stopped reading and thought that those words describe our current situation perfectly. How apt is the idea of faith becoming naïve. Indeed, Christianity has become small. We’ve privatized religion. I personally have promulgated from the pulpit a feel-good spirituality that shelters my congregations from the monumental problems that are developing. Nowadays as I sit in church huge swaths of land in the American West are burning and I’m learning from a robed clergy about having a better attitude towards life.
I also think that we’re thinking about God’s attitude towards the created world because so many wild animal species are dying off. Sermons about personal relationships and healthy attitudes can’t even take in alarming data such as the fact that a quarter of the wild birds in North America have simply perished in the last 10 years. Never has humanity been confronted with the prospect of a collapse of the biosphere that supports life itself. It’s no surprise that Christians are wondering what God thinks about it.
The God Who Not Only Saves Us but Joins Us
I’ve been working to understand Deep Incarnation for several weeks. As I worked to process its core ideas, I found myself returning to a powerful observation that came from James Cone’s Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone, a liberation theologian, points out in that book that there are startling parallels between Jesus’ crucifixion and the 4743 lynchings that took place in the US in the early 20th century.
For example, both lynching and crucifixion are political acts used by the powers that be to enforce by terror their own dominance. In other words, lynching and crucifixion were both deeply political. The politics that killed Jesus was a collaboration between religious elites and Roman occupiers. And the powers that lynched young Black men were vigilantes. Both crucifiers and vigilantes were acting with the permission of their political, social superiors.
There are several other parallels. Lynchings and crucifixions were gruesome public executions. The death of the victim often was made worse by extended torture designed to remind the public who or what was running the show. Both lynching and crucifixion entailed stripping and elevating the victim for gory public display. Both were extra-judicial murders, which are not deemed as crimes by legitimate authorities. The comparisons go on.
Cone goes on to point out that White church ministers and their congregations were totally oblivious to the connection between their lynching victims and the sufferings of Jesus Christ. One would think that some independent thinking believer would have made the connection between Christ’s agony and that of the Black boy who would suffer that very afternoon at the hands of her neighbors.
Cone doesn’t simply lambast the lynch mobs for their religious hypocrisy. He skewers no less than theologian Reinhold Niebuhr for missing the connection. Niebuhr, like Cone, was on New York City’s Union Theological Seminary faculty and enjoyed nationwide acclaim as a penetrating social justice advocate and ethical thinker. But nowhere in Niebuhr’s work is even a fragment of evidence that he noticed the parallels between gruesome lynchings and the cross of Jesus Christ.
God is With Us
I haven’t forgotten that this is post about Deep Incarnation and how Jesus saves the whole world. Before I make that tie-in, I’d like to offer one more observation about lynchings, namely that the lynching victims themselves didn’t miss the connection between Jesus and their own suffering.
James Cone gives several examples of how ordinary African Americans living in the horror Jim Crow America experienced some comfort in their awareness that Jesus stood with and suffered as they did. Says Cone:
…Many black poets, novelists, painters, dramatists, and other artists saw clearly what white theologians and clergy ignored and what black religious scholars and ministers merely alluded to: that in the United States, the clearest image of the crucified Christ was the figure of an innocent black victim, dangling from a lynching tree.[i]
The Jewish painter, Julius Bloch, to name one among many, understood the similarity between the lynchings and the crucifixion. In his 1932 painting “The Lynching” he depicts the Black male victim as stretched out and tied to tree limbs in a way that clearly reminds the view of the crucifixion. Despite such hints in visual arts, poetry and music White America never awoke to the fact that Christ was clearly aligned with beleaguered Black community. Or it didn’t awaken until James Cone pointed it out in Cross and the Lynching Tree.
Does Solidarity with Jesus Make a Difference?
Someone might be resisting where this essay is going. You might think that feeling a closeness with Jesus at the bitterest of ends hardly rises to the level of deliverance or salvation. One might wonder whether experiencing a grim solidarity with Jesus at the unthinkably gruesome last minutes of life would amount to anything beyond the meagerest of reassurance, like a drop of water in a raging forest fire.
We don’t know what it felt like for the lynching victim to discover in his hour of agony a fresh fellowship with Jesus. We do know that this idea of Jesus meeting his people in their hour of execution occurs in the New Testament. As the early Christian Stephen was being executed (Acts 7) he experienced a vision of Jesus Christ and clearly felt a closeness to him. Additionally, the Apostle Paul makes a very significant statement in Romans: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6.5 ESV).
Deep Incarnation and Salvation Through Solidarity
We’re now in a position to see what for me is the core of Deep Incarnation. From the earliest days of the Christian movement, believers have recognized that Jesus’ death and resurrection is transformative because the one on the cross is God who has become one of us. Not only has God become physically a human being, he has also taken on all of the struggles of being a human. Jesus felt emotions. He had a family and a job. He lived in politically difficult circumstances. He was vulnerable to sickness and injury. In sum, Jesus has come to us and has assumed all the elements of being an ordinary human being. All the interpretations of the crucifixion’s saving value depend on understanding that Jesus was both God and human.
Jesus’ solidarity with the lynching victims is powerful for me because it isn’t an isolated instance. Perhaps the Christian experience is a continual realization that Jesus knows our condition and takes on our struggles in a disarming and, let it be said, saving way.
Consider some of the lyrics of the children’s hymn, “Once in Royal David’s City:”
For he is our childhood’s pattern;
Day by day, like us He grew;
He was little, weak and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us He knew;
And He feeleth for our sadness,
And He shareth in our gladness.
Here is the principle of accompaniment pitched to a child’s level. While not as lurid as the accompaniment we see with African American boys in the American South, there is God’s startling solidarity with the difficult experiences of childhood that is full of grace.
What is Assumed
One of the great early theologians, Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390 AD), made this memorable observation about the character of salvation through Christ: “What is not assumed is not healed.” Gregory was a disputant in an early debate about Christ’s nature. During the debate, Gregory wanted to plant the principle that God becomes or takes up the character of what God is bringing into new life. Though fully divine, said Gregory, so is Christ also fully a human being.
Deep Incarnation theologians are saying that Christ assumes more than human nature. If Christ becomes a human, then more broadly Christ is also an animal. Accordingly, animal nature, say living nature, is taken up into God’s being. In turn, this nature is crucified and resurrected. Perhaps this principle extends to all of creation. In Christ, God became a created being and dwelt in a vulnerable state in the material world.
One of the thinkers who has carried Gregersen’s ideas forward is the Catholic theologian, Elizabeth Johnson. In her book, Creation and the Cross, she alerts the reader to the language of John 1.14, “The Word became flesh and lived among us…” Became flesh? Not human? I interpret the Fourth Gospel’s use of “flesh” in this context as a signal that the salvation which Jesus brings is intended for more than people.
What is Deep about Deep Incarnation?
So, what have we said so far? We’ve been talking about a neglected solidarity, which God seeks both with people like lynching victims and curiously with animals and perhaps the whole biosphere. Maybe Gregersen chose the world “deep” to suggest that the second person of the Trinity is repeatedly found in a lower situation in life than we would expect. He is born amidst scandal over his mother’s marital faithfulness to Joseph, her husband to be. He’s “born in a barn,” to use the phrase my parents threw at me as a child when I had lapses in social graces or personal tidiness. The Gospels bristle with instances of Jesus repeatedly embracing the humble while forgoing celebrity. Jesus accepts baptism intended for sinners, he touches lepers, dines with misfits, accepts the attention of the wrong kind of women, lives poor on handouts and so on.
Jesus Knew Shame
Recently, an American missionary working in Japan shared yet one more “depth” that Jesus entered that usually eludes American Christians. Jesus knew shame, particularly as he died on the cross. The combination of nakedness and public ridicule would be unthinkably shameful for many in Asian cultures. Additionally, dying in public as Jesus did would have been a supreme embarrassment in Japanese society.
As we think of the shaming of Jesus, we could also imagine that people who feel intense unshakable shame could experience a kind of grace in the fact that Jesus shares with them a hard fellowship. He knows shame.
How Have We Missed Solidarity?
The fact that Jesus joins us in the difficulties of life is not how Christians in America have been taught to think about Jesus’ crucifixion. Instead, every theologian, minister, church member and Sunday School student is regularly reminded of one supreme meaning of Jesus’ life and death, namely that Jesus came to fix our sin problem. To do this, we’re told, Jesus needed to suffer to appease God the Father who is angry with us because our sin. We’re told that Jesus paid a price, died in our place, set us free, bought our forgiveness, and so on. The cross achieved a transaction between the first person of the trinity and the second person of the Trinity.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to review the history of the Church’s interpretation of Jesus’ death. If we were to undertake such a survey, we’d discover that the meaning of Jesus’ suffering was quite varied in the earliest days after Jesus’ rose from the dead. The astonished disciples knew that they had been through something momentous, even world changing. But there was little consensus as to what exactly it was.
Anselm’s Dominance
Theories which interpreted the crucifixion of Jesus came and went through the centuries. It wasn’t until the 11th century that one explanation for why Jesus came and died captured the imagination of much of the Christian world. The theory was invented by Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm developed that is commonly called the Satisfaction Model of Atonement. Anselm bases this model on the economic system of feudalism. The forgiveness of sin, in Anselm’s model, is likened to the situation when disobedient peasants on the manor have offended their lord’s honor. Peasant misbehavior required restitution to calm down manor lord who has been dishonored. Anselm uses the practice of appeasing an offended nobleman as the framework for understanding how Jesus’ suffering pays a price to take the shame away from the Lord and restore the equilibrium of the estate.
Despite its reliance on an outdated economic arrangement, namely feudalism, the idea of paying off or appeasing an offended “lord” has had appealing explanatory power for millions of Christians. Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory has morphed slightly into the Penal Substitution model, which is the explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion that prevails today. The core idea of Penal Substitution and Satisfaction is that Jesus pays a price to an offended God on behalf of the sinner.
There is little doubt that the church-going lynchers had been thoroughly schooled in the penal substitution theory. They saw Christ’s sacrifice as exclusively “for sins.” They may have been converted to Christianity because of their personal encounter with the grace that came from Jesus taking upon himself the punishment that they deserved. In turn, any idea that Jesus had established a strong solidarity with the youth that they were stringing up never entered their minds.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that Jesus does not make a sublime transaction through his death. Instead, I’m making a case for looking at Jesus’ work as a form of accompaniment that establishes fellowship with sometimes-unexpected recipients, including animals and perhaps the whole living cosmos. To use the language of Gregory of Nazianzus, Christ assumes or takes up into himself what he is saving. The most important thing is the bond with Christ. As we—together with all of humanity and all of the living world–are embraced by him so also we have hope that his destiny of being brought to everlasting life will be ours as well.
At the end of Genesis’ first creation narrative, the Creator surveys all that had been made and pronounces all of it “very good.” (Genesis 1.31). Throughout the scriptures, God is loyal to that original evaluation of what God had made. God vows never to let the world be destroyed in Genesis’ Rainbow Covenant (Genesis 9.8-17). At the consummation of all things as depicted in the Book of Revelation we see God coming grandly to dwell forever on a newly created earth where evil and suffering have been ended forever (Revelation 21). God is loyal to all that God created. God accompanies all that God has created. And God redeems all that God has created.
Deep Incarnation explores how Christ meets and saves both people and (wonderfully) other creatures. Deep Incarnation is an affirmation of Creation’s goodness through the lens of a high Christology.
It is also a powerful lens through which to view what is happening to creation. Global warming and the destruction that is unfolding in its wake is utterly counter to God’s declaration of the goodness of what God has made. The forces that have altered the atmosphere, at first unknowingly, but more recently with full knowledge of the destruction they are bring, are profoundly in opposition to God’s intention and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Christians who have ignored, permitted, or averted their eyes from the destruction of God’s world are complicit and need immediately to think again about their values.
Deep Incarnation does not provide a pathway for reversing the climate emergency. Rather, it orients us to what we’re looking at, which is evil. It is a foundation from which preachers and theologians can begin to act in a closer alignment with God’s intentions, which were declared and enacted at the beginning of all things.
[i] Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Kindle Locations 2808-2809). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.
