Incarnation

In which I take a break from inter-religious relations to consider a breakdown in a different kind of dialogue. . .

I met an old friend recently. He allowed as how he no longer attended church accept to receive Holy Communion, coming in only after the sermon. His reason was simply. He was tired of hearing sermons (from churches all over his city) predicated on the denial that the scripture had any basis in history. Or as often sermons that naively accepted every statement in scripture as historical truth. A man with two PhD’s in the hard sciences, he simply couldn’t accept that either of these positions was anything other than a gross over simplification of the complex phenomena represented by an ancient text.

Given that the ancients had no instruments to measure the vastness of space and time or to explore geology and biology, and given their intentions, it seemed to him unrealistic to take their statements about the creation of the world as scientific propositions. Yet given that they could not have been completely gullible with regard to historical claims that had important ramifications for individual and social behavior it seems equally unlikely that the Biblical narrative was entirely fabricated.

He was looking for preaching that recognized both sides of this equation, and for a very good reason. His understanding of Jesus as fully human requires that Jesus participate, as all humans do, in a society with a particular history, a particular location in the much wider story of humanity. A mythological figure arising out of a Palestinian Jewish social identity itself based entirely on myths could not conceivably be the Christ proclaimed by Christianity. Neither could a historical Jesus elevated by his followers to the status of God and given a back story to bolster those claims. And neither could a Jesus so naively historicized as to possess contradictory narratives. Depending on one’s epistemology each could be a true description of Jesus. But while my friend finds them unlikely from a rational standpoint, what is more important is that none are of even passing interest. They are too simple to be humanly important or to warrant wasting a Sunday morning.

As fascinating as both the controversies about the historicity of the Bible, and the doctrine of incarnation are, I think for the preacher they are less interesting than what either excessive historicizing, or demythologizing says about a modern view of what it means to be human. Because if you don’t understand humans, specifically the humans out in front of the pulpit, you cannot reach them with the gospel.

And this, I think, is where such preaching can go wrong – and quite possibly why the churches that remain firmly in the grip of either fundamentalism or the liberal tradition are gradually dying out. Both are dominated by three powerful misunderstandings about our culture. The first is that we are modern in the sense understood by Schleiermacher and his successors as people for whom the only authoritative speech is based on a Kantian epistemology. The second is that this epistemology would inevitably become universal as the human race “grew up” into a clear scientific perception of reality. And the third is that only truths asserted or defended within this framework will motivate people to faith and action.

My friend, and in fact that growing number of Christians who eschew either fundamentalism or liberalism, are evidence that people who accept the scientific method as a good descriptor of reality nonetheless find it inadequate as the sole basis on which to comprehend their humanity in its largest context. For them there are texts, places, and rituals that are alive with a transcendent truth indivisibly located in immanent realities. They are participants in the kind of incarnation that modernity and her children cannot comprehend.

What they are seeking, often unsuccessfully, is preaching willing to surrender to this possibility of incarnation. They are looking for preaching that yields to the possibility that scripture cannot be reduced to either a handful of scientifically verifiable historical propositions or an equally thin set of theological kernals shaken from the supposedly mythological chaff by a reifying human hubris. They have heard Christ’s voice when they opened their Bibles at home. They wish their preachers would allow God incarnate to speak from the lectern and the pulpit.