It is one thing to believe in the incarnation. It is quite another to live it out. Of course, from an orthodox Christian vantage point, there is only one incarnation—Jesus of Nazareth, who is the eternal Word who became human flesh and blood (John 1:14). And yet, the Christian is called to participate through God’s Spirit in Jesus’ embodied life. In other words, love is active and embodied. This post highlights the importance of embodiment for various domains of life. Incarnation must replace excarnation.
Incarnation and Excarnation
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor speaks of the struggle between incarnation and excarnation. All too often, the modern turn to reason led to an ‘all in the head’ way of being. One also finds this dynamic in Platonist thought in the ancient period. These paradigms promote excarnation. But from a Christian vantage point, which celebrates incarnation, it is essential to emphasize embodied reason and spirituality.
Thus, we must account for the importance of emotions, among other dimensions of our humanity. While it would be unwise and possibly dangerous to give free reign to emotional flurries, we must not discount emotions either. In fact, without the emotions and other aspects of our embodiment, we cannot attain fullness.
One only encounters God’s love known as “agape” in embodied terms. As Taylor reasons, “Agape moves outward from the guts; the New Testament word for ‘taking pity’, splangnizesthai, places the response in the bowels. We cease being able to make sense of this the more we go along with…self-alienating images,” which emerge from analyzing ourselves primarily through the media and virtual means or when viewing humans as “users of tools,” “separable instruments,” and “parts of systems.” Taylor claims, “Resurrection only makes sense when we take seriously enfleshment.” (740-741)
From Reductionism to Fullness
Taylor goes so far as to argue that to undo “disenchanting reductionism,” we must “rediscover the way in which life in our natural surroundings, as well as bodily feeling, bodily action, and bodily expression, can be channels of contact with fullness.” (766) Such enchantment from my vantage point is revealed not only in John 1:14, which speaks of the incarnate Word as the fullness of grace and truth, but also in Colossians 2:9-10 in contrast to proto-gnostic teachings that denigrated embodiment: “For all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in him.”
I found Taylor’s reflection of how excarnation manifests itself in objectified knowledge most insightful and relevant to my own experience. He makes the following point in his engagement of Charles Péguy’s own critical analysis of modernity. Modernity exalted “disengaged reason as the royal road to knowledge, even in human affairs. The proper road to knowledge is by objectification,…” For Taylor, objectification entails “grasping the matter studied as something quite independent of us, where we don’t need to understand it all through our involvement with it, or the meanings it has in our lives…” He adds that “This view of what knowledge is tends to favour, without necessarily generating, a view of humanity which is ‘objectified’ in another sense, that is, understood as on all fours with non-human objects, understood in mechanistic terms, and in a determinist framework.” (746)
Objectivity vs. Objectification
I have witnessed this objectifying approach to humanity over the past three and a half years while caring for my adult son, who endured a catastrophic brain injury in January 2021. The scientific community is well known for approaching patients in objectifying terms. Objectivity has its rightful role, but what are the limits to safeguard human subjectivity and personhood? An article in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy notes the problematic orientation involving objectification in the natural sciences and proposes a solution involving a balance between objective analysis of the body while accounting for the patient’s subjective account of what they are experiencing. The author, Fredrik Svenaeus, argues:
Objectification is no doubt a real problem in medicine and it can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient if not enveloped by a personalistic attitude. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine, the patient’s body should be viewed as a (malfunctioning) biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. The listening to the patient’s illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far been keen on identifying the negative aspects of objectification in medicine, a more balanced strategy might be to discuss and analyze differences between medical objectifications that make the patient feel like being merely a body and the objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity. This is what I intend to do in this paper. “Bad objectification” makes the patient feel like being a body instead of being a person, while “good objectification” makes the patient feel like a body but not in a way that is detrimental for his personhood. In some cases, which I will come back to, such good forms of objectification can even make the patient feel more at home with himself by incorporating a richer understanding of what goes on in the body.
The Incarnation and Holistic Care
The implication of the doctrine of the incarnation calls us to feel more at home in the world in which the eternal Word became flesh and blood, and in our own bodies, just as he did. It is important as the article indicates to treat the body objectively, while also accounting for the patient’s feelings and observations. Medical staff experience heavy demands on their time and so it proves especially difficult to take time to ease patients’ anxiety and to listen to them. Still, if doctors don’t listen to their patients, it can end up leading to misdiagnosis and wrong treatment.
A therapist specializing in neurological occupational therapy provides a wonderful balance between the two in caring for my son. The therapist carefully analyzes my son clinically as a biological organism. But she also accounts for his personhood, which is integral to his biological and neurological base, even in its severely damaged status. She speaks to Christopher by name, demonstrates incredible patience in waiting for him to respond, nimbly moves his hands, arms, and head, highlights miniscule and significant signs of progress, and instructs my wife and me scientifically, albeit in emotionally astute terms.
Incarnation and Spiritual Formation
How might the preceding discussion translate into the sphere of spiritual formation when dealing with suffering and trauma in order to cultivate resilience in a rationalistic and objectifying age? In short, the church needs to act in keeping with what it is, the body of Christ. We must account for one another fully, not simply cognitively or materialistically, but holistically, as Jesus’ people. Such holistic care involves knowing one another by name, listening to one another’s stories, affirming people’s emotional expressions, bearing patiently with one another in our emotional and physical struggles, and cultivating a sense that we can only experience spiritual fullness by celebrating the various dimensions of embodiment.
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