Why Bother?

Apologetics Series - 4

The Search for Truth:
The Evangelistic Relevance of the Incarnation

A central Christian belief is that the Son of God became a human being like us. This sermon, fourth in a series on ‘Christian Apologetics’, preached at an evening service in St. Albans Presbyterian Church, Palmerston North, New Zealand, on 11 February 1996, and published in the Christmas issue of Renewal News (Rotorua, Presbyterian Renewal Ministries), December 1996, pp. 24-26, illustrates from three distinguished writers how this belief gives meaning to life and hope amid suffering.

The Search for Truth

Historically, there have been two paths in the search for truth. One, represented by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, is the theoretical approach: the contemplation of universal ideas or forms; the search for truth in beauty, symmetry, or form. Today, this would not only be the approach of Platonist philosophers, but of pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

The other path, represented by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, is the empirical approach to truth: the examination of particular instances or facts; the search for truth by the accumulation of specific evidence or examples of general laws. Today, this is the approach of the experimental sciences.

The Christian doctrine of the incarnation affirms that these two approaches to truth are united in a person: the one who said ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6). By declaring Jesus the Messiah of Nazareth to be ‘the Word made flesh’ (John 1:14), John is affirming that Jesus unites these two classical paths to truth; he fulfils and completes what is correct but incomplete in each of these approaches, by bringing them together and integrating them. Jesus Christ is the invisible Word or Logos, through whom everything was created and who gives form and harmony to all reality, who appeared in history as a particular, perfect human being, ‘full of grace and truth,’ and was seen, handled and vouched for by other human beings (cf 1 John 1:1-3).

I would like to illustrate the evangelistic and apologetic potential of the incarnation, of the Christian belief that Jesus is ‘the Word become flesh,’ with reference to three personal stories.

1. The American Philosopher Paul Elmer Moore

Oxford theologian Alister McGrath tells how Paul Elmer Moore, one of America's greatest Platonist philosophers, eventually became a Christian late in life. Moore was fascinated by the world of beautiful Platonic forms, the world of the purely ideal. But gradually, disillusionment set in. He began to experience a sense of unutterable bleakness and solitariness. He found himself driven to search for God ‘by the loneliness of an Ideal world without a Lord.’ He began to long for those impersonal forms to become personal - for those perfect ideals to acquire a personal face. ‘My longing for some audible voice out of the infinite silence rose to a pitch of torture. To be satisfied I must see face to face, I must as it were, handle and feel - and how should this be?’ (Paul Elmer Moore, Pages from an Oxford Diary [Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1937], Section XVIII, quoted in Alister McGrath, Bridgebuilding: Effective Christian Apologetics [Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 1992], p. 52).

Moore found his longings satisfied in what is affirmed by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation: that Jesus Christ, the perfect Word of God, became flesh and dwelt among us. McGrath comments on the significance of Moore's experience: ‘Without the incarnation, we are left in the world of ideas and ideals - a chilly world, in which no words are spoken, and the tenderness of love is unknown. The incarnation allows us to speak with authority of God being personal. It speaks of God entering into our history, and allows us to abandon the cold and unfeeling world of ideals in favour of a world charged with the thrilling personal presence of God.’ (Bridgebuilding, p. 169). Paul Elmer Moore’s experience illustrates that perfection is not an abstract ideal, but a human person, Jesus Christ.

2. The Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky

The great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky grew up in a devout Russian Orthodox home, but abandoned his childhood faith at university when he became involved in an early anti-royalist revolutionary group. Arrested with a number of his fellow conspirators for plotting to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I, Dostoevsky was reprieved from death in a mock execution ordered by the Tsar himself, and exiled to Omsk, east of the Urals, to ruminate on his life. After years of searching the prodigal publicly returned to Russian Orthodox faith of his childhood, about the time of his return to Russia from Europe in 1871.

In his notebooks preparatory to his prescient novel The Devils (sometimes titled The Possessed), which seemed to foreshadow the calamities which would befall Russia in the twentieth century, Dostoevsky indicated that his ‘whole faith’ and ‘consolation’ rested not on any ‘mere daydream or ideal’ but on the orthodox Christian doctrine of the incarnation :

Christ came down to earth, to tell mankind that the nature of the human spirit as they knew it might appear in such heavenly brilliance, and indeed in the flesh, and not only in a mere daydream or ideal, this being both natural as well as possible....The whole point is that the Word had truly ‘been made flesh’. Therein lies the whole faith and the whole consolation of mankind. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for the Possessed, ed. E. Waisolek, trans. V. Terras [Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1968], February 1870, p. 147).

The reference to the nature of our human spirit appearing in heavenly brilliance is an allusion to the transfiguration of Jesus, a central theme in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which sees the transfiguration as the occasion in Jesus' life when our humanity, humanity ‘as we know it’, was glorified or irradiated with divine splendour. The transfiguration of Jesus’ humanity, according to historic Christian belief, prefigures our own human destiny or beatitude. ‘What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’ (1 John 3:2).

Dostoevsky's view that the incarnation is both the present consolation and future fulfilment of our humanity appears in two other variants in the same notebooks, dated June 1870:

(1) '. . . peace of mind, source of life for every man, the salvation of all men from despair . . . and the guarantee for the existence of the whole world, are all contained in these words: And the Word was made flesh, and in faith in these words.'

(2) 'It isn't Christ's morality, or his teaching, that will save the world, but faith, and nothing else, faith in the fact that the Word was made flesh. . . . What one must believe in is precisely the notion that this is the ultimate ideal of man, the Word all incarnate, God incarnate.' (Notebooks for the Possessed, pp. 238 & 252-3 respectively).

The first extract makes the point that God's dwelling among us in our humanity is what gives meaning to our present earthly life. The second points to the Word made flesh being the ‘ultimate ideal,’ pattern, or measure of what is human; the foreshadowing of our destiny and prototype of what we are yet to become.

3. The New Zealand Poet James K. Baxter

A further implication of the incarnation is that it assures us of God's love for us human beings in our actual life situations. God does not deal with us by remote or ‘from a distance,’ as the popular song has it, but shows his willingness to come among us and associate with us - experiencing our life, walking our roads, fishing our lakes, enduring our weaknesses, bearing our sufferings, and suffering our injustices.

When I was studying theology and training for the ministry in Dunedin from 1966 to 1968, New Zealand's best-known and most prolific poet, James K. Baxter, was Burns Fellow at Otago University. Those were the years of theological controversy occasioned by the denial by my Old Testament Professor, Lloyd Geering, of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. For Geering the incarnation and resurrection were not real events, just symbolic ways of describing the impact Jesus had on his contemporaries. (Why earthy Galilean fishermen felt the need to invent such symbols to describe his impact on them in the first place, was never satisfactorily explained to us.)

Baxter published a satirical poem in the Otago University student paper in 1967, challenging Geering's views. Sadly I have lost my copy of the poem, but it was memorable enough for me still to recall some of its lines. The gist of it was that if the good Lord didn't have a real body, and mix it with real men, he (Baxter) would ‘give the lot for a jug of beer /and a couple of station pies.’ The poem concluded:

The good Lord walked with real men
And showed to them his glory
In spite of Doctor Geering
And Canon Montefiore.

The award of a doctorate to Geering was premature, and modernization of the railway system has eliminated station pies, but Baxter's point was well made. Like St Paul, who said we might as well eat, drink, be merry and make the most of this life if Jesus did not really rise from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:32), Baxter saw that the relevance of the Christian message rests on the reality of the incarnation. God so loved the world that he did not become a theologian, but gave his only Son to share fully in our humanity, to genuinely experience our sufferings, to bear our sins truly in his own body, and really to die for us on the cross.

Baxter, an alcoholic who candidly acknowledged himself to be a 'gloomy drunk' (Autumn Testament [Wellington, Price Milburn, 1972], p. 4), held to the Orthodox Christian understanding of the incarnation, because it affirmed the reality of God's love for real human beings like him, in all the reality of their sufferings and their struggles. In Autumn Testament (p. 24), the last collection of writings he prepared for publication before his death, Baxter wrote:

King Jesus, after a day or a week of bitching
I come back always to your bread and salt,
Because no other man, no other God,
Suffered our pains with us minute by minute
And asked us to die with him.

If Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Son of God in human flesh, it makes an enormous difference to how we cope with the evil that human beings do to each other. It means the Son of God himself has endured persecution, perversion of justice, torture, abuse, sadism, and execution. So no human being, however victimised, can claim that God does not care about them.

Only a fully orthodox doctrine of the incarnation, which affirms that God has genuinely entered into our human experience, can show itself relevant to a century which has experienced unimaginable horrors of human suffering: in the muddy trenches of the Somme, the clinical extermination camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, the bleak forced labour camps of Stalin's Gulag, or the genocidal horrors of the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero. 'An incarnational theology speaks of God subjecting himself to the evil and pain of the world at its worst, in the grim scene of Calvary,' says Alister McGrath. 'God suffered in Christ, taking upon himself the agony of the world which he created.' (op. cit., p. 173).

Christmas is far more than the sentimental event of a baby’s birth. It represents God’s identification with our humanity in the profoundest degree, giving meaning to human life and hope amid our darkest sorrow.