Incarnation works - M.E.M.O - Column

Christian Century, Dec 11, 1996 by Martin E. Marty

An article from the September 23 Wall Street Journal included a quote I thought I'd find relevant around Christmas: "Liberals argue that incarnation doesn't work." This formulation made me think right away about the Washington Post article a few years ago which said that evangelicals are not very bright, well educated or well-off. One is never allowed to forget that gaffe: the whining sort of evangelicals with Ph. D.s, after they step out of their BMWs, quote it every five minutes to remind the rest of the country how beleaguered they are.

When I read the Wall Street Journal line I thought: tit for tat. Conservatives took a pounding and now liberals must. Liberals of the whiny sort--or, rather, moderates, there being so few liberals left--will revive their complaint that the mass media are harder on "mainline" and "oldline" Protestants than they are on evangelicals or Roman Catholics.

What was the Wall Street Journal talking about? I cannot keep you in suspense much longer. It was merely a typographical error. Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, was attacking liberals for arguing that incarceration doesn't work. Hanke says it does, and he notes that the presidential candidates belonged, in varying degrees, to the "lock-em-up" school. Hanke is not wishy-washy: "The liberals are dead wrong" and their argument is "simple-minded."

While Hanke, the politicians and economists fight over that, let's consider the phrase that was actually printed: "Liberals argue that incarnation doesn't work." Conservatives often do that too, perhaps without knowing it.

That typographical error challenges us to think about the meaning of the divine incarnation that we are about to celebrate. Incarnation doesn't work when the divinity of Christ gets obscured. Many liberals acknowledge the celebrated child but fail to see him as "sent." You can go behind infancy and get into some delicious things about a pre-existent Logos, "the Word made flesh," that is, incarnated. Liberals who muffle all this are saying that "incarnation doesn't work," because there was no Logos to take on flesh in the first place.

But "incarnation doesn't work" in many conservative camps too. The conservative evangelicals and their kin are so sure about the divinity of Christ, so eager to put up the barricades to defend that doctrine, that they get nervous when the humanity--the flesh taken on--is vigorously emphasized. The Jesus of the Nativity belonged to the company of sweaty-armpits of the sawdust-in-the-beard, browbeaten and wearied carpenters. We are told in scripture that he shared all the human temptations; portray that in modern literature, however, and you get chastised. Incarnation doesn't work.

We are on the edge of mysteries that are better anticipated in Advent prayers than argued about by doctrinaires. Incarnation does work, if it is pondered in hearts and celebrated in song. Liberals and conservatives tend to give incarnation its chance for a few hours on December 24 and 25. I like to picture how we would regard God, word, world and flesh if incarnation were allowed to work through the year.