Embodied: Why Incarnation Matters

I know the doctrine of incarnation makes many progressive Christians nervous. On some level, it makes me pretty nervous. It's one of those tenets of Christianity that seems irrational and we've mostly been brushed under the rug as a result. Let's be honest, talking about doctrine at all makes a lot of folks nervous because we think the church has talked about it too much. Yes. And no. The doctrine put only a little too simply: in Jesus, God became flesh and lived among humans.

There's some hypostasis, preexistence and other trinitarian things to work out according to classical Christian thought, but let's just stick to the basic claim of incarnation: in Jesus, God became flesh and lived among humans. It's a claim that makes others from Abrahamic traditions nervous and more than a few within the Christian tradition. I don't know if I believe that God became flesh and lived among humans.

But I do trust in it. It's a claim about Truth I'm willing to make. And here's why.

Pixels on a screen and noises bounced off satellites and towers are not enough. I love Facebook and Skype and Facetime and texting and all the other things that make the distance seem less. Oh, I should add phones to that list.

But the truth? To find someone I keep in touch with whom I've known for at least five years, I'd have to travel over 1,000 miles. To find someone I keep in touch with whom I've known for ten years, over 1,900 miles. Ditto for anyone longer than 10 years. And for many of those people, phone calls and images are not enough. I long to sit with them, to eat with them, to touch them. I want the hugs and the shared laughter and general ridiculousness that only happens in person.

I want the connection that can't be had with disembodied voices and faces. Bodies matter. My body matters--from day to day living to a need for touch. We are embodied people and to think of us as anything else is a problem; we can't know each other apart from our bodies.

So I trust in the incarnation. I trust in the claim that our bodies are good enough for God to take on for Godself. I trust in the claim that God knew we needed to touch and encounter God in the same ways we encounter each other. I trust in the claim that everything in this embodied, broken world, was worthy of God's presence.

I trust in the incarnation. God became flesh and lived among us. It's Truth even if we can never test fact.