Deep Incarnation
Odd as it may seem to others, Christians hold to the radical notion that the one transcendent God who creates and empowers the world freely chooses to save the world not as a kindly onlooker from afar, but by joining the world in the flesh. The prologue of John's Gospel states this succinctly, speaking of the advent of Jesus as the coming of God's personal self-expressing Word, full of loving-kindness and faithfulness: "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14). Note that the Gospel does not say that the World became a human being (Greek antropos), or a man (Greek aner), but flesh (Greek sarx), a broader reality. Sarx or flesh in the New Testament connotes the finite quality of the material world which is fragile vulnerable, prone to trouble and sin, perishable, the very opposite of divine majesty. Taking the powerful biblical theme of God's dwelling among the people of Israel a step further. John's Gospel affirms that in a new and saving event the Word of God became flesh, entered personally into the sphere of the material to shed light on all from within.
In truth, the configuration of sarx that the Word became was precisely human. However, the story of life in our planet of repositioning our species, connecting Homo sapiens historically and biologically to the whole tree of life. Rather than standing alone as a species, we are intrinsically related to other species in the evolutionary network of life on our planet. Consider this example, taken from Darwin's observations:
What can be more curious than that the hand of man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle off the porpoise, the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?
On the ordinary view of the direct creation of each being, he writes that we can only say that it has pleased the Creator to construct each animal in this way. But if we suppose an ancient progenitor had its limbs arranged this way, he continues, that all descendants inherit the pattern. The bones might be enveloped in a thick membrane to form a paddle to swim, or a thin membrane to form a wing, or that may be lengthened or shortened for some profitable purpose; but there will be no tendency to alter the framework. Indeed, the same names can be given to the bones in widely different animals. What a grand natural system, formed by descent with slow and slight successive modifications!
The Word did indeed become human flesh; but we now know that human connection to nature is so genuine that we cannot properly define our identity without including the great natural world of which we are a part. Danish theologian Niels Gregersen has coined the phrase "deep incarnation," which is starting to be used in theology to signify the radical divine reach through human flesh all the way down into the very tissue of biological existence itself with its growth and decay.
Born of a woman and the Hebrew gene pool, the Word of God became a creature of Earth. Like all creatures Jesus as an earthling whose blood held iron made in exploding stars and whose genetic code made him kin to the whole community of life that descended from common ancestors in the ancient seas. "Deep incarnation" understands John 1:14 to be saying that the other human beings; it also reaches beyond them to join him to the whole biological world of living creatures and the cosmic dust of which they are composed. As Pope John Paul II realized the incarnation accomplishes "the taking up in unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature of everything that is 'flesh': the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, has a cosmic significance . . .
Instead of writing that long post I mentioned earlier, I remembered this passage from Elizabeth A. Johnson's Abounding Kindness: Writings From The People of God so I typed it out. Finally found my book holder which I misplaced a few weeks back so I can type out things like this, again.
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