CTNS Public Forum: Jesus and the Depth of Creation: The Idea of Deep Incarnation, with Niels Henrik Gregersen
Tucson Room of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP), 2451 Ridge Road, Berkeley (enter via the courtyard on LeConte Avenue )
There seems to be an ineradicable tension between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The idea of deep incarnation aims to overcome three pitfalls of contemporary Christology. The one is the liberal solution of seeing Jesus merely as a significant historical figure of the past; the other is the classic Platonist solution of seeing Christ as an exemplar of the divine Logos, who is existing alongside creation and incarnation; the third is the view that the incarnation of God in a human form is a paradox in principle, beyond further explanation. Deep incarnation here argues for the view that by assuming the particular life-story of Jesus the Jew, God’s own Logos or Wisdom conjoins the material conditions of God’s world of creation (“all flesh”), shares and ennobles the fate of all biological life-forms (“grass” and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). In this view, incarnation is the story of God’s reach into the very tissues of material and biological existence. The “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity, not just an isolated human figure of the past but neither an external appendix to divine life.