What Would be the Alternative to an Incarnate God?

There are incarnations of Mary’s boy in Mary’s own Bible.

“The ideas about God that we Jews identify as Christian are not innovations but may be deeply connected with some of the most ancient of Israelite ideas about God.”

Christmas is not merely the Messiah's birthday.

Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation.

Christmas is the Nativity of God.

At Christmas, the church dares to announce a revelation; namely, the Maker of Heaven and Earth is a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. Mary, the Council of Ephesus decreed in the fifth century, is the Theotokos, the God-bearer. Jesus is the God-who-is-human. His finite flesh contains the infinite. Of course, this claim immediately begets the question the creed attempts to answer.

How is it possible?

As stubbornly as it persists, how is not the best question to ask about incarnation. Because God is the Condition that conditions all conditions, we cannot condition what God can do based upon what we take to be the givens of the world.

For example:

The dead don’t rise— that’s a given of the world.

And yet, Jesus lives with death behind him.

God is the Condition that conditions all conditions. The God who raised Israel from slavery in Egypt can resurrect Jesus from the grave.

God is the Condition that conditions all conditions; therefore, how questions are seldom the best questions to ask when it comes to God.

Rather than ask how—

How did God become man?

How can the finite contain the infinite?

How is it possible for Mary to give birth to her Maker ex nihilo?

Rather than ask how—

Advent is the perfect occasion to inquire about the alternative.

What is the opposite of incarnation?

What would be the alternative to an incarnated God?

If the Word did not take flesh, what sort of God is God?

The genuine alternative to an incarnate God would be a God who has no spatial location whatsoever. The true opposite to incarnation would be total, absolute monotheism. If God is not incarnate, then God is sheer spirit. Corporeality would be totally foreign to a God who is spirit. The defining essence of matter is that it takes up space; therefore, if God is totally non-corporeal, then there can be no spatial location of God.

Once you understand that exactly this God— the God who is sheer spirit and occupies no space— is the opposite of an incarnate God, you realize two implications.

1. This God— the God who is sheer spirit and occupies no space— is precisely the God in whom most Christians in fact believe.

2. This God— the God who is spirit and takes up no space— is incompatible with the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Hebrew Bible does have spatial location. He walks in the Garden of Eden. He has a dwelling place in the world. From the pillar of cloud by day to the pillar of fire by night, from tent to tabernacle, from temple to the holy of holies therein, the Old Testament just is a history of God’s dwelling place in the world.