All I want for Christmas is … a coherent account of the incarnation

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.

(John 1:14, The Message)

At the core of Christian faith is the doctrine of the incarnation according to which God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, incarnated and became the man Jesus Christ. But what does it mean to say that God became man? Could this really be true? Is it possible? Is the claim even coherent?

Some Christians have not been particularly concerned with whether the claim is coherent (by human reason) or not. God's ways are higher than our ways, we are reminded. So if it doesn't make sense to us, too bad. We shouldn't expect it to.

If we concede human reason has limits (and we surely must), we should find at least some sympathy with this response. Just because something appears incoherent or impossible by our lights does not necessarily make it so. Nonetheless I find the attitude that the problem of the incarnation is no problem at all to be short-sighted for a number of reasons.

First, it ignores the Golden Rule. If you would expect that others would openly address apparent incoherencies in their beliefs then you had better do so in yours as well.

Second, in shirking the Christian's responsibility to think through the idea of incarnation, this response also shirks the Christian's obligation to be prepared always to provide a reason for the hope we have within. (If somebody has an argument that our hope is incoherent, surely the Christian ought to pay the argument some heed.)

Finally, this attitude erroneously assumes that thinking hard about theological issues is a sign of impiety. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The denial that we can understand the logic of incarnation is really a pseudo-piety which in fact undermines the faith and its intellectual engagement with the world.

The Contradictions of Incarnation

With that in mind, one might next ask what exactly the problem with God incarnating is to begin with. The problem, in short, is one of compossibility. God exemplifies certain attributes and he seems to do so out of necessity. Among these attributes are omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence (the three classic "omnis"), as well as atemporal eternity, aseity, impassibility, immutability, immateriality, and a number of others.

Unfortunately, each one of these attributes appears to contradict an attribute that human beings possess. For instance, while God is omniscient, human beings are not. As a result, it seems that there are many attribute pairs (e.g. omniscience; finite knowledge) that are not compossible: that is, they cannot be simultaneously exemplified in the individual. And as a result, the incarnation appears to be an incoherent concept.

This problem should leave the Christian to ask: what does it mean to say that the Word became flesh (and thus moved into the neighborhood)?

And so for the next few posts (or as long as my attention lingers), we shall begin to address this question: what would a coherent model of the incarnation look like?