Quotes about Incarnation

When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God's love for you and the universe you call home.

If my underlying thesis in this book is true and Christ is a word for the Big Story Line of history, then the incarnational worldview held maturely is precisely the Good News!

Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time. Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.

If the universe is "Christened" from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever. Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the "resurrection" of the body. Most simply said, nothing truly good can die!

If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says we believe in the "resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus's body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him.

Christianity's true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is "very good" (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? "Very good" sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart."5

instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God's loving union with physical creation.

When Paul wrote, "There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything" (Colossians 3:11), was he a naïve pantheist, or did he really understand the full implication of the Gospel of Incarnation?

Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the "Second Coming of Christ," which was unfortunately read as a threat ("Wait till your Dad gets home!"), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the "Forever Coming of Christ," which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection.

Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12—16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.