INCARNATION

It is, of course, a central claim of Christianity that the Logos is present in the flesh, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It will be recalled that in chapter 4 I began to speak of a God who is respectful in God's dealings with human beings, a God who is always reticent in the revelation of Godself. Here is the nerve of such suggestions. The personal God engages with human beings in the most personal way possible: such a God addresses us in and through a person. This is of course profoundly mysterious, and can be attributed to the graceful action of God; that it is, is fundamental to Christianity. Further, what needs to be understood aright is the constitutive significance of this claim – more on this in section II.

God's presence in the historical particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, accessible to us through the particular narrative witness of Christian scripture and the tradition – institutional, communitarian, individual, theological – of the Church, suggests that God has been present in social relations – not as the orderer of sociality, but living in the flesh as a person in such relations. Here perhaps much recent ‘sociological’ investigation of the context of Christian scripture is important (and perhaps the Christological essays that have come out of liberation theology – Boff (1980) and Sobrino (1978) – fit here also) in that such investigation enquires into the very texture of these social relations: an enquiry ‘after the flesh’.