A NOTE ON THE INCARNATION
CECIL FRANKLIN

It was with a large measure of reluctance that I wrote my original essay. In that I tried to be relevant and unargumentative. It is with a larger degree of reluctance that I reply to Dr. Bales’ critique. Again I shall try to be relevant and unargumentative.

Without attempting to reply to every point of the critique, I choose one area of Christian doctrine that appears to be crucial and pivotal of some of our differences: the doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.

For the first several centuries of the Christian era there was much controversy about precisely who and what Jesus Christ was and is. The writings of the apostolic age—the writings that were in the process of becoming accepted as Christian scriptures, books of the ‘new covenant’—were taken as authoritative for the question, but the statements on the subject there did not answer all the questions that Christians asked.

Christians came to say, on the basis of these writings, that Jesus Christ was true God and true man. The term ‘Son of God’ had to be taken as somehow figurative, since it could not have quite the same literal sense in the context of monotheism, which was held by Jews and Christians, as it might have had in the context of pagan polytheism.

But the idea of one person who was true God and true man presented and presents some serious questions. We believe that God is infinite, but man is finite; God is omniscient, but man’s power is narrowly circumscribed. It would then appear that, humanly speaking (the only way, after all, we can speak), the idea that one person is both true God and true man is a logical contradiction. I think it is for this reason that Christian theologians came to speak of certain Christian doctrines as ‘mysteries’, to indicate that there are truths which the limited mind of man cannot fully grasp or comprehend. Indeed, if God is infinite, and man’s mind is finite, we should be chary of any fully comprehensible formula that purports to convey the reality of God. I am inclined to think that some of the views that were rejected by the early Church—views of such men as Arius, Apollinaris, Nestorius, Eutyches—were rejected in part because they were too neat and too comprehensible.

Although the Church did arrive at a kind of formula—that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human—even this does not answer all the questions that can be asked. The Church rejected the view that Jesus Christ consisted of a divine being merely inhabiting a human body (an oversimplification of the view of Apollinaris). But what, for instance, of the knowledge of Jesus? God knows everything. What shall we say of Jesus when he appears to ask a question for information: that he already knows the answer, but is merely indulging in play-acting? This would seem to give to the whole story and to Jesus’ true humanity a kind of unreality.

If this is granted, we are in the situation of trying to reconcile two factors: (1) Jesus’ knowledge was limited; (2) as the Son of God, Jesus came to bring the word of God. Although the second of these is something believed by all Christians, it ought not to be unduly exaggerated. Most Christians (excepting old-fashioned liberals) would see the central point of Jesus’ mission not in what he taught, but rather in what he did, in his full self-giving obedience to the Father, for the sake of mankind.

If Jesus’ knowledge was limited, it would appear useful to consider the nature of that limitation. I am under the impression that most of Jesus’ contemporaries thought the earth was flat, and the heavenly bodies revolved around it. If this is true, I am inclined to suppose that Jesus also thought that. In fact, it would seem reasonable to suppose that Jesus was limited quite like his contemporaries, except to the degree necessary to perform the mission for which he had been sent.

Paul wrote that Christ ‘emptied himself’ (Phil. 2:7, R.S.V) in becoming man. It is not entirely clear what Paul meant, but if we take this Statement as authoritative, it suggests some real limitations of the man Jesus Christ. In this context, there is no intolerable threat in the idea that Jesus held beliefs about the books of the Old Testament that are subject to modern scholarly investigation. According to the doctrine of Incarnation, God came to man through true man.

The belief in Biblical infallibility can be interpreted as denying the legitimacy of rational and empirical investigation of those areas that are normally subject to that kind of investigation. Some misguided Christians in the later middle ages denied the legitimacy of this kind of investigation of the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. One might wonder about a doctrine of revelation that sees God as revealing truths that are of such a sort as to be subject to this kind of investigation.

There are many Christians who do believe the tenets of the historic Christian faith, believe that God revealed himself in events in the history of Israel and preeminently in Jesus Christ, and believe that the Bible is indeed the word of God, without holding a doctrine of Biblical infallibility which adjures the processes of critical historical and literary investigation. What is saddening is that some Christians hold a rigid doctrine of Biblical infallibility that isolates them from the world of scientific scholarship, and an equally rigid type of Biblical interpretation which keeps them separated not only from those Christians who do not share their belief in Biblical infallibility, but even from those who do. It is in this context that I make a plea for ‘wider horizons’.

Supplementary Note. Dr. Bales’s quotation from Jenkin Lloyd Jones is somewhat puzzling. Dr. Bales quotes correctly from Lutheran News, but I think the information must have become garbled somewhere upstream. ‘Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ is a name famous in American Unitarianism: he was a prominent Unitarian minister (originally from England) in Chicago around the turn of the century. It may be that he has a namesake in the ministry of the Unitarian Church in England. An Anglican would not say ‘my own fellow Unitarians’ when ‘speaking of conditions in the Church of England’.

It would not, of course, be hard to find a quotation from an Anglican making criticisms (with which I might agree) of affairs within Anglicanism. In any event, that is not the point at issue.—University of Denver, Denver, Colorado