So far, you could argue that my reasons for still doing Christianity could apply to most of the theological systems out there: It furnishes a handy set of signifiers, it makes me fit, it opens my hand.
After all, the very genesis of religion lies in the need for signifiers to use for the Beyond.
And religion’s core role has always been to give heft and credence to a specific code of ethics—at least in theory.
Of course, since I still identify as a proponent of Christianity, I may argue for its uniqueness in the realm of signifiers and ethics.
But I also know I can’t engage these reservations head-on simply because there is a depth of spiritual experience that you only attain after a considerable investment of time and effort, and these I have allocated in Christianity.
Reaching a similar depth of feeling in a different religious system would take decades of hard work.
I don’t want to go back to square one in this process. I’m too far gone into this pilgrimage. I’ve only now gotten to streamline my backpack. I might have learned a trick or two.
But my involvement with Christianity also means I can’t be entirely objective.
I have nothing interesting to say about living life as a Buddhist, atheist, or even a true agnostic.
Even though I have plenty of doubts regarding what some would call key doctrines of the Christian faith, there are also tenets that I always held to be self-evident. Comparisons with other religious options are hence bound to be spurious.
But this final reason is about a theme that, if not entirely unique to Christian thought, nevertheless receives a reworking within that system that is always like an electroshock to the heart.
In the grand scope of world mythology, gods coming to earth is nothing new. The mechanics of this divine descent differ depending on the story and culture.
Deities major and minor have been spotted traipsing around among humans in different tales within and without the Fertile Crescent: Egypt, Ugarit, Mesopotamia, India, Greece.
Sacred spirits are believed to visit and influence humans in religions that trace their origins to West African mythology, like Brazilian Candomblé or Cuban Santería.
The story of the Watchers, described at length in the First Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraphic work stemming (mostly) from the 2nd century B.C., might be a scathing commentary on the Greek tales of gods coming to earth to sleep with mortal women.
In First Enoch, the Watchers are angels who fall from the sky and mate with women, begetting a tribe of giants.
They teach humans forbidden but faulty knowledge, half-truths rejected from on high (1En 16).
In this way, they start our civilization—but its birth is in abuse and error.
The Enochian tradition portrays the deeds of the Watchers as the origin of evil. The fallen angels become demons and taint the earth forever.
This story expands on a cryptic fragment of the canonical Book of Genesis (6:1-4), although it’s hard to say whether the shorter version is an abridgment of an old legend told much later in First Enoch or whether the later author got inspired by the laconic account in the Pentateuch.
In Christianity, the deity who comes to earth is not motivated by curiosity or sex, the need for companionship or the instinct to meddle.
Because of the plurality within their person, They are already perfectly happy with who They are.
They enjoy a satisfying, vibrant relationship within the realm of their being—a dynamic, multifaceted Group that from eternity acts in sync as One.
I sometimes think of the adventures the Three must have gone on together, the different dimensions they must have fashioned, the fun they had creating planets and toying with realities.
So it is baffling, to say the least, when one day, this Being decides to leave this cozy cocoon of sovereignty, acceptance, and love—and “empties themselves” (Phil 2:7).
They leave themselves behind—They set out on a pilgrimage of their own.
They become the Other—their Opposite.
They become everything They are not: dependent, powerless, needy, lonely, confined to malfunctioning matter.
They feel everything the Other feels.
They look up at themselves through the Other’s eyes.
They assess themselves from a distance.
They grapple with the clunky signifiers the Others use to describe Them.
The Gospel of John preserves some of these linguistic struggles. Jesus uses this metaphor and that, and another one still, and another, to try and convey what He is about, why He came to earth, what God—or rather, that which the Others have called God—is like.
They reveal themselves in this way even though They know They will be misread.
They allow this experience to mark Them forever. The author of Revelation writes curiously about the Savior “slain from the creation of the world”—the Sacred eternally scarred.
At the same time, this is not a boundless sacrifice. There are clear boundaries in place.
The moral character of God remains intact—this is non-negotiable.
In this sense, stripped as They are, They stay true to themselves.
They remain their joyful, radiant Self. A God of integrity, a Person that will be trusted—instinctively, irresistibly.
“Follow me,” Jesus would say—and people would drop what they were doing, nets and all, and join Him, entranced.
“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself,” He said at one point.
Curious, no? He had a sense of humor, that One. Commentators (and John) say He was referring to the crucifixion.
But He could have been looking through the clunky signifiers, telling us this and also something else.
The truth about a Deity who through eternity draws lost wanderers into Their orbit—a splendid Sun, the source of warmth and abundance, the energy we’re all attracted to, life itself.
So, the incarnation—was this an act of love?
Sure. Among other things.
While discussing incarnation, love is what gets highlighted most often, and, of course, the martyrological aspect—the gore, the suffering of the Ultimate Male Savior.
But the obsession with the human suffering of God incarnate is a relatively late addition to the Christian history of thinking-at-the-Sacred.
The Crucifixus Dolorosus, a depiction of the cross that shows a pained, contorted, bloody Christ, became popular only in late Gothic, some 1300-1400 years into the common era. (Later on, I will do a separate post about the Christs I encountered on a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Naumburg.)
But even this obsession with Christ’s agony—and with the object of God’s love—betrays how megalomaniac the Christian take on the incarnation can sometimes be.
We like to bask in the fact that we were the sole motivator of that extravagant operation: God did it for us, because of us! God chose us for His (His!) avatar! Bring on the lights!
In a particularly unselfconscious example of Christian navel-gazing, Derek Kidner describes humanity as the protagonist of “the drama that slowly unfolds throughout the length of the Bible” and laments that “the scientific account of the universe… overwhelms us with statistics that reduce our apparent significance to vanishing-point… [T]he human story itself… is now the single page in a thousand, and the whole terrestrial volume is lost among uncatalogued millions” (Genesis: An introduction and commentary, p. 61).
Of course, I can’t claim to have a monopoly on the correct telling of the incarnation story.
Part of the reason I include it here, among my reasons for still doing Christianity, is precisely the mystery of it, the countless ways it can be told and interpreted, undone and woven anew.
Its nature raises eyebrows and questions, inspires doubt and belief.
But when I meditate on the incarnation, I think less about what it says about our alleged (apparent?) significance and more about how it reflects on the character of the Sacred who chose to engage with us in this way—the Deity who intentionally divests themselves of the safety of who They are, steps into a blind spot.
I may never grasp the full context of that decision.
Maybe God, in a crazy scientist frenzy, was really conducting some kind of a madcap experiment?
Maybe evil really is that millisecond’s worth of system error, and we’re just stuck here in this infinite blink of an eye, a smithereen of eternity, ignorant of redress that comes in an instant.
But theodicy—the relationship of God to evil—though fascinating, is only tangentially a part of the incarnation story.
The story, in its essence, is bare bones, pared down.
It all comes down to the following: the Scientist didn’t stay in the lab.
They became a part of their own experiment.
The God next door.
Our near one. Our neighbor.
This, for me, is the reason. This is the only reason—the other three hinge on this one.
The rest of Christian theology is footnotes to how it all could have happened.
I sometimes wonder if we capitalize on the fine print so much because deep inside, we recognize God’s gesture immediately.
We feel the pull of it, the attraction of that splendid Sun—but we’re afraid.
Because doing what God did, leaving ourselves behind to meet the Other?
We know who is meant here. The Other. The one we don’t want to meet.
The one whose metaphors we don’t want to grapple with.
The one whose experience has always struck us as alien, disturbing.
The one whose eyes we don’t want to see ourselves through.
Yes. It will explode our life.