Alastair's Adversaria - Our God Contracted to a Span

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

The following was first published over on my Substack: https://argosy.substack.com/p/43-our-god-contracted-to-a-span. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection is entitled Our God Contracted to a Span. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. There is no shortage of accounts of the gods or other heavenly beings manifesting themselves in human form. Pagan mythologies are replete with accounts of gods appearing in human form and interacting, even to the point of having sexual relations with human beings. The Bible is no exception to this pattern. At various points in scripture, heavenly visitors appear in human beings. form, the bodies of angelic visitors seem to have been capable of typical human bodily functions.

The angels who visited Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19 were able to eat meals, for instance. One could even imagine a situation in which the most high god, not merely members of lower tiers of deities or angels, himself appeared in human form as such a heavenly visitor or messenger, interacting with us as one with the same appearance. Indeed, throughout the history of the church, many have seen the pre-incarnate Christ in some of the figures described in the Old Testament. Other myths spoke of demigods, persons with mixed ancestry, part human, part God, or of mortals who underwent apotheosis, being raised up to a divine status. Greek demigods such as Perseus, Achilles, Heracles and Anaeus might come to mind here, along with figures like Ku Cullen or Erlang Shen from other mythologies. The biblical literature includes curious accounts, such as those of Enoch's translation or Elijah's fiery ascension, events which some suppose elevated them to the status of immortals, inspiring extensive speculation.

We might also consider the cryptic account of the Sons of God who took the daughters of men in Genesis chapter 6, verses 1 to 4. There is an ancient reading of this, most famously narrated in the book of Enoch, that reads the sons of God as the heavenly watchers, who produced the next to men. Ethelim through sexual relations with human women. Heavenly visitors temporarily assuming human forms for some specific purpose, demigods arising from the promiscuity of lascivious or rebellious deities, or the elevation of divinely favoured mortals, all provided paradigms for understanding gods appearing in the likeness of men. Indeed, as I have noted, the biblical narrative itself,

and far more so the eccentric extro-biblical traditions that developed out of it, have several instances of such events. Considered against such a colourful backdrop, one might consider the story of the incarnation as merely a more dramatic instance of familiar tropes. Recent decades have seen a burgeoning interest, both in academia and popular literature, in ways that occasionally psychedelic texts of Second Temple Judaism

and early Christianity, can complicate our categories for understanding divine, angelic, and human natures and the possibilities of their relations. Sharp boundaries between the mortal and the immortal, the heavenly and the earthly, and in some cases even the divine and the creaturely, are unsettled by beings that traverse, transgress, or are intermediate for such categories. Scholars are not mistaken to note the way that the New Testament explores and develops such themes, connecting Jesus with various Old Testament stories of theophanic angels, heavenly messengers, God's spirit descending upon heroes, miraculous births, ascended prophets,

along with various traditions of wisdom or the Logos. Yet the multiplicity of such themes is part of the point, along with the numerous human motifs, last Adam and second man, Melchizedekin high priest, Davidic Messiah, prophet like Moses, etc., etc., each of these tells us something about how Christ is to be understood, but none exhausts the New Testament's account of him. The very multiplicity of the categories is provoked by the insufficiency of each one of them. Christ fulfills, yet also, exceeds all such paradigms and archetypes.

The early church's preoccupation with the question of the incarnation was driven by its concern to speak truthfully about the mystery of Jesus Christ, which lies at the heart of the Christian message. The seemingly abstruse philosophical categories and distinctions produced by its often fierce debates might seem to be indicative of a theological fastidiousness divorced from all reality. However, more than anything else,

they were motivated by the importance of ordering the church's confession and life around the great and glorious mystery of Christmas. In confessing their faith that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, the early church was generally not articulating its convictions in societies that could not imagine God's appearing as men, but in societies with no shortage of such fancied beings. There was a menagerie of intermediate and other heavenly beings, among whom Jesus could be classed.

Perhaps Jesus was an angel who appeared as a man, a human Messiah who was elevated and empowered by God, a human being temporarily possessed by the divine spirit, a lesser divinity generated by the supreme being, or perhaps his humanity was an insubstantial and illusory appearance generated by God. The challenge of the church was not to allow its confession to be compromised by adopting any of the lesser options on offer, but to assert a mystery that exceeded any myths' imaginings. For instance, Mary was and remained a virgin in the conception of Jesus, No sexual relation occurred between her and God.

Jesus was not some hybrid of humanity and divinity, an intermediate third thing, but fully man and fully God. Nor was Jesus a human person, who was possessed, as it were, by the Christ at his baptism, or exalted to divine status at the resurrection, as teachers of adoptionism, variously taught. Christ's human nature was not like a dispensable avatar, but truly united with his divine nature. Christ's human nature, as the tradition has insisted, was anhypostatic, not being personal in itself, but enhypostatic, being personal by virtue of the second person of the Trinity, taking the nature to himself. All such claims serve to close off culturally live options for conceptualizing the person of Jesus, ensuring that people did not fall short of the mystery. No one less than the Most High God himself, the supreme being, not some second, tier deity became man. No softening of monotheistic confession or the claims of classical theism were to be countenanced. God is not one of the petty deities of the myths, beings that,

while immortal, had origins, limits, and passions. The union of God and man in Jesus of Nazareth was personal and enduring, neither temporary nor dispensable as that of a deity with their avatar might be. The union was genuine, not merely an insubstantial appearance. It entailed no diminution of the divinity, hybridization of the divinity in humanity, or evacuation of the humanity. The meaning of Christ's incarnation is to be found not so much in the similarities between it and the other accounts and paradigms on offer in Scripture as in the differences. Any class or category that might seek to contain Christ as one among other members is burst. like a wine skin filled with new wine. For instance, in considering Old Testament angelic or even divine visitations in human form,

the bodies of such visitors neither seemed to have pre-existed nor continued beyond their use for a particular visitation. They had neither human origins nor histories. There was no enduring bond with the heavenly being who appeared in their form either. The body was a temporary avatar for a limited end. A body fully suitable and prepared for the purpose could be assumed and then immediately. immediately discarded afterwards. For such visitations, the body was purely functional and dispensable. While we might occasionally see allusions to angelic visitations in New Testament accounts of Christ, the place that the flesh of Christ occupies within the gospel accounts and the Christian theological imagination is quite distinctive.

The story of the Gospels is, in large measure, a story of Jesus' body. Throughout the accounts of Virgin Conception, birth, baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension. Jesus' body is not a dispensable appearance assumed for limited ends, but central to the narrative. Salvation is accomplished in the flesh of Jesus, the fact that the second person of the Trinity does not merely temporarily assume human flesh, but that even after the resurrection he continues to share our nature is an important Christian claim. Setting our account of the incarnation apart from almost all other accounts of deity's coming in human likeness or flesh. Over Christmas-tide, my mind is often drawn to such matters.

The mystery of the incarnation, or at least certain facets of it, is perhaps most powerfully seen in the infant Jesus. While Jesus came as a man, it matters greatly that he first came as an infant. Prevailing accounts of human nature are commonly implicitly ordered around able-bodied adult males, who most conform to the ideal of independent rational agents. However, deeper and less considered truths about our humanity can be seen when we center the infant, which we all were once, and in which enduring truths about ourselves are disclosed. In the infant, our radical dependence upon connection to and entanglement with others is unavoidably seen. In the sleeping newborn, gently cradled by its mother, we see our vulnerability, exposure and openness.

to others. In the loving gaze of parents at their tiny child, we see the given and unchosen roots of our existence and what we represent for others. These things do not cease to be true of adults, but our capacity to see them may gradually be impaired. As we mature, our self-expression, our choices, our agency and actions, our self-consciousness and subjectivity, our social standing and station, our thoughts and beliefs, our affections and desires, and other such things can so dominate our sense of who we are, that we can become inured to the importance of our most fundamental dependent and given bodily existence. Perhaps only in the final season of our lives, where the stubborn reality of the body once again asserts itself over all these things, will we consciously

reckon with this truth. There are theological truths about the word made flesh and God in Christ that may appear in their sharpest focus in the image of the cradled infant Jesus. In the infant Jesus, In the infant Jesus, we see that God takes our condition upon himself. He enters our humanity in its fullness. He does not merely assume a mature adult body for the purpose of three years of teaching ministry followed by his death and resurrection. Rather, he is conceived in the womb, born, and passes through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. He truly becomes one of us, not merely appearing in our form, as an angel might do, for a divinely appointed mission of limited duration. Matthew's Gospel begins with the genealogy. Being born as an infant to specific parents, Jesus takes not merely generic human flesh, but a particular human heritage and history to himself. He assumes a givenness that is constitutive of and common to our humanity, shouldering the burdens, the legacy, and the destiny of a lineage. Jesus is not a mere tourist in our nature, donning our likeness as we might some exotic cultural garment.

He is born as the son of Abraham and the son of David. The words of Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14 are recalled in the opening chapter of Matthew. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. A couple of chapters after this prophecy in Isaiah chapter 9 verse 6, words famous from many services of lessons and carols are recorded. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

everlasting father, prince of peace. These prophecies, first given to a king and people greatly unsettled by the threat of invasion during the Cyro-Ephraimite war, are related to Jesus by Matthew. In the first context of the prophecy, a child to be born, some from speculated Hezekiah, would be the Lord's assurance of the survival of his people

and the Davidic dynasty, and would also represent a timeline for the transformation of their situation. In Matthew's allusion to these prophecies, God's entrusting of himself to his people is more evident. If the birth of a royal son to David's house was a sign of God's presence in Isaiah's day, Jesus coming as an infant is much more so. Infants, in their extreme dependence, are given and entrusted to their parents. In coming as a weak and helpless infant, Jesus is given to humanity in a far more profound way than he could be otherwise. Mary's cradling and nursing of the Godman

is a startling image of the intimacy that is established between God and humanity in the incarnation. In the birth of an infant, we are made alert to time in a new way, experiencing the reality of our belonging to a generational life that extends far beyond our lifespans. The newborn infant is a sign of continuation and of newness of the enduring of a family and its share.

shared life and have a fundamental transition and reordering within it. Infants are creatures of time in profound and manifest ways and can at least temporarily open their parents' eyes to the fact that they are too. As Neil Postman once wrote, children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. In the infant, the parents see something of themselves that will endure beyond their passing, but also experience the beginning of that passing in the dawn of a new generation. In the child we see something of an awaited future in the present. The various people who saw the infant Jesus saw him as a symbol of hope, his infant presence, a promissory assurance of his future work.

In the infant Jesus, people saw a sign of the Lord's coming to his people, keeping the promises made to their fathers. They also saw the advent of a new age and a new kingdom. In coming as an infant, Jesus both entered into time in its deeper sense and manifested God's advent in time in ways that no other form of coming could. The birth of a child, following the pangs of delivery, is an apocalyptic advent of joy after pain. Birth is attended by joy and entails transformation.

The coming of a new child into your world transforms that world. That Jesus first comes in the darkness of the womb and the world, his birth heralded by angels to nighttime shepherds, and his presence sought by wise men following. following a star, is noteworthy. Birth is a key scriptural metaphor, both for the climactic and apocalyptic deliverance of God awaited by his people, as we see in places like Isaiah

chapter 66, verse 7 to 14, and for the work of Christ. As I have noted before, Luke and John both parallel Christ's birth, or the notion of birth, with Christ's resurrection. Christ's coming transforms the world and brings true joy, good news of great joy that will be for all the people. In the famous Christ hymn of Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 to 11, we read, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form

of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. This Christmas takes some time to tarry over the import of the words being made in the likeness of men. In verse 7, the Son of God did not merely come to us as a mature adult, in control of all his faculties, but in the way that we come into being, as weak and dependent infants knit together in our

mother's wombs. As adults, we can recoil at the prospect of such radical dependence upon others. To our pride, the prospect of being a burden might be the most feared indignity of old age. The manner of Christ's coming, as an infant, is a sign of his humility. Though the King of Kings, he first comes to us, not in the pride, pomp, and power of a great emperor, but as a helpless child finally infants in their radical vulnerability dependence weakness and meekness are symbols of peace the child depends for their survival upon the establishment of a peaceful and hospitable world around them and it is in the death or killing of infants that the violence of the world is most tragically and horrifically manifest the story of jesus infancy includes accounts of brutal violence against defenceless young children in the massacre of the holy innocence. However, in the baby at the heart of the story, there is a symbol of peace, of God's life entrusted to man as a sign of a world beyond such cruelty and conflict. He is the prince of peace, his coming a sign of peace among men and reconciliation of God and man. As we reflect upon the incarnation this Christmas tide, let us see within the infant Jesus, God truly become man, and in the newborn Christ, God's sign of his full identification with and presence to us, of his coming in the fullness of time,

and of hope for an awaited future already present in him, of promised joy to the world, of divine humility, and of longed for peace. Happy Christmas! Thank you very much for listening. If you'd like to support my work here and elsewhere, you can do so using the Patreon or PayPal links below. And if you'd like to read more of my reflections, see what I'm doing and what have been publishing elsewhere. You can follow me on the anchored argosy, the substack that I share with my wife Susanna. The link to that will also be

left below. May God bless you richly in the new year.