Incarnation

"THE WORD BECAME FLESH, " wrote John, "and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). That is what incarnation means. It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is the way things are.

All religions and philosophies that deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earthbound, are themselves denied. Moses at the burning bush was told to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy ground (Exodus 3:5), and incarnation means that all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and died on it. If we are saved anywhere, we are saved here. And what is saved is not some diaphanous distillation of our bodies and our earth, but our bodies and our earth themselves. Jerusalem becomes the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband (Revelation 21:2). Our bodies are sown perishable and raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42).

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Immortality

IMMORTAL MEANS DEATH-PROOF. To believe in the immortality of the soul is to believe that though John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, his soul goes marching on simply because marching on is the nature of souls just the way producing butterflies is the nature of caterpillars. Bodies die, but souls don't.

True or false, this is not the biblical view, although many who ought to know better assume it is. The biblical view differs in several significant ways:

1. As someone has put it, the biblical understanding of human beings is not that they have bodies, but that they are bodies. God made Adam by slapping some mud together to make a body and then breathing some breath into it to make a living soul. Thus the body and soul that make up human beings are as inextricably part and parcel of each other as the leaves and flames that make up a bonfire. When you kick the bucket, you kick it 100 percent. All of you. There is nothing left to go marching on with.

2. The idea that the body dies and the soul doesn't is an idea that implies that the body is something rather gross and embarrassing, like a case of hemorrhoids. The Greeks spoke of it as the prison house of the soul. The suggestion was that to escape it altogether was something less than a disaster.

The Bible, on the other hand, sees the body in particular and the material world in general as a good and glorious invention. How could it be otherwise when it was invented by a good and glorious God?

The Old Testament rings loud with the praise of trees and birds and rain and mountains, of wine that gladdens our hearts and oil that makes our faces shine and bread that strengthens us. Read Psalm 104, for instance. Or try the Song of Solomon for as abandoned and unabashed a celebration of the physical as you're apt to find anywhere.

As for the New Testament, Jesus himself, far from being a world-denying ascetic, was accused of being a wino and a chowhound (Matthew 11:19). When he heard that his friend Lazarus was dead, he didn't mouth any pious cliches about what a merciful release it was. He wept.

The whole idea of incarnation, of the word becoming flesh, affirms the physical and fleshly in yet another way, by declaring that it was a uniform even God wasn't ashamed to wear.

Saint Paul undoubtedly had his hang-ups, but when he compares flesh unfavorably to spirit, he is not talking about body versus soul, but about the old person without Christ versus the new person with him.

3. Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep.

The Bible, instead, speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. We do not go on living beyond the grave because that's how we are made. Rather, we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected), just as we were given them by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made.

4. All the major Christian creeds affirm belief in resurrection of the body. In other words, they affirm the belief that what God in spite of everything prizes enough to bring back to life is not just some disembodied echo of human beings but a new and revised version of all the things that made them the particular human beings they were and that they need something like a body to express: their personality, the way they looked, the sound of their voices, their peculiar capacity for creating and loving, in some sense their faces.

5. The idea of the immortality of the soul is based on the experience of humanity's indomitable spirit. The idea of the resurrection of the body is based on the experience of God's unspeakable love.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Imagination

EVEN A THOUSAND MILES inland you can smell the sea and hear the mewing of gulls if you give thought to it. You can see in your mind's eye the living faces of people long dead or hear in the mind's ear the United States Marine Band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." If you work at it, you can smell the smell of autumn leaves burning or taste a chocolate malted. You don't have to be asleep to dream dreams either. There are those who can come up with dramas laid twenty thousand leagues under the sea or take a little girl through a looking glass. Imagining is perhaps as close as humans get to creating something out of nothing the way God is said to. It is a power that to one degree or another everybody has or can develop, like whistling. Like muscles, it can be strengthened through practice and exercise. Keep at it until you can actually hear your grandfather's voice, for instance, or feel the rush of hot air when you open the 450-degree oven.

If imagination plays a major role in the creation of literature, it plays a major one also in the appreciation of it. It is essential to read imaginatively as well as to write imaginatively if you want to know what's really going on. A good novelist helps us do this by stimulating our imaginations—sensory detail is especially useful in this regard, such as the way characters look and dress, the sounds and smells of the places they live and so on—but then we have to do our part. It is especially important to do it in reading the Bible. Be the man who trips over a suitcase of hundred-dollar bills buried in the field he's plowing if you want to know what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about (Matthew 13:44). Listen to Jesus saying, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28) until you can hear him, if you want to know what faith is all about.

If you want to know what loving your neighbors is all about, look at them with more than just your eyes. The bag lady settling down for the night on the hot-air grating. The two children chirping like birds in the branches of a tree. The bride as she walks down the aisle on her father's arm. The old man staring into space in the nursing-home TV room. Try to know them for who they are inside their skins. Hear not just the words they speak, but the words they do not speak. Feel what it's like to be who they are—chirping like a bird because for the moment you are a bird, trying not to wobble as you move slowly into the future with all eyes upon you.

When Jesus said, "All ye that labor and are heavy laden," he was seeing the rich as well as the poor, the lucky as well as the unlucky, the idle as well as the industrious. He was seeing the bride on her wedding day. He was seeing the old man in front of the TV. He was seeing all of us. The highest work of the imagination is to have eyes like that.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Idolatry

IDOLATRY IS THE PRACTICE of ascribing absolute value to things of relative worth. Under certain circumstances, money, patriotism, sexual freedom, moral principles, family loyalty, physical beauty, social or intellectual preeminence, and so on are fine things to have around; but to make them the standard by which all other values are measured, to make them your masters, to look to them to justify your life and save your soul is sheerest folly. They just aren't up to it.

Idolatry is always popular among religious people, but idols made out of things like the denomination, the Bible, the liturgy, the holy images are apt to seem so limited in real power even to their idolaters that there is always the hope that in time they will overthrow themselves.

It is among the unreligious that idolatry is a particular menace. Having ushered God out once and for all through the front door, the unbeliever is under constant temptation to replace God with something spirited in through the service entrance. From the moment the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries set up the goddess of Reason on the high altar of Notre Dame, there wasn't a head in all Paris that was safe.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Humor

A GOOD JOKE is one that catches you by surprise—like God's, for instance. Who would have guessed that Israel of all nations would be the one God picked or Sarah would have Isaac at the age of ninety or the Messiah would turn up in a manger? Who could possibly see the duck-billed platypus coming or Saint Simeon Stylites or the character currently occupying the pulpit at First Presbyterian? The laugh in each case results from astonished delight at the sheer unexpectedness of the thing.

Satan's jokes, on the other hand, you can usually spot a mile off. As soon as the serpent came slithering up to Adam and Eve, almost anybody could tell that the laugh was going to be on them. That a person as blameless, upright, and well-heeled as Job was bound to have the rug pulled out from under him before he was through. That Faust, being Faust, was sure to be conned out of his soul. And so on.

In the last analysis, the only one who gets much of a kick out of Satan's jokes is Satan himself. With God's, however, even the most hardened cynics and bitterest pessimists have a hard time repressing an occasional smile. When God really gets going, even the morning stars burst into singing and all the sons of God shout for joy.

-Originally published in Beyond Words