The Myth of God Incarnate

January 1, 1978
Lakeland
(also: Naples, 1/8/78)

The Myth of God Incarnate

Among the faults I have found in myself, and other religious liberals, is the error of the single road to truth. Fact, reason, and logic have been our way of judging the rightness or wrongness of an idea or image presented for our belief. If a story cannot be historically verified, or seems unreasonable, then for us it is either superstition or swindle, or so we say.

I read to you from a statement by Rosemary Reuther. Let me repeat a key sentence: “For myself, I find a certain shallowness in the rationalist or liberal tradition, a certain lack of the depth [in the] symbolic dimension, the intuitive, the symbolic which in fact has been more characteristic of what has usually been called religious experience.”

Is she touching a weakness in us?

In taking as a focus point the recent book, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, my object is to present the possibility that we are depriving ourselves of some of life’s fullness by switching off the power of myth (although we do make an exception at Christmas – albeit some of us are unnecessarily apologetic and vaguely guilty about singing the Christ carols or going to midnight mass).

I will speak of a few of the main points of the book, discuss why myth seems a universal human experience, and attempt, or begin to attempt, to deal with the place of myth in a religion such as ours, a religious emphasis which seemingly places its trust in rationality.

First, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, a book by seven English scholars (theological professors, N.T. studies), has caused a minor furor in more fundamentalist Christian circles. The historic creeds of the Christian church have maintained that, basic to the Christian faith, is the belief that God took human form in Jesus, incarnated. That is, the deity took on the flesh, bone, blood, and mind of a human being, Jesus. The orthodox church wrestled for centuries with the difficulty of expressing this God-Man relationship. How could God become man and still be fully God? How could man be God and still fully man? In two historic councils of the church, Nicea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the orthodox bishops found their formulas for creedal understanding of how Jesus could be both God and man.

Nicea (325): “Jesus was Very God of Very God, Begotten and not made, being of one substance with the Father; who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.”

Chalcedon (451), in the attempt to stifle heresies adopted clarification of Nicea: Jesus was “perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood; in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

The writers of the book are Christian scholars who attempt to deal with considerations which are certainly not new to us. In their preface, they quote T. S. Eliot: “Christianity is always adapting itself into something which can be believed.”

From the mid-19th century on to the present, “Western Christianity has had to make two major new adjustments in response to important enlargements of human knowledge. It accepted that humans are part of nature and ... emerged within the evolution of the forms of life on this earth; and it accepted that the books of the Bible were written by a variety of human beings in a variety of circumstances and cannot be accorded a verbal divine authority.” (Of course, fundamentalists have not accepted either evolution or biblical errancy).

Furthermore as the varied studies of the Christian literature (N.T.) proceeded, there was increasing recognition that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (except for John) was a man approved by God for a special role within the divine purpose and that the later conceptions of him as God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, living a human life, is a mythological or poetic way of expressing his significance for Christians.

The Christian myth is that God was incarnate in the baby Jesus through the miraculous conception by the God of the Virgin Mary. Miraculous births were not unusual attributions to be made of outstanding leaders or extraordinarily gifted persons. It [was a] way of explaining genius....

Plato, greatest of philosophers, was believed by many to have been of divine birth. Others said that Pythagoras was the divine son of Hermes. Plutarch, [the] biographer, seemed to believe it was beyond question that Alexander was a descendant of Heracles on his father’s side and from the mythical heroes of Troy on his mother’s [side].

Augustus was Caesar during the time Jesus was born and court circles suggested and promoted the notion that Augustus was a god come to earth – an incarnation.

In 48 BCE [an] Asian inscription speaks of Julius Caesar as “God manifest, offspring of Ares and Aphrodite and common savior of human life.” Perhaps the most noble – beautiful and different – God incarnate [was the] child of poor people whose message was to the dispossessed.

The book, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, attempts to deal with how a Christian today can confront the myth and reconcile its poetry and metaphor with the age we now live. That is not my concern today.

Most of us who are Unitarian Universalists think of Jesus as human, [and] do not have to deal with a particular doctrine of God-Man or supernatural redeeming savior based on an exclusive redeeming scheme by a savior who was God Incarnate.

In a peculiar sort of way, we religious radicals, as most might think us, are in the same position as those Christian fundamentalists who are disturbed by such treatment of myth as in the book. The Christian fundamentalists do not want to entertain the thought that the Christian salvation scheme (virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection) is mythology; they believe it to be a literal fact. We do not easily accept the Christian scheme as mythology because we believe it has been preached as fact – a fact we deny is true on historical, literary, theological, and rational grounds.

However, we Unitarian Universalists, who presume ourselves to be rational creatures, are mistaken if we easily or quickly put down or dismiss myths as stories that just are not true. We tend to forget, or ignore much of the time, that the human being is not just a creature using logic and reason, but more often is a creature possessing creative imagination.

Joseph Campbell, the scholar with the widest knowledge and deepest insight into myth, said that “myth is an imaginative elaboration of fundamental problems and tensions in the form of a story speaking symbolically to the whole human condition.”

Others speak of myth as a “rise to consciousness from the depth level of the human psyche” or the myth “wakes realities which logical thought will never be able to express.”

Jung wrote “nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas. An idea molds man/woman only when it is an expression of psychic experience.”

Persons, pre-historic as well as historic, have a hunger for meaning. Who am I? Why am I alive? Why is the cold bitter? The sun scorching? The tiger ferocious? Why does drought and flood destroy our food and leave us hungry? Why do I hurt? What and why is death? What is the God power or Powers that made man/woman, beast, field, and stream? The seasons, the tides, the sun, the moon, and stars? Does the Power care about us? Does the Power care about me?

My surmise is that the variety of incarnation myths represent answers people have made to the last question. If there is an all-powerful god, does he/she care about us? The mythical answer has been yes – He (in historic times, God has been he in the monotheistic religions) came to earth as a babe of miraculous birth, as with Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mithra.

Welling up from deep unarticulated feelings, many peoples in many cultures have created a god who cared about people; who was incarnate in human form; who in some cases sacrificed all for the people who worshiped him. So it was with the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, Romans, even the ancient Hebrews, for Yahveh appeared to Gideon (Jud. 6/14) and Abraham (Gen 18/1 ff). In the creation myth of Adam and Eve, Yahveh was walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening – a vivid, anthropomorphic and pastoral incarnation.

We are part of a religious group that imposes no myth in the form of dogma, creed, or incarnated God. We number among us agnostics, atheists, and believers in a God based on reason. Many there are among us who assert that no myth is needed, only fidelity to the ongoing search for truth and the achieving of a greater measure of social justice for people on earth.

Yet I have a hunch that there are many among us who have asked, even as I have asked myself and speculated many times, is there love, care, imagination, beyond, behind, or underneath our human experience? Are these experiences of love, imagination, caring, sensitivity as we know them in our human condition, incarnations of forces that are part of all creation, somehow?

I do know that in those moments when I can say “yes” to that speculation, the universe is a home; in my skeptical moments, when I say “no” the universe is a house, but not a home.

The most difficult part of this talk is how to conclude it. I believe we all have mythologies – justice, truth, a better society – these are myths, too, born of our ideals and imagination – a bit thin because of being rather abstract. We have not usually allowed our imagination to bubble over with images born of our feelings [and] metaphors.

Let me end this with two thoughts, one by John Hick in the book I have referred to where he writes (p. 180) “It seems clear that we are being called today to attain a global religious vision which is aware of the unity of all mankind before God and which at the same time makes sense of the diversity of God’s ways within the various streams of human life.”

Many years ago, William James wrote “truth and fact well up in our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulations. There is in the living act of perception always something which glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught and for which reflection comes too late.”