Sunday, December 21, 2008

the incarnation

Religions are weird.

I was sitting in church, and as we were singing about Emmanuel, I just thought about how weird the doctrine of the incarnation is and how weird it is to believe in something like the incarnation.

Emmanuel means God with us. This represents one of the fairly important (I think) tenets of mainstream, canonical Christianity, which basically says that God could be (and was) born and lived.

That's a pretty big, strange belief. And it's fairly pervasive. It's not just a fundamentalist thing to believe that God could become a person. It's not a belief that only a few people in big, scary churches espouse. A lot of people believe in the incarnation, and still more sing about it every December without really thinking about what it means.

It's one of the things that makes the beliefs of this kind of Christianity unique. It's not like God appeared as avatar Jesus, showing us what a human should look like without necessarily being one.

I wrote a play once about a trading card with a holographic image of Jesus on it. I was inspired by real life events, I might add. It's really unfinished, but the gist is a bunch of people interacting with the same trading card that they keep finding and passing on. I always think of avatars as being a little bit holographic. That's really my only tie-in.

It'd take a really big God to be born, to allow yourself to be that limited and constricted. You don't see lots of other myths where that happens. Lots of religions pretty much content themselves with holographic images that kind of flirt with human qualities.

But in orthodox Christianity, it's pretty important that God can be born and can die. (A bunch of dudes debated this constantly in the proto-orthodox days in these cool things called "councils" and ended up with "creeds." It seems like a long, drawn-out process, and I hope somebody made refreshments.)

And, by strict standards, it's kind of like Jesus didn't play fair. Satan can't become a human. If you're not human, according to canonical Christianity, you're pretty much staying not human.

And then you get into atonement theology and all sorts of messy issues! Yay humanity!

Like I said, the incarnation is weird and either you believe it or you don't. But either way, it's kind of shoved in your face at Christmas.

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