Incarnation is Contextualization

The greatest challenge facing Christian theological education today is the growing irrelevance of the common theological anthropology based in a claim to know human nature without reference to either cultural context or human experience. Typically these are claims around the universality of sin, the universality of salvation, and thus the universal end of humanity in either God's Reign or eternal perdition.  

On the surface such universal claims about human nature appear to rise naturally from the Biblical witness, which begins with a description of the creation and "fall" of humanity and ends with a description of the New Jerusalem into which redeemed humanity flows. Yet the Bible itself bears witness that it's accounts of human nature arise as products of contextualization. In the Bible God's revelation comes to specific people and peoples in specific circumstances for specific purposes. 

While it speaks to the universality of God's providence, the Bible does not contain within itself a claim to speak a universal language. Indeed, in the New Testament it documents the explosion of the revelation of God in Christ into multiple languages, cultures, and human experiences of God's presence. 

What this means for theological anthropology has become starkly evident in the modern era. When Christian thought was loosed from domination by the monoculture enforced by the institutional church then the fissures in theological anthropology became evident. There emerged among Christians disagreements about the nature and depth of sin, the limits and value of human free will, the interrelationship of flesh, body, soul, and spirit, and most consequentially the roles and responsibilities of humans within the Body of Christ and the wider set of social relationships.

 

Old cultural differences within Christendom, suppressed by the totalizing presence of a state supported Church, emerged even as the rapidly changing culture of modernity began to assert itself. 

Today disagreements, long standing and never resolved over political rights, freedom of conscience, gender roles, human sexuality, the nature of embodiment, and others aspects of being human impact any theological understanding of the incarnation and subsequently soteriology. 

It isn't just that we cannot articulate our witness to it means to be human without taking the context of the hearer into account. We cannot understand the meaning of our own words unless we take the cultural context in which we learned to speak into account. 

If we ever controlled that context, a doubtful supposition, we do not control it now. The dominant cultural understanding of what it means to be human is rapidly slipping away from our Christian articulations of what it means to be human, leaving our theology incomprehensible, irrelevant, and in some cases reprehensible. 

And because we cannot understand God without understanding God incarnate our theology becomes ever more vaguely metaphysical.

We will either engage contemporary human experience in our witness to Jesus Christ as God incarnate, or we will continue our pattern of failure to be fruitful and multiple and cover the face of the earth. We either realize that we cannot meaningfully assert the humanity of Christ without understanding the contemporary human experience of being human, or we fade into the obscurity of past history and the abstract ephemera of philosophical theology.