The Radicalness of God's Incarnation: "For God So Loved the World that He Couldn't Stay Away"

For God So Loved the World…That He Couldn’t Stay Away:

A Christmas Meditation

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by Roger Olson

December 25, 2014

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The Incarnation of God as "one of us"

This is the heart of the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and therefore of authentic Christianity: the incarnation of God as “one of us.” Take it away and Christianity is little more than a moralistic, therapeutic deism (MTD). The incarnation, as event and doctrine, is the distinctive note of the Christian witness and the basis of Christian hope.

But many Christians believe in the incarnation of God in Jesus, but fail to grasp the fullness of it as good news about God. Karl Barth best expressed this good news about God in a nutshell: the humanity of God—the startling title (given his early emphasis on God’s “wholly otherness”) of one of his last books.

If Barth was right, and I believe he was, God was always inclined toward us, always determined in himself, by his free decision, as “He who loves in freedom,” to be for us in Jesus Christ. Thus, we must think of the Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, the Word, as the “Platzhalter” for Jesus Christ in the Trinity.

Thinking Wrongly of the Incarnation

1 - Many Christians think of the incarnation as God’s rescue mission, its only purpose being to get God the Son onto the cross to change God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. This does not take the truth of the incarnation seriously enough.

2- Many other Christians think of the incarnation as God’s identification with us, to reveal himself to us, but they too fail to take the incarnation seriously enough because, for them, too often, the incarnation is something of a charade insofar as it was simply a divine “addition” of an impersonal human nature to the Son’s pristine, impassible divine nature.

If we take the incarnation radically seriously, we must conclude that it was not merely a “Plan B” because of humanity’s rebellion or merely a pretense that made God appear to be one of us, with the “God part” of Jesus remaining incapable of suffering.

The Incarnation of God is Radical

I believe the one of the most beautiful, inspiring and truthful pieces of theological literature (which is also profoundly devotional) is Barth’s essay in Church Dogmatics IV/1 entitled “The Way of the Son of God into a Far Country.” There Barth, perhaps almost in spite of himself, grasps and expounds the radicalness of the incarnation. The Son of God, God the Son, God himself in the person of the eternal Word, too leave of the Father’s house and entered into the depths of human misery for our sakes. The result is, for Barth and for me, that God cannot be thought of as untouched, pristine, unaffected by what happened with Jesus Christ.

Because of the incarnation our misery is forever imprinted in the life of God but so is our transformation to glory. The wounds of Jesus (and not just the ones put there by the nails of the cross) are part of God’s life but so is his glorious resurrection. Because of the incarnation God’s grace and glory are part of every human person’s being (in potency) and, with faith, every human is capable of participating in God’s divine life and family forever.

Jesus did not “drop his humanity” when he ascended into heaven; he took his resurrected, glorified (but still wounded) humanity with him and he remains human forever. Because of the incarnation, the event of God’s love, one of "us" is "one of God"; our "being" is God’s and "God’s [being]" is ours—if we have faith in his Son. There’s no hint of pantheism in that; it’s all due to God’s grace which means God could have remained God without the incarnation. But he chose not to be himself without us.

The Incarnation was God's Intended Purpose of Creation

I believe, with the Eastern churches, that the incarnation was God’s great plan and purpose in creation all along; it was not merely a “rescue mission.” It became a rescue mission, but it would have happened even if humanity had not fallen due to rebellion. The purpose of God toward the world, toward humanity especially, was to join with it and join it with him by becoming one of us so we could become part of him. The original plan (to speak mythically) did not include the cross, but it became part of the plan when humanity rebelled. Because of our rebellion and God’s refusal to give up on his plan, the wounds of Jesus remain forever embedded in God’s life.

Love is the Fabric of Reality in God's Incarnation

What’s the final outcome, the “cash value,” of such a vision of God and the world? It must be that love is the fabric of reality, the heart of what it is all about to be, even for God. This narrative, this story, this eventful reality of the incarnation, if taken fully seriously, cannot help but push aside and out-of-the-way any notion of God as desiring glory above all.

Or, rather, it requires a redefinition of “glory” from our fallen notions of it. This truth tells us that Jesus’ wounds are the most glorious thing possible—even for God. The doctrine of God cannot be what it would be without the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus.

It is sad that so many Christians disregard this and prefer instead a philosophical idea of God as glorious according to human conceptions of glory—immutable, impassible, apathetic, self-enclosed, infinite (in the sense of incapable of limitations).

My prayer this Christmas is that all Christians will come to grasp the radicalness of the incarnation and allow it to transform their understanding of God as one of us.

- Roger

A Worldwide Map of how Multilingual People Transmit Information and Ideas.

S. RONEN ET AL., PNAS EARLY EDITION (2014)

Many books are translated into and out of languages such as English, German, and Russian, but Arabic has fewer translations relative to its many speakers. (Arrows between circles represent translations; the size of a language's circle is proportional to the number of people who speak it.)

Want to influence the world? Map reveals the best languages to speak

http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak

by Michael Erard 

December 15, 2014

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Speak or write in English, and the world will hear you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese, and you may have a harder time getting your message out. Now, a new method for mapping how information flows around the globe identifies the best languages to spread your ideas far and wide. One hint: If you’re considering a second language, try Spanish instead of Chinese.

The study was spurred by a conversation about an untranslated book, says Shahar Ronen, a Microsoft program manager whose Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) master’s thesis formed the basis of the new work. A bilingual Hebrew-English speaker from Israel, he told his MIT adviser, César Hidalgo (himself a Spanish-English speaker), about a book written in Hebrew whose translation into English he wasn’t yet aware of. “I was able to bridge a certain culture gap because I was multilingual,” Ronen says. He began thinking about how to create worldwide maps of how multilingual people transmit information and ideas.

Ronen and co-authors from MIT, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Aix-Marseille University tackled the problem by describing three global language networks based on bilingual tweeters, book translations, and multilingual Wikipedia edits. The book translation network maps how many books are translated into other languages. For example, the Hebrew book, translated from Hebrew into English and German, would be represented in lines pointing from a node of Hebrew to nodes of English and German. That network is based on 2.2 million translations of printed books published in more than 1000 languages. As in all of the networks, the thickness of the lines represents the number of connections between nodes. For tweets, the researchers used 550 million tweets by 17 million users in 73 languages. In that network, if a user tweets in, say, Hindi as well as in English, the two languages are connected. To build the Wikipedia network, the researchers tracked edits in up to five languages done by editors, carefully excluding "bots".

In all three networks, English has the most transmissions to and from other languages and is the most central hub, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the maps also reveal “a halo of intermediate hubs,” according to the paper, such as French, German, and Russian, which serve the same function at a different scale.

In contrast, some languages with large populations of speakers, such as Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic, are relatively isolated in these networks. This means that fewer communications in those languages reach speakers of other languages. Meanwhile, a language like Dutch—spoken by 27 million people—can be a disproportionately large conduit, compared with a language like Arabic, which has a whopping 530 million native and second-language speakers. This is because the Dutch are very multilingual and very online.

The network maps show what is already widely known: If you want to get your ideas out, you can reach a lot of people through the English language. But the maps also show how speakers in disparate languages benefit from being indirectly linked through hub languages large and small. On Twitter, for example, ideas in Filipino can theoretically move to the Korean-speaking sphere through Malay, whereas the most likely path for ideas to go from Turkish to Malayalam (spoken in India by 35 million people) is through English. These networks are revealed in detail at the study’s website.

The authors note that the users they studied, whom they consider elite because—unlike most people in the world—they are literate and online, do not represent all the speakers of a language. However, “the elites of global languages have a disproportionate amount of power and responsibility, because they are tacitly shaping the way in which distant cultures see each other—even if this is not their goal,” Hidalgo says. When conflict in Ukraine flared this past summer, most people in the world learned about it through news stories originally written in English and then translated to other languages. In this case, “any implicit bias or angle taken by the English media will color the information about the conflict that is available to many non-English speakers,” Hidalgo says.

The networks potentially offer guidance to governments and other language communities that want to change their international role:

• “If I want my national language to be more prominent, then I should invest in translating more documents, encouraging more people to tweet in their national language,” Ronen says.

• “On the other side, if I want our ideas to spread, we should pick a second language that’s very well connected.”

For non-English speakers, the choice of English as second or third language is an obvious one. For English speakers, the analysis suggests it would be more advantageous to choose Spanish over Chinese—at least if they’re spreading their ideas through writing.

The problem of measuring the relative status of the world’s languages "is a very tricky one, and often very hard to get good data about,” says Mark Davis, the president and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium in Mountain View, California, which does character encoding for the world’s computers and mobile devices. “Their perspective on the problem is interesting and useful.”

Cultural transmission happens in spoken language too, points out William Rivers, the executive director of the nonprofit Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Languages and International Studies in Garrett Park, Maryland. Data on interactions in, say, the souks of Marrakech, where people speak Arabic, Hassaniya, Moroccan Arabic, French, Tashelhit, and other languages, are impossible to get but important in cultural transmission, he says. He adds that “as the Internet has become more available to more people around the world, they go online in their own languages.” When they do, now they know how to connect to other languages and move their ideas, too.

[click to enlarge]

Connections by Published Book Translations

Connections by Tweeter Translations

Connections by Wikipedia Edits Translations

Global Language Network - Cesar Hidalgo
MIT Prof. Cesar Hidalgo on multilingualism, hierarchy of the
language networks, and cross-lingual research









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