From ‘All Things New’ by Fiona and Terryl Givens:
. . . . Why did Christianity represent a revised imperative to build community and act according to new norms? Many religious revolutionaries from Buddha to Gandhi have instigated new codes of conduct and ideals for community-building. Did Jesus preach something yet more radical?
A partial answer is implicit in Hart’s earlier phrase: something about the way in which God invaded history in “Christ.” For Hart—and most Christians—Christ represents a unique instance of God being made visible and approachable to us. We can now “walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ,” in one poet’s words.3 The accessibility to God is generally called the miracle of the “Incarnation.” God, the invisible, the incomprehensible, the Creator of the Universe,”wrapt in night’s mantle, stole into a manger.”4
The Christian church would spend the next four centuries struggling to work out the precise meaning of that Incarnation, that “such a way’ of God becoming Christ. Church councils and church fathers where so preoccupied with that question that they seemed to have mental effort for little else. At Nicaea and Chalcedon, in chambers and treatises, they debated: . . . .
Those questions are largely academic, and today they mostly fail to interest, motivate, or inspire us. . . . Before the theologians took over the conversation, what was it about Christ—the person and the message that was galvanizing, transformative, and so appealing that it led a small band of Galileans to reshape the world and lay the foundations for a church of billions? That seems a more fruitful direction of inquiry. Let’s go back to the beginning and reassess in what the original Christian revolution consisted.
One possibility: In Christ, for the first and only time in human history, we see ourselves as we were meant to become. We see in Christ our own possible destiny: to be fully and completely like Him. Infinite love and goodness have a form, a face, a healing hand—that reaches out to touch, to embrace. This we discover, to our shock and surprise, this is God. For Christ, we learn, is not a mere earthly version of a distant, unapproachable, “foggy” God. God the Son is the perfect reflection of who God the Father always was and is: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9). This is not a metaphor, not mystic wisdom, but plain and precious truth unveiled. So when God the Son says to our ever greater shock and surprise, “Come, follow me,” He is saying much more than modern Christians realize. ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Meridian, Idaho: Faith Matters Publishing, 2020). 12-13 . . . . continued
