Advent Week 2: "The Irreverent Doctrine of the Incarnation"

In the preface of the Phillips Bible paraphrase (kind of a precursor to the Message), CS Lewis offers a word relating the bible text to the incarnation. He likens the particularity and style of the Greek text as betraying its writers of not being necessarily in full command of the language of our sacred Text. Here is an unique and interesting thought and meditation for our Advent preparation and bible-reading.

"Does this shock us? It ought not to, except as the Incarnation itself ought to shock us. The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby in a peasant-woman's breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorized Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as an earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ's life) are of a different sort: miles deeper and further in."

O God,

you wonderfully created

and yet more wonderfully restored

the dignity of human nature;

grant that we may share the divine life

of your Son Jesus Christ,

who lives and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God now and for ever.

Amen.

processing: Tim Keller- The Reason for God: Belief in An Age of Skepticism

Catching up on posting for some of my end of summer reading:

I am intrigued by Tim Keller. He's one of those names that you here again and again as someone doing big things, and seemingly doing them the right way. Keller seems to combine intellectual rigor and appeal with pastoral concern and care, no doubt a proper cocktail for the urban ministry he heads.

While, generally proofs by reasoning and apologetic for God only marginally interest me (one can't afford ignore the Mere Christianity's & Simply Christian's), Keller's accessible and widely-read erudition holds great appeal. I don't know many "hot" Protestant ministers engaging with care and creativity minds and work from Flannery O'Connor to Niebuhr to Foucault.

Various Excerpts:
[referring to the charge of injustice and fanaticism] "What if, however, the essence of Christianity is salvation by grace, salvation not because of what we do but because of what Christ has done for us? Belief that you are accepted by God by sheer grace is profoundly humbling. The people who are fanatics, then, are so not because they are too committed to the gospel but because they're not committed to it enough (57)."

[referring to the response to Jesus' use of miracles in Matthew 28:17] "The most instructive thing about this text is, however, what it says about the purpose of Biblical miracles. They lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder. Jesus' miracles in particular were never magic tricks, designed to impress and coerce...Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order (95)."