Be Like Jesus, or Believe in Him?

“We are incarnational.” I heard this again yesterday from a friend - the same thing I’ve heard a hundred times growing up in the Episcopal Church. I think I understand what it means: Jesus as a man was not afraid to get his hands dirty in the grime of the real world, from his messy birth in a barn to his death with unnamed criminals (his physical presence for 33 years was real and commendable: an example to emulate). 

I certainly believe this is true, but implied in the popular catchphrase is the idea that Jesus is primarily our example for moral living rather than our Savior and the King of a kingdom not of this world. The “incarnational” slogan represents  a remarkable shift in the history of Christian thought: from Calvary to Bethlehem - from Atonement to the Incarnation - from human sinfulness to a sunnier picture of human nature - from the finished work of Christ for our salvation to the life of Christ as an example to follow for moral improvement - from God's righteousness imputed to undeserving sinners to infused righteousness based on obedience and our faithfulness. Of course I am overstating this to make a point: the disproportional attention given to the death and resurrection of Christ in the four gospels, and St. Paul’s single-minded commitment to the cruciality of the Cross: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2; Gal 5:14) seems to dramatically contradict the modern trend towards incarnational understandings. And not only that, but it constitutes a break from the foundations on which the Church of England was founded (the traditional Anglican formularies). As Scottish theologian, P. T. Forsyth, said, “Christ is to us just what the cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what He did there… You do not understand Christ till you understand His cross” (The Cruciality of the Cross). “What dominated his mind was not the living but the giving of his life” (John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ).

Charles Gore (1853-1932), the one-time Principal of Pusey House Oxford, is perhaps the best face marking this theological shift. Gore was a young liberal Anglo-catholic professor at Oxford University, a son of the 1830s-40s Oxford Movement, when he edited and contributed to the wildly influential Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889). Lux Mundi was a collection of twelve essays by eleven essayists, including J. R. Illingworth “The Incarnation in relation to Development” and R. C. Moberly “The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma.” In Gore’s essay he wrote: “The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the human doing of view.” The outcome of this book (and of the liberal Catholic theology in general), was to steer the Church of England away from the Reformation’s commitment to the Bible as God’s uniquely inspired Word that contains all things necessary for our salvation, to the Bible as a man-made reflection of God’s interaction with humankind, and subject to science and reason. 

The English reformers where sure about the centrality of the Cross of Christ while maintaining appropriate respect for the whole life of Christ from birth to his bodily resurrection and ascension. They knew that the death and resurrection of our Lord was of “first importance” (1 Cor 15:3): that he came to die. But they were also clear that Jesus lived the perfect life of obedience as our substitute to reconcile sinful humanity to God - “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but the fulfill them” (Mt 5:17). Jesus is so much more than an example to follow or a coach to cheer us on. He is God who lived and died to ensure that “man can be pure before his Maker” (Job 4:17) for everlasting life. As Tim Keller often says, “Jesus lived the life that we couldn’t live, and he died the death we deserve to die.” In him, in union with him, Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection resulted in the reconciliation of unholy people to a completely holy God. This is the Christian gospel.