Giving Up Christianity for Christianity: The True Meaning of Incarnation

What if Christianity actually looked like Jesus? I don't just mean the church or people. What if God looked like Jesus? What if the religion constructed in the name of Jesus looked like the humble peasant from Nazareth?

First of all, as a religion, Christianity would be diametrically opposed to the triumphalism of fundamentalist religion. Why? Jesus was not a triumphalist. Jesus didn't try to force his enemies to convert to his way. He embodied it and was willingly crucified for it.
Would Christianity be willing to undergo crucifixion for the way of Jesus?

What if Christianity was more concerned with embodying the emancipating way of Jesus than making its own name great? Jesus wasn't concerned with making his name great. He was concerned with inviting people into the way he embodied in his life, the way that leads us to the loving Father of creation and into the heart of reality.
Jesus invited people into a gracious understanding of reality, a view of the universe not as indifferent but as a relational cosmos grounded in the love that is the subsurface unity of reality.
Jesus was more concerned with the well-being of humanity and creation than his own life.

Christianity must take up its cross and incarnate the cruciformity of Christ.
The truth of Christianity is not propositional but relational and contextual, not abstract but operational.
Jesus was the truth not through his words but his actions.
The truth of Christianity must be contextualized through incarnation in the life of the one who would follow Jesus. In this way, Christianity may actually look like Jesus.

What if Christianity was more concerned with the well-being of the world than its own survival? If we seek first the kingdom of God then maybe, just maybe, Christianity will be added to us. But we first have to give up our triumphalistic notions of a God who loves and cares more for Christians than everyone else. And who knows, perhaps we will realize with the kingdom that we no longer need Christianity.

Perhaps upon seeing the kingdom we will realize that as a temporary vocation for the children of God in human history, Christianity is over, and that the goodness harbored within its event has been resurrected into our material reality as an all-encompassing presence and the revelation of the children of God in every human body loved and cherished by God. When Jesus died, Christ was risen in the body of those who remembered him and who carried forth his presence through the indwelling of the Spirit.
Perhaps Christianity will also pass away, and the Spirit within will be risen again in the whole of creation as the kingdom fully arrives with the peace of God covering the entire cosmos.

The Genetic Structure of Ethics in the Morality of Jesus

Moralisms, or ethical systems of rules and norms, fail to mediate the transcendental character of the Ethical. They are contingent, provisional, and given.
Goodness cannot be measured or calculated, demonstrated in the excess of grace in contradistinction to the moderation of Greek morality (reason=virtue=happiness).
Goodness is better understood as organic and pulsing than abstract and static.
Conventional ethics has a genetic character of economic transaction and reductionism. The economic character of ethics is predicated upon the transaction of a commodity.
A commodity is a traded good which benefits the receiving party. Participation in conventional ethics is constituted by the expectation of a commodity to the benefit of the participant.
The excess of love in the ethics of Jesus drives against the cold reduction and calculation of conventional ethics and radicalizes the commodity.
Thus, the genetic structure of ethics in the teachings of Jesus is the excess of grace over and against merit and economic exchange and the impossibility of the transcendental character of the Ethical (Ethos) to be mediated by a given norm or rule.
The irreducibility of what is good and right should keep us on our feet, not as blind judges but with eyes peeled to see the particularity of the Other, the singularity of each situation.
This irreducible ethos can only get its grip on the mind when mediated through the heart.
Jesus invites us to return to the organic structure of the transcendent good as mediated through the living experience, the being-in-the-world and angsty, emotionally laden quality of giving-a-damn that constitutes real human ethical action.
Of course, we could just as easily throw out the abstract jargon and call it love.
The irreducible call of love is the event that lies underneath the ethical dilemma and behind the eyes of those who are suffering.
What we need to be confronted with are not lines on paper but lines on withering faces.
We don't need the blackness of ink but the blackness of neediness in the eyes of the homeless staring back at us as we walk the street.
It's not ultimately the bodies of dissertations that will give us a "moral compass" but the bodies of orphans and widows, the bodies of Others who demand our love and care.

Being-Toward-the-Other: the Ontological Constitution of Salvation in Christian Soteriology

In the salvific transfiguration of being that results from an encounter with the Sacred vis-à-vis the symbolic medium of Jesus of Nazareth, a fundamental reorientation of self radically alters the path of the individual's vocation. The will is no longer fundamentally oriented toward Ego but toward the Other. Along with Heidegger's ontological constitutions of being-in-the-world and being-toward-death, along with Ricoeur's being-interpreted, another existential configuration comes into focus: being-toward-Other.

Through this traumatic encounter, the Gaze of being finds dissatisfaction in the objective horizon of its consciousness -- a field of idolized phenomena violently assimilated and reduced to objects of personal gratification. Under the vocationally tyrannical and objectifying Gaze of being the Other is mutilated and reduced to an enslaved other, no longer an Other but another shadow that is otherwise than Other, otherwise than being, a mere icon idolatrously mistaken for the Real. So this horizon of consciousness is realized as a killing field populated by shadow objects of Ego, fenced off from that which is beyond the perceptive horizon of consciousness -- the traumatizing Real, the Other, the irreducible and ineffable, along with its penetrating Gaze that commands our attention, sinking into the black voids at the centers of our eyes, invisibly crossing our Gazes in an ineffable and commanding commonality, soliciting our attention and reverence and caution.

So the traumatic encounter with the Sacred Other leads to a reverence for every other Other, a being-toward-Other which demands that we draw out of ourselves under the Gaze of the Other and respect and love the ineffability of the Other, symbolized in the black and bottomless commanding abyss at the centers of their Gaze, which is the locus of their irreducible singularity. 

But how does the Sacred Other function within the symbolic medium of Jesus Christ? How does it succeed in reconstituting our being? First, in the teachings of Jesus. Through the medium of evocative parable we are drawn into the experiences of the Other -- the desperation of the prodigal, the suffering of a man mugged and left in a ditch. But more importantly, the unconditionality of love behind these stories -- the celebratory love of a father for a son who took away his livelihood and destroyed his honor and fortunes, the dishonorable and scandalous love of a hated enemy who helps his enemy out of a ditch and pays for his healthcare anyway. Love draws us out of ourselves and beyond the boundaries Ego selfishly establishes. But what about the actions of Jesus? He heals the sick, raises the dead, and loves his enemies, embracing those who have been othered by the elites. He is unjustly murdered and crucified, and when we stand before the image of this figure in our minds, we stand before a naked and bleeding body, bearing the scars of our selfish world on his own flesh, a world we have contributed to ourselves. His blood cries out to us, his wails and cries screaming at our injustice, calling us to crucify our own Egos that crucify his body. And as the bleeding body of the Other, reduced to a mocked and derided other, he calls us toward himself to embody this cruciform love, to go out toward the body of the Other, lift it from the ditch, pay for its healthcare, and forgive it of what it has ostensibly taken from us.
 

The Easter Experience and the Empty Tomb: The Oracle of Early Christian Hope

Haight and Borg on Resurrection:
Recently I was reading Roger Haight on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in his book Jesus: Symbol of God, who holds a view of resurrection similar to that of Marcus Borg and other liberal scholars. There is not much that I disagree with them about, but this has become a bit of an issue for me. They do not affirm a the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus as an historical event, but my biggest issue with them is not their denial of this event which they may find intellectually impossible to affirm, but the fallacy of their arguments against it.

Marcus Borg reduces the event to a mystical resurrection where Jesus is removed from time and space and taken up into the life of God, and speaks vaguely of the appearances, refusing to admit any empirical qualities to them. Haight, in similar fashion, sets up a false binary opposition. Contrary to his own stated postmodern epistemology and the irreducibility of this event, he argues that if the event is to be meta-historical and transcendent, Jesus must be lifted up into the life of God apart from an empty tomb or empirical appearances. The event is meta-historical; therefore it is not historical. The event is transcendent; therefore it has no immanent qualities. Jesus could not have merely been the resuscitation of a corpuscular body; therefore his crucified body had no continuity with his resurrection. Now before moving into a more thorough deconstructive critique of this position, I want to lay out the importance of the resurrection as an historical event for Christian theology.

Wright and Paul on Resurrection:
N.T. Wright lays out the significance of the historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in his book Surprised by Hope. Therein he argues that the early Christian hope, which recapitulates and transforms the Jewish eschatological hope, was rooted in the future resurrection of God's children. The guarantee of this future resurrection was predicated upon the historical resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus was vindicated by God, so will his message and his followers be at the end of the age. But if Jesus is not risen, God has abandoned him, his message has failed, and we are wasting our time (according to Paul). Jesus is said to be the first-fruits of those who are asleep. This means that there will be a fuller harvest at the end of the age. It is a form of poetic justice: all those who have been oppressed and abused like Jesus and the outcasts he ate with -- they will be vindicated and risen up in the end.

Now Wright argues that the risen Christ was not the same Christ with the same body: his disciples didn't even recognize him at first. Paul argues upon the ground of Christ's resurrection that we will receive a new body in the resurrection, a celestial body that we do not yet understand or see. Wright refers to this as "transformed physicality": there is a continuity with physical existence, empirically and tangibly, but also a transcendent and fuller dimension to this existence. Perhaps it could be said this way: the new body is not less empirical but more fully so. It more fully exists, just as the promise held out is the promise of a "new creation," a "new heaven and new earth" that will be more fully material and real, not less so. We wont be ghosts in the clouds. We will be more fully human.

Jesus would have been more fully human and a foretaste of what lies beyond the eschatological horizon of his early followers' hope. What else could have drawn them out of their despair? They felt that Jesus had been a failure, and those who heard him crying out on the cross knew that he may have felt like a failure too. When Jesus was killed, so was his message. The disciples fled in despair. What could have led them to believe he had risen and been vindicated? I would argue nothing less than something very real and traumatic, something like an empirically present Christ. It's hard to imagine that they simply began to believe this as they reflected on their vivid memories of Jesus as Haight seems to think.

Haight's Fallacy:
So back to Haight. His belief that the event cannot be both historical and meta-historical is fallacious: he himself argues that Jesus mediates the presence of God as a concrete symbol. Why can the resurrection not be a concrete and mediatory symbol? In other words, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as an historical event can be understood as a dialectical symbol mediating a meta-historical and transcendent reality: Jesus has been taken "up" into the life of God, vindicated and exalted over his oppressors, concretely manifested in his empirical resurrection. Again, if Jesus is the first-fruits of the new creation and the second Adam (Gk. anthropos=human, Heb. adam=human), he must be more human, not less. The Jews believed that we are not whole beings unless we have both a body and an internal life-force joined as a psychosomatic unity. Jesus has to be a holistic psychosomatic unity from the new creation to accurately/truthfully preview the ultimate eschatological outcome of God's redemptive activity in history.

Theological Consequences:
Without an historical resurrection, the central oracle of early Christian hope is lost. Christianity as a spiritual path does not get lost, nor the luminosity and wisdom of Jesus' teachings. But the particularity of the Christian hope gets lost. The message of Jesus has a lot of transformative power in itself, but the resurrection gives it teeth. Some are content losing the metaphysical singularity of the Christian message   truncated from its spiritual path; others would like to have a form of poetic justice laid out in front of the world's suffering as a guarantee to the poor and oppressed, a messianic structure of hope-against-hope offered as an historical pre-figure to a future interruption to the insane samsara of systemic injustice as well as an ultimatum laid out before the oppressive cultural forces as a challenge and a threat.