Incarnation is going down; God descending. God withdrawing from Himself. He emptied himself of His transcendence. He went out of himself becoming the last and the lost. To live out of oneself, from one’s unique position, does not by a long way imply living only for oneself. Christ is introduced to illustrate this very point that in self-denial I realise, in a maximally active way and in full, the uniqueness of my place in being. His taking on of mortal flesh, is the great symbol of activity of a kind which has a real impact on the world: The world departed from by Christ will never again be the same world as the one in which he had never been: it is a fundamentally different world. In Christ the transcendent God becomes immanent. Further, the Incarnation informs and theologically legitimates the consistent preference for the concrete world of human experience against abstract concepts, for what we may term an incarnational view of truth. It is possible to have an unincarnated thought, unincarnated action, an unincarnated arbitrary life as empty possibility; life on the unspoken basis of one’s alibi in being falls away into impersonal, rootless being. Even where he prefers, the Christian connotation is unmistakeable. A living truth is an embodied truth, a word made flesh. In becoming Man, Christ saves God from the necessary neutrality of a disembodied consciousness and allows him to participate fully in the world. Thus Christ may be said literally to embody many of the ideas closest to man’s heart. The responsible deed is the actualisation of a decision inescapably, unalterably, and irreversibly; the deed is the final total, the all-round definitive conclusion; the deed pulls together, relates and resolves in one single and already final context both meaning and fact, the general and the individual, the real and the ideal, for everything enters into its responsible motivation; in the deed there lies the way out of mere possibility into singularity once and for all. The Christian connotation is unmistakeable. A living truth is an embodied truth, a word made flesh. Finally, values as rooted in relationships also echoes Christ. In becoming Man, Christ saves God from the necessary neutrality of a disembodied consciousness and allows him to participate fully in the world. Thus Christ may be said literally to embody.
Christ’s folly in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: ‘it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom.’ The Gospels are also carnival! What could this mean? Probably the most theologically acute commentators, argues that dialogue is a supreme value, but carnival is morally ambivalent. Certainly the world turned upside down is the effect of the Gospels (Acts 17:8). The language of the parables and of the Beatitudes would substantiate the claim, too. The last shall be the first. The Gospels should be read using the dialogic approach. The texts explored show how claims of authority actually work on us. It is one thing to assent to the authority, or inerrancy, or infallibility of the Bible. and yet another the process of reading it is a process of dialogue. The doctrine of Incarnation uses incarnation as a metaphor for form, which is the incarnation of the author; the key to understanding Christian realism, is that giving someone a cup of cold water could be the cause of eternal salvation. The self-emptying Christ of Philippians 2 can be the pattern for author and reader alike. To be artistically interested is to be interested, independently of meaning, in a life that is in principle consummated. I have to withdraw from myself, in order to free the hero for unconstrained plot movement in the world. The Gospel is upside-down foolishness only to those who reject it, whether they be the peasants or the powerful’… ‘Believers are indeed fools, but only to the falsely wise who are too proud to wear the mask of the Author and Finisher of their salvation.’