A Truly Human Incarnation: Recovering a Place for Nativity in Contemporary Christology

The vulnerability of natal life: A truly human incarnation

This first insight is more anthropological than christological—though the two are certainly related. Recovering the nativity can serve to place both the tragic and promising features of human vulnerability at the center of christological reflection, thus offering a deeper understanding of the human condition that God assumes in the Incarnation. The nativity—located within the context of human natality in general—can serve as a reminder that vulnerability, dependency, and exposure to tragic suffering are inevitable aspects of the human condition that both cry out for healing and hold the promise of redemption.

Grace Jantzen is one feminist scholar who attempts to refocus the Western Christian imaginary on natality in place of what she calls a necrophilic obsession with death and other worlds. Jantzen’s critique of the Western imaginary points to something that contemporary christology—including feminist and liberationist christology—has overlooked: namely, the natality of the divine. In her view, it is natality that actually forms the unacknowledged foundation of the Western obsession with death and the consequent drive for mastery. She therefore hopes that natality can “function as a transformative suggestion, a therapeutic symbol to destabilize the masculinist necrophilic imaginary.” ⁶ Jantzen further hopes that her construction of an imaginary of natality will open up new horizons for women’s becoming, which has its end in “becoming divine.” Jantzen relies heavily on Hannah Arendt, who argues that natality, more than mortality, is central to our existence and should be considered a primary category of thought. Natality is the condition of human possibility, the foundation of freedom—because we are natals we are free to do new things. However, Jantzen warns that our own beginning as natals is always embodied and,

Thus the freedom of natality is not the putative freedom of a disembodied mind, a mind made as free as possible from bodily shackles, as Plato would have it, but rather a freedom that emerges from and takes place within bodily existence. The new things that we can begin are begun out of our bodily and material existence, not ex nihilo. ⁷

Jantzen’s focus on natality offers a perhaps unintended, helpful suggestion for contemporary christology to take in its accounts of the Incarnation. To consider Jesus first and foremost as a natal, to reflect on his birth, offers a powerful vision of the possibilities embraced by divine love incarnate within the limitations of embodied human finitude. However, while Jantzen rightly employs natality as a touchstone for human becoming as embodied and finite creatures, she overlooks the tragic vulnerability implicated in embodied natality. As the opening reflections of this article suggest, being born is risky business, threatened on all sides by death and other dangers to the health and well-being of the pre- and postnatal body. Failure to take the vulnerability of natal life into account unfortunately contributes to the disembodied ethos that often characterizes the Western imaginary and the Christian faith.

Unlike Jantzen, care ethicists and other feminist thinkers who study concrete relationships of care and dependency argue that vulnerability is a universal and inevitable characteristic of our embodied and relational existence in a finite world. For example, moral philosopher Eva Feder Kittay (without using the language of natality per se) asserts that the fact that all human beings are “some mother’s child” reveals the universality of dependency and, thus, vulnerability in human life. Feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman similarly examines the mother–child relationship to posit that human life begins in a state of what she calls “inevitable dependency.” Furthermore, “many of us will [also] be dependent as we age, become ill, or suffer disabilities.” ⁸ Because dependency is an inevitable reality in human life, especially in its early stages, Fineman also insists that vulnerability is a universal dimension of human life. ⁹ Neither Kittay nor Fineman use the abstract philosophical language of natality that Jantzen does. Their focus on the early stages of human life is far more concrete and practical, theorizing dependency and vulnerability in order to show how these universal human realities call forth a moral response from caregivers, society, and the state. They remind us that we all come from somewhere, that none of us got to where we are on our own, and that unfettered autonomy is a myth. I take inspiration from their work to stress here that as natals, we human beings are essentially vulnerable creatures—because we are dependent on external forces for our survival and well-being, we are inevitably vulnerable to harm. Certainly the degrees and the kinds of harm to which we are vulnerable is a matter of social production. However, the body of work that Kittay and Fineman represent offers a needed correction to Jantzen’s analysis of natality (and this despite her insistence on respect for the limits of finitude): that the becoming promised in human natality is dependent on external forces and is thus constantly and from the very beginning faced with the threat of harm, of pain, of suffering, and ultimately, of death. Natality and mortality cannot be separated.

Kittay and Fineman can help to keep us honest, then, about the truly human condition that Christians profess God takes on in the Incarnation. When divine love enters into the human condition in the Incarnation, there is no supernatural exemption from the perils of existence. The vulnerability involved in conception, gestation, delivery, and early survival of human life is quite mind-boggling when one stops to think about it. There are seven billion of us now, and this makes human reproduction look rather easy. But each person’s particular existence is terribly contingent on and vulnerable to forces beyond anyone’s control. Contingency and vulnerability continue throughout human life, of course, but they are mitigated by the possibility of personal agency (however limited and threatened that may be). In contemporary christology, a nearly exclusive focus on the divinity present in the agency of an adult male fails to drive home the utter contingency and inevitability of vulnerability faced by divine love in the Incarnation. When he was thirty years old, Jesus could have chosen to live a quiet life in Nazareth. He could have chosen to give in to Satan’s temptations in the desert; he could have used his charisma to gather an army of rebels to fight the Romans; or he could have begged Pilate for mercy, denying the accusations that led to his crucifixion. But rewinding the home video of Jesus’ life to his utterly dependent and vulnerable beginnings in the nativity removes any pretensions of uncomplicated divine (or human) autonomy in the Incarnation. No human being chooses to be born, nor do we get to choose our early well-being (or lack thereof)—that is determined only in relationship with our DNA, maternal health, nutrition, social networks, and access to assistance or intervention during a complicated childbirth. In a truly human incarnation, there is risk involved, since divine love takes on contingent, dependent, vulnerable flesh.

On the other hand—returning to Jantzen’s insights—natality truly is the basis for human becoming and, thus, for divine becoming in the Incarnation. Vulnerability exposes us natals to great harm, but it is also the condition for the powerful possibilities of connection, meaning, and virtue. It is into this context of vulnerable human existence that God is born.

So mighty a wonder: The redemptive power of the nativity

This is the theological heart of the christological retrieval of natality proposed here: anchoring christology in the nativity illustrates starkly and profoundly that the supreme power of divinity is enacted most perfectly in what Nicholas of Cusa calls the “coincidence of opposites”—that is, the union of divine power with human weakness, of divine invulnerability with created vulnerability. ¹⁰ Human beings tend to see God as a reality that must transcend human vulnerability in order to “save” humanity from the limitations and sufferings that the human condition entails. Divine power is conceived as ultimately invulnerable to the pain and conflict experienced by embodied and relational creatures. But as the introductory reflections to this article suggest, Christians profess that in a cold stall in Bethlehem, divine love’s unalterable being entered the world as a vulnerable child.

How can this be? How can it be that the invulnerable can at once become vulnerable, that the divine can become human? Vulnerability is a hallmark of human life and our attempts to live it well. We are plagued by suffering in our bodies and our minds from the moment we are born. Our bodies are subject to hunger, cold, sickness, old age, desire, and death. Furthermore, our goodness depends a great deal on external factors and can be shattered to pieces by one hard blow. Because we see God as a reality that is above all of this, we look to God as a rock to stabilize us and keep us safe from harm—if not in body, then in spirit. The Christian tradition holds that, in its primordial dimension, divine love is ultimately invulnerable to the pain and suffering that we experience as embodied and relational creatures. There is nothing that can alter or destroy this essential power. But as Martha Nussbaum points out in her groundbreaking work, The Fragility of Goodness, there are limits to divine power understood in this way (even when reinterpreted as the invulnerability of love). Nussbaum argues that, in contrast with Plato, Aristotle held that the unlimited perspective is not necessarily unlimited: “Lack of limit is itself a limit.” ¹¹ Far from infinite and boundless, invulnerability cannot encompass all goodness because it lacks the fragility of human goodness. As Kittay and Fineman remind us, human existence is inherently dependent, contingent, and open to harm. Nussbaum adds to the weight of vulnerability that the good life is dependent on external goods and actually leads the virtuous person into situations of increased vulnerability. There is a certain attractiveness to the Platonic attempt to close off ultimate risk in favor of the purity and simplicity of stable value. However, human virtue is risky and whenever its ultimate risk is closed off, a loss of value occurs. Love is inherently unstable. With Aristotle, Nussbaum esteems a life of goodness that goes out to the world in love and openness. The “safe” life of stable and eternal value is not really a human life, for it lacks the virtues only available in the realm of embodied and relational vulnerability.

Based on Nussbaum’s Aristotelian critique, a strict reliance of the invulnerability of divine love is actually incomplete due to its own invulnerability to harm. The unchanging, stable power that invulnerably maintains the ultimate dignity of human nature is, in this sense, a limited power. Because it is invulnerable and divine, it does not and, by definition, cannot really participate in the vulnerable power of human love and human goodness. Deity conceived as only invulnerable and only divine is curtailed in the infinite power and goodness and love that divinity possesses because it is limited to the realm of invulnerable divinity and thus precludes values and powers that are only available in the vulnerable realm of humanity. How can divine redemption take place in the vulnerable domain of human love without the power of human love itself? The genius of Christianity is to answer this predicament with the doctrine of the Incarnation.

In the Incarnation, the invulnerability of divine love becomes vulnerable human flesh. In the vulnerable body and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians experience the fullness of divinity at work for the redemption of the cosmos. God from God, light from light, one in being with the invulnerable essence of divine love—Jesus responds to the problem of human vulnerability with living proof of the possibility of bringing together the divine with the human, the infinite with the finite, the impassible with the passible, the immutable with the mutable, the invulnerable with the vulnerable.

In his contemplation of the divine face, Nicholas of Cusa immerses himself in this paradoxical mystery of love, which he calls the “coincidence of opposites.” Addressing God as infinity itself, Nicholas professes that “there is nothing that is other than or different from, or opposite you. For infinity is incompatible with otherness; for since it is infinity, nothing exists outside it.” Without being one particular thing, “Absolute infinity includes and embraces all things.” ¹² Here we find a very different approach to infinity from Aristotle and Nussbaum. If divinity is truly infinity, then it must include the finite and its invulnerability must find a place for vulnerability. In contemplating this coincidence of opposites, Nicholas avers, it is necessary to enter the cloud of impossibility and recognize that the more this cloud seems obscure and impossible, the more truly its necessity shines forth. The intellect must become ignorant, abandoning reason in its pursuit of divine truth, which lies in the seemingly obscure and impossible coincidence of opposites¹³:

I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled is girded about with the coincidence of contradictories. This is the wall of paradise, and it is there in paradise that you reside. The wall’s gate is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and unless it is overpowered, the way in will not lie open. Thus, it is on the other side of the coincidence of contradictories that you will be able to be seen and nowhere on this side. ¹⁴

Centuries earlier Gregory of Nyssa made a similar point in The Great Catechism. In his view, the loving mystery of divine omnipotence is most visibly and effectively made apparent in the descent of divinity to the “humiliation” of humanity. It is only by entering into the realm of human vulnerability, taking it on and becoming one with it, that divine power manifests itself most fully as love:

That the omnipotent nature was capable of descending to man’s lowly position is a clearer evidence of power than great and supernatural miracles. For it somehow accords with God’s nature, and is consistent with it, to do great and sublime things by divine power. It does not startle us to hear it said that the whole creation, including the invisible world, exists by God’s power, and is the realization of his will. But descent to man’s lowly position is a supreme example of power—of a power which is not bounded by circumstances contrary to its nature. ¹⁶

The grandeur of the heavens and all of the miracles in the world, which usually function to override our vulnerability, are not very impressive at all because they simply show the divine nature to be what we think it to be by definition—divine. What is much more impressive is the power of God to become that which God is not—human and thus vulnerable. In this same passage, Gregory uses the analogy of fire to demonstrate his point. When we see a flame burning in an upwards direction, it is lovely, but not very impressive because that is what is naturally in the power of a flame to do. Now imagine seeing a flame burning in the opposite direction, downwards. That would be a marvelous sight to see! That a nature is capable of taking on its opposite is powerful indeed. According to Gregory,

So it is with the incarnation. God’s transcendent power is not so much displayed in the vastness of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the universe or his perpetual oversight of it, as in his condescension to our weak nature. We marvel at the way the sublime entered a state of lowliness and, while actually seen in it, did not leave the heights. We marvel at the way the Godhead was entwined in human nature and, while becoming man, did not cease to be God. ¹⁷

Gregory’s predecessor, Origen of Alexandria, argued for the greatness of divine power in this same manner, but with a specific significance attached to Christ’s vulnerability as a newborn child. In his view, the kenosis of Christ in the vulnerable events of the Incarnation and the cross is what actually reveals the greatness of the godhead. The greatest and most marvelous truths about the divine nature are made evident in the most wondrous and amazing fact of God becoming a particular human being, Jesus. Moreover, that the wisdom of God, creator of heaven and earth, could become a human baby, the paramount example of human vulnerability, is confounding indeed.

When, therefore, we consider these great and marvelous truths about the nature of the Son of God, we are lost in the deepest amazement that such a being, towering high above all, should have “emptied himself” of his majestic condition and become man and dwelt among men. ¹⁸

The impossibility that Nussbaum encounters in divine invulnerability is answered here, beyond the wall of paradise in the coincidence of opposites that takes place in the Incarnation. Human life is most vulnerable at its beginnings: in conception, gestation, childbirth, and early infancy. Again, the liberating good news of divine Incarnation does not begin with Jesus’ public ministry as an adult, nor with his shameful torture and death on the cross. Rather, it begins with the pre- and postnatal body of a vulnerable and dependent infant.

Though we should not leave behind the cross as an image of divine power at work in vulnerability, divine power present in the form of a human baby is a compelling image of redemption within the vulnerable human condition. Nativity (and the theme of natality that it evokes) is a sadly overlooked icon of divine power. The image of the baby Jesus abounds during the Christmas season, but very little reflection takes place surrounding the incredibly marvelous import of the idea that God Almighty became a little, tiny, wrinkly, red, squalling, pooping, peeing, drooling, and desperately hungry human creature. Popular images of the Christ child are usually robust and rosy-cheeked images of an older infant or toddler. They are unbearably cute. A newborn baby is beautiful, but at the same time really quite strange, ungainly and fragile looking. And she makes her needy vulnerability vociferously known. As Origen, Gregory, and Nicholas all indicate, divine power is most gloriously displayed in the coincidence of opposites. When we conceive of divinity as that which is ultimately invulnerable to the sufferings and vicissitudes of human life, what could be more marvelous or powerful than the incarnation of divinity in the figure of a dependent and defenseless newborn child?

To cradle Christ’s natal body: Practicing peace in a vulnerable and violent world

Recovering a place for nativity in christology can serve as a reminder that divine redemption in Christ does not begin with redressing social injustice and oppression (though it must certainly include that). Rather, redemption begins with the willingness—both human and divine—to accept the basic natal condition of vulnerability in spite of its perils and because of its infinite promise. The coincidence of opposites that takes place in the incarnation is not simply awe-inspiring proof of a divine power so great that it is able to encompass its opposite. Rather, the Incarnation of the Christ is the manifestation of the coincidence of opposites as the deepest truth about reality as a whole and about the place of human beings within reality. The Incarnation reconciles the invulnerability of Being with the vulnerability of human beings. The “Prince of Peace” (Isa 9:6), who was laid in a cold manger and cried out for succor, is for Christians the one who grants the power to make peace with the vulnerable nature of our lives.

The point of the Incarnation, then, is not to see the awesome power of divinity and bow down to worship it. The point is to recognize and realize ourselves in it and it in ourselves. While Christians see Jesus of Nazareth as a uniquely perfect distillation of divine love incarnate, the Christian tradition equally holds that Christ’s divine image is present in all human beings (Gen 1; Matt 25). The invulnerable divine image resides within vulnerable human beings—embodied, relational, and finite creatures who possess an infinite desire for goodness, beauty, and truth. As Nicholas of Cusa averred, “In all faces the face of faces is seen veiled and in enigma.” ²¹ The first person of the Trinity is the loving God who begets of Godself the second person, whom Nicholas calls the lovable God. All of creation is taken up in this second person, the mediator through whom all things exist and bring pleasure to the loving God. ²² Human beings are united with the loving God in and through their union with the lovable God—the creatable, cradled presence of God in the vulnerable world. There is a sense in which divine love for creation makes the invulnerable God inherently vulnerable. When we suffer, God suffers. This inherent vulnerability of divinity is expressed most clearly in the Incarnation and nativity of Jesus. The baby Jesus, whose life began in a pool of blood, who suckled at his mother’s breast like any other human child, represents divine power-in-vulnerability incarnate. But the sacramental imagination of the Christian tradition holds that God becomes vulnerable flesh in all children everywhere. Born of my own mother’s womb, I too embody the perils and promises of divine love in the flesh. The three children that were born of my body and have nursed at my breast are also the image of this vulnerable God. And so too is every child born in this world. The coincidence of opposites takes place in every nativity.

The problem, however, is that human beings seek to escape the coincidence of opposites through a flight to invulnerability alone. When vulnerability thwarts our desire and causes us suffering and harm, we often seek invulnerability through violence—to ourselves or to others. Life inevitably involves suffering and our attempts to survive the brutality of it all often destroys us or turns us into destroyers. The Incarnation empowers human beings to embody vulnerability differently: to follow the way of the Incarnation, to manifest the coincidence of opposites, to make peace with the tragic nature of existence. That invulnerable divine love became vulnerable grants human beings the courage and strength to endure suffering and resist injustice and violence peacefully, without recourse to internal or external violence.

I conclude with the suggestion that the contemplative practice of cradling the Christ-child’s vulnerable body can contribute to both contemplative union with God and a christocentric ethic of care. The transformation of both human sinfulness and the oppressive social structures that we inhabit will require that human beings make peace with—that is, recognize and live within the limits of—our fundamentally finite and fragile human condition. Putting an end to the violation of the vulnerable other will thus require an ability to cope with our own vulnerabilities. The baby Jesus is a quintessential icon of divine power-in-vulnerability. Contemplating this icon—in art, music, liturgy, imagination, theology, daily life, in ourselves and in those around us—can help Christians to live more honestly and peacefully with our own vulnerability, see the vulnerable other as image of Christ, and respond to the vulnerabilities of others with greater reverence, peace, and compassion.