WSJ Op-Ed: The Incarnation Changes Even Nonbelievers

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  The Incarnation Changes Even Nonbelievers, by Robert Barron (Bishop, Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, MN):

G.K. Chesterton once observed that even those who don’t believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation are different for having heard it. Christians celebrate this transformative revelation from Dec. 25, Christmas Day, through Jan. 6, the feast of the Epiphany. There is something so counterintuitive about the claim that God became human that the minds of those who but entertain the notion change willy-nilly. If you have taken in the story of the baby who is God, you simply aren’t the same person you were before.

First, your understanding of God will be revolutionized. The God who can become a creature without ceasing to be God and without compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes stands in a fundamentally noncompetitive relationship with the world. In most non-Christian theologies and religious philosophies, God is typically understood as set over and against the universe: a supreme being in sharp contrast with the finite beings of the created order. But the God capable of the Incarnation, though certainly distinct from the world, is noncontrastively other. He isn’t competing with creatures for dominance on the same playing field. To shift the metaphor, he isn’t so much the most impressive character in the novel as he is the author, responsible for every character in the story, yet never jostling for position among them.

This means that the closer God gets to a creature, the more beautiful and radiant that creature can become. ...

The unnerving doctrine of the Incarnation also tells us a great deal about ourselves. If God has stooped low to join himself to the human race, then we have a purpose and destiny infinitely beyond anything proposed by even the most extravagant humanisms of antiquity or modernity. In the light of Christmas, we see that the goal of human life isn’t simply to be ethically upright, politically powerful, aesthetically accomplished or autonomous. Rather, it is to be a sharer in the divine nature. As the Church Fathers distilled it: Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus. “God became man that man might become God.”

This “divinization,” within the confines of this life, looks like love, since love is what God is. When we will the good of the other even in the simplest way—from giving food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, to visiting the imprisoned and offering counsel to the doubtful—we are participating in the divine nature. ...

On the feast of Epiphany, Christians remember the journey of the Magi to visit the Christ child in Bethlehem. ... The Magi stand for all those down through the ages and across the cultures who have hungered and thirsted for meaning, for the ultimate good, for the living God. The mysterious star led them to the most surprising place: a cave outside the unremarkable town of Bethlehem where a child lay in the animals’ manger. They found the God who had stooped down to lift us up, the God who wants nothing other than to make us fully alive.

The Scriptures say that an angel warned them in a dream that they were under suspicion and that they therefore returned to their home country by another route. Of course they did, for as Archbishop Fulton Sheen observed: “No one who ever meets Christ with a good will returns the same way as he came.”

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