Richard Rohr<\/a> has some sobering and provocative observations about the importance of\u00a0Christians fully embracing the paradox and central tenet of the Christian faith, the mystery of the incarnation\u2014a Jesus who is\u00a0fully God and fully human<\/em>.<\/p>\n Rohr feels that Christians tend to highlight the first half of that paradox at the expense of the second half. In my experience, Rohr is correct.<\/p>\n What is stake? Plenty, according to Rohr. Here is an excerpt from \u201cFully God, Fully Human,\u201d a recent (February 11) daily meditation in a series focused on\u00a0St. Francis.<\/p>\n \u00a0. . . [I]n most of Christian history we have emphasized the divinity, omnipotence, omniscience, and \u201calmightiness\u201d of Jesus, which makes actually following him\u2014or loving him\u2014seem unrealistic. We are on two utterly different planes. A God who is \u201ctotally other\u201d alienates totally.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n I hope this doesn\u2019t upset some of my Christian friends, but an awful lot of Christians are not really Christian.<\/i><\/p>\n That\u2019s not a moral judgment; it\u2019s a description. Many Christians simply believe in a Supreme Being who made all things; that Supreme Being happens to be Jesus. He was the available God figure in Europe, so we pushed him into that position, while avoiding Jesus\u2019 living message: that the human and the divine coexist in him. He is actually a \u201cthird something.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n This is hard for us to grasp or even imagine, because it seems a contradiction in terms, an irreconcilable paradox. Already in Byzantine art and many later icons Jesus is shown holding up his two fingers, indicating, \u201cI am fully human, and I am fully divine at the same time.\u201d We were struck dumb by this paradox.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n For most Christians today, Jesus is totally divine, but not really human. Here is the price we pay for our inability to think non-dually: When we deny what Jesus holds together, we can\u2019t put it together in ourselves!<\/i><\/p>\n And that\u2019s the whole point: you and I are also daughters of heaven and daughters of earth, sons of God and sons of this world. Both are true at the same time, which defies all reason and logic. We also are a living paradox. But we need a model, an exemplar, a promise, and a guarantee (all words used in Pauline letters) to imagine such a far off impossibility.\u00a0<\/i>For us, that model is Jesus. . . . .\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Richard Rohr<\/a>\u00a0(formatting adjusted)<\/p>\n [Adapted from Richard Rohr,\u00a0 Readers, of course, are free to\u00a0quibble or disagree\u00a0with Rohr\u2019s phrasing, but the overall impact of Rohr\u2019s\u00a0observation rings true: a failure to embrace and accept a fully<\/em> human Christ is a sub-Christian view of Christ\u2014a \u201clow Christology,\u201d as it were.<\/p>\n In my view, the implications of a fully human Christ are not always embraced as deliberately as they should be.\u00a0I\u2019m sure\u00a0few Christians knowingly adopt a\u00a0\u201clow Christology,\u201d but they show it in practice when, for example, they fail to account\u2014or perhaps see no need to account\u2014for a Jesus whose cultural context shaped and informed his thinking and speaking<\/em>.<\/p>\n Some may want a Jesus\u00a0who is unaffected by his\u00a0historical setting, who was human, sure, but whose humanity didn\u2019t get out of hand; a 1st century Jew who nevertheless successfully transcended his cultural\u00a0moment and kept\u00a0his 1st century Jewishness at a safe distance; a Jesus whose humanity was simply a necessary step so he could be sacrificed.<\/p>\n Failing to accept the\u00a0implications of the paradox of the\u00a0God-man not only affects\u00a0our spiritual lives, as Rohr points out. For evangelicals especially it also affects a how we approach the Bible\u2014the ramifications of which can be seen in a number of areas, most notably when we turn to the interface of Christianity and science.<\/em><\/p>\n The Bible reflects the limitations<\/em> of the cultural contexts in which it was written and cannot be expected to speak the foreign language of science.<\/p>\n The Bible, in other words, like Christ, is fully and deeply connected to its own ancient cultural moments.<\/p>\n It is not beneath God to condescend to culturally conditioned human\u00a0modes of communication. Having such a condescending God is crucial\u00a0to the very heart of Christianity [i.e., the incarnation]. <\/em><\/p>\n True, such a God will allow ancient\u00a0Israelites to produce a description of human origins that reflects the\u00a0ancient ideas and so will not satisfy scientific questions. But if we are\u00a0going to talk about the Christian God, then this is something we are\u00a0going to have to get used to. <\/em><\/p>\n What sets this God apart is his habit of\u00a0coming down to our level. As Christians confess, God even became\u00a0one of us. Posing such a condescending and incarnating God as a\u00a0theological problem to be overcome\u2014which is what a literal reading of\u00a0Genesis unwittingly requires\u2014creates a far greater and more harmful\u00a0theological\u00a0problem than the nonliteral reading of Genesis.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=inspirandinca-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1616367016\")
However much Jesus was not merely\u00a0human, he was most certainly not less than fully<\/span> human<\/em>.<\/h2>\n
The Bible is not conversant with contemporary scientific modes of thinking, but with ancient ones.<\/h2>\n