Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.