Dan's Thoughts

Vision #13 - May 27, 2006

Thinking about a cake doesn't feed anyone. Talking about how superior your cake recipe is won't do it either. Writing your recipe on beautiful parchment and reading it aloud to an enchanted audience won't help actually get a piece of cake either. Only one thing puts cake in people's mouths: mixing the right ingredients, putting them in the oven and taking them out at the right time. All intention, talk and emotion become nothing but sound and fury unless someone takes action to make the vision material. We can’t eat until the recipe becomes a substance.

This is true of all vision, however grand and lofty. Until it becomes "flesh and dwells among us," it mere intention and dreaming.

This is Christianity's most important belief. We call it the doctrine of the "incarnation," a word that means "enfleshment," or "putting on material substance."

Without incarnation, there is no atonement and no Savior. Without the incarnation, God exists as an eternal alien, aloof and disconnected from all material things, including human beings. Without the incarnation, one can only be saved by being morally perfect and by becoming disembodied. Without the incarnation, Christianity becomes a heretical form of Judaism that owes more to Plato than to Moses. Destroy the doctrine of the incarnation then and you destroy Christianity itself. No wonder that the doctrine of incarnation is always under attack, in every culture and in every age.

Despite the protests of the Da Vinci Code, Christians have always believed in the incarnation. St. John put it this way, "This is how you may recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that will not confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you have heard would come and which is already in the world." (1 John Chapter 4:2, 3)

The Da Vinci Code rails against the incarnation. It claims that until Constantine, Christians didn't believe Jesus was God. It insists that Mary Madeline was an expression of the "divine feminine" but that Jesus was not in himself divine. The novel hints that Mary anointed Jesus for his mission through a ritualized sexual experience that brought him transcendence and enlightenment. This effectively offers Mary Magdalene as a substitute for Jesus Christ and sexual experience as a substitute for repentance and forgiveness. Thus, there is no sacrament to unite matter with spirit, only ecstatic experience to liberate us out from matter. The movement represented by the Da Vinci Code seeks to free us from all earthly and material constraints. It offers to help us transcend categories like male and female, good and evil, moral and immoral. The movement is called Gnosticism. It is a very ancient but a very different kind of religion than Christianity and it thoroughly qualifies as "antichrist."

Orthodoxy, "that which has at all times and in all places been believed by the whole people of God," insists that Christians must hold two vital truths about Christ; first, that he is fully God; secondly, that he is fully human. As human beings, we approach the invisible presence of God through the visible and tangible body of Jesus Christ. As Martin Luther put it, "I know of no other God save that of the babe in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Outside of him, God is unknowable and incomprehensible but knowable and comprehensible in Christ Jesus alone." Jesus is himself then "the holy grail." He is the material vessel that contains the sacred blood and eternal life. For his blood was poured out on an actual day in ancient Palestine by the order of an actual Roman official named Pontius Pilate. The blood of Christ then is a material substance that unites Jesus to suffering humanity. Sin-tossed and soul-weary men and women who long to become new can find forgiveness and grace here, at the foot of the bloody cross. For this reason, Christians believe that the Lord's death and resurrection, even more than his teaching, makes him the Savior of the World.

Mel Gibson was right; our modern Gnostic intellectuals are wrong.

The doctrine of the incarnation implies that Christian worship must necessarily involve material substance and sacred action as well as emotion and reason. Thus, we receive wine and bread and eat it in the presence of God. We plunge our converts into real water. We anoint our people's heads with oil and place our place our hands upon them for prayer. We give financial offerings, tokens of our trust in God’s provision. We "pass the peace," that is to say we embrace one another or shake hands as a part of our worship. In prayer, we lift our hands, or kneel, or sign the cross. We dance. We weep. We study. We discuss and debate what we have studied. We give food to the hungry. We care for the dying. In other words, we struggle to bring what is intangible and invisible into material existence where it can become agents of transformation and grace to the human family. Mental assent is not enough; emotion does not suffice. Conversion is more than intention; it involves the acceptance of a cross and the walking of a path. Sooner or later, authentic faith materializes. Even the writer of the Velveteen Rabbit knew this. The writer of the Da Vinci Code does not.

The spirit of antichrist is at work whenever we are enticed to forget that we are spiritual beings. It is also at work when we are wooed to forget that we are material beings. We cannot accept then a spirituality that has no ground, no reason, no common sense and no materiality. For ours is a faith filled with blood, tears, reading, sacrament, submission, brotherly love and accountability, community life, awe and reverence -- embodiment, in other words. Ours is a faith that cannot be satisfied with privatized thoughts and impressive emotions. To be real, Christian faith must become enfleshed and made visible.

Theology as recipe just doesn't cut it, even if the beautiful cook book describes mouth-watering, gourmet meals. If I get hungry enough, I would rather eat at McDonalds than listen to the most impressive recipes from the most stunning book.

This is why those some called "the fly over people" were so moved by The Passion of the Christ. It is also why the guardians of secularism, including some church leaders, found it so repulsive: it told the truth about what Christians really believe. Unfortunately, the cross remains "to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews a stumbling block but to those who believe, the power of God unto salvation."

Dan