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Article Excerpt
Throughout Christian history, at different times and places, believers have expressed ambivalence regarding the Incarnation. There has always been something scandalous and shocking about God taking a fully human form. What is the source of this discomfort? Recent work in Terror Management Theory has shown that people feel ambivalent toward their bodies and bodily functions because the body functions as a mortality/death reminder. If this analysis is correct it might explain why many Christians, from the earliest days of the church, have resisted the notion of the Incarnation. Thus, it was the thesis of this study that existential concerns are intimately involved in Incarnational ambivalence. The study sought to test this formulation by assessing Incarnational ambivalence, death anxiety, and other facets of an existential faith orientation to determine if existential fears were implicated in Incarnational ambivalence. Overall, the results of the study supported the predictions. Respondents reporting greater death anxiety and displaying a more "closed" faith orientation, existentially speaking, were the most likely to reject strong body-scenarios involving Jesus, finding these scenarios uncomfortable, demeaning to Jesus, unrealistic, and unbiblical.
Death, the Gnostic Impulse, and Incarnational Ambivalence
Throughout Christian history, at different times and places, believers have expressed ambivalence regarding the Incarnation. There has always been something scandalous and shocking about God caking a fully human form. In the early centuries of the church this Incarnational ambivalence--discomfort in imagining a fully human Jesus--was observed in the Gnostic and Docetic heresies. Yet Incarnational ambivalence has been observed in every era up to our own, particularly in Protestantism (Hall & Thoennes, 2006; Lee, 1987). What is the source of this discomfort? Why do many Christians feel queasy about the Incarnation? Recent work in Terror Management Theory (Solomon, Greenburg, & Pyszczynski, 1991; Green-burg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997) may provide one answer. Specifically, across a variety of studies it has been shown that people feel ambivalent toward their bodies and bodily functions (e.g., sex) because the body is a mortality/death reminder (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenburg, & Solomon, 2000). If this analysis is correct it might explain why many Christians, from the earliest days of the church, have resisted the notion of the Incarnation. Perhaps a fully human Jesus is theologically and psychologically worrisome because Jesus becomes too vulnerable to the forces of decay, the very forces that cause us such deep existential dread. Phrased another way, a super-human Jesus, one not affected by bodily functions, pain, or vulnerability, might seem a better prospect, psychologically speaking, to rescue us from our existential anxieties. Thus, it is the thesis of this study that death concerns are intimately involved with Incarnational ambivalence. Consequently, this study sought to test this formulation by assessing Incarnational ambivalence, death anxiety, and other facets of an existential faith orientation to determine if existential fears are indeed implicated in fleeing the body of Jesus.
Feeling Queasy About the Incarnation: The Psychology of Gnosticism
Gnostic views of the body and the Incarnation. As noted above, ambivalence concerning the body and the Incarnation has a long history in Christian thought starting with the Gnostic heresies. Although an in-depth account of Gnosticism is beyond the scope of this study, a theological overview of the Gnostic influence upon Christian thought will help place the current research in a larger context, particularly as body and Incarnational ambivalence is still encountered in various sectors of Christianity. (For an excellent account of the influence of body and Incarnational ambivalence within Christianity see Hall & Thoennes, 2006).
For the purposes of this study we need only focus on two features of Gnostic theology. First, the Gnostics had a very low view of the material universe deeming it to be created by a malevolent deity who could not be the true God of goodness and love. This view manifested itself in an extreme matter/spirit dualism: The material universe was depraved, broken, and evil while the spirit existed in a realm of beauty, health, and perfection. Salvation, then, in the Gnostic view, is the liberation of the spirit from the evil encasement of the body and the material cosmos. As Bart Ehrman (2003, p.119) summarizes:
There must be a greater God above this world, one who did not create this world. In this understanding, the material world itself--material existence in all its forms--is inferior at best or evil at worst, and so is the God, then, who created it. There must be a nonmaterial God unconnected with this world, above the creator God of the Old Testament, a God who neither created this world nor brought suffering to it, who wants to relieve his people from their suffering--not by redeeming this world but by delivering them from it, liberating them from their entrapment in this material existence.
The second feature of Gnostic theology is related to the first. Specifically, the value-laden matter/spirit dualism of the Gnostics affected their view of the body. If matter is evil then the body, as a material object, must also be. Given that the body was a source of evil and depravity many of the Gnostics advocated mortification (Ehrman, 2003, p. 126):
Gnostics were ascetic, advocating the strict regulation and harsh treatment of the body. Their logic was that since the body is evil, it should be punished, since attachment to the body is the problem of human existence, and since it is so easy to become attached to the body through pleasure, the body should be denied all pleasure.
Obviously, this view of the body had implications for how the Gnostic Christians viewed the body of Jesus in the Incarnation. Specifically, if the body is evil was it possible for Jesus, the Son of God, to have an actual, physical, fully human body? As Erhman (2003, p. 124) notes, this was "one of the puzzles the Gnostics had to solve, and different Gnostic thinkers did so in different ways." It is not necessary to review these theological systems except to note that they are symptoms of Incarnational ambivalence, an anxiety at the notion that Jesus did indeed exist in a fully human body.
Gnostic influences in Christianity. A historical survey of Gnostic views of the body would be of little interest if it were not for the fact that...
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