The Incarnation as the medieval “theory of everything”

Henry Ford, preparing to say “History is bunk!” Ah, if only he’d taken the Incarnation into account . . .

Well, tomorrow morning I head, early in the morning, to Baltimore for the Evangelical Theological Society meeting and then to England to attend the dedication of the “C S Lewis stone” in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey. So today is the last “live” post from my book Medieval Wisdom: An Exploration with C S Lewis. 

From here on in, it’ll be one final series of pre-programmed, pre-scheduled mini-posts for a week that run through all the themes of the book and show how they were underwritten by the medievals’ focus on the Incarnation.

Thanks for reading – and in a year(ish) from now, roughly Winter 2015, keep your eyes peeled for the actual published book from Baker Academic.

The Incarnation underwrites every facet of the medievals’ faith we have studied in this book: their high valuation of tradition, their passion for theology, their detailed and intentional morality, their compassionate ministry to bodies as well as souls, their understanding of the sacramental quality of the created world, their investment of emotion into their devotion to the Lord, and their willingness to discipline their bodies in service of that same devotion.

What would happen if we recaptured these medieval values?

Tradition

By putting the “body” back into our understanding of Christ and his church, we would again see how fitting it is for us to study and value our own traditions. We would recapture the wisdom and truth in those traditions, while never separating this truth from the primary revelation of Scripture – as most medievals understood for most of the Middle Ages!

Tradition is nothing less than wisdom and truth passed down from generation to generation through history. How apt is this? Christianity is at its core not a list of timeless principles or abstract teachings. It is a uniquely a historical religion, based on a historical person and the words of two “Testaments” full of historical accounts.

Nineteenth-century liberal theologians liked to talk about the “essence of Christianity”—usually little more than “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man”—that needed to be extricated from the centuries of errant doctrines and practices of a church that never seemed to get it right. (The problem with this approach, as a wit once observed, is that those nineteenth-century liberals, when they read Christian history, looked down the well of 19 centuries and saw their own faces at the bottom.) But there is no “essence” that is not clothed in history. Christianity is all about the Incarnation of God’s second person as a first-century Jew from Nazareth.

And naturally, then, the New Testament is, again, no philosophical book of abstract teachings, but rather a narrative of a life, a sacrifice, a resurrection—played out on the stage of history. And the Book of Acts and the Letters, following the model of the Old Testament’s “historic” books, just picks up the story from Easter. Tradition is the extension of the story beyond Acts – the continued faithful, often flawed attempt of the church to wrestle with its identity in Christ. When we in effect shout Henry Ford’s foolish jibe—“History is bunk!”—and throw aside the lessons of that history, we are cutting ourselves off at the knees spiritually, intellectually, practically.

Related articles

• “Raiders of the lost Incarnation”: The beginning of the end of my book about C S Lewis and the manifold wisdom of medieval faith (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• Q: What do Aslan, St. Francis, and medieval mystery plays have in common? A: The Incarnation. (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• C S Lewis: Why value our bodies? Because we can know God ONLY through the senses (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• C S Lewis and chronological snobbery: “Why – damn it – it’s medieval!” (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• The Incarnation and the importance of the embodied life in C S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• C S Lewis on the Incarnation: Theosis, “coming down and drawing up,” the Great Dance, and statues coming to life (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• Tradition V. Scripture? A ludicrous idea to the medievals (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• The Virgin Mary and the greatest thing we can learn from medieval Christians (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)