Excerpt from CHRIST ACTUALLY: The Son of God for the Secular Age

by James Carroll
Here is the question, finally: Why do Christians need to believe in the Incarnation? The point of
incarnation language, the Catholic theologian Roger Haight writes, is that Jesus is one of us, that what
occurred in Jesus is the destiny of human existence itself: et homo factus est. Jesus is a statement, Gods
statement, about humanity as such. Humanity is the presence of God. The presence of God, therefore,
lies in what is ordinary. Not in supernatural marvels. Not in a superman with whom we have nothing
actual in common. Not in saints. Not in a once-only age of miracles long ago. Not first in doctrine,
scholarship, or theologybut in life. Doctrine, scholarship, and theology are essential as modes of
opening up that life and its meanings, and there is no separating the life of Jesus from interpretations of
it. The interpretations must always be examined, and criticized. And we endlessly conjure
interpretations of our own, as here in this book.
But the life is our object. The life of Jesus must always weigh more than his death. And, to repeat, the
revelation is in the ordinariness of that life. His teachinghis permanent Jewishness, his preference for
service over power, his ever-respectful attitude toward women and others on the social marginis
available to us because his followers passed the teaching along, which continues. His encounters with
beloved friends, disciples, outcasts, antagonists, and Romans, all arranged in a story that is more
invention than memory, are valued as occasions of his encounter with the Holy Onebut they are
typical encounters, not supernatural ones. Again and again he turned to God, and, as the tradition says,
he turned into Godbut that, too, occurred in the most ordinary of ways. Day by day. Act by act. Choice
by choice. Word by word. Ultimately lifted up, as John says, on the cross which was the Resurrection.
And the cross is central to this meaning not because God willed suffering but because, in Jesus, God
joined in it. The quality of the suffering, in Eliots phrase, is changed. And that includes the extreme
suffering of war.
Leaving us with? A simple Jesus. An ordinary Christ. One whom the simplest person can imitate, the
most ordinary person bringing Christ once more to lifeday by day, word by word, bread by bread, cup
by cup. In all of that we see divinity, which, paradoxically, is what makes Jesus one of us. Whatever sort
of God Jesus is understood to be, it must be the God who is like humans, not different. If that seems
impossible, then what we think of Godand of humans must change. This is essential to the New
Testament and the very logic of Christian faith. And, finally, the truest argumentnot prooffor the
divinity of Jesus is in the one undenied fact of this history: that billions upon billions of ordinary human
beings have found in this faith an immediate and saving experience of the real presence of God,
partaking of Godbecoming God. Even unto here, with these words written and read. We come to
Jesus, in the end as in the beginning, only through the Jesus people.
If Christ is undiscovered now, a figure lost to many, that is in part because of scandals done in his name,
by those who call out his name most loudly. In part, he remains undiscovered because of the
abstractions and secrets of scholars who do not trust ordinary people with the very ordinariness of

Jesusas if the mass of believers can embrace only superstition and magic. And in part, he remains
undiscovered because so much about our age has shaken us to the core, leaving us stripped of the
intellectual horizon within which faith, for most of these thousands of years since Abraham, has had its
resonance. Even while understanding that loss, still the conclusion of this long inquiry includes a frank
criticism of contemporary culture for its ignorance of, and indifference to, the language of
transcendence. The divinity of Jesus is problematic, but the blatant repudiation of the faith that
constructs itself around that divinity is blind to a constellation of intellectual subtleties that have
enhanced human life for two millennia. Likewise, the word God is problematic, but its abandonment is
problematic, too.
Human life is more than material. To be rendered mute in the face of that mystery is to be less than
human. And being less than human now carries dangers that simply did not exist before. Auschwitz and
Hiroshima amount to the twin interruptions of history that have made this inquiry not only necessary
but urgent. Auschwitz and Hiroshima, which warned not just of a capacity but of an inclination, lay bare
the new actuality that confronts men and women: the dread prospect that the human specieswhich is
the very cosmos aware of itselfwill bring about its own extinction.
Even for those of us who still find a home among people who can- not let go of their affection for Jesus,
belief is not what it was, and there is an unknowing for us as much as for any agnostic or atheist.
Unbelief is now built into belief, since intelligent belief includes a self- critical and necessarily skeptical
element. No Christendom, no hierarchy, no churchno Catholic Worker community, evenbuttresses
belief or replaces it. So each person makes the choice alone, even if the choice is for the solidarity of
faith.
Not faith in Jesus Christ, precisely, but faith, at the invitation of Jesus, in God. Now we know, though, the
limits of our language about God. We do not know God not because we are ignorant, but because
God refers to one who, when it comes to certitude, is beyond categories of knowledge. The God to
whom Jesus points is the God beyond God. We recognize in Jesus all that we need to know about the
God who otherwise remains incomprehensible. And this recognition, because it is well rooted in the
past, is powerful enough to carry us into the open-ended future, even extending beyond what can be
imagined.

From CHRIST ACTUALLY by James Carroll. Reprinted by arrangement with

Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House
Company. Copyright James Carroll, 2014.