Incarnation

This Christian doctrine lies within a wide spectrum which includes at the one end the concept of animism — the Divine is in everything and everything is Divine — and at the other, concepts of revealed books, in which the spirit is made not flesh but word. Christianity seems to span quite a wide range of that spectrum.

In the fourth Gospel, the concept of incarnation rests first on the personification of "The Word" with antecedents in the Hebrew Wisdom literature's personification of the Logos. The writer identifies the man Jesus with this personifying of the divine. At this stage in the development of Christian thought there's a lot in common with the Hindu concept of the Avatar, and some Indian Christians are redeveloping this. However, Catholic Christianity did not go that way but developed the doctrine of the Trinity instead, "taking the manhood of the Christ into the Godhead".

Incarnation in the wider sense is still a valuable insight — seeing the divine in the physical and mundane. It is powerfully consistent with Sea of Faith's understanding of religion as a human creation. In becoming man, God destroys the barrier between heaven and earth. The veil of the temple is torn in two.

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