INCARNATION
THE incarnation of an infinite God is a shocking absurdity, and an
infinite impossibility. We ask in all solemn earnestness, and in the
name of the intuitive monitions of an unshackled reason and an unbiased
conscience, can any man in his sober senses, who has been in the habit
of reflecting before he believes, entertain for a moment the monstrous
absurdity that the Almighty and Infinite Maker of the universe was once
reduced to a little wailing infant, lying in senseless and helpless
weakness on the lap of its mother, unable to walk a step, or lisp a
word, or do aught but cry with pain or for nourishment stored in the
mother's breast? What! Almighty God fallen from his burnished, dazzling
throne in the lofty heavens, and reduced to helpless, senseless
babyhood! Omnipotence shorn of all power but to breathe, and cry, and
smile! What! that Omniscient Being, who "leads one world by day, and
ten thousand more by night," becoming suddenly transformed into a human
bantling, which knows no higher enjoyment that that of being "pleased
with a rattle, and tickled with a straw!" Who can believe it? Ay, who
dare believe it, if he would escape the charge of blasphemy? Then say
not that "the man Christ Jesus," though standing at the top of the
ladder of moral manhood, and high above the common plane of humanity,
was yet a God--"the Infinite Ruler of the infinite universe." Who can
believe that that Being, whose existence stretches to an eternity beyond
human conception, yea, whom "the heaven of heavens cannot contain," was
ever cooped up in a human body, reduced so near to nothing in dimensions
as to be susceptible (as was Jesus) of being weighed in scales, and
measured with a yardstick?
We ask again, Who, from the deepest depths of his inmost, enlightened
consciousness, can believe such revolting, such atheistical doctrine
as this? Or who will venture to descend still lower, and conceive of
an Almighty, Omnipresent Being, who fills all space above, around, and
beneath, "from infinity below to yon fixed star above," and millions
upon millions of miles beyond it, sinking and dwindling to that mere
mite, speck, or monad state and condition comprehended in the initiatory
step of embryonic existence? And then think of the Almighty, Omnipotent
Creator of the universe lying in a manger with four-footed beasts and
creeping things, sleeping with oxen and asses in a stable. Next he
is seen an urchin on the street playing with marbles and jack-knives,
absorbed and forgetful of the world around him. Who can believe that
awfully majestic Being, who is represented by his own inspired book as
being so transcendently grand and awe-inspiring that "no man san see
him and live" (Ex. xxxiii. 20), was not only daily seen by hundreds and
thousands, but was on such familiar terms with men, that they regarded
him as their companion, and equal, and even sometimes coolly reprimanded
him for supposed misdemeanors and errors? Could they believe this to be
Almighty God? Impossible! Impossible! And then who can believe that that
infinite Being, whom we have been taught to regard as absolutely and
eternally unchangeable, could become subject to hunger and thirst
(as did Jesus)? Or who can believe that the eternally and unceasingly
watchful Omnipotent Deity, whose eye, we are told, "never slumbers,"
could sink into unconscious sleep, become "to dumb forgetfulness a
prey," night after night, for thirty years, oblivious, and unconscious
of the world around him? Think of a being of incomprehensible majesty,
dignity, and power, able to "shake the heavens and the earth also,"
being unable to protect himself from insult, and was therefore derided
and "spit upon," and finally overcome by his enemies, as is related of
Jesus. Can any man believe, who has not made shipwreck of his senses, or
banished Reason from her courts, that God 'Almighty, who comprehends
in himself the most absolute and boundless perfection of goodness and
wisdom, was tempted by demons, devils, and crawling serpents? Who can
believe that the Lord, who owns "the cattle upon a thousand hills"
(Psalm 1. io), and the countless host of worlds besides, that wheel
their course through infinite space, had not "where to lay his head"?
Who can believe that that was the all-wise, omnipotent, and omnipresent
God, possessing all power in heaven above and the earth beneath, who was
betrayed by weak, finite mortals? What! the Almighty Creator betrayed by
a puny being of his own creation into the hands of his disobedient and
rebellious children? Why could he not, if possessing "power to lay
down his life, and take it up again" (John x. 17), cause that all these
children of his (as we must assume they were, if he was Almighty God,
and hence the Father of all) should love him, instead of hating him?
Can any man believe that Jesus was possessed with omnipotent power
while standing to be whipped (scourged) by Pontius Pilate, or that
he possessed a power above that of finite mortals while in the act of
praying, with such extreme ardor that the sweat dropped from his face,
that the cup of death might pass from his lips, or while calling for an
angel to support him in the hour of his mortal dissolution? or that He,
"by whom all things exist," could cease himself to exist, by dying upon
the cross between malefactors? Think of this, reader! and think of the
eternal Creator, the infinite Deity, the omnipotent Jehovah, the Maker
of worlds as numberless as the sands upon the sea-shore for multitude,
fainting, bleeding, dying, and pouring out his own blood to appease his
own wrath; dying an ignominious death to satisfy an implacable revenge!
Away with such insulting mockery, such blasphemous flummery! It can
only find place in the dark chambers of an unenlightened mind.
Well has Watts said of Locke's skepticism,--
"Reason could scarcely sustain to see,
Or bear the infant Deity:
A ransomed world, a bleeding God,
And heaven appeased by flowing blood,
Were themes too painful to be understood."
Yes, and too painful to be believed, too, Mr. Watts! Here we have a
"bleeding God," an "infant Deity," and a vengeful God, appeased by
murder and streams of "flowing blood." Gracious heavens! Whose reason
does not revolt at such a picture? Whose soul does not sicken at
the thought, and who would not prefer, infinitely prefer, to sink
to annihilation, if not to perdition itself, to being thus saved by
navigating a river of blood?? Dr. South hits off some of the absurdities
involved in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation so forcibly and so
lucidly, that we cannot resist the temptation to subjoin---here a few
extracts from his sermon on the subject' "But now," says this Christian
clergyman, "was there ever any wonder comparable to this, to behold the
Lord (Jesus Christ) thus clothed in flesh, the Creator of all things,
humbled, not only to the company, but also to the cognation, of his
creatures? It is as if one should imagine the whole world not only
represented upon, but also contained in, one of our own artificial
globes, or the body of the sun enveloped in a cloud as big as a man's
hand, all of which would be looked upon as astonishing impossibilities,
and yet is as short of the other as the finite is of the infinite,
between which the disparity is immeasurable. It is, as it were, to
cancel the essential distances of things, to remove the bounds of
nature, to bring heaven and earth, and what is more, both ends of the
contradiction, together. Men cannot persuade themselves that a Deity and
infinity should lie within so narrow a compass as the dimensions of
a human body; that omnipotence, omnipresence should ever be wrapped in
swaddling clothes, and debased to the homely usages of a stable and a
manger; that the glorious Artificer of the whole universe, who spread
out the heaven like a curtain, and laid the foundations of the earth,
could ever turn carpenter, and exercise an inglorious trade in a little
cell. They cannot imagine that He who once created and at present
governs the world, and shall hereafter judge the world, should be abased
in all his concerns and relations, be scourged, spit upon, mocked and at
last crucified. All which are passages which lie extremely close to the
notions of conceptions which reason has made to itself of that high
and impossible perfection that resided in the divine Creator." (Sermon,
1665.) Dr. South, it will be observed, admits that the doctrine of
the divine incarnation involves many palpable absurdities and
contradictions, and lies directly across the path of reason. Fatal
admission to the doctrine of the deityship of Christ, but true, as his
own elucidation of the subject demonstrates. To the author, since he
first subjected the question to a logical scrutiny, and looked at it
with an unbiased mind, it presents difficulties insurmountable, and
absurdities innumerable. He can imagine nothing more transcendently
shocking, revolting, and dwarfing to the mind, both morally and
intellectually, than the thought of believing that a being born of and
suckled by a woman, and possessing the mere form and dimensions of
a man, can be regarded as the great Almighty and Omnipotent God, the
Creator of unnumbered worlds, millions of which are larger than this
planet, on which Jesus was born.
And then, reader, look for a moment at some of the many childish
incongruities and logical difficulties this giant absurdity drags with
it. It represents Almighty God as coming into the world through the
hands of a midwife, as passing through the process of gestation and
parturition. It insults our reason with the idea that the great,
infinite Jehovah could be molded into the human form--a thought that is
shocking to the moral sense, and withering, cramping, and dwarfing to
the intellectual mind, imposing upon it a heavy drag-chain which checks
its expansion, and forbids its onward progress. Christians tell us that
the human and the divine were united in "the man Christ Jesus." But this
is a monstrous absurdity, which no truly rational and unbiased mind can
accept for an instant--that of hitching, splicing, tying, or dovetailing
together finite man with the infinite Jehovah, that of amalgamating
and commingling human foibles with divine perfection. Think of wedding
mortal weakness to omnipotent power, local man with the omnipresent
Deity! Think of compounding the creature and the Creator in one and the
same being! Think of the omnipresent "I AM," whose illimitable existence
stretches far away throughout the expansive arena of a boundless
universe, occupying a dwelling within the narrow confines of the human
temple! As well essay to crowd the universe into your pocket, or the
Himalayas Mountains into a thimble. On the other hand, think of a small
compound of flesh, blood, and bones, a few feet in dimensions, and
weighing perhaps not more than one hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois,
containing that infinite, omnipresent Being, whom, we are told (we
repeat the quotation), "the heaven of heavens cannot contain"! And more
than all, kind reader, I ask you if you can accept for a moment, without
the immolation of your common sense, and the trampling of your reason
beneath you feet, the monstrous thought that that mighty and almighty
Architect who who created the countless myriads upon myriads of
ponderous worlds, which now roll in majestic order, and eternal rotation
along the great cerulean causeway of heaven, that mighty Architect who,
from time beyond human computation, has been rolling out orb after orb,
world after world, if not myriads at a time, ten thousand times, ten
thousand of which would dwindle our little pygmy, Lilliputian planet
into insignificance, if compared with it in size.
I ask, and drive home the query to your inward consciousness, and the
inmost temples of your sacred reason:
Can you believe, after a moment's reflection, that a Being who is too
vast, infinitely too vast in power and ubiquity to be grasped by the
human understanding, did become (as did the finite and humble Jesus)
a helpless, senseless, unconscious, human infant; a suckling, crying,
squalling babe, powerless of speech, and unable to walk? Ay, worse,
more startling still, we are shocked with the thought that this mighty
World-builder, this infinite, omnipotent Creator, was reduced so near to
the verge of nonenity, so near to the last glimmering spark or speck
of existence, and the world so near without a God, as to become an
inanimate foetus--a monad in the matrix of a human virgin? Shocking the
thought! Blasphemous the doctrine! Believe it who will; believe it who
can! We cannot; we would not; we are infinitely beyond it. Such a belief
may be deposited by educational tradition in the affections, but to
enter the temple of Reason, it never did, it never can. She never
unbarred her doors to admit such monstrous, such enormous incongruities.
and all these logical absurdities, and a thousand more, grow
legitimately out of the doctrine of the divine incarnation,--out of
the postulate which would (following in the line of the pagan
superstitutions) elevate the finite, humble, mortal Jesus to the throne
of heaven, the exclusive prerogative of Almighty God. Come away, my
Christian friends, from such disparaging, such dishonorable views of the
Deity, such blasphemous caricatures of Almighty God. Come away from such
morally darkening and such intellectually dwarfing superstitutions, the
moldering relics of oriental mythology, the expiring embers of childish
credulity and tradition, which originated far back in the dark cradle
of human existence, in the infancy of an undeveloped age, ruled by
ignorance, superstition, and priestcraft. Yet millions of people laying
claim to sense and intelligence, even now profess to believe it. Talk
not to me of infidelity or blasphemy for denying the divinity or
Godhead of Jesus Christ. The blasphemy lies in the other direction. The
infidelity is with the opposite party. It is with those who thus make
the dignity and character of Deity the sport of childish I baubles, the
game of priestly tawdryism. And be assured, dear friends, one and
all, that coming generations will mark the man who now worships "the
man Christ Jesus" as being "very God" as an idolater, if not a
blasphemer--for worshipping a finite man for an infinite God, even
though the motives for such worship may be as pure as the pearly stream
that issues forth from the golden fount which rolls and sparkles beneath
the throne of Almighty God.
Note. The words Creator, Maker, &c., are used from a
Christian standpoint Science knows no Creator.