Incarnation and Anthropology
As Christmas draws near, we begin to think again of the significance of what CS Lewis called “ The Grand Miracle ”. It has been said that the early Christian debates were all about Christology, the Reformation debates concerned Soteriology and modern debates are all about Anthropology: what it means to be a human person. In our modern (or postmodern) world, we are all struggling to work out what true humanity looks like, especially when faced with the man-made destruction we see in Yemen, Aleppo and the rest of Syria. And it is at this time of year that we focus on the Christian answer to that question. Athanasius, in his great work De Incarnatione , describes human nature as so damaged that it is barely recognisable from what it was originally meant to be. He offers the wonderful image of a portrait that has become so defaced by stains and dirt that the artist needs to sit down and re-paint the image in all its original glory. This is what God does in the Incarnation: “He,...