Implications of Incarnation
What
do 'Theotokos', the Incarnation, and an orthodox
Christology reveal about the beginnings of human life? To be pro-choice one
must have an Adoptionist Christology.
by
Heather Bakker Ghormley
A few months ago I
got into a conversation with a Christian midwife about early term
abortions. She surprised me by saying
that she supported elective abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. She explained that she does not believe
fetuses possess human souls “until the time of quickening.” Quickening, she
informed me, refers to the time when a pregnant mother begins to feel her child
kicking, usually about the fifth month.
I found her reasoning a bit unsettling and void of any sort of scientific
or theological content: as if, a person becomes a person because another person
(forget God) notices her kicking! But
our exchange reminded me how many people, Christians as well as non-Christians,
live with a sort of agnosticism in regards to the beginning of human
personhood. Does personhood begin at
conception? At quickening? At birth? Some other time? For the Christian, this
question comes down to determining at what point God infuses our human bodies
with a God-given human soul.
While one can
certainly make non-religious arguments for a fetus’s right to life, science
will never be able to answer the question of when God gives a human body her
soul. The question, “When does a human
become a spiritual being”, is a theological question, not a scientific
question. It requires a theological answer. No microscope or sonogram can
illuminate how or when God chooses to bestow the dignity of God’s image on a
fetus. However, while the moment of Image-giving will always be shrouded in
mystery and beyond our simple human experience, Christians are not altogether
without some theological tools to help answer this question. In fact, we have more than just a tool. We have the Incarnation of the true Image of
God who is at the same time the ultimate image of humanity, our savior Jesus
Christ. As Christians we look to the
life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to learn what it means to be fully
human, how to live a life pleasing to God, and what we may expect from God’s
interaction with us. Thus, to determine when God gives God’s Image to human
persons, we may, in faith, turn to what we know about the moment of the
Incarnation, the moment when the Word became Flesh.
In the history of
Christian doctrine, theologians generally espoused one of three views about the
nature of Christ. First, that Christ only appeared to be human but was actually
strictly divine, a view popularly known as Docetism. Second, that the second person of the
Trinity, the Word, adopted the human Jesus at some point in his ministry. Most proponents of this view suggest Jesus’
baptism as the time of his adoption. This view fits broadly under the heading
of Adoptionism.
Most Adoptionists also suppose that when Jesus
cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he did so
because the Divine Word was departing from the human Jesus. Thus, for Adoptionists,
God does not undergo Jesus’ human death. Shining between the extremes of Docetism and Adoptionism is the
traditional orthodox position. The orthodox view teaches that from the creation
of the person Jesus, the Word and the human were fully united into a single
person and remain so for all eternity.
As early as the
late 2nd Century this third view of Christ inspired Christians to
give Jesus’ mother, Mary, the title Theotokos,
a Greek word meaning “God bearer.” In
other words, the received teaching of the church is that when Mary gave birth
to Jesus, she was in fact, giving birth to someone who was both fully human and
fully God.
In
defending this view of Mary as Theotokos, the
famous 5th Century theologian, Cyril of Alexandria, asks the
question: if God blesses marriage, “then why did the Word who is God, make a
virgin the mother of his own flesh with a conception straight from the Holy
Spirit?”[1] Cyril proposes that the answer to this
question resides in the Pauline idea that “the Son came, or rather was made
man, in order to reconstitute our condition within himself…this is why he
himself became the first one to be born of the Holy Spirit…so that he could
trace a path for grace to come to us.”[2] In other words, the Word, who is by nature
the Son of God, assumed human flesh, to transform all other human flesh, such
that we too could, by grace, be born of the Holy Spirit and become children of
God. This transformation had to begin
through a Divine initiative, therefore requiring the overshadowing of the Holy
Spirit, rather than a conception in the normal fashion. For Cyril, if the Son did not assume the
fullness of humanity, then humanity has no hope of full regeneration. Yet, if the Son did assimilate human nature,
then human nature is changed at the moment of His coming. Every aspect of human
life that the Son touches becomes sacred and capable of receiving the grace of
God.
Yet
the question remains: which parts of human life did the Word touch? At what stage of Jesus’ development did the
Word become flesh? In Luke’s infancy
narrative, the angel Gabriel announces to Mary, “behold, you will conceive in
your womb and bear a son…” (Luke 1: 30b,
If
we hold to the first position, that the Holy Spirit merely began the process of
growing a body in Mary and that the Word incarnated at some later point when
that body achieved the stature of personhood, then we are left with a version
of Adoptionist Christology. A picture of the Incarnation in which the
Word can come and go as He pleases in reference to the biological life of Jesus
presents a number of serious theological problems, not the least of which is that
the Word could flee from Jesus on the Cross.
If the Son of God did not die and rise again as the human Jesus Christ,
then God has not reconstituted human death, which means we have thin hope of
escaping the curse of the First Adam (Rom. 5: 12-21)! If we do not believe the Son of God
reconstituted human conception, then we might question whether He has
reconstituted other aspects of human life, which leaves us with only a quasi
redemption.
Suppose
then, that we hold the second option: The Word incarnated into a mass of cells
that only later achieved personhood.
This view seems slightly problematic because the Incarnation is already
a great scandal without suggesting that the Word incarnated into something that
did not even have viable personhood. But
such a sub-person incarnation is imaginable.
Yet, if the Word incarnated into the human “stuff” of a pre-person
human, by that very moment of loving divine condescension, that human stuff was
lifted up to a sacred level. That is to
say, if the Word humbled the Word’s self to become a blob of cells, the Word
did so to exalt that blob of cells. And because Jesus Christ as the New Adam
reconstitutes the entire human race, all future blobs of fetal cells are
consequently exalted. Thus, even if these “pre-human” cells are not yet
“persons,” because of the work of the Incarnation they are highly exalted and
should be treated as sacred.
The
simplest and most theologically sound position is the third position: that in a
single motion the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and the Word Incarnated into a
human zygote in her womb. Seemingly out
of nothing, one of Mary’s eggs began to grow and divide with a complete set of
To
impose an adoptionist anthropology on the life of
Jesus Christ, may seem like a simple way to justify early term abortions. However, the theological risk one takes when
one espouses an adoptionist Christology has
devastating results. For if the Word and the entire biological life of Jesus
did not become inseparably one, then we have no guarantee that the Word died
and rose with Jesus. And if the Divine did not do these things, then Jesus’ experience
of them does not ultimately correspond to a Divine assumption of them. If God
has not assumed human death, then humanity has no hope of sharing in the Divine
Life. Therefore, if God has not assumed
human conception, “then our faith is in vain” (1 Cor.
A
theologically sound Christology requires an anthropology that maintains that
life begins at conception. My midwife
friend sought to ease her conscience about the abortion of unwanted children,
but she did not realize that in so doing, she took on an unstable Christology
with no guarantee of human salvation.
Christians need not live with ambiguity concerning the point at which
humans become persons. Human life begins at the moment of conception, and so
did the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Biological life and spiritual life belong together in Christian
theology. Therefore, we live now in
imitation of Christ and place our hope in a share of our Lord’s glorious
Resurrection.
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