The Advent and Christmas season is upon us. Within the Christian Church, we focus on the incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus, where the Word became flesh. This past month I have read Rob Bell’s latest book, “Everything is Spiritual.” Within it, he plays with quantum theology, a theology based on the insights of quantum physics and uses it to help us understand different aspects of our Christian faith. In this blog, I want to play with quantum theology to help us better understand how the Word of God became flesh in the human Jesus. In doing so, it helped me understand how all of us are incarnations of God, the Word becoming flesh in us. Each year in the church during the season of Advent, we often treat the incarnation story of Jesus as one unified story based on the stories of Jesus in the Bible. But the truth is that there are 4 different understandings of Jesus’ incarnation in the Bible written at a different times independently of each other. Four Biblical Understandings of the Incarnation Based on Bible historians, the earliest Biblical documents referencing Jesus are the letters written by Apostle Paul some 20-25 years after Jesus’ death, between 50 and 60 CE. It is interesting to note that Apostle Paul writes nothing about the birth, life, and ministry of Jesus. It seems that he has little or no knowledge of these aspects of Jesus' life. His focus was the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and these historical events formed the foundation of his belief that Jesus was the incarnation of God in human flesh. The earliest gospel Mark, written 10 plus years after Paul’s letters (around 70 CE), connects Jesus’ incarnation to Jesus’ baptism which is recorded happening at the beginning of his prophetic and healing ministry. Jesus is often seen around the age of 30 when he began his three year ministry. During his baptism, the writer of Mark’s gospel writes that ‘as Jesus came out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And then a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”’ (Mk 1:10-11). This is where the gospel of Mark begins his gospel. The gospel writer of Mark seems unaware of Jesus' birth stories. The gospels of Matthew and Luke written some ten years after Mark (80's CE) are the only Biblical documents that contain the birth narratives of Jesus. Matthew focuses more on Jesus’ father Joseph while Luke highlights Jesus’ mother Mary. But the key thing these gospels both stress is that Mary was a virgin when she found herself pregnant with child meaning that God was the father of Jesus, not Joseph. From a Jewish perspective, there was no prophetic expectation that their Jewish Messiah had to be born from a virgin. Typically, the Jewish word, translated by early Christians thinkers as virgin, is more commonly translated as “young maiden”. Many Jesus historians suspect the reason why this virgin interpretation became important to Luke’s and Matthew’s Christian communities was because there was a competing narrative around who was the son of God at that time in history. In 42 BCE, the Roman Caesar Julius was deified as god. His adopted son, Caesar Augustus, who was the Roman Caesar when Jesus was born, was known as “son of the god” (Wikipedia “son of god”). Within this context, the early Christians possibly found it necessary to show Jesus was the Son of God by stressing Jesus’ mother Mary was a “virgin”, just as the prophets predicted. The gospel of John, written some 10-20 years after Matthew and Luke, also has no mention of the birth narratives. Instead, John uses a philosophical mystical argument of how the Word of God became flesh in the human person of Jesus. By this time in history, the members of the Johannine Christian community had elevated Jesus to the status of God. Jesus was now the Great “I Am”, that name that God gave himself in the Jewish story of Moses and the burning bush. Many stories in this gospel reflect the theological beliefs of this early Christian community and contain less the historical details of Jesus’ life. The Four Aspects of Incarnation Four different ways of understanding the incarnation of God in human flesh through Jesus. I want to suggest that each biblical understanding of the incarnation provides a window into understanding what the incarnation really is. Many of you know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man was touching a part of an elephant, the trunk, the trail, a leg, a side, an ear, and a tusk. Each were convinced they knew what an elephant was based on their experience, and yet they knew only a small part of the elephant. I think a similar dynamic is happening around the 4 different Biblical understandings of incarnation. Through Apostle Paul, we see how the resurrection reveals that Jesus was more than a physical human being. He was a Soul that transcended death. Through Mark’s gospel, we see how Jesus’ baptism revealed to us and Jesus that he was more than a human being: he was also a beloved child of God. Through Matthew and Luke’s understanding of incarnation, we notice that Jesus’s divine and human nature were both present at his conception. Finally, John helps us see how the incarnation involves a mystical union between our human and divine nature, the Word of God becoming physical in the form of the human Jesus. This understanding of Incarnation only makes sense to a Christian. Unless you buy into this Christian worldview, this notion of Incarnation makes little sense. This is why it is hard to talk about the Christian notion of the Incarnation outside the church. This has made me wonder, is there another way to talk about the Incarnation of God that non-Christians might understand, one that possibly helps us get at more clearly the underlying dynamics of Incarnation? Here is where I find quantum physics useful. I think quantum physics provides us a way of understanding the dynamics of incarnation without using Christian language. Let me illustrate. Quantum physics has discovered that light is both a particle (photon) and a wave. Normally, light, and energy in general, have the properties of a wave, like a sound or water wave. When waves bump into each other, they create interference patterns. Scientists have done many experiments with light that create these interference patterns. When light is a wave, we do not know exactly where each particle is. The light photon could be anywhere within the wave, many millions of potential locations. When light is functioning like a wave, it does not function like a particle until someone observes it at a particular location and time. In that moment, the wave nature of light collapses and it now becomes a photon in a particular location and particular time. This is called the observer effect; as soon as something is observed, the wave function of reality collapses and it becomes manifested into earthly reality with mass, location, and time. There may be a similar relationship between energy and mass for energy follows the laws of wave and mass follows the laws of particles. What I have just described where the wave properties of light, energy and reality collapse into a particle, mass, and physical reality could be seen as a scientific description of physical incarnation. I see this scientific incarnational model providing a way of understanding of how the Incarnation happened through a Christian lens, how the Word of God became flesh in the human Jesus and in humans in general. This past month in a spiritual direction session, my directee and I played with this scientific framework and applied it to understanding the Incarnation of God in Jesus and in us. The wave dynamic of reality could be seen as the heavenly realms, divine reality, where the different qualities of God’s spirit exist as potential, waiting to manifest into earthly reality. These qualities include love, compassion, courage, power, joy, resilience, grace, truth/insight, value, peace, etc. All of these qualities are always unconditionally present, waiting to manifest into our earthly reality in response to what is happening there. In contrast, the particle dynamic of reality is the earthly world we live in, where reality manifests in time and physical space. However, it is important to note that this incarnation is temporary, not permanent. Our physical world is constantly changing. Nothing is totally static. All living physical reality involves the cycle of birth, development, aging, and eventually death. Even the cells within our human body are constantly changing, some reproducing, same dying. Nonliving reality also has a life cycle where it manifests from energy into physical reality and eventually over many years, sometimes millions of years, returns to energy. There is one observation I want to make. Our Christian traditions teaches that we, as human beings, are as the word suggests, both human and Being, both human and divine. Within this quantum framework I have described, this suggests that we are both particle, as manifested in our physical body, and wave, as embodied by our soul that is connected to this physical body. Seen in this way, this means that when we pay attention to the dynamics of our soul through prayerfulness, mindfulness, and contemplation, we are noticing the wave of God’s spirit flowing within our soul. As soon as our sense of “I” joins or unites with these dynamics, these dynamics become realized in our physical world through our words and actions. The wave function happening within our soul collapses and becomes manifested into our physical lives and world. The Word of God we sense within our soul like compassion, grace, courage, truth, and resilience becomes flesh through our human actions. This is the incarnation as we, Christians, understand it: The word of God becoming flesh. For me, this is how Jesus became the incarnation of God. It was not because God was his miraculous biological father and Mary was his mother. Rather, it was because Jesus was a very contemplative person who was in regular communion with God. As a result, due to Jesus’ prayerfulness, the wave function of God’s spirit within Jesus’ soul constantly was collapsing into various physical manifestations on earth through his teachings, healings, and how he related to the various people he met in his life. This was why people came to see as Jesus as “Emmanuel” which means “God with us” for they experienced God deeply in the presence of Jesus. What made this Emmanuel state possible for Jesus was that God was also Emmanuel to him in a deeply personal intimate way, a way that allowed the wave function of God to manifest in Jesus’ life in very concrete and physical ways.
When we understand the incarnation in this way, we soon see that this dynamic of God becoming flesh is not unique to Jesus. Rather, all humans have this potential for we are all human beings, both human and divine. Just as Jesus was born with both a divine and human nature, so were all of us. Each human being is a child of God. Just as Jesus heard at his baptism that he was a “beloved one” of God, this is true for all of us. God wants all of us to hear, to realize deeply that we are one of God’s beloved children. Just as Jesus manifested his divine nature through abiding daily in God’s loving and gracious presence, so we too manifest our divine nature through abiding each day in Christ’s loving and gracious presence. We are all connected to the vine of God (John 15). Just as Jesus discovered at this death that he was more than his physical body, that he was a soul that transcended death, so all of us will discover at our death we are not just earthly creatures. Our souls too will transcend death. And so in Jesus, we see how we, as humans, can also realize our divine birthright as God’s children. Jesus shows us the way to being incarnations of God ourselves. One could called this the way to our ongoing salvation, where we are made in the likeness of Christ through living it out each day in our lives. This is the amazing truth of God’s incarnation, an incarnation that I think the framework of quantum physics helps us understand in a very real, personal and powerful way. A teaser: What would the Christian notion of sin look like through this quantum framework? There is a huge human temptation to become attached to the physical incarnations that arise in our life like money, youth, sex, beliefs, possessions, people, etc. This leads to many forms of injustices in our world: the "haves" and the "have nots." We resist change. We resist surrendering, trusting, generosity and sharing, and going with the flow of life. We want our lives to be fixed and predictable. We resist allowing the particle nature of life return to its wave-like reality that it came from. Instead, we want to create a God in our own image, one that we can control...which breaks the first two commandments of the Ten Commandments. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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