Incarnation and Cross

In the history of the Christian faith two divergent lines of approach to the contemplation of Jesus have appeared again and again: the theology of the Incarnation, which sprang from Greek thought and became dominant in the Catholic tradition of East and West, and the theology of the Cross, which based itself on St. Paul and the earliest forms of Christian belief and made a decisive breakthrough in the thinking of the Reformers.

The former talks of “being” and centers around the fact that here a man is God and that, accordingly, at the same time God is man; this astounding fact is seen as the all-decisive one. All the individual events that followed pale before this one event of the one-ness of man and God, of God’s becoming man. In the face of this they can only be secondary; the interlocking of God and man appears as the truly decisive, redemptive factor, as the real future of man, on which all lines must finally converge.

The theology of the Cross, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with ontology of this kind; it speaks instead of the event; it follows the testimony of the early days, when people inquired, not yet about being, but about the activity of God in the Cross and Resurrection, an activity that conquered death and pointed to Jesus as the Lord and as the hope of humanity.

The differing tendencies of the two theologies result from their respective approaches. The theology of the Incarnation tends towards a static, optimistic view.  The sin of man may well appear as a transitional stage of fairly minor importance. The decisive factor, then, is not that man is in a state of sin and must be saved; the aim goes far beyond any such atonement for the past and lies in making progress toward the convergence of man and God. The theology of the Cross, on the other hand, leads rather to a dynamic, topical, anti-world interpretation of Christianity, which understands Christianity only as a discontinuously but constantly appearing breach in the self-confidence and self-assurance of man and of his institutions, including the Church.

Anyone at all familiar with these two great historical forms of Christian self-comprehension will certainly not be tempted to try his hand at a simplifying synthesis. The two fundamental structural forms of “Incarnation” theology and “Cross” theology reveal polarities that cannot be surmounted and combined in a neat synthesis without the loss of the crucial points in each; they must remain present as polarities that mutually correct each other and only by contemplating each other point toward the whole.