Advent Day 24 - Taking On Human Flesh with Father Robert Barron Asking how God, the sheer act of being (ipsum esse), can take on human flesh is an interesting question because I think it is only ipsum esse that can accomplish this. Its a commonplace of the Christian tradition that in Jesus, God has become a creature. We have to be careful about that language. We dont mean that God turned into a creature - that God stopped being God by turning into a creature. Nor do we say that a creature turned into God - thats mythological language. What we mean is that God took to himself a human nature to use for his iconic purposes. St. Paul talks about Jesus as the icon of the invisible God. His humanity is the iconic representation of the invisible God. Having made that clarification, its only ipsum esse that can pull off this trick. If God were a being in this world, like one of the ancient gods or the deist god, then he would only relate to a human nature in a competitive way. To use an analogy, my two hands cant become one another - they repel each other. Likewise, I cant become a bookshelf, and a bookshelf can only become something else (like ash) by being burned and destroyed. Thats the way it goes with finite natures. But God can become a creature, without ceasing to be God or compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes, precisely because hes not a competitive nature in the world. Hes not a being, but ipsum esse - the sheer act, or energy, of to be itself. Thats why the ideas of the Incarnation and God as ipsum esse are correlated and mutually implicative. youtu.be/-4eI0_0utus
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 14:36:51 +0000
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