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Why on earth would an infinite God bother with Incarnation?

By GEORGE WEIGEL [First Things] – Posit an all-powerful and infinite God, and most of us wouldn’t have too much trouble with the idea that such a God could do anything, including coming into the finite world he created. The real question is why such a God would want to do such a thing: to submit his divinity to the limits of our humanity, to dwindle into infancy and then to go farther—to die as a tortured criminal at the hands of his own creatures. Here is the “scandal” of Christianity. For the answer faith gives to the question of why is salvific love: a love so great that it required, not an argument, but a demonstration.

Eastern Christian theology helps us understand the full dimensions of the why of the Incarnation through its concept of theosis, or divinization: God becomes man so that we might become like God—so that we can live comfortably with God forever. Here, then, is the admirabile commercium: God “exchanges” his divinity for our humanity, thus enabling us to “exchange” our weakness for his divine glory—the glory of which the angels sing to the shepherds of Bethlehem. The years St. Paul spent in the desert, pondering just how the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, which had been revealed to him on the road to Damascus, fulfilled God’s election of Israel, led the Apostle to the Gentiles to be the first to formulate this “exchange:” “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” [2 Corinthians 8:9].

Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.

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