The Incarnation, the Limits of Created Perspective, and the Love Philosophy Could Not Imagine
“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
Colossians 2:9
A conversation with my son brought the strangeness of the incarnation freshly before me.
Christians have heard the words so often that we can cease to feel their force. God became man. The Word was made flesh. The One who made the world entered it, accepted the limitations of a human life, suffered at the hands of His creatures and died upon a cross.
We confess these things because they are true. But we should not pretend that they are philosophically ordinary.
To many ancient minds, the idea would have sounded almost absurd. The higher belonged above; the material belonged below. Perfection meant freedom from change, bodily weakness and suffering. The journey of the soul was upwards—away from the visible, the mutable and the physical towards the invisible and eternal.
Then Christianity entered the world and declared that the movement had taken place in the opposite direction.
Man had not climbed high enough to reach God.
God had come down.
The God Philosophy Would Never Have Invented
The incarnation did not merely provide a new answer within the established philosophical system. It overturned the system’s governing assumptions.
The Platonist looked beyond the visible world towards a higher and more substantial reality. Later Neoplatonism developed this into an ordered ascent from the material world towards the divine source of all things. Matter occupied the lowest level. In Plotinus, it could be described in terms of privation (the absence or lack of positive being and goodness), darkness and evil—not because every physical object was equally wicked, but because matter as such stood at the lowest extreme of reality, furthest from the fullness of intelligible being. (See Note 1.)
Christianity announced something no philosophical ascent could have anticipated:
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…”
John 1:14
God did not summon us to escape the material world in order to find Him. The eternal Word entered the material world and took a true human nature.
Centuries later, Islam would reject this confession at precisely its most radical point. The Qur’an honours Jesus as Messiah and messenger while denying that God has a Son and warning Christians not to say “Three” (Qur’an 4:171). Islam is not simply Neoplatonism in religious clothing, and its objections must be heard on their own terms. Yet it shares the conviction that divine transcendence makes the Christian confession unfitting: God is too exalted to become man. Christianity replies that God’s transcendence is not threatened by His freedom to draw near—and that the incarnation was not a physical act of begetting, but the eternal Son’s assumption of human nature. (See Note 4.)
The Stoic sought freedom from passions that disturbed rational judgement. Serious Stoicism was not simply an instruction to feel nothing; it distinguished disordered passions from good and rational affections. Nevertheless, its moral ideal centred upon mastery, inner stability and freedom from dependence upon circumstances. (See Note 2.)
Then the shortest verse in the Bible quietly overturned the table:
“Jesus wept.”
John 11:35
Christ’s tears were not a failure of reason. His grief was neither sinful nor disordered. Perfect humanity did not require emotional detachment. At the grave of Lazarus, holiness wept.
The world associated greatness with rising above service. Christ washed His disciples’ feet.
The world associated power with invulnerability. Christ was crucified.
The world imagined that divine perfection must mean remaining untouched by hunger, weariness, grief, pain and death. The gospel proclaimed a High Priest who could be “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15).
Christ entered the temple of the philosophers and overturned its tables.
Judging God from Inside the Box
Why does the incarnation sound impossible to the human mind?
Part of the answer may be that we stand within creation and mistake its boundaries for the boundaries of reality itself. Space, time, matter, causation and bodily limitation are not merely subjects we study. They are the conditions under which every ordinary human experience occurs.
We have never stood outside them. We cannot walk around the universe and inspect it from another side. We are creatures within the work attempting to reason about the One who made it.
We therefore imagine God becoming man as though an unimaginably large object had somehow been squeezed into an impossibly small container. The objection seems obvious: how can the infinite fit inside the finite?
But the question begins with a false picture of God.
God is not the largest being within the universe. He does not occupy a distant region of space beyond the stars. He is not contained by the totality of created reality:
“Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee…”
1 Kings 8:27
The “heaven of heavens” is not outside creation. Angels, heavenly powers and every invisible realm are still created. God alone is uncreated. Yet Solomon understood that even the highest created heaven could not contain the One to whom he prayed.
God is not merely outside our box. He is the reason there is a box at all.
Dimension, distance and magnitude exist because He gave them existence. The laws by which material things operate express His will; they are not laws standing above Him. He sustains every created thing without being enclosed by the creation He sustains.
Man stands within one chamber of creation, surveys its walls, and proceeds to declare what the Architect of all reality can and cannot do.
That is not intellectual humility. It is provincialism on a cosmic scale.
Is Creation Itself Not Already Astonishing?
Before asking whether God could enter creation, we should consider the astonishing fact that creation exists at all.
Why should there be something other than God? Why should the infinite and self-sufficient God will finite creatures into being? Why should He create persons capable of thought, love, rebellion and fellowship with Himself? Why should He know them individually?
The existence of creation already tells us that divine transcendence does not mean divine remoteness.
God can create what is genuinely distinct from Himself without diminishing Himself. He can be intimately present to every part of creation without becoming merely one part among others. He can sustain the world continually without being trapped within it.
What overwhelms the human mind did not exhaust divine power:
“For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”
Psalm 33:9
Creation appears impossibly complex to us because we are small agents working with materials we did not make. We must learn slowly, act locally and manipulate one limited thing at a time. The universe is difficult for us to comprehend. It does not follow that it was difficult for God to create.
Its immensity measures our smallness, not His strain.
Once creation itself is admitted, the absolute wall imagined between God and the material order has already fallen. Matter exists because God willed it. Embodiment is not inherently evil. The Creator looked upon the material world He had made and pronounced it “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
The incarnation goes immeasurably beyond creation, but it does not establish the first contact between God and matter. Every atom already owes its existence to Him.
What If the Visible Is Only the Vestibule?
Our natural temptation is to treat the visible universe as the great reality and heaven as a mysterious addition to it. Scripture may invite us to reverse that perspective.
Paul describes Christ as the Creator of a reality extending far beyond our present senses:
“For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers…”
Colossians 1:16
We cannot quantify the relationship between the visible and invisible creation. Scripture does not tell us whether the unseen order is larger in any spatial sense, and we should not pretend to know. But it does tell us that what we presently perceive is not the whole.
We see earthly bodies, distant stars and the measurable universe. We do not ordinarily see thrones, dominions, principalities, powers or innumerable companies of angels. Our sensory horizon is not the boundary of created existence.
The visible world may be the vestibule rather than the whole house.
That possibility should humble every attempt to decide what is fitting for God from the narrow standpoint of earthly experience. Complexity is relative to perspective. What seems inconceivable from within one order may cease to be so when viewed from a higher one.
Yet even the whole created order—visible and invisible—is not the measure of God. If unseen creation dwarfs everything available to our senses, it remains creation. The greatest angel is still a creature. The heaven of heavens still cannot contain its Maker.
Paul’s Great Reversal in Colossians
This is what gives Paul’s words in Colossians their extraordinary force.
We should be historically careful. Neoplatonism reached its mature form after the New Testament, and scholars continue to debate the precise mixture of Jewish, ascetic, visionary and philosophical ideas confronting the Colossian church. Paul was not secretly writing a refutation of Plotinus. (See Note 3.)
Nevertheless, Colossians delivers a theological judgement upon every system that separates divine fullness from bodily existence.
Paul first warns:
“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”
Colossians 2:8
This is not a prohibition upon thought. Paul reasons, argues and commands Christians to grow in understanding. His target is philosophy functioning as captivity: human systems that present themselves as wisdom while carrying believers away from the sufficiency of Christ.
His next sentence is the thunderclap:
“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
Colossians 2:9
Not a fragment of deity. Not a lower emanation sent to bridge the distance between matter and God. Not a temporary divine influence resting upon an ordinary man.
All the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Christ.
The human body of Jesus did not contain or exhaust His infinite divine nature, as though deity could be enclosed by skin. Nor did the Son cease to be what He eternally was. He assumed a complete human nature while remaining fully divine.
The One who entered Mary’s womb continued to uphold creation.
The infant in the manger was the One by whom all things consist.
The man who slept from weariness upon the ship was the Creator of the sea.
The man who wept at Lazarus’s grave was the resurrection and the life.
The man who hung upon the cross was the Lord of glory.
Then Paul employs the language of shadow and substance:
“Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”
Colossians 2:17
The shadows in this passage are not physical creation itself, as though matter were unreal. They are provisional ordinances pointing forward to Christ. Christ is the body—the substantial reality to which the shadows pointed.
The philosophical instinct tells us to move away from body towards spiritual fullness. Paul places fullness and body together in a single sentence.
Christ turns the categories upside down.
The Descent That Revealed His Glory
Philippians 2 takes us further into the humiliation of Christ:
“But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
Philippians 2:7–8
The expression “made himself of no reputation” is sometimes described as Christ “emptying Himself.” But Paul does not say that the Son emptied Himself of deity or surrendered the attributes that made Him God. The passage explains the emptying through what He took and what He accepted: the form of a servant, human likeness, humiliation, obedience and death.
The movement is not the subtraction of deity but the assumption of servanthood.
He did not cease to possess divine glory. He veiled that glory beneath the conditions of an ordinary human life and refused to use His status as a means of avoiding the path appointed by the Father.
This reveals something human philosophy easily misses. Humility is not the opposite of divine greatness. In Christ, humility becomes the disclosure of divine greatness.
We define glory as being served. God the Son revealed glory by serving.
We define power as the ability to avoid suffering. He revealed power by willingly enduring it and overcoming it.
We define exaltation as ascent above others. He descended into our condition and was therefore “highly exalted” by the Father (Philippians 2:9).
The incarnation was not an interruption during which God acted unlike Himself. It was the revelation, within human history, of the love and humility belonging to His eternal character.
The Angels Desired to Look
Would the incarnation appear as absurd to angels as it does to human philosophy?
We should answer carefully. Angels do not stand outside creation and they do not comprehend God exhaustively. They too are finite. They too depend upon Him for their existence. The difference is one of vantage point, not infinity.
They have witnessed dimensions of divine majesty presently hidden from us. They know more of the height from which the Son descended. An angel who had beheld heavenly glory would understand the humility of Bethlehem in a way unavailable to those who saw only a carpenter’s child.
Perhaps the incarnation appeared less impossible to them because they understood more of God’s power. Yet it appears no less wonderful. Scripture presents them as spectators astonished by redemption:
“…which things the angels desire to look into.”
1 Peter 1:12
At Christ’s birth, the heavenly host filled the night with praise (Luke 2:13–14). Angels ministered to Him after temptation and in agony. They announced His resurrection. Paul says that through the church the manifold wisdom of God is now being made known “unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10).
Heaven is not watching because redemption is obvious.
Heaven is learning something through it.
The angels’ greater perspective may remove the illusion that incarnation is beyond divine ability while intensifying the wonder that the Son would assume our nature rather than theirs:
“For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham.”
Hebrews 2:16
The wonder of the incarnation does not lie in its difficulty for God, as though becoming man strained His power. It lies in the distance His love was willing to stoop.
From below, the incarnation appears impossible because we underestimate God.
From above, it appears unfathomable because heaven knows more of His glory.
The Wisdom the World Called Foolishness
The cross brings the conflict to its climax.
If incarnation offended the philosophical instinct, crucifixion appeared to confirm its worst judgement. Here was flesh exposed to pain, a body stripped and wounded, a man publicly humiliated and overcome by death. What could look less like divine power?
Paul refuses to make the message respectable:
“But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”
1 Corinthians 1:23–24
The philosophers looked at the cross and saw the negation of deity: weakness, shame, suffering and death.
Paul pointed to the same crucified Christ and declared: there is the power and wisdom of God.
Christianity does not rescue God from the embarrassment of the cross. It announces that the cross exposes our false definitions of God.
His weakness is stronger than men.
His foolishness is wiser than men.
His humiliation reveals a glory the proud mind could never have conceived.
The Answer to the Riddle
Why would the infinite create the finite?
Why would the invisible enter the visible?
Why would the One whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain accept a human body?
Why would He hunger, grow weary, weep, serve, suffer and die?
The answer to the philosophical riddle is astonishingly simple:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…”
John 3:16
Because God so loved.
God did not create because He was lonely or incomplete. The Son did not enter the world because anything was lacking in Him. Creation and redemption did not arise from divine need but from the freedom and abundance of divine love.
John 3:16 does not explain away the mystery of the incarnation. It tells us why the mystery happened.
Philosophy asks how the infinite could enter the finite.
Pride asks why God would lower Himself to us.
Heaven answers: “For God so loved the world.”
The universe may be vastly greater than we presently perceive. The invisible creation may contain orders of life and glory beyond our imagination. Yet no expansion of our knowledge could ever make the manger ordinary, because the wonder is not ultimately one of scale.
It is the wonder of love.
Christ’s tears, His servanthood, His wounded body and His cross are not embarrassments Christians must explain away. They reveal something philosophy could never discover by climbing upwards.
God is greater than we imagined—and His greatness includes a love humble enough to come down.
Notes
- 1. “Neoplatonism” properly refers to a later development of the Platonic tradition, especially associated with Plotinus in the third century. Plotinus treated matter as privation and as the furthest extreme from intelligible goodness. This should not be projected without qualification onto every Platonist or onto Paul’s first-century opponents. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Plotinus”, especially its discussion of matter and evil.
- 2. Stoic apatheia should not be reduced to modern emotional numbness. Stoics sought freedom from irrational and excessive passions while allowing what they regarded as rational “good feelings.” The contrast with Christ is therefore not reason versus emotion, but self-protective detachment versus holy affection willing to enter another’s suffering. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Stoicism”, and “Epictetus”.
- 3. Colossians mentions philosophy, human tradition, the “rudiments of the world,” ascetic regulations, visions and the worshipping of angels (Colossians 2:8, 16–23). These features have produced several reconstructions of the teaching Paul opposed. The argument here does not depend upon identifying it precisely as Gnosticism, Platonism or any later philosophical school.
- 4. Islam arose centuries after Paul and should not simply be identified with Neoplatonism. Nevertheless, the Qur’an explicitly rejects both the Trinity and divine Sonship while presenting Jesus as a messenger of God (Qur’an 4:171). The comparison concerns a shared objection to the Christian confession, not a claim that the two systems are historically identical. See Qur’an 4:171.