The Incarnate Every 40 Years

If Christ is the incarnate, then he (or she) should come back down to earth and live every forty years so that humans can have a better understanding of God incarnate. I hold this opinion for two reasons. First, God would act very differently with indoor plumbing. Secondly, I feel so much of the gospels are lost in translations and figures of speech that I have no clue who Jesus is or what he was about.

How would Christ behave differently if he was socialized with indoor plumbing or the cell phone? In postmodernity, we adherents are cordially familiar with the concepts of contextualism. So much of human lives are influenced by our socialization and environmental influences. Therefore, when I read the gospels that are over 2,000 years old I feel like Christ's existence has very little day to day utility to me outside of the fact that he was a principled man. Now, let it be known that I think his principledness is certainly enlightening enough to illuminate Christ's persona in such as way as to cast the practical day to day stuff I might learn from him into a shadow. However, I feel like it's the day to day stuff that separates most Christian factions. It seems like it's the drinking, smoking, euphemisms, and practical attributes of the New Testament are the ones that divide. If Christ were to show up every 40 years and just clear up a little bit of the fog, I think we would all get along a good bit better.

The second reason I feel like the New Testament is out of date and we need another visit from Heaven is that the Gospels have been so muddied by translation that I genuinely have no clue what Christ was all about outside of the obvious "love". I will be honest too, it doesn't help me to know that Christ was all about love; John Lennon was all about that too.

A good example of my beef with translations is the incident with Christ and the woman of disrepute who "let her hair down" while Jesus at a table with others. According to Jack Miles, a former jesuit scholar and the author of the pulitzer prize winning book God, in his book Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God he says that the phrase "lets her hair down" is a genteelism for "strip-teased". That simple miscontiguous translation certainly changes that part of scripture. Instead of a nice little allegory for a women worshiping God; we find the incarnate getting a public lap dance.

Similarly, I realize euphemisms my African American students use would be completely misleading to a white business man. Context is everything. And context is lost to a lay-person studying the Bible. If Jesus would drop down for a visit every 40 or so years and re-contexualize his language and actions in more relevant customs, that would solve a whole lot of problems.

Now, I realize the obvious rebuttal to my arguments here; if the incarnate were to come down every 40 years just to validate his incarnatedness, then wouldn't faith be pointless? Obviously, if every 40 years a child was born of a virgin, lived a morally principled lifestyle, and was martyred by a bureaucratic system, certainly people would start to see a pattern. At that point, yeah, I think think most people would simply accept that fact that Christ is the Christ. Thus, there would be no need for faith; or so the argument goes.

There is an obvious flaw in this argument however. If faith has such value that God should not prove his existence to every incoming human generation on earth, then how do we assess the originators of our faith? Again, if I value faith so much that I don't want God to demonstrate His/Her existence, then I in turn should place very little value on the Peter, John, Mark, Matthew, Luke, Mary, and the rest of the New Testament crew since their faith required the least amount of effort. These matrons and patrons of Christianity have the least amount of faith since they were eyewitnesses to Christ's incarnation.

For that reason, we're holding a double standard praising the faith of New Testament figures since they actually possessed the least amount of faith. What faith need I assimilate to believe in Jesus if I hear the voice of heaven say, "This is my son, of who I'm well pleased?" The answer is very little. Is little faith enough faith? Well, if it's good enough for the founding fathers of Christianity, then I say it's good enough for me.

In summary, I think Jesus just should show up every 40 years to clear things up. In fact, I'm easy to please here, how about every 100 years God? I'd settle for that.