God Was Born in Human Form. Why Did He Bother?

This week we celebrate the enfleshment of the eternal Word in the form of a tiny, squalling Jewish boy in a cave that reeked of cattle. He came to live among the poor, preach unpopular doctrines, puzzle with bold innovations all who listened, demand absolute commitment from His listeners, then be tortured and killed — only to rise again. He warned His followers to expect much the same treatment for trying to spread His message.

It’s a perennial temptation to wonder why God bothered. If He wanted to forgive our sins, why couldn’t He just do that? Why not whisper to each of us in the privacy of our minds, “Your slate is clean,” without the messy business of His own Son getting martyred?

For that matter, if He wanted relationships with the creatures He’d planted here, who’d gone off the rails and fallen into sin, why choose just a single tribe of “stiff-necked people” and establish a covenant with them — which they’d keep on failing to keep and so would keep earning punishments from local, pagan invaders?

And then why send His son to that tribe, only to see the bulk of those people reject both Him and the covenant extended to any and all comers — many of whom would pretty quickly start persecuting the first tribe without any trace of gratitude for the gift of monotheism, much less of salvation?

These are the kinds of conundra that rattle around in my head and tempt me just to focus on the pine trees, the glimmering lights, and the strains of Mariah Carey. (All I want for Christmas is … soup.)

Asking such questions is perfectly natural, because our nature is fallen. And our intellects are proud. We want a universe that’s buttoned down and tidy, which we can solve like a crossword puzzle before slapping down the newspaper, feeling satisfied with ourselves. We’d prefer a cosmic system that appears much more efficient, with no unknown variables and no irrational numbers.

Mystery Is Humiliating

To have to face instead a vast, baroque menagerie of mysteries that hang in tension with each other and extend off into the mists of infinity and omnipotence … well, it’s humiliating. Literally, etymologically, in the sense that it enforces humility. The entirety of the Enlightenment was dedicated to shining klieg lights into every nook and cranny, driving out the “darkness” of mysticism and superstition. Our ancestors strove to evict the cranky, unpredictable God of the Jewish Bible and replace Him with “Reason.”

But they cut “Reason” down to size, lopping off all the parts that were too big to fit in their minds, until all that remained was really just “Cleverness.” Voltaire was clever, Marx was clever, even Richard Dawkins is clever in the sense of a precocious, overpraised child convinced he’s vastly smarter than his elders. But precocity ages poorly, and so has the Enlightenment. The culture it produced is just clever enough to figure out that risking your life for others, saving money for the future, and even having children, aren’t smart strategies from a hedonistic perspective. Each of us should rationally just free-ride on others’ sacrifices until the entire species just shrugs and disappears.

Even those who claim to be orthodox Christians are not immune to the temptation of perpetual adolescence, of waving off as irrelevant whatever doesn’t make sense to them after 10 or so seconds of thought. The Christian faith comes to us not as a set of logic problems or formulas, but instead falls down from Heaven like some gleaming UFO. It’s alien to our way of thinking, in some parts blazingly hot and in others unthinkably cold. Its contours don’t suit our tastes, and the language it seeks to teach us sounds harsh to our earthly ears.

Surely a Good God Wouldn’t …

So we take up the parts we like and declare them essential, and toss off those that we deem as “time-bound,” “extreme,” or “culturally determined.” The whole project of liberal religion, from Pope Francis’s lavender Vatican to the pumpkin-spice scented halls of Christianity Today, is to make faith safe, familiar, and comfortably irrelevant. The basic principle by which it operates can be summed up thusly: “Surely a good God wouldn’t …” then fill in the blank with whatever aspect of irreformable dogma conflicts with current culture, our daily comfort, or our own goofball notions of how we’d create a universe.

In a recent, brilliant column, Stream contributor Jules Gomes depicted two figures whose stories dramatize the real-world effects of these two kinds of faith: the pared-down, “sensible” precepts which a snotty “gifted” child is willing to accept; and the humbled, half-broken acceptance a sinner offers to mysteries that elude him.

• Biologist Francis Collins, long revered as a “genius” in upwardly mobile Christian circles, devotes vast efforts to trashing Intelligent Design, which anchors faith deeply in the material universe, finding in the humblest cell the signature of a Creator. A faith so materially real could make real demands of a person, and might even demand that he not perform ghoulish experiments on the bodies of children aborted in service to the government. Much better to remain “spiritual, not religious,” since religion (again, etymologically) means something that “binds” us, that dictates how we really live in this material world. Collins would rather follow Darwin blindly and banish the ghost of God whenever we use our minds to think about the world. Religion must serve instead as a plug-in Febreze, incensing whatever our glittering intellects and fallen wills approve.

• Epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, whom I met at a Florence conference on Intelligent Design. Bhattacharya risked his good name, his career, and the goodwill of virtually every colleague in his field to question the COVID consensus imposed across the world. When lockdowns, masking, and experimental vaccines derived from aborted children were being imposed globally via government coercion and Orwellian censorship, Bhattacharya could have stayed silent. Many others did. But because he saw his faith as rooted in the real, as the foundation of everything rather than some ornament on the wall, he spoke up calmly and clearly. He paid an ugly price for it, but the facts and the science have vindicated him. Now, after our almost miraculous 2024 election, he will take over Collins’ old job as head of the National Institute of Health. And we will all be healthier for it.

It offends the clever adolescent inside each one of us to genuflect before such strange, “irrational” things as covenants and sacraments, the Fall and blood atonement. Perhaps the wise men, made proud by their speculations about the cosmos, were hesitant in Bethlehem when they found whom they’d been seeking. But they were wise enough to kneel before the Mystery that eluded them.

Are we?

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.