Saturday, September 09, 2006

Of a Sudden, Strange Thought

The OT Christophanies...What if they were not "pre-incarnate" appearances of Christ? What if Jesus (post-resurrection) could time-travel? He seems to do a lot of strange appearing and disappearing after his resurrection, and his eating of the fish and honeycomb with the disciples reminds me of the time the Angel of the Lord came and had dinner with Abram.

That's all I've got. Anybody else have an opinion?

posted by Jeremy at 3:55 PM

3 Marginalia:

I was thinking about this after you mentioned it today. You said that Christ's eating and drinking with the disciples after his resurrection was proof for them that he was not a ghost. Yes. I agree. However, you assumed that "not a ghost" is an equivalent expression for "incarnate."
The significance of the incarnation is not the physicality (as opposed to spirituality) of Christ, but the humanity. Incarnation is not the same as physical existence. Even spiritual beings can exist physically, but we do not deem them incarnate. The significance of the incarnation is that Christ was born of a woman, that he grew and developed a human body, a perfect body, but a human one none the less. The Breath of Life which animates humans animated Christ's body just as it did his mother's. Spiritual beings can, or possibly always do, have physical forms, but they are not human (e.g. birthed) forms. That is why Nephilim in Genesis chapter six are such a big deal, precisely because they are an attempt at imitating incarnation by having spiritual beings impregnating humans. The angels that accompany Christ in his OT appearances also eat and drink, but you don't term them incarnate. Your mistake, I think, lies in equivocating incarnation with physical form.

Additionally, when you take a step back, there is very little reason to think of Christ as being bound by time at all. Christ encompasses time, not the other way around. Obviously the incarnated, pre-resurrection Christ operates in time, but do we honestly think that Christ's perception of time is equivalent to ours? He invented the medium, after all. Why would he be constrained by it? Does he even "percieve" it's progress, it's passing? Or is it simply a dimension which he percieves in it's entirety, like we percieve the entirety of an infinite series of points which form a line.

By  Anonymous, at 4:30 PM  

it's totally time travel. you're totally right. sweet.

By  Anonymous, at 9:21 AM  

Jeremy, I love this idea. I'm gonna be thinking about it for a while.

By  Anonymous, at 10:04 PM  

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