The Incarnation of the Son of God

Our theme at DYA today is Christ, and Dr. J. Kameron Carter got things going at our plenary session this morning by talking about Incarnation.

He encouraged the students to think about some key aspects of God's revelation in Christ Jesus:

- The truth of the Incarnation: Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human.

- The story of the Incarnation: Christmas! Or, restoration and reconciliation (which brings to God's creation a revolution).

- The ethics of the Incarnation: Or, the freedom of the Christian. It is the freedom to be God's creature; not to be in bondage, but to be in solidarity with God and one another. The ethics of the Incarnation is the ethics of freedom!

Prof. Carter spoke about the body of Jesus Christ as pointing to a social order, which we become part of through our baptism. We exist in a number of social orders, of course: our family, neighborhood, city, nation, university, fraternal organization, political party, place of employment, etc. But the social order that Jesus creates seeks to supersede all other social orders.

And particularly since so many of our social orders treat someone or something other than Jesus as Lord, our calling into the body of Christ ultimately calls those social orders into question. Remarking on the incompatibility of those earthly social orders that represent idolatries and false gods with the social order of Jesus, Dr. Carter said, "The social order that is Jesus Christ kills all false social orders. And the name for that is Easter."

It was a fascinating presentation on the meaning of God's Incarnation in Jesus, made more so by Dr. Carter sharing stories and pictures of a recent trip he took to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was able to study ways in which the history of that country shows how the Church actively cooperated with anti-Christian political, social, and military forces during the Portugese and Spanish colonial periods in Latin America.

But, as Dr. Carter argued, the very way of life offered to us by the gospel of Jesus shows us that the Christian faith is not destined to be allied with those powers and principalities that would corrupt it beyond recognition. Jesus always calls us to himself. And that is good news.

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In the next couple of days, I'll try to write more about my own role at the Duke Youth Academy. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Christian Practices here, and my main duties are to oversee our Arts Village and Prayer Practice Workshops. These are ways that we try to help our students "live into" their faith by understanding that the salvation God is bringing to us involves our bodies and that theological reflection is inherently aesthetic and corporeal.

And so we invite them to study with professional artists who are also committed Christians, as well as to engage in forms of prayer with which they may not be familiar.

More on that to come!