This book sets forth one primary claim, namely, that the theological centre of the Christian scriptures is the event whereby God becomes human for the purpose of drawing humans into a loving relationship with the triune God.
The first half of the book (‘The Prehistory of the Incarnation’) is devoted to a detailed study from the Jewish scriptures of ‘why and how God makes use of particular human beings in order to proclaim his will and his acts’ (p. 3). Genesis narrates the story of the conflict between God's creative purposes and love for his people and humanity's propensity for a self-determining autonomy that moves the creature away from God. But God's covenantal love and commitment to humanity provide the basis for God's continuing to send mediators who reflect God's love and will to make Godself known and experienced by his creation. The portrait of God's mediators does not provide evidence for a direct and explicit doctrine of the incarnation, though they do offer ‘traces that pave the way’ for God's incarnation in Jesus Christ as witnessed in the New Testament writings. What follows is a readable and yet fairly detailed study of how God reveals Godself and implements his will to draw people into a divine loving relationship through institutions and figures such as kings, priests, prophets, Spirit, Wisdom, servants and more. The Babylonian exile in the early sixth century bce presents a massive challenge, however, to the plausibility of God acting to reveal and save through mediators, and, as a result, one witnesses an increased emphasis upon God alone as the one who can save (e.g. Deutero-Isaiah and books 4 and 5 of the Psalter). One also begins to find an increased emphasis on figures whose rejection and suffering, even to the point of death, provide new hopeful possibilities for life with God. For example, the Servant Songs of Isaiah, the personified Lady Zion, and the righteous suffering anointed king of the Psalter testify to a dynamic whereby ‘out of suffering and death comes God's new beginning with those who are his’ (p. 215).
The second part of the book moves from ‘prehistory’ to ‘Conceptions of the Incarnation’. The structure is reminiscent of historical-critical studies of early Christian christology beginning, at least, with Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christ. Thus, there are five lengthy chapters on: the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith (chapter 1), Paul's christology (chapter 2), the Synoptic tradition (chapter 3), the Johannine tradition’ (chapter 4) and the testimony of Acts, the Deutero-Pauline epistles, Hebrews, 1 Peter and the Apocalypse of John (chapter 5). Whereas the latter four chapters are all unified in their belief that God is present in the person of Jesus, the first aims to provide a historically robust portrait of the relationship between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. The historical Jesus, it can be discerned, is one who taught with unparalleled authority and gave humanity a new understanding of God's character and immediacy. The texts that speak of the historical Jesus having a divine status or carrying out divine functions testify to the early Christian attempt, ‘in the light of the Easter experiences, to put into words and to interpret the experiences of transcendence that had already been made in the encounter with the human being Jesus’ (p. 244). Paul's notion of God's incarnation in Christ is deeply wedded to his understanding of how humanity is saved. In brief, God's incarnation has as its telos the participation of humans in the incorruptible life of God by virtue of receiving the Spirit of the Messiah (e.g. 1 Cor 15:20–58). Paul sets forth a view of God's revelation in Christ
as creative energy and as a will that can be experienced in a personal manner, a will that draws his creatures, precisely where they have turned away and become his enemies, back into the sphere of the power of race, transforming the ‘slaves’ into ‘children’ by giving them a share in his own righteousness, holiness, and power. (p. 266)
In the Synoptic tradition one can discern the influence of personified Wisdom when Jesus speaks of himself as God's emissary who reveals the Father to humanity (e.g. Matt 11:25–30; Luke 7:35). Mark and John occupy different sides of the pole between transcendence and immanence. Whereas in Mark the story of Jesus moves inexorably to the shame and wretchedness of Jesus's death on the cross, in John Jesus becomes the pre-existent one who is equal with God (John 1:1–2, 14, 18). John's Gospel and the Johannine epistles witness most explicitly to how God's incarnation in the person of Jesus has as its goal the sharing of divine transformational love with God's creation.
The authors conclude with the primary claim that encapsulates their exploration of the Christian Bible: ‘Becoming human is the definitive deed of love on the part of the God who created in his creation, and especially in his most beloved creature, the human being who is God's likeness, the vis-à-vis without which he does not wish to be God’ (p. 367). The book is successful in that it presents a coherent and wide-ranging argument for the centrality of the doctrine of the incarnation to both the Christian Bible and to its inextricable connection to the entire grammar of the Christian faith. In less than 400 pages it provides a readable and yet exegetically and historically sophisticated analysis of a remarkable amount of biblical texts which are directly relevant to the doctrine of the incarnation. As such, the book functions as an excellent reference work, even as the overall argument is often necessarily quite broad and somewhat general.
