This Advent and Christmas season we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Incarnation literally denotes enfleshment—the Word made flesh, as John 1:14 puts it. The eternal Son of God assumed humanity as a babe in Bethlehem in order to grow to adulthood and die for the sins of the world. This death and subsequent resurrection, the source of our salvation, presuppose incarnation. Without incarnation, there can be no salvation. The opposite of incarnation is excarnation, a word coined by Charles Taylor[1] to describe the modern inclination to limit all the significant issues of reality to the mind and to treat the body and material world as simply vehicles for reason and imagination.
1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Belknap, 2007), 288.
Excarnation is indebted to ancient Gnosticism, the first and most dangerous Christian heresy that afflicts the church and culture down to this very day.[2] While the Bible located the world’s ills in human sin, Gnosticism blamed them on creation itself. According to them, an ignorant, malign deity (the Demiurge) rebelled against the true God (often defined as a pure abstraction) and created matter, including the human body, contrary to God’s desire. The true God tried to foil the Demiurge by covertly inserting sparks of divinity into human bodies.
2. Benjamin Walker, Gnosticism, Its History and Influence (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian Press, 1983, 1989).
To the Gnostics, the Fall is not from righteousness into sin, as the Bible teaches, but from spirit into matter; and salvation is escape from the body and reversion to pure spirit. This means the human body and the material world are a prison from which the enlightened must escape. To them, Jesus came not to save from sin, but to deliver from ignorance and impart knowledge (gnosis), by which the illuminated learn of their true, excarnated destiny.
For Christians, man is rescued by God’s Son becoming man in assuming (and dying and rising in) a human body (see 1 John 1:1–3). For Gnostics, man is rescued by escaping from his body, after which the divine spark is released to return to God after ascending through the heavenlies. Man becomes God. Excarnation is the process of man’s salvation. This heresy is the antithesis of biblical orthodoxy, and its prominence is on the rise in our modern world.
In this article, I will explain how the excarnation mindset influences our culture, how it seeps into the church, and what we must do about it.
Excarnation in Culture
Excarnation is increasingly a guiding tenet of Western elites—including leaders in the medical field, the government, large corporations, and so on. There’s nothing Christian about it. The Bible teaches that God’s norms are interwoven into the cosmos. These include gravity and thermodynamics. They include economic laws of scarce resources. Moreover, they include his norms for human sexuality. Today’s elites don’t simply wish to rebel against these laws; they want to circumvent and then abolish them. They have figured out the only way to do this is to bypass reality itself. Their vision of the Good Society is one in which all people are equal in condition, and the “marginalized” are resituated as the apex of culture. If this means redefining reality, so be it.[3]
3. Anthony Esolen, Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2020).
If the human body as biologically male or female is an impediment to human imagination, sex-“reassignment” surgery is an option. If some humans are smarter, better looking, stronger, or cleverer than others, laws must be imposed that penalize their giftedness and reduce them to the level of their inferiors. Eventually, this means that their gifts must be eliminated to create true equality.
If women are naturally superior nurturers and men naturally superior soldiers, men must nurture babies (and even “get pregnant”) and women must serve in combat. TV and movies must depict lithe 120-pound women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular 200-pound male warriors.
The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it’s the reality-bending social vision that matters. The body forbids the exercise of the rebellious imagination, so the body must be circumvented and, if necessary, abandoned. Reality doesn’t conform to the elite vision of society, so reality is irrelevant.
The gnostic excarnation paradigm sees the body simply as a vehicle for the person, the “authentic self.” The person, the real you and I, is inside the body, the “ghost in the machine.” The body is like an automobile that carts us around. There’s a radical disjunction between the authentic, self-aware person, and his body. The body is simply a tool, like a screwdriver or a fork, though a highly complex one.
This anthropology (view of man) has momentous implications. For one thing, it means that if the self is not fully developed, the body is unimportant. This means that there should be no barrier to abortion and euthanasia and mercy killing. After all, it’s the self that is important, not the body. If there is no authentic self (or person on the inside), the body is disposable. Remember: the body is only there as a vehicle for the person. [4] This is the grim price we pay as a society for implementing the excarnation vision.
4. Robert P. George, “Gnostic Liberalism,” First Things, December, 2016, 33–38.
Excarnation in the Church
The Bible does not exalt spirit over matter; Jesus is Lord of the invisible and visible world (Col. 1:15–17). Yet ever since pagan Greek ideas of the inferiority of the material world infected Christianity, the church has battled with excarnation. Even as the church prays, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10), many Christians view the world outside the church—economics, politics, entertainment, education, and architecture—as inescapably “carnal” (fleshly) and unfit for Christian influence. So the church retreats to an excarnated spirituality. Prayer, interior dialogue, and contemplation of heaven are considered spiritual, while working to re-criminalize abortion, de-legitimize same-sex “marriage,” combat pornography, and reduce government theft programs in the form of confiscatory taxation are relatively unimportant and, in fact, a diversion from the church’s real, excarnated tasks. Escape from evil within the created order rather than confrontation with and victory over it is the excarnational agenda. Christianity is reduced to a “personal devotional hobby.”[5]
5. Stephen C. Perks, The Great Decommission (Taunton, England: Kuyper Foundation, 2011), 20.
But Advent stares us unflinchingly in the face with the truth that the present world, immaterial and material, is cursed by sin and is to be redeemed by the death and resurrection of our Lord. The most evil being in the universe, the Devil, is pure spirit. But Jesus, his conqueror, was born and lived and died and rose from the dead and lives forever in a body. As sovereign creator, our Lord is profoundly interested in the world, including the material world. He came healing the sick and exorcising demons from tortured bodies. To trust in the Messiah for salvation is to surrender oneself mind, soul, body—our entire self—to him (Romans 12:1–2).
He is as interested in purging sin from gangsta rap and abortion clinics and fraudulent bond-rating agencies and Bauhaus architecture as he is from Christian hearts and families and churches. The cleansing power of the Gospel does not simply take souls to heaven; it transforms everything it touches.
By and large, the church over the last century and a half has failed to counter the lawlessness of our age. Think only of this startling fact. On Easter 2020 almost every church in Christendom was empty due to almost global Covid lockdown orders. What the ancient Roman empire could not accomplish, what a hostile Islam could never pull off, what communist regimes couldn’t do, a massive statist utopia was able to accomplish—padlocking church doors at Easter. Unfortunately, many churches were willing collaborators in their own demise. They dug their own graves.
Then think about the response to the tragic killing of George Floyd and the resurgent Black Lives Matter. Churches all over North America called for reparations and joined in the chorus against “white supremacy.” In other words, they sang the tune of cultural Marxism, often singing it in a highly pious Christian key.
And then, of course, they capitulated before the erotic regime. Even many conservative evangelicals made their peace with so-called same-sex “marriage,” or, at least, same-sex “attraction.”
This is another name for same-sex lust, but that description is too indelicate for pious evangelicals.
Why the nearly wholesale failure and more recent collapse? Several reasons come to mind, but perhaps the most prominent is the church’s longtime devotion to a two-tiered view of reality. (Expressed in Francis A. Schaeffer’s metaphor of the upper and lower stories.)
Think of the double-decker tour buses in London. Christians move Christianity into the upper deck of the church and theology. On the lower deck they leave the rest of life as permissibly non-Christian. Christians assume the Bible has nothing relevant to teach about tax rates or foreign policy or education standards or architecture or popular music or movies or cloning or surrogate motherhood or medical care: these are issues that shouldn’t pose big arguments and “everybody should work them out for himself.”
The only important matters are evangelism and prayer (mostly in the church) and AWANA programs and Beth Moore Bible studies and church leadership conferences. The upper deck alone is Christian. Everything outside the church need not be Christian, and should not be Christian. The world is the lower deck and Christianity is the upper deck.
Meanwhile, the lower deck gains its independence from Christianity. Why? The bus driver is always on the lower deck. The lower deck, already unattached from the Bible and church and Christianity, ignores the upper deck, and soon starts driving the entire culture, above which the detached upper deck angelically floats, enjoying its helium holiness, while the lower deck drives the vast majority of cultural riders straight to hell.
To evacuate Christianity to the upper deck is to destabilize, dilute, and eventually destroy it. It’s not merely the case that when Christianity is evacuated upward, its effectiveness is blunted. Rather, it becomes something different from Christianity.
Imagine a wealthy sports owner who wanted to start a new baseball league, but to play the game without bases. You’d say, “You can create a new game if you want, but just don’t call it baseball.” Similarly, a double-decker Christianity that stresses Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection in the upper deck of the church and family but keeps them away from the culture on the lower deck is not normative Christianity. It’s a diluted and deformed version. Eventually it will become none at all.
Double-decker Christianity is no match for the antinomian regime driving the cultural bus. You won’t defeat this massive, all-embracing regime by reading warm Christian poems and holding hands and singing “I Saw the Light” on the upper deck. Only a vigorous, comprehensive, aggressive, robust biblical faith will conquer the antinomian secular/neo-pagan regime that pervades our culture.
Christians again need to get down from the upper deck and start driving the bus. Certainly, not everyone will drive the bus, but some must. And others must pay fare for the driver, fix broken seats, assist ailing passengers, while yet others must protect travelers from unruly bus riders. All in all, everyone who follows the Incarnate Christ must also embody the grace and truth of the Lord in all parts of the bus.
Conclusion
This Advent season, relish the incarnational life and dismiss the excarnational vision. The body and the material world are not designed for our escape but for joy and victory and service to other embodied souls. Jesus is Lord of all, and a God unashamed to be born into a barn amid farm animals is unashamed to care for and redeem every area of creation and culture presently under the dominion of sin.
Christmas is a celebration of incarnation that made possible his atoning bodily death and victorious bodily resurrection. Our future hope is not excarnation in a false medieval vision of angel babes and halos and harps in heaven but of the new heaven descended to a new earth purged from sin, where God will dwell eternally with us his people—on a profoundly material, but sinless, earth (Rev. 21:1–4).
