O'Collins has written some dense works on the Trinity, so this accessible book on the incarnation is a welcome treatment of this important topic. God reveals and redeems through the incarnation. It is the particularity of the incarnation that is scandalous.
The Christian understanding is not simply that Jesus embodied (incarnated) some great ideal or quality, so that Jesus is "merely the highest human example of someone open to and utterly motivated by the divine spirit" (8) but that Jesus is God incarnate, the Word made flesh. An eternally pre-existing "Subject within the oneness of God" took human form and dwelt among us. Not eternal in the sense of preceding or antedating everything else, but rather, “that Christ personally belongs to an order of being other than the created, temporal one” (15).
Was the human Christ conscious of his eternal pre-existence? "This would be to ignore the fact that his human memory, along with his human consciousness and all his other human powers, began to exist only when he was conceived and born. With the incarnation the Son of God becomes fully human and newly human (18).
Is pre-existence important? Pre-existence "strongly underlines the divine love for human beings and their world. To have continued sending prophets would cost God nothing, so to speak. But the coming and personal presence of the pre-existent Son of God uniquely expresses the divine desire to be with us, to share our sufferings and redeem us from our desperate situation. Anything less than this might well leave us wondering how much we matter to God. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’ (John 3.16) is convincing in a way that a ‘lesser’ text would not be: for instance, ‘God so loved the world that he sent another great prophet.’ As a traditional Christmas message put it, ‘God cared enough to send the best’" (24). He continues: "Belief in the personal pre-existence of the Word of God holds together beautifully the doctrines of creation and redemption. The central protagonist of the drama of redemption was/is already active in creating and conserving the universe. The Creator and the Redeemer are personally identical" (24).
We have seen God's face in the Christ Child. God's blessing in Numbers 6:24-26 has literally come true! Thanks be to God!
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