no Body without bodies
the persistent contradiction of "excarnate" Christianity
My favorite burrito meat is carne asada. I like my tacos al pastor, but if I’m oredering a burrito, I nearly always have it filled with delicious grilled steak.
That is, of course what carne asada means—technically, it simply translates “grilled meat.” As a California boy, this is a useful way for me to remember the meaning behind technical, Latin-derived theological terms like “incarnation.” The Spanish “carne” comes from the Latin for “flesh.” To “in-carnate” is to “come into flesh.” It may not be the most reverent of associations, but if you want to remember the meaning of Christmas and the significance of the birth of the Lord Jesus, it doesn’t hurt to think of what’s inside your super burrito.
All Christians, across denominations, cultures and traditions, have always confessed the incarnation; that, in the words of St. John, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). It’s one of Christianity’s most arresting, astonishing ideas: God Himself—the Almighty and Eternal Creator—entered into His creation by being born a human baby to a poor, unwed mother, so that He could set all of us free from evil, sin and death. It’s not an easy idea to swallow. But that doesn’t make it any less essential to the Christian gospel.
Now, I say all this to clarify what “incarnation” means, because I’d like to talk about the opposite. I’d like to talk about the opposite because I have lived the opposite, and I think most Christians in modern America have been taught to live the opposite too. Christ became incarnate. Christians in the modern West tend to become “excarnate."
excarnate Christianity
According to Charles Taylor, “excarnation” is “the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside ‘in the head.’”1 If incarnation is the taking on of flesh, excarnation is the moving from a healthy and whole, fully embodied, richly human practice of faith, to one that lives in the mind.
Taylor sees a parallel between the effects of the Protestant Reformation and those of the Enlightenment the following century. René Descartes (definitely a Mount Rushmore Enlightenment philosopher) believed that “we need to distance ourselves from our embodied understanding of things, in order to achieve clear and distinct knowledge.”2 In a similar way, Protestant Christianity “parallels what [this] modern disengaged reason has done to morality. In both cases, the key is to grasp current propositional truth…. In the first case, right worship follows, but the forms that it takes are secondary, and can be varied at will.”3
In other words, it doesn’t matter what you do in Sunday worship, or even mostly how you live Monday-Saturday, as long as you think the right things. Your embodied existence and practice—how you worship—doesn’t matter as long as your mind contains the right information when you do it.
In this way, the body becomes incidental to faith. What you do with your body in worship to God doesn’t matter. The most important aspect of who I am—the God on which I have centered my life, devotion and worship—only accidentally has anything to do with the fact that I have a body. I could have a body; I could not; it doesn’t really matter.
What really matters isn’t how I worship; it’s what I think about it. You can see how this fits with someone like Descartes and the modern world he helped bring about. After all, he’s the one who said, “I think, therefore I am.” In Taylor’s words, this practice of the Christian faith “exclude[s] bodily desire as an expression of the higher, of fullness.”4
In fact, it may have done worse. Over the course of his monumental work, A Secular Age, Taylor makes the case that “[c]orrupted Christianity gives rise to the modern.”5 He is arguing, in essence, that excarnate Christianity was the granddaddy of the Enlightenment. Modernity and all the wreckage that it brings—with its emphasis on the rational over the physical; its valuing of white over blue collar; its desire to dominate the physical in service of the ideological; its unexamined stories that tell us progress is inevitable; that there’s a right side to history; that some people are more valuable than others based on skin tone; that everything in life can be boiled down to profit and loss—modernity, in Taylor’s telling, gets laid squarely at the feet of the Church.
you can’t have a body-less Body
I find this way of seeing the rise of the modern world compelling for a variety of reasons. I may not have the scholarly acumen to prove Taylor right or wrong. But I do know that my upbringing in the faith is full of instances of excarnate Christianity. And that excarnate tendency is one I am trying to unlearn.
I am trying to unlearn this tendency because I am not excarnate. I was born just like my Lord. I have parents, a home, an address. I have to eat and exercise and empty my bladder. I have a body and my faith tells me that I should glorify God with it (1 Cor. 6:20). If my spirituality can’t bridge the gap between my head and my heart (let alone make it all the way to my hands), then it’s significantly lacking. If my spirituality can’t account for the fullness of my existence—that I am not just a soul, but an embodied soul—then I probably need a new spirituality.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the rise of the “nones” and the increasing number of ex-vangelicals in the U.S. could be explained, at least partly, by this modern American Christian tendency to excarnation.
One of the most important images for the Church in Scripture is the Body of Christ. Christians are the Body of Christ, His hands and feet on this earth. In order to live this reality, we have to recognize this excarnate tendency in American Christianity and say, “no,” to it. Learning to not just “think” our faith but to embody the good news of Jesus is, quite possibly, the most important thing for the Church in our time and place to do. It’s the only way we can actually be the Body of Christ.
What do you think? Have you experienced a thinking rather than a living faith—an excarnate Christianity? What has that been like in your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (London: Belknap Press, 2007), 613.
Ibid, 614.
Ibid, 615.
Ibid.
Ibid, 740.