For God So Loved the World

This is the heart of the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and therefore of authentic Christianity: the incarnation of God as “one of us.” Take it away and Christianity is little more than a moralistic, therapeutic deism. The incarnation, as event and doctrine, is the distinctive note of the Christian witness and the basis of Christian hope. But many Christians believe in the incarnation of God in Jesus, but fail to grasp the fullness of it as good news about God. Karl Barth best expressed this good news about God in a nutshell: the humanity of God—the startling title (given his early emphasis on God’s “wholly otherness”) of one of his last books. If Barth was right, and I believe he was, God was always inclined toward us, always determined in himself, by his free decision, as “He who loves in freedom,” to be for us in Jesus Christ. Thus, we must think of the Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, the Word, as the “Platzhalter” for Jesus Christ in the Trinity.