Article

A Truly Human
Incarnation: Recovering
a Place for Nativity in
Contemporary
Christology

Theology Today
70(4) 382393
! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0040573613506734
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Elizabeth ODonnell Gandolfo

Furman University, USA

Abstract
Theological reflection on the person and saving work of Christ in the past several decades
has been concerned primarily with the adult man Jesus, his life-giving ministry, his consequent death on the cross, and the salvation that his life, death, and resurrection offer to
sinful human beings and a broken and unjust world. But the liberating good news of divine
incarnation does not begin with Jesus public ministry as an adult. Rather, it begins with a
socially high-risk pregnancy; with a humble, messy, and painful birth; and with the natal
body of a squalling, dependent, and vulnerable infant. This article draws on both contemporary feminist scholarship and premodern theological voices to posit that recovering
the nativity as a christological symbol brings into focus at least three important theological insights that a predominant emphasis on the adult Jesus marginalizes in christology
and the Christian community today: that the natal life taken on in the Incarnation, like all
human life, is inherently vulnerable from the start; that the nativity is an overlooked, yet
powerful icon of divine redemption; and that contemplating the vulnerability of Christs
natality can cultivate the practice of peace in a vulnerable and violent world.
Keywords
Christology, incarnation, nativity, natality, vulnerability

Behold the unalterable power of divine loves being: now a single celled zygote. . .now a free-oating blastocyst. . .now an embryo, fully implanted in the
thick and marshy, nutrient-rich endometrial lining of a young peasant woman in
ancient Palestine. To borrow the poetic words of ecologist Sandra Steingraber, the
fused cells of love incarnate push long, amoeba-like ngers deep into the uterine
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth ODonnell Gandolfo, 603 Summitbluff Drive, Greenville, SC 29617, USA.
Email: elizabeth.gandolfo@gmail.com

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lining while secreting digestive enzymes that facilitate its burial. In response, the
tips of the spiral arteries break open and spurt like geysers. Thus, life begins
in a pool of blood.1 The incarnate life of divine love begins in a pool of
bloodlife-giving blood that nourishes the progression of Marys pregnancy
through neurogenesis, musculoskeletal somitogenesis, organogenesis, replete with
cellular migrations worthy of Odysseus.2 The bloodiness of this second Genesis
makes the life of Marys child possiblea re-creation not from nothing, but from
everything, from the universal stu of life. But the blood-borne origins of the
Incarnation remind us that the invulnerable nature of divine love becomes not
only possible, but also vulnerable in the crimson waters of Marys womb.
So too does the bloody and dangerous adventure of childbirth make the
Incarnation a vulnerable endeavor. Mary and her baby make it through the pregnancy safely, but childbirth is a very risky endeavor in premodern times (as it
continues to be in many contexts today). This is especially true after a long and
arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Mary could die, her baby could die,
or both. The bloodiness of her labor could end in the tragic loss of life, for love
incarnate will not pass into the world through Marys womb like a ray of light.3
Rather, the hard-as-steel muscles of Marys uterus press the babys head down on
her cervix until it slowly, painfully dilates and eaces and makes way for the child
to gradually inch his way through the birth canal with each grueling push, his
bruised and misshapen head nally emerging through the stretching, tearing perineum into the hands of Marys birthing attendant (if she even has one). After the
mucus is wiped from the babys mouth and nose, he gasps for his rst breath, his
umbilical cord is cut and tied, and he is wrapped in swaddling clothes.4
Placed in his mothers arms, Jesus looks up at Mary and hears her voice with
cloudy recognition, then remembers that he was born hungry and roots around
desperately searching for the colostrum he needs for survival. It would be easy to
cast this moment in the romantic glow of the Christmas story, but it is a terribly
vulnerable time for both Mary and Jesus. Even if everything goes without a hitch,
Jesus infancy is not bathed in the easy glow of celestial halos and hallelujahs. His
parents are in a strange place, lacking the social supports a close-knit community
might have given the new mother and her child. Jesus is laid in a manger for
goodness sakesa feeding trough. Like homeless persons on the city streets of
1. Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologists Journey to Motherhood (Cambridge, MA:
Perseus, 2001), 910.
2. Ibid., 14.
3. See Article III of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which employs this metaphor to explain
the manner in which Jesus entered the world: just as the rays of the sun penetrate without breaking
or injuring in the least the solid substance of glass, so after a like but more exalted manner did Jesus
Christ come forth from His mothers womb without injury to her maternal virginity. Council of
Trent, Catechism for Parish Priests, available at www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/romancat.html
(accessed March 18, 2013).
4. See Elizabeth Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints
(New York: Continuum, 2003), 27677.

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the United States, like squatters, displaced persons, and refugees around the globe,
Jesus mother improvises to provide for his care. And like babies in all times and
places, Jesus is entirely dependent and vulnerable. In this cold stall in Bethlehem,
divine loves unalterable being enters the world as the vulnerable child, the body
and blood of a young Galilean woman exhausted from labor and far from home.5
***
Contemporary christology pays scant theological attention to the fullness of divinity and its redemptive power taking on vulnerable human esh in the newborn
Christ-child. Theological reection on the person and saving work of Christ in the
past several decades has been concerned primarily with the adult man Jesus, his
life-giving ministry, his consequent death on the cross, and the salvation that his
life, death, and resurrection oer to sinful human beings and a broken and unjust
world. In this schema, the seriousness of human sinfulness and the horrors of
violence and oppression are problems met by an autonomous adult agent who
freely chooses to pay the ultimate price for a dangerous prophetic mission of
healing, forgiveness, and liberation. But the liberating good news of divine incarnation does not begin with Jesus public ministry as an adult. Rather, it begins with
a socially high-risk pregnancy; with a humble, messy, and painful birth; and with
the natal body of a squalling, dependent, and vulnerable infant. In the pages that
follow, I suggest that recovering the nativity as a christological symbol has the
potential to bring into focus at least three important theological insights that a
predominant emphasis on the adult Jesus marginalizes in christology and the
Christian community today: that the natal life taken on in the Incarnation, like
all human life, is inherently vulnerable from the start; that the nativity is an overlooked, yet powerful icon of divine redemption; and that contemplating the vulnerability of Christs natality can cultivate the practice of peace in a vulnerable and
violent world.

The vulnerability of natal life: A truly human incarnation

This rst insight is more anthropological than christologicalthough the two are
certainly related. Recovering the nativity can serve to place both the tragic and
promising features of human vulnerability at the center of christological reection,
thus oering a deeper understanding of the human condition that God assumes in
the Incarnation. The nativitylocated within the context of human natality in
generalcan serve as a reminder that vulnerability, dependency, and exposure to
tragic suering are inevitable aspects of the human condition that both cry out for
healing and hold the promise of redemption.
Grace Jantzen is one feminist scholar who attempts to refocus the Western
Christian imaginary on natality in place of what she calls a necrophilic obsession
with death and other worlds. Jantzens critique of the Western imaginary points to
something that contemporary christologyincluding feminist and liberationist
5. See ibid., 27576.

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christologyhas overlooked: namely, the natality of the divine. In her view, it is

natality that actually forms the unacknowledged foundation of the Western obsession with death and the consequent drive for mastery. She therefore hopes that
natality can function as a transformative suggestion, a therapeutic symbol to
destabilize the masculinist necrophilic imaginary.6 Jantzen further hopes that
her construction of an imaginary of natality will open up new horizons for
womens becoming, which has its end in becoming divine. Jantzen relies heavily
on Hannah Arendt, who argues that natality, more than mortality, is central to our
existence and should be considered a primary category of thought. Natality is the
condition of human possibility, the foundation of freedombecause we are natals
we are free to do new things. However, Jantzen warns that our own beginning as
natals is always embodied and,
Thus the freedom of natality is not the putative freedom of a disembodied mind, a
mind made as free as possible from bodily shackles, as Plato would have it, but rather
a freedom that emerges from and takes place within bodily existence. The new things
that we can begin are begun out of our bodily and material existence, not ex nihilo.7

According to Jantzen, as natals, human beings possess the opportunity for a life of
embodied becoming, even becoming divine, in a world of nite, yet powerful
possibilities.
Jantzens focus on natality oers a perhaps unintended, helpful suggestion for
contemporary christology to take in its accounts of the Incarnation. To consider
Jesus rst and foremost as a natal, to reect on his birth, oers a powerful vision of
the possibilities embraced by divine love incarnate within the limitations of embodied human nitude. However, while Jantzen rightly employs natality as a touchstone for human becoming as embodied and nite creatures, she overlooks the
tragic vulnerability implicated in embodied natality. As the opening reections of
this article suggest, being born is risky business, threatened on all sides by death
and other dangers to the health and well-being of the pre- and postnatal body.
Failure to take the vulnerability of natal life into account unfortunately contributes
to the disembodied ethos that often characterizes the Western imaginary and the
Christian faith.
Unlike Jantzen, care ethicists and other feminist thinkers who study concrete
relationships of care and dependency argue that vulnerability is a universal and
inevitable characteristic of our embodied and relational existence in a nite world.
For example, moral philosopher Eva Feder Kittay (without using the language of
natality per se) asserts that the fact that all human beings are some mothers
child reveals the universality of dependency and, thus, vulnerability in human
life. Feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman similarly examines the motherchild
6. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University), 129.
7. Ibid., 145.

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relationship to posit that human life begins in a state of what she calls inevitable
dependency. Furthermore, many of us will [also] be dependent as we age,
become ill, or suer disabilities.8 Because dependency is an inevitable reality in
human life, especially in its early stages, Fineman also insists that vulnerability is a
universal dimension of human life.9 Neither Kittay nor Fineman use the abstract
philosophical language of natality that Jantzen does. Their focus on the early stages
of human life is far more concrete and practical, theorizing dependency and vulnerability in order to show how these universal human realities call forth a moral
response from caregivers, society, and the state. They remind us that we all come
from somewhere, that none of us got to where we are on our own, and that
unfettered autonomy is a myth. I take inspiration from their work to stress here
that as natals, we human beings are essentially vulnerable creaturesbecause we
are dependent on external forces for our survival and well-being, we are inevitably
vulnerable to harm. Certainly the degrees and the kinds of harm to which we are
vulnerable is a matter of social production. However, the body of work that Kittay
and Fineman represent oers a needed correction to Jantzens analysis of natality
(and this despite her insistence on respect for the limits of nitude): that the
becoming promised in human natality is dependent on external forces and is
thus constantly and from the very beginning faced with the threat of harm, of
pain, of suering, and ultimately, of death. Natality and mortality cannot be
separated.
Kittay and Fineman can help to keep us honest, then, about the truly human
condition that Christians profess God takes on in the Incarnation. When divine
love enters into the human condition in the Incarnation, there is no supernatural
exemption from the perils of existence. The vulnerability involved in conception,
gestation, delivery, and early survival of human life is quite mind-boggling when
one stops to think about it. There are seven billion of us now, and this makes
human reproduction look rather easy. But each persons particular existence is
terribly contingent on and vulnerable to forces beyond anyones control.
Contingency and vulnerability continue throughout human life, of course, but
they are mitigated by the possibility of personal agency (however limited and
threatened that may be). In contemporary christology, a nearly exclusive focus
on the divinity present in the agency of an adult male fails to drive home the
utter contingency and inevitability of vulnerability faced by divine love in the
Incarnation. When he was thirty years old, Jesus could have chosen to live a
quiet life in Nazareth. He could have chosen to give in to Satans temptations in
the desert; he could have used his charisma to gather an army of rebels to ght the
8. Martha Fineman, The Autonomy Myth: Towards A Theory of Dependency (New York: New Press,
2004), 35. See also Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth
Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 162, and The Vulnerable Subject and the
Responsive State, Emory Law Journal 60 (2011): 23.
9. See Fineman, The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State, 23ff. and The Vulnerable
Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition, in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
20.1 (2008): 910.

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Romans; or he could have begged Pilate for mercy, denying the accusations that led
to his crucixion. But rewinding the home video of Jesus life to his utterly dependent and vulnerable beginnings in the nativity removes any pretensions of uncomplicated divine (or human) autonomy in the Incarnation. No human being chooses
to be born, nor do we get to choose our early well-being (or lack thereof)that is
determined only in relationship with our DNA, maternal health, nutrition, social
networks, and access to assistance or intervention during a complicated childbirth.
In a truly human incarnation, there is risk involved, since divine love takes on
contingent, dependent, vulnerable esh.
On the other handreturning to Jantzens insightsnatality truly is the basis
for human becoming and, thus, for divine becoming in the Incarnation.
Vulnerability exposes us natals to great harm, but it is also the condition for the
powerful possibilities of connection, meaning, and virtue. It is into this context of
vulnerable human existence that God is born.

So mighty a wonder: The redemptive power of the nativity

This is the theological heart of the christological retrieval of natality proposed here:
anchoring christology in the nativity illustrates starkly and profoundly that the
supreme power of divinity is enacted most perfectly in what Nicholas of Cusa
calls the coincidence of oppositesthat is, the union of divine power with
human weakness, of divine invulnerability with created vulnerability.10 Human
beings tend to see God as a reality that must transcend human vulnerability in
order to save humanity from the limitations and suerings that the human
condition entails. Divine power is conceived as ultimately invulnerable to the
pain and conict experienced by embodied and relational creatures. But as the
introductory reections to this article suggest, Christians profess that in a cold
stall in Bethlehem, divine loves unalterable being entered the world as a
vulnerable child.
How can this be? How can it be that the invulnerable can at once become
vulnerable, that the divine can become human? Vulnerability is a hallmark of
human life and our attempts to live it well. We are plagued by suering in our
bodies and our minds from the moment we are born. Our bodies are subject to
hunger, cold, sickness, old age, desire, and death. Furthermore, our goodness
depends a great deal on external factors and can be shattered to pieces by one
hard blow. Because we see God as a reality that is above all of this, we look to God
as a rock to stabilize us and keep us safe from harmif not in body, then in spirit.
The Christian tradition holds that, in its primordial dimension, divine love is ultimately invulnerable to the pain and suering that we experience as embodied and
relational creatures. There is nothing that can alter or destroy this essential power.
But as Martha Nussbaum points out in her groundbreaking work, The Fragility of
10. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence
Bond (Mahwah, NJ; Paulist, 1997).

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Goodness, there are limits to divine power understood in this way (even when
reinterpreted as the invulnerability of love). Nussbaum argues that, in contrast
with Plato, Aristotle held that the unlimited perspective is not necessarily unlimited: Lack of limit is itself a limit.11 Far from innite and boundless, invulnerability cannot encompass all goodness because it lacks the fragility of human
goodness. As Kittay and Fineman remind us, human existence is inherently
dependent, contingent, and open to harm. Nussbaum adds to the weight of vulnerability that the good life is dependent on external goods and actually leads the
virtuous person into situations of increased vulnerability. There is a certain attractiveness to the Platonic attempt to close o ultimate risk in favor of the purity and
simplicity of stable value. However, human virtue is risky and whenever its ultimate
risk is closed o, a loss of value occurs. Love is inherently unstable. With Aristotle,
Nussbaum esteems a life of goodness that goes out to the world in love and openness. The safe life of stable and eternal value is not really a human life, for it
lacks the virtues only available in the realm of embodied and relational
vulnerability.
Based on Nussbaums Aristotelian critique, a strict reliance of the invulnerability of divine love is actually incomplete due to its own invulnerability to harm. The
unchanging, stable power that invulnerably maintains the ultimate dignity of
human nature is, in this sense, a limited power. Because it is invulnerable and
divine, it does not and, by denition, cannot really participate in the vulnerable
power of human love and human goodness. Deity conceived as only invulnerable
and only divine is curtailed in the innite power and goodness and love that divinity possesses because it is limited to the realm of invulnerable divinity and thus
precludes values and powers that are only available in the vulnerable realm of
humanity. How can divine redemption take place in the vulnerable domain of
human love without the power of human love itself? The genius of Christianity
is to answer this predicament with the doctrine of the Incarnation.
In the Incarnation, the invulnerability of divine love becomes vulnerable human
esh. In the vulnerable body and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians experience
the fullness of divinity at work for the redemption of the cosmos. God from God,
light from light, one in being with the invulnerable essence of divine loveJesus
responds to the problem of human vulnerability with living proof of the possibility
of bringing together the divine with the human, the innite with the nite, the
impassible with the passible, the immutable with the mutable, the invulnerable
with the vulnerable.
In his contemplation of the divine face, Nicholas of Cusa immerses himself in this
paradoxical mystery of love, which he calls the coincidence of opposites.
Addressing God as innity itself, Nicholas professes that there is nothing that is
other than or dierent from, or opposite you. For innity is incompatible with
otherness; for since it is innity, nothing exists outside it. Without being one
11. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1986), 342.

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particular thing, Absolute innity includes and embraces all things.12 Here we nd
a very dierent approach to innity from Aristotle and Nussbaum. If divinity is truly
innity, then it must include the nite and its invulnerability must nd a place for
vulnerability. In contemplating this coincidence of opposites, Nicholas avers, it is
necessary to enter the cloud of impossibility and recognize that the more this cloud
seems obscure and impossible, the more truly its necessity shines forth. The intellect
must become ignorant, abandoning reason in its pursuit of divine truth, which lies in
the seemingly obscure and impossible coincidence of opposites13:
I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled is girded about with the
coincidence of contradictories. This is the wall of paradise, and it is there in paradise
that you reside. The walls gate is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and unless it
is overpowered, the way in will not lie open. Thus, it is on the other side of the coincidence of contradictories that you will be able to be seen and nowhere on this side.14

Within the wall of paradise, where the impossible is possible, Nicholas

encountered Jesusequally divine and human, innite and nite, invulnerable
and vulnerable.15
Centuries earlier Gregory of Nyssa made a similar point in The Great Catechism.
In his view, the loving mystery of divine omnipotence is most visibly and eectively
made apparent in the descent of divinity to the humiliation of humanity. It is
only by entering into the realm of human vulnerability, taking it on and becoming
one with it, that divine power manifests itself most fully as love:
That the omnipotent nature was capable of descending to mans lowly position is a
clearer evidence of power than great and supernatural miracles. For it somehow
accords with Gods nature, and is consistent with it, to do great and sublime things
by divine power. It does not startle us to hear it said that the whole creation, including
the invisible world, exists by Gods power, and is the realization of his will. But
descent to mans lowly position is a supreme example of powerof a power which
is not bounded by circumstances contrary to its nature.16

The grandeur of the heavens and all of the miracles in the world, which usually
function to override our vulnerability, are not very impressive at all because they
simply show the divine nature to be what we think it to be by denitiondivine.
What is much more impressive is the power of God to become that which God is
nothuman and thus vulnerable. In this same passage, Gregory uses the analogy
12. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God, 259, par. 55.
13. Ibid., 258, par. 53.
14. Ibid., 252, par. 37.
15. Ibid., 276, par. 276.
16. Gregory of Nyssa, Address on Religious Instruction, in Edward Rochie Hardy, ed., Christology
of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 300, par. 24.

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of re to demonstrate his point. When we see a ame burning in an upwards

direction, it is lovely, but not very impressive because that is what is naturally in
the power of a ame to do. Now imagine seeing a ame burning in the opposite
direction, downwards. That would be a marvelous sight to see! That a nature is
capable of taking on its opposite is powerful indeed. According to Gregory,
So it is with the incarnation. Gods transcendent power is not so much displayed in the
vastness of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the
universe or his perpetual oversight of it, as in his condescension to our weak nature.
We marvel at the way the sublime entered a state of lowliness and, while actually seen
in it, did not leave the heights. We marvel at the way the Godhead was entwined in
human nature and, while becoming man, did not cease to be God.17

In Gregorys view, it is this power that eects our redemption from the devil. In less
mythological terms, human beings are freed from the vicious hold that our vulnerabilities have on us by the power of divine compassion for and solidarity with our
condition.
Gregorys predecessor, Origen of Alexandria, argued for the greatness of divine
power in this same manner, but with a specic signicance attached to Christs
vulnerability as a newborn child. In his view, the kenosis of Christ in the vulnerable
events of the Incarnation and the cross is what actually reveals the greatness of the
godhead. The greatest and most marvelous truths about the divine nature are made
evident in the most wondrous and amazing fact of God becoming a particular
human being, Jesus. Moreover, that the wisdom of God, creator of heaven
and earth, could become a human baby, the paramount example of human vulnerability, is confounding indeed.
When, therefore, we consider these great and marvelous truths about the nature of the
Son of God, we are lost in the deepest amazement that such a being, towering high
above all, should have emptied himself of his majestic condition and become man
and dwelt among men.18

This kenosis of divine invulnerability in the humiliation of humanity begins with

the gestation and birth of the baby Jesus:
But of all the marvelous and splendid things about him there is one that utterly
transcends the limits of human wonder and is beyond the capacity of our weak
mortal intelligence to think of or understand, namely, how this mighty power of
the divine majesty, the very word of the Father, and the very wisdom of God, in
which were created all things visible and invisible, can be believed to have existed
17. Ibid., 301, par. 24.
18. Origen of Alexandria, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 109, ch. VI.1.

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within the compass of that man who appeared in Judea; yes, and how the wisdom of
God can have entered into a womans womb and been born as a little child and uttered
noises like those of crying children.19

The power at work here transcends the limits that the Greeks placed on divinity
and, thus, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baed, and struck
with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to
hold to, or whither to betake itself.20 The greatest display of divinity and the
power of divinity to save takes place in the union of invulnerable divinity with
its oppositevulnerable humanity, here characterized as a little child born of a
womans womb who utters noises like those of crying children. This is how the
persuasive power of Origens God worksby gently taking us by our weak and
suering hands and sitting and crying with us in our vulnerable condition.
The impossibility that Nussbaum encounters in divine invulnerability is
answered here, beyond the wall of paradise in the coincidence of opposites that
takes place in the Incarnation. Human life is most vulnerable at its beginnings: in
conception, gestation, childbirth, and early infancy. Again, the liberating good
news of divine Incarnation does not begin with Jesus public ministry as an
adult, nor with his shameful torture and death on the cross. Rather, it begins
with the pre- and postnatal body of a vulnerable and dependent infant.
Though we should not leave behind the cross as an image of divine power at
work in vulnerability, divine power present in the form of a human baby is a
compelling image of redemption within the vulnerable human condition.
Nativity (and the theme of natality that it evokes) is a sadly overlooked icon of
divine power. The image of the baby Jesus abounds during the Christmas season,
but very little reection takes place surrounding the incredibly marvelous import of
the idea that God Almighty became a little, tiny, wrinkly, red, squalling, pooping,
peeing, drooling, and desperately hungry human creature. Popular images of the
Christ child are usually robust and rosy-cheeked images of an older infant or
toddler. They are unbearably cute. A newborn baby is beautiful, but at the same
time really quite strange, ungainly and fragile looking. And she makes her needy
vulnerability vociferously known. As Origen, Gregory, and Nicholas all indicate,
divine power is most gloriously displayed in the coincidence of opposites. When we
conceive of divinity as that which is ultimately invulnerable to the suerings
and vicissitudes of human life, what could be more marvelous or powerful than
the incarnation of divinity in the gure of a dependent and defenseless newborn
child?

19. Ibid., ch. VI.2. Emphasis mine.

20. Ibid.

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To cradle Christs natal body: Practicing peace in a vulnerable

and violent world
Recovering a place for nativity in christology can serve as a reminder that divine
redemption in Christ does not begin with redressing social injustice and oppression
(though it must certainly include that). Rather, redemption begins with the willingnessboth human and divineto accept the basic natal condition of vulnerability in spite of its perils and because of its innite promise. The coincidence of
opposites that takes place in the incarnation is not simply awe-inspiring proof of a
divine power so great that it is able to encompass its opposite. Rather, the
Incarnation of the Christ is the manifestation of the coincidence of opposites as
the deepest truth about reality as a whole and about the place of human beings
within reality. The Incarnation reconciles the invulnerability of Being with the
vulnerability of human beings. The Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6), who was laid in
a cold manger and cried out for succor, is for Christians the one who grants the
power to make peace with the vulnerable nature of our lives.
The point of the Incarnation, then, is not to see the awesome power of divinity
and bow down to worship it. The point is to recognize and realize ourselves in it
and it in ourselves. While Christians see Jesus of Nazareth as a uniquely perfect
distillation of divine love incarnate, the Christian tradition equally holds that
Christs divine image is present in all human beings (Gen 1; Matt 25). The invulnerable divine image resides within vulnerable human beingsembodied, relational, and nite creatures who possess an innite desire for goodness, beauty,
and truth. As Nicholas of Cusa averred, In all faces the face of faces is seen
veiled and in enigma.21 The rst person of the Trinity is the loving God who
begets of Godself the second person, whom Nicholas calls the lovable God. All of
creation is taken up in this second person, the mediator through whom all things
exist and bring pleasure to the loving God.22 Human beings are united with the
loving God in and through their union with the lovable Godthe creatable,
cradled presence of God in the vulnerable world. There is a sense in which
divine love for creation makes the invulnerable God inherently vulnerable. When
we suer, God suers. This inherent vulnerability of divinity is expressed most
clearly in the Incarnation and nativity of Jesus. The baby Jesus, whose life began
in a pool of blood, who suckled at his mothers breast like any other human child,
represents divine power-in-vulnerability incarnate. But the sacramental imagination of the Christian tradition holds that God becomes vulnerable esh in all
children everywhere. Born of my own mothers womb, I too embody the perils
and promises of divine love in the esh. The three children that were born of my
body and have nursed at my breast are also the image of this vulnerable God. And
so too is every child born in this world. The coincidence of opposites takes place in
every nativity.
21. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God, 244, par. 21.
22. Ibid., 272, par. 83.

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The problem, however, is that human beings seek to escape the coincidence of
opposites through a ight to invulnerability alone. When vulnerability thwarts our
desire and causes us suering and harm, we often seek invulnerability through
violenceto ourselves or to others. Life inevitably involves suering and our
attempts to survive the brutality of it all often destroys us or turns us into destroyers. The Incarnation empowers human beings to embody vulnerability dierently: to follow the way of the Incarnation, to manifest the coincidence of
opposites, to make peace with the tragic nature of existence. That invulnerable
divine love became vulnerable grants human beings the courage and strength to
endure suering and resist injustice and violence peacefully, without recourse to
internal or external violence.
I conclude with the suggestion that the contemplative practice of cradling the
Christ-childs vulnerable body can contribute to both contemplative union with
God and a christocentric ethic of care. The transformation of both human sinfulness and the oppressive social structures that we inhabit will require that human
beings make peace withthat is, recognize and live within the limits ofour fundamentally nite and fragile human condition. Putting an end to the violation of
the vulnerable other will thus require an ability to cope with our own vulnerabilities. The baby Jesus is a quintessential icon of divine power-in-vulnerability.
Contemplating this iconin art, music, liturgy, imagination, theology, daily life,
in ourselves and in those around uscan help Christians to live more honestly and
peacefully with our own vulnerability, see the vulnerable other as image of Christ,
and respond to the vulnerabilities of others with greater reverence, peace, and
compassion.

Author biography
Elizabeth ODonnell Gandolfo completed her doctorate in theological studies with
the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. She teaches as an adjunct
instructor of religion at Furman University in Greenville, SC. She has published in
the International Journal of Practical Theology and Horizons.