De-Incarnation

The Protestant Error

From an Orthodox perspective, the Protestant Reformers made many errors. But I believe most (if not all) of them can be categorized under the following heading: de-incarnation. My claim is not that Protestants deny the Incarnation. It is important to distinguish between a worldview as a whole and its errors. 

What I mean by “de-incarnation” is that Protestant theology divides man and God in a manner that contradicts the implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation (implications which the Fathers and theologians of the Church have drawn out). This “splitting” of God and man is, I suggest, the essential Protestant error and can be discerned in nearly every one of their doctrines that contradict the Orthodox view (the consistency of this pattern is quite remarkable and is the strongest proof that this diagnosis of Protestant theology is correct). The result of this de-incarnational split is the denigration of man. The following quote is often misattributed to Martin Luther, but I think the fact that it’s been misattributed to him is telling: “[justified man is a] snow-covered dunghill.”

The Reformation split God and man and reacted to this split by focusing entirely on God to the detriment of man (as “man” was seen as the enemy of God, as we will discuss below). In the Enlightenment, we see this dialectic swing to the opposite side: God and man have been separated, but instead of a full embrace of “God alone,” we get the embrace of “man alone.” 

I use the term “de-incarnation” not because faithful Protestants deny that God became man in the person of Christ but because the doctrine of the Incarnation has always been inseparable from the practices and doctrines of the Church which the Reformers rejected as manifestations of man’s pride and idolatry. The reason why Orthodox and Catholic Christians pray to saints, venerate icons, and understand our justification to consist of our internal transformation is inseparable from the fact of the Incarnation. Of course, the term “Incarnation” refers most directly to that event wherein the Holy Spirit descended upon the Virgin Mary. But the Church has always understood this event to extend beyond this historical moment to include the “christification” of the whole cosmos, the transformation of the universe into the body of Christ. While I do not claim that Protestants deny this eschatological transformation, I believe that their doctrines either implicitly or explicitly contradict the implications of a genuinely incarnational worldview. One clear example of the Protestant denigration of man (which, once again, I consider a symptom of the “splitting” of God and man) is found in the doctrine of “imputed righteousness.” 

In Orthodox Christian theology, salvation consists of our participation within the incarnate Christ and our “adoption” as sons and daughters of the Father through our union with the eternal Son. This “participatory” understanding applies to both the beginning and the end of our salvation; we are both originally “justified” and subsequently “sanctified” through our reception of the infinite riches of Christ, through which God truly becomes interior to us. Because the Father is always “pleased” with the Son, our transformation into the Son’s likeness makes us pleasing to the Father. We can understand this as the “infusion” of Christ’s “righteousness” within us, while the typical Protestant view is that of “imputed” righteousness. In the latter view, our justification does not consist of our internal transformation into the righteousness of Christ but of the Father’s “accrediting” to us of the Son’s entirely alien or external righteousness so that we are judged not by our own works but on the basis of Christ’s works which are “counted” as our own. For virtually every major strand of Protestant theology, the righteousness of Christ is understood to be accredited to us through “faith alone.” Question 60 of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) asks, “How are you righteous before God?”:

“Only by true faith in Jesus Christ. Even though my conscience accuses me of having grievously sinned against all God’s commandments, of never having kept any of them and of still being inclined toward all evil, nevertheless, without any merit of my own, out of sheer grace, God grants and credits to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never sinned nor been a sinner, and as if I had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me. All I need to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.”

As opposed to the grace of God transforming us into the likeness of Christ from within–destroying our sins through our death and resurrection in Christ (which occurs definitively in baptism)–Protestant theology typically sees the grace of God as merely “covering over” our sins at the moment of our justification. The activities of Christ remain entirely external to us and are simply “counted” (by the Father) as if they were our own. 

The same denigration of man is evident in the Lutheran understanding of God’s monergistic predestination of the elect.