The Incarnation of Christ is presented as more than Christ’s descent into human life: it is a free identification with humanity in its most abject condition. In the book’s account, this identification makes divine love intelligible as love for human beings not despite their misery and materiality, but precisely there.

Competing Accounts of Christ

The Incarnation is set against two other ways of understanding Christ’s relation to humanity. In the Orthodox account described here, Christ’s elevation into a noble ideal risks making him a model to imitate: humanity is called to strive toward becoming God. The emphasis falls on likeness to an exalted figure, and Christ’s exceptional status gives way to an ideal image.

Catholic theology is characterized instead through symbolic exchange. Its scholastic arguments explain redemption in terms of Christ paying the price for human sins. The passage links this juridical logic to the possibility of reducing redemption to something purchasable from the Church, the outcome against which Martin Luther reacted.

Protestant Identification

The Protestant account makes the relation real rather than exemplary or transactional. In the act of Incarnation, Christ freely identifies with the excremental Real that the book uses to describe humanity’s miserable, bodily condition. The point is not that humanity rises to an ideal likeness of God, or that its redemption is settled through an exchange, but that Christ identifies himself with the very condition from which those accounts keep their distance.

This identification gives divine love its specifically Christian force in the passage. Love is directed toward the miserable human being as such: the human condition is not cleaned up, elevated, or exchanged away before it can become the object of love.

Theological Significance

The Incarnation thus reorganizes the meaning of both humanity and divine love. The abject condition of human beings is not merely a low starting point to be overcome through imitation, nor simply a liability to be paid off. It is the condition Christ freely takes upon himself. The passage’s sharp contrast among idealization, symbolic payment, and real identification makes the Incarnation the point at which love becomes inseparable from solidarity with human misery.