Today at St Philip's Bible talk, Michael Jensen, a lecturer at Moore College was the guest teacher.
His talk was on torture, and while I was unfortunately not able to stay until he had finished (he ran a little over time and I had to leave for another appointment), I did hear the meat of his talk, I think.
It was surprising that his opposition to torture derived from Christ as being the one who died for us, bodily. At one level his anthropology (theological) was right: we are embodied creatures, and the incarnation, Christ, does set a high significance on people; but the point of my surprise was that he didn't take us back to the creation account in Genesis where we learn that the physical body is important: made by the hand of God (formed from dust, directly, not indirectly or by an intermediary in deist fashion and given life by God Gen 2:7), made in his image (Gen 1:27).
In fact, on the point of 'intermediary' I think one of the thoughts to be brought to bear on the connection between God the father and us as his creation is that Christ is our mediator: can we extend the concept of mediator beyond salvation? I think that John 1:3 permits such an extension.
So, to interpose between the father and his creation anything but Christ is to reduce Christ; thus the loose set of linkages that disconnect the father and his creation, operating through such ideas as theistic-evolution, or long-gap creation (which is finally reduced to theistic-evolution at root) serve to add to the work of Christ in a crazy haphazard manner that in fact removes the connection: God moves further and further from us, and the direct linkages that the Holy Spirit is at pains to refer to at many points in the Bible. I think of the Lukan genealogy, for one; but would also refer to Hebrews 11:3, for instance. I would not be surprised if there are more passages that would serve this line of thinking.
It seems to me that Christ's incarnation is in the stream of God's having made us as embodied and spiritually enlivened: Christ, our creator then takes this on...that would be the reason for treating the person, embodied, as inviolate; to preserve and honour the dignity of god-imageness; this is the source of the significance that Michael saw, IMO.
That he appeared to avoid this pivotal point in our understanding of who we are before God, and the Bible's enunciation of it I think de-powered his talk and left us with a Christ, an incarnation, not grounded in the creation as the setting of and basic context of God entering his creation as a creature (in real terms, and not symbolic ones) but one with but symbolic power at best: that is, with less power than it actually has.
