Theology and An-Archy: Deep Incarnation Christology following Emmanuel Lévinas and the New Materialism

In this article, I explore deep incarnation Christology. I posit that many of these christological models offered today, while a welcome development in theology, are grounded in metaphysical anthropocentrism. Insofar as such theologies normalize the human and ground theology within a humanist, conceptualist horizon, the idea of divine infinity is circumscribed, and the human becomes divinized and self-positioned as a transcendent species. Likewise, such a framework, identifying God within strict, dogmatic boundaries, posits divinity as the alter ego of the human. To the contrary, I suggest that theology cannot be grounded within human intentionality. Although theology unfolds in representational thought, it is grounded instead in passivity, revealed outside of the subject’s time, in an an-archic past and a pure future, wherein divinity is encountered within but ultimately beyond human corporeity in affective encounters with cosmos and Earth. As such, the idea of infinity is grounded in a time and space beyond the beginning of human consciousness. Such a model invites us to consider a God who comes to mind from beyond an impassable chasm, and thus irreducible to the human imagination. Thus, while this article embraces the idea of deep incarnation, it reimagines the doctrine along lines that are different from what is prominent today.