This advent and Christmas season we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Incarnation literally denotes enfleshment. The eternal Son of God assumed humanity as a babe in Bethlehem in order to grow to adulthood and die for the sins of the world.

This death and subsequent resurrection, the source of our salvation, presuppose incarnation. Without incarnation, there can be no salvation.

Excarnation

The opposite of incarnation is excarnation, a word coined by philosopher Charles Taylor to describe the modern inclination to limit all the significant issues of reality to the mind. The body and material world are simply vehicles for reason and imagination.

Excarnation is indebted to ancient Gnosticism, the first and most dangerous Christian heresy that afflicts the church and culture down to this very day. While the Bible located the world’s ills in human sin, Gnosticism blamed them on creation itself.

According to Gnostic mythology, an ignorant, malign deity called the Demiurge broke from the true God and created matter, including the human body, contrary to God’s desire. The true God tried to foil the Demiurge by covertly inserting sparks of divinity into the human bodies. To the Gnostics, the fall of man is not from righteousness into sin, but from spirit into matter, and salvation is escape from the body and reversion to pure spirit. This means the human body and the material world are a prison from which the enlightened must escape. Jesus, according to the Gnostics, came not to save from sin, but to deliver from ignorance and impart knowledge, which in the Greek is called gnosis, by which the illuminated learn of their true, excarnated destiny.

For Christians, man is rescued by God’s Son becoming man in assuming, and dying and rising in, a true human body. For Gnostics, man is rescued by escaping from this body, after which the divine spark is released to return to the heavenlies: man becomes God and excarnation is the process of man’s salvation. But this heresy is the antithesis of biblical orthodoxy.

Excarnation in Culture

Excarnation is increasingly a guiding tenet of Western elites, yet there is nothing Christian about this philosophy.

The Bible teaches that God’s norms are interwoven in the cosmos. These include gravity and thermodynamics. They include economic laws of scarce resources. Moreover, they include his norms for human sexuality. Today’s elites do not simply wish to rebel against these laws. They want to circumvent and then abolish them. They believe the only way to do this is to bypass reality itself. Their vision of the good society is one in which all people are equal in condition, and the “marginalized” are resituated as the apex of culture.

If this means redefining reality, so be it. If the human body as biologically male or female is an impediment to human imagination, sex “reassignment” surgery is an option. If some humans are smarter, better looking, stronger, or more clever than others, laws must be imposed that penalize their giftedness and reduce them to the level of their inferiors.

Eventually, this means their gifts must be eliminated to create true equality. If women are naturally superior nurturers and men naturally superior soldiers, men must nurture babies and women must serve in combat. Television and movies must depict petite women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular male warriors. The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it is the reality-bending social vision that matters. The body forbids the exercise of the rebellious imagination, so the body must be circumvented and, if necessary, abandoned.

Reality does not conform to this elite vision of society, so reality to them is irrelevant. The excarnation paradigm sees the body simply as a vehicle for the person, otherwise known as the “authentic self.” The person is seen as inside the body, the “ghost in the machine.” The body is seen as an automobile that carts us around. There is a disjunction between the authentic, self-aware person, and his body. The body is simply a tool, like a screwdriver or a fork.

This view of man has momentous implications. For one, it means that if the self is not fully developed, the body is not important, implying there should be no barrier to abortion and euthanasia and mercy killing. After all, in this system the self is important, not the body.

If there is no authentic self, or person on the inside, the body to them is disposable. This is the grim price we pay as a society for implementing the excarnation vision.

Excarnation in the Church

The Bible does not exalt spirit over matter since Jesus is Lord of the invisible and visible world (Colossians 1:15-17). Yet ever since pagan Greek ideas about the inferiority of the material world infected Christianity, the church has battled with excarnation.

Even as the church prays “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), many Christians view the world outside the church, such as economics, politics, entertainment, education, and architecture, as inescapably “carnal” and unfit for Christian influence. The church retreats to an excarnated spirituality where prayer, inner dialogue, and contemplation of heaven are considered spiritual, while working to recriminalize abortion, delegitimize so-called same-sex marriage, combat pornography, and reduce confiscatory taxation are relatively unimportant and, in fact, a diversion from the church’s real, excarnated tasks.

Escape from evil within the created order rather than confrontation with and victory over it is the excarnational agenda. In the words of Stephen Perks, Christianity is reduced to a “personal devotional hobby.”

But advent stares us unflinchingly in the face with the truth that the present world, immaterial and material, is cursed by sin and will be redeemed by our Lord. The most evil being in the universe is pure spirit, but Jesus was born, and lived and died, and rose from the dead, and lives forever in a body. He is profoundly interested in the world, including the material world. He came healing the sick and exorcising demons from tortured bodies. To trust in the Messiah for salvation is to surrender oneself mind, soul, and body to him (Romans 12:1-2).

Jesus is as interested in purging sin from gangsta rap, abortion clinics, fraudulent bond-rating agencies, and Bauhaus architecture as he is from Christian hearts, families, and churches. The power of the gospel not only takes souls to heaven, but transforms everything it touches.

Conclusion

This advent season, relish the incarnational life and dismiss the excarnational vision. The body and the material world are not designed for our escape but for joy and victory. Jesus is Lord of all, and a God unashamed to be born into a barn amid farm animals is unashamed to care for and redeem every area of creation presently under the dominion of sin.

Christmas is a celebration of bodily incarnation that made possible atoning bodily death and victorious bodily resurrection. Our future hope is not excarnation in a false medieval vision of angel babes and halos in heaven, but of the new heaven descended to a new earth purged from sin (Revelation 21:1-4), where God will dwell with us his people on a material, but sinless, earth.

This article was originally published on P. Andrew Sandlin's CultureChange Substack.