Threads of incarnation

I loved writing Wearing God in part because it allowed me to rove around archives (I use the term here broadly, to denote a far-reaching Christian repository—not, in other words, to denote libraries’ manuscript collections) from more or less every century of the Christian past. The biblical images for God that most (American?) churches today largely ignore were decidedly not ignored in earlier eras. I’d love to imagine that I’m doing something startlingly original in this book, but in fact, I’m mostly doing retrieval.  

For example: the book plays with the idea of—as the title suggests—wearing God, wearing Jesus; putting Jesus on. This is, of course, biblical language (Romans 13:14; Galatians 3:27), and it is theologically suggestive: it wants to take seriously the physicality or materiality of the relationship between the baptized person and Jesus in a way that many of us—especially, I think, many of us Protestants—have a hard time doing. The language of clothing, of wearing and being worn, threads throughout Christian theological reflection. 

It’s especially important for early Syriac writers, who were interested in how clothing could help say something about incarnation and redemption. St. Ephrem (who plays with figurative language, and epithets, for the divine more revealingly than just about anyone) put it this way: “All these changes did the Merciful One effect: Stripping of His glory and putting on a body; For He had devised a way to reclothe Adam, In that glory which Adam had stripped off.” Or here is Ephrem again, spelling out God’s wearing us and our wearing God: “Our body became your garment; your spirit became our robe.” Maybe the catechism of Theodore of Mopsuestia makes the theological work of the figure clearest: “For our salvation, He put on a man and dwelt in him.” So pondering these sartorial images is a deeply traditional exercise.