What got healed?

From the perspective of the incarnation the answer is clear: it is the distortion of the fall and of human sin that lies behind this disruption or dichotomy between knowing and being, word and event, theology and history, and it is that very rupture in our human existence that God has come to heal in the incarnation. When the Word was made flesh, the rupture between our true being in communion with God and our physical existence in space and time was healed. It is precisely about this that the sacraments have so much to say in the unity of word and physical elements in the ordinances of baptism and eucharist. The sacraments are designed in the midst of our brokenness and dividedness to hold together in one, spirit and flesh, word and event, spiritual and material, until the new creation. Sacraments are thus the amen to the incarnation, the experienced counterpart to the Word made flesh. Here, then, in the Word made flesh we have truth in the form of personal being, truth in the form of concrete physical existence, truth indissolubly one with space and time, with historical and physical being. To demythologise the truth of its physical and temporal elements is to try to disrupt the incarnation, to attempt to tear apart the Word from the flesh assumed in Jesus Christ. Thus demythologisation belongs to the essential distortion of sin — the sin that brought about the dichotomy in us, that refuses to accept the limitations of our creatureliness in speech and language and in the thought forms of space and time, that wants to conceive the truth in some imaginary form of pure being instead of the form of human flesh which it has assumed once and for all in the incarnation. The relation of the kerygma to history belongs to the very essence of the Christian faith, for it is grounded in the unity of reconciliation and revelation in Iesus Christ, in his unity of word and act, person and work, in the union of true God and true man.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 296

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That ends our quick jaunt through Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. I hope you enjoyed it. Maybe someday I'll tackle the next volume, but first, let's read through Scot McKnight's The Audacity of Peace. I'll start that tomorrow and go back to one post per day for it, since it's a shorter book.
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