I recently attended a stimulating lecture by Dr. David Clough (University of Chester), who is working on a project on "animalist" theology. The lecture dealt with Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, and was titled 'God became an animal: An exploration of a more-than-human account of the incarnation in dialogue with Karl Barth.'The thrust of this piece is a critique of Barth's emphasis on the humanness (read: species homo sapiens) of Jesus (as subject of the incarnation, as object of election, as covenant partner, and as representative of those who are / that which is redeemed) rather than on the creatureliness of Jesus, which Clough suggests is more theologically robust.
I apologize for not shuffling through my notes and really doing justice to the full content of the paper, but I do want to make one critical comment. I agree that Barth (and most Protestant theology that follows him) doesn't give enough attention to the sense in which God's entire creation is treated as a covenant partner (Gen. 8-9) and is the object of Christ's redemptive work. Barth focuses on the human problem, which I think gets us 95 percent of the way there. But clearly, Scripture says more (cf. Rom. 8:19-23).
There must be a way for Christian theology to not only take ecological issues seriously, but to maintain a robust doctrine of creation as an object of God's intention (or, dare we say, God's love?) while at the same time not losing sight of the primacy of the human person, vis-a-vis election, creation, and redemption. To say that men and women are not given a primacy of place is, I think, not to read Scripture very carefully.
That's a bit of a side-rant, though. It's not what Clough is doing here. He offers an interesting take on reading Jesus' incarnation -- his becoming flesh -- as the taking up of the nature of an animal, not explicitly the nature of homo sapiens. The full significance of the incarnation is not that Jesus became a human being, any more than it is about him becoming male, or Jewish, or brunette. Clough wants to make the incarnation about the general creatureliness which the Word of God assumed. Again, without blurring out the significance of the human person in her relationship with God, this helps to turn our eyes to the broader sense in which the life and work of Christ is universally redemptive.
The issue I do take with Clough, however, is that from this starting point much of the paper is about re-writing the Church Dogmatics to better account for this "God became an animal." With modifications to Barth's doctrine of election (election includes God's intention for all of creation), Clough suggests, this refocus ripples out to the rest of the work and essentially leaves us with the Dogmatics that Barth should have written. But the fact is that it is not what Barth wrote, because it was not who Barth was. Perhaps if he lived in the twenty-first century and had different influences over his theological foci, he would have "done better" by our standards. But the project of adjusting the Dogmatics to contemporary theology is, in my view, a waste of time. Better to start afresh (even with a Barthian view) and try to read Scripture a little bit better.
Broadening one's view of the incarnation away from the particular and to more universal categories also loses sight of some of what Barth was on about. In the material I am reading now (IV/1), Barth insists that the Jewishness of Jesus' flesh is precisely the point:
There is one thing which we must emphasise especially. It is often overlooked in this context. It is not taken seriously or seriously enough. Yet from this one thing everything else, and particularly what we have just stressed, acquires its contour and colour, its definiteness and necessity. The Word did not simply become any "flesh," any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh. The Church's whole doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that this comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental. The New Testament witness to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, stands on the soil of the Old Testament and cannot be separated from it. (Church Dogmatics IV/1, 166)Clearly Barth had other reasons for stressing the Jewishness of the Mediator in post-World War II Europe. In part, he is preoccupied with establishing the unity of the one, single covenant and staving off Marcionite attitudes toward Judaism and the Old Testament as a Christian document. But his general point remains forceful for Clough's agenda, as well: Just as we must not make too much of the particularity of the incarnation (e.g. suggesting that Jesus came for Jews alone, or that his maleness was exclusionary of women), so also we must not write it off and speak of the incarnation only in the most generic of categories.
Jesus died for the world - the world of men and women first, and also for all of creation that is groaning for its own redemption. And he did this as a Jew, and as a human being.
