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Good convo in the replies reminds me more nuance is due: 'incarnational' can be used to affirm bodily co-presence, embodiment, place, seeking God or Christ in others, as others have pointed out. And there's something profoundly futile in seeking a pure theological discourse. 1/ https://twitter.com/benfulford1/status/1312281884320313344
At the same time, all theological discourse needs care and alertness to what we may be doing with it, without realising it. The association of 'incarnational' & 'incarnation' is pretty salient in many Xn contexts, I think. That link is a source of huge semiotic potential... 2/
Which can be realised in various ways depending on the use, and also on the persons construing that use in a given context. It can, for e.g., vaguely (in a good way) link the value of embodiment, bodily co-presence, place, to the valuing of those things by God in Christ. 2/
That's the force of a usage which might also be made by appeal to other doctrines like creation, though the point is a distinct one.
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But the Christological association of 'incarnational' and 'incarnation' also lends itself and is used to talk liken the act of a ministerial or missional agent to the divine Word assuming human life as Jesus of Nazareth. And that I think is problematic in at least 2 ways... 4/
Before I get on to those it's worth stressing the analogy being made. It's not simply to the imitation of Jesus Christ; it's the imitation of or analogy with the divine Word or Son (or Sophia for that matter) becoming human. That makes a big difference imo. 5/
Bc in that analogy, the person doing mission or ministry is invited to imagine themselves as having occupied an initial position of comprehensive vision, uninhibited freedom and untainted goodness wrt their ministry, unfettered by context, untrammelled by history, weightless, 6/
initially invulnerable, unimpaired in agency, and unmarked in terms of social identity. And it invites them to imagine themselves as other in just these ways to those to whom they are sent, and so to imagine them as the contrast to all these characteristics: 7/
