"All the world is God's, and God is in all the world from the very beginning.
Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation? one asks oneself, astonished.
God is in everything already, and yet there must be something missing if a sort
of second entrance into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and
circumspection. Since Creation is universal, reaching to the remotest stellar
galaxies, and since it has also made organic life infinitely variable and capable of
endless differentiation, we can hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that
Satan has everywhere intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable
for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is not easy to give
an answer to this question. One would like to say that Christ had to appear in
order to deliver mankind from evil. But when one considers that evil was
originally slipped into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would
seem much simpler if Yahweh would for once, call this "practical joker"
severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influence, and thus eliminate the
root of all evil. He would then not need the elaborate arrangement of a special
Incarnation with all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails."
"One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It
means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God. It means more
or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God.
At the time of the Creation he revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be
more specific and become man."
"It was only quite late that we realize (or rather, are beginning to realize) that
God is Reality itself and therefore - the last but not least - man. This realization
is a millenial process."
"All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so
doing he finds that God in his "oppositeness" has taken possession of him,
incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. We
rightly associate the idea of suffering with a state in which the opposites
violently collide with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful
experience as being "redeemed." Yet it cannot be denied that the great symbol
of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the
Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for
nearly two thousand years. This picture is completed by two thieves, one of
whom goes down to hell, the other to paradise. One could hardly imagine a
better representation of the "oppositeness" of the central Christian symbol. Why
this inevitable product of Christian psychology should signify redemption is
difficult to see, except that the conscious recognition of the opposites, painful
though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a definite feeling of
deliverance. It is on the one hand a deliverance from the distressing state of dull
and helpless unconsciousness, and on the other hand a growing awareness of
God's oppositeness, in which man can participate if he does not shrink from
being wounded by the dividing sword which is Christ. Only through the most
extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance
into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of
being marked out by God. In this way alone can the image of God realize itself
in him, and God become man...
...Because the image of God pervades the whole human sphere and makes
mankind its involuntary exponent, it is just possible that the
four-hundred-year-old schism in the Church and the present division of the
political world into two hostile camps are both expressions of the unrecognized
polarity of the dominant archetype."
Answer to Job