Irenaeus on the Incarnation: "The Flesh Is Not to Be Excluded"

I really like the epigraph from St. Irenaeus (by way of Scott Cairns) Barbara Brown Taylor chooses for her book An Altar in the World (NY: HarperCollins, 2010).  The book's theme is that if we hope to find God anywhere at all in the world, our goal must be to become "more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world" (p. xvii).

Irenaeus says,

The tender flesh itself

     will be found one day

     --quite surprisingly--

     to be capable of receiving,

and yes, full

     capable of embracing

the searing energies of God.

     Go figure.  Fear not.

For even at its beginning

     the humble clay received

God's art, whereby

     one part became the eye,

another the ear, and yet

     another this impetuous hand.

Therefore, the flesh

     is not to be excluded

from the wisdom and the power

     that now and ever animates 

all things.  His life-giving 

     agency is made perfect,

we are told, in weakness--

     made perfect in the flesh.  

(Irenaeus per Scott Cairn, Love's Immensity [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007], pp. 5-6)

Insights like this, or Irenaeus's observation that the glory of God is humanity fully alive, ground Christianity.  They're the vital, living root from which Christian faith grows, when it's true to its origins.

One of the grand ironies--even more: grand tragedies--of the period of Christian history through which we have been living in recent years, and through which we continue to live, is this: the very groups within the Christian churches who claim to be saving orthodox faith from its detractors are significantly departing from it through their heretical obsession to prove such non-grounding aspects of Christian tradition as the claim that gay and lesbian human beings have no place in God's plan of salvation.

Heresy: picking and choosing between those foundational aspects of Christian faith with which we intend to live.  One cannot affirm the incarnation--the belief that God took human flesh to show us that the way to God is to become fully human, to live as fully as possible the real lives that God has given us in the real world--if one denies the full humanity of any segment of the human population.

As Nicole Sotelo notes, one of the orthodox-savior groups within American Catholicism, the Knights of Columbus, do in a pamphlet they distribute to explain to people what real Catholics believe: their pamphlet informs Catholics and others, 

... The only genuinely [sic] sexual orientation is heterosexual. ... There are no homosexuals but only heterosexuals with a homosexual problem.

There are no homosexuals.  This heretical pamphlet has erased from the human community a part of God's creation.  In the name of explaining Catholicism to Catholics and others, it distorts one of the most fundamental of all Christian proclamations: that God took flesh, all flesh, in order to fill all human flesh of every sort whatsoever with divine energy.  

(The Knights equally debase truly orthodox Catholic notions of the full humanity of women, Sotelo points out, with another pamphlet which maintains, 

[T]the key feature of femininity [is] receptivity ... to accept and affirm everything simply as it is. This is contrasted with the masculine soul, which reflects God's creativity, and which has been fashioned to take initiative -- to 'make' and to 'do.'" 

Women are half-human receptacles designed to accept and affirm.  To be objects in a world in which men are subjects.  To accept and affirm what males, who reflect God's creativity, choose to place in those receptacles designed to accept and affirm.)

Heresy.  Picking and choosing between the centermost affirmations that ground Christian faith, of which perhaps the most central of all is the affirmation that God's life-giving agency in the world is made perfect in the flesh--in all flesh.  In female flesh as well as male flesh; in homosexual flesh along with heterosexual flesh.

It is impossible to affirm this centermost doctrine of Christian faith when we pick and choose among types of human flesh, designating some as made in God's image and other flesh as defective and incapable of mirroring God or sustaining and communicating the divine creative energies.

To the extent that the churches of this period of history continue to permit themselves to be captive to self-professed saviors of orthodoxy who combat and obscure these foundational insights of the Christian tradition in the name of preserving orthodoxy, they have fallen into heresy--precisely in those areas in which the saviors of orthodoxy are most vocal about their mission to defend orthodoxy: in areas having to do with gender and sexual orientation, with the full humanity (and full human rights) of gay and lesbian human beings and women.