The Psychology of Christianity: Part 7, “Born of the Virgin Mary...”

When I searched the empirical literature for research concerning the Incarnation I found only a single study investigating how Christians experience the defining doctrine of their faith.

(This, if you’ve been following along, is a recurring theme. My survey of the psychological literature revealed huge and theologically significant gaps. What’s going on? More on this in a post to come.)

This lack of empirical attention regarding the Incarnation is odd as Christians display a great deal of diversity in how they reconcile, psychologically, the cognitive dissonance created by the confession that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. For example, theologians talk of a “high Christology” which leans toward the divine and a “low Christology” which leans toward the human. We also see what I’ve called “Incarnational ambivalence” in Christian anxieties when the humanity of Jesus is robustly portrayed in art, literature, theatre or film. Many Christians, it seems, struggle with the notion that Jesus fully participated in the human condition, particularly when the issues are metabolic (i.e., eating and excreting) or sexual.

This anxiety was vividly brought home to me a few years ago when I mentioned in a class at an event at my university (the ACU Lectureship) that we don’t like to think of Jesus as having ever suffered from something like diarrhea. Within a week of that class the ACU administration had a letter of complaint in their hands expressing outrage that I’d made such a suggestion. The author of the letter suggested that Jesus never would have experienced diarrhea because Jesus “would have healed himself.”

The letter startled me. It was stunning to see such theological contortions to avoid the full implication of the Incarnation.

But I have to admit the doctrine is scandalous, then and now. And many people, it seems, just don’t, when push comes to shove, have the stomach for it. (Pun intended?)

The one empirical study you can find regarding Incarnational ambivalence is one I published last year. The core notion behind that study was that death anxiety is implicated in anxiety about the body of Jesus. Existential psychologists have amply documented the fact that our physical bodies, in their neediness and vulnerability, create existential dread. I know this firsthand as I watch my hair turn grey, my bad back get weaker, and age spots appear on my hands.

So in my study I correlated death anxiety with discomfort with robust imaginings of the body of Jesus (yes, diarrhea was included). As expected, death anxiety predicted greater Incarnational ambivalence. It seems a sort of existential dread prompts many Christians to protect Jesus from “this mortal coil.” Which is somewhat ironic as full participation in the human condition is at the core of the doctrine of the Incarnation. All of which functions as an interesting case study in how psychological dynamics (existential dread in this case) can undermine good theology and creedal orthodoxy.