ABSTRACT
Official church teachings still assume that a single individual on Earth is the unique incarnation of a singular divine being, even though this view is terracentric, anthropocentric, and androcentric. Saskia Wendel asks whether it is possible to speak of divine incarnation without this narrative of exceptionalism. She investigates the implications of such an assumption for an understanding of Jesus as the Body of Christ, as well as for the possibility of reusing this metaphor as a designation of an alternative idea of incarnation. Wendel understands both individual conscious life and the entire universe as God’s embodiment – in the sense of a manifestation, self-expression, and image of the divine as conscious life in the coincidence of the mental and the physical. Inspired by Nicholas of Cusa, Wendel assumes that the microcosm and the macrocosm, the divine and the creaturely come together in every human being, but possibly also in other finite forms of existence. She marks the shortcomings of the Body of Christ metaphor as designation of the universe as God’s embodiment. Instead, she proposes to speak of God’s universal incarnation and to understand Jesus of Nazareth as a special instance of this incarnation.
