ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a story of the annunciation to indicate how fact and fiction are not always wholly opposed; symbolic fiction can sometimes convey historical truth no less effectively than the bare factual record. To help focus the issue, it begins by setting the reader something of a challenge, and ask him or her to envisage the scene in their mind's eye. Contemporary Christians often worry when theologians tell them that parts of the biblical narrative are unlikely to be historically true. Of course, if the doubts are based on dogmatic disbelief in the possibility of miracle or incarnation, they have every reason for concern. Theologians and artists who then followed that precedent in inventing a kneeling angel had the right intuition: God in submitting himself to an incarnation not only makes us as human beings dependent on him but also, equally, him dependent on us; God's representative now kneels before representative humanity.
