The Christian God took an action which weaves together the super-intention and the conscious object of desire we studied in Stage Four of McKee‘s eight stages of story in a very surprising way.
God himself enters
the story…
The Scriptures
reveal to us that in this particular drama, the characters are created for a
loving relationship with their author.This world, like
all good stories, vibrates in tune to its author’s heart. This fact
remains, despite the catastrophe of the fall, for the fall itself is part of
the story. The Scriptures flow with a verdurous life-force shunted from
the veins of the Almighty. But even this is not enough. The author of life
insists on entering his story, Hitchcock-like. Only his role is no cameo. When
God enters the story he takes up the central role, and suddenly it becomes
apparent that his role was central all along. And since this is the
archetype of all stories, it is fitting that in it, the author’s bone, flesh,
and blood are all, quite literally, laid bare. Anything else would be
anticlimactic.God Is the Author Who Enters His Story, By
Andrew Shanks, The Gospel Coalition, June 9, 2013
Christians call it “the Incarnation.”
But I propose, we call it…
The Empathetic
Incarnation
I’ll explain.
But first, bear with me if your unfamiliar with these big theological words I’m encountering in my research. We must take a look at the incarnation, to help us understand its impact.
So, here is an explanation of the Incarnation…
Question: “What is the meaning of the Incarnation of Christ?”
Answer: Incarnation is a term used by theologians to indicate that Jesus, the Son of God, took on human flesh. This is similar to the hypostatic union. The difference is that the hypostatic union explains how Jesus’ two natures are joined, and the Incarnation more specifically affirms His humanity.
The word incarnation means “the act of being made flesh.” It comes from the Latin version of John 1:14, which in English reads, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” Because of the near-exclusive use of the Latin Vulgate in the church through the Middle Ages, the Latin term became standard.
What is the meaning of the Incarnation of Christ?, Got Questions
Here’s J.I. Packer, the famous Christian scholar from Green Bay, Wisconsin, on the importance of the incarnation..…
The truth of the incarnation as given by the evangelists has been regarded by the Church as of so vital a character that the whole Christian scheme has been staked upon it. It has been the doctrine of a standing or falling Christianity.
J. I. Packer, in The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works, By Fritz Eichenberg
Will you suspend disbelief with me for a bit? Knowing story like I know story this incarnation stuff fits with one of the most important elements of a protagonist in a story that works.
So, let’s try this on for size–
By taking on human flesh, Jesus became an empathetic protagonist in the story.
If that doesn’t sound amazing to you, it may be because in story terms, what it means to be empathetic may not be what you think. Let’s look again what McKee writes about the compelling nature of having an empathetic protagonist…
The PROTAGONIST must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic.
Sympathetic means likable. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, for example, or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their typical roles: The moment they step on screen, we like them. We’d want them as friends, family members, or lovers. They have an innate likability and evoke sympathy. Empathy, however, is a more profound response.
Robert McKee, Story
Empathetic means “like me.” Deep within the protagonist the audience recognizes a certain shared humanity. Character and audience are not alike in every fashion, of course; they may share only a single quality. But there’s something about the character that strikes a chord. In the moment of recognition, the audience suddenly and instinctively wants the protagonist to achieve whatever it is that he desires.
How about that? Can you see why this incarnation stuff catches my attention? This Christian God suddenly becomes “like me”, taking a form in the story that “strikes a chord” as we recognize “a certain shared humanity”.
Before I turn to the question of the controlling idea in the Christian story, I have more material I’m compelled to include, since this incarnation stuff is such a wild idea to me.
So, when God the Son came to earth, he actually became a man — he was “fully God and fully man.”
Empathy, then…
The Incarnation, it was said, is an act of identification and sharing. God saves us by identifying himself with us, by knowing our human experience from the inside. The Cross signifies, in the most stark and uncompromising manner, that this act of sharing is carried to the utmost limits. God incarnate enters into all our experience. Jesus Christ our companion shares not only in the fullness of human life but also in the fullness of human death. “Surely he has home our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4) — all our griefs, all our sorrows. “The unassumed is unhealed”: but Christ our healer has assumed into himself everything, even death.
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
…like us.
And notice the interesting “empathetic” language
used to describe the incarnation in the following New Testament passage…
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
That ‘likeness’ language sounds familiar, doesn’t
it? It connects to the ‘image and likeness’ stuff we explored related
to the balance in the story.
So, while Jesus was born in the “likeness of men”, he also is the image of the “invisible” God…
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
This passage tells us a lot about Jesus…
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
This Jesus is an image bearer, like us…
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
…but without any of the faults that came after the inciting incident.
And the following material is connected to the Incarnation…
God is in love with the human race and the story of the Bible is the story of this great love. In ways that puzzle theologians, simple Christians and even angels, God’s purpose embraces the race as human, with all of its attendant weakness and sin. The ultimate expression of this is the crown jewel of Christian orthodoxy: God himself has become eternally human in order to bring the fallen human race back to the creation, back to itself, and back to him! And a subtext to this great meta-narrative is that God has chosen human beings to be his assistants in this work—as ministers of the Word.
Classical Pastoral Practice for Today: Let’s Be Human!, by Thomas N. Smith, Reformation and Revival, (Summer 2003)
…Jesus restores the balance, bringing humans back to himself.
And the incarnation brought enormous change in the history of the world…
The story of the Incarnation has informed and inspired humankind for centuries. It was not a noble lie; it was the noble truth. It was the single greatest life to change the history of the world. At His birth, shepherds who raised sheep for the slaughter at Passover came face-to-face with the perfect Lamb. Born into the household of a carpenter, the very framer of the universe entered history. Offered gifts from rulers from afar, He Himself was the greatest gift of all — the King of kings and Lord of lords. All the power of Rome tried to stop Him. He came to free the captives. He came to announce liberty to an enslaved world.
Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Secular Gods
Jesus, again, is “like us”/empathetic…
Baffled that we are not the authors of our own stories, we find to our surprise that, rather than trivializing our lives, the triune terms of this particular story enlarge us, even as they tie us to a particular place and time…. [The incarnation] makes it possible for us to take our own history seriously, even to receive ourselves and others as actors in a temporal drama in which God is not far away but, rather, is as close as the plot and narrative that he unfolds and brings to completion.
The Significance of the Doctrine of the Trinity for the Life of the Local Congregation, Thomas W. Currie III, Insights 111 (1995)
The importance of the incarnation in the Christian story can hardly be exaggerated…
The doctrine of the Incarnation is indeed a scandal, not to say improbable, to the modern mind that does not yet grasp the immensity of the concept or the enormity of its impact on all that would follow from it throughout history from that first Christmas to this one.
That the eternal God should deign to co-mingle in time and space with humanity does tell us something, not about the ‘smallness’ of God, but about the inestimable dignity of the human person who is created in the image of the Lord of History. Thus it tells us about the importance of human history to eternity; of the relation of the visible world to the invisible one; and of the way the mortal life we each live here and now determines our immortal destiny.
This season, which pulsates with nostalgia, memory, sadness as well as with a deep and abiding sense of profound joy and human meaning – and does it all at once – is a season prompted by the very Incarnation of God’s Love, a love that goes beyond words, but rather is a Word – the Logos – that became flesh.
The ‘Small’ God Who Brought Heaven Down to Earth, by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, Acton Institute, December 22, 2010
And the incarnation is unique to Christianity…
We answer that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation, the word made flesh. It is God revealed in man. …. But unless there were some human element in the Deity, he could not reveal himself in a human life. The doctrine of the incarnation, therefore, repeats the Mosaic statement that “man was made in the image of God.” Jewish and Mohammedan monotheism separate God entirely from the world. Philosophic monotheism, in our day, separates God from man, teaching that there is nothing in common between the two by which God can be mediated, and so makes him wholly incomprehensible. Christianity gives us Emmanuel, God with us, equally removed from the stern despotic omnipotence of the Semitic monotheism and the finite and imperfect humanities of Olympus.
James Freeman Clarke, “Ten Great Religions—An Essay in Comparative Theology”
Making Jesus a unique empathetic hero…
The Incarnation gives answers to five great questions. First, what is God really like? John answered, “The Word became flesh.” The Incarnation lifts the veil of people’s uncertainty about God. This is revelation at its clearest.
Second, does God know and understand the human plight? John’s answer is that the Word “dwelt among us.” He identified with humanity, particularly in their weakness and suffering. No religion has the concept of God sharing humanity’s struggle with them. “He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was the man, He played the man.”
Third, does God really care? The fact that He “became flesh” answers this question. Believers are reconciled through the incarnate One who was “full of grace and truth.”
The Incarnation of the Word: John 1:14a, David J. MacLeod, Bibliotheca Sacra, January 2004
…and making us all equal…
The doctrine of the incarnation lay at the heart of Christian egalitarianism. The deity was no longer remote and awe-inspiring, like the Jewish Yahweh was. God was within us and “us” meant all of us.
We Shouldn’t Forget Liberalism’s Religious Roots, by David Marquand, The New Republic, September 19, 2014
Because people are made in the image and likeness of God, when Jesus then takes on human nature to become both fully God and fully man, he plays a fascinating connecting role between God and man…
As a filmmaker, there is no greater satisfaction for me than when an audience member says, “that character in your story? That is me.” It means we have contact; an electric current is complete.
A beautiful example of this from the Christian faith is the scripture that Sunday school children love to memorize: Jesus wept. The virility of two sacred words, found in St. John’s account of the gospel (11:35), tells a remarkable story of the God who suffers because his creation suffers. Jesus grieved with his friends, even though he knew that he could alleviate their pain (and did). Embedded here, in these two words, is an insight into the mystery of the mind of Christ, and they tell of a God like no other—whose love is so invested, so one-with, that our heartbreaks are his. No wonder he wishes us to share with us his reconciling narrative. He means for us to commit as wholly as he has: love, we are told, in the commandments that are empowered by the resurrection, with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind.
Think of story as a conduit for love, as wiring is to electricity. If every human being is made in the image of God, then stories can connect us in a place more elemental than culture, gender, ethnicity, religious conviction, or age. They open a channel for love to flow to the Lord your God and to your neighbor and back again to yourself, completing the connection between all three.
To Have the Mind of Christ? Start by Telling Stories, By Lauralee Farrer, Fuller Studio
According the Christians, our lives take on a whole new meaning because of the empathetic incarnation…
In the appearance of this author within his own story, all of the other minor roles foreshadow and echo his critical one. In that grand denouement which is the incarnation, all other lives suddenly take on a whole new meaning and importance. In addition to their contribution to the story within their own plot arches, each individual life becomes a living echo of the story’s main character, Jesus Christ. A whole discipline of theology, known as typology, is devoted to locating these echoes in the Bible.
God Is the Author Who Enters His Story, By Andrew Shanks, The Gospel Coalition, June 9, 2013
So, again according to the Christians, when God the Father sent God the Son to earth, it was an act of revealing himself to human beings — with a very relational point to it…
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Once again, then, the Christian God is the empathetic protagonist…
…which, according to the Christian story, makes us humans deeply connected with him.
The Controlling Idea
Now let’s look next at how the empathetic incarnation in the Christian story fits with the controlling idea.
Here is how Shawn Coyne explains the controlling
idea…
That’s a really interesting theme but technically, the controlling idea is an expression. It’s a formulated sentence so what you have to do is put in the value that’s at stake in the story and explain how it has changed. So in this case and in the traditional controlling idea, generic controlling idea for the thriller is that hero sacrificed themselves, tyranny, justice prevails when heroes sacrifice themselves for the good of everyone else.
Shawn Coyne, in The Foolscap Story Grid, by Tim Grahl
And here is some of what Robert McKee says about the
“controlling idea” …
Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax.
….
What Is Your Story’s Meaning?, Robert McKee Email
Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax.
….
A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.
….
The Controlling Idea is the purest form of a story’s meaning, the how and why of change, the vision of life the audience members carry away into their lives.
Robert McKee, Story
Now consider this from Coyne, which connects the
controlling idea to change…
The other thing about a controlling idea and the theme is that you have to have in one sentence the cause of the change.
….
Remember when I said that your controlling idea or your theme has to convey change?
Beginnings Differ from Endings, by Shawn Coyne
Some have called the Controlling Idea a “Logline”…
Ben Montgomery, the terrific reporter/writer for the Tampa Bay Times, uses loglines for his long narratives. “Early in the reporting,” he told me, “I think: ‘If I had to pitch this story in two sentences, what would I say? What is the central idea, or driving question, that would pull readers through the story?’ It helps bring my stories into sharper focus. Then, when it comes to writing, I take that logline and try to wrap every fact around it, like stripes on a barber pole.”
….
I love his analogy, “like stripes on a barber pole.” That’s what creating a logline allows you to do: stay on or close to the one true path, the line that runs through your story in its best, strongest form.
Want to write great narrative? Study screenwriting. By John Capouya, NiemanStoryboard, March 14, 2014
Since story is about change, then what if these two passages — which both are about massive, climactic change — may be somehow combined to express the controlling idea in the story in the Bible…
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Okay, I’m a sucker for a story challenge…so, here’s a lame try to construct a Controlling Idea for the Christian story:
Loyal love triumphs when Jesus willingly lays down his life for mankind.
If you have any interest in giving the Controlling Idea for the Christian story a shot yourself, McKee has a whole section for you to study in his book Story.
Anyway, now that we have taken a shot at the controlling idea, let’s fill out the idea even more with material that shows the role which the empathetic incarnation played in the story…
The Incarnation, then, is God’s supreme act of deliverance, restoring us to communion with himself.
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
Here’s a very interesting look, written long ago, at the incarnation from the inciting incident forward…
The story of man’s failure and the consequences is too well known to be here described. He sinned by disobeying God, and he thereby brought the curse of God upon the whole human race. God was now faced with the problem of just how to save the fallen race of man and at the same time maintain His justice and His holiness. His problem was, to speak the words of Romans 3:26, ”…that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”
To say that the Incarnation is the solution of this problem is simple, but to explain just how this act could solve the problem is a more difficult task. Perhaps the full import of this can never be seen until we possess clearer vision than we have at present, but one can at least get a faint glimpse of the reason.
When sin gained its entrance into the world, it not only affected man but also had its effects on God. His love for the work of His creation could not find its complete satisfaction if all His creatures were instantly blotted out of existence. Nor could His justice be satisfied if He saved men apart from a just payment for the wrong sin had wrought. Some go so far as to say sin caused a disruption between these two attributes, but this seems to me hardly plausible. Both His love and His justice are infinite and one must not think of the love coming to the rescue of the justice nor can the justice be said to come to the rescue of the love. It was the death of Christ on the cross, made possible by the Incarnation, that satisfied God in every respect.
The Seven-fold Purpose of the Incarnation, By Howard C. Zabriskie, Bibliotheca Sacra, January 1939
Empathy is powerful stuff…
Still another reason why the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us is this: Nothing so appeals to the human heart as does unselfish sacrifice for others. The story of a mother’s sacrificial love for her children always melts the heart. Altruistic love is the most winsome and touching quality of which men know anything.
The Incarnation Of The Son Of God, By Leander S. Keyser, Bibliotheca Sacra, July 1928
The Christian God’s loyal love for mankind is what motivated him to give his son…
Christology is committed to exploring the deepest mystery which consists in the act of incarnation. God the Father so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to the world in order to bring salvation and redemption to the world. So it is no surprise to discover as we read the Gospels that the love of the Man, Jesus (the Incarnate Son), for man is the most poignant mark of His earthly life. And this love is the very love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father.
Truly Man, But More Than Man: Reflections In Christology, By Peter Toon, Reformation and Revival, Fall 1999
The incarnation was an act of humility…
The Incarnation is an act of beautiful and astonishing humility. When a person who is great and powerful treats you with kindness and respect, as if you were on the same level with him, you are deeply touched by his humility. Christ’s Incarnation displays infinitely more humility than the President of the United States might by taking the place of a lowly private in the Army. God displayed His greatest glory with the greatest act of humility. The Incarnation overthrows all glory-seeking and calls us to be servants (Phil. 2:1-13).
Trust in the Incarnate Word, By Joel R. Beeke, Puritan Reformed Journal, January 2011
Here’s Moser showing Jesus’ willing conformity to his father’s will …
Paul anchors spiritual wisdom not in an abstract principle or a Platonic Form, but instead in a personal agent who manifests God’s power without defect. He refers to “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24) and to “Christ Jesus who became for us wisdom from God … and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). An immediate question concerns what particular features of the person Jesus Christ constitute his being the power and the wisdom of God.
Part of Paul’s answer includes the following:
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5-8)
A key feature is the willing conformity of Jesus to God’s will, even when the result is self-sacrificial death. Paul introduces the idea of Jesus’s humble obedience to God to capture this feature. This obedience differs from grudging obedience and even mere obedience; it ultimately welcomes God’s perfect will, even if one is initially ambivalent and faces rigorous consequences. In his conformity to God’s will, Jesus exemplifies the power and wisdom of God as an agent humbly and reverently cooperating with God on the basis of God’s distinctive wisdom and power, including the power of self-giving agape.
Paul Moser, The Severity of God
That’s all I have on that. If you’re methodically working your way through all the stages of story, I’ll send you next on to Stage Five…
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