The Incarnation, Dorothy Sayers, and Alistair McGrath

During World War II, Dorothy Sayers explored the question why Christ and not someone else? In Creed or Chaos? she wrote, "If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life."

The authority of Jesus lays not in what we think about the rightness of his teaching but in who he is. Jesus shows us what God is like rather than only tell us about God.

Alistair McGrath writes about this issue: One of the factors that fueled my teenage atheism was my belief that God was a total irrelevance. God was in heaven; I was on earth in the midst of time and space. God was not involved or present in my world and had no connection with my situation.

Then, in my first term as a student at the University of Oxford, I learned about the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. I could see at once that, if this was right, it was a game-changer. God was not a distant irrelevance, an abstract declaration, but one who chose to enter into my world of space and time in personal form. God came to us in order to bring us to God. . . . Christians hold that they can see the face, not merely know the character, of our God. God is like Christ, who is the "image of the invisible God." (What's The Point of Theology?, pp. 35-36)

In the Incarnation, Jesus is both the nature and the face of God.