Jessica Martin, known to everyone as Jess, was a graduate student at Baylor and our student worker for the Christian Scholar’s Review website. Over the past several years, Jess and I exchanged hundreds of emails as she transferred the articles from the print issue onto the site. She was also often the final editor of pieces I and others contributed to our weekday blogs, always suggesting the perfect bon mot to make mine more insightful. As we worked together, our emails grew more personal, and about a year into our collaboration, she revealed to me that she had a terminal cancer diagnosis. Over the past eighteen months, our exchanges increasingly included personal updates and thoughtful reflections on our spiritual journeys.
Jess was never just our graduate assistant. She was a bit older and highly skilled, so I came to see her as part of the team. When something went wrong with our articles on the website, she never punted the problem. I trusted that she would solve any issues or find workarounds. The fall issue, which went live in mid-December, was particularly demanding, involving articles, interviews, and poetry, all while she handled a persistent technical problem in the site’s backend.
While we knew she was growing more ill, we didn’t know how quickly her condition had deteriorated last fall. Five days after the winter issue went live, she stepped out of her role, entering hospice the following week. In February, soon after Valentine’s Day, she went to be with the Lord.
Once she entered hospice, I tried to write to her daily or send a funny picture. By mid-January, she stopped replying, but I continued sending notes. Having come to know and love Jess, I trusted she would respond if she could, praying she would at least be able to read those final messages. When I learned of her passing, I cried throughout the day. Even now, two months later, I cannot write about my dear friend without tearing up.
But I never met Jess in person. I never talked with her. I don’t even know what she looked like.
Our relationship, deeply important to both of us yet oddly disembodied, has led me to reflect more carefully on theology that emphasizes the importance of Jesus’s incarnation. In its various forms, it pushes us away from a disembodied spirituality focused mainly on orthodoxy—what James K. A. Smith calls “brains on a stick.”1 Instead, it calls us back to the embodied reality of the Christian life: the embodiment of Jesus, the embodiment of our own souls, and the church as an embodied community. Embodiment—both Christ’s and ours—matters not only for salvation but for spiritual formation and Christian community.
It is clear that Jesus’ atonement requires human form, but incarnational theology presses further. James Torrance argues that in the incarnation, the Son of God assumes our human nature to heal and restore it in his person. By taking on flesh, Jesus sanctifies every aspect of human existence and offers that restored humanity to the Father on our behalf. Salvation, then, is accomplished not only through his death but through his embodied life, in which our humanity is renewed and brought into worshipful communion with God.2
If salvation involves the renewal of our humanity in Christ, then our own bodies cannot be incidental to the Christian life. Dallas Willard emphasizes that incarnation is not only about Christ coming in the flesh, but also about redeeming ours. Our bodies are essential to who we are spiritually, and our salvation begins even now as our inner spirit and outer body are gradually brought into unity.3
And because this renewed humanity is not lived in isolation, the incarnation also shapes Christian community. Because Christ has taken on human flesh and reconciled humanity to God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stressed that believers relate to one another through the mediating work of Jesus Christ. Thus, our Christian relationships are not grounded in shared interests or demographic affinities, but in God’s grace extended to us, and which, in turn, we extend to others. Such embodied relationships among believers are not merely a benefit of following Christ; they are the means by which his reconciling work is lived out among his people.4
Subsequently, until very recently, I have believed that the church, Christ’s body incarnate, functions best when we gather in person to live out the incarnation in its fullness. As a professor, I also affirm Parker Palmer’s insistence that the gift we offer students is not merely our knowledge but our very selves, making teaching an incarnational act.5 I always felt that I could better understand what was in my students’ hearts if I could see their eyes.
Yet my digitally mediated relationship with Jess has led me to reconsider whether the embodied relationships central to incarnational theology require physical proximity, thereby reducing what we shared to something artificial or, at best, superficial. My grief, however, has been real. As I wrestled with the meaning of this unusual friendship, I found myself turning to theologians working in disability theology who invited me to think differently about embodiment, especially for those who cannot always be physically or cognitively present for one another.
I found that many of these theologians support the view that incarnational presence is not defined solely by physical contiguity. For example, Thomas Reynolds argues that the incarnation itself reveals a relational form he calls “vulnerable communion.” In Jesus—the one who is “there for others”—human life is not defined by self-sufficiency but by a posture of vulnerable availability, as his own humanity embraced human limitation and lived in radical dependence upon God. If such vulnerability and dependence are central to communion with others, then incarnational presence is not secured by proximity alone, but by the ways we are available to each other in this vulnerable love.6
Amos Yong deepens this vision of relational communion by emphasizing the Holy Spirit’s role in constituting and sustaining the body of Christ. The fellowship of the Church in which all—disabled and nondisabled—are gathered into the body, is made possible by the power and presence of the Spirit.7 Thus, incarnational relationships are not solely defined by anything unique we offer each other, including proximity. Instead, they are shaped by our faithful response to the leading of the Holy Spirit as we meet one another within the shared limits of our embodied lives.
Deborah Beth Creamer reinforces this by reminding us that embodiment is always lived within limits. Human life is necessarily incomplete, constrained by body, perception, biases, time, and circumstances. These limits are not exceptions but the very nature of the human condition. Recognizing this reframes the meaning of presence in the incarnation: we are never fully or perfectly “present” to one another but always encounter one another within mediated constraints.8
Taken together, these authors invited me to see that Christian community is not defined only by shared space and time but also by vulnerability, Spirit-filled communion, and a life of shared limits. If this is so, then digitally mediated relationships need not be seen as departures from incarnational life, but as one more way in which embodied persons encounter one another within the finite conditions of human existence. My relationship with Jess was indeed both vulnerable and Spirit-filled, even as we were aware of its limits—not based on our physical distance, but because of the precious little time we had together.
To honor the gift of Jesus’s incarnation is not to insist on a single form of presence, but to trust that God remains faithful within the mediated and limited relationships that mark our lives—relationships that will one day be made complete in Christ. In my grief, I hold onto God’s promise that when Jess and I are reunited in the new heaven—having truly loved each other as sisters in Christ during this life—we will tenderly embrace with our new, limitless bodies in the next.
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press, 2016), 3. ↩︎
- James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (InterVarsity Press, 1996), 53; 70-75. ↩︎
- Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (NavPress, 2002),162-163;165. ↩︎
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together. Translated by Daniel W. Bloesch (Fortress Press, 2016), 11-15. ↩︎
- Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. 10th Anniversary Edition (Jossey-Bass, 2007). ↩︎
- Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Brazos Press, 2008), 175 – 213. ↩︎
- Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Baylor University Press, 2007), 218-225. ↩︎
- Deborah Beth Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (Oxford University Press, 2009), 93-114. ↩︎
