God has a human face

This is how we can sing in the Mass: "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world." The event of the Christ was an event that infected all of time to the extent that we can say that the world has been saved.

Now, if the Church had not affirmed Christ as being God in the doctrine of the Trinity none of this would be possible. This is because the event of the Christ would not have been an event in God because Jesus would always be outside of the godhead. Without, what has become known as the Atonement, we would have been left with morality and law. Jesus would have been the moral teacher and judgment would have been based on how closely his followers followed that teaching.

In other words there would have been no grace in the world, only the moral law, only Christian ethics. But early Christians, especially St Paul, understood that the law was not enough, indeed if we only have law then we are destined to live arid lives because law does not address the fundamental questions of our being.

Of course the law is important but as a means of justification, as a way to a pious life or as a way to heaven it is a dead end, literally. Christian culture is based on grace. We understand that our desire is malformed and that we are prone to act in deathly ways but that is not the last word for us. We are, as Luther was fond of saying, "simultaneously sinner and saved". We all know the clichéd character whose life is ordered to the utmost degree but who is lacking in humanity and compassion for others.

Grace is what gives life depth and breadth and freedom. With grace there is no longer the constant nagging that we are not living up to some standard. It is a letting go of control that is only possible when we hear the good news of the gospel, that an event has taken place in God that has set us all free. Nothing can remove us from the grace of God.

Rather than seeking perfection in imitation, a heavy burden indeed, we are set free to pursue our lives knowing that we are second by second being transformed into the image of Christ. We become a people who can look our neighbour in the eye and see him or her as a fellow human being unconfused by their moral or religious status.

In all of the hysteria about terrorism we can understand that even the worst of ISIS are children of God and recipients of his grace grounded in the event of Christ. This is the only thing that will short circuit the rush to violence that will beget even more violence.

This is why we can celebrate the Prince of Peace at Christmas, not as some wishful thinking Christmas card's plea to "Give Peace a Chance" but as grounded in real historical events that we can say, that we can narrate. It is these events that give the world its narrative arc, from violence to peace, from hatred to love, from despair to hope. For Christianity these dichotomies are not just utopian sentiment but are based on real events, real things that have been established forever.

The nature of Christ formed the nature of the Church that in its turn formed our society. If the Church in the fourth century had opted for understanding Christ as an exemplary man then it would have faded into the world. Indeed there are churches of our time, in the Protestant denominations particularly, that have almost unconsciously abandoned the divinity of Christ and have become the world's social worker. The mission statement for these churches is "We make a difference." So intent are they on serving the poor and establishing justice that they have lost the beauty of worship and the divinity of Christ.

On the other hand there are churches that have lost the humanity of God. For example, in Docetism, Jesus was really a divine being dressed up as a man. The man may have suffered but the divine, because it was divine, could not suffer. Churches thus influenced emphasise the spiritual because the bodily suffering of God is discounted.

Bodily life is a lesser thing; indeed the body is a source of contamination and danger. The aim is to prepare the self for heaven by ascetic practice. The monastic life can be prone to this temptation, as Luther understood. Christianity so understood cannot wait to shuffle off this mortal coil in order to ascend to God.

I suggest that Islam fits within the belief that the divine eclipses all to such an extent that bodily life is unimportant. It is a shadow of what Christianity would have become if the Church had lost the divinity of Jesus and thus lost the divinity of man. There is such a divide between the divine and the human that the human is made only for obedience, for submission. Suicide bombers believe that their bodies are of no consequence and that their souls will be transported to heaven on their destruction. This mirrors the body/soul dualism that led the Church into dark places in various episodes of its history.