Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 30
destabilising force in the individual because the individual can interpret and apply the
doctrine with great diversity while still adhering to an orthodox understanding of the tenet.
The mystery of how a person can be fully God and fully man is one which the
creeds do not attempt to answer. While they state that Jesus is God incarnate, they never
explain how this can be, and so at the heart of the religion is a mystery that justifies the
flesh because God could become flesh without ceasing to be God, yet it did not end sin,
death, and the corruption of the physical world because there is still the promise of a ‘new
earth’ that will set all creation right. 36 A tension remains then, because the physical is
redeemed, but it will still need to be replaced. This creates a problem for the devotional
writers as to how much emphasis and attention should be given to the flesh, and the results
of how much attention is given to the physical has surprised some critics. As Richard
Rambuss has stated, ‘Articulating a devotion that is profoundly attuned to the Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh – becoming a man – these religious
works exhibit surprisingly little inclination to efface the corporeal’. 37
What Rambuss’s
surprise betrays is a current preference for the spiritual over the physical that did not exist
to the same degree in the seventeenth century, and that it is actually in the physicality of
Jesus that some of these poets find their greatest comfort. This is further supported by
Rambuss when he writes that
Seventeenth-century religious verse is densely nuanced psychologically, yet
arguably many of its most profound subjectivity effects are incited, in accordance
with the incarnational theology I have here been calling to the fore, by this poetry’s
36 Revelation 21.1. William Aldis Wright (ed,), The Authorized Version of the English Bible, 1611, vol. 5,
(Cambridge, 1909).
37 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (London, 1998), p. 2.