Major Reviews 337 The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation by Ian A. McFarland Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2019. 260 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-664-26297-6. RECENTLY I HEARD THE story of a Lutheran bishop who was asked when Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson’s Christian Dogmatics (Fortress, 1984) would be updated or replaced. “It won’t,” the bishop answered, “because the Lutheran churches do not produce theologians anymore.” The good bishop was wrong. The Word Made Flesh, written by Lutheran theologian Ian McFarland, presents itself as a the- ology of the incarnation, but it could count as a mini-dog- matics. Beginning with a chapter on the doctrine of God, the book continues with a chapter on creation and ends with an account of church, sacraments, and the eschaton. All this is held together by a narration of the incarnation as the beginning and end of God’s relating to what is not God. McFarland’s account of God, creation in general, and of the incarnation in particular, is shaped by three fundamental convictions. First, “the incarnation is not best conceived as the solution to a problem . . . [but] instead more appropriately understood as the ground of our being” (p. 12). Referencing Col 1:15, McFarland holds that God’s determination to be Jesus enjoys logical prec- edence not only over the fall, but over all of creation. That is, God does not become incarnate for the sake of creation, but God creates because God has decided to be incarnate (p. 11). Second, divinity is not visible. That God can nonetheless be seen in Jesus is exactly because in him God takes on that which can be seen: humanity. Therefore, McFarland quotes Martin Luther approvingly: “whoever wishes to deliberate or speculate soundly about God should disregard abso- lutely everything except the humanity of Christ” (p. 6). McFarland argues that the best way to unpack these claims is with “a Chalcedonianism without reserve” (p. 3). Chalcedonian Christology holds that when we perceive Christ, we perceive no other than the divine Word, but nothing other than a created substance, Jesus’s humanity. McFarland devotes an important part of his book to presentation of the Chalcedonian logic. Largely ecumenical in nature, with particular Lutheran or Orthodox accents as he attempts to solve some of the lingering puzzles of a Chalcedonian approach (such as the logos ansarkos and the interaction between Jesus’s divinity and humanity), this is one of the clearest contemporary analyses of Chalcedonian Christology that I am aware of. Third, McFarland holds that a human life by definition is “bounded by birth and death” (p. 165). There is an intrinsic end to our lifespan. This assumption has important consequences for how he unpacks notions like resurrection and ascension and how he imagines the eschaton. Christ’s resur- rection, ascension, and coming should not be conceived as further episodes in Jesus’s life. They are rather “three distinct dimensions of God’s eternal vindication of Jesus’ finite, human life as lived from birth to death” (p. 160). Christ’s resurrection, McFarland holds, “is not more of this life, but precisely the vindication of this life in its completeness” (p. 165). It is “the declaration that he lives, but in a new mode, as God lives—eternally and not in temporal sequence” (p. 167). Christ’s ascension, even while cast in the biblical narrative in terms of “temporal succession and spatial movement” (p. 169), should be understood as “a claim about the abiding power of Jesus’ human life” (p. 175). And Jesus’s coming means that his life, now lifted beyond time and space, “because it is God’s own, is lived as God lives: not in doing particular things (eating here, healing there, teaching somewhere else), but doing all things (e.g., upholding the whole of creation). In short, as risen, Jesus is supremely alive: the one who grounds, sustains, and empowers everything that is” (pp. 179–80).