Received: 11 May 2022 Accepted: 11 January 2023 DOI: 10.1111/dial.12783 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Wicked incarnations: Jesus, intra-action, climate change Mari E. Ramler Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, Tennessee, USA Correspondence Mari E. Ramler, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN 38505-0001, USA. Email: mramler@tntech.edu Abstract To take incarnation seriously, Creation Care Christians, such as Douglas and Jonathan Moo, focus on Jesus’ divinity in incarnation. If the divine Jesus was fully flesh, then creation must be good. And if we do not take care of it, we are sinning, they reason. Laurel C. Schneider’s promiscuous view of incarnation insists on a porous flesh, one that is materially entangled with the world. This is beyond Sallie McFague’s model of the world as God’s body. Applying Schneider’s promiscuous incarnation, Mary-Jane Rubenstein claims that the world is God’s body, and, as such, God does not transcend matter as Ernest Simmons suggests. For Catherine Keller, unknowable divine interdependence must move us to civic action. In the middle of this conversation, I offer the term wicked incarnations to make explicit the intra-action of divinity and the world in its incarnations. To take incarnation seriously is to acknowledge incarnations as a dynamism of divine and material forces, neither of which pre-exist their relationship. I join Keller in hoping that this moves us to care about and for the material world, its changing climate, and our intra-active relationship with nonhuman, divine presence. KEYWORDS climate change, incarnation, intra-action, quantum entanglement The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky out of reach Chelan Harkin, “The Worst Thing” 1 INTRODUCTION Recently, theologians have been taking incarnation seri- ously by applying quantum entanglement to the doctrine of incarnation. Yet, incarnation is always-already intra- active, according to Karen Barad’s definition of “intra- action,” which I understand as no classically interactive things, just relations. In a quantum science model, entan- glement precedes things’ thingness. Barad’s term intra- action understands agency not as an inherent property of an individual (or human) to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces, always operating in relation with one another. 1 If divinity and the world are quantumly entangled, then they are already, by definition, intra-active. Thus, the divine is always-already materially plural. 2 My term wicked incarnations makes explicit the fact that both divine flesh and climate change are entangled and, thus, wicked prob- lems because they cannot be clearly defined nor neatly solved. I use the term wicked as it was first introduced in 1973 by scholars of design and urban planning Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. They distinguished between “tame” and Dialog. 2023;1–9. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dial