When man started to unembody the Incarnation he started to lose the iconicity of the Creation. In losing the iconicity of the Creation and of Christ he was slowly omitting the sacred rituals until he came to believe that there are no sacred rituals anymore and that nothing of the created order is or can be sacred. The man who believes that there are no sacred rituals anymore will very soon realize that his unritualized body is not sacred also, and thus will start preach the soul-only salvation. The unritualized man is the secular man, for that who refuses the sacred in the form of ritual is unavoidably driven towards a secular behaviour, be it a ethicist or pious or puritan behaviour, secular nevertheless.
After the Annunciation, God the Son did not become a spirit, but took flesh, He became embodied, receiving full human nature. The central problem of humanity thus is not its lack of spirituality, but its lack of embodied iconicity. We were not supposed to imitate Christ only at the level of His spirit, His mind, but also at the level of his whole humanity which is unavoidably embodied.
Just think for a second if one can imagine the development of the same Christian theology as we have now if Christ would have been obese. Or would we have the same theology if Christ was clean shaved?
What does it mean to become like Jesus?
Does it mean to follow him in our minds and in our ethical behavior, but to run away from His manger into conformable apartments and A-class offices, from the dusty streets of Galilee into our SUV’s, from his heavy cross of Calvary inside the comfort of modernity? Can we really follow half of Jesus, or we either follow the complete God-man or end up not following Him at all?
Can we really follow a ritualistic, ascetic and iconic Jesus in a unritualistic, anascetic and aniconic manner?
Vasile 