Here are a whole load of quotes from James Denney's The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation in which he attacks an understanding of the incarnation which gives the sinful state of our humanity a back seat.
When I hear about the incarnation it is often described as primarily a metaphysical or epistemological event. Consequently salvation is then seen as similarly metaphysical or epistemological. In contrast the Bible sees it primarily as a act of reconciliation to deal with our moral alienation from God.
-------------------------------
"It is not too much to say that the metaphysical incarnation which was the vital centre of Athanasius' thought - his sacramental union of the divine and the human in the incarnate Word - had dulled his sense of an ethical union and communion of man with God, and of the powers by which such a union and communion can be impaired and destroyed, or perfected. [footnote: "It is significant that he only mentions the forgiveness of sins once, and then only in connection with Christ's work as seeking and saving the lost during his life on earth (14.2)] The same holds of Greek theology generally, and of the type of piety akin to it. It is too much out of relation to the world in which moral creatures, conscious of their estrangement from God, and needing and longing for reconciliation to Him, live and move and have their being." (pp.42-43)
"Christ had no reason for coming into the world but to save sinners. This is the true experimental and Biblical ground on which to stand. Attractive as it may appear to speculative minds, the idea that Christ would have come apart from this redemptive purpose - to complete creation, or give humanity a Head - departs from the line of religious and especially of Christian interest. It finds the motive of the incarnation in some speculative or metaphysical fitness, and not where Scripture and experience put it, in love." (p. 59)
"God became man because only thus could sin be dealt with for man's salvation, and God's end in the creation of man secured. In other words, the rationale of the incarnation is in the atonement. It is through the atonement that the incarnation is seen to be rationally necessary and therefore credible." (p. 65)
"He must be man that He may be entitled to act for the sinful race, and He must be God that He may be able to offer to God the immeasurable satisfaction which shall be equal to the necessities of the case. Hence the need for the incarnation or the God-man. It is the necessity of making satisfaction for sin, in order that men who have sinned may nevertheless attain the destiny of blessedness in eternal life with God, which explains the one dogma of the Christian faith - namely, the incarnation. As it has already been expressed, the rationale of the incarnation lies in the atonement. Were it not for the atonement, no one could say that the incarnation had any necessity in it which appealed to reason." (p.71)
"Nothing is commoner, for instance, than for those who conceive the incarnation as the taking up of human nature into union with the divine, to say that the incarnation is itself the atonement; in the person of the God-man humanity as such is reconciled to God. To the writer such expressions are as good as meaningless, and neither for the evangelist nor the theologian can he see that they have any value. But looking at the actual life and death of Jesus as the proper definition of the term incarnation - the sum of reality apart from which incarnation is an empty sound - he would have no difficulty in saying that the incarnation and the atonement, or the incarnation and the work of reconciling man to God, were all one. The traditional dogmatic conception of the incarnation, with which the idea of an incarnation independent of sin, and designed to consummate creation, is usually connected, does not lift us into a region of eternal or ideal truth; it does not enlighten our minds in the knowledge of Christ; it only lifts us out of the region of historical and moral reality. We have the practical interest of Christianity as well as the broad sense of the New Testament with us when we stand by the view that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." (pp. 183-184)
"The only incarnation of which the New Testament knows anything is the appearance of Christ in the race and lot of sinful men, and His endurance in it to the end. Apart from sharing our experience, that sharing of our nature, which is sometimes supposed to be what is meant by incarnation, is a abstraction and a figment. But everything in that sharing our experience is essential." (p.242)
