Body, soul, and Incarnation

In some circles it's customary to say that at the Incarnation, God enters time and space. Other Christians say that happened at creation. That's okay for popular discourse, but theologically imprecise. 

If God exists outside of time and space, then there's no transfer of divine attributes to the human nature or human attributes to the divine nature. Rather, it's a relation between the transcendent nature of the Son and the immanent human nature. The two sides of the relation remain distinct. 

To take a comparison, if you're a Cartesian dualist, if you think a human being is an embodied agent consisting of an immaterial soul coupled with a physical body, then ordinarily, you can't directly interact with someone else's mind–unless you're telepathic. Rather, you interact with another person through the intervening medium of their body via the five senses. 

But even though that's indirect, embodied experience, mediated physical interaction, results in a rich, multilayered personal relationship with another individual. Indeed, there are dimensions to that which are missing if we were discarnate spirits with telepathic access to each other's minds. An eternalist model of the Incarnation isn't second best, but analogous to the closest human relationships (e.g. husband/wife, parent/child, siblings).