How does something outside of human reality become real to humans? God first became real to many of us through the love of our parents. For many, God becomes real in the story of Jesus. God becomes real when a hungry person is fed or a naked person is clothed. What makes God real for you?

To be honest, the traditional Christian view of a literal exclusive incarnation of God in Jesus makes the whole thing seem less real. I don't want a comic book superhero Jesus. It seems too convenient to slap the "real" label on all your own bizarre religions ideas and stories while labeling every other attempt to describe God as false. That view has taken something beautiful and used it to create division, competition, and even death. If I had not found another way to view the incarnation of God in Jesus, I probably would have left Christianity.

I prefer to understand incarnation as a metaphor describing the manifestation of God’s will done on Earth. This symbolic understanding is not meant to suggest that God is not a reality. The issue is not if God is real but how God becomes a reality in the world and in our lives. The ineffable reality (i.e. incapable of being expressed; indescribable or unutterable) becomes manifest into the physical world as we carry out God's will. God becomes "real" as people embody the values, character traits, and priorities that we associate with God. Until it is felt or expressed, love is only a concept, but there are many ways to incarnate love. The Jesus of the gospel stories becomes the Christian incarnation of God’s word (logos, wisdom, divine reason). For Christians, the stories about Jesus portray the best example of how that might look in human form. Then in turn, Christians incarnate Jesus as we express his character in our own lives. Paul described those people living out Jesus' message as the symbolic body of Christ in the same way that Jesus had become known as the symbolic body of God. I agree.

John Hick has written a helpful article on his website called "Who or What is God?". Here is an excerpt:

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.

I don't think we should overlook or discount the impact of our experiences. For example, the I-Thou experience that one finds in prayer, mediation, religious ritual, or even in nature. Again, Hick has another great insight:

What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements.