Essential Christology: What Every Christian Should Know About their Lord and Savior

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In the name of their teaching on the godhead, Platonist philosophers regarded this notion as unthinkable. The Stoics, in turn, could not manage to reconcile the Christological dogma with their cosmological doctrine. It was in order to respond to these difficulties that, more or less openly, many Christian theologians borrowed from Hellenism the notion of a secondary god deuteros theos , or of an intermediate god, or even of a demiurge. Obviously, this was tantamount to clearing the way to the threat of subordinationism.

Frequently bought together

This subordinationism was already latent in some of the Apologists and in Origen. Arius made a formal heresy of it. He maintained that the Son occupies an intermediate position between the Father and the creatures. At the Council of Nicaea in a. In so doing, the Church both repudiated the Arian compromise with Hellenism and deeply altered the shape of Greek, especially Platonist and neo-Platonist, metaphysics.

In a manner of speaking, it demythicized Hellenism and effected a Christian purification of it. In the act of dismissing the notion of an intermediate being, the Church recognized only two modes of being: To be sure, " homoousios ", the term used by the Council of Nicaea, is a philosophical and nonbiblical term. It is evident all the same that, ultimately, the Fathers of the Council only intended to express the authentic meaning of the New Testament assertions concerning Christ, and to do this in a way that would be univocal and free from all ambiguity.

In turn, the dogmatic definition impressed its own determination and mark on the experience of salvation. There was, then, an in-depth interaction between lived experience and the process whereby theological clarification was achieved. The theological reflections of the Fathers of the Church did not ignore the special problem connected with the divine preexistence of Christ.

Their attempts are bent on presenting the preexistence of Christ not at the level of ontological reality but at that of intentionality: Christ had preexisted in the sense of having been foreseen kata prognosin. These presentations of the preexistence of Christ were judged inadequate by the Catholic Church and condemned. Thus the Church gave expression to her own belief in an ontological preexistence of Christ, for which it found support in the Father s eternal generation of the Word.

The Church also referred to the clear-cut New Testament affirmations concerning the active role played by the Word of God in the creation of the world. Obviously, someone who does not yet exist, or is only intended to exist, cannot play any such role. The whole Christological theology of the Church Fathers is concerned with the metaphysical and salvific identity of Christ. It undertakes to answer these questions: For this quest for meaning is conditioned by the convergence of two sets of data: The affirmation of transcendence is nonnegotiable.

It is postulated by the affirmation of the full and authentic divinity of the Christ. It is likewise indispensable if we are to go beyond so-called reductive Christologies: It also makes it possible to refute the thesis, monophysite in inspiration, that posits an admixture of God and man in Jesus, the result being that the immutability and impassibility of God are undone.

On the other hand, the idea of immanence, bound up as it is with the belief in the Incarnation of the Word, makes it possible to affirm against the docetism of the Gnostics the real and authentic humanity of Christ. During the controversies between the schools of Antioch and Alexandria, it was difficult to perceive how transcendence, that is, the distinction between the two natures, could be reconciled with immanence, that is, the hypostatic union. We can see there the apophatic equivalent of the formula that affirms "the two natures and the one hypostasis" of Christ.

It excludes any intermediate state between divinity and humanity. In these assertions the conciliar Fathers attained a new level in their perception of transcendence, for the transcendence they asserted is not only "theological" but "Christological". No longer are we told only that God infinitely transcends man but that the Christ, both God and man, infinitely transcends the whole human kind and all history. What, then, does the Council of Chalcedon represent in the history of Christology? The dogmatic definition of Chalcedon does not pretend to offer an exhaustive answer to the question "How can God and man coexist in Christ?

No definition can exhaust the richness of this mystery by means of affirmative utterances. It behooves rather to proceed by way of negation and mark off a place from which we may not depart. Within this place of truth, the Council locates the "one" and the "other", which seemingly exclude each other: Both these aspects must be asserted unrestrictedly, while excluding anything that would smack of juxtaposition or admixture.

In Christ, then, transcendence and immanence are perfectly conjoined. In view of the cognitional categories and methods employed, one can take the view that the New Testament has undergone a measure of Hellenization. Yet, on the other hand, the definition of Chalcedon radically transcends Greek thought, for it lets coexist two viewpoints that Greek philosophy had always regarded as irreconcilable: In order to establish a correct Christological doctrine, we must not limit ourselves to taking into account the development of ideas that resulted in the Council of Chalcedon.

In addition, we must pay attention to the last Christological councils, and especially to the Third Council of Constantinople in a. In the definition of this Council, the Church demonstrated her ability to clarify the Christological problem better than she had already done at the Council of Chalcedon. By the same token, she showed her readiness to reexamine the Christological questions because of the new difficulties that had surfaced in the meantime.

She wanted to deepen still further a knowledge she had acquired by pondering what Sacred Scripture had to say concerning Jesus Christ. The Lateran Council in a. In the year a. By the same token, she had also underlined the relation between this free human will and the hypostasis of the Word. For in this Council the Church declares that our salvation had been willed by a Divine Person through a human will. So interpreted in the light of the Lateran Council, the definition of the Third Council of Constantinople is rooted in the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church and of the Council of Chalcedon.

But, on the other hand, it also helps us in a very special way to respond to the exigencies of our time in the matter of Christology These exigencies tend to afford a better perception of the place occupied in the salvation of mankind by the humanity of Christ and by the various "mysteries" of his life on earth, such as his baptism, his temptations, and the "agony" of Gethsemane.

In a sense, Christology must take on and integrate the vision that contemporary man acquires of himself and of his own history through the reinterpretation that the Church makes available to the believer. In this fashion, we can remedy the imperfections that Christology derives from an excessively narrow use of what is referred to as "nature". We can also link to Christ, who brings all things under his headship Eph 1: The confrontation of Christology with contemporary culture contributes to the new and deeper knowledge that man acquires today about himself.

On the other hand, Christology probes into the truth of that knowledge; when necessary, it submits it to a criterion of its own, as is the case, for instance, in the spheres of politics and religion. This applies particularly to the latter. Religion is either negated and totally repudiated by atheism, or it is interpreted as a means of attaining to the ultimate depths of all things, without reference to a transcendent and personal God. As a result, religion risks assuming the appearance of pure "alienation" from humanness, while Christ loses his identity and uniqueness.

In both cases, the result, logically, is this: There is no remedy for this situation unless anthropology be renewed in the light of the mystery of Christ. Given the parallelism between the two Adams, Christ, who is the second and last Adam, cannot be understood without taking into account the first Adam, that is, our human condition.

The first Adam, on the other hand, is perceived in the truth and wholeness of his humanity only if he makes himself accessible to Christ who saves and divinizes us by his life, death, and Resurrection. Many of our contemporaries experience difficulties when the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon is presented to them.

For many, the phrase "human nature" no longer denotes a shared and immutable essence; it evokes only a pattern or a summary of the phenomena that, in most cases, we happen to observe in people. Very often, the concept of person is defined in psychological terms to the detriment of the ontological aspect of personhood. Today many voice even severer difficulties with regard to the soteriological aspects of the Christological dogmas. They recoil from any notion of salvation that would inject heteronomy into existence as project [the plan of life].

They take exception to what they regard as the purely individualistic character of Christian salvation. The promise of a blessedness to come seems to them a Utopia that distracts people away from their genuine obligations, which, in their view, are all confined to this world. They want to know what it is that mankind had to be redeemed from and to whom the ransom had to be paid.

They grow indignant at the contention that God could have exacted the blood of an innocent person, a notion in which they sense a streak of sadism. They argue against what is known as "vicarious satisfaction" that is, through a mediator by saying that this mode of satisfaction is ethically impossible.

If it is true that every conscience is autonomous, they argue, no conscience can be freed by another. Finally, some of our contemporaries lament the fact that they cannot find in the life of the Church and of the faithful the lived expression of the mystery of liberation that is proclaimed. In spite of all these difficulties, the Christological doctrine of the Church and the dogma defined at the Council of Chalcedon most especially retain a definitive value. It is no doubt permissible, and it may indeed be opportune, to seek a deeper understanding of that dogma, but it can never be allowable to reject it.

Historically speaking, it is a mistake to say that, at Chalcedon, the Fathers of the Council bent the Christian dogma to suit Hellenistic ideas. On the other hand, the contemporary difficulties mentioned above show that some of our contemporaries are profoundly ignorant as to the authentic meaning of the Christological dogma. Nor do they entertain a correct view of the truth of the God who creates the visible and invisible world. In order to attain to faith in Christ and in the salvation that he brings, we need to accept a number of truths that account for the Christ and his salvation.

The living God is love 1 Jn 4: At the dawn of time, this living God—Father, Son, and sanctifying Spirit—created man in his own image and conferred upon him the dignity of a person endowed with reason in the middle of the world. In the fullness of time, the triune God crowned his own work in Christ Jesus. He made Christ the mediator of the peace and Covenant he was offering to the whole world for the benefit of all human beings and for all time to come. Jesus Christ is the perfect human being: At the same time, he lives entirely with human beings, and for their salvation, that is, for their fulfillment.

He is, therefore, the example and the sacrament of the new humanity. The life of Christ affords us a fresh understanding of God and of man as well. They also make possible a new man who finds his glory in service, not in domination. For their sakes, he takes on the form of a servant cf. This life of Christ, lived as it is for the sake of others, helps us to perceive that, for man, genuine autonomy consists neither in superiority nor in opposition. A man animated by a spirit of superiority supra-existentia seeks to stand out in front and dominate others. When controlled by a spirit of opposition contra-existentia , man treats others unjustly and seeks to manipulate them.

A conception of human life derived from the life of Christ comes at first as a shock. This is indeed the reason why it demands conversion of everyone, and not only once at the beginning but continuously and through perseverance until the end. Such conversion as this can emerge only from a freedom renewed by love. As history takes its course, and cultural changes occur, the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon and Constantinople III must always be actualized in the consciousness and preaching of the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This indispensable actualization is an obligation binding both upon the theologians and upon the apostolic solicitude of shepherds and faithful. The task of theologians is, first of all, to construct a synthesis in which are underlined all the aspects and all the values of the mystery of Christ. Into their synthesis theologians need draw the authentic findings of biblical exegesis, and of the research on the history of salvation. Moreover, they will have to give appropriate consideration to the manner in which the religions of the various peoples manifest a concern for salvation, and to the way in which people generally attempt to secure authentic liberation.

Just as much must they be mindful of the teachings of saints and doctors. A synthesis of this kind cannot but enrich the formula of Chalcedon through more soteriological perspectives. It will thus convey its full meaning to the phrase "Christ died for us. Theologians must also devote their full attention to perenially difficult questions; for example, the questions relative to the consciousness and knowledge of Christ and to the manner of conceiving the absolute and universal value of the redemption effected by Christ for all and once for all.

This Church is entrusted with the task of letting all human beings, and all nations, share in the mystery of Christ. To be sure, this mystery is the same for all, and yet it must be set forth so that all should be able to assimilate it and celebrate it in their own lives and cultures.

This task is all the more imperative in view of the fact that, in our time, the Church is increasingly conscious of the originality and value of the various cultures. It is through their cultures that people express, through symbols, gestures, notions, and specific languages, the meaning they credit to life. This brings with it certain consequences. The mystery has been revealed to the holy people whom God chose; Christians have believed it, professed it, celebrated it. This is a fact that cannot be duplicated in history. And yet, to an extent, this mystery opens itself up to new ways of expressing it, ways yet to be discovered.

Thus, in every nation and age, disciples will give their faith to Christ the Lord and become one Body with him. The Mystical Body of Christ comprises a large diversity of members. To all it gives the same peace in unity but without overlooking the traits that make them distinctive. The Spirit "maintains everything in unity, and knows every tongue" Introit of the ancient Roman Liturgy for Pentecost; cf. From this Spirit all nations and all human beings have received their own particular riches and charisms.

God the Father "did not spare his own Son but handed him over for the sake of us all" Rom 8: Our Lord became man "for our sake and for the sake of our salvation. If so, the Person of Jesus Christ cannot be separated from the deed of redemption. The benefits of salvation are inseparable from the divinity of Jesus Christ. Some theological speculations have failed adequately to preserve this intimate connection between Christology and soteriology Today, it is always imperative to seek ways better to express the reciprocity of these two aspects of the saving event, which is itself undivided.

In this study, we want to limit ourselves to the consideration of two problems. Our first inquiry is historical in nature and is located within the time when Jesus lived on earth. It revolves around the question "What did Jesus think concerning his own death? Needless to say, this research must be complemented by taking into account the Paschal understanding of redemption cf.

To repeat, the International Theological Commission does not intend to expound and explicate a complete Christology. Here it seeks only to set forth the foundation of the mystery of the Christ, in keeping with both the earthly life of Jesus and his Resurrection. Our second inquiry unfolds at a different level cf. It will show how rich in soteriological teachings is the diversity of terminology by which the New Testament refers to the deed of redemption. We will attempt to systematize these teachings and set forth their whole theological meaning. Needless to say, this inquiry must be conducted in confrontation with the texts of Holy Scripture themselves.

Jesus was perfectly aware that, in his words and actions, in his existence and Person, the Kingdom and the reign of God were at once a present realization, an expectation, and a coming cf. Accordingly, he presented himself as the eschatological Savior and gave a direct, albeit implicit, explanation of his own mission. He was ushering in the eschatological salvation, since he was coming after the last of the prophets, John the Baptist.

He was bringing God and his reign to presence, and the time of promise to fulfillment Lk If, for Jesus, the Passion was a failure and a shipwreck, if he felt abandoned by God and lost hope in his own mission, his death could not be construed then, and cannot be construed now, as the definitive act in the economy of salvation. A death undergone in a purely passive manner could not be a "Christological" saving event. It must be the consequence, the willed consequence, of the obedience and love of Jesus making a gift of himself. It must be taken up in a complex act, at once active and passive Gal 1: The moral ideal of his life and, in a general way, the manner of his conduct show that Jesus was oriented in the direction of his own death and prepared to undergo the same.

He was thus actualizing the exigencies he himself had set forth for the benefit of his disciples cf. At the moment of his death, Jesus expresses his will to serve and give his life cf. This is the result and prolongation of the attitude that marks his whole life Lk Both his life and his death grow out of a fundamental attitude that is the will to live and die for God and for others. This is what has been called an existence-for-others, or a proexistence. Because of this orientation on his part, Jesus was by his very "essence" ordained to be the eschatological Savior who effects "our" salvation cf.

This salvation is meant for the multitude Mk How are we to interpret this fundamental disposition, as it becomes manifest in Jesus during his life, to exist, namely, for others, to offer and give himself totally to the point of undergoing death? Obviously, the unfolding of the events through which he lived would inevitably add more vitality and concreteness to this orientation.

Would God bestow full and total success to the proclamation of the Kingdom? Would Israel prove incapable of clinging to the eschatological salvation?

Was it necessary for him to be baptized with the baptism of death cf. Would the Father want to establish his reign, if Jesus should meet with failure, with death, nay, with the cruel death of martyrdom? Would the Father, in the end, ensure the saving efficacy of what Jesus would have suffered by "dying for others"? Jesus gathered affirmative answers to these questions from his awareness of being the eschatological mediator of salvation, the reign of God come to presence.

Hence, he was able to arrive in all confidence at the solution to the problems that arose. This confidence on his part may be asserted and understood in terms of what Jesus says and does at the Last Supper Lk He is prepared to go to his death, and yet he awaits and announces his Resurrection and exaltation Mk How did Jesus understand and express his own fundamental disposition to exist for others, his own readiness to serve and abide by a dedication to others that presided over his conduct and even his death?

However, he believed that a way could still be found to an orthodox Christian affirmation, since we today discover by various routes that Jesus is worthy not only of our admiration but also of our worship. Jesus himself, however, would not have thought in this way. This conclusion has clearly not proved satisfactory in the minds of most thinkers of the last twenty years. Book after book, at both a scholarly and popular level, on both sides of the Atlantic, has returned to the same point and made it the starting-point for a different exploration of what Jesus really said and thought.

As you know, two or three such books are splashed around the publishing world every year. The fact that they are mutually incompatible does not deter authors and publishers from producing yet more Jesuses. Recently from one of the most famous pulpits in New England, a new book about Jesus was recommended to me on the grounds that the Jesus contained therein was opposed to capital punishment, was uninterested in sexual ethics, and in various other ways my summary supported the liberal status quo.

These are the books that are sold in Barnes and Noble, in Waterstones, in W. These are the books that people in my congregation, and perhaps yours, are likely to read. At a time when the general mood of the culture in which I live is deeply anti-Christian, ready to swallow anything, no matter how wild or wacky, as long as it is not orthodox Christianity, these are the books that feed the general cultural mood and that increase the sense that anyone who believes or practices anything like orthodox Christianity is simply living in cloud-cookoo-land.

Our culture knows in its bones that Jesus could not have been like we traditionally say he was. My third example is my good friend and colleague Marcus Borg, with whom I have discussed these issues dozens of times over the past decade. We have now collaborated on a book which sets out the main points of our dialogue. He does not accept such thinking because, as he says explicitly at one point, he does not like, or approve of that Jesus.

It is important to begin by clarifying the question. I regard this as deeply misleading. I can perhaps make my point clear by a personal illustration. Each year I used to see the first year undergraduates individually for a few minutes, to welcome them to the college and make a first acquaintance. I developed stock response: So they would stumble out a few phrases about the god they said they did not believe in: At this point the undergraduate would look startled.

Then, perhaps, a faint look of recognition; it was sometimes rumored that half the college chaplains at Oxford were atheists. An obvious example is the earth-goddess, Gaia, revered by some within the New Age movement. Eros has of course been well-known to students of divinities time out of mind. Did they ever hear of paganism? It is vital that in our generation we inquire once more: And if, as Christians, we bring together Jesus and God in some kind of identity, what sort of an answer does that provide to our question? This is obviously the place to start. Their belief can be summed up in a single phrase: Both of these can give birth to practical or theoretical atheism.

This is what happened with a good deal of ancient paganism in Greece and Rome, until, as Pliny wryly remarks, the arrival of Christianity stirred up pagans to a fresh devotion to their gods. Several biblical books, or parts thereof, are devoted to exploring the difference between YHWH and the pagan idols: Daniel, Isaiah , and a good many Psalms spring obviously to mind. The theme is summed up in the Jewish daily prayer: Classic Jewish monotheism, then, believed that a there was one God, who created heaven and earth and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that b this God had called Israel to be his special people.

Jewish-style monotheism meant living in this story and trusting in this one true God, the God of creation and covenant, of Exodus and Return. This God was also utterly different from the far-away ultra-transcendent gods of the Epicureans. Always active within his world, did he not feed the young ravens when they called upon him? His eventual overthrow of pagan power at the political would be the revelation of his overthrow of the false gods of the nations. His vindication of his people, liberating them finally from all their oppressors, would also be the vindication of his own name and reputation.

In justifying his people, he would himself be justified.

In his righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, they would find their own. This monotheism was never, in our period, an inner analysis of the being of the one God. It was always a way of saying, frequently at great risk: It was a way of holding on to hope. We can see the dynamic of this monotheism working its way out in the manifold crises of second-temple Judaism, with the Maccabees, Judas the Galilean, and above all the two wars of the late 60s and early s A.

This God was both other than the world and continually active within it. Emboldened by deep-rooted traditions, they explored what appears to us a strange, swirling sense of a rhythm of mutual relations within the very being of the one God: These four ways of speaking moved to and fro from metaphor to trembling reality-claim and back again. Best known of all is perhaps a fifth. Wisdom becomes closely aligned thereby with Torah and Shekinah. I still find it extraordinary that nobody ever taught me all this when I was in seminary. Nor can we look to Jewish scholars for help at this point, since they, by and large, have not been interested in the topic as such.

So NT scholars have just assumed that, if first century Jews were monotheists, they could not in any way have anticipated trinitarian thinking. This I believe to be a huge category mistake at both ends. First, as systematic theologians would of course remind us at once, the point of trinitarian theology is precisely that it is monotheistic, not tri-theistic. Second, as I seem to be one of the only people, who keep on saying, first century Jewish monotheism was never in any case a numerical analysis of the being of the one God.

I cannot stress too strongly that first century Judaism had at its heart what we can and must call several incarnational symbols, not least the Torah, but particularly the Temple. And, though this point has been routinely ignored by systematic theologians from the second century to the twentieth, it is precisely in terms of Torah and Temple that the earthly Jesus acted symbolically and spoke cryptically to define his mission and hint at his own self understanding. They offer a very high, completely Jewish, and extremely early christology, something that is still routinely dismissed as impossible, both at the scholarly and the popular level.

This was not a matter, as has often been suggested, of the early Christians haphazardly grabbing at every title of honor they could think of and throwing them at Jesus in the hope that some of it might make some sense, rather like a modernist painter hurling paint at a canvas from twenty paces and then standing back to see if it said anything to him. Rather, all the evidence points to serious and disciplined theological thought on the part of the very earliest Christians. Refusing to contemplate any god other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they found themselves drawn by the Spirit to use language of Jesus, and indeed of the Spirit, which was drawn from the Jewish traditions and traditional ways of reading scripture.

This language fit so well and enabled them to say so many things by way of worship, mission, proclamation, and ethics that they must have been daily encouraged to pursue the same line of thought, to turn it into hymns and layers and creedal formulae, discovering and celebrating a new dimension of something they already knew like someone who had only known melody suddenly discovering harmony.

The result of all this explosion of exciting but, as I have suggested, focused and disciplined thinking about Jesus and the Spirit is that, in effect, the NT writers offer an incipient trinitarian theology without needing to use any of the technical terms that later centuries would adopt for the same purpose. What is more, when we understand how their language works, we discover that it actually does the job considerably better than the later formulations.

Let me put it like this, no doubt overstating the point for the sake of emphasis. Chalcedon, I think, always smelled a bit like a confidence trick, celebrating in Tertullian-like fashion the absurdity of what is believed, and gave hostages to fortune which post-Enlightenment fortune has been using well. But the NT writers, by re-using the Jewish god-language in relation to Jesus and the Spirit manage to say everything that needs to be said, and to make it look, from one point of view at least, so natural, so obvious, so coherent with the nature of God and with the full humanity of Jesus that fortune receives no hostages at all.

Ironically, the Jewish setting and meaning were either misunderstood or forgotten so soon within the early Church that the fathers struggled valiantly to express the truth, but with one hand, the biblical one, tied behind their backs. And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years.

Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him. My suggestion, then, is that the NT writers, despite what has been said about them again and again within post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship, can be shown to be expressing a fully, if from our viewpoint incipient, trinitarian theology, and to be doing so as a fresh and creative variation from within, not an abandonment of, their Second Temple Jewish god-view.

This rich seam of Jewish thought is the place the early Christians went quarrying for language to deal with the phenomena before them. This does not do justice to what was actually going on. Some, conversely, have suggested that it was only when the early Church started to lose its grip on its Jewish roots and began to compromise with pagan philosophy that it could think of Jesus in the same breath as the one God. Jewish polemic has often suggested that the Trinity and the Incarnation, those great pillars of patristic theology, are sheer paganization. I shall argue against this view as well.

The question can be posed thus: Whatever we say of later Christian theology, this is certainly not true of the NT. There is no time here to explore these themes in detail, but it is important to glance in outline at the way in which different writers developed these ideas. Several of the Jewish themes I have mentioned come together in the famous Johannine prologue.

The passage as a whole is closely dependent on the Wisdom tradition, and is thereby closely linked with the Law and the Presence, or Glory, of God. Similar points can be made about the letter to the Hebrews. The christology of the opening verses of the letter is closely reminiscent of the portrait of Wisdom in Wisdom of Solomon chapter 7. The letter, of course, goes its own way by constructing a christology unique in the NT in terms of Jesus as both high priest and sacrifice, the ultimate reality to which the figure of Melchizedek pointed.

John and Hebrews are usually regarded as late. What about the early material? Paul is our earliest Christian writer, and, interestingly, the earliest parts of his letters may be those which embody or reflect pre-Pauline Christian tradition. Within that strand of material, three passages stand out. The same is true of Philippians 2: It is important to note here that, although Philippians 2: The language is reminiscent of imperial acclamation-formulae: Despite its many differences with both 1 Corinthians 8 and Philippians 2, Colossians 1: The same point is made, by a sort of concentration of this theology into one statement, the spectacular verse in Colossians 2: Another passage, which is very different on the surface and very similar underneath is Galatians 4: As in the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame 4: It is very early and very Jewish.

Jesus and the Identity of God

The logic of the passage is that the Galatians must either learn to know the one true God in terms of Jesus and the Spirit or they will be in effect turning back to the principalities and powers to which they were formerly subject. Their choice is either incipient trinitarianism or a return to paganism. Within these passages, and others like them for instance, the remarkable Romans 8: Later Christian theologians, forgetting their Jewish roots, would of course read this as straightforwardly Nicene christology: Jesus was the second person of the Trinity. Many have assumed that this is meant by the phrase in John and Hebrews, though that assumption should probably be challenged.

These latter uses such as 2 Sam 7: It became another way of speaking about the one God present, personal, active, saving, and rescuing, while still being able to speak of the one God sovereign, creating, sustaining, sending, and remaining beyond. It was, in fact, another way of doing what neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism needed to do, and paganism in general could not do, but which Judaism offered a seemingly heaven-sent way of doing: Put back in context, though, it appears as what it is: Similar exegetical points could be made from other NT writings, not least the very Jewish book of Revelation.

But I have said enough to indicate, or at least point in the direction of, the remarkable phenomenon at the heart of earliest Christianity. It is as though they discovered Jesus within the Jewish monotheistic categories they already had. The categories seemed to have been made for him. They fitted him like a glove. It was the one and only Jesus himself. This raises in an acute form the question why they told the story the way they did.

In the logic of this paper we now work backwards from what people said about Jesus a decade or three after his death and resurrection to what can be said about the human, earthly Jesus himself in his own time and even, dare we say, in his own mind. At this point we need to ward off several frequent misunderstandings. And if we in the Church think we are immune from this, I would urge that we think again. Christians are alas, capable of all kinds of fantasies and anachronisms in reading the Gospels, and to pull the blanket of the canon over our heads and pretend that we are safe in our private, fideistic world is sheer self-delusion.

It is demonstrably the case that where the Church has thought itself safe in its canonical world worshipping the ever-present ascended Jesus in prayer and the liturgy, it is capable of massive self-delusion and distortion. It will not do, again, to sneer that historians always see the reflection of their own faces at the bottom of the well. Those who forswear historical Jesus study will find it impossible, ultimately, to escape seeing the reflection of their own faces in their dogmatic Christs. But if that is the negative reason for engaging in historical Jesus study, as a kind of necessary check on fantasy and idolatry, the positive reason is so important, so exciting, and in our generation so possible and accessible that I cannot begin to describe the frustration I experience when I find this enterprise caricatured, slighted, and dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Just because Muzak and hard rock exist, that is no reason not to write great music today. The existence of kitsch does not mean that there is no such thing as great contemporary art. The existence of the Jesus Seminar does not mean that historical study of Jesus is a waste of time. The positive reason for studying Jesus within his historical context and using all the tools at our disposal to do so has to do with that still-neglected factor, the meaning of Israel within the purpose of God.

If we are to be biblical theologians, it simply will not do to tell the story of salvation as simply creation, fall, Jesus, salvation. We desperately need to say: I believe it is because of this vacuum that people have elevated minor themes, such as the sinlessness of Jesus, to a prominence which, though not insignificant, they do not possess in the NT itself. This approach is unacceptable for the same reason the approach of Crossan and others is unacceptable: After all, it is precisely the cavil of the heterodox today that the Gospels themselves are the self-serving back-projections of a later, and perhaps corrupted, theology.

I fail to see why we should provide such people with more ammunition than they already have. At the human level, Jesus is like us precisely in this: Orthodox Christians are frightened of letting Jesus belong to a world like this, precisely because we know that if he is like us in belonging to such a world, he will he very unlike us in that his world is not our world. We are therefore, eager to flatten his world out or to declare, it of little relevance, because we want to be able to carry him, his message, and his timeless achievement of salvation across to our world without losing anything in the process.

In this eagerness we forget what the NT writers and above all Jesus himself never forgot: It is precisely because he is The Jew par excellence that he is relevant to all Gentiles as well as Jews. This is the ultimately humiliating move for Gentile and Jew alike, precipitating an epistemology of humiliation whereby all may know this Jesus as the living, saving word of God, as different from us in the way that makes him the same as us, as over against us and therefore relevant to us.

This was the story, the warts-and-all story, that Jesus of Nazareth brought to its god-ordained climax. If we want to know the truth of the salvation which he wrought, that is where we must look for it and not somewhere else. Otherwise, for all our impeccable orthodoxy, we might as well go back and shake hands with Rudolph Bultmann.

As George Caird used to say, Christianity appeals to history, and to history it must go. What sort of a task is this, then? It is not simply a matter of apologetics, though I do believe that proper historical Jesus study has enormous apologetic value as we are able to say that, yes, the gospel records do make sense within the world of first century Judaism, despite what the Jesus Seminar and the mass-market paperbacks tell us.

Nor is this, taking up a point that Colin Gunton made, a matter of defending the Christian faith on grounds from outside of faith. The thin, truncated, Enlightenment version of historiography, the pseudo-objective would-be neutral and presuppositionless study of the bare facts of the past, is a parody of the real thing, and woe betide us if we allow the parodies to put us off the reality.

We are called to mission, including to the Enlightenment world, and we shall learn the truth as we learn how to declare it, how to give a reason to our contemporaries for the hope that is in us. This is the God given saving story of a muddled, often disobedient people who nevertheless carried within them the holy seed, the seed of promise. Let me give you an illustration. I have a houseplant in my living room, which someone gave me some years ago.

I watered it, dusted its leaves, and watched it grow for two or three years.

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It had pleasant but undramatic green leaves. After that time, suddenly and without warning, from the center of the plant there grew a flower, tall, red, and spectacular. Nothing in the plant had prepared me for this but there it was. That, after all, was what this plant had been all about.

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