Christology

The question of Christology hinges on how God comes into the world in the person ofJesus. Is Jesus the one and only Christ? If he is the Christ, why this particular human and not
someone else and how are humans and indeed creation saved through this person? How is this particular person universal and unique at the same time? How is he truly God and truly human?
This last question also raises theological and anthropological questions. Who is God? Is God capable of temporal existence or is He timeless and so wholly other that to say that the Word became flesh is to state a logical impossibility? Conversely how can a human be God? How can a sinless human be human? Can a human be God and not lose her or his humanity? Can a temporal
creature in any meaningful way be the bearer of eternity in her or his person? Is a finite spatial person capable of carrying a non-corporeal and infinite God?

Obviously given the space of this paper not all of these questions can be answered.However there can begin a questioning of these questions and some of their assumptions along with a the framing of other questions and possible solutions. I begin with my on particular questions and assumptions born of my situation in life. As a North American, southern, white male born into a lower middle class family who was raised with certain assumptions concerning scriptural authority(verbal plenary inerrancy), I am blessed and burdened with the need to construct a Christology which is Biblically based. As one educated under critical scholarship, I am also blessed and burdened with the need to recognize the limits of biblical authority vis-a-vis historical-
critical research and a theology which views God as a higher authority than the Bible. I also have seen the contradictions of exclusivity in regards to issues of racial, sexual and economic injustice. The hermeneutic of my culture has historically utilized the Bible to claim a universality which actually excludes persons and voices and thus fails to offer a compelling universal message. A repressed humanity fosters an diminished view of the humanity in Christ and thus a truncated Christology. On the other hand, I have come to be equally critical of a Christology which in its apologetic toward modernity domesticates and diminishes Divinity and thus deprives Christology
of power. All this is to say that I wish to develop a Christology which addresses pluralism without losing its universality. Such a Christology must be particular, open, universal, communal and
eschatology. This proposal for Christology will be written in reverse and may appear at first to be catabolic and may be evaluated to be anabolic but is arguably neither but rather metabolic or teleo-bolic in that the end and meaning of Christology is finally in front of us, not all behind, above and
with us. Christ is in continuity with the Christological traditions that originate from different reference points and is moving toward the “Day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6) which is still yet to come. In short the future revelation of Jesus Christ is determinative in saying who He/She is
process of becoming.

If we begin for irony’s sake with the particular, Jesus must be the center of Christology. The problem of the historical Jesus makes this a difficult task. We can know with reasonable
historical certainty that there was a man name Jesus from the town of Nazareth who lived in Roman occupied Palestine in the 1st century. We also know that he had a following and that he was
crucified by the Roman authorities. Beyond this we have the witness of the church in the canon of scripture. Scholars have and will continue to debate how much of the testimony of the NT is historically accurate. While my best guess is that the New Testament is more historically factual than critical scholars tend to claim and less so than traditionalist want to affirm, for this paper I assume that we must admit that all of the texts of the Gospels in particular and the New Testament as a whole are colored by the theological concerns of the primitive church in various locations and times. This is not to say that historical critical scholarship cannot find elements of the Gospels which are historically more or less probable than other portions. Rather we must say that all of the texts of the canon (including the Hebrew Bible) are necessary for constructing a Christology and that we cannot construct an adequate Christology which does not take all of the texts seriously whether historical or mythical. The first serious consideration is that Jesus was truly human. This means that he lived in a particular time and place. This is both a theological and a historical truth. Whatever we may conclude about the humanity and the divinity of Jesus, the canon is consistent that God comes to humanity in history and not outside of it. Jesus was also a Jew. If we take the idea of the incarnation seriously this means that God comes into the world as a particular human with a particular history, not as a generic human nor as an apotheosis but in affirmation and judgement of all humans in each one’s particularity. We cannot say for example that the Godrevealed in Jesus is not the Jewish God or that Jews worship a false God. If God became incarnate in Jesus that God is no other God than the God of the Jews and the Jewish faith. The desire of the inerrantists, even moderates like Grenz, to insist upon more factuality than can be claimed by historical research is understandable but such historicity is unverifiable. While God is revealed in history, objective historical research (if such exists) cannot conclude that very much beyond the prosaic is historical and thus we cannot establish a sufficient Christology from the tools of historical research. Grenz insists upon the historicity of the resurrection as the basis for affirming the claims of Jesus to divinity. As evidence he sights the change of the day of worship and the reality of the martyrs. First, we have to say that even if Jesus were raised from the dead, we have to assume that he did indeed claim to be divine if we are to conclude that he is divine. Second, we would have to assume that God would not raise from the dead (and thus vindicate) someone who made faulty claims about himself. Such an assumption has profound implications in regards to the doctrines of salvation by grace and justification by faith by leaving the whole of humanity (except perhaps Jesus) unqualified for resurrection and thus without hope for such vindication. Most of all, we have to question the evidence that Grenz gives. The apparent sudden
change in the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday is extremely problematic on a number of grounds. The witness of the martyrs deserves more attention. Certainly, such martyrs are evidentiary but not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If we assume that some and maybe many of the traditional accounts of the martyrdom of the first Christians are factual, we must also acknowledge that martyrs have died for causes less than a human who was raised from the dead. While the mass hysteria critique is also problematic, we must acknowledge the ability of humans to make myths to justify a cause is beyond legendary.

The God who confronts us in our particularity is an open God. She is open to the free decisions of human creatures and these free decisions influence and even change God. The human
is open to the world and God is open to humans. Thus we have a human Jesus who grows in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humanity and a Self-secure God Who binds and loses in heaven what His people to bind and loose in on earth. More importantly, the resurrection in the Biblical tradition is a communal event. Paul thus calls the risen Christ “the first fruits of those who sleep.” For the resurrection of Jesus to be meaningful in the canonical way, we must await the resurrection of all the saints. For the resurrection to be historically proven, we must first
see it repeated or, theologically speaking, completed. That meaningfulness requires a future disclosure of God in Christ whom the creed says in hope shall come to judge the living and the dead.

While the historicity of the resurrection is beyond the purview of historical critical scholarship and sound canonical theology, such scholarship and theology cannot refute the
possibility of a historical resurrection of the dead which begins with Jesus. If the canonical claim is taken seriously then Jesus is the resurrection on which all resurrections depend. His resurrection is universal in significance and not just for the benefit of Christians. While event this cannot established beyond reasonable doubt, if the witness concerning his resurrection cannot be dismissed, neither can the witness to his divinity and this too signifies a universal claim on creation since the canon consistently affirms that the God of Abraham and Jesus is the one true Creator of the cosmos. To claim less is to claim a tribal deity who must compete with or eternally tolerate other tribal deities who may or may not be benevolent towards the creation. Scripture and tradition affirms the universal Lordship of Christ. Whether or not this universality is imperialistic is a question to be address. However, first we must realize that this universality is connected to the particular Jesus, whether that Jesus is understood canonically or historically. Whatever we know
about Jesus is knowledge about the universal God. Does this mean that the knowledge we have of Jesus is the final knowledge we may have about God? Only if Jesus does not continue to reveal himself. Hall persuasively argues for the full and true humanity of Jesus and all its implications. In the process of affirming his humanity, we might wonder if Hall, in spite of his criticism of apotheosis, has forgotten the divinity of Jesus and made Him incapable of any more universal significance than any other human. Does Hall’s Jesus represent God any more than Martin Luther King, Jr, a biblical prophet or any Christian? If more so, then how much more is necessary to establish Jesus as theabsolute singularity. The question of the particular universality of Jesus is the question of his uniqueness (monogenesis). These is a question Hall does not answer. I am not certain I can answer it myself. I can say yes to the evangelical stance that He is unique but realize that the minute one posits uniqueness along side universality, one is treading very close to imperialistic theology. Feminist and womanist theologians point out how easily this occurs in their critique of traditional Christology’s patriarchialism. If we wish to take a clue from Iranaeus that what is not assumed is not redeemed, then women cannot be redeemed. If on the other hand the divinity of God is androgynous then the male humanity of Christ is linked to the feminine aspects of Divinity. There is certainly within the wisdom tradition of scripture ample precedence for this assertion. There is, however a bit of a canonization within the canon when feminists assert that Jesus who identifies himself with “the least of these.” While certainly this text is an important part of any Christological construction it is not the only one and it is arbitrary to make it the pivotal text. We may say that Jesus is found in the black woman but we must as be careful as Hall points out not to make an apotheosis out of Jesus either as the ideal middle class white male or as the most oppressed of the oppressed. If we do, we deny his true humanity. Furthermore, the basis for constructing such a theology is not from below but rather from above, from the received canon. Moreover the canon within the canon approach opens the door to all sorts of oppressive interpretations. We are stuck with the dilemma that Christ represents the universal God in a unique
way which may not be definable. We can say that this unique universality preserves the particularity of all humans but does not specify how Jesus is unique in a universal way. I leave this as an unresolved tension in my Christology, knowing its potential imperialism and also knowing that anything less leaves Jesus dispensable or at least optional to Christology.

A partial remedy for this dilemma is to affirm the openness of Jesus Christ from both the human and the divine sides. While we may say that Jesus was sinless we need not say that Jesus was omniscient or inerrant or perfect in his humanity. The Biblical witness states that he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humanity(Luke 2:52). This canonical witness is in perfect harmony with any account, secular or otherwise, of anthropology. Humans are always in development, always becoming. We may further state that whatever Jesus may have known about his divinity, there is no point in his life that this recognition was complete. Indeed, his cry of God-forsakenness on the cross is a clear indication that the full understanding of his divinity eluded him until the end of his humble, earthly pilgrimage. That the Gospel of John, with its high Christology, seems to indicate otherwise is not a problem. First the high Christology of John is not always consistent. The high priestly prayer of Jesus recognizes that he lacked glory in this world that He had before the creation (John 17:5). Such a lack is evidence that while the Johanine Jesus clearly identifies himself as Divine, He does not consider that Divinity to be full of the glory necessary for total Divine self-realization. Moreover, as critical scholarship points out, the high Christology of John’s Gospel is a reflection of the theological concerns of that community and not necessarily a historic fact of Jesus’ self knowledge. We must not go so far in this direction as to say that the community’s reflection on Jesus is inferior to the self knowledge of the historic Jesus. Such an assertion assumes that others can know nothing more about our individual selves than we already know. The whole fields of the social and psychological sciences would be pointless endeavors if that were true. Rita Nakashima Brock points out that in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus is not always cognizant of his divinity as when the woman touches the hem of his garment and he feels the power go out from him. Jesus in his human nature, at least, is unaware of who touches him, pointing to the reality that his divine nature does not always disclose all knowledge to his human nature. Nakashima Brock points out further that in his encounter with the Syro-Phoenecian woman, Jesus is taught by that woman that his mission is to include the gentiles. While Nakashima Brock
may not give due credence to the possibility that Jesus was being deliberately provocative; nevertheless, the Syro-Phoenecian woman, instead of Jesus himself, articulates the expansion of
Jesus’ mission. The human nature of Jesus continues to grow in sophia and charis indicating that the incarnation does not mean that his human nature is perfect or omniscient. Jesus even wrongly predicts the coming of the Son of man in glory in his own generation. The fact that this prediction must have been a great embarrassment to the early church makes the historicity of this prediction more likely. Regardless of the historical reliability of various portions of the Gospels, the canon is clear that Jesus is never in his human nature closed to growth. His life is “open to the world” as Grenz drawing on Pannenberg points out in regards to human nature.

If we are to acknowledge the openness of his humanity, a consistent openness of his divinity would take seriously the incarnation as being the way in which what happens to and within
the humanity of Jesus also happens to and within his divinity. I f we assume that all that the human nature experienced the divine nature experienced also, we might also advocate a kenotic Christology. The voluntary( hand tied behind the back as opposed to hand chopped off) version is preferable but once there is consistent voluntary identification with humanity involuntary suffering inevitably occurs. If the both the human and the divine nature do not know the hour of coming, we have to admit that the divine nature has entered our time and if God enters our time, His nature must be temporal and if temporal then open to a future which is in some , if not many respects, indeterminant. This is not to say that God’s experience of time is the same as human experience of it; however, in Jesus the human experience of time is incorporated into the divine experience of time. If that incorporation is possible a temporal eternity as opposed to a timeless one is necessary. The best that a timeless eternity can do is to say that eternity is adjacent to time and hence the incarnation is not a union of divinity with humanity but a tangential proximity. This is not to posit a Nestorian view of the union but rather to say that God is capable of union with humanity because God is temporal and capable of voluntary self limitation. In God’s self limitation H/She demonstrates openness toward the future and this economic demonstration is consistent with God’s ontological reality (Rahner’s rule). When the Son predicts His coming in glory during the generation of the original disciples and this does not transpire, we have a God-Human who does not know the future with exhaustive certainty. This would be consistent throughout the triune persons since the Father knows the future only in as much as He determines not to change His mind about that future. A Christ who is both ontologically (temporal) and economically (restricted to the time and space of 1st century Judea) limited can say and really mean, “Who touched me?” Such a Christ is also not absurd when he prays since relational events within the trinity are temporal rather than timeless. Furthermore, this Christ demonstrates the confident love of God by granting that what His disciples permit or forbid on earth will be permitted or forbidden in heaven.

The promise of given both to Peter and the disciples lets us know that after the ascension Christ is still open to new learning and this openness makes possible the communal aspects of
Christology. He has more to teach us that could not be borne all at once(John16:12). We should not then ask, “What would Jesus do?” as if He is not still doing but rather “What is Jesus still doing?” That doing is done in dialogue with His Body. Jesus is present in the Church in both divinity and humanity whether we are to understand this as via the Holy Spirit (Calvin) or by the ubiquity of his presence post-ascension (Luther). He is also present in the Bible and the Sacraments. And as He gathers all things into Himself (Ephesians), His presence is manifest outside the church in the world He came to save. We need not see this only in terms of His immanence in the world but also in terms of his transcendence as the continuing and heuristic presence of Judaism and Islam attest. While Hall is right to recapture the consistent importance of the human nature as a sign not only of real human representation but also as an assurance of divine solidarity, Judaism and Islam remind us even in their critiques of Christian faith that the wonder and mystery of the incarnation needs the reality of God’s transcendence. In all these places of Christ’s presence, there is genuine, living, interactive, vulnerable relationship that makes Christ always becoming always open to the new creation and even open to the retrieval of the Hebraic faith which Jesus was dependent upon. The uniqueness of Jesus, however it may be conceived, must always be in ongoing relationship to the work of the Spirit in Israel, the Church and even in the other faiths and philosophies of the world He is saving. The particular Christ is also the communal Christ and the cosmic Christ.

This openness to the world which is both human and divine, manifest in both natures of Christ is an openness to the future and so christology is eschatological. What Christ was and is always becoming is open to what is to become when He/She is to come in glory. We do not know the final revelation of Christ. We know that the last witness of the canon says that he is the Alpha and the Omega. We know that the Pauline witness says that through him God will be all in all. The objective certainty of Christ does not lie in either the canonical witness nor in the tradition of the Church, nor in the resurrection as a historical event, nor in a historical Jesus but rather in the future of God in Christ. Christology is firmly established not from above or below but in the future. Christology is an ongoing process (metabolic), the final structure of which is in established in the end (teleo-bolic). Christology begins at the end. Christology whether from above or below is limited; Christology from the end is cumulative. Christology from below and above can be self serving; Christology from the end serves and judges all. Jesus Christ is growing and His growth does not stop with His biological maturity as a human, nor with his death or resurrection, nor with the closing to the canon, nor with the experience of the church in tradition or its contemporary situation, nor with the individual experiences of saints dead or living. All of these are part and parcel but what and who Christ is ultimately is revealed in the future. Whether we presume to start from above or below we have already begun with the pre-supposition of the eschatological Christ. That Christ is still outstanding, open and in process.

We close with the puzzle of the uniqueness of Christ. Christology must affirm that Jesus Christ is the unique God-Human without being imperialistic and exclusivistic. Nakahima-Brock makes a Christ the crest of a communal wave, a Christa community. This image is basically a passive one of dependency rather than inter-dependency. Mark Kline Taylor wants to affirm the communal aspects of Nakashima Brock’s Christa/Community wave however he would like to assure that Jesus plays an active rather than passive role. So Taylor suggest the analogy of yeast. Yeast comes from bread but is also essential in making loaf bread and so while it does make Jesus essential and active in Christology it fails to make Him unique. We may not have a fitting metaphor for how Jesus is the absolute singularity, nevertheless it must be affirmed. A controversy which I have not touched on is the sinful verses sinless nature of Christ. I think that issue is to be settled by recognizing that original sin is transferred in our communal history and not seminally. Jesus is born into the sinful condition of the world and even in the womb so the Christmas story tells us the sinful world conspires to exclude Him from shelter. Yet Jesus is the sinless one even as by sin He is undone. We may recognize in this paradox the need of humanity for a Christ who is all that we have described, particular, open, universal, communal and eschatology. In this Christ we have a Savior of the individual, the community and the cosmos even if we have to let our words, even inspired words, fall short of and merely approximate the glory of the final Word of God.