Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Person and Work of Christ, Hypostatic Union, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, The Chalcedonian Definition, Anhypostasis/Enhypostasis

The Person and Work of Christ

            Traditionally, the study of Christology has been talked about as a study of the Person and work of Christ.  The temptation that can arise when we think about this subject in this way is to treat the Person of Christ and the work of Christ as two separate things.  In reality, these two ideas are intimately connected.  We see in the gospel that the Person of the Incarnate Son is the work of God in our midst, and God’s work among us, in its fullest sense, is the Person of Christ.

            This connection is evident in the Nicene Creed.  Immediately after the statement of faith in Jesus, the Son of God, the Creed states, “Who for us and our salvation…” emphasizing that when we think about who Jesus is, we must remember that he is who he is for us and our salvation.  The Incarnation was not one thing and the saving activity of God something else, but rather the Incarnation is the reality of God’s saving will worked out in history.

Hypostatic Union

            When the church had finally agreed that Jesus could not be thought of without taking into account that he had both a human nature and a divine nature, the question of how those natures were related to each other was raised almost immediately.  For some, this question might seem to be superfluous.  If we have admitted that Jesus is really God and that Jesus is really human, does it really matter how those natures are related?  The answer is an emphatic yes.  In order to understand what is at stake in this issue, let us consider the two major alternatives that were put forward before a consensus was reached at the ecumenical council of Chalcedon in 451.

Monophysitism

            This view literally means “One nature” and so we can already anticipate that this view is going to tend to collapse the two natures of Christ into only one.  The claim is made that Jesus has both a human nature and a divine nature, but, since human nature is finite and divine nature is infinite, Christ’s humanity is swallowed up in his divinity like a drop in the ocean.  In practice, this means that Christ’s humanity is not really taken seriously because it is utterly overshadowed by his divinity.  In the end, while this view pays lip service to the humanity of Christ, in practice, it is as if he has no humanity at all.

Nestorianism

            The Christology that has come to be known as Nestorianism tries to account for the two natures of Christ in a different way.  Whereas Monophysitism tended to collapse the two natures of Christ into one, Nestorianism tends to completely separate them.  There is a sense that there are two Christ’s, a human one and a divine one.  These two Christ’s appear together, but they cannot be combined into a single person.  It has been described as two natures connected like two planks of wood, glued together at the ends.  They are attached, and so they are “one” in a sense, but there is no meaningful connection between them.  What impacts one nature does not necessarily impact the other, which is the point at which this view causes serious concerns for Christian faith.  If a sharp distinction is maintained between Christ’s human nature and his divine nature, the conclusion can be made that some events we see in the gospels show us one nature and not the other.  This is most serious when we consider the crucifixion.  Nestorian Christology, with its radical distinction between Christ’s two natures can easily come to the conclusion that Christ suffers and dies in his human nature but this has no impact on his divine nature since, it is presupposed, God cannot suffer.  However, if this kind of distinction is maintained, we must question what connection the human Christ has with the divine Christ, since the scripture does not give a clear criterion by which to know when they are joined in their action and when they are not.  In the end, this view results in the conclusion that the human Jesus finally tells us nothing certain about God.

The Chalcedonian Definition

            At the ecumenical council of Chalcedon, a definition was proposed that achieved universal agreement in the church.  The creed that was affirmed at Chalcedon says that Christ is “truly God and truly man…consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood…one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”  This affirms that Jesus is every bit as much God as the Father is and at the same time every bit as much human as we are.  The phrase used to describe this understanding of the two natures of Christ is “hypostatic union.”  This refers to the perfect union of two hypostases (natures) in the one Person of Christ.  The four words describing how the two natures are related to each other are making two major points.

            The first two words, inconfusedly and unchangeably, are ruling a Monophysitist understanding of Christ out of bounds.  It means that the two natures of Christ cannot be confused, that is, collapsed together.  We are not allowed (in light of what is revealed in the Biblical witness) to think of Christ as having some kind of nature that is somehow different than truly divine nature and truly human nature.  Also, the human nature does not somehow change into the divine nature nor the divine into the human or that both natures merge into a third nature.  Both natures are indeed there.

            The second two words, indivisibly and inseparably, emphasize that, though there are two natures, they are utterly united to each other.  We cannot talk about the natures as if they were separate.  Why would we ever want to separate the two natures in Christ?  Historically, the reason has been because of presuppositions about human or divine nature that are violated by the actual fact of the Incarnation.  Once again, as we have argued earlier, if we see that God has actually done something that challenges our preconceived ideas of what God can and cannot do, we must allow the fact that we encounter in the gospel to overturn our presuppositions.  Somehow, even the things that we think are “beneath” God (such as suffering) are taken up in the Person of Christ.

            So, what is at stake in the question, “How are the two natures of Christ related” is extremely important for us because the two views ruled as inappropriate for understanding Christ as he is put forth in the New Testament end up denying one of the natures or the other.  Monophysitism finally denies (for any practical purposes) that Christ really has a human nature, as it has been swallowed up in the infinity of the divine nature.  Nestorianism finally denies that the human Christ really has a divine nature, because his divinity recedes at key points in his life (such as the crucifixion).  If indeed both natures are really necessary for the Incarnation to truly be an act of God that penetrates into our humanity, and it does, for Christian salvation to make any sense at all, then we must come to some conclusion like the one reached at Chalcedon.

It is important to remember that the interaction of the two natures within the single Person of Christ is to be thought of in Chalcedonian terms rather than the two alternatives (which were declared to be heresy).  This view, and the implications that flow from it, will be assumed for all the rest of discussion.

Anhypostasis/Enhypostasis

            To bring clarity to our thinking of the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ, it is helpful to discuss two terms that were coined by different eras in church history to give expression to crucial insights.  The first of these was developed in the early church and is called “Anhypostasis,” which derives from Greek, literally meaning “without person.”  It is meant to express the conviction that, without God entering into human flesh, there would not have been any human Jesus.  What this means is that any view that affirms that Jesus was born under the normal course of natural events and only at a later time was “made” Christ (a view called “adoptionism,” as in, “Jesus was born as just a man but was adopted as the son of God” and was widely condemned as heresy in the early church).  This conviction receives its clearest expression in the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Birth.  Jesus’ birth was not due merely to natural causes but was the result of the interaction of the Creator of the universe, circumventing the ordinary means of impregnation and taking human initiative out of his Incarnation.

            The second of these two terms was emphasized in the Reformation era and is “Enhypostasis,” which dervies from Greek, literally meaning “in person.”  The central conviction expressed in this term is that in the person of Christ, there is really is a real human nature, that it is not shortchanged or swallowed up in any way.

            These two terms together help to solidify what we mean when we speak of Jesus as being fully God and fully human.  We mean that there never would have been any Jesus or any words or acts of Jesus if it were not for the initiative of God, who always makes the first move and that, in every deed, in every word, and even in the being of Jesus, real humanity is involved.  Jesus’ words are simultaneously divine words and human words; Jesus’ actions are simultaneously divine acts and human acts.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Incarnation, "Change" in God

“Change” in God

            The very title of this section may be offensive to some who hold to a particular understanding of divine immutability.  Often, the argument comes from Greek philosophers who argue something along these lines:  God is perfect.  Because of God’s perfection, God cannot change in any way, shape or form, because every change (by their definition) must be a becoming better or a becoming worse or a growing form less to more mature.  If God changes, he is either becoming better (in which case, he was not perfect before), or he is becoming worse (in which case, he is not perfect now).  This has been assumed to be the Judeo-Christian understanding of God’s “unchangingness” and there are some passages in the Old Testament that can be read in such a way as to support this view.  Things such as (Malachi 3:6) “I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”  However, even this verse implies that the unchanging being of God should be thought out in terms of faithfulness and trustworthiness rather than in static terms.

            The strongest argument against such a static conception of God’s immutability lies in two actions of God that are each unique in their own way.  The first of these is the creation of the universe out of nothing.  Unlike any idea that the universe is co-eternal with God or that there is a kind of logical necessity to creation (it had to be what it is and could not have been otherwise), Christian faith declares that God created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing).  If this is the case, there once was “a time” (though, strictly speaking, time did not exist until God created the universe) when God was not yet Creator and now, God is Creator.  God, of course, was always able to create, but the free decision to become Creator is a change in God that overthrows the Greek understanding of immutability yet remains faithful to the Jewish.

            Unless there was any doubt that creation implied a kind of “becoming” for God, Christian faith bolsters and amplifies this claim with what is arguably the single most significant action ever taken by God.  The Incarnation.  We read in the New Testament that God became human “when the fullness of time came” (Galatians 4:4).  Before the time when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and she conceived and gave birth to Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity was not intimately joined to human nature.  Since that time, he has been.  There is a sense that there is “change” in God inasmuch as the one who once was not a partaker in human nature now is.  Again, this is eminently faithful to the Jewish concept of “unchanging,” but it flies in the face of the Greek, static view.  Once again, it must be stressed that this is not a conclusion reached through abstract reasoning, but is based on the concrete act of God in Christ where we see that God has done a new thing, even for God and it is only in light of that fact that we dare to say that there is change in God in any sense.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Incarnation, Real Knowledge of God

Real Knowledge of God

            One of the most significant and scandalous implications of the Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth is the fact that, in doing so, God brought real knowledge of himself into our humanity.  Sometimes, it is tempting to think that Jesus had the entirety of the Old Testament revelation already implanted into his human mind from birth and that there was no real human learning in his life.  We cannot maintain this, however, when we recall the story in Luke, chapter two when Jesus is left behind in Jerusalem and was found in the Temple when he was twelve years old.  We remember that Jesus amazed the teachers with his answers and his understanding of the Old Covenant, but we often forget that we are told that he was asking them questions.  Jesus took our ignorance upon himself and actually went through a process of learning the revelation of God from within our humanity.  Granted, he was so connected to his Father that his learning was greatly increased and he reached a deeper understanding of God than we often do, but the learning process is indeed real.

            Throughout his life, Jesus tells us about the exclusive relationship that he has with his Father.  He says things like (Matthew 11:27) “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal him.”  This verse, so often used in support of double predestination, is primarily speaking of the absolutely exclusive knowledge of God that is possessed by the Son.  No one can have any real knowledge of God unless it is rooted and grounded in the Son.  It is as Athanasius said, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.”  Our knowledge of God must arise in and through the Son; if it does not do so, our conclusions can be rooted in nothing other than our own human subjectivity and have no objective grounding in the being of God.

            We must remember, though, that Jesus is not simply speaking of the knowledge that the Son has had of the Father since eternity past, but is referring to the knowledge that the Incarnate Son has of the Father in his incarnate person.  This real knowledge of the Father is lodged in Christ’s human nature as well as his divine nature.  We cannot separate Christ’s divine knowledge of God from his human knowledge of God without introducing a dangerous split in the person of Christ.

            This is important for us to understand because it means that, in Jesus, God has introduced real knowledge of God into our humanity, that the limits of humanity are not intrinsically incapable of real knowledge of God, that God’s ability to manifest knowledge of himself in our humanity is greater than our humanity’s limitations (though we know this only because this real knowledge has been brought into our humanity in Christ).  This means that, as we participate in Christ through the Holy Spirit, we actually become partakers of the real knowledge of God that Christ had.  In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul asks, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct him?”  He is asking the philosophical question, “How can we know God?”  He answers his own question by saying, “But we have the mind of Christ.”  For Paul, this is the same idea as what he mentioned just a few verses before when he comments, “‘Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.’  For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.”  God has revealed the things of God to us through the Spirit, which is to have the mind of Christ.  Through the activity of the Triune God, we partake of authentic knowledge of God.

To the Jews a Stumbling Block

            When we look at some of how Jewish thought has approached the problem of knowing God, we see a different conclusion.  If you were to ask a pious Jew, who is rooted in and committed to the historical faith of their ancestors, and ask them, “Who is God?”  They would answer like the Old Testament does.  “God is the one who delivered us from slavery in Egypt; he parted the Red Sea; he fed the people with Manna from heaven; he led them into the Promised Land; he defeated their enemies.”  But if, after this response was given, you were to press further, saying, “Wonderful.  You have told me what God does and has done.  Who is God in God’s own life?”  The response would be a pious shrug of the shoulders.  “I don’t know.” 

When we ignore the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and we insist on a radically unitary understanding of God where there is no personal distinction within the being of God, God becomes an enigma.  There are no relationships of mutual and reciprocal knowing rooted within the very being of God and so God is intrinsically unknowable.  If this is how we understand God, our claims to know God are more an example of human presumption than real knowledge.

It is important to understand that this claim to know God is not based on what has been called “natural revelation,” or what we try to deduce about God from nature and human experience.  We root our authentic knowledge of God in the person of Christ, not in any abstract concept of God.  This is why Christian faith can claim to really know God.  What we need to understand is that, when we compare this to the views of other monotheistic faiths, we must not be surprised when others say that we are blasphemers for becoming too familiar with God.

To Gentiles Foolishness

            In light of the cosmological dualism latent in much of Western philosophy, it can come as no surprise to us that Paul tells us that the Incarnation is foolishness to the Gentiles.  In the Greek mind, God is even further removed than he is to the Jew.  The Jews believe that God interacts with humanity and at least reveals something of himself, even if it is not a fully reliable understanding of God in God’s own life.  To the Greek, God is completely separate from the created world.  Indeed, ancient Greek philosophy felt that the creation had a kind of necessary existence because it emanated from the very being of God (that is, it is not created out of nothing).  If God is so utterly transcendent over the created order so as to be unaware of it, then human beings cannot really have any kind of meaningful knowledge of God.  It is not a stumbling block like for the Jews, who consider such knowledge to be blasphemous.  Rather, it is simply foolish to say we can know God, a claim more to be laughed at rather than taken seriously.

            Another way Greek thought dismissed the Incarnation is because, in their mind, it was simply inconceivable that God would enter into humanity because, to the Greek mind, human flesh was restrictive and evil (this view was brought to its most extreme expression in Gnosticism).  If this is indeed true, then God cannot enter into human flesh because it would taint God’s divinity.  Once again, Athanasius was the one who decisively overthrew this way of thinking.  He argued (in light of what we actually see in Jesus Christ) that the entry of God into tainted humanity is not the corruption of God but the uplifting and healing of humanity.  This observation will come into play when we consider the Christian life.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Incarnation, Dualism, Cosmological Dualism, Epistemological Dualism, Anthropological Dualism

Dualism

            Dualism is a word that is used to describe a way of thinking that tends to separate the universe into two utterly separate categories.  It is presupposed that nothing can be in both sides of a particular dualism and any such crossing over is deemed to be “irrational.”  If indeed Jesus of Nazareth is a real incarnation of God in real human flesh, it necessarily overthrows all manner of dualisms that tend to separate what God has joined together.  In our investigation of three kinds of dualism, we will seek to understand first what the form of dualism implies, then why it is damaging to Christian faith, then finally how the reality of the Incarnation overturns such ways of thinking.

Cosmological Dualism

            Many religions and philosophical systems include a form of cosmological dualism.  In this form of dualism, the universe is separated into two different realms; the tangible realm and the intangible realm.  The first of these includes everything that we can experience using our senses, whereas the second one is composed of things that are not observable through the senses.  This can be understood as the realm of God (or the gods), or it might be the realm of “real” and “enduring” things, such as in Plato’s concept of an ideal plane.

            In practice, such a dualistic worldview tends to presuppose that God cannot interact with the tangible world.  For the ancient Greeks, this often took the form of God creating the universe before time began.  Ever since that time, God has not actually interacted with the world.  In fact, in some systems, God is not even aware of the world.  Lest we think that this is only an ancient idea, Isaac Newton subscribed to a dualistic separation between God and the world.  For him, the universe was a closed system of cause and effect.  Any interaction of God that disrupted this order would be considered a miracle (as was often the definition at the time).  However, Newton did not think that this was really possible.

            This understanding of the world is disastrous to both Jewish and Christian faith, because the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms that God does indeed interact with the world.  At the very least, this tradition believes that God created the universe, not out of logical necessity but out of freedom and love.  God did not have to interact with that which is distinct from himself, but chose to do so while yet remaining distinct from that created world.  This is affirmed throughout the entire biblical canon because God is continually cited as manifesting his presence among the Israelites and among the apostles.  And yet, even though God does indeed interact in this way, there is no confusion of any kind between God and the world.  However one interprets the relationship between God and the world, one cannot twist the Jewish and Christian scriptures to support a Pantheistic view.

            In any case, the Incarnation shows that a cosmological dualism is a fundamentally inappropriate way to understand the relationship between God and the world.  We are not free to presuppose that God does not interact with the world because God has indeed done so.  Not only has God done this in the abstract, but in the very concrete person of Jesus.  It is simply impossible to maintain both that Jesus is the fullness of God in flesh and that God does not interact with the created order.  If we try to fit Jesus into a cosmologically dualistic framework, we can come to no other conclusion that, in Jesus, we are confronted with something other than the God of the universe, which fundamentally destroys Christian faith as presented in the New Testament and believed by the church.

Epistemological Dualism

            Another area where dualism has had a damaging impact on Christian faith is in epistemology.  Epistemology deals with our theory of knowledge, that is, how do we know what we know?  On the one hand, an epistemological dualism makes a distinction between what we know and our knowing of it.  This is a good thing because we need to always remember that things are what they are (most importantly, God) regardless of whether we know them or not.  However, the view becomes a true “dualism” when it claims that our knowledge and the reality we know have no, and can have no real connection.  This view asserts that we can never know something in itself, but can only know it as it appears to us.

            Again, there is a certain nugget of truth here because it emphasizes the significant way in which the person of the knower affects knowledge.  We already know this to be true in light of our consideration of God’s interaction with Israel.  We must grant that personal considerations such as lifestyle have a considerable impact on our knowledge and that we are hindered from knowing certain things if the lives we lead are incompatible with that knowledge.  However, this is only to assert that there is no necessary connection between reality and our knowledge of it.  It means that, given that reality is objective and our knowledge of it is subjective, the knowledge we think we have might not be correct.

            However, epistemological dualism maintains that real knowledge of objective reality from within our subjectivity is not only not necessary but not possible.  This is finally the root of post-modernity and the emphasis in recent years on the idea of pluralism.  Pluralism is a view that claims, since we can not have confidence that we really know something, because our community and background so affects our knowledge, we must allow for all different points of view.  Both of these movements stress the knowing subject (us) over and against the object we seek to know (God).  The latter of these ideas still grants that there is an objective reality that we can know but our knowledge cannot be considered accurate in any meaningful way because it is hopelessly filtered through our minds; the former denies that we can have any knowledge of objective reality, sometimes even denying that there is such a thing as objective reality.

            The reason why epistemological dualism is destructive to Christian faith is because it effectively eliminates any meaningful understanding of revelation.  If we presuppose that there is (and can be) no actual connection between what we seek to know and our knowledge of it, then, no matter what God does or has done, we cannot actually have any real knowledge of God.  Thus, when the scriptures tell us things like in John’s prologue where we are told that Jesus has come to explain God, it has no real meaning.  If we cannot finally have any real knowledge of God, then the gospel is finally without any real substance.

            The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation does not allow for an epistemological dualism because God, as he is revealed to us (Jesus) is the same as God in his own being because Jesus is of one being with the Father.  This of course does not mean that we cannot be mistaken in our understanding of Christ (just as we can with any reality), but rather that we know that, as we come to know God in his revelation to us, we come to know God himself.  This overthrowing of epistemological dualism is one of the more radical ideas of Christian faith.  Christian thought teaches that, because of God’s Incarnation in Jesus, we actually can have some real knowledge of God.  The Christian God is not the undifferentiated unity of Islam or some strands of Judaism, but rather a Trinity of Persons.  Because of this, God is intrinsically knowable as each Person of the Trinity knows each of the others.  We become participants in this knowledge in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

Anthropological Dualism

            The last major dualism that we will be discussing is Anthropological, that is, it has to do with a split made in the middle of the human person.  Most often, this takes the form of a dualism between body and soul, though there have certainly been variations on that theme.  Anthropological dualism asserts that the human person is divided into two mutually exclusive parts, for argument’s sake, we will stick to the division between body and soul.  These two parts may be connected together, but such a connection is seen as nothing more than at a mathematical point (that is, there is no real connection between them).  That which effects one of them does not touch the other.  Physical things have no spiritual value and spiritual things have no physical value.

            Anthropological dualisms were extremely common in the early church, especially where Christianity had been influenced by Platonic thought.  Even in more recent times, this form of dualism is latent in much Christian thought.  C. S. Lewis (who I like in general) once commented, “You do not have a soul, you are a soul.  You have a body.”  If all he meant were that our souls are fully part of who we are and not something added on by people who are religiously minded, there would be no problem.  However, to imply that the body is just added on is the same issue, just turned around a different way.  Similar trends are seen when Christians talk exclusively about God saving the souls of believers as if, somehow, the soul is separable from the rest of the human person.

            The early church realized that anthropological dualism tears apart the Christian faith and came to a church-wide agreement about it at the first ecumenical council at Constantinople in 381 AD.  The issue at the time was called Apollinarianism, which proclaimed that Jesus could not possibly have had a human mind.  The argument went something like this.  We know that God came into the world as a specific human being and took humanity upon himself.  However, the human mind is the source of all kinds of terrible corruption.  This corruption was viewed as so utterly opposed to God that to say that Jesus had a human mind would be a tainting of the divine nature.  The church eventually handled the situation by affirming a clarifying statement put forward by Gregory Nazienzen which said, “The unassumed is unhealed.”  This statement basically means that, if there is any part of human nature that God did not take upon himself in the Incarnation, the same part of human nature remains unredeemed.  In that specific instance, if Jesus did not have a human mind, our human minds remain untouched by God’s redemptive work.

             The reality of the Incarnation overthrows such partitive ways of thinking of the human person.  Jesus does not make a distinction between soul and body, but enters into both equally.  There are moments in the New Testament where the authors will speak of the body in negative terms and the soul (or spirit) in positive terms, but upon closer examination, it is clear that this is merely an illustrative distinction and not meant to imply a complete dualism in humanity.  Gregory Nazienzen is by no means infallible, nor is his famous dictum sacrosanct, but it is particularly helpful in summarizing the significance of the redemptive work of Christ, so it is lifted up here as a pithy explanation that is faithful to the gospel.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Incarnation, Of One Being With the Father

The Incarnation

            The very central theological claim in all of Christian faith is that God himself has become incarnate (“in flesh”) in the man Jesus of Nazareth.  When you boil everything down, when you dig past all of the philosophical debates and arrive at the one point on which every other Christian claim is made, you end up with this extremely important, and extremely offensive idea.  Indeed, the only reason that this work did not start out with a discussion about the incarnation of God is because the incarnation is simply not intelligible apart from the Old Testament framework and the historical interaction of God with Israel.  It will be argued that every point of Christian doctrine, every reflection on the Christian life, needs to be thought out from the point of view of the second Person of the Trinity made flesh.  However, it must always be remembered that this is Christ within the context of Israel.

Of One Being With The Father

            The Nicene Creed is the single most ecumenically affirmed statement of Christian faith.[1]  By far, the longest section in the Creed is the article talking about Jesus.  It reads, “And [we believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, by whom all things were made.”  The point on which the entire Creed turns is on that phrase, “of one being with the Father” [Greek: ομοουσιος τω Πατρι, Homoousios to Patri].  This phrase states the firm conviction of the early church that Jesus of Nazareth is distinct from the God he called Father, but at the same time, so closely united to him that they are truly the same God.  This statement overthrew both the view that Jesus and the Father were utterly different beings as well as the view that Jesus and the Father were absolutely one and the same (the argument was that nothing is of the same being with itself but of one being with something else).

            This might be a difficult idea to grasp, and various thinkers have considered it to be nothing more than muddled thinking, but it truly lies at the core of Christian faith.  The early church felt compelled, in light of who Christ is and what he did, to claim that he was nothing less than very God of very God.  It is true that, as the Nicene Creed is not contained in the Biblical canon, it is always open (as are all theological statements) to revision in light of scripture, but let us reflect for a moment what would be implied in the other possible explanations.

            First, Jesus is something other than God.  The question we must ask is, “If Jesus is not God, how can he forgive sins, speak for God, etc.”  The simple answer is that, in light of the entire Old Testament witness, only God can do these things.  If Jesus is not God, then his words are nothing more than those of a creature who has no authority to promise such things.  The New Testament does not say anything to overturn such a conviction.  Second, Jesus is fully God, but a God that is separate from the God he called Father.  This would overthrow the entire Jewish conviction (instilled by God himself) that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4).  If this explanation were maintained, the gospel would be severed from its mooring in God’s historical interaction with Israel. 

The other possible explanation is that Jesus and the Father are completely indistinguishable and the distinction between Father and Son is rooted in our subjective experience and not in the being of God.  This, at first, seems the best alternative, but it undermines the entire gospel because it claims that God is not in God’s own being what he is in his interaction with us.  That is, though God reveals himself to us as both Father and Son (and indeed, also as Holy Spirit), those distinctions bear no relation whatsoever to who God really is.  If this is so, then the gospel finally tells us nothing about God because it tells us about a God who is a community of Persons.

Building on this Nicene conviction, that the relationship between the Father and the Son is within the very being of God, Athanasius, the great Alexandrian theologian of the fourth century, wrote, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.”  There are a few consequences of this statement that are worth raising at this point.

First, it means that the Father/Son relationship is internal to God while the Creator/creature relationship is external to God.  Both of these ideas have far reaching impact on our theology.  In regards to our understanding of natural theology as traditionally defined (that is, looking at nature to help us understand the nature of God), it affirms that there is no bond of being between creation and the Creator.  This means that, while we can conclude that creation is consistent with God’s being, it finally does not give us any concrete knowledge about who God is.  The underlying principle is that, in Christian faith, creation is contingent.  That is, creation is not how it is because of any kind of logical necessity.  It might have been different; it might not have been at all.  God was always able to create, but was under no constraint to do so except as a manifestation of his free choice.  In this way, creation is seen to depend entirely on God, both for its being and its continuation.

The Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) had an enormous impact on the Greco-Roman world at the time that we often do not notice because such an idea is so deeply engrained in our culture.  According to Greco-Roman philosophy, it was not possible for God to change in any way.  The argument was framed like this:  Any change is either from lesser to greater or from greater to lesser.  If God were to change, God would either be becoming greater (in which case, God was not perfect before the change) or else God is becoming lesser (in which case, God is not perfect now).  Because of this understanding, if God is to be seen as Creator, it must be concluded that God must have always been Creator and, thus, creation is equally eternal to God.

Of course, this is not what the Judeo-Christian tradition has traditionally affirmed.  Despite the arguments around whether creation took place exactly as the first two chapters of the book of Genesis or not, Christians are united that there was a time when creation came into being and that God was under no constraint to create.  This means that, in a sense, God became Creator.  There was, in some sense, a change in God.  At this point, we are driven by God’s self-revelation to reject the Greco-Roman understanding of divine immutability (unchangeability) and interpret it more in terms of a Jewish idiom.  The statement that God does not change does not mean that God is static or frozen, but that God is eminently faithful, reliable and trustworthy.  This understanding of God’s immutability allows for a doctrine of creation out of nothing.

Because there is no bond of being between creation and God, creation must not serve as a source for our thinking about God.  This means that we cannot reason from the gracefulness of an animal to the gracefulness of God, nor from the majesty of a mountain or a sunrise to the majesty of God.  Any such reasoning would be interpreting nature according to categories not derived from God’s self-revelation.  After we have allowed God’s self-revelation and self-communication to disclose God’s attributes to us, we can see nature as pointing beyond itself to the God that created it, but this is a bearing witness to God, not a direct communication of God.

 Athanasius’ conclusion is no less significant when it comes to theology proper, or “revealed theology.”  According to his affirmation, we ought to signify God from the Son and call him Father.  Our reflections about God must not begin with abstract concepts about God arrived at independently of God’s complete self-revelation in Jesus Christ (such as using concepts of God borrowed from secular philosophy).  When we apply this idea rigorously, we find that much of theology done throughout the years, particularly in the West, has leaned on such independently generated ideas.  Many early theologians (including Augustine) were heavily influenced by a neo-platonic worldview and many medieval thinkers were methodologically more dependent on Aristotelian philosophy than on the Biblical tradition.

One might make the traditional argument that, if something is really true, it should not matter how one gets to it.  The problem with this view is that it presupposes a dualism between form and content.  More and more, it is becoming clear that content is impacted by the form it takes and that form should be determined by content.  This means that if we want to know God, we must seek to know God in a godly way.  In the case of Christian faith, where it is affirmed that God has revealed God’s self to us in and as the man Jesus, this is particularly clear.  The content of God’s self-revelation is God’s own being.  This has taken shape fully only in the man Jesus.  We are not free to come to conclusions about who God is that bypass the actual form of God’s self-revelation and self-communication.  Because of the oneness of being between the Father and the Son, we can rest assured that there is no God behind the back of Christ, but only the Triune God we see manifest in Jesus.

If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ.  When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like.  This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin  our reflection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”

In practice, this means thinking out things like the attributes of God, such as God’s love, power, mercy, etc., not in terms of our personal experience, or our culture, or in any other abstract way, but only in terms of the concrete reality of the Incarnation of God in our midst.  This is because we cannot finally separate God from Christ; they are indeed the same God and the character of the Father is not finally different than the character of the Son.  This kind of Christocentric thinking must also be the way we approach sin, sacrifice, the Christian life and even the church.  As this idea will be reinforced over and over again throughout the rest of this work, no more will be said about it at present.  Suffice it to say that the Incarnation forms the point on which all of Christian theology turns.

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[1] Ironically, even traditions that cannot agree which books should be in the Bible (whether to include the Apocrypha or nor) agree on the Nicene Creed as an accurate description of Christian faith.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, Jesus Within the Context of Israel, Jesus Redefines Judaism

Jesus Redefines Judaism

            Though we must always remember to place Jesus into his appropriate context as a Jew, we cannot simply conclude that he has no impact on Judaism.  Perhaps the most significant impact that Jesus has on traditional Judaism is that he forces us to rethink the oneness of God.  Jesus takes the Shema onto his own lips (Mark 12:29), affirming that he believed that there was only one God, a God that he called Father.  And yet, at the same time, he continually spoke of his unique relationship with this Father saying things like, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), “Do not let your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1), and “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22).  Each of these (and many others could be added to them) points to a kind of exclusive relationship between the Father and the Son; in fact, we read several times that people tried to execute him because he made himself God.

            So, somehow the Jewish understanding of God needs to be reinterpreted to understand how both the Father and the Son can be God and yet have there still be only one God.  Indeed, nearly every Christological heresy could be described as attempts to answer the question, “How are the Father and Son related to one another” within the context of monotheism.  This has resulted in many different views:  That Jesus is simply a man (Ebionite Christology), that Jesus is only God and only seemed to be human (Docetic Christology), that Jesus is a half-man, half-God mediator (Arianism), that Jesus is another God altogether (Tritheism) which throws out the Jewish conviction of the oneness of God, or that Jesus is simply a particular manifestation of the one God but there is no personal distinction between him and the Father (Modalism).

            Trying to wrestle with this kind of tension is difficult enough, but when a dualistic framework which presupposes that God and the world can have no real interaction (like in Greco-Roman philosophy and their intellectual heirs), the problems multiply.  In the end, we have only two options, conclude that Jesus was just a man whose claims to be equal to God were simply delusions of grandeur or to take him seriously and rethink our concept of God.  Seeing that the New Testament and the entire apostolic community absolutely refused to consider the first of these options, we are left with rethinking our doctrine of God, which will be explored at various points below.

            Another way that Jesus redefines Judaism is in its scope.  Traditionally, it was viewed that God had a special relationship with Israel and, though there was only one God, this one God was only Israel’s God.  The continual reaching out of Christ to the Samaritans and Gentiles show that the scope of salvation has been extended to the rest of the world.  God has entered into humanity, so all of humanity is implicated in this act of God.  The scandal of particularity still stands because Jesus must still be interpreted within a Jewish framework and the Christian gospel, though open to all people is still rooted and grounded in the person of Christ.  Though the gospel is universal in one sense, it can only be accessed in Christ.  There is no other way to the heart of God other than Jesus (John 14:6).

            We also see, after looking at Christ’s life, that the sacrificial system, so important for understanding the sacrifice of Christ, is marginalized and set aside, no longer serving as the center of the faith.  There is good reason to hope that Israel will be able to resume their rituals of sacrifice because it will help both Jews and Gentiles rediscover the significance of sacrifice within the framework that God has crafted, but, because of Christ and how his death is interpreted in the New Testament, we see that the sacrificial system was pointing forward to Christ’s death and, now that the one sacrifice has been made, we need not continue the practice of regular animal sacrifice.  However, be that as it may, the sacrificial system is not to be considered unimportant, nor can we simply ignore it now that we understand Christ’s death as a sacrifice.  This is because, since Jesus died in the context of Israel and the Israelite understanding of sacrifice is necessary to correctly appropriate it, we must always remain rooted in the historical context God shaped so that a correct understanding can continue to arise.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, Jesus Within the Context of Israel, Jesus as a Jew

Jesus Within the Context of Israel

            Since the entire last chapter was dedicated to God’s interaction with Israel being critical for our understanding of Christ, it can come as no surprise that this chapter, dealing with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, would start with placing Jesus within His Jewish context.

Jesus as a Jew

            Again it must be said that, even though it may be an offensive idea, Jesus was a Jew.  This has both a positive and a negative meaning.  Positively, it means that Jesus lived and taught within the Jewish context in Israel.  This means that He was speaking to people who took the law for granted, who participated in Temple worship, who believed in the One God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who believed that history was headed in a definite direction.  It means that Jesus needs to be thought out according to the categories of thought and life that God hammered out through the hundreds of years of history that Israel had endured since Abraham was called.

            In a negative sense, the fact that Jesus was a Jew marks off some ways of thinking as utterly incompatible with the gospel.  For example, Greco-Roman thought and its heirs throughout Western history has operated with a body-soul dualism where the body and soul are seen as being completely different and having absolutely nothing in common.  Often, this manifested itself as a belief that the soul is intrinsically good while the body is intrinsically evil and that the world and body are a kind of prison for the soul.  This idea is utterly foreign to the Old Testament and, though the New Testament sometimes uses language that can be interpreted in a dualistic way, we must resist that temptation by remembering that Jesus was a Jew, the apostles were Jews, and they wrote from a Jewish worldview (perspective).

            The fact that Jesus was a Jew is significant because God did not simply enter into humanity as some kind of abstract concept but became a particular human person.  Though Jesus presented a gospel that was intended for all of humanity, it is dangerous to imagine that Jesus somehow transcended all human culture and ethnicity and can be thrust into any context without reckoning with the “Jewishness” of Christ.  Jesus was not European, nor was he American, nor was he Asian or African.  The gospel is open to everyone who is from those areas of the world, but we must, in a sense, become Jewish and get inside the Jewish way of thinking if we want to really understand Christ.  The gospel can be translated into any culture, but it also challenges and transforms any culture it enters into, just as it did the Jewish culture.

            One other thought we must bear in mind is that the Jewish man Jesus lived at a particular time in a particular place, who traveled to different places which we can visit ourselves.  When the time came, Jesus died in the city of Jerusalem and we can visit the sites that are mentioned in the Gospels.  This same Jewish man, after being in the tomb for three days, was raised from the dead, still as a Jew, and forty days later, ascended to heaven to be seated at the right hand of God, as a Jew.  Not only is one of the Persons in the Holy Trinity bound up with humanity, not only does the Trinity include a human, but a Jewish human, a particular human.  The gospel, from beginning to end, is built on concrete events which cannot be jettisoned, even once we have understood their meaning.