On Reconciliation: Some Theological and Biblical Reflections

Biblical Paradigms

If the ministry of reconciliation truly belongs to the core of authentic Christian praxis, then it must be established first and foremost that the theological rationale for reconciliation is deeply rooted in scripture.  When one approaches the bible for this purpose, one is struck by the fact that the motif of reconciliation is a strand that is interwoven throughout the entire biblical narrative.  One example of this can be seen in the words of the prophet Isaiah, who says that God “has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release the prisoners…to comfort all who mourn” (Is 61:1-2).  Indeed, this verse offers a beautiful depiction of God’s “good news” of reconciliation for a broken world that is overtaken by the bad news of war, oppression, death, suffering, and captivity.  In this passage, Isaiah connects this reconciling vision to “the year of the Lord’s favor” (v. 2), which is a reference to the jubilee year spoken of in Leviticus 25:10-55.  The premise behind these laws in Leviticus was to ensure that the bonds of debt, captivity, servitude and poverty could not endure from one generation to the next, because God had commanded that every fiftieth year, “you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Lev. 25:10).  Thus, Isaiah’s vision points backward toward the original statutes and the principle of reconciliation that was supposed to undergird the Israelites successful dwelling in the Promised Land.  Additionally, however, this passage points forward to the New Testament, as well, because Jesus quotes precisely this passage in Luke’s Gospel when he speaks for the very first time about the nature and purpose of his mission (Lk. 4:16-21).

This example is the first, but certainly not the last time Jesus would speak about God’s plan of reconciliation as the nature of his mission.  Perhaps the most prominent example of this theme in Jesus’ ministry occurs in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 (with parallels in Luke 6).  Since these chapters comprise the most important ethical teaching for Christian discipleship, it is revealing that the theme of reconciliation should gain such prominence.  Like his inaugural statement in Luke 4, Jesus begins his sermon by acknowledging that reconciliation begins with a word of blessing and hope to the broken and downtrodden.  The Beatitudes offer a vision of comfort for those who mourn (Mt 5:4), a world inherited by the meek and the persecuted (v 5, 10), in which God’s children are peacemakers (v 9).  Later on, Jesus says, “When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you…go; first be reconciled…then come and offer your gift” (v 23-24).  There is no room for putting religious rituals and worship practices above human relationships—another prophetic motif which connects Jesus’ teaching to the OT tradition (e.g. Amos 5:10-27). If any question remains about how far we are to take this radical vision of reconciliation, Jesus removes all doubt when he rejects in kind any form of violent retaliation (v 39-42), and advocates instead that disciples respond to violence with selfless generosity (v 42), and, perhaps most puzzling of all, by loving our enemies and interceding on behalf of those who persecute us (v 44).  This, we are told, is what makes us children of God (v 45), and thus it is the radical call put upon those who dare to be “peacemakers” in a violent world.

Theological Mode

Though I am influenced by more than one theological mode, my theological journey began with the convictions and passions I share with the existentialist philosophy and theology of Nikolai Berdyaev.  He opens the book Slavery and Freedom with a chapter entitled, “In Place of an Introduction: Concerning Inconsistencies in My Thought.”  For him, as for me, the desire for internal consistency present in systematic theology is trumped by the existential need to always address the world’s suffering and brokenness in a relevant way.  Thus, like Berdyaev, I affirm the basis of philosophy in gaining knowledge of the world, but, “in my case the desire to know the world has always been accompanied by the desire to alter it…I have always denied that the things which the world presents to us are stable and final reality.”

Even as my mode has leaned toward socio-political or relational theology at times, I have never been able to embrace a transcendent theology.  It seems to me that pure transcendence is the negation of this existential impetus and, if carried to its logical extreme, results in passively waiting for God as deus-ex-machina to act and fix the world. Such a theology cannot offer enough room for agency and incarnation which are vital components of a ministry of reconciliation which accords equal weight to bodily and spiritual needs.

Sources of Authority

Any theology which claims to be Christian theology must take the word of God revealed in scripture as a primary source of authority.  Despite our many differences and schisms, all sects of Christians are bound to the authority of the bible.  Thus, the bible itself could be a profound vehicle for inter-denominational reconciliation if we could all but learn to see that reconciliation is vital to the biblical message; but therein lies the problem—we remain deeply divided by our varying interpretations of scripture that led to our divisions and schisms in the first place.  Thus, the bible must be foundational as a source of authority, but will not suffice by itself.  Even if we could all agree on the original meaning of the bible (which would be a nearly impossible feat in itself), in order to agree on how to apply and live out the teachings of the bible in our own very different contexts, we must also appeal to the authority of reason and experience.  In all things, however, we must leave space for the word of the living God lest we make idols of reason (as in the Enlightenment), experience (postmodernism), or even the bible itself (fundamentalism).

The Church and the World

The problem with articulating a stance on the proper relationship between the church and the world lies in the tremendous ambiguity of both words; both have meant various and quite contradictory things to different people in different circumstances, so much clarification is needed.  Thus, depending on the working definition of the terms, I suspect that there is a sense in which all five of Niebuhr’s types are justifiable.  For example, “church against the world,” if understood prophetically where “church” means those who do God’s will and “world” means the status quo of oppression, war, and exploitation, becomes a very acceptable model.  The church should be against the status quo of the world until the status quo is the Kingdom of God.  If, however, we are talking about the “church” as a historical human institution and the “world” as all humans outside that institution, then we need only reference the Inquisition and the Crusades (among other examples) to realize that the “church against the world” model can be extremely dangerous and inadequate.  Here, as always, the semantic meaning and context determine the legitimacy of the theological statement.

Theory of Atonement

I have difficulty with the dominant American Christian teaching on the doctrine of atonement.  As Miguel De La Torre sums up, many Christians seem to forget that, “Jesus…was put to death, like so many today, by the civil and religious leaders who saw him as a threat to their power.  There is nothing redemptive in the suffering of the just.”

With De La Torre, I find in the crucifixion a picture of “God’s solidarity with the countless multitudes who continue to be crucified today,” but Jesus’ brutal death on the cross “should never be reduced to a sacrifice called for to pacify a God offended by human sin.”

Viewing atonement through a reconciliation hermeneutic is at odds with the traditional doctrines of satisfaction/substitution and of divine impassibility because it rests on the assumption that God is a God of love who is willing to suffer in order to repair a broken relationship with humanity.  This opposes the doctrine of an impassible God who lacks nothing (thus cannot long for a restored relationship with us) and is thus marked by retributive rather than restorative justice (God can only be sated by the substitutionary death of the innocent Jesus).

 

 

 

Theological Cosmology

Biblical cosmology is fundamentally relational—it concerns the relationships between us and God, each other, and with the rest of creation.  It is represented by the Greek metaphor of oikos, the household of God.  The originally harmonious order of the household has been violated so that we know live in a broken home with severed relationships and a broken-down home that has fallen into disrepair.  The hope of Christian reconciliation is the hope for a new creation—a new house.  It thus speaks both to the repair of familial relationships as well as repair to the physical structure of our dwelling.  Thus Christian reconciliation addresses economic (oikos + nomia, the proper order and administration), ecological, and ecumenical (concerning all members of the household) relationships.  In this sense, everything that happens on this earth, from politics and economics at the systemic level to human relationships on an individual level, pertains to Architect’s mission of reconciling and rebuilding what we have torn down.

Eschatology

In 21st-Century America, eschatology and apocalypse are hot topics, but the eschatological vision that most Americans are preoccupied with seems to be at odds with the biblical message of reconciliation.  The renewed obsession with the second coming of Jesus, the cosmic spiritual warfare depicted in Revelation, and the (biblically indefensible?) doctrine of the rapture has resulted in, as Crossan puts it, people “waiting for God to act violently while God is waiting for us to act nonviolently.”

In contrast to  this popular silver-screen eschatology,  the ministry of reconciliation calls us to live by faith in the new hope for a new and reconciled creation and to give our lives to working within this new reality even though God’s realm is all but invisible in this broken and fallen world.  We take our affirmation from St. Paul, who encourages us not to become preoccupied with this “momentary affliction…because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:17-18).

 

Bibliography

 

Berdyaev, Nikolai. Slavery and Freedom. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944).

 

Brummer, Vincent. Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).

 

Crossan, John Dominic. God and Empire. (New York: HarperOne, 2007).

 

De La Torre, Miguel. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004)

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Who Is Christ for U.S. Today? The Challenge of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought

April 21, 2011

Introduction

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 21^st century North America is the relative obscurity of the bulk of the details of his life and thought; the only thing that virtually everyone knows about him is that he died as a martyr in Nazi Germany due to his role in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  There is certainly a sense in which this fact is a credit to him—throughout his writings, Bonhoeffer consistently emphasizes the importance of concretely living and enacting the Christian faith as a ‘man for others’ and he is critical of the church’s loss of credibility by failing to act in the world for justice and peace.  In that sense, Bonhoeffer would likely be glad that his fame was won through the way he enacted his Christian faith rather than what he wrote about it.  The danger, however, lies in the fact that Bonhoeffer’s writings give us the context for his actions and the hermeneutic through which they ought to be interpreted.  Without his writings, it has been all too easy for American Christians to construe Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assassination plot as paradigmatic, and then to make this fact normative for subsequent Christian engagement in plots to kill other ‘Hitlers’ like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, or Kim Jong-il.

This kind of thinking plays into our desire to distill a black and white, good versus evil narrative out of historical situations while ignoring the nuances and shades of gray.  That his decision was not gladly and easily made becomes evident when one reads in Discipleship that for Bonhoeffer, the true nature of the love Jesus called his disciples to live out is only fully understood in his injunction to love our enemies (Mt. 5:43).

While for many of us, Hitler has become a cliche for the most evil person we can think of, what Bonhoeffer really struggled with was how he should love Hitler—to love him as Christ demands love of the enemy, not as der Führer in the way the German Christians loved him.

A second danger has manifest in a tendency to abstract certain strains of his thought from the context of his written work as a whole, which has often led to misinterpretation and misappropriation of Bonhoeffer’s thought.  Perhaps the best example of this is the misreading by both liberal and conservative scholars of his provocative theme of Christianity in a religionless world—a “world come of age.”  On one hand, Bonhoeffer has been made the champion of the so-called ‘death of God’ theologies and on the other, he has been denounced as erroneously prophesying the defeat of religion by a rapid secularization of the world that never came to be.  Both misinterpretations ignore the nuance of the word ‘religion’ as Bonhoeffer uses it in the Letters and Papers from Prison and especially in his earlier writings.  To avoid these pitfalls, we need to approach Bonhoeffer as a whole person whose life and theology unfolded in a specific context, and as a man who sought to be a faithful witness to Christ by laying down his life for others and taking on the suffering and injustice of his time.  Certainly christology plays a central role in all of his theology, but this must be understood as complementing and informing Bonhoeffer’s concept of religionless Christianity rather than contradicting or superseding it.  It is absolutely vital that we recognize that his christology was never an abstract dogmatic theologizing, nor was it an uncritical appropriation of traditional Christian doctrine.  When taken in context, it becomes clear that his christology is always pressing toward a concrete understanding of who was Lord (Christ) and who was not (Hitler, the Nazis and the German Christians); this can be seen in the fact that he delivered his famous Christology lectures at Berlin University just months after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

Thus, we can see his christology developed while he sought out the full implications of the question, “What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?”

If we begin to truly understand Bonhoeffer in his own time and place—his ‘us’ and his ‘today’—then we can begin to articulate and enact our own response to these questions in our context.  As we examine how Bonhoeffer interacted throughout his life with this “nagging” question, we can begin to highlight the implications for the church in the 21^st century to strive to exist for others out of true loyalty to Christ.

Who is Us? – The Problem of the Church and the World

In his essay for the Seventh International Bonhoeffer Congress in South Africa, Peter Selby poses this ungrammatical question as an entry point in discussing Bonhoeffer’s question of who Christ is for us.  Contrary to the question “who are we,” which is a matter of identity, Selby suggests that asking “who is us” is a question of solidarity—of whose right it is to define who the “us” includes:

If the question, Who is Jesus Christ, for us, today? is to be addressed, therefore, it has to be on the basis that Jesus Christ is not the one who accommodates himself to prior decisions…about who “us” is, but on the basis that only in and through him is the decision about the boundaries of our solidarity to be made.  When we know him we know who “us” is, and without submitting our decisions about who “us” is to him we shall not know who he is.

While certainly for Bonhoeffer, as well as many who have sought to apply his insights, this issue of solidarity was a matter of race—the so-called Jewish question in Bonhoeffer’s time, as well as the racism he addressed in America, and the issue of apartheid in South Africa (doubtless a major concern taken up at the Congress)—Selby seeks to apply Bonhoeffer’s insights to “a world in which the power to decide who ‘us’ is has been handed over to those who have the capacity to succeed in the market and ultimately to control it.”

In this sense, the question of “us” leads to conflicting claims: the “us” delineated by the so-called sovereign entities of nation states and markets as opposed to the “us” called into the body of Christ.  It raises the question of the relationship between the church—the community of disciples called by Jesus—and the world at large; the border line of the church’s “us.” For Bonhoeffer, this question emerges out of his much maligned, misunderstood, and misappropriated reflections on “religionless Christianity” in his correspondence from Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge.  The point of these reflections was to wrestle with what it meant to be a Christian in “a world come of age,” in which “human beings have learned to manage all important issues by themselves, without recourse to ‘Working hypothesis: God.’”

As the need for God as a source for knowledge about ourselves and our world diminishes, God has become what Bonhoeffer dubs a deus ex machina to conveniently provide solutions and comfort only where human knowledge and efforts fail. This is problematic because the better and more comprehensive human solutions become, the farther God is consequently pushed to the margins until we no longer need God at all. Thus, Bonhoeffer addresses his question of who Christ is “for us today” in light of the relationship between Christ, the church and the world:

How do we go about being “religionless-worldly” Christians, how can we be εκ-κλησια, those who are called out, without understanding ourselves religiously as privileged, but instead seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world? Christ would then no longer be the object of religion, but…truly lord of the world. This notion of “belonging wholly to the world” is developed much earlier in Discipleship, in which he states that “the disciples and the people are one in that they are all the community called by God…All are called to be what they truly are.”

In short, he summarizes, “Jesus claims all of human life, in all its manifestations, for himself and for the kingdom of God.” Only when it recognizes and takes seriously its identity as the body of Christ can the church begin to exist for others and extend this call to all of humanity.  Being called by God and not self-chosen, the church is the actual presence of Christ on earth in concrete historical reality. Thus, like Christ, the church belongs wholly to the world by existing for others in love and service, for it is not the body of Christ as a matter of form, but of function.

The problem of the church, however, is the confusion between its concrete existence as the body of Christ in and for the world and its existence in the world as but one example of a specific sociological type: religious community.  This is the problem Bonhoeffer recognized and tackled in his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, in which he identifies the two fundamental misunderstandings of church: confusing it with the sociological religious community on the one hand, or with the actualized Realm of God on the other.

While he consistently reiterates the identity of the church as Christ’s body and the fact that God calls the church into community as an end in itself, Bonhoeffer recognizes the danger of misinterpreting these insights in his later works.  In the preface to Discipleship, for example, he notes that “a great number of people who come to our preaching…admit sadly that we have made it too difficult for them to get to know Jesus,” then poignantly asks, “Do we really want to deny being in community with these people?” It is in this work that he begins to establish the inextricable link between faithful belief and obedient action, when he argues that the disciple responds to Jesus’ call not by “a spoken confession of faith in Jesus,” but by the “obedient deed.”

While he argues that this obedient action is what truly sets the disciples apart, the περισσον by which their righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, Bonhoeffer also recognizes that it is precisely here that Christians are most likely to separate too far from the world and begin to despise rather than love the world. This results from the confusion that our righteousness is our own when in fact it is that of Christ reflected onto the whole community.  On the contrary, notes Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, “The one who looks at Jesus Christ indeed sees God and the world as one…[and] can from then on not see God anymore without the world and the world without God.”

Who is Christ? – The Problem of Sovereignty and Allegiance

We have seen that Bonhoeffer’s concept of religionless Christianity in the world come of age was developed in the context of Christ’s claim to lordship over all and his call of all humanity into the community that constitutes his “us.”  In much the same way that the writers of the New Testament framed the concept of Christ’s lordship as a subversive foil to Caesar’s claim to be “lord and god,” Bonhoeffer developed this christology over against the backdrop of the German Christians’ acceptance of Adolf Hitler as der Führer.  While this is rather obvious at face value, what is truly important in both cases is the drastically different and paradoxical nature of the “lordship” of Christ in comparison with that of Caesar and Hitler.  While it is true that Bonhoeffer emphasizes God’s claim to be Lord of this world come of age, it “is not the God of power who…overcomes his enemies by force, but the man for others, the God who has come to serve…the suffering God who has let himself be pushed out of this world to the cross.”

Perhaps the most important theological implication of Bonhoeffer’s distinction between Christianity and human religiosity is that while the former “directs people in need to the power of God in the world, God as deus ex machina,” Christianity and “the Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering of God can help.” For the Christian witness to the Lord to be authentic, it must likewise be borne out in “identifying ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings.”

When Bonhoeffer suggests that this means renouncing “peace and happiness” by mourning the injustices of the world, he was not being abstract or vague; he was referring explicitly to the mantra of the National Socialists, to whom the German churches all too readily accommodated in the interest of stability and security. This kind of peace in the guise of ‘security’ is never promised to the true followers of Jesus, who are all too often labeled “disturbers of the peace” because “in their poverty and suffering,” they fatally give “too strong a witness to the injustice of the world.”

Geffrey B. Kelley employs these insights to extend Bonhoeffer’s critique of the church in America into its contemporary context.  He lists a number of atrocities committed by the United States and its allies in the name of “national security” while American Christians either passively stood by, or even worse, openly endorsed their nation’s actions. While these wars and incursions in the name of national ‘defense’ cost the lives and livelihood of countless civilians in some of the world’s poorest regions, the U.S. dismissively labels these innocent fatalities ‘collateral damage.‘  As Kelly notes, this dubious use of dishonest and euphemistic language serves as a dire example “of how Jesus’ preaching of agapeic love for and sensitivity toward one’s supposed enemies could be suppressed by Christians who should know better,” with the result that, “the enemy had been demonized and brutality justified.”

In addition to adopting this brand nationalistic militarism under the guise of triumphalist theologies, the church in America has been led to ignore the devastation caused by such warped values in our own country: that countless billions of dollars are being diverted from programs that can help provide for the basic needs of our most disadvantaged and marginalized citizens to be squandered on overseas conflicts and government contracts that benefit the already well-to-do.  It is certainly not an accident that the rate of inequality between the richest and poorest Americans has be rapidly increasing since World War II, and yet the church has remained overwhelmingly silent.

In this case, the sovereignty of Christ as Lord, and the loyalty and allegiance demanded of us to him have been compromised and confused with the sovereignty of the nation and its own claim to authority.  While the nation claims to have the authority to break Christ’s commands in the Sermon on the Mount—namely to love the enemy and to not resist evildoers with violence—Christ’s command remains binding.  Too often, Christians have divided their lives into two spheres, which Bonhoeffer dubs the ‘private‘ and the ‘official,‘ and have pretended that they were only obligated to heed Christ’s command in the former.

“The world is too evil to avoid resisting evildoers nonviolently,” we have claimed, but Christ replies, “It is precisely because this world is evil that the commandment is at all times binding: do not resist an evildoer.”  Obviously Bonhoeffer’s nonviolent ethics were ultimately compromised in his decision to take part in the assassination conspiracy, but should this be counted a glaring inconsistency?  Or was it actually an example of Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the Christian should be willing to take on the suffering of the world with Christ, to prefer suffering for oneself over causing others to suffer?  In any case we should be careful not to make such an act normative; it must be understood in the context of the extreme circumstances in which Bonhoeffer lived, and with the unusual difficulty of wrestling with how best one should love a man like Hitler as Christ bids us love our enemies.  Perhaps this is the point at which we should recognize the importance of seeing Bonhoeffer as a fallible human being and avoid the danger of idolizing him as a Christ-figure himself, placing his words on the same level as the Word of God.  What is important is that we see in his witness Jesus‘ claim to total and exclusive loyalty—even unto suffering and death.  Nothing and no one can be allowed to compromise or compete with this loyalty; even Bonhoeffer.

Conclusion: Who is Bonhoeffer for us Today? 

We have gleaned many insights from examining the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in context, and this has led to some questions and challenges for our own time.  The biggest obstacle for understanding the significance and application of Bonhoeffer for us today is undoubtedly the drastically different circumstances in which we live.  Few writers have articulated this challenge as sharply as Chung Hyun Kyung does in her letter Dear Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  She writes:

Yes, in your time the enemy was clear.  But how about our time? In our time we do not have a Hitler character.  Our enemies are often so beautiful, attractive, even sexy.  They dominate us with the power of seduction…rather than military force.  When I look at today’s situation of globalization, CNNization and marketization, I can see that the driver is mad.  But the passengers and the person who tried to save them are also slightly mad.  We are all to some degree insider-outsiders in this madness of globalization.  We are victims and we are also complacent.  And also we resist.

She is right to note that in our context, we cannot simply replace the actors from Bonhoeffer’s stage with contemporary names; we do not have a Hitler figure.  We do not have such a cliche villain that can suddenly elucidate who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in our narrative because, as she goes on to say, “nobody’s hands are clean.”  Throughout her letter, she deconstructs the heroic, almost messianic character of Bonhoeffer’s legacy as saint and martyr, subtly reminding us, as Bonhoeffer himself undoubtedly would, of his humility and humanity.  The importance of this deconstruction is the notion that the injustice of our world cannot simply be overcome by the vicarious and self-sacrificial action of one hero on behalf of all (even as our Hollywood movies would have us believe otherwise)—the world’s evil is too pervasive for that.  Indeed, she is quite right to assert that “what is at stake in our time is Life itself.”

For this reason, Bonhoeffer’s idea of religionless Christianity is an indispensable resource, helping us to see that “Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life.”

If this is true, then the solution to the death and destruction of life in the world will require the church as a whole, and not just an individual martyr, to serve and protect life where it is most vulnerable.  It will require a pro-life stance that makes an ethical claim on our whole being, not just a partisan political slogan on a bumper sticker.  It will require Christ’s community on earth to accept its mission to serve God through the least brother and sister and to be willing to endure suffering on their behalf.

As such, it is a call not into random and senseless suffering, but into the suffering that brings reconciliation. It will require us “to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed,” in a new language that is “liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.” We must accept that the word of God is the mark of the life of the whole community, not just professional clergy, and that “preaching does not simply repeat the message but says it anew, does not recount the past but addresses the present.”

Thus, we will be required to denounce the powers of death and destruction that threaten vulnerable life everywhere—both human and nonhuman—because Jesus’ true disciples “long for the renewal of the earth and for God’s perfect justice.” In short, it will lead us to the conviction that we cannot serve two masters and will call us to turn from Mammon to God, to renounce our wealth and cheap grace and to take up the costly grace of the cross.

Asking Bonhoeffer’s question of who Christ is for us today will lead us to ask other difficult questions, like whether we should pay our taxes when we know that those funds are being misappropriated to impoverish the many, enrich the few, and proliferate weapons and wars that threaten lives and ecosystems.  Should we vote our consciences our act on them?  Should we trust the government to represent us, or should we represent Christ even when it leads us to disobey the government, break laws, and endanger our financial and/or physical security?  Should we grant asylum to God’s children whom the government and our neighbors call “illegal aliens” and accept the risks involved?  After examining the ethic of resistance that led Bonhoeffer to subvert the norms of Nazi Germany in solidarity with those who suffered at the hands of his own society, David Wellman poses several important questions for 21^st century American Christians:

On whose behalf might we be called to act? Would it be Iraqis in particular or Muslims in general? What about the growing legions of the poor? Perhaps the focus should be on the preservation of indigenous cultures…who are systematically despoiled, hated, marginalized and forgotten because of their race, their culture, their gender, their beliefs or their sexuality.  And what about the destruction of the ecosphere itself, the foundation of all human and

non-human life, that is daily imperiled by many who would claim Christianity as their guide? As dwellers among the world’s wealthiest people, we certainly all have dirt on our hands, but this can only mean that we too have a role to play.  For Jesus wants us all.  “Never did [he] question anyone’s health and strength or good fortune as such or regard it as rotten fruit…Jesus claims all of human life.”

Perhaps Bonhoeffer, in this vain, would agree with his compatriot Jürgen Moltmann that, “The opposite of poverty isn’t property.  The opposite of both poverty and property is community.” As the community called by God to welcome all humanity in loving service, we must proclaim and embody the three main characteristics of Jesus’ own ministry: caring for the poor, healing the ill and wounded, and announcing the Kingdom of a God who, unlike the gods of this world, derives power and prosperity out of serving and sacrificing for rather than subjugating marginalizing the weak. This is Christ’s call for all of humanity to be what it truly is, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Bibliography

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 1. Translated by Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Leukens.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.

_____ Discipleship. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 4. Translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

_____ Letters and Papers from Prison. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8. Translated by Isabel Best, et. al. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

Kelly, Geffrey B. “The Idolatrous Enchainment of Church and State: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Freedom in the United States.” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 298-318. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Kyung, Chung Hyun. “Dear Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Letter.” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 9-19. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Mühlhaus, Karl-Hermann. “The ‘End of Religion:’ An Error of Bonhoeffer or a Challenge to Theology in the Postmodern Situation? Reflections on Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Nietzsche.” Theology & Life 30 (2007): 65-94.

Pangritz, Andreas. “‘Who Is Jesus Christ, for Us, Today?'” In The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John W. de Gruchy, 134-153. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Selby, Peter. “Who Is Jesus Christ, for Us, Today?” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 20-38. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Wellman, David J. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethic of Resistance in George W Bush’s America: A Call to Progressive Christians in the United States.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 60, no. 1-2 (2006): 69-77.

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Will the Real Saint Paul Please Stand Up? — Recovering the Liberating, Community-Building Insights of a Misunderstood Apostle

March 22, 2011

Introduction

What Paul Really Said…

The most essential question for followers of Jesus to ask about Paul is: what is the relationship between Paul and Jesus?  If Paul is found to be incompatible with following Jesus, or his theology was thought to be different from that of Jesus, then Christians ought to dismiss him altogether and brand him a heretic.  If, however, the opposite is true, that Paul really was a disciple and a follower of the Way of Jesus, then we must re-approach his writings carefully and seriously.  This task raises the challenge of determining, as the titles of works by N.T. Wright and John Bristow suggest, what Paul really said.

The problem for many people in the twenty-first century—scholars, clergy, and lay people alike—is that certain Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts  as they have traditionally been interpreted, seem to be ethically amiss on the particular issues of gender relations and slavery.One can easily conclude that Paul has strayed from the ethical stance of Jesus toward women and liberation, citing certain Deutero-Pauline texts that seem to baptize the very status quo Jesus had prophetically and emphatically denounced.

At this point it would be convenient to dispense with all but the undisputed Pauline corpus and move on, but this cannot be done easily.  For one thing, issues of authorship aside, all of this material is nevertheless canonized as holy scripture.  Typically, those who have tried to remove texts from the canon wound up being themselves removed from the church—in any case, it is counterproductive.  Furthermore, as Murphy-O’Connor demonstrates, even the issue of authorship itself cannot easily be shrugged off; the early acceptance of the authenticity of Pauline authorship cannot be explained away without at least “a very solid link with Pauline circles.”

In short, the problem is twofold: on the one hand, we must address the ethical charge that certain Pauline (in the wider sense of the term) texts should be questioned because of their position on slavery and gender equality; but on the other hand, we cannot easily ignore or dispense with these texts altogether because they are canonical.  The function of taking the canon seriously extends far beyond merely satisfying continuity with an established tradition; it is for the well-being of the ecumenical community that we avoid reinforcing the very sectarianism that has been endemic to Christian history.  As I will demonstrate, no greater violence could be done to Paul than to deal with his writings in a way that destroys rather than builds Christian community.  In fact, if we could identify one reason above all others that Paul wrote at all, it would be the purpose of building and preserving communities.  What is needed, then, is a more nuanced approach that seeks to understand the Pauline corpus in its original context—to acknowledge as Crossan and Borg put it, that we essentially are “reading someone else’s mail.”

In What Paul Really Said About Women, Bristow attempts to take on the task of setting Paul’s words about gender issues in their proper context.  Through his detailed analysis of historical practices and attitudes toward women in Greek, Roman, and Jewish life, paired with his grammatical and etymological expertise in koine Greek, the original language of Paul’s writing, Bristow is able to cast Paul’s most controversial words about women in a new light.  Yet as a pastor primarily addressing other pastors and laypeople, his historical critique is consequentially more sensitive and nuanced in its handling of traditional beliefs and interpretations. In this method of contextual analysis, he is able to respect the original text and confirm its authority as scripture while at the same time he addresses important ethical challenges by debunking and dismissing false interpretations of the texts rather than the texts themselves.

This is merely one example that beautifully illustrates how sending Paul’s mail back to its proper context enables us to understand Paul’s real message. By understanding the communities to and about whom Paul wrote, we are enabled to discover how Paul addresses our own communities as members of the same Body and Spirit.

Jesus and Paul

The Ladies’ Men?

What Bristow’s analysis brings to light is the essential continuity of the roles played by both Jesus and Paul to empower and embrace the women in their communities, even as their particular attitudes and responses varied according to the specific situations and cultural contexts in which each operated. While evidence abounds from the Gospels and Acts that Jesus’ movement was very inclusive of women during both his earthly ministry and at Pentecost, the evidence that Paul held a similar stance is buried under centuries of poor translation and interpretation.

Bristow thoroughly demonstrates how passages such as Ephesians 5, as well as undisputed Pauline passages such as 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, have been translated and interpreted in ways that reinforce patriarchalism and the oppression of women, concealing Paul’s original meaning and intent.

The greatest source of this interpretive error is the reinterpretation of Paul’s writings by subsequent generations of Christians in light of Hellenistic and specifically Aristotelean categories and values which has made Paul’s words endorse the exact opposite of the values he lived and stood for. When Thomas Aquinas, the great champion of Aristotelean Christianity, was canonized by the Roman church, the revolutionary egalitarian Paul was finally eclipsed by the conservative, patriarchal Paul.  Passages like Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2 have drowned out the liberating voice of Paul found in other places.  We can, however, be released from this hermeneutical snare of mistranslations and catchwords when we remember a phrase from one of Paul’s undisputed letters which epitomizes what Paul really did say about women and slaves: “There is no longer slave or free…male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:28-29). These words reveal who Paul really was, and who he believed Jesus to be. In these words lies the ultimate significance of Paul’s message and its implications for the community of the Church.

How They Role…

What emerges from the attempt to understand Jesus and Paul from the perspective of gender equality is that to really understand what they have in common we must understand the roles they played within their own context. Thus, the real question about their relationship has much less to do with the content of their teachings than the unique role that each felt he was playing in the context of Jewish salvation history.  It turns out that the most obvious commonality between Jesus and Paul, though often overlooked is also one of the most significant: they were first century Jews.

Within this contextual framework, N.T. Wright poignantly argues, the thesis that Jesus and Paul are fundamentally at odds—because the former proclaimed the Kingdom of God whereas the latter proclaimed the Lordship of Jesus Christ—is essentially untenable. By thoroughly examining the distinctive elements in the social-historical contexts of both men, Wright finds tremendous continuity between the roles that Jesus and Paul played within Jewish monotheism.  The shift in emphasis to the roles of Jesus and Paul reveals, Wright contends, that within the context of his Jewish religious-historical consciousness, Paul would have been utterly incomprehensible if he had said and done the same things as Jesus.

Instead, Paul’s message, as understood through the hermeneutical lens of his divine calling by the one God of Israel, occupies its own proper place in Jewish salvation history.  For Paul, the climax in the narrative of Jewish salvation history had already been reached at the death and resurrection of the Messiah; with the Messianic age ushered in, there was a complete paradigm shift—the world had been quite literally turned on its head.  Politically it meant that Christ and not Caesar was Lord.

In the words of Jesus, blessings and curses have been reversed (Mt. 5, Lk. 6).  Paul, too, interprets the reversal of the curse, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal 3:13).  The analogy that Wright is led to draw of the relationship between the two is that of the relationship of a composer to his conductor.

The weakness of this analogy, however, is that there seems to be a slight confusion of roles.  For, unlike a composer who diligently transcribes his musical revelation into detailed notation for the conductor to read and perform, Jesus never wrote a single word; Jesus himself was the performer.  On the other hand, the copious writings of Paul in correspondence with early churches and other epistles penned in his name make up nearly half of the New Testament.  Even literature composed by early Christians about Jesus’ words and deeds—the Gospels and presumably the sayings collections from which these drew—comprises a minority of Christian scripture by comparison to the works and tradition of Paul.  Thus, it seems that a more proper analogy may be made that Jesus was the virtuoso, the musician and performer.  The Gospel writers, then, were the compilers of the original score, and Paul was the transcriber, sometimes even the transposer of the score into a new key to catch the Gentile ear, and always the recruiter of new players into the community of transformed performers.  Though there is nothing wrong with Wright’s analogy, this alternative construction seems to get us closer to his own well-articulated point that Paul’s role was “to call into being, by proclaiming Jesus as Lord, the worldwide community in which ethnic divisions would be abolished and a new family created as a sign…that new creation had been launched.”

Thus, the roles of Paul and Jesus are united in the shared narrative framework of salvation history which Jesus had brought to its climax, and to which Paul’s words and works stood as a testimony to all nations.  The reality of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and initiated is what Paul invited others to participate in as “heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29).  Neither Jesus nor Paul, then, ought to be understood primarily as founders or teachers of a new religion; instead they both fulfilled their specific calls to action on behalf of Israel’s God whose saving action was manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In light of this understanding of Jesus’ and Paul’s unique roles and their Jewish context, we can finally take up the discussion of Paul’s words about Jesus (christology), and the implications of this teaching for Paul’s work in forming and fostering Christian community.

Paul’s Communal Christology

Jesus is Lord

We have seen that what Jesus did was what mattered to Paul and that it was the catalyst for what Paul ultimately did and said.  Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God in his life, death, and resurrection and thus, Paul proclaimed, Jesus alone is the Lord to whom all things are subject (1 Cor. 15:27-28) and in whom the fulness of God’s glory is revealed (Phil. 2:9-11; 2 Cor. 4:6).  These bold statements constitute a very high christology along the very same theological premises for which Paul had once zealously attacked the Jesus movement (Phil. 3:6; Gal. 1:13-14).  It is even likely that Paul was mocking his own anti-Christian arguments when he cites the application of Deuteronomy to imply Jesus was cursed by God in his death on the cross (Gal. 3:13).

This begs the question: what sparked Paul’s radical paradigm shift from zealous persecutor of the church to zealous founder of church communities?  Paul alludes to a profound experience of the risen Christ which he interpreted as a divine revelation that turned his entire interpretive framework upside down (1 Cor. 15:8; Gal. 1:12-16). It was not a conversion, in the sense of an exchange of one religious identity for another; it was a revelation of what Paul felt to be the true way of understanding and living as a Jew.  In light of this revelation, Paul speaks of his vocational change, using language reminiscent of God’s call to the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, as a unique call from God to share the euangelion, the good news of this revelation with the Gentiles (Rom. 1:5; 15:17-19).  As a Pharisee, Paul had previously held that the Torah alone was the norm, which meant that he was not able to accept the claim of Jesus as Lord.  Thus, argues Luke Timothy Johnson, “It was the experience of Jesus as the powerfully risen Lord that put Paul in a state of cognitive dissonance.”

This is the point at which the discussion surfaces about Paul’s tension between affirming the truth and validity of the Law in some statements while taking a markedly antinomian stance in others.  This debate, however, misses the point of what this christology really meant for Paul: the Lordship of Christ represents a the true way of being human in community.    It is significant to note that Paul does not ever outline a fully systematic and comprehensive christology; what can be called Paul’s christology is in reality a constellation of fragments distilled from Paul’s writing (and thus, divorced from their context) and compiled by scholars to evaluate systematically.

Paul’s christology is really not understood at all if his statements are removed from their immediate context which always revolves around the building and nurturing of Christian community. When Paul affirms Jesus as Lord, he is simultaneously speaking about the redemption-community which is the sign, or in Paul’s words, the ‘firstfruits’ of the new creation inaugurated by Christ (Rom. 8:23).  In short, because Jesus is the true Lord of all creation, the church is the community of redemption in which creation is beginning to be subjected to its rightful ruler.

The Real Son of God

The statement of authority in Paul’s proclamation reaches its peak when Paul gives Jesus the title Son of God.  While the use of the titles Lord and Son of God certainly do imply that Paul believed Jesus to be divine, it should be recognized that they are at least as important as declarations of who is not the divine lord and son of God. When Paul proclaimed Jesus as Lord, it meant that Christ, not Caesar, is the true Son of God.  At this point, sharply divided along lines of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ scholarship, most interpreters have fallen into two equally narrow camps: on the left side, it is recognized that Paul hailed Jesus of Nazareth over Caesar, so it is concluded that Paul was essentially making a radical political statement to denounce the empire’s false claims of ultimacy; on the right, this dimension is either denied or ignored and Paul is seen as simply the source of the true religious doctrine, essentially stating a system of beliefs one must hold to obtain salvation.  Such a lack of integration of Pauline insights has led to the tired dichotomy between preaching the gospel and social action that essentially misses the point: for Paul these were inseparable.

While the christological language of Paul’s gospel certainly resonated deeply within Jewish religious tradition, the very same language is oozing with radical political criticism.  This is easily overlooked until we recognize that Paul lived in an empire whose lord was venerated as a son of God, and which proclaimed itself the ultimate source of freedom, justice, peace and salvation for the whole earth—indeed, even labeling these proud proclamations as euangelion, the gospel, the good news.

We cannot ignore that this was the political landscape “within which Paul went about declaring the ‘gospel‘ according to which Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by Roman soldiers…was the world’s true Lord, claiming universal allegiance.” It is thus no accident that among the locations where Paul worked most arduously to proclaim this counter-imperial gospel were the most thoroughly Roman cities in the Greek world—namely Philippi and Corinth—and the capital of Rome itself!

This contextual analysis makes clear the extent to which certain Pauline passages that have been made to endorse a status-quo of slavery (Philemon and Eph. 5) or reinforce subservience to political domination (Rom. 13) have been misunderstood.  On the contrary, these statements are simply instances in which the radical Paul was attempting to prevent Christians from succumbing too easily to any political ideology or movement “that merely reshuffles the political cards into a different order.”

No political change can be revolutionary enough for the community whose citizenship belongs to an entirely new and transformed creation!  Paul was far beyond a radical ideology, or party affiliation—what he championed was a radically new existence.  This new way of being human, along with the hope for a new creation under a new authority was for Paul the real gospel, the real good news, and the salvation offered by this gospel is to be found exclusively in the community it inaugurates.

Paul’s Christological Community

A New Way to be Human

For Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection is the climax of God’s mission of salvation and reconciliation because Jesus was the revelation of a new way of being human as a sign of the dawn of a whole new creation.  We have seen how Paul’s christology is developed in the context of its implications for the community he felt God was calling him to bring together and nurture.  This call was aimed at the incorporation of Jews and Gentiles, males and females, slaves and free men and women into the salvation-community of the Church, which Paul literally refers to as Christ’s body (Gal. 3:28).

Indeed, one might be led to ask, along with Johnson, whether Paul understood the church to be the real bodily presence of the resurrected Jesus. It is unfathomable that any thorough reading of Paul could lead to an individualistic and systematic soteriology.  On the contrary, Johnson notes, “It can be argued that for him soteriology is ecclesiology; all of his language about salvation has a communal rather than an individual referent.” Johnson goes on to demonstrate that the real reason circumcision became such an important theme in Paul’s writing was not for antinomian or anti-Jewish polemical concerns, but because if some in the community were circumcised it would mark an obvious division between the Jewish males and the Gentiles and women of the community.

Perhaps the most revealing of the many metaphors Paul uses to depict the church community is that of the family.  In this family, God is the Father (Rom. 1:7) and Jesus Christ is the Son (1:4), but he is the firstborn of many children (8:29).  Here it is crucial to note that Paul deliberately refers to the community members to whom he writes as adelphoi—brothers and sisters. In this family it is adoption in Christ, and not ancestral blood that constitutes legitimate membership.  It is the community in which the Holy Spirit dwells (Rom. 8:9-11), the very Body of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 12:22; Rom. 12:4-5).  The many gifts given to the family’s individual members are to be used solely for the ‘building up’ of the whole community (1 Cor. 14:26) into the true temple, the oikos in which God dwells and reconciles all of creation anew.

Conclusion 

  In the end, it turns out that what Paul really did—that is, what he felt uniquely called by the one God of Israel to do—holds the key to truly understanding what Paul really said. The question of what Paul really said is less a question of which epistles are genuine and which ones are pseudonymous—it is a matter of grappling with the true essence of Paul’s life and work.  What all of this points to is that Paul was, in his own words, one of God’s oikonomoi, or household managers (1 Cor. 4:1-2).

He encountered the risen Jesus, the firstborn of a new family of reconciliation and he responded to God’s personal call to welcome all of humanity into this family to which it truly belongs. In all things, he put the needs of the community ahead of his own personal desires, even when it led to being ‘afflicted in every way,’ ‘perplexed,’ and ‘persecuted,’ because even in the midst of these struggles he was “not crushed…not driven to despair…not forsaken” (2 Cor. 4:8-9). Why endure all of this hardship?  Because for Paul, the community was truly the end in itself, the embodied result of God’s reconciliation. This is what enabled him to affirm with the whole church that “we do not lose heart,” no matter what “slight momentary affliction” we may endure (4:16-17).

Bibliography

Borg, Marcus J., and John Dominic Crossan. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. New York: Harper, 2010.

Bristow, John Temple. What Paul Really Said About Women: An Apostle’s Liberating Views on Equality in Marriage, Leadership, and Love. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Dunn, James D. G. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 1-15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hurtado, L. W. “Paul’s Christology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 185-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Paul’s Ecclesiology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 199-211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Levine, Amy-Jill, and Marianne Blickenstaff, eds. A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003.

Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Winter, Sara. “Philemon and the Patriarchal Paul.” In A Feminist Companion to Paul, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff, 122-136. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004.

Wright, N. T.. Paul: In fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

_____ What Saint Paul really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.

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Jesus of Nazareth: Historical Sketches

10/26/2010

Introduction

Before conducting a historical study of Jesus, it must first be remembered that he lived in a time, place, culture, and religion which are different from our own.  The task of the historical study is thus to allow this particular situation of the man Jesus of Nazareth to speak to us out of this very particularity.  At the same time, however, we cannot deny that the only reason history has recorded the words and deeds of Jesus is because of the conviction of his followers that this man revealed the nature of God in a way that profoundly spoke to them in their own particular situation(s).  The very reason for trying to understand and locate Jesus in his own historical context is to attempt to discover how he can relate to and speak to us in our contexts.  The universal significance of Jesus Christ has as its foundation the particular significance of the first century Jewish man from Nazareth in Galilee.  Through all this, we must humbly admit that Jesus of Nazareth speaks to us solely through the voices of others, and that this fact itself contributes an important insight into what manner of man Jesus himself was.  These other voices constitute the earliest attempts by communities of Jesus’ followers to articulate how this historical human being is at once the living Christ, present to their own communities and cultures which differed both from one another and from that of Jesus himself.  In this sense, the Gospel accounts are not historical records of the man who worked miracles and taught in parables, but are themselves parables that attest to the miraculous experience of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us.  John Dominic Crossan’s understanding of both parables of Jesus and parables about Jesus sums this point up quite well:

 

Here is another principle well understood in parables by Jesus, but often forgotten in

parables about Jesus. What if the audience, having heard the Good Samaritan parable,

unanimously chose to debate its historicity. “I think,” said one, “it is history, for I was on

that road only yesterday.” “I think,” said another, “that it is parable: did you really think his

Sower story was about agriculture?” “I think,” said a third, “that whether it is parable or his-

tory, the point is the same: what if the alien is kinder to us than we are to each other?”

 

 

The point is well made: we cannot afford to get lost in debate over which accounts are historical fact and which ones are myth, because either way we risk missing the point of what it all means.  The truth of Jesus’ parables clearly withstand the historical judgment that they are fictional constructs because their historicity is not the point; in the same way we risk losing the very fabric of our faith if we pin the truth of the Gospels on their historicity.  In the end we must confess that the truth of the scriptures is not of the sort that can be proven right or wrong by historical inquiry.  Once we relinquish these fears, we may then open ourselves up to the truth of a renewed understanding of who Jesus was, and thereafter begin to understand in a much more profound way who Jesus is.

Identity & Context of Jesus

Essential to any scholar’s effort to elucidate the historical mystery of Jesus of Nazareth is a method that seeks to establish to the best degree possible the context in which he lived.  However, as historians begin piecing together the frail fragments of the past, widely variant pictures emerge.  There are, it seems, as many historical Jesuses as there are Jesus historians.

In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing, for there is a considerable diversity of images of Jesus within the New Testament itself.

What is needed is a way of seeing the underlying unity of this diversity.  In short, the best method is the one that can account for the widest variety of sources and integrate them into a more holistic understanding of Jesus of Nazareth and the communities of his followers.  Such an explanation would need to account for how Jesus was both situated within his own context and at the same time distinct enough from his context to have begun his own movement.  In his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Crossan depicts a Jesus who is sufficiently revolutionary, but is he intelligible enough to his contemporaries to have garnered as many followers as he clearly had? Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews is thoroughly Jewish, but is he original enough to have cast the seeds of a movement cohesive enough to break free from mainstream Judaism even under the circumstances of harsh imperial backlash?  The truth, as usual, must be somewhere in the middle.  If Jesus was so indistinguishable from his peers then there is little to explain why we are still talking about him; yet if he was unintelligible to his peers there is no indication why anyone in his day would have taken him seriously enough to listen to him, much less execute him as an incendiary figure.

Ultimately, the historical study of Jesus must take account of the precious few facts that are beyond dispute.  Of these, the most solid fact is that of his death: he died by crucifixion, a political execution carried out as a public address by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem on or around the time of Passover.

We also know that while Jesus was executed as a political criminal, his followers were not—they continued to live in Jerusalem for years after Jesus’ death.

Any historical account must tackle the question of how this Galilean Jewish religious figure came to be executed as a political insurrectionist despite being considered harmless enough not to warrant killing or even persecuting his closest and most immediate followers. To attempt to answer these questions by appeal to the scriptures alone is insufficient, for the New Testament accounts were written during a time when the very center of the Jewish faith, the Jerusalem Temple, had been destroyed in a war with Rome, and when the Jewish communities that had come to be known as Christians were increasingly at odds with another Jewish sect, the Pharisees, and were also increasingly incorporating Gentiles into their fellowship.

While it is instructive to examine how the writers of the New Testament related Jesus to their own contexts in order to see how we might understand him in light of our own situation, this tendency in scripture makes it difficult to see past the post-Temple, and even more importantly, post-Resurrection consciousness of Christian faith into the thoroughly Jewish life of Jesus.  Yet aside from a small handful of outside (but by no means neutral) sources, the Gospels comprise the largest and most useful source of information about Jesus.  One cannot discount the veracity of the New Testament texts without accounting for how and why any given piece was created by the scripture writers; if a tradition about Jesus is not historically accurate there must still be some historical reason for its creation and circulation, as well as for its being identified with Jesus—all of which tells us more about who Jesus was.  From a historical standpoint, the more attested a particular datum is by independent sources, the more reliable it is.

According to a consensus of scholars, the earliest strata of independent sources under consideration are the Epistles of Paul, Mark, and the theoretical source Q which comprises the shared material of Matthew and Luke that is not taken from Mark.  Crossan adds to the list the extra-biblical sayings Gospel of Thomas, which he presumes to be similar in both form and content to they hypothetical Q source.

Fredriksen emphasizes the importance of John for an alternative to Mark’s dramatized Galilee to Jerusalem trajectory, suggesting that John’s account of Jesus’ back and forth movement between Jerusalem and Galilee can better account for the circumstances of Jesus’ death.  What all the sources agree on is that Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee, and that his ministry began and generally stayed in that region after Jesus had met John the Baptizer, and came to an end when he was crucified in Jerusalem under the authority of the Roman prefect Pilate.  How we interpret who John and Pilate were will ultimately shape how we view Jesus and his ministry.

The Question of Divinity

To make sense of how, when, and in what sense Jesus became aware of his divinity, one is hard-pressed to make any conclusion based solely on New Testament evidence.  Even if we take the use of “Son of God” as literal expression of his divinity, the Gospels could give the impression that Jesus’ divinity was rooted either in his resurrection and exaltation (Mk. 13:32; Lk. 1:32; 1 Cor. 15:24; 1 Thes. 1:9), or at his baptism (Mk. 1:11; Mt. 4:3-6; Lk. 4:3-9), or at birth (Lk. 1:32-35), or even from eternity (Jn. 1:14-18; Rm. 8:3; Gal. 4:4; Col. 1:15).  How do we make sense of this?  We must remember that these passages do not reflect the self-consciousness of Jesus himself, but instead they are reflections of Jesus’ followers whose profound experience of Jesus as risen Lord led them to search their culture and tradition for words and symbols to articulate what this experience meant for them.  The more we retroject this post-Easter consciousness back onto the pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth, the muddier and less plausible the historical picture becomes.  The sense in which Jesus may have thought himself divine, then, must be grounded in his own pre-Easter context.  To that end, we can learn much more about who Jesus was by examining precisely who he was not.

From Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, and Luke 4:22 we learn that Jesus was, by family trade, a tekton which is usually translated to mean carpenter.  In the context of first century Palestine, we learn that the word carried a derogatory connotation of one who had to work with his hands; in a Roman world that was sharply divided between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ this would place Jesus squarely in the latter category.

Leaving the question of Jesus‘ literacy aside, we must at least admit that this distinction identifies Jesus with the peasant class.  This is what makes the suggestion of Jesus‘ divinity so shocking.  We know from history that the concept of divine sonship and even virginal conception are by no means unique to Jesus; both had, in fact, been attributed to Caesar Augustus by Virgil.

Crossan cites the pagan philosopher Celsus to make the point that what made Christianity so shocking in the ancient world was not so much the application of divinity or divine sonship and virgin birth to a human being, but rather the specific human to which these were applied.

To say such things of Caesar made perfect sense, but to say the same of a Jewish peasant was vulgar as far as Celsus was concerned.  What is enlightening about this element of context is that it casts Jesus’ divinity in terms of power and authority as defined against both Caesar and Rome on the one hand and against the Jewish priests and religious authorities in Jerusalem on the other.  In this sense, Jesus seems to have become aware of this authority after his baptism, when he subsequently began to exercise it in his ministry.  Since we cannot see inside his mind, the best we can do is look for evidence in Jesus’ words and deeds–all of which commence after his baptism by John (Mk. 1:9; Lk. 3:21; Mt. 3:13-15).

Jesus’ Message

The predominate theme of Jesus’ earthly message is without a doubt his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, or, as it is called in Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven.  In the synoptic Gospels, this phrase is used a total of 123 times, and it appears five more times in John.

The question is whether and to what extent Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was apocalyptic.  It is clear that Jesus’ Kingdom message came right on the heels of the ministry of John the Baptizer, who was himself clearly an ascetic apocalyptic prophet.  Did Jesus continue on after John as an apocalyptic prophet?  Fredriksen points to the urgency, impracticality, and intensified ethical teaching of Jesus’ Kingdom message to assert that it ought to be understood apocalyptically: “the fervent conviction that redemption was at hand served as incentive for the intensification and extension of the teachings of the Torah.”

Thus, she goes on to dismiss “its sheer impracticality.  No normal society could long run according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

In making this point, however, she ironically gives credence to Crossan’s alternative appraisal of Jesus’ message.

Crossan cites Matthew 11, Luke 7, and Mark 2:18-20 as evidence that Jesus broke away from John’s movement of apocalyptic asceticism, which leads him to conclude that “Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet like John the Baptist, but he was a world-negating eschatological figure.”

Thus, according to Crossan, the message about the Kingdom needs to be interpreted in the same matrix of power and authority as Jesus’ divinity. For Crossan, the Kingdom simply means “what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge.”

When Fredriksen candidly admits that no usual society could run on Jesus’ Kingdom principles, she is quite right; that is precisely Crossan’s point about how utterly scandalous and revolutionary Jesus’ ministry was.  This Kingdom of God, which Jesus enacted through his boundary-shattering ministry and the practicing of what Crossan terms “open commensality” and “radical egalitarianism,” is in fact “more terrifying than anything we have ever imagined, and even if we can never accept it, we should not explain it away as something else.”

 

Crossan’s elucidation of the social and political dimensions of the Kingdom seems to explain the biblical record better than the strictly apocalyptic characterization of Fredriksen.  For if the Kingdom teaching was the central theme of Jesus’ teaching as the synoptics clearly suggest, then it had to have been a theme revolutionary enough to have so polarized its hearers that Jesus would at once be revered as Christ and crucified as a criminal.  In addition to the obvious fact that the phrase itself is couched in thoroughly political terms, the biblical references to Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God only further substantiate such an understanding.  It is first and foremost the Kingdom of the poor (Mt. 5:3; Lk. 6:20; James 2:5), which is to be received as a child (Mk. 10:13-16; Mt.18:1-4; Jn. 3:1-10), and which is characterized as both an obnoxiously invasive weed (Mk. 4:30-32; Mt. 13:31-32; Lk. 13:18-19), and a dinner party for social outcasts (Mt. 22:1-13; Lk. 14:15-24).  These things Jesus came to announce within an empire that devalued and oppressed the poor, which regarded children as expendable nobodies, and in whose society there were rigid mores about who ought to eat with whom.

Jesus’ Ministry

It is often pointed out that the controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees, especially poignant in Matthew, is better accounted for by the context of the Gospel’s writer than the historical Jesus.  The need to distinguish and define the community over against the Pharisees and the now destroyed Jerusalem Temple comprise the polemical concerns of Matthew’s community much more than that of Jesus.

This does not, however, rule out altogether the notion that Jesus was involved in a religious conflict with his contemporaries.  Indeed, one of the most salient features of the Judaism of Jesus’ day was that there were many competing interpretations, held as firm convictions, of what constituted the correct way to be Jewish.

What put Jesus’ interpretation at odds with that of his contemporaries seems to be his way of subverting hierarchies and power relations.  The Kingdom he announced was open to all without distinction; the only requirement was that they be open to hear and see the work God is doing to enact the Kingdom in present reality.  This Kingdom erased boundaries and undermined those who make them.  Thus, we see Jesus dine with tax collectors and sinners (Mk. 2:14-17), unclean lepers (Mk. 1:40-45), women (Mk. 1:30; 5:25-34; 12:41-44; 14:3-9; 15:40-41), and children (Mk. 10:13-16).  Even if we disagree with Crossan’s way of eschewing the literal factuality of all Jesus’ healing stories as “intervention into the physical world,” we must accept his analysis of their significance as “intervention in the social world.”  For through healing Jesus was directly undermining the boundaries of ostracizing the unclean.

None of this implies that Jesus was not Jewish, or that he was adamantly opposed to the Judaism of his time; what it does imply, however, is some tension between Jesus the boundary-breaking Galilean peasant Jew and the aristocratic Jerusalem priestly Jews.

 

Reconstructing how this ministry led up to his crucifixion is no easy task.  Fredriksen discounts the entire chronological sequence of Mark and its emphasis on the  scene with the money changers in the Temple as the cause of Jesus’ execution, because it fits in all too well with Mark’s aforementioned anti-Temple polemic.

Instead, she points to the Triumphal Entry as the occasion that riled up a potentially dangerous crowd.  The way in which Jesus came into Jerusalem announcing the Kingdom of God, she argues, would have led them to associate Jesus with the messianic figure who would usher in the rule of God.  Since they were not familiar with Jesus’ mission of nonviolence and healing, they were not aware that Jesus could not be this messianic warrior; since they could easily become unruly during such a sensitive time as Passover, Jesus had to be killed as an example.  This, then, explains why only he and none of his followers were killed.

Crossan, on the other hand, dismisses the Triumphal Entry as another instance of “prophecy historicized” because of the way the evangelists seem to go out of their way to identify Jesus’ actions with obscure Old Testament prophecies which render the entire story, in his view, historically implausible.  Instead, he argues, it was indeed the incident in the Temple that leads to Jesus’ execution.  Such an event is attested to by Mark (11:15-19), John (2:14-17) and the Gospel of Thomas.

Even though John places the scene near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John nevertheless clearly associates it with Jesus’ death, so he merely placed it at the beginning of the story, Crossan argues, to cast a shadow over the rest of what follows.

 

This construction would certainly indicate why Jesus had upset many of his contemporary Jews, but why, Fredriksen asks, would this have anything to do with the Romans who ultimately executed him?  If the issue of Temple cleansing exists between Jesus and the priests, why should Pilate intervene?

Yet, while attempting to discredit the Temple scene as the decisive event that provoked Roman action, Fredriksen ironically concedes that based on the layout of the Temple, among the few people who would have had a good enough view to even witness Jesus’ actions were the Roman soldiers watching from above.

Though this fact is entirely incidental of Fredriksen’s intentions, it could perhaps explain precisely why the Romans did get involved with Jesus’ execution.  And why should they need to execute any of Jesus’ followers if it was only himself performing this disruptive deed?  Crossan seems to make a good case that this was the only trip Jesus made to Jerusalem, at least during his period of ministry, and that the evidence of the scene at the Temple seems most compelling in its ability to explain the circumstances of Jesus’ death.  But Fredriksen is also right in asserting that the crowds in Jerusalem also had to play a role—after all, death by crucifixion was a kind of sadistic public service announcement, and the Jerusalem crowds were its intended audience.

It seems plausible, then, to combine both reconstructions: Jesus was speaking and acting out a provocative and controversial prophetic statement both on the way to Jerusalem and in the Temple which provoked the priests, alarmed the Roman guard, and elicited messianic expectations among the crowds.  Fearing that Jesus’ authority would undermine their own, the priests would have good reason to plot against him; appealing to the delicate and tense situation of Passover in Jerusalem, Rome would have had every reason to stamp out the situation and make Jesus an example to the crowds by publicly crucifying him.

Conclusion

The story of Jesus is one of both historical particularity and eternal universality.  We have no exact portrait of who Jesus was; what we have are interpretations.  The Gospels themselves emerge as a unique literary genre: lengthy parables centered on the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, the elements of which are recast in the image of the intended audience’s context to provide meaning for the difficulties posed by the historical particularity of each community.  Out of this emerges the universal Christ— grounded in the particularity of the historical man Jesus of Nazareth, yet indifferent to the particular situation of the actual man in order to remain relevant to communities different from the one he inhabited.  The fact that these diverse images of Christ come from the particular and concrete individual Jesus of Nazareth grounds Christ’s universality in his particularity.  We relate to what Jesus meant for his peers by extending an analogy or metaphor to make him our peer.  He asks of everyone to answer the question: “Who do you say I am?” The answer is not so much concluded as lived.  One lives one’s life in response to Jesus’ question, searching for glimpses of the coming Kingdom and carrying on his work as a community of healed healers.

Personal Implications of Historical Jesus Studies

My personal reflection on the significance of this study for my own life and ministry must reflect the nature of my life and ministry.  Since I am first and foremost a poet, I will thus conclude with two poems:

 

The Real Jesus

Who is the real Jesus,

after Christ became Caesar?

Who can be our humble king,

After the cross was co-opted by Constantine?

Or should we keep clamoring on about his death

Only to ignore what he said with each breath,

To be the children of patristic church fathers

Instead of Jesus’ Abbah Father?

 

What happens when we get harshly critical

Of harsh critics?

Do we then transcend them or get them to rescind?

Or does neglect and disrespect reckon

Us equal to that which we object?

 

For what do we exist?

Is it to insist,

Or to resist,

Or to consist,

Or to persist or subsist,

Or is it to assist?

Or is it to define oneself as some other -ist?

 

If you get the gist of this list,

Seeing the truth through shrouded mist,

Like one breaking out of the literalist’s cist

Whence life and death coexist,

The dualist must desist without grist

And hold his whist–

 

For the twisted wish to be an -ist,

Whether atheist or a theist,

Is inconsistent with

The fact that all of us exist betwixt

The “is” and “am”

Imprisoned, dammed,

And in need of a fix…

…and this,

This is Christ

 

 

On Easter Sunday

 

On Easter Sunday

I went to worship

But the message of Resurrection

Was painted poorly in story,

With tainted inflection;

 

No more do they preach–

They teach

Empty theory presented in hollow speech,

Asking me in faith

To accept the dispersion

Of a latter gospel version

Forensically,

When it was penned as a myth

To be understood intrinsically,

And lived out with each breath

As we unite with the divine

To defeat death

 

And it’s hysterical

How Truth’s become clerical,

Hijacked from meaning

By religious fanatics, combatants

More eager to judge and sentence

Than to trade a grudge for repentance

 

Father forgive them,

For they know not what they do

Grant grace and forgiveness

For making an unholy idol of You

For no one needs Resurrection and new life

More than we “Christians” do

On Easter Sunday

 

Hope is Christ

Hope is alive,

it survives, and thrives

In new life

Died not dead

Bleeds not bled…

 

Salvation is suffering

Salvation from suffering;

Was not

Once and for all,

Is always

With us

Because no Caesar

Can be our leader,

Not from above

He must be with us and love

He must be with us

So we are one

 

Christ is not crystallized

He is alive

Christ is our chrysalis

His promise is

To mend our many weary scattered

Caterpillar legs

Weaving them into wings

Then peal them back in sacrificial openness

So we can be born again

Free

 

Bibliography

 

 

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. New York: HarperOne, 1994.

 

Crossan, John Dominic. “The Parables of Jesus.” Interpretation 56, no. 3 (2002): 245-319.

 

Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

 

Horning, Estella B. “Who Is Jesus? Christologies in the New Testament.” Brethren Life and Thought 41.1 (1996): 20-28.

 

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Glimpses of Divine Light: The Trinitarian Nature and Work of God

Introduction

An analysis of how the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of Christ relate to one another requires, from the onset, an affirmation that they are, in fact, related.  This cannot be done outside a trinitarian framework which acknowledges the inseparability of oikonomia and theologia; the mystery of salvation is inextricably bound up with the mystery of the triune God. The main obstacle to delineating this relationship lies in the difficulty of doing Christology and pneumatology without subordinating one to the other.

The need therefore arises to construct the two in mutual subordination within a trinitarian framework wherein we can conceive of a Christological pneumatology and a pneumatological Christology; if this divine division of labor is taken too far, we will digress from trinitarian theology to tritheism.  By allowing perspectives from the Orthodox and Catholic traditions to dialogue with the theological insights of the Reformed and Protestant communities, perhaps we can facilitate the kind of ecumenical spirit needed to tread such precarious theological territory.  For it is only in the one Spirit of the one Father and only Son that we have any hope for redemption in the one Kingdom and one community that Jesus desires his disciples to become (Jn. 17).

Whatever can be said of the work of Christ and the Spirit must take the doctrine of creation as its backdrop.

From creation, we can establish a trinitarian framework of human relationships–between humans and God, between humans and other humans, and between humans and the rest of creation–all of which are mediated in the Spirit.  The experience of sin is a corresponding threefold alienation with respect to these harmonious relationships, which leads to the need and hope for an act of redemption, as alluded to by the prophetic expectation of God’s Spirit being poured over all creation, as well as the New Testament hope for a new creation.

 

To understand how the work of Christ fits into this framework, we must also turn to Genesis to explore the creation of humankind in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28), and to examine the kind of work humans were created to do–mediate God’s presence in creation and sustain its original, perfect harmony (2:15).  This work is ultimately tied to the presence of the Spirit which was breathed into humanity during creation (2:7), and which is needed for humankind to be restored.  Thus, the work of Christ consists in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who was filled with the Spirit in such a way as to reclaim the image of God (Col. 1:15), inaugurate the reestablishment of God’s Kingdom, and ultimately becomes so filled by the Spirit as to pour it out himself for the redemption of all.  The work of Christ and that of the Spirit, thus, become intertwined so that, as Vladimir Lossky has said, “Christ becomes the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity. The Holy Spirit grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.”

The relationship implicit in the trinitarian understanding of the oikonomia has also led St. Irenaeus to call the Son and the Spirit “the two hands of God,” whose presence and work are active in the sanctification–or theosis as it is called in the Orthodox tradition–of the body of Christ, and through it, to work for the salvation of the world.

What follows is an attempt to briefly outline how the theme of oikonomia is developed in scripture and doctrine in order to move toward a way of understanding Christian discipleship and life in the Spirit–from proclaiming to performing our doctrines of faith.

The Work of the Spirit: From the Beginning

The two creation accounts in Genesis make it quite clear that human beings were created for and in community.  This involves a series of three relationships: with the creator, with the animals and the earth, and with each other (and the self).  In fact, the only thing in all of the creation process that was said by God to be “not good” was that the human being should be alone (Gen. 2:28).  Sin is both the cause and effect of the experience of alienation with respect to these relationships; it is the disordering of the created order of relationships.

The freedom in which humanity was created is solely within the context of relationship; as finite beings, we must be paradoxically bound to our relationships if we are to be freed from the alienating power of sin.  This led Paul, for one, to use the stark language, contrasting slavery to sin with slavery to righteousness in Christ (Rom. 6:16-20).  Thus, freedom and salvation from this alienation requires, as Luther put it, not for sin to leave man, but for man to take leave of sin.

Hence, the need for the Spirit’s activity to be mediated by the work of a human being to reconcile humanity’s estrangement from God.  In short, God’s creative and redemptive activity are one; he created by his Word (dabar), and his redemptive Spirit is his Breath (ruach) by which he created and redeems humankind (Ps. 33:6; Gen. 2:7).

This anticipates the frame of reference that led early Christians to see Christ as the divine Word (logos) made flesh; an incarnation of the Word, Breath and Spirit of God in human form (Jn.1).

The tradition of hope for God’s redemption by his Spirit is given particularly vivid expression in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, the themes of which were heavily drawn upon in the language and tradition of the New Testament.  It is impossible to understand Christian testimony about the Spirit of Jesus Christ without seeing it within the eschatological backdrop of Hebrew prophecy.  For the prophets, the violated relationships which constitute sin represent the disorder of God’s order, which is often poetically depicted as a sort of un-creation of God’s creative activity (Amos 5:8-27).  This, however, was not the end of the prophetic vision, which goes on to promise the pouring out of God’s liberating and life-giving Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28-29), which will usher in the dawn of a new creation (Ezek. 36:24-28).

By Jesus’ time, however, many had come to believe that the activity of the Spirit had ended because God no longer seemed to speak to them through his prophets.

 

Thus, the language of the promise of redemption through God’s Spirit became the appropriate means of understanding the redemption experienced by the Christian community in the person of Christ.  As Moltmann describes it, they saw anew the work of the Spirit in the ministry of John the Baptist, as it was given to Jesus when it descended upon him at his baptism, then empowered him while leading him to face temptation in the desert, gave him authority in teaching and healing, sustained him in his suffering, and finally broke into the world of God-forsakenness at his death on the cross only to raise him into new life, being poured out by Christ himself for the new creation that is the coming Kingdom of God.

Such an understanding is corroborated by the Orthodox theology of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, who saw the work of the Spirit clearly active throughout the biblical narrative of Christ’s own work.

The work of the Spirit in the Orthodox process of theosis, has also been described in the Catholic tradition as the very same process of sanctification by which the “divinization of the humanity of Christ” is accomplished, then shared with the community of faith.

The language of theosis and sanctification can be especially helpful for the discovery of work of the Spirit in the church within Protestant traditions that have emphasized justification in its stead.

An analysis of this theme within the life and work of Christ will thus constitute a useful paradigm in which we can understand the work of the Spirit that restores the threefold relationships that have lapsed into threefold estrangement.

 

The Work of Christ: Renewing Relationships

We need to affirm that the human being Jesus of Nazareth was sanctified by the Spirit into oneness with God (Christology from below), and then to speak simultaneously of the incarnation of the divine hypostasis of the Son of God (Christology from above); in Christ, the humanity of Jesus is brought into oneness with God who is then brought into oneness with humanity at the same time.

Likewise, we can describe the work of salvation as both the overcoming of death and sin, and as the perfection of fallen human nature through the restoration of right relationships.

Whereas Adam had set an unfortunate precedent in grasping for what was not his –namely, taking the place of God–bringing death for all (Gen. 3), Jesus set a new precedent by humbling himself in sheer obedience to God unto death, bringing the grace of new life to all (1 Cor. 15:21).

This parallel led to the development within Christology of seeing Jesus as a new Adam, the firstborn and eldest brother of a new eschatological family, to mark the dawn of a new creation.

As the true image of God, Jesus becomes for us the image of true humanity in fellowship with God, into whose likeness all of creation is to be born anew.

 

Just as creation was brought into its original order through the wisdom of God (Prv. 3:19), Jesus has come to be seen as the mediator of this wisdom in human form as the Word incarnate (Jn.1).  In Jesus, this wisdom becomes manifest in the way he reestablished proper relationships with God, creation, and other humans through the way he lived and died.

In his life, he preached and lived the good news of the Kingdom of God.  While there was a well-established prophetic expectation for a future in which God would once again rule over his creation, Jesus was unique in proclaiming it in the present tense, thereby inaugurating it himself (Mk. 1:15).

Because he related to God as his Father (Mt. 6:5), he paved the way for others to be adopted as children of God (Eph. 1:5)  The key to understanding our faith in Jesus therefor lies in the faith of Jesus, whose obedience to the will of God even in suffering unto death remained perfect; this is what has made his life and death effective in bringing righteousness to others.

The language of Jesus’ death as an atoning substitutionary sacrifice can become misleading and morbid if we treat Jesus’ death in isolation from the resurrection.

Together with the joy of Easter, the metaphor of sacrifice, however abused and misappropriated it may be in isolation, also has the power to speak to the very heart of God with its capacity to orient us to his graceful, self-giving love poured out for his creation.

Because Jesus lived so fully in the Spirit, after he was raised from the dead by the Spirit, the Spirit became his to give to all creation.

 

 

The Spirit, Christ and the Kingdom: At Work in the Church

In his book The Trinity and the Kingdom, Moltmann outlines a thoroughly trinitarian development in the unfolding of the Kingdom of God: the Kingdom of the Father, the Kingdom of the Son, and the Kingdom of the Spirit.  In the first of these, that of the Father, humans are revealed to be not mere servants of an earthly ruler, but servants to the creator God, reclaiming the divinely endowed task of sustaining his creation (Gen. 2:15).

We are released from our bondage to the Law which Christ fulfilled–not by abolishing it, but by internalizing and therein protecting it from being broken.

Instead of being hopelessly bound to religious customs and rituals, we are freed to live according to the natural order of God’s creation, taking on this already divinely established way of life.

 

In the Kingdom of the Son, the servants of God are further revealed to be his children; we begin to relate to him as a king who is also our parent.

The promise of the cross is freedom from sin; the freedom to be obedient to God.  This is because obedience can only come from within, and cannot be externally coerced by any threat of violence or fear–even unto death on the Roman cross.

The word translated “ransom” (lutron) in Mark 10:45 carries the connotation of the price that is paid to free someone from slavery, and this is the sense in which the obedient death of Jesus must be understood.

Through the faith in and of Christ, who sends his Spirit to us, we are now adopted as God’s children (Gal. 3:2), so that we can share in his intimate union with the God he revealed to be our Abba Father (Gal. 4:6).

As we are able to share in Christ’s baptism in the Spirit, we must remember that “Christian baptism is not…baptism into a particular community of faith but into the universal new humanity, the body of Christ, designed to nurture commitments to universal humanization.”

While many in the Protestant West have focused on doctrines of justification, the Orthodox emphasis on theosis–the work of Christ’s restoration of true humanity, as well as the pouring out of his Spirit to effect this process within the church–is an element of good news that we cannot afford to neglect.

 

Finally, with the Kingdom of the Spirit, comes the hope of freedom from death.  In the Spirit, we who are God’s children are further revealed to be God’s friends.

The full disclosure of the Kingdom of God is eschatological, so the hope of freedom from death is latent, though not yet manifest.  As the body of Christ, we experience simultaneously the joy represented by Easter and the suffering represented by the cross; we are free to rejoice where we experience the liberation of the Spirit, which also compels us into solidarity with those who are still in bondage.

Thus, even as we experience the freedom of Easter, we are not permitted to escape this world of death and suffering; it is our task to accept this world and work patiently and diligently by the renewing power of the Spirit to transform it into the world that is to come.

 

 

Conclusion

We have seen the work of the Spirit and that of Christ in various Christian perspectives, which have arisen from a multitude of attempts to grasp the profound mysteries of the triune God and his work of salvation and redemption.  On some points these perspectives agree more than others, but they can and must be brought together in the name of the Spirit who blows where she wills, in spite of the doctrinal boxes we attempt to fit ourselves and our God into.  Moving past these conceptual differences, we must strive to live by the Spirit of Christ so that the good news “will not be a matter of proclamation but of service, since the proof of our dogmatic pudding will be found in the acts of kindness and justice…which we conduct in the name of Jesus Christ.”

 

To say Jesus is the Christ is to imply that his is a divine Spirit, a Holy Spirit; to say that the Son of God was Jesus of Nazareth is to say that his divine Spirit is also a very human one.  Thus, it must be said that the process of theosis is as much one of becoming human as it is of participating in the divine life.  There is no need to speak of God becoming human without in the same breath (ruach?) speaking of our becoming truly human.  To speak of Christ, then, is to say, ‘If God lived as a human being, this is who he would be…this is how he would be…this is the gospel he would preach…and want us to be and preach,‘ and to affirm that in Jesus of Nazareth, this is exactly what has happened.  Jesus is like a prism through which the unbearably bright white light of the Spirit is channeled, concentrated, dissected, then reflected as the rainbow of colors that are its constituent parts, so that we all might find our own individual frequency within the full illuminating spectrum of divine light.  As the Spirit filled Jesus without dissolving his human identity, so shall it be for those of us who become part of the body of Christ, that we may “not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind[s]. Then [we] will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Rm. 12:2).

 

Bibliography

Bobrinskoy, Boris. “The Indwelling of the Spirit in Christ: ‘Pneumatic Christology’ in the Cappadocian Fathers.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984): 49-65. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000941057&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Breck, John. “The Two Hands of God: Christ and the Spirit in Orthodox Theology.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1996): 231-246. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001020499&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Brümmer, Vincent. Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005.

 

Coffey, David. “The “Incarnation” of the Holy Spirit in Christ.” Theological Studies 45, no. 3 (1984): 466-480. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000925407&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Groppe, Elizabeth T. “From God For Us to Living in the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ: Catherine LaCugna’s Trinitarian Theology as a Foundation for her Theology of the Holy Spirit.” Horizons 27, no. 2 (2000): 343-346. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001277040&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Gunton, Colin E. The Actuality of Atonement. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989.

 

Hector, Kevin W. “The Mediation of Christ’s Normative Spirit: A Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher’s Pneumatology.” Modern Theology 24, no. 1 (2008): 1-22.

 

Lee, Jung Young. The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

 

Malcolm, Lois. “Jesus and the Trinity.” Word & World 29, no. 2 (2009): 143-151.

 

McFarlane, Graham. “Atonement, Creation and Trinity.” In The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement. Ed. Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker, 192-206. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Play. Translated by Reinhard Ulrich. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1972.13

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Translated by Magaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. Translated by Magaret Kohl. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

 

Moore, Stephen D. Post Structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

 

Seeley, David. “Deconstructing the New Testament.” Vol. 5. In Biblical Interpretation Series. Ed. Alan Culpepper and Rolf Rendtorff, New York: E.J. Brill, 1994.

 

Yong, Amos, Dale T. Irvin, Frank D. Macchia, and Ralph Del Colle. “Christ and Spirit: Dogma, Discernment, and Dialogical Theology in a Religiously Plural World.” Journal of Pentacostal Theology 12, no. 1 (2003): 15-83. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001473052&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

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WHO IS GOD AND WHO ARE WE: TOWARD A DIALECTICAL UNDERSTANDING OF DIVINITY AND HUMANITY

2/20/2010

In what sense can we speak of Jesus as fully divine and fully human?  For centuries this question has baffled the minds of Christians who have sought to come to terms with who Jesus was and who he has continued to be for his followers.  Though most of the language we use to address this question has its source in scripture, the details and implications of this question do not seem to have been so problematic for the original writers and readers of the New Testament literature.  As this language was appropriated by the early Church Fathers and debated in the Ecumenical Councils, however, it was gradually abstracted into categories of Platonic philosophical thought wherein it became conceptually problematic.

It was this kind of abstract theologizing, founded, as it were, on inadequate philosophical grounds, which produced a litany of misunderstandings, conflicts, and divisions within the church.

The importance of understanding Jesus was felt as strongly as it had been by his earliest followers, but the context for this understanding had shifted dramatically, resulting in two millennia of confusion and fragmentation which is not easily untangled.  If there is to be any hope for  a truly unified ecumenical church, however, we must humbly begin to take up the task of deconstructing these doctrinal puzzles in order to re-establish the cultural, linguistic, and historical context of Jesus and the writings produced by the early communities of his followers.  To impose later definitions upon the language of scripture is both anachronistic and detrimental to our ability to appreciate the gospels as intended by their authors.

If we continue to proclaim the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, reading this presupposition back into the New Testament texts, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Church Fathers and to persist in our irreconcilable divisions.  Thus, we must seek to reclaim the language of the earliest Christian communities in the rich fullness of their original context, so that we may once again understand how we continue to experience God through Jesus in our own context.  I will argue that a two-fold dialectic is needed to come to such an understanding.  First, we must make a conceptual distinction between the Pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth and the Post-Easter Jesus Christ to understand how a first century Jewish man came to be professed as Lord.  Then, we must explore the intricacies of the dialectic of divinity and humanity in general in order to understand the significance of God’s revelation to us through Jesus in terms of who we are, who he is, and how we can envisage our relationship with him.

Our first task is to take up the question of what can be known about the Pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth as an individual historical person.  While this knowledge cannot be absolutely determined as a matter of historical fact, much progress can be made by simply exploring the cultural context in which Jesus lived.  We know, first of all, that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who lived in a period of Roman domination.  He came out of a religious tradition characterized by creational and covenantal monotheism in which God was seen as the creator of all that exists, and believed to be a God that entered into a covenant relationship with the people of Israel through whom he chose to unfold his plan of restoring the original harmony of this creation.

Given this context, it is obvious why Roman rule posed not only a political, but ultimately a theological challenge which produced a gamut of responses.  Messianism is deeply rooted in the notion that God would again deliver his people from the hands of foreign oppressors.  There is also a deep historical connection between times of exile and the word of God being spoken to his people through prophets, who reminded the people of their relationship with God and warned of the consequences associated with forgetting who they were (God’s people) and who God is (the Creator).  Again, this points back toward the creational and covenantal monotheism. This Jewish historical context is indispensable for interpreting the roles and actions of John the Baptist and Jesus, who deliberately associated themselves with this prophetic tradition and were, according to the New Testament, readily recognized for having done so by their contemporaries.

With this picture in mind we may now examine what the first Christian communities wrote about Jesus.

According to a consensus of New Testament scholars, it is clear that the earliest known writings containing biographical information about Jesus are the synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke, of which Mark is regarded as the earliest.

Within Mark, we read descriptions of Jesus made by his earliest followers, using the religious and cultural idioms most familiar to them to describe how they had experienced God’s revelation through the life and death of Jesus.

Such language is primarily manifested in the usage of several titles attributed to Jesus, all of which are deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, and none of which were originally or exclusively associated with Jesus, much less did they implicitly or explicitly denote his unique divinity; only later would these terms begin to carry such a special connotation.

The usage of Son of Man and Son of God need not, however, be taken as titles solely attributed to Jesus in reference to his two natures, divine and human.  Son of God is not the same as God the Son, the second person of the trinity, but was instead suggestive of the special sense of intimacy and commissioning Jesus had with God.  Son of Man, on the other hand, is notoriously ambiguous; it could simply mean ‘human being’ or it could refer to various Old Testament images, such as the Righteous Sufferer of Psalm 22.

The original intent of using titles like Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, Lord, and Word was metaphorical in the sense that they were a means of likening something new that was not fully understood (their experience of Jesus) to something familiar within their religious tradition.  In this sense, such titles were a means of appropriating the language that had applied to God’s chosen people of Israel, and to reapply them to Jesus, who had revealed to his followers the truth about who God is and who his people are called to become.

We can catch a glimpse of the self-understanding of the Pre-Easter Jesus in Mark, which is what N.T. Wright has called “the story of a Galilean prophet, announcing the kingdom of Israel’s God, summoning Israel to change her direction, that is, to repent.”

This is a portrait of a real human being, who modeled the paradigm of openness in relationship with the God he called ‘Father,’ and who, rather than explicitly defining who he was, has chosen to encounter his followers with the open-ended question that begs our creative response: ‘who do you say I am?’

This sounds more like the kind of question posed by one who wishes to be followed in both life and death, more than a statement intended to produce conclusive doctrines about abstract conceptions of his nature(s).

As we begin to understand the language used to speak of Jesus as a product of a faith community seeking to reconcile their Jewish roots with their profound experience of God’s Spirit in the person of Jesus, we can better appreciate what these early Christians were trying to express.  The crux is, as Marcus Borg eloquently summarizes, that “very early on we [Christians] metaphorized our history, and since then we have often historicized our metaphors.”

When this happens, we find ourselves lost in nonsensical doctrines we no longer understand, and we lose the rich meanings imbedded in the original metaphorical language.  It seems much more powerful to encounter, for example, the ‘I am’ statements the gospel John as metaphorical and poetic product of a community’s effort to understand the experience of the Post-Easter Christ, rather than as being literally and factually stated by the Pre-Easter Jesus; it says much more about what an extraordinary figure Jesus was if his earliest followers came to speak of him in such high regard in spite of the fact that he never claimed any such thing for himself than it would if he had foisted such an understanding upon them during his life.

This is not, however, to undermine the profundity of the experience of the divine Spirit of God that these Christians witnessed in the risen Christ, nor to call to discontinue the use of such language in both scripture and creed.  Instead, it seems as though a literal interpretation does more to undermine its significance, where the use of metaphorical and poetic language implies an attempt to express something so powerful that ordinary language simply could not begin to contain it.  Attempts to understand these truths literally have led to failure and accusations of heresy; the power of a metaphor rests in its ability to point beyond its own imagery toward a greater and higher truth while being expressed in a shared experience.

We must part with the notion that a metaphor is somehow less true or inferior to literal language, because, quite simply, the gospels were not written by modern journalists. Only poetic language can point toward the deeper meaning we experience when we engage the Christ of faith, but only if we know where these inherited idioms come from and what they have meant for those who used them.

Understanding our language is tantamount to understanding Jesus.  It is at this point that there is continuity between the Pre-Easter Jesus and Post-Easter Christ: the Easter experience of Christ as a divine presence after his death flows directly out of the experience of the empowering of the Spirit in the healing, teaching and wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus, Paul began to reinterpret the original language, and especially the title “Christ,” as a way of addressing the profound intimacy of Jesus Christ and the God he called the Father.  Such creative use of familiar language in unfamiliar ways is poetry at its best.  Paul, then, must be seen as creatively responding in an ideal way to the question Jesus posed: ‘who do you say I am?’  As one deeply imbedded in Jewish religious life, Paul experienced God’s presence in Jesus so radically that Jesus became his lens for re-envisioning the implications of everything he previously knew about God.  Paul as Pharisee had lived the Torah, but Jesus seemed to live the Torah in such a way that Paul had to rethink (repent) how God related to his people.

Christ, for Paul, was a more powerful symbol than the Torah itself for establishing an identity for the people of God–one which now extends beyond the nation of Israel.

We must not, however, ignore the direction Paul takes as he expounds this into the notion of our adoption as God’s children, made possible by Jesus, who is seen as the firstborn of a restored humanity.

It is also significant that all of this is done within the thoroughly Jewish understanding of God as the creator, and of human beings as his image or likeness, as described in Genesis 1:26. In Jesus, we have received a revelation not only about who God is, but also who we humans are, and accordingly how we are related to God.

Here we encounter not only the question of Jesus’ divinity and humanity in particular, but also the dialectical interrelation of divinity and humanity in general.

If we affirm the divinity of Christ in the same spirit as Paul, this forces us to radically rethink our notions of what the divine nature is; if we affirm his humanity, as well, then we must recognize that divinity and humanity cannot be defined in isolation.

Defining natures in a mutually exclusive way is unjustified, unproductive, and unnecessary; a more inclusive dialectical way of thinking is needed to make sense of the concept of incarnation.

The central Biblical symbol for exploring this dialectic is the creation of humans in God’s image, and Paul’s use of it when he says of Christ, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15).

If we take this connection seriously, along with Jesus’ use of ‘Father’ for God, we must see in this a humanizing of God.  Anthropomorphism is by no means a novelty in God-language, but in these usages there is a liberation from false anthropomorphism, and implicitly from false humanism.  That is, in Berdyaev’s words, “Human-ness is divine; it is not man that is divine, but human-ness…the integral attitude of man to life…the revelation of the fullness of human nature…the disclosure of the creative nature.”

This must be taken in conjunction with the fact that “man as we know him is to but a small extent human; he is even inhuman.”

For Berdyaev, our exalting language of Christ has stopped short of reaching the Pauline notions of adoption and sonship.  One of the primary reasons is that we tend to equate God with power, or omnipotence; such a supposition is seriously challenged by the fact that in a literal sense, the Roman empire was more powerful than the Son of God.

Thus, if God is powerful, it is power in a very different sense; it is spiritual power and love.  Carrying this concept of power a little further, we begin to see that God’s Kingdom, which Jesus preached and ushered in, is a very different sort of kingdom, and Jesus, having been executed by the most “powerful” empire on earth must be a very different sort of Lord than the roman Caesar.  If Jesus is in a sense God, this means God himself suffered and was crucified by the most powerful human nation, but it also means that God breaks through our estrangement and alienation from him by sharing our suffering out of his profound love.

If we attempt, as the Fathers have tried to do, to locate Jesus’ deity in his miraculous works and in his resurrection from death instead of in his suffering, we fall right away into docetism and we are again cut off from this Jesus who only seemed to be, yet, as it turns out, ultimately was not like us.

 

Thus, if we wish to uphold the language of our tradition and proclaim the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, we can do so only if we explore the wider implications of how we share in that relationship as, in Paul’s language, the adopted children of God of whom Jesus was the firstborn.  In the revelation of Jesus we must encounter the truth not only of who God is, but who we are as well.  If we allow the rich resonances of our metaphorical and poetic religious language to penetrate to greater depth than face-value literalism, we can continue in the spirit of Paul and the early church by recasting symbols from our own cultural context in a creative response to Jesus’ question: “who do you say I am?”  This creative act of engaging our religious convictions with the cultural world we inhabit is fundamental in our attempt to understand our identity as individuals in a faith community.  If we have nothing new to say about who Jesus is, who God is, and who we are, then the voice of God has ceased to speak to us; if we do take this up as our task, however, the Word of God will once again be pronounced and God’s new creation can come into being as his Kingdom begins to break through and restore its original perfect harmony.

Bibliography

 

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Hick, John. The Metaphor of God Incarnate. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.

 

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Christology: A Global Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

 

Le Poidevin, Robin. “Identity and the Composite Christ: An Incarnational Dilemma.” Religious Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 157-186. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001733874&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Translated by R A. Wilson and John Bowden. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

 

Need, Stephen W. Truly Divine & Truly Human: The Story of Christ and the Seven Ecumenical Councils. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2008.

 

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