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

 

Bateman, Herbert W.,  IV. “Defining the Titles “Christ” and “Son of God” in Mark’s Narrative Presentation of Jesus.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 3 (2007): 537-559. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001612497&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

Berdyaev, Nikolai A. The Divine and the Human. Translated by R M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949.

 

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 2006.

 

Borg, Marcus J., and N T. Wright. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1999.

 

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

 

Gianoulis, George C. “Is Sonship in Romans 8:14-17 a Link With Romans 9?.” Bibliotheca Sacra 166, no. 661 (2009): 70-83. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001703998&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

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.

 

Skarsaune, Oskar. “From the Jewish Messiah to the Creeds of the Church.” Evangelical Review of Theology 32, no. 3 (2008): 224-237.

 

 

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How Does the Christian Understanding of God Shape Theological Reflection?

10/05/2009

If our task is to explicate the Christian understanding of God as it shapes theological reflection, we must first assume that there is such a Christian understanding, and then attempt to articulate it.  The primary source of a Christian understanding, then, is the witness of scripture; the interpretation of scripture is subsequently informed by tradition—the myriad attempts that have been made by previous and contemporary Christians to glean just such an understanding from scripture.  In this endeavor, we must readily admit, like Anselm, that God cannot be comprehensively understood or conceptualized, and that we must rely first on our faith to guide our understanding.  Nevertheless, we also admit that our understandings are grounded in a context or worldview, and that they rely on reason and logic to be articulated.  Although the scripture’s witness of God occurs within a Hebrew context, much of traditional Christian thought has appropriated a Hellenistic hermeneutic that is not intrinsically a Christian paradigm.  Furthermore, the spread of global Christianity throughout modernity has inspired the appropriation of various other cultural contexts as interpretive lenses through which Christianity can be understood.  Rather than legitimate one culture’s system of logic over against another’s, this crisis of interpretive pluralism forces us back to God’s self-revelation in scripture and our humble faith that this revelation is self-authenticating.  By using the “both/and” logic of Chinese philosophy instead of the “either/or” reasoning of Greek philosophy, we can better understand the uniqueness of a Christian understanding of a God who is transcendent, a God who is one, and also a God who is with us.

In order to affirm that God is transcendent, we must first dispense of the Aristotelian dualistic logic of “either/or.”  This leads to an insolubly static duality of subject and object, which is incompatible with a God who transcends the division of subject and object.  At this, Karl Barth rightly adopts a “both/and” or “neither/nor” logic in place of “either/or.”  He suggests that God is both essence and existence, and neither an object nor an idea.  Thus, not only is the logic of Aristotle inadequate to conceptualize a transcendent God, but also neither is the Platonic conception of ideals.  In the tradition of the church, the metaphysics of Greek ontology led to the static ontology of God seen as the essence of being.  This thought permeated both the Neo-Platonist thought of Augustine, as well as the Aristotelian thought of Aquinas.  Seeing God as a static being, however, is incomprehensible to a humankind and a world that are in the dynamic process of becoming, and not being.  The “both/and” logic in which Chinese philosophy is rooted allows us to conceive of a God who, by transcending the dualism of “either/or” is both being and becoming.  If, as we faithfully believe, God is ultimate reality, he must be both.  Thus, Jung Young Lee is able to account for both the changelessness alluded to by the doctrine of divine impassability as the source of creation, and the need for a dynamic conception of God to relate to humankind, by asserting the Chinese concept of change as ultimate reality.  Thus, by conceiving of God as change, God implicitly transcends any objectification, while still relating to the world in which all things are in a process of change and becoming.  If we read God as change, then it is true when Lee asserts that, “everything changes because of change [i.e. God], but change itself is changeless.”  In other words, the use of this Chinese conception informs and enhances our traditional notions that God is the first cause through which our dynamic world of changes has come into being, and yet this God is also unchanging.  Rather than fall into the dualistic trap of interpreting these doctrines in light of a static God of substance, we can use the inclusiveness of the concept of change to understand how such a God relates to us and reveals himself to us in a world in flux.

Next, we must see how this understanding of God as changeless change sufficiently articulates the Christian concept of a God who is one.  In this endeavor, we must turn to the scriptures that mediate God’s self-revelation.  Deuteronomy 6:4 contains the Hebrew Shema, an ancient understanding of the God of the Bible.  In the transliterated Hebrew text, it reads, “Sh’ma Yis-ra-eil, A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu, A-do-nai E-chad,” which literally means, “Hear Israel! Yahweh our God, Yahweh one.”  By virtue of its ambiguity, it is translated in a number of different senses in English, such as “Hear O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone” and “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.”  Both senses emphasize the unity or oneness of God, and point toward the Christian conception of monotheism.  Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton, however, casts this concept of monotheism in a different light: it does not seem to indicate belief in one God as opposed to a polytheistic belief in many gods; monotheism in the Old Testament rather indicates a God who is consistent in his action in history.  Thus, “a God who is inconsistent is historically polytheistic.”  God is our God because he is the same for us as he was for the patriarchs, he is one because he has not changed, and he is alone because he is God of all.  As we see in Amos 9:7, God is both the God of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, and the God of the exoduses of other peoples as well.  He transcends the dichotomized duality of “us” and “them” precisely by being one God for all.  As Barth argues, God’s transcendent unity is also the unity of the past, present, and future.  Thus, we begin to see that the authoritative uniqueness of Christianity is grounded not in the exclusiveness, but in the inclusiveness of God.  As Lee states:

It encourages not competition but cooperation, not domination but coordination, not authority but authenticity, not conformity but affirmation.  It rejects…a dualism that is in any case incompatible with the original Judeo-Christian message.

Both Barth and Lee are articulating the notion that theological reflection cannot assert its own authority based on the merit of its propositions.  Hence, Christian theology is authoritative not so much by virtue of an overt claim to authority as by its self-authenticating proclamation of a transcendent God who is one and who includes all by loving grace.  This God is changeless insofar as he is consistent from one time and people to another, but he also implicitly must embody change in order to be the same God in changed circumstances.

Lastly, it becomes clear that God, when understood as changeless change, is not only unified and transcendent, but he is also Immanuel—God with us.  As Barth confirms, God reveals himself to us in the scriptures and through the history of his deeds.  He does this because he has a fundamental interest in humankind, which culminated in the act of the incarnation of Christ.  The concept of changeless change helps us see God in light of the dynamic interrelationship that Barth asserts is the task of theology to describe; a God whose unity allows him to “exist neither next to man nor merely above him, but rather with him, by him, and most important of all, for him.”  Traditionally, this aspect of God has led to his characterization as a personal God, but when he introduces himself for the first time in scripture, we see that while his relation to us is on some level personal, his nature nevertheless transcends the bounds of personal and impersonal.  Thus in his meeting with Moses in Exodus 3:14, when asked by Moses what his name is, his response is strikingly non-symbolic and mysterious: “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.”  The other names we use for God symbolically reflect the conditions of certain encounters with God, but when God defines himself, he does so non-symbolically as “is-ness.”  Though it is important that God relates to us on a personal level, and that he achieved the fulfillment of this relationship through the incarnation of Christ, the impersonal or super-personal nature of God must not be forgotten.  Otherwise we risk misunderstanding God through what Barth calls “anthropotheology” rather than properly trying to understand ourselves and God through “theoanthropology.”  In other words, God must first be understood as transcendent before he can be understood as Immanuel; otherwise we merely reduce God to being Immanuel in the sense that he is one of us.  We were created in his image, so we must not cast him in our image; instead we must faithfully strive to understand him, which in turn will inform a proper understanding of ourselves as his likeness.

By using the “both/and” logic of Chinese philosophy instead of the “either/or” reasoning of Greek philosophy, we can better comprehend how God is transcendent; a God who is one and alone, and also a God who is with us.  This understanding prompts us to reflect upon how we relate to God, and how we live our lives as Christian believers in this God.  Since he is a God who loves, forgives, and extends grace, we are called to do the same; since is inclusively one universal God of all, we must also be inclusive of all; since he exhibits his authority through his humility, being tortured and killed by the authorities of this world, we are called to be humble servants.  As he is the God of the Gospel, we are likewise called to bring this “good news.”  If, however, we fail to understand him in this dynamic interrelationship, and if we fall into a static conception of him as wholly other, then we cut ourselves off from allowing him to transform us.  For this reason, we have faith in him, that we may understand him, and that through our faith seeking understanding we may be transformed by him.

 

 

 

References

 

Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963.

 

Charry, Ellen. Inquiring After God. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

 

Hamilton, Victor. Handbook On the Pentateuch. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005.

 

Lee, Jung Young. The Theology of Change. New York: Orbis Books, 1979.

 

Siddur, Siddur.org.  Available from HYPERLINK “http://www.siddur.org/transliterations/SatAM/11shacharit_shema_2.php#shma” http://www.siddur.org/transliterations/SatAM/11shacharit_shema_2.php#shma; Internet; accessed October 5, 2009.

 

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Spirit: Missing Link in the Doctrine of the Trinity?

11/24/2009

Since its earliest days, the church has held the doctrine of the trinity to be of central importance.  Agreement on this point was nearly unanimous.  The proper articulation of the doctrine, however, has been one of the most contentious and divisive areas of Christian theology.  The difficulty of elucidating and grasping the trinity has in turn led to its neglect in some cases and its outright dismissal in others.  In both instances, the abandonment of the trinity stems from assumptions and modes of thought that are non-trinitarian.  Forcing the trinity to be non-trinitarian is a tiresome and fruitless endeavor, but it has unfortunately been a common pitfall.  Inevitably, contradiction arises out of monistic and dualistic thought.  These are but two sides of the same philosophical coin; the coin that encompasses and surpasses them, then, is trinitarian thought.  Integral to the application of trinitarian thought to the Christian doctrine of the trinity is the least understood and most neglected hypostasis thereof: the Holy Spirit.  In order to reclaim the doctrine of the trinity, we will need to examine the non-trinitarian thinking that ultimately leads to the neglect of the Spirit, explore the implications of the Spirit in trinitarian thinking, and finally begin to discover the role of the Spirit in the Christian life.

To critically examine the validity of affirming the trinity as the Christian concept of God, one must first determine whether the perceived problems of the doctrine lie within the trinity itself, or merely in the poor articulation thereof.  To that end, Lesslie Newbigin points out that the trinity is not so much a problem as a solution to the problem of the dualistic tendencies of classical thought.  The issue is that monotheism is taken as the assumed starting point from which the trinity is derived.  This gives rise to two basic doctrines and one common result.  On the one hand is Tertullian’s conception of the divine substance in three persons,  and on the other hand is the Hegelian conception of the divine as absolute subject.  Both of these are functionally disintegrative as they reduce the three parts of trinity into a static and abstract monotheism; both of them are guilty of reducing trinity to modality.  The problem with these approaches is that they restrict the ‘persons’ of the trinity from having any substantial or subjective personhood, and thereby effectually negate the need for distinguishing between them in the first place.  The result is the insoluble dualism whereby the cold absolute God is isolated from humanity with no mediator.  What is missing is a trinitarian approach, grounded in the inclusive mediator of the Spirit.  That is needed to resolve the startling ecclesial contradiction that the church has no developed doctrine of the Spirit, yet it acknowledges the role of the Spirit as the mediator of all revelation.  The Spirit is the inner connecting principle that connects and brings to completion the seemingly contradictory and exclusive sides of dualism, or the static reductionism of monism.  Thus, we can discern the presence of the Spirit in John 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  Without the ‘in’ as a representative of the functioning Spirit, the distinction between the Father and Son are dissolved: “I am the Father and the Father is me.”  If we conceive of God as substance, then we lose this subtlety because ‘in’ is not a substance, and it therefore loses all meaning and significance.  We are led to conclude with Berdyaev that the antithesis between Spirit and matter cannot be upheld, because the “Spirit is freedom, not substance.”

Thus, in the context of the doctrine of the Spirit, the doctrine of the trinity elucidates the unity of God not so much numerically as in terms of fellowship.  It is a co-working of three subjects.  In John 10:30 we read, “I and the Father are one,” not “I and the Father are one and the same.”  The latter would indicate a stress on numerical identity, whereas the actual text tends more toward emphasizing a relationship.  Once again, we may infer the presence of the Spirit in this verse as the connecting principle operating in the word ‘and.’  This is underscored by the notion of marginality that is interwoven with the function of the Spirit as mediator.  Marginality can be seen as the unrecognized existence between two worlds that is treated as if not existing.   The marginality of Jesus is depicted in John 1:11 where his own people do not recognize him. It was not until after the Easter event when the Spirit was poured out that his marginality was to be accepted and transfigured; only in the context of the trinity can we accept the marginal (and thus ourselves be accepted).  Only within trinitarian thought can we experience the harmony of unity and diversity seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

The implications of the trinitarian inclusiveness of the Spirit for Christian living are manifold; they constitute an inexhaustible call for a creative response as a faith community.  If our faith affirms a Spirit who indwells then we must embrace and uphold this as a fundamental mystery.  Our knowledge of God cannot be entirely propositional so we are led to a twofold affirmation of revelation as the humanity of God expressed in the mutual revelation of the Son and the Father on one hand, and the mystery of God expressed in the Spirit on the other.  To speak of the humanity of God is not necessarily an anthropomorphic elevation of man; as Berdyaev paradoxically elaborates, “it might be expressed by saying that God is human whereas man is inhuman.”   The Russian Orthodox thinker Aleksei Khomiakov coined the term sobornost to cast the notion of  the catholicity of the church in a trinitarian light.  In sobornost, he implied, “unity in multiplicity, oneness in diversity…a catholicity realized in quality not in quantity, in depth rather than breadth, a characteristic communicated by the Holy Spirit which enables individual communities, and even persons, to give full and complete manifestation to the mark of catholicity.”  Berdyaev expounds upon Khomiakov’s notion by seeing in the Pentecost of Acts the inauguration of a new era of the Spirit that promises a social and cosmic transfiguration culminating in a “real and not merely symbolic sobornost.”  Moltmann sees this in the transformation from the Shekinah of God that was dwelling with us in the Temple to the Spirit of God that indwells our bodies which become temples (I Cor. 6:13-20).  Through the Spirit we are at last allowed to partake, by faith, in the sonship of Jesus as we are transfigured, as his church, into his body.  In this we are liberated from the earthly kingdoms consisting of lords and servants and invited to freely participate in God’s Kingdom which consists of a loving Father and us as his free children.  As by grace we are included in this sonship, we are called to embody this same grace in extension to the Other.  Only within trinitarian thought can we truly include the Other without attempting to dissolve the otherness.  Then we may engage in the practice not of dialogue, but that of ‘trilogue,’ recognizing the Spirit is already on both sides of the table, accepting the Other as the only truly genuine expression of religious empathy.

The trinity is the essential starting point for all Christian reflection.  If it is to be thoroughly reclaimed, however, it must be on the basis of a truly trinitarian mode of thought.  Only in this paradigm can the implications of the Christian trinity be discussed, and from there the implications for Christian living.  The essence of the trinity is bound up in the acceptance of the Spirit, without which it unravels into a static conception of a God to whom we cannot relate.  This is not to downplay the significance and/or centrality of the Father and the Son, but merely to serve as a corrective to the longstanding neglect of the Spirit and of the lack of its doctrinal development.  Without the trinity and the Spirit, the Christian faith is a hopelessly tragic tale of a despotic God and a condemned humanity forever separated from the God we confess faith in.  Only within the trinity can we find the true Christian hope of the coming Kingdom and the ultimate source of God’s good news for his children.

Bibliography

Berdyaev, Nikolai. Truth and Revelation. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953.

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Trinity and Religious Pluralism. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.

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

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1981.

Newbingin, Lesslie. “The Trinity as Public Truth.” In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Ritchey, Mary G. “Khomiakov and his Theory of Sobornost.” Diakonia 17, no. 1 (1982): 53-62.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Does the Trinity Belong in a Theology of Religions?.” In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

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