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

 

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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