Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Christology - A New Series by Me - Post #1 - Why Christology Really Matters
This website is above all things the writings (or is it ravings) of a theologian. While I care deeply (and believe I can speak intelligently) on a wide range of issues – from politics, to economics, to foreign policy and most of all history – I am first and foremost a theologian. So, from now on I am going to be doing a few more straight theological postings.
This year, as I have prayed, I have felt God leading me to focus on the issue of Christology. I taught one day of a seminary course in February on the issue of Christology, and I showed me how little I still yet understand the nuances of things like the Chalcedonian definition and/or the importance of the perichoretic interaction between the divine and human persons in Christ.
Of course, you probably don’t care a fig about these items at all. So, the first post on Christology – why it matters
I still remember fondly the InterVarsity Grad Student Conference in 1998 in Chicago. And not just for the fact that they had a blizzard to top all blizzards that shut down the city for three days and left us stranded at the Hilton Towers Hotel (not a bad setup if you can get it). The plenary speaker that year was N.T. Wright, who writings I had just become aware of that year. He delivered four lectures – Jesus and the Gospel, Jesus and the Kingdom, Jesus ….
After his discussion on Jesus and his understanding of his being Messiah vocationally, my wife and I (Tan also has her MA in Biblical Studies and is in many ways sharper than me, though in the way you would expect a Math major from Wheaton College to be) sat for dinner with a table of graduate students from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. They were quite simply stunned by what Wright was talking about, they knew it was important, and they knew that it meant big changes for their theology if true. But danged if they had no clue how to interpret his speech.
For the next hour Tan and I walked them through a basic discussion of Christology. Like many evangelicals, their basic understanding of Jesus was that, “you know, he was God and knew all the God stuff, and well, of course he was human, but he was really God.” This is what Wright calls the “Three Feet off the Ground” Jesus, where we have so elevated his divinity that Jesus is actually hovering off the ground, all divine, like so great master from the new age Kung Fu movies out of China (the best being of course, Crouching Tiger).
This is of course not what the early Church Fathers saw, and I would argue that this is not what the biblical texts show us. However, we are in a different era, with different issues facing us. The past two centuries have seen a denigration of the person of Christ. Sure, they may grudgingly acknowledge that he was a historical person. But divine? Surely not. Jesus – the model person, a prophet, a good teacher, or some other human category. That has been the answer from what is generally called the liberal wing of Christianity – with a solidly rational basis for understanding Jesus. We have no model for someone who is human and divine, therefore he cannot be divine. The Jesus Seminar, that great fashion of the early 1990s liberal theological (and cultural movement) stripped Jesus of anything important to say and anything important to do. When we get done we are darned pressed to find any reason why the people wanted him killed.
Against this context evangelicals and others from the conservative theological side have argued fought hard to not give up the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, not least for the basic two reasons that (1) the scriptures seem pretty clear on it and this is part of the larger issue regarding the trust and authority of the scriptures and (2) Christianity makes no sense and does not “work” without Jesus being divine (and of course human). And, I think we have done a good job of communicating to the world that, no, he was not “just” those other things – good teacher, prophet, et al – he was the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God.
In the first five centuries of Christian belief and theology, the issue was more the other way. Everyone knew that Jesus was a special force – some form of divinity (for those who have read the Da Vinci Code, this is error number one – the issue was never “should we make Jesus God” – the issues was always what kind of God was Jesus, at the same level as the Father or slightly lower). This challenge in those centuries was being clear that he was really human. Gnosticism, with its layers of supernatural and its general abhorrence of all things physical, kept pushing at the edges, trying to make Jesus as little truly human as possible. Those early theologians and ministers of the Gospel knew as St. Paul knew that without Jesus being truly and really human, that the whole work of salvation was a bust. And so, they worked hard not just to affirm the Son of God as equal in rank with the Father, but to make sure we were clear that Jesus was truly human.
Believe it or not, theology does really matter. Even in the first century the writers of the Gospels were making sure they included stories and speeches that left us with no doubt that, improbable as it seems, this man – Jesus of Nazareth – was truly a human just like us and yet was truly the son of God. Not that they understood how this is possible. Not that they or us can truly work out all the implications of this. But they knew it mattered.
And it still matters today. Whether it is Dan Brown’s horrible fictional treatment of history, or Bart Erhmann’s solidly scholarly but ultimately embittered theology, or the Jesus Seminar with their glitzy voting with colored marbles (yes, insert joke here about losing them), the issue of whether and how Jesus of Nazareth was fully God and fully human still matters.
In the coming posts, how it matters, implications, and why today more than ever, our postmodern world needs the hope of good Christology to find wholeness.
