This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Jesus the Bastard?

Episcopal priest and mother of two, Chloe Breyer, speculates about the illegitimacy of Jesus in her Slate.com article, The Earthly Father - What if Mary wasn't a virgin? [H/T: T-19]

The allegations as to Jesus' illegitimate birth go way, way back, to the Jewish leaders of the first century, and the anti-Christian polemicist, Celsus. Such charges have been revived in our day via the "historical Jesus" quest and its postmodern manifestation in the Jesus Seminar. The claim is that Mary was pregnant with Jesus by another man than her betrothed, Joseph--in one accounting by Panthera, a Roman soldier. The Christians, then, to cover over this embarrassing detail for one who was supposed to be the Son of God, claimed a miraculous virgin birth.

But what's at stake in all this? Why does the Creed insist on asserting the virginity of Mary? Is this just a bunch of dogmatic fundamentalism? Is it really necessary to Christian faith to believe in the virginity of Mary? Is this a core Gospel doctrine? What would it really matter if we allowed some good-hearted quibbling on Mary's virginity?

After all, if Orthodoxy insists on a virginal conception so as to safeguard Jesus' divinity by excluding human paternity, then, according to Rev. Breyer:

The illegitimacy tradition, by contrast, holds that the Holy Spirit supplemented, rather than replaced, Jesus' human paternity.

And isn't that sort of what the Holy Spirit does for us?

Therein lies the most important of two immediate problems for those who want to deny Mary's virginal conception: Jesus then becomes just like us. Period. Full stop. Just: Like us. This is the problem that makes this some other Gospel than the one received from the Apostles: it means Christ is not by nature God. He is only God by adoption. And if he is not really God by nature, we are not really saved.

More on the implications in a moment.

First a little background on how a minister, claiming the Christian faith, can boldly argue for the legitimacy of this as an alternative form of Christian faith. Breyer gets the bulk of her ruminations here from Dr. Jane Schaberg's 1987 book (excerpts of which can be found here).

In 1987, Schaberg, a biblical studies professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, published The Illegitimacy of Jesus. Her central argument was that Matthew and Luke's Gospels originally told of an illegitimate conception rather than a miraculous virgin one.

Breyer then rehearses the "few short passages in two of the four Gospels" which provide the sources for the virginal conception of Mary.

In Matthew, an angel appears to Joseph, who is perplexed about his fiancee's pregnancy. Should he divorce Mary or have her stoned her to death, as the law of Deuteronomy requires? "Joseph, Son of David," says the angel, "Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus." The angel then goes on to quote the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel." (In fact, "virgin" comes from Matthew's use of a Greek mistranslation; the Hebrew in Isaiah reads "young girl.") The version in Luke is similar.

One first of all notes the simple assertion that parthenos "mistranslates" the Hebrew. Of course Rev. Breyer fails to note that the texts of the Greek Septuagint, from which Matthew takes his citation of Isaiah, are generally a millennium older than our Hebrew manuscripts. She also fails to note that of all the instances of "almah" in the Hebrew, of which there are seven, none refer to a married woman or one who has had sexual relations. In fact, in Gen 24, both "almah" (young woman, v. 43) and "bethulah" (virgin, v. 16) are applied to Rebecca. And the Septuagint translates "almah" in Gen 24:43 with "parthenos" just as it does in Isaiah 7:14.

But this is the necessary method of operation for those who are offering interpretations alternative to and opposing the tradition: first instill skepticism and doubt. Call "parthenos" of Isaiah 7:14 a mistranslation--which also calls into question the inspired nature of the biblical text--and the wedge of doubt has been set.

Breyer continues:

So far, the Scripture sounds pretty clear. But the infancy narratives from Matthew and Luke must be squared with some startling silences, alternative Greek translations, and a couple of snide comments from Jesus' hometown critics. Paul never mentions the virgin conception and in Galatians describes Christ as "born of a woman." John's Gospel says nothing on the subject of Jesus' conception. And Mark describes the shocked response of the synagogue-goers of Jesus' hometown of Nazareth when Jesus as an adult returns to preach and teach as God's chosen one. The Nazareth Jews presumably would have known better than anyone about the irregular timing of Jesus' birth. "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" his parents' neighbors ask one another. Since Jewish men of the time were identified in relationship to their father, Schaberg and other scholars take this remark as an insinuation about Jesus' parentage—one that was so offensive that the later Evangelists Luke, Matthew, and John changed it.

Note that this alternative interpretation has exploited the opportunity that "silence" affords to fill in the gaps. There is no evidence whatsoever in silence. It is just that: silence.

So, two Gospels mention it, as do the earliest accounts we have outside the Scriptures. But because two Gospels don't mention, nor does St. Paul, then one apparently is justified in flatly contradicting the explicit evidence of the other Gospels, for the sake of a speculation.

And there's more. When Mary responds to the angel's good tidings in Luke, one translation of her speech is, "How can this be, I do not know a man?" But in the Greek, the word for man is anthropos, which also means "husband." Schaberg suggests that if this is the meaning Luke intended, the text could imply that Jesus had a human father who was not Joseph. Finally, in the Magnificat, Mary's song of praise and thanksgiving to God, she says, "God has lifted up his humble maidservant." The Greek word for "humble" is the same one that the Septuagint (the old Greek version of the Hebrew Bible) uses to describe the rape of Dinah in Genesis and other incidents of sexual violation. From this, Schaberg discerns the possibility that Mary's "humility" could be "humiliation" from a sexual assault.

Here is the second tactic after one exploits the silences. Note secondary meanings, and assert them as primary ones. I haven't done a linguistic check on the use of "humility" in the Septuagint, but I suspect it is used of more than just persons violated sexually. No matter: it's a possible meaning. And since it is possible, it must be legitimately viable.

But this is tantamount to saying that, since the statement "Clifton claimed that God had made him rich with many blessings" could mean that God had made me financially wealthy, then it must be the fact that I'm financially wealthy. (Won't Anna be surprised!) Or since "blue" can mean sad, one could suggest that saying "The sky is blue" means the heavens are sad. To claim, in the face of the evidence and the history, that it's possible that Jesus was not conceived virginally, is to make possibility tantamount to lunacy.

But of course, it's all just conjecture. No harm in a little speculating right?

Admittedly, Schaberg's conjecture that the Gospel writers were obliquely conveying an illegitimacy tradition—one in which Mary was the victim of rape or seduction—is just that: conjecture. It lacks positive corroboration within the Gospels or other Christian writings. Schaberg acknowledges that she cannot prove that early Christians read the infancy narratives in the way she proposes. Still, if the Gospel writers did assume that their readers knew of an illegitimacy tradition, their words could support a figurative, rather than literal, reading of the angel's annunciation. It seems rash to rule out that historical possibility when theologically it works so well.

Ah, but here's the thing: Theologically it doesn't work so well. In fact, it doesn't work at all.

For the Gospel is about each of us being made one with God through Jesus Christ (John 17:20-26), to become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:3-4). God is utterly holy and other. Even if human beings were not sinful, God's holiness would utterly set him apart from us. We would be and are always other than God, we are creatures and he is the Creator. But Jesus says we are to be one with God. And St. Peter claims we are to be partakers of the divine nature. The only way for this union to happen is for humanity and divinity to be fully united in the Person of Jesus Christ. If Jesus was not virginally conceived by the Holy Spirit, then he is not fully God. If he is fully but only a man who has been granted God's likeness but not his essence, then not even he can unite us to God, for even Jesus remains always wholly other than God as a creature. If Jesus is fully man, then there is no one in whom we can be united to God.

Only the virgin conception allows for Jesus to be both essentially, by nature, God and essentially, by nature, man. Only the virgin conception allows for Jesus to bring union to the human and divine natures. And only in our union with Jesus, who is both God and man, can we have union with God.

Secondly, if Jesus is wholly humanly begotten, and is not therefore God in essence or nature, and if he was only adopted by God through the Holy Spirit, then humanity is not really fallen or sinful. We can, as we are, be adopted by God--though not united to him. Human nature does not need to change, since it can be adopted by God, as he did in Jesus Christ. But if human nature need not change, then we are ever condemned to our sinfulness and to our mortality and death.

Breyer then asks a series of questions:

Can a loyal Christian believe that Christ was not born of a biological virgin?

No. It removes any possibility of union with God in Christ.

Perhaps it's worth posing a different question: Why is church authority so intent upon Mary's virginity as a historical fact?

Because it is the only Gospel which saves us and does not leave us in sin and death.

Would Jesus be any less God's son if he had an earthly father?

Yes, because he would lack the nature and essence of God the Father.

The central message of the Gospel is that God raised up and redeemed his servant from death by crucifixion—the Roman style of execution reserved for the lowest of the low. Why couldn't God have sent the same message of divine solidarity with the world's outcasts by making a Messiah out of a man whose conception was also taboo?

Because divine solidarity does not happen by fiat, but by participation. And only Jesus is the perfect union of God and man in which we can have that participation.

Good news to remember at this time of the year. I may be getting ahead of myself liturgically, but in light of the examination of the heresy examined above perhaps I may be forgiven:

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

The Astonishing Christ

Let me commend to your listening attention (all links mp3 and will open in your mp3 player):

The Astonishing Christ (Session I)
The Astonishing Christ (Session II)
The Astonishing Christ (Session III)

[H/T Journeyman James and Huw]

Pomo/Em Church Jesus: A Reply to Andrew

Andrew, one of the respondents I quoted in my previous post ("Why the Pomo/Emergent Church is Extremely Dangerous"), gave a lengthy reply/defense in the comments to that post. I thought I would engage his comments in a separate post.

Andrew begins:

Clifton, I hope you don't mind me posting a bit of a defence of the 'Jesus is God' discussion on Open Source Theology. I don't want to address every point you have raised in your lengthy and detailed article, but I do want to make some general comments and respond to your criticism of my own relatively minor contribution to the discussion.

1. The 'emerging church' tends to regard itself not as a clear fixed position but as a fluid, searching conversation. I realize that can sound slippery and evasive, but I would say that many, if not most, of the people who are engaged in this conversation are driven both by a need to to be honest about their state of belief and by a deep loyalty to the Jesus who is revealed in the scripture. The complexity and messiness of the conversation is explained by that tension. We are simply trying to understand things better. If we are going to confess before the world that Jesus is God, we want to know what we are saying - not as a matter of unthinking parroting of tradition, but in all the richness, complexity and ambiguity of the confession. This is where many believers find themselves in this postmodern, post-Christendom moment, and we have to find some way of moving forward with integrity.

I am sympathetic to your comments here. I do, in fact, know something of what it means to be part of a delimited body of believers (one rather knows, I suspect, whether one's church is an emergent congregation or not), but which body of believers have very few hard and fast confessional beliefs. My own background is the Restoration Movement churches (specifically, the instrument using "independent" Christian churches), and our identity was largely predicated upon a hermeneutic or an ecclesial method than it was on a confession. It seems to me that the em church believers are strikingly analogous to that.

Furthermore, I readily admit that I have no scientifically reliable data to prove my contention that the views expressed on the Open Source Theology blog are typical of em church believers. At best I can only offer my personal anecdotal evidence that my encounters with the writings, online and in print, of em church believers is wholly consistent with my contention (or vice versa). I would not be surprised if a person found such a contention question begging. In my defense, however, the counter-examples to my contention are much rarer, it seems to me.

In any case, the substance of your first point seems to me to be that em church believers are concerned to have and to do "authentic" theology. With this I have no quarrel, however strange at times the conclusions (even if provisional) of such theological wrestlings may seem to me. What I do strongly object to is the false dichotomy you have presented between either confession as "unthinking parroting of tradition" or "all the richness, complexity and ambiguity of the confession." Surely you can understand why I might object to what appears to me to be an unwarranted prejudicing of the issue in the favor of the em church apologetic.

I rather suppose this is precisely the problem I was trying to elucidate in my criticism: the failure to adequately come to grips with the actual life and thought of the Church through time and space. Or, to say it differently, the "richness, complexity and ambiguity" that you espouse as paradigmatic is not opposed to the simultaneous living of the tradition. To borrow Pelikan's well-worn axiom: Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living; Tradition is the living faith of the dead. I am becoming an Orthodox Christian precisely because the living faith of the Tradition, in all its richness, complexity and ambiguity, is not available to me anywhere else.

If we may take the Chalcedonian definition as a point in particular: What about Chalcedon is the "unthinking parroting of tradition"? By the same token, in what way does Chalcedon fail to manifest all the richness, complexity and ambiguity of the confession." And yet, what em church believer readily and wholeheartedly espouses Chalcedon? I don't doubt that there are em churchers who do, after much throat clearing and footnotes perhaps. But what about ready and wholehearted affirmation of Chalcedon is in any way an "unthinking parroting of tradition"?

You go on:

2. The very diverse views expressed in the 'Jesus is God' post are not necessarily all consistent with any emerging 'consensus'. It is an open conversation - that is simply the nature of the thing; we do not pretend to be in any sense normative or definitive for emerging theology.

It is this notion of "emergence" that at once prejudices the discussion in favor of the em church apologetic and simultaneously fails to account for any content to the term. What is an "emerging theology"? Whence it's origins? If it arises from the "ruins" of the critique of modernist Christian theology, how can one know that one has truly sifted truth from error? If it is "emerging" from the surrounding culture, what does this say about em church ecclesiology? And correlatively, how does one know that it is Christian? Does it even matter that it is Christian?

Let's grant the lack of a consensus. I happen to think this claim to a lack of consensus is a bit disingenuous, for I do happen to think there is broad consensus which privileges a so-called "postmodern" epistemology and anti-metaphysic, with the jargonish discourse to support such concepts, over any substantive truth claims (or metanarratives that purport to be objectively or absolutely true). But let us for now stipulate such an inchoate "theology."

In what sense, one is pressed to ask, can em church believers speak in any meaningful way of the Gospel? Don't mistake. I am not in any way opposed to the particularity of the Gospel which distinguishes between communities and (small t) traditions. But I fail to see how, if such a plurality of "gospels" fails to reach any sort of singular consensus St. Paul's words in Galatians anathematizing those who preach a different gospel retain any meaning any longer. And if the gospel is inescapably plural, then I do not see how it can engender any ecclesial identity beyond the several individuals who happened to meet this past Sunday, which several individuals will differ from those who happen to meet next week, such that not even a local community retains any norming identity, and church just happens to be whatever it is now.

The above criticism notwithstanding, the intention stated in the following point is one I wholly affirm as well.

3. Any particular post should be understood in the context of the whole site (and for that matter of the whole emerging conversation). You could, for example, have a look at 'The marks of a renewed theology'. I can't really speak on behalf of the whole 'emerging community', but for myself at least the intention is to be more, not less, biblical.

I would only press you on what it means for an emerging theology to be biblical. It is a polyvalent term that I'm not sure is adequately grounded in any meaningful or coherent context--for such an intention is predicated upon a particular hermeneutic. And I do not see that the (so-called) "postmodern" hermeneutic is, in any way, ecclesial, and therefore how it can in any meaningful way make an emergent theology biblical.

You next disagree with my contention of semantic or functional equivalence between "Jesus is God" and "Jesus is Lord."

4. I would still disagree that 'Jesus is God' and 'Jesus is Lord' are semantically or functionally equivalent, but this requires a more careful response. The objection that Christians were pressured into confessing that 'Caesar is Lord' rather than 'Caesar is God' seems to me trivial given the pervasiveness of an ideology of imperial divinity. I could be completely wrong in suggesting that the cultic-political context was significant for the development of the slogan 'Jesus is God', but it surely makes good historical sense to suppose that something like this was in the background. And please notice that I did not say that it was 'simply rhetorical context' - you have added the word 'simply'. We can recognize the rhetorical context without diminishing the theological significance of the statement.

I did misattribute the term "simply" to your contention, and for that I ask your pardon. It was, ironically, a rhetorical slip on my part.

It seems that my remarks on "Jesus is Lord" were abbreviated enough to fail to adequately convey what I mean. I meant, and mean, that the pneumatic expression "Jesus is Lord" is, in fact, in the biblical context, a real and absolute claim to divinity, even identity with God. This is abundantly clear when one takes into account that the Church's Old Testament was the Septuagint, and the use of kurios in the ecclesial text and thus its usage in the New Testament.

I don't deny that the demand to say "Caesar is Lord" was tantamount to a claim to divinity. In fact, that was precisely my point.

What I was objecting to was the notion that somehow "Jesus is God" is not a biblical proposition. In fact, it is.

5. As far as I can tell, you have misunderstood my point about opacity and transparency. I should have taken more trouble to explain. Apologies. At issue here is whether the different discourses we use to speak about Jesus are open to each other - so for example, can we see, beneath or behind the simple summary statements, something of the more complex narratives out of which they emerged and which they encapsulate. Equally, as we work through the difficult narrative or theological arguments, are we able to perceive the simple devotional or evangelistic statements that give practical and pastoral and prophetic force and clarity to our beliefs.

I grant that I very likely misunderstood your argument regarding opacity. But if so, I'm not sure that the above clarification really necessitates an alteration of my comments.

To say it another way, in light of your clarification: what sense does it make to say that a particular discourse or set of discourses is "opaque" to another discourse or set of discourses? Opacity is a metaphor, of course, describing the absence of a capacity for a set of terms in one located discourse to be meaningfully used (or transcribed, translated) into terms of another located discourse. You highlighted in the response I criticized in the previous post such discourses as historical, eschatological-apocalyptic, confessional-doxological, theological, mystical, and evangelistic. It's not clear to me that it makes any sense to say that the historical discourse about theology or the Gospel is "opaque" to, say, the evangelistic discourse. After all, a discourse is merely a structured vocabularly oriented around formalized concepts. I'm not sure what sense it makes to say that concepts (or words) are opaque to one another, in part because I cannot make sense of what it might mean for a discourse to be hermetically sealed off from another discourse such that there was no possibility of transparency of any meaning between the two. For if such transparancy were, in fact, impossible, I'm not sure I could even conceive that such was impossible. In place of such a conception would be a cipher. Which is to reiterate in different words what I said before: if such things were, in fact, opaque, we could not know it.

Nor even if such claims to discursive opacity did make sense is it obvious that such claims are true. I can see how one might confess that these concepts and jargon speak to different things, but even evangelistic claims (Jesus is God) are grounded in historical discourse (Jesus was a man who lived in this place and time as attested to by these documents and witnesses, which documents and witnesses are variously supported by these archaeological finds).

6. I really don't understand why critics of the emerging church feel that they have to adopt such a scornful, alarmist and judgmental tone of voice.

I readily grant that the title of my previous post is alarmist, and it does make a judgment (though whether that means it is judgmental might be a matter over which we could quibble). I do not think it or my post is scornful. In any case, I did not intend to scorn.

But that my post and its concomitant title make a judgement is inescapable, nor is it necessarily unChristian. We are called to test the spirits. Since the Holy Spirit is the one who gives it us to say that Jesus is Lord, and given that Jesus is Lord is an equivalent claim to confessing that Jesus is God, then to test the claims that question the meaning of that confession is wholly within my responsibilities as a Christian.

Further, if my judgment is right--and though I think that it is, I also grant it is not an infallible judgment--then any alarmist tone to my post is not only consonant with such judgment, it is necessary.

However, if my words conveyed any scorn, that I deeply regret, and for it I apologize and ask your forebearance.

Pray for me a sinner.

Why the Pomo/Emergent Church Is Extremely Dangerous

If the post here (H/T: Pontifications) and its many responses are typical of emergent "christology" (and I suspect they are), then the so-called "emergent church" is not a work of the Holy Spirit. For the Spirit Himself gives it us to say, "Jesus is Lord" (1 Corinthians 12:3). (Note: The Holy Spirit also gives it us to say "Abba, Father" [Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6; cf. Mark 14:36], demonstrating that declarations denying the patriarchy of God are utterly void of any claim of Holy Spirit origin and authority.)

Here are the comments of the author of the post:

Some people avidly assert that Jesus is God and tend to be suspicious of anyone who has reservations about that statement. In some circles that phrase is practically a shibboleth.

Note that from the get-go, the author has psychologized the issues. Instead of it being a matter of someone being rationally critical of those who waffle on the truth of the claim "Jesus is God" we have people who are "suspicious." And of course, this is presented as a problem.

Personally I am not comfortable with that statement because I think it condenses a complex truth so laconically that it leaves itself open to significant misunderstanding. But on the other hand I reject the opposite statement (viz. "Jesus is not God") because I believe Jesus is uncreated, self-existent, transcendent, worthy of divine honour, etc.

Note this second strategy: the "principled hedge." I'm not comfortable with it--but won't go so far as to deny it. Once again, we have a psychological statement, not a truth claim. And notice the locus of the mental discomfort: it purportedly does not preserve the complexity of the issue. There is a subtle psychologism here, as well, for, after all, adults deal with complex realities, children deal with simplistic ones.

And the third strategy: the affirmation of a denial. But, logically speaking, to deny that Jesus is not God does not necessarily entail the affirmation that Jesus is God.

In short, the author has thus far confessed nothing save his own psychological states.

Finally, we do get a confession. But are these confessions really any less "simplistic" than "Jesus is God"? What is the author saying when he claims God is "uncreated"? "Self-existent"? "Transcendent"? "Worthy of divine honour"? Aren't all these concepts shorthand for utterly complex realities that we cannot fathom? Isn't the author being just as simplisitc albeit with more words? In what way is the confession that Jesus is "uncreated, self-existent, transcendent, worthy of divine honour, etc." a truthful improvement on "Jesus is God"?

He goes on:

I am struggling to get a handle on why it is unsatisfactory to say "Jesus is God", and I would like to be able to explain it more articulately to people who glibly say "Jesus is God" as though it were a simple, self-explanatory definition that needs no circumscribing. Maybe it is contrary to the principles of emergent theology to try to analyse and define things systematically, but I am hoping your responses to this thread may give me some useful new insights for my own spiritual growth and also to help me communicate effectively with others.

It seems to me that the author's problem is not the simplicity of the claim "Jesus is God," but precisely its (to borrow a phrase) irreducible complexity.

Now I suppose some plausible claim as to simplistic reduction--which could render the proposition "Jesus is God" as modalistic--might be entertained for a moment. But only for a moment, and in any case, that is not the direction this author is taking the question.

But notice what that author and the first sixteen (of twenty-three as of this post) responses entirely bypass: the "definition" of Chalcedon.

For it [the Christology of the Fathers] opposes those who would rend the mystery of the dispensation into a Duad of Sons; it repels from the sacred assembly those who dare to say that the Godhead of the Only Begotten is capable of suffering; it resists those who imagine a mixture or confusion of the two natures of Christ; it drives away those who fancy his form of a servant is of an heavenly or some substance other than that which was taken of us, and it anathematizes those who foolishly talk of two natures of our Lord before the union, conceiving that after the union there was only one.

Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us. (Definition of Chalcedon)

First of all, let us notice the author's (and presumably the pomo-oriented emergent folk's) deep aversion to "circumscribing" God. This is healthy. But notice that the "definition" of Chalcedon does not really "define" God. For to define something is to delimit it, to classify it as a this and not a that, to discuss that which is essential about that thing. Definition then, is utterly and absolutely inapplicable to God. For his essence is not accessible to us, and to delimit or classify him is to presumably have exhaustive knowledge about God such that we can place him in a set of things which have been tested by counter-example.

No, the historic Church has resolutely refused to define God. All she has been able to do is to declare, on the basis of the revelation in Christ, what God is not, and thus, by extension, we can only say what Christ is not. Or, rather, any positive declarations about God or Christ are circumscribed by what we cannot say about God or Christ. Notice the pronouncement from Chalcedon above. All of the positive declarations about who Christ is are bounded by the negative declarations. Christ is one Person, goes the positive affirmation, but we first start with the negative: Christ is not a duad of Sons, and this is reiterated again when it declares Christ the Word to be one Person, not separated or divided into two Persons. Christ is consubstantial with us humans, but he is not sinful. Christ is the union of two natures, but those natures are not confused, mixed, divided or separated. Always and everywhere our positive declarations about God are bounded by those propositions declaring what God is not. If we say God is one divine nature or essence, we must also say that God is not a monad. If we say God is a triad of Persons, we must also say that God is not three Gods.

So the Pomo/Emergent Church fear of circumscribing God is utterly baseless and founded on a quite mistaken notion from postmodernist populist drivel. We can never exhaust the meaning of "Jesus is God" so as to circumscribe him, and as the history of the Church has shown us, the best we can do is to declare that which cannot be said about Jesus.

Notice also how the emergent discussion, especially exemplified in the responses to the post, hinges on a false dichotomy: that between careful declarations and confessions of faith (i.e., "theology") and real world living. It is the Gnostic mind/spirit-body split all over again. Here's a taste of some of the responses.

Respondent Vincent-Olivier writes:

My opinion on this is that the "Jesus is God" proposition is innapropriate (or inconfortable [i.e., "uncomfortable"--cdh]) because "is" is used here as an identity and, in the case of "Jesus is God", two of the properties of identity are violated :

1. "Jesus is God" violates transitivity because if the hypostatic union ("Jesus is God" and "Jesus is man like any man") is true, then there must be some thruth [sic] in the "God is man" and "Man is God" statements;
2. Identities also imply symmetry, which means that if you accept "Jesus is God, then "God is Jesus" must also be true. And "God is Jesus" definitely sounds awkward in a orthodox point of view.

But, hey, if you accept the outcomes of the two properties over the "Jesus is God" statement, then there is no problem.

Re: "problem" 1. In point of fact, it is precisely the case that since the proposition "Jesus is God" is true, that it is also true, on the basis of the hypostatic union, to say "God is [a] man." Jesus did not divest himself of his humanity when he ascended into heaven (if he did we are not saved). Similarly, it is also true to say "[A] man is God." Notice I have introduced the indefinite particle prior to "man" in both statements. This is necessary because the respondent makes a claim regarding the hypostatic union that is predicated upon an equivocation of the term "man." For man is both a particular noun and a generic one. It stands in quite nicely for "human" (generic) as much as it does for (that) "man" (particular). But to speak more correctly, in God becoming (that) man, Jesus, he did not become all men, he became human; that is to say, he united the divine nature to human nature. But in that God became human, human nature is now deified in Christ. So it is as true to say that in Christ, God became a man and that man is God, AND that God became human and human became god. And we, insofar as we unite our personal hypostases (unique existents of human nature) to Christ, we, too, become gods, as Jesus said in John 10:34 (or "deified," made partakers of the divine nature [2 Peter 1:3-4]).

Why the respondent has problems with saying "God is Jesus"--unless it be from superficial fears of modalism--I have no idea. But it is, nonetheless true.

But there are more responses like that one. The respondent Andrew notes, incorrectly:

‘Jesus is God’, in the first place, is not a biblical statement so there is no biblical context within which to interpret it. It arose, presumably, either as a confessional statement or as a summary of a complex theological debate. In either case, in order to understand how it functions rhetorically we would need to bring into focus the rhetorical context in which it was used. For example, as resistance to the ‘confession’ that ‘Caesar is god’; or as a redefinition of the perceived nature of God; or as a slogan marking the culmination of conciliar debate. In other words, it is a mistake to read it as a purely logical statement of identity. The narrative substructure is not superseded by the more convenient encapsulation but must remain a visible and dynamic part of its meaning.

In point of fact, the biblical narrative or context does indeed provide precisely this formulation: Jesus is Lord. Oh, most assuredly, I understand that "Jesus is Lord" and "Jesus is God" are two different sentences. But they are not two different meanings. And the claim "Jesus is Lord" is quite precisely, and even more exactly, the same claim as "Jesus is God"--which is made abundantly clear by the biblical context Andrew has seemed to have either forgotten or ignored. In fact, using Andrew's "rhetorical" contextualizing of the claim, it was not the claim "Caesar is god" that Christians were called to repeat, but "Caesar is Lord." Nor was it simply rhetorical context. It was wholly existential, and not merely a resistance to a definition of the perceived nature of God.

The respondent Andrew goes on to say:

We are stuck with the fact that we have no simple, single coherent account of who Jesus was in relation to God. We have layered accounts: a historical layer, an eschatological-apocalyptic layer, a confessional-doxological layer, a dense, tangled theological layer, a mystical layer, a practical, reductive evangelistic layer, and so on. I suppose the challenge we face is to allow these layers of discourse about Jesus to be much more transparent to each other. I don’t think that in the long run we will be helped by simplistic evangelistic summaries that are opaque to history or narrative or confession or theolog

Ah, yes, the claim "Jesus is God" is forever inaccessible to us. All we have are opaque layers, which we must somehow make more transparent to other layers. But if these "simplistic evangelistic summaries" are inherently opaque, on what grounds is predicated their opacity? Their simplicity? Their historical context? Their theology? Their mysticism? Their confessionalism-doxologicalism? Their practical reductive evangelisticity? (I admit that last is a neologism.) All of these together?

The next question is, how does one render transparent that which is opaque? Either one must knock a whole through it, or must make it so thin that light can get through. Which is to say, one must alter the nature of the thing. But on what basis can we do that? Aren't our own claims that these things are opaque really just meaningless exhalations? What do we mean when we say something is "opaque"? And if it is opaque to us, how can we know it's nature is opaque, or even really say anything meaningful--such as "The claim is meaningless or opaque"--about it? Perhaps the opacity lies within us? Perhaps we are the ones who must be made transparent?

No, criticisms such as Andrew's sound smart and wise, but in reality such claims are nothing more than solipsism.

Note that the following respondent rejects any traditional or (small-o) orthodox understanding of the claim "Jesus is God" and at the same time claims to be part of the church (uses "we"):

In a literal sense I would say "no". The "fully man, fully God" view is more than I can intellectually accept. But I do equate Jesus with God in the following ways:

1. Jesus was someone in agreement with God’s objectives so when I say I believe Jesus and agree with him I am agreeing with God. So in that way Jesus = God.
2. You could say Jesus and God are one and the same in a similar way that my wife and I are one and the same. I feel we are inseparable and bound through mutual vows for all time.
3. Jesus is the "son of God" meaning he is someone speaking on behalf of God or conducting business as a representative of God or in the authority of God as a son would represent his father in his absence during a business transaction.
4. I see Jesus as a person embodying the nature of God’s character. I don’t accept the notion of him being a literally physical offspring of God. A person being a physical offspring of the spiritual force is very "greek/roman god-like" and not really something I could accept.
5. God is love and Jesus was definitely a walking exhibit of love so in that way you could say Jesus is God. I also think that any of us could be said to be "God" in this way. What I mean by that is an extension of how Jesus showed us to love God by serving others. So for us the "others" we serve become like a surrogate for God as we serve them and we become like a surrogate for God to those we serve. In the same way Jesus said, "whatever you do for the least of these you have done for me". So in this way God is more than a being living "out there in heaven" and Jesus is so much more than the man that lived in the first century because he continues to live and serve through us as we live and serve for him.

I think when we speak of Jesus as the "incarnation" of God or "physical body" of God it is similar to the metaphor of the church being the body of Christ. We are Christ’s body when we live out his vision and mission just as Jesus was God’s body as he delivered God’s message and God’s love in a physical way.

Whether the respondent consciously grasps this or not, in rejecting as true on its face the claim "Jesus is God," he has just presented a Jesus none of the early martyrs knew, an Arian Jesus, in some respects, a Gnostic Jesus in others.

Respondent 17, David Richards, finally interjects the Chalcedonian proclamation, with which there are, at present, no real engagements.

It is this largely unreflective adoption of postmodern sensibilities coupled with either an almost wholesale ignorance of the biography of the Church or a conscious rejection of it that makes the Pomo/Emergent Church such a danger to unwitting Christians. P/EC'ers and their disciples reject the historical life of the Church as unsuitable for present day Christian life. When one asks why one gets talk of therapy: Christians have been hurt by the "institutional church" (that ubiquitous bogeyman that never quite gets defined), or non-Christians seekers are looking for a more fulfilling way of engaging spirituality or god (vaguely intuited and thus the lower-case "g"). But P/EC'ers buy into this socially constructed criticism of the Church (notice how I am using one of their weapons against them), and thus are no more authoritative than the "institutional church" they criticize. That is to say, instead of bypassing authority, P/EC'ers simply substitute their own, though that authority is utterly blind.

And being blind, it apparently cannot see its Christological errors, because it will not learn its history. And not seeing its Christological errors, it cannot but also fail to see its ecclesiological ones. Thus it claims to offer the Church, but such offers are empty and void. If P/EC'ers cannot claim without hesitation that "Jesus is Lord," or "Jesus is God," then they share no part with those martyrs who died with that confession on their lips or the saints who lived that life for us all.

Correcting Modern Errors About the Nicene Creed

In the online article, "Do You Know Whom You Worship?", Dr. D. H. Williams, professor of patristics and historical theology at Baylor University, puts to rest a couple of erroneous understandings about the Nicene Creed.

The first is that notion, originally put forth by Walter Bauer, then, debunked, now resurrected by Bart Ehrman and others, that the struggle for orthodoxy in the fourth century was nothing more than imperial politics.

At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some Protestant historians regarded the Council of Nicaea and its creed with the same suspicion as they did the church of Rome. The esteemed German scholar Eduard Schwarz, for example, depicted the conflicts between pro-Nicene and "Arian" opponents as in reality a struggle for power within the church which was disguised as a theological dispute. The council's decisions represented a victory for those who wielded the most influence over the emperor. This meant too that the creed was an unfortunate capitulation of the church to imperial politics and an emblem of the new merger between the Roman empire and Christianity.

To this day, some churches and denominations see creeds, ancient or modern, as little more than legislated statements of power used for manipulating the faithful. Such a view is often built on the assumption that the church by the time of Nicaea had compromised its original biblical standards, replacing principles of Scripture with the authoritarianism of a new imperial and episcopal establishment.

While the council did involve interchurch politics with dissenting groups trying to obtain the emperor's ear, the Nicene Creed had its origin in the worshipping life of the church. A mere collective of bishops could not make for sound Christian doctrine. We are mistaken to cast the early bishops into the role of power brokers and political schemers, rather than the pastors and preachers that most of them were. Interpreting and proclaiming the true faith to their congregations was a major preoccupation with nearly every one of the early church theologians.

Likewise, creedal statements had to represent the common mind of the church or else they would not have been accepted and employed by the larger body of believing Christians. The vigilance of bishops in upholding and preserving Christian truth is exemplified in the opening words of the Council of Antioch (which met in the early months of 325) when it declared that its statement of faith was "the faith that was set forth by spiritual men … always formed and trained in the spirit by means of the holy writings of the inspired books." At the councils at Antioch and Nicaea, both of which formulated creeds, the concern was the same: articulating a theological vision that emerged from the church's faith. In effect, the creed was a statement ex corde ecclesiae—out of the heart of the church.

The second error Dr. Williams corrects, is that the Nicene Creed was an imposition of pagan philosophical terms on the mind of the Church.

The charge laid against Nicaea by later theologians that the creed was more the product of philosophical influence or "Hellenization" than of Scripture is misconstrued for two reasons. First, all Christian thinkers of the time—"orthodox" and "heretical"—were drawing on contemporary philosophical language in order to frame theological truths. Terms such as person, substance, essence, and many others all had a philosophical background that pre-dated Christianity but were borrowed permanently for Christian purposes. Where there was obvious conflict between the Bible and Greek philosophy, the Bible took precedent for even the most erudite Christians.

Second, one of the lessons learned during the "Arian controversy" was that in order to achieve doctrinal orthodoxy you cannot interpret the Bible from the Bible alone. The church needed a vocabulary and a conceptual framework that stemmed from the Bible but were also outside of the Bible. Sooner or later, some means of interpreting the scriptural text would be required.

Whatever else may be said of the ancient creeds, it cannot be denied that they were deliberately constructed to be the epitome of the biblical message. When instructing new converts, Augustine taught, "For whatever you hear in the Creed is contained in the inspired books of Holy Scripture" (Sermon 212. 2). It was the task of these creeds not merely to reproduce the Bible but to enable Christians to understand what the Bible, both Old and New Testament, means.

In the end, the Nicene Creed represented a large-scale attempt to answer the question, "Do you know whom you worship?" Christianity's central convictions that God is one and Christ is God had to be put into a cohesive statement that preserved the integrity of both. This was the burden of the fourth century. The Council of Nicaea responded with a creed that was new to church history and was not immediately accepted, but, as time would tell, it was crafted according to the intention of church tradition and biblical principles. As Charles Williams once said of the Christian faith encapsulated by the Nicene Creed, "It had become a Creed, and it remained a Gospel."

Our Lady

I have been very fortunate with my wife's pregnancies in that they've both thus far fallen during the Nativity Fast and Feast. It has afforded me much time for thought and reflection on the Incarnation.

This morning, while reading Douglas' entry on the Theotokos, he pointed me to the Pontificator's similar entry. I want to quote both these fine gentlemen and offer my own meager reflections.

Pontifcator captures the essence of my Protestant heritage on this matter:

The Church catholic has always kept Jesus and Mary close together, as evidenced by the ecumenical confession of Mary as Theotokos, “Mother of God.” This title was formally authorized by the General Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), a council convened not to address Mariology but Christology. At a deep intuitive level, the Church has understood that her confession of the Incarnation of the eternal Word is intrinsically connected to the veneration of the blessed Virgin.

Yet for some reason Protestants, including the overwhelming majority of Anglicans, do not intuit this connection. . . .

Something is very wrong with Protestantism. Our ecclesial communities do not generate a devotion to Mary. This absence of Marian devotion suggests to me a theological flaw. . . .

The Protestant, of course, immediately protests: “I believe in the Incarnation as strongly as any Catholic or Orthodox Christian!” But the fact remains that all of Protestantism has lost Mary, and many forms of Protestantism are now on the verge of losing Christ.

This raises a critical question for me: Is a Protestant competent to offer judgment on Marian devotion or Marian titles? I am beginning to suspect that no matter how “orthodox” we Protestants think we are in our doctrine of the Incarnation, we in fact are not. We have not faithfully appropriated the orthodox doctrine, because we have deleted Mary from the Church’s life of worship and prayer. This deletion of Mary is both evidence of our deficiency in our understanding of the Incarnation and a cause of this deficiency. Something is very wrong when our teaching and love of Christ does not generate the kind of hymnody, veneration, and devotion that is common in Orthodoxy and Catholicism. . . .

Within the tradition and history of the Church, a lively faith in Jesus as the incarnate Word has gone hand-in-hand with a lively veneration of his blessed Mother. Yet for Protestants, Mary remains a person of the past, much like Abraham, David, and John the Baptist. One must wonder if we really have understood the mystery of the Incarnation.

I know this has been true of me. I would have fought tooth and nail, indeed, I believe I may well even have died, for the dogma that God became man in the flesh and Person of Jesus, and remained essentially and fully God. But the only time I contemplated Mary was at Christmas Eve during our church's evening service, and while Grandpa or my dad read from Luke 2. As a pastor, occasionally I would preach on the passages in which Mary appeared, and I would emphasize her faith and obedience. But the Pontificator is right: to me she was an historic person just like Abraham and David.

Oh, I would agree with the title Mother of God, something we came across in my second year Greek class at Ozark Christian College. But it was a theological point. Even after coming to some level of comfort in praying the rosary shortly after I graduated from Ozark, and even after being confirmed in the Episcopal Church, Mary remained essentially a stranger to me. Then I turned to Orthodoxy. I prayed the Akathist Hymn one Saturday evening in October a couple of years ago, and about a month later Anna was pregnant.

Enter Mary.

Douglas sums up in an achingly beautiful way how my reflections on Mary have grown over the last couple of years:

Mary was not just some woman. She was not just a womb to carry Jesus. God did not pass through her womb to enter into time and this world as if through a tube. God united her to Himself and through her took on our human nature. Her flesh became His. Christ had no earthly father, after all. If you want to look at it scientifically, Christ’s DNA was Mary’s. In His human nature, Jesus Christ is accessible to us all because He become one essence with us through Mary, but in all aspects of His humanity He was nearer to and resembled no one more than His Mother.

And not only this, but Mary for nine months bore the Divine Person of the Logos, God Himself, in her womb. God whom the heavens cannot contain was contained in Her womb. With every kick and turn of the unborn One within her, Mary felt the movements and life of her Child and Her God. And when He was born and she nursed and cared for Him, she suckled at once her Child and the God who had fashioned all things, in whom we live and move and have our being.

I once had the Incarnation but did not have Mary. The Pontificator is right. My faith was very different then. I now have the Incarnation and I have Mary. It makes all the difference in the world.

The Coherence of Christian Theology VI

The Incarnation and the Church

The Incarnation is not only the dogmatic center from which the spokes of the Trinity, union with God, and the Resurrection extend, but it is the doctrinal foundation of the Church as well. In fact, I do not think it too hyperbolic to state that ecclesiology is Christology. What we believe about the Church is, and ought to be, a reflection of our belief about Christ. And because the Incarnation is the foundation of our soteriology, what we believe about the Church will also reflect what we believe it means to be saved. That is to say, the doctrines about salvation and the Church are essentially linked to one another, in and through the dogma of the Incarnation.

The Church is Christ's Body. This is often thought of as a metaphor, a comparison between two different things. It is that. But the strength of such a comparison comes only from the reality it purports to limn. Or to say it another way, it only counts as a metaphor because it is true. But if the Church is Christ's Body it shares the same divine-human realities that Christ himself exhibits. If Christ is the theandros, the God-man, then the Church is similarly theandric, divine-human. If, in Christ's Person, the union of two natures was accomplished perfectly, so in the Church is the accomplishment of the union of the human and divine. If in the Person of Christ is the hypostasis which accomplishes the union of the human and divine, without separation, confusion, change or division, and if it is on this union that our salvation is predicated, then our incorporation into the Church is an experience of that hypostatic union, and it is only in the Church that we experience such a salvation.

This divine-human nature of the Church is often overlooked in our mostly Protestant and evangelical culture here in the U.S. Even the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, careful as is her theology, experiences the Protestant influence when her members feel free to hold their own contradictory opinions over the teaching of their church, or live lives in direct violation of her strictures, and still consider themselves members in good standing. (I'm too new to Orthodoxy to comment on Orthodox parish culture here in the U.S.) In many churches, then, on any given Sunday, the Church is not seen as a theandric entity, but rather as a fraternal organization: recite the pledge, pay your members' dues, vaguely own the organization's ethos, but pretty much do what you want, so long as you still get to call yourself "Brother So-and-so." And if ever the Church does or requires something you don't like, lobby to change it, or just leave and go elsewhere.

This is a focus on the human aspect of the Church, though a distorted one, but it completely misses, in an Arian-like heresy, that the Church is as divine as is her Head, the Lord Jesus. And in missing the divine nature it diminishes and distorts the human nature.

The reality is that the Church is a divine entity, while it is a human one. We human members of the Church do not contribute to it its divine element; we are incorporated into its divine life. It is true, that in God's unfathomable wisdom, we humans enter the Church still struggling with the sin and passions which continue to suffuse our persons. But our sinfulness does not diminish the divine reality of the Church. Rather the divine reality, if we freely struggle in concert with that reality, purges us of our sin. Indeed, the necessity of struggling against sin, as lived in our own specific particularities and under guidance of the Church, in the Church's priest or confessor, is part and parcel of being a member of the Church, for the characteristic facet of the life of the Church prior to the consummation is the struggle against sin and the enemies of God.

While the divine nature of the Church bestows upon her divine authority, and while that authority is worked out in the various institutional ways adapted to multiple times and cultures, the institution is not the primary structural form of the Church. If the Trinity is a relation of divine Persons, and if the incarnate Christ was the union of the divine and the human, then the primary structural form of the Church must be the family. God the Father is the heavenly patriarch of the Church, the Father who is iconized in the priest, for the priest (at the authorization of the bishop) is the human representation of Christ, and whoever has seen the Christ has seen the Father. The Churchly family then is one with authority, with hierarchy, but it is a divine-human one, one exercised in grace by faith. The Church is not a democracy, she has a Head, and that Head has given to his ministers authority to loose and to bind. But this authority is familial, so when the heads of the Church consult in council, their decisions are accepted by the faithful family. This is the manifestation of fatherly authority and is no autocracy, for the faithful family may say to her heads, "This is not of the apostles," and she has for not all councils are authoritative. But the Churchly family knows that authority nonetheless has been given and looks to her Bishops for the faithful transmission of the authentic mind and witness of the Church.

This familial, patriarchal mixing of the human and the divine then does not diminish that divinity, though the members of Christ's Body struggle always against their sins and passions, but rather, the divinity of the Church raises the human and deifies it. But this deification can only happen in the Church, for one becomes a Christian not as an orphan but as a newborn child into a large family. Only those certified as members of the family, through the apostolic authority and the grace of God in baptism and chrismation, can have confidence of their heritage. This does not eliminate the possibility, indeed the reality, that orphans have been, are, and will continue to be born to the Church, but these are known to God alone, and his dealings with them are subject to his discretion. One can say with certainty where the Church is, how far extends the familial boundaries. But one cannot so surely say where the Church is not, or what long-lost son or daughter will find their way home in the consummation.

So, the Church is life for us, because in the Incarnation the human is united to the divine, we are deified, and given a family with memories, heirlooms and names, all things which signify for us life. And if the Church is the locus of life and salvation through the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, then the Mysteries (or Sacraments) that it is hers to safeguard and to freely give, are another manifestation of the energetic grace of God and a means of our salvation.

The Coherence of Christian Theology V

The Incarnation and the Resurrection

The bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead follows necessarily from the Incarnation. If it was essential to God's work of accomplishing our salvation that Jesus be fully human and fully divine, that is to say, if it was essential that Jesus have a human body, then the human body is essential to the afterlife. We are not, after all, going to be disembodied spirits in heaven. If our salvation is accomplished bodily, then our resurrection from the dead will be a bodily one. This is borne out in the several resurrection narratives in the New Testament. In Luke 24:39-43, Jesus asks his disciples to “handle him” to see that it is he. He asks them for a piece of broiled fish, which he eats in their presence. In John 20:17, Jesus exhorts Mary Magdalene not to “cling to him” which she could not have done if he were an immaterial spirit. Later in the chapter, at 20:27, he encourages Thomas to put his fingers into the nail marks in his hands, and to place his hand into side. Given Thomas' reluctance to believe Jesus had risen from the dead without tangible proof, one would be hard pressed to understand Jesus' words in any other way than to indicate he is, indeed, a bodily presence. We may well question how it was the nail marks and the spear wound remained as tangible signs of the crucifixion in his resurrected body, but this does not take away from the central point: Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Paul himself continues in this tradition, in 1 Corinthians 15, explaining that the resurrection from death is essential to the Christian gospel, and that such a resurrection involves a body, though such a body is a spiritual one, different, if continuous, with our flesh and blood body.

More to the point, without the Incarnation, the Resurrection is a useless and unnecessary addendum. If there were no Incarnation, then either through moral striving, or through noetic enlightenment, or both, we have our salvation. We need no Resurrection because we need no bodily salvation. It is the bodily aspect of the Incarnation that demands a bodily Resurrection, even if that body is of a kind Paul can only describe as spiritual and heavenly.

Non-Christian religions, and Christian heresies, very much want to downplay or dismiss the Incarnation for an emphasis on the immaterial soul. The material world is maya, or worse, concretely evil. But this sort of understanding doesn't stand up to the sort of unconscious counterevidence we live each day. While many of us may prize, admire, and even envy, the intellectual acumen of our beloved, or the purity of their soul, in point of fact, we also want the body that goes along with that mind and soul. We may well one day discover what it is like to kiss telepathically, but I rather suppose few of us would enjoy it as much as the more conventional kissing we do. We may well miss the mere presence of our beloved when they are absent from us, but it is not a mere presence we wish to embrace. We prefer the warmth of body pressed to body, the tautness of the muscles executing the embrace, the scent of the hair, the fragrance of the perfume. We may occasionally engage in mental fantasy, but what we truly want is the humiliating joy of the sexual embrace. In short, our joy and satisfaction in our beloved is tied to a body. Does it not make sense that our future hope will not be something disembodied, but more truly embodied? I understand both the Scriptures and the Church Fathers and the Saints to affirm that there will be no sexual intercourse in heaven. But I cannot imagine that there will not be embrace.

But my own predilections aside, the logic of the Incarnation and the explicit texts of the Scriptures necessitate a bodily Resurrection. The Church Fathers have said emphatically that nothing that has not been assumed can be saved. Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, is the reality of not only a mind, a heart and a soul that is filled and transfigured with Life, but so, too, the flesh, the body. Union with God must include the transfiguration of the physical, if the Incarnation is what Christians claim it to be. God does not merely save our souls, he saves our bodies as well. We see this in the biblical accounts of Jesus' own bodily Resurrection, but in the accounts of the lives of the saints whose bodies withstood impossible physical travails, seeming impervious to the elements. Limbs did not freeze in subzero temperatures. Extremes of fasting did not destroy the flesh, for Life transfigured them and made real Christ's own words: they had food of which we do not know, for their food was to do the will of God.

The Resurrection, just as the Incarnation, is not only about the body, but it is not not about the body. Just as death involves soul and body, so the Resurrection involves soul and body. The principle of death lives in us physically, as well as morally and spiritually. Though we live in a society that takes great pains to hide the fact of death, we do not escape it's reality. We fall sick. We age. We grow old. But the grace of God is that from the moment of our new birth, we begin to experience the Resurrection. Death must still take its toll on us, just as our Lord had to suffer death. But just as death has been swallowed up in the death of Christ, so too, our baptismal death gives us a pledge of our inheritance, so that though outwardly day by day we waste away, inwardly we are being recreated in the new man (2 Corinthians 4:16).

More on Christ's Essential Maleness

Jennifer has an understandable reaction to the following piece from Touchstone's Mere Comments of 22 September. The author of the post, S M Hutchens writes:

The argument, made in the name of realism by a number of Evangelicals, that English is changing, so reason demands Bible translations must be altered to reflect changing usage, refuses to face head-on the essential question of whether these changes are being forced upon the culture by an anti-Christian ideology to put forward its views, and if so, what should be done about it by Christians. This position reminds me very much of the Christians who were willing to give the Hitler salute because the changing culture demanded it and they didn't really intend anything unorthodox by it. The question for both is, what do these changes stand for, and what is the Christian response? In our view, the grammatical changes in the TNIV reflect egalitarian ideology, which is not Christian, and is, indeed, the principal heresy the Church has been called upon to deal with and reject in this age. . . .

At Touchstone we rarely use the word "complementarian" because it seems to steer a bit shy of the rock of offense, which we believe needs to be clearly identified lest it be missed in all the fog thrown up by egalitarians: Christianity is a patriarchal faith which teaches that the Image of God is perfectly and completely expressed in a male human being--indeed, that maleness is the very sign of sexual inclusiveness. If one believes that in, by, through, and for Christ, none of whose characteristics, including his sex, are superfluous to his being, everything was made, everything subsists, and everything will be consummated, and understands the implications of this belief, he will reject egalitarianism and its grammar.

Whether or not this is a true example of Godwin's law (as the first respondent to Jennifer's post suggests), I'll leave for others to evaluate.

But the point Mr. Hutchens raises is germane: is egalitarianism Christian? If it is not, then the translations which reflect this theology are promoting heresy. If it is, then what does one do with a biblical text that is so often patriarchal? It would seem that it is encumbent upon Christians to alter their own sacred texts. But on what authority do we do that?

The Coherence of Christian Theology IV

The Incarnation and Union with God

The Incarnation is the lynch pin to the Christian understanding of union with God. In some religions, union with God is accomplished through the acceptance of esoteric doctrines regarding God. In other religions, union with God is accomplished by the divesting of the illusion of selfhood and personhood, the melting, as it were, of oneself into the divine and impersonal essence. But in Christianity, union with God is accomplished only through the God-man, Christ. As Christ, himself, declared: No one comes to the Father, except through him (John 14:6). Union with God is accomplished in and through a particular Person.

Christianity is different from other religions in that union with God is accomplished by grace through faith. It does not preclude human striving, for Christians are called to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). But it precludes any possibility of that union on the basis of human effort alone (Ephesians 2:8-10). Christianity is different in that, though it does require the acceptance of certain doctrines, of certain ways of life, for Christ called all Christians to be taught everything he commanded (Matthew 28:20), salvation is not accomplished on the basis of the acceptance of these doctrines alone. It is not merely an intellectual faith. It does not compartmentalize the intellect off from the body, the mind from the heart, the soul from the spirit. It is different also in that, though it does require the taking on of a certain form of living, for Christ called all Christians to obey everything he commanded (Matthew 28:20), salvation is not accomplished on the basis of human effort alone. It is not merely a religion of good deeds.

Christ is neither merely a divine Teacher, or merely a moral Exemplar: he is the Author of Life. Being the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word in whom all things were created, all that he says and does is Life. If we are in union with him, we are in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, we have life in ourselves. This union with God, this indwelling within us of Life, is accomplished in a synergy of grace and faith with our free will. We will to receive him who comes to us. We will to partake of the divine nature revealed to us and manifest in us. This union is accomplished by grace, not by our mere human striving, through the means of faith, which we both freely will and freely receive as gift.

Contact with this Life within us does not leave us the same, but changes us, transfigures us. We cannot partake of the holy without ourselves being sanctified. We cannot be given life without becoming ever more alive. We must strive always to fight the principle of death which has infected our flesh, soul and spirit. And that striving is painful and costly. It is death to the death which infuses us. We must strive because the principle of free will is never abrogated. We may as freely reject the gift as we freely received it. Union is a process, a way of life, that cannot be said to have been accomplished until we are finally resurrected in the consummation of all things.

Just as Jesus is the union of the human and divine, and in this way, our only way to union with God, so the union with God is a transfiguration in that Life that affects heart, soul, mind and strength. It has been said that nothing that has not been assumed can be saved. Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, is the reality of not only a mind, a heart and a soul that is filled and transfigured with Life, but so, too, the flesh, the body. Our striving is not merely one of moral effort, of spiritual war, but a striving that involves “strength” our body. Christian theology is completely holistic: every nook and cranny of our lives is invaded by God's gracious energies. And that invasion, that whole union results in the transformation of all that we are, all the we do, all that we say and think.

This union with God, in short, is pervasive, involving the whole of a human being, body and soul, mind and heart. We know that it is completely transformative because of the relation of the Incarnation with the bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

The Coherence of Christian Theology III

The Incarnation and the Trinity

Without the Incarnation, we would have no certain knowledge of the Trinity. We would have hints and indications, for our Christ-centered reading can now see them in the holy texts of the Old Testament. But we would have no clear revelation from God. Only the revelation of God in Christ makes known to us the fact that God is a Trinity of Persons. In the Son, God is revealed as the Father; in the Son we are given the promise of the Pentecostal advent of the Holy Spirit. Christ, himself, testified that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), and took on himself the holy Name, “I AM” (John 8:58). In Christ's birth, the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:35). In Christ's baptism, the Holy Spirit manifested himself with the Father and the Son (Luke 3:21-22). Apart from Christ there is no revelation of the Trinity.

This means that attacks on the reality of the Incarnation, arguments which seek to diminish the truth about Christ's Person, are also attacks and arguments against the teaching of the Trinity, and similarly, arguments against the Trinity are an attack on the Incarnation. If one seeks to diminish the Personhood of Christ, one will also diminish the Personhood of the Father and the Holy Spirit. But if we diminish the Personhood of the members of the Trinity, we no longer have a Trinity, but a variety of modes in which God manifests himself. We may still ascribe Personhood to God (as does Judaism and Islam), but we have no Trinity.

Yet if we have no Trinity, we have no Christianity. The belief in the Trinity is inscribed in the Nicene Creed, the only affirmation of faith accepted universally by all the Church. I do not mean to denigrate the other creeds (such as the Apostles' Creed) which have come down to us, but rather to emphasize that the one Creed which has universal acceptance from all the Church necessitates a Trinitarian understanding of God for all Christians. So, if we deny the Incarnation, we deny the Trinity which Christ revealed to us, and, in effect, we deny the Christian Faith.

I have drawn some sharp lines of demarcation here, with regard to the implications of the Incarnation and belief in the Trinity, a line which says, “This is Christian” and “This is not Christian.” But I want to emphasize why the conjoining of the Incarnation and the Trinity is both important and a blessing to us.

If God is not a Trinity of Persons, as Jesus revealed, then Christ is little more than an avatar, the embodiment of a divine principle or force, but not fully God. God is making a revelation in Christ, if Jesus is nothing but an avatar, but is not revealing himself (Hebrews 1:3). Furthermore, Jesus cannot be a unique manifestation of God, since there can be many avatars of God without diminishing other manifestations. Yet if Jesus is uniquely God, not only can he reveal God's Person, God himself, to us, but there can be no other manifestation of God that attains this revelation or reaches this height of glory. In other words, if there is no Trinity, as classically understood, then Jesus is not uniquely God in the flesh. He may be an avatar, but there may be greater avatars to come. Jesus need hardly be considered the last and greatest. Furthermore, if Jesus is only an avatar, he does not fully manifest God or the divine principle. He may represent the highest revelation yet known, but this hardly need be a complete and final revelation. Furthermore, if there were no Incarnation, we would have no knowledge of the Trinity. The two doctrines are inseparably connected at the point of the Person of Jesus.

The blessing of the revelation of the Trinity in the Incarnation is that God is revealed as both a unified essence and as a union of Persons. God is a unique being, a singular essence, of which like there is no other. If God were not a Person we would be hard pressed to avoid the risk of failing to distinguish this essence from any other unique physical or metaphysical essence. For all we know, God may just be something like gravity, or the mystical aether once thought to form the essence within which the universe existed. But if God is a Person, even a Person distinctly different from our human experience of personhood, then not only is he supremely unique, as he may be as a force, but more to the point, it is possible to have fellowship with him, for only persons can said to be in fellowship with one another. I have accidental encounters with rocks. I do not have fellowship with them. I may “know” rocks, but not in the same way I know my wife. Or, for that matter, God.

In other words, the Incarnation opens up the reality of the Trinity to us—dimly as we can comprehend it—which itself opens up the real possibility of relationship, fellowship with God. We can relate to God as persons. We need not annihilate our personhood so as to achieve some sort of impersonal union with an impersonal force or principle. We may, as it were, become ever more human, not less, in our fellowship with God.

Which brings me to the next implication of the Incarnation: the accomplishment of union between ourselves and God.

The Coherence of Christian Theology II

The Reality of the Incarnation

Let's be absolutely clear on this: if one does not understand the Incarnation correctly, one will not live correctly other Christian doctrines. If one tends to emphasize the divine attributes of Jesus (and thus in some way to deny the human aspects), in sort of a Gnosticism or adoptionism, then one will emphasize belief over action, inner spiritual-emotional states over the pragmatic struggle of living in the ways Jesus lived, and participating in his life. If one tends to emphasize the human attributes of Jesus (and thus in some way to deny the divine aspects), in a sort of docetism, then one will emphasize the more superficial behavioral states of Christianity, indeed, to steer towards chilianism (the heresy of utopia) over the proper adherence to the Faith once for all delivered to the saints. Only a correct understanding of the Incarnation can keep the human being whole and avoid the anthropic schism which dehumanizes. Of course, being correct on the Incarnation does not guarantee correctness on other doctrines; one may still go wrong in some way. But the centrality of the Incarnation necessitates proper fidelity to God's revelation in Christ: it is the plumb line of the Christian Faith.

God's supreme revelation to humankind was not given in a nation, nor in a written text. God's last word to us is his Son (Hebrews 1.1-4). The fulfillment of his Covenant is the Person of Christ. There is nothing else left for God to do: his final will has been accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth, though it is clear that this accomplishment is even now being worked out in the final consummation of all things.

It is precisely this single ultimate revelation in Christ that is the focal point, the beginning and the end, of all Christian theology. If God did not take on human flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ, then all that Jesus said and did, however we may construe it as noble and exemplary, is empty of meaning and promise. But if Jesus is whom he claimed to be, if the Second Person of the Trinity did, indeed, receive our humanity from Mary, then everything he said and did changes everything we say and do, all our thoughts and inner passions. If Jesus is he who is from everlasting, then every particle of our physical being, all the invisible inner stuff that makes us uniquely who we are, soul and spirit, thought and energy, bone and sinew, every breath and surge of blood, is changed, transfigured in the glory that is his.

The Incarnation matters. On it depends everything that ever was, is, or ever shall be.

The Coherence of Christian Theology I

[Note: This is the first post of a multi-part essay on the Incarnation.]

Introduction

It all starts with the Incarnation. Take away the Incarnation and all of Christian theology falls apart. Christianity is utterly unique—whatever similarities it shares with other faiths—on this one point alone: it teaches as non-negotiable dogma that Jesus is God-made-flesh. Take that away and the doctrine of the Trinity falls apart, as does the promise inherent in Jesus' bodily Resurrection from the dead, and of union with God in Christ. So, too, does the doctrine of the Church and her Sacraments, as well as the proper understanding of Mary. All of these uniquely Christian doctrines, these ways of life, are emptied of any reality if the Incarnation is taken away.

This is why insistence on absolute fidelity to the Christian teaching and way of life on the Incarnation is crucial. Everything uniquely Christian about our faith depends on it. If you go wrong on the Incarnation, you cannot go right on any other doctrine. In terms of the standard on Christian teaching on the Incarnation, one must look to the definition given at the council of Chalcedon (here):

Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us.

Simply put: in Jesus' one Person are two natures and two wills, human and divine, operating in perfect union and harmony, providing for us in his Person a bridge to the Father, and not a bridge only but the single means of union with God, of a partaking of the divine nature.

On the Male-Only Priesthood

In the provocative Priesthood and the Masculinity of Christ, R. Mary Hayden Lemmons argues the following point:

The refusal of the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests has left many feeling that the Church considers women to be inferior to men. They have difficulty reconciling the Church's proclamations of sexual equality with the 1994 papal argument of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. In that document, John Paul II reaffirmed the 1977 teaching of Inter Insigniores and proclaims that the Church lacks the authority to ordain women, since Christ did not appoint women as apostles and since the historical tradition has restricted priestly ordination to men.

These papal arguments have not been very persuasive due to the common conviction that equality requires gender neutrality--even within the ministries of Christ. If this were so, masculinity would be irrelevant for the mission of Christ. But this is not true. The masculinity of Christ is crucial to his mission of remedying the effects of original sin.

According to Genesis, original sin deprived the human race of its original unity with God and deeply affected the original unity of man and woman. As a result, Christ had an humanitarian mission to restore unity with God and a gender mission to restore heterosexual unity. The humanitarian mission required that Christ be fully human and fully God. Accordingly, since women are as human as men, God could have incarnated as a woman. A female Christ could have restored the human race to its original unity with God. It is not Christ's humanitarian mission that required Christ to be male.

The maleness of Christ is required to restore the unity between men and women disrupted by original sin. Genesis 3:16 says, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." This passage indicates three gender consequences of original sin: the excessive desire or obsession of women for their men, male domination over women and sexual inequality. Freeing the human race from these consequences of original sin constitute Christ's gender mission.

These consequences are significant. In his letter On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, John Paul II identifies male domination with chauvinism and blames it for the many ways in which women suffer from the lack of proper appreciation for her equality and dignity. Chauvinism—as a consequence of Original sin—required that the Christ be a man. Due to chauvinism, a female Christ would not have been recognized by men as being their lord, their rabbi, their savior. Christ exemplified sacrificial love, which chauvinism identifies as a weakness and as a peculiarity of women. According to chauvinism, maleness is about power, independence, and control. Not so, taught Christ. Rather, masculinity is for the sake of pouring out one's life for another in love, not for the sake of dominating self-gratification.

Fallen women also needed Christ to be incarnated as a man-and not only to teach men a lesson. Original sin weakened femininity to the point where it blinded women to the truth about her desire for love. Original sin derailed woman's transcendent passion for God with an egocentric passion for man-for a Mr. Right able to satisfy the yearnings of her heart. Fallen woman thus assumes either that Mr. Right will be perfect or that accommodating his chauvinism will be the sacrifice that enables her to be loved. Thus, woman needs not only to be freed from the harms of chauvinism but also from the misdirection of her desire. Women need to learn not only that there can only be one perfect man, Jesus Christ, but also that men need not be chauvinistic. If Christ had been incarnated as a woman, these lessons would have been untaught. Thus, the gender mission of Christ required Christ to be incarnated as a man for the sake of women as well as for the sake of men.

If Christ had to be incarnated as a man in order to fulfill his gender mission, then it is not possible for women to undertake this mission. If it is not possible for women to undertake the gender mission, then it is not possible for women to be ordained Catholic priests. For the Catholic priest images Christ in his gender mission as well as in his humanitarian mission. This is particularly the case since the Catholic Church was founded to counter the effects of Original Sin.

[Via Touchstone's Mere Comments (third item down).]

Notes one respondent to this article at the Touchstone blog: “This argument is literally nonsensical to our contemporaries, including our Christian ones.” Writes Fr. David Mills: "A good friend, an 'complementarian' [one who holds traditional sex distinctions] Evangelical who lives and works in egalitarian Evangelical circles, sometimes sends similar articles to his e-mail circle. He always gets snarky responses like 'The road of sanctification has nothing to do with gender' and pseudo-scholarly rebukes that he is 'privileging' the 1950s or the Victorian period, which were supposedly the origin of the conservative view of 'gender relations.'

"The answers are often revealing. His perky friend mapping out the road to sanctification did not seem to realize that her statement is straightforwardly Gnostic. I mean, how can sanctification have nothing to do with sex, when we are embodied, therefore sexed, creatures?

"And if that is true, might it also be true that as the sexes are different, so their ways to sanctification might be different? And if that is true, might it also be true that each has a role to play in the sanctification of the other? As God made sexual difference necessary to the regeneration of the species, indeed to the creation of new human souls, might He have made sexual difference necessary to its redemption? The Christian mind, uninfluenced by modern ideas of sexual identity, naturally answers yes to the second and third questions, I think."

Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and Mental Iconography

On Monday night, newly rented DVD in hand, I watched, for the first time, Mel Gibson's phenomenal movie "The Passion of the Christ." I cannot express how powerfully moved I was.

By that I do not mean simply emotionally moved. I was moved emotionally. Primarily by the scene, early on in the movie, of Peter's betrayal and his guilt and self-condemnation. Almost as powerfully by the scene in which the Theotokos hold's her Son's lifeless body and looks directly into the camera--and thus straight into one's own eyes. I was ready for the scene, expecting it, because I'd already read about it. But I was not prepared for the existential impact: I did this, not anyone else, me--by my own fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault. The subversive hatred and fear of the Jewish elders, the sadism of the Roman torturers, the spitting of the crowd--Mary's gaze brought home the brutal, ugly reality: it was all my fault. The tortured cry of Christ: "Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?" felt like sharp iron thrust through me, both an indictment and my own cry in the desolation of my mortality, sin and guilt. It was strong, strong stuff.

Now I'm in a dilemma. I purchase movies for my own home collection primarily to relive the experience. That experience may be oriented around ideas and writing and story line, or it may be the thrill of the experience of good moviemaking. But how could I justify my purchase of "The Passion" on these grounds? Somehow buying "The Passion" for the experience of it seems horribly narcissistic and self-centered: which is precisely why the events depicted in "The Passion" happened!

But what would be an appropriate reason? Not for the experience, surely, at least not solely or even primarily. But what about as something like an icon? Icons are meant to be "windows into heaven" as the proverbial saying goes. They are meant to give us glimpses into divine realities. "The Passion" surely does that. This, then, would be both an appropriate and honorable reason for purchasing the DVD, it seems to me.

Still, there is a distinct difference between icons and a movie. Both are stylized--Gibson's graphic depiction of the physical violence of course is highly stylized. Both point to realities, godly realities, beyond themselves. Yet I remain in ambiguity.

I'm not sure how to articulate my hesitation. It's not as though icons depicting the crucifixion are bloodless, though some are more bloody than others. And it's not a case of simply wondering whether my mental iconography of the Passion should be the traditional iconography of the Church as opposed to the one of the film. There are a variety of traditional icons, each with their own distinctive emphases, and the one that lodges in one's mind will be the one that shapes one's primary responses to the Passion. Nor is it the case that the film excites the passions (grief, conviction, etc.), whereas traditional icons invite contemplation. One of the most moving icons I've ever experienced is the first one I came across of the "Extreme Humiliation" depicting Christ's repose in the tomb. And Gibson's "The Passion" has unleashed some sincere contemplation within me in the past couple of days.

What the ambiguity also is not, is some sort of concern over soteriological doctrine. Enough wise Orthodox have responded to that issue to quell any concern on my part on whether "The Passion of the Christ" can be meaningfully appropriated by Orthodox Christians. Nor is it a matter of the sort of aversion to mass popularity. I think it mostly true that if most of a consumerist, narcissistic society is for something, one should pause and reflect, and then avoid it. But though "The Passion" turned into something of a cultural phenomenon, I don't hesitate to appropriate it for my home on that basis alone.

But still I hesitate. And I'm not sure why. Is it that traditional icons have something that "The Passion of the Christ" does not have? Traditional icons have the considered experience of the Church over time. "The Passion" is too new. However, that is not usually a conscious consideration on my part, in whatever way it may play a significant unconscious role. Is it that, as a new father, and as an inquirer into Orthodoxy, my role as "priest" in the home has taken on ever-larger significance and seriousness? Am I hesistant because I am unsure of the effects on my family and our piety? Perhaps. But again, not in an overtly conscious way.

In the end, I have no real way to articulate my hesitation. "The Passion of the Christ" is one of the most important movies I've ever seen. And I'm not sure if I want to add it to my home collection. Why that is, I cannot say.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: On the Incarnation and Theology

No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders, that God became man. . . . Theologia sacra arises from those on bended knees who do homage to the mystery of the divine child in the stall. Israel had no theology. She did not know God in the flesh. Without the holy night there is no theology. “God revealed in the flesh,” the God-man Jesus Christ, is the holy mystery which theology is appointed to guard. What a mistake to think that it is the task of theology to unravel God's mystery, to bring it down to the flat, ordinary human wisdom of experience and reason! It is the task of theology solely to preserve God's wonder as wonder, to understand, to defend, to glorify God's mystery as mystery. This and nothing else was the intention of the ancient church when it fought with unflagging zeal over the mystery of the persons of the Trinity and the natures of Jesus Christ. . . .

The ancient church meditated on the question of Christ for several centuries. It imprisoned reason in obedience to Jesus Christ, and in harsh, conflicting sentences gave living witness to the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ. It did not give way to the modern pretense that this mystery could only be felt or experienced, for it knew the corruption and self-deception of all human feeling and experience. Nor, of course, did it think that the mystery could be thought out logically, but by being unafraid to express the ultimate conceptual paradoxes, it bore witness to, and glorified, the mystery as a mystery against all reason. The Christology of the ancient church really arose at the cradle of Bethlehem, and the brightness of Christmas lies on its weather-beaten face. Even today, it wins the hearts of all who come to know it. So at Christmas time we should again go to school with the ancient church and seek to understand in worship what it thought and taught, to glorify and to defend belief in Christ. The hard concepts of that time are like stones from which one strikes fire.

(Letter to the Finkenwalde Brothers Christmas 1939 [from A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 471-472.])

The Many Faces of Jesus

Albert Schweitzer long ago famously noted that the so-called quest for the historical Jesus was bound to fail. That quest was little more than a mirror image of those seeking the historical Jesus, and hardly a referendum on the “true” Jesus. That, of course, did not stop the renewal of the quest for the historical Jesus in the mid- and late-twentieth century. But Schweitzer's criticism, it seems to me still stands. Not just for the "historical questers" but for all those who come to us declaring that they have the "real Jesus."

One hears much of different sorts of Jesuses out there, outside the rather academic and esoteric quest for the historical Jesus. One that has a lot of play right now is a view that pits the Jesus of the Gospels over against the Jesus of Paul. The Jesus of the Gospels, it seems, is a pacifist, more loving, more radical, more anti-establishment, more concerned about the poor, is inclusive, non-judgmental, and so on. The Jesus of Paul tolerates a government that uses the power of the sword, is more institutional, is exclusive, homophobic and judgmental. In short, the Jesus of the Gospels is the perfect sixties-liberal Jesus. The Jesus of Paul is the bizzaro Jesus.

But these aren't the only Jesuses out there. There's the guru Jesus, who's all about helping you evolve into your higher person. There's the self-help Jesus who is out to ensure you achieve your potential. There's the hippie/slacker/gen-x/cool Jesus with whom we just hang out, who's our “bud,” and ain't into this institutional, structural, formal oppressive religion thang. There's the pomo Jesus who's all about story and alternate narratives, and isn't concerned about whether or not there's an authoritative metanarrative to which we all must adhere. There's the Democrat Jesus who thinks, so we're told, that President Bush is a bonehead. There's the Republican Jesus who thinks everyone should have capitalism and tax cuts. There's the mainline Jesus who is pretty much one among many religious leaders and not too worried about whether he's the only way to God or not. There's the evangelical Jesus who has a special plan for your life. But don't forget the vegetarian Jesus. And of course, everyone knows that the green Jesus would never own or drive an SUV.

And so it goes.

The obvious problem here is that each of these Jesuses are self-referential: the Jesus we want, the one that makes sense to us. But this is not, if I may be forgiven for using a typically trite phrase, the “real Jesus.”

The Jesus who bid those without sin to cast the first stone at the woman caught in the act of adultery is the same Jesus who bids the Church to treat the unrepentant brother as a tax collector or sinner. The Jesus who mocks our hypocritical judgmentalism is the same Jesus who bids us demarcate false prophets by their fruit and know whom are the swine so as not to cast our pearls before them. The Jesus who frequently pulled the beards of the Jewish religious establishment is the same Jesus who bids us with grievances to take them to the Church. The Jesus who bids us turn the other cheek is the same Jesus who “opened a can of smite-arse” on the merchants in the Temple. Twice.

But none of us were alive when the Incarnate Christ walked this earth. The only Jesus we know is the Jesus that has been given to us. The only Christ we have is the Christ of the Church. There is no use looking for the “real” Jesus if we do not begin and end with the Church's Jesus. We either take him whole, or not at all. We take the Jesus who said not even to resist an evil person, along with the Jesus who overturned the livelihoods of simple Jewish merchants making a living as best they knew how.

Nor will it do any good to resort to a personal Jesus, a Jesus of our own individual experience. We do not have Jesus apart from the Church. There is no such thing as an experience of Jesus apart from the Church's experience. So any experience of Jesus that would depart from the Church's Jesus is, if I may be so blunt, a false Christ, and one that cannot save us. Our only hope is to find the Jesus the Church proclaims and submit to him; letting that Jesus, the real Jesus, drive out all our false Christs and transforming us by his grace through the struggle of faith.

Thank God, for Our Father in the Faith, St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome

Today being St. Leo's feast day, contemplate this from the Tome of Leo:

Accordingly while the distinctness of both natures and substances was preserved, and both met in one Person, lowliness was assumed by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity; and, in order to pay the debt of our condition, the inviolable nature was united to the passible, so that as the appropriate remedy for our ills, one and the same "Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus," might from one element be capable of dying and also from the other be incapable. Therefore in the entire and perfect nature of very man was born very God, whole in what was his, whole in what was ours. By "ours" we mean what the Creator formed in us at the beginning and what he assumed in order to restore; for of that which the deceiver brought in, and man, thus deceived, admitted, there was not a trace in the Saviour; and the fact that he took on himself a share in our infirmities did not make him a par-taker in our transgressions. He assumed "the form of a servant" without the defilement of sin, enriching what was human, not impairing what was divine: because that "emptying of himself," whereby the Invisible made himself visible, and the Creator and Lord of all things willed to be one among mortals, was a stooping down in compassion, not a failure of power. Accordingly, the same who, remaining in the form of God, made man, was made man inthe form of a servant. For each of the natures retains its proper character without defect; and as the form of God does not take away the form of a servant, so the form of a servant does not impair the form of God. . . .

Accordingly, the Son of God, descending from his seat in heaven, and not departing from the glory of the Father, enters this lower world, born after a new order, by a new mode of birth. After a new order; because he who in his own sphere is invisible, became visible in ours; He who could not be enclosed in space, willed to be enclosed; continuing to be before times, he began to exist in time; the Lord of the universe allowed his infinite majesty to be overshadowed, and took upon him the form of a servant; the impassible God did not disdain to be passible Man and the immortal One to be subjected to the laws of death. And born by a new mode of birth; because inviolate virginity, while ignorant of concupiscence, supplied the matter of his flesh. What was assumed from the Lord's mother was nature, not fault; nor does the wondrousness of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, as born of a Virgin's womb, imply that his nature is unlike ours. For the selfsame who is very God, is also very man; and there is no illusion in this union, while the lowliness of man and the loftiness of Godhead meet together. . . .

Troparion of St Leo Tone 3
Thou wast the Church's instrument/ in strengthening the Church's teaching of true doctrine;/ thou didst shine forth from the West like a sun/ and didst dispel the heretics' error./ O righteous Leo, entreat Christ our God to grant us His great mercy.

Kontakion of St Leo Tone 3
From the throne of thy priesthood, O glorious one,/ thou didst stop the mouths of the spiritual lions;/ thou didst illumine thy flock with the light of the knowledge of God/ and with the inspired doctrines of the Holy Trinity./ Thou art glorified as a divine initiate of the grace of God.

The Circumcision of Our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, and the Feast Day of St Basil

"And when eight days had passed, before His circumcision, His name was then called Jesus, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb. And when the days for their purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, 'Every firstborn male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord'), and to offer a sacrifice according to what was said in the Law of the Lord, 'A pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.'" (Luke 2:21-24 NASB)

"When they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth. The Child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him." (Luke 2:39-40 NASB)

Troparia:
Thou Who art by nature God, didst without change take human form,
O most compassionate Lord,
and in fulfilling the Law of Thine own will didst receive circumcision in the flesh,
to banish hades and roll away the veil of our passions.
Glory to Thy goodness; glory to Thy compassion;
glory to Thy condescension , O Word

Thou Who sittest with the Father
on a fiery throne in the heights
wast pleased to be born of a Virgin through the Divine Spirit on earth.
Wherefore Thou was circumcised as a man on the eighth day.
Glory to Thine all-gracious will; glory to Thy providence;
glory to Thy condescension, O only Lover of mankind.

Kontakion:
In undergoing circumcision
the Lord of all has circumcised the sins of mortal men.
On this day He gives salvation to the world.
And the Hierarch Basil, the Creator's lightbearer
and Christ's mystic, rejoices in the highest.

"For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you [the Church] have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross." (Colossians 2:9-14 NASB)