Religion: JESUS CHRIST

Christianity, religion Christianity, Christianity religion. JESUS CHRIST:

JESUS CHRIST

Jesus and the early church

There is no completely unambiguous use of the title “God” for Jesus in the NT (John 20:28 is the nearest; Rom. 9:5 and Titus 2:13 present considerable problems of translation and interpretation). However, it is clear that, within 20 years of the crucifixion (i.e. by the time Paul was writing 1 Cor.), there were Christian communities accustomed to thinking of Jesus as embodying the action of God towards the world, God's “power” and “wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:24). By the end of the 1st century C.E., when the gospel of John was probably written, Jesus could be seen as the one in whom dwelt the creative and mediating logos of God, the divine mind and purpose, the one upon whom the glory of God's tangible presence permanently rested. Jesus has become for believers what the temple was to Israel, the place where God is met, but is also the visible form of the power that makes the world. Both Paul and John suggest that, because Jesus is experienced as inaugurating a new age, a new creation, because he bestows on the believer a new identity in which human life is no longer bound and limited by a past of moral failure and staleness, or self-deceit and spiritual blindness, the history of Jesus is completely continuous with the infinite resource of divine life which brings all things into reality. Just as in the Jewish scriptures, especially the Psalms and Isa. 40-55, the exodus and the return from exile are seen as images of the creation itself, so now is the formation of the new human race through the history of Jesus. The difference is that here the creative act of God is bound up with a single human story as never before and that the scale of the restoration and renewal expands all the time towards the limits of the human world, including all men and women equally. It is inevitable that Jesus, as the one who enacts the saving action of God, should, like the God of Israel, be called Lord and should be seen as the touchstone by which all human events are to be judged, the one who possesses “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28:18).

Yet this is only part of the picture. Jesus possesses supreme authority but does not simply stand in the place of the God of Israel. He prays to this God as “Father”, “Abba”, and interprets his mission and destiny as the fleshing-out of a purpose not his own. His authority is inseparably interwoven with a loving dependence upon the one he worships, a steady “obedience” – i.e. he allows the pressure of God's love for the world to mould his human identity without interruption. Particularly in John's gospel, Jesus is presented simultaneously as entirely and sovereignly free – and as doing nothing from his own human initiative alone. It is this paradox in the way the figure of Jesus is understood in the NT (cf. Phil. 2) that prompts the development of a technical theological account of his person and a new Trinitarian conception of God.* If Jesus' life is entirely moulded by the loving will of God, it makes sense to say that it is that loving will “made flesh” (see incarnation ), that there is no obstacle in Jesus to God's action in renewing the face of the earth.

But the life of Jesus, as we have seen, does not simply express the outgoing action of God but is also a loving response to God. So the conclusion is slowly drawn that the very life of God – if it is this which is expressed in the life of Jesus – involves both the outgoing, generative, creative element and the product or issue of that outgoing in the form of total and perfect response, reflection back of the love given. God comes to be conceived as both “Father” and “Son”. In the doctrinal controversies of the 4th century, out of which the Nicene Creed* emerged, the crucial point established was that God is never to be thought of as a solitary individual: God is eternally in relation and so eternally open to the “other”. It is because God is thus that there is no problem about God's will to create: although this is a free action, it is rooted in the divine life itself, whose nature is to generate in love and to generate love. Because of the relation of Father and Son, creation* has access to a share in this movement of creative love: creatures can also be creators. This theme, set forth classically by Athanasius in the mid-4th century, is what lies behind the Eastern Christian understanding of salvation* as theosis , sharing in God's life.

Jesus and salvation

The confession of Jesus Christ as God must therefore, if it is to be faithful to the NT witness, involve the belief that through Jesus the renewal of the whole human race has become possible and that all human beings may find in Jesus the good news of their absolution and liberation; through Jesus, all have access to the life he lives, the life of liberty and creativity founded upon complete openness to the divine will for the salvation of women and men. In other words, to confess Jesus as God is to presuppose something about the radical character of the salvation he brings – the “new creation” – and to be committed to the new human race, without barriers of race, sex and status, which has begun to exist as a result of his life, death and resurrection. Bonhoeffer was certainly right in insisting that it is impossible to confess Christ as God and Saviour while refusing to be committed to the hope of an
integrated, reconciled humanity: the Christological confession poses clear and sharp questions to our political and social loyalties, to our partial and distorted models of human community.

Remembering Paul's words in 1 Cor. 12:3, “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit”, we may conclude that to know Jesus as “Lord”, to acknowledge him as the Creator and final Judge of the new humanity, and as the one who opens for us the way to a share in the freedom of the Creator, is to live in or by the power of God's Spirit. God is “Father” and “Son” but is equally that agency which draws us into the relation between the eternal creative source and the eternal creative response – that which realizes in us the possibility established in the history of Jesus Christ and in the coming-to-be of a community committed to Jesus Christ.

Often in the history of theology, the salvation brought by Christ has been analyzed and theorized about without reference to the witness and work of the Spirit. Some have tended to think (as a superficial reading of certain early Christian writers might suggest) that salvation occurs because God, in becoming flesh, transforms human nature by the mere fact of contact with it. Others have stressed that the cross of Jesus alone brings about our redemption,* as a sacrifice or an expiation for our sin, and have refined and developed the language of Paul and the letter to the Hebrews about atonement through sacrifice. Both themes have a significant place in Christian theology. It is essential to see Christ as God's way of pledging absolute faithfulness to our “cause”, God's identification with the need and agony of human beings. Salvation does involve a transformation of our situation by God's contact with it. No less is it essential to see the death of Christ as pivotal to the process. Only in the cross do we see clearly the depth of our unfreedom, the way in which our moral, religious and political systems of power fear and reject the life God offers, and strive to obliterate the threatening hope of conversion. Only here do we see the cost of our slavery to ourselves and protection of ourselves. To say, as Christians have consistently said, that the cross is God's bearing of this cost may be a metaphor, but it is an untranslatable and irreplaceable one.

However, neither of these themes alone will carry the full weight of what the Bible understands as salvation. For this we need a doctrine of the work of the Spirit actively forming Christ's likeness in us, ceaselessly bringing us to conversion and hope.

We cannot speak of Jesus as God without speaking of him as Saviour; but equally we cannot speak of him as God without speaking of the God he calls Father, and we cannot speak of him as Saviour without speaking of the life in us of God as Spirit. This point is made with admirable clarity in the 1979 document from the Klingenthal consultation on the filioque:* “We are ‘christified', ‘made christs', in the church by the indwelling in us of the Holy Spirit, who communicates the very life of Christ to us, who in Christ makes us the brothers and sisters of Christ, and strengthens us in our new condition as the adopted children of the Heavenly Father.”

The Chalcedonian schism

In the early centuries of the church, Christology proved to be a deeply divisive force at least as much as it was a unifying one. The classic definition at Chalcedon* in 451 of the inseparable co-existence in Jesus of full divinity and full humanity looked back on what was already a complex history of controversy and was itself to fuel further division. The churches that refused Chalcedon did so because some believed it to compromise the necessary distinction between divine and human nature, while others saw it as over-emphasizing the disjunction between the divine Word and the
human Jesus.

The 20th century saw great advances in overcoming the ancient schism. Representatives of Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches (esp. those of the so-called monophysite tradition – a misleading label – in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, Ethiopia and India) have had candid, fruitful conversations; recent popes have issued joint statements of faith with leaders of the non-Chalcedonian churches (e.g. the joint declaration of Pope John Paul II and the Syrian Orthodox patriarch of Antioch in 1984). There is a growing recognition that terminological confusion and misunderstanding, as well as political and ethnic rivalries, have long embittered what is at heart a disagreement in idiom and emphasis within a common faith. Non-Chalcedonians have played an active role in the work of F&O, not least in the recent studies towards an ecumenical explication of the apostolic faith as confessed in the Nicene Creed (381) (the sub-title of the 1991 study document Confessing the One Faith ). These studies have made it clear that a Christology firmly anchored in Trinitarian belief, grounded in a careful, critical and imaginative reading of scripture, and oriented towards the priorities of mission and of proclaiming a shared hope for the human world, remains the fundamental inspiration and critique of all ecumenical endeavour. Such an emphasis has increasingly dominated reflection on the doctrine of Christ outside the European and North American context.