A Christological Confession
by
Anthony Buzzard
From A Journal from the Radical Reformation, Vol. 1, No. 1.
The Christological confession which follows
relies heavily on biblical and historical data and contains an analysis and
evaluation of traditional Christology. It is therefore necessary to point out
that it is nevertheless "a confession." I am convinced that a
biblical Christology must be rooted in history. To support a strong faith, a
confession must be subjected to rigorous analysis, historical, theological, and
exegetical. What follows is not just an exercise in cold intellectualism. It is
a struggle of heart and mind in quest of a confession which matches the
apostolic model in Christology: faith in and commitment to the historical and
risen Jesus as the Messiah.
"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday,
today and forever" (Heb. 13:8) appears under a bewildering variety of
images, if we trace him with Pelican.1 But are many of these images merely the
reflection, as Schweitzer remarked, of "each successive epoch [which]
found its own thoughts in Jesus"? - for typically "one created him in
accordance with one's own character." There is no historical task which so
reveals someone's true self as the writing of a life of Jesus.2 Can the
post-Constantinian Jesus really be the Jesus Christ of history? Might it not be
that we have recreated Jesus after the imagination of our Gentile hearts?
At a time when theological literature
emphasizes a plurality of Christologies within the New Testament canon, we
should not forget that, despite differences of emphasis, there is a
common confession throughout all the New Testament documents which embeds
itself in the statement that Jesus is the Messiah. That is Peter's great discovery, recorded by all four Gospels. Jesus welcomed
it as a blessed revelation (Matt. l6:16, 17). John expressly states that the
purpose of his entire work is to convince us to believe in Jesus as Messiah,
Son of God: "These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may find life in His
name" (20:31). In Acts, Peter, Philip and Paul spend themselves in their
efforts to proclaim that the historical Jesus is none other than the promised Messiah of Israel, now presented also to the Gentiles. The tendency
evidenced by Paul's use of the title "Christ Jesus" (in that order)
in his later epistles shows that "Christ" has not for him lost its official, colorful, Israelitic significance. Throughout the New
Testament preaching, all are invited to cling to this Jesus, the Messiah long-promised, while counterfeit "Jesuses" hover on the
sidelines as a menace to the faith (2 Cor. 11:1-4).
It has perhaps been a strength of the
British approach to Christology that it recognizes the dangers of subjectivism.
The absence of a surefooted historical approach to Christology opens
the floodgates to a vague religiosity, even to anti-Christ. The point is well
put by Jon Sobrino:
The New Testament as a
whole is quite conscious of the danger of breaking with Jesus in the name of
the risen Christ. That is why the Gospels were written. Though they are not
biographies of Jesus, they do refer the reader to his historical
figure rather than to some figure that is or can be easily idealized or
manipulated. The Gospels are conscious of the danger of ending up with a cultic
deity, or maintaining the religious structure common to other religions
existing at the time and simply changing the name of the worshipped deity to
Jesus . . . . Christianity has frequently taken the form of "religion"
rather than "faith." . . . On the theological level
this has been due in the last analysis to a Christology that has preferred to
focus on the risen Christ as an abstract symbol of faith rather than on the
historical Jesus as the proper key to an understanding of the total Christ. The
total Christ is certainly present by virtue of his Spirit. The real
question is whether this Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus or some vague, abstract
Spirit that is nothing more than the sublimated embodiment of the natural
"religious" person's desires and yearnings. If it is the latter, then
it is not only different from, but actually contrary to the Spirit of Jesus.3
My purpose in Christology is therefore to
attempt to answer first the question, "Who is Jesus in the New
Testament?" The question, "Who is Jesus for me?" is certainly
not separate from the first. But it cannot precede it. Lest our Christology
degenerate into idolatry, we have to be cautioned by the words of R. Alan Cole:
To worship Christ with
the wrong beliefs about Him is to worship a false Christ, by whatever name we
call Him; for we, in so doing, falsely imagine Him to be other than He is, and other than He is revealed in Scripture to be. This alone makes
sense of the prophetic denunciation of much of the prophetic Yahwism of their
day as in fact mere Baal-worship.4
Common to much of current Christology is an
appeal for a return to the historical Jesus, as distinct from the more abstract
figure projected by the traditional creeds. Major theological writers in
America and Europe warn us against the peril of reading our Bibles through the
prism of the Church Councils. A safer and sounder approach is "from
behind," situating Jesus in his own Hebrew context. John A. T. Robinson's
long reflection on the New Testament made him critical of the
"church fathers" whom he takes to task for "abusing the Johannine texts [relative to Christology] and giving them a
meaning which John never intended." He points out that:
John was early adopted
by the Gnostics as "their" gospel and the stress in the Johannine
epistles on Jesus come in the flesh (1 John 1:1; 4:2; 2 John 7) must be seen as
a reaction to the docetic impression his [John's] teaching evidently provoked.
But the very fact that the reaction was so vehement suggests that this is
genuinely a misrepresentation of his intention: indeed it is for him very
"antichrist."5
John Robinson's major contribution to the
debate initiated by the Myth of God Incarnate6
(and continued in Incarnation and Myth, the Debate Continued7) was to suggest and, I think, satisfactorily
document the fact that "John is a typical representative of the New
Testament, not the anomalous exception, with one foot in the world of Greek
philosophy, that he is so often presented."8
This point of view was worked out in Robinson's careful exegetical treatment of
John's Christology9 and later
in dialogue with James Dunn in Theology magazine.10
Dunn had already attempted to demonstrate that the notion of the personal
preexistence of Jesus was foreign to much of the New Testament material,
including Paul's letters. Dunn managed to rescue the traditional
doctrine of Incarnation by finding it in John's Gospel only.
Robinson argued that not even in John was it really evident. John was thinking
in terms of Jesus being foreordained in God's cosmic purpose
rather than literally preexistent. Even Dunn comes very close to the same
conclusion when of John 1:14 ("the word became flesh") he notes:
Prior to verse 14 we are
in the same realm as pre-Christian talk of wisdom and logos, the same language
that we find in the wisdom tradition and in Philo,
where as we have seen we are dealing with personifications rather than persons,
personified actions of God rather than an individual divine being as such. The point is obscured by the fact that we have to translate the masculine "logos" as "He" throughout the poem.
But if we translated "logos" as "God's utterance" instead, it
would become clearer that the poem did not necessarily intend the
"logos" in verses 1-13 to be thought of as a personal divine being.
In other words the revolutionary significance of verse 14 may well be that it
marks . . . the transition from impersonal personification to actual person.11
We are here at the very crux of the
Christological problem. The issue is that of the nature of preexistence. Once
it is maintained that Jesus, as Son, existed before his birth, the whole
Trinitarian problem arises. If it can be maintained that Jesus comes into being
at his conception, a very different Christology emerges. The debate over all
the centuries centers around these questions.
Traditional orthodoxy was plagued by the
difficulty of allowing to Jesus a full human personality. The very
abstract notion of "anhypostasia" (Jesus was "man" without
being "a man") was developed precisely in order to preserve the
concept that he had preexisted as Second Member of the Trinity. British,
American, and European scholarship has long been exercised
about the latent Docetism involved in this classical construct.
Norman Pittenger has written:
In my judgment a
fundamental difficulty with the Christology of the patristic age is
that while in word it asserted the reality of the humanity of Jesus Christ, in
fact it did not take that humanity with sufficient seriousness . . . . The tendency of Christological thinking in the mainstream of
what was believed to be "orthodox" was far more heavily weighted on
the side of the divinity than of the humanity of Jesus . . . .
"Orthodox" Christology, even when the excesses of Alexandrine teaching were somewhat restrained at Chalcedon in 451 AD, has tended
towards an impersonal humanity, which is, I believe, no genuine
humanity at all.12
The same concern underlies John Knox's
question: "Is there any conceivable way of being 'man' except by being 'a
man'? Many theologians whose integrity and learning I greatly
respect have answered that there is. I can only say, I cannot follow them,
either in the sense of agreeing with them or thinking in their terms."13
Earlier, D. M. Baillie in God Was in Christ14 had stated forthrightly
that "it is equally nonsense to say that Jesus is 'Man,' unless
we mean that He is a man." He is followed in this opinion
by the Roman Catholic theologian, Thomas Hart, who says: "The Chalcedonian
formula makes a genuine humanity impossible."15
He notes that another Roman Catholic scholar, Piet Schoonenberg, is
"already reformulating the Chalcedonian Christology"16
by asserting that Jesus was genuinely a man.
This central difficulty involved in the orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity,
particularly the matter of the "anhypostatic" nature of Christ,
forces us to seek out a different approach. The humanity of Jesus so evidently
portrayed in all the Gospels can, I believe, only be preserved if we lay aside
the traditional notion of preexistence. In the Synoptics there
is no question but that Jesus came into being at his conception. This has been
amply demonstrated by Raymond Brown in The Birth of the Messiah:
"Both [Matthew and Luke] develop the Christological insight that Jesus was
the Son of God from the first moment of His conception . . . . In the
commentary I shall stress that Matthew and Luke show no knowledge of
preexistence: seemingly for them the conception was the becoming of God's
Son."17 F.C. Baur is no less convinced
that the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels cannot yield a portrait of Jesus
in Nicean/Chalcedonian terms:
First we have the
Christology of the Synoptic Gospels, and here it cannot be contended on any
sufficient grounds that they give us the slightest justification for advancing
beyond the idea of a purely human Messiah. The idea of preexistence lies
completely outside the Synoptic sphere of view. Nothing can show this more
clearly than the narrative of the supernatural birth of Jesus. All that raises
him above humanity - though it does not take away the pure humanity of his
person - is to be referred only to the causality of the "pneuma
hagion," which brought about his conception. This spirit, as the principle
of the Messianic epoch, is also the element which constitutes his Messianic
personality. The Synoptic Christology has for its substantial foundation the
notion of the Messiah, designated and conceived as the "huios theou";
and all the points in the working out of the notion rest on the same
supposition of a nature essentially human. God raised him from the dead,
because it was not possible that he should be holden of it (Acts 2:24).18
If we focus upon a Christ whose humanity is
real and whose conception is supernaturally caused, as Luke presents it, we
avoid the abstruse arguments prompted by the "church fathers" whose
reading of John 1:1 may be challenged. This challenge is no innovation upon the
theological discussion. The Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, found himself
in 260 AD unable to accept the notion of a "second, preexisting
Person," which seemed to complicate the Bible's cardinal monotheistic
tenet. Professor Bethune-Baker is convinced:
that Paul of Samosata
had behind him a genuine historical tradition to which, in our reconstruction
of doctrine, we must return. Loofs19 comes to
the conclusion that . . . "he is one of the most interesting theologians
of the pre-Nicene period, because he stands in the line of a tradition which had
its roots in a period before the deluge of Hellenism swept over the
church."20
Precisely the same concerns over the
humanity of Jesus motivated Michael Servetus to question the traditional
Trinitarian formulations - and pay for it with his life at the hands of Calvin
- and the same theme is taken up in Anabaptist circles first by Adam Pastor21 who was excommunicated by Menno
Simons, but whose convictions were later fully shared by the Polish Brethren at
Racow. The same tendency is revealing itself in the current debate, in which
both Catholic and Protestant theologians call us to a reevaluation of Christology
forged in terms of Greek philosophy and invite us to a critique of long-held
dogma.
The common drift of this alternative
Christology is well summarized by Lamberto Schuurmann:
It cannot be denied that
it is the ontological language that has long predominated. Clearly, this is due
for the most part to the hegemony exercised by Neo-Platonic philosophy, and its
claim to constitute an adequate vocabulary for the articulation of theological
affirmations. It is not easy to say whether the whole tradition, over all these
centuries, has been a distortion of the gospel. The well-known fact that Hebrew
has no way of making ontological statements is evidence by itself of the
enormous changes certain Hebrew concepts must have undergone in their
transition to a Hellenistic milieu . . . . In a word, what is lacking in the
great majority of these images [of Jesus] is the relationship between the
symbolism projected and the concrete, historical life of the historical Jesus.
With all due respect to the Protestant churches, it is to be noted in their
case that this shortcoming is due in large part to an almost total disregard
for the Old Testament. Jesus is approached from an individualist and liberal
need, in which what is decisive are values such as immortality and future
reconciliation. I believe that it is the Old Testament that must save the
church from this implicit and explicit Gnosticism, as it has so often done in
history. Hence great emphasis should be placed on the Old Testament in
catechesis and preaching.22
I suggest that an original misreading of the
"logos" Christology of John by Justin Martyr and others of the
Alexandrian school led to an eclipse of the Messianic Christology of the New
Testament. The germ of the later, rigid formulations of Nicea and Chalcedon was
thus introduced. It had been Philo who had mixed philosophy with Hebraic
theology and come close to positing a "second God." How far this
"second person" was conceived in personal terms is hard to say. But
when Justin works out his Christology, the "Logos" has become
one-to-one identified with a pre-human Jesus. The Trinitarian problem and the
arguments about the hypostatic union of natures in Christ are the result of
this concentration on one section of Scripture, treated in a non-Hebraic
manner, to the exclusion of the clear humanitarian Christology of Luke and
Matthew.
A reconstruction of Christology must, I
think, reckon with this unfortunate historical development. If the
"word" of John 1:1 is understood, with many modern scholars, as
"God's self-expressive activity," similar to the wisdom which was
also "with God" (Prov. 8:30), rather than a preexistent
"Person," the Trinitarian complexities are avoided. At the same time
the identity of Jesus as Messiah, fully and uniquely representing God, is
preserved. On this model the abstraction into which Jesus was changed by Greek
metaphysics is replaced by a real human person embodying God's word to man.
"God was in Christ" (2 Cor. 5:19), not that God was Christ.
Such a formulation has the enormous advantage of maintaining intact the
uncompromising unitarianism of Hebrew Old Testament theology - not to mention
the unitarianism of Jesus recorded in the Gospels (Mark 12:28-34). It also
allows us to perceive the wonderful thing God has graciously done through and
in man, that is, in Jesus, the second Adam.
I believe that The Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics23 sensed correctly
that "there was perversion amidst progress in the development of
Christianity after the death of the apostles." We have not yet fully
reckoned with the fact that "there were characteristics of the Greek
speculative genius and of the practical Roman ethos not altogether harmonious
with the distinctive character of the gospel . . . . The salt in seasoning did
lose some of its savour." The effect on Christology was a dissipation of
the vital energy of the original confession of Jesus as Messiah and hope for a
successful outcome of history. A "demessianized" and consequently
"de-apocalypticized" Jesus is a pale reflection of the Jesus of our
Christian documents. By contrast the Messianic Jesus of Luke's Annunciation
account (Luke 1:32-35) - and throughout his Gospel - is witness to the mighty
fact that God has reached down to touch flesh, interrupting but working within
the human biological process to bring forth His New Creation. Jesus is the Son
of God precisely because (dio kai) he is conceived under the influence of
"holy spirit" (Luke 1:35). Luke knows nothing at all of a Son of God
antecedent to the virginal conception.
The appropriation of this Lukan Jesus (who,
I believe, is equally the Jesus of John when the latter's Gospel is read in its
own Jewish context) will reinstate a vital Christology and initiate a renewed
appreciation of the common faith of Scripture. It will remedy the problem
expressed by William Thompson, by recapturing the essential apocalyptic
Messianic Jesus:
I think we gain a new
appreciation for the so-called "apocalyptic dimension" so present in
the preaching of Jesus. As we shall see [and here the author
identifies the crux of our problem], scholarship has had a difficult
time coming to terms with this element in Jesus' ministry. Either
scholars have ignored apocalyptic altogether, because it won't fit the
sentimentalized and romanticized picture of Jesus so beloved to many, or even
when its presence is acknowledged, scholars often don't know
what to do with it. Apocalyptic becomes an unfortunate and
outmoded inheritance of an all-too-Jewish Jesus.24
Those of us who espouse an "anabaptist"
tradition should be among the first to make available a Christology which
invites "restoration," the typically anabaptist exercise of going
behind the Councils to origins in the first century. This
Christology will embody the best in reverence for God's Son
without the overlay of the largely meaningless abstractions
with which Jesus was later vested in post-apostolic times. Needless to say,
this Jesus will be nonviolent, in true pre-Constantinian style. A Christology
along these lines will not be an innovation. It will find its roots not only in
the New Testament, but at Antioch and amongst a significant
strand of "anabaptism." It will also find support in the modern trend
to expose the serious distortions of the traditional
formulation. It will not, however, be a denial of the "divinity" of
Christ, which can be traced with Lukan Christology to the divine action of God
bringing into being His unique Son.
This Jesus, the Messiah, bearer of the Good
News of the Kingdom, is more real to me than ever. I find him in
the Christian documents and wherever hearts and minds are willing to seek his Father and him in spirit and in Truth.
Endnotes:
1 Jesus Through the Centuries, Harper and Row, 1985.
2 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Macmillan Pub. Co.,
1968, p. 4.
3 Christology at the Crossroads, Orbis Books, 1978, pp. 382,
384. Emphasis added.
4 Tyndale New Testament Commentary on the Gospel of Mark,
Eerdmans, 1983, p. 199.
5 Twelve More New Testament Studies, SCM Press, 1984, p.
142.
6 SCM Press, 1977.
7 Eerdmans, 1979.
8 Ibid., p. 178.
9 Human Face of God, chapter 5, "Humanity and
Preexistence," SCM Press, 1973.
10 85, Sept. 1982.
11 Christology in the Making, Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1980, p. 243.
12 The Word Incarnate, Nisbet, 1959, p. 89.
13 The Humanity and Divinity of Christ, Cambridge
University Press, 1967, p. 63.
14 Faber and Faber, 1961, p. 87.
15 To Know and Follow Jesus, Paulist Press, 1984, p. 46.
16 Ibid., p. 65.
17 Geoffrey Chapman, 1977, pp. 31, 561.
18 Church History of the First Three Centuries, n.p., p.
65.
19 Paulus von Samosata, n.p., p. 322.
20 Rawlinson, ed., Essays on the Trinity and Incarnation,
Longmans Green and Co., 1928, p. 259.
21 See "Adam Pastor, Antitrinitarian Antipaedobaptist,"
by Henry Newman, Papers of the American Society of Church History,
Vol. 5.
22 Bonino, ed., Faces of Jesus, Latin American Christologies,
Orbis Books, 1984, pp. 166, 176.
23 James Hastings, ed., Vol. 3, p. 588.
24 The Jesus Debate, A Survey and Synthesis, Paulist
Press, 1985, pp. 30, 31.
