Adult Forum Dec 31

It is not really that amazing that the church understood that Jesus was both human and divine what we theologically refer to as Christology. It is clear that Jesus understood the will and purposes of God in a radically new way. It is obvious that Jesus dedicated his entire personhood to achieving the will of the Father. Living, dying, and rising, Jesus reveals the unconditional love of the Father, in a way that gives us a particular picture of a universal truth.

Christology points to the way Jesus experienced God as Father. We understand that for Christians, God is still mediated through the life of Jesus to his followers. A double nature may be characteristic for any mediation of the infinite God through a finite medium or symbol. The symbol both makes God present and points away from itself to a God who is other than itself. In this way, Christology is the welcome warning that the divine presence in the life of Jesus does not mean and cannot mean that Jesus was not a true and real human being: “like us in everyway except sin”. Christology insists that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. The divine nature does not in any way diminish the human nature.

It is often the case that people frown at the language of Christology as if it is some theological slight of hand, trick of language that is beyond comprehension. Think about human nature as something open to, responsive to and mediating divine presence. It is not alien or contradictory to human nature to be a vehicle or medium of divine immanence.

Karl Rahner spoke of Jesus as the “unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality” or as “the most radical culmination of man’s essence”. Speaking of something that is in principle unique, but of an interaction of the divine and the human which occurs in many different ways and degrees in all human openness to God’s presence” is the way John Hicks describes incarnation. John Macquarrie says, “incarnation was not a singularity or anomaly in world history but is a constant characteristic of God’s relation to his creation. There are, one may say, degrees of incarnation.”

A pluralistic theology of religions can recognize a similar structure of a transcendent reality that must be somehow immanent or incarnated in a finite reality in order to be effectively mediated by that finite reality. We should not confuse the divine essence being mediated with the medium. Thus in terms of religious pluralism, it is not the incarnation or Christology formulae of theological tradition that is a problem but the idea that incarnation happened only once and only in Jesus. (Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Chalcedon Defended: A Pluralistic re-reading of the two-natures doctrine. Expository Times 118:113-119, 2006).