Christology: a theological grounding for understanding salvation
Christology posits the two natures of Jesus, fully divine and fully human, in one person. Christ is the One in whom all things hold together. Metaphysically, Christ is the center both of Godhead and cosmos as the Godward community. Christ saves us by being real and really present: Emmanuel, God with us, sharing our human condition; ascended to the right Hand of the Father, in the blessed sacrament of bread and wine, and in the hearts of all the faithful. For Anglicans (Episcopalians) Christology is the core of our theology, which integrates the creed, from which we reason toward an understanding of the Trinity, down to creation for incarnation, out through the Church to the world, evangelism and mission.
In Soteriology we speak of being saved in Christ. Our human condition generally and the Divine-human relationship particularly are sub-optimal without the connecting arms of Christ. Chalcedon (conference of bishops in 325 CE) brought forth the framework of the creed of Christian faith. In it we see a statement of faith that sees Christ as the Divine Word assuming a completely human nature. Because Christology is revealed theology it is fundamentally divisive. Each person may experience and understand God as revealed in Christ differently. We read the same scriptures but do not understand the same words in uniform ways. We use the language of Scripture to claim different explanations of God, of Jesus, of Christ, of heaven and of salvation. History is full of examples: the charge of Jews being “Christ-killers” led to anti-Jewish pogroms, and sponsored disastrous Crusades. More recently the bible is viewed as a historical-scientific document. Consider the view of the “right to life” movements and the “creationist” dogmatism. The search for the “historical Jesus” revealed few “facts.” What we know from the stories of Scripture is more relevant to the life of the communities in which they were written than about the central figure of their faith. As St. Paul declared long ago, Christ is a scandal both to Jews and Greeks.
Search as we may for common ground in which to find mutual tolerance if not understanding seems a reasonable project but when we dig too far we may not find substance enough to orient our faith or our lives. At the other end of the spectrum pluralism seeks to retain the particular differences in order to respect difference and mutuality. All cannot be equally and literally true at once nor can all be practiced at once. I am reminded of a friend who frequently asks why not Buddhism? Her search for a nonviolent practice of Christianity is often at conflict with some of the louder proclaimers of our faith. Buddhism she reminds me is tolerant and peace loving. It is and so is Christianity if we take Jesus’ life as example.
Try explaining to any reasonably intelligent person how Christ had two natures: one divine and one human or that the divine essence is supposited by three persons. Adams says “Most theories will exhibit costs and benefits, handle some problems and issues better than others: e.g. obviously and crudely, idealism does better with mind than with body; materialism the other way around; supralapsarian double predestination is strong on Divine sovereignty but weak on human freedom and responsibility in relation to God; eastern Trinitarian theology is firm on “three” but scrambles for “one,” while Augustinian approaches easily accommodate “one” while somersaulting for “three”. The goal of theology is to develop one’s own outlook in such a way as to make it a credible competitor, overall getting roughly as good a rating for explaining, handling problems and difficulties as the others…It requires the intellectual flexibility to enter into the other theories, to appreciate their benefits as well as to assess their costs, to learn what, why, and how they handle issues well or badly.” (p11-12)
As a Anglo-Catholic Christian, the Bible, the creeds and the sacraments bear authoritative weight. I am influenced by the writings of theologians across the centuries. I am shaped in prayer and worship within a tradition of liturgy. I give serious weight to Christian experience, reason, scripture and tradition. Only God is infallible. What God says is true but human reception of revelation has to be filtered through our human cognitive faculties, which are fallible. To accept the truth of scripture and creeds is not to assign them infallible weight. They are divinely inspired and tools for spiritual formation. To be Christian is to according to Charles Gore to put oneself to school to them on a daily basis, not only to those parts one finds congenial but especially to those aspects that repel (Charles Gore, “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration” in Lux Mundi, 1890).
I do not expect all the data to be identical or mutually consistent. There is truth within and across sources. To seek too much uniformity is to lose the residence of harmony and the chance to learn from the differences. For example, I believe human authors of Judges and 1 Samuel believed in a God who commanded the scorch and torch “holocaust” of holy war and I believe they were wrong. Scripture has a rich database. There are statements clearly in contradiction of others; we saw in the earlier course on the story of the bible how texts were copied and translated, written by various authors in different contexts and how much controversy went into selecting which books to include in the bible. Much of the New Testament was written in the second and third generation after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in efforts to attest to his significance for Israel and to the “ends of the earth.” Scripture is authoritative even as it is not literal and inerrant.
There is no one biblical worldview. Any reader of the bible makes some philosophical and theological assumptions. To isolate scripture away from culture, science, and other sources of knowledge about our world and human beings is to flirt with anti-realism. Truth is like white light containing in itself many colors. One way to illustrate this point is in the 400 year process it took to arrive at a definition of Christology. If the scriptures and their writers had the full revelation and conception of Jesus and it was clear, it would have been evident from the first writings of Paul (1 Thess. ~ 49 CE and Mark ~65 CE).
Bible: Leviticus 2:19, “You must be holy as I am holy”. Human beings are however unclean, defiled, sinners. Christ as priest and victim is the one pure “sacrifice” offered for us once and for all on the cross.
In the honors/shame cultural context God is more worthy of honor than sinners can offer. Thus when the worst has happened, the cross and the death of Jesus, God is honored by resurrection, raising Jesus on the third day to sit in glory at the right hand of the Father.
Ransom: like the oppressed slaves in Egypt, the children of promise must be rescued. Jesus by paying the ransom price liberates the sinners, breaks the bonds of sin and death, and renews us with God.
Sin and satisfaction: in a strict construct of justice, sin must be punished. The wages of sin is death said St. Paul. The debt cannot be paid by a fallen sinner. The God-man (Jesus) makes satisfaction for the sins of the world.
Ignorance: human beings are lost in darkness but Christ is the light of the world, the Way, the Truth, the Life.
Sin is separation from God, a condition described in Genesis as the temptation to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tricky serpents clever rationalization that the only reason for such a rule is to keep us from being like God. Sin is rebellion against God, usurping our proper place in the order of creation. Sin reflects our estrangement from God. We are free moral agents, capable of knowing right and wrong and of obeying God’s plan for social harmony (just try keeping the 10 commandments for a week, or try living by the golden rule for all people for a week). We have free will, the capacity to reason, and a relational nature. We can be very cleaver in our creative reasoning and create justifications for why it is ok for you or me to x whereas from a distance of calm reflection we would not recommend the same action for another person.
The bible presents sin as a diagnosis for why things are not right with us and our world. Anselm asserts that God is just and because we are made in the image of God we have free will. God gave rational creatures free will so we could uphold justice. We have the free will to enact justice and the free will to neglect to do justice. This situation is replete in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as the minor prophets e.g. Hosea and Amos.
Evil is a term we reserve for horrific sins, it may be perpetrated by an individual or a group or a system. The Nazi concentration camps aimed to not only kill but to dehumanize their victims. Slavery deprived persons of their freedom and reduced human beings to chattel property. Systemic evil and individual acts of evil, e.g. rape seek to deprive a person of human dignity.
Horrors are not always injustices e.g. a person’s slow and degrading death with cancer seems evil, horrific, but not necessarily unjust. Cerebral palsy or schizophrenia represent excruciating forms of individual torment. What makes horrors so pernicious is their life-ruining potential, the effect of negating positive personal meaning. It is difficult to understand suffering and horrific evil without experience. We do not seem to learn from reading books, watching movies, or even watching a friend suffer. Our human capacity to inflict evil seems to outweigh our empathy for those who suffer. The prayer by Jesus from the cross in Luke’s Gospel is Father forgive them for they know not what they do. By acts of self deception, denial, and ignorance, lacking the sensitivity to see and know another as equal to ourselves allows us to see and not see, to hear and not hear, to know and not know the horrors affecting others. Take for example people living in towns in Europe as the trains passed through filled with Nazi prisoners, or our own acceptance of the treatment of prisoners of war to protect us from terrorism.
Generally we blame people for evil, not God. The doctrine of free will means we are responsible for choosing to acts of evil or for allowing others to do them. Adams posits: “My contention is that the fundamental reason why the human condition generally and Divine-human relations specifically are non-optional is that God has created us radically vulnerable to horrors, by creating us an embodied persons, personal animals, enmattered spirits in a material world of real or apparent scarcity.” (p 37) Sin is both the symptom and consequence but the root of the problem is systemic. As biological beings we are limited to the life cycle, birth procreation and death, all of which are in tension with our spiritual nature. The gap between the Divine and human is terrific. God’s ways are higher than our ways.
God in the person of Jesus bridged the gap by becoming human through hypostatic union. God Incarnate shares our nature, our plight in the material world and thus the Divine Word became vulnerable to horrors. The motivation was divine solidarity, God with us, becomes the divine participating in human horrors and in so doing defeats their life-ruining powers.
Crucifixion placed the victim in a cursed stat, therefore according to Deuteronomy 21:23 anyone who hangs on a tree is accursed and on this basis Jesus could not be the Messiah. If Christ comes to save human persons from the power of evil, then crucifixion is the exact situation that accomplishes his mission. If God takes God’s place with the cursed, then the cursed are not cut off from God after all!
Theodicy is used to justify the ways of God in a world of horror. The claim Adams makes is intriguing: “Divine love would not subject some individual created persons to horrors simply for the benefit of others or to enhance cosmic excellence.” (p45) “The only currency valuable enough to make good on horrors is God, and the horror-participant’s overall and eventual beatific intimacy with God” (p 47). God not only cares about human beings and all of creation but makes good the promise. The divine love for us – all of us – is so great that God enters our condition to defeat horror on our behalf. If being created by God and limited in time and space in a suboptimal condition with a huge gap between us and God is our reality, then God by entering into suffering as horror participator becomes horror’s defeater. What then must the nature of Christ have to be to accomplish this feat?
Christ the horror-defeater
When we speak of salvation we place Christ in the role of savior, one who bridges the gap between humanity and God, as the one who solves the non-optimality problem. Adhering to the Chalcedon formula that Jesus is both divine and human in one essence with the Father, we are left with some unanswered questions: in what way do the two natures co-exist, what does hypostasis mean when applied to Christ, how many wills does Christ have, what happens to the two natures during death and resurrection, is the risen Christ male?
Chalcedon and the subsequent council at Constantinople were firm on the point that Jesus the Christ had only one will. Famously Gregory Nazianzen posited: “what is not assumed cannot be restored.” The issue may seem trivial but we are trying to understand what it really means for God to be a person limited by time and space and if limited how the death of that limited being restores humanity to God. The soteriological role of Jesus as savior begs for a job description, and a set of qualifications, which make Christ able to accomplish salvation (we’ll save the for whom until later). Medieval theologians offered several roles: perfect sacrifice, lamb of God, ransom price, defeater of the devil, and mediator of grace. They asserted that sinlessness had to be a condition of the unblemished sacrificial lamb, but at the same time the crucifixion had to reveal a human being really in pain, really suffering, as a means to paying the ransom. Thus we have a vulnerable, corruptible body with flawless spirit. (I suspect my Buddhist friend would stop me right here and say a flawless spirit would feel no suffering but would transcend it.)
Scripture offers some verses that support an assumption of grace filled existence for Jesus: Col 2:9 “the whole fullness of God dwells bodily”, and John 3:34 says, “the Spirit is given to Him without measure” and in John 1:16 “from him we have received grace upon grace”. The reference in Luke 2:52 about Jesus increasing in wisdom, grace, and favor with God and man is taken not as a growth in progression or possession but as a manifestation of that which already was. In these bible based supportive passages for the perfection of Jesus, we ignore troubling passages e.g. Matt 11:27 AND Mark 13:32 where Jesus tells the disciples he knows neither the day nor the hour when the end will come. When Jesus expresses emotion, anger, sorrow, tears, the patristic authors attribute it to the humanity of Jesus but do not allow emotion to trump his perfect will and reason.
There are passages of scripture that seem to support the satisfaction hypothesis. “He was tempted but without sin” (Heb. 4:15); “God made Him to be sin who knew no sin” 2 Cor 5:21; “He became cursed for us” (Gal 3:13). These passages we hear as Jesus taking on the penalty for our sin. Aquinas stressed that Jesus’ human nature had to be like our nature, no matter how highly advanced it might be. Like us Jesus was vulnerable to hunger, thirst, fatigue, to suffering and death. However, from the moment of his conception he enjoys the fullness of grace, beatific vision and such supernatural knowledge as a human can hold and is able to live the “perfect sinless life.”
British theologians at the turn of the last century moved in the direction of progressive or developmental theology. Their construction reflected the Darwinian evolutionary and scientific age in which they lived and thought. Taking biblical texts friendly to this developmental proposal, e.g. Luke 2:52 (growth in wisdom and grace), Heb. 5:8 (learned obedience), Philippians 2:5-11 (emptied himself of the form of God, took the form of a servant). The Incarnation is thus a state of progress in time and culminates in the revelation of the mystical body in post-resurrection appearances and finally in the ascension to the Godhead. Thinkers such as Charles Gore did not diminish the perfection of Jesus in each of the developmental stages: “In Him first we see man completely in the image of God, realizing all that was in the divine idea for man. He was perfect child according to the measure of childhood, boy according to boyhood’s measure, man according to man’s standard; and He was perfected at last according to the final destiny of manhood in eternal glory.” Gore accepted the miracle working career of Jesus’ earthly life, which demonstrate that God is personal. Gore thought that the life and work of Jesus bring redemptive purpose of God into clear focus in the world (a very incarnational statement).
Adams posits that by taking the role of horror-defeater, Jesus is both human and divine and thus Christology is the explanatory lens through which we can approach an understanding of salvation. She offers 3 states: a) establishing a relation of organic unity between the person’s horror-participation and his/her intimate, personal, and overall beatific relationship with God; b) healing and otherwise enabling the horror-participant’s meaning-making capacities so that he can recognize and appropriate some of the positive significance of stage a; and c) recreating our relation to the material world so that we are no longer radically vulnerable to horrors. (p66)
In stage a the participation must be from the human vulnerability to pain, scarcity, death, and as Matthew and mark put it a sense of abandonment by God. Living in an environment in which horrors are real, the human Jesus must experience the mess of our status. The words and deeds of Jesus in a systemic power structure brought forth punitive consequences. The horrific nature of crucifixion could not be stalled or avoided by a human being caught up in the injustice of the system, nor were they. Stage b addresses the cross, the crucifixion, the social rejection of any person put to death by so mean a manner. The method was degrading, cruel, and intended to dissuade anyone from acting in a way that would bring forth a sentence of crucifixion. If capital punishment today is intended to deter horrific crime, (whether or not we think it works as intended), crucifixion was that and more in the ancient world of Roman occupation and rule. In sections of the Gospels Jesus seems to be provoking His enemies: the Pharisees who were most bent on preparing messiah’s way actually handed the messiah over to be crucified, and the explanation we have by the authors of the Gospels is that this is a deliberate exposure of the injustice and unrighteous old system overturned in the new covenant of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Thus the Gospels present a Jesus who was not only a victim, but also an occasioner and perpetrator of horrors to the extent that he cannot stop the destruction of the temple even as he forecasts it’s fall, nor the death of his disciples. The victory is the defeat of horror by participation in it and overcoming the sting of it. The Reign of God is the outward and visible signs of the Teacher’s admonition to be children of God and heirs of God’s eternal love. John’s Gospel speaks of mutual indwelling, abide in me and I in you, … the father and I are one… the healing miracles, the raising of Lazarus, and his own resurrection are symbols and signs of the promise of God: horror is to be defeated.
To achieve these stages Jesus has what to us is supernatural power. Jesus’ birth is heralded as a miracle of incarnation: the word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1). The miracles during his life and ministry were supernatural. The death transformed into resurrection and post-resurrection appearances were also supernatural. Like Aquinas for mere moral human beings to accomplish the will and purpose of God requires something supernatural: grace. The situation remains that sin is the main soteriological problem and the One Who saves us from sin must be sinless. The sin problem is something Jesus deals with through his Divine nature, which is sinless.
Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology, Cambridge University Press, 2006.