Who Do You Say That I Am?
Believing in Jesus Christ in the 21st Century

 Anna Case-Winters
Associate Professor of Theology
McCormick Theological Seminary

Address to the 2002 Covenant Conference
November 9, 2002

 Introduction

I am delighted to be here. Just to be among this great cloud of witnesses is a joy, and to be asked to address you is awesome. This event is proving to be a time of restoration, renewal, and recommitment. We will travel in the strength of this sustenance for many days!

In this dawning of the 21st century there are many and difficult challenges for those who are believers in God. It seems that talk of God has been eclipsed in our day; or where public talk of God occurs, it is discredited by its connection with holy wars or invocation of divine support for national interests or personal blessing. If we would continue to affirm and inquire into this much-abused yet still holy name of God, we have to give an account of ourselves. The very existence of God in these circumstances is under suspicion.

But there is a prior question, is there not? Before we can even ask, “Does God exist?” we have to ask, “What do we mean by God?” This question is the real question for us now, I think. Whether we affirm or deny that God exists, we have to define what it is we are talking about here. We cannot just predicate existence or non-existence of something unspecified.

If you were to engage a committed atheist in conversation, it is probably not helpful to begin with the traditional ” arguments for the existence of God.” These generally only prove convincing to those who already believe on other grounds. It is probably more to the point to begin with the question, “What do you mean by God?” You may find that as they spell out what they mean by God, you do not believe in that God either. They may describe a Santa Claus in the sky or a wrathful judge and punisher of evil or a puppet master pulling all the strings from above.

I recently saw a Far Side cartoon that makes my point. It showed God as an old man with a long beard sitting before a computer, watching world affairs go by on the screen. And on the keyboard there is this key marked SMITE. And every now and then

Now is that what we mean by God? I don’t think so! Many popular understandings are not worthy of the subject matter–not worth believing in. So what do we mean by God?

For Christians our meaning is Christ-formed. We believe that God was in Christ and this self-revelation is our best clue to what God is like. This does not give us an easy answer to the God question, however. Rather, it takes the question to another level. Who is this Christ? The new question, the real question, is the old question: “Who do you say that I am?” And our accounting to this question must paint a picture worthy of that to which it points.

Many have challenged the “worthiness” of particular understandings prevalent today. These new challenges are added to the old challenge — the challenge of believing at all — the leap of faith, the foolishness, the stumbling block, the scandal. We who would name the name of Jesus are beset behind and before! But as the believers who went before us did, so to must we meet also the challenges peculiar to our time. It is not enough to just reiterate what they said. Rather, we must do for our time what they did for theirs. When all is said and done, the foolishness and the stumbling block remain; but let it at least be God’s foolishness and stumbling block and not another forged by our inability or unwillingness to face and address the questions of our day and time.

I will take up only three such questions today. But these are big ones. When I lay them out, you may conclude that I am, as Joseph Sitler use to say, “chewing on more than I can bite off.”

• In a time of raised gender consciousness, what do we make of the maleness of Jesus? As Rosemary Ruether put it so provocatively, “Can a male savior save women?”
• What of the atonement? Some interpretations of the satisfaction theory of the atonement are deeply offensive to contemporary sensibilities, as they seem to glorify suffering. How do we think about this?
• What kinds of claims are we making around the Lordship of Christ? What do we really mean to be asserting in our religiously pluralistic context?

Now I do not mean to simply answer all these three little questions today. In fact, I would wager that anyone who has a simple answer for these questions simply has not understood the questions! What I hope to do is illumine the questions in their challenge for us and begin to hint at ways they might be helpfully addressed. Mostly I want to offer a few stray thoughts and a few resources for Christians today who would seek to be faithful to our historic affirmations concerning the person and work of Christ, and at the same time engage faithfully the particular questions these affirmations raise for our time.

So–

I. Jesus and Gender

“Can a male savior save women?”

At first blush this may seem to us to be making too much of the maleness of Jesus. As human beings, we say, the accidents of our birth — our eye color, race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity — though important, are not the main considerations about us. So also, the maleness of Jesus is not decisive for God’s work in him. any more than his eye color is.

But the problem is that in fact the church has made much of the maleness of Jesus. In Christian tradition, this person has been understood to reveal to us both the true human being and the true God. Many have made deductions from this that since Jesus, the human exemplar, is male, then the true human being is male, with female as something of a deviation from the norm, a subspecies, or as Aquinas (quoting Aristotle approvingly) allowed–the female is a “misbegotten male”! Similarly, since Jesus reveals who God is and Jesus is male, some have deduced that God must be male. And as Mary Daly observed, “if God is male, male is God.”

The outworking of these deductions has been disastrous for women. A case in point is the Vatican Declaration (1976) that “there must be a physical resemblance between the priest and Christ” — and they are not talking about eye color or ethnicity here! For Ruether, as a Catholic woman, this is particularly poignant. Since she is not ordained, she cannot be silenced, and she has been bold enough to say that with this declaration, “The possession of male genitalia becomes the essential prerequisite for representing Christ, who is the disclosure of the male God” (Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, p. 126). Now before we begin feeling too righteous in relation to Roman Catholic Christians, I want to remind us that we have our own peculiar set of prerequisites functioning around ordination.

What an odd turn of events it is that Jesus should in any way be used as an instrument of oppression or an occasion for exclusion. Consider who he was and what he did: eating with sinners and outcasts, welcoming children, encouraging women among his followers, caring about the least and the lost, leading through serving. Maybe his being male is significant here since, if a woman did these same things, they would have been unremarkable!

Jesus had a habit of overturning cultural and even religious prohibitions in the interest of persons involved (speaking to women on the street, healing on the Sabbath — shocking!) The norms of his patriarchal society do not seem to limit his ministry. His way of being has caused Elizabeth Johnson to remark that the problem is “not so much that Jesus was a man as that more men are not like Jesus” ! (She Who Is, p.161).

Indeed. And I think we need to take this whole discussion to another level. I will put it this way: there’s more to the Christ than Jesus. (Maybe I am going out on a limb here, but I am among friends.) But I think I can back this up. Remember that Jesus himself did a major reframe on what it meant to be the Christ. Remember that Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but an affirmation, a title meaning “God’s anointed.” His way of being “the Christ” was a kind of repudiation of all expectations — expectations of nationalist revenge and triumph, expectation of a king coming to put down the nation’s enemies. He freed up religious expectation of his day from the fossilization of his own tradition. Would we now make a fossil of him? How contrary to his spirit that would be.

Consider Matthew 25. Where is the Christ to be seen? In the thirsty, naked, sick and imprisoned. In our limited imagination, we find it hard to look beyond the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Will we in the last day be found asking, “But Lord, when did we see you?” There is more to the Christ than we know in Jesus.

Consider the community of believers who followed Jesus. They are said to be en christo. “Their own lives assume a Christic pattern” (Johnson, p. 72). The Christian community–plural, gendered, and diverse as it is — is the body of Christ. When Saul is addressed on the road to Damascus during his persecution of the Christian community, the question comes to him “Saul, why do you persecute me?” There is more to the Christ than we know in Jesus.

Consider all those accounts — beyond our more familiar Christologies — of what might be termed “the cosmic Christ.” The conviction that the mystery of Christ pertains to the fundamental structure of the cosmos, and all this prior to any role in relation to human sin. This is the divine Logos. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1). It is all there. And elsewhere, in the less familiar passage of Colossians 1:15-20, “Here is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible. . . . He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

The relation of the Christ to creation is in the primordial mystery of God’s creative purpose (Zachary Hayes, “Cosmology and Christology,” Epic of Creation). Salvation might be thought out less in terms of the eternal destiny of individual souls and more in terms of God’s bringing to completion God’s intentions with the whole creation. The Christ event presents a vision of a God whose mystery lies in the direction of an incalculably generous love, forgiveness, and acceptance. What God instantiated in the Christ is immensely larger than our words have heretofore described, or ever can describe.

[More could be said--but we all have flights to catch, today.]

II. What Did Jesus Do?

And what of the atonement?

Brown and Bohn, in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, charge that “Christianity is an abusive theology that glorifies suffering” (p. 26). Substitutionary atonement looks a lot like “divine child abuse. . . God the Father demanding and carrying out the suffering and death of his own son” so that God can forgive our sins. I would join to their voices that of womanist theologian Delores Williams. Williams, in Sisters in the Wilderness, has brought to our attention that the substitution and sacrificial suffering do not play themselves out as “good news” for people accustomed to roles of surrogacy and sacrifice and suffering.

If it is the case that our interpretation of the cross has become a glorification of suffering, then it seems to me we have badly misrepresented the meaning of the cross. Theology goes awry from time to time.

[It reminds me of a Snoopy cartoon. Snoopy was sitting on top of his doghouse, writing away. Charlie Brown asked him, "What are you writing?" Snoopy answered, "It's a book on theology." Charlie Brown persisted, "And what are you going to call it?" Snoopy replied, "The title will be, 'Have you ever considered that you might be wrong?'" We might be wrong here!]

Perhaps we should begin again at the beginning. We affirm with I Corinthians 5, “God was in Christ reconciling the world.” This story is not about God punishing or causing or requiring the suffering of some other. It is rather about God in Christ, a co-sufferer in solidarity with human beings, in a way that offers healing and emancipatory hope. The crucifixion is a social and political response to the challenge that the life that Jesus lived presented to principalities and powers. Dorothee Soelle, in her book Suffering, has pointed out that there is nothing distinctive in crucifixion; people are, in a sense, “crucified” everyday. What is distinctive is in the life that Jesus lived, in love of God and neighbor, a life that seems to call us to stop the crucifixions! It is time to reclaim the cross–not as a glorification of suffering but as a scene of “dangerous remembrance, empowering resistance, and emancipatory hope” (Joy Ann McDougall, unpublished paper, AAR, 1999).

This can happen best when the cross is not viewed in isolation from the larger Christ event. The Confession of 1967, as John Wilkinson pointed out, lifts up the life and ministry of Jesus. In this way, it fills in the blanks of some earlier creeds. Remember how the Apostle’s Creed goes, “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, (comma!) suffered under Pontius Pilate.” What is missing from this picture?!

What would happen if our doctrine of the atonement took the life of Jesus the Christ, in its redemptive power, more seriously? Consider for a moment the birth narratives and how incarnation — as such — is in itself redemptive. This line of thought could be traced out of Johanine theology into Irenaeus and later Schleiermacher. There is the wonder of Word made flesh. And Irenaeus is intrigued with how Jesus “recapitulates” our lives, redeeming as he goes. With each step our lives are taken into the divine life in a kind of theosis. “He became as we are, that we might become as he is.” It is this divine embrace of our lives in the incarnation that accomplishes our salvation. The incarnation would be enough!

Another way of thinking about what God was doing in Christ — one that has received too little attention — is Abelard’s view (1079-1142). In his view, the human problematic is not so much that we have sinned and God’s wrath puts a distance between us and God. It is more that our own sense of shame causes us to put the distance between us and God. It is not a matter of God turning from us in anger; we turn from God in shame. We go into hiding.

This model I can illustrate from childhood. I think I believed my mother knew everything I did, even if she did not see me do it. As a small child, whenever I got into mischief and did enough damage that I could not undo it, I would go and hide in my brother’s closet behind the boxes of things that were stored. And I can hear my mother calling, “Anna, where are you?” Eventually I would peep out sheepishly to confess my misdeed or more likely to tell her whose fault it really was. What I did not know until much later was that very often she had no idea I had done anything at all until she found me hiding. But because I was hiding, she knew something was amiss.

One picture of the human predicament is as guilty, shame-faced, hiding. This may be more central to the biblical witness about sin than has been heretofore recognized. It goes all the way back to the story in Genesis 3:8, where Adam and Eve hide from God in the garden and hide from one another with a covering of fig leaves. To the person hiding, whether in a closet or in the garden, salvation comes as a discovery that we are in fact loved and accepted just as we are. We no longer need to hide.

The work of Christ as the Word is to manifest God’s love, acceptance, and forgiveness. It is a revelation of what is already the case. Once we know of this great love, we cannot help but respond and be transformed. We are drawn out of our guilty hiding and inspired to live lives marked by love and acceptance and forgiveness. Christ is our example: as we grow in grace, our lives come to be, more and more, conformed to his pattern.

Multiple readings of God’s work in Christ are available in Scripture and Christian theology. No one of them comprehends the fullness of our redemption. But each one sheds a beam of light upon the depths of divine love.

III. Jesus is Lord

And what kinds of claims are we making around the Lordship of Christ? What do we really mean to be asserting in our religiously pluralistic age?

That “Jesus is Lord” is our oldest and most central confession. But there is a range of perspectives among Presbyterians regarding what that affirmation means. There are some who are comfortable with language of “uniqueness” or “singularity” or Jesus as the “only savior.” Others are concerned to keep a certain reserve about the extent to which we may know the mind of God and the ways of God with other peoples. They would insist that God is free in these things. To be honest, we have to recognize that both these ways of speaking are found in the Bible and in our historic confessions. So how do we proceed?

Sometimes the way forward is by going back. So I propose a “Digression for Dogma.” In our churches, we sometimes have a “Moment for Mission.” Well, this is our “Digression for Dogma.” Dogma is not really a bad thing in and of itself; it may actually be useful for the church. Dogma simply means the “teaching of the church.” It has gotten a bad rap when imposed or received uncritically. Then we have dogmatism, which has come to signal a certain rigidity and a loss of the tentative and humble attitude that should attend all our church statements. But a critical appreciation of the teaching of the church can be genuinely illumining. So let’s let the dogma out.

What is the teaching of the church on these things? I would like to take the Second Helvetic Confession [SHC] as an example. It is one of our 16th-century confessions, and it exemplifies the ambiguity of Reformed tradition on this matter, an ambiguity that we are still seeing in the contemporary discussions. Martin Bullinger, who succeeded Zwingli at Zurich, wrote SHC. Bullinger would not have had on his screen the context of religious pluralism that is ours today. But the question of What about those who are not in the church or those who through no fault of their own never even heard the gospel? What about Moses, for example? — these questions would have vexed the 16th century; and they are not unlike our own questions. SHC is rather evenhanded — in terms of the differing propensities of Presbyterians today. This balanced view is so much richer, I think, than excluding one insight or the other for the sake of simplicity. There is a holy perplexity here that does not admit of simple solutions. (The document “Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ” that the General Assembly just approved and commended to the churches for study also makes room for this profounder perplexity.)

SHC in its even-handed treatment goes back and forth between insights. On the one hand, echoing Cyprian, SHC reiterates a view that “outside the church there is no salvation.” On the other hand, there is a recognized difference between the visible and the invisible church (5.137), and the latter is “known only to God.” Bullinger notes that, in the OT “God had some friends in the world outside the commonwealth of Israel” (5.137). This sense that we cannot ourselves draw the boundaries of the church runs deep in Christian theology. Augustine, acknowledging this, said of the church that “there are many sheep without, and many wolves are within.” [Any of us, who have worked in the church for very long, can resonate with these sentiments.]

On the one hand, SHC says, “So we teach and believe that this Jesus Christ our Lord is the unique and eternal Savior of the human race, and thus of the whole world” (SHC, 5.077). On the other hand (and this is a continuation in the same sentence!), “in whom by faith are saved all who before the law, under the law, and under the Gospel were saved, and however many will be saved at the end of the world” (SHC, 5.077). It would appear that people who never even heard of Moses (before the law), much less of Jesus, are being saved. How can this be? SHC continues, “God can illuminate whom and where he will, even without the external ministry, for that is in his power” (SHC5.007).

God is free! Therefore, we are cautioned, “We must not judge rashly or prematurely. . . nor undertake to exclude, reject, or cut off those whom the Lord does not want to have excluded” (SHC 5.140). And elsewhere it says, we should “have a good hope for all” (SHC 5.055).

SHC is a helpful resource, and there is so much more. But just two more things for now from the treasure house of dogma. So we are having a debate about Christology. What’s new? Debates about Christology are as old as the church. Sometimes the debates were settled by which side had the most monks with clubs in attendance! Thankfully, our discussions of Christology at General Assembly in June were not of this sort! But if you think things get heated at GA, we have nothing on the councils of the early church! In addition, history teaches us that when one side “wins” a debate, it does not necessarily settle the matter. We may take heart.

The definition of Chalcedon was so carefully hammered out — fully human and fully divine, two natures in one person, neither confused nor separated. That settled things, right? Not necessarily. From that day until this, there have been some who emphasize humanity, working out their Christology “from below” and insisting that Jesus was a real human being, “like us in every way except for sin.” And there are those who continue to emphasize divinity, working out their Christology “from above” and insisting that in Christ it is God with whom we have to do. Neither of these approaches is wrong, only partial. Chalcedon helpfully guides us into a more comprehensive picture.

If you will time travel with me from Chalcedon to the 16th century, we can pick up the christological debates of the Reformation. Here we find Luther emphasizing the unity of the person of Jesus Christ (one person!), while Reformed folk like Zwingli and Calvin emphasize the integrity of the two natures (two natures!). For Luther, the communicatio idiomatum (communication of the properties/natures in Christ) meant that whatever could be said of God could be said of Jesus the Christ. Omnipresence, for example, could apply to make possible Christ’s local physical presence at every table in the Eucharist. Ubiquity was assumed.

But Calvin said — this is the “And now a word from our sponsor” moment! — Calvin said this was confusing the two natures. (Calvin spoke of the communicatio idiomatum as a rhetorical device. When the properties of the divine nature are attributed to the human nature this is metaphorical and not literal.) He countered that when the Logos became flesh in Chris, it did not cease to fill the whole cosmos and thus to be outside as well as inside the person of Christ. This doctrine has come to be called the extra calvinisticum–that Calvinist “extra.” In this day, and this debate, I am especially glad we have it; for if the second person of the Trinity is not dissolved and disappearing in the man Jesus, and there is more to Christ than we know in Jesus, then that may give shape to the kinds of claims we make about Jesus as the Christ. Another way a similar thing has been said is finitum non capax infiniti: “the finite does not have the capacity to completely contain the infinite.” These notions are as Reformed as any you will find, and I think they actually are tremendously helpful in the present conversation.

We are clear that Jesus is fully divine; but does that mean that Jesus is all there is to God? We affirm from of old “God was in Christ, reconciling the world” But does that mean this is this the only locus of divine activity?

Tom Parker, Professor Emeritus of Theology at McCormick Theological Seminary, gave an illustration once that has stayed with me as a help in thinking about all this. He talked about growing up on the West Coast and playing in San Francisco Bay. He enjoyed the water of the bay, but he could see from where he stood that there was a whole big ocean out there. Now the bay is fully, completely (totus) ocean, but it is not all of (totem) the ocean.

Similarly Jesus the Christ is fully divine, but God is still more than this. There is more to God than we know in Jesus. What we know of God as Christians, we know from God’s revelation in this one; in him we have found “the way, the truth, and the life.” Beyond that, we really cannot claim to know, but from of old people of faith have said that God transcends all our words and all our best thoughts. The longer the shoreline of knowledge, the greater the ocean of mystery.

What does this all mean for interreligious dialogue? What is it and what is it for? Is there a difference between evangelism and proselytizing? [I find myself in complete agreement with what Shirley Guthrie said yesterday. This is not surprising; he is my esteemed teacher of some 25 years ago. I may not agree with him about everything all the time -- he would be disappointed if I did! But on the nature and importance of evangelism we are agreed.]

I have noticed that I am in the odd position of being zealous about evangelism and reluctant in proselytizing. Most days I just live with the perplexity of this, but when I try to make sense of this, what do I say? It is in Jesus Christ that I have found the words of eternal life. It is in him that I have seen the power of evil broken, and a new hope born. Now I want to share that with every breath and every act. There is a world out there that is hungry and hurting. If we have good news, why would we withhold it? Many have no religious commitment whatsoever. And for those of other faiths, well, good news is good news. God is really free, and God’s Spirit is present and active throughout the world and not just in the church. [I assume God's Spirit is in the church -- on a good day -- but not contained or constrained there.] When we go out in witness and mission, we are not “taking God to people”; we should rather be prepared to find God already at work. There is a good chance we might receive some good news even as we share the good news.

Diana Eck, in her book Encountering God, notes how Medieval churches were designed with “Holy Spirit holes” in the ceilings, opening them to the sky, dramatizing architecturally the openness of the church to God. On Pentecost in 10th-century Rome, doves were let loose through these holes into the sanctuary to fly about and rose petals were let loose to fall down upon the people like tongues of fire and choirboys were set to whooshing and drumming to call to mind the rush of the Spirit. It is all wonderfully imaginative (p. 130). I wonder if we have not made a mistake in closing up the Holy Spirit holes in our churches (and I am not talking about the architecture!) How hard it becomes for the Spirit to get in. Or maybe we think we have caught the Spirit and worry that it will get away and escape the constraints of our churches and our theologies.

Conclusion

In our time, there is a task of revisioning to be done in our Christology as in all other aspects of our theology. When we have said all we can say about Jesus of Nazareth, we have not told the whole story. When we have believed the best that we can believe, the Christ is greater still. Both our accounts of the historical Jesus and our theological construction of the Christ of faith are at their best much too confining for the reality to which they point. It may be that that Jesus the Christ has to break out of the confines in which he has been once again entombed by our theological constructs, our limited imaginations, and our small hopes.

Whatever we affirm must be affirmed with a fitting humility, for holy mystery always eludes us. We walk by faith and not by sight. It has been wisely said that a good theologian must know when to mumble.

To God alone be the glory!

[Editor's note: Paul Capetz offered a response to this paper.]

Resources:Borg, Marcus and Wright, N.T. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Conversation.
Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.
Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ.
Eck, Diana. Encountering God.
Hayes, Zachary. “Cosmology and Christology” Epic of Creation
Heim, Mark. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion.
Hick, John. A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths.
Johnson, Elizabeth. Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology.
Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus is the Christ of Faith.
Norris, Richard. Christological Controversy.
Pedraja, Luis. Jesus is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Jesus through the Centuries.
Placher, William C. Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus Christ for Christian Faith.
Placher, William C. Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic World.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk.
Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness.

Response to Anna Case-Winters’

 “Who Do You Say that I Am? Believing In Jesus Christ in the 21st Century”

Paul E. Capetz
Associate Professor of Historical Theology
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

2002 Covenant Conference
November 9, 2002

When someone is asked to respond to a paper or a lecture in an academic setting, the usual assumption is that the person responding will have some critical remarks that suggest disagreement with the scholar to whom one is responding. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything critical to say in response to Anna Case-Winters! As I read her paper earlier this week and again listened just now to her remarks, my sense is that she has pointed us in the right direction for thinking about the challenges of Christology today in the light of the theological resources of the Reformed tradition. The strength of her Christological reflections is their simultaneous grounding in the historic documents of Reformed faith and their openness to the burning questions on the minds of people today.

Since there are no points of disagreement that I wish to register, instead I simply want to elaborate on a few of her remarks by way of enhancing and rounding out the proposal she has given us. Let me do this by taking the three challenges she names at the outset of her lecture and engaging her discussion of helpful ways we might go about tackling these problems in a way that is responsible to our Reformed heritage.

I.
First, there is the question of the gender of Jesus: “Can a male savior save women?” (Rosemary Ruether). In one sense, of course, the maleness of Jesus is a problem, but only if no distinction is properly drawn between the human and the divine natures in the person of Christ. Christology, as our speaker has pointed out, is not to be misconstrued as “Jesusology” or “Jesusolatry.” Jesus is fully human, which means that, like all human beings, there is a particularity to him of time and place, gender and sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, religion and culture, as well as socio-economic location. Both the New Testament and the classical creeds of the church insist that Jesus was, in every sense, truly human. It is important to remember that one of the Christological heresies against which both the New Testament and the creeds fight is “docetism,” the idea that the savior only appeared to be human since his true identity is divine. Interestingly, if that heretical position had succeeded in becoming orthodox, we would have a much easier way to address the question before us about the gender of Jesus: if Jesus only appeared to be human, that would mean that he only appeared to be male!

But I doubt that any one of us here today would want to throw away the full humanity of Jesus for a ghost-like redeemer. The genuine humanity of Jesus is crucial to our faith; but real humanity is never “humanity in general” but always “humanity in particular.” Like Jesus, each of us is historically particular; no two of us are identical. And when we read in Galatians 3:28 that “in Christ there is neither male nor female,” we never take that to mean that we cease being men and women by becoming Christians. That would be to obliterate our very humanity which lies in its particularity and its physical embodiment.

What I find truly remarkable about the New Testament is that it does nothing to minimize the particularity of Jesus. Think about the conversation recorded between him and the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matt 15:21-29, Mark 7:24-30). Here is an exchange where Jesus is not only religiously and culturally particular, but actually comes across as ethnocentric. When she implores Jesus to heal her daughter, he refuses her with the insulting words, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman’s retort is so clever and quick that Jesus is forced to concede: “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” I remember a professor at Yale saying that this is the only passage in the New Testament where someone actually wins an argument with Jesus. Here a woman gets the best of Jesus, and a foreigner at that!

Why didn’t the writers of the New Testament eliminate this embarrassing episode from their portrayals of the savior? Apparently, they took seriously their commitment to the real humanity of Jesus and understood that the humanity of Jesus, like that of everyone else, is finite and limited, subject to correction and enrichment from the particular experience of other human beings who are different from ourselves. I think the way forward for us in this tricky matter is to hold a text like this one from Matthew and Mark in tension with that from Paul in Galatians so that we have a paradigm of what it means when we affirm that in Christ there is neither male nor female. On the one hand, we must insist that sexism is idolatrous because it evaluates the worth of persons according to gender. But on the other hand, we have to stop thinking about Jesus in isolation from his real relationships with other people, without whom he would not have been the particular person he was, such as his mother who raised him, the women who loved him and supported him throughout his ministry, the women whose dignity he restored through his healings and table-fellowship, and the women who buried him and were the first witnesses to his resurrection. Jesus, in all his human particularity, would not have been who he was apart from these relationships with these women. That’s surely a large part of what it means to affirm, with the New Testament and the classical creeds, the full humanity of Jesus.

II.
Second, what about the atonement? Delores Williams has made the provocative statement that we don’t need any more crucifixions and, of course, she’s completely right about that. But it would be wrong for us, I think, to move from that moral concern for history’s victims to the proposal that we should abandon the cross as a central symbol of Christian faith. After all, one cannot really understand what Jesus in his full humanity lived, experienced, and endured apart from the manner of his death.

When I teach seminarians about the doctrine of the atonement, I remind them that in the ancient world in which Christianity arose, “religion” consisted of animal sacrifices, quite literally. Few of us today would recognize what the ancients thought of as being essential to religious practice. If we were to walk into a church on Sunday morning and see an animal being slaughtered, we would be shocked and horrified. But for ancient people, Jews and Gentiles, animal sacrifice was essential to the meaning of religion. It was the means through which individuals and communities made reparation to God or the gods for breaches in the divine-human relationship. When the Jewish Temple was destroyed, of course, animal sacrifice ceased altogether in Judaism, and the prayer service of the synagogue became normative. Also, when the Romans first began to take notice of the Christians, it was hard for them to view Christianity as a religion because there was no animal sacrifice. It looked more like a social club or a philosophical school, but not a religion. So I think we moderns fail to understand the importance of sacrifice to ancient sensibilities when we talk about the atonement today. If we are going to take seriously what the Confession of 1967 says about reading scripture in its historical context, taking into account “views of lifewhich were then current” (9.29), we have to appreciate the theological significance of the early Christian claim that there is no more need of animal sacrifice because Christ has made reparation for the breach between humanity and God. This was a theological innovation of Christianity: insistence upon the “once and for all” character of Christ’s death as an atonement for sin provided a rationale for a form of religion without the literal practice of sacrifice.

On account of this innovation, sacrifice comes to be understood in both the New Testament and later Christian writings in a metaphorical and symbolic sense. When Paul says that we Christians are “to present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is [our] spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1), he is clearly using the word “sacrifice” in a non-literal way. We are to live lives that are pleasing to God by doing God’s will. That’s what sacrifice means in this passage.

Unfortunately, obedience to God sometimes does lead to precisely the sort of crucifixions that Delores Williams has in mind. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his life for the sake of the liberation of oppressed black people in this country. King was well aware that he might be killed for his leadership of the civil rights movement. King’s death never should happened in an ideal world; but since we live in a world that does not reflect God’s will for human life, the cross reminds us that sin exacts a price, a price paid by Jesus and one that his disciples must also be willing to pay when necessary. What if there weren’t people like King who, in the name of what he as a Baptist minister believed was the potential cost of discipleship, picked up their cross to follow Jesus? With Delores Williams, I believe that we should deplore and lament that King and others had to die. The world shouldn’t be like this. But, unfortunately, it is, and King’s is a modern example of what is sometimes required of Christians in a world corrupted by human sinfulness. Like that of Jesus, King’s death was a “sacrifice” on account of sin.

I believe the way forward for us in this matter of atonement doctrine is both to understand the ancient context of the Bible more empathetically and to search for contemporary analogues that can teach us anew what “sacrifice” ought to mean in the life of Christian discipleship. A Christianity without the cross is a gospel of “cheap grace,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another modern Christian martyr, reminded us all. In his workshop yesterday, Shirley Guthrie lifted up the importance of Luther’s theology of the cross as a necessary corrective to any and all triumphalistic versions of Christianity that focus solely on the resurrection. Resurrection is that for which we Christians hope, but it is not the state of the world in which we live. The Easter faith has to be preached in a Good Friday world. I believe that reflections of this sort could help us to appreciate anew the theological intentions behind the classical doctrine of the atonement of Jesus.
III.
Third, there is the question of religious pluralism. Again, I believe that Anna Case-Winters has pointed us to the rich resources in our own tradition for thinking about the issues involved in this question. It is precisely this seemingly arcane doctrine called the extra-Calvinisticum that indicates the way forward. Calvin affirmed that the logos or the Word of God was fully incarnate in the human Jesus, but not in such a manner that the Word of God was circumscribed, limited, or exhausted by the human Jesus.

It was here, of course, that Calvin had his principal Christological difference with Luther, and this Christological “extra” in Calvin’s theology led to a different understanding of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper from that held by Luther. Jesus is not God, but God is fully incarnate in Jesus. Again, everything hangs on the crucial distinction between the human and divine natures in Christ. For the Lutherans, Calvin was guilty of the ancient Christological heresy called “Nestorianism,” of separating the two natures with the result that there are two Christs, not one. Yet his intention was not to separate but to distinguish.

In spite of Lutheran charges that Calvin works with an insufficient Christology, I believe that Calvin correctly understood the dangers of idolatry lurking in the failure to make this distinction between the human and divine natures properly. We do not worship a human being; that would be idolatry of a high order! We worship the one God, made known to Moses and the prophets, and then fully revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that the Word of God, while incarnate in Jesus nonetheless transcends the finite human person Jesus, is the way to begin thinking about our present encounter with non-Christian religions.

The ancient apologists of the 2nd century correctly understood that it was this doctrine of the logos that made it possible for them to explain how the Greek philosophers were inspired in their wisdom by the same Word of God that inspired the prophets. As a result, they believed that the pagans had not been left without witness to God and the Christians felt free to appropriate the Greek philosophical legacy for themselves. Of course, they sharply distinguished the wisdom of Greek philosophy from the folly of Greek idolatry, but why should we not attempt to make the same distinctions as we get to know our non-Christian neighbors?

We need not condemn out of hand everything in other religions; there may be plenty of wisdom in them that could enrich us, just as the ancient Christians were enriched by Greek philosophy. Still, on the other hand, a willingness to listen and to learn is not to say that we should fail to make critical distinctions between those elements in other religions which are reflections of genuine wisdom and those elements that may be idolatrous. Again, to refer to Shirley Guthrie’s workshop yesterday, we Christians are pointing to Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life,” not to Christianity, which is just as subject to idolatry as any other religion and which has, in fact, committed many idolatries in the name of Jesus.

We have nothing to fear in the present encounter with non-Christian religions. Indeed, I believe it will have a purifying effect on our own tradition, forcing us to see ourselves through the eyes of the other. Those of us who have been involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue have learned, not only that we Christians have been guilty of grave sins in relation to the Jews, but also that we had misunderstood important pieces of our own scripture and tradition on account of our loss of a vital, living relationship between church and synagogue.

And we have to remember, too, that Christians in Asia and Africa have been grappling in a very practical way with these issues for centuries. Part of our problem in the West is that the embrace of an appreciative attitude toward religious pluralism forces us to acknowledge our loss of cultural hegemony. We no longer live in a Christian culture in the official sense. All the more reason, therefore, to start learning humbly the lessons of the churches in the non-Western parts of the world where Christians have been dealing with religious plurality a lot longer than we have.

I could go on and on, but this will have to suffice for now. My remarks only confirm the points made much better and more eloquently by Anna Case-Winters. We can learn from her example that our tradition is not only deep, but broad. We have untapped resources in our tradition that can provide us with helpful ways of thinking through contemporary challenges.

IV.
But breadth without depth quickly becomes shallow. That’s why we need to know our tradition in order to be broad in the best Reformed sense of the term. One of the recurring themes in conversations I’ve heard at this conference is the urgent need for Presbyterians to re-acquaint themselves with their tradition. We talk a lot about the Reformed tradition, but not many people in our churches really know what this means. Too often seminarians and ministers neglect their intellectual responsibilities as those who are called to teach the Bible and the doctrines found in the creeds and confessions. I do a great deal of adult education in local congregations, teaching the “essential tenets of the Reformed faith” to intelligent members of the church who are thirsting for historically informed theology that can make sense of their religious convictions as well as their experience of living in the contemporary world.

We desperately need what John Wilkinson called for the other day: “a thrilling revival of theology in our time.” The problems in our church today are more than merely matters of morality or matters of polity. They are fundamentally theological, getting at the heart of our identity as Protestant Christians who have inherited a distinctive tradition that goes back to John Calvin. Yet without a solid base of knowledge of our tradition, we will continue to flounder. How many Presbyterian ministers could pass a rigorous exam into the theology contained in the Book of Confessions? How many really read Calvin and the other reformers? How many take theology seriously? How many regularly teach courses to their elders and deacons using the Book of Confessions? We have a great tradition, but we can’t leave it lying on the shelf gathering dust. It can’t be of any help to us if we don’t know it and teach it.

Without depth, there is no breadth worthy of the name. But with the proper depth in our own tradition, we will find the breadth to embrace the contemporary challenges without fear. For our tradition is a self-critical tradition, calling ourselves to constant re-examination of what we have inherited from the past and insisting upon new formulations of the tradition that meet the needs of our own time. Calvin didn’t live in our world, nor do we live in his. Therefore, we cannot simply repristinate his teachings as though they were infallible. But that would be the last thing he’d want us to do. He would hope for us that we take up the same attitude of critical appreciation toward his tradition that he took toward the traditions he inherited, precisely so that we might find a responsible and fitting formulation of the gospel for our time, as he did for his.

I close with these words of Calvin which could well serve as the motto for just that sort of “thrilling revival of theology in our time” which the church needs so much in order for it to carry on the legacy of the Reformation today:

Our constant endeavor, day and night, is not just to transmit the tradition faithfully, but also to put it in the form we think will prove best.
(“Defense against Pighius,” cited by B. A. Gerrish, “Continuity and Change: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Task of Theology,” in Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 13.)

Confessing Christ in a Post-Christendom Context

 Address to the 1999 Covenant Conference
Covenant Network of Presbyterians
Atlanta, GA
November 5, 1999

Douglas John Hall
Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Excerpts from this address appear in Covenant Connection Vol. 2, #4

Before turning to the substance of my first address, I should like to thank the planners of this event for inviting me to participate in it. As a foreigner, and inheritor of Presbyterian identity by only one third of my ecclesiastical lineage, I have little right to be here, really. My only qualification for accepting the honor of the invitation, I think, is a lifetime of attempting to comprehend the same mysteries that you yourselves seek to address. I also feel a strong sense of identification with what I believe to be the generative basis of this “network.” At a time of unprecedented transition in the Christian Movement, when (as George Orwell once put it) “the little orthodoxies of the right and the left vie with one another for possession of our souls,” it is necessary to assert both the modesty and the complex, nuanced character of Christian faith and theology against the false certainties of true belief, ideology and religious simplism. Today, Christians of integrity are thrown back upon the never reducible testimony of Scripture, Tradition and the divine Spirit–a testimony that defies possession, but also manifests an exceptional trust in the insight, imagination, reasonableness and spiritual courage of ordinary human beings when they are modest enough to ask for what they do not and cannot possess. As I keep assuring myself, “God permits theology.” That, in any case, is the spirit in which I would like to address the two topics I have been asked to treat in these meetings: christology and ecclesiology.

Both of these topics, obviously enough, demand far more time and space (not to mention wisdom!) than are available to me. I have assumed, however, that what you have wished me to do is to comment upon aspects of these two areas of doctrine that have seemed to me especially vital for the life and mission of the church in our context. In both lectures, much (nearly everything, in fact!) will have to be assumed and telescoped; but I will concentrate on what I think are critical questions–critical in the sense that they represent, at least in my opinion, points on which greater clarity is required if the community of Christ’s discipleship is to move into the post-Christendom future with something like apostolic confidence.

Our first subject is christology, and there will be three sections. The first will address the centrality of Jesus Christ in Christian confession. The second will concentrate on christology proper, that is, the identity or person of the Christ. The third, which I feel is today the greatest challenge, will consider the soteriological side of the subject. I would be glad if you could consider the substance of this lecture a kind of commentary on the first paragraph of your own “Call to Covenant Community,” which reads: “We affirm faith in Jesus Christ who proclaimed the reign of God by preaching good news to the poor, binding up the broken-hearted and calling all to repent and believe the good news. It is Christ whose life and ministry form and discipline all we say and do.”

I. The Centrality of Jesus as Christ

Christianity is a dialectically monotheistic faith in which the nature and purposes of the Ultimate are illumined by historical events culminating, though by no means terminating, in the life, death and resurrection of the Jewish teacher Jesus, called by faith the Christ. This may seem a truism, but it acquires new import in our historical situation. For as the Christian religion emerges out of the constantinian cocoon in which, throughout most of its history, it has been so tightly enclosed, Christians find themselves relieved of the burden of assuming, as the raison d’être of their movement, custodianship of the random religious sentiments and moral codes that have clustered about the corpus Christianum. In short, we are free, insofar as we are courageous enough to undertake it, to contemplate and to enact in concrete ways the only biblically and theologically sound reason we have for calling ourselves Christians–which is to say our confession of Jesus as the Christ. As long as Christianity had to play–or allowed itself to play–the role of Western culture-religion, the nomenclature “Christian” was obliged to stand for all sorts of dispositions extraneous or tangential in relation to biblical faith. In the post-Christendom context that has been in the formation since the 18th Century and will be the normal situation of the church in the third millennium, Christians are required to become knowledgeable and articulate about the christological basis of their belief. We are Christians, not because”we are (or think we are) good, or right, or just, or “concerned”–and certainly not because we are “nice”–though hopefully we are (as Reinhold Niebuhr once said) “as decent as ordinary people.” We are Christians because we believe in God as God is made known in Jesus Christ through the divine Spirit and the testimony of Scripture.

This is basic, and indeed it is so basic that we should expect, over the next few decades, that any for whom such a confession contains no element of meaning or conviction or even interest would likely withdraw from the churches and seek their spiritual homes in religious or quasi-religious or purely secular settings more commensurate with their predispositions and “values.” This too–this exodus that has already been experienced by most churches in Europe and (to a somewhat lesser extent) North America–is an inevitable aspect of the humiliation of Christendom, the pluralization of religion, and the secularization of society. To many (and in some sense to all of us) it seems a matter of deplorable loss; but we should try to see it, rather, as a necessary and even a desirable clarification of the meaning of Christian identity in the post-Christendom world. In direct proportion to its being deprived of the cultural props that have sustained it as the established religion of the western world, the Christian church is being cast back upon its rudimentary confessional basis.

The attempt to affirm and give direction to this process within the North American context, however, is fraught with difficulty. For here it is necessary to be vigilant simultaneously on two fronts. On the one hand we share with European and other Christians the task of distinguishing Christianity from the remnants of superficial culture-religion, and this necessitates the firm recovery of our christological foundations. On the other hand we find ourselves surrounded by true-believing, biblicist and fundamentalist versions of our faith which out-do us in confessing Christ–but a Christ so unbending, so dismissive of difference, and so reducible to dogma that we cannot recognize in him the One we have been taught by biblical scholarship and Reformation theological traditions to honor as Redeemer.

If I am asked to identify more precisely what biblical scholarship and Reformation traditions have taught us on this subject, I quote one of the eminent theologians of the first part of this century, who wrote:

Christianity is what it is through the affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth, who has been called “the Christ,” is actually the Christ, namely, he who brings the new state of things, the New Being. Whenever the assertion that Jesus is the Christ is maintained, there is the Christian message; wherever this assertion is denied, the Christian message is not affirmed. Christianity was born, not with the birth of the man who is called Jesus, but in the moment in which one of his followers was driven to say to him, “Thou art the Christ.” And Christianity will live as long as there are people who repeat this assertion. (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. ii; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 97.)

This statement, albeit in somewhat different language, could have been made by Karl Barth, or Rudolf Bultmann, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Suzanne de Dietrich or any number of others who have spoken to us of these matters during the century. As you will have recognized easily enough, it was written by Paul Tillich, hardly a flaming conservative, and as the very first paragraph of the christological section of his Systematic Theology. I find it right and altogether satisfying. However: How, in our present context, shall we say this, represent this, live this, without seeming to endorse the kind of christomonism (Dorothee Soelle called it “Christofascism”!) that inevitably ends in religious triumphalism and exclusivity?

I think that we can do so only if we recover a foundational Theology–a doctrine of God–that is informed by a Judaic sense of the dialectic of divine distance and proximity, otherness and sameness, transcendence and immanence. Christomonism and the exclusivity that attends it represents, I believe, a failure of trinitarian theology. For a triune understanding of God, the western tradition especially was always tempted to substitute an undialectical monotheism heavily informed by a christology emphasizing the divinity principle and downplaying Jesus’ true humanity. The result, in the hands of the simplifiers, is what H. Richard Niebuhr rightly named “a new unitarianism of the second person of the trinity”–or, in the plain and oft-repeated slogan of popular evangelicalism, the simple declaration: “Jesus is God.” If all we can say of Jesus and of God is that Jesus is God–all the God of God there is–then we have effectively ruled out all other attempts of the human spirit to glimpse the mystery of the ultimate; and this is all the more conspicuously the case when our understanding of “Jesus,” in the first place, is really a dogmatic reduction of his person, his “thou-ness,” to the “it-ness” of christological propositions that, most of them, enshrine little more than our own religious bid for authority.

Perhaps the doctrine of the trinity was doomed to failure from the start, because it tried to express in the ontological language of the hellenistic world an understanding of deity belonging to the tradition of Jerusalem. More of that in a moment. But even in its officially sanctioned forms, the trinitarianism of the classical tradition ruled out as plainly heretical the docetism, monarchianism, and monophysitism that would have justified any such bald statement of Christ’s divinity as the slogan, “Jesus is God.” Its language notwithstanding, the trinitarian theology of the main stream tried to do the two things that had to be done if Christianity was to survive at all: namely, first, to justify the centrality of Jesus Christ for this faith by affirming his unique relation to the ultimate; and, second, to set the mystery of his appearing within the context of a greater mystery still, that of the “suffering love” of the Creator for the creation.

It is this latter dimension that has continuously been thwarted in Christian religious history in favor of yet another apotheosis of the particular; and it is this same dimension that is most in need of being recovered in our present context. Only if the Christian Movement is able to demonstrate, concretely in deed and word, how Jesus Christ reveals the radical world-commitment of a God who is (as Paul reputedly said on Mars Hill) “not far from every one of us,” will it manifest biblical faithfulness in the multi-religious and multi-threatened world that is and is coming to be. As (I think) your christological article in the “Call to Covenant Community” assumes, gospel has more to do with the humanity of God than with the divinity of Christ; that is, it posits the divine origins of Jesus of Nazareth as the necessary theological presupposition of its primary testimony to the ultimacy of the Creator’s world-orientation (John 3:16!). And when the so-called “divinity of Christ” becomes an article of faith independent of that divine world-orientation, then the gospel of the incarnation of the Word has been replaced by yet another declaration of the divinization or apotheosis of a seemingly human being. But this leads to the second point, the specifically “christological” aspect of our faith; and here my thesis is stated rather succinctly in the sub-heading I’ve given to this section:

II. Recovering Biblical Ontology in the Discussion of Christ’s Person

The tendency of most historic Christianity to overemphasize the divinity principle in christology must be traced to the political and ontological transformation of our faith that occurred between the original testimony to the messiahship of Jesus, which issued out of a Jewish context, and the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries that gave definitive shape to the doctrine of Christ’s person. Today it is necessary for Christians to become clearer about that transformation.

Politically speaking, the transition is rather easily stated. It should not be overlooked that both the trinitarian and christological decisions of this period, decisions that have to do with the most foundational aspects of the Christian faith and have been accepted in subsequent ages with astonishing equanimity, were decisions undertaken by the church under the aegis of Empire. Rome’s adoption of this faith insured that, especially in christology, the triumphalist dimensions and possibilities of the received narrative would be given pre-eminence. No respectable empire wants to set up as its primary religious symbol the spectacle of a broken, publicly despised, and officially criminal human being, particularly one whose execution the empire itself effected! It was inevitable, given the fourth-century establishment of Christianity, that the divinity principle in christology would triumph–as it has triumphed in all the subsequent empires with which the Christian religion has covenanted. Little of the Hebrew Bible’s critique of power (the power of kings and military heroes and alleged deities) found its way into Christian christological reflection, except in the thin tradition of the theologia crucis.

But it is in the vicinity of Athens and Alexandria and not of Rome that one has to look for the more subtle aspects of the transformation of the crucified one into the transcendent God-Man whose very suffering seems academic. Both christology and trinitarian theology were articulated according to an ontology that not only gained little or nothing from the narrative traditions of the Jews, but displaced those traditions very effectively. As Joseph Sittler and Joseph Haroutunian and, latterly, many feminist writers have demonstrated, the ontology of Jerusalem is a relational one: being means being-with; existence is co-existence. Reality is not to be glimpsed through the examination of individual entities or abstract universals but in the between-ness of all that is. Jesus’ relatedness to God does not consist in his possession of a divine substantia, but in his faithful representation of God’s dominion, which is servanthood; and Jesus’ relatedness to us (the relatedness that matters!) does not consist in the obvious fact of his participation in our human ousia and form but in his faithful representation, before God, of our struggle to live the life of the wondrous and impossible creatures that we are.

The question that is put to Christians today where our christology is concerned is whether we can return our thought and the ethical consequences of our thought concerning Jesus the Christ to the ontological matrix in which it was originally enfolded–namely, the relational ontology of the tradition of Jerusalem; and thus overcome this obdurate temptation, neither biblical nor contemporary, of regarding the one at the center of our confession as the bearer of “substances” that are as incomprehensible as they are incompatible. I know that the decisions of the ecumenical councils with regard to Christ’s person were sincerely meant to translate the received testimony of the primitive church into the more universal, established, and highly nuanced philosophic language of the period. But it is a language that is, like all language, more than language; and it is a language that is as foreign to us today as it would have been to the disciples of Jesus themselves. If we must still resort to the language of the “two natures” (and probably for ecumenical and other purposes we must), why cannot we give them an Hebraic as well as a contemporary twist and say, for instance, that insofar as Jesus bears within his person and represents for us the very presence (the being-with-us; the Emmanuel-hood) of God, he turns inevitably towards the creature for whose love God yearns: that is his “divinity”; and that, insofar as Jesus bears within himself and represents for us the very soul and pathos of the human creature, he turns inevitably towards the eternal Thou who (as Augustine rightly said) “created us for thyself”: and that, relationally understood, is Jesus “true humanity.”

The ethical consequences of such a christology are manifold; for it at once denies us, as a paradigm of wholeness, a Christ-figure morally impeccable in his unique and lonely perfection, and it gives us a model of moral integrity achieved through an ongoing struggle towards depth and truth in all of his relationships.

I turn finally to the soteriological aspect of christology, under the sub-heading–

III. The Cross as God’s Act of Solidarity and Reconciliation

Lately something has puzzled and astonished me consciously that had been festering in my mind for many years: How did it happen that one particular theory of the atonement, the so-called Latin or Anselmic or substitutionary or satisfaction theory, came to dominate the entire Christian religion in its Western expression? It is amazing, surely, when every textbook of Christian systematics one can think of develops three or more (usually three) historic types of atonement theory, that people in the pews (and many in the pulpits!) assume that there is only one–to the point, as I have discovered of late, that some people are immensely relieved when they learn that there are other explanations of the cross, and that Anselm’s classic expression of the atonement in Cur Deus Homo? had its critics from the very start.

There is of course no doubt that the substitutionary theory has had a profound psychological appeal, and that certain biblical texts can be adduced to support it. The human anxiety of guilt is perennial.

But it is also, like everything else, historically conditioned. An atonement theology directed towards the assuaging of guilt before God is a powerful gospel–in contexts where God is immediately and almightily real; or where (as we may note more skeptically) a religion is still powerful enough to hold up before its host culture the image of a holy and righteous deity before whom none is worthy except through the appropriate cultic observations. As however Tillich demonstrated brilliantly in his most popular book (The Courage To Be), human anxiety does not always take the form of guilt and condemnation, dominantly. The earliest and (according to Gustav Aulen) Luther’s atonement theories were not addressed to the anxiety of guilt, but to that of (in Tillich’s terms) “fate and death.” Personally I am convinced that, while both guilt and fate have obviously not left the human scene, Tillich was right in insisting that the dominant anxiety of the whole modern epoch is neither of these but that of “meaninglessness and despair.”

Why have we Christians failed to produce soteriologies that speak to the anxiety of our age in the way that Anselm and the Reformers spoke to theirs? Sometimes I think that the reason for this failure (besides the readiness of religions to foster theological conventions that precisely do not speak to their contexts!) is because of our great hesitancy to enter into the anxiety that shapes our own epoch: for the anxiety of meaninglessness and despair, however it may be named, is the most debilitating of all. As Kierkegaard insisted, it is the “sickness unto death” that cannot be specified as to cause or character.

Yet we must enter this darkness. For any convincing expression of “salvation” has to be forged on the anvil of the peculiar damnation that is its negative backdrop. If for guilt one wants to offer forgiveness, one has to become consciously and articulately guilty with the guilty. If for death and destiny one wants to offer liberation, one has to enter the dark realms of mortality and oppression. And if for meaninglessness and despair one wants to offer a gospel of purpose and hope, one has to experience–in one’s person, and in the corporate person of the church–the “sickness unto death.”

In the churches we have almost palpably shied away from any such venture; indeed, we have offered the church as sanctuary from the cold winds of late 20th Century despair and the loss of purpose that informs nearly every creative work of art and parades itself visibly in the arena of politics. Until we become courageous enough to go with our contemporaries (and especially the most victimized of our contemporaries) into the dark night of the eclipse of meaning, we shall not have a gospel that speaks to the real situation of our time and place.

Certainly fundamental changes would be required of the churches if they were to do this: we would have to put truth before comfort; we would have to listen to the losers, the jobless, the homeless, the unsuccessful, the ostracized; we would have to leave the sanctuary and enter the marketplace, and learn through participation how to contemplate the human condition as Jesus did: with compassion.

In connection with this assignment, I read again (rather carefully) the New Testament. Theologians should do this from time to time. It is really quite surprising how often the word “compassion” appears as the primary response of Jesus to human situations, both personal and collective. Considering such texts (and much else) over the past months, I have found myself wondering: has not the Christian religion put far too much emphasis on sin, and far too little on finitude, mortality, creaturehood? Well, I am a Protestant! I believe in my heart that sin is a splendid concept, full of wisdom– and, when it is understood biblically, that is, relationally, that is, as the abbrogation of relationship, it is itself, at bottom, a highly compassionate teaching. But sin has rarely been understood biblically, and the press that it still has today is so moralistic, so tied to guilt of the most privatistic nature (above all, to sex), and finally so bourgeois, that it is hardly helpful in the Christian apologetics of salvation in our social context.

Compassion is evoked in Jesus, and in those whom Jesus calls, not by the recognition of human guilt, though it is certainly true that we are guilty, we rich especially! But Jesus’ compassion arises in response to our finitude–that is, the strange admixture of possibility and impossibility that constitutes the being of the human. Out of the anxiety of creatures capable of such abysmal self-knowledge as we can and often do acquire, much evil and wickedness emerges. But until a faith shows that it understands the anxiety that is sin’s genesis, neither will it speak profoundly to the suffering that is sin’s consequence. As the gospels present him, Jesus conveys an astonishing empathy with the broken human beings whom he encounters; and it is only through this compassionate identification with their brokenness that he is able to become their healer. In this movement of the incarnate Logos towards ever greater participation in creatureliness, and especially in his own final brokenness at Golgotha, Jesus enacts–indeed, “fulfils”!–that “divine pathos” that Abraham Heschel declared to be the essence of the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic tradition. The cross is certainly a many-sided event and symbol, and contexts alter meanings; but in our context at least, I believe, it should be seen primarily, not as a divinely managed human sacrifice to a righteously wrathful God but as God’s own solidarity with the creature and the decisive statement of One who would be “with us” unreservedly.

What a difference is made in the whole realm of sexual ethics (to mention only one consequence of such an imago Christi), if human sexuality is regarded under the perspective of our finitude rather than that of sin and guilt–at least as these are regularly conceived. What a piece of work is man, is woman, who must combine the noblest sentiments of existence, included other-directed love, with the hard realities of self-preservation and concupiscence, and do so with some measure of dignity and grace! Seen from the vantage-point of our extraordinary kind of creaturehood, sex can neither be glorified and romanticized nor despised and demonized. It is an integral aspect of our creatureliness, and its problematic, as with every other dimension of our “finite freedom in anxious self-awareness” (Tillich), should elicit foremost in the disciples of Christ compassion: com-passion, Mitleid–that is, the with-suffering of those who share, and recognize that they share, the same possibilities and ambiguities as they find in others, albeit perhaps in different configurations. What could it mean for the struggle over sexual orientation and ordination that is going on in all of our denominations if we began, not from some culturally inherited moral code, but from the thought-filled recognition of our discipleship of the compassionate Christ?

This is of course part of a larger issue, which could be called the tragic dimension of the human condition. In her book, Tragic Dimension and Divine Compassion(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), Wendy Farley argued that Christians have not addressed profoundly the reality of the tragic. I concur–and I add: particularly North American Christians, who have been so uncritically carried off by our culture’s veneration of alleged “freedom.” There is a necessary dimension of the tragic in our creaturehood (yes, I think it is a necessary dimension), because any kind of freedom or victory of the good without it would be shallow and unworthy of both God and humanity as they are viewed in Scripture. And surely, at bottom, it has always been the Judeo-Christian recognition of our finitude, and of the compassion that is evoked by its tragic dimension in the very heart of our Maker, that has constituted the basic appeal of this faith–even when, at the official doctrinal level, it has been overshadowed by the sterner dogma of God’s holy wrath in the face of human distortedness.

I want to close on that note, with the recitation of one of the most touching literary illustrations of that appeal known to me. In his A History of the English Church and People, the Venerable Bede, describing the council held by King Edwin in 627 to decide whether Christianity should be adopted in the land, has one of the king’s chief counsellors address the assembly in the following manner:

Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it. (Trans. by Leo Sherley-Price and revised by R.E. Latham; Penguin Books, 1955; p. 127.)

This, to my mind, not only represents very movingly the anthropological presupposition of all authentic soteriology, but exemplifies the apologetic stance for which we must aim in our proclamation of “gospel” in our time and place.