The Man for Others

The doctrine of the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ is on any account central to the entire Christian message and crucial therefore for any reinterpretation of it. It is also the point where resistance to reinterpretation is likely to be at its maximum and where orthodoxy has its heaviest investment in traditional categories. This is true both at the level of technical theology, where any restatement must run the gauntlet of the Chalcedonian Definition and the Athanasian Creed, and at the popular level, where one will quickly be accused of destroying the Christmas story.

Traditional Christology has worked with a frankly supranaturalist scheme. Popular religion has expressed this mythologically, professional theology metaphysically.

The orthodox 'answer' to the 'God-Man' problem, as forumulated in the Definition of Chalcedon, is within its own terms unexceptional - except that properly speaking it is not a solution but a statement of the problem. But as a correct statement, as a 'signpost against all heresies', it had - and has - an irreplaceable value. 'The Christological dogma saved the Church', says Tillich, 'but with very inadequate conceptual tools'.

Popular supranaturalistic Christology has always been dominantly docetic. That is to say, Christ only appeared to be a man or looked like a man. The commonest vision of Jesus was not as a human being at all. He was a God in human form, full of supranatural knowledge and miraculous power, very much like the Olympian gods were supposed to be when they visited the earth in disguise. The supranaturalist view of the Incarnation can never really rid itself of the idea of the prince who appears in the guise of a beggar.

Myth has its place. It is there to indicate the significance of the events, the divine depth of the history.

"And what God was, the Word was". In other words, if one looked at Jesus, one saw God - for 'he who seen me, has seen the Father'. He was the complete expression, the Word, of God. Through him, as through no one else, God spoke and God acted: when one met him one was met - and saved and judged - by God. And it was to this conviction that the Apostles bore their witness. In this man, in his life, death and resurrection they had experienced God at work; and in the language of their day they confessed, like the centurion on the cross, "Truly this man was the Son of God". Here was more than just a man: here was a window into God at work. For 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself'.

There is a paradox running through all the Gospels that Jesus makes no claims for himself in his own right and at the same time makes the most tremendous claims about what God doing through him and uniquely through him. Men's response to him is men's response to God: men's rejection of him is men's rejection of God. And the fourth Gospel merely highlights this paradox when it combines the saying that 'the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing' with the uncompromising assertion, 'No one comes to the Father, but by me'. Jesus never claims to be God, personnally: yet he always claims to bring God, completely.