But the Christian affirmation is not simply that love ought to be the last word about life, but that, despite all appearances, it is...It is frankly incredible unless the love revealed in Jesus is indeed the nature of ultimate reality, unless he is a window through the surface of things into God. Christianity stands or falls by revelation, by Christ as the disclosure of the final truth not merely about human nature but about all nature and all reality. The Christian's faith cannot rest in the capacities of man. The Christian's faith is in Christ as the revelation, the laying bare, of the very heart and and being of ultimate reality.
Our impasse is primarily an intellectual one: 'It does not immediately or directly affect Christian faith or Christian worship or the conduct of the Christian life. God is still at work. The old formulas continue to be used: they serve in worship, the comprise pictorial imagery useful for meditation, and they mark the continuity of our faith and devotion with that of our Christian ancestors. They preserve what may be meaningless to one generation but meaningful to the next. Our search is fides quaerens intellectum: and so long as they search can and does continue, the insufficiency of our theology need not affect Christian faith or conduct or worship'.
Without the constant discipline of theological thought, asking what we really mean by the symbols, purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God with ourselves and the world, the Church can quickly become obscurantist and its faith and conduct and worship increasingly formal and hollow.
That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant to the world. I would see much more hope for the Church if it was organized not to defend the interests of religion against the inroads of the state but to equip Christians by the quality and power of its community life, to enter with their 'secret discipline' into all the exhilarating, and dangerous, secular strivings of our day, there to follow and to find the workings of God.
For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.
'There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity fo mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted'. Herbert Butterfield.
The basic commitment to Christ may have been in the past-and may be for most of us still-buttressed and fortified by many lesser commitments-to a particular projection of God, a particular 'myth' fo the Incarnation, a particular code of morals, a particular pattern of religion. Without the buttresses it may look as if all would collapse. Nevertheless, we must beware of clinging to the buttresses instead of to Christ. And still more must we beware of insisting on the buttresses as the way to Christ. For to growing numbers in our generation they are barriers rather than supports.
Showing posts with label Christology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christology. Show all posts
Monday, March 11, 2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Man for Others (contd)
It is only on the Cross that Jesus can be the bearer of the final revelation and the embodiment of God's decisive act: it is 'Christ crucified' who is 'the power of God and the wisdom of God'. For it is in this ultimate surrender of self, in love 'to uttermost', that Jesus is so completely united in the Ground of his being that he can say, 'I and the Father are one...The Father is in me and I am in the Father'.
Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God.
Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being. And this 'life for others, through participation in the Being of God', is transcendence.
In the man Christ Jesus stands revealed, exposed at the surface level of 'flesh', the depth and ground of all our being as Love.
The whole schema of a supranatural Being coming down from heaven to 'save' mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man 'come of age', who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life...We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged.
It is this union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being - what Paul Althaus once described as 'inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God' - that we mean by hell. But equally it is the union-in-love with the Ground of our being, such as we see in Jesus Christ, that is the meaning of heaven. And it is the offer of that life, in all its divine depth, to overcome the estrangement and alienation of existence as we know it that the New Testament speaks of as the 'new creation'.
Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God.
Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being. And this 'life for others, through participation in the Being of God', is transcendence.
In the man Christ Jesus stands revealed, exposed at the surface level of 'flesh', the depth and ground of all our being as Love.
The whole schema of a supranatural Being coming down from heaven to 'save' mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man 'come of age', who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life...We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged.
It is this union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being - what Paul Althaus once described as 'inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God' - that we mean by hell. But equally it is the union-in-love with the Ground of our being, such as we see in Jesus Christ, that is the meaning of heaven. And it is the offer of that life, in all its divine depth, to overcome the estrangement and alienation of existence as we know it that the New Testament speaks of as the 'new creation'.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
New Being
Jesus is the full embodiment of the New Being. That is the reason that He can say words which no prophet or saint ever said: that nobody knows God save Him and those who receive their knowledge through Him. These words certainly do not mean that He imposes a new theology or a new religious law upon us. They mean rather that He is the New Being in which everybody can participate, because it is universal and omnipresent. Why can He call Himself meek and lowly in heart after He has said words about His uniqueness, words that, in anyone else's mouth, would be blasphemous arrogance? It is because the New Being that forms Him is not created by Him. He is created by it. It has found Him, as it must find us. And since His Being is not the result of His striving and laboring, and since it is not servitude to the religious law but rather victory over religion and law that makes His uniqueness, He does not impose religion and law, burdens and yokes, upon men.
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