stretch and challenge
Approaches to Christ
Peter Manning continues his investigation into approaches to understanding the person of Christ
With controversy about how the Church was to understand Jesus as the saviour ongoing, a Church council was called in 451 CE at Chalcedon. The council affirmed the Nicene Creed as true Church teaching, and formally rejected both Nestorianism and Eutychianism.
But in producing its own statement of faith, old theological divisions within the Church persisted. At the heart of the creed lay a commitment to proclaim that Jesus was both fully God and fully human, two natures (divine and human) in the one person. However, a difference in theological emphasis had come to exist in the two main teaching centres of the Church and many of the heresies that the creed sought to exclude were by theologians taking ideas in these schools of thought to their extremes. For example:
■ At Antioch the humanity of Jesus was stressed even while his divinity was recognised. The Jesus of Antioch could identify with us because he was fully human, yet he could also save us because of his divinity. Thus Antioch focused on the duality of the two natures.
■ In contrast to this the Alexandrian school focused on the divine nature of Jesus as of the utmost importance alongside a stress on the unity of his personhood.
Language
In using language to try and make sense of Jesus as God incarnate, made flesh, the theologians borrowed the mainly Greek philosophical language of their time and attempted to make that language carry meanings not originally intended. Such a situation created much confusion and misunderstanding, especially when translated to other languages.
Language reaches its limit when focusing on the mystery of the incarnation and the development of new understandings. In such an environment the Chalcedonian Creed attempted to define Christ by excluding through its positive statements all the heresies of the previous years. In this way it drew a doctrinal box around the mystery that is God in Jesus.
Unfortunately, in its emphasis on two natures the leaders of the churches that would break away to form what we now call the Oriental Orthodox Church saw the continued threat of Nestorianism and refused to sign up to the creed. In contrast, the leaders of the churches that signed up to the Chalcedonian Creed saw in its rejection by the Oriental Orthodox Church a continued persistence of the monophysite view expressly rejected by the creed.
The Oriental Orthodox Church, including the Coptics, have often been misunderstood as monophysite for rejecting the Chalcedonian Creed when in fact they would use the word miaphysite to distance themselves from that position. The term miaphysite is perhaps best understood as emphasising the unity of Christ as one person with two natures but in a way that the Oriental Orthodox Church feels avoids any hint of Nestorianism.
Christ in a post-Kantian world
It is perhaps not surprising in a less than perfect world that the Christian community failed to use reason to reach an agreed understanding of Jesus as God. What is more, during the Enlightenment the philosopher Kant (1724–1804) revolutionised the way we think about reason. He argued that we come to know the world through our own humanity and the way human minds perceive the world. He called this the world as we know it, the phenomenal world. In contrast to this is the world as it actually is, the noumenal world, that we can never know.
If Kant is right about our inability to know the true nature of reality, how could God successfully make himself known to us through the incarnation of Jesus into the world? We have a problem of knowledge that seems unbridgeable. If God cannot make himself known to the world due to the limits of human reason, how does that impact on Christology (the debates about Jesus’ identity we have investigated in this article). This problem is especially poignant for Christian theology, as it is in the incarnation that the Christian religion sees the definitive breaking into human history of God. God reveals, makes known, himself to humanity through acting in history as the Christ.
A leap of faith
One way to respond is to say that we can know nothing beyond our own individual experience and how we interpret things. The Danish theologian Kierkegaard (1813– 55) responded to the challenge of Kant by calling for a leap of faith beyond the constraints of reason. Knowledge cannot embrace God but faith can.
A non-realist approach
However, many in the modern world have declined to follow Kierkegaard. Instead, in the shadow of Kant a more sceptical and relativistic attitude to knowledge has prevailed. Down this path, living as a Christian can become a form of life that is acted out to give life focus and meaning. The Christological beliefs only matter in as much as they enable us to live the life of a Christian in the here and now. Whether or not anything about Christianity connects with the noumenal world becomes irrelevant. This is a non-realist approach to faith and life.
Relationality
Another approach rejects the Kantian splitting of reality between the noumenal and phenomenal world by arguing that the most basic category for understanding reality is relationality. Everything from the subatomic particle to weather systems and human communities are forged by relationships with the things that surround them. From such relationships things gain their substance and effect changes in their nature. The world exists and we as humans have evolved to relate to it.
In living in the world we come to understand key aspects of it because of the act of relating to the reality that we are embodied within. By acting in the world we better come to know it. Science has been so successful because it engages with the world. It has achieved more than 2,000 years of philosophical ruminations while sitting in a chair could ever do.
Through language we attempt to produce models which mentally represent the relationships we experience when we act in the world. Such models may be more or less successful in helping us to relate to the world with more understanding. Rather than cutting us off from the real world, language and reason are embedded in our engagement with the rhythms of a dynamic, relational reality.
This is the pathway to a realist approach to knowledge, faith and life. From such a perspective the Christological formulations of the early Church still have significance as statements of belief about the possible nature of reality. But why is that?
Worship of Christ in the Church
Despite disunity and Church schism, one essential fact stands out when looking at the Oriental Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church and the many Protestant Churches. They all give worship to Jesus as saviour. Although the particularities of statements of faith may vary and specific forms of worship differ, the central act of relating remains the same. The Church in its various forms claims that it is through the relational act of worship that the reality of God is known.
Monotheists
Through the doctrinal contortions of the early Church we see a community struggling to get reason to make sense of what its community feels compelled to do — worship Jesus as God — even though they are monotheists. Monotheists believe in one eternal creator, God alone. Reason struggles to catch up with the act of worship because relating is the primary category of reality.
The New Testament Church felt that, despite its monotheism, it could do no other than worship Jesus. What this meant for beliefs was left for future generations to try and make sense of. The creeds mark the engagement of reason with the consequences of this action. It is faith seeking understanding, to borrow a phrase from the medieval theologian Anselm (1033– 1109). The Christian community succeeded, despite disunity through oversensitivity to what each group most feared, in mapping out an essential area of agreement through the creeds that enables the Churches to seek closer links today through the ecumenical movement.
The resurrection as historical experience
Without the resurrection claim arguably there would be no Christianity, as Jesus would have died either as a false Jewish Messiah or a misunderstood social and religious reformer. The significance of this event to the historical emergence of Christianity as a movement cannot be overstated. In his book The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993, Penguin), E. P. Sanders considers the New Testament witness to the resurrection. He sees the resurrection as not belonging to the historical life of Jesus but to ‘the aftermath of his life’. He notes that the Gospels and the writings of the Apostle Paul fail to provide an agreed account of the resurrection appearances.
Faced with divergent sources it becomes impossible to reconstruct what really happened. The New Testament writers deny the idea that they saw a ghost or that Jesus was a resuscitated corpse. Paul claims that Jesus’ resurrected body had been transformed to a ‘spiritual body’. The resurrected Jesus who Luke describes has a body and can eat but is also different. People did not always recognise him at first and Jesus appeared and disappeared while in plain view.
E. P. Sanders concludes by stating that it is undeniable that the followers of Jesus had resurrection experiences. Divergent accounts are what you would expect in a true historical record as people focus on their own different points of interest. The willingness of the first Christians to die for their beliefs bears witness to the hold the experience of resurrection had over their lives. However, what those experiences were remains the mystery of faith that the Church continues to bear witness to through its worship of Jesus as risen Lord.