The recent discussion about the divinity of Jesus has been fascinating and has generated some powerful insights. For the most part, however, it has polarized between Theocrat’s view that Jesus is essentially a unique but human agent of God and Peter’s more orthodox argument that the historical Jesus was somehow both human and divine. The various points made are too many and too complex to address in detail, but I have some sympathy with Peter’s lament that this could go on interminably. Paul Chen is certainly right to suggest that an alternative approach needs to be found, and I wonder if he isn’t on the right track when he asks, ‘Why do we so badly have to decide which exact nature he is of?’
I can’t help feeling that we’re still encumbered with a rather ‘modern’ methodology that assumes that the various biblical texts must all somehow serve as evidence for a coherent, unitary theological position regarding the person of Christ. We suppose in effect that revelation is the translation of some sort of prior, pure, abstract truth about God into the complex categories of human thought and experience, and that the task of the theologian is simply to reverse that process: from the complexity of biblical discourse we attempt to recover the essential simplicity of theological truth. Truth has been encoded in the texts of scripture and needs to be decoded.
What I would suggest we need to do is begin to restructure this whole discussion around the simpler task of telling and illuminating the historical narrative and decentralize the programme of constructing a definitive systematic theology. The importance of narrative for the debate has been generally recognized (Peter refers to the ‘narrative of the presence of God’, for example). It seems to me, however, that we are still too quick to jump from narrative to doctrine: narrative simply provides us with a different type of data out of which we construct our grand theological theories. I think there are a number of ways in which taking narrative seriously and keeping it central to how we structure our belief system at all levels would change the shape of this debate.
1. A narrative theology encourages us to draw meaning from larger structures. We are still prone to taking arbitrary proof texts out of context and building a predetermined case around them. Larger narrative structures are much more resistant to being bent to fit some reductive and rationalizing theological schema; narrative naturally allows for a diversity of perspectives without having to arbitrate between them.
2. A narrative theology is informed not by a post-biblical belief system but by a community, which has to act and interpret its actions in the light of its theological tradition and of immediate experience. This has all sorts of implications. I would argue that for an emerging theology it is the existence of a covenant people that should have hermeneutical priority. There is a strong realist commitment in this: what we actually have is a historical community telling stories about itself over a period of time. Over time the story changes, the context in which it is told changes, the reasons for which it is told change. The community is not simply handing down from one generation to the next an immutable set of truths or doctrines. I have argued elsewhere that around the time of Jesus the ‘righteous’ in Israel were retelling Daniel’s story of the coming of the Son of man in order to account for their actual circumstances and sustain hope for the future. This narrative, I think, somehow has to be taken into account in our endeavours to speak biblically about the relation between Jesus and God - but it hardly fits comfortably into conventional christological categories.
3. Within a narrative framework it should be easier to maintain a sense of how the relation between Jesus and God must be understood dynamically and functionally, not merely staticly and ontologically. This point has been emphasized in the debate (I am inclined to agree with Theocrat in this matter), but I feel that there is still a tendency to assume that a proper christology must give priority to categories of being rather than categories of doing. I certainly think that if we are going to speak of the historical Jesus as ‘divine’, we need to understand this primarily in terms of his self-consciously acting the part of YHWH. ‘Acting’ is a complex notion: Jesus acts out prophetically, he acts as agent, he acts as God. He also, incidentally, acts the part of Israel under judgment. Would it then be appropriate to think of him not as God become man but as the one who acts out, in the various senses of the term, the eschatological drama of judgment, forgiveness and renewal?
4. The narrative throws up certain contingent insights into who Jesus was. Typically we attempt to rationalize those insights on the assumption that they are simply expressions of a universal truth: we drop the historical memory into the acid of theological analysis, which dissolves away all that is secondary and contingent, leaving pure revealed doctrine. I would suggest that a properly narrative (and postmodern) theology would retain a much stronger sense of the narrative integrity of the insight. So, for example, Thomas’ words ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28) are read not as an expression of a universal truth but as a particular confession of personal faith within a particular narrative context. This was how Thomas responded - or how John understood Thomas to have responded - to Jesus’ invitation to believe.
5. If we keep the narrative setting in view, we are more likely to draw contextually appropriate conclusions from the texts. It seems to me contextually inappropriate, for example, to base an argument about ontology on Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22:1. The psalm speaks of the God who will not abandon one who trusts in him: Jesus invokes it as an expression of hope that God will deliver or vindicate him. Stephen, on the point of martyrdom, prays to the Lord Jesus (Acts 7:59), but the narrative context is crucial. He prays to the one who has been revealed to him as the Son of man (7:56), the one who suffered at the hands of the enemies of the people of God and who has been exalted to the right hand of the father. It may not be so appropriate to pray to the Lord Jesus in that way outside the eschatological context.
So I think I’m arguing for two rather different things - first, to exercise a measure of theological restraint in reading the texts, allowing them to set contextual limits to the language that we use about Jesus; but secondly, to recognize that within the covenant community, within the body of Christ, the Spirit of God prompts (continues to prompt) a wide range of personal and corporate insights into the nature of the overlap of identity and purpose between Jesus and God.
A polemical narrative
This is a timely intervention, and to the need for exercising theological restraint could be added the need for exercising restraint in posting comments - at least, when applied to myself.
I want to suggest two qualifications in the appeal for a more narrative-based understanding of the biblical texts, which arise from what I see the NT texts in particular as pointing us towards:
1. That the texts are seeing in Jesus the fulfilment of the OT narrative in the broadest sense; this includes especially the story of Adam, and the story of the world which hovers behind Israel’s particular story. Israel’s vocation had always been to bring the blessing of Abraham to the entire world, and this found its multiple fulfilment in Jesus - his death/resurrection, ascension/outpoured Spirit.
2. That the NT texts have a polemical function: in maintaining God’s essential ‘oneness’, for instance, they do so in the light of paganism’s idolatry. And they assert that in Jesus, God is summoning the entire world to obedience to himself, through Jesus’s death/resurrection, ascension/outpoured Spirit. The use of story is a springboard to mission which addresses (and challenges) other ‘stories’.
I think it is helpful, and maybe essential, to bring a variety of critical lenses to bear on interpreting the bible. For instance, I personally think that it is valid to look at Thomas’s confession of Jesus and see it as more than Thomas (or John) making a confession solely relative to a particular context. I think the same might be said of Stephen’s dying prayer.
On a broader level, it’s not unreasonable to pick up the clues that Jesus himself was providing as to the purpose of his mission, which challenge us on a theological level. There needs to be some qualification of the idea that he was ‘acting out’ certain roles: this can lay itself open to the charge of ‘play-acting’, which does not ring true of Jesus’s consistent emphasis.
Along these lines, we might reasonably ask what the atoning sigificance of the death of Jesus (as provided in the clues he has given us) tells us about God. So for instance, if Jesus were simply a man, what would that tell us about a God who required a human blood sacrifice of an innocent victim? For me, I am left with no option than to consider theological formulations - and provided this is not the only way in which I approach interpretation, I do so without feeling the need for any postmodern hesitation.
Narrative and play-acting
This is an important observation. Your wide-ranging discussion with Theocrat never really touched on the question of to what extent the confession of Jesus as lord, saviour, god was influenced by the socially mandated confession of Caesar as lord, saviour, god. I suspect that this influence at least shows up in New Testament apocalyptic language and may well have left its mark more widely. For example, I wonder whether when Paul writes that Jesus ‘did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped’ (Phil. 2:6), he does not have in mind polemically the image of a blasphemous adversary, an anti-Christ, who aspires to the status of god. This is framed, though, in narrative terms: polemic only makes sense in a context of debate, confrontation, dialogue, as part of a story. I wouldn’t want to pretend that this is an absolute theological requirement but I do think it will help us to develop a more credible, useful, and indeed biblical christology if we keep this narrative, historical, polemical context firmly in view. This is the reason for my ‘postmodern hesitation’: ‘postmodernism’ has made me pause and wonder if there isn’t actually a better way of getting where we want to go.
Two points in response to that.
First, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to suggest that there was an element of ‘play-acting’ in what Jesus was doing: the entry into Jerusalem was a prophetic acting out of the return of YHWH to Zion, for example.
Secondly, I did not mean to imply that he was only play-acting. I made the point that ‘acting’ is a complex notion: ‘Jesus acts out prophetically, he acts as agent, he acts as God’. It’s not easy to separate out the different layers. When, for example, he pronounces words of forgiveness, the ‘act’ could probably be interpreted at all three levels: he acts out the forgiveness of YHWH prophetically or symbolically in anticipation of the forgiveness of Israel that is to come; he acts on behalf of YHWH, as an anointed agent; and in some sense YHWH acts in him, is revealed in him, is encountered as a god quite unlike the god of the Pharisees or the god of the Roman centurions. Again, though, this is a narrative christology.
Polemic narrative
The polemic thrust of the NT texts may influence the argument - but I’m sure it would be an oversimplification to say that ‘Lord’ was somehow primarily coined as a title of Jesus to provide a challenge and alternative to Caesar as ‘lord’. I’m thinking of all the echoes of ‘Lord’ in the Septuagint OT which fill out our understanding of Jesus as ‘Lord’, and point to the primary meaning. The contrast with Caesar as ‘Lord’ seems more like a fortuitous coincidence, and no doubt Paul exploited the double-meaning.
I liked your gloss on Philippians 2:6 (‘did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped’) as capturing and contrasting with the blasphemous intentions of the anti-Christ, possibly the Roman emperor. Isn’t the better meaning of ‘grasped’ something like ‘exploited’ though? Which would rather more strongly suggest the divine role of Jesus as the primary meaning.
Contemporary narratives
Philippians 2:6 and other New Testament texts could also be in dialogue with texts such as one of the Nag Hammadi texts in which the Monad extrudes Sophia, who in turn to be like the Monad makes a god who creates the world and whom the Jews worship.
Luke has Jesus saying to Paul on the road to Damascus, “It hurts you to kick against the goads,” a well-known quotation from Euripides’ Bacchae, in which a new god from the East advances on Greece where he and his followers are persecuted but ultimately prevail.
So the New Testament narrative(s) may be read in light, not only of existing Hebrew narratives, but of existing hellenstic narratives.
Where does the rubber hit the road?
Perhaps evangelical theologians have tried too hard to hammer out a precise definition of who Jesus is. They try to formulate a rigid definition which (they hope) encapsulates the truth in a nutshell. But this approach is doomed to fail because of the limitations of human language. But I’m not convinced the narrative approach is a better alternative.
Unless we enjoy mental gymnastics for their own sake, the main purpose of our theology should be to guide our behaviour … towards God and towards our fellow man. After all our cogitations and discussions have ended, each one of us is left with the question of whether we should behave towards Jesus as though he were God or not.
To do so if it is improper would be to break the first commandment - Exodus 20:3. But to fail to do so if it is proper could be just as disastrous - John 5:23 and John 8:24.
In the end, our high-faluting discussions boil down to this very practical question of whether we should treat Jesus as God. I think this is where the rubber hits the road for the man in the pew who struggles to understand perichoresis and homoi-ousios/homo-ousios.
Seizing equality with God
I’m sure you are right about the provenance of the title ‘lord’ for Jesus. Part of the problem here is that we have very little direct evidence for how Paul interpreted and responded to the language of paganism.
The verb harpazÅ and related terms seem mostly to be used in the LXX in the sense of ‘seizing violently’ - there are numerous references to lions ‘seizing’ their prey; it is also used for robbery, theft, plunder. Gordon Fee in his commentary thinks it cannot have this sense here, but if we think of it as a word that actually describes the hubris and blasphemy of Caesar rather than something that Jesus might really have done, I don’t see that there is a problem.
Seizing - grasping - robbery - exploiting
Yes OK, but you seem to have jumped in Philippians 2:6 to seeing Caesar not Jesus as its primary referent.
I really need a break from this site; could people not post anything provocative for a few days so I can begin a painless detox?
P.S. I guess since ‘violently seize hold of’ is an unlikely association with Jesus’s view of his rights as co-equal with God, the word ‘exploit’ (or ‘take advantage of’/Wright) might have seemed a better interpretation. Or maybe the idea is that if Jesus had not been prepared to give up his rights, he would have merited the criticism which ‘grasp’, or ‘seize hold of’ conveys, and would have demonstrated the abuse of power, or lack of servant heart and self-denial which lie at the heart of an anti-christ attitude to power. That Jesus acted the way he did was consistent with the self-denying love which had always been at the heart of the trinity, and became its supreme expression.
I don't think so
I don’t think so. Jesus is the primary referent, but he is portrayed as the one who does not do what Caesar has done, which is violently, arrogantly, to seize equality with God.
I agree with your later statement:
Perhaps a few people could pray for Peter…
harpazÅ
I do not think there is a problem translating harpazÅ as ‘seizing violently’ or ‘grasping for something you don’t already possess’ if the word equality in the same verse is understood not as ‘ontological equality’ but rather as equality of kudos, reputation, and prestige. In other words, Jesus did not strive for the adoration & glory that would have been his if he had remained permanently in heaven.