The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.
The identity of Jesus of Nazareth is an issue of continuing interest and controversy, both within and without Christianity. As NT Wright puts it: “who was Jesus?” and “so what?” - these remain challenging questions to answer. In the contemporary context of pluralism, traditional Christology comes under particular assault because of the scandalous suggestion that he might be so related to the God of the universe at the level of being that he represents the only real opportunity of knowing the true God. How can he have been genuinely God and genuinely human at the same time without either of these descriptions being compromised in one way or another? Can we say with Paul “God was in Christ”; and what might we mean by it?
The problem is twofold. Firstly, the human, historical Jesus has been the subject of frenetic scholarly argument over two centuries. It remains a real question to challenge us: what can we know, if anything, of Jesus’ earthly life, and how should we understand his mission? Some have decided, given the plethora of reconstructions of the life of Jesus, that there is no way to access the real Jesus, no knowing the truth about his human life. Albert Schweitzer wrote in 1906, after reviewing a century of scholarship that the best we could hope for in Jesus is a subjectively experience of one unknown:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the task which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
A.Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, p.401
Rudolph Bultmann wrote in 1926:
I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus…
R.Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, p.8
Secondly, there is a philosophical problem: if we start, as most modern theology has done, with what we know of the human Jesus, how can we begin to speak meaningfully of the eternal Christ, the Son of God? The problem runs the other way, as well: if we start with statements about the eternal or transcendent, how can we proceed to connect those to the temporal and immanent? Since the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the late 18th Century, this issue has deeply vexed theologians.
5 comments:
Jesus was Yahweh...Phillipians 2:11. Yahweh was the Son of God. Jesus was the Son of God.
I myself find Pannenberg's "from below" approach very helpful. Even though Pannenberg's own argument is dubious at some important points, I reckon his Jesus--God and Man is still the best and most impressive modern christology.
Perhaps a better approach would be Christology "from within" (is it your father who talks about this?). We don't start from the position that Jesus was man or God (which has its own problems, e.g., which god?) but we understand Jesus in terms of the fulfilment of OT promise, in which we are inescapably pointed to one who is both divine and human, Yahweh who has come to rescue his people yet nevertheless at the same time one who is human, one descended from David, for example, one who is the representative and substitute for human beings and a second or last Adam, the head of a new humanity.
I don't know if my old man talks like this but it does resemble Karl Barth somewhat!
Ben:
"…rising from the historical man Jesus to the recognition of his divinity, is concerned first of all with Jesus’s message and fate and arrives only at the end at the concept of the incarnation."
W. Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man, 1969, p. 33
Pannenberg’s agenda is to give a reliable and universally accessible basis for theological formulation. He says “the method of a Christology from above is closed to us…our starting point must lie in the question about the man Jesus; only in this way can we ask about his divinity.” The truthfulness of Christian doctrine is not established on some secret criteria but by appeal to data that all can access and understand. The divinity of Jesus is not something we should presuppose but rather it must be argued for and given rational support; which can only be done by starting at the level of the accessible data, namely the time and space dimensions of Jesus’ identity.
How does he propose to move from the finite to the infinite? He wants to seek an event in Jesus story that is both a possible subject of historical investigation and carries with it a theological significance. The obvious candidate is the resurrection, of course; and Pannenberg makes this the lynchpin of his Christology
Was there more to come on Pannenberg? Sounds like you were getting ready for the killer-punch or something.
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