Christ is Not a Principle
Christ is Not a Principle
God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology
God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology
God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)
He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)
God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)
He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)
Continuing the trend of alternating ancient and modern theologians, today’s selection is from Christos Yannaras’ Elements of Faith, pp. 91-92:
In the Third, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils, over four full centuries, the Church struggled to save the truth of the incarnation of God from its falsification by an intellectual schema and axiomatic “principle.” The “Christ” of the heresies was an ethical example of a perfect man or an abstract idea of a fleshless God. In neither case is the life of men changed in any essential respect, the living body of man remains condemned to dissolve in the ground and the individual or collective "improvements" of human life are a farce, an absurdity, or bare deception.
The Church did not struggle for four full centuries over an abstract metaphysic or to safeguard an ethical example. She did not even struggle for the “soul” of man; she wrestled to save his body. Can the body of man, the flesh and not only the soul, be united with God “without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation”? Can human nature constitute a single event of life together with the divine nature? If yes, then death does not exist. Then, the body is sown in the ground like wheat in order to bear fruit a hundred times over and man can realize the fulness of life.
She wrestled for four centuries to save the body of man from the absurdity of death, and to declare that the humble stuff of the world, the flesh of the earth and of man, has the possibility of being united with the divine life and the corruptible to be clothed in incorruptibility. It was a struggle and a contest so that our conventional everyday language would be able to signify the dynamics of life revealed by the flesh of the Word. Along with language there are the exercise of the artist to speak the same truth with a brush, not figuratively or symbolically, but impressing on the drawing and in the color the rendering incorruptible and the glory of human flesh; and the artistic song of the architect who “rationalizes” stone and clay and in whose building what cannot be contained is contained, the fleshless is made flesh, and the whole creation and the beauty of creation is justified; and the hymn of the poet and the melody of the composer, an art which subordinates the feelings instead of being subordinated to them, revealing in this submission the secret of life which conquers death.
A few reflections:
Yannaras is a controversial figure, and not an easy read (to say the least). But the point made here should be clear to all: we must be able to say, without embarrassment or qualification, that Jesus of Nazareth, the one Mary carried in her womb, the one Herod mocked and Pilate had tortured and crucified, is God—divine exactly as the Father and Spirit are. To say anything else is to make the Gospel unintelligible and unbelievable.
Those of us shaped in or near the predominate forms of American Evangelicalism have a very difficult time grasping what “orthodoxy” means. This is so for a myriad of reasons, of course, including the fact that we have been kept from even a rudimentary awareness of and appreciation for the development of doctrine. Cardinal Newman was right: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” Or at least it’s to cease to be the kind of Protestant most of us have been told we must be.
It’s worth remembering that “heresy” is not simply another word for false teaching. A heretic is someone more devoted to his own understanding of a doctrine than he is to his neighbors’ good, which leads, inevitably, to schism—even if the heretic insists on calling it reform. It is also worth remembering that much of what passes for “orthodoxy” in many circles is simply what is most typical or common in the conventional expression of Christianity at a certain time/place, expressions which irrespective of whether they are more or less “conservative” are always essentially compromised, intellectually and imaginatively as well as morally and spiritually. To put it sharply, conventional Christianity is what the Spirit must save us and our neighbors from—and that depends on being faithfully traditional.
“Orthodoxy,” as Rowan Williams has put it, is about “being in right relationship with the tradition, with the community, with God’s own act of revelation… a fitting response to the gift we've been given.” Yannaras reminds us how hard it was in fact to find language anything like appropriate to the event of the Gospel. It was hard not only because of the uniqueness of the Incarnation, but also because people then, as now, struggled to let go of their preconceived notions of what is and is not possible for God.
If you want a contemporary example of having unwittingly reduced Christ to a moral exemplar or abstract principle, consider this rubric for prayer at Communion (from the denomination I grew up in and around):
“Lord Jesus, we observe this sacrament in remembrance of You. This
bread reminds us of Your bodily example upon this earth. We believe
Your life is to be a constant example for our lives. This juice is
symbolic of Your blood shed for our sins. We thank You for dying in
our stead. We now bless these elements to the nourishment of our
spiritual bodies in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy
Ghost.”Compare that with the prayer it replaced:
“Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we praise Thee for the great love
expressed in the gift of Thy blessed Son, who suffered death on the
Cross for our redemption, and made there a full and sufficient
sacrifice and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, and did
institute this blessed sacrament to be a perpetual memorial of His
precious death till He comes again. We pray Thee that Thou wilt grant
that we who receive these Thy creatures of bread and wine, emblems
of His broken body and shed blood, in remembrance of His death and
passion, may be partakers of His nature by faith in His precious blood,
who in the same night that He was betrayed took bread, and when He
had given thanks brake it and gave it to His disciples, saying, ‘Take eat:
this is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’
Likewise after supper He took the cup, and when He had given thanks,
He gave it to them, saying, 'Drink ye all of this: for this is my blood of
the New Testament, which is shed for you, and for many, for the
remission of sins. Do this as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of
me.’ Amen.” Having made that comparison, ask what could have motivated such a change and what difference the change might make to worship, catechesis, and discipleship, to say nothing of ecumenical and inter-religious dialog. Consider too how what we think is possible and necessary to say about the sacraments reveals (or exposes) what we think can and must be said about Jesus. Memorialism, of the kind illustrated in the example above, testifies to the conviction that Jesus is now absent, having been replaced by the Spirit. Why might someone think he must be replaced? How can such thinking be saved?
As Yannaras point outs, not coincidentally, the artist is also a theologian—and often capable of bearing witness to the mystery of resurrection in ways the professional theologian, bound to the rules of the academy or the denomination, cannot.
Beautiful prayer for The Sacraments