Jesus is Not Christ Without Us
Jesus is Not Christ Without Us
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)
Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)
The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)
This entry is from St Symeon' the New Theologian’s First Ethical Discourse. For an introduction to St Symeon and his work, see this lecture by ++Alexander.
If it is true that the saints become genuinely the members of Christ Who is God of all, and if, as we said, they have as their duty remaining attached and united to His body so that He may be their Head and they—all the saints from the beginning of the world until the Last Day—may be His members, and the many become one body of Christ, as it were a single Man, then it follows that some, for example, fulfill the role of His hands, working even now to accomplish His all-holy will, making worthy the unworthy and preserving them for Him. Others are the shoulders, bearing the burdens of others, or even carrying the lost sheep whom they find wandering in the crags and wild places abandoned by God. These, too, accomplish His will. Others fulfill the role of the breast, pouring out God's righteousness to those who hunger and thirst for it, providing them with the bread which nourishes the powers of heaven. Others still are the belly. They embrace everyone with love. They carry the Spirit of salvation in their bowels and possess the capacity to bear His ineffable and hidden mysteries. Others, again, take the function of the thighs since they carry in themselves the fecundity of the concepts adequate to God of the mystical theology. They engender the Spirit of Wisdom upon the earth, i.e., the fruit of the Spirit and His seed in the hearts of men, through the word of their teaching. Finally, there who act as the legs and feet. These last reveal courage and endurance in temptations, after the manner of Job, and their stability in the good is in no way shaken or weakened. instead they bear up under the burden of the Spirit's gifts...
Do you see the depths of this mystery? Do you understand the infinite transcendence of super-abounding glory? Do you grasp that the mode of this union transcends our intelligence and our every concept?
O, brothers, the wonder! O, the inexpressible condescension of that love for us of God Who loves mankind! The union which He has by nature with the Father He promises that we may have with Him by grace, if we desire it, and that we may be in the same relation with respect to Him, if we keep His commandments.
O, fearful promise! that the glory which the Father gave the Son, the Son gives in turn even to us by divine grace. And yet more: that as He is in the Father, and the Father in Him, so, if we so will, the Son of God will be in us and we in Him by grace.
O, grace unsurpassed! that the love with which God the Father loved His only-begotten Son and our God, that the same love will be, He says, in us, and that He Himself, the Son of God, will be in us. And this follows naturally, for now He has become our kinsman in the flesh, and has rendered us co-participants in His divinity, and so has made us all His kinsmen.Above all, the divinity imparted to us through this communion cannot be broken down into parts, is indivisible, and thus all of us who partake of it in truth must necessarily and inseparably be one body with Christ in the one Spirit.
A few reflections:
I was taught (or at least I learned) to think of Jesus as one person among many. But that of course would mean my relation to him must exist in competition with my relation to everyone and everything else, and that simply cannot be true of him because it cannot be true of God. To put it bluntly, Jesus is not one more person in my life, not even the most important; he is my life—and yours (Col. 3:4).
In the same way, I was taught (or at least I learned) to think of the church as a loose collection of individuals (not persons, notice) gathered by shared beliefs, experiences, and goals. But St Symeon’s account makes so much more sense of what the Scriptures say, not least Jesus’ sayings, which led St Augustine to the realization of the Totus Christus: “What you do to the least of these, you do to me” and “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
St Symeon realizes that this mystery must be true (“this follows naturally”), given who Jesus is and what he has done. His thinking, then, is truly “biblical” precisely because it is so strictly Christological—and therefore cannot but lead to intoxicated praise, a besotted doxology. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose.”
Like Gregory of Nyssa, St Symeon thinks of the body of Christ as being composed of the total number of saints from beginning to end of history. That means Jesus is seen to be Christ no less in the Old than in the New Testament. And the same is true not only of the figures in Scripture but also of everyone in time, including pre- (and post-?) historic humans.
The promise of the Gospel is actually overwhelming, too much to take in. If speaking it does not drive us to poetry, and does not finally leave us speechless, it’s not the Gospel we’re thinking of.
That said, it’s worth asking why what we say of the Gospel so often stops short of anything even remotely scandalous, must less actually inexpressible and overwhelming.