Essential Christology: What Every Christian Should Know About their Lord and Savior

St Paul, in proclaiming the Resurrection, does not worry about presenting an organic doctrinal exposition he does not wish to write what would effectively be a theological handbook but he approaches the theme by replying to doubts and concrete questions asked of him by the faithful; an unprepared discourse, then, but one full of faith and theological experience. We find here a concentration of the essential: Above all else the fact of the Resurrection emerges, without which Christian life would be simply in vain.

On that Easter morning something extraordinary happened, something new, and at the same time very concrete, distinguished by very precise signs and recorded by numerous witnesses. For Paul, as for the other authors of the New Testament, the Resurrection is closely bound to the testimony of those who had direct experience of the Risen One. This means seeing and hearing, not only with the eyes or with the senses, but also with an interior light that assists the recognition of what the external senses attest as objective fact.

Paul gives, therefore, as do the four Gospels, primary importance to the theme of the appearances , which constitute a fundamental condition for belief in the Risen One who left the tomb empty. These two facts are important: In this way the links of that tradition were forged, which, through the testimony of the Apostles and the first disciples, was to reach successive generations until it came down to our own.

The first consequence, or the first way of expressing this testimony, is to preach the Resurrection of Christ as a synthesis of the Gospel proclamation and as the culminating point in the salvific itinerary. Paul does all this on many occasions: I should like to cite just one text: Paul, arrested in Jerusalem, stands accused before the Sanhedrin.

In this situation, where his life is at stake, he indicates what is the sense and content of all his preaching: This same phrase Paul continually repeats in his Letters cf. But we may wonder, what, for St Paul, is the deep meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus? What has he to say to us across these 2, years?

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Is the affirmation "Christ is risen" relevant to us today? Why is the Resurrection so important, both for him and for us? Paul gives a solemn answer to this question at the beginning of his Letter to the Romans, where he begins by referring to "the Gospel of God Paul knows well, and often says, that Jesus was always the Son of God, from the moment of his Incarnation. The novelty of the Resurrection, consists in the fact that Jesus, raised from the lowliness of his earthly existence, is constituted Son of God "in power".

Jesus, humiliated up to the moment of his death on the Cross, can now say to the Eleven, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" Mt The affirmation of Psalm 2: So, with the Resurrection begins the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ to all peoples the Kingdom of Christ begins, this new Kingdom that knows no power other than that of truth and love. The Resurrection thus reveals definitively the real identity and the extraordinary stature of the Crucified One.

An incomparable and towering dignity: For St Paul, the secret identity of Jesus is revealed even more in the mystery of the Resurrection than in the Incarnation. While the title of Christ , that is "Messiah"; "the Anointed", in St Paul tends to become the proper name of Jesus, and that of "the Lord " indicates his personal relationship with believers, now the title " Son of God " comes to illustrate the intimate relationship of Jesus with God, a relationship which is fully revealed in the Paschal event.

We can say, therefore, that Jesus rose again to be the Lord of the living and the dead, cf. All this bears important consequences for our lives as believers: For we know that Christ being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him" Rm 6: This means sharing in the suffering of Christ, which is a prelude to that full unity with him through the resurrection that we hope for.

The logic of the passage is that the Galatians must either learn to know the one true God in terms of Jesus and the Spirit or they will be in effect turning back to the principalities and powers to which they were formerly subject. Their choice is either incipient trinitarianism or a return to paganism. Within these passages, and others like them for instance, the remarkable Romans 8: Later Christian theologians, forgetting their Jewish roots, would of course read this as straightforwardly Nicene christology: Jesus was the second person of the Trinity.

Many have assumed that this is meant by the phrase in John and Hebrews, though that assumption should probably be challenged. These latter uses such as 2 Sam 7: It became another way of speaking about the one God present, personal, active, saving, and rescuing, while still being able to speak of the one God sovereign, creating, sustaining, sending, and remaining beyond. It was, in fact, another way of doing what neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism needed to do, and paganism in general could not do, but which Judaism offered a seemingly heaven-sent way of doing: Put back in context, though, it appears as what it is: Similar exegetical points could be made from other NT writings, not least the very Jewish book of Revelation.

But I have said enough to indicate, or at least point in the direction of, the remarkable phenomenon at the heart of earliest Christianity. It is as though they discovered Jesus within the Jewish monotheistic categories they already had. The categories seemed to have been made for him. They fitted him like a glove. It was the one and only Jesus himself. This raises in an acute form the question why they told the story the way they did. In the logic of this paper we now work backwards from what people said about Jesus a decade or three after his death and resurrection to what can be said about the human, earthly Jesus himself in his own time and even, dare we say, in his own mind.

At this point we need to ward off several frequent misunderstandings. And if we in the Church think we are immune from this, I would urge that we think again. Christians are alas, capable of all kinds of fantasies and anachronisms in reading the Gospels, and to pull the blanket of the canon over our heads and pretend that we are safe in our private, fideistic world is sheer self-delusion. It is demonstrably the case that where the Church has thought itself safe in its canonical world worshipping the ever-present ascended Jesus in prayer and the liturgy, it is capable of massive self-delusion and distortion.

It will not do, again, to sneer that historians always see the reflection of their own faces at the bottom of the well. Those who forswear historical Jesus study will find it impossible, ultimately, to escape seeing the reflection of their own faces in their dogmatic Christs. But if that is the negative reason for engaging in historical Jesus study, as a kind of necessary check on fantasy and idolatry, the positive reason is so important, so exciting, and in our generation so possible and accessible that I cannot begin to describe the frustration I experience when I find this enterprise caricatured, slighted, and dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Just because Muzak and hard rock exist, that is no reason not to write great music today. The existence of kitsch does not mean that there is no such thing as great contemporary art. The existence of the Jesus Seminar does not mean that historical study of Jesus is a waste of time. The positive reason for studying Jesus within his historical context and using all the tools at our disposal to do so has to do with that still-neglected factor, the meaning of Israel within the purpose of God. If we are to be biblical theologians, it simply will not do to tell the story of salvation as simply creation, fall, Jesus, salvation.

We desperately need to say: I believe it is because of this vacuum that people have elevated minor themes, such as the sinlessness of Jesus, to a prominence which, though not insignificant, they do not possess in the NT itself. This approach is unacceptable for the same reason the approach of Crossan and others is unacceptable: After all, it is precisely the cavil of the heterodox today that the Gospels themselves are the self-serving back-projections of a later, and perhaps corrupted, theology.

I fail to see why we should provide such people with more ammunition than they already have. At the human level, Jesus is like us precisely in this: Orthodox Christians are frightened of letting Jesus belong to a world like this, precisely because we know that if he is like us in belonging to such a world, he will he very unlike us in that his world is not our world. We are therefore, eager to flatten his world out or to declare, it of little relevance, because we want to be able to carry him, his message, and his timeless achievement of salvation across to our world without losing anything in the process.

In this eagerness we forget what the NT writers and above all Jesus himself never forgot: It is precisely because he is The Jew par excellence that he is relevant to all Gentiles as well as Jews. This is the ultimately humiliating move for Gentile and Jew alike, precipitating an epistemology of humiliation whereby all may know this Jesus as the living, saving word of God, as different from us in the way that makes him the same as us, as over against us and therefore relevant to us. This was the story, the warts-and-all story, that Jesus of Nazareth brought to its god-ordained climax.

If we want to know the truth of the salvation which he wrought, that is where we must look for it and not somewhere else. Otherwise, for all our impeccable orthodoxy, we might as well go back and shake hands with Rudolph Bultmann. As George Caird used to say, Christianity appeals to history, and to history it must go. What sort of a task is this, then? It is not simply a matter of apologetics, though I do believe that proper historical Jesus study has enormous apologetic value as we are able to say that, yes, the gospel records do make sense within the world of first century Judaism, despite what the Jesus Seminar and the mass-market paperbacks tell us.

Jesus and the Identity of God

Nor is this, taking up a point that Colin Gunton made, a matter of defending the Christian faith on grounds from outside of faith. The thin, truncated, Enlightenment version of historiography, the pseudo-objective would-be neutral and presuppositionless study of the bare facts of the past, is a parody of the real thing, and woe betide us if we allow the parodies to put us off the reality.

We are called to mission, including to the Enlightenment world, and we shall learn the truth as we learn how to declare it, how to give a reason to our contemporaries for the hope that is in us. This is the God given saving story of a muddled, often disobedient people who nevertheless carried within them the holy seed, the seed of promise.

Let me give you an illustration. I have a houseplant in my living room, which someone gave me some years ago. I watered it, dusted its leaves, and watched it grow for two or three years. It had pleasant but undramatic green leaves. After that time, suddenly and without warning, from the center of the plant there grew a flower, tall, red, and spectacular. Nothing in the plant had prepared me for this but there it was. That, after all, was what this plant had been all about. Apply that to history in general, and you may end up with Schleiermacher. Apply it to the story of Israel, and you get Jesus.

I do not think we will find that the true Jesus is significantly different from the Jesus of the Gospels as has now become literally a dogma in many critical circles , nor do I believe that we will know who the Jesus of the text of the Gospels actually was and is unless we go behind the text and find out what it actually means. You could almost say that this is not much more, basically than high-grade lexicography. Just as the Renaissance by its study of Greek enabled Erasmus and others to go behind the Vulgate and discover meanings in the NT which nobody had suspected and which proved quite revolutionary, so I believe that the explosion of study of Second Temple Judaism in our day enables us to go behind the received ways in which we have understood the words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters of the NT.

We are enabled to discover meanings in our beloved Gospels, and hence meanings in our beloved Jesus, which we had never suspected and which may again prove quite revolutionary.

At the heart of this enterprise stands the question what Jesus thought about his own mission and identity? Did he think he was going to die for the sins of the world? I cannot myself see that an orthodox christology or atonement theology can give a negative answer to either of those questions without running into serious difficulties. Can you really be God incarnate and have no idea of it?

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Unless we are prepared to address the question in those terms we are simply being Apollinarian, producing a Jesus with a human body but a divine mind. When we do so, we find that dozens and dozens of lines of inquiry converge to produce a well ordered, coherent, historically credible sense of vocation, emerging in central symbolic actions, hinted at in a hundred cryptic and teasing sayings. Jesus believed that in doing so he was not just pointing to or talking about, but was actually embodying, the return of YHWH to Zion. These, though striking and startling, emerge from the world of Second Temple Judaism like the flower growing suddenly out of the plant.

They were not expected, but upon inspection this is where they belonged. All the elements of the package were around somewhere in the culture. They are not, repeat not, a retrojection of later Christian theology, not even of later NT theology, which by and large developed in other legitimate ways. They are only credible, but they are totally credible, as the historically reconstructed mindset of Jesus himself. And they form, not the substance of later atonement and incarnational theology, but its historical starting point.

A couple of smaller points. It is often supposed that addressing this question involves psychoanalyzing Jesus. It involves doing what historians always do: Suppose one of the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus had been raised from the dead. People would have said the world was a very odd place; they would not have said that the brigand was therefore divine. No, the basic meaning of the resurrection, as Paul says in Romans l: In Jesus God had rescued Israel from her suffering and exile.

And then the final step, in Jesus God had done what, in the Bible, God had said he would do himself. Resurrection pointed to messiahship, messiahship to the task performed on the cross, and that task to the God who had promised to accomplish it himself. From there on it was a matter of rethinking, still very Jewishly, how these things could be. Does any of this train of thought go back to Jesus himself?

I have argued that it does. Having abandoned Jerusalem at the time of the exile, his return was delayed, but he would come back at last.

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He acted as though he thought the stories were coming true in what he himself was accomplishing. This is the context, at last, in which I think it best to approach the question with which this essay began. Jesus who wanders round with a faraway look, listening to the music of the angels, remembering the time when he was sitting up in heaven with the other members of Trinity, having angels bring him bananas on golden dishes.

I do not wish to caricature the caricatures: Equally, what passes for historical scholarship sometimes produces an equal and opposite caricature: As it stands, this invites another fairly obvious retort: But the question is still wrongly put. What we should be asking is: This is what, after all, the great Rabbi Akiba seems to have believed about bar-Kochba.

And Jesus seems to have believed it about himself. The language was deeply coded, but the symbolic action was not. He explained his action with riddles all pointing in the same direction. Recognize this, and you start to see it all over the place, especially in parables and actions whose other layers have preoccupied us. Why, after all, does Jesus tell a story about a yearning father in order to account for his own behavior? Even if they are allowed to stand as words and actions of Jesus, they remain cryptic.

But predicate them of the same young man who is then on his way to Jerusalem to confront the powers that be with the message and the action of the kingdom of God and who tells stories as he does which are best interpreted as stories of YHWH returning to Zion, then you have reached. Or suppose we approach the matter from another angle, vital and central but, remarkably enough frequently overlooked.

Jesus seems to have believed it was his vocation to upstage the one and outflank the other. Jesus acted and spoke as if he thought he were a one-man counter-temple movement. So, too, Judaism believed in a God who was not only high-and-mighty, but also compassionate and caring, tending his flock like a shepherd, gathering the lambs in his arms. Jesus used just that God-image, more than once, to explain his own actions. Judaism believed that her God would triumph over the powers of evil, within Israel as well as outside.

Jesus spoke of his own coming vindication, after his meeting the Beast in mortal combat. Jesus, too, used the language of the Father sending the Son. Approach the incarnation from this angle, and it is no category mistake, but the appropriate climax of creation. The Shekinah glory turns out to have a human face.

What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying.

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This Jesus is both thoroughly credible as a first century Jew and thoroughly comprehensible as the one to whom early, high, Jewish christology looked back. Two words by way of personal testimony are appropriate. First, the Jesus I have discovered through historical research is certainly not the reflection of my own face. I wish I looked more like him, but I am still struggling a lot with that. Nor is he the Jesus I expected or wanted to find when I began this work nearly twenty years ago. Studying Jesus has been the occasion for huge upheavals in my personal life, my spirituality, my theology, and my psyche.

The good news is that this has been a healing, though deeply challenging and often wounding, process. Second, the Jesus I have discovered is clearly of enormous relevance to the contemporary world and Church. I know that others with very different Jesuses would say this as well, so you may find the point irrelevant.

But, I continually get unsolicited letters from clergy and lay people around the world who tell me that reading what I have written about Jesus has revolutionized their ministries and their Christian discipleship. That does not mean that what I have written is all true; merely that it is not trivial or irrelevant for the life and mission of the Church.

Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breadth is not, as has often been suggested, a category mistake. Likewise, if you start with the New Age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels.

But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. Start with the Deist God, and your historical Jesus study will only achieve incarnational christology by sliding towards docetism.

Start with the real historical earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace. That, for me, is the theological significance of the earthly Jesus. The evidence for this is not good. The early Church did not make much use of these themes. There is, of course, some overlap, but also quite substantial discontinuity. This, ironically, may be why this latent christology has often gone unnoticed.

I see no reason why the contemporary Church should be reticent about this either. Using incarnational language about Jesus, and Trinitarian language about God, is of course self-involving; it entails a commitment of faith, love, trust, and obedience. But there is a difference between self-involving language and self-referring language. I do not think that when I use language like this about Jesus and God I am merely talking about the state of my own devotion.

I think I am talking, self-involvingly of course, about Jesus and God. All this leads, in conclusion, to the area which, it seems to me, is just as vital a part of the contemporary christological task as learning to speak truly about the earthly Jesus and his sense of vocation. We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God.

I have no time or space to develop this. What follows is an attempt to summarize material that could easily turn into a whole other paper, or more. Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and as the feminist would say kyriarchical view of god.

It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it. Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained. That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge. Let me put it like this. The portrait has been redrawn.

At its heart we discover a human face, surrounded by a crown of thorns. Salvation is of the Jews, and from the King of the Jews it has come.