Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  I suppose the question is whether Athanasius’ theology is also interesting in its own right, whether it has its own ability to make a critical contribution to contemporary concerns — or whether race and feudal orders (ie medieval European concepts) are the only tools in the box worth using.

  Not to split hairs: but Rowan Williams’ “therapeutic” view has more to do with the healing of the whole human community — nobody ever accused Rowan of being an optimistic positive thinker!

  11: Does the New Testament Provide a Coherent Account of Jesus Christ?

  Introduction

  The most striking characteristic of contemporary New Testament scholarship is the reluctance if not outright refusal of its practitioners to offer a coherent account of the person and work of Jesus Christ. One leading academic authority “argues that rather than trying to identify a single Christology of the Gospels, let alone of the entire New Testament, we should acknowledge and affirm that the New Testament contains several legitimate pictures and theological interpretations of Jesus”.512 Accordingly, the dominant “method of New Testament Christology involves reading each book as it stands without necessarily trying to pull all the differing materials into a coherent whole”.513 Clearly such a laissez-faire approach to biblical hermeneutics risks losing sight of the forest for the trees. On the other hand, such a clichéd critique begs two questions: Does the theological forest — a coherent account of Jesus Christ — actually inhere in the text of the New Testament? And if so, what form does it take?

  There are those who hold that a coherent account of Jesus Christ is possible only if one locates the New Testament in the narrative and historical framework of the Bible as a whole: from Genesis to Revelation. But on that front too New Testament scholarship long ago gave up the search for coherence. A leading introductory text on Christology declares that, while the “current way of doing theology” pays due attention to the background significance of the Old Testament, it is reluctant to “christianize” what should “stand first as the Bible of the people of Israel”.514 Such piously ecumenical sensitivity to Jewish interests has the effect of consigning the Christology of creation in Genesis to the category of “demanding tasks” beyond the remit of an introductory survey. Also placed in the too-hard basket is the New Testament Book of Revelation in which Jesus Christ promises that he is coming soon to consummate the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. The Word presides over the end just as he was present at the creation. By consigning both Genesis and the Book of Revelation to the same academic purgatory, the author of Christology: A Global Introduction signals that coherence is beyond the reach of New Testament scholarship.

  The Coherence of Mythology

  Coherence requires the creation of harmony from all members of a group made up of disparate elements. In principle, therefore, no coherent account of Jesus Christ can emerge from a text which confines itself to “interpretations concerning the person of Jesus Christ in the four Gospels and in the main writings of the apostle Paul”.515 No longer convinced that coherence is within their grasp, scholars routinely detach New Testament books from the Old Testament, from each other, and, most commonly, from the end of the Bible story prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Such a deconstructionist methodology drains even the particular book under discussion of its mythopoeic power. If we value coherence, we must remember that God speaks to us in the archetypal language of myths and symbols. Accordingly, the Word warned in Revelation 22:19 that “if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life [and] from the holy city” of New Jerusalem. The academic practice of form and historical criticism routinely disregards such divine admonitions. The effect and often the intent of “rational” and “objective” textual criticism are, therefore, to “de-mythologize” the person and works of Jesus Christ.516 In practice, therefore, a coherent account of Jesus Christ is best found by setting aside the “higher criticism” to search instead for a Master Story or the Grand Narrative of salvation history that holds together the manifold mysteries contained within the canonical text of the Bible.517

  The early church fathers well understood the mythic power of the divine economy as revealed in Scripture. Indeed, they demonstrated consummate skill in the use of myths and symbols to construct an account of Jesus Christ that was not only intellectually coherent but had the power to move people. The Christian myths and symbolism developed in their writings helped to create a holy people — the New Covenant Israel of God — drawn from the many races and ethnicities in the world of late antiquity. In modern times, the corrosive scepticism of the Enlightenment undercut the power of Christian mythology while enshrining its own Master Story as the cult of perpetual progress. Reacting against that modernist mentality, Reinhold Niebuhr contended that myth alone is “capable of picturing the world as a realm of coherence and meaning without defying the facts of incoherence”.518 If so, it may still be possible to recover a coherent account of Jesus Christ from the ravages of recent New Testament scholarship by returning to the frankly mythic writings of both the early church fathers and the authors of the New Testament itself.

  “Myth” is not simply synonymous with purely fictitious narratives involving imaginary characters. In fact, mythical thinking imparts “a sense of collective self” to any human community and the early church was no exception. The early church fathers were acutely aware that Christians were a new race of men and women.519 It followed that Christians, too, possessed a “sense of self…viewed through the prism of symbols and mythologies of the community’s heritage”.520 Christians understood the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the pivotal moment in the divine plan of salvation history which unfolds in the Old and New Testaments.

  Like other patristic writers, Origen (184–253 AD) drew liberally on both the Old and New Testaments to understand “these great and marvellous truths about the nature of the Son of God”. Even “before that personal appearance which he manifested in the body he sent the prophets as heralds and messengers of his coming”. Then, “after his ascension into the heavens he caused the holy apostles, unlearned and ignorant men…but filled with his divine power, to travel throughout the world, in order to gather together out of every nation and all races a people composed of devout believers in him”.521 For Origen, therefore, belief in Christ was the providential outcome of the “divine power” with which apostolic preaching was infused. Faith in Christ became the foundation myth of a new Christian people. Just how that happened is bound to interest anyone investigating the origins of nations, nationality and other forms of collective identity.

  Secular scholars such as Anthony D Smith have studied the role of “ethno-symbolism” in the origins of many diverse peoples. They found that the core identity of every nation or ethnic group resides in a “quartet of ‘myths, memories, values, and symbols’”. They pay particular attention to “the ‘myth-symbol’ complex, and particularly the ‘mythomoteur’ or constitutive myth” that shapes both individual and collective experience in an ethnic group.522 Much of what they say has obvious application to the early history of the Christian church. Faith in Christ was the mythomoteur driving the formation of Christian communities. The church successfully communicated a coherent picture of Jesus Christ in the language of a mythology which incorporated all of the disparate elements of the biblical narrative into a harmonious whole.

  Early Christian Mythology

  Irenaeus of Lyons, for one, was certain that the coherence of the Christian faith was inscribed in the order of creation. Accordingly, he insisted that there could be no more than four Gospels, or fewer, “since there are four zones in the world in which we live, and four cardinal winds”. It was “the Word, who is the Artificer of all things and is enthroned upon the Cherubim and holds together all things, and who was manifested to men, gave us the four-fold Gospel which is held together by the one Spirit”.523 The light of the Gospel, “the preaching of truth, shines everyw
here and illuminates all men who wish to come to the knowledge of the truth”. The church “consistently preaches, teaches, and hands [the faith] down as having one mouth”. Despite the dissimilarity of languages spoken by Christians dispersed throughout the whole world “the power of the tradition is one and the same”.524

  For Irenaeus, the essence of Christian mythology is simply stated. It rests on the notion that Jesus Christ “recapitulated in Himself even the ancient first-fashioned man”. When the Word became flesh “and was made man, He recapitulated in Himself the long unfolding of humankind, granting salvation by way of compendium, that in Christ Jesus we might receive what we had lost in Adam, namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God”. Just as “Adam got his substance from untilled and as yet virgin soil” when “the Lord took mud from the earth and fashioned man,” so too the Word…rightly took from Mary, who was yet a virgin, His birth that would be a recapitulation of Adam”. The mythic drama of recapitulation involved other characters as well. Just as “Eve was disobedient, for she did not obey when she was yet a virgin,” so too the Virgin Mary “was obedient and was made the cause of salvation for herself and the entire human race”. Only if the Son of God became man could sin “be put to death by humanity, [so that] humanity would escape from death”. Irenaeus drew on Luke for “the genealogy of our Lord, which extends to Adam…and so…joins the end to the beginning” thereby demonstrating that it is Christ “who recapitulates in himself all the nations that had been dispersed from Adam onward”.525

  Patristic writers, generally, recognized that “the literal text of Scripture” places many obstacles in the way of Christian faith. They therefore laboured to construct a Christian mythomoteur capable of reconciling the human and divine character of Jesus Christ in the hearts and minds of their audiences. In response to sceptics throwing “the way of truth into disorder,” Gregory of Nazianzus offered a “clear solution, satisfactory to people of sound sense — the solution, I mean, of allocating the more elevated, the more distinctly divine expressions of Scripture to the Godhead, the humbler and more human to the New Adam”. Accordingly, Gregory combed Scripture to construct paired oppositions of the divine and the human in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “He hungered — yet he fed thousands…He thirsted — yet He exclaimed: ‘Whosoever thirsts let him come to me and drink’”.526

  Gregory’s sermons were masterpieces of partitive exegesis in which he strove to reveal how “Man and God blended” into “a single whole, the stronger side predominating, in order that I might be made God to the same extent that he was made man”.527 Gregory understood that to the extent that the preaching and teaching of the church removes obstacles to faith in Christ man has a share in the divine life manifested in Christ just as he shared in our humanity. In other words, “as God became incarnate, man became divinized, and…to the extent that Christ became a real man, so we become real gods”. Faith in Christ is a very powerful myth indeed according to the patristic writers. Not only does a faithful reading of Scripture provide an intellectually coherent account of Jesus Christ; faith also becomes the pathway to what Eastern Orthodox theologians call theosis, i.e. “the mystery of eternal life in communion with God in the divine Logos”.528

  Myth and Theosis

  Modern discussions of theosis or deification are often confined to the spiritual life of individuals. Few (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male) theologians seem interested in theosis as a really-existing historical process affecting the development (as divinization) and decline (as de-divinization) of Christian communities, past, present, and future.529 Things were quite otherwise in the patristic era. Athanasius of Alexandria (299–273 AD) was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote that Jesus Christ “was incarnate that we might be made God”.530 He wrote as a leading ecclesiastical authority in an established Christian politeia.531 To be convinced that the New Testament provides a coherent account of Jesus Christ, Athanasius had only to compare “the weakness of idols” with the visible manifestations of Christ’s power to persuade “the entire inhabited world to worship one and the same Lord, and through him God, his Father”.532 In less than three centuries, the mythic power of the Word had divinized a corrupt, decadent, and dying pagan civilization.

  For Athanasius, it was not just that the myth of the risen Christ enchanted believers; they were deified in the literal sense that Christ came to be present in and through every Christian. In the Eastern tradition which draws on his work, deification denotes “the ‘participation’ of the believer in Christ, which, because Christ is God, means participation in God himself”.533 Athanasius saw evidence of an ongoing process of theosis all around him. Experience was witness to the truth of Christ’s presence in the virgins and “the youth who live a pure life in chastity, and the belief in immortality in so great a company of martyrs”. “Indeed, “those who become disciples of Christ, instead of fighting each other, stand arrayed against the demons by their lives and deeds of virtue…and what is most wonderful is that they scorn even death and become martyrs for Christ”.534 For Athanasius, there was an objective, ontological unity between Christ and the Christian that was visible in the transformation of communities incorporated into the faith.

  Barbarians, Athanasius wrote, “have an innate savagery of manners…and cannot bear to remain without a sword for a single hour, but when they hear the teaching of Christ they immediately turn to farming instead of war”.535 The participation of the faithful in Christ was “not just a subjective experience”. Nor was it a merely a cognitive change in consciousness or the emotional “effect” of an altered belief system. Rather, theosis entails a real transformation in human nature. In Christ’s new creation a real union or a genuine “community of being” between God and man manifests itself in ways both visible and invisible.536 We can see this process at work in the New Testament. In fact, by viewing the New Testament as a case study in theosis we may be able to provide the most coherent account of Jesus Christ available to us.

  The Divinization of Israel

  Indeed, the patristic writers conceived salvation history as a Master Story in two acts about the divinization of Israel. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, there were “two remarkable transformations of the human way of life in the course of the world’s history. These are called the two ‘covenants’…The first was the transition from the idols to the Law; the second, from the Law to the Gospel”.537 God was only imperfectly present during the period of the first covenant:

  [G]rowth towards perfection comes through additions. In this way, the old covenant made clear proclamation of the Father, a less definite one of the Son. The new covenant made the Son manifest and gave us a glimpse of the Spirit’s Godhead. At the present time, the Spirit resides amongst us, giving us a clearer manifestation of himself than before.538

  Gregory presented the process of divinization as one proceeding “by piecemeal additions, ‘ascents’ as David called them, by progress and advance from glory to glory”. So long as “the Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged,” it “was dangerous for the Son to be preached openly…It was dangerous, too, for the Holy Spirit to be made…an extra burden, when the Son had not been received”.539

  Athanasius, too, perceived that even “the salvific work of the Incarnate Son must first progress within his own humanity, and only then, after he himself has been made perfect and so deified, are human beings by being joined to him, able to progress themselves in the process of deification”.540 The Gospels deal with the sanctification of Jesus Christ’s humanity; the rest of the New Testament, from Acts to Revelation has to do with the divinization of the still-embryonic Christian community, at first consisting mainly of the righteous remnant of Old Covenant Israel. Paul’s letters reflect the experience of early churches learning what it means to live “in Christ,” a phrase that Paul uses over 160 times in his chief letters.541 The latter half of the New Testament records the birth-pangs of the new creation: “We know that the whole creation ha
s been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time”. He advised his brothers in Christ to “wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” at the moment of parturition (Rom 8:22–23).

  Similarly, Peter told “God’s elect” (1 Pet 1:1) not to “be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you”. He assured that first-century audience that they were living through the last days as “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pet 2:9). Accordingly, “you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed”. Clearly both Paul and Peter thought that the end of the Old Covenant world was imminent. In Revelation, John reported a vision in which Jesus Christ told him that “the time is near” (Rev 1:3). The people of God were to be the new creation consummated in the Book of Revelation. The Apocalypse of John prophesies the destruction of “the great city which is figuratively called Sodom, and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified” (Rev 11:8). Only after “the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” did John see “the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:1–2). We can discern an underlying coherence in the New Testament account of Jesus Christ by recognizing his presence at the creation of the new heaven and the new earth promised in Revelation. Myth and history are fused together in a process of theosis which began with the advent of Jesus Christ and ended with his final judgement upon carnal, national Israel, the resurrection of the dead, and a vision of the kings of the earth walking in the light of the Lamb (John 5:27–30; Rev 21:23–24).