LIBERATING
ORTHODOXY
SALVAGING
TRINITY AND INCARNATION FOR PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY
Thomas C.
Sorenson
Copyright © 2023 Thomas C. Sorenson.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or
reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior
written permission from the author. Write to Thomas C. Sorenson, 14751 N.
Kelsey St., No. 105-384, Monroe, Washington, USA, 98272.
Except as otherwise
noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised
Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used
with permission. All rights reserved.
About the Author
The Rev. Dr. Thomas C.
Sorenson is a retired ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He has
earned advanced degrees in history, law, and ministry. He was ordained to the
ministry of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ in 2002. He spends most
of his time in retirement writing. His personal blog is at
liberatingchristianity.blogspot.com. There he posts articles on theology, law,
and Russia (his PhD is in Russian history). He lives in Sultan, Washington,
USA, with his wife, the Rev. Jane Sorenson, and their fluffy Pembroke Corgi
Rennie.
Other Works By the Author
Liberating
Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon,
2008).
Liberating
Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised
Edition. Self-published
in 2021 and available at amazon.com.
Liberating the Bible:
A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians (Archway Publishing, Bloomington, Indiana, 2014).
Liberating the Bible:
A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible.
Self-published in 2022 and available at amazon.com.
Liberating the Bible:
A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament.
Self-published in 2022 and available at amazon.com.
Liberating the Bible:
A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Three, The New Testament.
Self-published in 2022 and available at amazon.com.
Reflections on a
Russian Statesman, The Populist Conservatism of Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, self-published in 2020 and
available at amazon.com.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: Orthodoxy
CHAPTER TWO: The
Trinity
CHAPTER THREE: The Incarnation
INTRODUCTION
Sometimes it takes a bit of
sudden inspiration to jar an author into undertaking a new writing
project. Probably the project has been
percolating in the author’s subconscious, or even in the author’s conscious
mind, for quite some time before that happens.
With me what has done it a couple of times is coming up with a
title. My first book, Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles of Faith in the New
Millennium, began to take definite form for me only after that title came
to me one day as I was out walking my dog.
The title of my other book, Liberating the Bible: A Pastor’s Guided
Tour for Seeking Christians, flowed quite naturally from the title of the
first book. I have drafted a third book, How Can I Be A Christian, A
Personal Confession of Faith, that so far has been neither published nor
self-published though I probably will self-publish it someday. I have been
thinking about writing another book for some time now, but the spark for this
book also came only when I got a title.
In July, 2011, my wife, the
Rev. Jane Sorenson, gave a talk at the large UCC church in Seattle that she was
serving as Interim Senior Pastor at the time about her personal spiritual
journey. After that talk one of the
people present told Jane that what she had heard in Jane’s remarks was “a
generous orthodoxy.” I do not know the
person who said that to Jane, and I do not know what she meant by it. I do know that I was immediately quite taken
with the term. I immediately thought: That would make a great book title! The problem is, there is already a book out
there with that title. So I modified it into the title of this book, which
echoes to at least some extent the titles of my first two books. Why I think that is a good title for the book
will, I hope, become clear anon.
The issue that this work
addresses is what I perceive as a danger in progressive Christianity
today. Progressive Christianity today is
on the whole a very good thing.
Progressive Christianity is leaving behind some of the destructive
aspects of traditional Christian orthodoxy, which is a very good and necessary
thing. It is moving beyond biblical
literalism to a new and better understanding of the nature of the faith’s
sacred texts. It is rejecting Christian exclusivism, the belief that only
Christianity is a true path to God and that only Christians are saved. That
aspect of popular Christianity puts God in a box and limits the scope of God’s
grace. It is therefore completely
unacceptable. Progressive Christianity is rejecting the classical theory of
atonement, also known as the doctrine of substitutionary sacrificial atonement,
as the doctrine of cosmic child abuse that it truly is. It is rejecting the understanding of belief
as accepting as true certain factual assertions for which there is little or no
evidence. It is replacing it with better understandings of faith as trust and
commitment. All of these things about
contemporary progressive Christianity are very good, positive developments that
hold the promise of saving our ancient and sacred faith from the extinction
that will surely come its way if aspects of modern, popular Christianity which
make the faith unacceptable to enormous numbers of people today can’t be
overcome.
Popular writers like Marcus
Borg (superficial as his work usually is), John Shelby Spong (as inflammatory
as his language often is), and John Dominic Crossan (as densely scholarly as
his work sometimes is) are doing vitally important work in spreading the
message of a different kind of Christianity to the people of our context
today. I am confident that I too have
made a contribution, however small, to that effort in my books Liberating Christianity: Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium and Liberating the Bible: A
Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians in both their original and
their revised editions.. It is my hope that this book will make another
contribution, however minor, to that work.
Yet as there is with
anything positive, there is a danger in the progressive Christianity that is
growing among us today. That danger is
that, in their effort to discard the negative aspects of Christian orthodoxy,
progressive Christians will throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, I know that that’s a cliché, but
sometimes clichés express a truth better than anything else an author might
say. In their effort to reform and
preserve Christianity, far too many progressive Christians are throwing out two
central concepts of traditional Christian orthodoxy without which Christianity
simply is not recognizable as Christianity.
I speak of the ancient Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the
Incarnation. In this work I will set out
a vision of progressive Christianity that preserves Trinity and Incarnation as indispensable
symbols of the Christian faith.
My concern that progressive
Christianity is losing the symbols of the Trinity and the Incarnation arises
from two sources. One is the popular
literature of progressive Christianity itself.
Marcus Borg, for example, seemed more and more to be rejecting the
doctrine of the Incarnation as his work progressed. He has little if anything to say about the
Trinity in his popular works. The same
can be said of other popular authors of the new progressive Christianity. The other source of my concern is the work
that I used to do as a member of the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific
Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. As part of
that work, I read a good number of ordination papers. Mostly those papers came from recent seminary
graduates. I would see paper after paper by new seminary graduates that expressed
the tenets of progressive Christianity with regard to such things as the
rejection of the classical theory of atonement but that rejected, or at least that
did not expressly affirm, the classic Christian understandings of the
Incarnation and the Trinity. Yet Christianity simply is not recognizable as
Christianity without the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation. This brief book
is an attempt to save those foundational understandings of the faith while
liberating them from baggage with which the tradition has so laden them.
Both Trinity and Incarnation
have baggage from which they need to be liberated. That baggage is, first of
all, a literalist understanding of the language of faith. As statements of
facts about God and Jesus Christ, neither Trinity nor Incarnation is at all
believable. No reasonable person could believe as a matter of factual truth
that God is both three and one at the same time as the orthodox understanding
of the Trinity asserts. Nor could any reasonable believe as a matter of fact
that that all of God (in the form of God the Son) could inhere in any one human
being, as the doctrine of the Incarnation asserts that God did in the person of
Jesus of Nazareth.
That neither of these
orthodox doctrines is understandable as statements of fact raises the question
of the true nature of the language of faith. The nature of the language we
apply to our faith is crucial. Christianity will die, and it will deserve to
die, if it can’t overcome literalism as the only way to understand the faith. I
have, however, thoroughly debunked linguistic literalism as the language of
faith elsewhere. In both of my previous books that are publicly available, I
have shown the failing of literal language for faith and explained the true
nature of faith language as symbolic and mythic. I will not go into that issue
further here. I direct any interested reader to my discussions of those issues
in either of those books. Here I will just ask you to assume that there must be
a better way of understanding Trinity and Incarnation than the literal, factual
way. When here I say true or truth I mean mythically and symbolically true not
necessarily literally or factually true.
Because I intend for this
book to focus on Trinity and Incarnation, I will not address many other elements
of progressive Christianity. Popular Christianity asserts that belief in Jesus
Christ is the only way for all humans to be in proper relationship with God.
More specifically, the Christian exclusivism of popular Christianity insists
that taking Jesus as one’s personal Lord and Savior is the only way for one’s
soul to gain heaven and avoid hell after death. Christian exclusivism is
perfectly absurd, and it is something that drives many people away from the
faith. However, as with literal language for faith, I have debunked Christian
exclusivism extensively elsewhere. Here I ask the reader only to understand
that while Trinity and Incarnation are essential to Christianity, they are not
necessary for proper relationship with God. Please just assume that
Christianity is not the only way of salvation.
There is also the issue of
nonviolence. Sadly, most of progressive Christianity has been slow to embrace
Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. Yet violence is one of the great scourges of
the world today as it has been for millennia. I have expounded and explained
Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence elsewhere. I will not do so again here. I direct
the interested reader to the discussion of Christian nonviolence in either Liberating
Christianity or Liberating the Bible.
There are, of course, many
other issues that progressive Christianity must and does address. The include
both social and personal ethics, the relationship between women and men and
women’s place in the church, Christian homophobia, the nature of the church,
and just what it is that God wants from us. As crucial as these issues are, I
will not discuss them here. I don’t want this book to run on forever, after
all.
So what I will address here
is first of all the meaning of the word orthodoxy. I will distinguish it from
the word Orthodoxy, people’s understanding of Orthodoxy often clouding their
understand of Christian orthodoxy. I will then turn first to the doctrine of
the Trinity. I will explain what it is, what the difficulties with it are, and
why it is absolutely essential for the Christian faith to hold onto it. I will
then do the same for the doctrine of the Incarnation.
What I say about those two doctrines
may sound more like traditional, conservative Christianity than like
progressive Christianity. So be it. I consider myself to be a thoroughly
progressive Christian. Being a progressive Christian requires us to overthrow a
great deal of traditional Christianity. It does not, however, require us to
overthrow all of traditional Christianity. After all, traditional Christianity
would not have survived as long as it has if all it had in it were error. I
intend in this book to salvage the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation from
the dumpster fire that traditional Christianity has become in today’s world.
Whether you will agree with me on the necessity of doing so, or whether you
will find my efforts to do that successful, is not for me to say.
Chapter One: Orthodoxy
The easiest way to define
orthodoxy is to say that it is the status of being orthodox, but that
definition doesn’t get us very far, does it. Clearly, we need to define
“orthodox” if we are to understand orthodoxy. “Orthodox” is an English that
derives from two Greek words. One is “ortho.” “Ortho” means
basically right or correct. We see it in our word “orthopedic,” which means
relating to the health of bones and muscles. The other is the Greek word “doxa,”
which means glory, splendor, or grandeur. The best definition of “orthodox” as
I use the word in this work is “right praising.” That is “orthodox” which is
right (or proper) praising of God. Orthodox theology is theology that conforms
to the standards and norms of the Christian faith generally. “Orthodox” is an
antonym of the word “heterodox.” “Heterodox” means “not orthodox.” The
Christian faith considers that heterodox which differs from what the dominant
Christian churches consider to be orthodox. “Heterodox” is a synonym for “heretical.”
That is orthodox which is not heretical.
Understandings of the faith
varied wildly in the early years of the Christian movement. We see some of that
diversity of understanding in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament.
They do not all understand Jesus the same way. In particular, the Gospel of
John sees Jesus very differently than do the other three New Testament gospels.
There was, however, a much broader range of understanding within Christianity
than that. In the earliest years of the Christian movement, there was no
central authority to accept or reject any opinion anyone had about the faith. Representatives
of what became orthodox Christianity, like Irenaeus of Lyon, critiqued, even
attacked opinions that the tradition came to see as heterodox; but there was
originally no person or institution that could declare either Irenaeus or those
he attacked to be correct.
That began to change in the
fourth century CE. In the early fourth century, the Roman Empire, though which
Christianity had spread, was falling apart. It was essentially splitting into a
Latin western half and a Greek eastern half. Enter Emperor Constantine (ruled
306-337 CE). Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to a
new city he established on the site of an older, small Greek city called
Byzantium. He called that new city Constantinople, naming it after himself. (This
city is known today as Istanbul. Nonetheless, Constantine tried to hold the
entire empire together. By Constantine’s time, Christianity had become a large
enough presence in the Roman Empire that Constantine thought he could use it in
his effort to do that.
He had, however, one big
problem in that regard. The Christian movement itself was hardly unified or
uniform. There was at that time one issue in particular that produced a major
division within the Christian faith. It was the question of the nature of “the
Son,” which made it an issue of the nature of Jesus Christ. History knows this
division as the “Arian controversy.” The issue in that controversy was whether
the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, was identical with the Father, the
First Person of the Trinity or was only similar to the Father. The controversy
was often expressed as the difference between the words “homoousious”
and “homooisous.” Homoousious means “of the same substance.” Homooisous
means “of like substance.” Thought there is literally only an iota of
difference between the two words, there is a world of theological difference
between them.
A man named Arius was a
priest in Alexandria, Egypt, which was at the time one of the major centers of
Christianity in the Roman Empire. He taught that the Father was more divine
than the Son. He said God “created” the Son. He said of the Son that there had
been “a time when he was not.” His primary opponent was Athanasius, also a
priest of Alexandria. He said that the Son was “homoousious,” of one
substance, with the Father and that the Son was “begotten” not created. To this
day no one really knows what “begotten” means other than it means something
other than created, but never mind. He denied that there was a time when the
Son was not. Most people today find this controversy hard to understand and
harder to take seriously. We think: Really? Christianity was split over whether
or not to insert an iota into the word homoousious? In the fourth
century CE, however, this dispute more than any other split the Christian
movement. Constantine, who may or may not have been in some way Christian at
the time (he wasn’t baptized until he was near death), wanted the dispute
resolved. His interest in the resolution of the controversy was political not
theological. He didn’t care how it was resolved, he just wanted it resolved.
So he did something that was
supposed to get it resolved. He called what came to be known as the First
Ecumenical Council of the Christian church. He called all of the bishops of the
church to convene at Nicaea, a town across the strait from Constantinople on the
northern shore of Asia Minor in today’s Turkey. There, more or less under the
watchful eye of the emperor, the two sides argued it out. Athanasius and his
supporters won. The Council issued the Nicene Creed, which a great many
Christians recite in worship to this day.
That creed says of the Son:
I believe in one Lord, the
Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial [homoousious]
with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men (sic) and for our
salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the
Virgin Mary, and became man.
The Nicene Creed thus addresses both Trinity and
Incarnation. The point here, however, is that Athanasius’s teaching of the true
divinity of the Son and therefore of Jesus Christ became the standard
understanding of at least most Christians. In other words, it became Christian
orthodoxy.
There is, perhaps
unfortunately, a common confusion about the word orthodox. It arises from the
fact that there are specific Christian churches that call themselves Orthodox,
with a capital O. We generally think of them as “eastern Orthodox” churches.
That designation came about in this way. In 1054 CE the Patriarch of
Constantinople and the Patriarch of Rome, that is, the bishop of Rome or the
Pope, excommunicated each other. Two issues of disagreement let to this split
in the church, nominally at least. One is known as the dispute over what is
called “the procession of the Holy Spirit.” The original orthodox position on
this issue was stated in a revision to the Nicene Creed issued by the Second
Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in 381 CE. That Council adopted this
language:
And [we believe] in the Holy
Spirit, the Lord and Giver-of-Life, who proceeds from the Father and with the
Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.
A problem between the eastern and western Christian
churches arose when, in the late sixth century CE, some western Christians,
whose liturgical language was Latin rather than Greek, added the Latin word “filioque”
to this creed. “Filioque” is Latin for “and the Son.” These churches
began to recite the creed by saying that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the
Father filioque,” that is, proceeds “from the Father and the Son.” There
is no doubt that the insertion of the filioque into the creed altered
the creed as the Second Ecumenical Council had adopted it.
The Greek-speaking churches
of the eastern part of the former Roman Empire would have none of it. They
objected to the filioque on both theological and procedural grounds.
They said that saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and
the Son rather than only from the Father diminishes the Holy Spirit as part of
the Trinity, making it less than both the Father and the Son. That no one
really knew (or knows) what “proceeds” means didn’t bother either side of the
controversy at all.
The Greeks also objected to
the addition of the filioque to the creed because the creed had been
adopted by an Ecumenical Council, that is, in theory at least, a Council of the
whole church. The Greeks insisted, and to this day insist, that only another
ecumenical council could change something issued by an earlier ecumenical
council. No ecumenical had ever adopted the filioque. Indeed, no
ecumenical council has adopted it to this day.[1] The
filioque eventually became a standard part of the creed for
Latin-speaking churches, that is, the churches of western Christianity. Most of
those churches today, including the Roman Catholic Church, include “and the
Son” in their recitation of the Nicene Creed. The eastern Orthodox churches do
not.
The theological disagreement
over the filioque was one of the nominal reasons for the schism of 1054.
The only other one was a dispute over the claims of the Bishop of Rome, that
is, the Pope about the Pope’s authority in the church. After a rigid priestly
hierarchy developed in the early centuries of the Christian movement, five
centers of the faith rose to institutional primacy. They were Rome, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople. Each of those jurisdictions has at its
head a patriarch and was considered to be “autocephalous,” that is self-ruling.
Originally, all five patriarchs were considered to be equal in prominence and
authority, though the Bishop of Rome may always have been primus inter pares,
first among equals. Over time, however, the Pope began to claim greater primacy
over the four other patriarchs. Rome, after all, had been the founding city of
empire of which Christianity became the state religion. Moreover, the Pope
claimed to be the direct successor of the Apostle Peter, who was, supposedly,
the first bishop of Rome. The Pope pointed to Matthew 16:18, which has Jesus
say, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church….”[2] The
Pope began to claim the authority to control the other four patriarchs. Those
patriarchs denied the Pope’s claims and refused to recognize the Pope’s
authority over them. The Pope’s claim of primacy in the church and the refusal
of the other patriarchs to accept it was the second nominal reason for the
schism of 1054. To this day the claim of the Pope to authority over the whole
church and the eastern churches’ refusal to accept that claim is, in addition
to the filioque, one of the only two doctrinal differences between
eastern Orthodox and western Christian churches.
To us more secular
westerners, however, a far more fundamental reason for the schism of 1054 was
the growing cultural and political gap between the Latin-speaking churches of
the west and the Greek-speaking churches of the east. The Roman Empire had
ceased to exist in the west some five hundred years before the schism. It still
existed in the east, though we usually call it the Byzantine Empire not the
Roman Empire. The Byzantine emperors, however, continued to call themselves
Roman emperors. The Greek culture of the east and the Latin culture of the west
were developing in different directions. One example is the role St. Augustine
played in the western churches. The west considers him to be an early giant of
Christian theology. However, he wrote in Latin not Greek, and few people in the
east could read Latin. He has therefore always been less significant in eastern
Orthodox theology than he has been in western Christian theology. At least
until the renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE in Italy,
the culture of eastern Christianity was, on the whole, more sophisticated than
that of the culture of western Christianity. For example, the Greek-speaking
east knew the philosophy of Aristotle. The Latin-speaking west did not until it
learned of him from Spanish Muslims and Jews beginning around the eleventh
century CE. It was probably inevitable that these two sides of Christianity would
eventually split apart.
At the time of the great
schism of 1054, there was in effect only one church in the eastern
Mediterranean world. It called itself the Orthodox or Greek Orthodox church. Over
the following centuries there came to be capital O Orthodox churches of other
nationalities, mainly in central and eastern Europe. The largest of them by far
is the Russian Orthodox Church. In 988 CE Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv (which
until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 we called Kiev, its Russian name)
converted to Orthodox Christianity. When the prince converted, everyone was
converted. The theology of the Russian Orthodox Church is the theology of the
Greek Orthodox Church from which it is derived only translated into Russian. Other
Orthodox Churches include the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian Orthodox
Churches along with a few much smaller ones.
Capital O Orthodox church
structures and worship look different from either Roman Catholic or Protestant
structures and worship. We all know the onion dome churches of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Icons play a much larger role in Orthodox Christianity than
they do in western Christianity (though their use is also orthodox in western
Christianity). Eastern Orthodox churches are covered with them in a way western
churches, for the most part, are not. Orthodox priests wear long beards. Roman
Catholic priests generally do not. Both Orthodox and Catholic Christians often
make the sign of the cross over their chests. When they do, the Catholics move
their hand from up to down, then from left to right, the Orthodox move their
hand from up to down, then right to left. To most of us these are quite
insignificant differences. They do, however, reflect cultural differences
between the western churches and the eastern Orthodox churches that the
Orthodox churches in particular consider to be immensely important.
I have perhaps rambled on
too long about the history the Orthodox Churches and how they came to be.
Please forgive me. I have a PhD in Russian history, and I wrote my PhD
dissertation on a man who was, in effect if not in title, the head of the
Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905. I find this history to be both
fascinating and important. In this book, however, I mean orthodox and orthodoxy
with a lower case o (except of course when one of those words is the first word
in a sentence). My aim is not to rescue the Russian or any other Orthodox
church. It is to liberate small o orthodoxy and specifically the orthodox
doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Both eastern and western
Christian churches accept both of those doctrines, the only real difference
between them still being the filioque. We now turn to a consideration of
just what those doctrines are and why I so wish to liberate and hold onto them.
Chapter Two: The Doctrine of
the Trinity
“You Christians aren’t
monotheists! You don’t have one God, you’ve got three gods! You call yourselves
monotheists, but you just flat aren’t!” Thus speak many faithful Jewish and
Muslim folk. These brothers and sisters in faith of our just can’t accept the
notion that three can be one and one can be three. Judaism has a strictly
unitarian view of God. Islam is, if anything, even more vehemently
monotheistic. Islam rejects anything that in any way detracts from or impinges
on the Oneness of Allah (Allah being just Arabic for “the God”). Neither
Judaism nor Islam, great spiritual traditions both, posit any “persons” of God.
To them, we Christians just are not monotheists.
We Christians, however,
insist that we are monotheists. We confess one God not three, but then of
course we complicate the matter by saying that the one God subsists as Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, three so-called Persons, not one. Why do we say that? Why
don’t give up our three is one nonsense and agree with the other two great
monotheistic faiths that there is one God and that God is one, period? To these
questions we now turn.
For all Christians, but
especially for us Protestant Christians, anything we confess as true of our
faith should be grounded at least to some extent in the Bible. I once asked
some church folks how many times the phrase “the Father, and the Son, and the
Holy Spirit” appears in the Bible. No one could give me a specific answer, but
everyone was sure that the phrase appears there many, many times. Well, about
that they’re just wrong. The full Trinitarian formula of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit appears in the Bible only once. It appears at the end of the Gospel of
Matthew in what we call the Great Commission. Matthew 28:19 has the risen
Christ say to his followers, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit….” That’s it. There are other references in the New Testament to the
Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit of course. But Matthew 28:19 is
the only time the full Trinitarian formula appears in the Bible.
So if a Trinitarian
conception of God has such meager biblical roots, and it does, we must ask why
we still have that conception of God. To answer that question we must begin
with an understanding of just what the Trinity is. One online secular source
defines the Trinity as “the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three
persons in one Godhead."[3]
Another says more completely:
A Trinity doctrine is
commonly expressed as the statement that the one God exists as or in three
equally divine ‘Persons,’ the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The guiding
principle has been the creedal declaration that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
of the New Testament are consubstantial (i.e., the same in substance or
essence, Greek homoousious). Because this shared substance or essence is
a divine one, this is understood to imply that all three named individuals are
divine, and equally so. Yet the three in some sense ‘are’ the one God of the
Bible.[4]
These two attempts at defining the Trinity get us
about as close to a definition of it as we can get. I put it this way: The doctrine
of the Trinity is the assertion that God subsists as one God in three “persons”
(Greek, prosopon). Each “person” is fully God, and yet God is complete
only in all three “persons.” Put as succinctly as possible, the doctrine of the
Trinity says that God is One, and God is Three, at the same time.
And I can hear you saying,
“That’s nonsense! It’s just not possible! Three and one simply are not and
cannot be the same thing!” And, of course, you’re absolutely correct about
that. Three and one are not the same thing. There is no rational understanding
of them that makes them the same thing. They just flat aren’t! So here’s the
most important thing to understand about the Trinity: It doesn’t make a lick of
sense! It asserts as true something that simply is not and cannot be possible.
What far too few people understand, however, is that the Trinity not making a
lick of sense is its great virtue. And yes, I know that that statement requires
a lot of explaining, so here goes.
The explanation of the
statement that the Trinity not making a lick of sense is its great virtue
begins, as so many explanations do, with a question: What is God? What do we
mean by the word God? The Trinity is, after all, a statement about the essence
of God. We Christians are so bold as to say of God: God is Creator of all that
is. God is that which brought the universe into being. God is the power that
has redeemed creation. God is the power that sustains creation in being and
keeps it from falling into nonbeing. The God who does those things subsists as
spirit not as a material being. God as spirit is the ultimate reality behind and in all that exists. God utterly transcends
that which God has created while at the same time inhering in all that God has
created. God is the reality in which we live and move and have our being. Acts
17:28. God is pure being, being itself, and the depth dimension of all that is,
to use Paul Tillich’s phrases about God. God is love, 1 John 4:8, love that
utterly transcends any sort of human love.
Perhaps you are getting a
sense from all of that verbiage that it really isn’t possible to define God. If
that’s the sense you have, you’re absolutely correct. One profound thing we can
say about God is that it isn’t possible to say anything definitive about God. God
is mystery, and the mystery of God is beyond full human comprehension. As
mystery, God is a paradox. God is the Known Unknown, the Solved Unsolvable. God
utterly transcends human language, but we speak of God using human language nonetheless.
God is mystery, but God is not a mystery to be solved like the mystery of a
whodunit novel in which everything is revealed at the end. We do not and cannot
solve the mystery of God. Rather, we acknowledge it, live under it, and live
into it.
People are forever trying to
solve the mystery of God. They try to simplify God, to make God small, to make
God comprehensible, something they can grasp, something they can hold onto.
They say that we learn the full truth of God in the Bible. Or in Jesus. They
think of God as a man, though perhaps as a man writ large, not all that
different from us, just bigger, more knowing, and more powerful. They make
God’s love as limited and conditional as our human love is. They project onto
God the familiar human ways of living, the ways of earning and reward and of
judgment and punishment. They understand human legal systems, or at least more
or less they do, so they make God the great lawgiver. They think that God wants
most of all for us to obey God’s laws just as the local police expect us to
obey our local, human laws. In other words, they think of God in purely human
terms.
In all of that they are,
once again, quite simply wrong. If God is truly God, and God is, God must and
does transcend human ways absolutely. The Hebrew scripture book of Isaiah puts
this truth this way:
For my thoughts are not your
thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says
the Lord.
For as the heavens are
higher than
the earth,
so are my ways higher than your
ways,
and my thoughts than your
thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9.
We simply cannot and must not reduce to God to the
human. We cannot ultimately know God in God’s true essence. In Taoism they say,
“The Tao [the Way] you know is not the Tao.” We Christians should adopt and
adapt that saying and say, “The God you know is not God.” There simply is no
way to solve the mystery of God, and we really do need to stop trying to do it.
That is why one great virtue
of the Trinity is that it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The Trinitarian
understanding of God preserves the mystery of God in a way a more simplistic
monotheism never can. The doctrine of the Trinity, after all, insists that
we accept as true contentions that our rational minds know just can’t be true. It
says God is One and God is Three at the same time. We rational creatures rebel
against such nonsense. We know that there can be one of something, or there can
be three of something, but one thing is not the same as three things. Our
rational minds, if they accept the reality of God at all, tell us that God
cannot possibly be one and three at the same time. The claim that God is that
is so absurd that it cannot possibly be true.
Perhaps this will help us
get around our rational objections to the Trinity. I often suggest thinking of
the Trinity as a Christian koan. In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a phrase or
question that makes no sense. The practitioner meditates on the koan as a way
of transcending the limitations of the rational mind. The most famous Zen koan
is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “One hand clapping” is, of
course, an oxymoron. Clapping is, by definition, the slapping together of two
hands. One hand cannot clap because there is no other hand for it to slap
against. Yet this koan has a person meditate on a sound that simply cannot be a
sound. In that meditation the practitioner’s aim is to transcend human
rationality and to transition to a higher level of consciousness.
As a koan the Trinity asks:
“What is one when it is three?” And: “What are three when they are one?” These
questions, of course, have no answers. They make no more sense than does “what
is the sound of one hand clapping.” Yet meditating on them can raise our
consciousness above its usual limited, rational state to the level of a higher
truth. Meditating on them does not solve the mystery of the Trinity. It is,
rather, a way of entering into the mystery of the Trinity. It can lift us above
our reasonable denial of the possibility of the Trinity into the Trinity’s
transcendent truth.
Still, people so often seek
not to enter into the mystery of the Trinity, they try to eliminate it. They
keep trying to understand how the Trinity might work in a way that makes sense
to our rational minds. There are at least two ways in which people try to do it.
One is to say that sometimes God is the Father, sometimes God is the Son, and
sometimes God is the Holy Spirit. This approach solves the mystery of the
Trinity in a way, but it does it only by denying the unity of the Trinity’s
three Persons. It denies the Trinity because it denies that God is all three
Trinitarian persons at the same time. This attempt to understand the Trinity is
heterodox. It is, indeed, heresy. It doesn’t solve the mystery of the Trinity.
It denies it.
Another common way people
try to make the Trinity make sense is to assign different divine functions to
different Trinitarian Persons. People say that the Father is the Creator, the
Son is the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is the Sustainer of all creation. This
approach to the mystery of the Trinity too is heterodox, is heresy. It too
actually denies the Trinity by making none of the Persons of the Trinity fully
God. Each of the Persons functions only partially as God, something that simply
is not true of the Trinity.
In the Trinitarian understanding
of God, each Person of the Trinity is fully God in that Person’s own right. The
Holy Spirit is all of God. The Son is all of God. The Father is all of God.
Yet, at the same time, God is not complete without all three Persons. Which of
course makes no sense at all. Once again we are faced with the foundational
truth of the Trinity. It isn’t possible. It is just true.
Any understanding of the
Trinity that separates the Trinitarian Persons or that fractures the divine
function is false because it denies the unity of God. Yet there is a way of
thinking about the Trinity that simultaneously preserves both the Oneness and
the Threeness of God. It also introduces the concept of dynamism into the
Trinity, divine dynamism being another of the Trinity’s great virtues. This
approach introduces the concept perichoresis into our understanding of
the Trinity. Perichoresis is a Greek word that means “dancing around.” It
understands that the three Persons of the Trinity are not static. They move,
they dance, unendingly with, in, and through each other. As one they merge into
each other. As three they dance around and through each other. Their dance
expresses the divine love of the Persons for each other in a way similar but
not identical to the way two people can express their love for each other as
they dance together. Similar but not identical, for, no matter how much two
people may love each other, and no matter how close they may hold themselves
together in their dance, they remain two distinct, individual people. In the
divine perichoresis, the Persons of the Trinity both remain distinct and
remain one at the same time.
The dynamism that the term perichoresis
expresses is as great a virtue of the Trinity as is the way it preserves the
mystery of God. Perichoresis expresses the internal love of God, but it
is also an image of divine love far beyond the love of the Trinitarian Persons
for each other. In the divine dance of the Trinity, God’s love overflows. It
spreads out from God to everything God has created. God’s love encounters
creation in a perichoresis that echoes that of God’s three Persons. God’s
love embraces creation in a way as beyond comprehension as is the divine dance
of the Persons themselves. From God’s dynamism, God’s love flows out to, over,
and into creation as unconditionally as God’s love flows between the Persons of
the Trinity. The Trinity is an image of God’s love as God’s very essence and of
how God’s unconditional love flows from God to everything and everyone God has
ever created.
I understand, I think, why
people deny the Trinity. As I’ve said so many times before, the Trinity makes
no rational sense. That is doesn’t makes it hard for people today to believe. As our western culture grew more and more
rationalistic in the great cultural developments we call the Enlightenment and
the Scientific Revolution, Christians came to find the Trinity harder and
harder to accept. They saw the truth that I have insisted on here, that the
Christian concept of the Trinity makes not one lick of rational sense. Because
as creatures of the Enlightenment they considered human reason to be the
determiner of all truth, they rejected the Trinity precisely because it is so
irrational. Christian rationalists in the Congregationalist tradition, which
just happens to be my own, rejected the Trinity and formed a new faith they
called Unitarianism. Unitarianism, which means Oneatarianism. Back in
the eighteenth century CE Unitarians still considered themselves to be
Christians. Some, though by no means all, still do. They were and are not,
however, specifically Trinitarian Christians. For them, the Trinity is just too
irrational to be acceptable.
I get that, I think. I
understand why people reject the Trinity. I understand it, but I cannot agree
with it. Without the Trinity, Christianity becomes far too rational. God
becomes far too human and thus far too small. God also becomes far too static.
A static, merely unitary God seems too remote from us. The dynamism of the
Trinity expresses God’s constant interaction not only within the Godhead itself
but also with creation. I am thoroughly convinced that progressive Christianity
will simply loose too much if it ceases to be Trinitarian.
Yet we still must wonder:
Isn’t Trinitarianism just inconsistent with a progressive sort of Christianity?
After all, the Trinity is a core confession of the ancient Christian tradition,
and there is so much in that tradition that progressive Christianity must deny
and reject. We must reject and repent of all of the violence Christians have
inflicted on each other and on non-Christian people of all sorts. We must
reject and repent of the Christian exclusivism that has made Christians hate
God’s non-Christian people, that has turned Christians into spiritual
imperialists, and has convinced them that God wants them to force other people
to be Christian, at the point of a spear or the barrel of a gun if necessary.
We must overcome our faith’s tradition of Biblicism that makes the faith’s
foundational book inaccessible and unbelievable to thinking people today. We
must reject and repent of the Christian tradition’s sinful sexism, its misogyny
that has led it to disparage and suppress women almost from the very beginning
of the faith. We must reject and repent of Christianity’s traditional
homophobia, of the way our tradition has condemned so many of God’s people just
for being the sexual beings God created them to be. We must reject and repent
of the way the Christian church has been, and to a considerable extent still
is, in bed with violent, oppressive secular powers. We simply cannot deny that
Trinitarianism prevented none of these horrific things.
There is another aspect of traditional
Christian Trinitarianism that raises a profound question of whether progressive
Christianity can accept it or not. It is the gender exclusive names of two of
the three Persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son. Father and son are,
of course, common human words, and they both refer to male not female human
beings. Many of us progressive Christians who so want to hold onto the Trinity
nonetheless struggle with the sexual exclusivity of the terms father and son. We
know that God is not male. Neither is God female nor of any other sort of human
sexuality. God utterly transcends human sexuality in the same way God utterly
transcends everything else human. Yet Christianity’s nearly exclusive use of
the terms father and son to refer to God gives the entirely false impression
that God is male. People have said that the Trinity consists of two men and a
bird, yet of course the Trinity does not consist of men or other creatures at
all. Many of us therefore strongly believe that we must come up with other
terms for the first two Persons of the Trinity.
If we are going to deal with
the problem of gender-specific language for two of the Persons of the Trinity,
we must understand where that language came from. The language of the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity arose from the way, in the New Testament gospels, Jesus
calls God father. The New Testament also frequently calls Jesus Christ the Son
of God. Our sacred texts use this language in large part because, sacred as
those texts may be, they arose in cultures that were thoroughly patriarchal and
misogynist. In the ancient world, especially perhaps in the Jewish tradition
out of which Christianity grew, no one thought of God as anything other than
male. The earliest understandings the people had of the Jewish god Yahweh was
that he, always he, was a tribal war god. War gods are almost always male, as
Yahweh certainly was. Ancient Judaism moved far beyond the primitive notion of
Yahweh as merely a war god, but it always retained the masculine language for
God that had originally come from the people’s understanding of Yahweh as a war
god. Christianity grew out of Judaism, and it adopted the language of its
mother faith for God. Indeed, the Jewish and Greek cultures in which
Christianity developed and grew gave it no reason to change that language.
Those cultures would never call God Mother or God’s offspring Daughter. They
just wouldn’t. So we’ve got Father and Son, and many of us aren’t happy with
that fact at all.
Some progressive Christians
seek to solve the problem of the traditional male language for the Trinity by
calling the persons of the Trinity Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer rather than
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This solution has the virtue of not being
gender-specific, but there is a grave theological problem with it. We saw above
that it is inappropriate to assign different aspects of the work of God to
different Persons of the Trinity. Yes, the Father is the Creator, but so is the
Son and so is the Holy Spirit. The same is true of the functions of redeemer
and sustainer and the Persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit as well. I prefer
the use of the terms Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer in worship, but in a more
purely theological setting they are not entirely appropriate.
So what are we to do? One
thing we can do is refer to the First Person of the Trinity as Mother rather
than Father. There is no reason why God cannot be Mother. Neither is there any
reason other than overuse that God may not be Father. The problem is trickier with
regard to the Son. Christians confess that it was the Second Person of the
Trinity, the Son, who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The Son is fully
God, but Jesus of Nazareth was a male human being. We may consider it to be in
some ways unfortunate that he was only male, but, because he was a particular
human being, that’s precisely what he was. Perhaps an acceptable solution to
the problem of male language would be to call the Persons of the Trinity
Mother, Son, and Holy Spirit. I have not done so here, though perhaps I should
have. However we handle the language problem with the Trinity, we must do
everything we can to overcome that notion so many Christians have that God is
somehow male.
Trinitarianism prevented
none of the things about Christianity that we must reject and of which we must
repent. On the other hand, Trinitarianism doesn’t require any of those things
either. Trinitarianism is, therefore, at least not inconsistent with
progressive Christianity. Indeed, when properly understood, the Trinity points
our faith in a progressive direction. The Trinity is an expression of divine
love as much as it is anything else. It points first of all to God’s internal
essence as love. The three-fold aspect of God’s essence expresses God’s love as
divine and unconditional.
Beyond that, the love of a
dynamic God in perpetual motion, as the Trinity is, moves out of God and into
God’s creation dynamically and powerfully. For us Trinitarian Christians, the
Trinity expresses the outflowing of God’s love more immediately than does a
more static, purely unitarian understanding of God. I do not mean by what I say
here in any way to disparage the faith of God’s Jewish and Muslim people. Not
at all. I mean merely to express how the matter appears to me from my Trinitarian
perspective. From that perspective, the doctrine of the Trinity gives us a God
of love in motion, in action, in infinite love with us and with all of God’s
creation.
And what exactly is
progressive Christianity? It is a faith grounded in and expressing the
boundless, unconditional love of God for all of creation including God’s love
for each and every person who has ever lived or ever will live. Progressive Christianity is a religious faith
grounded in the positive parts of the Christian tradition. It seeks to order
the world and individual human lives according to God’s grace, that is, God’s
unconditional love in action. That’s why a Trinitarian God reflects and supports
progressive faith. The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a God of love, the God
which progressive Christianity confesses.
So I say to my progressive
Christian sisters and brothers in faith, let us cling to our faith’s
traditional Trinitarian conception of God (perhaps with a necessary alternation
of the names of two of the Trinity’s Persons). Understanding God as the Trinity
does not make us Tritheists. The Trinitarian God, though consisting of three
divine Persons, is still one God. The Trinity is an ancient Christian
confession. Holding to it does not, however, make us conservative. The God of
the Trinity, properly understood, is not conservative. This God is dynamic.
This God is active in creation infusing creation always with God’s
unconditional love. There is nothing conservative in that. So despite
Trinitarianism’s historical coincidence with much in our faith tradition that
we must reject and transform, I remain a Trinitarian Christian, and I call all
of my fellow progressive Christians to remain Trinitarian as well. To me,
Christianity is not really Christianity without the Trinity. I hope to make the
necessity of the Trinity for true Christianity clearer as we discuss the other
major Christian doctrine that is a subject of this little book, namely, the
Incarnation. To the daunting task of making sense of the Incarnation we now
turn.
Chapter Three: The
Incarnation
“We proclaim Christ
Crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those
who are the called…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 1
Corinthians 1:23-24. “And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation
is in vain and your faith is in vain.” 1 Corinthians 15:14. Paul, whose
writings are the oldest Christian writings we have, focuses not on Jesus divinity
but on the significance of his crucifixion and resurrection as a mere human
being. Very early in the Christian tradition, Jesus was Lord and Savior, but he
was not yet divine.
“You are my Son , the
Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Mark 1:11b. “And now you will conceive in
your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. Luke 1:31. “Joseph, son
of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived
in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 1:20b. “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and
lived among us….” John 1:1, 14. In the gospels of the New Testament, the time
at which Jesus becomes God’s Son keeps getting pushed back. Mark, the earliest
of the canonical gospels, probably written in the early 70s CE, proclaims Jesus
as God’s Son only at his baptism as an adult by John the Baptist at the
beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In both Luke and Matthew, both written around
fifteen years after Mark, Jesus is God’s Son from the moment of his virginal
conception in Mary’s womb. In John, written perhaps fifteen years after Luke
and Matthew, Jesus is not just God’s Son. He is God, and he was God “in the
beginning,” from before the creation of time. Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke
proclaim Jesus’ significance, and Mark, Matthew, and Luke declare him to be
God’s Son. But they stop short of declaring Jesus himself to be God Incarnate.
John doesn’t. John is the gospel of incarnation in a way the other gospels are
not. Only by the end of the first century CE had at least one Christian
community, John’s, come to see Jesus as nothing less than God in human form.
The confession of Jesus as
truly God Incarnate found its full creedal expression only in the early fourth
century CE, three hundred or more years after the last canonical gospel, John,
had been written. We’ve already quoted these words from the Nicene Creed, but
they are worth quoting again here:
I believe in the Lord, the
Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial
with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us [humans] and for our
salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate in the
Virgin Mary, and became man.
Here, in the Nicene Creed of 325 CE, we have the
classic, fully developed doctrine of the Incarnation.
A fully developed doctrine
yes, or so it would seem. But the Christian tradition wasn’t content to leave
the doctrine well enough alone. In 451 CE, the Council of Chalcedon, which was
the Fourth Ecumenical Council, issued this so-called Symbol or Definition of
Chalcedon, which became as much as part of Christian orthodoxy as did the Nicene
Creed:
We, then, following the Holy
Fathers, all with one consent, teach men (sic) to confess one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood;
truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] (sic) soul and body;
consubstantial [homoousious] with the Father according to the Godhead,
and consubstantial [homoousious] with us according to the Manhood; in
all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father
according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our
salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the
Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged
in two natures, inconfusedly (sic), unchangeably, indivisibly,
inseparably; the distinction of natures by no means taken away by the
union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and occurring in
one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one
and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as
the prophets from the beginning [have declared] (sic) concerning him, and the
Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the Creed of the Holy Fathers has
handed down to us.[5]
Wow! What a lot of verbiage! All to say that the Lord
Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human at the same time. We call the
Christology of Chalcedon a two-natures Christology. Christian orthodoxy sees
the Incarnation as consisting of a human nature and a divine nature both
present in Jesus Christ with neither nature in any way detracting from or
diminishing the other.
Talk about absurd! We’ve
already talked about how absurd the doctrine of the Trinity is. The doctrine of
the Incarnation is every bit as absurd. Think for moment about just what the
doctrine of the Incarnation claims. God, the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent Creator of everything that is, the Holy Spirit in and behind
everything that is, the ultimately unknowable ultimate reality, became a human
being. One particular human being. A man named Jesus of Nazareth. A man like
any other man. Fully human. Physical. Mortal. A person who, like the rest of us,
was born, grew into adulthood, felt pain, was both loved and hated, and died
just as we all die. How is that possible? Well, it isn’t. It’s just true.
People, including Christian
people, have an immense amount of difficulty holding onto the full doctrine of
the Incarnation. They so often deny one side or the other of Jesus’ nature. Today
they most often deny Jesus’ divinity. They say Jesus was a great moral teacher.
He taught us the true ways of God, but he did it just as an ordinary human
being. There was nothing divine about him. It’s certainly easy enough to
conclude that about him. He was, after all, an historical individual. As best
as we are able to determine, there was indeed a human being named Jesus of
Nazareth who lived in Roman-occupied Galilee in what we call the first century
CE. There’s really nothing mysterious about any human being who ever lived. We
all have a human anatomy. We all have a human mind. We belong to many different
cultures, and we don’t all believe the same things or think the same way about
things. Still, we all have perfectly human beliefs and thoughts. We’ve all been
born. We all are and always have been mortal. There’s nothing mysterious in all
of that. So sure. Jesus was a human being, but that’s all he was, people say.
It’s hard to argue otherwise.
Today even some people who
consider themselves to be Christians see Jesus as merely human. He was a great
moral teacher. He is the great moral teacher Christians choose to accept and to
follow. But there wasn’t more to him than that. Some Christians will come right
out and say as much. There are probably a lot more Christians who think of
Jesus that way but can’t, or don’t, articulate how they disagree with the
orthodox Christology that says he was much more than that. I suspect that most
Christians just don’t think about the Incarnation much. They read the stories
in Matthew and Luke of Jesus’ virgin conception. They read the Prologue to the
Gospel of John with its powerful proclamation of Jesus as the Word of God made
flesh. But they probably don’t think much about what those stories mean.
The other way Christians
fail to hold onto the Incarnation is to overemphasize Jesus’ divinity and
ignore his humanity. This is the most common failing of the Christian tradition
with regard to the Incarnation. Jesus becomes God and only God. He is Lord and
Savior, and how can a human being possibly be those things? They can’t. We pray
to Jesus, and surely it is idolatry to pray to a mere human being. We entrust
our souls to him, and surely we’d be outright fools to entrust our souls to any
mere human. We think he can take our souls to heaven, something no mere human
could possibly do. We say if you want to know God, look at Jesus, and the
Christian tradition has far too often forgotten that when we do that we see
first of all a human being. We call ourselves Christians, and Christ is Jesus’
title as a divine figure not a merely human one.
So if the Incarnation
doesn’t make a lick of sense, and if the Christian tradition that confesses it
keeps messing it up by overemphasizing one nature of Christ or the other, why
shouldn’t we just chuck it? Rational people can’t accept it, and most people
today at least like to think of themselves as rational. The Incarnation is an
ancient doctrine that we want to use in a postmodern world. The Christian
tradition formulated it centuries ago using Greek concepts few if any of us
understand today. There are just so many reasons to abandon the Incarnation and
see Jesus as a mere human who was perhaps one of the many great moral teachers
of human history like so many people do today but not as more than that.
There are three reasons why
progressive Christianity must retain the doctrine of the Incarnation. One is
that progressive Christianity is Christian, and Christianity just isn’t
Christianity without the Incarnation. The Christian confession that in Jesus of
Nazareth we see both a human being like us and God Godself is the central tenet
of the Christian faith. It is what makes Christianity Christian. It is what
more than anything else differentiates Christianity from the world’s other
great religious traditions. That Incarnation is what makes Christianity
Christian is perhaps not enough in itself to justify retaining it, but if we
are going practice our relationship with God in the Christian tradition, which
is what being Christian really is, we need the Incarnation.
The second reason why
progressive Christianity must retain the Incarnation is that it makes God
accessible in a way no other way of approaching God does. In Jesus, God isn’t
just some far off, transcendent reality, though God remains that as well. Jesus
of Nazareth was a human being, every bit as human as every one of us is. We can
relate to another human being more easily and more intimately than we can
relate to any theological abstraction. Yet in the Incarnation we confess that
in that one human being, Jesus, we see and learn as much about God as it is
possible for us to know. Jesus doesn’t obviate the mystery of God, but through
Jesus we can enter into that mystery and gain knowledge of its nature better
than we can in any other way. With the Incarnation we really can say, if you
want to know God, look to Jesus. Yes, the gospels of the New Testament don’t
all give us the same picture of Jesus, but our tradition says that in taking
the four of them together we gain an adequate picture of him and of what he
means for us.
In Jesus as God Incarnate we
see not just that some moral teacher who lived two thousand years ago thought
certain things about God. We see Who God really is for us, or at least we see
at least as much of that as we are ever capable of seeing. We see that God’s
ways are not the world’s ways. We see that God calls us to turn the ways of the
world upside down, and to do it nonviolently. We see that God calls us to
transform the world’s ubiquitous systems of oppression and exploitation of the
poor and the marginalized into the realm of God in which all are accepted as
they are and in which everyone has enough because no one has too much. In Jesus
we learn God’s love not for creation as an abstraction but for us. Even for us.
For every one of us.
In Jesus we see what God
will do to show us how unshakably present in solidarity God is with us in
everything that happens to us. The main reason why I will not abandon the
Incarnation is that theology of the cross is impossible without it. If Jesus is
only a man, then his crucifixion is a tragedy to be sure. But if Jesus is only
a man, the tragedy of his crucifixion is just one in an endless string of human
tragedies. It’s just another example of the injustice and violence we humans
are so ready and willing to inflict on other humans. But when we confess Jesus
to be both human and divine at the same time, his crucifixion takes on
infinitely more meaning than that.
With Jesus as both human and
divine, we see in his crucifixion how God actually relates to human sin and
suffering. We see God preventing neither sin or human suffering. God’s didn’t
stop the Romans from crucifying Jesus, a sinful act if any human ever committed
one. Rather, we see God in the person of Jesus enter into human sin, human
suffering, and death. In Jesus God takes those things into God’s own being. In
God Incarnate on the cross we see that God relates to human suffering and death
not by preventing them but by being present with us in unshakable solidarity as
we suffer and as we die. Paradoxically, in Jesus’ cry from the cross “My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?” we see God’s presence with us even in our
anguish over what we are sure is God’s absence from us. In God Incarnate on the
cross we learn that God is with us always, no matter what, as our rock and our
salvation.
And we see those salvific
things only if Jesus is God Incarnate. No mere human could demonstrate to us
what Jesus demonstrates to us about God. Only one who is both fully human and
fully divine could possibly do that. Jesus did it on the cross. In Jesus on the
cross, God suffers and dies. But God in Jesus Christ doesn’t suffer and die to
pay some ghastly price to God for the forgiveness of sin. Jesus Christ doesn’t
die as a consequence of cosmic child abuse by a violent, self-absorbed God like
the classical theory of atonement asserts. That is, for me, the primary reason
why progressive Christianity must cling to the orthodox confession of Jesus of
Nazareth as God Incarnate.
Do I know that Jesus was God
Incarnate as a matter of historical fact? No. There is no way to know it as
historical fact. But the great good news is that it doesn’t matter that we
can’t know it as historical fact. We know it as truth far deeper the mere
historical fact. We know it as truth far more powerful than mere historical
fact. We accept it with our minds, but, more importantly, we know it in the
depth of our souls. We know it because the confession of Jesus as God Incarnate
rings true with us a depth no mere fact can ever reach. We know it because we
choose to know it, but we choose to know it because knowing it gives us hope.
Knowing it gets us through the night. Knowing it gets us through life with
confidence that God is with us always no matter what. God demonstrates God’s
unconditional solidarity with each and every one of us on the cross of Jesus. My
confession of that truth keeps me from despair over the harshness of life, over
the violence and injustice we humans to inflict on each other day after day
after day. That confession keeps me from despair because it tells me that none
of that separates any person ever from the love of God.
Without the Incarnation,
frankly, Christianity isn’t worth much to me. Without the Incarnation I can see
no particular reason to follow Jesus, no particular reason to entrust my life
and my soul to him. With the Incarnation, Jesus is the greatest truth there
ever was or ever could be. The Incarnation assures me of nothing short of
salvation in this life, and it gives me hope of salvation beyond this life. Of
course the Incarnation is absurd. It is one of those profound truths, like the
Trinity, that isn’t possible, it’s just true. I know in the depths of my soul
that it’s true. I know that it is one of the most profoundly true things there
is or ever could be. So I will never give up the doctrine of the Incarnation. I
will argue for as long as I have breath that progressive Christianity must
never give up the Incarnation. I will hope and pray as long as I have breath
that it never does. May it be so.
[1] Of
course, the last Ecumenical Council met in the eighth century CE, but never
mind.
[2]
The name Peter, Petros in Greek, means rock.
[3]
Britannica.com/topic/Trinity-christianity.
[4]
plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/
[5] ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.i.v.i.iii,html.
This statement of the Incarnation was aimed against a Christology that said
that Jesus Christ had only one nature that was somehow both human and divine.
That Christology is called Monophysitism. It is the Christology of the Coptic
Church of Egypt to this day. The Greek word that this translations renders as
“Subsistence” is hypostasis. No one really knows what hypostasis
means, though Chalcedon uses it to emphasize that the two natures of Christ
subsist in one person.
