If adopted as guidelines for understanding Jesus’ person, Nicaea and Chalcedon prevent the radical transcendence of God in Jesus from being domesticated. A Christology developed along these lines will point beyond the present to a greater reality in which sin and death have been overcome, inviting and empowering people to participate in this.
Yet this doctrinal development also involved significant losses. In emphasizing the uniqueness and transcendence of Jesus the theologians of this era “forgot that Jesus himself proclaimed a coming Kingdom of God.”99 The hope for liberation within history was forgotten and a repressive orientation towards Judaism developed.100 In order to be faithful to Jesus and create space within Christian consciousness for Judaism and other religions, Christian theology must reclaim Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign of God, remembering that he looked to the coming of a reality that he prefigured, which includes more than the church and himself. The search for metaphysical concreteness in understanding Jesus also brought a loss of concern for Jesus’ historical concreteness,101 for understanding where and how he located himself within the social conflicts of his day, and with this came a loss of Jesus’ preferential option of the poor. Christology was assimilated to a patriarchal worldview and began to function “as a sacred justification for male dominance.”102
However, the Christology of Nicaea and Chalcedon also has liberating potential. The central principle of this Christology, “the unassumed is the unhealed,”103 suggests that what is salvific about the incarnation is not that Jesus was male, but that he assumed a human nature. If what he assumed does not include women’s nature then Jesus cannot be their savior. This principle thus undermines patriarchal distortions of Christology.104 It also has liberating potential in relation to the environmental crisis. In the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, Jesus’ body, a piece of creation, was taken up into the glory of God. This transformation of one piece of nature “pledges a joyful future beyond death” for the rest.105 From this expectation can come a new understanding of nature in the context of the environmental crisis, as destined for glory and to be respected as such. The emphasis in Alexandrian and Antiochean Christologies that Jesus reveals the fullness of humanity also has liberating implications when Jesus’ historical concreteness is recovered.106 In a world plagued by sin and evil, Jesus reveals that the fullness of humanity is to be found in the struggle for justice.
Finally, Jesus proclaimed a radically transcendent God, yet a God who rejoices over the salvation of sinners (Luke 15:10), a God responsive to human need. The Johannine interpretation of Jesus also portrays God as radically transcendent to creation, yet as living and finding fulfillment through people receiving Jesus’ message and living in light of it.107 In the doctrinal development leading to Nicaea and Chalcedon, this living aspect of the divine nature was formally encoded in the doctrine of the Trinity. But substantively the Hellenistic notion of divine impassibility that Christian theologians used to understand God meant that God was no longer conceived as living in this way. This made it difficult to understand how Jesus’ divinity could be present in his suffering on the cross. The doctrine of the Trinity affirmed at Nicaea emphasized the radical transcendence of God and the freedom of God to do new things in history. But its emphasis on the living aspect of God’s being was undercut by the fundamental assumption that the divine being was immutable. In this respect the search for a Christian doctrine of God that led to Nicaea remains unfinished.
Chalcedon as a Starting Point for
a Descending Christology
The Chalcedonian Definition bequeaths Christian theologians the task of striving to understand how the second person of the Trinity and Jesus’ humanity are united in his one person.108 In this respect Chalcedon represents the end of a long process of doctrinal development. But as a guideline for how the person of Jesus Christ should be understood it also presents a starting point for further reflection.109 Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) understood this in a particular way.
The outbreak of World War I, the fact that many of Barth’s liberal theology professors supported German participation in the war, and Barth’s reflections on Scripture in light of this led him to argue that humanity exists in a state of alienation from God and can only have authentic knowledge of God through God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.110 Following a progressively developing approach informed by the Chalcedonian Definition, Barth went on to argue that Jesus did not simply embody what could be known of God from elsewhere, but that all Christian concepts of God must be developed in light of Jesus Christ.111 In keeping with this Barth undertook a far-reaching revision of the idea of God that was formulated during the period of Nicaea and Chalcedon.112 Theologians influential at these councils insisted on God’s otherness and understood this in terms of God’s absoluteness and immutability. But Barth argued that when Jesus Christ becomes the starting point for understanding God this conception is not enough. The immutable absolute is other to sinful humanity, but it is not the otherness of God. According to Barth, understanding God in light of Jesus Christ requires that one recognize a second otherness to God. God is not only absolute; God is also living. God’s being is moved and dynamic,113 at once radically transcendent yet also capable of entering into relationships with creation and humanity. The true otherness of God is only revealed in the freedom and love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Barth’s demand that the doctrine of God be developed in light of Christology has been widely influential in recent Western Christian theology.114
In this way Chalcedon presents a starting point for what Karl Rahner called a descending Christology. This chapter and the two preceding it have attempted an “ascending Christology,” beginning with Jesus and seeking to understand the experience of salvation through him.115 But if an ascending Christology concludes with finding the conditions of possibility for this in Jesus being the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, then this in turn calls for a descending Christology that seeks to understand God in light of Jesus. An ascending Christology begins with Jesus and studies the continuities and discontinuities between what can be known of him and the confession of him as the second person of the Trinity. A descending Christology reverses this direction of inquiry. It takes up Barth’s challenge to understand God in light of Jesus Christ. It begins with God understood as triune in light of Jesus. It then seeks to understand Jesus, his person and work, in light of what he reveals about God. At the same time it seeks to understand God in light of Jesus as the Christ. It asks, what must God be like if Jesus is the Word of God? For instance, if the second person of the Trinity became incarnate in Jesus, then God must be absolute and immutable, yet also capable of change in the sense of becoming incarnate.116 In this way a descending Christology seeks to provide a more consistently “Christian doctrine of God,”117 and with that a metaphysical framework for understanding Jesus and what it means to have faith in him. The next chapter will present a descending Christology of this kind.
