target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_5cb7c97a-7142-5228-b21b-3eb7b5ef3e27">94. Pelikan, “Chalcedon after Fifteen Centuries,” 930.
95. Ibid., 932.
96. Norris, “Toward a Contemporary Interpretation,” 76.
97. Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve?,” 161.
98. Norris, “Chalcedon Revisited,” 140.
99. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 230.
100. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 246–48.
101. Ruether, “Can Christology Be Liberated?,” 23.
102. Johnson, She Who Is, 151.
103. Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ, 158.
104. Johnson, She Who Is, 153.
105. Johnson, “Passion for God,” 121.
106. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus, 92–94.
107. Brown, Epistles of John, 555.
108. This can lead to very elaborate understandings of Jesus’ person, as in the later theology of Karl Barth (Jones, Humanity of Christ, 117–50).
109. Rahner, Theological Investigations, 1:150.
110. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 245–50.
111. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1:129.
112. Schweitzer, “Karl Barth’s Critique,” 231–44.
113. Jüngel, Doctrine of the Trinity.
114. Johnson, “Christology’s Impact,” 161 n. 9.
115. Rahner, Foundations, 177.
116. Ibid, 219–23.
117. Moltmann, Crucified God, 200.
4 Jesus Christ—the Word
of God
Why Develop a Descending Christology?
A descending Christology seeks to understand Jesus in terms of the Trinitarian life of God. The preceding chapter traced how reflection on the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ led to the conclusion that God is eternally triune and that Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. This concept of God then becomes the starting point for a descending Christology that asks what it is about God that makes God’s being triune and leads to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The answers to such questions are necessarily speculative and seek to describe the ineffable, so as “to speak in some way about that which we cannot fully express in any way.”1 The basis for pursuing these questions lies in the experience of salvation through Jesus. This experience of salvation is also a commissioning to speak of God as encountered in Jesus as best one can, even though God remains mysterious, ultimately incomprehensible and so can never be finally known.2 Any understanding of God remains a work in progress and the limits of human knowledge have to be respected.
Yet a descending Christology is necessary because talk of God never takes place in a vacuum. It is intrinsic to humanity to exalt something or someone. People live within moral horizons that inevitably esteem some values over others, investing some with ultimate concern.3 Some form of at least a minimal theology seems intrinsic to human life.4 Though God is ineffable, still one’s ultimate concern or vision of God is expressed in one’s life. Talk of one’s ultimate concern or concept of God is inevitable in examining the vision one lives by. The question is not whether one has an ultimate concern, but what it is. If one claims God as one’s ultimate concern the question is which God one believes in. A descending Christology seeks to develop a consistently Christian understanding of God.
A descending Christology is speculative. It asks about what has not been directly experienced, the nature of God in eternity, on the basis of what has been experienced of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Such speculation is inevitable in any discussion of God or ultimate concern. It is not empty speculation if it proceeds on the basis of revelation as witnessed to in Scripture and with due attention to other forms of knowledge and experience. Without this inquiry the task of Christian theology to test the congruence of the church’s understanding of God with what it believes about Jesus remains unfulfilled. A descending Christology is a form of discernment, 5 an attempt to understand God as best one can in light of what one has experienced in Jesus Christ.
God as Living and Absolute
Christian theologians reflecting on Jesus’ relationship to God in the era of the council of Nicaea (325 CE) understood God’s being in terms of the Hellenistic axiom that the divine is absolute and impassible. This axiom developed partly through Plato and Aristotle’s critique of the depiction of the gods in the literature of Homer and Hesiod.6 In taking over this axiom Christian theologians internalized this critique of anthropomorphic understandings of God and affirmed God’s transcendence to humanity. Homer depicted the gods as the highest of beings, but as beings much like humanity in being subject to moral temptations and conflicts. Plato and Aristotle argued that God was beyond this. As the absolute, God was not a projection of humanity but the standard by which humanity should live. Patristic theologians took up this critique and in principle went beyond it, affirming God’s absoluteness, but also that God is living; able to do new things and moved by love to redeem creation.7 For the patristic theologians, God was not subject to temptation, but God was living. This last affirmation was undercut by their adoption of the axiom of divine impassibility. This axiom did not fit with the biblical notion of God as living,8 for life involves change and the actualization of potential. Adopting this axiom made it difficult to say why God created the world or acted to redeem it. The notion of God as absolute and therefore immutable expressed the power of God’s being in relation to sin and death, describing God as transcendent to both and so able to save humanity from them. But it cannot express the nature of God’s being as moved by love.9 This requires a more dialectical understanding of God’s relationship to creation, in which God is absolute but also internally related10 to it.
The
