christology/scripture (david)

I cast down the gauntlet so to speak. So here goes.

I became a Christian in November of 1982. At the time and for some time following I found it very important to direct my prayer toward the God of Jesus. I remained agnostic on Christ's divinity -- not because I doubted but because I felt my call clearly to be to the God Jesus revealed and to Christ as his revealer. Overtime I have become more explicitly Trinitarian (Tri-unitarian) mostly by osmosis. I'm mean Trinitarian is the default position of Christianity and without strong reasons/incentives otherwise that's where a Christian ends up.


Then I ran into ran into Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Instead of trying to reason his way into faith through what is called Natural Theology or Philosophical Theology he starts with the core fact God's self-revelation in Christ Jesus. His Christology is logically prior to his doctrine of reconciliation. You have to have studied Protestant theology to know how truly radical that move is. He starts with revelation qua revelation even before the content of that revelation. And suddenly this troublesome notion of God, three persons in one Godhead which I sort of embraced knowing full well that it was utterly incoherent -- suddenly it made sense to me.

christology

What I have is a Quaker peculiarity. I hold to what church types call a "high christology". As Barth would say, Christ Jesus was fully human, fully God, and fully God-man. Now my friend Larry is squirming in his boots. Because everytime I affirm the divinity of Christ he feels a need to qualify it. Yes Jesus is divine, but so are we all. They taught us at AVP everything before a "but" is a lie.


Like Larry I affirm that doctrine all but lost to Protestantism, theosis. We're all on the God-track. Salvation doesn't just mean escaping the horny guys with pitchforks -- it means becoming divine. And that offer that opportunity and that reality is available to all of us. So we both affirm universal theosis. And maybe just maybe this theosis extends to the universe itself and not just everybody in it.

But in the meantime, I know I'm not quite there yet. I'm not even fully human let alone fully divine. And that goes for anyone I know or have heard of including those I love most in this world. So while we're all human and divine, Christ Jesus is human and divine in a different way I cannot fully articulate -- only that this difference remains important for me to affirm.

I'm going through a time of foment right now. Not sure where its taking me. The name(s) I call God in prayer and in public suddenly aren't working for me any longer.
Time will tell where it takes me. Maybe I'll pack it all in and become a cyber-Daoist.

scripture

If my christology is high my doctrine of scripture is low. The bible is a collection of ANETs: Ancient Near Eastern Texts. What marks it a different from other ANETs is simply that it is held to be scripture by a fluid cluster of interrelated sects calling themselves Christian.

I do not deny the spiritual validity or utility of other scriptures -- Daodejing, Quran, Torah, Analects. But I also note these are not my scriptures. I come to them as an outsider. I'm presently a practitioner of the Christian path and I can only read other people's scriptures in light of that practice. Reading is always done form within a tradition or set of (often conflicting) traditions.

I also affirm with Karl Barth (and early Quakers), that our scriptures, are faithful witnesses to the Word of God. I also affirm with Karl Barth, that when reading them in faith, seeking the Word they bear witness to, they become the word of God to/for us. I have experienced it. But for me it is not the Bible but the Word that has the authority and power. And faith has to be there prior to the reading.

David's Questions: Our personal notions of scripture and Christ

I don't think I can talk about the nature of scriptures without talking about revelation.

And I can't talk about Christology without talking about what it means to be "a human being."

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of it, how does Creation happen? Much as poems are "written," or plants grow. We live in our dream.

What is there to dream us?

Given the miracle that anything exists at all--that there is spirit to live this story--I'm inclined to believe the notion that God intrinsically exists. If it were possible for God not to exist, there would not be any existence, any being to experience the nothingness that wouldn't be anywhere--but my experience contradicts that alternative (and so does yours!)

God "became" us because that was the only way we could have any reality whatsoever.

The Whole Thing is within us, within each of us, and so is whatever we call "the outside world." But is not limited to that.

We experience our moment-to-moment existence. This could be, as in a dream, a succession of (seemingly) unrelated images, but instead we have continuity, the past morphing into the future--So something holds it all together, and whatever that is--is beyond our conscious self. Whatever that is, it is not some brute unreasoning "subconscious," not a mental working that's less conscious than we are but obviously something conscious of much more. I can imagine no limit to it.

And yet it has "peopled" itself into this universe. It is not possible to exist without being, intrinsically, It itself. And thus it loves us "as we love ourselves." If we are hungry to know the truth, it feeds us. But it's such a bewildering truth, and we're so little.

Scripture is our baby food.

Is it "the Truth"? How can words or letters be true or false, except as we translate them into our minds? Scriptures nourish the truth growing in us, if we chew them and digest them properly. Like what we might tell a child who wants to know, "Why is the sky blue?"

"Inspiration is not dictation." We can read scripture (like anything in this world, but particularly scriptures) as containing messages addressed to us. The passage we need (like anything else in this world) is likely to come to our attention at the appropriate moment, when it will be most helpful. At best, scripture is written by people in a state of communion with God, but it is not written by infallible people, nor can it make us infallible. It is merely one form that our mental/spiritual "daily bread" can take.

Is Jesus "just another human being," then? Yes. But what is a human being?

Is Jesus sent by God to let us know what God is like? Yes.

Is God like Jesus in character and personality, then? That appears to be the message.

son of God?

Often it's illuminating to look for the original meaning of a religious phrase. Often you find that it's been distorted beyond recognition--but then you also find that the new meanings it's taken on have an illuminating power of their own.

So. The "Son of God" once meant simply the "King of Israel," period. Like "the Son of Heaven" was ruler of China.

To call someone a "son of" anything can merely mean that he somehow resembles whatever he is "son of." Like the "Sons of Thunder." But there's also that metaphorical family relationship.

Jesus led us to understand ourselves as "God's children." Outside of John, he doesn't go around sounding like: "I'm the Son of God and you're not." He tells us to look on God as a good father to us, to trust God, depend on God, love and obey God, not as a ruler or a boss but as one truly akin to us.

Ursula Le Guin in _The Lathe of Heaven_ quotes from Chuange Tse XXIII:

"Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn it by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason..."

The good news for us is that we are all God's children in this sense.

But if we don't believe this... then we don't believe it.

It's hard to help someone who's too busy struggling, dispairing, or frantically maintaining denial of imagined horrors. And for the "wicked," mercy can look a lot like wrath.

{A friend of mine, counselling men whom courts had referred in cases of wife-beating, found many of them utterly unrepentant, sure that what they'd done was entirely right and proper. All he could do for some was to pray. At the moment he was praying for one particularly bad example, the man was on his way to his wife's with every intention of killing her. The police caught him on the way, and he ended up spending a long time in jail, time enough to think things over and sort them out differently. Our jails and prisons are a scandal, an accustomed atrocity, institutions that should be abolished. But the effect, this time, was good.}

Theological types have gotten fond of calling God "wholly other." This is valid in the sense of "wholly unlike our habitual selves"--even when our habits are good ones. But we can understand God better as "wholly akin." Wholly akin to what is deepest in us, most alive, most creative and unexpected.

gospel according to mark 1:14-20

Jesus begins to preach the gospel, and to call men to follow him

1:14-15 - It was after John's arrest that Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God, saying, "The time has come at last - the kingdom of God has arrived. You must change your hearts and minds and believe the good news."

1:16-17 - As he walked along the shore of the Lake of Galilee, he saw two fishermen, Simon and his brother Andrew, casting their nets into the water. "Come and follow me, and I will teach you to catch men!" he cried.

1:18 - At once they dropped their nets, and followed him.

1:19-20 - Then he went a little further along the shore and saw James the son of Zebedee, aboard a boat with his brother John, overhauling their nets. At once he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and went off after him.

temptations/david

Mark's tradition doesn't specify the temptations. We just don't know. The traditions that do specify can for the present purpose be taken to be an alternate Christology.

Mark presents Jesus encountering the Holy Spirit in an ecstatic experience of the heavens being sundered and a voice claiming you are my dearly-beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!

This is a secret event. Jesus hears and sees. No one else does. This troubles the author of John's gospel who transfers the vision to the Baptist so an outside source can witness to Jesus' sonship to Heaven.

For Mark the immediate effect of the immediate result of the descent of the Holy spirit, the sundering of the heavens, the adoption of Jesus by God -- is for the Holy Spirit to drive Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the satan.

The Holy Spirit does this. And during this time no one was with him but wild animals, and only the angels were there to care for him.

Such is the inward life of the Christ. Sent into harm's way by the Holy Spirit. To be tested by the Evil One. This is what it means to be a son of God. This is what it means to be led by the spirit.