This is a guest post from Fr David Adamson-Hill, priest with responsibility for St George's, Waddon in the Parish of Croydon. It is written to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 2025.
Would it Matter if Jesus was not fully God and fully Human?
Docetism is an easy heresy to fall in to; the belief that
somehow Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, was in some way less human than we
are; as if God was disguised in the body of a man. The truth of the incarnation
is that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, and the Christian 'faith is
grounded in the divine human relation'[1]
which only becomes possible because of the absolute and irreducible humanity of
Jesus. Ignatius of Antioch, the second century bishop and martyr, neatly sums
up the problem:
'Every denial of the reality of
the humanity of Jesus means a denial of the reality of our redemption, for if
Jesus only seemed to have a body, then he only seemed to redeem us...The whole
of Christianity then evaporates into a mere semblance of reality.'[2]
A modern day
problem for Christians in trying to grasp the full humanity of Jesus is the
temptation to try and escape the finitude of our human condition. In a broad
sense this can mean escaping the terminality of death, though most people
realise this is impossible and undesirable. More subtly and more realistically,
it means the desire to escape the normality of life – the everyday situations
and context that bind us to the world. Like all human beings, Jesus had his
time and he participated in our history under specific conditions. This
specificness, which is key to human identity, places Jesus in a context that is
very human. Being “bound” by anything less than the same conditions which
“bind” us would take away from this humanity.
Why does
this finitude matter? It matters because 'through the incarnation, the Son of
God experiences at first hand what it is to be human – with all our limits'[3]
By Christ living within human limits, we, as humans, begin to be liberated
'from our inclination to regard our limitedness as an affliction.'[4]
In fact, what it is to be human is turned on its head. No longer should we try
and fit the knowledge of Jesus into our human experiences, but rather how we think
about what it means for us to be human is changed by our sharing in the life
and time of Jesus. I’m a big fan of the Scottish Dominican theologian, who says
'we human beings have to learn to understand ourselves as being allowed to
partake in [Jesus’s] humanity.'[5]
This
recognition that humanity in general is able to partake in the specific humanity
of Christ in fact opens up a new way of being human – in God's self revelation
of Christ, God has made possible the 'humanization of humanity.'[6]
This full humanization is seen in the way Christ responds in complete
faithfulness to the Father's call. Arguably, it is Christ's faithfulness in the
face of pain, fear, and death that best express this freedom found in
faithfulness. In order to understand the freedom and faithfulness of Christ, we
must recall that 'God is most emphatically not an escape from human ills
enabling us to evade the horrors and suffering of human life.'[7]
Christ's faithfulness only means
anything to us as humans because Christ had the human freedom to choose whether
or not to to run away from his impending death, and Jesus of Nazareth had no
foreknowledge to help make that decision. Without this human power of choice
and self-determination in the face of uncertainty, our salvation would be
completely undermined. In this faithfulness, there is no escape or easy way
out, but there is victory.
If Christ's
humanity is reduced by a forcing of divine foreknowledge into his
self-awareness, then there is a real risk of reducing the saving power of
Calvary. 'The human consciousness of Jesus did not pre-exist in heaven. To
claim that would be to threaten the genuineness of his humanity.'[8]
This is the key point; that without genuine human fear in the face of death,
without a knowledge of Resurrection, how are human people able to relate to the
human Christ? The Resurrection itself would lose meaning as well; it would no
longer be the result of an act of complete faith, the 'act of surrender to
participation in the divine life according to our human nature.'[9]
To enter fully into death means to understand and experience death as terminal.
The difference with Christ is that 'At the very point where the history of any
other human being would stop unconditionally, he has a further history.'[10]
In the face
of the total humanity required for our salvation through Christ, how then can
Christ's full divinity, the relation to the eternal logos be explained? A
lot of confusion comes from a lack of appreciation of what the term 'person'
really means, when the word is used in a theological sense. To say that Christ
is fully human, and to say that Christ was a human person, is to say two
different things; there is a difference between nature and person, with person
being a subset of nature. 'Nature is what makes one human or not. Christ has a
completely human nature. Therefore Christ is completely human.'[11]
Christ is completely human without being a human person, in fact person hood
(what we have) is not the fulfilment of human nature – fulfilment is what
Christ is, the incarnation of the divine logos.
This
fulfilment takes the shape of a new way of being human, which is to say a new
way of being faithful to God. Before this new way of being, God's call was the
same, but humanity never fully responded to the call, to the fulfilment of
humanity’s own vocation. To introduce you to another Dominican theologian,
Edward Schillebeekcx, who writes that in Christ we find 'a man in whom was
concentrated the entirety of man's vocation to faithfulness.'[12]
This faithfulness is being attuned to the self-communication of the divine,
even to participate in this communication. Human persons are called to continue
this participation as children of God.
Human
persons now have the possibility, and the example, of living in this ongoing
self-communication of God, living with the freedom to accept it or otherwise. In
Christ 'humanity becomes “fully human” - able to share in the divine life, the
“theological act of encounter with God'[13]
through Christ's full humanity. The existence of Christ's humanity 'is what
establishes and thus reveals human nature in all its possibilities.'[14]
This true human nature is something that, left to our own devices, humanity
cannot achieve – but humanity is not alone, it is given grace – the possibility
of participation in the divine, through the ability to speak of divine life
'incarnate in the personal freedom and will of Christ'[15]
Kerr writes
that 'The life of the man Jesus was a limited life in a restricted time. Yet
that life, with all its limitations, was the life of the eternal Son and Word
of God.'[16]
To have the same 'personal freedom' as Christ, which is key to sharing in the
Divine life, means realizing that it is good to have life limited by time;
there is freedom in accepting that the way of transcending humanity as it
appears to human persons is to accept an un-transcended, completely normal,
version of humanity.
'Because of
his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to be what
he is' so goes the famous saying of St. Irenaeus.[17]
In this is summed up what it means to become 'fully human' – it is the vocation
to intimacy with God through Christ. This is the revelation of the ultimate
destiny of all humankind, shown once and for all in an individual, and
accessible to all through that same individual. The openness that is required
for this is what is given to us in the human life of Jesus Christ. Without this
human life, there could be no intimacy with God; human persons could not have
seen what it really means to be a human being, and the human destiny and
calling to community with God could not have been fulfilled.
[1]Jennifer
Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God: The Theological Anthropology of
Edward Schillebeeckx (T&T Clark: London, 2009), p. 143
[2]Walter
Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (Continuum: London, 2012) pp. 178-9
[3]Gerald
O'Collins, SJ, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of
Jesus (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995), p. 236
[4]Kerr,
Immortal Longings, p. 23
[5]Kerr,
Immortal Longings, p. 26
[6]Cooper,
Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 127
[7]Harry
Williams, The True Wilderness (Continuum: London, 1965), p. 46
[8]O'Collins,
Christology, p. 254
[9]Cooper,
Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150
[10]Kerr,
Immortal Longings, p. 31
[11]O'Collins,
Christology, p. 25t6
[12]Edward
Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Sheed
& Ward: London, 1963), p. 13
[13]Cooper,
Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150
[14]Kerr,
Immortal Longings, p. 26
[15]Cooper,
Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 160
[16]Kerr,
Immortal Longings, p. 35
[17]Irenaeus,
Adv. Haer. V, Preface (Ex Fontibus Co: Dublin, 2010), p. 554
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