A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

History and Incarnation

I’ve been reading Thomas P. Rausch’s introduction to Christology called Who Is Jesus? and enjoying it quite a bit. One of the points he emphasizes is the importance of keeping the historical Jesus in view when doing Christology. Any Christology worth its salt has to be connected to and rooted in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and this entails using (albeit not uncritically) what we can learn from historical research into who Jesus was.

Faith is not based on history, Rausch says. It’s based on an encounter with the living Christ who is the Lord of the Church. To that extent he is in full agreement with those like Luke Timothy Johnson who argue that the “real Jesus” is emphatically not the Jesus of historical reconstructions. And Rausch also agrees in calling into question the Enlightenement assumptions of many historians such as the rejection of the supernatural or treating religion as epiphenomenal on social or economic strutures and forces.

But, he says, we can’t dispense with the historical Jesus. If the Christ of faith is not continuous with the Jesus of history, then what we end up with is a “mythological or ideological construction” of some sort. Fundamentalists and biblical literalists do this by taking refuge in a theory of biblical inerrancy which supposedly guarantees that the words put in Jesus’ mouth in the gospels are identified with the very words he spoke when he was on earth, thus closing the gap between the Jesus of history and the Jesus as presented in the gospels. A more sophisticated version of this strategy is found in what we might call a “postmodern” or “cultural-linguistic” turn. The value of the gospels is located in narrating an identity which the church enters into and questions of historical veracity are, or can seem to be, bracketed or indefinitely deferred.

Rausch instead argues for what he calls a “dialectical Christology,” one which moves between two poles: the Church’s confession of Jesus as risen lord and savior as we find it in the NT, the Creeds, the tradition, and the experience of countless Christian people on the one hand, and, on the other, a firm grounding in “the earthly Jesus, the Jesus made accessible through historical research” (p. 8). This doesn’t mean that Christians should uncritically accept whatever secular scholars claim to have discovered (Rausch is quite critical for instance of the researchers associated with the Jesus Seminar), but that they have to take it seriously.

I think a lot of people are troubled by the idea that Christianity might, in principle, be falsifiable if certain historical facts turned out to be otherwise than we thought them to be. Hence the various attempts to reduce Christianity to a set of “eternal truths” that don’t depend on contingent historical facts or to in some other way put it beyond the reach of historical criticism. But isn’t the dependence on history just another aspect of the scandal of particularity that has dogged Christianity pretty much from the beginning? Presumably God was aware of the risk involved in revealing himself in the midst of human history in all its messy particularity, but still thought it was worth it.

For Christians it matters whether or not the man Jesus of Nazareth is substantially the same person as presented in the gospels. The Church has never been content with a merely mythological Christ-figure, though some forms of theology and devotion may have suggested it at times. If we’re going to be true to the Chalcedonian affirmation that Jesus is true God and true man, we can’t be indifferent to the particularities of the man he was (and is).

5 responses to “History and Incarnation”

  1. Chip Frontz

    Lee,

    What would be an example of a particular historical claim of a secular scholar that Christians would have to take seriously?

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  2. Lee

    Well, I think one example is that scholars (secular and Christian) have cast doubt on many of Jesus’ discourses in the Fourth Gospel where he discusses his own identity and person at length. In the past these were used as proof-texts for Jesus’ divinity, but I think now most mainstream theologians would say that we can’t take those speeches as verbatim reports of what Jesus said and are perhaps better seen as the result of theological reflection upon Jesus’ significance by the early church. That seems to me like something that we have to take seriously (even if maybe we’d want to challenge it at some points).

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  3. Chip Frontz

    Is that an example that you are thinking of, or an example that the author mentions?

    The Johannine discourses have at least one Synoptic parallel, at Matthew 11:25-27. Moreover, Paul was positing the eternal sonship of Christ long before the Gospel of John, which seems to indicate that the tradition is at least that early.

    Even if the farewell discourse is the product of some literary creativity (which I think is incontrovertible based upon the similarity between the Gospels and Epistles of John), I think that you have to presume against the idea of “projection,” where Jesus is a kind of tabula rasa for the author’s hopes and dreams. In other words, Christianity stands or falls on the faith in the authentic witness of the biblical writers to actual sayings and concepts of Jesus, even if those sayings are remembered and arranged by the authors in slightly different ways.

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  4. Lee

    Yeah – I just pulled that example out of my, er, hat. And I’m more than happy to concede the point.

    Rausch’s point is more that historical research can and should, in principle, be allowed to affect our understanding of Jesus.

    One example he does use is the fairly recent theory that has gained a certain degree of acceptance that Jesus’ actions in the Temple were a precipitating cause of his arrest. He argues that this episode should be given greater weight in how we understand Jesus’ mission and self-understanding.

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  5. Gaius

    Perfectly right.

    The idea of a gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith of the kind that, say, the Christ rose from the dead, appearing on several occasions before finally rising to Heaven, but the historical Jesus died and then his body was lost, has been a creation all along of unorthodox types and liberals ranging from deists and unitarians of one sort or another to atheists.

    But I cannot agree with you that Christianity is unique in asserting the historicity of its central divine figure, if that is what you meant to say or suggest.

    Even the Greeks and the Romans believed (that is, those who did believe) in the historical reality and action of their gods.

    The chief difference between the Greek (but not the Jewish or the Zarathustran) view of history and that of the Christians was the Christian eschatology according to which human history would come to a final and complete end with the end of the world, to be followed by a “new heaven and a new earth” in which “the lion would lie down with the lamb,” etc. The battle between good and evil indelibly characteristic both of individual and collective human life, and of human history, would be over. And the saved would then live … well, happily ever after.

    But that is quite a different difference from the one generally alleged that somehow the pagan gods and goddesses of the Greeks and Romans were, in contrast to Jesus, not (for the believers) actual participants in the drama of history.

    This is far from true regarding their activity in history, involving everything from answering petitionary prayers for individuals to intervening powerfully on one side or another in wars.

    In no way is that different from the action of Yahweh – except that individual actions of Yahweh in history are all part of and play a role in shaping the overall plan of Salvation History, leading (as noted above) to the end of the world.

    In short, what is different does not show in the gospel of Jesus’ life and work, or even his resurrection, shorn of the broader theological context in which his life and work are understood by believers.

    The difference is that between a religion with an eschatological view (Christianity, but also Judaism and Zoroastrianism) and a religion totally without any such thing (the Roman and Greek paganisms).

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