How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (43 page)

           
and was made man.

           
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

           
he suffered death and was buried.

           
On the third day he rose again

           
in accordance with the scriptures;

           
he ascended into heaven

           
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

           
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

           
and his kingdom will have no end.

Every one of these statements was put into the creed to ward off heretics who had different beliefs, for example, that Christ was a lesser divine being from God the Father, or that he was not really a human, or that his suffering was not important for salvation, or that his kingdom would eventually come to an end—all of them notions held by one Christian group or another in the early centuries of the church.

But these views tend to be far less important to liberal-minded Christians today, at least the ones in my experience. On several occasions over the past few years, when giving lectures in liberal and open churches throughout the country, I have said that of the entire creed, I can say only one part in good faith: “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” For me, personally, not being able to say the (rest of the) creed—since I don’t believe it—prevents me from joining such congregations. But members of these congregations—and even clergy—often tell me that this should not be an obstacle. A lot of them don’t believe it either! At least not in any literal way.

This would never have been true in the fourth-century context in which such expressions of faith were initially produced. For the church leaders who formulated them, not only the very basic literal meaning of these statements mattered (God exists; Christ is his Son; he was God; but he became a human; he died for others and rose from the dead; etc.); the deeper nuances mattered as well—every word was to be taken as literally true and important, and contrary statements were to be rejected as both heretical and dangerous. Heretics with slightly different views were in danger of eternal damnation. This was serious business in the theological environment of the fourth Christian century. With respect to Christology, as we will see in this chapter, it was concluded that Christ was a separate being from God the Father, who had always existed alongside God, who was equal with God and always had been equal with God, who became a human, not in part, but completely, while not abandoning his status and power as God. This view seems internally inconsistent and contradictory—how can Christ be God and God the Father be God if there is only one God? And how can Christ be fully divine and fully human at the same time? Wouldn’t he need to be partly human and partly divine?

Rather than seeing these statements as inherently contradictory, perhaps it is more useful to see them as the paradoxes that resulted from the debates over Christ’s being. And since they are the paradoxes that came to figure so prominently in specifically orthodox Christianity, I have coined a new term for them. I call them
ortho-paradoxes.
As a way of summing up our discussion to this point, I lay out these paradoxes in greater detail before looking at some of the important theologians in the early church who helped to shape them, leading up to the first major church council that met in order to resolve some of these issues, the famous Council of Nicea in 325
CE
.

T
HE PARADOXES OF ORTHODOX
Christianity emerged from two brutal facts. First, some passages of scripture appear to affirm completely different views. Orthodox thinkers realized that it was necessary to affirm all of these passages, even though they appeared to be at odds with one another. But affirming these different passages, at one and the same time, necessarily led to paradoxical affirmations. Second, different groups of heretics stated views in direct opposition to one another, and the orthodox thinkers knew that they had to reject each of these views. This meant that the orthodox had to attack a view from one side as wrong while also attacking the opposite view as wrong. But both of two opposing views cannot be completely wrong, or nothing is right, and so the orthodox—in attacking opposing views—had to affirm
part
of each view as being right and the rest as being wrong. The result was a paradox that each of the opposing sides was wrong in what it denied but right in what it affirmed. It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around without concrete examples, so I now explain how both of these factors led to the resultant ortho-paradoxes—one having to do with the nature of Christ (that is, whether he was God or man or both) and the other having to do with the nature of the godhead (that is, how Christ could be God if only God the Father was God).

When it comes to the nature of Christ—the question of Christology—one can point to clear passages in scripture that say he is God. As we have seen, for example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58, invoking the name of God from Exod. 3); “I and the Father are one (10:30); “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And at the end of the Gospel, doubting Thomas declares that Jesus is “my Lord and my God” (20:28).

But other passages of the Bible say that Jesus is human. And so, John 1:14 says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” First John 1:1–4 claims that Christ can be seen, and heard, and handled. First John 4:2–3 indicates that anyone who denies that “Christ came in the flesh” is an antichrist. And, of course, throughout the Gospels of the New Testament Jesus is portrayed as human: he is born, he grows up, he eats, he drinks, he suffers, he bleeds, and he dies.

The resulting ortho-paradox was driven by the positions that the orthodox were compelled to stake out when opposing the contradictory views of their opponents and the biblical texts. The adoptionists were right to affirm that Jesus was human but wrong to deny that he was God; the docetists were right to affirm that Jesus was divine but wrong to deny that he was human; the Gnostics were right to affirm that Christ was both divine and human but wrong to deny that he was a single being.

And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition.

As we will see, this did not settle the issue of who Christ was for the orthodox. It instead led to more questions, and “false beliefs” continued to propagate—not against any of the standard orthodox claims, but against various ways of
understanding
these claims. As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical.

The theological debates more broadly dealt with the implications of orthodox Christology for understanding the nature of God—if Christ is God, and the Spirit is God, yet God the Father alone is God, then is God one being, or two, or three?

Here again, some scriptural passages seem to stand at odds with one another. Isaiah 45:21 is quite explicit: “There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is no one besides me.” On the other hand, in some passages, God is spoken of in the plural. In Genesis, when God creates the first human, he says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26). But to whom is God talking when he says “us” and “our”? In Psalm 45:6, God is speaking to someone else and says, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.” Who is this other God? In Psalm 110:1 we are told, “The L
ORD
says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Is there more than one Lord? How can there be if, as Isaiah says, there is only one?

More specifically, if Christ is God, and God the Father is God, in what sense is there only one God? And if one adds the Holy Spirit into the mix, how does one escape the conclusion either that Christ and the Spirit are not God, or that there are three Gods? In the end, the orthodox settled for the paradox of the Trinity: there are three persons, all of whom are God, but there is only one God. One God, manifest in three persons, who are distinct in number but united in essence. This too became the standard doctrine of the orthodox tradition, and as happened with the Christological ortho-paradox, it also led to further disputes, heretical interpretations, and nuanced refinements.

For the rest of this chapter we examine some of the Christian thinkers who stood in the orthodox tradition to see how they worked out these various Christological and theological views in their writings. I do not try to cover every important orthodox theologian of the early Christian centuries, and I do not mean to suggest that the figures I discuss here were aware of each other’s work. But these thinkers all stand within the very broad stream of “orthodox” tradition. In the preceding chapter we saw how Hippolytus and Tertullian hammered out certain orthodox views. Now we look at a range of other thinkers standing in the same orthodox line. We start at a relatively early point, even before Hippolytus, in the mid-second century, and move from there through theologians all the way up to the famous Council of Nicea, convened by the emperor Constantine in 325
CE
in order to resolve the outstanding theological controversies of his day.

J
USTIN CAN RIGHTLY BE
considered the first true intellectual and professional scholar in the church. Before becoming a Christian, he was already trained in philosophy, and he himself narrates how he came to be a Christian in an autobiographical account in one of his surviving works. Originally from Palestine, Justin moved to Rome in the middle of the second century in order to set up a kind of Christian philosophical school, possibly around 140
CE
. His surviving works include two “apologies.” In this context an
apology
does not mean “saying you’re sorry.” It comes from a Greek word that means
defense
and is used as a technical term to refer to an intellectual defense of the faith with regard to the charges leveled against it by its enemies. We also have from his hand a book called the
Dialogue with Trypho
, in which Justin records a conversation that he allegedly had—it is possibly fictitious—with a Jewish scholar over the legitimacy of the claims of the Christians that Jesus was the messiah anticipated by the Jewish scriptures.

Eventually Justin was arrested and condemned for his Christian beliefs and activities. We do not have a reliable account of his trial and execution, but it is clear that he was condemned and died around the year 165—earning him the sobriquet Martyr.

The orthodox of later times considered Justin to be a proponent of their views. As one would expect, his exposition of theology is highly intelligent—he was, after all, a philosopher—but by later standards it came to seem rather unsophisticated and unnuanced. Theology takes a long time to develop, and once it does, earlier views, even intelligently expressed ones, can appear unrefined and even primitive.

Here we focus on our central concern and consider what Justin had to say specifically about Christ and his character. Justin held to the view that Christ was a preexistent divine being who was, in his words, the “first begotten of God” (
1 Apology
46).
¹
Christ was begotten—that is, brought into existence—before the creation of the world (
2 Apology
5), and in time he became a human being for the sake of believers and in order to destroy the evil demons who were opposed to God (
2 Apology
6).

There are two principal ways that Justin understands Christ as a divine being, both of which harken back to earlier views we have already explored. Justin develops these views in more sophisticated ways than seen in the New Testament itself. He saw Christ both as the preincarnate Angel of the Lord and as the Logos (Word) of God made flesh.

In several places throughout his writings Justin speaks of Christ as the Angel of the Lord who appeared in the Old Testament. In Chapter 2 we saw that there is some ambiguity in the famous passage of Moses and the burning bush: the “Angel of the Lord” speaks with Moses, but then the narrative shifts to indicate that in fact it is “the Lord” who is speaking with him. Justin is keen to explain this textual conundrum in Christological terms. The reason this divine figure is both the Angel of the Lord and the Lord, at the same time, is that it is not God the Father who is there in the bush, but it is Christ, who is fully divine. First Justin establishes that the angel is no mere angel, but God: “Do you not see that He whom Moses speaks of as an Angel who conversed with him from the fiery bush is the same who, being God, signifies to Moses that He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob?” (
Dialogue
59). But then he argues that this “God” could not have been God the Father: “No one with even the slightest intelligence would dare to assert that the Creator and Father of all things left His supercelestial realms to make himself visible in a little spot on earth” (
Dialogue
60). And so who was this God? It was Christ, the angel who later was to become human.

Christ was also one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre in Genesis 18, another passage we have considered. Because this “angel” is also a “man” but is called “the Lord,” it is clear to Justin: “There exists and is mentioned in Scripture another God and Lord under the Creator of all things who is also called an Angel.” This one “appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, and is called God, [and] is distinct from God, the Creator; distinct, that is, in number, but not in mind” (
Dialogue
56). These patriarchs did not see God the Father but “God the Son . . . His angel” (
Dialogue
127).