From the evolving perspective of the New Testament
today’s Post
Last week we looked at the earliest writings about Jesus: the beginnings of the ‘New Testament’ as seen in Paul and the ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. We saw how these gospels did not necessarily depict a Jesus who considered himself divine, and instead reflected a teacher whose ‘millennialist’ beliefs led him to preach correct moral behavior in preparation for the ‘coming’.
This week we’ll take a look at Jesus through the perspectives of Paul and John, in which Jesus is depicted as not only divine, but in some way, eternal.
Paul’s ‘Cosmic Christ’
As we saw last week, the three synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a gifted teacher executed for his beliefs but ‘exalted’ by God after his death. While Paul’s insights seem to have preceded these authors, his ’letters’ focused less on stories of Jesus’s life and more on summarizing them and showing how Jesus was more than just a human person. Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’.
As Richard Rohr points out in his book, “The Universal Christ”, ‘Christ’ is not Jesus’s last name but a recognition of the presence of a universal phenomenon which preceded Jesus in time, but which was ‘personified’ in him.
Bart Ehrman addresses this aspect of Jesus in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, starting with the insights of Paul and commencing through the development of Christian theology that was to follow. Ehrman notes how, as Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’ he sees the ‘exaltation of Jesus’ by God occurring during his life, as opposed to after his death as claimed by the synoptic gospels. This suggests to him that somehow Jesus must have been present in God’s creation from the beginning. This insight is the beginning of the concept that Jesus was in some way “divine”, and represents Paul’s initial attempt to see how such an overlap between ‘human’ and ‘divine’ was possible given the traditional Jewish dualistic understanding of these two concepts. In this, Paul is addressing the contrast between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, subjects which were to engage the new church for many years without successful resolution. (We will see, however, how Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution offers an approach to resolving this duality.)
The Second Perspective: John
John seems to have written the fourth Gospel as many as thirty years after Paul, and surely had access to both the letters of Paul and the synoptic gospels. We have seen how the synoptic gospels stressed the teachings of Jesus, his interpretations of the Torah and his millennialist beliefs, and how Paul summarized and expanded his message while seeing his presence somehow as eternal. John delves deeper into the nature of God and how it could be that Jesus himself could be understood as divine. In doing so, he carried Paul’s potentially dualistic insight one step further into the first integrated insight of God as both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’.
As we saw last week, Bart Ehrman doesn’t consider the concept of a ‘God-Man’ as necessarily audacious during Jesus’ time due to the many similar and familiar myths of the day. John, however, goes into unprecedented detail of how Jesus was divine, indeed co-extensive with God, laying the groundwork for the doctrine of ‘the Trinity’ which would emerge later in church history.
With John we see a significantly different depiction of Jesus’ life and death from that of the synoptic gospels. Some examples, as listed by Ehrman:
- Jesus’ claims to divinity are much stronger, including self-identification with the ‘Son of Man’.
- There are more stories of miracles, and the nature of the miracles is more supernatural
- In the synoptic gospels, Jesus hesitates, often even refuses, to perform miracles as a sign of his identity. He even downplays miracles, and notes that they are also performed by others. In John, Jesus not only performs miracles frequently, but does so as signs to compel belief.
- Where the synoptic gospels see divinity as ‘awarded to Jesus after death’, and Paul sees Jesus as a human who is ‘exalted by God’ during his life, John sees Jesus as having somehow been ‘one with the Father’ from the beginning of time. It is this aspect of Jesus, ‘the Christ’ that John asserts.
- Where Paul and the synoptic gospels treat ‘love’ as the correct form of behavior necessary to earn salvation, John goes on to depict ‘love’ as an aspect of God ‘Himself’ and hence ‘ontological’.
- Where Paul identifies Jesus as ‘The Christ’ prophesied in the Old Testament, John goes much further, stressing his eternal kinship with God. He introduces the concept of ‘The Word’, which is an aspect of God by which creation proceeds and which is ‘made flesh’ in the human person of Jesus.
John’s Cosmic Christ
This last new concept in John’s depiction of Jesus is the most significant of all. It goes well beyond positing a close kinship between Jesus and God: visualizing Christ as eternal, as having always existing even as God has always existed, and being present in the act of creation itself. To John, Christ is both ‘immanent’ as manifest as an aspect of God and ‘transcendent’ in Christ’s presence in Jesus.
John reflects the influence of Greek thinking with the idea of Jesus, as the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, as “the Word”. As Ian Barbour (“Religion and Science”) says:
“The term word merges the logos, the Greek principle of rationality, with the Hebrew image of God’s Word active in the world. But then John links creation to revelation: “And the Word became flesh.” “
With this concept, John locates Christ as part of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected. Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation. Christ, in this context, represents the ‘blueprint’ for creation, in the same way that God represents the ‘act’ of creation. While the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are used to distinguish between these two facets, John doesn’t see this as reflecting a hierarchical ‘order’ in which one comes from the other, but an ontological ‘equality’ in which they are ‘co-temporal’. One is simply a facet of the same whole as is the other.
So, in John’s view, Jesus ‘the man’ is simply the inevitable appearance of the human aspect of the ‘word’, the personal aspect of creation as it unfolds. Jesus is indeed, The “Word become flesh.”
John, Love, God and Jesus
As we have seen, the idea of love has been generally addressed throughout history as a manifestation of emotion in human relationships. From this perspective, love is an ‘act’, or an emotion that underpins the act. John overturns this common approach by identifying love as the very nature of God. He does not say that God loves, nor even that God loves perfectly. John says that God is love; that the very nature of God is love itself. By distinguishing the phenomenon of love from an action of God (found in the many lines of scripture that describe God as ‘loving’), John goes one step further and describes God as love itself, which opens the door to an ontological engagement with God that occurs in the act of loving. From John’s perspective, we don’t love God so we can merit improvements in our life, or so that we can earn a position in the afterlife, we love God (and we love in general) because it is ultimately essential to our growth as human persons.
To John, we ‘become’ through a relationship with God which effects our personal growth.
We have seen this passage from John several times, but it’s worth reviewing in the light of his ‘Christology’:
”God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”
In this simple, succinct statement, John offers a highly integrated and intimate perspective on not only who or what God is, but how ‘He’ is active in human life.
This ‘hermeneutic’, while burning brightly in John, seems to have dimmed with the Church’s development of a Christology which concentrated on such things as rationalizing Jesus’s death, identification of rules for life that insure a ‘salvation’ after death, and building a complex hierarchy that could serve as a stabilizing agent to society as it continued its expansion into new parts of the globe. Instead of celebrating the incredible intimacy of ‘God’ as active in the very root of ‘Person’, God became further remote from life, first requiring Jesus as an intermediary to God, then saints as an intermediary to Jesus, and the Church as an intermediary to the saints. Today’s dilution of the influence of religion in Western society shows how dangerous such an evolution has become.
The Next Post
We have seen in the last two weeks how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction evolves over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts. Next week we will take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for the Secular Side of God.