What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Isa 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures, the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people, the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young" (Isa 40:11). It is the OT portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove. Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus "knew he was God" in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself "Well I never! I'm the second person of the Trinity!" Rather, "as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be."[39] I commend to you this category of "vocation" as the appropriate way forward for talking about what Jesus knew and believed about himself. This Jesus is both thoroughly credible as a first century Jew and thoroughly comprehensible as the one to whom early, high, Jewish christology looked back. JESUS AND CHRISTOLOGY TODAY What are the implications of all this for how we approach questions of christology today? Two words by way of personal testimony are appropriate. First, the Jesus I have discovered through historical research is certainly not the reflection of my own face. I wish I looked more like him, but I am still struggling a lot with that. Nor is he the Jesus I expected or wanted to find when I began this work nearly twenty years ago. Studying Jesus has been the occasion for huge upheavals in my personal life, my spirituality, my theology, and my psyche. The good news is that this has been a healing, though deeply challenging and often wounding, process. Second, the Jesus I have discovered is clearly of enormous relevance to the contemporary world and Church. I know that others with very different Jesuses would say this as well, so you may find the point irrelevant. But, I continually get unsolicited letters from clergy and lay people around the world who tell me that reading what I have written about Jesus has revolutionized their ministries and their Christian discipleship. That does not mean that what I have written is all true; merely that it is not trivial or irrelevant for the life and mission of the Church. Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breadth is not, as has often been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the Deist god and the reductionists' Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the New Age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. Start with the Deist God, and your historical Jesus study will only achieve incarnational christology by sliding towards docetism. Start with the real historical earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace. That, for me, is the theological significance of the earthly Jesus. Anyone can, of course, declare that this picture was read back by the early Church into Jesus' mind. The evidence for this is not good. The early Church did not make much use of these themes. There is, of course, some overlap, but also quite substantial discontinuity. (This, ironically, may be why this latent christology has often gone unnoticed. Scholar and pietist alike have preferred the early Church's christological formulations to Jesus' christological vocation. The pietist read them back into Jesus' mind, and the scholar declared them impossible and then argued on that basis for an unreflective or reductionist Jesus.) As with Jesus' Messiahship and his vocation to suffer and die, the key sayings remain cryptic, only coming into focus when grouped around the central symbolic actions. The early Church was not reticent about saying that Jesus was Messiah, that his death was God's saving act, and that he and his Father belonged together within the Jewish picture of the one God. I see no reason why the contemporary Church should be reticent about this either. Using incarnational language about Jesus, and Trinitarian language about God, is of course self-involving; it entails a commitment of faith, love, trust, and obedience. But there is a difference between self-involving language and self-referring language. I do not think that when I use language like this about Jesus and God I am merely talking about the state of my own devotion. I think I am talking, self-involvingly of course, about Jesus and God. All this leads, in conclusion, to the area which, it seems to me, is just as vital a part of the contemporary christological task as learning to speak truly about the earthly Jesus and his sense of vocation. We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God. I have no time or space to develop this. What follows is an attempt to summarize material that could easily turn into a whole other paper, or more.[40] Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god. It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it. Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained. That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge. My proposal is not that we understand what the word "god" means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross-and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word "god" to be recentered around that point. We could only ask the "kenotic" question in the way we normally do-did Jesus "empty himself" of some of his "divine attributes" in becoming human?-if we were tacitly committed to a quite unbiblical view of God, a high and majestic God for whom incarnation would be a category mistake and crucifixion a scandalous nonsense. The NT, on the contrary, invites us to look at this Jesus-the earthly Jesus, the Jesus of Second Temple Judaism, the kingdom-movement man, the ambiguous double revolutionary, the parabolic teaser, the healer, the man who wept over Jerusalem and then sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane-to look at this Jesus and to say with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only "Ecce Homo," but "Ecce Deus." Let me put it like this. After fifteen years of serious historical Jesus study, I still say the creed ex animo; but I now mean something very different by it, not least by the word "god" itself. The portrait has been redrawn. At its heart we discover a human face, surrounded by a crown of thorns. God's purpose for Israel has been completed. Salvation is of the Jews, and from the King of the Jews it has come. God's covenant faithfulness has been revealed in the good news of Jesus, bringing salvation for the whole cosmos. The thing about painting portraits of God is that, if they do their job properly, they should become icons. That is, they should invite not just cool appraisal, but worship though the mind must be involved as well as the heart and soul and strength in our response to this God. That is fair enough, and I believe that this God is worthy of the fullest and richest worship that we can offer. But, as with some icons, not least the famous Rublev painting of the three men visiting Abraham, the focal point of the painting is not at the back of the painting but on the viewer. Once we have glimpsed the true portrait of God, the onus is on us to reflect it: to reflect it as a community, to reflect it as individuals. The image of the true and living God, once revealed in all its glory, is to be reflected into all the world, as was always God's intention. The mission of the Church can be summed up in the phrase "reflected glory." When we see, as Paul says, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we see this not for our own benefit, but so that the glory may shine in us and through us to bring light to the world that still waits in darkness and the shadow of death. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 This paper expands and develops chapter 10 of N. T. Wright and Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). It also stands on the shoulders of The Climax of the Covenant (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1991: Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), chapters 2-6; Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress. 1996), esp. chapter 13; and sundry smaller publications, e.g., The Crown and the Fire, Following Jesus, The Lord and his Prayer, and For All God's Worth (all published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. 1994 to 1997). 2 James D. G. Dunn. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (London/Philadelphia: SCM/Westminster Press. 1980). 3 Anthony E. Harvey. Jesus and the Constraints of History: The Bampton Lectures. 1980 (London: Duckworth. 1982), 173. 4 Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels (London: Collins, 1973); Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM. 1983); The Religion of Jesus the Jew (London: SCM, 1993). 5 Wright and Borg. The Meaning of Jesus. 6 Marcus J. Borg. Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row. 1987); Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: Harper-San Francisco. 1994); Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, Pa: Trinity Press international, 1994). 7 I have written about contemporary divinities in Bringing the Church to the World (Bethany Books. 1993). 8 For full discussion, see my The New Testament and the People of God, volume 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God, chapter 9. 9 Pliny The Younger, Letters, 10.96.9f. 10 Deut 6:4, The opening words of the prayer known as the: Shema. There are various other possible ways of translating the underlying Hebrew, e. g., "YHWH our God is one YHWH" or "YHWH is our God, YHWH alone." 11 Psa 147:9. 12 See particularly Wisdom 10-11; Sirach 24. 13 In Hebrew all five are represented by feminine nouns. 14 I do not know why I should find this surprising. Perhaps it is because systematic theologians seem so much more at home with the patristic concepts and technical terms and how they work than with the biblical ones, which they have assumed to be of little value for serious constructive systematics, perhaps because of what their post-Enlightenment biblical teachers told them when they were students. 15 John 1:1-18; cf. The New Testament and the People of God. 410-417. Klyne Snodgrass helpfully suggests to me that Exodus 33 and 34 are to be heard closely behind the Johannine text; this enriches the reading still further. 16 John 1:14; cf. Sirach 24. On the comparison cf. The New Testament and the People of God. 413-416. 17 E.g. Heb 1:5. 18 E.g. Heb 2:5-9, cf. 1 Cor 15:27; Eph 1:22; Phil 3:21. All these passages either quote or allude to Ps 8:4-8, esp. v. 7. 19 For which, see the detailed studies in The Climax of the Covenant, chapters 4, 5 and 6; and What St Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), chapter 4. 20 See N. T. Wright. "One God, One Lord, One People: Incarnational Christology for a Church in a Pagan Environment," Ex Auditu 7 (1991): 45-58. 21 Cf. Col 2:14f. 22 Compare the logic of Rom 5:6-11. It is because Jesus is God's son in a fully personal and ontological sense that his death reveals God's love. Adoptionism would make nonsense of Paul's whole central argument at this point. 23 Cf. George B. Caird and L.D. Hurst, New Testament Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 320f. This is not to say, as some have assumed, that the usage is therefore implying an adoptionist christology. 24 In 4Q174. The meaning of the same phrase in 4Q246 is disputed. 25 Cf. too Rom 1:3-4, where, though "son of God" means more than "Messiah," it does not mean less. 26 E. Käsemann, "The New Quest for The Historical Jesus." in Essays on New Testament Themes (London. SCM, 1964 [1960]), 15-47. 27 That is my main answer to Luke T. Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). 28 Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979); cf. his Critical Realism and the New Testament, Princeton Theological Monograph Series, no. 17 (Allison Park. PA.: Pickwick Publications, 1989), and Christus Faber: The Master-Builder and the House of God. Princeton Theological Monograph Series, no. 29 (Allison Park. PA.: Pickwick Publications. 1992). 29 Rom 11:32 30 See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996), x. 31 A point I share in principle, of course, with Albert Schweitzer. See Crossan. "What Victory? What God?," in Scottish Journal of Theology 50 (1997) 345-358. 32 I am reminded of the tombstone in Tübingen of Adolf Schlatter, who similarly stood at the crossroads and was shot at from both sides. It carries a quotation from John 7:37: "If any man thirst let him come to me and drink." The engraver, however, made a Freudian slip and put the reference as John 8.37, which of course reads "I know that you are Abraham's children, but you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. 33 In Jesus and the Victory of God, chapter 13, to which the following is necessarily and obviously indebted. 34 Though Eusebius and Jerome have an interesting remark about bar-Kochba supposing himself to be a luminary descended from heaven (possibly a wrong deduction from his nickname); Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History 4.6.2; Jerome, ad Rufinum 3.31. See Jesus and the Victory of God, 627f, and note 66. 35 On throne imagery and the idea of sharing God's throne, see Jesus and the Victory of God, 624-629. 36 For this and what follows see the close listing of material and the argument of Jesus and the Victory of God, 645-651. 37 Neusner, in an interview following the publication of his book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus: An Intermillenial Interfaith Exchange (New York: Doubleday, 1993), declared that Jesus attitude to Torah made him want to ask: "Who do you think you are? God?" 38 Jesus and the Victory of God. 648-50. 39 Jesus and the Victory of God, 653. 40 What follows is borrowed from my article "A Biblical Portrait of God in N. T. Wright, Keith Ward and Brian Hebblethwaite, The Changing Face of God: Lincoln Lectures m Theology 1996 (Lincoln Studies in Theology 2, Lincoln, UK: Lincoln Cathedral Publications, 1996) 9-29. I would like to develop these ideas in dialogue with, the proposals of Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. 1997), sometimes in agreement with him and sometimes not.
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