Who is this Jesus guy, anyways?

A reader writes, " I had been searching for someone to ask about the role of Jesus in Christianity. I was raised in a fundy church (the churches of Christ) and in my 28 years have done the "seeking circuit" from Transcendental Meditation in Iowa to Zen Buddhism in San Francisco. I've landed in the Episcopal Church and have been getting my toes wet, but am often repelled by Christianity's belief that Jesus is the only mediator to God. I know from childhood that Jesus was God and Man, and so the orthodox part of my brain accepts it, but doesn't believe it.

I've listened to your sermon on that and that is very helpful in starting to shape my thoughts, but I understand God, it is Being, the Absolute and the "unknowable," so big and all encompassing that man cannot grasp it (him, her, whatever). So that's why Jesus is so important, right? He's God on a sort of Man scale, a sort of demigod? Is it possible, then, that in worshipping Jesus so much he himself becomes an obstacle to "knowing God," almost idol-like? At church sometimes I get uncomfortable all the praises to Jesus and not so many to the "Absolute." Maybe I'm Jewish?"

He sent this back in November.  I wish I was as prompt as Strongbad at answering e-mails, or as entertaining, but at least I am getting to it... ;-)

Confusion about the person of Jesus is nothing new.  The first several centuries of the church were spent in arguments about how Jesus related to God and exactly how Jesus was both God and human.  The main conflicts in the early church were between the school of Alexandria, which emphasized the divinity of Jesus, and the school of Antioch, which emphasized the humanity of Jesus.  Compromises resulted in the Nicene Creed (The image is an icon of the Council of Nicea).

Jesus is not considered a demi-god, as that would imply a lesser status.  The orthodox position is that Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of the Holy Trinity.  In the prologue to the Gospel of John, Jesus is portrayed as the incarnation of the pre-existent Word.  Therefore, the Son has always existed, was present at creation, became incarnate in the person of Jesus, died on the cross, and was raised to sit next to his father in heaven.  He is both fully God and fully human, and is of equal status with the Father and the Spirit.

That being said, it is obvious that all this cannot be found directly in scripture - it is further philosophical development based on the rather vague references we have in the Bible. (See my earlier post  - The Mystery of the Trinity.)  It is a construction intentionally designed to keep all the important aspects of God in tension, thereby avoiding heresy, which is when someone overextends any metaphor about God, obscuring others.  In traditional liturgical Christianity, prayer is carefully balanced so that it remains Trinitarian.  Here is the collect from the Book of Common Prayer for today:

"O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

This is based in the model found in the Gospels, where Jesus himself tells us to pray to the Father, "Our Father, who art in heaven."  That being said, there is a disturbing trend in several strands of modern Christianity towards "Christomonism," which is when the salvific work of Christ is overemphasized,
ignoring the work of God as Creator and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.   A lot of modern prayer that is all about Jesus tends towards this heresy.  Jesus should be the center of our church, but by no means does Jesus encompass all of God.

I think in this case, Jesus (or actually, not Jesus himself but our conception of him) can indeed become an obstacle to the understanding of the whole of the wonder of God.  Christians claim that Jesus is  the mediator between humans and God, but it does not exclude truth being found in other places.  Indeed, if the Son existed in the Trinity before the incarnation of Jesus, then some of the mediating work must have been done beforehand.  We claim that in the person of Jesus, God's will for us is made most truly present and perfect.  That is a long way from claiming that Christians have a monopoly on truth.  To do so would be an act of hubris on our part.

David+

Comments

[J-Tron]

I wonder if your answer doesn't border on another heresy, a kind of tri-theism? Of course, it's hard not to veer into heresy sometimes in addressing questions like this. Our vocabulary for doing so is so limited. I do think the point you make is good, that we should not limit what is possible of God by what we know of God, even when what we know is part of the gospel. But this is the bit that worries me:

"Jesus should be the center of our church, but by no means does Jesus encompass all of God."

Of course Jesus is all of God. The same is true of the Holy Spirit and of the Father. They are not parts of a whole but rather each is the whole. And yet they are also not interchangeable. The Spirit is not the Son is not the Father. But the Father and the Son and the Spirit are One. That is the mystery, at least as I understand it.

[FrSimmons]

I think it depends on how you interpret my words. Jesus is "all God," that is, fully God but also fully human.

However, I would not say that each person is the whole - I would use the traditional language that they are of the same substance (Ousia). They also always act with a unified will.

When we refer to God, in a Trinitarian sense, we mean the whole, but as soon as we refer to one of the persons, we are by definition not talking about the completeness of God. Otherwise, we slide into Patripassianism, with each person being just a function of the whole.

David+