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If Jesus Was Just A Really Great Guy, Why Do We Worship Him?
A Guidebook To Progressive Church #6
I’m going to lean into the whole topic of the creed and Christ’s divinity a little bit more because I think it’s crucial for an understanding of any kind of progressive movement we also name “Christian.” However, it’s somewhat treacherous working this space because there are honestly a lot of conflicted thoughts (and feelings) about it in progressive circles.
Perhaps the most popular writer today tilling the progressive fields and Christology is Richard Rohr. I’m guessing many of you reading this post may also subscribe to his Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation, so it will come as a sort-of surprise if I then go on immediately to state unequivocally that I have major reservations with his project, especially with his recent The Universal Christ.
Now, the whole discussion of Jesus as God and also as man has kept Christian theology busy ever since, well, since ever. It’s the topic. So this post can’t be an entire survey of the whole history of the development and continuing maintenance of the homoousion.
The overly simplistic way to describe this is to remember that every kind of Christianity and every heresy has at root been a back and forth along a continuum between “Jesus was just a man who God really liked” all the way over to “God in Christ wasn’t really a man he just played one on TV… he was really just God.” Along that continuum have been thousands of proposals, some better and some worse, finding words to spell out the mystery of Jesus Christ being both fully God and fully human.
In brief I can say that I fundamentally disagree with Richard Rohr’s claim that the spirit of Christ is not the same as the person of Jesus, because I think he erroneously let’s go of the paradoxical tension of those two “fully”s.
I say quite the opposite of Rohr, that Jesus really is truly the Christ, the eternal Logos, God from God and light from light, of one being with the Father, etc. I happily repeat from memory all the parts of the Nicene Creed and believe them.
And I believe them precisely AS a progressive Christian.
Now, this does not mean I reject all of Richard Rohr’s work. Not at all. I quite like it that we have a spiritual leader arising out of progressive Roman Catholicism who offers the kinds of resources he offers. He seems like a good guy.
I just happen to think that like many theologians before him, he’s traveling the wrong road to get to the destination he intends. I find it problematic to divide Jesus from “the Christ” in this manner not because I disagree that Scripture and Christian tradition point toward a cosmic Christ, but precisely because they point to this Christ as being fully present in this one specific person, Jesus. Yes, it’s part of the offense of the gospel that God is fully invested and present in this one specific Palestinian Jew. But that’s I think precisely how Christ is “cosmic.”
The early church was at such great lengths to work out a clear articulation of how Jesus was “of one being with the Father” because the authority of everything Jesus said and did is related to who he was. And it’s not just later church tradition that worried itself over this. The discussion has been around ever since the Centurion at Christ’s crucifixion is reported to have said (in Matthew): “Truly this is God’s Son.” Then that dialogue kept going three days later when the women left the tomb and told the disciples, “He’s not there.”
All of this is narrative/gospel of how we are to think of Jesus Christ as “Son of God.” What Jesus taught (from his parables to his sermons) and did (from his healing to his prophetic actions) all gain their gravity out of who he is described as being in Scripture: the one in whom God dwelt fully.
The homoousious (of one being with) makes the Sermon on the Mount vital (see my previous post on this). We find Christ’s preaching and life so profoundly compelling precisely because it was God in that specific one Jesus doing all those things and saying all those things.
All progressive Christianity that is not liberal Christianity in disguise (we’ll need to discuss “liberal” Christianity in a separate post) is distinguished by it’s maintaining a commitment to this truth, that the Christ isn’t “divine” just because he is perceived by us as good but instead the opposite, we learn “the good” that is Christ’s preferential option for the poor in and through coming to faith that the Christ who modeled this preferential option was/is “Son of God.”
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It’s important to keep in mind this claim, that Jesus was of one being with the Father, is not made as an authoritarian move in order to squash all opposition. If we attend to the historical context for when this was all being worked out, we can keep in mind that such an assertion actually places any community who believes it at risk in precisely the same way Jesus’ life was at risk. To believe that Jesus was “LORD” was to set up a “LORD” in opposition to other “LORDs.”
In the 21st century, given what we now know about this kind of language and the function and place of “LORDs”, we may rightly struggle with the term—but it is profoundly helpful to remember that Jesus is only named “Lord” as a way of indicating Jesus was in opposition to all the other “Lords,” from the religious leaders to Caesar himself.
In the present moment, with the rise of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, how much more important to keep this in mind, because the peculiar way Jesus was a “Lord” was in solidarity with all the communities of peoples that authoritarianism and Christian nationalism now wish to erase or reduce or sideline.
The problem with Christian progressives abandoning a faith commitment to the “of one being with” is then they no longer have any theological perspective that provides support for their actions and teachings. They have no connection to any kind of “sovereignty” in the positive sense of that word. As a friend recently wrote in response to the second post in this series, “Divine sovereignty is a doctrine of comfort: If the God revealed in Jesus is sovereign, then Caesar is not, which sounds like very good news to me.”
Just so we might say the greatest resistance to authoritarianism in November of 2022 is the maintenance of the homoousion. Authoritarians think the authority they can enforce is “of one being with the Father.” Thank God we know that “of one being with” is located in Jesus.
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth .This marks a two dimensional universe. The heavens are the spiritual while the earth is the physical. Jesus is true God in the spiritual dimension and true man “ son of man” in the physical dimension.