After completing my reading of the introductory chapter of the quest for historical Jesus by Paul Rhodes Eddy and James K. Beilby, I prefer to return to a classic textbook on Reformed theology. I am referring to Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics Volume 3. There are three sections in this volume that is relevant to my purpose:
Christological Conflicts
Modern Christology: Kant, Schleiermacher, Ritschl
Return to the Historical Jesus
I got five interesting insights in reading the section on Christological conflicts. The first one is about the theological challenges faced by the Apostolic Fathers. The two heretical tendencies are identified as Ebionitism and Gnosticism. On the part of the Ebionites, they saw nothing in Jesus but his humanity. In the case of Gnosticism, because of their low view of matter, they ascribed creation to a “demiurge” (p. 253). Applying this idea to Christ, they “drew a sharp line of separation” “between the divine and the human” (ibid.). They saw Christ as the “highest aeon” who “descended from heaven and for a time united himself with the earthly man Jesus, or brought a psychic body with him from heaven, or for a time assumed a seeming body with a view to liberating humankind from the bonds of matter” (ibid.).
The second insight is related to Harnack’s commentary. In his mind, “the recognition of Jesus as a divinely chosen and Spirit-endowed human was not Ebionite but Christian,” and yet at the same time, he also argued that “the doctrine of the two natures of Christ was originally Gnostic” (ibid.).
The development of the doctrine of two natures associated with the influence of Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian is the third insight we got from reading Bavinck’s material. With this development, the Christological conflict in the apostolic era had been weakened.
Our fourth insight is about the difference in the Christological stance between the church in the East and the West. The East had a very unstable idea about Christ, whereas the West followed a position that has been later considered the orthodox confession through Augustine’s influence. The East, because of lack of strict definition of words like οὐσια, φυσις, ὑποστασις, προσωπον, it became susceptible to all kinds of misunderstanding. In the case of the West, Augustine popularized the doctrine of Christ as one person with two natures:
Thus there appeared a mediator between God and humans that, combining the two natures in the unity of the person, he might elevate what is earthly to the heavenly and temper the heavenly with the earthly (p. 254).
The last insight was the development of the Chalcedonian Christology:
. . . the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in humanhood, truly God and truly man … one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Onlybegotten, made known in two natures [according to the original reading; not out of two natures], without confusion [ἀσυγχυτως], without change [ἀτρεπτως], without division [ἀδιαιρετως], without separation [ἀχωριστως](p. 255).
However, despite the Chalcedonian formulation, diversity exists among those who subscribed to it. In the East, Monophysitism was very powerful. Even though it was “condemned and suppressed," it kept surfacing in the teaching of the Theopaschites, the Aphthartodocetists, the Aktistetai, and the Monothelites. It tended to erase the boundary line between the divine and the human and increasingly to make the churches in the East ready for their dissolution into paganism” (ibid.). Despite the influence of Augustine, the mysticism of the East gained the upper hand in the West. Consequently, “the idea of a deification of the human also penetrated the Latin Church and Latin theology. Mystical contemplation, the doctrine of the superadded gifts, and the theory of transubstantiation all rest on the idea that the finite is capable of participating in the infinite” (p. 256).
Historically, instead of learning from the mistakes of the Apostolic Fathers, the two ancient heresies were constantly revived under different names. Following the Ebionites, we have “Arianism, Nestorianism, Socinianism, Deism, rationalism, and others” (p. 259). Gnosticism had their followers in Patripassianism, Sabellianism, Monophysitism, Anabaptism, and pantheism in all its different forms” (ibid.). Interestingly, in modern theology, under the influence of Socianism and rationalism, Bavinck identified Kant, Schleirermacher, and Ritschl as representatives of a new kind of Christology.
Kant
Kant, “could not accept the biblical and ecclesiastical doctrine of Christ because he denied the knowability of the supernatural and, reasoning from the imperative ‘you shall’ to the ‘you can,’ had no need of a Redeemer” (p. 260). In Bavinck’s language, here is the summary of Kant’s Christology:
Christ could therefore function only as a model of morality and a teacher of virtue. All that Scripture and the church said about Christ beyond this had a merely symbolic value. The Christ of the church is the symbol of a humanity pleasing to God: it is the true, only-begotten, much beloved Son for whom God created the world. The incarnation of Christ symbolizes the origination of a truly moral life in humans. His substitutionary suffering signifies that the moral person in us has to pay for the evil done by the sensual person. Faith in Christ means that for their salvation people must believe in the idea of a humanity that is pleasing to God. In short, the historical person called Jesus is neither a mediator nor a savior. All the church confesses about that person fully applies to the idea of humankind as a whole (ibid.).
Bavinck’s interpretation of Kant’s Christology tells us that the latter’s position as well as the quest for the historical Jesus that separates the historical Christ and the real Christ were Gnostic in origin. The important point in Kant’s Christology is the identification of Christ with humanity. Fichte, Shelling, and Hegel followed this idea.
Fichte believed “that God and humanity are absolutely one” (ibid.). The great historical significance of Christ is that he “was the first to recognize and clearly articulate this oneness in himself” (ibid.). However, this recognition is not unique to Christ. Any human apart from Christ can also experience such oneness with God. I find the conclusion of Fichte’s position very questionable:
If Jesus were to come back, he would be completely content to find that Christianity ruled in people’s hearts even though his person had been completely forgotten (ibid.).
Schleiermacher
Schleiermacher’s Christology shares Kant’s rejection of the church’s doctrine of Christ. However, his position is different in avoiding “the mistake of looking for the essence of Christianity in an abstract idea and detaching it from the historical person of Christ” (p. 262). Instead of the idea of humanity, Schleiermacher placed his emphasis “on the experience of the church, on the Christian consciousness, whose content is reconciliation and fellowship with God. The ultimate cause of it can be found nowhere but in the founder of the Christian church, in whom, accordingly, God-consciousness must have been present with absolute power. And this power of God-consciousness was God’s being in him, so he is the religious archetype of humankind, sinless, and the supreme product of the human race, simultaneously brought forth by an act of divine creation as the perfect subject of religion. What is above all important is not his doctrine but his person, not what he did but what he was, and not his ethical example but his religious life. By thus locating the realization of the religious idea not in Christ’s humanity but in his person, Schleiermacher exerted enormous influence and again secured for Christology a place in dogmatics” (ibid.). The influence of Schleiermacher’s idea can be seen in three ways.
First, in contrast to Kant, “theologians tried to maintain that Christ was a most extraordinary and wholly unique revelation of God. If God consciousness in Christ was absolute and never disturbed by any sin, God must also have dwelt in him in an entirely unique way” (ibid.). However, theologians differ in their interpretation depending on their view of the Trinity.
Second, as a result of Schleiermacher’s work, the unique feature of studies in this new Christology is the unusual “interest in the historical human development of the person of Christ” (ibid.). “A favorite object of study became the history of Israel, of the classic world of antiquity, and especially of Jesus’ own time” (p. 263).
The third influence manifests among those who still affirm the doctrine of Christ as the 'God-man' but intend to go beyond the Chalcedonian Creed and the dogmatics of the church. The idea of becoming was applied to God, particularly to Christ as the God-man. One way to explain this idea of the God-man is “kenosis,” teaching “that at the incarnation the Logos emptied himself of all or some of his properties down to the level of the human development attained and then gradually won them back in the way of development” (pp. 263-264).
Ritschl
Ritchl is the last representative of the new Christology. Unlike Schleiermacher’s view, Ritchl’s view is closer to Kant. He “stresses the work of Christ more than the person and, in describing the nature of Christianity, assigns a larger role to the ethical dimension” (p. 264). In his Christology, he “rejects all metaphysics and everything that is condemned by natural science and historical criticism, such as the preexistence of Christ, his supernatural conception, resurrection, ascension, and second coming” (ibid.). In this sense, Christ is just like us, “an ordinary human being” (ibid.). However, he is different from us in relation to “his calling, the work he did, that is, the founding of a kingdom of God” (ibid.). “Christ has shown us and confirmed by his death that the kingdom of God is the destiny of all humans, that his will must become the will of all humankind” (ibid.). As to his divinity, this is understood not in the metaphysical sense but as an indication of his rank and status in the kingdom of God” (ibid.). Divinity “is not a reference to his being but to his office” (ibid.). “Christ may be called ‘God’ because in his relation to us he occupies the place and value of God" (p. 265).
By tomorrow, since we still have no class here because of the typhoon, hopefully, I can complete an article on Bavinck's Return to the Historical Jesus.
After completing this article, I prompted ChatGPT to create a classic militant Christian hymn about the Chalcedonian Christology, and here is the outcome.
