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leif_ohlsson
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Subject: So when did Jesus actually become a part of God?
(A review of God Crucified - Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament, by Richard Bauckham, 1998.)
This is a short (only 80 pages) and sweet little book arguing one good idea very well, namely that already the first Christians, rather soon after the Easter experience and long before the Gospels were written, thought of the risen Christ as part of the identity of the one and only Jewish God, JHWH.
The choice of the word "identity" is important here, since it denotes a difference about how we are used to think about the "nature" of something, and the way the Jews in the Second Temple era thought about their God.
To understand the difference in our terms, instead of resorting to our standard formula "God is unconditional love", we should think "God is the one who loves us" (though we never seem to get the message).
The difference might seem like splitting hairs, but it means a lot if you understand identity as something which is defined by acts making a difference in our concrete lives. It is the difference between WHAT something is, and WHO a person is.
For the Jews, their God had a name (although unutterable), JHWH, and a distinct "personality" (if you will) which could be deduced by his way of taking care of his people, leading them out of Egypt, smiting their enemies, etc. In short, their God was knowable, on a personal level.
Knowing JHWH on this personal basis was reified every morning by praying to him who had created everything and who is Lord over the whole creation. Only JHWH was worthy of worship, in distinction to lesser celestial beings like angels and sundry helpful entities. JHWH was visualized as comprising his Spirit, the Word, and Wisdom, which all were seen as integral to the one and only God.
What happened very soon after the Easter event, was that the believers in Jesus started to envisage God, JHWH, in a new way. We should imagine how they, in their daily morning prayers, now ascribed the very same characteristics as of JHWH to Jesus, and that this was a way of understanding JHWH and Jesus as one and the same "person".
The point is that they never flinched from their old God, and certainly not from their most principled monotheism. What they did was unprecedented, but not impossible even in their Jewish understanding of God, namely to creatively understand who God, JHWH, was in a new way. There had been reasons for undertaking similar adjustments many times in their history, since JHWH defined who he was by what actions he made on behalf of his people.
But it should also be said that never before had there been such a large shift in understanding who JHWH was. To mark this major shift, they even gave him a new name, much as the pre-Moses God of Israel once got the name JHWH. That new name was "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit".
As for the character of the "Son" part of God, it was marked by understanding him as sitting on God's right-hand side, a clear indication that the "Son" character was to be understood as integral to the one and only God of Israel.
Some very clever evidence for this is given in the book by reading and interpreting Paul as a record of this post-Easter reorientation. As for the implications for present-day Christians, one should note that some 400 years before the infamous Chalcedon formula, this way of understanding God was already there. At best, Chalcedon safeguarded the early "Christian" (completely Jewish!) understanding of God against later Hellenic influences (while also creating loads of trouble for us latter-day Christians!)
As for the book, it could have been even shorter and sweeter. Already after the two first chapters, I took the opportunity offered by a blank page in the book to jot down the gist of the conclusion fleshed out above. The last of the three chapters is a rather difficult-to-read exhibition of the author's eminent OT exegetic prowess. You can safely skip it, if you are not extremely interested in high-level OT exegetics.
Anyone's got a right to establish one's credentia, and the book is a collection of academic lectures, so there is no reason for complaints. All the more remarkable that the two first chapters (lectures) in fact are so eminently readable and accessible also to the lay person.
From a faith perspective a problem might be that the attempt to show how cleverly the first-generation Christians (or, more correctly, Jesus-believing Jews) used their inherited tradition of interpreting and re-interpreting scripture, comes out more like a homage to the creative ability of these post-Easter Jesus-believing Jewish theologians, than as their revelation about who God is after that momentous event.
But I guess that is how it should be. We are left with the eternal challenge of daring to take the leap of faith - that God now actually is he who has incorporated the experience of living fully as a human in a necessarily flawed creation. Only a very short time after the ignominius death of Jesus, his followers dared it. So why not us?
This is a short (only 80 pages) and sweet little book arguing one good idea very well, namely that already the first Christians, rather soon after the Easter experience and long before the Gospels were written, thought of the risen Christ as part of the identity of the one and only Jewish God, JHWH.
The choice of the word "identity" is important here, since it denotes a difference about how we are used to think about the "nature" of something, and the way the Jews in the Second Temple era thought about their God.
To understand the difference in our terms, instead of resorting to our standard formula "God is unconditional love", we should think "God is the one who loves us" (though we never seem to get the message).
The difference might seem like splitting hairs, but it means a lot if you understand identity as something which is defined by acts making a difference in our concrete lives. It is the difference between WHAT something is, and WHO a person is.
For the Jews, their God had a name (although unutterable), JHWH, and a distinct "personality" (if you will) which could be deduced by his way of taking care of his people, leading them out of Egypt, smiting their enemies, etc. In short, their God was knowable, on a personal level.
Knowing JHWH on this personal basis was reified every morning by praying to him who had created everything and who is Lord over the whole creation. Only JHWH was worthy of worship, in distinction to lesser celestial beings like angels and sundry helpful entities. JHWH was visualized as comprising his Spirit, the Word, and Wisdom, which all were seen as integral to the one and only God.
What happened very soon after the Easter event, was that the believers in Jesus started to envisage God, JHWH, in a new way. We should imagine how they, in their daily morning prayers, now ascribed the very same characteristics as of JHWH to Jesus, and that this was a way of understanding JHWH and Jesus as one and the same "person".
The point is that they never flinched from their old God, and certainly not from their most principled monotheism. What they did was unprecedented, but not impossible even in their Jewish understanding of God, namely to creatively understand who God, JHWH, was in a new way. There had been reasons for undertaking similar adjustments many times in their history, since JHWH defined who he was by what actions he made on behalf of his people.
But it should also be said that never before had there been such a large shift in understanding who JHWH was. To mark this major shift, they even gave him a new name, much as the pre-Moses God of Israel once got the name JHWH. That new name was "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit".
As for the character of the "Son" part of God, it was marked by understanding him as sitting on God's right-hand side, a clear indication that the "Son" character was to be understood as integral to the one and only God of Israel.
Some very clever evidence for this is given in the book by reading and interpreting Paul as a record of this post-Easter reorientation. As for the implications for present-day Christians, one should note that some 400 years before the infamous Chalcedon formula, this way of understanding God was already there. At best, Chalcedon safeguarded the early "Christian" (completely Jewish!) understanding of God against later Hellenic influences (while also creating loads of trouble for us latter-day Christians!)
As for the book, it could have been even shorter and sweeter. Already after the two first chapters, I took the opportunity offered by a blank page in the book to jot down the gist of the conclusion fleshed out above. The last of the three chapters is a rather difficult-to-read exhibition of the author's eminent OT exegetic prowess. You can safely skip it, if you are not extremely interested in high-level OT exegetics.
Anyone's got a right to establish one's credentia, and the book is a collection of academic lectures, so there is no reason for complaints. All the more remarkable that the two first chapters (lectures) in fact are so eminently readable and accessible also to the lay person.
From a faith perspective a problem might be that the attempt to show how cleverly the first-generation Christians (or, more correctly, Jesus-believing Jews) used their inherited tradition of interpreting and re-interpreting scripture, comes out more like a homage to the creative ability of these post-Easter Jesus-believing Jewish theologians, than as their revelation about who God is after that momentous event.
But I guess that is how it should be. We are left with the eternal challenge of daring to take the leap of faith - that God now actually is he who has incorporated the experience of living fully as a human in a necessarily flawed creation. Only a very short time after the ignominius death of Jesus, his followers dared it. So why not us?
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