Introduction to Christianity Part Two: Jesus Christ, Chapter One
C. Jesus Christ – True God and True Man
1. The Formulation of the Question: “Have we not perhaps raised ourselves aloft on a splendid system of ideas but left reality behind us, so that the indisputable coherence of the system is of no use to us because the foundation is missing? … one not only can but must answer with Yes if one is not to slip either into rationalistic trivialities or mythological son-ideas that were long ago surpassed and overcome by biblical faith in the Son and the way it was expunded in the early Church.” (212)
2. A Modern Stock Idea of the “Hisorical Jesus”
“Who was Jesus of Nazareth really? What view did he take of himself?” (212) These are the questions that modernity has seen fit to answer with what R identifies as “such a conglomeration of hypotheses.” “If one goes to work carefully from a linguistic point of view and does not mix together things that it would be convenient to find cohering, the following points can be established.” (215)
a. The question of the “divine man”: “The concept of divine man or God-man theos aner occurs nowhere in the New Testament.
b. Biblical terminology and its relation to dogma: “Within the language of the New Testament, a rigourous distinction must be made between the designation “Son of God” and the simple designation “the Son”. To anyone who does not proceed with linguistic precision, the two seem to mean just the same thing. The two descriptions do indeed in a certain sense have something to do with each other; but originally they belong to quite different contexts, have different origins, and express different things.” (216)
i. “The expression ‘Son of God’ stems from the “king” theology of the Old Testament, which itself rests on the demytholigization of oriental “king” theology and expresses its transformation into the “Chosen People” theology of Israel. The classical example of this procedure … is provided by Psalm 2:7, and thus by the text that at the same time became one of the points of departure of Christological thinking.” (217) R goes on to contrast the ‘demytholigized myth’ surrounding Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ and the ‘myth that has remained myth’ of the Roman emperor, with his all-embracing claims. (222)
ii. “… the few words that have been handed down to us by the Greek New Testament in Jesus’ mother tongue, Aramaic, form a particularly good key to his original mode of speedh. They struck those who heard them as so surprisingly new, and mirrored so well the special quality of the Lord, his uniqueness, that they were remembered word for word; in them we can still hear him, as it were, speaking in his own voice.” (223) Abba being chief among these.
“The Christology of John and of the Church’s Creed, in contrast, goes much farther in its radicalism, inasmuch as it acknowledges being itself as act and says, “Jesus is his work.”
1. The Formulation of the Question: “Have we not perhaps raised ourselves aloft on a splendid system of ideas but left reality behind us, so that the indisputable coherence of the system is of no use to us because the foundation is missing? … one not only can but must answer with Yes if one is not to slip either into rationalistic trivialities or mythological son-ideas that were long ago surpassed and overcome by biblical faith in the Son and the way it was expunded in the early Church.” (212)
2. A Modern Stock Idea of the “Hisorical Jesus”
“Who was Jesus of Nazareth really? What view did he take of himself?” (212) These are the questions that modernity has seen fit to answer with what R identifies as “such a conglomeration of hypotheses.” “If one goes to work carefully from a linguistic point of view and does not mix together things that it would be convenient to find cohering, the following points can be established.” (215)
a. The question of the “divine man”: “The concept of divine man or God-man theos aner occurs nowhere in the New Testament.
b. Biblical terminology and its relation to dogma: “Within the language of the New Testament, a rigourous distinction must be made between the designation “Son of God” and the simple designation “the Son”. To anyone who does not proceed with linguistic precision, the two seem to mean just the same thing. The two descriptions do indeed in a certain sense have something to do with each other; but originally they belong to quite different contexts, have different origins, and express different things.” (216)
i. “The expression ‘Son of God’ stems from the “king” theology of the Old Testament, which itself rests on the demytholigization of oriental “king” theology and expresses its transformation into the “Chosen People” theology of Israel. The classical example of this procedure … is provided by Psalm 2:7, and thus by the text that at the same time became one of the points of departure of Christological thinking.” (217) R goes on to contrast the ‘demytholigized myth’ surrounding Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ and the ‘myth that has remained myth’ of the Roman emperor, with his all-embracing claims. (222)
ii. “… the few words that have been handed down to us by the Greek New Testament in Jesus’ mother tongue, Aramaic, form a particularly good key to his original mode of speedh. They struck those who heard them as so surprisingly new, and mirrored so well the special quality of the Lord, his uniqueness, that they were remembered word for word; in them we can still hear him, as it were, speaking in his own voice.” (223) Abba being chief among these.
“The Christology of John and of the Church’s Creed, in contrast, goes much farther in its radicalism, inasmuch as it acknowledges being itself as act and says, “Jesus is his work.”
posted by Quin Finnegan at 1:42 PM
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