Crucified God

On the Trinities podcast, we have been looking at various efforts to explain how one who is "fully God" could die, if God is immortal.

It's a bit of a head-scratcher, but I had a go at playing "devil's advocate" and wrote to both the show host and the PhD student advocating a new form of social Trinitarianism to try and assess the strengths of this approach.

Here then I posit the following impossible triad (all cannot be true) and how I think a Trinitarian should answer. These alternatives are inspired by Jurgen Moltmann's distinction that it is not as accurate to say death of God as death in God (The Crucified God) and McIntosh's intrinsic/group persons. If I were a fourth century or later trinitarian, I would also want to distinguish between person and being, or intrinsic and group persons. I would say that the Triune God is a being (or group person) and that Jesus Christ is not a being (or a group person); Jesus Christ is an intrinsic person.

Definitions:
God = one (group) being; God = three fully divine intrinsic persons, F S & HS
Immortal = "never dying"

1) God is essentially immortal
2) No fully divine person has ever died
2) Jesus is fully divine

As I mentioned in my comment, I think the way forward for a capital T Trinitarian might first be to deny the wording as accurate because Jesus Christ is an intrinsic person, not a being (i.e. human-divine person, not a human being), to substitute the word person for being, then deny 2. Now they can take refuge in the person/being distinction and propulse a possible further distinction that might follow from Moltmann's thought, that God experienced death within him.

Alternatively, if we took a McIntosh Group Person social Trinity, this scenario could invite the comparison with a closely knit family losing a treasured member. The functional group person experiences the death of an intrinsic person. Here, it is the group person who is essentially immortal, and the intrinsic person Logos incarnandus (Barth) who is not.

DID GOD DIE

?

Following Jesus. Personal Monday ii.

This was not really planned, but given the only person who I know actually regularly reads this blog made a specific request, I am happily having another go at this (thanks R.!)

This time last week, and as a result of more general reflection on what it means for me to be a "follower of Jesus", I tried to show and agree that following him was not an end to itself but a life journey with a goal in mind. That spiritual goal I believe gave me energy in my own quest to not miss out on being spiritually adopted, one of the greatest challenges of my twenties. Vague trinitarianism I now know does not facilitate this task.

This week has seen an interesting shift for me though: I resumed praying to Jesus again. 

Perhaps this was in part due to my declaration last week to follow him. I have been going through a period of focusing on Father prayers for quite a long time, as Jesus taught, but it has not always been easy to feel the closeness I would expect from being restored to the perfectly loving father, even while fully acknowledging the incredible cost. It would be easy to argue that this is simply because I was excluding the divine Son and Spirit from the equation, but I suspect it has much more to do with the way I was brought up and have lived out my church life and doctrine. 

The other reason I am back on the Jesus prayer wagon, I think, is to have rediscovered a couple of Revelation references that speak of Jesus loving us, loving me. Why is that so extraordinary? That is one of the first things Christian parents love to teach our children, that we share with people. But I had been quite surprised to discover that all (or so I had thought) of New Testament epistle (and I think also Acts) references to Jesus loving us were all past tense, drawing our attention to the cross, where Moltmann encourages us to begin our theology, and for me to begin mine.

But here is Revelation chapter 1, verses 4-6, the first of these references I found this week, and I would encourage all to focus on it for a minute for it is one of very few places where the Bible really does "tell me so":

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne,5 and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first born of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

Obviously, or so it seems to me, this is quite a trinitarian-unfriendly passage (I had not even noticed this at first!), but I am not looking at that here. It's Monday!

To him who loves us. 

This “him” is unavoidably Jesus, for it is his blood that has freed us (or washed us, depending on the ancient manuscript you prefer). It also is unavoidably present tense, as the next verb, "freed" or "washed", is past, providing an apparently intentional distinction.

Jesus loves me.

I love Jesus.

I also love God.

J

I will also need to think a bit more about the following Jesus, as we also have “fishers of men”, “carrying my own cross”, abandoning other legitimate preoccupations…. I am beginning to realise my Monday posts could have been subverted away from trinitarianism analysis to following Jesus. My friend R. is a very crafty friend indeed!

Balanced theology: "EVERY THEOLOGY HAS A DEGREE OF PASSIONATE EXTREMISM"

How does passionate over-emphasis work out in theology among the people of God? Whilst researching Moltmann a bit, I came across this article by Trevin Wax at the "Gospel Coalition", which I found interesting, check it out. Note this comment left at the bottom of Wax's article by a reader, identified as James Houghton, which at my time of writing has still not yet been responded to by Wax:

People often call for balance what I find interesting is that Jesus never did.

There are two issues here: Wax's unfortunate lack of clarity on his underlying point and definition of "balance", and unclear assumptions from Houghton's short comment, which I shall also respond to.

I really enjoyed Wax's article on my first read-through. However, I now realise that there is a subtle and perhaps unhelpful shift of emphasis away from what I understand in Stott's work on balance in the life of the Christian toward theological balance, which I think is actually a different point entirely. In turn, this unfortunately makes it less clear which of these two elements of "balance" James Houghton thinks is out of sync with the testimony of Jesus, or if indeed it was simply the mention of the word "balance" that connected with some personal bee in his bonnet.

Let us talk briefly about Jesus' "balance". He could certainly be very extreme: outrageous comments and stories against the religious leaders of his time, turning the tables, the dead can bury their own dead, "you" are my family if you do God's will, willing to die for sins while none of those sins were his, pretty much the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, the list just goes on and on. But was Jesus really saying that the dead should bury the dead? Was he even saying that the spiritually dead should bury the dead? Or was Jesus greatly saddened by death? Did he first weep at Lazarus' death before powerfully raising him (textually rhetorical!)? Could we not say that Jesus was drawing on ideals similar to our modern notion of balance when he said:

Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's (Mark 12:17) 

A couple of other Jesus and balance examples that come to mind: As NT Wright also points out, the house where the paralytic was lowered through the roof is quite plausibly Jesus' house. He was settled. Jesus also "balanced" his time between time with his heavenly father, his disciples and the crowds. And so on.

I also have in mind a relevant comment from Bart Ehrman, which I am certain everyone can agree on. He says that we are to remember that literally billions of events occur in every human being's life, including of course, Jesus (see here for article). He mentions this to help students ask good questions of the text, and identify the different kinds of questions that we can and should ask. But the point is that the vast majority of actions and sayings that took place in Jesus' life are unknown to us, we have just a tiny fraction in four rich flavours. As a Christian theologian, I hope and believe that the fraction we have is the most significant, but it does not exclude from my mind the possibility that, in addition to some of the examples noted above, Jesus could very easily have thought and even explicitly taught that there is balance to be had in Christian life (Stott) and in theology (Wax), but that the gospel writers did not remember it or chose to exclude it. This is an indisputable possibility, despite Houghton's objection.

As to my own conclusion, on this issue of balance in Christian discipleship, I have to respond that Stott's model seems very appealing, I agree with it and can identify with it. With regards to the church's theological balance through some degree of passionate extremes, which is a different point entirely, I think Wax (following Motlmann as he makes very clear) makes a very interesting point. It brings us back to the "unity in diversity" values we often hear, although Wax is clearly going further: if the church benefits through these sometimes extreme views, then we could even point to longer-term stability through some theological boat-rocking!

I do, however, want to throw a diplomatic line to Wax, and suggest, after all, an overarching idea that does gather in his discipleship balance point at the start of his article, and does also I think faithfully reflect the position of Jesus:

There is a rather paradoxical balance: a balance between balance and passionate extremes, or over-emphases. (The clue was in Wax's title: a DEGREE). This post is already too long, but it would be wonderful to explore more fully what this kind of balance could look like for me.