The Deity of Christ

Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson, Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781433557255
• eBook ISBN: 9781433531187
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

The biblical teaching about the deity of Christ is a precious truth and foundational to the Christian faith. It has been called "the most distinctively Christian doctrine of all"—one that must be taught and preserved.

With this in mind, Robert Peterson, Christopher Morgan, Andreas Köstenberger, Steve Wellum, Gerald Bray, Alan Gomes, Ray Ortlund Jr., Stephen Nichols, and J. Nelson Jennings have collaborated to develop a theology of Christ's divinity across multiple disciplines. Combining first-rate evangelical scholarship with rich application, their work examines this central doctrine from contemporary, historical, biblical, systematic, apologetic, and missional perspectives. 

This accessible volume—the third in the noted Theology in Community series—guides readers to the significance of Christ's deity across the Old and New Testaments, in Johannine literature, in popular culture and church history, and among cults and world religions. With its keen theological insight and straightforward application, this volume will give pastors, students, and educated readers a clear and useful treatment of the deity of Christ.

1

The Deity of Christ Today

STEPHEN J. NICHOLS

Dan Kimball cleverly titles his engaging, prophetic, and at times disturbing book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations.¹⁵ Kimball discusses with quite revealing results the views of Christianity by the unchurched. Let me suggest a sequel, this time with discussions about Christianity by the churched. It could be titled They Like Jesus but Not Christology. Such a judgment may seem harsh, perhaps even wide of the mark. But, as I will try to make the case here (as I have attempted to make it elsewhere), such a judgment may actually be right on target.¹⁶

The deity of Christ is a cardinal doctrine in the life of the church. As the early church fathers came to understand, not to mention fight and for some even die for, this doctrine is of the utmost importance. The doctrine of the deity of Christ has everything to do with the doctrine of the work of Christ. The gospel is, to put it frankly, at stake. As the following essays of this book unfold, the centrality and urgency of the doctrine of the deity of Christ will be all the more apparent.

That being the case, some self-awareness and potential self-criticism regarding how we think about Christ and how we express those thoughts may be in order. We would be wise to explore the current horizons of thought on the deity of Christ. From my limited vantage point, a few places along the horizon do not bode well for the church and her proclamation of a biblically faithful and compelling gospel. There is, in other words, some unhealthy thinking on the person of Christ in many places of American evangelicalism. Of course, it would be wrong to limit the discussion to merely the American corner of the horizon. Further examination beyond the fifty states can also be instructive. The majority of our discussion here, however, will focus on the American corner. We will proceed along two lines—first, the making of contemporary christology, and second, the unmaking of contemporary christology.

“My Own Personal Jesus”: The Making of Contemporary Christology¹⁷

Depeche Mode’s 1989 song “Personal Jesus,” with its recurring line “Your own personal Jesus,” well captures three elements of contemporary thinking about Christ, namely that such thinking of him is intensely personal, intensely—if not exclusively—experiential, and decidedly counter-confessional and counter-creedal. Such thinking received cinematic expression in a deeply satirical scene from the spoof, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. This particular scene starts off with a prayer, uttered by Will Ferrell’s character, to “Baby Jesus.” The scene quickly spirals downward and inward, with each person around the table offering his or her personal take on what Jesus looks like and how he would act. The Jesus of American culture is not only multiplex but sadly and strangely far removed from the original, biblical depiction.

The same is true of the Jesus of contemporary religious thought. Here, the overriding factor seems to be a cultural predilection to tolerance and inclusivity in light of pluralism. The work of John Hick stands out on this score. Hick reduces Christ to metaphor, zapping Christ of both his historical particularity and his divine identity. The incarnation acts as a metaphor, too, a metaphor for making the presence of the Real (Hick’s preferred designation for God) known. Hick chalks up the language of the New Testament Gospels’ claims to deity as inauthentic and instead regards those claims as creations of the later Christian community, efforts to trump up the figure at the center of their religious devotion. As he summarizes the thesis of much of his own work, Hick notes, “Jesus himself did not teach that he was God and that this momentous idea is a creation of the church.”¹⁸ Hick proceeds to deconstruct literalist Christologies, such as those put forth at Nicaea and Chalcedon.¹⁹ Those who take Jesus and his claims to deity literally, Hick argues, miss the point altogether. Jesus is nothing more than a metaphor.

Veli-Matti Karkkainen shows the connection between Hick’s metaphorical (and mythological) Christology and Hick’s pluralism, as he notes, “Christ is depicted as the embodiment of divine love, complementary to the intense experience of the release from suffering in Buddhism or the source of life and purpose in Hinduism.”²⁰ Hence, the essence of the Christ event may be found in all religions. What matters most for Hick is what Christ represents, not some quest to uncover and put forth, as the creeds do, who Christ is.

The pluralist Christ may be found in many places beyond the work of John Hick. In the new globalism, as Christianity continues to interface with world religions, the pluralist option continues to gain popularity. Marcus Borg, of the Jesus Seminar, published a book simply placing the sayings of Jesus side by side with the sayings of Buddha.²¹ This pluralistic Christ has become so ideologically distorted that he can no longer be recognized.

The Transformation of the American Jesus

In the hands of American pop culture or in the hands of scholars of world religions, Christ does not fare well. At this point we may very well ask, how did this happen? How did we get here? Stephen Prothero makes the case that the American Jesus went through a three-stage transformation, moving from a creedal Jesus with an emphasis on dogma, to a biblical Jesus with an emphasis on his humanity and closeness, to a Jesus liberated from Christianity and the Bible. This Jesus of contemporary American culture wears many faces, reflecting the tastes of postmodern and pluralist times.²²

From impersonal to personal. According to Prothero, the American Jesus was first shaped by the strict, dogmatic ideals of the Puritans. The transition from the first to the second stage, then, involved the dramatic shift away from the Christ of the Puritans. As Prothero notes, “In the early nineteenth century, evangelicals liberated Jesus first from Calvinism and then from the creeds.” He explains that while evangelicals were not rejecting Christ’s deity, they were much more comfortable discussing and fixating on his humanity, transforming Jesus from “a distant god in a complex theological system into a near-and-dear person, fully embodied with virtues they could imitate, a mind they could understand, and qualities they could love.”²³

This “near-and-dear” Jesus tended to be more reassuring, more affirming, and hence to be preferred even more than God, who remained distant, shrouded in mystery, and ready to judge. Simultaneously, the New Testament gained an upper hand on the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God is a God of wrath, a judge and warrior, whereas in the New Testament, Jesus is love, a friend of sinners. This Jesus of “biblicism” as opposed to the Christ of the creeds offered a kindlier and gentler savior. As such, this transformation from the first stage to the second purportedly took Jesus away from man-made creeds to a focus on the Bible alone.

Some would argue that this move was a positive one. But we should pause before we condone that conclusion. First, it’s a faulty dichotomy to pit the Christ of the creeds against the Christ of the Bible. The early creeds, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Christologically charged Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds, are extremely biblical, reflecting biblical language and, in my view, quite helpful summaries of wide swaths of biblical teaching on the person of Jesus Christ.²⁴ It may very well be unwise and presumptuous to assume that the Bible and the three aforementioned creeds are at odds.

Second, the Jesus of biblicism can be potentially harmful given the way biblicism tends to play out. The creeds force us to consider the “whole counsel of God,” whereas we tend to have our favorite places and preferred texts in the biblical canon. To put the point directly, the Jesus of the Bible tends not to be the Jesus of the whole Bible. Rather, he tends to be the Jesus of the parts of the Bible one happens to like. We can see this especially in nineteenth-century American culture. To Victorians, Jesus espoused Victorian virtues of tenderness and gentleness. He was a meek and mild savior, who always had time for children. One of the favorite episodes from the Gospels, and an oft-reproduced image on cards and lithographs, was Jesus welcoming the children.²⁵ We can also see a personalized Jesus, if we move ahead a bit, into the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Here the popular image is of Jesus as a countercultural rebel, with the favorite episode being Jesus’ throwing the money-changers from the temple. The Jesus of biblicism is rarely the complex and mysterious Jesus of the whole Bible.

Third, the Jesus of biblicism proved problematic in American culture due to the demise of biblical authority in American culture. Mark Noll argues that this decline, which was generally in the wake of the Civil War, was due to the use of biblical arguments for slavery. Noll explains, “The country had a problem because its most trusted religious authority, the Bible, was sounding an uncertain note.”²⁶ Couple that with the encroachment of biblical higher criticism in the surrounding decades, and you end up with a doubly damning cocktail for biblical authority.²⁷ The upshot of it all is that the Bible no longer held the place of the most trusted religious authority it had once held. And this leads to the next step in the making of contemporary christology.

From personal to liberated. As the first stage of the American Jesus, the creedal Jesus of the Puritans, gave way to the second, the biblical Jesus of the nineteenth century, so the second stage would give way to the third. Back to Prothero’s thesis: as Scripture waned in American culture, and in other places as well, Jesus was liberated from the Bible and from Christianity itself.²⁸ At the turn of the twentieth century this dynamic played itself out in the fundamentalist and modernist controversy. The liberal side, championed by such figures as Harry Emerson Fosdick, called for a radically different Jesus from the Jesus of orthodoxy. Fosdick made the case that from the beginning, Christ had been “interpreted.” The disciples themselves interpreted him, using the cultural models of their place and time to express how Christ speaks to the “deep and abiding” or perennial needs of humanity. This Fosdick takes as the license to embark on his own interpretation of Jesus in light of the cultural models of his own day. The Jesus that emerges in Fosdick’s reinterpretation, not surprisingly, is strongly, if not heroically, human—not the Jesus Christ of the creeds, the God-man.²⁹ J. Gresham Machen captures the difference between Fosdick and liberalism’s christology and that of an orthodox, biblical christology. He declares with a bit of rhetorical flourish, “Liberalism regards Jesus as the fairest flower of humanity; Christianity regards him as a supernatural person.”³⁰

The American Jesus Today

As the twentieth century rolled on, the Jesus of the creeds and the Bible continued on its downward trajectory toward the intensely personal Jesus of one’s own making. In the closing decades of the twentieth century at least three factors have come into play, which have exacerbated this anti-biblical and pluralistic trend. These include the many portrayals of Jesus in film, the all-consuming consumerism and commodification of culture, and the invoking and enlistment of Jesus in politics. For the unchurched of our culture, movies, trinkets, and the buzz of political ideologies inform them far more about Christ than do the pages of the sacred text.

Film. First, consider movies. Two of the most controversial movies of recent decades have been cinematic portrayals of Jesus, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Also making the list is Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code (2006). There has been much debate over these movies, but I do not wish to enter that debate here. I wish to make only a single point: when you add up all the box office receipts and DVD rentals, you realize the power of these films in communicating Christ to culture. For many, the only Jesus they will ever know is the Jesus of these and other films.

One of the difficulties film faces in depicting Christ concerns the subject at hand, his deity. How do you portray the deity of Christ on screen? His humanity comes through rather easily, and in the case of Scorsese’s film, all too easily. Even Gibson’s The Passion, despite all the praises heaped upon it by evangelical leaders, faces limitations in presenting Christ as the God-man and in presenting a theological interpretation of all that suffering depicted on the screen.

Consumerism. Film isn’t the only place Jesus shows up in culture. He also appears seemingly ubiquitously on bracelets, necklaces, stickers, backpacks, T-shirts, and even (sic!) rubber duckies. Contemporary American culture clearly stands out as the most consumer-driven culture of all time. And even Jesus has been sucked up in its wake. Religious kitsch or “holy hardware” has another name: Jesus junk—two words that clearly don’t belong together. The upshot of this commodification of Jesus, spurred on for the most part by well-intentioned evangelicals, is twofold: the trivialization of Christ and a detrimental witness before a watching world. To put the matter directly, when we reduce Jesus to a vinyl rubber ducky or to copped advertising slogans on T-shirts and golf balls (“Got Jesus?”), we are not speaking persuasively and compellingly for the gospel. We simply look silly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• List of Abbreviations
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Deity of Christ Today — Stephen J. Nichols
• 2. The Deity of Christ and the Old Testament — Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.
• 3. The Deity of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels — Stephen J. Wellum
• 4. The Deity of Christ in John’s Gospel — Andreas J. Köstenberger
• 5. The Deity of Christ in the Apostolic Witness — Stephen J. Wellum
• 6. The Deity of Christ in John’s Letters and the Book of Revelation — Andreas J. Köstenberger
• 7. The Deity of Christ in Church History — Gerald Bray
• 8. Toward a Systematic Theology of the Deity of Christ — Robert A. Peterson
• 9. The Deity of Christ and the Cults — Alan W. Gomes
• 10. The Deity of Christ for Missions, World Religions, and Pluralism — J. Nelson Jennings
• Selected Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index