Crucified and Resurrected

Restructuring the Grammar of Christology

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Bennett, Jo, Jo Bennett

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801097546
• eBook ISBN: 9781493400119
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This major work, now available in English, is considered by many to be one of the finest and most significant contributions to modern Christology. Preeminent scholar and theologian Ingolf Dalferth argues for a radical reorientation of Christology for historical, hermeneutical, and theological reasons. He defends an orthodox vision of Christology in the context of a dialogue with modernity, showing why the resurrection, not the incarnation, ought to be the central idea of Christological thinking. His proposal is both pneumatological and Trinitarian, and addresses themes such as soteriology, the doctrine of atonement, and preaching.

1
Incarnation

The Myth of God Incarnate

1. The Myth Debate

In July 1977 a relatively slim volume appeared in England under the title The Myth of God Incarnate. It was published, after three years of discussion, by a group of seven theologians from various denominations under the direction of John Hick.1 The book triggered a shock wave. The first edition was already sold out before the release date. Over thirty thousand copies were sold within the first eight months. It gave rise to the stormiest discussion in ecclesiastical and theological circles since the publication of J. A. T. Robinson’s book Honest to God fifteen years earlier. Conservative evangelical circles made just as little secret of their unanimous rejection of the ideas it set forth as did neoorthodox Roman Catholic theologians—who invoked Barth—or their even more traditionally minded Anglican cousins. The Church of England Evangelical Council called on the five Anglican authors to resign from their positions within the church. In the press, letters to the editor questioned whether the five could even be considered Christians. The book ignited a public scandal. A few short weeks later an apparently very hastily written rebuttal edited by Michael Green and titled The Truth of God Incarnate was rushed onto the market.2 A heated theological debate ensued, which precipitated an avalanche of literature.3 What was the furor about?

In the first keynote chapter of the Myth book, Oxford patristic scholar Maurice Wiles formulated the problem as follows: “Could there be a Christianity without . . . incarnation?” or—to phrase it a little more precisely—without the belief that “Jesus of Nazareth is unique in the precise sense that, while being fully man, it is true of him, and of him alone, that he is also fully God, the Second Person of the coequal Trinity”?4

One might be tempted to reject this question as self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Isn’t belief in Jesus Christ by definition belief that the Second Person of the Trinity has taken human form? But this semantic gambit—fairly popular among theologians—doesn’t yield us any progress if Christianity can exist, or indeed has existed, without it. Admittedly, we could insist that any such faith is not worthy of the name “Christianity,” that we have here a heresy, a faith that is no longer—or, it might rather be said, not yet—Christianity. However, in order to arrive at such a judgment, it is theological arguments of substance that are called for, rather than semantic assertions. For the point at issue is no longer simply whether a supposedly Christian tenet, or one that calls itself Christian, falls within a predefined concept of what is Christian. The point at issue is rather our very concept of what is Christian, in other words, our understanding of what is essentially Christian. So we can rephrase Wiles’s question thus: Does belief in the incarnation belong to the essence of Christianity? If so, then Christianity cannot exist without this tenet. But if Christianity can exist without it, then belief in the incarnation is not an essential constituent of Christianity. Precisely this thesis is put forward, using various arguments, by Wiles and the other authors of the Myth book: belief in Jesus Christ is not necessarily belief in the incarnation; Christology (the theological self-interpretation of belief in Jesus Christ) is therefore not necessarily incarnational Christology.

There is nothing new in that. Years before the Myth book was published, Wolfhart Pannenberg had stated, “In contrast to classical incarnational Christology, which took the idea of incarnation as its starting point and assigned the incarnation process a place in the sequence of factors for discussion, a practice of starting from the historical figure of the human Jesus of Nazareth seems to be gaining increasing acceptance today.”5 The outcry that greeted the thesis put forward by the Myth authors can therefore be correctly understood only against the background of the previous 150 years of Anglican theology. Since the Oxford Movement for restoration in the middle of the nineteenth century had focused Anglican spirituality and theology so rigorously on the mystery of the incarnation, the concept of incarnation had become something of a neo-Anglican “shibboleth, exempt from reasoned scrutiny and treated with unquestioning literalness.”6 Across the entire theological spectrum there was an environmental shift to a “religion of incarnation,”7 with the concept of incarnation as the all-encompassing paradigm of theological thinking. This paradigm has four main structural elements:

1. The doctrine of the incarnation, as the most concentrated expression of the gospel, holds the dominant theological position among the articles of Christology.8 In that God’s Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, entered our human existence, God took on himself the human condition in such a way that we humans are now in touch with God through the human nature of Jesus Christ. It is therefore not the cross and the resurrection but the fact that Christ became human that is the decisive soteriological message of the Christian faith.

2. This has ecclesiological consequences. The incarnation is not simply a past event, but “Christ is continuously incarnated in his church.”9 If Jesus of Nazareth was the locus of God’s becoming human, then the church is the locus for the continuous presence of the incarnate one. It becomes this locus by virtue of being a sacramental system, within which believers are incorporated into the mystical body of Christ through the sacraments, the instruments whereby grace is appropriated. “To be united with the church and to be united with Christ are therefore identical processes.”10

3. In the course of the debate with Darwinism, this incarnational-sacramental approach was expanded, by the Lux Mundi group in particular,11 into a theology of creation immanentism.12 The incarnation is not only the foundation of the church; it is also the key to understanding the world. God is to be sought in the world, not above the world. As the incarnate Logos he is at work in the whole of creation, in nature as well as in human culture and science. Contemporary phenomena such as socialism and the theory of evolution are therefore to be viewed as allies, not opponents, of the Christian faith, so that, in the light of the incarnational concept, there will eventually be a relationship of unbroken harmony between modern culture and Christian faith.

4. If we had accentuated God instead of the world in this relationship of immanence, then, taking the same premises as our starting point, we could have arrived at propositions concerning the doctrine of God that would take aspects of the Christian tradition that had hovered at the edges thus far and draw them into a central position. This becomes evident especially in the Anglican theology of the suffering of God,13 out of which there emerged a series of significant works in the period during and after the First World War, and which was later recalled to mind by Jürgen Moltmann.14 This theology, too, is indissolubly linked with the basic incarnational approach. If Christ is God made man, then his earthly life provides insight into God’s being. The suffering of the Son on the cross, which the church commemorates in the eucharistic offering, is to be understood as the temporal realization of that which is done by God the Father in eternity: he is a suffering God, who suffers with us, for us, and because of us, and who, by his loving commitment to the affairs of the world, transforms the process of evolution into a process of redemption.

These brief comments give sufficient indication that the concept of incarnation characterizes neo-Anglican Christology and equally its ecclesiology and its doctrines of creation and of God.15 It constitutes the foundation of its entire theological system and is itself grounded on a belief in the incarnation that is held to be fundamental. Since the Myth authors’ thesis takes precisely this foundation as its point of reference, they remain unaffected by theological matters of dispute, such as those that might come up for discussion under this paradigm. Rather, it argues openly for a theological paradigm shift that was certain to have a considerable effect on the theological self-understanding of the new Anglicanism. The frenzied and acrimonious tone of the debate is therefore hardly surprising. What is more surprising is that it was conducted in such an ill-defined and superficial manner and was very quickly pressured into apparent contradictions.

For academic theology in England, however, this debate did not come as a total surprise. For years there had been increasing signs that the center of the theological debate was beginning to shift away from the question of God toward Christology. Since the end of the 1960s, there had been certain milestones on this path, such as the publications of the Cambridge Christology Seminar16 and Don Cupitt’s Stanton Lectures of 1969, which expressly endeavored to initiate a philosophical debate on Christology and were published in 1971 under the title Christ and the Hiddenness of God.17 Then in 1974 there appeared, under the title The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, Maurice Wiles’s Hulsean Lectures, given in Cambridge the previous year. These set out, in view of the difficulty of achieving a truly viable historical knowledge of Jesus using the sources available to us, to conduct a fundamental inquiry into incarnational Christology.18 In 1977 the publication of Geoffrey Lampe’s God as Spirit completed the shift from criticism to constructive counterproposal.19 On the basis of a rigorously developed Spirit Christology, Lampe decisively opposes the idea of the preexistence and postexistence of the person of Jesus Christ, thereby pulling the rug out from under the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. This doctrine, however, is not simply discarded but reinterpreted as a continuous incarnation of God the Spirit in the human spirit. There is no dispute that this, God’s incarnate presence, is uniquely represented in Jesus Christ. But this unique expression comes about not by simple virtue of the incarnation but by virtue of the manner and quality of this incarnation. Put briefly, Lampe’s attempt no longer sets out to unfold the doctrine of incarnation christologically; now it does so pneumatologically. It is no longer to be restricted to one locus within the field of Christology; instead, Lampe locates Christology, in its entirety, within the context of a comprehensive pneumatological concept of incarnation that thematizes the self-mediation of the Spirit of God with the human spirit. This means that, whatever theological objections may be raised against Lampe’s attempt, the metaphysical20 misunderstanding, at any rate—that the doctrine of the incarnation and its unfolding in the classical two-natures doctrine is a theory of the persona privata [private person] of Jesus Christ—is overcome. Jesus Christ may be treated as a theological topic only when viewed in his specific relationships with God and with human beings—never abstractly, as an individual regarded in isolation. It is through these relationships that he is what he is, and he can therefore never be considered as a christological topic apart from them.

The Origin of Christology, a thoughtful and carefully argued book by Cambridge New Testament scholar emeritus Charles Moule that appeared in the same year as Lampe’s work, demonstrates that the individualistic misunderstanding of Christology can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Preface to the 2015 English Edition
• Preface to the 1993 German Edition
• Abbreviations
• 1. Incarnation
• 2. Cross and Resurrection
• 3. Jesus Christ
• 4. Trinity
• 5. Atoning Sacrifice
• Modern Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover