Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation

Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon

Eboni Marshall Turman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137373885
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

The Black Church is an institution that emerged in rebellion against injustice perpetrated upon black bodies. How is it, then, that black women's oppression persists in black churches? This book engages the Chalcedonian Definition as the starting point for exploring the body as a moral dilemma.

1

The Politics of Incarnation: A Theological Perspective

“. . . the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . .”

—John 1:14a

Christian identity has largely been shaped by the interpretive decisions and authoritative guidelines of a common patristic history. Although formulated millennia ago, conciliar traditions continue to guide contemporary theological and christological reflection in both the academy and the local church. The primary questions that motivated early Christian communities of interpretation, and that continue to prompt contemporary theological and ethical inquiry, namely, “What is the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and God?” and “Who is this Jesus in relationship to the world?” presume a specific articulation of divine identity that can be accessed and normatively interpreted in ways that confer providential significance for human historicity.

New Testament and early nonbiblical accounts of the person and personhood of Jesus Christ provided the essential paradigm for the agenda of the conciliar tradition and later developments within the scope of the Christological project.¹ As evidenced by the critical and systematic queries of early apologists like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian of Carthage, and Origen of Alexandria among others, the Christological confession of God’s fleshly manifestation in Jesus has served as the impetus toward theological identity crisis throughout the history of Christendom. The initial crisis of Christological identity emerged from the problematic assertion of an embodied God that ostensibly occasioned the fragmentation of divinity. Jesus as the Son of God paradoxically embodied the unity of two modalities of being: spiritual and fleshly, divine and human.² This portrayal of the person of Christ as simultaneously consisting of seemingly opposed natures thrust the Christian project into centuries of conceptual dilemma that precipitated volatile, and sometimes violent exchanges concerned with the identity of God and thus, the identity of God’s people.

Logos-Sarx Kai Logos-Anthropos: A Tale of Two Cities

The antecedents of the greatest conciliar monuments of patristic history, namely the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon in 325 and 451, respectively, predominantly emerged from “two broad traditions . . . that began to take shape” during the fourth and fifth centuries.³ Logos-sarx or Word-flesh Christology is generally associated with Alexandrian theology and its monotheistic inclination that accentuates the singleness of God’s identity. Sarx, rather the “flesh,” as it is asserted in John 1:14 (Logos-sarx egeneto), designates the weakness and vulnerability of the created realm. Alexandrian logos-sarx Christology, characterized by its insistence on the Logos-Son as the single divine subject who is God, jettisons any possibility of sarx as a pertinent site of inquiry into the identity of Jesus. Distinctly denying the significance of human agency, and even the very presence of a human soul in Jesus Christ, the Alexandrian school upholds the singularity of the Logos by contending that the Word is the sole functioning agent in the activity of Jesus. Logos-sarx Christology posits that although God assumes flesh in the enfleshment of the Logos, Jesus is not a human being. Consequently and quite ironically, the person of Jesus “lacks a rational soul . . . is not a human subject” and “is without a principle of human individuality, freedom, and action,” precisely because, according to the Alexandrians, “all of these elements would undermine the effective presence and initiative of God for” human salvation.⁴ The fulfillment of God’s soteriological activity is not dependent upon any human enterprise; instead, human flesh is processually divinized, and thus saved, by the Word’s very assumption of it.

Centered in the catechetical school of Antioch in Syria, Antiochene Logos-anthropos (Word–human being) Christology is another strand of thought that dominated the patristic period. In stark contrast to the Alexandrian school that holds that the Word is the critical site of origination that bequeaths significance to the Christ event, Logos-anthropos Christology asserts Jesus Christ-as-human being as the significant and critical partner in the salvific activity of God. The Antiochene school contended that Alexandrian Christology’s focus on Jesus as God dangerously transformed the Logos into a mutable subject with human limitations and passions. So as not to suggest the ineffability of the Divine, Antiochene theologians systematically proposed the utility of a christological binary by arguing that Jesus comprises two distinct natures that are held in unity with one another. In other words, the human and the divine intersect insofar as Jesus Christ is a single historical subject who is indwelt by the Word. However, “indwelling,” that is, Jesus’s having been assumed by the Logos does not dissolve his human subjectivity. Instead the divine Logos and human intelligence and freedom work together in Christ so that the distinction and integrity of each nature is preserved, “as opposed to confusion or mixture of one into the other or the formation of a third thing.”⁵ While clearly disavowing the ontological unification of Jesus’s two natures, Logos-anthropos Christology contends that Jesus’s humanity is God’s own. Antioch therefore conceives the identity of Jesus Christ as unity in duality and thereby emphasizes the divine Word and the person of Jesus Christ as a moral unity of divine and human intention and action.

While acknowledging the critical differences between the Christological trends of Alexandria and Antioch, it is also important to concede their several commonalities. Most evident is the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools’ quest to understand the identity and character of Jesus Christ. To this end, both streams of thought reflected on the “objective data of revelation proposed in the scriptures.”⁶ Some theologians like Earl Richards argue that the most significant difference between the two schools is the low and ascending Word–human being Christology of Antioch that focuses on the life, ministry, and death of Jesus the Nazerene, as opposed to the high and descending Logos-sarx Christology of its Alexandrian rival and its insistence on the preexistent Johannine Logos.⁷ However, more contemporary Christological scholarship suggests that Alexandrian and Antiochene theologians have both developed “christologies from above” insofar as both schools inherited the “preexistent” criteria and presuppositions of the Logos-theology of the Apologists that was concretized at Nicaea. Although Alexandria would insist on the single divine nature of God and Antioch adamantly claimed the equal instrumentality of human activity for the work of salvation, both schools agreed that the Logos could not be subject to human limitations. Therefore, the Alexandrian and Antiochene theologians were similarly and unremittingly frustrated by the paradox of the eternal Logos’ confluence with a temporal world.

The Apologists

Three significant theological moves characterized the theologies of the early apologists: the transference of the problem of Jesus’s identity to the inner life of God, “a conception of differentiation within the Godhead, and the subordination of the Logos-Son to the Father.”⁸ In the first place, the monotheistic impulse of early theologians like Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) posited Jesus’s divinity as a given by situating his existential reality within the contours of the transcendent God. In his Apology, Justin suggests “that the Father of all has a Son, who, as the First-born Word of God, is also God.”⁹ Contemporary theologian Roger Haight suggests that this transference principle is directly related to the methodological differentiation of theological personification and hypostatization that preceded the development of Logos Christology. As found in the Jewish scriptures, theological personification employs linguistic symbols to refer to attributes of God. Accordingly, hypostatization occurs when the symbolic figure of speech refers to concrete being. Haight suggests that

as long as Logos and Wisdom remain what they were originally, personifications, that is, figures of speech used to say something about God, it makes sense to say that God’s wisdom was actualized in Jesus, and that Jesus embodies God’s wisdom. But when the Logos is understood to be a reality in itself, distinct from the Father, and yet somehow divine, and as a divine entity to have assumed flesh, a far different assertion is being made.¹⁰

Appealing to John’s Prologue, Justin Martyr posited that God was necessarily and simultaneously inclusive of both Father and Logos, although the Logos was admittedly derived from the Father. In defending the Christian faith against Gnostic criticisms, the apologists articulated philosophically based claims that established the Logos as hypostatically integrated with the distinct being of Jesus, rather than merely a personification or metaphorical depiction of God.¹¹

Responding to Gnostic dualism, docetism, and the transference principle of Justin’s Logos-theology, Tertullian of Carthage (c. 165–240) further uncovered the character of differentiation within the life of God in two critical ways.¹² On the one hand, he argued against the Gnostic assertion of Christ’s flesh as illusion by maintaining that “Caro cardo salutis,” rather, that “flesh is the hinge of salvation.” This vital assertion redeemed the soteriological viability of the incarnation against Marcionite arguments that situated the body as passive matter and negated the possibility of Jesus’s life as salvific event. At the same time, the Latin-speaking North African theologian challenged Monarchian insistence upon the “absolute unity of the divine in the face of the apparent division and plurality” that is characteristic of Logos-theology.

In his Against Praxeas, Tertullian contends that while God’s person is indeed singular, in the divine realm God can only be articulated by way of multiplicity. He employs the classic imagery of light and its radiance, and the fountain and its stream to elucidate the intimate, yet peculiar relationality between the Creator and the Son, that is one substance, constituted of two distinct natures that are compounded without compromise. Tertullian paradoxically expounds upon his theological supposition through his contrasting development of a Christological vocabulary that asserts Jesus as a singular person, although substantially variegated. He explains:

He [Jesus] is explicitly set before us both as God and as a human being. . . . What we see here is two ways of being, not compounded but conjoined, in one person, Jesus, who is God and a human being. The characteristic property of each substance is preserved in so real a way that the Spirit carried on its own activities in him—that is, power and works and signs—and at the same time the flesh was involved in its passions.¹³

While Tertullian clearly identifies Christ as the “ground of both divine and human actions,” and thereby anticipates “the classical resolution to the Christological problem that will be hammered out more than two centuries later” at Chalcedon, he further complicates Christological identity by asserting the soteriological utility of the flesh and, at the same time, objecting to the notion that the Father could be subject to the flesh.

Although peripherally engaged in the writings of Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, this critical paradox that points toward the subordination of the Son to the Father was more fully developed by Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253), Tertullian’s younger contemporary and arguably one of Christianity’s greatest thinkers. For Origen, “there never was when the Logos did not exist” (ouk estin hote ouk en); however, God alone is unbegotten and immutable.¹⁴ Therefore, although the Logos is coeternal with the Father, it is subordinate to God precisely because it is generated by the Father. Determined as the eternally begotten of God, Origen further conjectures that the Logos is “deuteros theos,” a second God of sorts that is, “less than God, but superior to all created beings, as it alone knew God and God’s will.”¹⁵ Earl Richards describes Origen’s complicated negotiation of divine identity by suggesting that, in one sense, Origen affirmed “the existence of two Gods” and “in another sense only one.” Origen argues that

we must not fall into the opinion of those who, fearful of asserting two Gods, have separated from the church for the fantasy of the Monarchians, withdrawing the Son from the Father and thus practically suppressing the Father, nor, on the other side, fall into another impious doctrine, that which denies the deity of Christ.¹⁶

Interestingly enough, in his Commentary on John Origen utilizes the article “the” to designate God the Father as distinct from the Logos that is God only by participation in the Father, the only source of power and divinity.¹⁷ As the image of the transcendent God, Origen’s Logos does not function as source, but rather as mediator between God and the flawed created world. The process of mediation begins with the unification of the Logos with the undefiled rational spirit of Jesus, and is secondarily actualized in the incarnation of the Logos by way of human birth. Origen’s Logos-theology presumes a double mediation wherein the “Logos mediates the deity to the soul [and] the soul mediates God’s Logos-Son to the body.” Accordingly, it is through the divine body of Jesus that those who have defected from the wisdom of God are redeemed into the “spirit world of the Logos and their glorification.”¹⁸ Said differently, by way of the primary unification of the Logos with the spirit of Jesus, the body...