RethinkingOurStory

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Following a path laid out by the historical conversation about Jesus, in our year-long project, we’ve looked first at Jesus’ humanity, and now turn to look at his divinity. What does it mean when Christian people say Jesus is divine? Does it mean, as seems to be implied in many of the conversations we Christians have on the topic, that Jesus is a “deity?” If so, we need to take a look at that word and ask ourselves about the unspoken meaning it causes when we unconsciously frame our understanding of Jesus in these terms.

The word “deity” informs thinking other than our Judeo Christian thoughts about the divine. Romans, Greeks, the Norse, and Aztecs all framed their understanding of their gods in a way that gives meaning to the word “deity.” Consequently, the dictionary has several meanings for the word. One thing it means is attaining to the estate or rank of a god or a goddess. This evokes the understanding the Greeks had of their deities, Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, and Aphrodite. They were beings very much like humans, but bigger and more powerful. Is that what we mean when we Christians say Jesus is “divine?” Most wouldn’t say so if asked directly, but often these themes inform our unspoken assumptions about the word, and about Jesus.

But we Christians also think of Jesus as human, sometimes, causing the Greco-Roman notion of the demi-god seems to unconsciously apply. Some frame Jesus in their minds as half god, half human, like Herecles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, half god, half human.

The dictionary also uses the word in another sense, as a person or thing that is revered as a god. In this meaning, when a person or thing becomes highly valued to people, it is elevated in revered status equal to the gods (In this society, money is the only deity).

Is that what we mean when we say Jesus is divine? Are we saying that because of his ability to perform miracles, and the profound wisdom of his teachings, or because of the drama surrounding his death and resurrection, that we have come to revere him so deeply, that we have elevated him to the status of a god? Again, if asked directly, I don’t think many of us would say this is what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.”

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Yes, there is a danger to our Christian spirituality when we don’t think carefully about what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.” However, because this has been such a controversial topic in our ancient past, we Christians tend not to discuss it very openly. Feeling the pressure to acquiesce to the party line, we don’t do our best thinking on this subject.

On the one hand, we’re afraid we’ll be out of the club if we tinker with something as sacrosanct as the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity. When we Christians determine who is in the orthodox club, and who is out, who is part of a cult, our primary litmus test is this question; Do you hold that Jesus “was god,” or was he merely “a god.” If you say Jesus “was God,” you’re in; “a god,” you’re out.

Preparing for this mini-lesson, I was speaking to a devout Christian on this topic a while ago. As soon as I brought up the topic fireworks went off. “Go ahead and do this “rethinking Christianity” project if you must,” she said, “But you just can’t be rethinking this topic. Some things are just too sacred to mess with.”

However, on the other hand, if we don’t reconsider some of our instincts about Jesus’ divinity, our spirituality will suffer. If we unconsciously put Jesus in the same camp as Zeus or Apollo, or if we frame him in our minds as a half god, like Herecles or Perseus (Zeus fathered Perseus, another demi-god, this time with Danae.  The guy got around!), or if we frame the divinity of Jesus in these ancient, familiar mental constructs people have always had for their gods, we reduce Jesus, and we reduce the concept of divinity.

Also, if we unconsciously invite these constructs about divinity from other religions to inform our thinking about Jesus, we ignore much of the teaching of Jesus himself. We certainly ignore the teaching of the ancients who insisted we hold Jesus’ divinity in tension with his humanity. If we think of Jesus as an improved version of Zeus, in a very visceral way, it lets us off the hook.

Many times in the Christian scriptures Jesus told us to live the way he lived, to do the things he did. He told us to to heal those who are sick, to confront injustice the way he did, to express the divine nature the way he did, and to live virtuously the way he did. But if Jesus is a Greek deity, that makes no sense. Yes, Jesus lived and died selflessly. But, we say to ourselves, of course he lived nobly.  He was a god, for goodness sake. True, it would be better if I lived selflessly and virtuously myself. It would be better if I healed people’s wounds or confronted social injustice, but what hope do I have to live at this elevated level?  I’m a mere mortal. We see Jesus discern the heart of the Divine and living accordingly, and we say to ourselves, “I can’t do that, I’m just a man, just a woman. He was a god.”

But, I suggest, these ancient Roman and Greek and Aztec and Norse constructs of “the gods” don’t apply to Jesus. I’m suggesting that the divinity of Jesus can’t be reduced to the term “deity” as our social and historical instincts would dictate. Jesus was something much more, an expression of the mysterious, uncontainable divine (More on that next week).

The dictionary suggests yet another usage of the words “divine” and “deity” which I believe serves as a better mental framework. It says this of the word “deity:”  of divine character or nature; holding the very nature of God; proceeding from God.

If we frame the words “Jesus is divine” this way, it does not let us off the hook. There’s no room for “well Jesus was a god, for goodness sake” kinds of thoughts. Jesus and the book of Genesis both teach us that we ourselves, are made of the divine, that we holding the very nature of God within our beings, and that we proceed from God. Yes, we’ve been corrupted, as we saw in the section we did on rethinking our humanity, but those essential characteristics were never erased.

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In AD 451, a group of bishops got together in a town in Turkey called Chalcedon. There hadn’t been much trouble on the topic of Jesus’ divinity in the early years of Christianity being as influenced as they were by the Jewish mind. They had been so rooted in the one-ness of the Hebrew God, that they understood Jesus as an expression of that divine oneness. They did not see Jesus’ divinity as a separate Zeus-like deity. But when Christianity spread into Rome where the Greco-Roman mind did have the Zeus-like images of God, they needed clarification. So they got together, talked it over, and issued a proclamation.

“Jesus is a oneness,” they said, “a fully human and a fully divine oneness.” Mostly what they said was negative, “Jesus is not what those other guys are saying he is.” They were defending against separatist doctrines that said Jesus was two entities, a spiritual one and a physical one.

But what this Council at Chalcedon did not do, was try to explain the mystery. They just left it in its unexplainable ambiguity. This Jesus figure, so important in our history, in our religion, we’re not going to try and pin down exactly what he is, or how this whole human-divine thing works.

And now, this many years later, mainstream Christianity hasn’t made any formal statement about Jesus that goes much beyond the one we made at Chalcedon. The divinity of Jesus remains a mystery we’re just content to live with. We’re ok with defying explanation, and in a way, this makes sense.

To say Jesus is divine, is to say that somehow he expresses God, and, as we saw in the earlier sections of our project, we cannot in any way, ever get our minds around the nature of God. “Ineffable,” “transcendent,” “incomprehensible,” these are the words we apply to the doctrine of God. Even though popular Christianity reduces God to being a guy in the sky, it is not our faith. We hold that one cannot contain the vastness of the divine in the human mind. Experience tells us there is something there, but wisdom is content to leave the immensity of the Divine in the realm of mystery.

So, long ago when people experienced Jesus as something beyond themselves, a reality bigger than their reality, it made sense that they would use the word “divine.” Jesus is beyond our capacity to contain, bigger than we can control or hold on to. So for centuries, we’ve said this; “Jesus is a man, a human being like you and me, having the same kind of body, the same emotional upheaval, the same hurt and disappointment and ecstasy that go with the reality of being human.” “Jesus is also an expression of the invisible God, a way of putting flesh to a reality that can’t be contained in flesh, an imperfect expression of the inexpressible, but a visible, tangible expression nonetheless, a way of putting into three dimensions, a reality that can’t be contained in three dimensions.”

We’ll hold these two truths in tension, we Christians say…

• Jesus a human being like you and me, and…
• Jesus an expression of the Divine that cannot be expressed

And we’ll live with the mystery that imposes on our brains. We’ll live with the tension that creates, because we believe there is a reality that is bigger than our brains and hearts can contain, and we believe the person of Jesus somehow expressed that bigger reality.

However, we humans (and we Christians are no exception to the rule), we don’t like mystery. We don’t like tension and we don’t like our truth to come to us in the form of paradox.

Even though the church has never said more than we said at Chalcedon in any kind of formal statement about Jesus, popular Christianity certainly has. And when we have, we’ve tended to swing to one or the other poles of this paradox. We give lip service to Jesus being human and divine, but we live, speak, and worship as though he is one or the other. Some generations, some denominations, give rich focus to Jesus’ humanity, others to his divinity.

In conservative American Christianity in our generation, we’ve tended to focus on the divinity of Jesus, Jesus exclusively as the Son of God.

When I was a middle-schooler, I participated in an irreverent discussion that took place in a Sunday school class. The topic of our discussion was the degree to which Jesus experienced every-day bodily functions. A kind, older, church-lady who happened to be in the class that day was appalled at the suggestion that Jesus would ever pass gas. It was inconceivable to her, that Jesus, the visible expression of the invisible God, as Paul calls him, could ever be reduced to a world of blood, semen, and gastric juices. “How could such inexhaustible Truth and Beauty as is contained in divinity ever coexist in such proximity to bowels and foot odor?”

Next week, I’ll suggest a way we can think that can help us live with the paradoxical tension, the mystery of humanity and divinity. As I said in the section on rethinking human nature, what I say will have implications for how we think of our own humanity. We’ll see that Jesus himself, suggests that the same kind of oneness with the Divine that he experienced is ours to experience as well.

Next week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 12:45 am and is filed under 5-Rethinking Jesus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.