Is Doctrinal Correctness About Jesus Absolutely Essential?
Deconstructing Christianity: On the Son of God, imperial Roman politics, and what Jesus did and did not teach about himself.
There is no denying that the gospels identify Jesus as the Son of God, and depict various people, God’s voice from heaven, and Jesus’ own implicit and explicit acknowledgments affirming as much. He went around calling God Abba (something like Papa); but on the other hand, he assumed his followers might just as well do the same. What we do not see is any depiction of Jesus explicitly teaching that he was the Son of God; it is not part of his sayings or core teachings, much less central to them.
In Matthew 16 when Simon Peter declares that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus says that God alone revealed this to Peter, gives him the nickname “Rock” (Cephas in Aramaic, and Petros in the Greek of the New Testament), and declares that on this ‘boulder’ (petra)—presumably Peter’s confession—he will build his ekklēsia. The notion that Jesus is the Son of God would be a point of departure for building up the new assembly of his followers, but this was not any kind of doctrine in and of itself. Not yet, anyway. What Jesus lived and taught was far more important.
At the very least, being ‘the Son of God’ meant that Jesus was really, really special, just as the attribution of some filial relationship to the divine has meant for many other powerful people over much time across Asia and North Africa. It seems clear that Jesus was uniquely conscious of his union with God, and that he endeavored for his disciples to develop that same sense of oneness in themselves as they went on to make disciples in his name, in the name of his ever-present Spirit, and in the name of the metaphorical Father with whom they experienced that oneness.
Who or What Is Jesus?
The life of Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (ca. 313–86) coincides with the first seven decades of Christianity’s new legal status as established by the Edict of Milan, issued the year Cyril was born. Christians were formerly members of an outlawed and persecuted sect. Now they could own property, build churches, worship freely, and participate in public life as Christians. But, being officially sanctioned not only provided Christianity with benign public permission but also subjected it to outright meddling in its process of development by governmental rulers. The emperor Constantine had discovered that Christianity, tolerance of which was supposed to unify his subjects, was torn apart by a dogmatic conflict.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
This conflict was made more urgent by the flood of new converts arriving in the wake of Christianity’s new legality. Early gentile converts had been people who were sympathetic to and understood Judaism on some level. Now the faith needed to be explained to people without any connection to or knowledge of Christianity’s Jewish roots. And, though the gospels contained triadic references to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, there were contrasting views and teachings about what these signified, and how they related. The problem as it presented itself, however, was explaining Jesus in particular.
If Christianity was monotheistic, who or what was Jesus? He was the Son of God, but what did that mean? This problem was exacerbated by whether God was entirely transcendent from the universe as its creator; or whether, as the I AM representing being itself, God was somehow part of creation’s being. As a human, was Jesus part of creation, or as the Son of God, was he transcendent from it? The context of these questions was a moment in the zeitgeist when people were losing confidence that the material and human worlds were either robust and enduring, or could provide any connection to the divine.
A hitherto unknown teaching had emerged that God created the universe ex nihilo—out of nothing. Nothingness became the accepted interpretation of the chaotic primordial formlessness and emptiness described in the first of the ancient Hebrew creation narratives. Some might take for granted ex nihilo as a linchpin of theism, but at the time it represented a fundamental shift in how Christians understood God in relation to the world. No longer did a chain of being emanate from God the creator to the material world; ex nihilo tore the universe away from God, who necessarily transcends it.
This dualism has implications for the oneness Jesus claimed with the Father, and for which he prayed on behalf of his disciples (John 17). It also has implications for a God who as the great I AM personifies the unity of all being (Exodus 3). This split is much more identifiable in the Catholic and Protestant Christianity of the West than in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The idea of dualism between God and the universe should be reexamined today in the context of Christianity once again transforming itself.
The conflict becomes one about where Jesus comes down in relation to a gaping divide between transcendent God, and the material universe and human world where Jesus was manifest. The debate ended up being personified by two people in Alexandria representing views on whether Jesus was created by God, or was himself God the creator. This might seem simple to those indoctrinated according to the outcome of the disagreement, but it was by no means straightforward at the time. It was also not some esoteric debate among a few educated experts; it spread to churches across the Christian world, touching on people’s experiences of faith, and was as culturally significant as any split over ideas we experience today.
In the spirit of finding the Logos everywhere in the Hebrew scriptures, Christians already considered the personification of Wisdom found in Proverbs as referring to Christ. Arius (250- 56–336), a young, brilliant, handsome, and charismatic Presbyter in Alexandria cited Proverbs 8 to show that Christ was created by God. Beginning with verse 22, Wisdom is speaking:
YHVH created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth...
... when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
For Arius, it followed from this passage that Wisdom—the Logos—had been created ex nihilo. The Logos, God’s first act of creation, was God from the beginning, from before the foundation of the world, because God had foreseen his perfect obedience and rewarded it by raising him to divine status. This was in keeping with Christ’s self-emptying and exaltation in Philippians 2. If Christians receive Jesus, if they pisteúousin* his name, they too—imitating his total self-emptying—receive the right to become exalted as “children of God,” as it says in the first chapter of John.
*For more on faith and belief, see my post Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?
Arius also drew on the gospel of John to argue that Christ, as God’s first creation, had been elevated to divinity by God before the foundation of the world. It might be useful to note that among the gospels, Jesus’ divinity, or at least his Son-ship, is either conferred or confirmed at his baptism in Mark. In Matthew, depending on the translation, he is referred to as the Messiah (Hebrew) or Christ (Greek), that is, the anointed one in the opening verse, and as conceived of the Holy Spirit in Joseph’s dream, in connection with his birth. He is named “Son of God” at the annunciation to Mary, in connection with his conception in Luke, and he is God from the beginning in John.
For Athanasius (296-8–373), assistant to the bishop of Alexandria, Jesus could not possibly be God the creator—without whom nothing was made that was made—unless he was separate and transcendent from creation; that is, he could not have been created. If Christ were a mere creature, would not his worship constitute idolatry? God’s substance or ousia, as Being itself, was beyond our comprehension as creatures who came ex nihilo—from non-being. Christ’s divine nature—of the same ousia—also had to be beyond our comprehension, not within it as other created things are. Ironically, Arius had also been trying to preserve the transcendence of God by arguing that God’s power as the uncreated was so great that it had to be mediated through the craft of God’s first creation, the master worker Logos.
Councils and Creeds
Constantine wanted unity through the imposition of uniform belief. In 325 he called all the bishops to Nicea in Asia Minor to figure it out. Of course, any dispute over the construction of orthodoxy and heresy is ultimately a power struggle, and Athanasius prevailed on paper.
The council issued a statement that Christ was not created from nothingness, but begotten from the ousia of the Father, “from God” in a way different from all other creatures. All but three of the delegates signed it, with Arius among the dissenters, but this created no unity. The bishops returned to their dioceses and continued teaching from anywhere between the two positions, while acrimony over the dispute increased, and creedal orthodoxy became politicized.
The dispute over Arian vs. homoousian theology continued for another fifty years amid additional deliberation, acrimony, and even violence. The Nicene Creed of 325, which had been issued in Greek and Latin, declares that Jesus is of one substance or being (ὁμοούσιον / consubstantialem) with the Father, begotten, not made. The creed was further expanded at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 to affirm the divinity of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from and is worshiped and glorified together with the Father (and the Son).
The phrase “and the Son” gradually began to be added, starting a couple of centuries later in churches of the Latin-speaking western empire, and was likely accepted formally by the papacy by the eleventh century. Controversy over its use brought tensions between churches of the eastern and western empire to a head. This became the stated cause of the historic split between them that endures even now.
As any Christian who worships in a Western liturgical tradition knows, The Nicene Creed is still a permanent part of the Liturgy of the Word, recited following the Sermon in services that include Eucharist or Holy Communion. Its Christological position was affirmed and further defined at the Council of Chalcedon (451), convened to affirm Mary as the ‘Mother of God’ rather than the ‘Mother of Christ’ as related to proper Christology, and to suppress some teachings about Christ that were deemed heretical.
This began a process of estrangement for the so-called “Oriental” churches existing outside the empire. These churches differed over the exact nature of Christ—holding that he was two persons at once, rather than one person with two natures. This culminated in their separation from the rest of Christianity in the sixth century. These churches have maintained some of the most ancient forms and cultural traditions in all of Christianity, worth reexamining today.
The doctrine of the Trinity is set forth in essence by the Nicene Creed. By the end of the century, that doctrine would reach its current and explicit form under the attributed guidance of a close-knit group of church leaders known by their Anatolian origins as the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa; and Gregory of Nazianzus, archbishop of Constantinople. Basil and Gregory were brothers. Long overlooked in historical accounts is the fact that their older sister Macrina—well-read herself in the scriptures and early church writings, and something of a universalist—taught and influenced her younger brothers.
Conclusion
Jesus is referred to in scripture as the Son of God. Developmentally immature literalism aside, the actual meaning of this is a challenge. No matter what people want to read into the gospels, Jesus is never shown getting up in front of people and explicitly teaching such a thing about himself. What he did teach is the important thing.
It was not until several centuries after Jesus’ ministry that Christian leaders, under pressure from imperial authorities, developed out of various scriptural assertions the literalistic and rather precious doctrines that Jesus and God were uniquely homoousian (of the same essence or substance), that Jesus represents the one, perfect hypostatic union of full divinity and full humanity (elucidated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451), among various other Christological assertions. Over three and a half centuries the first six ecumenical councils convened by Roman and Byzantine emperors took the metaphors of Jesus being the Son of God and the Logos of God and concretized them into a series of stand-alone constructs drained of any symbolic meaning, retrofitting relevant scriptures as proof of their newly minted orthodoxies.
While much of Christianity remains in thrall to these manufactured doctrines, while their existence as part of our creed is undeniably part of our shared history, and while ‘Son of God’ is a fine concept with important symbolic meanings, these ideas also happen to fall outside the type of reality that can be determined as factual* in nature. Their treatment as such is an unnecessary distraction and stumbling block to the reception and application of Jesus’ actual teachings, which have the potential to help save the world. ‘Son of God’ is rather a contemporaneous metaphor for Jesus’ extraordinary wisdom and sense of intimate connection with the Unity of All Being, toward which we bow with great reverence. This is what needs to be explicitly taught if Christianity is to be rescued from its own growing irrelevance.
*Again, see my post Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?