GregersenChapter3Christology FINAL

Christology

Niels Henrik Gregersen

Abstract: The task of this chapter is to relate Christology to issues of global anthropogenic warming, moving from climate change to Christology, and back again. The focus will be on the intergenerational aspects of Christology, on thesocial body of Jesus, and on Jesus as God’s wisdom in person. Cosmic aspects of Christology are explicated through the notion of deep incarnation in the Gospel of John, and through the idea of Christ as the cosmic bond between God and creation in Paul. These variegated traditions express understandings of Jesus Christ ‘high’ in theology, ‘low’ in materiality, and ‘broad’ in scope.

Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air pleasant? The Sea profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations I.9.

Words of silence

We always live more deeply than we are able to think and experience.[1] Every day we breathe in and out thousands of times. Silently the oxygen we are inhaling is transported through our lungs to the blood that runs in our veins, thus removing the surplus of carbon dioxide from our organism. Regulated from automatic systems in our brainstem, these metabolic processes mostly go on below our awareness. Certainly, we can hear our own breathing; to a certain point we can even control it; but we can’t feel the oxygen running in our veins, nor see or smell the carbon that we emit by exhaling. A self-forgetfulness seems built into our constitution, and it’s only when we experience air hunger that we become attentive to our embedment in biological processes larger than ourselves.

We are metabolic organisms. Yet we also live as atmospheric beings. We regularly experience that our moods are changing according to sun, rain and atmospheric pressure – more than we will ever be able to conceptualize. Natural processes often operate in such pre-reflexive silence. This also applies to global warming trends. For as pointed out by Mike Hulme, “Climate cannot be experienced directly through our senses.”[2] The “dispersion of causes and effects”(Stephen Gardiner) makes it difficult for us to perceive the urgency of global warming. [3]

Here the sciences tell us more about ourselves than we can experience from a first-hand experience. Certainly, we experience drought, heavy rains, storms, and ice melting as never before, with devastating consequences for some parts of the world (in particular the arctic poles and around equator). But the green houseeffect still has the status of a ‘theory’, similar to the way in which we speak of the Big Bang ‘theory’. It cannot be otherwise, since the climate sciences track global patterns of local causes and wider effects. Yet as the scientific evidence for the greenhouse effect is piling up, only ignorance or unwillingness can account for the denial of the fact of global warming. The next step is then to ask, why are the temperatures and sea levels raising on our planet? In science mono-causal explanations are extremely rare, and the process of weighting the individual factors (fossil fuels, waste products, volcanoes, solar activity, etc.) is an ongoing task. But no longer is it possible to neglect the importance of the human factor of climate change.[4] Since we live in hidden structures fundamental to our existence, not manifest to our natural eye, we need be informed by the best available sciences about what we cannot immediately perceive or “feel”.

Global warming has thus come up as a new ecological challenge for the human race. Since the 1960s human beings people in heavily populated areas live with first-hand experiences of pollution and waste. Moreover, since the 1970s the human race has been confronted with the scarcity of resources, not just of fuel but increasingly also of metals and unpolluted water. Yet since the 1990s we have come aware of the emergency of the global warming processes – processes predicted already in 1896 by the Swedish Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Svante Arrhenius. What we still do not know is to what extent the processes are building up incrementally, and to what extent they are exponential due to the ‘avalanche-effect’ of positive feedback processes, a well-known natural phenomenon. There is much we do not know, and cannot know in detail.

Global warming, however, differs from other ecological problems in at least three respects. Firstly, global warming by nature is a planetary problem. Secondly, the causes behind global warming are dispersed, hence silent. Whereas people can mostly smell pollution and waste, and we can identify the exact site of our natural resources, there is something creeping about global warming. The routes from causes to effects appear to be “theoretical” in nature, since they are at work over long distances. Political interests in silencing the global warming issues feed on the silence of the global warming processes themselves.

Add to this, thirdly, that whereas there is always something ugly about pollution and products of waste, carbon dioxide and most other greenhouse gasses have the appearance of something “natural” about them. The exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide is as old as life. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is basic to all life, and has been a natural and necessary ingredient in the metabolism of living creatures since the dawn of life on our planet. Grossly speaking, carbon is exchanged with oxygen in animals, while the photosynthesis of plants constantly absorbs carbon dioxide while emitting oxygen. But just as too much of carbon dioxide is toxic for individual organisms, so the emission of carbon dioxide causes temperature raises, regardless of whether the emission comes from living organisms, from the burning of fuels, or from volcanoes. The same goes for oxygen, which is likewise toxic in concentrated forms.

Life is never at rest in a steady state of an absolutely optimal balance, but is at work between the boundaries of too much and too little. If we define the “good” as that which is beneficial for the flourishing of life, carbon dioxide is an irreplaceable good, just as also oxygen belongs to the goodness of creation. But what makes life flourish becomes life-threatening when the bio-chemicals go beyond bounds. It may be hard to realize that something as fundamental for life as CO2 can constitute a global problem. There is something deep and wide-scale about dioxide emissions, which easily escapes our attention.[5]

Breaking with self-forgetfulness

The Christian tradition is familiar with the problems of silence, denial, and all too facile ideas about what is “natural.” There can be a need to speak up against silence, to deny denial, and to break with common sense notions of the self-evidential. Here a spiritual dimension comes to the fore. We do not only need to know about facts of life, but also to attune ourselves to reality. We tend to believe that our own center of perception is the center of the world itself, while practically ignoringour dependence on the atmosphere for our living and flourishing. Only in states of crisis do we wake up. In his exposition of Psalm 118 (Das schöne Confitemini) from 1530, Martin Luther pointed to the fact that if we suddenly experienced that we cannot breathe, we would gladly trade all our properties in exchange for the small portion of air that it takes to pray the Lord’s Prayer. “What is a kingdom compared with a sound body? What is all the money and wealth in the world compared with one sunlit day? … What would our magnificent castles, houses, silk, satin, purple, golden jewelry, precious stones, all our pomp and glitter and show help us if we had to do without air for the length of one Our Father.”[6] Luther is here reminding us that very elementary bodily experiences tend to escape our attention, just like the Anglican poet-theologian Thomas Traherne more than a century later pointed to our difficulty in “retaining” the delightful insights that otherwise come easy to our experience.

We here need to differentiate between two sorts of self-forgetfulness. There is a self-forgetfulness that belongs to the goodness of creaturely existence. We could not thrive and survive if we constantly had to be aware of all our natural states and dependencies. We live by virtue of silent biological processes at work beneath our awareness in order to focus on the foregrounds ofour attention, and act in a forwards-oriented manner. Here we should not worry but live as the birds in the air or the lilies of the field (Mt 6:25-34). But there is also a self-forgetfulness that belongs to what is termed sin, or self-centeredness, in the Jewish and Christian traditions (see chapter 8 on Sin). We thus tend to forget that we are not only living by virtue of nature, but also at the expense of nature. We feed on the same resources as others do, and by over-consumption we destroy the conditions of future generations of human beings, and other creatures (see chapter 6 on The creatures). The optimal climate for all species does not exist, but each creature is nourished by the silent gifts of innumerable natural processes, most of which are limited. By forgetting to attend to climate changes, we seem neither able to interpret “the appearance of earth and sky” nor to “know how to interpret the present time” (Lk 12:56).

Christology in a changing climate

It would be anachronistic to expect that we today could derive specific ethical directives or political solutions from the Jesus tradition. Jesus was a teacher, healer and prophet – not a forecaster of far-future ecological disasters.[7]He lived as a charismatic peasant preacher calling for conversion in an era long before ecological disorders came into existence. Jesus, however, required a mental conversion that has immediate practical consequences for his followers’ relation to God, other people, and the environment. Here the Christian confession to Jesus as Christ is inextricably interwoven with what Luther above called the “beautiful confession” to the world as God’s own creation. The relevance of the synoptic Jesus-tradition (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) for ecological issues is thus mediated by the theology of creation implied in Jesus’ teaching as well as in his calling for conversion. He preached the kingdom of God for humanity in analogy to the eschatological vision that the Spirit shall be “poured out on all flesh” (Joel 2:28, quoted Acts 2:17-21). In this sense, Jesus’ preaching was earth-bound from beginning to end – without ever separating God and world.

Christology is therefore not first and foremost a backwards-oriented remembrance of the teachings of Jesus in his earthly life nearly two thousand years ago. Christology is carried by the conviction that God’s eternal Logos has revealed and re-identified itself – once and for all – as Jesus Christ withinthe matrix of materiality that we share with other living beings. “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). In this way divine transcendence and radical immanence are held together in Jesus Christ. A simple way of restating the core concern of classical Christology would be to say that just as Jesus eternally belongs to God’s own life (together with the Father and the Spirit), so he and the divine Spirit belong to the nexus of creation for which God the Father is forever present. Or more precisely, the Son of God, who is eternally born out of the Father, is present as the incarnate Jesus Christ, forever living with and for all other creatures in the universe through the workings of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is thus not a bygone historical individual, on whom we can look back in historical distance, but synchronous with each creature in time and space. Christ is co-inherent in all that exists.

In this view, there are not two realities – God and nature – existing alongside one another, as in some medieval and early modern concepts of a “supernatural God” on the top of nature. Once God has chosen to create a world which is not divine itself (see chapter 5 on Creation), God and creature make up one complex reality. Remove the life-giving Spirit and the cosmic Christ from the world of creation, and there will be no creation. Take away God the Father as the source of all reality, and there will be no creaturely events flowing out of divine love.

Incarnation: The stretch and reach of God

Classic Christology is here in conflict with another creed that came up in early modernity (say, between René Descartes and Immanuel Kant), and still today rules the imagination of many Western Christians. Typically, this unspoken creed has the following five tenets:

  1. God is elsewhere, in principle unknown to us.
  2. We ourselves live in a godless world of impersonal forces, though we may have the luck to shape some humanitarian islands in an otherwise ruthless nature.
  3. Jesus is a historical figure of the past; speaking of Christ is a mythic ornamentation.
  4. The Christian church is the fellowship among those who gather to remember Jesus as a remarkable person from a past civilization whose example might still be inspirational to us.
  5. Just as we are going to die each individually, the world of creation is going to dissolve anyway. Whether human life will come to an end by creeping global climate changes or by other humanly induced catastrophes (such as warfare) – that’s the end which will also be God’s end.

New Testament traditions as well as the later Christology of the Church speak another language about God and the world of creation. They seem to say something like the following:

  1. God is not an unknown X existing behind the world, but is revealed and manifest in Christ, who came up in the material world to dwell among us (Jn 1:14), and whose work will be fulfilled by God’s Spirit (Jn 16:12-14).
  2. We live in a world created out of the love of God, and so loved by God the Father that he sent his only Son (Jn 3:16). Even in the hardships of creation the infinite Father is proximate (Mt 10:29-31). Accordingly nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (Rom 8:35).
  3. In Jesus the Father’s eternal Logos was took bodily form, so that the fullness of divinity found the pleasure of dwelling in him(Col 1:19), who himself dwelt in our world (Jn 1:14).
  4. The church is more than a place for remembrance and cultivation of tradition. The church is the body of Christ, “holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19).
  5. God has promised to hold fast to his creation so that the world will be re-created even through the ‘uncreations’ provided by chaos and sin (see Chapters 4 and 10). Therefore, Christians look forward to “the world to come” (The Nicene Creed from 381).

Christology has therefore unique resources, if not even a mandate, for speaking of a union of creator and creature.[8] Wherever God is present in creation, God is operative. To use a metaphor, God and nature is like fire and iron, which constitute one reality as long as the iron is heated up by the fire, while it becomes two quite different things, when taken apart.[9] Of course there are different forms and degrees of union between God and creatures, but even our sheer existence presupposes a participation of our life in God. “Where God is not, there is nothing. Accordingly, God is present through all things and in all things” (Anselm of Canterbury).[10]

The doctrine of the Trinity (see Chapter 2) expresses Godas the encompassing reality – the loving source of all reality (the Father), the sustaining bond between all reality (the Son or Logos) and the directing and fulfilling end of all creation (the Holy Spirit).[11] There is simplicity in this triune understanding of incarnation: God is at home (Jn 1:14) in the very world that God has made in the first place (Jn 1:8-11), and God continues to love his work even under the conditions of sin and disorder.“For so God loves the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).

This motif of a union between God and world in Christ does not suggest an identification of God and nature, as in pantheism. Love safeguards the otherness of the beloved (see chapter 4 on Spirit). Here the subtlety of the Trinitarian view of incarnation comes to the fore. The life of the Triune God is copious and hence capacious. There is a stretch within the divine life that is the precondition for God’s ability to span from the high and ideal to the low and practical. The Father is routinely described as ‘heavenly’ insofar as the Father is never incarnate in the world of creation, but remains its ‘transcendent’ source. But Son becomes ‘flesh’, just as the Spirit or divine Breath vivifies all living creatures and shall in the end be ‘poured out on all flesh’. Yet where the Son and the Spirit is, there is also the Father. It is this stretch of Trinitarian life which facilitates the divine reach into the depths of creation in incarnation.