Why Christology Is An Endangered Species

The warnings on cigarette and alcohol advertisements are curious paradoxes. “Warning: the surgeon general has determined that smoking is hazardous to your health.” “Warning: the surgeon general has determined that pregnant women should not drink alcohol.” The products and the warnings speak to two ingrained but incompatible convictions of modern life: the commitment to unlimited freedom, and yet an interest in doing the right thing. The warnings betray the two faces of American life—the Libertarian and the Puritan—that are also present in the American church. We are witnessing an explosion of experimental and alternative theologies, some quasi-Christian, others unChristian, but all attractive in various degrees to our commitments to freedom, self, and personal fulfillment, whatever the cost. The church also hears the voice of Scripture, however, like the surgeon general, warning that our cravings can kill us. The church is enamoured with a theology today—and has been for quite a long time—that is detrimental to its health, and on which it cannot survive.

A Theology of Creation over a Theology of Redemption

My thesis, simply, is that we are witnessing a paradigm shift away from a theology of redemption to a theology of creation. The theological center is shifting from a Christocentric theology to a theocentric theology; from the Second Article of the Creed to the First Article; from a theology of God’s redemptive acts and promises in history, to a theology of the state of things in their natural order as being the rightful and final expression of God’s will. We are witnessing a shift in theology from what God can and will do in the gospel to what God did once for all in creation.

Concomitant with the shift from Christology to creation is a shift away from the doctrines of sin and repentance, which according to the preaching of the cross are essential to the reception of new life in Christ. The new theology argues that what is, is essentially good and right. The paradigm shift changes the theological proclamation of the church from a call to transformation according to the image of Jesus Christ to one of God’s affirmation of who I am as I am made, without any further need for change. The proclamation of the saving grace of the gospel has usually been expressed in transitive verbs of conversion— believe, turn, repent, follow. The new theology is couched in intransitive verbs of being and becoming. We are, in short, witnessing a shift from a theology of transcendence to a theology of immanence in which statements that are putatively about God are in fact statements about humanity, human community, and creation. Theology “From above” in being replaced by theology “from below” that has strong affinities with Deism and Unitarianism The new theology is solipsistic: the one thing worth living and dying for is the self.

The Current State of Affairs

Several years ago I was swimming off the beach of Moro Bay, California, and noticed to my dismay that the shoreline had changed. The shoreline had not really changed, of course, but because a riptide was carrying me rapidly out to sea my position with respect to it had. I want to suggest that the church is being carried by a riptide of a different nature. The shoreline has changed, and we are no longer in the same place we were—or thought we were. Like confused swimmers we ask how we ended up where we are, and how to get back to shore.

God as Imago Hominis

The initial contours of our problem were adumbrated by Ludwig Feuerbach’s concept of religion as wish-fulfillment. According to Feuerbach, humanity projects its essential needs onto the canvas of eternity and baptizes them as “god.” Feuerbach reversed the Biblical teaching of humanity as the imago Dei; rather, according to him, God is the imago hominis. Feuerbach needed to eliminate the person of Jesus Christ from the divine equation, for Jesus gives God a very specific face and profile. But if Jesus as the visible expression of the invisible God is blurred, or erased, then humanity is freer to paint the face of God however it likes.

Feuerbach advanced these ideas in The Essence of Christianity, first published in 1841. Feuerbach recast Hegelian Idealism in a manner openly hostile to confessional, Trinitarian Christianity. His blueprint marks an essential shift from a theology of transcendence to a theology of nature, and particularly human nature. For Feuerbach, man is the one true ens realissimum. Feuerbach removes the disguises of earlier Enlightenment theologies and plainly, even antagonistically, promotes a theology from below as opposed to a theology from above. It is a theology based on the assumptions of naturalism (the universe as a closed system, in which everything that happens can be accounted for by prior observable causes) as opposed to a universe that has not only been created by God but is also sustained by God (Col. 1:16), and is being redeemed by God at the cost of God’s entering the created order in the person of Jesus Christ.

The year 1841 may seem to anchor Feuerbach’s ideas, and others like them, to the distant and dormant past, but this is not the case. They remain active in the blood stream of the modern world, as is evidenced by the words of Hans Asmussen in his opening address to the Synod of Barmen in 1933. “We are raising a protest against the same phenomenon that has been slowly preparing the way for the devastation of the Church for more than two hundred years. For it is only a relative difference if whether beside Holy Scripture in the church historical events or reason, culture, aesthetic feelings, progress, or other powers and figures are said to be binding upon the Church.”1 The immediate protest of the Theological Declaration of Barmen was lodged against the “orders of creation” e.g., whether one was Aryan, Slav, or Jew—over a theology of both the newness and oneness to which God calls all people in Jesus Christ. Its ultimate protest, however, was against a theology of immanence over a theology of transcendence, a theology of creation over a theology of redemption.

A. Natural Religion of the Enlightenment

I should like to mention four factors that have diminished and compromised Jesus Christ as the unique revelation and salvation of God. These four factors are not alone responsible for the contemporary drift away from Christology, and indeed other factors could be added to them. Nevertheless, the four I shall mention are examples of the modern tendency to define the gospel in terms of immanence rather than transcendence.

The first of them is Enlightenment rationalism. The time span of “two centuries” mentioned by Asmussen refers, of course, to the gestation period of the post-Enlightenment world, during which the church has been tempted to compromise and accommodate its theology to the nascent and heady scientific worldview of philosophical naturalism. An axiom of Enlightenment rationalism was its dogmatic denial of the possibility of miracles. Anyone who has read Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (ET, 1910), a classic statement of this accommodation, will remember the fanciful and often strained insistence with which Enlightenment scholars sought either to account for the miracles of Jesus on the basis of purely naturalistic explanations, or to eliminate them altogether. The result, as Thomas Jefferson’s New Testament evinces, was a much smaller New Testament, consisting primarily of Jesus’ personal example and his moral teachings, as opposed to any atoning value of his death on the cross, save as an example of compassion. The reduction of the message of the gospel to “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” from which Jesus himself was effectively eliminated from the saving equation, was a defining hallmark of Enlightenment theology. To be sure, the defiant dogmatism of Enlightenment rationalism against the possibility of the miraculous has abated somewhat today, but its influence certainly remains in a prejudice against miracles in general, including most miracles recorded in Scripture.

B. The Debate over Creation and Evolution

The exchange between science and theology—at least in its modern phase—dates to the conflict over the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo verses the geocentric cosmology of the church in the seventeenth century. The initial encounter of science and religion was essentially not one of faith versus scientific reason, for the early architects of both the scientific method and worldview—Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton—were committed churchmen and devout in their religion, if not wholly orthodox. They believed, in the words of Francis Bacon, that God had revealed himself in two “books”: the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. They knew the second book as well as the first, as is evinced by Boyle’s mastery of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in order to read and understand the Bible. They reveled in the correspondence of the two “books,” convinced that the “Supreme Creator” and “Grand Artisan” of the world was one and the same author of Scripture. These early pioneers were intent on proving the compatibility of natural science and Christian faith, a fact worth recalling in our day when the two are often regarded as incompatible and even antithetical.

Even among the early scientific patriarchs, however, one notes a subtle but perceptible shift of emphasis toward nature and away from Scripture. The early formulators of the scientific method were intent to show that Scripture conformed to the world revealed by reason and natural observation, thus endowing nature with a priority over revelation. Moreover, in the long and formative history of the debate over creation and evolution the theological conversation has revolved almost exclusively around the First Article of the Creed—God as creator. In the debate over cosmology and natural origins, the Second Article— Jesus Christ as redeemer—has played virtually no role, and indeed has been regarded as negligible, as evinced by Newton’s denial of the doctrine of the Trinity and Locke’s denial of the deity of Jesus Christ. The debate between science and Christianity, in other words, is essentially a debate between science and theism.

It is important to recall, however, that according to Scripture, the doctrine of creation includes the Second Article as well as the First Article. The Gospel of John says that “all things were made through him (Christ as the Word of God), and apart from him nothing came into existence that was made” (1:3). In Colossians, Paul writes that “in him (Christ as the Son of God) all things were created in heaven and on earth, the seen and unseen, whether thrones whether lordships whether rules whether authorities; all things were created through and for him . . and all things consist in him” (1:16-17). Christology is therefore not a negligible article of faith in the dialogue between science and religion, but an essential aspect of it, according to Scripture.

The debate over human and cosmic origins continues, of course, to the present day. One of its most significant examples, in my judgment, is the Intelligent Design movement, which aims, on the basis of scientific evidence, to test the assumptions and evidence of dogmatic naturalism. Intelligent Design thinkers are presenting fascinating evidence and arguments—and succeeding in promoting a stimulating debate—for evidence not of random and inchoate evolution but of intelligent design in the natural order. Yet even in Intelligent Design, which on the whole is friendly to confessional Christianity, the significance of the doctrine of the Incarnation has yet to be fully explored.

C. The Encounter with World Religions

A third cause of the present drift toward a theology of immanence is the influence of the encounter with other religions, which began with the Christian foreign missions’ impetus in the nineteenth century, and which, because of modern communications and transportation systems, continues unabated today. The increase in knowledge and dialogue with other religious traditions has not left our understanding of Christianity unaffected. On the whole this encounter has had positive consequences for Christianity and is to be welcomed. It has taught us how much Christianity shares in common with other world religions, particularly in the fields of ethics. Most religions, Christianity included, agree on a broad range of ethical principles and ideals, roughly summarized by the Golden Rule, even though there are significant differences in how those principles are understood and practiced.

At other points, however, the encounter of Christianity with other religions has taught or reminded us how significantly Christianity differs from other religions, particularly in the nature of God, its concept of revelation, and the meaning of history. This is especially evident when Christianity is compared with Eastern religions. The point at which Christianity differs most from all other religions, however, is in its doctrine of the Incarnation. No other religion—ancient or modern, world-wide or local—claims that its God has become a fully incarnate human being, as does Christianity.2 This claim obviously distinguishes Christianity in a very particular way from other religions. In the present quest for a lowest common denominator on which all religions can agree—and perhaps eventually unite—the particularist claim of the Incarnation is sometimes judged as an exclusivist, perhaps elitist, claim of Christianity. In Jewish-Christian dialogue, for instance, Christian theologians have on occasion attempted to mitigate the differences between Judaism and Christianity, motivated in part, no doubt, by a desire to atone for past injustices of Christians toward Jews—and also, hopefully, to guard against future ones.

In an effort to lessen or alleviate the supposed-exclusivity of Christianity and to enhance its compatibility with other religions, a high and orthodox New Testament Christology has sometimes been surrendered in favor of a generic theism, a predominantly First Article faith.

D. Gay Theologies

The point at which most Christians and churchgoers are likely to encounter a theology of immanence over a theology of transcendence is in the thought and rhetoric of gay and lesbian thinkers. This is the fourth and most pronounced expression of my thesis. The advocates of homosexual orientation and lifestyles clearly express a theology of immanence in their insistence that homosexuality is primarily, or exclusively, of genetic origins. As such, they assert that it is inborn and innate rather than learned, and hence constitutive of the individual self. A line attributed to the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost expresses gay apologetics, “We know no time when we were not as now.”3 The assertion that gay persons have been “born that way” carries an apparently self-evident legitimation, for what has been given by God must be good—and cannot be made better by change to something else.

This line of thinking, which is often naively accepted, carries implications that few would be willing to accept. Who among us would be prepared to say that a person born with Down’s Syndrome or with tragic birth defects is born such according to God’s will? The same thinking can justify forms of behavior that are clearly aberrant and harmful. Would a penchant for violence, aggression, laziness, selfishness, or sexual indulgence also be regarded as the will of God? To do so attributes monstrous proportions to God’s will. In truth, we do not always know why things are the way they are. Some people are born to great advantage and others to great disadvantage, but none can be said to deserve the state to which they are born. We cannot simply assume that what is, is of God. The doctrine of the fall is an instructive bulwark against the above theological error. None of us comes into human experience with a perfect genetic code. The various flaws that we all experience in our own nature are present in various forms in the larger fabric of creation. One of the chief glories of the Christian gospel is that it liberates us from determination by fate, heritage, genetics, and the past. We are neither judged nor saved on the basis of what we bring into this world. All participate in sin—of which, according to Scripture, homosexual practice is one expression—and all are offered redemption in Jesus Christ. The final word of the gospel is not what we are, but what we can become through the redemption wrought by the cross of Jesus Christ.

What is an Evangelical and Reformed Response?

These four currents—Enlightenment rationalism, the encounter of Christianity with modern science, the encounter of Christianity with world religions, and the influence of gay theologies—have had the affect of defining Christianity in other than Christological categories. Whenever something other than the cross becomes the defining symbol of Christianity, then what is symbolized is something other than Christianity. To strike Christ and the cross from Christianity is to strike salvation from Christian belief and proclamation.

I wish in conclusion to shift from the above analysis of the current state of affairs to the question of a proper evangelical and Reformed response. That response can best be prompted by posing a simple question: Is the way things are the way they must always be? Surely, the word of the Apostle is the abiding hope of humanity: “Those of us who have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?” (Rom 6:2) Christians believe in another order of existence than the one we now perceive, the order originally created by God which, through the redemption wrought by Christ, is being renewed by grace and will be completed at the eschaton.

Karl Barth asks this question in his Epistle to the Romans: “Can we appeal to the fact of creation, and then proceed to treat the motions of the body and the course of this world as willed by God, or at least as permitted by Him? Can we, with our eyes fixed upon a redemption which is not available in this world, proceed to conclude peace, or at any rate to arrange an armistice, with the world as it is?”4 This question cuts the Gordian knot of a theology of immanence. We are not summoned to conclude an armistice with the world, but rather in the power of the resurrected Christ to protest all other lords and powers of this world.

In his Religious History of the American People, Sydney Ahlstrom commented that practically every heresy in church history could be recounted in one form or another in twentieth century America.5 The elevation of a theology of creation over a theology of redemption reintroduces the ancient heresy of Marcion, which, among other things, separated the creator God from the redeemer God and pitted them against each other. Marcion was wrong, as is the modern variant in the battle between a theology of creation and a theology of redemption. Creation and redemption are not the works of two separate deities. In the final analysis they are not even two separate works of the one God, for the creator God is revealed in Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God. “In Christ were created all things in heaven and upon earth, the visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships, whether rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). At the heart of creation is Jesus, the Savior. Isaiah rightly saw and proclaimed that the only God who could and did redeem Israel was the God who made Israel: “This is what the Lord says—he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you…. For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your savior’” (Isa 43:1-3).

Swimming for Our Lives

Earlier I used the analogy of being caught in a riptide and carried out to sea. How did I get back to shore? I had to swim for my life. The church today must swim for its life. It is once again beset with an array of opposition not unlike the church that produced the Barmen Declaration. The first article of Barmen is as necessary and salutary for our time as it was in Germany in the 1930s: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and death.”

Listen again to Ulrich Mauser’s words on Barmen: “The Reformation of the 16th century is often said to revolve around three claims: Jesus Christ is the only agent of salvation, Scripture is the only judge of Christian faith, and faith is the only door to justification before God. Barmen adds a fourth ‘only’: Jesus Christ is the only revelation of God. The one Word of God is in its power of revelation without rival and without competition, it tolerates no supplement beside it, and it is not in need of support by any evidence outside it.”6 If Jesus Christ is the only revelation of God, then it immediately becomes clear that without Jesus Christ the concept of “God” loses all definition. As Feuerbach said, the concept of God then becomes synonymous with any number of human projections. Apart from Jesus Christ, God is no longer a Gegenuber, a definable reality apart from us with whom we must contend, but simply a mirror or mirage of human longings and desires. It is thus apparent how disastrous it is to collapse the doctrine of Christology into a simple doctrine of God, for if we shift Christology into theology then the concept of God, and theology itself, is robbed of all meaning, for without Incarnation, “God” can be conceived of in any way we like. Hence, as Feuerbach understood, once Jesus Christ is eliminated from the saving formula, theology loses its moorings and can drift into myth and superstition.

In asserting that Jesus Christ is the only revelation of God we are not saying, as Mauser reminds us, that outside Christ there are no things valuable, beautiful, true, and necessary for life. Nor is the effect of article one of Barmen to denigrate human reason, art, industry, and community. What it does deny, however, and what the church today, as in Nazi Germany, needs to reaffirm, is that the complexities of human nature and society and the course of history and the splendors of the universe and the judgments of humanity are not either the source or content of the church’s proclamation of the saving gospel of grace manifested in Jesus Christ. This Jesus, “the one Word of God,” is not discovered through human reason or historical criticism; this Jesus is not the echo of the voice of conscience or culture or history; this Jesus is not simply a model of or for humanity. The Incarnate One who alone is sufficient to save us from all these and other powers is the one who “attested for us in Holy Scripture,” and it is He alone whom we must hear, trust, and obey—in life and in death.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2002).