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The singing of this last hymn recalls for me the now-classic movie of 1997, The Titanic, in which that hymn was center-stage…you remember the scene: the luxury liner thought to be invincible is sinking, people are scrambling for precious places on the lifeboats, and through the chaos, the string ensemble continues its eerily otherworldly playing…the whole scene rings with an intentional irony. At the conclusion of the film, as John and I were leaving the theater and walking by the long lines of people waiting to go in for the next showing, he did a rather uncharacteristic thing in stating the obvious to those waiting: “The boat sinks…they all die…the boat sinks…they all die…” he said to anyone listening. As I recall, no one seemed particularly irritated that he had spoiled the dramatic ending…for he had not. Few, if any, were unfamiliar with how this story ends. The boat sinks…they all die…or at least most of them do…
Why remember this scene and this hymn as a prelude to today’s meditation? Quite frankly, because when our brother suggested that I address the question of whether or not Jesus was the only human to embody the Christ, well, my first thought was that this question runs us into a theological iceberg from which we may all sink and die!
Since early in Christendom, within just a few years of Jesus’ death and resurrection, in fact, the notion that Jesus was somehow uniquely Christ or Messiah was gaining ground. Peter’s Pentecost sermon written down some 40-50 years after the event it describes, tentatively declares that “this Jesus…has been made by God both Lord and Messiah.” Who would dare argue with this emerging theology? That God made Jesus, and no other, as the Christ…certainly not Peter, nor any of his listeners. We are told that none of the hundreds gathered that day questioned Peter’s interpretation of Jesus as the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, but rather focused on their own repentance in light of this startling news that Jesus of Nazareth was the unquestioned Christ.
With the various church councils of the first 350 years of Christian history, the notion of Jesus as the Christ grew into doctrine and by 451 CE with the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus as the only Christ, the only Messiah, was etched in stone by the bishops in residence who decreed that Christ is one in two natures. To quote from the document itself, “we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body…like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us…”
With all due respect, there is much interpretation in such a statement! Logicians might look at the Council of Chalcedon’s primary pronouncement and declare it to be a classic example of circular reasoning: Jesus is Christ because we say so, and we say so because Jesus is Christ.
For the next 1700 years, millions of Christians worldwide faithfully repeated creeds that declared Jesus to be “the only begotten, son of the Father” and anyone who dared to suggest that perhaps Jesus was not the only one to embody the Christ or Messiah character was considered a heretic.
I first encountered this so-called heretical thinking in seminary…a good place to be introduced to alternative theologies! It was through the work of Dutch Catholic theologian and ordained Dominican priest, Edward Schillebeeckx. At the suggestion of one of my theology professors, I purchased the immense two-volume work on Christology by Schillebeeckx, the first of which is entitled, Jesus and the second, Christ. Each volume was about three inches thick! Just seeing them sitting on my bookshelf for months before I took time to peruse them, gently hinted that there might be something unique in each of these two names or titles. And from that hint, I imagined, there just might be a possibility that though Jesus was an historic figure who lived in a particular culture and timeframe, the title of Christ could be given to others besides Jesus. In fact, that very claim got Schillebeeckx in a load of trouble with the Roman Catholic Church; in his writing he failed to use traditional theological language for Jesus the Christ and also directly countered the doctrines declared by the ancient Council of Chalcedon. Schillebeeckx writes of Jesus as a kind of eschatological prophet rather than as a “God-in-human” person. That is, to quote Schillebeeckx, when Jesus “…is called the paradigm of true humanity, this means that Jesus has lived out in advance, before us, what we have to bring about in creative fidelity and in circumstances different from those he himself knew.” Thus Jesus is understood by Schillebeeckx to be the clearest possible revelation of God available to humanity, and by extension, as we live out creative fidelity to God in our day and time and circumstances, we too, embody God in a way similar to Jesus.
To some, the work of John B. Cobb in process theology arrives at a similar theological destination, using the different route of 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb writes of the incarnation, that doctrine which traditionally asserts that Jesus is uniquely Divine, therefore uniquely in the position of being named Christ or Messiah.
“Jesus was far more receptive to God’s aims than I am and that the vast majority of people are. To what can we attribute this greater than normal receptiveness? …That some are more responsive to God’s call than others is what we would expect. Indeed, we would expect a considerable variation. Perhaps genetic factors play a role, but I would emphasize human freedom. Nothing compels one to be responsive or resistant [to the call of God]. That is the decision made moment my moment. The rhetoric we use about Jesus, however, often singles him out in so extreme a way that this kind of answer may seem insufficient. But even for extreme differences we have analogies. The difference between the musical abilities of Mozart and me are truly extreme,” Cobb continues. “In the spiritual realm, I would say the same of Gautama Buddha and me or of St. Francis and me. These people inspire awe and wonder…I mentioned that, although I do believe that Jesus was wonderfully responsive to God’s call, I do not think of this as an adequate way to talk about his uniqueness. He may not have been more responsive than Gautama or Francis. There may be some simple people of whom we have never heard who have also been extraordinarily responsive to God’s call. Perhaps Jesus was the most responsive of all… It is,” concludes Cobb, “the ideal for Christians today to be as faithful to God’s call to us as Jesus was in his day…”
Other theologians agree that Jesus is Christ, but not in an exclusive manner. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Living Buddha, Living Christ, that when Jesus said “I am the way…” he meant that to have a true relationship with God, you must practice his way, or his path of compassion. Neil Douglas-Klotz, professor of comparative spirituality, agrees, writing in his book, The Hidden Gospel, that as we attune ourselves to Jesus’ breathing, atmosphere, and way of prayer, we will be led to experience the same things that Jesus experienced…so if we see Jesus the teacher as a doorway to the divine, rather than as the only incarnation of divine itself, we will be ever so much closer to receiving the same power as did he. And Carter Heyward, professor of theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, bluntly asserts that “…the Christian Scriptures and the vast majority of Christians who have taken the Bible to heart have not understood…that God was no more in Jesus than in us; and that truthfully and wonderfully God really is in, with, and among us—intimately and immediately, here and now, forever and ever. Our spiritual call and ethical opportunity is to welcome this Spirit in our lives, one day at a time.”
No discussion of this particular topic of whether or not Jesus was the only person ever to embody the Christ would be complete without at least a passing glance at Martin Luther, the great reformer of the early 1500s. In his presentation of Christian ethics, Luther sees the person of Jesus the Christ as pivotal in the role of faith and ethics. In faith and through faith, God is revealed in the hiddenness of an external form, i.e. Jesus of Nazareth. And, as we understand this principle of faith, we then also understand how we are to behave. United to Christ, the believer is to be servant of others as was Christ. We are to be, as Luther puts it, little Christs to our neighbors, for in so doing we find our true identity as children of God. This argument is explosive, giving a whole new understanding of Christian theology.
Christian author and professor of literature at
Magdalen
College
in
Oxford
, C.S. Lewis, echoed the words of Martin Luther in his work, Mere Christianity. Lewis wrote, “This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects, [such as] education, building, missions, or holding services…” Lewis strongly asserts, “…the Church exists for nothing else but to draw [people] into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became [Human] for no other purpose…[than] to make people little Christs…”
So where does this parade of authors, professors, church leaders, and mystics lead us theologically at Redlands UCC? Are we followers in name only of Jesus the Christ? Are we actually to become a congregation of “little Christs”? Are we to be about the business of welcoming others into this family of faith precisely and specifically so that they, too, will be nudged to be “little Christs” as are we? Two thousand years of the history of Christian theology aside, what do you think? More to the point, what do you need to believe? There is, to be sure, a certain comfort in believing that Jesus was the only one ever invested by God with the spirit of the Christ; and there are many scriptures attesting to such. As poet and artist William Blake once quipped to a friend of the Bible he deeply revered, “Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.”
To me, it is compelling to consider that we are to be more than simply followers in the footsteps of the Christ…if God’s intent for us is to become little Christs, with the compassion and the love and the forgiveness and the healing power to effect real change in our very real world, then our role as little Christs informs all our actions, guides all our words and thoughts, and transforms each of our relationships. And if Luther and Schillebeeckx and Lewis and Cobb and all the others we’ve heard from today are correct, then Christ is embodied in us as much as in Jesus of Nazareth, and if that is so, then our brother in faith who asked this question in the first place is no heretic, but rather a prophet of truth, leading us each to take up our position in the long list of Matthew’s “begets,” to be clothed with a new self as the author of Colossians exhorts, to have the mind of Christ as the apostle Paul urges, and to move toward that place of the spirit where we humbly receive God’s gift to us of a new name: Mr. or Ms. Christ.
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