I’ve been enjoying the debates with the good Dr. Morales on the Christology of the Gospels (part 1, part 2). But since the first set of discussions I’ve been thinking that the question we’re debating is interesting, but perhaps only partially helpful in making progress on the question of Jesus’ identity in the gospels.
To set this up again: though standing on the common ground of the traditional Christian confession of Jesus Christ as very God, we disagree on the extent to which this facet of Jesus’ identity is visible in the Synoptic Gospels.
But our agreement extends beyond the confessional. We would both say things about Jesus in (say) Mark to the effect of, “Look, Jesus is being identified with Israel’s God here,” or, “Look, here’s Jesus doing something that we’d normally think only God can do.”
Given our largely Christan context for reading the Gospels, I imagine that it sounds like special pleading to many of my readers that I would say, “Here’s Jesus being identified with God–and yet this is no indication that he is ontologically divine.” But, as James McGrath suggested in the comments of our “Pass them by” discussion, this only means that based on our theological commitments we think that “identification with God” entails divine ontology.
What we really need to hammer out is how we can adjudicate between a human’s being identified with the work of God, the super-expansion of such a category that would happen if one human actually came and was a faithful representative where others (Adam, Israel, David) had failed, and at what point a quantitative expansion of the human vocation to represent God to the world is insufficient to account for the data and w
e have to start positing a qualitative difference for Jesus (i.e., what must Jesus do or say to take us to the point where we must say, “This is not something that could be said or done by a human being, however so great he may be; now we’re talking about God”).
In my estimation, the Old Testament provides such a robust category for understanding human agency in general, and for interpreting the Christology of the Gospels in particular, that I find little evidence of “identification with God” to offer compelling indications that the category of “human representative of YHWH on earth” has been blown up into “YHWH physically present among us.”
To take but the most obvious example, the title “son of God” clearly identifies Jesus with God. But what sort of identification is it? The biblical co-texts that help us make sense of such a title indicate that this is a way of saying that Jesus is the Davidic King (Ps 2; 2 Sam 7), the one who fulfills primordial humanity’s vocation to rule the world on God’s behalf as God’s faithful child (Gen 1:26-28).
The idea of Jesus as “son of God” structures Mark’s narrative: at his baptism, transfiguration, and crucifixion Jesus is called “son of God” by God (first two) and a centurion (final episode). The point in each case (especially as the baptism prefigures the crucifixion) is that Jesus is son of God as he fulfills his particular Messianic vocation.
In other words: Christ = Son of God = vocation to suffer, die, and then be raised.
With an OT narrative telling us that humanity is created to be entrusted with God’s rule over the created order, and with numerous indications that God identifies himself with a people such that his name is on them–their fate is His fate and His reputation is their reputation–it seem that the default mode for reading the Gospels should be that ideal first readers would hear the stories of Jesus in this way.
Yes, he is wonderfully exhibiting the saving work of YHWH–and this means that, at last, the king has come.
So the question as we wrestle with how to read and understand the Christology of the Gospels is: how do we know when identification has moved beyond unique possession of the divine imprimatur and empowering Spirit and moved into the realm of ontological identity?
One initial answer I want to give is this: if we see other humans doing it, it is no indication that Jesus is ontologically divine. Other thoughts?
