First, as we discussed previously (here and here), Barth draws us back to revelation, claiming that God is only known as God has revealed himself in and by the word.

In §26.2, Barth takes up the same question from the human side. If God is knowable, there must not only be a God who makes Godself known, but a humanity capable of receiving this knowledge.

Who, then, or perhaps what, is this humanity?

First, Barth returns to the question of natural theology, applying his previous arguments about God as knowable through the natural order to humanity as those who can know as they are by nature.

Well, not exactly as humanity is “by nature.” What humanity is in its “fallen nature” is more to the point. We’ll come back to this in a second. At any rate, humans as we actually are cannot truly know the true God through a natural theology, but only through God’s revelation.

“Anthropology” is not the route to humanity’s ability to know God.

Interestingly, and again, perhaps, surprisingly, Barth is equally insistent that ecclesiology, humanity as addressed by the church, is not the humanity able to receive the revelation of God. Humanity in the church is as liable to deception about its understanding of God as humanity in general. It is as liable to control it for its own purposes, as humanity in general.

Though I don’t recall Barth saying so explicitly, I wonder if this twin denial isn’t a recurrence of Barth’s regular two-sided glance: on the one hand he wants to show how evangelical dogmatics stands over against Christian liberalism; on the other he wants to show how it stands over against Roman Catholicism.

If not anthropology or ecclesiology, then on what basis can we discover humanity’s readiness for God? Unsurprisingly, it comes from Christology.

God is known knower in the triune, eternal relationship between Father and Son. This Son who has eternally known God, becomes human, thus joining the eternal self-knowing God with human flesh. How can people know God? Because, on the human side as well as the divine, God knows Godself. “On the human side” meaning, in this case, the humanity of the God-man.

I have a couple of questions about Barth’s construction.

First, do his stances against anthropology and ecclesiology as means by which we might see that God is knowable to people underplay the significance of Christ as The Human One and of the church as the Body of Christ? In the salvation story, there is a redefinition of humanity, of “image of God,” of the people of God, of “the church,” that is derivative from Christ himself.

Does Barth take this incorporation into Christ seriously enough in his denial that as humans or as the church we can know God?

Second, and related, does Barth give too much play to sin as a defining element in our human nature? Not that all humans aren’t born in sin and all the rest. But being sinful isn’t at the core of what it means to be human. Yes, it’s the reality that we are born into and from which Christ ushers us into a better future.

But Christ was fully human, and yet without sin. So if it’s sinfulness that keeps us from knowing God, it’s not our humanness that keeps us from God, but instead it’s the lack of true humanness that keeps us from knowing God.

So then, third, why is it that Christ offers a new humanity in which God is knowable? Is it because Christ is God? Or is it because Christ is truly human? Has Barth retreated too quickly to the Trinity rather than taking full stock of the inherent value of humanity as created in God’s image and recreated in the image of God in Christ?

That’s the real fun stuff. On a side note: is there a difference between natural theology and general revelation? The latter phrase keeps the requirement of “revelation” on the table, as Barth says is necessary, but allows for a broader compass of revelation than we find in only scripture, Christ, and preaching.

Writing study notes for a Bible is a huge challenge for me. I’m working on that for Colossians right now. Yesterday’s labor of love? A footnote for, “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” You pretty much have to say what you’re going to say in 40 words. Otherwise, you’ve used up your word count for the whole chapter.

Here was my attempt at that:

Paul sees his own suffering in ministry as an extension of the work of Christ on the cross (cf 2 Cor 4:10-12). He is working to complete (lit., “fill up”) the work of reconciliation by creating reconciled communities that participate in the reconciliation Christ has already accomplished.

You hope you’re giving folks enough tidbits and breadcrumbs to find their way to exegetical treasure.

One fascinating thread that runs through the description of Christ in Col 1: the connection with Wisdom. Here, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said often by others.

The connection with Wisdom in the Jewish tradition helps fill in some otherwise puzzling details.

For example, what are we to make of the language of “fullness”?

Both God and Wisdom are said to fill the earth–indications of God’s presence and saving power. But in Colossians, it is Christ who becomes the focal point of the fullness of God.

God fills heaven and earth (Jer 23:24)–but Christ is now the fullness of God. Christ is that by which God fills the earth. God’s Spirit and Wisdom fill the earth (Wisdom 1:6-7), but that fulness has Christ as its substance.

These notions of God’s presence and power are focused on Christ–and Christ is revealed as the one in whom all things on earth hold together. That sovereign presence of God, known everywhere on earth, is now a reconciling presence in the crucified and risen Christ.

And, the hope of God’s final glory is that this Christ indwells us, making God’s fullness the filling received by all who are united to Him.

How is it that Christ can be sufficient? How is it that Colossians can consistently call people away from other sources of wisdom, power, fullness, and knowledge?

Because the Christ who bears the fullness of the cosmos-filling God indwells us–and we, too, are in Him.

There I go with 400 words again…

This is the claim that my Fuller colleague, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, works out briefly, clearly, and beautifully in the January issue of Christianity today. [I'll post a link when it becomes available.]

Veli works out this claim in between our contemporary cultures turn to the scientist to help us answer the question of what it means to be human, on the one hand, and the creeds’ silence about Jesus’ life, on the other.

“…we know who we are becaue we have been created in his image, in the image of the one who became one of us and into whose image we out to be conformed until the day when we see him face to face.” (30)

He goes on to highlight how the New Testament speaks “in very concrete terms having to do with the actions of Christ”: we know Jesus through his enfleshed actions here on earth.

Building on the church father Irenaeus, and his idea of recapitulation, we learn what it means to be truly human by looking at Jesus: “we discern that being a real human means having a life shaped by dependence, service, and ultimate self-offering to the Father—and all this in the face of the temptations and trials of life” (30).

Taking full stock of the incarnation helps us to unravel misguided notions about “who we really are.” There is not some disembodied “soul” within us that is “us,” to the expense of our confounded bodies.

No, the Word became flesh to be human among us.

There is also no isolated “I” who is truly human.

No, the Word is second Adam and thus human as one of the member of new humanity. We are saved into “the communion of believers of all ages.”

There is one particular direction I would have liked to see Veli discuss in brief, and that is the connection between image-bearing and rule. Jesus not only proclaims, but inaugurates the Kingdom of God as its King, a role originally given to Adam that he recapitulates. And, this rule over the earth is part of the destiny awaiting those who are Christ’s: if we endure, we shall also reign with him, says 2 Timothy 2.

All Christians have a theology of Jesus. And most of us need a good infusion of understanding of the rich significance of Jesus’ humanness. He did not become flesh and blood simply so that he could die. He became a man so that he could show us what it means to be fully and truly human.

He reflected on the problem that was the driving force behind Scot McKnight’s recent King Jesus Gospel: what is the gospel of the Gospels? Why do we have these stories about Jesus’ life?

Wright set up the problem like this:

For many Christians, Jesus could be born of a virgin and die for our sins, and that would be enough.

What, then, do we discover in the Gospels?

He suggested that there are four “speakers” that need to be properly adjusted in volume so that we can get the full, stereoscopic effect of the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus:

1. The Gospels show Jesus as the climax to the story of Israel–not merely isolated prooftexts, but the whole grand narrative. This speaker, Wright suggests, has been on mute for too much of the church’s history–and still today.
2. The Gospels depicts Jesus as the embodiment of Israel’s God. This speaker, Wright argues, has been turned up far too loud–and perhaps played with no little distortion as well. The point should be less Jesus as second person of the Trinity and more Jesus as the God who renews covenant (Isa 54) and redeems the whole world (Isa 55) by carrying our sins and bearing our sorrows (Isa 53).
3. Jesus is the start of the movement that became the church. Again, Wright sees this one as turned up too loud inasmuch as it causes us to look past Jesus’ actions on earth far too quickly. The forward-looking reading can make us, too, look forward and thereby forget that Jesus is inaugurating the kingdom in his life and death.
4. The kingdom of God calls the kingdoms of this world to account. This speaker, too, Wright thinks has been too low–perhaps disconnected and stuck in a corner. Wright looks at Jesus and Pilate debating kingship and truth, at Paul proclaiming Jesus is Lord in Caesar’s own city, and sees the gospel calling the kingdoms of this world to account, to a better way of rule.

At the end, Wright strove to connect this four-fold reading of the Gospels to both life and death of Jesus. Perhaps my mind was wondering after a long day. I didn’t find this part to be as clearly laid out. Perhaps my problem was that I couldn’t quite see how there was an inherent connection, how cross drove the kingdom vision or enabled it to come about.

After a day with Wright, and seeing how he can pack out a house, even in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, I was poised to have N. T. Wright thoughts in mind when I read this morning’s blog post by Seth Godin.

The blog post talked about being “the best”–essentially, it says, being the best is a distraction that keeps us from taking our “better than most” and becoming well known for our unique contribution.

As I’m about to go to the Society of Biblical Literature conference, I think about N. T. Wright and think that there are probably any number of people who could rightly claim to be “better” New Testament scholars than Wright. They are more careful exegetes, know their history a bit better, or some such.

But what Wright has done is to take his “better than most” and parlay it into “most influential,” such that his overall project ends up being one of, if not the, most important biblical theology projects because people actually listen to what he is doing.

That’s where Wright has been able to become great: he has made the effort, and succeeded, in speaking to the masses. And the church’s and academy’s readings of the Bible are becoming, and will continue to be, better for it.

A couple friends like to rib me, only partially joking, about my “Arian” project. You remember Arius? He’s the one who argued against Jesus’ identity with God: there was a time, Arius claimed, when the logos was not.

Preexistent? Yes. God himself? No.

Arius is deemed a heretic because he wrongly puts together the pieces about Jesus as heavenly being.

It is this kind of argument (though not this argument directly) that Richard Bauckham’s book, God Crucified was meant to curtail: the way that the NT writers identify Jesus with God does not have precedent in Judaism’s treatment of other heavenly beings.

In my work, I am not arguing that Arius was a better reader of the NT, and that heavenly but non-divine Christology typifies the Synoptic Gospels. This would be an argument against what the church teaches concerning Jesus’ divinity.

Instead, I am arguing that the Synoptic Gospels do not address the question of Jesus’ ministry on earth as one of a divine being at all. They neither to confirm or deny.
What we find in them is another aspect of the church’s theology of Jesus. The Gospels are not the place to go for understanding the nature of Jesus’ divinity. However, they are treasure troves of indications about what it means for Jesus to be human, to be the Adam figure who recapitulates humanity’s primal purposes upon the earth.

Irenaeus is the church father most closely associated with this understanding of the function of Jesus’ humanity: it is not something to apologize for (ah well, he had to be human, but the really cool thing is that he’s God!); nor is it simply negative, as though Jesus simply had to be human so he could die for our sins.

Jesus is human, and has to be human, because this was God’s plan from the beginning: that humanity would come, serve, and rule upon the earth in the name of God. Jesus has to be human because there is a human quest that needs to be fulfilled, a human vocation that must be answered–or else God’s project will come to naught.

Is my project Arian? No, it is Adamic. It is a plea to discover afresh what we too often pass by because we seem to think that true theological value is found only in the presence of God upon the earth.

No, there is more: an untapped vein of Christological gold to be discovered in the work of the Human One.

[Moses, enthroned on Mt. Sinai] became god and king of the whole nation.

FYI.

Here’s the larger context, where he explains the exalted state Moses entered into:

…if the prophet was truly called the friend of God, then it follows that he would naturally partake of God himself and of all his possessions as far as he had need; (157) for God possesses everything and is in need of nothing; but the good man has nothing which is properly his own, no, not even himself, but he has a share granted to him of the treasures of God as far as he is able to partake of them. And this is natural enough; for he is a citizen of the world; on which account he is not spoken of as to be enrolled as a citizen of any particular city in the habitable world, since he very appropriately has for his inheritance not a portion of a district, but the whole world. (158) What more shall I say? Has he not also enjoyed an even greater communion with the Father and Creator of the universe, being thought unworthy of being called by the same appellation? For he also was called the god and king of the whole nation, and he is said to have entered into the darkness where God was; that is to say, into the invisible, and shapeless, and incorporeal world, the essence, which is the model of all existing things, where he beheld things invisible to mortal nature; for, having brought himself and his own life into the middle, as an excellently wrought picture, he established himself as a most beautiful and Godlike work, to be a model for all those who were inclined to imitate him.

File this under, “things Jewish people could never say about a human being because they are monotheists.” Your file by this name should be getting pretty thick with things, such as this, that Jewish people said about human beings…

For those of you just tuning in, allow me to clarify: I believe in the divinity of Jesus. But I do not think that this belief was widely held by the writers of and/or played a controlling influence in many of the earliest Christian documents, including the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The idea that Jesus was God was not universally spread and/or developed and/or accepted.

Today’s instance of muddled thinking on the way to high Christology comes from the “Abba, Father” prayer. In this prayer, known from Mark 14, Jesus addresses God as “Father” as an individual praying for deliverance. Elsewhere Jesus prays to God as “Father” as well in the Synoptic Gospels, perhaps most famously teaching his disciples so to pray.

Rounding up a summary of evidence that the historical Jesus used such address to God, a scholar says that it is hard to deny the use of such language to Jesus himself:

For he must have said or insinuated something similar to what is recorded here to give rise to the rapid conclusion that surfaced not long after his death, that he was indeed the Son of God (even if that were not yet understood with the full nuances of the Council of Nicea)… that… would include some inkling of the uniqueness of the relationship between him and the Father as ‘abba’, whom he actually so addressed.

So Jesus must have referred to God as something like “Abba, Father,” because people soon came to believe that he was the preexistent Son [sic] of God, uniquely so related.

Aside from the obvious historical problem that the only time Jesus is said to call God “abba” is in a scene in which Jesus is absolutely alone, with the disciples knocked out asleep and therefore without any human witness (so that from a “historical Jesus” perspective the phrase is dubious, at best), a more significant problem besets this argument.

Of the three times that the “Abba, Father” prayer are articulated in the NT, one is by Jesus–and the other two are said to be the cry of every believer.

Can we please, please, pretty please agree to this: if the NT says it about other believers, then it is evidence neither of Jesus’ unique relationship to God nor of his preexistence nor of his divinity?

Mark has a theology of Jesus as son of God that has almost nothing to do with Nicea, and almost everything to do with the OT depiction of Davidic Kings and of Israel more generally. Paul has a theology of sonship of God that has nothing to do with preexistence and everything to do with being raised up to rule the world on God’s behalf.

Rather than running straight to “Son of God” as a reference to high Christology, complete with knowing nods and hushed tones and apologies for it really not meaning in the NT what it means in later theology, how about we keep exploring how the conjunction (rather than disjunction) between Jesus and later believers transforms our understanding of the identity of both?

If it’s true about you and me, and also true about Jesus, then something else is going on besides a testimony to Jesus’ eternal preexistent sonship. And I think that’s worth unpacking.

We cry out, no less than Jesus, “Abba, Father.”

Elizabeth calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,” when baby Jesus is in utero. Those petitioning Jesus for help will defer to him as “Lord.” It is “the Lord” who appoints seventy-two and sends them out on their mission.

And it is “the Lord” who turns to look at Peter after Peter has denied him for the third time (22:61).

And then… nothing.

Throughout the trial before the elders, Jesus is not referred to as “the Lord.”

Throughout the trial before Pilate, Jesus is not referred to as “Lord.”

Standing before Herod, he is simply “Jesus.”

Before the crowd, he is simply “this man.”

Led to the cross, he is Jesus. Crucified, he is mocked as the would-be Christ or would-be King of the Jews. But he is not called the Lord.

Through the taunting of the one bandit and the petition of remembrance from the other, he is derided as “the Christ” or simply called Jesus.

It is “Jesus,” not “the Lord” who gives up his spirit, and “Jesus” whom the women watch from afar.

“Jesus’” body is buried.

But on the first day of the week, when the women come to anoint the body with their aromatic spices they discover less than they came to find. And also find out that they should have been looking for more.

They find that the body of “the Lord Jesus” is missing.

The risen one is the Lord once again. And so the two who come running back from Emmaus say to the rest, “The Lord has really risen!”

And so Peter can say on the Day of Pentecost, in reference to the resurrected Jesus, “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

The resurrection is an enthronement. It is the heavenly reinstatement of what Jesus showed forth and then set aside while on the earth.

Peter says in that same sermon in Acts 2: “Jesus was a man testified to by God through signs and wonders.” The Lord Jesus was acting on the power and authority of the Lord God. And was rejected: finally rejected by even his closest followers, he walks through the passion narrative as simply “Jesus,” as the messianic pretender.

But God witnesses to him again by the resurrection, enthroning him as the Lord once more. The missing body is not simply the body of Jesus. It is, once again, the body of the Lord.

Well, it doesn’t come from there in Mark’s gospel, anyway.

For Mark, the invitation to discover that Jesus must suffer is tied to his self-designation as the son of man.

Now, I know that there are hundreds of theories and myriad details about what this term meant in Aramaic, how the historical Jesus is likely to have used the phrase, and the like. But that is, for the most part, irrelevant for interpreting Mark.

In Mark’s gospel, the phrase “son of Man” is clearly linked to the vision of Daniel 7 (Mark 13:26; 14:62). At least in these latter parts of Mark, the connotations of “the Human One” entail Jesus playing the role of Daniel’s enthroned Son of Man.

Earlier uses of the phrase also find explanation here: the Son of Man has unique authority–authority on earth to forgive sins; authority even over the sabbath.

The son of man in Daniel is enthroned and given an eternal kingdom. The power of that rule is at work, already, in Jesus’ earthly ministry, even though he has not yet come on the clouds to the right hand of God.

But can Daniel 7 also open up the door to understanding the third type of “son of man” saying, the passion predictions?

• The human one must suffer many things and be rejected… (Mark 8:31)
• Why was it written that the Human One must suffer many things and be rejected…(Mark 9:12)
• The Human One goes to his death just as it is written about him…(Mark 14:21)

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the first time we hear a passion prediction, “The human one must suffer many things and be rejected” (Mark 8:31), the passage goes on to echo Daniel 7 in its promise that anyone ashamed of this suffering Human One will find that the Human One is ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of the father with the angels.

In other words, in the story of Mark’s gospel, Jesus as the enthroned and returning Human One is inseparable from Jesus as the suffering Human One.

So what does Daniel 7, the coming of the great and glorious Human One to be enthroned at God’s right hand, have to do with suffering?

In the final interpreting of Daniel’s dream, we discover that the last beast, and the last horn of the beast, that is finally put down and destroyed at the advent of the Son of Man, had oppressed the holy ones whom the Human One represents.

As I watched, this same horn waged war against the holy ones and defeated them, until the Ancient One came… The set time arrived, and the holy ones held the kingship securely. (Daniel 7:22, CEB)

25 He will say things against the Most High
and will exhaust the holy ones
of the Most High.
He will try to change times set by law.
And for a period of time,
periods of time,
and half a period of time,
they will be delivered into his power.
26 Then the court will sit in session.
His rule will be taken away—
ruined and wiped out for all time.
27 The kingship, authority, and power
of all kingdoms under heaven
will be given to the people,
the holy ones of the Most High. (Daniel 7:25-27, CEB)

The Son of Man who is enthroned is none other than the holy ones who suffered under the oppressive hand of the final king who would be destroyed. They were, first, delivered to suffering and death, and then afterward ushered into eternal kingship and power.

Interestingly, Daniel 12 contains the only widely recognized reference to resurrection in the OT. And that passage tells the same story as Daniel 7, only using different imagery. And there, with the defeat of the great enemy comes not only the exaltation of God’s people to rule, but even the resurrection of the righteous who have been put to death.

How is it written that the Human One must suffer at the hands of people and then rise again? It is written in the visions of the Human One beheld by the prophet Daniel. To be the Human One enthroned at the right hand of God means that one has, first, suffered and died at the hands of the unjust rulers who war against the people of God.

If I am puzzled by the desire to analyse the ‘grand Story’ into substories, the notion that there is a ‘story of God’ puzzles me even more! A ‘story’ concerns something within history and describes events that change and affect the characters, but God is by definition outside history, and does not change (Mal. 3:6).

My own reading of scripture would lead me to suggest that if your god is “by definition” one who is outside the history and unchanged by it, you need to either find a new religion that fits your God or else redefine your God to fit the biblical narrative.

The whole point of biblical narrative is that God has bound himself to the story–not merely as an author or observer, but as a participant. What else can it mean to call God “redeemer” or “savior” in any meaningful sense? God must act in history to be the God of the Bible. Our understanding of Mal 3:6 must be shaped by the things God actually does and claims to do and promises to do.

And, as a tip of the hat to my high Christology and dearly held Trinitarian belief, if we say that the incarnation did not change God then we have embraced the docetism that so rampantly affects contemporary Christianity.

God is part of the story. God who did not have to create, created. God who did not have to engage and act, has chosen to not only be a part of the story of the world, but to bind Godself to it, staking God’s own name on playing the climactic roles in bringing this story to completion.

God is not only the “off stage” sender who hurls the protagonist into the chaos. God is the chief Actor who participates to bring the story to its final resolution in keeping with God’s own purpose and promise.