CTC6 Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament

The author says:

"This book is a version of the 1996 Didsbury Lectures, which I delivered in October 1996 at the British Isles Nazareth College in Didsbury, Manchester. I have slightly revised the text of the lectures and added footnotes. There were a total of four lectures, but I have combined the third and fourth into a single chapter, as the argument flowed continuously through both.

The book contains a concise version of a theory that I will publish more fully in another book I am working on, tentatively titled "Jesus and the Identity of God: Jewish Monotheism and New Testament Christology." In both books, I present a new way of understanding New Testament Christology in its Jewish context. Taking as my starting points the current debate about the nature of Jewish Monotheism in the Second Temple period, and efforts to find Jewish precedents in early Christology, I argue that current trends that find Jesus as a semi-divine intermediary figure are completely mistaken. Working with the main category of the identity of the God of Israel – which appropriately points to who God is rather than what divinity is – I show that early Judaism had clear and consistent ways of characterizing the unique identity of the one God and of distinguishing him absolutely from the rest of reality. When we read New Testament Christology with this Jewish theological context in mind, it becomes clear that, from the beginnings of post-Easter Christology, early Christians accurately and unambiguously included Jesus within the unique identity of the one God of Israel. They did this by including Jesus in the unique and definitive characteristics by which Judaism identified God as unique. To do this, they did not have to break with Jewish monotheism, since monotheism, as Second Temple Judaism understood it, was structurally open to the development of the Christological monotheism we find in the New Testament texts.

Ancient Christology was truly high Christology, and I call it divine identity Christology, proposing it as a way out of the accepted distinction between "functional" and "ontic" Christology, a distinction that does not correspond to early Jewish thought about God and that has seriously distorted our understanding of New Testament Christology. When we think in terms of divine identity, rather than divine essence or nature, which are not the primary categories for Jewish Theology, we can see that the so-called divine functions that Jesus exercises are intrinsic to what God is. This divine identity Christology is not merely a step on the way to the patristic development of ontological Christology in the context of Trinitarian Christology. It is already a complete Christology, which maintains that Jesus Christ is intrinsic to the unique and eternal identity of God. The Fathers did not so much develop it as transpose it into a conceptual framework built on Greek philosophical categories of essence and nature.

The inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity has implications not only for who Jesus is, but also for who God is. This forms the second half of the argument I pursue in this book and will develop more extensively in the other book. When it was taken seriously, as it was in most forms of New Testament Theology, that not only the pre-existent and exalted Jesus, but also the human, suffering, humiliated and crucified Jesus belonged to the unique divine identity of God, then it became clear that Jesus reveals the divine identity – who God really is – in humiliation as well as in exaltation, and in the connection between the two. The very identity of God is revealed in Jesus, his life and his cross, as well as in his exaltation, in a way that is continuously complete and consistent with the Old Testament and Jewish understanding of God, but is also new and surprising. While the Fathers, in their own way, successfully appropriated Nicene Theology, the inclusion of Jesus in the identity of God in the New Testament was not so successful in appropriating its corollary, the revelation of divine identity in Jesus' human passion and life.

To see how justice is done to this fact, we must return to the Theology of the cross, which originated with Martin Luther and became popular in the 20th century.

We will see that my thesis is not only a historical account of the background, origins, and nature of New Testament Christology, but that it is also very significant for our evaluation of the Church's Christological tradition and for contemporary constructive Theology. In the present book, this is only mentioned very briefly towards the end. It will be developed much more in a later treatment.

In the present concise version of my argument, I have not only been unable to develop some central points of it, but I have also been unable to provide the detailed study of texts and constant interaction with other interpretations of Jewish monotheism, New Testament Christology, and central early texts, both Jewish and Christian, that will be needed to adequately establish my arguments in the context of current academic discussion. This will have to await a more complete study. But many readers, no doubt, will find the present form of my argument, with fewer exegetical details and footnotes and bibliography, easier to appreciate and assimilate. I am very happy to have the opportunity to publish my work in this form, which is not so much a "popular" version as a concise presentation of my argument, in which the tree is not lost in the forest, and the main contours of my central theory are made clearly visible."