Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: chrise@hpsrcje.hp.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Is Jesus God!! Message-ID: Date: 18 Feb 91 04:39:06 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 173 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu OFM writes some sentences that, I fear, will confuse more than enlighten readers on the nature of Jesus Christ. In fact traditional theology carefully maintains the distinction between Jesus, regarded as a human being, and God. The Incarnation says that God united a human being with himself. That union is close enough that we can say that Jesus' actions are God's. Thus we can say that God died for us. It is close enough that we can say that we see God through Jesus. But the two participants in the union retain their separate natures. Jesus is still a human being, subject to the limitations of human nature, and he is still dependent on God through prayer. "Traditional" (must be Catholic, who else believes in tradition? :-) theology states that Jesus is a divine person with dual natures. As the second person of the Trinity, his divine nature (pure spirit) is eternal. He took on a human nature (body and soul) in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Frank Sheed, in _Theology for Beginners_, explains how to understand the difference between person and nature: "person" answers a "who?" question, while "nature" answers a "what?" question. There is only one "who" in Jesus (he wasn't a mere man "possessed" by God) but there are two "what"s (divine nature, human nature). But farther, because Jesus is not God directly, but rather is united with God in the union of the Incarnation. Sayings "Jesus is not God directly" just confuses the matter (I mean, is he or isn't he?) by ignoring the person/nature distinction that is basic to orthodox Christology (the "hypostatic" union refers to the union of the two *natures* in the one *person*). Jesus is God. I highly recommend Sheed's book for a clear discussion of many "technical" theological points (which have enormous day-to-day implications, technical though they be). Chris "And in my vision the heavenly chariot flies through history, the dull heresies sprawling, the wild truth reeling yet erect." - GKC [I'm inserting this reply here, since otherwise there's no way to make sure that it arrives at other sites after the message it is replying to. Messages within a group do not always arrive in the same order sent. This is only a problem with replies that I generate myself, since others will be in a later group of messages. --clh] ------------------------------------------------------------------ From: hedrick@cs.rutgers.edu Subject: Re: Is Jesus God!! Chris objects to my statement that Jesus is God indirectly, asking is he or isn't he? While I understand the desire to have a clear answer, it was precisely the desire to have simple statements that led to so much trouble in the 3rd and 4th Cents. The Arian view is much simpler than the orthodox one. The problem is that it doesn't do justice to the complexity of the Biblical witness. Chris quotes Frank Sheed as saying that "person" answers a who? question and "nature" answers a "what?" question, saying that there is only one "who" in Christ. I think this is simplifying things a bit too much. The question is whether Christ has a complete human existence. There has been a tendency in Western theology to imply that the eternal Logos took on the parts of a human being, but that there wasn't really a human life there. The most extreme version of this was that Jesus was a human body with the Logos taking the place where a soul would normally be. That was clearly rejected. Even Athanasius (about the farthest in this direction who is regarded as orthodox) says clearly that Christ has both a human body and human soul. However even if you give Christ a human soul, there's still a question of how you see his humanity. I sometimes get the impression from reading Athanasius that Christ's human body and soul are simply appendages to the divine Logos. I.e. that the Logos has all the parts of a human being, but there isn't a real human being there. But I think the final agreement at Chalcedon says there is. (I'm not alone in this suspicion. Athanasius' position is sometimes described technically as "anhypostasia" -- the concept that there is no hypostatis associated with the human nature. To use your language, that "whoness" is associated entirely with the divine Logos.) In general theologians have rejected the idea that Jesus was simply the divine Logos appearing to be a human. He was a real human being, who lived a real human life. As such he had a human will, a human personality, etc. All of the things we think of as making up personal existence must be present in their normal human versions in Jesus (the only exception being that he is sinless). That's what Chalcedon means by talking about two separate natures that are not mixed or confused. Jesus prayed to God to heal people; he prayed for strength. Does he really have all the powers of God, and pray for strength only to set an example for us? This would make a mockery of his pain in Gethsemane: it would turn it into a sham. I believe the conclusion is clear that when we are considering Jesus' life as a human -- and that is clearly what the original question I was answering was looking at -- he does not *directly* have the attributes of God. However there is another side to this. In the discussions leading up to Chalcedon there is also a concern with Christ's unity. Nestorius, who takes an extreme version of my position, is criticized as believing in two Sons, one human and one divine. (It's not clear that he actually meant that, by the way, but he was understood as saying it.) The orthodox position is that there is one Son with two natures. The word used to characterize the one Son is "person". This is where things get messy. The problem is what we normally mean by "person" are all attributes of one or the other of the natures. A person, as we normally perceive it, is a combination of a visible presence, a personality, a style of interacting with people, a set of knowledge, etc. But these are all attributes of Christ's human existence. (And if we think of God as a person, in some suitably generalized sense, the divine Logos also has the attributes of a divine persona.) Thus the only sense I can make of Chalcedon is that they were using the term "person" in a somewhat more abstract sense. Indeed they often used the Greek "hypostasis", which is a very abstract word, equivalent possibly to something like "entity". So what sense does it make to say that the divine Logos and a human being constitute a single entity? Now we get to the question of the union of the two natures. I don't think we can say exactly how the union is done. The Incarnation is, after all, a mystery. I listed some of the implications in the original posting, such as the fact that the actions of the human being are also to be regarded as God's actions, and that when we encounter the human being, we encounter God. I believe the concept was that the divine Logos and the human being "interpenetrated", as it were. That is, I do not have in mind an arms-length relationship, where we interact with either the human being or the Logos, and whichever one we interact with tells the other about it. Rather, every action involves both natures. It must be seen on two planes. On the human plane, it is the action of a human being, being done as a result of his human will. On God's plane, the same action is part of God's plan, and reveals God to us. Thus when we encounter Christ, we encounter both a human being and God. But the planes must be kept distinct, or we end up "confusing the natures". (E.g. it is a heresy [the monothelite heresy] to say that Christ has only one will. There is both a human and a divine will involved in every decision. But they always act in concert.) It is for this reason that I want to insert a qualification when we say that Jesus is God. Note that I assume here that Jesus is being used to refer to the human being. Of course sometimes Jesus Christ is used to refer to the whole union, as it were. But the question being asked was clearly about actions that were specific to the human nature: praying to God, etc. At any rate, to say simply that Jesus is God implies that Jesus is immortal, invisible, etc. That is nonsense, and is not what Christians mean. (If I have to invoke specific authority, it would be "confusing the natures", i.e. failing to recognize the distinction between the two natures involved in the union.) When people say that Jesus is God what they mean is that Jesus is God's human existence, i.e. that he is united with God in the union of the Incarnation. There's the same indirectness in the statement that Jesus is God as there is in the statement that God died on the cross. The latter statement cannot be meant in an absolutely direct sense, or God would have been dead for three days (and no one would have been left to resurrect him). We *do* want to say that God died, but he experienced death by virtue of the fact that he took a human life to himself, not directly in his divine nature. There is something called the "communication of attributes". This is a principle that says because humanity and God are united in Christ, one can attribute both human and divine properties to both. So we can say that Jesus is God, and we can say that God died. But we need to know when we're invoking the communication of attributes, or we'll appear either to be speaking nonsense or "confusing the natures". I claim that people become JW's to a large extent because orthodox Christians are careless in the way they use language, and give the impression that orthodox Christian doctrine says things that are nonsense.