Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: lindborg@jade.cs.washington.edu (Jeff Lindborg) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The missing body/Empty tomb Message-ID: Date: 13 May 91 07:48:30 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Washington Computer Science Lines: 110 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article tblake@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Thomas Blake) writes: >Well, I've always looked upon Jesus as being like me, only where I have >a soul in my body, Jesus has something else. (God with skin on.) Well if Jesus was merely God with "clothes on" (or the "Logos wrapped in flesh" as Justin said) in what way was He human? He MUST have been human to have been tempted and suffered pain, died etc... surely God could not possibly be tempted or die. >[I hope you realize that your concept is one of the classical >Christological heresies (Apollonarianism, I believe). The orthodox >position is that all of Jesus' parts, including his soul, are human. >In the Incarnation, God took an entire human being to himself. As >Irenaeus (I think -- my theological library is at home) said: "what >was not assumed could not be saved". I.e. if God only took on a human >body, what relevance does the incarnation have to us? Yes, this was indeed Irenaeus. He was concerned with the idea of "recapitulation" which was the notion that man kind "fell" as a result of Adam's sin and that the only way to rectify the situation is to do it "over" with Christ playing the part parallel to Adam. Hence Christ must have been human (as was Adam), Eve was a virgin who was "played" by Mary and the tree was represented by the cross. He considered Christ a new begining for mankind... sort of starting over and doing it right this time. However, if Christ was "fully" human, in what way was he divine? Christ must have been divine to have brought mankind the possibility of salvation, but he must also have been human. This was (and is) a very difficult problem to solve and volumes were written by many different theologians. Today's orthodoxy still falls short of a proper explanation but covers itself by stating that mankind can never fully understand the divine and hence we must wait till we see God and ask him. I smell a cop-out... > Our sinfulness >is not primarily a problem of the body, but the soul. Personaly I liked Origen's idea that sinfulness was not an element in and of itself but a lack of closeness to the divine. This alleviated the need to explain why God created sin by stating that sin is merely a product of souls moving away from the perfection of God. This also offered an easy 'out' for how Jesus was sinless (he was 'one' with God) and human at the same time. Of course Origen also seemed to believe in reincarnation to a certain extent but we wont talk about that.... >The classical >position is that there are two things going on in Christ: Looked at as >a human being, he is a complete, normal human being. Looked at from >God's side, God in his fullness is present in him. This fails (of course) to address how Jesus's human spirit coexisted with the Logos (or divine) element. We they both present in Him? We they somehow 'melded' together or were they in seperate 'chambers' (as Tertullian believed... stating that the human did the suffering while the Logos did the divine stuff)? Was Christ's spirit somehow perfect (and arguably, then, not human)? It was the fate of the early Christian coucils to bring up more controversies then they attempted to solve. Chancelon (in an attempt to 'path-up' Nicaea) was no exception. Jeff Lindborg [I believe the orthodox position is that both a human spirit and the divine Logos are present in Christ. The concept of a melding together of human and divine attributes is clearly rejected by Chalcedon. As you say, many Christians are content to leave the Incarnation a mystery. My own view is, which I believe is in accordance with Chalcedon, is that what is going on is on two levels, and each event must be understood on both levels. On the human level, Jesus suffered as any other human being who is crucified. On God's level, Jesus is really God's presence in human history, so God himself suffers. Your suggestion that things were separated so that suffering is assigned to God and "divine stuff" to the Logos might be regarded as failing to do justice to the unity of Christ's person. On the one hand, there is a recognition that suffering is properly speaking something that can only happen to a human. Thus it happens to God only by virtue of the union of human and divine (the "communication of attributes"). But the whole "theotokos" debate indicates that the church did want to say that both natures were involved in all aspects of Christ, both suffering and "divine stuff". I agree that many of the theological formula seem to raise as many questions as they answer. I don't feel that way about Chalcedon though. It doesn't mandate a specific Christology -- after all, it was designed to allow moderate versions of both Alexandrian and Antiochene theology. It has been claimed that Chalcedon sets up a series of requirements on Christology which no actual fully-specified Christology can meet (i.e. that it is self-contradictory). However I believe Theodore of Mopsuestia's theology is both coherent and consistent with Chalcedon. Many believe that there is also an Alexandrian theology that meets these criteria, but I am not sufficiently sympathetic with Alexandrian Christology to judge. I don't think one would say that Christ's perfection makes him not human. The Christian position has generally been that God's original creation of human nature was perfect. Sin is present in us all, but is a result of the Fall, and is not inherent in being human. This distinguishes sin from simple finitude. That is, we need not imagine that Christ knew everything. That would violate the limitation of being a finite creature. But obeying God perfectly does not. (This does leave some obvious open questions, including where the Fall came from if human nature was created perfect. This is a discussion we've had fairly recently, so I'm not going to renew it here.) --clh]