I just finished writing the following for my christology course at LTSP. It's definitely sort of 'out-there,' so I'd love to hear your feedback. I just cut and pasted from MSWord, so there's minor formatting issues. Thanks so much!
I.
Method
One of postmodern
thought’s greatest contributions to theology is the notion that theology, and
therefore christology, is highly contextual.
For theologians like Jon Sobrino and others who have long
walked with the peoples of Latin America heavily weighed down upon by systemic
sin and oppression, Christ’s preferential option for the poor is a source of
liberating hope.
For other
theologians like Douglas John Hall trying to living out the Protestant theology
of fifteenth century thinkers in a contemporary context, the cross of Christ
provides a lens to interpret the “ambivalence and contrarieties of life.”
Indeed, we possess not one but four
gospels in the Christian Testament, all of which portray Christ contextually
and therefore somewhat differently.
At the same time, something must be said for the unity of faith in
Christ; without some sort of unifying principle, contextual christology based
solely upon the uniqueness of human experience becomes what John Polkinghorne
describes as “only a babble of local dialects.”
Borrowing from science, he instead
argues for a more moderate theological approach called “critical realism” which
throws off the shackles of modernism’s notion of unproblematic objectivity yet
also shuns the postmodern temptation to view understanding as unattainable.
Using the method of critical realism,
this paper therefore proposes a christology that is highly contextual toward
twenty-first century American life yet also submits that understanding to both
the traditions of the Church and the community of saints, both alive and dead.
II.
Context
One’s
context is defined through many aspects.
Perhaps the most easily defined aspect is place: the spatial aspect of
my future ministry context will likely be in urban America, on the planet
Earth. A more difficult aspect of
one’s context to define is social location. While I am a fairly young, seemingly white but in fact
bi-racial, educated member of the middle class, the social context of my future
ministry will likely be much more diverse. One also has an ideological context: I am liberal on most
issues and civically inclined, while the ideological context of my ministry
will perhaps be quite similar.
There is also an experiential aspect of context: I personally
experienced a relatively happy childhood, yet also suffered from depression and
the loss of my mother at a fairly young age. A final aspect of context, and the one that most often
gets overlooked, is time. I currently live in an early
twenty-first century context, a time of lingering economic distress, great
environmental degradation and rapidly quickening technological progress. This chronological aspect of my context
for ministry will not always remain quite the same however: if I am ordained in
2014 when I am twenty-eight years old as planned, and if I remain in ministry
until I retire around the age of 65, my life as a pastor will stretch roughly
to the year 2050. If my method for
christological reflection is to be highly contextual, then I must take the
chronological aspect into account.
While
we cannot predict the future with any high degree of accuracy, especially as
far out as 2050, we do have some clues to help indicate what a future context
for ministry might look like.
Ever
since I read
The Age of Spiritual Machines
by Ray Kurzweil as a fourteen year old at Camp Calumet in New Hampshire, the
implications of technological progress has absolutely fascinated me. A futurist and well-known inventor of
items like synthesizers and print-to-speech reading machines, Kurzweil has been
making predictions about the future since the early 1980s by extrapolating off
of Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a
microchip doubles every two years. Essentially, this means that the power
of computing (which Kurzweil measures as the amount of computing power you can
buy for $1000) increases exponentially, rather than linearly. Exponential curves begin by rising
slowly, but eventually start rocketing up toward infinity, and Kurzweil would
argue that we are now approaching part of the curve where it is becoming
possible to notice that the pace of technological progress is rapidly
increasing.
If we stay on our
current course of exponential growth in computing as Kurzweil predicts, the
results at twenty or thirty years out are absolutely astonishing.
By the end of the 2020s, you will be
able to buy a computer for $1000 that roughly equals the intelligence of one
human.
By the mid 2040s, you will
be able to buy a computer for $1000 that roughly equals a billion times the sum
of all human intelligence.
The practical ramifications of
Kurzweil’s claims are even more staggering.
For instance, as telling the difference between human and
artificial intelligence becomes nearly impossible, the definition of being
sapient (or perhaps of having a soul, theologically speaking) will be difficult
to discern.
As off-loading
information from one’s aging brain to a studier artificial brain becomes a
reality, so does a type of immortality. While Kurzweil’s predictions certainly
seem far-fetched, he has great credibility: in 1999 President Bill Clinton
awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Bill Gates has called him “
the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial
intelligence." There are of
course many who have criticized his work, but still, given Kurzweil’s
credibility, his predictions at very least can prove useful in developing a
contextual christology for ministry well into the twenty-first century.
III.
Substance
Given the spatial
limitations of this paper and the lack of pre-existing scholarly literature
concerning the theological implications of an exponential progression of
computing, developing a complete christology here proves impossible. Instead, I will simply seek to make a
number of contributions to this new avenue of christological inquiry, all
supporting a thesis that “through His life and triumphant resurrection over the
sin of the cross, Christ does for the cosmos what we sapient creatures cannot
do on our own: Christ shepherds us into right relationship with God.
A.
The Person of Christ
In
his Letters and Papers from Prison,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously asked, “Who is God?” By asking ‘who’ rather than ‘what,’ Bonhoeffer emphasizes
that God is a ‘who’ who we can experience, rather than an abstract concept:
Not
in the first place an abstract belief in God, in his omnipotence, etc. That is not a genuine experience of
God, but a partial extension of the world. Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience that a transformation of all human life is
given in the fact that ‘Jesus is there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the
experience of transcendence.
The person of Jesus Christ is the
means through which we experience the transcendent God, a ‘who’ (and the only
‘who’) who is wholly there only for others.
While He is the means through which we experience God,
Christ is also the greatest possible gift of God to a less than perfect cosmos,
as He is the gift through which God is wholly there for all of Her creation.
As stated in the Nicene Creed, Jesus
Christ is “the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all the ages,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of
one Being with the Father.”
Thus, while Jesus Christ is God’s
greatest possible gift to creation, Christ also is God, existing eternally as
one ‘who’ with the Creator and the Spirit, yet also forever dancing with them
in Trinity.
Through the person of
Christ then, God also provides the gift of example to Her creation, as God
demonstrates what is good by giving of Herself through Christ.
Christ
is God, of one ‘who’ with the Creator and Spirit, yet also eternally (and
paradoxically) dances with the Creator and Spirit in Trinity. I use the word ‘dance’ to describe
Christ’s being with the Trinity to characterize it not as a rigid, static state
of being but one that is always shifting, fluid and mysterious. While Christ has traditionally been
referred to as ‘the Son’ in the Church, ‘the Son’ may no longer be the best
symbol to indicate Christ’s nature in some contemporary contexts. As the masculinity of Christ has often
been used to reinforce patriarchal structures and belief systems in the Church
and wider society, it must be emphasized that ‘the Word/ Wisdom of God,’
another traditional symbol to indicate Christ’s nature in Trinity, has both
feminine and masculine aspects.
While John 1:1 uses the masculine noun logoß, meaning ‘reason,’ ‘truth’
and most traditionally ‘word’ (among other things) to refer to Christ, the
related concept sofia, a feminine noun meaning ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’
is another traditional symbol for Christ in Trinity used by Church, and should
thus be emphasized for the sake of inclusivity. As Christ is the means through which we have knowledge of
God and is the gift of God through which the truth of what is good is revealed
(both discussed above), referring to Christ in Trinity as the ‘Wisdom of God’
or the ‘Truth of God’ is accurate.
While
Christ is God, Christ was also “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin
Mary, and became a human being.” While the Scriptures do attest that
Jesus Christ was in fact a male human being, we must also emphasize that in the
original Latin, the Nicene Creed states Christ “became a human being” (homo
facus est), rather than “was made man” (vir
factus est). Once again, as we minister in a context
where the cultural norm is still to emphasize the masculinity of God, we must
make it unequivocally clear that the gift of Christ was incarnate as human, not
simply a man.
Christ was not only
given by God for all of us, but was literally made of the same stuff as all of
humanity.
As humanity was good
enough for God to become incarnate as fully human, we must also recognize that
all of humanity is worth our respect, care and love.
Furthermore, for some people at least (and we must remember
not all), it is a comfort to know that God suffered and sacrificed on Earth as
a human, not simply a man.
For
others (and I believe this will become particularly more important as the line
between human and artificial sapience begins to blur in the future), it is a
comfort to know that God had to do all the little things that are part of being
human as well… God as Jesus probably stubbed his toe a few times, God probably
had a few bad hair days and God has experienced going to bathroom as fully
human, and this can be very comforting news!
B.
The Work of Christ in the Cosmos
Throughout his
famous series Cosmos, agnostic scientist
and thinker Carl Sagan frequently exclaims, “We’re all made of
star-stuff!” When thinking about
the work of Christ in what has traditionally been referred to by Lutherans as
“the Earthly Kingdom,” and what I call “the cosmos,” remembering the fact that
we are all made of star-stuff can be extremely helpful. Not only was humanity good enough for
God to become incarnate as fully human, but also creation was good enough for
God to become incarnate in creation!
Thus, if creation was good enough for God to become fully incarnate in
it as Jesus Christ, we must further recognize that all of creation is worth our
respect and care. Furthermore, we
are provided the gift of an example for how to be wholly there for others in
creation through the words and actions of Jesus Christ, even if we cannot
follow that example perfectly. In
a context where our very existence is threatened by environmental degradation,
and in a future where the very meaning of what it means to be human will blur,
we must move beyond an anthrocentric view of Christ’s work in the cosmos, to
one that more greatly encompasses all of God’s creation.
Jurgen
Moltmann, whose christology “directs its attention towards Christ’s bodily
nature and its significance for earthly nature as a whole,” has put forward the
idea of a messianic Christ, which when set in the context of the messianic hope
of Israel, argues that the work of Christ is not only to redeem a sinful
humanity but also to answer the groaning of all creation.
In the sense Moltmann uses the term
then, it seems as if a “messianic christology” that concerns itself with the
groaning of all creation is appropriate to our contemporary context, with one
major exception.
Recognizing that
we live in (and likely will continue to live in) a time where humanity is
pushing ever farther beyond the bounds of the planet Earth, we must also move
beyond Moltmann’s suggestion of thinking about only Christ’s earthly nature, or
what I call a “terracentric” view of Christ’s work in the cosmos.
Christ did not work only for
humanity, or only for creation in a local sense, but in fact for all God’s
creation, which includes the entire universe, of which Earth is only a very,
very small part. In a context where humanity can do more and more wondrous
things, it may be helpful to humbly emphasize the wonder and sheer expanse of
what God does in the cosmos through Christ.
What
work though, does Christ do in the cosmos? For thinking about Christ’s work in the most general sense,
Genesis 1 and once again John 1 seem particularly instructive. In Genesis 1, God begins by creating
light out of “a formless void.” In
John 1, it states that “all things came into being” through the Word of
God. Putting these two concepts
together then, one can recognize not only that God creates the cosmos through
Christ, but also that God makes cosmos out of chaos through Christ. God’s
act of creation through Christ is not one where something simply pops up out of
nothing, in a sense, but one where God takes something that is wholly chaos,
and begins bringing it into order as God intends it, creating cosmos (the
universe as a well ordered whole).
Unfortunately however, whether by human sin and/ or some other
mechanism, we must recognize the cosmos is, as of yet, has not wholly evolved
into what God intended it.
While God may have
brought order to chaos “in the beginning” through the Word by creating day and
night, roughly two-thousand years ago, through his words, actions and triumph
over the human sin of the cross, Jesus Christ began bringing order to the chaos
of sin, death and oppression.
This
happened through various physically actions, but whether feeding people,
healing people or hearing people, Christ signaled what has traditionally been
referred to as “the in-breaking of the Kingdom,” or the ordering of chaos as
God intended it.
Another important
aspect of bringing God’s order to chaos is, as Jon Sobrino and others have
argued, Christ’s preference for the poor: “The proclamation of good news to the
poor simply because they were poor shook the very foundations of religion, and
was the best way of showing God’s gratuitousness in a world that idolizes
riches.”
Reflecting the views of Delores S.
Williams, Christ also brought God’s order to chaos through his resurrection and
thereby victory over evil:
The
resurrection of Jesus and the flourishing of God’s spirit in the world as the
result of resurrection represent the life of the ministerial vision gaining
victory over the evil attempt to kill it…
The image of Jesus on the cross is the image of human sin in its most
desecrated human form.
Whether creating light from a
formless void, combating the sin of human oppression by showing a preference
for the poor, or triumphing over sin and death in Jesus resurrected, God
does whatever She has to do, through Christ, in order to bring order as she
intended it, creating cosmos out of chaos.
C.
The Cross of Christ
In
our contemporary culture, one’s theology of the cross is easily pulled in
multiple and very divergent directions due to a variety of contextual
concerns.
Whether manifested
emotionally, economically, physically or in other forms, we live in a time of
great oppression and exploitation of human beings under crushing systems of
sinful injustice.
For many people,
especially those who suffer everyday from such systems of oppression, the
symbol of the cross can best function contextually as the ultimate symbol sin
that Christ triumphs over in resurrection, a position argued by Delores S. Williams.
Folks completely beaten down by
systematic sin do not need to be humbled any further by the cross... put in
Lutheran terms, they have gotten a whole lot of law in their lives, and they
just need the gospel!
For those
individuals, it is only the good news of Christ’s triumph over the human sin of
the cross that liberates and brings hope.
For others that endure great suffering however, we must recognize that
there is something of God in the blood of the cross.
As Joanne Terrell has proposed, the idea of a
“divine-sufferer,” of a God who has truly suffered and
died for us “highlights the egregious
nature of every historical crime against humanity and the Divinity.”
If one is to hold a highly contextual
christology, one must hold both these opposing views in tension.
For
others, especially those who have not felt the sting of sinful oppression that
strongly (we must bear witness though that all folks have to some degree
though), the scandal and paradox of the Incarnate God present in the ultimate symbol
of human sin is exactly what they need to hear about. Such individuals, myself included, need to be humbled each
and everyday by the scandal of God in Jesus Christ showing up in utmost
humility where we would least expect Him: stripped, beaten, broken and left on
a tree to die. Only in knowing of
such a humble Christ can we be turned away from worshipping ourselves and other
human idols toward the good news of God in Christ Jesus. While we live in a time when many face
horrific oppression, we also live in a time of rapid technological
progress. If Ray Kurzweil’s theory
of the exponential progression of computing power holds true, humanity will be
able to do truly marvelous things within my own lifetime that we must begin to
anticipate. Although in one sense
we have been co-creators with the Creator for millennia, we will move far
further into this role in the twenty-first century, engineering matter on the
molecular, atomic and even subatomic levels, and perhaps even creating what
many would recognize as sapient or self-aware life through artificial
means. In such a context, we will
need the humility of the cross to remind us that us that the one thing we
cannot do alone is to be in right relationship with God.
D.
The Work of God in Christ Before the Creator
The
work God does through Christ before the Creator (what traditional Lutheran
theology terms “in the Heavenly Kingdom”) is similar to what God does through
Christ in the cosmos: God makes cosmos out of chaos. As Christ is wholly for others, we can be passively bound to
Christ through no work of our own.
In such a union, Christ bears the burden of our sins and death, bringing
us into right relationship with God as our Creator intended it. By bringing us into right relationship
with the Creator, God brings order to chaos, further creating cosmos through
Christ. For my own pastoral
context that hopefully extends well into the twenty-first century, speaking of
justification before God in terms of “bringing sapient creatures into right
relationship with God” will become increasingly important. As the line between humanity and
artificial sapience blurs, humanity may eventually achieve a sort of
immortality: the information that makes up our sapient minds at least, may
become eternal, if we so will it.
Thus, if death no longer is a universal outcome of life but rather a
choice, speaking of Christ as raising us from death to life will no longer hold
any power.
If
we may eventually be able to do such marvelous things as create a type of
eternal life, why, one might ask, could we not eventually bring ourselves into
right relationship with God? Quite
simply, in all of Her eternity, it could never be possible to know exactly what
right relationship with our Creator would even look like. Revelation, even through Christ, is
incomplete, and God has rightly ordained it this way. For instance, as even the Bible is written contextually, we
have very different portrayals of the life of Jesus. Creating a perfect moral system even based both upon God’s
revelation in the Bible and through human experience proves impossible, due the
many ambiguities and contradictions in life and Scripture. The question of sin itself is even
filled with ambiguities. In a
future where humans have created and perhaps merged with artificial yet
seemingly sapient creatures, is sin confined only to humanity? Could “spiritual machines,” as Ray
Kurzweil has termed them, be brought into right relationship with God?
Melanchthon’s description of original sin in his “Apology of the Augsburg
Confession” can help us with this problem:
When
they speak about original sin they fail to mention the more serious defects of
human nature like being ignorant of God, despising God, lacking fear and
confidence in God, hating the judgment of God, fleeing this judging God, being
angry with God, despairing of his grace, and placing confidence in temporal
things, etc.
Essentially, Melanchthon describes
sin as rebellion against God. If
another sapient creature (artificial or otherwise) were to know of God, belief
in God, yet also have the serious defect of rebelling against Her, could it not
be said that such a creature would be capable of sin?
When
speaking of Christ’s work before the Creator, one additional (and thankfully
more near-term) issue must be discussed: does God save non-Christian creatures
(people of other faiths or no faith) through Christ? The second-century theologian Justin Martyr can greatly
assist us with this question:
We
have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared
above that He is the Word of whom ever race of men were partakers; and those
who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought
atheists… So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason,
were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably… through
the power of the Word, according to the will of God the Father and Lord of all…
In our Christian tradition there
exists language that states Jesus is the Word for every race of humanity, including
atheists and those who lived before Christ, even if they were so evil as to
slay those who lived reasonably.
How, then, could Jesus not be the Word for a pious Muslim, Jew or
Buddhist? Christ is for everyone
and can act as the Word for anyone, regardless of that person’s faith or
action. God’s justice is not human
justice, and while the humility of the cross reminds me that I cannot know this
for sure, I wholeheartedly expect to see even those who I would consider the
worst of humanity eternally worshipping the Creator with me when chaos finally
evolves fully into cosmos.
IV.
Practical Conclusions
When
using Polkinghorne’s method of “critical realism” to develop a christology, one
must necessarily end up with a christology that is both high contextual in
terms of space, time and relationship yet also bears witness to the ancient
traditions of the Church and the community of saints both past and
present. One holding such a
christology must necessarily be in relationship with a wide variety of individuals,
and must do one’s best to attend to the diverse needs of all, working against
oppression and thereby following Christ’s example of being wholly for the
other. Keeping one’s chronological
context in mind also necessarily leads one to prayerfully and reverently try to
anticipate the future, in order to best minister to those saints yet to be born
(or perhaps, created). When
brought to bear on my own context, critical realism has led me to hold a christology
which states “through His life and triumphant resurrection over the sin of the
cross, Christ does for the cosmos what we sapient creatures cannot do on our
own: Christ shepherds us into right relationship with God.” This means recognizing that either “in
the cosmos” and/ or “before the Creator,” Christ redeems all creation, not just
humanity. Doing my best to care
for all of creation in all of its beautiful diversity therefore becomes a deep
Christian calling; without doing so, I cannot be whole. The cross however also reminds me that
no matter how strongly held my christological convictions might be, I could be
wrong, and I will never be able to bring myself into right relationship with my
Creator on my own. Luckily enough,
the humility of the cross can also remind one to occasionally take a break from
human reason, to go outside, look up at the stars, and soak in the marvelous
gifts of the cosmos God gives in Her wondrous eternity.
Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.
