of God in the “person” of the Holy Spirit. Here the Johannine notion of Jesus as the Word is taken up into a Trinitarian perspective derived from the thought of Jonathan Edwards as interpreted by Sang Hyun Lee.15 Part I develops this understanding by following what Karl Rahner called an ascending and then a descending Christology.16
Part II turns from the person of Jesus Christ to his work. The saving significances of Jesus,17 as articulated in various atonement theories, are here understood as what Charles Taylor calls “moral sources.”18 They are articulations of the saving significance of Jesus that move people to communicate in their own lives the goodness and beauty of God that Jesus incarnated in his, and that sustain them in doing so in spite of opposition to this and their own failures. This understanding of Jesus’ saving significance reflects the influence of modern liberalism, which is concerned with life in history as opposed to eternity,19 and a development within the past several generations of Christologies that has ancient roots that sees Jesus as a source of salvation for all.20 In light of this, that Jesus “saves” people in eternity is taken as a given. The question then becomes, what is his saving significance for people within history?
Part III focuses on some relationships of Jesus Christ to others. As the Word of God, Jesus Christ exists in history dialogically, giving shape and orientation to Christians’ lives, yet also being shaped by their needs and concerns, faithfulness, and creativity. As the Word, Jesus provides a center for Christians in history, but a center that exists in dialectical relationships to other religions and social movements, as a result of values that Jesus incarnates. Finally, part of Jesus’ saving significance is the influence he can have on a person through prayer.
This study of Jesus’ person, work, and relationships does not claim to be exhaustive. As John 21:25 indicates, no Christology can be. What it does claim is that understanding Jesus as the Word of God, grounded in what can be known historically of Jesus and informed by subsequent reflection upon him, can give Christians an identity characterized by what Serene Jones calls “bounded openness.”21 This is an identity bounded by what is revealed of God in Christ, yet open to the world. This Christology seeks to acknowledge Christian traditions so that they empower Christians to seek justice and resist evil, in a way that is open to critique and reformulation. At the same time it claims to find in Christ reasons for openness to others.
1. Schweitzer, Contemporary Christologies, 133–34.
2. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 69.
3. Brown, Epistles of John, 555.
4. Baum, Religion and Alienation, 218–19.
5. Ibid., 219.
6. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 2.
7. Ibid.
8. Baum, Religion and Alienation, 2nd ed,, 225.
9. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Taylor, Remembering Esperanza, 23.
12. Ibid., 31.
13. Ibid., 31–32.
14. Ibid., 41.
15. Lee, Jonathan Edwards.
16. Rahner, Foundations of the Christian Faith, 177.
17. The book works with a total of six saving significances or atonement theories: Gustav Aulén’s three; the Christus Victor, substitutionary, and moral influence theories, as well as a notion of Christ as revealing the nature of God (part I), Christ as working to reconcile humanity to God through his teaching (chapter 5), and Christ as the center of history (chapter 10).
18. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 91–93.
19. The modern liberal concern for life within history itself arose partly through the influence of the Reformation’s “affirmation of ordinary life as more than profane, as itself hallowed and in no way second class.” Ibid., 218.
20. Moltmann, Coming of God, 235–55.
21. Jones, Feminist Theory, 170.
Part I
Introduction to Part I
The following four chapters that comprise part I primarily seek to understand the person of Jesus Christ. The first three do this by following an ascending Christology, beginning with what can be known about Jesus historically and following the development of Christology in the early church and patristic era up until the Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). An ascending Christology seeks to show the legitimacy of the affirmations of these councils as ways of understanding Jesus by showing the continuity between what they state and what can be known about Jesus historically and what was affirmed about him by the early church in the New Testament
Chapter 1 offers a portrait of Jesus drawn from the quest for the historical Jesus. Faith in Jesus Christ does not usually begin with what can be known historically about Jesus and it is not based upon this. But this study of Jesus Christ begins here for the following reasons. The Gospels interpreted the history of Jesus each in a different way in light of his resurrection, the early church’s experiences of the Holy Spirit, and the concerns and insights of the church communities they originated from. The quest for the historical Jesus attempts to discern the historical figure of Jesus amidst this interpretation. The results of this quest are never final. But historical knowledge of Jesus can provide a check on the human imagination’s temptation to fashion images of Jesus determined by self-interests and can also help keep an understanding of Jesus historically concrete, showing how and where Jesus located himself amidst the social conflicts of his day. From this we can gain a sense of where one should follow Jesus and expect to encounter him in the present.
Chapter 2 examines New Testament descriptions of Jesus’ resurrection and its meaning for Christian faith. It is necessary