ABSTRACT
Christians worship a vulnerable God, one who, for the salvation of humankind, came down from heaven, was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and was executed ec by the Roman authorities in occupied Jerusalem sometime between 29 and 33. The historical actuality of the life of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, fully divine and fully human, has always been fundamental to classical Christian faith. For the first Christian theologians the Docetic suggestion that Jesus merely appeared to be human and was not therefore subject to the realities and contingencies of history, together with the Ebionite suggestion that Jesus, though the greatest of prophets, was not actually divine, constituted the two paradigmatic distortions of classical incarnational theology. Colin Gunton has shown how these heresies have been replicated in the modern era (Gunton 1983). (1) Docetism reappears in the guise of Deism, the dominant theology of the Enlightenment, which denied any possibility of an immutable deity becoming a mutable human being, since that would allow the accidental truths of history to override the necessary truths of reason. Though the life of Jesus could be read idealistically, as a symbolic representation of an eternal ideal, it could not be seen to embody, let alone generate and actualise, eternal truth. Thus the eternal significance of Jesus is effectively dislocated from his historical actuality. (2) Ebionism reappears in the guise of naturalism, the emergent philosophy of the mainstream Enlightenment, which denied the existence of any transcendent realm above, beyond or ingrained within the natural order. On a naturalist reading, though Jesus was certainly a flesh-and-blood human being, he could not possibly be divine, or representative of any form of transcendent reality. Idealists sought to protect eternal transcendent truth by denying any necessary relationship between the eternal ideals of Christianity and the Jesus of history; naturalists sought to deny eternal transcendent truth by reducing Jesus to an ordinary human being. Thus, with the dawning of the Enlightenment, the ancient heresies of Docetism and Ebionism were reconstituted in distinctively modern guises: either the eternal significance of Jesus has no necessary connection with his historical person, or the historical person of Jesus has no eternal significance. Where once Paul’s proclamation of Christ crucified constituted a ‘stumbling-block’ to ancient Jewish scholars who could not accept Jesus’ divinity, and ‘foolishness’ to Hellenistic philosophers who could not accept God’s mutability, so now assertions of Jesus’ divinity constitute an affront to empiricist-and positivist-minded naturalists unable and unwilling to discern any eternal significance in the historical Jesus, while assertions of the eternal transcendental significance of the all-too-human Jesus constituted an affront to rationally minded idealists unable and unwilling to accept that eternal ideals can be embodied in and constituted by contingent historical events. Insofar as orthodox Christianity persisted in seeking to identify, in the hypostatic union of Christ’s divine and human natures, the essential unity of contingent historical events and eternal transcendent truths, it rejected philosophical idealism and naturalistic reductionism in favour of a heady combination of historical and theological realism.
