Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Who's at the center?

The danger lies in a subjective and pragmatic approach to Christ in which it is not Christ himself, but the human subject who holds the focus of attention. Let us take someone, for example, who knows Christ because they value Christ for what he has done for them, because Christ satisfies their needs, and their christological knowledge is built up in that way, by value-judgements (A. Ritschl) or by judgements of experience (F. Schleiermacher, W. Herrmann). But if our knowledge of Christ is built up on the fact that we experience or value Christ as our redeemer, that we pass a judgement about Christ, that we make an existential decision in which we come to know and find ourselves, then our christology is essentially anthropocentric in character. Such a knowledge of Christ requires a prior store of human principles or tenets, categories or values, with which to measure out, in this or that coin, the market value of Christ. But true Christian faith can have nothing to do with such thirty pieces of silver, for they mean Christ's coming under human standards, the betrayal of the Son of God to a self-righteous humanity. Mankind and the human self are here set up as critics and evaluators of Christ and his work, and the judgements passed on Christ will naturally vary with the scale of values that mankind possesses. But all this presupposes that humanity is in possession of values capable of measuring or judging Christ and estimating his person: or to put it the other way round, it starts off by presupposing that Christ can be brought under our normal standards and criteria. It means in fact that Jesus Christ is little enough to be domesticated or subordinated to our own ideas and satisfactions.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 34

<idle musing>
Pretty earth-shattering idea, isn't it? I found myself doing a doubletake the first and second time I read it.
</idle musing>

No comments: