Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

That's all. But that's more than enough, isn't it?

What will it be?

Once again the great dilemma is: either in Jesus Christ we are confronted by the eternal God in history, so that the person of the historical Christ as man and God is of utmost importance; or Jesus is only the historical medium of a confrontation between me and the act of God which summons me to decision, but in which I reach a self understanding which enables me to live my life bravely. Here christology passes away into some kind of existentialist anthropology.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 263

Is he God? Or only worthy of honorable mention?

It is clear now that if we give up the classical christology or even approach Jesus from a purely historical angle, the historical events which belong to the life and death of Jesus fall away as of no final significance. The great dilemma is this: either in Jesus Christ we are confronted by God, and by one whose person is himself of the utmost importance, or Jesus is in the end only a teacher, a religious genius, the greatest man that ever lived but who, before the absolute importance of timeless and eternal truths, sinks into only an honourable mention.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 261

If Christ is not God, then?

If Christ is not God, if God is not fully and wholly present in Christ and identical with Christ, then God does not reconcile the world to, himself, and the work of Jesus is not eternally valid, but is only temporal and contingent and relative. If Christ is not God, then the love of Christ is not identical with God's love, and so we do not know that God is love. We may know that Christ is love, but if he is not really God in the complete sense, then all we have in Jesus Christ is a revelation of man, of humanity at its noblest reaching up into the clouds. If Christ is not God, then we do not have a descent of God to man. Thus as the obverse of the fact that Christ's real humanity means that God has actually come to us and dwells among us, Christ's deity means that God himself has come to save us. The dogma of the humanity of Christ asserts the actuality in our world of the coming of God, and the dogma of the deity of Christ asserts the divine content of our knowledge and salvation, the objective reality of our relation to God himself. The dogma of the deity of Christ means that our salvation in Christ is anchored in eternity: that it is more sure than the heavens.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 188

Finding a christological balance

[H]ow can we be faithful in our theological statements to the nature of the eternal being of the Son who became man and who yet remains God, and at the same time be faithful to the nature and person of the historical Jesus Christ?

That has been the constant problem of theology. We see it already in the early church, in the contrasting emphases between Antioch and Alexandria, in the tendency of the logos christology even before that to depreciate the historical Jesus. Then, after the battle with Arianism, we see a tendency of post-Nicene christology while affirming the true humanity of Christ, to fail to give adequate account of the saving significance of the historical humanity of Christ, content apparently to give the historical Jesus a place only in the liturgical year, and not in the actual doctrine of Christ. By contrast the modern tendency, especially in the west has been to give an account of Christ solely in terms of what he did for man, rather than in terms of his person and being as the Son of God become man, with the result that the doctrine of Christ tended to be displaced by historicism on the one hand, or religious experience and spiritual values on the other hand.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 182

Becoming flesh

However, while we must say all that about the flesh that the Word assumed, we must also say that in the very act of assuming our flesh the Word sanctified and hallowed it, for the assumption of our is itself atoning and sanctifying action. How could it be otherwise when he, the Holy One took on himself our unholy flesh? Thus we must say that while he, the holy Son of God, became what we are, he became what we are in a different way from us. We become what we are and continue to become what we are as sinners. He, however, who knew no sin became what we are, yet not by sinning himself. Christ the Word did not sin. He did not become flesh of our flesh in a sinful way, by sinning in the flesh. If God the Word became flesh, God the Word is the subject of the incarnation, and how could God sin? How could God deny God, be against himself, divest himself of his holiness and purity? Thus his taking of our flesh of sin was a sinless action, which means that Jesus does not do in the flesh of sin what we do, namely, sin, but it also means that by remaining holy and sinless in our flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh he assumed and judged it by his very sinlessness.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 63

The centrality of the incarnation

Now when we listen to the witness of holy scripture here we know we are faced with something we can never fully understand, but it is something that we must seek to understand as far as we can. One thing should be abundantly clear, that if Jesus Christ did not assume our fallen flesh, our fallen humanity, then our fallen humanity is untouched by his work — for ‘the unassumed is the unredeemed’, as Gregory Nazianzen put it. Patristic theology, especially as we see it expounded in the great Athanasius, makes a great deal of the fact he who knew no sin became sin for us, exchanging his riches for our poverty, his perfection for our imperfection, his incorruption for our corruption, his eternal life for our mortality. Thus Christ took from Mary a corruptible and mortal body in order that he might take our sin, judge and condemn it in the flesh, and so assume our human nature as we have it in the fallen world that he might heal, sanctify and redeem it. In that teaching the Greek fathers were closely following the New Testament. If the Word of God did not really come into our fallen existence, if the Son of God did not actually come where we are, and join himself to us and range himself with us where we are in sin and under judgement, how could it be said that Christ really took our place, took our cause upon himself in order to redeem us?—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 62

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>

Avoiding that suffering Messiah

Just as Judaism had consistently avoided the whole notion of a suffering Messiah, so the New Testament witnesses themselves reveal that they too shrank from it but were forced to acknowledge it by the historical interweaving of the particular history of Jesus and the whole history of Israel. It was therefore against their own piety that they were forced to interpret the passion of Jesus in terms of the suffering servant. History would not allow them to do anything else.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 17

The centrality of the incarnation

Everything in Christianity centres on the incarnation of the Son of God, an invasion of God among men and women in time bringing and working out a salvation not only understandable by them in their own historical and human life and existence, but historically and concretely accessible to them on earth and in time, in the midst of their frailty, contingency, relativity and sin. Whatever christology does it cannot depreciate or minimise historical existence with its stark factuality. It stands or falls with the fact that here in our actual history and existence is the saviour God. The historical element is absolutely essential, for apart from it the whole mystery of Christ is dissolved into thin air, and the incarnation means nothing at all.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 8

A true Christology

If Jesus be really Reconciler and Lord, then He is God. Faith knows that this is what He is. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.” And this divine existence, this truly revealing, truly reconciling, and truly ruling force, is not an impersonal Word, given by God, a power inspired by God, but it is the Person of Jesus Himself. This is the very heart of the truth of Jesus as the Christ, that in Him God really meets us, and that this meeting with God is itself based upon the personal being of Jesus, and is one with Him. Jesus is the One in whom God meets us personally—not impersonally.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 348–49

Apostolic Christology

As we look back on the whole course of the doctrine [of Christology], from the beginning, in the testimony of Jesus to Himself, down to the developed Christological doctrine of the New Testament, we can see no break anywhere. The whole Johannine teaching of Jesus the Son of God is simply a further development of that confession of Peter, which first became possible on the basis of the death of Jesus on the Cross, and the Resurrection. Everywhere Jesus is True Man, a man among men, and yet, in the very earliest records, He stands over against all other men with an authority which only God possesses. Rationalist historical criticism which maintained that there was a contradiction between the historical picture of Jesus and the Christ of apostolic theology cannot appeal to historical testimony for its statements. It was those who knew the “Jesus of History” best, His companions, who proclaimed Him as the Son of God, and as their Risen and Heavenly Lord.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 251

<idle musing>
Looks like Brunner is very firmly in the "early high-Christology" camp, doesn't it? I agree. I think the records very firmly endorse a very high Christology along the lines of what Larry Hurtado (among others) has written about.
</idle musing>

Christology of the Early Church

We know little of the Christology of the Primitive Church; but what we do know wlth complete certainty is enough. The first disciples know and testify that Jesus is the Christ, the Risen Lord, whom they invoke in prayer, in the same way as the Jew would call upon God alone, using the Aramaic name, which is only applied to God: Maran, Lord. In the Lord’s Supper they celebrate the Presence of the Living Lord. His death is for them no longer an “offence” or a cause of doubt, but a saving fact, even if they have not yet worked out any doctrine about the two saving facts, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Thus the “Christology” of the Primitive Church—if we may be permitted this expression—is in unbroken and unquestioned continuity in two directions: with all that the disciples have handed down to us from His own mouth, and from His Life, on the one hand; and, on the other, with all that the new Apostle, Paul, taught, who was the first to interpret all that they believed in theological terms. There are great differences, it is true, between certain representatives of the Primitive Church and Paul; but there is not the faintest trace in the New Testament of any idea that these differences were related to Christology, to the Person of Jesus. The Primitive Church confesses, its own faith in the Pauline doctrine of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 250

Kenosis—never-ending!

A profound mystery: God becomes a slave. This implies very specifically that God wants to be known through servanthood. Such is God’s own self-disclosure. Thus, when Jesus describes His return in glory at the end of the world, He says, “Happy those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. I tell you solemnly, he will put on an apron, sit them down at a table and wait on them” (Luke 12:3, emphasis added).

Jesus remains Lord by being a servant.—Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child, 141–42 (all emphasis his)

One sentence sums it up

Jesus is Lord above all lords is the shape of Christian political life.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 233

But it's not supposed to happen that way!

This [the definition of "Messiah"] is particularly important to remember for the title Christ, for in fact nowhere before Jesus is there any indication that the Messiah was expected to be denounced by the leaders of the Jewish people and subsequently killed by pagan decree. Luke himself articulates the novelty of this notion through the mouth of Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus. The two are returning home after Jesus’ death at Passover and meet a stranger along the road. In response to his question about the cause of their obvious dejection, they say, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21; cf. Acts 1:6). The implication could hardly be more apparent: their messianic hope went unfulfilled. The rest of the Gospel, together with Acts, then develops the transformation in the meaning of Messiah to include suffering and death. In the final scenes of the Gospel, for example, an exegetical lesson is given by no less than Jesus himself. And what did he teach? “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:25–27). The idea of a suffering and dying Messiah is unexpected enough to require a lesson by the Messiah himself.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 122

Early Christology?

Where modern New Testament scholars have routinely believed that Jesus was acclaimed Lord only after his death and resurrection, Luke makes clear that he was Lord from the moment of his existence. Jesus’ identity is inseparably bound to his emergence in the world as the Lord. To be Jesus, Luke's story line says, is to be the Lord.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 120

<idle musings>
Agreed! I never understood the late Christology position. Even Bart Ehrmann, a self-avowing agnostic, when he researched for his book on Christology ended up in the early Christology camp.
</idle musing>

In summary

At the most basic level, whether we ask these kinds of questions of our congregations or of our individual selves, the New Testament christological hymns have the potential to challenge contemporary Christians to consider whether our view of Jesus is expansive enough. The remarkable portrait of reality painted by the New Testament christological hymns is that of an imaginal world—a real world but one that cannot yet be perceived in the visible space around us—in which Jesus is Lord of all, the unique agent of God’s work of redemption inclusive of Jews and Gentiles, inclusive of all people. If the church was born in the matrix of worship, and worship was centered on the crucified, risen, and exalted Jesus to the glory of God, then Christian vitality depends on growing and maturing in relationship with these origins. The New Testament christological hymns bring us with laser focus to the birth and infancy of the early church as it wrestled with its culture, its traditions, and its message of good news for all people. Our deep reflection and appropriation of the meaning of the New Testament christological hymns today could be a catalyst to a renewal and rebirth that is needed in the present moment as much as it ever has been.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, pp. 234–35

<idle musing>
And so ends this book. I hope you enjoyed it, even though it was a bit dragged out. My take on the book, if you are interested, is that it's not what I thought it would be. And that's a good thing. I was looking for it to be a bit more forceful, presenting questionable evidence to claim great things about christological hymns in the NT. It doesn't. It has more modest, attainable goals. It claims that there is enough evidence that there are hymn-like sections in the NT that might be preexisting hymns, or they might have been composed for the book itself. They might give us insight into early Christian worship.

So, it is a better book than I anticipated it being, although not as thrilling. Maybe that's why it took me longer to get through it?

New book, starting tomorrow. We've been in the NT for a while, so let's head to the OT for a bit, but first we'll sidetrack for a couple of days into the wild and woolly world of the ANE with Robert Miller's latest book, Baal, St. George, and Khidr, a fun little book, but very difficult to extract stuff from; you really need to check it out of your local library (OK, probably have to ILL it) and read.
</idle musing>

The continuing tradition

One third-century hymn, “Phos Hilaron [Jesus Christ the cheerful light],” is still in use today. The developments in these later hymns are noted by McGuckin [Path of Christianity], who explains that those “tendencies toward personal mystical union evoked in the second-century materials” were later set aside in favor of more dogmatic and instructive hymnody in the post—Nicene era.” But he also notes that this dimension of early Christian worship was not entirely lost: “This more intimate psychic aspect of hymnic writing passed on into the ascetical literature of the Eastern church."—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 231

So what does it prove?

First the christological hymns as a whole portray Christ as the exalted Lord who is the ultimate victor over all powers. This victor motif was important to vindicate Christ in light of his shameful death on the cross. It was also important in drawing out the implications of Christ’s present status for the daily practical realities of his followers. Christ’s exalted status offered hope to believers in the midst of the Roman World in which Christ was not yet obviously reigning as Lord.

Second, as a result of this exalted status above all powers, Christ is understood to be worthy of worship alongside God. This participation in receiving worship was implicit in some hymns but explicit in others. These two themes cohere with Ralph Martin’s summary statement: “If there is one motif that pervades the New Testament hymns, it is this ringing assurance that Christ is victor over all man’s enemies, and is rightly worshipped as the Image of the God who is over all.” Bauckham expresses something similar when he writes, “The earliest hymns celebrated the saving death and heavenly exaltation of Jesus as the one who now shares the divine throne and, as God’s plenipotentiary, receives the homage of all creation.” The exalted status of Jesus is closely connected with the idea that he is worthy of divine worship.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 225