(The basis for this essay is primarily Lecture #3 in Sharon Betcher's Constructive Theology II: Christology course at Vancouver School of Theology, augmented by my own prior knowledge.)
There has been a (somewhat unfortunate in its implications) trend in our culture in at least the last century or so, and possibly the last fifteen centuries, to wait for The One who will have the special gifts and ability to (rescue/liberate/redeem/transform) us and our reality. From DC Comics’ “Superman”, who comes to earth as the (one and only) last survivor of a superior alien race, to Neo from “The Matrix”, we entertain a fictional realm in which all of our trust can be placed in a solitary individual who is worthy of that trust.
The results in the real world can be seen in the political arena - candidates are elected based on whether or not they seem like The One we have expected. And if they do, then two possible tragedies can result, both of which can be observed in recent history. First, the candidate thinks of him- or herself as The One, chosen and gifted to shepherd the people into redemption, in which case democracy and social justice go off the rails. Or, the candidate turns out to be just another person after all, in which case the public is left disillusioned and resentful.
There is a third unfortunate result of this type of thinking - those of us who are convinced that we are not The One convince ourselves that we must wait. That we are not gifted and chosen, and therefore can not change the world. That we must simply bear the times until someone (alien? ontologically distinct? miraculous?) other than we arrives.
One possible route through this unfortunate development is offered by Spirit Christologies. The “spirit” image was one of the first to be used to make meaning around the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. At the most basic level, they take Jesus to be a prophet of liberation and divine justice, bringing a spirit of resurrection to “dry bones” people, and ushering them into a new creation. Spirit pre-existed Jesus as a metaphor for the Divine, and some of his earliest followers came to speak of him being filled with the Spirit, thus becoming God’s adopted son.
The origin of this notion is related to the Exodus and Genesis stories, in which God’s spirit hovers over creation - first, in Exodus, the creation of a people from no-people, and second, in Genesis, the creation of a cosmos from a chaos. We also find the spirit hovering over the waters of baptism in the synoptic gospels - do we dare say that in Jesus’ baptism God is creating a son from a man who was no man’s son?
Jesus, then, was a man around whom the spirit of God was particularly active. People who had been “dry bones” felt resurrected in his presence, as though by the breath of God. People who felt (or were) ostracized or homeless suddenly found themselves “adopted” into a new household - created into a new people. People who were abused, humiliated, raped, and degraded found themselves turned into some-bodies, instead of no-bodies. And after his death, this spirit was still accessible to them.
The greatest problem with these Spirit Christologies is that they conflict with classical theism and trinitarian theologies. According to the trinitarian view (which was normative in Christianity from the councils of the 4th and 5th centuries CE right up until the second half of the 20th) the Spirit is very clearly the “third” of the three members. It came after Jesus (on the day of Pentecost) and was his representative on Earth. If it was active before he came, and if it was the agency by which he worked, then the trinitarian view becomes highly unstable.
Likewise classical theism, which holds that Jesus is “begotten, not made”. The Universe was made by God, and then fell away into sin, says classical theism. Therefore anything that arises from the “made” universe is tainted. Jesus, in order to be divine, needs to come from “outside” the made-ness of creation (not unlike Superman being flung to our planet from another galaxy). Only a Jesus who was “eternally begotten of the father” could do what classical theism required him to have done - redeem a world that was ontologically fallen. Adoption by the spirit was simply not enough to satisfy the demands of the 4th century church.
If we are no longer beholden to classical theism (defined by Sharon Betcher in her lecture as “depending on a big God-Daddy outside the world”) and do not consider the world to be “fallen” from perfection into an ontological state of evil (but rather, perhaps, “fallen” into illusion and disharmony) then we do not require a Christ who was begotten outside of creation. Can we perhaps find meaning for our lives in spirit christology, as so many have in the last several decades?
One benefit that these approaches offer is in response to the problem outlined above, regarding waiting for The One. If the purpose of The One is to empower us with the Spirit, then we need not wait, because that spirit is moving now. All we must do is step out to meet it. And if we wait to put all of our trust into one individual, without trusting ourselves to be vessels of the spirit, then we will inevitably be disappointed. This will be seen as threatening, though, to many who hold religious authority and who wish to be the arbiters of theological truth.
To this point, my definition of a Christian has been “any person for whom Jesus holds decisive theological significance.” One criterion of a defensible Christology, then, is the role of Jesus in these terms. I believe that Spirit Christologies have no problems in this area. For when people encountered Jesus, they found themselves filled with the spirit, renewed, liberated, resurrected. And people continue to have this experience when they encounter the stories of him, and the community (of some-bodies) that continues to bear his name.
Someday, perhaps, that experience will no longer be accessible through him and his stories, but the spirit will nevertheless continue to blow new life into dry bones.
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