St Mary's Church Almondsbury
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THEOLOGY 1: How can Jesus be divine and human? A summary of the talk given by Rev John Hadley; the first in our series entitled “Theology for the Layman / Laywoman”.			X-plore Programme
Obviously, nothing could be more utterly different than God and humanity – so how could the two possibly come together in one person? Council of Chalcedon – doctrine of the two natures of Christ – seems so artificial; based on a static model that stems from later Greek philosophy Apollinaris rejected this picture, saying that in Christ the divine Word took the place of ordinary humanity: but was rejected as a heretic How can we find a more helpful picture? Are God and humanity really so utterly different? (1) God. Phil. 2.6, wrongly translated as e.g. “did not snatch at equality with God” but what it actually says is oukh harpagmon hegesato to einai isa Theou: (literally “not a snatching he thought being equal with God”, that is “he did not think (that) being equal with God (was) (a matter of) snatching/grasping..... “..... but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming in the likeness of humans...” In other words, divinity does not involve snatching, standing on a pedestal, being superior: on the contrary, divinity involves self-emptying, humility, giving one’s self away. Christ was not less divine by becoming human: on the contrary, that is how he showed his divinity. And this is not an isolated text: throughout the gospels, Jesus rejects the model of “Son of God” which involves power, difference, superiority: and accepts only that of self-giving love (cf the Temptations, Peter’s confession, and all the sayings about giving up one’s life in order to find it, taking up one’s cross etc etc). It is because he is willing to go all the way to the cross that he is truly divine: only so can he embody God who is the God of love. (The dispute over the unwarranted phrase “and the Son” (filioque, which the Western church added to the Nicene Creed, is much more than a quibble about words, because, with this addition, Jesus is left up there with God rather than down here with us.) (2) Humanity. Again, we assume that humanity is as different from God as it could be. But Genesis 1 tells us that men and women are made in the image of God Some theologians say that at the “Fall” this divine image was entirely lost; but this is not our experience. Divinity still lurks in our depths, and calls out, beckons, sings to us – an experience we know as longing or yearning... “And so the yearning strong with which the soul doth long shall far out pass the power of human telling...” Shakespeare in a couple of his gloomier passages refers to “man” as “this quintessence of dust” and as a “poor, bare, fork’d animal”; but in fact the very sadness of these passages is itself a pointer to a world beyond the dust. The Oxford chemist and atheist Peter Atkins maintains that the sciences are the only true indicators of reality: the arts might have their place as a pleasing escape from reality, but they are not serious academic disciplines. Whereas I would maintain it is the arts which, intentionally or otherwise, constantly transfigure the merely material and point us to the spiritual reality of God. Thus a sculptor can take a familiar shape and show us in it something we have never seen before; painters can astonish us, with the synergy of their subject and their materials, by making the mundane beautiful; and a musical genius like Mozart can use the simplest combinations of notes to take us into a different world. If Atkins is right, of course, all this remains an irrelevant distraction: but for me it is evidence (?) of the hidden divinity which every so often breaks out “like shining from shook foil” as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. And in Christ, the Son of Man, the Second Adam, we see someone in whom our calling to divinity has been realised. The more human we are, the more divine we become. Those who have tried, for political or even religious ends, to “quench the spirit”, to suppress the divinity in humans – Shakespeare’s Malvolio, Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, the Taliban (don’t have fun, don’t enjoy, don’t embellish, don’t laugh, don’t sing) – are on a horrific but in the end a doomed enterprise: the cakes and ale will always reassert themselves. Perhaps this is why the “sin against the Holy Spirit” is for Jesus the ultimate blasphemy. (3) I have described a God whose divinity is known not in aloof grandeur but in self-giving love; and a humanity which is at its truest when it is unearthing divinity in its heart. Far from being polar opposites, God and humanity constantly reach out to one another and yearn to be at one. The New Testament is full of language along these lines: the voices from heaven, the prayers of Jesus, and Paul’s astonishing language of reconciliation: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself... for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5.19,21). And it is good that at the very heart of the Bible lie those few pages of mysterious and passionate yearning which we call the Song of Songs. The coming together of God and humanity in Christ is not an intractable proposition or a complicated diagram, leading to a very unconvincing piece of psychology (how could someone with two natures really be one of us?), but a love story; one which ends, not with God grudgingly “adopting” us his children again once Jesus has made a suitable sacrifice for us: but with Christ welcoming us as sharers of his sonship, of his divine humanity, in what he calls “the Kingdom of God”.
Contact the Church Office Rev. Philip W. Rowe, Vicar of Almondsbury and Olveston with Aust The Vicarage, 3 Sundays Hill, Almondsbury, Bristol, BS32 4DS 01454 613223		Email the Website Administrator