Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life - Don Schweitzer

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Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus, 92–94.

      4 Jesus Christ—the Word

       of God

      Why Develop a Descending Christology?

      A descending Christology seeks to understand Jesus in terms of the Trinitarian life of God. The preceding chapter traced how reflection on the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ led to the conclusion that God is eternally triune and that Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. This concept of God then becomes the starting point for a descending Christology that asks what it is about God that makes God’s being triune and leads to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The answers to such questions are necessarily speculative and seek to describe the ineffable, so as “to speak in some way about that which we cannot fully express in any way.”1 The basis for pursuing these questions lies in the experience of salvation through Jesus. This experience of salvation is also a commissioning to speak of God as encountered in Jesus as best one can, even though God remains mysterious, ultimately incomprehensible and so can never be finally known.2 Any understanding of God remains a work in progress and the limits of human knowledge have to be respected.

      Yet a descending Christology is necessary because talk of God never takes place in a vacuum. It is intrinsic to humanity to exalt something or someone. People live within moral horizons that inevitably esteem some values over others, investing some with ultimate concern.3 Some form of at least a minimal theology seems intrinsic to human life.4 Though God is ineffable, still one’s ultimate concern or vision of God is expressed in one’s life. Talk of one’s ultimate concern or concept of God is inevitable in examining the vision one lives by. The question is not whether one has an ultimate concern, but what it is. If one claims God as one’s ultimate concern the question is which God one believes in. A descending Christology seeks to develop a consistently Christian understanding of God.

      A descending Christology is speculative. It asks about what has not been directly experienced, the nature of God in eternity, on the basis of what has been experienced of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Such speculation is inevitable in any discussion of God or ultimate concern. It is not empty speculation if it proceeds on the basis of revelation as witnessed to in Scripture and with due attention to other forms of knowledge and experience. Without this inquiry the task of Christian theology to test the congruence of the church’s understanding of God with what it believes about Jesus remains unfulfilled. A descending Christology is a form of discernment, 5 an attempt to understand God as best one can in light of what one has experienced in Jesus Christ.

      God as Living and Absolute

      Christian theologians reflecting on Jesus’ relationship to God in the era of the council of Nicaea (325 CE) understood God’s being in terms of the Hellenistic axiom that the divine is absolute and impassible. This axiom developed partly through Plato and Aristotle’s critique of the depiction of the gods in the literature of Homer and Hesiod.6 In taking over this axiom Christian theologians internalized this critique of anthropomorphic understandings of God and affirmed God’s transcendence to humanity. Homer depicted the gods as the highest of beings, but as beings much like humanity in being subject to moral temptations and conflicts. Plato and Aristotle argued that God was beyond this. As the absolute, God was not a projection of humanity but the standard by which humanity should live. Patristic theologians took up this critique and in principle went beyond it, affirming God’s absoluteness, but also that God is living; able to do new things and moved by love to redeem creation.7 For the patristic theologians, God was not subject to temptation, but God was living. This last affirmation was undercut by their adoption of the axiom of divine impassibility. This axiom did not fit with the biblical notion of God as living,8 for life involves change and the actualization of potential. Adopting this axiom made it difficult to say why God created the world or acted to redeem it. The notion of God as absolute and therefore immutable expressed the power of God’s being in relation to sin and death, describing God as transcendent to both and so able to save humanity from them. But it cannot express the nature of God’s being as moved by love.9 This requires a more dialectical understanding of God’s relationship to creation, in which God is absolute but also internally related10 to it.

      The Hellenistic notion of God as absolute and immutable gave rise to a conception of God known as classical theism, in which God does not change, has no need of the world, and receives nothing from it. This notion of God as having no real relation to the world is deeply entrenched in Western Christian thought, but has been accurately criticized as inadequate on the basis of Christology,11 its inner incoherence, and its effective history, particularly in relation to women.12 Yet the idea of God as radically transcendent to creation, acting freely in relation to it, out of love but not out of ontological necessity, needs to be preserved for the doctrine of God to be adequate to the biblical witness and contemporary experience.13 One way to do this is to understand God’s being as an expression of God’s goodness.

      The Self-Diffusive Nature of God’s Goodness

      Central to Jesus’ preaching was an emphasis on the goodness of God as absolute and determining God’s actions in history.14 St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) made celebrating God’s goodness central to his understanding of Christian life. This had an influence in Franciscan theology.

      According to Anselm (c. 1033–1109 CE), God is absolute as that “than which nothing greater can be conceived.”15 Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274 CE), a Franciscan, applied this to God’s goodness. The good that is self-diffusive, that communicates and further expresses itself, is greater than the good that does not. God’s goodness, as “that than which nothing better can be thought,” must therefore be “supremely self-diffusive.”16 It must also be fully actual, as the good that is actual is greater than the good that is not. According to Bonaventure, the self-diffusion or communication of divine goodness occurs eternally in the generation of the second person of the Trinity and the spiration of the third. Through this God’s goodness is infinitely diffused and fully actual. Thus “the supreme communicability of the good demands necessarily that there be a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”17 Yet while God’s goodness is absolute in being supremely self-diffused in the Trinity in eternity, it remains open to further diffusion in time and space through creation and redemption,18 for the self-diffusive nature of the divine goodness is fulfilled in the eternal generation of the Word and spiration of the Holy Spirit but is not limited by this. Consequently it is open to further

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