The Problematic Basis of the Incarnation, Part II

My last post was about a quite significant change that has taken place in Christian theology in the recent past. The recognition by Bible scholars that Jesus did not claim to be God, and the widespread acceptance of this by theologians, has forced Christian theology to rethink the basis of the doctrine of the incarnation. If it can no longer be based on Jesus's explicit teaching, it has to be based on something else. John Hick, in his book The Metaphor of God Incarnate, has identified four types of responses to this development, the first of which I described in the earlier post. Now I'll describe the other three.

The Christ-Event

The second type of response makes reference to the rather vague notion of the "Christ-event," a notion that generally blurs the lines between the events of Jesus's life and the Church's beliefs about him. The distinction between what Jesus taught and instituted and what the Church taught and instituted is no longer considered to be of any importance.

Hick notes that this idea does call attention to an important fact: "The meaning, for others, of anyone's life consists not only in the conrete actuality of that life itself but also in the way(s) in which he or she is perceived, revered or denigrated, remembered and responded to by others."¹

There is a problem with this particular approach, however:

We know of him (Jesus) only because others responded to him, with yet others responding to their responses, so that a movement developed which almost inevitably came to regard him as divine in the highly elastic sense in which outstanding religious and political figures were often regarded in the ancient world. This 'soft' divinity, expressed in the 'son of God' metaphor, eventually developed into the 'hard' metaphysical claim that Jesus was God the Son, second person of a divine Trinity, incarnate. But to use the 'Christ-event' concept to validate this development involves arbitrarily stretching that highly flexible 'event' at least as far as the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), and preferably to include the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE).²

One might ask, in other words, if the 'Christ-event' can last until the mid-fifth century, why not longer? Who gets to decide when enough development has taken place?

One possible answer to that questions brings us to the third type of response.

Guidance by the Holy Spirit

"This is," Hick notes, "mainly a Roman Catholic position."³ Unlike the 'Christ-event,' this idea can be used to validate any number of beliefs, which is how we ended up with two very dubious, but nevertheless "infallibly proclaimed" Marian dogmas in the last 156 years.

I don't really need to describe the doctrine, as we're all familiar with it: the Holy Spirit, some say, guides the tradition of the Church, protecting the leaders of the Church from teaching erroneously in matters of faith and morals. Since they have, in fact, taught that Jesus is fully divine, it must be true. If it wasn't true, God presumably would have intervened and stopped them from teaching it.

Hick's rebuttal of this idea is quite good, so I will quote it in full:

The claim to divine guidance of the church’s developing theology is prompted by the immense differences between that theology and the message of Jesus himself. But it should be evident that an appeal to the Holy Spirit cannot add anything to the case for the truth of the Chalcedonian or any other dogma. In propounding the further dogma that those who created the original dogma were divinely guided, one is simply shifting the point of debate from a first-order belief to the second-order belief that the first-order belief is divinely guaranteed. But we have no way of determining whether the councils were in fact divinely inspired other than by evaluating their pronouncements. If we can accept these as true we might accept that the authors were inspired in making them; if not, not. There is an obvious circularity here: one believes the dogma to be true because the ecumenical councils were divinely guided in declaring it, and one believes that they were divinely guided because one believes the dogma to be true. There is no escape here from the question of the first-order grounds for the dogma. This third response is thus deceptively redundant.⁴

The Heavenly Christ

The fourth response downplays the significance of the pre-Easter Jesus to some extent in favour of the Christ experienced as a present reality. Hick does not deny that Christians may have vivid experiences of Christ as present in their lives, but he notes that comparable phenomena are found in other religious traditions. Furthermore, I would point out that whatever people are experiencing when they experience Christ as a present reality, it is not a literal incarnation of God, which would imply a physical, bodily presence. It should be obvious, I think, that such experiences are incapable of grounding the belief in Jesus's divinity.

I'll have more to say about Hick's book in the near future.



Notes

All page references, unless otherwise noted, are to Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 2nd Edition.

[1] 36.

[2] Emphasis added; 36.

[3] 36. Hick does note some non-Catholic theologians who take this particular approach, including Richard Swinburne (an Anglican), and Stephen Davis, an Evangelical Protestant.

[4] 37.

The Problematic Basis of the Incarnation, Part I

I read John Hick's The Metaphor of God Incarnate a couple of years ago, and I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't have much of an impact on my way of thinking until I read it again last weekend.

I've decided to write an extended review of the book. It will take a few posts, as Hick packs a lot of argument into 188 pages. I want to share some of his insights, and hopefully encourage some people to read it, because I think it's a terrific and important book.

One thing Hick writes about at length is how New Testament research has completely undermined the traditional source of authority for the doctrine, namely Jesus's own teaching, putting theologians in the difficult position of finding a new basis for it.

The consensus among scholars -- even among those who affirm the Nicene-Chalcedonian formulas -- is that Jesus never claimed to be divine. Hick quotes a number of "orthodox" scholars' admissions to this effect, including Michael Ramsey, C.F.D. Moule, and James Dunn, as well as some Chalcedon-affirming theologians like Brian Hebblethwaite and David Brown.¹

This development is no small matter. Hick writes,

From at least the fifth to the late nineteenth century Christians generally believed that Jesus had proclaimed himself to he God the Son, second person of a divine Trinity, living a human life; and their discipleship accordingly included this as a central article of faith. But that supposed dominical authority has dissolved under historical scrutiny.²

With the traditional basis of the doctrine having collapsed, theologians who "adhere to the Nicene-Chalcedonian dogma...have had to find a new basis for it." He observes that they have "decided that the doctrine of the incarnation does not require the knowledge or consent of the historical Jesus himself."³

Hick questions whether an incarnate God who doesn't know that he's divine is an intelligible idea, and asks further "how it is possible for the church to know something so important about Jesus that he didn't know about himself?" He has identified four types of responses:

The first involves a qualification of the admission that Jesus was unaware of and did not teach his own deity. This response holds that he was implicitly aware of it in his uniquely intimate filial relationship with the heavenly Father, and that he implicitly taught it by his actions, particularly in abrogating the law of Moses and in forgiving sins.⁴

Hick accepts the "widely received view that Jesus' use of the word [abba] did constitute a genuinely new contribution to Western spirituality," but points out that Jesus taught his disciples to think of and address God in the same way. Hick also points out "that to experience God as one's heavenly Father is not the same as experiencing oneself as uniquely God the Son, second person of the divine Trinity."⁵

Similarly, Hick finds unpersuasive the argument that Jesus was claiming to be God by teaching some things contrary to the Torah, citing the argument by E.P. Sanders that Jesus only demanded the transgression of the law in one instance, that being in Matthew 8.22, when he said, "Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead."⁶

Another quotation from Sanders explains the weakness of the argument that Jesus's forgiving of others' sins entailed a claim to divinity:The oft-repeated claim that Jesus "put himself in the place of God" is overdone. He is often said to have done so in forgiving sins; but we must note that he only pronounced forgiveness, which is not the prerogative of God, but of the priesthood.⁷

In my next post, I'll describe the other ways theologians who affirm the traditional doctrine of the incarnation have responded to the modern discovery that Jesus did not claim to be God, as identified and described by Hick.

Go to Part II.

Notes

All page references, unless otherwise noted, are to Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 2nd Edition. See Works Cited.

[1] 27-28.

[2] 29.

[3] 29.

[4] 30.

[5] 31.

[6] 32. The argument from Sanders is in Jesus and Judaism, 267. I would argue, following John P. Meier's fourth volume of A Marginal Jew, that there were other instances in which Jesus abrogated the Mosaic law, specifically in his prohibition of oaths. Having said that, this prohibition conflicted with a rather obscure point of the Mosaic law, and I imagine it's possible that it never even occurred to Jesus that there was a conflict. See Meier, Marginal, 4.182ff.

I would further point out that disagreeing with the law does not imply a claim to divinity. Paul was far more liberal in his approach to the Torah than Jesus was, and he certainly never claimed to be divine. Sanders argues, "It was Jesus' sense of living at the turn of the ages which allowed him to think that the Mosaic law was not final and absolute," (Jesus and Judaism, 267; quoted in Hick, 32). Paul also understood himself as living "at the turn of the ages," and claimed authority on the basis of what he interpreted as a revelation to him from God. It strikes me as probable that Jesus understood his own authority in a similar way, and for a similar reason.

[7] Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 240; quoted in Hick, 32. It's ironic that this argument is sometimes made by Catholic priests -- and Hick notes that it has been used by Cardinal Walter Kasper in his book Jesus the Christ -- despite the fact that Catholic priests do exactly the same thing in the confessional everyday.

John Hick and "Multiple Resurrection"

I came across this on John Hick's website:

I found what John Polkinghorne had to say in his interview in the March Reform extremely interesting, particularly when he was speaking about resurrection. He believes not only that Jesus rose from the dead in a bodily form but also that we will also be resurrected in bodily form. He suggests that 'in some way the soul might have, in an extraordinary, elaborate sense, doors into the information bearing patterns of the body, which of course dissolve at death. But God remembers it all and God will re-embody it when I am resurrected. That will be the continuity between life in this world and life in the world to come.' Or as he has put it elsewhere, the body has a code or formula expressing its entire nature and structure, and this formula is reembodied as a resurrection body in the resurrection world.

This is a fascinating idea. It goes beyond the belief of the process theologians that we all exist eternally after death in the divine memory by adding that God uses that memory to re-embody us – which is much closer to traditional Christian belief. It is not unlike the 'replica' theory that I myself once proposed.

There does however seem to me to be a problem in it. Some people die in infancy, some as the result of an accident or war in early adulthood, some in middle age, most in old age. Whatever the age, the information or code or formula is that of the person at that age and in that condition. So a resurrected woman in her eighties dying of cancer will be the same woman in her eighties dying of cancer. And likewise with everyone else. But this cannot be what Polkinghorne intends. Are we, then, in our resurrected state suddenly miraculously to be cured of all diseases, and do we suddenly grow younger or older to some ideal age? All this is no doubt possible, but it complicates the theory to a point at which it ceases, to my mind, to be attractive or even plausible.

The older idea that at death we go to either heaven or hell is even more implausible. For at the end of this life few if any are good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell. We almost all need to develop and change, which means that we must live longer. And this must be in an embodied state in which we interact with one another, making moral choices and thus becoming better (or worse) people. This in turn seems to require another finite life, also bounded by birth and death, for it is these boundaries that make life serious and urgent. Because of life’s finitude we must get on with whatever we are going to do – we are not going to live for ever.

But one more such life will not be enough for most of us. This suggests a series of finite lives, each beginning, morally and spiritually, where the last left off. In other words, some form of reincarnation, or re-embodiment, or indeed multiple resurrection.

The article continues with an elaboration of this idea. I'm not sure how "multiple resurrection" would differ from reincarnation. Perhaps Hick feels that the terminology will be more acceptable to a Christian audience, though I suspect that if a Christian is willing to consider the concept of reincarnation as a possibility, they won't be scared of the traditional term for it.

I don't typically find ideas about the afterlife to be particularly interesting, and I don't have any particularly strong beliefs on the subject. Reincarnation is the only idea that could conceivably be empirically verified (to some degree, via past-life memories, for example).

I haven't written much on the subject in the past, but I might do a little bit in the near future, when I review Paul F. Knitter's terrific recent book, Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian. I imagine I could write a dozen posts on that book alone, as it was quite thought-provoking.

You can read the whole article by John Hick here.

Is forgiveness that has to be paid for really "forgiveness"?

From John Hick's The Metaphor of God Incarnate:

The basic fault of the traditional understandings of salvation within the Western development of Christianity is that they have no room for divine forgiveness! For a forgiveness that has to be bought by the bearing of a just punishment, or the giving of an adequate satisfaction, or the offering of a sufficient sacrifice, is not forgiveness, but merely an acknowledgment that the debt has been paid in full. (127)

Pluralism and Indifferentism

Introduction

A few years ago, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released the infamous Dominus Iesus, the secular press picked up on the fact that this was a controversial document. But they generally misunderstood the controversy. An Associated Press article, for example, ran under the title, “Vatican Rejects Equality of Religions.” As if that was news.

Dominus Iesus certainly had an arrogant tone, and this was indeed lamentable. But the suggestion that the Vatican might have affirmed that all religions are equal, and that their failure to do so was somehow newsworthy, was remarkably naïve. Never mind that it would have been a sudden and dramatic reversal of a nearly 2000 year old position, the bigger problem is that it doesn’t even make sense. It simply isn’t possible to coherently affirm that all religions are equal.

Why not? I’ll explain.

First of all, it has to be recognised that religions are not monolithic entities. If we wanted to decide which was better, Christianity or Buddhism, we would first have to decide which form of Christianity and which form of Buddhism we were going to compare. Within every religious tradition is a diversity of religious perspectives, some of which will be closer to the truth, or more conducive to “salvation” (however defined), than others.

Now, if I was to assert that all religious perspectives are equal, this would itself be a religious perspective. But the opposite of this – that all religious perspectives are not equal – is also a religious perspective. So I cannot assert that all religious perspectives are equal without also affirming the opposite. I would be contradicting myself.

We All Believe Our Beliefs Are True

If I affirm one perspective, and you affirm another perspective, I cannot coherently claim that your perspective is superior to my own. As soon as I decide that your perspective is superior, I would effectively be adopting that perspective.

One might argue that it is possible to affirm one perspective while acknowledging the other as an equally valid perspective. Actually, this is not possible.

Imagine two hypothetical religious traditions, which we’ll call P and Q. Traditionally the adherents of these religions have considered their own religion superior to the other. But times have changed, and people are becoming uneasy with the traditional triumphalism. On both sides there are some who maintain the superiority of their own tradition. We’ll call their positions Pe and Qe.

Let’s say I want to continue to call myself an adherent of P, I want to continue to attend services in a P house of worship, I find great richness and beauty and spiritual nourishment in the P tradition, etc., but I don’t want to affirm Pe. I can come up with a new position, which affirms that P and Q are equally valid. I call it Pp.

Have I succeeded in affirming a position without claiming that it is superior to others? No. If I affirm Pp, I nevertheless have to find my position superior to those who affirm Pe and Qe. If I affirm that P and Q are equally valid (i.e., Pp), I have to find Pp superior to Pe and Qe, because they deny that P and Q are equally valid. If I’m right, they must be wrong.

There’s probably a simpler way of saying that. But the point is, it is simply not possible to coherently assert that all religious perspectives are equally valid. Religious indifferentism is intrinsically incoherent.

Pluralism

So what about the so-called “pluralist” theologies? Traditionally, pluralism has been distinguished from not only exclusivism (which asserts that salvation is not available to those outside of a given religion), but from inclusivism as well.

Inclusivism, as it is usually understood, takes many forms, from the “anonymous Christian” idea of Karl Rahner (see Theological Investigations 6.390-398), to the less articulated position taken by the magisterium (see Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes).

An inclusivist believes that only their own religious perspective is fully “true,” but admits that those who share other perspectives can be saved. However, this salvation happens the way the inclusivist understands it. In other words, a Christian inclusivist might admit the possibility of a Muslim being saved, but they would likely assert that it is through Christ that the Muslim will be saved, and not through their submission to the will of God as defined by the Qur’an.

John Hick

This kind of inclusivism is rejected by John Hick, who is probably the best known pluralist theologian. Hick rejects inclusivism because, like the “intolerant exclusivism” that preceded it, inclusivism “rests upon the claim to Christianity’s unique finality as the locus of the only full divine revelation and the only adequate saving event” (Disputations 84). As Hick sees it, inclusivism doesn’t do enough to address what he calls the “destructive effects of the assumption of Christian superiority” (79).

Instead, Hick says Christians should see Christianity not as a superior religion, but “as one of the great world faiths, one of the streams of religious life through which human beings can be savingly related to that ultimate Reality Christians know as the heavenly father” (emphasis in original; 85).

I have a few problems with Hick’s “pluralist hypothesis,” but for now I’m only going to concentrate on one, which is his insistence that he has somehow transcended inclusivism. Inclusivists, as he sees it, believe that their religious perspective is true, and other religious perspectives are at least somewhat inferior. Still, unlike exclusivists, inclusivists admit the possibility of salvation for those not sharing their perspective. Only this salvation, if it will happen, will happen for the reason known to the inclusivists, not for the reason believed by those holding inferior perspectives.

Understood this way, how is Hick not an inclusivist? He believes that his pluralistic perspective is true, and that inclusivists and exclusivists are in error. Still, he admits that inclusivists and exclusivists can be saved, but for the reason understood by Hick. So what’s the difference?

The problem is with seeing exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism as discrete categories along a single axis (i.e., the traditional typology). Theologies are either exclusivistic or inclusivistic. Here the distinction concerns the scope of salvation: is it limited to the adherents of one religion, or not.

Within inclusivism there is a further division, along a different axis. There are the traditional inclusivist theologies, like Rahner’s, and the pluralistic inclusivist theologies, like Hick’s. Here the distinction concerns not the scope of salvation, but something quite different.

As for what this “something” is, I can offer only a tentative suggestion. It seems to me that the traditional inclusivists see their religion as, if not an entirely divine product, at least the product of a unique divine initiative. A traditional Christian inclusivist sees Christianity as the religion specifically intended by God. A pluralistic inclusivist like Hick sees Christianity as one of several human responses to the “infinite Real,” the differences between it and other religions being the result of the “different cultural ways of being human” (Interpretation 14). Not surprisingly, non-pluralist inclusivists and pluralist inclusivists tend to disagree over the doctrine of the incarnation, at least as it is traditionally understood.

Hick’s idea has much to recommend it, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say, but his failure to acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid asserting the superiority of one’s own views over those with whom one disagrees is very problematic. I have a few other problems with his work as well, but that will have to wait for another day.

Recommended Reading

S. Mark Heim, in his book Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion offers a similar critique of Hick (and others), but for somewhat different reasons. I disagree with some of Heim’s conclusions, but it’s one of the best critiques of the pluralism-as-distinct-from-inclusivism perspective I’ve come across.

John Hick has a number of very interesting articles on his official website. And they're not just about pluralism.