The second meeting of the Theologue-Troy group was held this past Friday at Village Coffee in
We have posted below the notes from Tyler Gresham's presentation on Contextual Chsitologies.
Within this discussion I want to discover what the orthodox view is of Christ and what contemporary contextual christologies say about Christ.
Orthodox Christology
Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can come to the father but by Him (John 14:6). He is one with the Father (John
What does Christ’s salvific work accomplish?
The atonement (Christ’s death for humanity’s sins) redeems us to God.
“Christ died once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter
“For if we have become united with Him [Christ] in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin” (Romans 6:5-6).
Our union with Christ kills death and removes us from the bondage of sin. Christ is our redeemer and savior, according to Orthodoxy. Our belief in His death and resurrection removes us from sin’s bondage and He is the only way to the Father.
Process Christology
Process Christology uses Heraclitus’s (540-475 BC) oft quoted dictum: “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” The christology uses Einstein’s principle of relativity and William James’s stream of consciousness thought as examples of process thought.
“The goal of process theology, based on the analysis of process philosophy, is to determine the relevance of the Christian faith for a culture increasingly imbued with the sense of becoming” (190).
“The most important concept is ‘actual entity’ or ‘occasion of experience.’ Everything in the universe, from God to the smallest puff of existence, is an entity. Each entity has two sides: mental and physical” (190).
God, therefore, is an entity, but perhaps a “‘bigger’ entity than others.” So, He is not distinct from the world, but a part of the world. “God and the world require each other for the intelligibility of each” (190). Therefore, to experience the world we must at some level also experience God. Process theology also highlights the tender, feminine aspects of God.
Process Christology has two main streams of thought: there are some process theologians “to whom Christ is just an extraordinary person, not a special revelation in the classical sense of the term”(192). “Christ is different only in degree, not in kind, from God’s other revelations” (192). The other stream of process thinkers believe Christ is unique and “is special in his personhood” (193). Both camps are universalist, believing that Christ is not an absolute savior because this would not align with God being love.
Process thinkers believe that the world is in the process of becoming, so God does not even know the course of the world. He has not predetermined or foreknown the future.
Process theologians have a great hope for the future, and that “God’s subjective aim is that the entities of the world constantly experience greater value. In that sense, total openness to the future provides the basis for hope that progress will occur.” There are problems with this openness, for it “is also risky. Human beings may choose self-annihilation in terms of ecological catastrophe caused by human actions or nuclear war. Even God cannot guarantee the future of the creation though the hope of the
As for an afterlife, “human beings do not enjoy the immortality or experience resurrection in the traditional orthodox sense but rather add to the enjoyment of God and are ‘remembered’ by God” (195). This closely resembles a combination of Christianity and Buddhism.
Feminist Christology
“Many feminist thinkers insist that the personification of God as Father is a form of patriarchy and makes mechanisms for the oppression of women appear justified; from this grows male dominance” (196-7). “Gregory of Nazianzus ridiculed his opponents who thought God was male because God is called Father, or that deity is feminine because of the gender of the word, or that of the Spirit is neuter because it does not have personal names. Gregory insisted that God’s fatherhood has nothing to do with marriage, pregnancy, midwifery, or sexuality. God is not male, even though we call God him. It is just a conventional ways of using language. Christian theology believes that none of the divine Persons has a gender, but in their actions in humanity and the world, each Person is manifested under names borrowed from the genders” (197). Therefore, feminist thinker Elizabeth Johnson prefers to call God “She Who Is.”
According to Naomi Goldberg: “Jesus Christ cannot symbolize the liberation of women. A culture that maintains a masculine image for its highest divinity cannot allow its women to experience themselves as the equals of its men. In order to develop a theology of women’s liberation, feminists have to leave Christ and the Bible behind” (197-8).
Many women, and men, have embraced this theology because of the past when women were called “the gateway to hell” and “less than male,” because of the oppression that women in the church have experienced, and because of the interrelatedness of women with the experience of being mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. Perhaps in the past a single male figure could represent all humanity, but with the thought of the interrelatedness of life today this is no longer so, according to feminist theology.
With this interrelatedness, God is no longer known “in the inner chamber of the heart or at a solitary place but in the true community of women and men. As a result, the experience of God is ‘the social experience of the self and the personal experience of sociality’” (199).
Feminist thinkers also argue that Christ is a prototype rather than an archetype. “This means that the biblical tradition of a male Jesus addressing his male Father is not an exclusive source but a re-source (only one way) for thinking about Jesus” (200). This has led many feminists to call Christ with the feminine Christa.
Therefore, when discussing salvation, feminists align “with liberation theologians” and recognize “salvation as a holistic shalom, social and physical wholeness and harmony. Salvation is understood relationally, between human beings and in relation to God. Only that kind of holistic approach can equip the church to fulfill its task in promoting justice, peace, and wholeness” (202).
Black Christiology
“The starting point for black theology in general and black Christology in particular is black experience. The proponents of this contextual theological movement argue for the uniqueness of black history and current experience, which have been taken into consideration in doing theology” (204). Therefore, liberation is a key point for black theology and Christology.
James Cone, the most famous black liberationist, “defines liberation as working so ‘that the community of the oppressed will recognize that its inner thrust for liberation is not only consistent with the gospel but is the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ Thus to speak of liberation as God’s work and intention in the world means that one must understand liberation as a permanent, final, and ultimate feature of one’s existence” (204-5). Therefore, the task of theology is “to identify with the humiliated and the abused” (205).
So, black theologians base their theology on their African heritage. They emphasize the “legacy of slavery and the struggle to survive under harsh and unjust oppression. ‘African slaves who embraced Christianity also modified and shaped it to meet their existential needs and saw, even in the contorted presentations of the gospel by some white people, a continuity between what they knew of God in Africa and the God of the Bible’” (205).
Therefore, African Americans have brought their own folktales and mythologies to the table as well, and with these they tell stories about God. James Evans, another prominent black theologian, notes, “‘The two stubborn facts of African American Christian existence are that God has revealed God’s self to the black community and that this revelation is inseparable from the historic struggle of black people for liberation’” (206).
In light of this, Christ becomes a very powerful figure for blacks. “‘The Messiah embodies the nationalist hopes and dreams of an oppressed people….It is noteworthy that continued oppression and travail did not destroy the messianic dream but intensified it’” (206).
The hope for a messianic age also included the hope that that age would issue forth an in-gathering of the people of God. “The idea of the in-gathering of the people of God seemed to support the hopes of pan-Africanism and the radical transformation of the world order and gave hope for the coming of justice and peace” (207). Furthermore, Evans believes that the “‘center of the African heroic poem is the epic hero.’” Many African Americans see the messianic hero as an epic hero. So, “this African mode of figural interpretation allows African American Christians to see in Jesus not only an epic hero who embodies the values that promote the liberation of the oppressed but also a mediator who is concerned about their daily survival” (207).
The black Messiah has aroused a heated debate between the larger theological community. While some blacks, such as Albert Cleage, believe in an actual, historical black Messiah (Cleage goes as far to suggest that the Bible was written by black Jews and that Christ was a Zealot attempting to overthrow the government to establish a black nation of Israel), many others believe in the historical Jewish Christ, and that “he is also the redeemer of each and every specific group. ‘The black Christ participates in the black experience. In some sense Christ makes contact with what the black Christian is aware of in his unique history and personal experience’” (209). Moreover, this makes the black Messiah a “mythical construct” to help blacks escape the negative views of being black.
Postmodern Christology
Postmodernism is one of the most recent of the schools of religious thought. “The postmodern notion of religion is characterized by consumerism: ‘The individual in the role of consumer is encouraged to pick and choose from a vast inventory of religious symbols and doctrines, to select those beliefs that best express his or her private sentiments’” (213). In postmodernism, “the church of the third millennium finds itself in the midst of a culture that has become ‘nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom’” (213).
With this attitude, “postmodernism cherishes pluralism and divergence and encourages consideration of the radical ‘contextuality’ or ‘situatedness’ of all thought forms and philosophies” (214). Postmodernist thinkers base their pluralism in the belief that “language is whimsical and capricious and does not reflect overarching, absolute linguistic laws. Consequently, one of the major tasks of postmodernist study is to deconstruct language; there is virtually no relationship between what the author meant and how the reader understands and appropriates the text….Some postmodernists even go so far as to say that the very idea of ‘meaning’ is a forced concept, implying that somebody had the authority to define the meaning” (214-5).
Therefore, postmodernists believe that no meaning can be placed on the biblical text. “The notion that there is a meaning to a biblical text—whether ascertained by church authority as in the premodern period or by critical scholarship as in the modern period—is blasphemy to the postmodern mind-set” (215). So, postmodernists have no real Christology because the system is “hostile to claims concerning a determined meaning” (215).
There are postmodern theological texts, but they are quite different from any other theological text. Mark Taylor, a postmodernist theologian, devised what he calls a/theology (a designation for a sort of anti-theology). To
We will look at three distinct views of postmodern theology and christology. The first is a sort of postmodern liberation theology proposed by Harvey Cox. He believes that churches will embrace postmodernism to “affirm social justice, the rights of the poor, a communal understanding of salvation, and democracy not only in society but also in the church” (217).
Mark Taylor is a proponent of radical postmodernism. He bases his views on those of Thomas J. J. Altzier, who believed in “the death of God.” He viewed this “‘self-annihilation of God,’ as an event in history. Beginning in the incarnation and culminating at the cross, God emptied himself in the person of Jesus Christ. God became fully identical with humanity by negating his own objective existence through finite life and death. This ‘passage’ of God in history to total immanence, in Altzier’s analysis, was an act of grace for the sake of creature and creation” (218).
Ted Peters believes in an evangelical approach to postmodernism. He wants to understand “‘how God’s promise of future wholeness for all creation affects our life now amid a world of brokenness’” (219). Peters’ rejects many mainline postmodern beliefs and stresses for the contextualization of the Gospel. He would like the “church’s theology and ministry….to be made intelligible and effective in each context to which Christians are called to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ” (220). He only believes in postmodernity because it is our current context, so our theology should address it. For Peters, Christ brings the forgiveness of sins and “a proleptic foretaste of new creation” (220). He believes in the factuality of the cross and resurrection, and says that Christ is the “final prophet, the final priest, and the final king” (221).
Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Christology: An Ecumenical, International, and Contextual
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