How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (37 page)

As I intimated before, the Prologue is not saying that Jesus preexisted, that he created the universe, that he became flesh. Instead, it is saying that the Logos did all these things. Before all else existed, it was with God, and since it was God’s own Logos, in that sense it actually was God. It was through the Logos that the universe and all that was in it was created and given life. And this Logos then became a human being: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That
in-fleshment
, or incarnation, of the Logos is who Jesus Christ was. When the Logos became a human and dwelt among his own people, his own people rejected him (John 1:11). But those who received him were the ones who were made “the children of God” (1:12). These were people who were not merely born into this physical world; they were born from God (1:13). That is because this Logos-made-flesh is the unique Son of God; he is superior even to the great lawgiver Moses since he is the only one who has ever dwelled with God—in his very bosom. And he is therefore the only one who has made the Father known (1:17–18).

In considering the far-reaching implications of this magnificent incarnation Christology, there is a clear downside that you may have detected just from my preceding remarks. If the Logos-made-flesh is the only one who truly knew God and made him known—far more so than Moses the lawgiver of the Jews—and if this one who revealed God has been rejected by his own people, what does that say about the Jews? According to this view, they have obviously rejected not only Jesus, but the Word of God who was God himself. And by rejecting “God” the Logos, have they not also, by implication, rejected God? The far-reaching, and rather horrific, implications of this view will be the subject of a later discussion in the epilogue. Some Christians came to argue that by refusing to recognize Jesus’s true identity, the Jews rejected their own God.

One other point needs to be reemphasized at this stage however. If one uses the term
high Christology
to talk about this kind of incarnational view, the Prologue of John would be presenting a very high Christology indeed—higher than that even in the Philippians poem. For the author of that poem, as for Paul himself, Christ was some kind of angelic being before becoming a human—probably the “chief angel” or the “Angel of the Lord.” And as a result of his obedience to God unto death, he was given an even more exalted state of being as one who was equal to God in honor and status as the Lord of all. This in itself is a remarkably exalted view of Jesus, the rural preacher from Galilee who proclaimed the coming kingdom of God and who, having ended up on the wrong side of the law, was crucified. But the Prologue of John has an even more elevated view of Christ. Here, Christ is not an angel of God, who was later “hyperexalted” or given a higher place than he had before he appeared on earth. Quite the contrary, even before he appeared, he was the Logos of God himself, a being who was God, the one through whom the entire universe was created.

Even though this view of Christ as the Logos made flesh is not found anywhere else in the Gospel of John, its views are obviously closely aligned with the Christology of the Gospel otherwise. That is why Christ can make himself “equal with God” (John 5:18); can say that he and the Father “are one” (10:30); can talk about the “glory” he had with the Father before coming into the world (17:4); can say that anyone who has seen him has “seen the Father” (14:9); and can indicate that “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). This last verse is especially intriguing. As we have seen, in the Hebrew Bible when Moses encounters God at the burning bush in Exodus 3, he asks God what his name is. God tells him that his name is “I am.” In John, Jesus appears to take the name upon himself. Here he does not receive “the name that is above every name” at his exaltation after his resurrection, as in the Philippians poem (Phil. 2:9). He already has “the name” while on earth. Throughout the Gospel of John, the unbelieving Jews understand full well what Jesus is saying about himself when he makes such claims. They regularly take up stones to execute him for committing blasphemy, for claiming in fact to be God.

B
Y NO STRETCH OF
the imagination have I intended to provide a full, complete, and exhaustive evaluation of every Christological passage of the New Testament in my discussions so far. To do that would take a very long book indeed, and my objective is something else—to explain the two dominant Christological options of the early Christian movement: the older Christology “from below,” which I am calling an exaltation Christology, arguably the very first Christological view of the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven; and the somewhat later Christology “from above,” which I am calling an incarnation Christology. We don’t know how soon Christians started thinking of Jesus not merely as a man who had become an angel or an angel-like being, but as an angel—or some other divine being—who preexisted his appearance on earth. But it must have been remarkably early in the Christian tradition. This view did not originate with the Gospel of John, as I used to believe (as have a lot of other scholars). It was in place well before Paul’s letters, as evidenced in the fact that the pre-Pauline Christ poem of Philippians attests it, as does Paul himself in scattered and sometimes frustratingly vague references throughout his writings. I don’t think we can say for
certain
that this incarnation Christology dates earlier than the early 50s
CE
, but there’s no reason it could not do so. Possibly it is much earlier. Once Christians thought of Jesus as an angel—and that could have happened very early, perhaps in the first years of the movement—the way was opened for the idea that he had always been an angel, and therefore a preexistent divine being. And so an incarnation Christology was born.

As we will see, eventually incarnation Christologies developed significantly and overtook exaltation Christologies, which came to be deemed inadequate and, eventually, “heretical.” Already in some of the later writings of the New Testament we have elevated affirmations of the divinity of Jesus in Christological passages that apparently were written to counter earlier, objectionable views. This is the case, for example, with a passage attributed to Paul in the book of Colossians.

I say this passage is
attributed to
Paul because scholars have long had reasons to think that this book was written by one of his later followers some time after Paul was dead.
¹⁸
I won’t go into those reasons here. But I do want to note quickly that the book embraces Christological views that are astounding in their affirmation of who Christ really is. In particular the poetic section (another preliterary tradition perhaps?) in 1:15–20 has long fascinated scholars. Here, Christ is said to be the “image of the invisible God” (1:15)—a clear allusion to Jewish teachings of Wisdom as a hypostasis of God. Christ is called the “first born of all creation” (1:15), and we are told that “all things were created in him” (1:16). These “all things” are not just the material world, but all natural and supernatural beings “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities” (1:16). Just as in the Prologue of John, Christ the Logos was made flesh; here, he is Wisdom made flesh. In fact “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (1:19). We have now moved into an entirely different realm from the earlier exaltation Christologies.

Something similar could be said of the elevated Christological statements of the letter to the Hebrews, a book that was eventually admitted into the New Testament once church fathers had become convinced that Paul wrote it, even though it does not explicitly claim to be written by Paul and was almost certainly not written by him. The book begins with striking Christological claims. Christ is the “Son of God” who is the “heir of all things” and “through whom [God] created the world” (1:2). More than that, like the hypostases of Wisdom and Logos, Christ “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (1:3).

This may appear to be the kind of incarnational Christology found in the Gospel of John—and indeed it is very close in some respects. But a hint of exaltation Christology remains here as well, much as we found in the Philippians Christ poem. For here, after Jesus’s death, we are told that he “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs” (1:3–4). Once more, as in Philippians, we have an incarnational Christology mixed with a later exaltation. One of the major themes of the early part of Hebrews is that Christ in fact is superior to all angelic beings (e.g., 1:5–8; 2:5–9). In stressing this point, the unknown author quotes the passage from Psalm 45 that we had occasion to notice in Chapter 2, in which the king of Israel is called “God.” Now the verse is taken to refer to Christ: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (1:8).

The book of Hebrews wants to stress that Christ is superior to the angels in part because of its overriding emphasis: Christ is superior to simply everything in Judaism—angels, Moses, the Jewish priests, the Jewish high priest, the sacrifices in the temple, and on and on. Once again, we are confronted with the discomfiting situation. To make such exalted professions about Christ more or less forced the Christians to drive a wedge between their views and those of Jews, a matter to which we return in the epilogue.

A
T THIS POINT IT
is enough to note that exaltation Christologies eventually gave way to incarnation Christologies, with some authors—such as the anonymous writers of the Philippians Christ poem and the letter to the Hebrews—presenting a kind of amalgam of the two views. Eventually, however, incarnation Christologies emerged as dominant in the Christian tradition.

But this is not the end of the story of how Jesus became God. As we will see, innumerable developments occurred as theologians tried to work out the precise implications of these rather imprecise early claims made about Christ. One of the first issues to be addressed is one that may seem blindingly obvious to most readers as a potential problem. If Christ really was God, and God the Father was God, how could Christians claim that there was just one God? Aren’t there two Gods? And if the Holy Spirit is also God, aren’t there three Gods? If so, aren’t Christians polytheists instead of monotheists?

Many of the struggles in the period after the New Testament period were over this precise issue. Numerous solutions to the problem were posed, several of which were eventually denounced as false teachings and heresies. But other solutions led theologians further onward and upward as they tried to refine their views, so as to affirm in the strongest terms their hard-fought convictions: Jesus was God; he was not God the Father; yet there was only one God.

O
VER THE PAST FIVE
years I have become re-enamored with French cinema, and among my favorite filmmakers is Eric Rohmer. I am especially taken by his two brilliant films
My Night at Maud’s
(
Ma nuit chez Maud
, 1969) and
A Tale of Winter
(
Conte d’hiver
, 1992). The plots of both films are driven, in part, by a philosophical concept known as “Pascal’s Wager,” derived from the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Pascal’s Wager is invoked in these two films through their explorations of personal relationships. Suppose a person has a decision to make in life—to do something or not. Even though there would be no downside in doing it, she would have only the slimmest of chances for success. Still, that success, should it happen, would lead to an amazingly positive outcome. Pascal’s Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

When Pascal developed this idea, it was related not to existential decisions about personal relationships, as in Rohmer’s films, but to theology. For Pascal, a man of the Enlightenment, it was important to decide whether or not to believe that God exists. There may be only a slim chance that he does. Still, if someone decides to believe, there could be a fantastic reward if he is right and no real downside if he is wrong. On the other hand, if he decides not to believe, no real benefits come from the decision, but there could be very real and harmful downsides (such as eternal punishment). And so, even though the chances of being right may be remote, it is better to believe than not to believe.

People have often told me that I should return to my Christian faith because of Pascal’s Wager. Their logic is that if I believe in Christ, I could experience enormous benefits if it turns out that Christ really is the Son of God who brings salvation, and no downside if he is not; but if I choose not to believe, I could face enormous (eternal) bad consequences, with no upside. So it is better to believe than not to believe.

On the surface this may sound convincing, but I think it needs to be put into a broader perspective. The problem is that deciding for or against a particular religious point of view is not like flipping a coin, where there are only two possible options and outcomes. There are hundreds of religions in the world. You cannot choose for
all
of them, because some of them are exclusivistic and require a person’s total commitment. So it is not an either/or proposition, as those who support Pascal’s Wager sometimes imagine.

To put it in simple terms, if you were to choose
for
Christianity, that would mean choosing
against
Islam (to pick an example). But what if the Muslim view about God and salvation is right and the Christian view is wrong? Then it doesn’t help to have taken Pascal’s Wager and to have chosen Christianity.