Where is Jesus?

A friend of mine was babysitting and asked the kid "Have you asked Jesus into your heart?" He promptly replied, "Yes!" After a pause, the kid got a puzzled look on his face and asked, "Who lives in my ear?"

Although amusing, the innocent literalism of this child challenges our linguistic habits. What do we mean when we say that Jesus lives within us? Do we really take this seriously? And if we do, what happens to our belief that Jesus was raised from the dead? How can an embodied person be present in us?

This puzzle first hit me a few years back, but I have yet to "solve" it. However, I do have a better sense of the options and what is at stake than I used to. So here goes a crash course in the debate surrounding the bodily presence of Jesus.

Either: Jesus is in heaven

After Jesus was raised in bodily form, he ascended to the right hand of God the father, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. Thus Jesus' body is locally present at the right hand of the Father. He has "ascended to the heavenlies." Jesus can be said to be present in us only in the form of his Spirit. Any presence between the believer and Christ is to be understood spiritually. We will only be bodily present to one another at the end of time when he returns.

The advantage of this view is that it holds on dearly to the genuine bodily resurrection of Christ. It also gives a significant place to the Holy Spirit in the relationship between Christ and the Christian. The disadvantage of this view is that Jesus' body appears to be "trapped" in heaven. He lacks the freedom proper to his divinity. He is present only in Spirit, but is that a genuine presence? Is that any different than me being "present" to my friends in California because they are thinking about me? Furthermore, this view merely begs another question: Where is heaven? Is heaven in outer space, tucked behind Saturn? Is heaven even a place at all?

Or: Jesus is everywhere

The alternative view is that Jesus' raised body takes on the properties of divinity, and thus is capable of being omnipresent. Jesus in his glorified form can be bodily present beyond the usual boundaries of space. Thus Jesus really is present to us and in us. This is certainly a mystery, but it is a mystery based on a promise: "lo I will be with you to the very end of the age" and "wherever two or three are gathered, there I will be in the midst of them." So the right hand of God the Father is not some place, but a symbol of the divine power by which Jesus is present.

The advantage of this view is that it can take with radical seriousness the biblical claims to Christ's presence with the believer. It also avoids splitting up the body and spirit of Jesus. The disadvantage is that an omnipresent body is an unthinkable thought. What makes a body a body is that it is bounded by space. A body that is everywhere ceases to be a body. Furthermore, one wonders how the Holy Spirit fits into this equation. Why did Jesus ascend and pour out his Spirit if he is already omnipresent by virtue of his resurrection? On this view, the cosmic narrative of Jesus falls into redundancy.

What do you think?

Is Jesus localized in heaven?
Or is Jesus everywhere?
Which view's advantages outweigh its disadvantages?
Can one view assimilate the concerns of the other?
Is there a third view?
Should the question be reframed? For instance, are these views rigidly spatial and so need to be supplemented by temporal questions?
What else should be taken into account?

Is "God" in the Old Testament the Father or the Trinity?

If the purpose of theology is to make us better readers of Scripture (which I believe), then this is one area where the opposite seems to be the case. The interface between the Trinity and the Old Testament wreaks havoc on the intelligibility of both. The doctrine itself is entirely absent (I'm not one of those who would attempt to "prove" the Trinity from the OT, let alone the New) and hence an imposition on the text. But the OT too loses intelligibility, at least if one is trying to read it in Christian terms (which is not necessarily the only way to read the OT, but must be at least a way).

The nub of the problem is this question: Is "God" in the OT the Father or the whole Trinity?

Option #1: God is the Father

The advantage to this formulation is that it quickly solves the problem by relegating all trinitarian interpretation to the NT. The God of the OT, the one who brought Israel out of Egypt, is the Father of Jesus Christ. The intelligibility of the text is protected against the imposition of later doctrinal developments.

The disadvantage to this formulation is that the doctrine of the Trinity is rendered unintelligible. The whole purpose of the doctrine of the Trinity is to ensure the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, who must be divine in order to bring us salvation and revelation. If the Son is not “there” in the OT, then he is not really “there” in the eternal triune God. Jesus ends up being one historical manifestation of one God, not the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity.

Option #2: God is the Trinity

The advantage to this formulation is that a robust doctrine of the Trinity is maintained. God in the OT is the eternal triune God acting in time with his people Israel. The fatherhood of God is not just a metaphor for the being of God, but is linked to his eternal fathering of the son. The incarnation is not some questionable add-on, but the fulfillment of his eternal design.

The disadvantage to this formulation is obvious: the triune God is nowhere to be found on the pages of the OT text. Only forced exegesis finds the Trinity in the OT. So those who hold this position are cornered into talking about the Trinity being “hidden” during this time. Theological problems abound as well, for the Son becomes detached from his historical incarnation and thus his human particularity can be questioned.

What do you think?

Which one is better?
Which one is worse?
Is there a way to hold on to both?
Is there a third option?

Providence and Predestination

I have noticed a pattern regarding the combination of two complex doctrines: providence and predestination. The two are of course related, providence being the secret divine willing of all events and predestination the eternal election of who will be saved. It is precisely their close proximity that makes the pattern of popular belief so striking. So here's my desciption of how I have observed church folk approach these problems.

Neither Providence nor Predestination - A lot of folks either practically or theoretically reject the two doctrines. Certainly God is not behind everything. Certainly our free will is sufficiently powerful in both mundane and salvific matters. Certainly God's hands are tied by our decisions.

Both Providence and Predestination - Of course, you have the other extreme in what I call "street" calvinists, who piously affirm both the election to salvation and the ordination of all events. Thus you have the legend of the puritan woman who fell down the stars only to say "I'm glad I got that out of the way." There are surely more sophisticated ways of contruing the relationship between these two doctrines. But I am trying to describe common belief and practice here.

Providence without Predestination - Here's where it gets peculiar. The potential extremity of the above views is at least commended for its consistency. But the fact of the matter is a large segment of church folk affirm providence without predestination. So you have folks who firmly believe that God has a particular will for their life and they need to find it. They piously approach suffering and death as "God's will." Yet when it comes to salvation, they are extreme Arminians, proudly claiming free will and a full capacity to accept or reject salvation. They have somehow found a way to separate the pair in their minds, or at least in their lives.

Predestination without Providence - But it gets weirder. You have the opposite combination as well. There are many among us who will go the wall defending God's utter predestination of souls unto salvation, yet affirm complete autonomy in all other matters. These folks might even quote the famous line of Luther's from The Bondage of the Will, wherein he exclaims (in his usual tongue-in-cheek manner) that yes, humans have free will ... to hammer a nail, to go to the market, to get up from bed ... but in matters of salvation we are utterly dependent on God. This can be a very "respectable" position, because one affirms divine sovereignty where it counts for the traditional battle, but can take a world-affirming, humanist viewpoint on all other matters.


The funny thing about this pattern is that it displays our ability to sustain "happy inconsistencies." We have found a way to have our theological cake and eat it too. And maybe I shouldn't spoil the fun, because consistency isn't the only theological virtue. However, one wonders if we have any coherent sense of who God is if we think he works in two completely different ways depending on whether it is a matter of salvation or not. Is this really the God we serve?

Am I on to something here?
Is this pattern descriptively adequate?
Could you think of examples that fit nicely into this pattern?
What am I missing?
Which is the best approach?
Are we doomed to some 'happy inconsistencies' to avoid extremes?
Or is there a way to affirm both without becoming deterministic? If so, how?

New Items Posted Regularly at The Writing of John Drury

Two new items have been posted at The Writing of John Drury, my collected writings page. Just two formal seminar papers on the knowledge of God, one on Calvin and one on Barth. If you are into that sort of thing, check them out here under "hotspot." If you have comments, leave them at this post.

Do Christians make the Church or does the Church make Christians?

Does a gathering of individual Christians make a collective church of Christians? Or is there a realistic entity called “the Church” that makes its participants into Christians? This is the basic theological question that still plagues us today. This perennial tension between individualists and communitarians crops up both between and within the alternative proposals for renewal today. For instance, one can find within the emergent conversation both radical individualists and radical communitarians. Both claim to value community. That is not the issue. This issue is whether the basis of ecclesial community is found in the collective of free individuals or in the community itself as such which then grants communal identity to its members. An arsenal of arguments are assembled, the battle rages on, and yet no victor is in sight.

Part of the problem in the debate between communitarians and individualists is that it remains solely on the sociological plane. The missing piece to the puzzle is the very center of church life itself: Jesus Christ. The debate will go on in perpetuity as long as it remains a struggle between two foci. But when a third point is added, a triangle is formed and a more rich discussion can follow.

So then, how do the Church, the Christian and Christ relate?

The classic way to formulate the basic options was put forth by Schleiermacher (19^th Cen). He put it in terms of a contrast between the Protestant and Catholic ecclesiological principles (Christian Faith 103-108):

The Protestant principle is that the relationship between the Christian and the Church depends on the Christian's relationship to Christ.

The Catholic principle is that the relationship between the Christian and Christ depends on the Christian's relationship to Church.

Of course, this leads us into a whole other web of problems. Which principle gives pride of place to Christ? Which principle avoids the perils of the extremes? Are these principles adequate descriptions of the Protestant/Catholic difference? How do we acknowledge both the freedom of Christ and the indispensability of the Church? Is there a way to synthesize the principles? Is there a third option? But at least they are properly theological problems and therefore we might be able to get somewhere. In other words, a good ecclesiology must deal in Christological currency.

Although I enjoy being provocative, it seems appropriate to at least sketch the beginnings of my own solution to this basis ecclesiological problem. I would recommend that we navigate Schleiermacher’s triangle by means of the concept of mission. My inspiration here is von Balthasar, who outlines a missional concept of theological personhood in his Theo-Drama vol. III. Balthasar’s advance is that our personhood is grounded neither in our individual Christianity nor our participation in the community of the Church as such, but rather in the fulfillment of our mission. We are sent by God. This is who we are, both as individual Christians and as a communal Church. Balthasar gives the example of Paul, who as an individual missionary was on the periphery of the church and yet served the church precisely in his peripheral mission. He notes rightly that individualism and communitarianism coincide for Paul, especially when he reflects on his suffering for the church (e.g., Colossians 2).

Here’s how one might render Balthasar’s insight in terms of Schleiermacher’s triangle:

The Missional principle is that the Christian's relationship to both Christ and the Church depends on her participation in the mission to which Christ sends the Church.

My hope is that this way of putting things will keep the Christian and the Church in proper balance as they subsist in the one mission of Christ. This certainly doesn’t solve all the problems, but it may help to reframe it in a fruitful way.

Any thoughts?
Any communitarians or individualists out there who want to take me to task?
Any objections to Schleiermacher’s way of Christologizing the problem?
Any suggestions toward a missional solution to these problems?

Is Jesus God?

Is Jesus God? I would like to answer this baldly stated question in the manner of that great preacher, Reverend Lovejoy: "No with an if; Yes with a but."

The answer to this question must be "no" if we mean that God, simply stated, is the human being named Jesus. Jesus is not God if we understand the identity of God to be exhausted in the history of the human Jesus. Jesus is not God if we mean God has no choice but to become a human being in order to fix his out of control creation. Jesus is not God if we claim to worship and serve a human being as such. Jesus is not God if it is implied that God had become incarnate in order to become that which he is not already in eternity. Jesus is not God if we understand God to already be a creature named Jesus before there even was a created order.

Nevertheless, the answer to the question "Is Jesus God?" must also be "yes." Yes Jesus is God, but as the incarnation of the eternally begotten Son of God. Yes Jesus is God, but on the basis of the fact that there already is in God's eternity a fellowship of persons. Yes Jesus is God, but only if we remember that God becomes human as an outpouring of his divine life as Father and Son in the Holy Spirit. Yes Jesus is God, but as the unfolding of a plan set in eternity by the triune God. Yes Jesus is God, but Jesus can pray to the Father without suffering from multiple personality disorder since the Son has been praying to the Father throughout eternity. Yes Jesus is God, because the Trinity logically precedes and therefore grounds the Incarnation.

In other words, the Trinity is the divine line of credit upon which the Incarnation draws. The Triune life of God in eternity is the condition for the actuality of temporal incarnation of God in the man Jesus. This is why, historically speaking, the doctrine of the Trinity had to be established first (4th century: Nicea & Constantinople), before the church turned its face fully to Christological problems (5th century: Ephesus and Chalcedon). This may seem counterintuitive, for as this post shows it is precisely the Christological question which leads one to the Trinitarian formula. Yet the order of discovery does not always correspond to the order of reality. Christology leads to Trinity, but only the Trinity has the resources to ground Christology. The key of course is that they remain inseparable. For the Trinity without Christology is meaningless metaphysical mathematics. But Christology without the Trinity is ungrounded pious assertion.

So what's my point? Certainly we can confess the divinity of Jesus without all this further ado. But it pays to remember the pains with which Christians have always treaded carefully around the topic of the divinity of Jesus. It's not something we just assert and say "love it or leave it." "Jesus is God" is a mystery worthy of manifold adoration -- an act of worship which includes precise theologizing in order to block misleading implications that leave us open to all sorts of attacks. So keep saying 'Jesus is God." Or keeping asking "Is Jesus God?" But whether you confess or ask, accept or reject, give a weighty statement like that the thought it deserves.

Any thoughts?
Is this account with its distinctions accurate?
Is it adequate?
Is it coherent?
Is it useful?

Is it really "not about you"?

You have heard it said, “It’s not about you.” I appreciate this popular attack against anthropocentrism, inasmuch as it goes against the narcissistic individualism of American religion. Since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I should put my weight behind it. But I am reluctant to do so. Why? Because it doesn’t go far enough.

The initial problem is that it is only a negation. Avoiding anthropocentrism doesn’t really accomplish much. Negating the self is easy. There’s nothing peculiarly Christian about that. Thus it tells what the faith is not about. But what is the faith about? It might as well be about a dog, for as long as it is not me, the formula is satisfied.

Of course, one ought to give the benefit of the doubt that the affirmation is implied by the negation. It’s not about you, because it’s all about God. But even as an implication, the formula stills does not succed in centering our faith on God. By focusing on the negation, it remains firmly planted on anthropocentric soil. Theocentrism is here only accomplished by the negation of the human, and thus God is still just an extension of humanity. One still starts with the self and then seeks to reach beyond oneself by negating the self. Such is the same old cul-de-sac of false humility in which we have been caught for years.

The apparent solution is to simply focus on the affirmation: “It’s all about God.” The advantage here is that the negation is implied: if it is all about God, than it can’t be all about me, or you, or anything else. The problem with this solution is that one wonders whether this egotistical God is really the God of Christianity. Does the reality of God by definition overpower the reality of humanity? Does the acknowledgement of God require the disenfranchisement of the human? Are God and humanity really in competition with each other? No! For us and for our salvation, God became human. A phrase like “it’s all about God” veils this act. So just as “it’s not about me” remains stuck in an anthropocentric circle, “it’s all about God” stately baldly leads to a theocentrism that excludes the central humanizing activity of God. It seems in either case we are required to choose between God and humanity.

The real alternative is to proclaim that “It’s all about God, and God is all about us.” A Christian theocentrism that is truly centered on the Christian God must also affirm a modified anthropocentrism. We do not need to help God out by hating humanity. We just need to point to God’s own love for humanity. In light of the incarnation, we can trust that our affirmation of God does not exclude but rather includes an affirmation of humanity. And who better to lift humanity to its intended heights than the very God who created us?

So in a way it is about me, but only because this God is all about us, and that "us" includes "me" in a real and genuine way.

Did Jesus Die and Go to Heaven?

A lot of Christians use the phrase "die and go to heaven." Though it may hold some truth, it is a misleading phrase. Why? Because the only concrete clue we have about our future is the first-fruits of our resurrection: the raised body of Jesus. And Jesus certainly did not “die and go to heaven.” If he didn’t, why should we expect to? The fact of the matter is, Jesus died and went to hell. Now he went to hell for us, but that does not mean we just die and flitter off as disembodied souls. No. We die and are raised like him. So although we may consciously experience our heavenly future immediately, the fact of the matter is that our hope lies in the restoration of our bodies, not just in our souls going to heaven after we die.

If there is one consistent thing across the resurrection accounts, it is that the post-Easter Jesus had a body, and it was his body, the same body that had died. Was it changed? Certainly. It was a transformed and glorified body. That’s what makes it good news for us. But this transformation is a predicate of his same body. The resurrection is not some replacement of our identity or a leaving behind of this life altogether. If so, then it wouldn’t really be us who are experiencing it. The resurrection is the transformation of this life. That’s what makes it good news for us.

Of course, the phrase “die and go to heaven” does not necessarily need to be abandoned. That is the bottom line. But it helps to be complemented by the phrase, “die and yet will be raised like him.” Such speech reminds us that we are not just imprisoned souls awaiting the end of this embodied life. Rather, we are embodied souls awaiting the redemption of all things, including our own bodies.

What implications does this have for how we relate to our bodies?
Once we have retrieved the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, how do we continue to speak coherently about the “soul”?
Am I missing something major in this account?

Was Jesus Tempted?

I get this question a lot:

"The Bible says that Jesus was tempted in the desert, but if He is God, how could He be tempted? If you say that His humanity was tempted, are we saying that Jesus had the "urge" to commit sin? Are we to separate the humanity from the divinity of Christ?"

Here's a recent response to such an email query:

Temptation does not require that Jesus had a sinful inclination - it could simply be an option laid before his will which he rejected. The same applies for us that we can experience temptation without necessarily being culpable. We have a tendency to think that Jesus' humanity had some extra boost of divinity that we do not have and we therefore get ourselves off the hook for the call to become fully human. Note also that all the temptation stories for Jesus are to give up and/or twist his mission (wilderness at beginning of ministry and garden of Gethsemane at the end), so they have a particular focus. Hence Jesus was tempted to contradict the nature of his mission. And once again, this is the more dangerous form of temptation for us - to not fulfill or twist our vocation.

As for the unity of divine and human natures, it is essential that the one person "The Son made Man Jesus" does all and experiences all as a united person with two natures. So when the human flesh undergoes temptation, God is united to the humanity so that God experiences temptation in and through the humanity. God adds (assumes) humanity onto himself so that he can perform this mission, and yet the Trinitarian shape of his eternal life is the condition for this "adding" (hence God is not "changing" into a man). Everything undergone by the humanity God also takes on as his experience. And everything done by the humanity (whether it appears human or divine) is performed by the humanity under girded by the power of God. So the two natures are never separated, yet they are not mixed. The one God-Man is born, eats, sleeps, heals, walks on water, dies, and rises again. There is a long Christian tradition that attributes some things to the humanity and others to the divinity. But this is a dangerous game because the unity of the two natures is broken and we are left with a schizoid Jesus. It’s all the one person: The Logos Incarnate.

Does this old-school Chalcedonian stuff really answer the question?
Or are the problems of Christology unsolvable?
In other words, does the plain sense of Scripture fall apart in the context of a high Christology?
If so, what's the alternative?

Will Heaven Be Boring?

As a kid, heaven always sounded boring to me. Won't we get sick of worshipping God all day? That sounds so repetitive. The only solution I ever came up was that at the eschaton we will be changed into the kind of people that won't get bored of God. Unfortunately, this just means we'll become boring too. Furthermore, this transformation hypothesis doesn't really affect the premise that God is boring. No wonder Christians, who proleptically participate in the eschaton (aka 'foretaste of glory divine'), are so bored and boring!

This week I have been reading J. Warren Smith's Passion and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa, who deals with this problem as it was framed in the Patristic period. Apparently, Origen's teachings on human satiation implied that God was boring (or at least that humans can become bored in their contemplation of God). He believed that human beings had pre-existent souls who used to contemplate God yet as they became too full of God's goodness (aka, satiated) they "fell" into fleshy bodies. Only the soul of Jesus never fell, so he took on a body for our sakes to bring us back into contemplation of God. Despite the wacky primitive Christology, Origen's theory leaves open the problem that we may once again become satiated with God and re-fall. Although he answers such an objection, the idea that we could be satiated with God in the first place raised questions about divine infinity. Though Origen himself may have assumed that God was infinite, he did not think through the implications of this assumption.

Enter Gregory of Nyssa. First of all, Nyssen discarded Origen's idea of a pre-existent soul and the deficient Christology attached to this theory. But more importantly, Nyssen argued that because God is infinite, the human can never become satiated with his goodness. Rather, God is so unbounded that he will by nature remain interesting for eternity. Not only that, but we in our human finitude (which will never pass away even in the eschaton) will remain eternal interested in God. Eternal Life with God will mean dynamically exploring by our finite means of knowledge the infinite dynamic being of God. In other words, we will never get bored of God, because of the radical difference between his infinity and our finitude. Nyssen's term for this is epectasy: continual reaching. C. S. Lewis expresses this idea beautifully when he speaks of the children in New Narnia going "further up and further in" (Harper ed., 203f).

So the bottom line is that the end will not be boring. Actually, it will be eminently more interesting than life is now, for God fully revealed will give us an eternity's worth to think, feel and do.