In The
Christological Necessity of Universal Pre-Existence, I discussed how, if
one wishes to affirm both the personal pre-existence of Jesus and his being
fully human, one will have to accept the Latter-day Saint belief that everyone,
not Jesus merely, personally pre-existed. The following from Catholic theologian
Thomas N. Hart provides us another instance where the Chalcedonian formulation
of Christology (e.g., the Hypostatic Union) undermines the true humanity of
Jesus:
The
Chalcedonian formula makes a genuine humanity impossible. The
conciliar definition says that Jesus is true man. But if there are two natures
in him, it is clear which will dominate. And Jesus becomes immediately very
different from us. He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. He knows past,
present, and future, and enjoys the unbroken vision of God, He knows exactly
what everyone is thinking and going to do. This is far from ordinary human
experience. Jesus is tempted, but cannot sin because he is God. What kind of
temptation is this? Can it be called temptation at all? It has little in common
with the kinds of struggles we are familiar with. These difficulties flow from
the divinity overshadowing the humanity, and from Jesus not having a human
personal center.
The
formula explicitly assigns Jesus a human nature, and all Christians confess
that Jesus is truly man as well as truly God. But if we consult our mage of
him, we recognize that we see him as a divine rather than a human being. His
outward appearance is human, but his inner life is very different. He has a
human body, and he eats, sleeps, and talks like a human person. But things are
quite different within, where the self-consciousness is all that of God. Is it
having a body, and eating and sleeping, that constitute a human being? What contemporary
theologians are saying is that it is precisely the “innards” of a person that
bear the distinctive marks of a human nature. The Anglican theologian John Knox
puts this matter particularly well. To be human is to be inwardly human, and that
is to be limited in knowledge, not to know the future, not to know what is
inside others but only to be able to intuit or guess. To be inwardly human is
to wonder who one is and what one is supposed to do with one’s life, and to
carry that question with varying degrees of acuity all through one’s existence.
To be human is to struggle with God, to be aware of God as present to oneself
at times, but to know times too when God seems to be absent and out of reach.
To be human is to unfold step by step in the recognition and realization of one’s
authentic self-hood (which includes one’s vocation), not to possess it all at once
from the beginning. Can Jesus be true God and at the same time be truly human
in these essential ways?
We can
see the same difficulty if we consider our living of the Christian life. The
Christian spirituality that follows from Chalcedon has always been strong in
this respect, that it brings God nearer, in Jesus, and so facilitates our
relating to God. But in another respect, this spirituality has always been
weak. We cannot identify with this Jesus. He is not just superior to us, the
way St. Francis of Assisi was superior to most of us; he is different. He has
not struggled in the mire of life the way we have to. So if we say to someone
who is struggling to integrate his sexuality into responsible loving: “You
know, Jesus had to struggle with this too,” the person will probably respond: “What
makes you think that? He was God.” And if we say to the patient dying a painful
death, with much fear and little sense of the presence of God: “It was in circumstances
just like this, and with very similar feelings, that Jesus died,” the patient
will probably reply: “I know he suffered a lot. But he knew he was God and he
knew he would rise again.” If we try to console the person whose spouse has had
an affair, who has been deeply wounded and cannot find it in her heart to forgive
or trust again, and we say: “You know, Jesus didn’t just talk about forgiving;
he suffered some terrible hurts and betrayals from those who were closest, and
had to struggle just as you do to forgive, and trust them again,” the person’s
likely reply would be: “But he was so different, and his whole life so
different, that I just can’t relate to what you are saying.” In other words,
Jesus is human in a way, but not in the way we are. And yet does not Hebrews
say of him: “Since he was himself tested through what he suffered, he is able
to help those who are tempted” (Heb 2:18)? (Thomas N. Hart, To Know and
Follow Jesus: Contemporary Christology [New York: Paulist Press, 1984], 46-48)
