Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Thomas N. Hart on how Chalcedonian Christology makes a Genuine Humanity for Jesus an Impossibility

 

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)

 

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