God has a human face

At Christmas the Church proclaims that God has a human face. Mind you, it was a close thing.

The councils of the Church in the fourth century deliberated over the divinity and the humanity of Christ. Was he an exemplary man who deserved the honorific title "Son of God" or was he the eternal Word that was at the beginning of creation made flesh in the form of Jesus of Nazareth? Was he wholly God who only appeared as a man and only appeared to suffer and die as a man? Was he a divine emissary from God who did not share the same substance of God but whose mission was to preach repentance or to reveal sacred knowledge?

The Church came to the decision that Christ was of one substance with the Father. They decided that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. From how the New Testament narratives ran they derived the doctrine of the Trinity in which the Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God. By deciding thus the Church produced a scandal among the religions of the world that exists to this day.

For Judaism, Jesus was the unacceptable Messiah and saying that He was God flew in the face of the utter transcendence of God. Later, for Islam, the idea of the Trinity looked very much like Tritheism and hence was in contradiction to the belief in the one God, Allah. For Islam Jesus could be a prophet but certainly not God.

While it is popular to say, in an intended peace-making turn, that Christianity, and Islam believe in the one God, it is apparent from close inspection that this is not true. When Christians talk about God they talk about the triune identity. This is non-negotiable.

There is, however, more of a point to saying that Jews and Christians believe in the one God. We can say that they both believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but Jews parted ways with Christianity when it pronounced Jesus as divine.

It may seem that the rather complex and subtle Christological controversies of the fourth century are too obscure, too metaphysical and too long ago to be interesting or important. However, if the Church had not came down on the side of Christ being both truly human and truly divine, of one substance with the Father, coequal with the Father and the Spirit, our civilization would now be unrecognisable.

If the Church had been persuaded that Jesus was subordinate to the Father, a divine emissary giving moral guidance and the path to heaven, the whole work of salvation would have been forfeit and Christianity would have been reduced to morality.

Let me explain.

The Church believes that the events of Jesus' life, death and resurrection were actually events in the Being of God that has eternal consequences for the lives of men and women.

In His teaching Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors and thumbed his nose at holiness laws. He confronted the religious authorities with their lack of faith. In response the "church" of the time organised his murder via the civil authorities. Everyone thought that was the end of the story: a troublemaker was eliminated.

However, death could not hold the eternal Word who was with God at the beginning and was God. Now you must think theologically and not concretely. God raised Jesus from the dead to sit at his right hand in glory. This was not a nature miracle: the biochemistry of death was not reversed. The resurrection is rather an event in God in which Jesus was vindicated and his persecutors judged. The position of victims and perpetrators was reversed. This subverted all of the power structures of the world and inaugurated an age open to a new possibility of peace.

This is how we can sing in the Mass: "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world." The event of the Christ was an event that infected all of time to the extent that we can say that the world has been saved.

Now, if the Church had not affirmed Christ as being God in the doctrine of the Trinity none of this would be possible. This is because the event of the Christ would not have been an event in God because Jesus would always be outside of the godhead. Without, what has become known as the Atonement, we would have been left with morality and law. Jesus would have been the moral teacher and judgment would have been based on how closely his followers followed that teaching.

In other words there would have been no grace in the world, only the moral law, only Christian ethics. But early Christians, especially St Paul, understood that the law was not enough, indeed if we only have law then we are destined to live arid lives because law does not address the fundamental questions of our being.

Of course the law is important but as a means of justification, as a way to a pious life or as a way to heaven it is a dead end, literally. Christian culture is based on grace. We understand that our desire is malformed and that we are prone to act in deathly ways but that is not the last word for us. We are, as Luther was fond of saying, "simultaneously sinner and saved". We all know the clichéd character whose life is ordered to the utmost degree but who is lacking in humanity and compassion for others.

Grace is what gives life depth and breadth and freedom. With grace there is no longer the constant nagging that we are not living up to some standard. It is a letting go of control that is only possible when we hear the good news of the gospel, that an event has taken place in God that has set us all free. Nothing can remove us from the grace of God.

Rather than seeking perfection in imitation, a heavy burden indeed, we are set free to pursue our lives knowing that we are second by second being transformed into the image of Christ. We become a people who can look our neighbour in the eye and see him or her as a fellow human being unconfused by their moral or religious status.

In all of the hysteria about terrorism we can understand that even the worst of ISIS are children of God and recipients of his grace grounded in the event of Christ. This is the only thing that will short circuit the rush to violence that will beget even more violence.

This is why we can celebrate the Prince of Peace at Christmas, not as some wishful thinking Christmas card's plea to "Give Peace a Chance" but as grounded in real historical events that we can say, that we can narrate. It is these events that give the world its narrative arc, from violence to peace, from hatred to love, from despair to hope. For Christianity these dichotomies are not just utopian sentiment but are based on real events, real things that have been established forever.

The nature of Christ formed the nature of the Church that in its turn formed our society. If the Church in the fourth century had opted for understanding Christ as an exemplary man then it would have faded into the world. Indeed there are churches of our time, in the Protestant denominations particularly, that have almost unconsciously abandoned the divinity of Christ and have become the world's social worker. The mission statement for these churches is "We make a difference." So intent are they on serving the poor and establishing justice that they have lost the beauty of worship and the divinity of Christ.

On the other hand there are churches that have lost the humanity of God. For example, in Docetism, Jesus was really a divine being dressed up as a man. The man may have suffered but the divine, because it was divine, could not suffer. Churches thus influenced emphasise the spiritual because the bodily suffering of God is discounted.

Bodily life is a lesser thing; indeed the body is a source of contamination and danger. The aim is to prepare the self for heaven by ascetic practice. The monastic life can be prone to this temptation, as Luther understood. Christianity so understood cannot wait to shuffle off this mortal coil in order to ascend to God.

I suggest that Islam fits within the belief that the divine eclipses all to such an extent that bodily life is unimportant. It is a shadow of what Christianity would have become if the Church had lost the divinity of Jesus and thus lost the divinity of man. There is such a divide between the divine and the human that the human is made only for obedience, for submission. Suicide bombers believe that their bodies are of no consequence and that their souls will be transported to heaven on their destruction. This mirrors the body/soul dualism that led the Church into dark places in various episodes of its history.

It is important to realise that for Christianity the body is affirmed. After all, the Word became flesh. Jesus lived in a body, died in a body was raised in a body and ascended in a body. The Spirit descended on a body. Jesus healed bodies. Indeed, there is no life outside the body.

The gospel was never about how the soul can get to heaven. It was always about the promise of the heavenly kingdom here on earth in which God will dwell with His people as he did in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. This is a vision that holds the divine and the worldly together, that heals the separation between God and the world.

When the Church neglects either the divinity of Christ or His humanity the promise is distorted in our eyes. The coming kingdom will be understood to exist either as a spiritual reality hidden in the hearts of believers or as a totally material reality made in the world, in our case, by way of technological advances. Both of these options will distort the human person, who as Barth has said, is the creature suspended between heaven and earth.

If we are to have a meaningful conversation with Islam we have to become theologians because only then will we be able to understand what makes Christianity and Islam so different and the societies they engender so different. The time is past when we can, with a wave of the hand, lump the religions of the world together because we are afraid of a critical discussion that will produce religious intolerance.

Christians can have this discussion because we know that in the grace of God all people exist as human souls before God. Thus religious belief may be discussed without it leading to prejudice and persecution. The lesson that the Church learnt in the Middle Ages was that when you kill a heretic you kill a human being; you do not kill a belief. It is an understanding that we must relearn today.

People of other faiths are primarily human beings with the same hopes and fears and loves that all people of the world share. We are all neighbours; we are all recipients of the grace of God even though we know it not.

This is a better basis for tolerance than willed blindness to religious difference because it has the capacity to lead to real understanding.