Incarnational Faith:

The Search for Theological “Both” - ness

The Word was God . . .

and the Word became flesh and lived among us.

(John 1:1c, 14a)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on Reformation Sunday, October 29, 2006

(Volume 1 Number 19)

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 John’s gospel wastes no time in announcing the Incarnation, asserting that ours is a gospel conjoining the divine and the human, the Word and flesh.  God in flesh, is the quintessential _expression of the Theological Both-ness to which my title refers.  On this Reformation Sunday I want us to consider (1) how are we to understand this Theological Both-ness and (2) what relevance does such Theological Both-ness have to the way we live out our faith?

It took several centuries for the church to articulate the nature of Christ, but it concluded by affirming that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  To say this is a paradox is stating the obvious. It is much more.  It is a mystery which overturns our reliance upon logic.  

It would be easier, of course, to speak of Jesus’ Half-ness, that Jesus was Both Divine and human ONLY in the sense that he was half human and half divine.  We might not balk so much. After all, we speak of ourselves as a Duality, as Spirit and Body.  To say this of Jesus would express that very same Duality, only somehow purer and more in touch with God than are we. 

But it is precisely this Half-ness which the early church councils were so diligent not to grant us room to imagine.  Our earliest creeds took care to establish the Both-ness of the Incarnation, a Savior BOTH fully God and fully human.  For example, the Creed of Chalcedon from the 5th century affirms that Jesus was “at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, of one essence with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one essence with us as regards his manhood, in all respects like us, apart from sin.”

Confused?  Well, the church has always admitted that such assertions are opaque at best.  Yet we insist on this language of Both-ness, no matter how offensive to logic.  Is such an assertion of Both-ness, so blatantly contradictory, not to be admissible in our day when reason and science have proven their worth and changed the world so radically?  Well, let’s not forget that science itself does the same in accepting its own mysteries, e.g., the nature of light.  On the one hand, science affirms evidence that light consists of particles, yet also accepts contradictory evidence that light is wave.   Which is it?  Wave?  Or, particle?  Science embraces light’s Both-ness. 

God becoming flesh embraces the Both-ness of this One who is the Light, though to say that Jesus, born in Bethlehem and raised in a Galilean village, was Both fully human and fully divine, is an assertion that taxes our powers of reason.  To be sure, it was an affront to logic in the 1st century also, but in different ways.  Huston Smith accurately points out that what we find hard to believe today is that Jesus could have been God, whereas in the Greco-Roman world it was his humanity that had to be argued for, his divinity being easily, almost casually, accepted.  

We find it easy to believe that 2000 years ago a human person named Jesus lived in the Galilee and died in Judea.   We find it disturbing, though, that this manifestly human person could also be God, a claim giving pause to a culture given to a scientific way of knowing.  That an historical person, a flesh and blood being, could be God?  Incredible. 

In the first century, however, it was quite the reverse.  To the Greeks and Romans of the Mediterranean world, the dividing line between human and divine was so thoroughly perforated that it was routine for emperors to claim divinity and to be accepted as such by the masses.  An assertion that Jesus was divine would raise few eyebrows.  “So, what’s new?” might be their dismissive response. 

The shocking thing about the Incarnation in the ancient world (what Paul called the scandalon, the “scandal”) was its idea that a god would be willing to suffer in order to effect redemption.  This was radical, an understanding of divinity that shocked the Mediterranean world.  Redemption through a suffering God sparked a reaction that drove Christians into the catacombs. It is the suffering of God which becomes the stunning feature of the faith we affirm each week.  “Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried.”  The cross was a scandal.

One of the early church fathers, Bishop Irenaeus, wrote, “God became man that man might become God,” echoing St. Peter’s words in the New Testament, that Jesus “partook of human nature, so that we might be partakers of the divine nature.”   That divinity is accessed by all through Christ expresses a Theological Both-ness that drove emperors to spill blood. Why?  Because such a faith would effectively rob them of their unique claim as participants of the divine nature.  They could not allow that, in a Christian world, not just a king but every follower of Christ has in any sense become divine.  The point was hardly lost upon the Roman Emperors. In seeking to destroy Christianity in its crib, they were defending the uniqueness of their claim to divinity.  They could not permit a Theological Both-ness which allowed the common person to claim a divine status equal to their own. 

Imagine a political leader in our day calling a news conference and startling the nation by claiming to be Divine.  It would be mocked, of course.  In our Western world, people won’t accept that a human person can be a god.  But there would be another source of disinterest for Christians, because Christians see our partaking of the divine nature as universal for ALL believers.  In a Christian context, the lowest on the social ladder knows that they are equally divine to presidents and Prime Ministers and kings, the Both-ness that is the king’s being no more remarkable than that which is every believer’s experience in Christ.  This Both-ness gives force to the message of Christ, that “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

Now, is there any practical relevance to this doctrinal survey of the nature of Christ?   Today is Reformation Sunday, marking a change which began in Wittenberg, Germany nearly 500 years ago, on October 31, 1517, when a monk named Martin Luther decorated the Castle Door with his 95 theses.  Luther’s, too, was a Search for Theological Both-ness, challenging the power which the church held over the masses, a power claiming special status granted by God.  The masses were at the mercy of Rome for salvation, forgiveness and absolution, which was granted in often corrupt ways.  Luther would challenge the church, insisting that salvation is by simple faith alone, immediately accessible to the masses without the intervention of Rome and its priests.  He would open the scriptures to the masses so that all could experience its sacred power. The Reformation was a “first shall be last and last shall be first” message.  Gradually, the Protestant Church emerged from the dialogue initiated at Wittenberg, unleashing a force which would re-shape Europe and the Western World. 

In our day, a new Reformation seems to have been launched.  This new Reformation, I think, may also be understood as a Search for Theological Both-ness.  Brian McClaren, a leader of the emerging church movement, notes that strange things are happening, long-familiar assumptions that have mapped the religious landscape are being blurred as pastors and lay people become unwilling to allow themselves to be narrowly defined within the established borders of their own religious heritage.  I love the cover of McLaren’s latest book, A Generous Orthodoxy.  While he comes from a conservative and evangelical background, his book embraces a wonderful Both-ness.  The book’s subtitle is:  Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/Calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + Methodist + Catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian.   That’s a lot of plus marks!  In other words, McClaren sees a force gathering our diversity into unity.   McClaren clearly insists on freedom to explore other traditions, to glean positive influences that might help him become the Christian that God is calling him to be. 

While I was raised a United Methodist, my earliest years in ministry, like McClaren’s, were situated way out on the fringe of one of the most conservative twigs on one of the most conservative branches on one of the most conservative limbs of Christianity.  When I occupied a fundamentalist Missionary Baptist pulpit thirty years ago, I considered the very word “ecumenical,” to be anathema.  Our stationary at my church in Helena included the phrase, “A nucleus of truth in a mass of error.”  This sort of territorial mentality was the spirit of the times.  There would be no plus marks in the development of my theology!  I developed a hermeneutic of suspicion, finding the ideas of others automatically suspect, fearing that they were designed to influence me away from the boundaries that narrowly defined me as a fundamentalist.  

Were I to pinpoint a Castle-Door-at-Wittenberg Moment of radical re-formation in my own journey, it would be when I arrived in Ann Arbor to begin graduate work in Hebrew, a threshold opening a new world to me.  At first, my newfound openness led me to reject faith itself.  The fundamentalist part of me couldn’t conceive of faith in any other way than that which had been my experience.  If not THIS faith (which I had preached for seven years) then it must be NO faith.  I was ready to leave the church.  What I eventually learned, though (to quote McClaren, yet no less true for me), was that there’s “something here that I can’t stop loving, and that something is actually a Someone.”  To quote Marcus Borg, “I was seeing Jesus again, for the very first time.” 

May I suggest that we are now entering a post-Reformation period, that after 500 years of the Protestant Reformation we are reclaiming some of the things that were, along with some corrupt practices of the Roman Church, tossed out by the Protestant Church?  I think so, and I think that a Search for Theological Both-ness characterizes this new spirit.  One of my best friends in the ministry is Rev. Don Chandler, pastor of Central Baptist Church in Conway who, along with our wives, will be journeying next week to follow the Journeys of Paul in Greece and Turkey.  Don offered me my first job in church, in 1974.  Those were days when the word “ecumenical” was frowned upon.  We even considered the Southern Baptist Convention to be liberal!  Why, how dare they speak so openly of things such as denying biblical inerrancy?  Well, four days ago, on Wednesday, that church unanimously voted to petition the Southern Baptist Convention for DUAL membership.  That’s a Both-ness, Missionary Baptist and SBC, inconceivable in the 70’s. Dual membership with an SBC church?  Why, you may as well flirt with the Catholics!

Strange things are happening, indeed.  Good things.  Lutherans are using prayer beads.  Staid Episcopalians and Methodists are walking labyrinths and linking their traditional worship rituals with contemporary expressions of praise.  Presbyterians and Methodists, lay and clergy, are finding spiritual retreat at Benedictine monasteries and (oh my goodness!) are learning to cross themselves without feeling they have betrayed the faith.  Assembly of God and Pentecostal folk are learning the value of silence, and Baptists are learning to respect the forty days of Lent and finding other value in observing a liturgical rhythm of the church year.  Evangelical leaders of mega-churches such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels are in the news, becoming interested in topics traditionally stressed by Mainline churches – global warming and poverty and AIDS and social justice, even as Mainline churches become more interested in faith and evangelism.

I wonder.  Are we entering an era of Theological BOTH-ness?  I think so, and I find it nothing short of exhilarating, holding much promise for the church and its ability to touch the world for Christ. 

Sources:

Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition.  I am indebted to Smith’s work for creating the spark with led to this sermon, particularly to pp. 97 - 102 on the Incarnation.  (HarperSanFrancisco: 2005).                                                                                                            

Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy.  (Zondervan, 2004).