November 7: Patristic Christian views / symbolism

David Vishanoff

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2017

Assignment

Read Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, chapters 5, 6, and 7.

• Ch. 5 – The Cosmic Christ
  • How could anyone ever equate the historical man Jesus with the rational principle that orders and sustains the universe? Or rather, what would it mean to equate the two?
  • Notice especially how this view of Jesus refashioned Christian understandings of sin, the fall, and salvation.
• Ch. 6 – The Son of Man
  • Pelikan says on p. 71 that seeing Christ as a revelation of God came quickly, but that seeing him as a revelation of human nature took more time. That seems counterintuitive; wasn’t his humanity more obvious?
  • And why would focusing on his human nature lead to Augustine’s doctrine of the depravity of human nature?
• Ch. 7 – The True Image
  • The church councils declared that Christ is uniquely the image of God, in a way that no other human or creature is. When they made images of Christ, were they saying that God can truly be depicted in human form, or were they just drawing metaphorical allusions to God’s indescribable nature?

These three chapters go together, and we should try discussing them together. Christians identified Christ as the true image of God (ch. 7), the true image of humanity (ch. 6), and the image of the whole cosmos (ch. 5). That’s making a lot out of one symbol. Doesn’t a symbol that stands for everything end up standing for nothing? What then is the point of making Christ stand for all these things at once?

What kind of symbol is Jesus in American society today? What does he stand for in our culture?

For today, keep working on whatever aspect of your gospel needs attention, and do a little thinking and writing (maybe in an introductory essay) about this: how does Jesus function as a symbol in your gospel? In other words, what does he stand for–hope, challenge, love, the Church, the oppressed, oppression…? Please be prepared to present to the class the main things you want Jesus to symbolize in your gospel.

Notes from class

Jesus became for orthodox Christians what scholars of religion like to call a “master symbol”–a symbol that united different and even seemingly opposite things, as a way to answer or at least give meaning to all the main paradoxes of human life. We saw him being used as the answer or meaning for several paradoxes:

• The God behind the universe is both rational and personal, because Jesus is both, and he both God and the organizing pattern of the universe.
• The universe is knowable but mysterious. Jesus makes it both: he is its organizing pattern, which he makes accessible by creating the world in accordance with it and by becoming a concrete and accessible human person, but it remains mysterious because Jesus is also the “mind of God.”
• God is knowable but beyond human comprehension. Jesus makes him both because he is both an accessible human person and the “mind of God” that is beyond our categories (like time).
• Humans are both miserable and marvelous, sinful and in God’s image. Jesus displays that divine image, and provides the way for humans to recover it by his taking on humanity.
• Human relationships necessarily involve getting to know others without fully knowing them. This was our own example of a life paradox; we can imagine theologians making Jesus a symbol of this too, since he embodies the relationship between God and humans, and he makes God knowable without reducing him to human categories for us to know him fully.
• Images aren’t really God and so can’t really reveal him, but are needed for understanding God. According to the pro-icon theologians, Jesus makes images true representations of God by bringing the reality of God into physical images, both in his creation of humans in the image of God, and in his incarnation in human form.

We had several ideas about the appeal of paradoxical theologies:

• Some paradoxes are universal to human experience, we think–like the paradox of having to believe that we know and communicate with people even though we know we don’t really know them, and we even need them to remain somewhat unknown for us to have a relationship with them.
• We suspect that humans can’t really function without some paradoxical view of the world, unless they just bury their heads in the sand and ignore the paradoxes they are living and experiencing.
• The theologies that have become orthodoxies have often been those that incorporate these paradoxes rather than explaining them away or affirming only one side of them. (I looked, but I can’t find where I first encountered that observation, but I’m sure I’m not the first to think of it.)
• In less intellectual forms of Christianity Jesus is likewise made the answer to all life’s hardest questions, so he serves as a master symbol there too, just without the same theological elaboration.
• One way to define Christianity would be: “any religious system in which the master symbol, which resolves or holds together all the main paradoxes of life, is Jesus.” Some of us would want to add an orthodoxy test to that definition, while others think the defining trait of Christianity is just that it makes Jesus the answer to all the big questions.

We also wondered about our own representations of Jesus:

• None of us seems to want to claim authority for our representations of Jesus, but some of us do want them to be orthodox Christian representations.
• But the anti-icon theologians (and some of us) would probably say that any representation other than the four orthodox gospels is necessarily heretical, because it necessarily distorts Jesus by translating him into a new context and culture.
• But this would seem to make all theology (and all the portraits of Jesus in Pelikan’s book) heretical, since theology always involves translating into the theologian’s context and culture.
• Pelikan and the pro-icon theologians (and some of us) might say that as each of us translates Jesus into our own context and culture, we can give new but true representations of Jesus because Jesus entered into human contexts and cultures and thus made them capable of representing him.
• Of course, we all agree that translating Jesus into our own contexts and cultures is natural and inevitable; we have been seeing different people do that all term. We’re just unsure what it takes for those representations to be true to whatever orthodox or historical essence we think Jesus has: do they have to pass a doctrinal test, or do they have to make Jesus their master symbol, or are they all equally true representations, or are they all just fictions?