ReJesus: Revisioning Christology?

ReJesus is the latest offering from the dynamic duo of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.

Let me say up front: I love these guys and their passion. I hope I’m not expecting perfection from them. They are contributing to a learning conversation. Their stated intention in this work is to declutter Jesus: to free him from the baggage and cultural accretions of centuries. Some of those accretions involve the imposition of philosophical baggage, and of course even the council of Nicea was working with a certain philosophical perspective when they articulated the Christological formulations that they did. I understand that Frost and Hirsch are attempting a correction; but I wonder if they have pushed too hard.

ReJesus is Soul Survivor meets Wild at Heart. The motivation is sound; others like Amos Yong and Clark Pinnock have affirmed that evangelical Christology is anemic, either academic on one hand or bumper-sticker best-buddy on the other. Where to start? Yong argues for a Spirit-Christology in a strong Trinitarian frame. In Flame of Love Pinnock takes on the filioque (”and proceeds from the Father and the Son”) clause in the Creed. Not only did this small phrase create the rift between East and West, but it implies to some the subordination of the Spirit in the Trinity. Pinnock makes the argument, taken up effectively by Amos Yong and others, that any implication that the Spirit is subordinate in the Trinity gets us into trouble as we go out in mission. Pinnock writes,

“The idea of adding filioque was not perverse theologically. The risen Lord did and does pour out the Spirit on the church- But the phrase in the creed can lead to a possible misunderstanding. It can threaten our understanding of the Spirit’s universality. It might suggest to the worshiper that Spirit is not the gift of the Father to creation universally but a gift confined to the sphere of the Son and even the sphere of the church…” (197)

One could argue that the filioque promotes Christomonism, and both Pinnock and Yong have been at pains to correct that emphasis. In order to establish a lasting and biblical foundation for the missio Dei we need to affirm, with Newbigin, that God’s mission involves Father, Son and Spirit. As Newbigin phrases it:

The concern for mission is nothing less than this: the kingdom of God, the sovereign rule of the Father of Jesus over all humankind and over all creation. Mission.. is the proclamation of the kingdom, the presence of the kingdom and the prevenience of the kingdom. By proclaiming the reign of God over all things the church acts out its faith that the Father of Jesus is indeed ruler of all. The church, by inviting all humankind to share in the mystery of the presence of the kingdom hidden in its life through its union with the crucified and risen life of Jesus, acts out the love of Jesus that took him to the cross. By obediently following where the Spirit leads, often in ways neither planned, known, nor understood, the church acts out the hope that it is given by the presence of the Spirit who is the living foretaste of the kingdom.” (The Open Secret, 64)

When someone with the cultural and biblical grounding like Newbigin affirms a strong Trinitarian foundation, we need to listen. To affirm the work Frost and Hirsch are doing in ReJesus,

Yes.. we need to engage with Jesus.
Yes, we need to let him be the wild and free sovereign Lord..
yes, we have tamed God..
yes, to confess Jesus is Lord is to confess that Caesar is not.
yes, Christology is important..

But the book offers.. a footnote on the Trinity?  To me they push toward Christomonism. They quote NT Wright on page 130, and Wright closes the quote with these words: “If Trinitarian theology had not existed, it would be necessary to invent it.” They then correctly argue that the early church did not have a clear Trinitarian theology, and of course, they are right. But it was for this reason that a variety of heresies arose in the church: Modalism, Sabellianism, Arianism. Each of these had profound implications for ministry and mission, and it was the function of the early councils to try to articulate an evolving clarity. Do we really want to return to the second century?

To my reading, Frost and Hirsch come close to a monistic confession, subsuming the reality of the triune God into Christ. To me this merely trades one problem for another. While addressing certain of our cultural distortions, they substitute an older one. And this is not merely a theoretical issue that lacks practical implications for the life and mission of the church. There are clear implications for anthropology and relationality and thus the way we think about salvation and God’s purposes in forming a people. As William Cavanaugh puts it,

“People are usually converted to a new way of living by getting to know people who live that way and thus being able to see themselves living that way too. This is the way God’s revolution works. The church is meant to be that community of people who make salvation visible for the rest of the world. Salvation is not a property of isolated individuals, but is only made visible in mutual love.” (The Church as God’s Body Language)

Now, to be fair, I don’t think Frost and Hirsch are saying, “Hey! We finally have all the answers!” as if working toward a new creed. I do see this as an going conversation around the church, mission, and God’s kingdom. And this response is similarly a contribution to the conversation. I know I don’t have the perfect perspective or perfect clarity. But I think the Trinitarian point is worth pushing.

Douglas John Hall you may know as the post-Christendom author. He’s a careful and Trinitarian thinker and he addresses this very issue in his short paper, “Confessing Christ in a Post-Christendom Context” 1999) He writes,

“I think that we can do so [recover a fundamental Christology] only if we recover a foundational Theology-a doctrine of God-that is informed by a Judaic sense of the dialectic of divine distance and proximity, otherness and sameness, transcendence and immanence. Christomonism and the exclusivity that attends it represents, I believe, a failure of trinitarian theology. For a triune understanding of God, the western tradition especially was always tempted to substitute an undialectical monotheism heavily informed by a christology emphasizing the divinity principle and downplaying Jesus’ true humanity. The result, in the hands of the simplifiers, is what H. Richard Niebuhr rightly named “a new unitarianism of the second person of the trinity”-or, in the plain and oft-repeated slogan of popular evangelicalism, the simple declaration: “Jesus is God.” If all we can say of Jesus and of God is that Jesus is God-all the God of God there is-then we have effectively ruled out all other attempts of the human spirit to glimpse the mystery of the ultimate; and this is all the more conspicuously the case when our understanding of “Jesus,” in the first place, is really a dogmatic reduction of his person, his “thou-ness,” to the “it-ness” of christological propositions that, most of them, enshrine little more than our own religious bid for authority.” (3)

So while one danger is Christomonism, another is reductionism. Frost and Hirsch are NOT interested in Christological propositions. Part of their motivation is to move away from these. But one can’t simply turn back the clock. With ReJesus I fear we reinforce an individualist and Cartesian paradigm.

So let’s consider for a moment the shorthand that we see everywhere:

Christology -> mission -> church

I am convinced that incarnation alone, and even mission and incarnation, are insufficient lenses to challenge our cultural frames. If we do not move beyond this monism to a Trinitarian exploration, we will merely reinforce the individualism that subverts Christian formation.

With the frame above.. Christology -> mission .. I feel we will end up with .. Jesus is sent.. I am sent.. out to convert discrete individuals who will become independent believers with no ability to submit to the body. Our dominant lenses and dominant ethic will not be challenged.  It won’t matter that Jesus chose twelve; we can write that off to methodology.

While we might affirm the Cross as the means to a new humanity, we can just as easily see “Jesus my personal Savior.” Jesus alone as the foundation for mission pushes us to monism, which in turn reinforces individualism. Where is the death of the individual that results in one new humanity? And where is the new community? Perhaps we could find it on the ecclesiology side by talking about the multiplicity of the body.

But I think apart from more work on the nature of God and the nature of humanity in his image, we will only reinforce Cartesian individualism and have no effective way to counter a consumer approach to spirituality. Even mission can be run through the grid of individualism after all, and salvation becomes another product we consume for self interest.

Finally, more on the issue of soteriology relative to Christology which is where Hall leaves off above. Amos Yong has been building on the work of Clark Pinnock and others. He argues that when we start with Christology and soteriology, we have no basis for asking, “How is the Spirit active in other religions?” (This is an inevitable subset of the question as to how the Spirit is active in the wider culture, and is one of the most pressing questions of our day as Tickle notes in her new book “The Great Emergence”).

But if we start with pneumatology, and move to a Spirit-Christology, we affirm de facto a Trinitarian frame and we start with ontology. Thus we begin with our common humanness; a starting point among rather than above. We don’t begin with the boundary questions that divide us and them; we don’t have to prejudge and get caught in all the nasty disputes about who can be saved. Instead we move in exactly the direction affirmed by Tickle in The Great Emergence - toward questions of the nature of humanity and the Imago. Then we are back with Newbigin on questions of prevenience and asking, “What is God doing in the world and how can we partner with him?” The same direction also affirmed by McLaren in “A Generous Orthodoxy.”

Yong writes in “The Holy Spirit and World Religions” (2004),

“I suggest that set within a robust Trinitarian framework, a pneumatological theology of religions is able to navigate a via media between imperialism on the one side and relativism on the other; between Christian theology on the one side and theology of religions on the other; between discerning the Holy Spirit on the one side and discerning other spirits on the other. This is because the human experience OF the Holy Spirit is at the same time human experience IN the Spirit. As such, a pneumatological epistemology emerges that is intersubjective and participatory on the one hand, even while preserving difference and distinctiveness on the other. The dominant metaphor operative here is that found on the Day of Pentecost when those on the streets of Jerusalem proclaimed, “in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11). In this account, the outpouring of the Spirit “upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17) opens up the possibility of encountering others in all of their differences even while avoiding or overcoming the radical incommensurability thesis. Thus the miracle of Pentecost is to allow for intersubjective communication and interrelational participation even amidst the preservation of otherness - linguistic, cultural and even religious.”  (192-93)

Perhaps ReJesus is an attempt to bridge a conversation between Jewish believers and evangelicals. “The Shema Schema” is an interesting chapter. I find myself wondering whether the avoidance of a clear Trinitarian frame, while an attempt to avoid complexity, simply muddies the water.

To close, ReJesus is a book on a mission. It is focused, and to me comes across as too narrow in focus. However, one can’t cover everything in every book. A book is generally part of a larger conversation, and just as a painter cannot be evaluated by a single painting, an author can’t be evaluated by a single book. I have pushed back hard against this particular book, because I think a wider brush stroke is necessary as we think about the missio Dei and the Trinitarian nature of mission.

For further reading, Moltmann - The Trinity and the Kingdom

Author Bio: Len Hjalmarson is a writer, pastor, student and software developer living in Kelowna, BC, in the heart of the vineyards and orchards of the Okanagan valley. He writes at NextReformation.com, and at places like ChristianWeek, ALLELON, and occasionally to Christianity.ca or Next-Wave magazine.

for further reading . . .

• Kevin Smith Making Film About the Trinity
• Find Yourself In The Faces Of Others
• “Oh the Glory”: Following the Spirit’s Song into the World
• The Apocalyptic Church
• Striving for a Just Peace without the Myth of Redemptive Violence
• Unusual Politics: With or Without the Church?
• Behold the Man: the Passion as Coronation