Dear Theophilus, 

In the last letter I had mentioned that we will look at the person of Christ. We have done a little of this in the past but now we will expand and build on that.

The figure of Christ is enigmatic to many. What are we to make of him? Some proposed that he was a prophet, a man of God, who showed us how we should behave as humans. Others saw him as a mistaken Messiah whose mission failed in death. Others saw him as a spiritual being whose suffering was an illusion and through this he showed us that the material is to be despised and the spiritual is to be honored. And the list goes on and on with all kinds of claims and all kinds of statements as to who Christ was.

None of the above versions was accepted by the early Church and none of them is accepted by the Church of today. What does the Church say about Christ?

If we were to go the scriptures we would also see there some confusion in the minds of the early disciples and apostles. Some saw Christ as a Messiah that had come to free Israel from the yoke of Roman oppression. Others saw other sides to him. But it became evident, very early, to the followers of Christ that they were dealing with a very unique individual. What dawned on them is that Christ is indeed Emmanuel, which means God with us. This Jesus, whom they had seen and touched, was and is on a par with God. Now this is a numbing thought and it took a little bit of time to sort out where the evidence of Jesus' life led his followers. And in the Epistles of Paul and in the Gospels, the first cautious statements come out that Jesus is divine.

For Jews living in first century Palestine this was an astounding realization but the disciples saw that they really had no choice but to accept this fact, no matter how difficult it was to comprehend. It is a curious fact that in the debates between Jesus and the representatives of Judaism as represented in the fourth Gospel, the fundamental question that was always at the back of the debate was always the same - the identity of Jesus.

Before we go any further, there is a very useful piece of guidance given to us by St. Maximus the Confessor, one of the giants of the Christian Church. He says, if I may be permitted to paraphrase him, that we run into difficulties when we try to explain the Incarnation, the technical term for Jesus becoming man. What St. Maximus is saying is that once we try to apply our rules of logic to the Incarnation, then we are going to be pushed into difficulties. What we should do is look at the evidence and judge the validity of this eviddence and accept that rationality stands mute before the event. This reminds me of writings on a tombstone in Wales where three young people were buried:

The death of Mary and William and Richard
Makes reason mute;
But faith makes it possible to accept
And to see order in the calling of the three.

Before all events of profound occurrence, reason is silent having exhausted its resources, having taken us as far as it can. From there, something else must carry us and that is faith. This is so with the Incarnation. If we were to try to hem this event in through our rationality, through our rules of logic, we will fail. But, you will argue, aren't you calling for the abandonment of all thinking and of retreating into a silent acceptance?

I'd like to go back to what St. Maximus says. We do not abandon our rationality and reason. What we do is realize where and how we can use that rationality. The statement that Jesus is divine was arrived at through reason and debate and discussion and exploration. Reason was at the center but it knew its limits. When it comes to discussing how, when it comes to discussing the mechanism of the Incarnation, then serious problems arise from the limitations of logic. Now, let's look at some of the developments that led the Church to proclaim Christ's divinity and at the same time, talk about God as Trinity.

Let's look at what is probably the most common argument put forth to explain Christ. He is simply a man of God, a prophet, maybe to a greater degree than any other, but still, only a man. This seems an eminently reasonable position to take. So, why didn't the early Church accept this solution?

If we were to comb the New Testament throughout all of the writings, we would find that Jesus is never, not even once, referred to by the apostles as a prophet. A more fundamental question arises. What did Jesus accomplish? What did he bring that was new? If we see Jesus as merely an exemplar, an illustration of God's tremendous love for humanity, then we have a very strange situation here. Jesus dies so that we may be redeemed and put into a right relationship with God and this shows how much God loves us. This is akin to seeing a house on fire, with a person inside and I send you, at the cost of your life to go into the burning building and save the occupant. And then the claim is made that I really loved the person in the burning building. No, this does not wash, and unless God is really involved in the person of Jesus, then the hero of the attempt to save us is not God but Jesus. What the crucifixion of Jesus shows is that he loved us; it does not show us that God loves us. If Jesus is not truly God, then he shows that he loves us more than God and this the Church saw as an absurdity. This, and other arguments, show that seeing Jesus as mere man, albeit an exalted man, is simply not in accordance with the evidence that stands before us from scriptures and from historical events.

We saw from the above that the Incarnation of the Word of God helps us to know more about God. Jesus shows us the character of God. What man has had glimpses of is now clearly portrayed in the person of Jesus - God is supremely, not power, but love. Aside from Jesus and the Incarnation, we cannot make this assertion with any sense of assurance. There is something else that is very profound here. It is fine to talk in universal terms of God and His love. But with the incarnation we see the importance of the particular. The love for man is shown through a given person in given historical circumstances and this underlines the importance of the particular. You because of who you are, are important to God. This love is specific and personal. It isn't some generalized love for some abstract universal thing called humanity. It is a love for you.

Once the Incarnation is accepted as being in accordance with the evidence, then a further step enriches our understanding of God. God is a trinity of persons and this opens the door to the statement that even before creation, God was and is love and this shows the importance of relationship to being.

Christ's divinity addresses another vexing problem and that is the question of evil. We have touched on this point in the past, but what I would like to do is highlight how Jesus' incarnation contributes to our understanding of evil.

Already, in the Old Testament, it is made abundantly clear that the ultimate responsibility for everything lies with God. If that is true, then in some sense, in some very profound and basic sense, God is also responsible for the misfortunes that befall us. This responsibility is faced up to in Christ's death. Christ takes on the evil of the world through his sacrificial death.

In general, we see an inconsistency in creation and we see instances of moral ambiguity. Sometimes it is even hard for us to determine what is good and evil and we are often faced not with the choice of choosing between good and evil, but we are faced with the possibility of choosing between what is more evil and what is less evil. But throughout this, it is important for us to keep in mind that God, in spite of His taking ultimate responsibility, does not create evil. Evil, in its basic quality, is an abstraction and God does not deal with abstractions.

Evil is an abstraction because it is parasitic and exists off others. But here we come to a paradox. In order to understand what is evil, we must have some conception of what is good. Good, on the other hand shows its primacy in that it does not need evil in order to have being. Thus, the fundamental quality of creation is what is good and this leads us to a trusting relationship in the goodness of God in spite of the existence of evil. And it is in the paramount example of Christ that we see the most deeply into the secrets of God's nature and see there love for all of us, a love which is totally unconditional. If Christ is not divine, no amount of intellectual gymnastics will give us the assurance that God is truly love and a fellow-sufferer in our journey throughout our lives on earth and beyond that.

Thus, the teaching about Christ's incarnation opens the doors to three of the most fundamental beliefs in Christianity: the trinitarian God who is seen not as some isolated individual but as relational; the answer to the existence of evil in the divine responsibility for everything; and the immanence of God showing, once and for all, that the universal and the particular are both important aspects of our lives. If a claim is made that Christ is not divine, then all of this is lost.

With these thoughts, I leave you.
Yours,

Bar-Abbas