Some
months ago in a private conversation, one of the students at
the Lahu Bible Institute (LBI) asked me the following question.
"Is it true," he wanted to know, "if Westerners
(farang) really don't believe in spirits (phi)?"
When I answered that most don't although some do, he then asked,
"Don't they believe in the Bible?" This last question
is an obvious one, at least in Thailand, and it is also a crucial
one that opens up a wide range of issues central to the Christian
faith.
My
response was to ask the student if he believed that Jesus was
a human being. He answered, "yes," without hesitation,
to which I asked in reply, "As a human being, was Jesus'
limited in his knowledge of the world?" In the long conversation
that ensued, I argued that Jesus did not and could not know
more than the most advanced state of knowledge available to
him personally in his own time. The same was true of the biblical
writers. If, that is, the state of knowledge known to Jesus
and the biblical writers personally affirmed the reality of
evil spirits, Jesus and the New Testament authors would have
"naturally" accepted that reality as well. Jesus even
as a human, of course, could have idiosyncratically rejected
belief in evil spirits, but there is no reason to expect such
an unusual act of him. The only other logical possibility is
that Jesus, as God, was/is omniscient, which means that he wasn't
"really" a human, part of the biblical definition
of "human" being that humans are not created all-knowing
(as shown in the Genesis account of Creation).
It
is one of the central tenets of the Christian faith that Jesus
was 100% God and 100% human, but the doctrine of the Incarnation
is so paradoxical that individual Christians have to choose
which 100% they think is more fundamental to the person of Jesus.
The nineteenth-century German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher,
for example, began with Christ's humanity and wrestled with
the question of how an individual man could also be God (see
The Christian Faith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1928, pp. 380ff). The nineteenth-century American Presbyterian
theologian, Charles Hodge, on the other hand, began with the
fact of Christ's divine nature and so emphasized that divinity
that contemporaries accused him of obscuring Jesus'
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humanity
Hodge, we should add, represented a theological perspective
widely shared among Presbyterian missionaries in Siam/Thailand
up to World War I and beyond. Urban makes it clear that the
division between those who emphasize the divinity of Christ
at the expense of his humanity and those who emphasize the humanity
of Jesus at the expense of his divinity has existed since the
earliest days of the church.
In
one sense, then, all Christians are heretics. None of us can
truly walk and talk the line of Jesus being fully divine, fully
human (or fully human, fully divine) because the very notion
is inherently paradoxical. It transcends our ability to make
sense out of it. The fact of the matter is that the great majority
of Christians instinctively emphasizes Christ's divinity and,
like Charles Hodge, shows a strong tendency to obscure his humanity.
We apply the Gospel of John's description of the Universal Creator
Christ (John 1) to the person of Jesus, while quietly ignoring
the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, who is neither all knowing
nor all-powerful.
There
are consequences in our failure to hold the Man-God, God-Man
paradox in balance and in the widespread failure to take Jesus'
humanity with ultimate seriousness. The doctrine of the Incarnation
is not just a doctrine. It comprises a central element of our
Christian worldview. It influences, in particular, the manner
in which we relate our faith to the world around us including
the extent to which we are willing to contextualize the Christian
faith. If Christ is GOD, who temporarily took on the inconvenient
form of a man and played the "human game" for a brief
moment but remained all knowing, all-powerful even then, the
Incarnation did not actually take place. God did not become
a man but only took on the human form, remaining essentially
divine. This is a version of the heresy of Docetism, which is
found throughout the church today.
Docetic
Christianity stresses the universality and uniqueness of the Christian
faith and sets it apart from other religious faiths. It stresses
the grandeur and holiness of God, and while Jesus is experienced
in highly personal ways, he is the Jesus of Power and Majesty
who is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient. He transcends
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rather than lives within human contexts, an
anti-incarnational divine figure that is also anti-contextual.
The link between Incarnation and contextualization needs to be
stressed. The biblical portrait of God in both the Hebrew Scriptures
and the New Testament emphasizes God's intimate involvement in
particular, mundane human contexts. Jesus, in particular, was
a specific, actual person who spoke a language, atea particular
cuisine, lived in a family, in a place—in a context. If
Christ is our model, we will celebrate the fact that our own faith
is rooted in a place and time. It is our mundane faith, wrested
from a particular context and beholding to that context, rather
than a universal, timeless faith. The Docetic model of Christ,
in effect, denies all of this. It denies contextual Christianity
and accentuates the distance between a supposedly universal Christian
faith and the particular contexts within which that faith is found.
It was the vision of the Docetic Christ that the old-time missionaries
brought with them to Siam, and it is that same vision that makes
it so difficult for Jesus of Nazareth to return to Asia or to
find a meaningful place in the multitude of Thai contexts.
The
Lahu student eventually responded with his belief that if Christ
is/was God he had/has to know everything. How could he be divine
otherwise? The point is well taken, and all I can say is that
perhaps the divinity of Christ was not epistemological. It didn't
have to do with the breadth of Christ's knowledge but, rather,
with the depth of his compassion and the peace that he introduced
into the world. I realize that this response does not redress
the paradox of Christ as 100% human and 100% God, since humans
can no more love without fault than they can know without mistake.
Seeing Jesus as all-loving, however, seems to me to be more
consistent with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Maybe the problem
is in the word, "perfect." Could Jesus be both divinely
perfect and humanly im-perfect? Many will reject that possibility
out of hand. The very idea seems nonsensical, somehow. All I
know is that the Incarnation losses all meaning if we cannot
affirm the real-life humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. If he was
not one of us, Christianity is nothing but word games, and wrestling
with the meaning of the "Good News," so-called, in
Thai contexts is a waste of time.
Herb Swanson
Ban Dok Daeng
March 2003
See E. Brooks Holifield, "Mercersburg, Princeton, and the
South: The Sacramental Controversy in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Presbyterian History 54, 2 (Summer 1976):
238-58.
Linwood Urban,A short History of Christian Thought, New
YOrk: Oxford, 1986, 75-77.
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