Christ and Humanity

“But this is my doctrine; …By ladders of rope I learned to climb many a window and with nimble legs I climbed high masts…Not good, neither evil, but my taste, as to which I have neither shame nor concealment. Here lies my way where lies yours? I answered them which inquired of me ‘the way.’ For the way existeth not! Thus spake Zarathustra.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra!

Evangelical Christians are often critical of the Enlightenment, especially for its rationalism. Descartes shifted the seat of authority from Scripture, tradition, and the church to the inner world of the individual mind: “I think, therefore I am.” Everything else is up for grabs, but I can be certain that I exist because of my rationality.

And yet, we tend to be greatly influenced by the reaction to this way of thinking in the form of Romanticism-the 19th century movement that shifted the foundation of knowledge from the self’s reason to the self’s experience and intuition. While we would be hard-pressed to locate in our hymnals today anything like, “You ask me how I know he lives? I cannot be sure that he lives today, but he was a historical person who can be studied,” we do have the Romantic version, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.” The Christian response to the Enlightenment, after all, was two-fold: The orthodox attempted to meet the scientific and historical objections head-on, by employing reason and historical arguments, while the pietists accepted a truce with the Enlightenment if the latter would simply concede to the former the territory marked “spiritual.” So, secularism was awarded the public world of real facts, real history, and real time and space; the religiously inclined were awarded the Liechtenstein of religious experience. Immanuel Kant (18th century), reared in pietism, where religion was considered primarily a matter of the heart anyway, he told us that religion belonged to the “noumenal” (i.e., “spiritual”) realm-out of reach of rational, historical, or evidential inquiry, while the “phenomenal” realm included the actual facts of history and science that can be verified as having actually happened. Eventually, this reworking of Plato’s distinction between the realm of “Idea” (the perfect form in heaven) “Matter” (the imperfect copy on earth) led to the notion that the religious idea was unknowable apart from personal experience and the history of Christ described by the apostles was seen as the “spiritualization” of the real facts concerning this extraordinary man. Christianity was beyond the limits of rational inquiry and the “myths” of Jesus’ early life were part of a “spiritual” history-very different from, say, the history of the Gallic Wars.

Modern liberalism was the product of the pietistic settlement and, in fact, most of the architects of theological modernism were pietists by orientation, background, and temperament. Friederich Schleiermacher (18th century), father of modern liberalism, sought to make Christianity relevant for the “cultured despisers” of historical, orthodox faith. He did this by linking Christianity to Romanticism, a matter of the heart, rather than a matter of creed or historical truth. The classical doctrines of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ-his incarnation, vicarious death and resurrection, ascension and second coming-were all pieces of unnecessary baggage that were standing in the way of the poets, sentimentalists, and moralists of the day. Much like the ancient Greeks, who demanded a gospel of moral wisdom rather than “Christ and him crucified,” the generation of Goethe found the Christian Gospel “foolishness” and “a stumbling block.”

Why was that Gospel a stumbling block? If we can answer that question, we may come closer to understanding why Christmas does not make much sense in the modern (or postmodern) world.

The Greeks worshipped gods who knew how to get things done. They were powerful, courageous-sometimes to the point of brutality. But they were also compassionate. The archetypical image of the deity was the Olympian-the athlete-powerful, fit and trim, ready to take on all-comers. Victory was the chief avenue to deification, and generals, caesars, and athletes were incarnations of these divine attributes. Evil was attributed to matter in a myth of creation in which the realm of pure spirit (Idea, the Mind) was related to deity and pure matter was related to the demonic. The “Fall,” in Greek religion, was the result of the spirit’s having tumbled from the spiritual realm to the temporal-physical “prison” of earthly existence. The Platonic tradition especially emphasized redemption as an escape from the earthly, temporal, material, and sensual to the heavenly, eternal, spiritual, and rational.

Much of the New Testament was written with this cultural context in mind, especially as many itinerant “evangelists” were enjoying a growing popularity for their blending of Greek mysticism with biblical Christianity. Paul, in fact, refers to those in Corinth who thought their seeker-sensitive version of the Gospel was more relevant as the “super-apostles” (2 Cor. 11). This hybrid emerged as the heresy of “Gnosticism,” which comes from the Greek word gnosis, or knowledge. By “knowledge,” these early heretics did not intend the sort of data that comes from historical, scientific, or material facts, but an allegedly superior knowledge based on spiritual intuition and revelation.

With this background, we can understand why John declared that “many false prophets have gone out into the world.” “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God,” he said: “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world” (1 John 4:1-3). Even before the Christian message gets to the Cross, the scandal to the Greek mind already appears in the Incarnation itself. If the spiritual is good and the material is evil, how could a good God create matter, much less become material? To say that God became human is fine, if by that one means that he adopted a human soul or that he appeared to have a human body and human characteristics. But the axiom, “God became flesh” was tantamount to saying, “God became what is essentially evil.”

Thus, Gnosticism flourished as a way of denying the incarnation (literally meaning, “in-fleshing”) while sounding spiritual and very religious to those who sought some connection to the divine within themselves. By following Jesus, one could become truly enlightened and eventually rise from the crude, earthly existence into which he had fallen to the higher life of the spirit.

While this synthesis of pagan mysticism and Christianity was officially eschewed, it has always had its adherents throughout church history, especially in the mystical traditions. But it received its greatest impetus in the triumph of “modernity.” Let me briefly explain what is meant by this.

During the Late Middle Ages, an Italian mystic by the name of Joachim of Fiore created a scheme in which history was divided into the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Spirit. The Old Testament, corresponding to this first age, is distinguished by its cruel, harsh deity who ordered the slaughters of entire people groups. We know the Age of the Son as the period in which the “good God,” Jesus Christ, softened the harsher features of the Jewish deity. In the appearance of Christ, we learned about grace for the first time, and the church was founded, with its “material” way of worshipping God through sacraments (bread, wine, water) and words (Scripture). But an even greater stage of historical development yet awaited: the Age of the Spirit, when the institutional church would be eclipsed by the universal brotherhood of man and the Word and sacraments would be rendered unnecessary by the intuitive life of the Spirit.

Joachim’s commentary on The Revelation was quite popular, especially among the Spiritual Franciscans, a group that was convinced that the institutional Church of Rome had become so worldly and corrupt that even the monastic orders (including the world-denying followers of St. Francis of Assisi) were synagogues of Satan.

While officially condemned, Joachim’s teachings nevertheless gained wider popularity during the Renaissance, as great humanists such as Petrarch detected the Greek, Platonic mysticism inherent in the system and heartily approved its emphasis on “spirituality” rather than dogma, creed, history. Petrarch envisioned the Renaissance as the Age of the Spirit, when the divinity in every person would realize a universal religion of spiritual peace and harmony.

Ironically, the period of the Reformation, far from squelching this reasoning, accelerated its prominence. The Reformers themselves opposed the “Manichaeans” (i.e., another name for “Gnostics”) in the form of the Anabaptists. These heirs of the medieval sects often argued that the Word and sacraments had been superseded by the Spirit. Dubbed the “Radical Reformation,” leaders of this movement, such as Menno Simons (namesake of the Mennonites) was refuted by Calvin for the former’s doctrine of the “heavenly body” of Jesus. Arguing that the Virgin Mary was merely a “channel” or “conduit” through which God came to earth, Menno denied the reality of the virgin birth and, therefore, the true humanity of Christ. Against the Polish Reformer, John a Lasco, Menno asserted, “that there is not a letter to be found in all the Scriptures that the Word assumed our flesh; or that the divine nature miraculously united itself with our human nature.” (1)

Calvin replied to the Anabaptist revival of Gnosticism or Manichaeanism by walking through the scores of biblical passages which describe the humanity of Christ. He begins with the Old Testament history: “For the blessing is promised neither in heavenly seed nor in the phantom of a man, but in the seed of Abraham and Jacob. Nor is an eternal throne promised to a man of air, but to the Son of David and the fruit of his loins.” Calvin emphasizes the historical genealogies and the Jewishness of the Son of Man to defend Christ’s human descent. Further, Jesus was “subject to hunger, thirst, cold, and other infirmities of our nature.” He “expiated in our flesh” the debt we owed. “And Matthew does not here describe the virgin as a channel through which Christ flowed.” By assuming our humanity, Christ dignified our humanity and proved that there is nothing wrong with matter or human nature in itself, as God created it, but that evil and sinfulness are to be ascribed to the perverse will and desire of the creature. (2)

In other words, the Jewish worldview is diametrically opposed to the Greek outlook. Throughout the Old Testament, God is involved in matter: He creates both the heavens and the earth, rules both in providence even after the Fall, and redeems his people in time, history, and the world, not from time, history, and the world. The Jew was not at all uncomfortable with his humanity; he did not chafe at the prospect of his physical, time-bound existence, but saw this world as the stage or “marvelous theater” (Calvin’s phrase) in which God’s glory was demonstrated through providence and redemption. Not only did God the Son become flesh; he redeemed sinful flesh (the body as well as the soul), and the whole person, body and soul, is involved in sanctification (cf. Romans 6) and final resurrection and glorification (cf. 1 Cor. 15).

The elements of the Radical Reformation and the Renaissance, however, which mediated this ancient heresy of Greek mysticism became the bricks that would lay the foundation for the Tower of Babel we have now seen collapse before our very eyes: modernity.

The German philosopher G. F. Hegel (19th century) was heavily influenced by the vision of Joachim of Fiore and employed his brilliance in the creation of a philosophical system that emphasized the evolution of humanity from matter to spirit, body to mind, the lower to the higher. “God” is this evolutionary ascent toward which all of history is moving, so that finally all will be “God” and “God” will be all. Through a winding spiral of thesis (“the sky is white”), antithesis (“the sky is black”), and synthesis (“the sky is both black and white”), history would progress toward its final destination.

From this project we have inherited the trinity of “modernity”: the ideas of progress, rationalism, and optimism. Ironically, these ideas are not self-evident in nature, or discernible in history, no matter how modern intellectuals defended their “rational beliefs” against religious “superstition.”

The Enlightenment project aided in the building of the French and American republics and altered the British and German monarchies. Hegel’s evolutionary view of human history from matter to spirit is the foundation of Darwinism, the social sciences, and Marxist thought. But it is the foundation of many of the conservative American attitudes and beliefs as well. After two world wars and the tragic consequences of Enlightenment optimism, progress, and faith in humanity, the triumphant note was drowned out by the dirge of despair. Apart from God, reason would triumph, the Enlightenment promised, but the failure of that enterprise was written on the subway walls. Apart from the Word, language would explain everything. But that optimistic sentiment gave way to deconstructionism when the experiment failed miserably. Now, there is no such thing as universal human rationality; language is merely a clever tool of the oppressor in subjugating the less fortunate by rhetorical foolery.

Yet, in spite of the sins of the fathers leading the children to repentance, “postmodern” intellectuals continue to live off of the borrowed capital of their despised parents. The tie that binds the rationalists of the Enlightenment, the inward poets of Romanticisms, and the existential cries of the Postmodernists is Gnosticism. Much as they might reject the sentimental optimism of their forebears, those today who glory in the term “postmodern” (the very name suggests indebtedness to the notion of progress) nevertheless view this world, not as a theater of God’s activity, but as an alien place where their spirit is imprisoned in matter, time, and history. Like the ancient Gnostics, modern liberals have been ashamed not only of the Gospel of the Cross and Resurrection, but of the Incarnation itself. They have torn the so-called “Christ of Faith” from the “Jesus of History,” and insisted that the truth of Christianity lies in its inward effects and experiences, not in its external historicity and earthly reality. Rudolf Bultmann, for instance, evidenced the typical pietistic background of twentieth-century apostasy by declaring that even though the resurrection did not occur in history, the important thing is that it occurred in his heart, in his own personal Christian experience. By escaping this world through spiritual inwardness, hedonism, or consumerism, the postmodern Gnostics are no happier with being human than were the poets who preceded them. The difference is, they have given up on the “process” of evolution from matter to spirit, from human to divine-at least, in principle.

Most of the German liberal theologians praised the Greek influences upon Christianity and despised the Jewish, following Nietzsche’s own disdain for the latter: “‘Sin,'” he declared, “is a Jewish feeling, a Jewish invention, and, in view of this background,…Christianity has actually attempted to ‘judaize’ the whole world. How far it has succeeded in Europe is best seen in the degree of strangeness that Greek antiquity-a world without a feeling of sin-still has for our sensibilities.” “For a Greek,” he concluded, the idea of sin and grace “would be both laughable and shocking.” (3) Thus, every conceivable category of Christianity was an offense to the pagan, as it is to the modern American-and for many of the same reasons. The modern American does not want to welcome a God who becomes part of the human situation; he wants to escape his humanity and “realize himself” through going within or going without for that divine spark. The Incarnation, the Cross, Judgment and Justification-these are ideas, we are told, do not work anymore in the contemporary context. Therefore, we must change the Christian message to answer the questions that modern (and postmodern) people are asking. That is to ask Christianity to become a guide to the quest for self-fulfillment-a Greek rather than Jewish quest indeed.

We began with Nietzsche’s quote about climbing ropes to the high masts, refusing to accept a creaturely place down below. The German nihilist spoke of a “Superman” who would eventually replace humanity in the wake of the “death of God.” Hitler and Stalin took Nietzsche up on the idea and we have found it appealing ever since. The “will to power” is the will to become gods. “Each man would be God, if he could be,” said Nietzsche. We may not have the power to become supermen, but we do have the will. It is in us ever since the Fall of the first Adam, the first man who wanted to become God.

So what does all of this have to do with Christmas? Plenty. First, against Greek wisdom and its Gnostic offshoots, Christianity affirms a good creation by a good Creator. Sin and evil are understood in moral, not metaphysical, terms. This is important especially in our day, as the metaphysical dualism of the Gnostics, Manichaeans, sectarian enthusiasts of old, and secular enthusiasts of the modern era, is often assumed also by many evangelicals who are obsessed with the “spiritual warfare” project inspired by Frank Peretti’s novels and the Vineyard-oriented ideas of Peter Wagner, Neil Anderson, and a host of popular writers. Furthermore, the biblical Fall is not from light to darkness or spirit to matter, or heaven to earth, but from obedience to disobedience and the consequences are not that the spirit must endure a prison of flesh, time, and history, but that the wonder and beauty of this created freedom in this glorious world cannot be enjoyed as God intended because of our own depravity as well as the depravity of others. The biblical message is not one of God and the children of light versus nature and the children of darkness, with the “good guys” and the “bad guys” engaged in struggles with territorial spirits to decide the battle for God. Nor is the Christian to distinguish between a “spiritual” part of life and a “secular” or “worldly” side. Even the growth of an evangelical sub-culture, disdaining the world even as it apes the tackiest forms of worldliness, is a sign of a high discomfort level not with sinfulness, but with being truly human. But redemption, then, in the Christian scheme, is not salvation of the individual soul or spirit from this earthly, historical, bodily existence, but the salvation of this world and the redemption of time and history, where the incarnation and resurrection of the God-Man accomplish the victory that all human attempts at progress toward the heavenly and the spiritual have failed to accomplish for the would-be Man-God.

To say that a man became a god is nothing more than the Greeks would have wanted to believe, as Schleiermacher’s “cultured despisers” insisted in their emotive hymns to their own deification. That is a victory! A triumph on the part of humanity! A man endured the trials and tests of material and historical existence and, rung by rung, climbed the ladder to the mast of heaven itself. At last, the underdog wins by the end of the movie and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. But to say that God became man by humbling himself, enduring shame and even the wrath of God himself, and then gained victory-not by progress, but by regress; not by ascent into heaven, but by descent to the earth and hell, flies in the face of the whole human enterprise.

Thank God it does. This Christmas, let us also beware of the antichrists and false prophets who deny that Christ has come in the flesh, even in the subtlety of carols that try to get us to believe of the Divine Infant, “No crying he makes.” For in Christ, God not only reconciled us, but entered into our own time-and-space history and made sense of suffering, death, evil, and justice. Let us embrace this world as God did and does, and patiently await the consummation, when our Brother, no longer the baby in the manger, will judge evil and make all things new.

For Further Reading

Philip Lee, Against The Protestant Gnostics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
David Walsh, After Ideology (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) and Barrs, On Being Human (Downers Grove, IL: IVP)
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958, second ed. reprint in 1991)
St. Irenaeus, Refutation and Overthrow of the ‘Knowledge’ Falsely So Called (usually known as Against Heresies). This may be found in The Ante-Nicene Fathers set, volume 1, or in a variety of other collections of early church classics.