Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted (Hebrews 2: 17-18)
These verses in the epistle to the Hebrews say some remarkable things about Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. And yet we may be oblivious to the significance of these verses because we have been so conditioned by our culture's habits of thought. No sane person who knows anything about the place of the evangelical and Reformed worlds of conservative Protestantism on the contemporary cultural map (i.e., the far right) would dare conclude that those who retain a high estimate of God's Word and of the teachings of the Reformation have become captive to the perils of political correctness. Yet even within many conservative Protestant communions and institutions the way many believers understand race, gender, and class, the holy trinity of political correctness, often conforms more to this world than to God's revealed Word. Let me explain.
During the course of going through the morning mail I recently found in an issue of the American Historical Association's newsletter a forum on the propriety of Whites teaching African-American history. While no consensus emerged, the forum itself confirmed one of the principal follies of these therapeutic times. The dominant ideology of the established cultural institutions’the federal government, the universities, and large blocks of the leadership within Christian churches, whether mainline, evangelical, or Reformed’says that it is impossible for an individual of a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation to understand the experience of someone different. This perspective, sometimes called "social constructionism," holds that the conditions of knowledge change according to differences in gender, race, ethnicity, and whatever else distinguishes individuals in the census data. This is the outlook behind redistricting efforts designed to ensure the elections of various minorities, appointments by the Clinton administration to make the federal government look more like America, the expansion of the literary canon to include the voices of oppressed outsiders, and the hiring of African-Americans to teach university courses in African-American history. Conversely, the idea that the experience of a particular human being is somehow universal or representative’especially if that individual is White, European, male, or heterosexual’is arguable if not downright foolish.
That followers of Jesus Christ would capitulate to such thinking is well nigh remarkable. Yet, evidence continues to mount which shows that Christians are more faithful to the dogma of multi-culturalism than to orthodox Christian teaching. Mainline Protestants have been at this game the longest. When those communions embraced the idea that Protestant orthodoxy was the product of a bygone age with little relevance for the knowledge and social arrangements of the modern world, mainstream Protestantism opened the door of the household of faith to arguments which denied that theological truth, religious practice, and ecclesiastical office transcend time and place. Still, evangelicals have made up for lost time. At many conservative colleges and seminaries one hears an increasing number of calls for greater racial and gender diversity within the faculty, student body, and curriculum. White male professors and the traditional canon, it is said, are neither representative nor affirming of people of color. Along the same lines run some of the arguments for women's ordination. After all, aren't women clergy much better equipped to address the needs of the church's largest constituency, other women? Church growth also follows the logic of multi-culturalism with its plans for planting congregations that will appeal to a particular age, gender, and/or ethnic group. And much of the fracas about worship within evangelical circles’if only there were more opposition to the liturgy of children's church which has come to be called "Praise and Worship"’surrounds the issue of whether traditional patterns of corporate worship are meaningless and hence oppressive to believers who have cut their teeth on television, rock 'n' roll, and Sugar Smacks.
Few Christians who champion these various forms of multi-culturalism seem aware of the tension between the politics of identity and the idea that lies at the foundation of the Christian faith’that a single, heterosexual, male, Jew who lived two millennia ago in Palestine has something in common not only with believers but with all humankind whatever their race, class, or gender. Yet, in this age of almost unanimous affirmations of diversity we must remember that the Christian religion teaches and followers of Christ celebrate at Christmas the fact that the second person of the Trinity took human form and in doing so became just like us. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, the affirmation of the Apostles' Creed that Jesus "was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary" means that the eternal Son of God "took to himself . . . a truly human nature, so that he might become . . . in all things like us as brothers except for sin." This is not the peculiar teaching of the Reformed churches but lies at the center, as Heidelberg's explication of the Apostles' Creed indicates, of all manifestations of trinitarian Christianity. Indeed, the doctrine of the Incarnation directly contradicts the prevailing orthodoxy of race, gender, and sexual preference that dominates American universities particularly and the culture more generally.
While it is remarkable how Christians have capitulated to the dogma of multi-culturalism, even more remarkable is the way Christianity defies the outlook of our time. What is particularly poignant about the doctrine of the Incarnation is the location of the universality of Jesus' experience. Because of the apparently wide distance between Jesus and us, our temptation is to locate the universality of Christ's experience in his divinity. We might think that by transcending the particularities of the human condition, Christ in his divine nature’not in his ethnicity, gender, or class’identified with and represented the variety and diversity of human experience. Yet according to Christian teaching, it was precisely in his human nature that Christ was able, as the author of Hebrews writes, to be made like us, to be tempted as we are, and to know our infirmities. According to Christian teaching, it is the spiritual dimension of human existence that transcends the parochialism of identity that balkanizes modern culture. Consequently, when Christians confess that the Son of God was conceived by the Holy Ghost and was born of the Virgin Mary we put our trust in the fact that the experience of Jesus Christ-his encounter with the demands of God's righteous Law, his temptation to disobey God's revealed will, his experience of the frailty and misery of the human condition-was in some fundamental way the same as that today of a married, African-American female attorney living in Anaheim or a male, Korean-American shop owner working on the lower east side of Manhattan.
This teaching has a significant implication for Christian witness and practice: The ultimate aspect of the human condition or personal identity is what connects us to the God who took human form. It is not race, class, or gender that determine our identity, but rather the spiritual component of our existence. Race, class, and gender may assist or impede one's efforts to secure a job within a university or the federal government, and these physical traits do surely affect how our neighbors and colleagues perceive and treat us. But Christ did not come to liberate individuals from the barriers that the political economy of a liberal democracy creates or from the prejudices that are buried deep within the soul of western European culture. For he did not experience corporate capitalism, the industrial revolution, or the rise and fall of Christendom in the West and so could not know in his human nature our experience of it. Christ's Incarnation was not a means of fulfillment for rational, autonomous selves. Rather Christ took human form and was tempted to disobey God's Law in the same way that we are tempted. He became just like us except without sin.
The Incarnation and the Gospel teach that what matters most in human experience is what is universal to the human condition. Christians confess that Jesus Christ knew what we experience not in our quest for political recognition or material security but rather in our temptation to sin. Political economies come and go, but what transcends them all is the fellowship between God and his creatures and the rupture of that fellowship because of our depravity. Indeed, the Incarnation, with its teaching that Christ knew our feebleness and frailty, should be a warning against allowing the categories of race, class, and gender to trump the doctrines of sin and grace. While the situation of human existence and the demands of local and international politics call attention to the differences among men and women, Christians must never lose sight of the universal and higher truths of spiritual life that have been revealed within the particularities of human culture.
As we reflect on the Incarnation during this time of the year, we should acknowledge the remarkable antidote which Christianity offers to the senselessness of our materialistic and self-absorbed culture. Christ's identification with us, clearly taught in the epistle to the Hebrews, makes our current fixation on the politics of identity and our current understanding of individual self-worth look trivial by comparison. A White man may not know the experience of a Black female. And Whites may not appear to be victims of the oppression to which minorities have been subject in North America. But then the Gospel comes along and says that all have sinned, that all people suffer from the oppression of guilt before God's holy Law, and that Christ knew or identified with this oppression by being tempted as we are and by bearing the guilt of our sins on the cross. We are on slim ground if we let the characteristics of race, class, and gender undermine or obscure this truth. For Christ, who is supposed to have been like us in all things, except for sin, is far removed from us if we follow the logic of multi-culturalism which says that the only thing a single, male, Jew who lived in first-century Palestine has in common with Americans living in the late twentieth century is, at best, a pulse. And if Christ is so different from us, then he really could not have identified with us and cannot set us free from our guilt and misery.
What is more, if we let the differences of gender, race, and class define what is good and valuable, in other words, if we let the standards of this world determine what a meaningful and enriching life is, then we lose sight of how great our salvation is in Christ. As James Henley Thornwell, the great Southern Presbyterian theologian, wrote over a century ago, the grace of the Gospel cannot be reduced to one's station in life, one's ancestry, one's net worth, or one's voting privileges. Rather, the Gospel transcends all earthly and physical characteristics. It consists, Thornwell wrote, "essentially in the dominion of rectitude, in the emancipation of the will from the power of sin, the release of the affections from the attractions of the earth, the exemption of the understanding from the deceits and prejudices of error." And these benefits are enjoyed equally "by the martyr at the stake, a slave in his chains, a prisoner in his dungeon, as well as the king upon his throne." How great the mercy of God and how blind we are to that greatness when we try to make it conform to worldly standards of self-esteem and the well-adjusted personality.
This is not to deny that the physical characteristics and cultural attributes that separate us from one another are real and do not in positive and negative ways affect our earthly existence. But we must never let these differences obscure our common creation in God's image, our shared guilt before God's righteous Law, and our salvation through the second Adam, the man who was like us in all ways except for sin. Despite all the physical and social attributes that separate us from Christ, we must never cease to confess that Jesus was tempted as we are, that he knew what was fundamental to our experience as men and women created in the image of God. If we fudge on that truth by allowing that African-Americans understand the Gospel differently than do whites, that women understand the Gospel differently than do men, that Koreans understand the Gospel differently than do Chinese, and so on, then we have made a mockery of Christ's identification with us. And if we have made a mockery of that truth then we are without hope.
As unlikely as it seems, Christ the bachelor, Christ the carpenter, Christ the Jew became like us’in every way like us’except for sin. This is the truth that multi-culturalism misses with its oppressively narrow fixation on physical characteristics and economic determinants. And if we are to understand the saving work of Christ aright and put our trust fully in him we need to allow our Christian profession, not the ideology of multi-culturalism, to shape our understanding of human identity.
