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Jesus’ Perspective On The Future – Pope Benedict XVI

March 22, 2013
The nucleus of Jesus' prophecy is concerned, not with the outward events of war and destruction, but with the demise of the Temple in salvation-historical terms, as it becomes a "deserted house." It ceases to be the locus of God's presence and the locus of atonement for Israel, indeed, for the world. The time of sacrifices, as regulated by the Law of Moses, is over.

The nucleus of Jesus’ prophecy is concerned, not with the outward events of war and destruction, but with the demise of the Temple in salvation-historical terms, as it becomes a “deserted house.” It ceases to be the locus of God’s presence and the locus of atonement for Israel, indeed, for the world. The time of sacrifices, as regulated by the Law of Moses, is over.

First, we saw the prophecy of the destruction of the Temple and, in Luke, explicit reference also to the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet it became clear that the nucleus of Jesus’ prophecy is concerned, not with the outward events of war and destruction, but with the demise of the Temple in salvation-historical terms, as it becomes a “deserted house.” It ceases to be the locus of God’s presence and the locus of atonement for Israel, indeed, for the world. The time of sacrifices, as regulated by the Law of Moses, is over.

We have seen that the early Church was aware of this profound watershed in history long before the outward demise of the Temple, and we have seen that amid all the difficult debates over which Jewish customs needed to be retained and imposed on Gentiles too, there was evidently no dissent over this point: with the Cross of Christ, the era of sacrifices was over.

Moreover, we have seen that the nucleus of Jesus’ eschatological message includes the proclamation of an age of the nations, during which the Gospel must be brought to the whole world and to all people: only then can history attain its goal.

In the meantime, Israel retains its own mission. Israel is in the hands of God, who will save it “as a whole” at the proper time, when the number of the Gentiles is complete. The fact that the historical duration of this period cannot be calculated is self-evident and should not surprise us. But it was becoming increasingly clear that the evangelization of the Gentiles was now the disciples’ particular task — thanks above all to the special commission given to Paul as a duty and a grace.

From this perspective, it can be understood that this “time of the Gentiles” is not yet the full Messianic age in terms of the great salvation promises, but it remains the time of present history and suffering; yet in a new way it is also a time of hope: “The night is far gone, the day is at hand” (Romans 13:12).

It seems obvious to me that several of Jesus’ parables — such as the parable of the net with good and bad fish (Matthew 13 47-50), the parable of the darnel in the field (Matthew 13:24-30) — speak of this time of the Church; from the perspective of a purely imminent eschatology, they would make no sense. Read the parables of Matthew 13 here.

As a subsidiary theme, we also came across the instruction to the Christians to flee from Jerusalem at the time of an as yet unspecified profanation of the Temple. The historicity of this flight to Pella in Transjordan cannot be seriously doubted. While for our purposes this may seem a peripheral detail, it has a theological significance that should not be underestimated: their refusal to take part in the military defense of the Temple, through which the sacred place itself became a fortress and an arena for cruel military actions, corresponds exactly to the approach taken by Jeremiah at the time of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (cf. Jeremiah 7:1-15; 38:14-28, for example).

Joachim Gnilka emphasizes the link between this approach and the heart of Jesus’ teaching:

“It is most unlikely that the Christian believers in Jerusalem took any part in the war. It was Palestinian Christianity that transmitted Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. So they must have known Jesus’ commandments regarding love of ‘.. enemies and renunciation of violence. We also know that they did not take part in the revolt at the time of Emperor Hadrian”
(Nazarener, p. 69).

A further key element of Jesus’ eschatological discourse is the warning against false Messiahs and apocalyptic enthusiasm. Linked with this is the instruction to practice sobriety and vigilance, which Jesus developed further in a series of parables, especially in the story of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) and in his sayings about the watchful doorkeeper (Mark 13:33-36). In this last passage we see clearly what is meant by “vigilance”: not neglecting the present, speculating on the future, or forgetting the task in hand, but quite the reverse — it means doing what is right here and now, as is incumbent upon us in the sight of God.

Matthew and Luke recount the parable of the servant who noted his master’s delay in returning and, thinking him absent, made himself master, beat the servants and maids, and gave himself over to fine living. On the other hand, the good servant remains a servant, knowing that he will be called to account. He gives to all their due and is praised by the master for so doing: acting with justice is true vigilance (cf. Matthew 24:45-51; Luke 12:41-46). To be vigilant is to know that one is under God’s watchful eye and to act accordingly.

In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul explained in stark and vivid terms what Christian vigilance involves: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat. For we hear that some of you are walking in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living” (3:10-12).

A further important element of Jesus’ eschatological discourse is the reference to the persecution that lies in store for his followers. Here, too, the time of the Gentiles is presupposed, for the Lord says that his disciples will be brought not only before courts and synagogues, but also before governors and kings (Mark 13:9): the proclamation of the Gospel will always be marked by the sign of the Cross — this is what each generation of Jesus’ disciples must learn anew. The Cross is and remains the sign of the Son of Man: ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering.

Let us now turn to the strictly apocalyptic section of Jesus’ eschatological discourse: to the prophecy of the end of the world, the second coming of the Son of Man, and the Last Judgment (Mark 13:24-27).

What is striking here is that this text is largely composed of Old Testament passages, especially from the Book of Daniel, but also from Ezekiel, Isaiah, and other scriptural texts. For their part, these passages are interconnected old images are reinterpreted in situations of hardship and developed further; within the Book of Daniel itself one can observe such a process of rereading certain passages as history unfolds. Jesus places himself within this process of relecture, and hence it is understandable that, for their part, the community of believers — as we saw earlier — reread Jesus’ words in the light of their new circumstances, naturally in such a way that the fundamental message remained intact. Yet the fact that Jesus spoke of the future, not in his own words, but by proclaiming the words of ancient prophecy in a new way is highly significant.

First, we must of course note the element that is genuinely new: the coming Son of Man, of whom Daniel had spoken (7:13-14), without being able to give him personal features, is now identical with the Son of Man addressing the disciples. The old apocalyptic text is given a personalist dimension: at its heart we now find the person of Jesus himself, who combines into one the lived present and the mysterious future. The real “event” is the person in whom, despite the passage of time, the present truly remains. In this person the future is already here. When all is said and done, the future will not place us in any other situation than the one to which our encounter with Jesus has already brought us.

In this way, the focusing of the cosmic images onto a person, who is now present and known to us, renders the cosmic context a secondary consideration. Even the question of time loses its importance: the person “is” in the midst of physically measurable things; he has his own “time”; he “remains.”

This relativization of the cosmic, or, rather, its focusing onto the personal, is seen very clearly in the closing words of the apocalyptic section: “Heaven and earth will pass but my words will not pass away” (Mark 13:31). The word — which seems almost nothing in comparison to the mighty power of the immeasurable material cosmos, like a fleeting breath against the silent grandeur of the universe — the word is more real and more lasting than the entire material world. The word is the true, dependable reality: the solid ground on which we can stand, which holds firm even when the sun goes dark and the firmament disintegrates. The cosmic elements pass away; the word of Jesus is the true “firmament” beneath which we can stand and remain.

This personalistic focus, this transformation of the apocalyptic visions — which still corresponds to the inner meaning of the Old Testament images — is the original element in Jesus’ teaching about the end of the world: this is what it is all about.

From this standpoint, we can understand the significance of Jesus choosing not to offer a description of the end of the world, but rather to proclaim it using words already found in the Old Testament. Speaking about things to come using words from the past strips these discourses of any temporal frame of reference. What we have here is not a newly formulated account of the future, such as one might expect from a clairvoyant, but a realignment of our perspective on the future within the previously given word of God, manifesting both the perennial validity and the open potentialities of that word. It becomes clear that the word of God from the past illumines the essential meaning of the future. Yet it does not offer us a description of that future: rather it shows us, just for today, the right path for now and for tomorrow.

Jesus’ apocalyptic words have nothing to do with clairvoyance. Indeed, they are intended to deter us from mere superficial curiosity about observable phenomena (cf. Luke 17:20) and to lead us toward the essential: toward life built upon the word of God that Jesus gives us; toward an encounter with him, the living Word; toward responsibility before the Judge of the living and the dead.

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Blessed are the Peacemakers; Blessed are You when Men Persecute You — Peter Kreeft

January 2, 2013
The peace that Christ blesses is the peace the world cannot give. It is peace with neighbor, self, and God; not with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It not a peace with greed, lust, and pride, but the peace that comes through poverty, chastity, and obedience, three most counter-cultural virtues.

The peace that Christ blesses is the peace the world cannot give. It is peace with neighbor, self, and God; not with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It not a peace with greed, lust, and pride, but the peace that comes through poverty, chastity, and obedience, three most counter-cultural virtues.

The Seventh And Eighth Beatitudes
Seventh, Christ blesses not peace, but peacemakers. Peacemakers are not pacifists. Peacemakers are warriors, but they are spiritual warriors, warriors against war. Sometimes war can be conquered only by war. Everyone speaks highly of peacemaking. How, then, is that countercultural, except to terrorists? Because the peace that Christ blesses is the peace the world cannot give. It is peace with neighbor, self, and God; not with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It not a peace with greed, lust, and pride, but the peace that comes through poverty, chastity, and obedience, three most countercultural virtues. These two kinds of peace are in fact at war with each other.

Our world’s peacemakers will embrace Christ’s peace, but only if they do not have to give up the world’s peace and only if they do not have to fight for it. Thus, paradoxically, we lack true peace because we are reluctant to war against the enemies of peace, and also because we do not put the three ingredients of Christ’s peace in the proper order. We preach incessantly about peace with neighbor, but seldom about peace with God.

Thomas Merton reminds us of this necessary order in three wonderfully simple sentences when he says, “We are not at peace with each other because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” Christ does the same in putting the first table of the law first, as Moses did. We need to relearn lesson one.

Christ blesses peacemakers, but when you are at war, you can make peace only by waging and winning war. Christianity is judgmental and repressive and negative. For Christianity says to us that we are at war, ever since a certain incident in Eden, and war judges the enemy (that’s why a war is fought: because a judgment is made about an enemy) and represses the enemy (that is what defense is: repressing the enemy’s offense) and negates the enemy, destroys the enemy (that is what offense is, destroying the enemy’s defense). Our enemies are real, just as real as flesh and blood; they are principalities and powers. They are not men; they are demons. And they are also our own sins.

Our Lord told us that he came into the world to bring a sword to wage and win this war. The sword is a cross. Happiness does not consist in pacifism; happiness consists in peace, and peace can be obtained only by waging and winning a war to make peace. The cross is like a syringe; it gives us a blood transfusion. It is the opposite of a normal sword. What Christ does is exactly the opposite of what Dracula does. Dracula, like the demons, takes our blood, our life. Christ gives us a blood transfusion. We are on a battlefield between Christ and Dracula.

When Christ says that peacemakers are blessed because they “will be called the sons of God,” he does not mean that peacemaking is the cause and being a son of God is the effect. The other way around: only the sons of God can make God’s peace, do God’s work. Peacemaking is the effect. But peacemakers are called sons of God. They are known to be sons of God because we recognize the cause by the effect.

Blessed are You when Men Persecute You
The eighth beatitude blesses not just pain or suffering, but persecution, that is, suffering imposed by rejection and hatred. This is the only one of the beatitudes that Christ repeats, both to emphasize it as the final and most outrageous beatitude of all, and to emphasize that it is not merely the pain, but the rejection, the reviling, the slander, that is blessed.

But how can this be? Everyone wants to be loved. How can it be blessed to be hated? One possible explanation is utterly inconsistent with Christ: a kind of sneering superiority, as if it were blessed to say to those who hate us, “I wouldn’t want love from worthless fools like you.” Surely it is great grief that the persecutors are fools. Of course they are not worthless fools; if they were, there would be no reason for our grief for them. And therefore grief on our part that they are not blessed is real, if we love our persecutors as Christ does and commands us to: “Love your enemies.” Notice that he does not say, “Do not use the word enemy, it is not nice.” We have enemies, but we must love them.

The reward that makes persecution blessed is the same as the one that makes poverty blessed: the kingdom of Heaven. Persecution has the same blessing as poverty because persecution is a form of poverty, poverty not of money, but of love, that is, of being loved. Both money and love are blessed only when they are given: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

We desperately crave love from the world. But the world is not Christ. The world is fallen, fallen into the knowledge of good and evil. The world is therefore afraid of Christ as the cavity is afraid of the dentist or as the liar is afraid of the light. (I use the word world here in the scriptural sense: not as the planet (Gaea, matter), which God created good, but as the time word, eon, that designates the era of sin, the kingdom of the devil.

Persecution is not blessed in itself, but it becomes blessed if it is persecution “for righteousness’ sake”, for the sake of God, not only explicitly, but also implicitly, that is, if you are persecuted for being that which God is: for being Godlike, for being righteous. Thus the righteous pagan like Socrates is also blessed when he is misunderstood, hated, rejected, persecuted, and killed, like Christ.

Just as your peacemaking is a sign that you are a child of God, and thus blessed, so being persecuted for the sake of your righteousness is also a sign that you are a member of His kingdom and thus blessed. Blessing comes only from what is good, and persecution, poverty, etc. are not good in themselves. Christ is not a Stoic or a Hindu or a Buddhist; blessing does not come from not caring about the good things of this world, which God created, nor from seeing through this world as an illusion, as maya, nor from the clever device of spiritual euthanasia by which our desires for things are quenched so that we can avoid the suffering that they bring. No, the Christian knows something real and good in itself that the Stoic, the Hindu and the Buddhist do not know (even though they may implicitly long for it and even attain it in the end), and that something is, simply, Jesus Christ. He makes blessed even the nails in His cross. And only He makes them blessed.

He that Loses His Life for My Sake shall Find It
Our ninth desire is for life, and the ninth blessing is death. Death contains all the other paradoxes. Christ teaches us this blessing of death not in words only, but also in deed — by his cross, which sums up all the beatitudes.

And the cross reveals the hidden source of all eight beatitudes: the historical fact, not the abstract principle, that God, out of sheer love for us, became incarnate, died, and rose to save us from sin and death. As Dorothy Sayers said, “The dogma is the drama.” By this dramatic judo, death itself was turned into an instrument for life, as an earthen dam is overwhelmed by the waters of the flood that conquers it, and the dam is swept along and made into a part of the flood itself. So the flood of God’s infinite life, when it entered our world, not only conquered death but turned death itself into life’s most powerful instrument. In the words of the old anthem “Open our Eyes”, “Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the Living God.”

Blessed are the Peacemakers
We anticipate that final death, and its final blessing, in all our little deaths now. Our participations in Christ’s eight beatitudes are those little deaths. We not only anticipate it, we actually participate in it, in these little deaths, the real little (or large) dyings that we do every day. And we also anticipate and actually participate in the final blessing, “the presence of the Living God,” every time we “open our eyes” and see who it is that is really present there. Where our eyes see only the most undramatic little wafer of bread, look who is present! How absurd that we find it easier to get up off our knees than to get down!

The secret of happiness is very simple. It is Jesus. Not just the philosophy of Jesus, but Jesus, his real presence. He actually comes to us in such unlikely vehicles as poverty, pain and persecution. He has weird taste in vehicles. He came to Jerusalem on a donkey. And when he comes, he acts with power, though usually also with subtlety and not bombast. He really works!

I am haunted by my memories of a few precious hours in the company of two happiest groups of people I have ever met in my life. In both cases I was supposed to speak to them. In both cases, they spoke to me — with very few words, like Mother Teresa, like Jesus. One group was in fact Mother Teresa’s nuns, in Boston’s worst slum. Another was a convent of contemplative Carmelites in Danvers, Massachusetts. What they said to me, simply by being who they were, was unmistakable: “See how happy I am; see how happy Jesus makes me!” This is how happiness happens: it is not so much taught, like math, but caught, like measles.

The Church is in the business of spreading the good infection, like in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, only this is a good infection. And that is “the new evangelism”. And it is also the old evangelism that won the world two thousand years ago. It will do it again, for there is no argument against real happiness. The smiles of the saints are the arguments that will win the world for Christ again. They are unarguable. Only one thing, then, is necessary to create a world of happiness from pole to pole. And it is not doing any of the many good things that Martha did, but doing the one thing that Mary did: just sit at Jesus’ feet; just be in his presence, know his love, all day. That is the scandalously simple secret of happiness.

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Happiness: The First Three Beatitudes — Peter Kreeft

December 28, 2012
As Chesterton said, “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ's philosophy seems upside down." We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

As Chesterton said, “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

Christ proposes a vision of happiness which is the exact opposite of what everyone in the post-Christian West assumes to be the sources of the greatest happiness in life.

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Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
We say how blessed we are as individuals or as a nation when we have wealth. He says no, you are blessed when you are poor. Poor not only in your bank account, but even more than that, not less, poor down to the depths of your heart, poor in spirit, detached from riches, whether you are physically rich or poor.

When Harvard University invited Mother Teresa to give a commencement address, she shocked them by taking issue with the gracious invitation they sent to her, as “the most famous person in one of the world’s poorest nations, to address the world’s richest nation.” She said no, “India is not a poor nation; India is a very rich nation. She has a wealth of riches, true spiritual riches. And America is not a rich nation. She is a poor nation, in fact, a desperately poor nation. She slaughters her own unborn children.”

Why? Because the mother fears those children will be poor, or will make her poor. The mother fears that she will not be able to afford to have these children, as if children are like cars or computers, calculable items in the household’s economy, consumer goods rather than consumers, objects rather than subjects, part of the circle rather than the center of the circle.

The supposed insanity of Christ’s saying thus turns out to be an illusion of perspective. In a lunatic asylum, from the lunatics’ point of view, it is the sane outsider who is insane. How useful to have a continual supply of outsiders, the saints, to remind us of where we live: east of Eden, in a lunatic asylum. Christ gives us a map to show how far east of Eden we are. The poor in spirit, of course, are not the weak-spirited; they are exactly the opposite. They are strong enough to be detached from riches, that is, from the whole world. They are those who are strong enough not to be enslaved to their desires for the things of this world.

Blessed are Those who Mourn
Well, what could Christ possibly mean by his second beatitude? Weeping and mourning is certainly not an expression of contentment, of the painless state that we all long for as part of happiness. Yet Christ tells us that those who mourn are blessed. How ridiculous for some Bible translations to translate makarios by ‘happy’ in this verse, in a society that means by ‘happy’ simply subjectively satisfied or content. That translation would make Christ say, “Those who weep are content,” which is not a meaningful paradox, but a meaningless self-contradiction.

Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering. Buddha founded an entire religion on the problem of suffering, or dukkha, and its cause, tanha, or greed, and its cure, the Noble Eightfold Path leading to nirvana, the abolition of both suffering and its source.

Unlike Buddha, Christ came not to free us from suffering, but to transform its meaning, to make it salvific. He came to save us from sin, and he did so precisely by embracing the suffering and death that are the result of sin. It must sound as absurd to a Buddhist to say that suffering is redemptive, as it would sound to a Christian to say that sin is redemptive. Each religion must accuse the other of the most radical practical error: confusing the problem with the solution.

The reason Christ gave for declaring mourners blessed is that they shall be comforted. For in hope this future is made present. It’s true that “one foot up and one foot down, that’s the way to London Town,” whether one is going to London to be crowned king or to be hanged on Traitor’s Gate. But the future destiny of the journey makes everything in the journey itself different, not just accidentally, but essentially, and not just extrinsically, but intrinsically. A journey to be hanged is tragic, even if it is in a comfortable coach. A journey to be crowned, even if it is in an uncomfortable wagon, is glorious.

St. Teresa said, “Looked at from the viewpoint of heaven, the most horribly painful earthly life will turn out to be no more than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” And Christ has the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is heaven. In giving us himself, he gives us heaven, and its viewpoint, that is, his.

Blessed are the Meek
The meek who will inherit the earth, whom Christ calls blessed — who are they? They are not well-known. They do not thirst for honor, fame or glory, and do not usually have it.

We all want to be known. But God, who is supremely blessed, is anonymous. He works by nature most of the time. He hides instead of constantly showing his glory. He came as a baby, and died as an executed criminal, and lets himself be ignored. He lets himself be eaten daily, as what looks like a little piece of bread. He is utterly meek, and utterly blessed. If we are utterly meek, we will be utterly blessed. If we are half meek, we will be half blessed. If we are not meek, we will not be blessed, for God is the source of all blessedness, and God is meek. And the effect cannot be the opposite of the cause.

The meekness that Christ calls blessed in his third Beatitude is indeed in sharp contrast to the desire to conquer nature that Francis Bacon declared to be the new summum bonum, the new meaning of life on earth, and to the desire to conquer fortune that was Machiavelli’s new summum bonum. But it is not the contrast that the world thinks. It is not a blessing on wimps, sissies, dishrags, wallflowers, shrinking violets, worry-warts, Uriah Heeps, nebbishes, nerds or geeks. The meek are those who do not harm, who do not see life as competitive, because they understand the two premises from which this conclusion logically follows.

  1. First, that the best things in life are spiritual things, not material things. That life’s meaning is to be found in wisdom and love and creativity, in understanding and sanctity and beauty, rather than in money or power or fame or land or military or athletic conquest.
  2. And they understand the second principle, too, that spiritual things are not competitive. That they multiply when shared, while material things are divided when shared. Since happiness depends on understanding the best things in life, and since the best things in life are spiritual, and since spiritual things do not diminish when shared, and since what does not diminish when shared cannot be obtained by competition, and since competition is the alternative to meekness, therefore meekness makes for happiness.

We should not be surprised that Christ the Logos is at least as logical as Socrates. Or that we are not. That’s why his pure reason sounds outrageously paradoxical to us. As Chesterton said (it’s impossible to stop quoting Chesterton; that’s like stopping eating potato chips), “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

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Ancient and Modern Concepts of Happiness – Peter Kreeft

December 26, 2012
We all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason.

We all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason.

Adapted from a lecture by Dr. Kreeft, who is a treasure of the Catholic Church:

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My topic today is Jesus’ concept of happiness. And we must begin with the dullest and most necessary preliminary: defining our term. Nearly everyone, from Aristotle to Freud, agrees that we all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason. We argue about other things, but not about happiness. We may say, “What good are riches if they don’t make you happy?” But we don’t say, “What good is happiness if it doesn’t make you rich?” This is clear, to both ancients like Aristotle and moderns like Freud.

But there is a very significant difference between the typically ancient and the typically modern meaning of happiness. Ancient words for happiness, like eudaimonia, or makarios in Greek or beatitudo in Latin, mean true, real blessedness, while the modern English word happiness usually means merely subjective satisfaction, or contentment, so that in modern English, if you feel happy, you’re happy. It makes no sense, in modern English, to tell someone, “You think you’re happy, but you’re not.”

But that is precisely the main point of the most famous book in the history of philosophy, Plato’s Republic: that justice, the all-inclusive virtue, is always profitable, that is, ‘happifying’. And injustice never is. Thus, that the just man, even if like Socrates, he has nothing else, is happy. And the unjust man is not, even if he has everything else, like Gyges, or Gollum, with his ring of power and invisibility. Thus, we should distinguish the ancient concept, which is really blessedness, from the modern, which is really contentment. I shall be talking about blessedness here.

  1. Blessedness differs from contentment in four ways, all of which can be seen by analyzing the Greek word eudaimonia. First, it begins with the prefix eu, meaning good, thus implying that you have to be good, morally good, to be happy.
  2. Second, daimon means spirit, thus implying that happiness is a matter of the soul, not the body and its external goods of fortune. The word happiness, by contrast, comes from the Old English word hap, meaning precisely fortune, luck or chance, which was the one Pagan thought category Christianity subtracted. In all other cases, Christianity added to Paganism. As Chesterton said, summing up all spiritual history in three sentences: “Paganism was the biggest thing in the world. Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small.” If blessedness is spiritual, it is free. You are responsible for your eudaimonia, but happiness just happens.
  3. Third, eudaimonia ends in ia, which means a lasting state, something permanent. Contentment is for a moment, blessedness for a lifetime. So much so that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics could not make up his mind whether to agree or disagree with the saying “call no man happy ’til he is dead.” That is, wait for the end of the story to judge it.
  4. Fourth, and most important of all, the state of eudaimonia is objective, whereas contentment is subjective. When we say happiness, we usually confuse these two meanings, the ancient and the modern. And that is not wholly unwise, because within the ancient concept of happiness, in a secondary way, there is also present the modern one: the need for some contentment, peace of mind, pleasure and at least a modicum of the gift of fortune. While within the modern concept of happiness, that is, within subjective contentment, there is also present, in a secondary way, a feeling for the need of something of the typically ancient ingredient, the need for at least some virtue and the feeling that the happiness, to be deep and lasting, ought to be real and earned and true happiness, whatever that may be.

We are about to explore Christ’s concept of happiness. It is typically ancient (blessedness) but it also includes the above ambiguity or doubleness of meaning: subjective satisfaction as well as objective perfection.

Our Concept of Happiness
Let’s look first at our concept of happiness. When I speak of our concept, who is us? I mean our culture, the mental landscape we all inhabit, even when we feel like aliens here, most generally the modern, post-Christian West, but most specifically contemporary America, as it would appear on opinion polls.

If an opinion poll were to ask Americans to list the nine most important ingredients in the happy life, they would probably give an answer pretty much like the following:

  1. First, the most obvious, though not the profoundest ingredient, is probably wealth. If you notice your friend has a big smile on his face today, you most likely would say to him, “What happened to you? Did you just win the lottery?” If that’s what you’d say, it must be because that’s what would put the biggest smile on your face. And let’s face it; money can buy everything money can buy, which is a lot of stuff.
  2. Second might be our culture’s most notable success, the conquest of nature and fortune by science and technology, allowing each of us to be an Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world.
  3. Third would probably be freedom from pain. I think few of us would disagree that the single most valuable invention in the entire history of technology has been anesthetics.
  4. Fourth would probably be self-esteem, the greatest good, according to nearly all of our culture’s new class of prophets, the secular psychologists — and secular psychologists are among the most secular of all classes in our society.
  5. Fifth might be justice, securing one’s rights. Justice and peace summarize the social ideals of most Americans, the ideals they want for themselves and for the rest of the world.
  6. Sixth, if we are candid, we have to include sex. To most Americans, this is the closest thing to heaven on Earth, that is ecstasy, mystical transcending of the ego — unless they’re surfers.
  7. Seventh, we love to win, whether at war, at sports, at games of chance, in business, or even in our fantasies. Our positive self-esteem requires the belief that we are winners, not losers. We want to be successful, not failures.
  8. Eighth, we want honor. We want to be honored, accepted, loved, and understood. In our modern egalitarian society, we are honored, not for being superior, but for being one of the crowd. In most ancient societies, one was honored for being different, better, superior, excellent. But we still crave to be honored. Some even want to be famous. All want to be accepted.
  9. Ninth, we want life, a long life and a healthy life. Thomas Hobbes is surely right in saying that fear of violent death, especially painful and early death, is very, very powerful. Your life is not happy if it’s taken from you, obviously.

This all seems so obvious and so reasonable as to be beyond argument. Higher ideals than these are arguable. Some of us seek them and some of us do not. But these nine would seem to be firm and impregnable, universal and necessary. Whoever would deny that they form a part of happiness would be a fool. Whoever would affirm that happiness consisted in their opposites would be insane.

Christ’s Concept of Happiness
Let us now perform a fantastic thought experiment. Let us suppose that there was once a preacher who did teach precisely that insanity, point for point, deliberately and specifically. Perhaps you cannot stretch your imagination quite that far, but I’m going to ask you to stretch it even one step farther. Imagine this man becoming the most famous, beloved, revered, respected, and believed teacher in the history of the world. Imagine nearly everyone in the world, even those who did not classify themselves as his disciples, at least praising his wisdom, especially his moral wisdom, especially the single most famous and beloved sermon he ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, the summary of his moral wisdom, which begins with his 180 degree reversal of these truisms.

Perhaps you find this far too incredible to be imaginable. It would be a miracle harder to believe than God becoming a man. It is hard enough to believe that anyone would believe the strange Christian notion that a certain man who began his life as a baby, who had to learn to talk, and ended it as an executed criminal, who bled to death on a cross, and in between got tired and hungry and sorrowful, is God, eternal, beginningless, immortal, infinitely perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, the Creator.

But it is even harder to believe that anyone would believe his utterly shattering paradoxes about happiness. Perhaps we do not really believe them after all. Perhaps we only believe we believe them. Perhaps we have faith in our faith rather than faith in his teachings.

For, of course, I am referring to Christ’s eight beatitudes which opened his Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon ever preached, and the one part of the New Testament that is still held up as central and valid and true and good and beautiful even by dissenters, heretics, revisionists, demythologizers, skeptics, modernists, theological liberals, and anyone else who cannot bring himself to believe all the other claims in the New Testament or the teachings of the Church. These people strain at the gnats but swallow the camel. So let’s look at the camel that they swallow. Perhaps they only seem to swallow it. Perhaps they swallow only their own swallowing, gollumping like Gollum.

To our desire for wealth, Christ says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To our desire for painlessness, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the meek.” To our desire for contentment with ourselves, he says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” To our desire for justice, he says, “Blessed are the merciful.” To our desire for sex, he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” To our desire for acceptance, he says, “Blessed are the persecuted.” And to our desire for more life, he offers the Cross. And now this man carrying his cross to Calvary even dares to tell us, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Moral Theology, Peter Kreeft, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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The Shadow Of The Cross Falling Upon The Stable At Bethlehem — Anthony Esolen

December 19, 2012
Moonlight over Montmartre, 2002

Moonlight over Montmartre, 2002

Mr. Esolen, a professor at Providence College, is the author of “Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.” You can find more of his writings under the category Anthony Esolen. This particular essay, coming as it does on the heels of Fr. Norris’ essay on Person Being and St. Thomas shows how the phrase “ground of being” needs to be further explicated for the Church to make herself known in the world. This review was recently featured in the WSJ.

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Imagine touring the Sistine Chapel with someone who has done more than merely read some learned commentary on the paintings of Michelangelo. He has looked at them, pondered them, loved them, even waited upon them to reveal their inner harmony, and now he seeks to hand on to you what he has found. Imagine listening to a master organist, not playing the whole St. Matthew Passion but showing you, as he touches a chord here and makes a progression there, some hint of the grandeur of Bach’s composition that you might miss in the overwhelming storm of its performance. Then you have an idea of what Pope Benedict XVI has attempted in his three-volume work on the life of Jesus, but most humbly and sweetly in the “Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.”

Modern men too often see things only by the guttering firelight of politics. Pope Benedict, who wrote many works of deep scholarship while simple Joseph Ratzinger, also served as the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, earning him a reputation among the ignorant as combative — “God’s Rottweiler.” It may surprise some, then, to read that Pope Benedict has written about one topic all his life long. Love is the key to his work, as it is the theme and lesson of this work. Indeed, the Pope has written that in Jesus, the man and the mission are one, and the mission is the holiness of love — of being entirely for and with God, and for and with mankind, without reserve. Now Benedict shows how this understanding of Jesus is manifest from the beginning, in his conception, his birth and his childhood.

Any scholar who would write on the first few chapters of Matthew and Luke faces two problems. The first is the opinion that the narratives about the birth of Jesus are add-ons, not central to the mission and the person of Jesus. The second is that we are too familiar with them. We have heard the carols and seen the crèches. We do not see the shadow of the cross fall upon the stable at Bethlehem.

Benedict addresses both problems at once, affirming the historicity of the narratives and showing that the question of who Jesus is hinges upon the question of whence he has come. People who encountered Jesus, whether they chose to follow him or not, claimed that they knew exactly where he came from, the no-account village of Nazareth. Yet they did not know where he came from — whence he derived his authority. The early Christians, by contrast, saw the life of Jesus as a coherent whole. The end of Matthew’s Gospel, says Benedict, when Jesus commissions his disciples to go forth to the ends of the earth, baptizing all nations, is present in the beginning, in the genealogy that links Jesus with Abraham and God’s promise of universality. Abraham is the essential wayfarer, Benedict writes, whose “whole life points forward,” a dynamic of “walking along the path of what is to come.”

Even to those who think themselves familiar with these texts, every page of “Jesus of Nazareth” will present some pearl of great value, something that should have been obvious but that has been passed over in haste or inattention. For example, when Luke places Jesus’ birth in the context of the Augustan empire, and notes that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to register for the tax, he expects his readers, Benedict argues, to compare one “prince of peace” with another, for that is what Augustus styled himself (“Princeps Pacis”).

The epithet was more than propaganda, Benedict says. It expressed a heartfelt longing in the people of the time, racked by the Roman civil wars and conflicts between the Roman empire and her rivals to the east. We might see how seriously it was taken if we study Augustus’s Altar of Peace in Rome, consecrated a few years before Jesus’ birth. It was so placed that on the emperor’s birthday, between morning and evening, the sun cast the shadow of an obelisk, says the Pope, along a line that struck the very center of the altar, where Augustus himself was portrayed as supreme pontiff.

But Augustus belongs to the past, Benedict notes, while Jesus “is the present and the future.” That is because the salvation we yearn for is not simply a truce, with some economic prosperity, but the healing of our very selves. Man is “a relational being,” Benedict writes, by which he means that we only know ourselves when we give ourselves away in love. More to the point, Benedict teaches, God allows us to know Him by giving Himself in love to us. This gift, though grand, is necessarily also secret and humble, seeking not to overmaster but to invite.

In speaking of an intimate love, all the Gospel writers speak the same language, Benedict explains, whether it is Matthew showing that the birth of Jesus occurs outside of and against the predilections of the grand court of Herod, or Luke stressing the quiet interior life of Mary, or John saying that God has pitched his tent among us, submitting to the infirmities of the flesh, and to rejection.

This love is no mere sentiment. It is the ground of our being. Yet Benedict points to the gospels themselves for examples of how often we seek less than love, even while we believe we are seeking more. Jesus’ own disciples believed that he would reestablish the earthly kingdom of David — and Matthew takes trouble both to establish Jesus’ descent from David (it is why Joseph had to travel to the city of David, Bethlehem) and to show that this kingship is wholly new, and not of this earth.

Thus Joseph is told that the child’s name will be called Jesus, a name derived from the Hebrew word meaning “to rescue,” because “he will save people from their sins.” That seems at once too little and too much, Benedict says. He compares the verse with the episode of the paralytic in Luke, who hears Jesus say, “Your sins are forgiven.” But he wanted to walk — and the Jews wanted freedom from their overlords. The paralytic would indeed rise up and walk, but the point is clear: The gospel calls people to no less than complete love of God and neighbor — to the surrender of illusions that we can heal ourselves.

“The Infancy Narratives” is a short volume but for that very reason may be an ideal introduction to Benedict’s writings, and for that matter Jesus’ message of love.

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The Titles of Jesus: Jesus the Son of God and Jesus as God – Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

July 23, 2012

Heinrich Hofmann’s Christ In The Temple

The major titles the New Testament applies to Jesus are as follows: Prophet, Suffering Servant, High Priest, Messiah, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, and God. Far from being a mere litany of honorifics, these titles actually refer to different aspects of his work and identity. The Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, from whom Oakes has drawn this list, has grouped the various titles into four rubrics: (1) the earthly work of Jesus, (2) the future work of Jesus, (3) His present work, and finally to (4) His pre-existence. In this sixth selection we will look at the title Jesus the Son of God and Jesus as God, the second and third of the titles dealing with the pre-existence of our Lord

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Jesus the Son of God
“Son of God” is like “Son of Man” in this sense: it has both a generic meaning that could, at least theoretically, apply to any male human being (or by metonymy, to human beings of both sexes), especially if he is of a pious disposition; and it has a specific meaning with a specific theological connotation, especially when applied to Jesus. But in that regard, the role of these two terms is somewhat reversed. In patristic times, as we shall see, “Son of God” was the term that was taken to apply to Jesus’ divine status, while “Son of Man” was seen to refer to his humanity. However, as we saw in an earlier post, “Son of Man,” at least in some contexts, referred to a heavenly, eschatological figure who would come down on the clouds to inaugurate a new age.

Conversely, in Hebrew usage “Son of God,’ again in some contexts, could be an honorific title given to any pious Israelite, or even to the whole nation of Israel itself. “Son of God” is also unusual in contrast to “Son of Man” in that Jesus rarely uses the former term to describe himself, whereas the latter is constantly on his lips as self-description.

Similarly, in a pagan setting “son of (the) god” [Greek syntax requires the article "the" in front of the word "god" irrespective of whether the reference is to a pagan god or the God of monotheism. Also, small letters were not invented for Greek until about the eighth century of the Christian era, so no orthographic distinction could have been drawn in the ancient world between the monotheistic "God" and a polytheistic "god."] did not necessarily imply that a human being so called had some kind of Olympian genealogy: the usual term in Greek for such a person (like Achilles) would be theios aner (divine man) rather than uios tou theou (son of the god). In any case, such ambiguity would not obtain in Israel, where “son of God” would clearly be understood as an honorific title by virtue of the fact that God was confessed as Israel’s Father. Given the fact that the God of Israel is without pedigree, the sonship that binds Israel to God was clearly one not of biological lineage in the pagan manner but of obedience.

This linkage of the concepts of sonship and obedience explains why the Old Testament can apply the term “son of God” to the people of Israel as a whole, to Israel’s kings, and to persons specially commissioned by God, including angels. For example, Moses is commanded by God to say to Pharaoh, “Israel is my first-born son” (Exodus 4:22), and God speaks through Hosea saying “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea. 11:1); and even when Israel strays, the people are called “faithless sons” (Jeremiah 3:22), implying that even in disobedience God is still calling the people to repentance, lest the bond between God and Israel be irrevocably broken. Kings, too, are called “sons” by God: “I will be his father, and he shall be my son” (2 Samuel 7:14), says God of David; and in a royal coronation psalm much quoted by the early church we read: “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). Angels too are called “sons of God” (Job 1:6; Psalms 29:1; Daniel 3:25, 28).

This wide range of usage in the Old Testament can create problems in the interpretation of Jesus as Son of God, because clearly the New Testament wants to link the idea of obedience and sonship in Jesus but also wants to insist that he is Son of God in a manner unique to him and unprecedented in Israel. A further complication comes from the fact that Jesus is called “Son of God” by both God (at Jesus’ baptism) and by Satan (during his temptations), making it apparently the appellation of choice for the “supernatural” actors in Jesus’ life.

When Jesus emerges from the River Jordan after being baptized by John, a voice resounds from heaven saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved” (Matthew 3:17) or “You are my Son, my Beloved” (Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). [FN: The voice from heaven repeats (more or less) these same words at the Transfiguration (including in Mark, who does not narrate in any detail the temptations): Matthew 17:5; Mark 97; Luke 9:35 (where the voice from heaven says "my Chosen One" instead of "my Beloved").]

Jesus is driven out by the Spirit into the desert to pray and fast for forty days and forty nights, at the end of which the devil comes to him with temptations that begin, “If you are the Son of God …” (Matthew 4:3, 6; Luke 4:3, 9). Both scenes stress the obedience of the Son, with the baptism suggesting a unique sonship and the temptations stressing Jesus’ refusal to see his sonship purely in terms of miraculous power but solely in terms of his mission.

FN: “The most important passages of the Synoptic Gospels in which Jesus appears as the Son of God show him precisely not as a miracle worker and savior like many others, but as one radically and uniquely distinguished from all other men. He knows that he is sent to all other men to fulfill his task in complete unity with the Father. This distinction, this isolation, means to Jesus not primarily miraculous power, but the absolute obedience of a son in the execution of a divine commission”
Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament

Moreover, when Peter confesses at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), Jesus explicitly says to him that “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but only my Father in heaven” (16:17), once again showing how Jesus’ unique sonship is a reality accessible only from a supernatural, not natural, perspective, a point Jesus stresses even more forcefully when he says, “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27; with slight variations in wording in Luke 10:22).

The linkage between sonship and mission is consistently held throughout the New Testament, but there are variations of emphasis. One point to note as we look at these variations: as we already saw, in the Synoptic Gospels “Son of Man” is the favored self-designation of Jesus whereas “Lord” and “Christ” are the favored titles for Jesus by the confessing, post-Easter church. “Son of God,” however, is both a term that Jesus uses to refer to himself and is a confessional term of the church.

In fact Mark defines the entire purpose of his Gospel as one that wants to bring his readers to a faith in Jesus as Son of God: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God” (Mark in), and culminates his narration of the death of Jesus with the centurion’s confession at the cross: “Truly this was God’s Son” (Mark 15:39). The Johannine literature makes this confessional use of “Son of God” even more explicit: “No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23).

Paul too sees the Son-title as explicitly confessional in a passage we have already seen: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God — the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who was a descendant of David according to the flesh and who through the Spirit of holiness was designated with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:1-4).

Another point to note: whereas Paul generally prefers “Lord” as his confessional term, John highlights “Son” above all other titles: for him it is the key to Jesus’ identity and mission. This term more than any other expresses Jesus’ unique relation to his Father and his unique mission, a mission to which he is totally obedient: “I do nothing on my own authority; … I seek not my own will but the will of the one who sent me” (John 5:30). Just like the Synoptic evangelists, John stresses that this unique relationship of Jesus to his Father cannot be perceived except by God’s revelation, as Cullmann deftly explains:

While witnesses can and must be produced to support other assertions, there can be no question of human witness for Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God.God himself is the only possible competent witness. Only he can validate this claim of oneness with himself. The claim to be the Son of God so bursts all human bonds that only this circular explanation is possible: the Father himself must attest that Jesus is the Son; on the other hand, this divine testimony must be given precisely in the Son.
Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament

Jesus as God
There can be no question that the New Testament is quite reticent about calling Jesus “God” outright, without further ado. Such reticence is understandable, for an explicit and unqualified designation of Jesus as God could sound polytheistic and mythological; or if “God” is meant monotheistically, to whom then is Jesus praying if he is already God simpliciter? On the other hand, a refusal to countenance calling Jesus “God” would lead to its own problems, underplaying and undercutting the unique bond that Jesus has with his Father, denigrating his divine status in favor of an excessive stress on his humanity.

We have already seen that the Fourth Evangelist has dealt with that theological dilemma in his prologue when he used Logos terminology: the Word was both with God and yet also was God (John 1:1). Furthermore, the obvious reticence of the New Testament in calling Jesus “God” can be exaggerated, for, as we have already seen, the title “Lord” was a specifically liturgical confession by which Christians addressed Jesus in worship. Still, passages that directly and without further ado designate Jesus as “God” are relatively rare, but no less significant for New Testament Christology on that account.

Outside of John 1:1 the most important passage would be the confession of doubting Thomas to Jesus on the Sunday after Easter, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), a passage that “frames” the Fourth Gospel in just the way the centurion’s confession “This was truly the Son of God” (Mark 15:39) framed Mark’s Gospel about the Son of God. [The fact that the centurion's confession hearkens back to the opening line of Mark's Gospel just as Thomas's confession hearkens back to the opening line of John's Gospel shows how desperate Arius was in the third century when he claimed that Thomas's confession "My Lord and my God" was really only an expostulation on his part, expressing a surprised prayer, rather in the manner of an American teenager crying out "Ohmigod!"Arius's exegesis is clearly a case of special pleading.]

Paul too speaks of Jesus as “God”: “Put on the mind of Christ Jesus, who, being the very form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” (Philemon 2:5-6); and he unambiguously asserts: “In him [Christ] the entire fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). In the Letter to Titus Paul speaks of waiting “for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).[ An almost identical phrase appears in the Petrine corpus too: "From Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours" (2 Peter 1:1).]

Finally we may mention these perhaps ambiguous lines: “Of their race [the Jews] come the patriarchs, and from them comes Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen” (Romans 9:5). [The ambiguity arises from the possibility that the word translated as "who" (referring to Christ) could instead mean "he" (referring to God), which would result in this translation: "Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them comes Christ according to the flesh, who is over all. God be praised!"]

Another potentially ambiguous passage from Paul speaks of “the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2) [The grammar of the Greek allows for the word "Christ" to modify either "mystery" or "God."].

More ambiguous is the line from Revelation: “He [Jesus] has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself” (Revelation 19:12), which may or may not be the sacred name of God. [Finally, mention should be made of two papyrus manuscripts p66 (published in 1956) and p75 (published in 1961). Both manuscripts give a variant reading for John 1:18, which most manuscripts read this way: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known” (RSV). But these two papyri reproduce the verse to say: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (NIV), or “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (NRSV).

The very ambiguity of these latter passages, together with their relative sparseness, points to one of the central problems that will beset the church’s later Christological thought: a too-close identification of Jesus with God will render both his obedience to the Father and his outward mission to the world inexplicable; but an excessive reticence, not to say cowardice, about worshiping Jesus as God will undercut the efficacy of his work of redemption and undermine a belief in his uniqueness that it is the whole point of every book in the New Testament to convey.

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Titles of Jesus: Jesus the Word – Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

July 20, 2012

The major titles the New Testament applies to Jesus are as follows: Prophet, Suffering Servant, High Priest, Messiah, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, and God. Far from being a mere litany of honorifics, these titles actually refer to different aspects of his work and identity. The Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, from whom Oakes has drawn this list, has grouped the various titles into four rubrics: (1) the earthly work of Jesus, (2) the future work of Jesus, (3) His present work, and finally to (4) His pre-existence. In this fifth selection we will look at the title Jesus the Word, one of the titles dealing with the pre-existence of our Lord.

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Jesus the Word
It would be very difficult indeed to overestimate the impact of the title “Word” (Greek, logos) to the Christology of the first six centuries of the church. For many church fathers the title was considered crucial, for it marked the great point of contact with the philosophical speculations of the educated pagan mind. That said, the use of this term to describe Jesus in the New Testament can be found only in the Johannine writings, and even there it occurs in just a few passages: the Prologue to the Gospel of John (John 1:1-4), in i. John la, and in Revelation 19:13.

What accounts for this discrepancy between New Testament paucity and patristic favoritism? First of all, as Cullmann points out, “the point at which the author of John makes use of the Logos concept shows that the title is indispensable for him when he wishes to speak of the relationship between the divine revelation in the life of Jesus and the preexistence of Jesus.” [Cullman, The Christology of the New Testament] No wonder, then, that the patristic writers themselves found the concept indispensable too, for questions of the preexistence of the divine Son dominated discussion at that time, for reasons to be explained in Chapter 4. (Plus, the Logos concept proved a godsend, so to speak, for Christian apologists trying to justify Christianity to educated Gentiles raised in Platonic and Stoic concepts of logos.)

But before touching on these essentially theological issues, we must first outline the (very large) semantic range of the term logos, which in Greek happens to have far more meanings attached to it than the English term “word” and includes, among others, these meanings: reason, account, narrative, essence, verbalization, and, of course, the spoken word as such. But because the noun logos is the nominative form of the verb lego, legomai (“to speak”), we must first concentrate on its primary meaning as spoken word.

As speech-acts, words communicate thoughts, which themselves are the products of minds. Furthermore, words are received by ears and then understood by other minds. This basically mental feature in all words surely accounts for the rich and powerful religious symbolism that surrounds the concept of word. For unlike the other senses, which perceive objects in their brute physicality, hearing picks up something much more “spiritual,” even evanescent. Tellingly, objects that are seen, touched, smelled, and tasted can be grasped; but words stay ever elusive and disappear as soon as they are heard. For that same reason, a hearer of a word has no control over what is being heard, and this too must surely be religiously significant, as the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar notes in this insightful passage:

Hearing is different [from the other senses], almost the opposite mode of the revelation of reality. It lacks the fundamental characteristic of material relevance. It is not objects we hear but their utterances and communications. Therefore it is not we ourselves who determine on our part what is heard and place it before us as an object in order to turn our attention to it when it pleases us. No, what is heard comes upon us without our being informed of its coming in advance. It lays hold of us without our being asked…. It is in the highest degree symbolic that only our eyes, and not our ears, have lids…. The basic relationship between the one who hears and that which is heard is thus one of defenselessness on the one side and of communication on the other…. Even in a dialogue between equals in rank, the one who is at the moment hearing is in the subordinate position of humble receiving. The hearer belongs to the other for as long as he is listening and to that extent is “obeying” him.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Seeing, Hearing, and Reading within the Church,” in Explorations in Theology Vol 2

The religious implications of this description are clear and hold true even for the nonreligious: listeners have no choice but to receive what is heard. Moreover, what they receive is not so much the object of the speaker but his thoughts, that is, his mental life. In that regard it is telling that Aristotle defines man as the zōon logikon, usually translated as “rational animal” but which could just as accurately be given as the “verbal” or “word-using” animal.

Both in pre-Christian Greek and Jewish thought the concept of logos became more and more “hypostasized,” meaning that Greek and Jewish thought moved more and more away from the concept of word as evanescent, disappearing as soon as it entered the ear, and toward a notion of word as somehow substantial (hypostasis being the Greek word for “substance”). For example, the Stoics identified the Logos with the cosmic law that governs the universe and is at the same time operative in the human intellect. But that notion of logos as law is still only an abstraction (roughly equivalent to Newton’s Law of Gravity).

The situation is different in Platonism, but crucially it is the Idea or Form (eidos) that is hypostasized, not the Word (logos); in other words it is the mental concept that takes on the contours of substance, not that which is communicated from one mind to the other.

“A major difficulty in the interpretation of logos is determining when this common and amorphous Greek word is being used in a technical, specialized sense. Thus Heraclitus, in whom it first plays a major role, frequently employs it in its common usage, but he also has a peculiar doctrine that centers around logos in a more technical sense: for him logos is an underlying organizational principle of the universe…. Plato also used the term logos in a variety of ways, including the opposition between mythos (tale) and logos, where the latter signifies a true, analytical account…. [He also] describes the dialectician as one who can give an account (logos) of the true being (or essence, ousia) of something…. The Stoic point of departure on logos is Heraclitus’ doctrine of an all-pervasive formula of organization, which the Stoics considered divine.”
F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University Press, 1967)

But as Platonism developed, the Logos too became more and more “personal,” acting as an agent or go-between, an intermediary between the inaccessible One and the finite world. Nowhere is that personalization made more explicit than in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus whose thought was heavily influenced by what scholars now called Middle Platonism. In a remarkable passage, Philo describes the mediatorial role of the Logos in this way:

To his Logos, his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same Logos both pleads with the Immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject. He glories in this prerogative and proudly describes it in these words: “I stood between the Lord and you “
[Philo, Quis rerum divinarum heres 42.205.]

This passage certainly marks a watershed in the development of the concept of the Logos (capitalized here to show its personal, substantial nature); but it would be an error to think that Philo is influenced here solely by Middle Platonism, for he is also building on developments in the Jewish Bible. [One might be tempted to follow contemporary fashion and say "Hebrew Bible" here; but Philo used the Greek translation (called Septuagint), which is significant, because that translation includes books not found in the Hebrew canon; and it is these books above all where certain aspects of God, such as his Wisdom and his Word, are hypostasized [vocab: To be treated or represented (something abstract) as a concrete reality]. But it is also crucial to note that some Hebrew books included in the Hebrew canon also hypostasize these divine qualities, especially the book of Proverbs]

In the earlier books of the Bible God speaks his word efficaciously. God says, “Let there be light,” and light comes to be. The word of God (Hebrew, debar YHWH) is thus creative of what it speaks. As Cullmann says, “every creative self-revelation of God to the world happens through his word. His word is the side of God turned toward the world. [Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament]

What then happened is that this efficacious word is made the object of independent consideration, precisely because it is so powerful. The Psalmist says, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalms 33:6); crucially, this powerful word continues its activities after creation: “He sent forth his word and healed them” (Psalms 107:20) and “He sends forth his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly” (Psalms 147:15). The phrase “his word runs swiftly” might be poetic license; but if so, that license in turn licensed further extensions of the image, and with Isaiah we get close to the word acting as an independent agent: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not but water the earth,.. . so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty but shall accomplish what I purpose” (Isaiah 55:10-11).

Finally, all that is needed now is for this hypostasized Word or Wisdom to speak on its own as an independent agent: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginnings of the earth. Where there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water” (Proverbs 8:22-24).

[FN: Admittedly, Proverbs speaks of Wisdom (Sophia, a feminine word in Greek), not Word (logos, a masculine word), which raises a host of issues pertaining to the feminine in God. Cullmann rightly says that "Logos and Sophia are almost interchangeable" (p. 257) in the respective theologies of the Book of Wisdom and the Gospel of John. Certainly, both authors see their favored terms in equally hypostatic ways, which is the main point of this paragraph. Plus, it should be recalled that the terms "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter" for the gender of nouns are terms of convenience invented by the Greek grammarians in Alexandria because most males are described by nouns in the masculine gender and most females by the feminine gender (for example, hippos can mean either "stallion" or "mare," depending on the gender of the preceding article); but things, concepts, abstractions, and so forth, can be described by words in any gender.

At all events, either Cullmann is right and Wisdom and Word are interchangeable, which means that the question of gender is irrelevant; or the gender of the noun is theologically significant, which means that the Fourth Evangelist must have deliberately chosen Logos instead of Sophia for theological reasons. But semantically considered (which is the focus of this writing), I would say that Wisdom refers more to the internal mind of God prior to creating, whereas Word is an inherently expressive concept, which is why Cullmann can say, rightly again, that in the Old Testament the "word of God" always refers (no matter how early or late the text) to the side of God that is turned toward the world. What Wisdom stresses is that when God creates the world, or relates to it thereafter, he always does so in ways that manifest his providence, his governance, his beneficence. Creation, in other words, is not ill-considered but is aboriginally "well thought out." In other words, God's outward and expressive Word is always a Wise Word, expressive of God's internally well-ordered mind.]

How much the Fourth Evangelist was influenced by these various trends has become a matter of enormous controversy in biblical scholarship, especially as it pertains to the influence of Greek sources in general, and Philo specifically.

[FN:The influence of Gnosticism on the Fourth Gospel should be mentioned here as well, albeit briefly. Speaking very broadly, Gnosticism is a "moralization," so to speak, of Plato's theory of the Divided Line. Plato divided his world into two separate realms, Reality and Appearance, with Reality above the dividing line and Appearance below it. Above the line is static Being as such, the realm of the Ideal, of stasis, and finally of the One. Below the line were matter, division, change, copies of the Ideas, and so forth, in short the realm of Becoming. Because Plato also called the One the Good, Gnostics extended the contrast by calling the realm of matter evil. At a stroke this made evil an independent principle. (For Plato what appeared below the line had but a shadowy claim on being, in contrast to the "really real" realm of true Being; but that did not make Appearance "evil," only less "real.")

For the Gnostics, then, salvation had to be interpreted as a complete escape from the realm of matter. The anthropological correlate of this view meant that the soul of man inhabited the body like "gold in the mud” And salvation could only be effected by a divine hypostasized being coming down from heaven merely clothed in the flesh. It would seem rather obvious, judging by the surface of the text, that the Gospel of John polemicizes against this view and thus John must have known of this worldview beforehand. The only trouble is, our sources for Gnostic beliefs all come from documents written after the New Testament was in circulation. In any case, we are concentrating in this chapter on the concept of Logos for its semantic import solely and only later in the next chapters on its role in determining christological doctrine, so these points need not be stressed further.]

But if we concentrate not on the historical antecedents of the Fourth Gospel (already taking for granted the same trend of hypostatization in both Greek and Jewish sources) but on the meaning of Logos in the text itself, two points emerge immediately. First, Jesus was addressed as Kyrios (in the “high,” divine sense of that word) in Christian worship, whereas the Logos designation must have arisen as a result of theological reflection (even today, Christians do not address Jesus in their worship as “Word”).

Second, prior developments in the intellectual history of Jewish and Greek thought would later make the concept of Jesus as the divine Logos perfectly suited for Christianity’s apologetic purposes, as we shall see in later (and this will account for the greater stress in patristic times of the Logos-concept than is found in the New Testament itself).

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). Leaving aside all questions of historical antecedents, these verses drive home one essential point that is the key to the whole of the Fourth Gospel: in Cullmann’s words, “Jesus not only brings revelation, but in his person is revelation. He brings light, and at the same time he is Light; he bestows life, and he is Life; he proclaims truth, and he is Truth. More properly expressed, he brings light, life and truth just because he himself is Light, Life, and Truth. So it is also with the Logos: he brings the word, because he is the Word “
[Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament]

Finally, we must note that John both distinguishes the Logos from God, yet also identifies that Logos with God. In other words, God and the Logos are not two beings, and yet they are also not simply identical. This blunt juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory statements brings us back once again to the inherently paradoxical character of Christian doctrine, a paradoxicality that will prove immensely provocative for later Christian thought (“The paradox gives rise to theology,” as we said earlier). Here again the key will be to let theology arise out of paradox without thereby resolving the paradox in a way that would make thought control the doctrine, or theology determine revelation. As Cullmann rightly says:

We must allow this paradox of all Christology to stand. The New Testament does not resolve it, but sets the two statements alongside each other: on the one hand, the Logos was God; on the other hand, he was with God. The same paradox occurs again in the Gospel of John with regard to the “Son of God” concept. We hear on the one hand, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); and on the other hand, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).
Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament

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The Titles of Jesus: Jesus the Lord and Jesus the Savior/Redeemer – Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

July 19, 2012

The major titles the New Testament applies to Jesus are as follows: Prophet, Suffering Servant, High Priest, Messiah, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, and God. Far from being a mere litany of honorifics, these titles actually refer to different aspects of his work and identity. The Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, from whom Oakes has drawn this list shows in this fourth selection that Jesus the Lord and Jesus the Savior/ Redeemer refer to Jesus’ present work.

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Jesus the Lord
Because Jesus was executed as “King of the Jews” and because the title “Messiah” carried inevitable royal connotations, it might seem that no more dangerous title could be given to Jesus than that of “Christ”; but in the Hellenistic setting of the Roman Empire, the truly dangerous title was that of Lord.One sign of that danger, a kind of “distant early warning” foreboding a future conflict between Christianity and the Roman Empire, can be seen in a telling decree issued by the Emperor Tiberius in the year A.D. 16 forbidding the prediction of the coming of a new king or a new kingdom within the confines of the Empire. [See Ben Witherington III, New Testament History: A Narrative Account] But this is precisely what a confession of Jesus as Lord entailed: by raising him from the dead, said Peter on Pentecost, “God has made this Jesus … both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).

This title “Lord” was therefore no empty honorific. Rather it meant that a new king has ascended the throne, a new kingdom has been established in history, which means as well that the days of all earthly authority are numbered: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again…. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command; … Then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (1 Thessalonians 4:14, 16; 2 Thessalonians 2:8).

These passages would seem to imply that the title “Lord” would be better placed in the section dealing with Christ’s future work; and the prayer often on the lips of the early Christians, “Marana-tha” (“Come, Lord”), also surely indicates that in confessing Jesus as Lord, the early Christians simultaneously looked forward to his imminent coming again.

All this is true, and surely one does not want to be too hard and fast in the use of the categories; but I think Cullmann is right in assigning the primary meaning of this term to Christ’s present work in the church now rather than just to his future in bringing about the end of the world. As he rightly says, “This designation expresses as does no other the thought that Christ is exalted to God’s right hand, glorified, and now intercedes for men before the Father.” [Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament]

Probably no title given to Jesus is more significant than Lord. Paul even says that no one can confess Jesus as Lord except in the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). Furthermore, he makes the confession of Jesus as Lord the very hinge of the Christian’s salvation: “If you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe with your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

But why does so much hinge on that title “Lord”? At first glance the title might not seem all that significant, for the title was (and to some extent still is) quite common. Its basic meaning denotes anyone who has a higher position in society over another. For that reason barons and the like are still officially addressed as “lord” in contemporary Britain. Even the almost empty honorific “sir” is etymologically rooted in the word for “lord” in the Romance languages. [For example the word for "mister" in French is monsieur, literally meaning "my lord," just as the Italian monsignore means the same thing; and the German for "mister" is Herr, the German word for "Lord." Note also that the English "mister" is related to "master," which means roughly the same thing as "lord," inasmuch as it refers to anyone whose social position makes him more powerful than the one addressing him with these terms of respect.]

The same holds true of the Greek kyrios: in some contexts it is best translated as “sir” (an honorific) but at other times as “lord” (or when referring to God, “Lord”). Because Greek, German, and most Romance languages use the same term, but English distinguishes “lord” from “sir,” English translations of the Bible can often obscure an important point in the Gospels when they depict someone approaching Jesus with the title kyrios. No doubt these curious onlookers might have meant the title merely as a polite way of showing respect for a noted teacher, but the evangelists also want to point out that, perhaps unbeknownst to the speakers, they are confessing Jesus as the true Lord.

But that still does not explain why such an ordinary term could come to be so significant to the Christians who made so much of their confession of Jesus as Lord. Part of the reason for that comes from a development in Jewish piety after the Babylonian exile. The Old Testament records that God had revealed to Moses his personal name, YHWH (perhaps pronounced “Yahweh;’ although that is disputed because ancient Hebrew did not indicate vowels). The name is drawn from the Hebrew word for “to be,” which is why God also reveals his name as “I AM WHO I AM.” But after the return of the Jews during the reign of king Cyrus, pious practice forbade the pronunciation of the divine name except by the High Priest on the feast of Yom Kippur, and then only in the Holy of Holies, the inner chamber of the Temple in Jerusalem.

For that reason, whenever the divine name appeared in the text, the Hebrew word for “Lord,” Adonai, was substituted when the text was being read aloud; so when the Jews living in Alexandria two to three centuries before Christ commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek (called the Septuagint), the word kyrios was always used whenever the Hebrew text read YHWH. In other words, for the Jews of Alexandria, the title “Lord” became the divine name par excellence, a connotation of the title that then started to hold true for all the Greek-speaking Jews of the Roman Empire, given the enormous prestige of the Septuagint for them. [This linguistic substitution also made sense against the background of the non-monotheistic religions of the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire, where the gods and goddesses (Serapis, Osiris, Isis, and so forth) were addressed as kyrios or kyria. See Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, pp. 196-97 for details and bibliography.]

Little wonder, then, that the Christians were persecuted by the Romans specifically because they refused to address the Roman emperor by the title “lord” in the civic rites required of all “patriotic” members of the Empire. [The Roman emperors might well have maintained republican fictions in Rome and in those lands absorbed by Rome before the fall of the Republic; but in the East they became increasingly insistent that the populace honor the emperor by more religiously exalted titles that implied divinity in the pagan pantheon.]This the Christians could not do, because their confession of Jesus as Lord meant that he was the only one before whom “every knee should bend” (Philemon 2:10). Obeisance offered to any other reputed or putative “lord” would thereby represent a denial of the very faith that was their salvation.

Only one other point needs to be stressed about this title: the ambiguity in this word — that is, whether “Lord” (when applied to Jesus) means mere respect (“sir”) or is a confession of his divine status (“one Lord”) — only applies to his earthly life. After Easter, Jesus is confessed as Lord exclusively in its religious meaning. Indeed, it is because of Easter that he becomes Lord. Such is the testimony of the earliest strata of the New Testament. Peter, in his first sermon on Pentecost, says, “God raised this Jesus to life…. Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:32, 36); and Paul says that Jesus was “established with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:4).

The significance of the resurrection for Christology can only be discussed in the next chapter, but here we can at least note that it is because of the resurrection that the title of “Lord” refers primarily to Jesus’ present work in the church, as Cullmann explains so well:

We must above all ask why, after the death of Christ, a particular community was founded at all. If the very early Church really had only a future expectation, if only the coming Son of Man was Christologically significant for it, then it would be impossible to explain the impulse to form a Church in which enthusiasm ruled and the working of the Spirit determined the whole of life…. On the basis of the conviction that with Christ’s resurrection the end had already begun, the first Christians could no longer think of him only as the coming Son of Man. He must mean something also for the present, for time already fulfilled. The intense hope that the end is near is thus not the foundation but the consequence of the Easter faith…. He has died and is risen, and he will come again. But he must have a task to fulfill also between these two salvation-events. His work cannot simply cease in the meantime.
Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament

The present activity of the Lord Jesus in these “between times” comes through most clearly in a passage from Paul dealing with the tricky issue of eating meat from animals that had first been sacrificed to idols, to which question Paul replies with this answer: since the “gods” the pagans worship do not in fact exist, no harm is done provided the Christian not get seduced by appearances. At this point, Paul adds this crucial justification:

So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords” [in pagan religions]), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
(1 Corinthians 8:4-6)

As the renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright points out, this passage could not possibly be more revolutionary for later doctrinal development for its rhetorical parallelism rests on an allusion to the most basic Jewish confession of faith, called the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Paul uses the same structure but now incorporates Jesus himself into the confession:

The Lord our God = One God — the Father…

The Lord is One = One Lord — Jesus Christ .. .

The reason this parallelism is so revolutionary is that it shows that Paul was already establishing the basis for later doctrinal development, as Wright so lucidly sees:

Faced with that astonishing statement, one would have to say that if the early Fathers of the church hadn’t existed it would be necessary to invent them. Paul has redefined the very meaning of the words that Jews used, every day in their regular prayers, to denote the one true God. The whole argument of the chapter hinges precisely on his being a Jewish-style monotheist, over against pagan polytheism, and, as the lynchpin of the argument, he has quoted the most central and holy confession of that monotheism and has placed Jesus firmly in the middle of it. Lots of Pauline scholars have tried to edge their way round this one, but it can’t be done. The nettle must be grasped. Somehow, Paul believes, the one and only God is now known in terms, at least, of “father” and “lord.” All things are made by the one; all things are made through the other.
[N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?]

In other words, when Christians confessed Jesus as Lord, they confessed his divinity, yet without abandoning their monotheism.

Jesus the Savior/Redeemer
Billboards in the Bible Belt of the United States often proclaim “Jesus saves,” and some evangelicals and/or fundamentalists still approach the unchurched with the question, “Are you saved?” For that reason it might come as some surprise to learn that “Savior” does not figure prominently in the New Testament as a title for Jesus; and when it does occur, it comes from relatively late strata. But the term still functions as an important confession, for what the title points to is not only a present work of Jesus but a work of his that is correlative to a plight of ours. No one needs to be saved who is not already in some situation of desperation, who is in some sense “lost.” Only someone who is drowning needs a life-saver; and only those who feel lost on this earth, orphaned from their true home, will be on the lookout for a savior.

So the question becomes, what did Jesus save us from? In other words, in what does salvation consist? The answer is simple: Jesus is Savior because he saves people from their sins and from the death that has swept into the world as a consequence of sin (Romans 5:12). For that reason the title “Savior” accomplishes something that the title “Lord” on its own does not: it stresses Jesus’ role as the one who has atoned for our sins. “Lord” after all is applied not just to God, who, so to speak, “owns” the name most of all; but it can also be applied (legitimately and illegitimately) to any number of others who have assumed a social role of power and domination (“domination” comes from the Latin word  , for “lord”), and so in that sense can be ambiguous.

But “Savior” stresses something much more specific, a unique work of Jesus: his atoning death on the cross. [The New Testament does in fact once call God (rather than Jesus specifically) "Savior" but only in the rarely quoted Letter of Jude: "To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy -- to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore" (Jude 24-25). But even here God is "Savior" through Christ, that is, through his work of atonement.]

That said, “Savior” still shares an important feature with “Lord”: just as the Lordship of Jesus is universal, so too does the salvation effected by Jesus extend to the whole world, a point stressed most of all in the First Letter of John: “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world…. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 John 2:2; 4:14).

The Greek word for “savior” (soter) is sometimes translated as “redeemer;’ but the two words in English bring out different features of the word not available in Greek (just as “sir” and “lord” bring out different meanings not available when .translating the single Greek term kyrios). Redemption is primarily an economic concept (as in redeeming coupons for the purchase of goods) and implies an exchange or purchase. The religious application of that word in the New Testament is due to the institution of slavery, where an owner could purchase a slave from the slave-market and then set him free if  he so chose.

For Paul the slavery from which we have been purchased was the slavery of sin (Romans 6:19-23), and the purchase price was the blood of Christ (Romans 3:25). But because the Greek soter does not make that distinction, [Except in the verb forms, where the distinction applies: sozo means "to save" (from a plight, like drowning) while hilaskomai means "to redeem" (in the Pauline sense of redeem from the slavery of sin by the atoning blood of Christ). But hilaskomai has no nominal form in the New Testament, so "Redeemer" as distinct from "Savior" could never become one of the titles of Jesus in New Testament Greek.]“redeemer” and “savior” cover the same semantic range for the most part, differing only slightly in their (English) connotations.

Finally, one must recall that the name “Jesus” itself in Hebrew means “the Lord saves,” which perhaps accounts for the late appearance of the title “Savior” in the New Testament and for its more prevalent usage in Christianity later on, when the name “Jesus” would sound purely as a proper noun (analogous to the way the name “Christ” became attached as a kind of last name). [One example of the favored use of the term “Savior” later on to describe Jesus can be seen in the image of a fish as a symbol for Christianity. The word for fish in Greek is ichthus, which can also form a Greek anagram, Iesous Christos Theou Dios Soter: “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.”

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Titles of Jesus: Jesus the Son of Man – Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

July 18, 2012

John 3:14-21, is an unusual passage in that John does not rely on either a parable or a story. In this passage, Jesus tells us, for the first of three times in John’s gospel, that the Son of Man must be lifted up.

The major titles the New Testament applies to Jesus are as follows: Prophet, Suffering Servant, High Priest, Messiah, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, and God. Far from being a mere litany of honorifics, these titles actually refer to different aspects of his work and identity. The Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, from whom Oakes has drawn this list, has grouped the various titles into four rubrics: (1) the earthly work of Jesus, (2) the future work of Jesus, (3) His present work, and finally to (4) His pre-existence. In this third selection we will look at the title Jesus the Son of Man which with the previous post, Jesus the Messiah, completes the rubric of Jesus’ future work.

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Jesus the Son of Man
With two exceptions the title “Son of Man” is never used by others in the New Testament to designate Jesus, only by Jesus himself. Except for those two instances (Acts 7:56; Rev. 1:13), [The first occurs on the lips of Stephen just before his death by stoning, and the other is from John the Divine (the author of Revelation); both passages are actually but allusions to Daniel 7:13 and thus not confessions of faith by either Stephen or John the Divine but are silent quotations drawn from Daniel's vision, discussed below.] the term is exclusively Jesus’ own self-designation.

We are thus faced with a paradox that is almost the mirror-image of the paradox of the title Messiah: whereas Jesus acknowledged his identity as Messiah only in the most exceptional of circumstances and otherwise deflected its ready and too-easy use by his followers, even as the New Testament makes “Christ” (meaning “Messiah”) the most frequently cited title for him, so here, in contrast, Jesus regularly referred to himself as Son of Man, but the early Christians almost never so designated him by that title: Jesus largely deflects the title “Christ” while the church calls him that constantly; but the term he uses of himself most of all, “Son of Man,” almost never appears on the lips of Christians as a confessional term.

Complicating the issue even further, the term Son of Man encompasses a wide range of semantic implications. In some contexts the term could mean only a polite way for a male speaker of Aramaic to say “I” (the way some authors write their autobiographies in the third person, to avoid sounding egotistical by using the first person pronoun too often). Thus when Jesus says “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” this could be merely a periphrastic way of saying “I have nowhere to lay my head.”

Another common usage in Aramaic is the generic one, to refer to the human race at large, the way speakers of English will say “man must eat.” [This contemporary usage is less common now because of the critique of feminist grammarians; but the generic use of "man" to refer to all human beings is deeply embedded in the structure of English ("man" comes from the same Indo-European root as "mental" and functions in the way sapiens does in the description of our species as Homo sapiens) and is still common enough that the generic use highlights the same for the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek usage.]

Thus when Jesus says, “Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath was meant for man, for the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28), that could mean (although the verse is hotly disputed among exegetes) that Jesus is referring in the second half of the sentence not to himself but to man in general.

It is of course the third meaning that counts for Christology. Here “Son of Man” becomes a genuinely theological title, for when used in this sense it refers to that eschatological figure from heaven who will come as God’s celestial designate to inaugurate the end of the world and to bring about the final reign of God in a definitive kingdom, where evil will no longer hold sway and where God will reign utterly unopposed by either earthly powers or by evil supernal principalities. Now why did so generic a term as “Son of Man” (which in some contexts, as we have seen, can refer to humanity at large) come to be associated with so vivid a scenario as the end of the world? The answer simply is: because of an accident of apocalyptic literature.

Readers in our civilization who encounter apocalyptic literature for the first time enter upon a world filled with phantasmagoric imagery, lurid depictions of the end-times, bizarre vocabulary — in short, a world utterly removed from the quotidian display of journalism and the historical sobriety of the typical “just the facts” narrative of modernity. But everything about the apocalyptic genre makes sense when the reader sees the situation that gave birth to that literature: a fusion of extreme tribulation with irrepressible hope.

Consider the worldview of the Jews in the centuries after the Babylonian exile: at all times they knew that history was in God’s control and under the sway of his all-seeing providence, so much so that even the unsuspecting Persian king Cyrus was prompted to “let God’s people go” without even having a glimmer of a notion of that God’s existence. But then again, neither did Alexander the Great have any inkling that he was acting out in history according to God’s set purposes; he conquered the later Persian kings, the very heirs of the same king Cyrus whom Isaiah had called “Messiah” (Isaiah 45:1). Nor did Alexander’s Seleucid successors have any idea that they were operating out of the laws of providence set forth ahead of time by the God of the Jews; nor did the Roman conquerors, all of whom were oppressors of God’s chosen ones. But for the strictly monotheistic and prophecy-saturated Jews this oppression, too, had to have taken place under God’s suzerainty and by his direction. Why? What could be the answer to this reason-bewildering and soul-confusing cry? If God chose — anointed even! — Cyrus to liberate God’s chosen people, why did God allow the Romans to conquer the Promised Land?

Previously, the answer had been that God was punishing the people for their sins, and to some extent that answer still held sway; but the pattern of sin, repentance, restoration of land, sin again, loss of land, repentance, restoration of land, and so on, was starting to lose its prophetic force (not least because of the absence of further prophecy). Something about the current situation under the Romans was pushing the explanation of God’s purposes to new extremes.

For one thing, the lesson that the Jews had to be strictly faithful to the Mosaic Law, both written and oral, had sunk in with large tracts of the population (later called “Pharisees”), who took obedience to the Law with great seriousness and religious devotion. For another, oppression under the Romans assumed a harshness not previously known, especially because of its taxation system, which allowed licensed “tax farmers” (the hated “tax collectors” of the New Testament) to squeeze as much money out of the Jews as they could for their own use provided they turned in the required amount to the Roman treasury on time. So a new answer had to be given.

Clearly God was deliberately letting evil run its course. Like a latent cancer, evil would be allowed to gestate until it would burst forth in full bloom; and then God, like a wise surgeon, could intervene and cut out the canker and restore creation to its originally intended splendor, but only after evil had fully manifested itself. And for that task, as he had done with many of his other works, God would send one of his celestial delegates, that is, one of his angels. Such a scene we find depicted in the Book of Daniel, where we read how the outcome of the end of history will take place:

I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came out of the sea, different from one another… [These four beasts represent the empires of the Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, and Romans, respectively] And as I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days [meaning God] took his seat…. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him. A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand [angels] stood before him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened…. I saw in the night a vision, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came before the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
(Daniel 7:2-14)

Notice that in this translation (RSV) the term “son of man” is not capitalized. Granted, the distinction between capital and small letters did not enter Western orthography until the eighth century A.D.; still the translators chose wisely, for here the term “son of man” is not yet a title, but merely the typical Aramaic indication for a human being, or rather in this passage, for someone like a son of man, meaning one who amidst the heavenly court has taken on human appearance. But this clearly is no angel chosen at random, but some more significant being; for his task will entail that, upon its completion, he will be given “everlasting dominion” so that “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.”

For that reason, the expression that Daniel used to mean solely the human form or appearance of this divine agent came to take on the connotations of a specific title for that expected figure. It came to be, so to speak, “capitalized” (in the mind, if not in the manuscripts). “Son of Man,” in other words, came to designate a specific figure who would come from heaven to “set things right,’ to give God’s final verdict upon the course of world history, to put an end to this seemingly endless series of bestial empires, and to give final definition to God’s intentions when he created the world in the first place.

Jesus’ awareness of this connotation of the title “Son of Man” is made most evident when he speaks specifically of the Son of Man “coming on the clouds” (as in Mark 14:62, as we have already seen), a clear allusion to this passage in the book of Daniel. Many commentators, especially those of skeptical bent, hold that, insofar as these passages represent the authentic words of the historical Jesus, Jesus is referring to someone else whom he too is expecting. The trouble (apart from the plausibility or implausibility of the exegesis involved) is that when Jesus speaks of the Son of Man in contexts where he is clearly not using the term generically but is being specifically theological, for the most part he describes the Son of Man in terms that Isaiah uses to describe the Suffering Servant.

We see this most clearly in the very passage where Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ and where Jesus then admonishes him and the rest of the Twelve not to divulge such dangerous news: “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly” (Mark 8:31-32a). No Messianic secret here at least: for here Jesus openly describes the Son of Man not in his exultant role but in his suffering on behalf of the people. [That Jesus' audience would have understood that eschatological connection is a point made by Craig Evans: "Interpreters of Daniel 7 in late antiquity almost always understood the `son of man' figure as referring to an individual, often to the Messiah (as in the Gospels, 1Enoch, and 4 Ezra)." [Craig A. Evans, "Jesus' Self-Designation `The Son of Man,"' in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity]

Again we are forced to ask why. Why did Jesus not use Isaiah’s language of the Suffering Servant when he spoke thus? Why use Son-of-Man language when he is intent on describing not his exaltation, the end of the world, or receiving dominion, but instead his humiliation and fated execution? Clearly, the association of suffering with the Son of Man meant that Jesus was linking his suffering with the definitive inauguration of God’s kingdom, something that not even the Suffering Servant Songs had done (that is, for Isaiah the Suffering Servant suffered on behalf of the people, but in an atoning way, and not necessarily to provoke the end of history). In other words, by speaking this way Jesus is signaling his acceptance of a divine vocation, one, moreover, that will transform God’s relationship to history in a definitive way: Jesus’ suffering and the end of the world are in some mysterious way linked.

Moreover, by using Son of Man as the title to express Jesus’ suffering, the stress is put on Jesus’ own control over his destiny, a feature of Christology that is strongly present in John but is also implied in the Synoptic use of Son of Man, as Heinz Todt rightly sees:

How is Jesus seen when in his suffering he is designated as Son of Man? He is not seen as the one who is utterly devoid of power; … instead he is always seen as the one who is marvelously aware of his course beforehand. … The one in whom the sovereignty is inherent accepts his rejection by and deliverance to men…. His authority on earth is confirmed by his resurrection power.
H. E. Todt, The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition, trans. Dorothea M. Barton (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,1965), pp. 220-21.

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The Titles of Jesus: Messiah – Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

July 17, 2012

Samuel Anoints David

The major titles the New Testament applies to Jesus are as follows: Prophet, Suffering Servant, High Priest, Messiah, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, and God. Far from being a mere litany of honorifics, these titles actually refer to different aspects of his work and identity. The Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, from whom I have drawn this list usefully clusters these titles under four rubrics: Prophet, Suffering Servant, and High Priest refer to the earthly work of Jesus [See previous post]; Messiah and Son of Man refer to the future work of Jesus; Lord and Savior to his present work; and Word, Son of God, and God to his preexistence. In this second selection we will look at the title of Messiah, one that refer to the future work of Jesus.

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Jesus the Messiah
As a participial passive adjective in Hebrew, “messiah” means “anointed” and as an adjectival noun it means “the anointed one,” which translates in Greek as “christos.” Originally, the title gained its significance from the ritual of anointing in a coronation ceremony (priests were also anointed, which gives the title a sacerdotal connotation as well). The anointing was done by smearing oil on the head or hands of a king to mark out the monarch (or priest) as having entered a new and permanent status. [ This ritual has continued on to modern times in the anointing of monarchs, as the world saw when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the first to be televised; and of course priests continue to be anointed in modern times too.]

The reason for oil as the symbolic instrument for anointing stems from its viscosity against water: oil covers the surface in a way that seems to “seal” the watery, less viscous contents below. In other words, anointing is used in ceremonies to denote a definitive change in status from one state of life to another (which is also why those undergoing baptism and confirmation, and not just priests and monarchs, are sealed with oil to denote their new, and irrevocable, status as Christians entering a new state of life).

The Hebrew concept of Messiah, however, added an additional element: because the institution of kingship was understood as divinely instituted, the real anointer was held to be God, who alone granted the federation of the twelve tribes of Israel the concession of having a monarch in place of the loose confederation of chieftains (or “judges” as they are known in traditional translations of the Bible). In fact, the concession was granted reluctantly:

“But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, `Give us a king to govern us.’ And Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, `Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me as king over them”
(1 Samuel 8:6-7).

At all events, because of the association of Messiah with kingship and with divine election, any monarch, even a pagan one, could be designated Messiah provided he were of royal status and had been set apart by God to accomplish God’s own providential purposes; this we know because Isaiah called the Persian king Cyrus “Messiah” for his role in allowing the Jews to return from Babylon to Jerusalem in 538 B.C.: “Thus says the Lord to his messiah whom, the Lord says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow down before him, … though you do not know me” (Isaiah 45: 1,5).

For that reason, Messiah would seem to denote a title pertaining to Christ’s present work, for a king is meant to reign on earth now and is a role to be filled by human beings currently living. After all, when the king dies, a new one takes over (“The king is dead. Long live the king!”). Nonetheless, this title aptly belongs in that category denoting the future work of Jesus for this reason above all: from the time of the Babylonian captivity Israel had lost its political independence, and thus also the monarchy, and lived, except for brief intervals, under systems of overbearing oppression, especially under the Hellenistic heirs of Alexander the Great (called the Seleucids), and even more under the harsh rod of Rome, whose taxation policies were deeply resented.

Hopes for liberation from such oppression thus had to be focused on the future, when a new king would, like King David of old, expel the oppressors and set up a new kingdom, with foreigners driven out and the Jews free to worship God without fear or favor. Taken in this sense, the title “messiah” would seem to entail a merely political hope.

But by the time of Jesus’ birth, messianic hopes had begun to take on a new and more extreme coloration, one that looked forward to a deeper transformation of conditions, a transformation so radical that only God, and not a mere human and earthly king, could inaugurate it. In this scenario the messianic agent would not be some chosen young shepherd (as David was), who stepped forth to lead his people because of his natural powers of leadership, piety, and military prowess. Now the Messiah would have to be God’s viceroy in a more direct, eschatological sense. In other words, the future work of this Messiah would have to be much more radical than mere military conquest and political liberation — it would have to transform the very conditions of world history that made oppression possible in the first place.

But precisely because the title of Messiah was primarily a Jewish political one (whether in its merely royal or in its more extreme eschatological coloration), this meant that the title could not have the same purchase on the hearers of the gospel in a pagan setting. This makes the title “Christ” somewhat unique among the other titles applied to Jesus, for it soon stopped sounding like a title and began to seem more like part of his name. This is partly because the institution of king had lost much of its significance in the Roman Empire. The Roman emperors might well have acted like kings, but they continued to maintain the fiction that they were ruling in continuity with the outmoded forms of the Roman Republic, which had no kings (the wind “emperor” comes from the Latin word for a military commander, imperator).

But more crucially, “messiah” remained a true title for the Jews of first-century Palestine because, under Roman oppression, they looked forward to a restoration of the kingdom first established by King David. The title “messiah,” in other words, was highly charged politically; indeed it was the title for which the Romans executed Jesus (which we know because the Roman governor of Judea at the time, Pontius Pilate, ordered the charge to be posted on the cross justifying the Nazarene’s execution: “Jesus Christ, King of the Jews”).

For that reason the translation of the Hebrew title Messiah into the Greek term Christos began a process that finally made the term Christ virtually a proper name for Jesus. Such is often the fate of names. For example, someone in the past might well have been known in his village as “James the Baker,” but no one assumes that a James Baker now is especially skilled as a pastry chef, anymore than one assumes that a Geoffrey Wainwright knows how to make wagons. Similarly with the title Christ: it was never a term that had much cachet in a pagan setting, and so in Greek it soon took on the connotations of a proper name. For one thing, the Roman emperors were never anointed upon assuming office, since they wished to maintain republican fictions. For another, anointing with oil was quite a common practice in the Roman Empire for both medicinal and athletic reasons, especially in the gymnasia and baths of the time.

The upshot is that once Jesus became known in the pagan world for his work by other terms more meaningful in a pagan setting, like “Savior,” the title “Christ” gradually became a kind of last name for him.[Even today, some library card catalogues will give at the entry for "Jesus" a directional note saying "see Christ," the way some libraries will say at the entry for Napoleon "see Bonaparte."] In fact, so much had the name “Christ” become virtually his last name that some pagan authors could not be bothered to get it right: as we saw at the outset of this chapter, with Suetonius complaining about the followers of “Chrestus.” And we are not surprised to learn that the term “Christian” to denote the followers of Christ was first coined in a pagan town, Antioch (see Acts 11:26).

Despite this easily discernible move from title to proper name, however, The New Testament recognizes the title “Christ” (or its Hebrew equivalent “Messiah”) of the most significant confessional titles assigned to Jesus. The Gospel of John, for example, concludes with this line: “[This book ] is written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). [This verse concludes chapter 20, with another chapter following, but that seems to have been an Epilogue, which perhaps was written after the "first edition," so to speak, of the Fourth Gospel had already been initially distributed among the community of the Beloved Disciple, which was then supplemented with chapter 21 before it was sent out for the edification of the other churches in the Mediterranean.]

Paul, too, clearly means Christ as a title, for although he often uses the expression “Jesus Christ,” he also interchangeably will say “Christ Jesus” or, more tellingly, “Jesus the Christ.” In other words, the New Testament is saturated in the conviction that Jesus is the Messiah, specifically “anointed” (that is, set apart) by God for redemptive purposes.

Complicating the issue, however, is the most remarkable fact about this title: the apparent diffidence, almost downright reluctance, on the part of Jesus to accept this title. So remarkable is this diffidence that this motif has earned its own moniker in the scholarly community: the so-called “Messianic secret.” Only twice in the entire New Testament is Jesus depicted as accepting the title (and even the second instance is ambiguous): In the first episode, during his interrogation before the High Priest Caiaphas, Jesus is directly asked, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” to which Jesus replied simply, “I am” (Mark 14:62).

The second episode deals with Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus at Caesarea Philippi when Jesus asked his disciples what the people were saying about him, to which Peter finally replied with his own confession: “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29; see the parallels in Luke 9:20, where the confession reads “the Christ of God”; and in Matthew 16:16, where the confession goes: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”). At this point accounts begin to diverge, for in both Mark and Luke, Jesus’ response is only this: “He gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him.”

In Matthew, however, Jesus seems to accept the appellation, for he then praises Peter for confessing what only the eyes of faith can see; nonetheless, he goes on, after apparently accepting the title, to warn the disciples still to tell no one outside of their select circle about his real identity. [In the Gospel of John there is a scene vaguely similar to the Synoptic depiction of the confession at Caesarea Philippi, when many disciples abandon the cause when they find the obligation to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ too much for their faith, and Jesus asks the twelve if they too wish to go away, to which Peter replies: "Lord, to whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to see that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6:66-71). But as this passage does not use the specific term "Christ" it is not strictly relevant here.]

Outside of these two instances, Jesus is consistently depicted as deflecting the title of Messiah as somehow inappropriate, despite its clear relevance to his mission and despite the enthusiastic use of the term by the early church (to such an extent that it became the title by which he is best known, albeit in a way that conflates the title with its use as a proper name). The situation is thus most peculiar: the very title that the early church felt best described Jesus is the very one that he seems to have deflected. Why? In short, because of the context: words have not only a certain denotative meaning (the so-called “dictionary meaning”) but also have definite rhetorical implications depending on the life-situation in which they are uttered (the connotative meaning). The noted scholar C. H. Dodd perhaps summarizes best of all the import of the Messianic secret in this lapidary formulation:

The office of Messiah was conceived in various ways, but always it was bound up with the special calling and destiny of Israel as the people of God. From the gospels we gather that Jesus set himself to constitute the new Israel under his own leadership; he nominated its founding members, and admitted them into the new “covenant,” and he laid down its new law. That was his mission. If it did not entirely agree with any of the contemporary ideas of what the Messiah should do, there was no other term available which came near to covering it. He could not deny his mission; he could not disavow the authority that went with it; and therefore, if the question was posed, he could not simply repudiate the title “Messiah.” But it was an embarrassment to him, and he preferred that it should not be used publicly, until at least his hand was forced. In the popular mind Messiahship was associated with the political and military role of the “Son of David.” To play that part was the last thing Jesus desired. Any suggestion that he proposed to do so was a hindrance to his true work and a danger to his cause. His appeal to his people must rest on something other than a debatable claim to Messiahship.
C. H. Dodd, The Founder of Christianity

And yet Mark depicts Jesus as finally and unambiguously accepting the title before Caiaphas. Why? Surely we may at least say this: a title that he would not deny to save his life, and for which he was indeed executed, cannot have been without personal significance for him. But the real question then becomes not the ultimately bootless one, “Did Jesus ever claim in his earthly ministry to be the Messiah?” but rather “What kind of Messiah did he think he was?“

For that reason Mark has Jesus adding to his famous “I am” (his admission that he was the Messiah) the additional line, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62b). Similarly, when the twelve apostles acknowledge Jesus’ Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi, he goes on to instruct them in these words: “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). In other words, in order to understand what Jesus meant by Messiah and how he understood his mission to be characterized by that title, one must first investigate that title by which he most forthrightly designated himself: Son of Man.

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