Criswell
Theological Review 6.1 (1992) 91-130.
Copyright © 1992 by The
THE IDENTITY OF JESUS
OF
CARL F. H. HENRY
Lecturer at Large
Prison Fellowship Ministries
Nowhere
is the tension between historically repeatable acts and a
once-for-all
event focused more dramatically than in the conflict over
the
identity of Jesus of Nazareth. Shall we explain him as the ideal
model
of mankind and expound divine incarnation by philosophical
analysis
of what is humanly possible, or shall we depict him rather in
terms
of the christologically unparalleled?
The Gospels provide our only
significant information about Jesus'
life
and work. Skeptical critics thrust upon these sources tests of reliabil-
ity that they do not impose upon other historical
writing. If universally
applied,
those same criteria would in principle invalidate ancient Greek
and
Roman accounts that secular historians routinely accept as factual.1
Efforts to destroy the credibility
of gospels often betray a bias
against
the supernatural. Gerald G. O'Collins recalls
"the official Soviet
thesis
(which appears recently to have been abandoned) that Jesus
never
existed and was a purely mythological figure.”2 Consistent Marx-
ists would need to reject the theology-of-revolution
view that the his-
torical figure of Jesus nurtures its
liberationist challenge to an
alienated
world. The assumptions of evolutionary naturalism likewise
lead
to a rejection of Jesus as in any way normative and decisive for
human
destiny.
* This essay represents the two
lectures read at the Criswell Lecture Series,
1 Cf. A N. Sherwin-White,
Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testa-
ment, (London
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
2 "Jesus, in The Encyclopedia of Religion (M Eliade, ed. in chief;
Macmillan)
8.266
92
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
Jews and Jewry
The
New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia3 escapes the larger
question
of the significance of Jesus by a generalized comment that
"certain
sections [of the Gospels] seem to reflect ideas and situations
in
the developing Christian church rather than those of Jesus' own
day."4
Were the editors to apply this complaint consistently to all the
biblical
data, they would need to devalue also the Old Testament
whose
reliability they assume. Curiously, whenever these same edi-
tors charge the evangelists with "anti-Jewish
sentiment" they accept
at
face value the Gospel representations they so interpret.
The controversy over the identity
and importance of Jesus arose
initially
in the context of Hebrew history and religion. This spiritual
community
devoutly expected a messianic deliverer, an expectation
grounded
in Yahweh's special prophetic revelation. The Jewish com-
munity divided in Jesus' day over Jesus' messianic
role. The Gospels
detail
the conflict among Jesus' religious contemporaries over
whether
to receive or to repudiate the Nazarene as the promised mes-
siah and divine Son of God.
The Christian church was at its
beginning overwhelmingly Jew-
ish in composition. Jews were faced by a choice
that the New Testa-
ment still thrusts upon its readers, whether to
affirm Jesus' divinity or
to
repudiate him as a blasphemer and messianic pretender. Simply to
tribute
him as humanity at its best was not an option.
But modern critical thought sought
to eviscerate the messianic es-
chatology of Jesus, even his Jewishness,
and to obscure his life, resur-
rection and ascension, and turned him instead,
as Stanley Hauerwas
says,
into a teacher of noble ideals, "the pinnacle of the highest and
best
in humanity. . . civilization's very best. "It was a short step,"
Hauerwas, adds, "from the biblical Christ--the
highest in humanity--
to
the Nazi Superman."5
First-century antagonists dismissed
Jesus as either a deceiver or a
megalomaniac.
Toledot Yeshu and
other early Talmudic stories cast
aspersions
on Jesus' origin and character. Presuming to speak for most
present-day
Jews, rabbi Yachiel Eckstein contends that Jesus was
merely
another martyred Jew, one of the many false prophets and
pseudo-messiahs."6
3 Ed. C. Roth and G. Wigoder (London: W. H. Allen, 1975).
4 Ibid.,
"Jesus," 1042.
5 Resident Aliens; Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1989)
25.
6 What Christians Should Know About Jews and Judaism (
Books,
1984) 242.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
In striking contrast, some recent
modern Jewish leaders unhesi-
tatingly applaud the man Jesus. Even the Jewish
rebel Spinoza, while
disavowing
the divinity of Christ, nonetheless considered Jesus the
greatest
and noblest of all prophets (Epistle
21). C. G. Montefiore
(1858-1925)
and Joseph Klausner (1874-1960) paid him notable
tribute.
Montefiore significantly commends Jesus over the
whole talmudic in-
heritance:
"We certainly do not get in the Hebrew Bible any teacher
speaking
of God as 'Father,' 'my Father,' 'your Father,' and 'our Fa-
ther' like the Jesus of Matthew," he writes.
"We do not get so habitual
and
concentrated a use from any Rabbi in the Talmud."7 Many writ-
ers not victimized by a skeptical view of history
now readily concede
that
Jesus towers above the stream of mankind as an individual of
rare
spiritual sensitivity, devotion, and compassion.
In the book The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus8 Donald A Hagner
acknowledges
that most contemporary Jewish scholarship and Jewish-
Christian
dialogue still reflects long-standing differences from the
evangelical
view of Jesus. But he considers "remarkable and significant"
the
current extensive Jewish research and the evidence it gives of "a
drastic
change in the Jewish appreciation of Jesus."9 To be sure, the
Jewish
theological stance remains hostile to the Christian doctrines of
incarnation,
atonement, and the Trinity, and it refuses to connect Jesus
with
any significant transformation of the world-order and any new
and
decisive historical inbreaking of the
reading
of the Gospels increasingly overcomes the ready complaint that
Christianity
is anti-Semitic, and it more and more elicits a sporadic ac-
knowledgement of their claims to
historical trustworthiness, as does
Pinchas Lapide's
admission of the resurrection of Jesus. Alongside this
may
be noted the clusters of secret believers in the state of
the
remarkable conversion to Christ of many Jews in other lands. It is
safe
to say that tens of thousands of modern Jews affirm that Jesus
fulfills
the Old Testament prophecies and is "the Christ, the Son of the
living
God."
Ironically, as David Novak observes,
some Jewish thinkers have
judged
Islam more favorably than Christianity because of Islam's sup-
posedly stricter monotheism and absolute
prohibition of images, in
contrast
with Christian trinitarianism and the use of images
in wor-
ship
by some major branches of Christianity.10 In the later Middle
7 The Old Testament and After (New York: Arno
Press, 1972, reprint of 1923 ed.)
205.
8 Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1984.
9 Ibid., 273.
10 “A Jewish Theological
Understanding of Christianity in Our Time," First
Things 9 (Jan. 1991) 28.
94
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
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Ages,
however, Jews took a more positive view, one that judged Chris-
tianity not idolatrous and which acknowledged trinitarianism to be
not
necessarily as a commitment to a different God than Yahweh.
The Manifold Views of Jesus
When we speak of Jesus, do we then nonetheless
in fact deal
simply
with a man who like other founders of religion made unique
claims
about genuine spiritual experience? Was he a notably inspired
and
inspiring prophet who confronts us with a specially lively sense
of
the supernatural? Was he a man through whom God superlatively
manifested
himself, and perhaps performed works unmatched in
human
history?
However honorific, such views do not
conclusively modify a per-
spective that begins and ends with man. Is Jesus
then only an ancient
Semite
that literary embellishment has lifted from an obscure life on
the
outposts of Hellenistic-Roman civilization?
Is he merely a devout Jew engaged in
a dispute with fellow Jews
over
the proper interpretation of Judaism? Is he but a Christian alter-
native
to the Hellenic savior-gods, one fashioned in miracle stories set
in
Palestinian Semitic context?
Was Jesus of Nazareth, as Jane Schabert declares, a biologically
natural
son born to Mary through rape or seduction in a disgraceful
paternity
that the gospel accounts turn to glory?11 Is Jesus the
Wunderkind
of the apocryphal gospels, a child genius who worked
miracles
even while at play?
Is he an itinerant Galilean Semite
imaginatively sharing his peo-
ple's apocalyptic hopes, or as Nietzsche contends,12
simply a dread-
filled
hypersensitive type, a religiously-obsessed fanatic warning of
the
End of all ends?
Is he a contemplative sage offering
words of wisdom as did Con-
fucius, Socrates, and Epictetus,
a majestic guru imparting universal
truths
about life and mortality? Was he, as speculative psychologists
have
suggested, extraordinarily endowed with extra-sensory percep-
tion? Is he the prophet of the "New Age"
consciousness, a model of
human
insights creatively open to depths of divinity in one's own in-
ner selfhood? Does he transcend the merely human as
an historical
presence
that discloses our overlooked possibilities and enlivens our
imaginative
powers? Is he an invisible comrade, the lively memory of
whose
earthly example still supplies inspiration and courage for the
facing
of life's problems?
11 The Illegitimacy of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).
12 The Antichrist (New York: Amo Press,
1972, reprint of 1930 ed.).
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH 95
Shall we say with Paul Van Buren,
that Jesus is "the perfect em-
bodiment of divine love"?13 Was
he so venerated that his colleagues
could
not believe that he was dead? Is he, as Rudolf Bultmann
viewed
him,
a man whose crucifixion cut short his earthly life but who in the
church's
proclamation became God and accumulated such aspects of
supernatural
mythology as virgin birth, incarnation, atonement, resur-
rection and ascension? Is he merely a literary
fiction of the gospel evan-
gelists, a mythical depiction that externalizes
and objectifies an inner
experience
of new being? Is he rather, as Gnostics held, the phantas-
mal
appearance that illuminates the dark world of a supreme but oth-
erwise unknowable God? Does he, as Paul Tillich puts it, stand in
complete
relational participation with the Ground of all Being?14
Is the term "Christ"
simply a semantic symbol for whatever sa-
tisfies human craving for a fuller life, and
hence an expression ser-
viceable to atheists and materialists as well as
to biblical Christians?
Does
he exhibit human nature at its best, as at once the restorer of au-
thentic humanity, and the consummator of
mankind? Is he the ethical
norm
by whose example humans in all generations must measure vir-
tue? Shall we with John A. T. Robinson say that he
is a complete em-
bodiment "of what was from the beginning the
meaning and purpose
of
God's self-expression," a human person who "embodied the divine
initiative
and saving presence so completely that he was declared at
his
baptism and confirmed at his resurrection to be everything God
himself
was"?15 Is he, as Piet Schoonenberg portrays him, the ulti-
mate
of human-ness in whose person we find God's complete pres-
ence?16
Is Hans Kling right, that Jesus "represents the permanently
reliable ultimate standard of
human existence"?17
Is he, as L. S. Thornton suggests,
founder of a new humanity that
towers
above mankind today even as homo sapiens now transcend the
lower
animal creation.18 Is he a
super-Apollo, a spiritual athlete, as
Renaissance
art at times seems to depict him in a mediating effort to
gain
a Christian advantage from emerging humanism? Is he, as
Teilhard de Chardin
avers, the focus of cosmic evolution as its final
unification
and "christification" of all reality? Or is
he the "political
Christ"--the
prophet of social revolution and catalyst for the revolu-
tionary overthrow of social structures--as
Gustavo Gutierrez would
13 Discerning the Way (New York: The Seabury
Press, 1980) 118.
14 Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63)
2.148.
15 The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) 77, 162.
16 The Christ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971) 7,136.
17 On Being a Christian (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) 443, 450.
18 The Incarnate Lord (
1928)
35, 367f.
96
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
have
it?19 Must we, in contrast
to early Latin credal christology,
ac-
commodate current Latin American alternatives like
the "charismatic
Christ"
and the “guerilla Christ”? Is he a social humanitarian con-
cerned for liberation of the working class, a defender
of lesser, land-
holders
against their landlords?
Is Jesus, as Pannenberg
holds, not a virgin's son, but nonetheless
by
his resurrection attested as the eternal Son of God and manifest
thereby
as preexistently sharing the divine essence?20
Is Jesus, as Oscar
Cullmann concedes, not only the sinless bearer of
messianic self-
consciousness,
but one whose deity we properly affirm in view of God's
distinctive
revelatory activity through him, yet concerning whose divine
essence
and dual natures it is useless to speculate?21
This incomplete sampling of current
views of the Nazarene, re-
markable for its disagreements, leaves little
doubt that modernity has
blurred
Jesus into history's most displaced person. In a recent book,
Jesus Through the
Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture,22
Jaroslav Pelikan
reflects the many diverse images and cultural under-
standings
of Jesus through which the biblical portrait tends to lose
normative
theological significance. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi move-
ment's official philosopher, even held that Jesus
could not have been a
Jew,
but depicted him rather as a Nordic anti-Semite.23 So multiform
are
the views of the Nazarene that an atheist is said to have jeered
that
"there is no god, and Jesus is his problem." As Douglas Groothuis
says,
"No other name has inspired greater devotion, evoked greater
reverence,
or ignited greater controversy."24
Must we then concede with Albert
Schweitzer that the historical
Jesus
is "to our time a stranger and enigma"?25 Must we rather
re-
mind
our generation of the baneful influence of alien speculative the-
ories? Respectful mention of Jesus' name embarrasses
much of our
secular
society. A liberal elite is prone to avoid introduction of the
Nazarene
as socially disruptive. The mass media seem at times to re-
serve
the name of Jesus for use only in profanity. Yet serious discus-
sion of the significance of the Nazarene cannot be
removed from the
contemporary
agenda. The twentieth-century space age has set the
discussion
of Christ in the near-neighbor context of Buddhists, Hin-
19 A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1973).
20 Jesus-God and Man (2nd ed.,
21 The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1963) 93,
266,
277, 306.
22
23 cr. Richard Morris, Evolution and Human Nature (
man,
1983) 82.
24 Revealing the New Age Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1990) 9.
25 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1910) 396.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH 97
dus, and Muslims who press the question of Jesus'
identity even if
some
Christians prefer to suppress it.
Many scholars who reject the Chalcedonian formulation that
Jesus
is true God and true man, and who instead hold to a one-nature
view
of Jesus, nonetheless distinguish him from the entirety of the
human
race. Tributes paid to Jesus even by scholars who disavow the
historic
christological creeds not only revere the Nazarene
above his
contemporaries,
but elevate him as well above all human beings an-
cient and modern. These assessments of Jesus Christ
exhaust ordinary
anthropological
categories in explanation of him. In contrast to the in-
herited view of Jesus Christ as the full revelation
of God in the flesh,
Teilhard de Chardin
holds that "Christ is not yet fully formed”26 and
that
he will not be until we are united in co-creative union with the
Eucharistic
Cosmic Christ.”27 The universal Christ-idea or Christ-
principle
seems more important to Teilhard than is the Jesus of
his-
tory. As James M. Houston comments, "Teilhard makes much of the
cosmic
Christ, but has little to say of the incarnate Christ.”28 Yet stu-
dents
of the life of Jesus repeatedly refuse to dwarf him simply to a
superman
like Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Winston
Churchill,
or to a superguru like Gandhi.
The Koran and the Nazarene
Despite its nontrinitarian
theology, for example, even the Koran
nevertheless
distinguishes Jesus from the rest of mankind by affirm-
ing his virgin birth, sinlessness,
messianity, and ascension to heaven
prior
to the endtime resurrection of all humanity. The
Koran portrays
Jesus
as Word of God (Kalimah),
even if it does so in less than ortho-
dox Christian terms. To be sure, Islam declares
Jesus to be "merely a
prophet,
a sent one, a word" and thus excludes his divinity, whereas
the
Christian revelation affirms him to be the
Sent One, the incarnate
Word.
Some Muslims assuredly welcome as a constructive contribu-
tion to interreligious
dialogue only christological affirmations that pre-
clude divine incarnation in Christ.
Yet it is all too easy, as Thomas
O'Shaughnessy remarks, to level
Muhammad's
view of Jesus to that of simply another human being,
and
to ignore his intimation of a considerably higher view.29 One
could
in fact "construct a rudimentary Life of Christ," remarks F. P.
26 Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1961) 133.
27 The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 131Ł.
28 I Believe in the Creator (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1980) 170.
29 The Koranic Concept of the Word of God (
1948)
15.
98
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
Cotterell, from the reference to Jesus (Isa) in the Koran, although some
materials,
e.g., childhood miracles attributed to him, have an apocry-
phal rather than biblical basis.30 Muhammad claims, of course, that
the
entire content of the Koran came as a divine revelation from the
Preserved
Tablet and not from earthly sources. It is unlikely that an
Arabic
version of the Gospels was available to him, and orally circu-
lating late tradition could readily have mixed fact
and legend.
While the New Testament calls Jesus
Son of God twenty-five
times
and Son of Mary only once, the Koran uses the title Son of Mary
twenty-three
times. The Koran is less explicit than the New Testa-
ment on the subject of Mary's virginity, although it
does not preclude
this
and even implies it. The Koran affirms that the conception of
Jesus
was through the Word of God (Sura 3:47).
Yet, as Cotterell
notes, the Koran is not much interested in the
events
of Jesus' earthly life and ministry. We are told that Jesus had
disciples
and performed miracles. Alongside New Testament sources,
however,
the Koranic account seems often slurred and confused.
The
most
striking difference is the Koranic notion that Jesus
did not die
upon
the cross (Sura 4:157). The conventional
interpretation is that he
was
translated into heaven without crucifixion and that another per-
son
replaced him (one fanciful theory nominates Judas). A rival inter-
pretation is that he was impaled on the cross but
did not die there;
supposedly
recovering in the tomb, he escaped to
allegedly
subsequently died. In either case the Koran here is at odds
with
all historical scholarship. As Geoffrey Parrinder
remarks, "No se-
rious modern historian doubts that Jesus. . . was
crucified, whatever
he
may think of the faith or the resurrection."31 Even in respect
to
this
major historical event the Koran therefore shows itself to be less
than
a trustworthy guide. Parrinder discusses32
E. E. Elder's sugges-
tion that we interpret the Koran to mean that Jesus'
death upon the
cross
was a divine act, not a human act. But this is unhelpful, since in
that
event the significance of Jesus' passion is wholly ignored.
A Growing New Consensus
Any attentive reader of the Gospels
will soon discover that the
founder
of the Christian religion differs greatly from the representa-
tions even of many philosophers, religious
commentators, and social
reformers
who pay the Nazarene quite lofty compliments. He is, as Os
30 "The Christology
of Islam," Christ the Lord (ed.
H. S. Rowden;
Varsity,
1982) 282.
31 Jesus in the Qur'an (Oxford University
Press, 1977) 116.
32 Ibid., 119ff.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH 99
Guinness
reminds us, neither "the gentle Jesus meek and mild" as
many
project him, nor the theatrical "'Jesus Christ Superstar' with his
tortured
doubts and personality problems Such views. . . are not
borne
out by the objective evidence of the life of Christ. . . .The radi-
cal
Christ of Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the
socialist
Christ of much liberal activism, the Hindu Christ--these are
not
so much anti-Christian as unhistorical."33 The insistent Gospel
witness
to Jesus has, in fact, repeatedly made itself felt over against
skeptical,
imaginative, and mythical portrayals that rashly discount
the
New Testament writings.
"Surely," as Robert F. Berkey remarks, "no issues of Christian
thought
have gone through more thorough analyses in this century
than
those problems pertaining to the New Testament affirmations of
the
unique, unprecedented, once-for-all character of the person of
Jesus.”34
The outcome, moreover, contends Berkey, is that the theolog-
ical climate has radically changed: a century that
began with "no clear
consensus"
now insists that in any attempt to understand New Testa-
ment faith we must give full weight to christological affirmations and
to
the "once for all" significance of the person of Christ.35
In 1913 Wilhelm Bousset
presumed to set forth in Kyrios Chris-
tos36 "a history of
belief in Christ from the beginnings of Christianity
to
Irenaeus." Bousset
projected a pre-Pauline Hellenistic Christian
community
that differed from Palestinian Jewish Christians by
affirming
a supernatural miraculous Jesus who was to be worshipped.
On
Palestinian soil and in Semitic context, Bousset
held, Jesus was in-
voked simply as 'master.' Only later, in Gentile
context and under the
influence
of the Hellenistic savior-cults, was Jesus acclaimed as 'Lord.'
This view bequeaths as its
"fundamental problem," as Hendrikus
Boers
observes, the notion that New Testament christology
must be
considered
"not historically true of Jesus himself," so that the New
Testament
ceases to express "the truth about the historical Jesus.”37
Bousset
sought to escape the devastating theological implications
of
this emphasis by contending that Jesus' teaching survives as a dis-
tinctive truth about God even when divested of
certain later accre-
tions. But Rudolf Bultmann
more thoroughly applied the view that
33 The Dust of Death (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1973) 355f.
34 "Christological
Perspectives: The Context of Current Discussions," Christoiogi-
cal Perspectives. Essays
in Honor of Harney K. McArthur (ed. R F. Berkey and
S. A
Edwards
(New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982) 3-23.
35 Ibid., 22.
36
Abingdon,
1970, from the 5th German edition of 1964).
37 "Jesus and the
Christian Faith: New Testament Christology since Bousset's
Kyrios Christos," JBL 89/4 (1970) 452.
100
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
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New
Testament christology is a product of early
Christianity. Bult-
mann disavowed entirely any reliable historical
portrait of Jesus and
declared
the Gospels to be merely an expression of human self-
understanding.38
Herbert Braun dissolved New Testament Christol-
ogy into an understanding of man mutually held by
Jesus, the apostles
and
the earthly church, one that loses any special knowledge of Jesus
in
a general anthropological outlook.39
Whatever we must in fact affirm
about Jesus of Nazareth, his hu-
man
nature must in no way be essentially impaired. The Christian
doctrine
of divine incarnation centers in a specific individual born in
else
the New Testament view of incarnation may require, the central
figure
of the Christian faith was during his earthly ministry, as Paul
writes
Timothy, nothing less than "the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim 2:5).
No
theory can be squared with the biblical doctrine of incarnation if
it
regards Jesus as an intermediate being, a demigod distinct from
mankind.
Nor is the notion acceptable that God merely assumed hu-
man
disguise, the semblance of humanity, or even the suggestion that
God
for three decades merely adopted a human body and indwelt it
as
divine mind or spirit inhabiting a human physique. Nor is divine
incarnation
merely a superlative example of God indwelling mankind
universally.
It involves nothing less than a singular relationship of
God
to human nature without precedent or parallel in the realm of
being
or in the history of thought.
The modernist allegation that any
affirmation of the divinity of,
Jesus
Christ necessarily involves an obliteration of his humanity was
already
widely propagated in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century.
Adolf von Harnack deplored
suppression of the real histori-
cal
Jesus by the "fictitious"" preexistent Christ.40 Harnack defined the
essence
of Christianity as an agenda of moral and spiritual values that
Jesus
the teacher had stipulated.
To preserve Christ's full humanity,
John Caird, in his end-of-the-
century
Gifford Lectures on The Fundamental Ideas
of Christianity
(1895-1896),
insisted that Christ's divinity "was capable of being ex-
pressed
in a human life and through the words and acts of a human
personality."
"Whatever of Divinity could not. . . breathe through a
human
spirit," said Caird, "could not be present
in one who. . . was re-
ally
and truly human." Christ's divinity was that "of a divine nature
that
suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings,
38 Cf. Jesus Christ and Mythology (London: SCM
Press, 1960),
39 "Der Sinn her neutestamentlich
Christology," ZTK, 54 (1957) 341-77,
reprinted
in
Gessammelte Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt (1962) 243-82.
40 Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte
(4th ed.,
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
volitions
of a human individual."41 The result was an emphasis not on
two
natures united in one person, but on Christ's unitary nature, and
a
redefinition of divinity basically in terms of unbroken human-divine
union.
This formulation inadequately states
what the New Testament
signifies
by the deity of Christ. As John Stuart Lawton notes, it is
merely
an embellished unitarianism; it affirms the humanity
of
Christ's
nature and personality yet disallows speaking of him as "per-
sonally God."42
Somewhat similar was the view of
William Temple, who found
Christ's
deity in his unity of purpose and harmonious willing with the
Father.43
H. R. Mackintosh hailed this view as a great theological ad-
vance.44
But one cannot logically categorize a human being as intrin-
sically divine simply because he perfectly obeys
the will of God, since
unbroken
obedience was God's intention for all humanity at the cre-
ation. An honorifically-conferred divinity fails to
affirm the unparal-
leled metaphysical unity of Father and Son that the
New Testament
asserts;
instead, it accommodates unitarian theism. In the
apostolic
witness,
as
moral
man living a life in harmony with the will of God; in fact. . . we
are
told singularly little about Christ's thoughts or relationships. . . in
which
a man's moral character is most clearly displayed. We are pre-
sented with a figure who, in the first place,
possesses and exercises di-
vine
powers--he performs miracles of healing, control over nature,
and
superhuman vision: above all, he enters and leaves the world in a
manner
in which other men cannot. This figure, moreover, makes far-
reaching
claims for himself: he can remit the eternal guilt of sin, he
proclaims
himself equal with God, and foretells that he himself will
sit
as judge over all men at the grand assize."45
Despite its deep ecclesial inroads,
modernistic theology failed to
stifle
transcendent christology. Modernism's christological inconsis-
tency
"In
the realm of pure Christology," he comments, it is "inexcusable. . .
to
begin with Christ's humanity and human life, and. . . to work up-
wards.
. . to the confession of his Deity. Those who do not begin with
41
The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (2
vols.;
l.l4.
42 Conflict in Christology, a Study of British and American Christology,
from
1889-1914 (London, S.P.C.K.., New
York: Macmillan, 1947) 313.
43 Cf. Nature, Man and God (Gifford Lectures
1932-34;
Press,
1934) 445f.
44 The Person of Christ (
Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1942) 297.
45 Conflict in Christology, 323.
102
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
the
fundamental Christian assumption that 'the Word was made flesh,'
but.
. . attempt to show how . . . a complete man as they suppose Christ
to
have been was united to God" cannot but end in confused and self-
contradictory
views.46
Early repudiation of the modernist
Jesus came not only from
evangelical-orthodox
expositors but on the one hand from faith-
versus-reason
champions of Christ's divinity paced by Soren Kierkeg-
aard, Karl Barth, and Emil
Brunner, and on the other from humanists
who
stressed the irreconcilability of liberal claims for Jesus' unique-
ness
with the scientific method which modernism professed to cham-
pion.
Kierkegaard affirmed that
Christianity's towering truth--the in-
carnation--prompts
a leap of faith that appropriates its consequences
in
life. By depicting the incarnation--the one solitary man Jesus Christ
who
is simultaneously the eternal God--as a paradox beyond the grasp
of
reason, Kierkegaard went beyond the early church fathers. When
they
wrote of the incarnation as a paradox they did not disavow all
rational
comprehension of its reality. By connecting God's incarnation
in
Christ with a sheer leap of faith to which logical tests are irrelevant,
Kierkegaard
needlessly sacrificed the cognitive criteria that could in-
validate
unacceptable religious alternatives to Christian beliefs.
Barth also
unqualifiedly affirmed the divinity of Christ as the
eternal
Word made flesh. He sharply contrasts the Son's relation to
the
Father with the saints' relation to God, and decisively rejects the
modernist
emphasis on moral obedience as a complete definition of
Jesus'
divinity. To be sure, Barth's commendation also of
the divinity
of
Scripture and of church proclamation (neither of which he consid-
ers infallible) raises problems, as does his
insistence that the Logos
assumed
fallen human nature. Yet Barth waved aside
contemporary
theologians
who first of all view Jesus as a Palestinian Jew, as do
Caird and
Waldrop
considers Barth's view Alexandrian rather than Antiochene
in
that he affirms Jesus Christ to be essentially and by nature divine
rather
than merely a fully human individual who can also be declared
divine.47
In line with this approach Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel
Davey likewise stress that the divinity of Jesus
Christ is the forefront
emphasis
of the New Testament.48
While neo-orthodoxy turned to the
Bible to vindicate its claims
that
modernism is a heretical deviation from the central witness of
46 Ibid., 323f.
47 Karl Barth's Concept of the Divinity of Jesus Christ," HTR 74/3 (1981) 241-53,
263.
48 The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber and Faber, 1931).
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
the
Scriptures, naturalistic humanism struck at modernism from the
left.
Modernism had declared evangelical Christianity prescientific
and
antiscientific in view of its insistence on miraculous supernatural-
ism.
It replaced the divine Christ by the human Jesus viewed as hu-
manity's moral exemplar. Modernism held, in
short, that following
the
example of Jesus' superlative devotion to the Father ideally will
deliver
one from inner tension and discord to an integrated personal-
ity. To the humanist the modernist regard for Jesus
as the exclusive
spiritual
catalyst conflicts with the tentative and revisable nature of
empirical
observation, and that other persons and even other causes
may
achieve the same ends. Modernism no less than evangelicalism,
the
humanists protested, applied scientific method and testing only in
a
limited way that prejudiced its christology. It was
neither modern-
ism
nor neo-orthodoxy that increasingly permeated secular university
education,
but rather humanism, which looked upon Jesus at best as
an
outstanding religious leader.
Less than a half century after Harnack and other European mod-
ernists declared orthodox christology
passe, the World Council of
Churches
at its organizing assembly in
that
Jesus Christ is "God and Savior." Although vulnerable to existen-
tial and perspectival
deployment, the formulation placed christologi-
cal
concerns once again near the heart of ecumenical faith-and-order
interests.
The question was again insistently raised: May not Jesus of
beside-God,
God come in the flesh in the stupendous miracle of di-
vine
incarnation?
Old Testament and New Testament
Earlier generations appealed more eagerly
than ours to the pre-
dictive content of the Old Testament. Modernism
with its denial of
the
miraculous and dialectical and existential theology with its insis-
tence on the uniformity of nature and its
internalization of miracle,
disavowed
predictive prophecy.
The first Christians were, as
Hodgson says in a preface for the
paperback
edition of his Gifford Lectures, "Palestinian Jews trying to
fit
their faith in the risen Lord into their inherited Jewish theology."49
Yet
their inherited religion had itself supplied prophetic intimations
and
anticipations of the exceptional role and nature of Messiah whose
coming
was divinely pledged. The fact that some modem interpreters
have
read back into the Old Testament christological
intentions and
49 For Faith and Freedom (Gifford Lectures 1955-1957; London: SCM
Press, 1968)
l.xi.
104
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
meanings
that seem foreign to it is no reason for minimizing the ex-
tensive basis which the New Testament writers,
and not least of all
the
authors of the Gospels, found in the Old Testament for accredit-
ing Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.
"Christian faith began," Hodgson
notes,
"with the acceptance of his claim to be the fulfillment of God's
messianic
promises given through the Old Testament prophets. Had
there
been no previous history of
New
Testament."50
The evasion of supernatural
prediction is reflected in Claus Wes-
termann's treatment of "The Psalms and
Christ" in which he sets
aside
messianic prophecy for what he describes as "a more profound
and
comprehensive" Old Testament anchoring of the Christ-event.51
But
if God cannot foretell the future in specifics, can he prefigure
them
in generalities? The writers of the Gospels and of the Epistles
unhesitatingly
appealed to the Old Testament predictions of the com-
ing Messiah.
Although Jewish and Gentile sources
both supplied linguistic
factors
for the early Church's identification of Jesus as God-man, the
Christian
doctrine of Jesus Christ did not spring from a simple bor-
rowing
of existing Hebrew or Greek semantic elements. Jesus' own
teaching
and life impacted notably and transformingly upon
Logos
and
Wisdom theology. Christianity's ties to Judaism, moreover, are
firmer
than the links that comparative religious scholars often postu-
late
between Christianity and Greek thought. Discovery of the Dead
Sea
Scrolls encouraged new investigation of Old Testament back-
grounds,
rather than of Gentile religion or philosophy as the context
illuminating
New Testament thought. W. D. Davies had emphasized
already
a generation ago that the religious background of Pauline the-
ology is Judaic rather than Hellenistic.52
Recent New Testament
scholarship
has looked more to the Jewish and less to the Gentile re-
ligious milieu to illumine christological
titles such as Lord and Son of
God.
This verdict, that New Testament christology has
roots in the
Old
Testament rather than in Graeco-Roman philosophy and
religion,
is
immensely important.
Yet Christian belief in the divinity
of Jesus Christ turned even
more
decisively on the events and teachings of the Gospels than on
pre-Christian
considerations.
We cannot, of course, gloss over
highly conflicting perceptions of
the
Gospel writings. Bultmann declares the Gospel
tradition histori-
cally unreliable. He makes the early Church's
creative imagination
50 Ibid., 82.
51 The Psalms: Structure, Content, and Message (Minneapolis: Augsburg,
1980) 27.
52 Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948,
1967).
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
decisive
for christology; the kerygma
is confinned not by historical
data
but by resurrection-faith. Thus Bultmann wholly
severs christol-
ogy from Jesus' self-understanding, from his
self-disclosure, from the
testimony
of eyewitnesses, from a carefully controlled oral tradition,
and
from any reliable narrative of Jesus' life and teaching.
Contrary to Bultmann's
insistence that John 20:28 ("my Lord and
my
God") is the only New Testament passage to designate Jesus as
God53,
Raymond E. Brown stipulates "three clear instances" John 1:1;
20:28;
Heb. 1:8) and five probable instances. The post-apostolic designa-
tion of Jesus as theos, Brown declares, is
therefore "a continuation of a
usage
already begun in New Testament times."54 Brown recognizes
that
the affirmation by Thomas is "strongly confessional and existen-
tial," and that "most of the other
instances" are liturgical or confes-
sional. Bultmann would take
any and all such statements not as
dogmatic
descriptions or objectifying statements but rather as declara-
tions of personal significance: "The formula,
'Christ is God,'" he con-
tends,
"is false in every sense in which God can be understood as an
entity
which can be objectivized."55
Yet an unbiased reader can hardly
avoid the New Testament's
ontological
claims for Jesus. Some leading Scandinavian, British and
American
New Testament scholars pointedly reject a form-critical ap-
proach, and disavow even more especially the
philosophical assump-
tions to which Bultmann
welded it. The Swiss scholar Oscar
Cullmann vigorously assailed Bultmann's
form-critical method and
rejected
existential philosophy as tendential and destructive.
Many Swedish scholars insist that
the Gospel writers preserve a
professional
oral tradition, while Anglo-American scholars emphasize
that
the New Testament need not be considered creative myth simply
because
it reflects the views of the early Church. The prime issue is
whether
claims for Jesus made by the first-century Church represent
a
fundamental break in the way Jesus' disciples conceived of him and
in
the way Jesus their teacher conceived of himself. The early
Church's
christological outlook no doubt discloses a
development. But
is
there, for all that, an essential continuity between its preresurrec-
tion and postresurrection
representations?
The Christological Titles
C. F. D. Moule
contents that the substance of the main christolog-
ical titles-Son of man, Son of God, Christ, the
Lord--is present already
53 Essays: Philosophical and Theological (London: SCM Press, 1955)
276.
54 Jesus, God and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 28Ł.
55 Op. cit., 287.
106
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
in
the very thought and teaching of Jesus, and moreover, that his claims
are
not merely functional but ontological.56 I. Howard Marshall simi-
larly locates christology within
Jesus' self-affirmation.57 Martin Hengel
too
rejects the notion that the early Church's christology
breaks deci-
sively with Jesus' own claims.58 The preresurrection message of Jesus,
he
holds, provided indispensable struts for the christology
of the early
Church.
Despite the vigorous counterclaims of Bultmannian and
post-
Bultmannian critics, many scholars share this
emphasis that christology
begins
with Jesus of Nazareth. The synoptic titles thus stand impres-
sively linked to the "I am" declarations of
the Gospel of John.
Jesus'
self-testimony is best considered under two aspects, the
names
or titles he applied to himself, and his references to his own
person.
The titles Son of David, Son of God,
and Messiah were used of
Jesus
by others, but not used by Jesus of himself. Most widely used of
the
titles are the Son-of-man sayings which bear importantly on Jesus'
messianic
self-consciousness. This title is, Berkey says,
"the only pre-
sumed messianic designation that the synoptic writers
have placed
directly
on the lips of Jesus" as used by him in the third person.
Moreover,
in Mark 14:62, Jesus indirectly applies the title to himself
in
the context of an express claim to be the Messiah. To be sure,
P.
Vielhauer considers all the titles inauthentic and Bultmann regards
them
as sheer inventions of the early church. But the Gospel evange-
lists
indicate that, as Cullmann emphasizes,59
Jesus wished to be un-
derstood as "Son of man."
Bultmann
concedes that Jesus used this title. But he holds that
Jesus
referred it not to himself but to an apocalyptic figure; the early
Church
only later, Bultmann contends, identified this figure
with the
resurrected
Jesus. More recent redaction critics widen the gap be-
tween Jesus' proclamation and the later Church's christological claims
by
removing each and every Son-of-man saying from the earliest lay-
ers of authentic Jesus-tradition. But the Gospel
record depicts Jesus as
being
tried and sentenced for its use.
Barnabas Lindars
insists that Daniel 7:13 has a collective or com-
munity sense and dismisses the claim that Jewish messianism used
the
term as the title of an eschatological figure.60 Lindars
holds that
56 The Origin of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977).
57 The Origins of New Testament Christology (
1976).
58 The Son of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976).
59 The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1959).
60 Jesus-Son of
Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983) 158.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
the
Gospel writers subsequently applied the title to Jesus. But if so,
the
absence of a Son-of-Man christology in the remainder
of the New
Testament
is difficult to explain. Slim though the evidence may be,
there
is some support for Jewish use of the title for an apocalyptic
figure,
but no conclusive basis for the theory that the church indepen-
dently imposed the term on the Nazarene.
F. F. Bruce stresses, however, that
in Jesus' day "the Son of man"
was
not a current title "for the Messiah or any other eschatological
figure."
Jesus' use was derived, he holds, from the reference in Dan
7:13f.
to "'one like a son of man'... divinely vested with authority."
Jesus
fused this title with the figure of a suffering servant--"probably
the
Isianic Servant." Bruce concludes that "a
'Son of man' theology
could
be nothing other than a theology based on what can be ascer-
tained about Jesus' understanding of his identity and
life-mission."61
But Martin Hengel,
Der Sohn Gottes, connects the idea of divine
sonship with Jesus' own proclamation, and traces
to Jesus himself the
affirmation
of his divine incarnation and vicarious atonement. In con-
trast to H. J. Schoeps and
other Religionsgeschichte
partisans who
declare
"the 'Son of God' belief the sole, albeit decisive, heathen
premise
of Pauline thought,"62 Hengel insists
the title can be under-
stood
only on Jewish assumptions.63
A J. B. Higgins insists that Jesus
expected a vindication of his
ministry
by exaltation that included "judgmental functions tradition-
ally
associated with the apocalyptic Son of Man."64
Bultmann
had rejected--appropriately enough, but not for good
reason--the
modernist appeal to a non-miraculous historical Jesus
behind
the Kerygma.
But he then lifted the gospel texts from an his-
torical setting and turned them into speculative
abstraction. Post-
Bultmannians sought to narrow the
gap between the preached Christ
and
the historical Jesus. But their form-critical method continued to
limit
the objective factuality of the Gospels, and moreover they had
no
interest in probing Jesus' messianic awareness. The beginnings of
christology, in their view, lies not in claims made
by the Jesus of his-
tory or in the pre-Eastern proclamations of
disciples influenced by his
life
and teaching, but essentially in the early Church as a post-Easter
community
of faith.
61 The Background to the
Son of Man Sayings,” Christ the Lord
(ed. H. S. Row-
den;
62 Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History (
63 Cf. W. R Long, “Martin
Hengel on Early Christianity,” Religion Studies Review
15/3
(1989) 232.
64 The Son of Man in the Teachings of Jesus (New York/Cambridge:
University
Press, 1981).
108 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Marcus J. Borg depicts Jesus as
"a Spirit-filled," charismatically-
motivated
person who regarded himself as prophet and may have
thought
of himself as the Son of God, but did not publicly proclaim
himself
to be such.65 Much the same verdict is given by Ragnar
Leivestad66
and by James H. Charlesworth.67
There is growing acknowledgement of
the need to move beyond
the
many contradictory critical discussions of christology
to a reexam-
ination of the New Testament documents. If
contemporary Gospel
studies
reflect any trend, it is a resurgent interest in the Jesus of his-
tory, including larger attention to Jesus' message
and works. C. F. D.
Moule notes the "unexamined false assumptions
behind a good deal
of
contemporary New Testament scholarship." Moule
specially faults
the
notion that "the genesis of Christology . . . can be explained as a
sort
of evolutionary process" whereby what began with a view of
Jesus
as a Palestinian rabbi evolved gradually into the affirmation of
"the
divine Lord of a Hellenistic Saviour-cult."68
Moule
readily grants a "development" in New Testament christol-
ogy. But he insists that this unfolding articulates
and refines what Jesus
and
his followers had affirmed from the outset. With an eye on the Ar-
amaic term maranatha, found
in the earliest Pauline literature (1 Cor
16:22),
Moule comments that one does not "call upon a
dead rabbi to
'come'.”69
The term in fact echoes the longing of the community of be-
lievers for the Lord's glorious return. Moule stresses that, as the
ran
scrolls attest, the Semitic term mar
("Master") was used not simply
of
a rabbi or human master but of God or gods also. In speaking of Jesus,
moreover,
monotheistic Jews who spoke Greek employed not simply
the
term Kurios current in the Greek world of their day
but even and
especially
Kurios--passages from the Septuagint translation of
the Old
Testament.
Reginald Fuller notes that Jesus had prepared the way for
the
highest sense of mar when during his earthly ministry he asked,
"Why
do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and not do what I tell you?"70
This assertion of an apostolic
continuity with Jesus' own christo-
logical
claims Moule bases not mainly on Jesus' words but
more
broadly
on evidence that "from very early days, Jesus was being inter-
preted as an inclusive Israel-wide-indeed,
Adam-wide-person: one
65 Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
66 Jesus in His Own Perspective: An Examination of His Sayings, Actions,
and
Eschatological Titles (Minneapolis: Augsburg,
1987).
67 Jesus Within Judaism: New Light from Exciting Archaeological
Discoveries
(New
York: Doubleday, 1988).
68 The Origin of Christology, 1f.
69 "The
Distinctiveness of Christ," Theology
76/641 (1973) 562-65.
70 The Foundations of New Testament Christology (
1965)
119.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
who,
as no merely human individual, included persons and communi-
ties
within him, and upon whom Christians found converging all the
patterns
of relationship between God and man with which they were
familiar
from their Scriptures.”71 Jesus was held obediently to fulfill
the
divinely given vocation in which
tament writers who are not explicit about the larger
ontological impli-
cations nonetheless assign Jesus "more than
individual implications"
in
their "conceptions of him as the convergence-point of all the Old
Testament
patterns of relationship between God and his people, and
as1he
universal Saviour," says Moule;
moreover, "Paul's understanding
of
Jesus is like a theist's understanding of God--that he is personal but
more
than individual," and even in those parts of the New Testament
where
Christ is conceived of much more individualistically, he is
ertheless conceived of a "definitely
transcendent and divine.”72
"Jesus is certainly called God
within the New Testament (John
20:28
and probably Tit 2:13)," Moule emphasizes.73
Bruce M. Metzger
holds,
moreover, that Jesus was expressly being called "God" as early
as
the Pauline letters,74 a circumstance that would demolish the notion
that
the ascription of divinity reflects a non-Jewish borrowing from
pagan
sources.
The person of Jesus himself, Moule contends, is one way or an-
other
the source of the remarkable estimates of him as 'the Son of
Man,'
'the Son of God,' 'Messiah,' and 'Kurios.'
From an analysis of the titles of
Jesus found already in the Gos-
pel of Mark,75 Ferdinand Hahn argues
that a hellenistic Jewish Chris-
tianity existed alongside a Palestinian Jewish
Christianity and a pre-
Pauline
hellenistic Christianity.76 This
accommodates a smoother link
between
Palestinian Jewish and hellenistic Jewish and hellenistic
Christian
belief, and implies a direct continuity between Jesus and
the
New Testament christology.
Donald Guthrie expounds New
Testament christology on the
premise
that Jesus' divinity is a biblically given datum guaranteed by
divine
revelation.77 His appeal to Scripture as decisive for the doctrine
of
Christ has the clear advantage of escaping constantly changing
71 The Origin of Christology, 136.
72 Ibid., 138.
73 Ibid., 137.
74 "The Punctuation
of Rom. 9:5," Christ and Spirit in
the New Testament (ed.
B.
Lindars and S. S. Smalley;
75 Especially Son of Man,
Lord, Christ, Son of David, Son of God.
76 The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity,
(Gottin-
gen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963;
77 New Testament Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1981).
110
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
alternatives
reflecting novel metaphysical principles or extra-canoni-
cal
post-apostolic documents. But it does not of itself assure interpre-
tations of the biblical data on scripture's own
terms. The appeal to the
New
Testament was made, for example, by advocates of a "kenotic"
christology and by proponents of a "moral
union" christology, both of
which
comprised the deity of Jesus Christ through their imposition of
tendential assumptions on the scriptural data
Karl Rahner
holds that the "titles of dignity" reflect Jesus' own
belief
in the Johannine and Pauline teaching of the doctrine
of divine
preexistence
of the Son-Logos and claim to have been divinely sent.
But
he contends that the New Testament goes beyond Jesus' witness
to
himself.78 The Judeo-Hellenistic doctrine of a wisdom anterior to
the
world, he holds, would have led to faith in Jesus' preexistence and
hence
the affirmation of a divine incarnation.79 But then, as Joseph
Siri indicates, the inference is difficult to avoid
that Nicea and Chalce-
don
crystallized a post-resurrection affirmation that Jesus is God in-
carnate, a view presumably not held earlier
either by the evangelists
before
the resurrection or found in the self-consciousness or self-
revelation
of Jesus of Nazareth during his three year ministry.80 The
implication
is that ascending theological speculation transformed
headlong
a more primitive view of Jesus into the doctrine of the in-
carnation
of a preexistent Word-Son.
More recently James D. G. Dunn
presumes to find a variety of chris-
tological views in the New Testament and regards
the preexistent Logos
subsequently
incarnate in Christ as but one of these options. To be sure,
Dunn
shows that the Christian doctrine of Christ's incarnation was not
dependent
upon a Gnostic redeemer myth, contrary to some skeptics.
He
concedes that as a feature of the Fourth Gospel John 1:14 in affirming
the
incarnation of the preexistent Logos-Son sponsors a fully personal
doctrine
of the divine preexistence of Jesus Christ.81 Even in the text of
John
1:1-13, however, Dunn finds not an emphasis on the Logos' per-
sonal preexistence, but rather only a personified
utterance of God.
Dunn
needlessly sacrifices other substantial supports of New Tes-
tament christology. He finds
no explicit doctrine of the incarnation in
the
Pauline writings, and contends moreover that not even Hebrews
offers
a fully personal doctrine of preexistence. He writes: "Only in
78 K. Hahner
ed., Sacramentum Mundi: An
Encyclopedia of Theology (6 vols.;
79 Ibid.
80 Cf. Gethsemane Reflections on the Contemporary
Theological Movement (Chi-
cago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1980).
81 Christology in the Making. An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine
of the
Incarnation (London: SCM Press,
1980).
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
the
post-Pauline period did a clear understanding of Christ as having
preexisted
with God before his ministry on earth emerge, and only in
the
Fourth Gospel can we speak of a doctrine of the incarnation."82
But G. B. Caird
affirms the preexistence doctrine to be an intrinsic
feature
of Pauline christology.83 C. F. D. Moule
points out, moreover,
that
Dunn's sweeping dismissal of the Pauline corpus rests on question-
able
exegesis of such passages as 2 Cor 8:9, Phil 2:5ff.
and Col 1:15ff.84
The
New Testament affirms more than that Jesus Christ embodies and
discloses
the nature of the invisible creative powers and the spirit of
love
that sustains the world Dunn's emphasis that the Pauline letters
refer
only to Jesus' post-resurrection status and contain no intimation of
Christ's
ontological preexistence and incarnation, and that even He-
brews
affirms preexistence only as a conceptual idea rather than as ac-
tual personal preexistence, rests on biased aprioris in reading passages
like
Rom 8:3, Gal 4:4 and Phil 2:6-7, and Heb 1:2-3, 2:6-9 and 7:3.
L. William Countryman protests
likewise that Dunn's argument
rests
on weak and highly vulnerable assumptions.85 Dunn contends, for
example,
that the several New Testament christological titles
(Son of
man,
new Adam, Son of God, etc.) depict distinct christologies,
and that
terms
like Logos and Wisdom can mean only what pre-Christian writers
meant
by them. In these circumstances Dunn overlooks the possibility
that
christological titles may to some extent have been
used interchange-
ably,
and that Logos and Wisdom in the New Testament have significant
personal
overtones. What Dunn considers central in New Testament
christology, Countryman adds, he expresses in
language that is incom-
patible with the biblical texts.86
While there is a developing christology in the New Testament,
Dunn's
exposition of a gradually emerging incarnational view
prejudi-
cially assigns the stimulus for incarnational
theology not to apostolic
revelation
or to Jesus' knowledge of himself, but rather to enlarging
Christian
faith. The notion that in its early stages the exaltation of
Jesus
was distinct from belief in his divine preexistence87 seems
moreover
to jeopardize the monotheism on which the New Testament
eyerywhere insists.
Donald Guthrie responds to the
recent tendency, especially among
redaction
critics, to find in the New Testament not an integrated
82 Ibid., 259.
83 "The Development
of the Doctrine of Christ in the New Testament," Christ for
Us Today (ed. N. Pittenger;
84 "Reviews," JTS 33/1 os
(1982).
85 Review of Christology in the Making, CH 51/3 (1982)
335.
86 Ibid., 335.
87 Christology in the Making, 63, 1;62f.
112
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
theological
perspective but rather a reflection of supposedly diverse
views
of the several biblical writers. Guthrie responds that the New
Testament
writers do not expound independent creative theologies:
the
corpus does not contain “a collection of different theologies rather
than.
. . a unified New Testament theology."88 The unprejudiced
inter-
preter “is not at liberty to pick and choose"
from the New Testament
data,
Guthrie cautions, in order to conform its representations to pre-
conceived
theories.
Cullmann
holds that the early Christian christological
formula-
tions articulate what is already presupposed in the
earliest literature
about
Jesus. But while Cullmann insists that “christology already un-
derlies the New Testament," he holds that christology is less inter-
ested in the nature of Jesus than in his function. He
stresses that the
New
Testament answers the question of the function of Jesus not in
terms
of myth but in terms of “actual events. . . that involve his life,
work,
death and presence and actions after his crucifixion.”89
Reginald Fuller complains that Cullmanns disposition to view
New
Testament christology as almost exclusively
functional disregards
the
latest stratum of the biblical literature, and lacks continuity with
the
still later patristic contribution.90 Philippians 2, for example, is
no
less
expressly ontological than is John 1, and should not be taken as
merely
the translation into Greek of earlier asserted functional
activities.
To affirm Christ's personal divine
preexistence is simultaneously
to
deny that Jesus Christ is a man who gradually became God. Al-
though
Jesus' contemporaries, even his disciples, may only gradually
have
perceived the deity of the God-man, he was not, for all that, a
devout
human being who acquired divinity in the course of spiritual
development,
or, was he, as D. M. Baillie adds, God or the Son of God
“transformed
into a human being for a period of about thirty years.”91
New
Testament Christianity depicts Jesus as at one and the same
time
both God and man.
Nothing in the Gospels indicates
that Jesus arrogantly or ostenta-
tiously displayed his deity or overwhelmed even
his closest disciples
by
it. Yet John's Gospel records his magisterial I ams as overt claims.
Guthrie
comments that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that in
the
mind of Jesus there was a connection with the great I AM as the
name
of Jehovah" in the Old Testament, particularly in view of John
88 New Testament Theology, 71.
89 The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1959) 316.
90 The Foundations of New Testament Christology, 247, 257.
91 God Was in Christ. An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (
and
Faber, 1948) 82.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
8:58.92
An implicit christology lies in the tender term abba93 and in
the
insistence on his unique sonship (cf. Matt 11:25-30),
which imply
that
the Father and the Son share the same essential life. The con-
junction
of Jesus' name with that of both the Father and the Spirit
supports
this. His divine prerogatives, as his life and teaching make
clear,
include the forgiveness of sins in his own name, and the future
judgment
as well of all humanity.
The Resurrection and Divinity
The resurrection of the crucified
Jesus holds in Christianity a piv-
otal importance for the affirmation of Jesus'
divinity. Bultmann scorns
all
talk of an empty tomb or of the crucified Nazarene's bodily appear-
ances; the only resurrection he allows occurred not
in
in
the believer's internal response to the preaching of the apostles.
The
beginnings of christology for Bultmann
therefore lie not in any
historical
ontological happening on "the third day" but in an existen-
tial event whose character is functional.
"Whether one argues that
Christology began within the con-
sciousness of Jesus, or later somewhere within the
life and faith of
the
early Christian community," Berkey comments,
"the substance of
Christology
is always shaped by, created by, understood through the
New
Testament's resounding affirmation 'He is risen!'”94
Moule is
surely right that Christianity does not rest solely or
merely
on "certain antecedent claims made by or for Jesus. . . but
rather
on the implications of his life, his actions, his teaching, his death,
and
most notably its extraordinary sequel.”95 The Easter verdict seems
to
Moule decisive because he finds it "impossible
to account for. ..ex-
cept as an intimation traceable only to Christ
himself”96 and because
subsequent
history supplies no evidence for reversing that verdict.
Can historical investigation alone,
however, provide a solid basis
for
an irreversible verdict on the permanent aliveness of Jesus Christ?
Granted
that a conclusively negative verdict on the factual resurrection
of
the crucified Jesus would devastate Christian faith, the question re-
mains
whether empirical historical inquiry can decisively adjudicate
the
question of Jesus' present aliveness and high priestly ministry.
92 "Jesus
Christ," The Zondervan Pictorial
Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand
Rapids:
Zondervan, 1975) 3.569a.
93 Cf. J. Jeremias, The Central
Message of the New Testament (
tress,
1965) 9ff.
94 "Christological
Perspectives," 18.
95 The Origins of Christianity, 163.
96 Ibid., 173.
114
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
It is not to historiography--"new"
or old-that we look for valida-
tion of Jesus' claim to reveal God, but only for
verification that he
made
such a claim and worked certain acts and lived in a certain way
and
said certain things that seem quite inconsistent logically with any
other
claim. When Van Harvey tells us that "there is no one true
significance
of an event"97 he arbitrarily presumes to tell us that the
importance
of the life and death of Jesus is not to be identified in
terms
of a divinely revealed meaning, and hence that the attribution
of
such significance to it is untrue.
Is the resurrection to be seen as a
confirmation of Jesus' divine
teaching
and work, or is it rather the event in which christology
took
its
rise? Michael Walsh resurrects the modernist thesis that Jesus' vic-
tory over death was a matter of faith more than a
historical fact: "all
that
really matters is that those who followed Jesus believed the res-
urrection to have taken place and they acted on
that belief."98
W. H. C. Frend
argues that only because Jesus was already ac-
cepted as unique could the Easter story. have gained
currency.99
Surely
something about Jesus' life and ministry contributed to the
credibility
of the resurrection reports. But the Gospels in no way sup-
port
a theory that the resurrection is grounded in the disciples' psy-
chological condition.
Peter Carnley
asserts that New Testament faith in the resurrec-
tion was grounded in an encounter exempt from
rational inquiry into
the
basis of belief.100 Carnley stresses the post-crucifixion role of the
phenomena
of "appearance" and "presence," the former only to believ-
ers (or in Paul's case to one acquainted with
Jesus), and yet sufficiently
ambiguous,
Carnley thinks, to allow doubt. Yet the experience is
not
merely
private, but also "communal and publicly shared." The Holy
Spirit's
presence, Carnley contends, is a presence of Jesus
Christ.
Carnley's treatment lacks a careful statement of
the particular roles of
appearance,
of experience and of liturgical remembrance in assuring
the
reality of the resurrection of the Crucified One, and he does not
work
out implications of the pre-Eastern ministry of Jesus contribut-
ing to this assurance.
Among current literature that goes
behind psychology to a larger
historical
rootedness for Jesus' message and mission--although
not
necessarily
to adequate discussion of the words of Jesus--are E. P.
97 Ibid., 221.
98 The Triumph of the Meek: Why Early Christianity Succeeded (
Harper
& Row, 1986).
99 The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 55.
100 The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987).
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
Sanders's Jesus
and the Spiral of Violence,101 and Marcus J. Borg's
Jesus: A New Vision.102 These
works, as Borg himself comments, halt
short
of both direct quotation by and specific attribution to Jesus, do
not
argue for historical exactitude in details, and are especially inter-
ested in sociocultural
implications.103
The case for the objective
historical resurrection of the crucified
Jesus
has been maintained not by evangelical orthodox scholars alone,
but
by others also who emphasize both the empty tomb and Jesus' res-
urrection appearances. Wolfhart
Pannenberg considers Jesus' resurrec-
tion decisive for every christological
concern. He does so, however, in
a
controversial way: in his view, the earthly life of Jesus is
"kenosis"--
a
condition in which his divinity was imperceptible and in which his
fellow-Jews
could only regard him as a blasphemer.104 Pannenberg
speaks
of "Jesus' nonmessianic ministry" as being
"transformed into
Christology
only in the light of the resurrection," and insists, as Berkey
notes,
that what "divides the nonmessianic historical Jesus
from the
Christ
of faith is not an affirmation but an event.”105 The resurrection
he
considers a real, external, nonexistential historical
event, not a
mythical
existential reinterpretation. Yet in doing so he also sacrifices
a
Logos-theology. Contrary to Barth, Lawson, Moule, Guthrie, and oth-
ers, he develops christology
"from below." He rules out the virgin birth
as
legend, and derives from the
pels ascribe to Jesus. Divine authority was merely
"implicit" in Jesus'
three-year
ministry; only the resurrection vindicates it. The resurrec-
tion thus displaces the incarnation as the
starting-point for the discus-
sion of Jesus' deity.106
Yet Pannenberg
denies revelation in the form of scriptural proph-
ecy and insists instead that revelation is given in
self-interpreting his-
tory. He critically rejects the unity of Scripture,
forfeits canonical
inspiration
and defers to noncanonical materials, and professes
to find
the
meaning of history in history itself, rather than in Scripture. While
he
contends for a unified history centered in the figure of Jesus, his crit-
ically concessive view of the Gospels leads him to
depict Jesus as mis-
takenly expecting an imminent end of world
history and leads him also
to
deny that Jesus portrayed himself as the coming Son of man. Instead
101
102
103 “A Renaissance in
Jesus Studies,” T Today 45/3 (1988)
280-92.
104 Jesus-God and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968).
105 "Christological
Perspectives," 20.
106 Cf. E. Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart
Pannenberg (
116
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
of
appealing to divinely authoritative and historically reliable Scripture,
he
insists that Jesus' resurrection "is not made certain by faith but only
by
historical research" and then adds the significant qualifier, "to the
ex-
tent
that certainty can be attained at all about questions of this kind."107
But history is in fact not
self-interpreting, nor is empirical histor-
ical investigation capable of yielding more than
high probability. In-
spired Scripture speaks prophetically of the
resurrection of the
Crucified
One. Jesus' disciples at first heeded neither the biblical inti-
mations nor their Master's anticipations of that
event. Yet the apostle
Paul
gave Jesus' resurrection due centrality (1 Cor
15:3-4), insisting
both
on its scriptural prediction and its historical factuality.
Although radical form-criticism and
redaction criticism shroud
the
Gospels in historical uncertainty, archaeological discovery contin-
ues its sporadic confirmation even of the Bible's
obscure details.
Nonetheless,
Pannenberg attaches little more theological significance
to
Jesus' messianic consciousness and words and deeds than do most
post-Bultmannian scholars. The tradition of the resurrection
appear-
ances and that of the empty tomb, he holds, arose
independently. Yet
their
complementarity makes Jesus' historical resurrection
"very
probable
and that always means in historical inquiry that it is to be
presupposed
until contrary evidence appears";108 certainty will not
come
until there is eschatological verification. But is it enough to say
that
apostolic Christianity proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ
merely
as highly probable?
John Cobb, who accepts the
historical probability of the resurrec-
tion, considers the empty tomb reports cognitively
more vulnerable
than
the appearances. At the same time he finds confirmation of the
tradition
of Jesus' appearances in present-day visionary "appearances"
of
the dead,109 a comparison that wholly misses the theological and
eschatological
significance of Jesus' resurrection. Cobb emphasizes
that
Jesus' appearances lack features usually associated with a body,
but
thinks the differences are minimized by focusing on one's post-
mortem
spiritual life rather than on the nature of bodily resurrection.
Speculative
considerations here override the importance of an au-
thentic New Testament witness.
Pannenberg
affirms the resurrection not only to be decisive for
the
recognition of Jesus' divinity, but also as ontologically constitutive
of
the reality of his divinity. It is the more remarkable, therefore, that
he
seems in the face of rival theological and exegetical expositions
increasingly
to shy away from Jesus' resurrection as an historical
107 Ibid., 99.
108 Ibid., 105.
109 "Wolfuart Pannenberg's 'Jesus-God
and Man,'" JR 49 (1969) 199ff.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
even110
or at least to consider all approaches to Jesus' resurrection to
be
merely provisional. He insists, on the one hand, that if the resurrec-
tion claim is valid it is so as an historical act in
the past. Yet, on the
other
hand, he declares it "quite difficult to affirm this event as a fact in
the
same sense as other facts I presuppose that history does not re-
quire
homogeneity of all events which are designated as historical."111
Many conservatives initially hailed Pannenberg for his rejection
of
neo-orthodox fideism and for his insistence on divine revelation in
history,
and the importance of historically attested divine acts as indis-
pensable to the Christian faith. These revelatory
acts reached their cli-
max
in the history of Jesus consummated by his resurrection, attesting
Jesus'
divinity, emphasized particularly in the empty tomb accounts
and
the Pauline report of the resurrection appearances. Pannenberg
questions
Willi Marxsen's view that
the Easter witnesses claim only to
have
seen Jesus who was crucified, and not to have seen him rise (be-
cause
admittedly there were no human eyewitnesses of the resurrec-
tion event per se). Their reflective interpretation,
says Marxsen, was
that
God raised Jesus.112 Marxsen's approach
could in principle di-
vorce the appearances from any linkage whatever to
Jesus. Pannen-
berg
concedes that only in the eschatological end-time will we speak
clearly
about what happened in Jesus' resurrection. The revelation
God
gives in the Risen Jesus is proleptic--that is, an advance disclosure
in
Jesus the individual of a comprehensive end-time consummation;
moreover,
it is paradoxical and metaphorical, in short, doxological, and
not
given in the form of universally valid truth.113 Pannenberg
holds
that
"the appearances reported in the Gospels, which are not men-
tioned by Paul, have such a strong legendary character
that no one can
scarcely
find a historical kernel of their own in them."114 Such radical
criticism
cannot but reflect negatively on claims for Jesus' resurrection.
According to Pannenberg,
Jesus' resurrection must be verifiable
in
principle by historical reason independently of faith. Jurgen
Molt-
mann counters that such historical verification
would require a con-
cept of history that would anticipate the prophesied
end of history,
one
dominated by an expectation of universal end-time resurrec-
tion.115
Pannenberg has modified his view to hold that in
history we
110 Cf. Gerald O'Collins, "The Theology of Revelation in Some Recent
Discussion"
(Ph.D.
dissertation, Cambridge University, 1968).
111 Cf. Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart
Pannenberg, 284f.
112 "The
Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem," The
Significance of the
Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ (ed., C. F. D.
Moule,
113 Ibid., 187, 397.
114 Jesus-God and Man, 107.
115 Theology of Hope (London: SCM Press, 1967) 82.
118
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
have
only "pointers" to the resurrection and that the resurrection of
Jesus
will "possess and retain the character of revelation for us."116
But,
as Avery Dulles comments, if divine promise is, as Pannenberg
implies,
only the anticipation of revelation, and if at the moment
that
Jesus becomes the fulfillment of the promise he passes beyond
the
limits of history," it would seem that as long as history lasts we
are
doomed to be deprived of revelation itself.117
The Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapide grants that
the
crucified Jesus arose from the dead.118 No other explanation, such
as
vision or hallucination, he says, can explain the revolutionary trans-
formation
of Jesus' disciples after Easter weekend. Although Lapide
concedes
the material facticity of Jesus' resurrection, he
dismisses as
pious
fraud such narrative details in the Gospel accounts as the disci-
ples' discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance
of angelic crea-
tures in white garments. He asserts that the
resurrection experience
helped
advance the divine plan of salvation, and declares that Jesus
could
be the Messiah of the Gentiles. Yet he denies that Jesus was the
long-awaited
Jewish messiah or divine Son of God.
The ground and hope common to the
Old and New Testaments,
however,
precludes any such distinction. Messiah is Saviour of
the
world,
not simply of Jews and of Gentiles, and his third-day resurrec-
tion attests messianity in
the context of the biblical hope and prospect
of
a final resurrection of all mankind.
Historical research by itself is
incompetent to establish the New
Testament's
most significant statements about Jesus Christ. It may in-
deed
attest that Jesus lived and died in
with
authority." But it cannot confirm that he was conceived by the
Holy
Ghost, or that he is the eternal Logos become flesh and veritable
divine
Son through whom God has ushered in the last days, or that he
arose
from the dead never to die again, or that God has made him both
Lord
and Christ, or that he will return in omnipotent power and glory.
Messianic Self-Consciousness
What role has Jesus' own
self-consciousness in respect to affirma-
tions of his divinity? Unless the substance of the
claims made by early
Christianity
can be legitimately referred back not to Jesus' contempo-
raries only, but also to what Jesus affirmed about
himself, christology
is
in jeopardy. Christianity cannot persuasively claim for Jesus what
116 Jesus--God and Man, 107
117 Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday: 1985) 65.
118 The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (
1983.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
he
did not and does not claim for himself. We may have no access to
Jesus'
self-consciousness except through his words and acts as re-
flected in the Gospel records, but neglect of
data concerning Jesus'
own
self-consciousness will obscure the contribution made by his own
life
and teaching to the attitude of the first Christians toward him.
All the gospels contain passage in
which Jesus affirms his divinity
(e.g.,
Matt 11:21; Luke 10:22; John 16:14f.; 14:26; 15:26; 16:7). The weight
of
the evidence is that Jesus believed that he was and is God's incom-
parable
Son, standing in God's place with divine authority and right,
and
determining the destiny of human beings according to their re-
sponse to his life and work. Herbert Brown nonetheless
declares it
"probable"
that Jesus lacked any messianic self-understanding.119
The challenge to the divinity of
Jesus Christ in the second decade
of
this century was projected on the ground that the historical Jesus of
the
Synoptic Gospels made no supernatural claims for himself. But
this
contention crumbled under research showing that Jesus depicted
himself
as the messiah of prophetic promise, and that he implied a
unique
relationship not only to mankind but to God.120 Burton Scott
Easton
remarked that "too many moderns treat" Jesus' messianic self-
consciousness
''as if it were something almost any religious man
might
possess," for example, the fervent conviction that in the future
judgment
of the world one would "not be on man's side but on
God's”121
would in any other figure have aroused countercharges of
delusion.
Leonard Hodgson stressed that what Jesus "thought of Him-
self
involves, if it be true, such a supernatural office as justifies the be-
liefs about him stated in the Christian creeds, and
that if these
elements
in His thought are set on one side, whatever remains is not
the
historic Jesus.”122
Oscar Cullmann
does: not hesitate to affirm that Jesus Christ be-
lieved himself to be Messiah.123 Prior to
the Easter-experience both
"Jesus'
own self-consciousness" and "his person and work" provided a
starting
point of christological thought. "From the
moment of his bap-
tism Jesus was conscious of carrying out God’s plan.124
As already mentioned in passing, Pannenberg considers the early
Church
the source of all the christological titles ascribed
to Jesus; the
titles
therefore, as he sees it, do not directly attest Jesus' consciousness
of
unique unity with God. Pannenberg's rejection of the christological
119 Jesus of
120 Cf. William Manson, Jesus the Messiah (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1943).
121 The Gospel Before the Gospels (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1928)
160.
122 And Was Made Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1928) 67.
123 The Christology of the New Testament, 314ff.
124 Ibid., 317.
120
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
significance
of the titles reflects the influence of questionable theolog-
ical assumptions and prejudgment. The ontological
structure of Jesus'
divine-human
consciousness he connects with a progressively devel-
oping self-understanding in intimate community with
the Father's
revelational presence, rather than
with a Logos consciousness. While
Pannenberg seeks to protect Jesus' sinlessness, he denies that he was
free
from error. Jesus erred, says Pannenberg, by
expecting the arrival
of
God's Kingdom in his own generation.125 This lack of knowledge ex-
tended
additionally to his own person. His complete dependence on
and
unity with God, with whose will he was functionally one in pre-
actualizing
the coming Kingdom, did not presuppose a messianic self-
consciousness.126
Yet Pannenberg holds that Jesus' sinlessness
was a
consequence
not of incarnation in a specially purified humanity that
constituted
him incapable of sin; it presupposes rather that Jesus as-
sumed sinful flesh existentially structured by
self-centeredness, but
that
his resurrection attests that he conquered sin under the very con-
ditions of human existence in bondage to sin.127
Jesus' personal com-
munity with the Father defines him as the Son of God.
The
resurrection
of Jesus attests that God's will to establish the Kingdom
governed
his life and work. God raised Jesus as the One who in his
mission
was unreservedly dedicated to him and who self-sacrificially
remained
so dedicated even amid the seeming failure of that mission.
The
End (whose nearness Jesus proclaimed) did not come in the way
in
which (so Pannenberg holds) Jesus and his disciples
expected-the
appearance
of the heavenly Son of Man, universal resurrection of the
dead,
the last judgment--but rather in the manner of Jesus' own sin-
gular proleptic
resurrection.
Karl Hahner
affinns that Jesus "knew he was indissolubly
united
with
his God."128 Pannenberg, like Rahner, holds
that Jesus' reflective
messianic
self-consciousness was an aspect of his personal intellectual
history,
and not due to an intrinsic and historically unconditioned
awareness
of the divine Logos. Jesus' self-knowledge arises in relation
to
the Father rather than to the Logos. Pannenberg
regards the Hebrew
religious
heritage as crucial, particularly its emphasis on the nearness
of
the
about
his own person, although he knew himself to be functionally one
with
God's will,129 and knew his ego to be other than that of the Father.
125 Jesus-God and Man, 226.
126 Ibid., 334.
127 Ibid., 354ŁŁ.
128 Theological Investigations, Vol. I, God, Christ, Mary, Grace (14 vols.; New
129 Jesus-God and Man, 334.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
Jesus'
personal community with the Father identifies him as the Son of
God,
and the resurrection confirms his whole activity to be in dedica-
tion to God's purpose to establish the Kingdom. Pannenberg contends
that
as human existence gains integrated personality through depen-
dence on God the Father, Jesus too received his
life-integrating person-
ality in personal communion with the Father.130
In the revelation of
Jesus
as the Son of God Pannenberg finds Jesus' ultimate
identification
with
the Lordship of God, and hence his entry into kingly rule over all
creation
in extension of God's Kingdom,131 his headship of humanity as
an
aspect of cosmic reconciliation, and his eschatological consummation
of
the world and historical process. Although Pannenberg
does not re-
gard salvation as automatically universal, he
nonetheless considers uni-
versal salvation a theological option.132
James D. G. Dunn holds that much as
one must acknowledge that
Jesus
claimed to be "the eschatological prophet" and to speak as "the
final
envoy of Wisdom, with an immediacy of revelatory authority that
transcended
anything that had gone before... there is no indication
that
Jesus thought or spoke of himself as having preexisted with God
prior
to his birth or appearance on earth."133 But this verdict can
be
achieved
only by dismissing such requests as John 8 and John 17 as
late
forms of tradition that cannot be traced back to Jesus.
Moule is
reluctant to find in Jesus' own consciousness an aware-
ness
of divine preexistence, a hesitancy that seems strange in view of
John
17:5 ("and now, O Father, glorify Me with the glory which I had
with
you before the world was"). Yet he retains the idea of Jesus' pre-
existence
and thinks that John (in 1:1-18ff.) and Paul (in Col 1:15ff.)
draw
out "the implications of their experience of him as transcending
the
temporal."134 This inference centered especially, Moule thinks, in
their
relation to Jesus as one who, beyond crucifixion, had without
waiting
for the end of history entered into absolute life. Thus the Eas-
ter-belief of the disciples that Jesus had passed
through death into
"life
absolute, life eternal" is for Moule the
decisive factor in affirm-
ing Jesus' supertemporal
existence.
It is one thing to say, as Bultmann did, that Christology is the cre-
ative invention of the post-crucifixion Christian
community, and very
much
another thing to say, as does Moule, that the
resurrection-event
congealed
the latent Christian conviction of Jesus' transcendent status.
But
did not still earlier factors, perhaps including Jesus' self-awareness,
130 Ibid., 345.
131 Ibid., 365ff.
132 Ibid., 271f.
133 Christology in the Making, 253ff.
134 The Origin of Christology, 138f.
122
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
already
contribute to the shaping of this slumbering conviction? In con-
ceding
this latter possibility Moule goes beyond Pannenberg's insis-
tence that: "Until his resurrection, Jesus'
unity with God was hidden
not
only to other men but above all, which emerges from a critical ex-
amination of the tradition, for Jesus himself
also. It was hidden because
the
ultimate decision about it had not been given."135 Moule to the con-
trary stresses that the New Testament writings share
a common "devo-
tion to the person of Jesus Christ, the historical
Jesus acknowledged as
Messiah
and Lord,"136 a veneration that did not first emerge after
Jesus'
resurrection
(cf. Luke 24:21).
Moule does
not specifically address the question of Jesus' virgin
birth,
stating only that "even. . . at its most reduced level. . .
[of]
. . . myth, one might still maintain that it was an expression of that
transcendental
quality which, from the very beginning, seems to have
attached
to Christ. . . .”137 But in that case might not Christ's preexis-
tence, empty tomb, resurrection and ascension
ministry be assimi-
lated similarly to this reductionist
level? Moule's declaration that the
canonical
writings need not as such be regarded as wholly trustwor-
thy138
serves only to widen doubts about historical factuality. It is not
enough
to reject as inadequate, as Moule indeed does, J. L. Houlden's
view
that the new life that early Christians found in Jesus, and their
consequent
experience of a new world, constrained them to view
Jesus
as the preexistent agent of its creation.139 To reinforce Houl-
den's
view only by Moule's emphasis that the first
Christians "experi-
enced Jesus himself as in a dimension transcending
the human and
the
temporal”140 insufficiently illumines the transcendent basis of
that
experience and the validity-claim attaching to it. The earliest
Christians,
Moule avers, were "driven to their conclusions
by the
force
of what was happening to them.”141 Yet this appeal to the impli-
cations of apostolic experience for the
transcendent nature of Christ
is
vulnerable through Moule's failure to elaborate an
adequate revela-
tion-grounded theology of the person and work of the
Redeemer.
Reginald Fuller finds in the
historical Jesus more than an express
basis
for the apostolic Kerygma.
He emphasizes that there exists "a
direct
line of continuity between Jesus' self-understanding and the
church's
christological interpretation of him.”142
"Jesus understood his
135 Jesus-God and Man, 321.
136 The Birth of the New Testament (London: Black, 1966) 9.
137 The Origin of Christology, 140f.
138 Ibid., 136f.
139 "The Place of
the New Testament," What About the
New Testament? Essays
in honor of Christopher
Evans
(London: SCM Press, 1975) lO3ff.
140 The Origin of Christology, 138.
141 Op. cit., 162.
142 The Foundations of New Testament Christology, cf. 15, 108, 254.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
mission
in terms of eschatological prophecy" and as actually initiating
in
his own words and works the expected future salvation and judg-
ment. "Take the implied self-understanding of
his role in terms of the
eschatological
prophet away, and the whole ministry falls into a series
of
unrelated, if not meaningless fragrnents."143
Yet Fuller contends that Jesus never
publicly proclaimed himself
the
Messiah, nor did he impose a christology on his
disciples.144
When
Peter identifies him as Messiah, Jesus charges his disciples not
to
broadcast the news but begins to speak of his impending suffering
(Mark
8:29-31). Only at the end when, condemned to die as a messi-
anic pretender, he was asked if he was the Messiah
and, about to be
crucified,
answered "I am" (Mark 15:2, 9, 26).
Peter Stuhlmacher
insists that the explicit post-Easter christology
of
the
He
declares wholly unacceptable the alternative that the Kerygma is
essentially
a human product, as Bultmann and post-Bultmannians held.
To
ground Jesus' deity upon the faith of believers is to rest the claims of
Christianity
on interpretation rather than on historical actuality and
substitutes
superstition for truth.145
The high Christology, says J. L. M. Haire, "is in the words of Jesus
Himself,
in His 'But I say unto you,' His knowledge of the Father, and
His
victory over the powers of evil."146
Where it suits their purposes,
mediating writers often secretly
rely
on a conservative rather than a critical view of the biblical ac-
counts.
And yet it is not only conservatives like R. T. France, who con-
sider it "probable that some, and perhaps all,
of the gospels were
written
in substantially their present form within thirty years of the
events,
and that much of the material was already collected and writ-
ten
a decade or two before that."147 For
is
here not dissimilar from that of the critical and quite radical New
Testament
scholar John A T. Robinson, except for
of
Robinson's vulnerable dating method.
Significance of Miracles
Once the question of historical facticity of the Gospels is raised
earnestly,
the subject of miracles is unavoidable. Not only do the Gos-
pels attribute remarkable miracles to Jesus before
his death and
143 Ibid., 130.
144 The
145 Jesus van Nazareth-Ghristus des Glaubens (Stuttgart:
Calwer, 1988).
146 “On Behalf of
Parker;
147 The Evidence for Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,1986).
124
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
resurrection,
but they also assign to these acts a role and importance
that
distinguish Jesus from other miracle-workers. As Colin Brown em-
phasizes, the miracles fulfill John the Baptist's
prophecy of Messiah's
coming
in demonstration of the Spirit. The Hebrew religious hierar-
chy, by contrast, sees the miracles as wonders that
detour the masses
from
orthodoxy, and in view of this call for the destruction of Jesus.148
G. F. Woods thinks a high degree of
probability attaches to claims
for
the resurrection and many New Testament miracles. Yet he empha-
sizes
that what seems beyond human power is not axiomatically divine.
Our
secular technocratic age notably dwarfs the evidential value of mir-
acles. Even if we could show that some events are not
human, it does not
necessarily
follow that they are supernatural.149 But it should be em-
phasized also that one will consider no event
whatever truly miraculous
if
he disbelieves in the supernatural. An Anglo-Saxon philosophical nat-
uralist would insist not simply that miracles
have ceased in post-biblical
times,
but that they have never occurred. Even if he were present at the
Second
Coming of Christ, he might at first insist that he was the victim
of
a cosmic illusion or afflicted by a brain tumor. The notion that the bib-
lical writers believed in miracles because as prescientific men they
were
ignorant of the laws of nature is preposterous. One is tempted to
say
they knew enough biology and physics to know that the virgin birth
and
the resurrection of Jesus were once-for-all historical acts.
But that way of putting it would
only sustain the misconception
that
observational science can identify once-for-all events, whereas in
fact
it is impotent to do so. For all science knows, there may have
been
or may still be other virgin births and resurrections. Science in
the
future may even simulate biblical happenings, but such simula-
tion would have no bearing on what occurred in
than
ignorance of science and its inferences and assumptions that ex-
plains
the scriptural insistence on the miraculous in biblical history.
The New Testament does not permit us
to see the universe either
as
a closed mechanical system of unbroken regularity or as an open
haphazard
chaos of only contrived predictability, or of capricious de-
terminations
by mythical divinities. The Christian theist holds that
the
sense of the universe is to be found in the purposive revelation of
God
who is personally sovereign and free in sustaining both cosmic
continuities
and unique once-for-all events.
148 That You May Believe: Miracles and Faith Then and Now (
Eerdmans, 1985).
149 The Evidential Value
of Biblical Miracles,” Miracles,
Their Philosophy and
History
(ed. C. F. D. Moule,
Morehouse-Barlow
Co., 1965) 21ff.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
One of the church fathers, Athanasius, author of On
the Incarna-
tion, suggests the cosmic
Christ became incarnate so that those who
did
not recognize his works in nature would acknowledge him
through
his works done in the flesh. As C. S. Lewis puts it, "the Chris-
tian story is precisely the story of one grand
miracle, the Christian
assertion
being that what is beyond all space and time, what is
uncreated,
eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended
into
his own universe and rose again, bringing nature up with him.”150
Indeed, Jesus is himself the Miracle--the
One who binds Satan
and
releases the penitent from Satan's grip. If one accepts the reality
of
divine incarnation in Jesus Christ, the possibility of miracles is im-
plicit in the Great Miracle; as Colin Herner comments, it is "a natural
corollary
of that Weltanschauung.”151
The Enlightenment hostility to
miracles,
he adds, arose not from "freedom from presupposition," but
from
contrary presuppositions.152
The central thesis of the Gospel of
John is that Jesus' works are
signs
of the nearing fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of re-
demption, and manifesting Jesus as Christ, the
Son of God. The raising
of
Lazarus after his death and burial serves notice that Jesus has life-
giving
power beyond death and is a foregleam of the coming
general
resurrection
in which Jews believed.
Yet for all that, the Gospel of Luke
makes abundantly clear that
the
disciples did not grasp Jesus' predictions of his own third-day res-
urrection. In those resurrection appearances Jesus
makes unmistak-
able
connections with his precrucifixion ministry.153
The resurrection
is
not to be wholly detached from the contribution of Jesus' preresur-
rection teaching and works to his designation as
Lord.
The first Christians, as Hodgson
says in a preface for the paper-
back
edition of his Gifford Lectures, were "Palestinian Jews trying to fit
their
faith in the risen Lord into their inherited Jewish theology."154
Yet
their inherited religion supplied prophetic intimations and antici-
pations of the exceptional role and nature of
Messiah whose coming
was
divinely pledged. The fact that some modern interpreters have
read
back into the Old Testament christological intentions
and mean-
ings that seem foreign to it is no reason for
minimizing the extensive
150 God in the Dock, Essays on Theology and Ethics, (ed. Walter Hooper,
Grand
Rapids:
Eerdmans 1970) 80.
151 The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (
1989)
442.
152 Ibid., 443.
153 Cf. C. F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority (6 vols.;
Books,
1979) 3.159ff.
154 For Faith and Freedom, Gifford Lectures 1955-1957 (London: SCM
Press, 1968)
l.xi.
126
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
basis
which the New Testament writers, and not least of all the authors
of
the Gospels, found in the Old Testament for accrediting Jesus of
coming
'Son of David' born in the Davidic line, the Suffering Servant,
the
supernatural 'Son of Man,' and the transcendent intervention of
God
to establish his Kingdom. "Christian faith began," Hodgson notes,
"with
the acceptance of his claim to be the fulfillment of God's messi-
anic promises given through the Old Testament
prophets. Had there
been
no previous history of
Testament”155
Worship of the Risen Lord
In recognizing Jesus as the promised
Messiah, his disciples sub-
scribed
to Jesus' own belief about himself, even if they only glimpsed
some
aspects of all that messianity meant to him. It was
not worship
uninformed
by cognitive considerations that motivated the disciples'
attitude
toward Jesus. D. A. Carson thinks it premature "to minimize
the
Christological implications of Jesus' historical self-disclosure."156
He
finds many subtle claims of Jesus to deity in Matthew's Gospel
alone
even if full understanding awaited the resurrection.157 In his
quotation
of Psalm 110 in which the Messiah is not only the Son of
David
but also David's 'Lord,' Jesus applied this title to himself (Matt
22:41-46).
Psalm 110 becomes in turn the Old Testament's most
quoted
referent in the New Testament
The critical effort to set the Synoptics over against the Fourth
Gospel
in respect to affirmation of the deity of Jesus Christ was un-
availing.
Even the least dogmatic of the Synoptics, the Gospel
of
Mark,
which uses the Old Testament references sparingly, nonethe-
less
opens with two Old Testament passages (Isa 40:3; Mal
3:1) that
speak
of the messenger who prepares for the historical arrival of the
Lord.
John the Baptist heralded "the Coming One" whom the inspired
prophets
had foretold, and Jesus' own ministry begins with the em-
phasis on the
4:23,
9:35; Mark 1:14f,; Luke 4:18-21, 4:43, 8:17).
Leonhard Goppelt says pointedly that in referring to the Kingdom
Jesus"
. . . was not introducing a new term. He proclaimed not that
there
was a
Testament
often depicted God as King, spoke of his sovereign rule, and
155 Ibid., 82.
156 "Christological
Ambiguities in Matthew," Christ the
Lord, 97-126.
157 Ibid., 110.
158 Theology of the New Testament, 1.45.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
of
his future eschatological reign. Jesus claims to be David's lord (Mark
12:35-37)
and he identifies himself to the high priest in terms that pre-
cipitate a charge of blasphemy. It cannot be
maintained convincingly
that
prior to the Gospel of John, which some on that account have dated
late,
we find no expression of "the essential bond between Jesus and
God."
For, as Goppelt notes, scattered instances are found
elsewhere (in
the
baptismal formula of Matt. 28:19, in 1 Cor. 15:28,
and in Heb. 1:8):59
More than this, the early Church
worshipped Jesus not only as
Lord
but, as D. R. de Lacey stresses, as the "one Lord" (1 Cor 8:6).160 In
short,
"Paul presents a 'Christianizing' of the shema.”161 “To Paul the
lordship
of Jesus is so fundamental that there is a sense in which it
challenges,
or at least significantly modifies, the heis theos to which as
a
Jew he was totally committed."162 In Oscar Cullmann's
words, "early
Christianity
does not hesitate to transfer to Jesus everything the Old
Testament
says about God."163
The weight of evidence is that Jesus
believed he was God's in-
comparable
Son, standing in God's place with divine authority and
right
and determining the destiny of human beings according to their
response
to his life and work. Radical critics contended that the
claims
of Jesus to be the divine Son of God originated from the early
Church,
while they also argued that sayings of Jesus could be consid-
ered historical if they present motifs not found in
earlier Judaism.
Here
Jesus' claim to personal divinity would surely qualify. To insist
that
the Church constructed the Jesus of the Gospel is like saying that
a
son has generated his own father.
Jesus expected both his approaching
suffering and death, and be-
yond
the grave, the Father's vindication of his obedient trust. This ex-
pectation was grounded not merely in a common
Jewish belief in the
appearance
of an eschatological prophet, but in Jesus' own special re-
demptive mission. Jesus anticipated that
vindication in a future eschato-
logical
Kingdom. But as Hans F. Bayer contends, he did not mistakenly
expect
the Kingdom to be introduced at his resurrection,164 but rather
interposed
a significant interim between his resurrection and his return.
Contrary
to the inclination of many critics to dismiss such passages,
Bayer
stresses the authenticity of the Gospel texts in which Jesus pre-
dicts his resurrection and vindication.
159 Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1981) 1.204, n. 64.
160 "One Lord' in
Pauline Christology," Christ the
Lord, 199.
161 Ibid., 200.
162 Ibid., 201.
163 The Christology of the New Testament, 307.
164 Jesus' Predictions of Vindication and Resurrection: The Provenance,
Meaning
and Correlation of the
Synoptic Predictions (Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1986).
128
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
Hodgson identifies himself with what
he calls "the central core"
of
the biblical testimony, "the belief that in Jesus Christ we see God
at
work in the history of the world, personally incarnate for the pur-
pose
of rescuing his creation from the evil with which it had become
infected,"165
The Christian affirmation is not simply that "God was in
Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor 5:19)
for, Hodgson
observes,
these words standing alone might be compatible with the
notion
that God was working more fully, but not singularly and defin-
itively, in Jesus Christ.166 Hodgson
allows, however, that "our belief in
Jesus
as God incarnate may have appeared in His mind as no more
than
a conviction of messiahship."167
Hodgson jeopardizes not only the
beliefs of the inspired biblical
writers
and his own beliefs, but those of Jesus of Nazareth also, by his
insistent
emphasis that human thought-forms are necessarily condi-
tioned by the age in which one lives.168
Concerning Jesus, Hodgson
asks:
"If in Jesus Christ God was genuinely 'made man,' lived, thought
and
taught as the subject of experiences mediated through a body
born
of the Jews in
we
not regard His teaching as conditioned by the outlook of His time
and
place and racial origin?."169 Hodgson's answer helps us little.
On
the
one hand, we are told that Jesus "burst the bounds" of a limited
selfhood;
on the other, that "we have no experience enabling us to
know
the extent to which perfect self-dedication to the finding and
doing
of God's will in a life of unbroken communion with God in the
unity
of the Spirit, would enable a man to deal with his own particu-
lar circumstances in such a way as to reveal
principles of universal
relevance,"170
But if universal principles or truths could be revealed
to
and in the mind of Jesus by the Spirit, why could objective truth
not
also have been revealed by the Spirit to divinely inspired proph-
ets and apostles who in the biblical record profess
to give us informa-
tion valid for all times and places?
This faith that Jesus is the
incarnate Son of God preceded the
crucifixion
and resurrection of Jesus, But it was decisively confirmed
by
the resurrection of the Crucified One, who brought forgiveness of
sins
and imparted new life by the Spirit, The Book of Acts and the
New
Testament epistles affirm that Christ is the personal presence of
God
in the community of faith. The very first Christian sermon, by
165 For Faith and Freedom, 1.82, 2.M
166 Ibid., 2.68.
167 Ibid., 2.89.
168 Ibid., 1.49.
169 Ibid., 2.89.
170 Ibid.
Carl
F. H. Henry: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS OF
Peter
at Pentecost, within weeks of the crucifixion of Jesus, stressed
that
Jesus is risen and ascended, that he has effected forgiveness of
sins
for the penitent, and that he has gifted the Holy Spirit to his fol-
lowers.
Messiah's redemptive mission included as its "central aim," as
Hodgson
observes, his forming "a fellowship of forgiven sinners"171
despite
the fact that many Jewish religious leaders spumed
Jesus be-
cause
they were expecting a political messiah. Messianic cancellation
of
personal sin was clearly a feature emphasized by John the Baptist
(John
1:29, 30) and in turn by Jesus (Mark 2:7); it had in fact been an-
ticipated by the sacrificial system of the Old
Testament economy
awaiting
decisive fulfillment (Heb 9:23, 26). Hodgson emphasizes that
Christians
can justify their belief in the incarnation not merely as a
matter
of subjective consciousness but as a prior objective fact "if we
think
of what was done as having been done by God Himself.”172
Hodgson orients belief in the
divinity of Christ too much in post-
apostolic
considerations, however, when he remarks: "The history of
the
doctrine of the Incarnation in the first four centuries is the history
of
the Church discovering that Jesus could not have been God's Mes-
siah and done God's saving work without Himself
being God,"173 for
that
"discovery" had been made much earlier. The belief that gives
the
Christian confession its singularly unique character, that in Jesus
Christ
dwelt "all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (
integral
and definitive aspect of the New Testament teaching; it is
affirmed
and reiterated by the apostles who were contemporaries of
Jesus.
Hodgson concedes in fact that "within the New Testament pe-
riod Christians were already, in practice, adopting
an attitude towards
Christ
which implied the recognition of Him as God." But he consid-
ers it "doubtful whether these first
Christians thought out the theolog-
ical implications of their religious belief and
practice."174
That Jesus Christ was "God
personally incarnate," writes Hodg-
son,
"is the ground of the claim of Christianity to be the true religion
for
all mankind."175 Hodgson considers that the evidence for the
virgin
birth
and resurrection of Jesus is "as good as one can reasonably ex-
pect historical evidence to be" and that one
who believes the high
view
of Jesus Christ is justified in accepting it at its face value."176
But,
in
contrast to the creeds of Christendom, he thinks these doctrines can
be
detached from genuine faith in Jesus Christ as God incarnate.
171 Ibid., 2.71.
172 Ibid., 2.75.
173 Ibid., 2.70.
174 Ibid., 2.76.
175 Ibid., 2.70.
176 Ibid., 2.91.
130
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL
REVIEW
But did Jesus of Nazareth then by
his own faith inspire the belief
of
others in his messianic sonship and divinity? Does
Christian faith
in
Jesus Christ rest finally upon the impression of Jesus' personality
and
on claims he made for himself? He indicated the value and limits
of
the Baptist's testimony without nullifying the importance of his
own
messianic consciousness: "I receive not testimony from man; . . . I
know
that the witness he witnesseth of me is true"
(John 5:34, 32).
Yet Jesus warned against claims made
independently by himself
or
anyone else. "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true"
(John
5:31). He set his own witness in the larger context of that of the
Father,
of Scripture, and of his own works (John 5:32-39).
Yet for Paul and the Gentile
churches it is not Jesus' public min-
istry but especially his resurrection from the dead
that is the histori-
cally decisive point for the Christian community. The
Easter faith
was,
to be sure, indispensably linked to the incarnation, earthly life
and
ministry of Jesus. New Testament theology nowhere justifies
Bultmann's dismissal of the supernatural Jesus of
history in the inter-
est solely of an inner "resurrection"-encounter.
Indeed, the Gospels
leave
no doubt that Jesus' own intimations of his impending crucifix-
ion
and resurrection seemed confusing to the disciples, and that they
were
both dismayed by his death and unexpectant of his
resurrection.
It
was not their unexpected confrontation by the risen Jesus alone,
but
the Old Testament prophetic teaching also concerning the coming
One
that finally illumined Messiah's death and triumph over it in
terms
of divine prophecy and fulfillment.
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