I favour arguments from texts to arguments from what people treat as necessary inferences. That’s by way of explaining that I prefer to stick to what we used to call the text itself rather than back-translation, hypothetical ur-forms and sources, and — pace my friend and mentor Richard Hays — more extended contexts from metaleptic echoes. The harder the evidence, the more I like the argument.
So I have long resisted the argument of advocates of early ‘Divine Christology’, the claim that [some of] the New Testament authors meant their readers to understand that when they used such terms as ‘Lord’ (Greek kyrios) for Jesus, they equated him fully with the divine referent of the Tetragrammaton.Granted that I have in-built limitations on my imagination, I balk at imagining a human being, possibly one whom I actually know/knew, was identical to the One God of heaven and earth.
Through Lent, though, we have been praying the so-called ‘Christ Hymn’ from Philippians as an evening canticle, the last verses of which read ‘God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ As the weeks of Lent passed, the force of Paul’s theological claim that God gave to Jesus ‘the name that is above every name’, so that at the invocation of that name ‘every knee should bend… and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’ drove home that strong implication that God had identified the Divine Name with Jesus of Nazareth. I still see quibbles — if Jesus is one with the Divine Name, why does this formulation maintain distinctions between God and Jesus, and between Jesus and the Father? Doesn’t ‘the name of Jesus’ refer to, you know, the name of Jesus? — but the simple implication that ‘the name that is above every name’ is the Divine Name has come to bear a lot of weight in my estimation.
I should add that I’m all for Early High Christology in general, so long as it stops at ‘divine in some sense’, including for instance ‘a subordinate divine agent’ (as Paul’s ‘When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all’ and most of John’s Christology seem to imply).
At the same time, one big question bothers me, namely: if early Divine Christology characterises such major sources as Luke-Acts and the Pauline Epistles, and maybe John — then why do so many manifestations of ‘lower’ Christologies remain in the same sources? If one were committed to the idea that Jesus Christ, the guy who walked around in your crowd, who ‘learned obedience’ (Hebrews), whose feet got dirty, who smelled of fish or got splinters from the woodshop, who perspired and used a latrine — in other words, a properly anti-Docetic Jesus — were in himself the earthly presence of the Tetragrammaton, the Triune Deity, then why would one be fussing with prophet Christology, royal Christology, Adam Christology, or any other treatment that falls way short of ascribing full divine identity to the Nazarene?
So I’m still hesitant, but the arguments of, for instance, Kavin Rowe have moved me closer to agreement than I’d have expected five years ago. But I’ve changed my mind about important issues before (cf. Mark Goodacre and the Farrer Hypothesis), so I may be nearing the verge of changing my mind again.
