We Would See Jesus
Douglas John Hall

If Jesus is to be anything more than another name, another historical mythic figure for us; if he is to become in any sense "Christ," "Saviour," "Lord"; if his name and his story are to arouse in us anything like "faith," then we shall have to encounter him and not merely some ideas about him. Before there was "christology" there was Jesus. And Jesus, the person, infinitely transcends every christology. Christologies and soteriologies may only point to the “Thou” who stands at the center of the newer Testamental narrative. Faith needs not only to hear about but in some real--if "different"--sense to "see" Jesus (John 12:21).

This need impels faith to fashion images of Jesus Christ. The stricter forms of scholastic theology may lament the fact, but it is essential to faith understood as trust to picture Jesus. The only alternative to this imaging of the Christ is to turn faith into assent to allegedly true propositions about Jesus Christ; and that is to distort faith, biblically understood. As we know from the history of Christian art, the imaging of the Christ occurred in the disciple community from the beginning, and it must occur.

But as the commandment against "graven images" warns, our (necessary!) image-making is never without its perils. Part of the task of theology is to draw attention to the concrete dangers fostered by Christian imaging of the Christ. These are never just "theological" or theoretical dangers. As we picture the Christ, the central figure of our faith, so we shall conduct ourselves as Christians in the world. The world will be the recipient of our imaging of Jesus--the good or ill.

There are four images of the Christ at work in the North American context which seem to me not to benefit God’s beloved world, or at least detract from the good that might accrue to creation from this Source. It is presumptuous to discuss any of the four briefly, as we must do here; but for the reader’s own further reflections I shall name and seek to characterize them in a shorthand way. For a more discursive treatment of the four, see my When You Pray: Thinking Your Way Into God’s World (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1987; pp.11-35).

I. THE DIVINE JESUS
Many of our fellow-citizens emphasize Jesus’ divinity. "Do you believe in the divinity of Christ?" they demand; and they will admit to the true fold only those who provide an unqualified yet to the question. Amongst the less sophisticated of these "true believers," the statement "Jesus is God" brings no memories whatsoever of the heresies (Monarchianism, Docetism, Adoptionism and Monophysitism), which were designated such precisely because of that kind of bald assertion of the divine principle.

For this mentality, the primary feature of the Christ is his absolute distinction from us: We are finite; Jesus is infinite ("Before Abraham was, I am."--John 8:58). We are sinful; Jesus was sinless (Heb. 4:15). We are mortal; Jesus, though he assumed mortality, was really immortal--the divine Logos who "was with God in the beginning" (John 1:2).

Accordingly, the soteriological side of this imago Christi sees Jesus as one who delivers us from our sinful estate--in reality, from our humanity: The divine Christ, stooping momentarily to our human condition, takes us up into his divinity. This deliverance can only be anticipated under the conditions of history and "the flesh," however. The final assumption of the redeemed into fellowship with the divine Christ requires the ultimate sloughing off of the creaturely condition. Hence salvation as it is entertained by those who accentuate the divine Christ is necessarily bound up with the doctrine of resurrection--ours, not only Christ’s. The goal towards which the whole gospel presses, thus conceived, is "heaven."

This way of "seeing Jesus" may do wonders for individual "souls," and especially those who feel burdened by their creaturehood; but it does little for the life of the world--apart from adding to the already negative assessments of it coming from other quarters--yet another reason why we should abandon hope for the future of the earth. One does not have to deny Christ’s divinity, as the radical liberals did; but when it is not held in tension with his real, recognizable humanity it only performs the function that "religion" usually performs: that of a rescue operation; getting a few more of us out of this world.

II. THE CONQUERING JESUS
Sometimes the religious fascination with our Lord’s divinity combines with the more political idea of divine sovereignty to produce a picture of Jesus as conqueror. As a child in Sunday school, I was occasionally obliged to sing a hymn whose opening line announced, "O the world must be conquered for Christ." I no longer recall the words that followed, but the tune is indelibly fixed in my mind. It is stirring and military.

While the mentality that fastens upon the divine Jesus lures some away from this world, the picture of Jesus as heroic victor, captain or king moves the faithful towards this world--with military intent! This ancient, Christocratic ideal is still very much with us. Since Constantine first envisaged its power ("In this sign conquer!"), this conquering Christ has been inextricably bound up with imperialistic societies; and the United States is perhaps the greatest empire in recorded history. It is not accidental that the most "conservative" forms of Christianity and the most "conservative" forms of America-first politics are so closely linked today.

Imaging Jesus Christ as victor belongs to the most ancient strands of Christian thought. But what sort of victory do we have in mind? Over whom or what is this victory achieved? As someone once remarked, the trouble is that we are always giving to God what belongs to Caesar! If power is an appropriate attribute of God at all; if conquering can ever be associated legitimately with Jesus Christ, then we had better be clear that the power and the victory under discussion are a most unusual type. At the top of the list of what must be conquered by the Christ is surely our own need to conquer everything and everybody, and the concommitant fear of our own vulnerability!

Somehow, the old hellfire and brimstone theology of our puritan past has never quite disappeared, and today--partly no doubt because of the approach of the millennial year, 2000--the picture of Christ as an impartial or even a vindictive judge has again found foothold amongst impressive numbers of Christians on this continent. Individuals have frequently suffered under the impossible moral demands of those whose "Jesus" is all law and no gospel. Indeed, whole classes and categories of human beings--including women--have never been able to measure up to the model of strong, masculine super humanity that Jesus, alas, has been caused to stand for.

But underneath the exclusion of individuals and human groups there lurks the same suspicion that we noticed in the first image of Christ--the suspicion that the world itself is irredeemable; that all that God could do by way of redemption is to rescue a few "souls" out of it, like brands snatched from the burning.

So in our time we have witnessed an exceptional re-emergence of that Christian dispensationalism which conceives of history as running inevitably towards the final dispensation--the world--annihilation that is the prerequisite for ultimate salvation. This is already "The Late, Great Planet Earth," and we are "The Terminal Generation" (Hal Linsey). That such a conception of history could come to be amongst a people that dreamed "The American Dream" is a great irony, but it is not wholly illogical; for the Dream never made room for failure, and by the standards of the Dream we have failed. Failed worldly dreams find other worldly counterparts. Jesus condemns this world to destruction, but he offers "the raptured" the same things they’ve always dreamt of--on the other side.

No one familiar with the Scriptures can dispense with the thought of divine judgment. But when the religious determine that the judgment is its own end and not a means to something else, they have altogether forgotten the Jesus who came, not to destroy, but to give life more abundantly (John 10:10).

IV. THE ACCEPTING JESUS
"Jesus Loves Me" can be a profound summation of the gospel. When Karl Barth was asked by a nervy American theology student what, in all his years of reflection and writing, he had learned, he replied with a twinkle, "Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so."

But it is one thing for the old man Barth to say this after a lifetime of living with the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit, and it is something else when middle-class church goers all over this continent make the love of God in Jesus the ontological and moral premise of their lives! The latter amounts to what the Japanese theologian, Kazoah Kitamori, called American Christianity’s "monism of love."

Love doesn’t just accept everything. If it’s love, it cares about the real condition of the beloved; and if the beloved is in fact a distortion of the person that he or she could be, then the only role that true love can spume is one of truth and the intention to change. "Jesus loves me" does not mean that Jesus likes me, accepts me, and makes no great demands upon me. Jesus loves me--therefore I had better be prepared for some embarrassing moment of truth and some hard work!

And Jesus, we say, is God’s eternal pledge of love for the world (John 3:16). The Jesus who is not ready to accept me just as I am is not ready either to accept the world, our world, just as it is. If we can trust any of the illustrations of God’s love for the world that we find in the continuity of the two testaments, we most conclude that this love, far from accepting the status quo, wills to alter it drastically--and especially amongst those whose economic and physical well-being makes them prone to believe they are already the accepted and approved of God!

CONCLUSION: THE TRANSFORMING CHRIST
Each of these images of the Christ can draw upon aspects of the christological tradition; but each of them is also a distortion of the best biblical and post-biblical traditions concerning Jesus Christ. And their distortions show up particularly in the attitudes they foster towards the world. The first approach encourages world denial and evasion of creaturely responsibility; the second a triumphalistic bid for worldly power; the third outright rejection of the created order; and the fourth an uncritical acceptance of the status quo.

In criticizing these particular images of the Christ, I have of course been assuming an imago Christi myself. My picture of the Christ is subject to the same necessity and the same limitations as any other: I cannot not picture Jesus Christ, as a person of faith; but I know that Jesus Christ also transcends my image of him. Too much of "me" and of my "here and now" are in this image for it to be thought eternal.

But I do not want it to be eternal, in fact; I want it to be timely! And in our particular socio-historical context, what seems to me most timely is to "see Jesus" as One who intends to transform the world. To transform something means to change its form, shape, direction; to turn it towards a different goal; to reorient it.

Against the image of the divine Jesus, I think Jesus does not want to take us out of the world but to put us into it (how we resist that!), and with a mind to mending it. Against the conquering Jesus "my" Jesus doesn’t ask us to take over the world but to befriend it. How friendless is the world today! Against the judging Jesus, I do not see the Christ as gathering about himself a band of nihilists who are ready to "push over what is falling" (Nietzsche); rather, he recruits reconcilers and stewards and poets of creation. And against the accepting Jesus I "see" a Jesus who calls human beings to responsibilities they would never dream of undertaking otherwise, given the fatalistic assumptions governing the thought of individuals and minorities in our time. Precisely not to accept the violence, injustice, inequality, and degradation of our social and natural environment: that is discipleship today.

If we are serious about seeing Jesus here and now, I suspect we shall have to jettison most of the other images of the Christ that circulate in our midst and prepare ourselves to meet the transforming Christ who calls us to participate in his transfiguration of the creation.

Douglas John Hall is Professor of Christian Theology, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His most recent book is Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers).