Franciscan Penance Library

JESUS CHRIST, TRUE GOD AND TRUE MAN, OR NOT?

In the Creed, Jesus Christ is considered to be “true God and true Man”.  In part II of Introduction to Christianity, Professor Joseph Ratzinger considers what this means and what many modern Catholics think it means. We had established that the Christian Yes to Jesus affirms that he is the Christ, that is, the one in whom person and work are identical.  He goes on to say: We could accordingly summarize the whole in the formula, “Christian faith is not centered on ideas but on a person, an ‘I’, and on one that is defined as ‘word’ and ‘son’, that is, as ‘total openness’.”  

Professor Ratzinger goes on to ask: Is Jesus, the Son of God, not then himself God?  Is it not true that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1)?  But the opposite question also arises, so that we must say: If this man is all he does, if he stands behind all he says, if he is all for others and yet in such self-abandonment still completely with himself; if he is the one who in losing himself has  found himself (cf. Mk 8:35), is he not the most human of men, the fulfillment of the whole concept of humanity?...Ought it be possible for the most radical humanism and faith in the God who reveals himself to meet and even merge here? Christianity simultaneously asserts that the One anointed by God to be the Christ was Jesus and this Jesus was fully God and fully Man. 

Of course, we must understand that this doctrine of Jesus Christ as True God and true Man was formulated in the first five centuries of the Church.  Is this a product of a pre-scientific and pre-critical world view?  Professor Ratzinger puts it this way.   But yet again a question arises.  Even if one must admit the soundness of the argument just expounded and thus simply recognize the intrinsic logic of the dogma, there yet remains the all-important step of looking at the facts.  Have we not perhaps raised ourselves aloft on a splendid system of ideas but left reality behind us, so that the indisputable coherence of the system is of no use to us because the foundation is missing?  In other words, we must ask whether the findings of the Bible and its critical illumination of the facts empower us to conceive the Sonship of Jesus in the way we have just done and in the way Christological dogma does.  Today the answer usually given to this question is an ever more decided and self-evident No; to many people the Yes seems to have sunk to a pre-critical position hardly worth noting any more. 

Professor Ratzinger maintains that as Christians we must say “Yes” to the doctrine of Christ formulated by the early Church councils.  First, however, he gives us the modern stock idea of the “historical Jesus”, the Jesus who is supposed to have “really” existed after we strip away all the doctrinal and metaphysical baggage which had arisen in the early centuries of the Church.  We must proceed slowly.  Who was Jesus of Nazareth really?  What view did he take of himself?  According to the stock idea, which today, as the vulgarized form of modern theology, is beginning to gain wide currency, things happened like this.  This historical Jesus is to be visualized as a sort of prophetic teacher who appeared on the scene in the eschatologically overheated atmosphere of the late Judaism of his time and preached, in accordance with this eschatologically pregnant situation, the proximity of the Kingdom of God.  This had been at first an assertion to be understood in an entirely temporal sense:  The Kingdom of God, the end of the world, was now coming very soon.  But the “now” had received so much emphasis in Jesus’ words that, for anyone who looked deeper, the element of “future” could no longer be regarded as the essential one, which seemed rather to reside---even if Jesus himself was thinking of a future, of a Kingdom of God---in the call to make a decision: Man’s whole duty was to the “now” that thrust itself upon him at any particular time.  In this way of thinking, the “real” Jesus was expecting the Kingdom of God to arrive very soon.  He expected his hearers to make a decision for this coming Kingdom now.   From this idea of Jesus preaching the coming of a “better world” or a utopia, the Kingdom of God, came the idea that our duty consists in building this better world even if we have to do it without God.  This seems to be the root of the secular orientation of many Christians who are very willing to set aside traditional morality and doctrine to build up the”Kingdom”.

How, however, did we get to the traditional formulation of Jesus Christ as true God and true Man?  Professor Ratzinger explains:  Let us not pause to wonder how such an empty message, which is alleged to reflect a better understanding of Jesus than he had himself, could have ever meant anything to anyone.  Let us rather hear what is supposed to have happened next.  For reasons that can no longer be properly established, Jesus was condemned to death and died a failure.  Afterward,  in a way that can no longer be clearly perceived, the belief in a Resurrection arose, the notion that he lived on or at any rate still signified something.  Gradually this belief increased, and the idea developed---an idea that can be shown to have arisen in other places in a similar way--- that Jesus would return in the future as the Son of Man, Messiah.  The next step was finally to project this hope back on the historical Jesus, put it on his own lips, and reinterpret him accordingly.  The picture was now rearranged to make it look as if Jesus had proclaimed himself as the coming Son of Man or Messiah.  Very quickly---according to our stock idea---the tidings passed over from the Semitic world into the Hellenistic world.  This had the following consequences.  In the Jewish world Jesus had been explained along Jewish lines (Son of Man, Messiah). In the Hellenistic area these categories were incomprehensible, and consequently Hellenistic patterns of thought were pressed into service.  The Semitic notions, Son of Man and Messiah, were replaced by the Hellenistic idea of the “divine person” or “God-man” and the figure of Jesus was thus rendered comprehensible.

But the “God-man” in the Hellenistic sense was characterized chiefly by two qualities: he was a miracle worker, and he was of divine origin.  The latter idea means that in some way or other God is his Father; it is precisely his half-divine, half-human origin that makes him a God-man, a divine man.  The consequence of the utilization of the category of divine man was that the attributes just described above had also to be transferred to Jesus.  So people now began to portray him as a miracle worker; the “myth” of the Virgin birth was created for the same reason.  The latter, for its part, led afresh to the description of Jesus as the Son of God, since God now appeared in mythical style as his Father.  In this fashion the Hellenistic interpretation of Jesus as a “divine man”, together with the inevitable accompanying phenomena, finally transformed the phenomenon of proximity to God, which had been characteristic of Jesus, into the “ontological” notion of descent from God.  The faith of the early Church then advanced along these mythical lines up to the final ratification of the whole in the dogma of Chalcedon, with its concept of the ontological Divine Sonship.  With the ontological origin of  Jesus from God, the myth was turned by this Council into dogma and surrounded with so much abstruse  learning that in the end it was raised to the status of shibboleth of orthodoxy;  the starting point was thus finally stood on its head.

Professor Ratzinger has outlined for us the alleged process by which the “historical” Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet of the coming Kingdom of God, was transformed to the Christ of faith who was true God and true Man.   He concludes this section by stating:  for my part I must confess that, quite apart from the Christian faith and simply from my acquaintance with history, I find it preferable and easier to believe that God became man than that such a conglomeration of hypotheses represents the truth. It is easy to see why Professor Ratzinger is so skeptical about the story of Christianity which he related above.  It is rather surprising that a series of questionable hypotheses could be strung together to form a conclusion which has been uncritically accepted by many.  These ideas have penetrated among Catholics and other Christians in the United States.  We can see the results of these ideas in priests who consider themselves to be social workers and CCD programs which are afraid to tell children about who Jesus Christ was and what He expects of us.  It is easy to see why so many have left the Christian Faith.  If Jesus was just a man who was close to God, why should we give our lives to Him when there have been many other persons in history who also have been close to God?  If so much of what Jesus said and did is just the theological embellishments projected on Him by the early Church, what relevance does he have for us after almost 2000 years? In our atheistic culture, if we do not guard the faith, it will be lost.

--Jim Nugent, CFP