It is a commonplace to say that most of the great heresies arose from an undue desire for simplification, an undue impatience with mystery and paradox, and an endeavour after a common-sense theology. And it is plain that the theology which repudiates all high Christology suffers from precisely these weaknesses. God our Father and Christ our Teacher: that sounds easy. It has an attractive simplicity—which is wholly illusory. It is as if, in contrast with the mysteries of Christology, the idea of God were quite easy, free from all paradox. It is as if the idea of God were a kind of counter, or a coin of fixed value in some universal system of currency, which could be handed out to all comers in the name of Jesus the Teacher, and accepted by everybody without difficulty. It is as if, while the idea of Incarnation presents great difficulty, it were a much easier matter to believe in God our Father. But is it easy to believe in God? In the kind of God that Jesus gives us? Not a 'deistic' God, or even a 'theistic' God (for Christianity is not theism plus Christology), waiting for men to discover His existence and then pass round the idea with its proofs; but the God whom we find in the New Testament? Is it easy to believe in such a God? Is it easier than to believe in the Incarnation? Surely the Incarnation is not an added difficulty, but is rather the sole way in which the Christian conception of God becomes credible or even expressible. It is only an extreme theological naivete that can be blind to the mystery and paradox of the word 'God' in the Christian sense; and we shall never do justice to the height of that paradox—we shall never do justice to the love of God—if we leave out the supreme paradox of the Incarnation. Such an omission would fatally impoverish and compromise our faith in God. That is why it is necessary to retort: Are you sure that you know what you mean by 'God'?'Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.' That is as true against modern as it was against ancient Gnosticism. For the whole Christological question is a question about God.
For a whole generation now theology has been coming to a clearer understanding of this. We may think of William Temple's bold statement in an early essay (1912): 'The wise question is not "Is Christ Divine?" but "What is God like?" '9 That may indeed be understood in a sense which would falsify the issue again by another over-simplification, and this has sometimes happened, with the suggestion that Christology can be exhausted in sayings such as 'God is like Jesus', 'Jesus reflects the character of God', 'Christianity gives us a Christlike God'. These sayings are doubtless true so far as they go, but they cannot stand by themselves. Dean Inge once wrote: 'The controversy about the Divinity of Christ has been habitually conducted on wrong lines. We assume that we know what the attributes of God are, and we collect them from any source rather than the revelation of God in Christ. . . . But surely Christ came to earth to reveal to us not that He was like God, but that God was like Himself.'a That was well said in its time, but to take it as the whole truth would be to fall into a common-sense simplification such as makes for heresy-in this case perhaps the Semi-Arian heresy which substituted homoiousios for homoousios! 'Like Christ' prompts the question, 'How like?' and may lead either to an 'Ebionite' Christology or to the quite pagan (and Arian) conception of a demigod, an intermediate being who is neither God nor man. There is a sense in which it may truly be said that God cannot be like anyone else and that no one can be quite like God except God Himself. A true Christology will tell us not simply that God is like Christ, but that God was in Christ. Thus it will tell us not only about the nature of God, but about His activity; about what He has done, coming the whole way for our salvation in Jesus Christ; and there is no other way in which the Christian truth about God can be expressed.
The Dialectical theologians of our age are most impressive in their assertion of this principle, that Christology is not a subsidiary study, or a limited department of Christian theology, but is at the very centre, and indeed is all-inclusive, because it is fundamentally concerned with our doctrine of God. Emil Brunner writes: 'The question, "What think ye of Christ?" is in no sense a deflection of interest from the main body of Christian truth. From the beginning this has always been the central question within the Christian Church, and from the outset the Christian answer to this question has always been the same: It is "the power of God unto salvation", as Paul defines the Christian faith. The question, "Who is He?" means the same as the other question, "What has God to say to us in Him?" The one cannot be answered without the other. . . . Unless you know who He is, you cannot know what God has to say to you. . . . For the question, "Who is He?" is the same one which says, "What part does God take in this whole process? What happens?" Karl Barth writes: 'An ecclesiastical dogmatic must indeed, as a whole and in all its parts, be Christologically determined, as surely as the revealed Word of God, attested by Holy Scripture and proclaimed by the Church, is its one and only criterion, and as surely as this revealed word is identical with Jesus Christ. If dogmatics does not in principle understand itself as Christology, and succeed in making itself intelligible as such, it has certainly succumbed to some alien domination, and has come very near to losing its character as ecclesiastical dogmatics.'
It is quite plain that this is the kind of Christological interest that we find in the New Testament. We never find there anything that could be called a Jesus-cult, or a Christology interested simply in the question of who or what Jesus was, apart from the action of God the Father. Whatever Jesus was or did, in His life, in His teaching, in His cross and passion, in His resurrection and ascension and exaltation, it is really God that did it in Jesus: that is how the New Testament speaks. It becomes most striking of all in connection with the reconciling death of Jesus. When His early followers spoke of His death on the cross as a supreme expression of love for men, it was not so much of the love of Jesus that they spoke as of the love of God who sent Him. In the New Testament we find no Prometheus as the suffering friend and helper of men, set over against a jealous High God. In the New Testament, as we shall see more fully in a later chapter, it is the love of God Himself that is seen in the sufferings of Christ. In the New Testament the love of Christ and the love of God are the same thing: the two phrases can be used interchangeably. 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself', and 'it is all of God'. It is true that in certain parts of the New Testament, not only in the early Petrine speeches in the Acts but in some of the Epistles, we seem to find the elements of a Christology which makes Christ a superhuman being and yet not quite a divine being: a being quite distinct from God and subordinate to Him. The same thing may be said of certain of the early Fathers after the Apostolic Age. This led the philosopher Locke to remark that 'the Fathers before the Council of Nicaea speak rather like Arians than orthodox'. And it is curious to remember that the English Arians of the seventeenth century professed to base their position purely upon the direct study of the New Testament, taken as absolutely inerrant, and understood in the most naively literal way. But it is easy for us to see how unhistorical and unfair this treatment of the New Testament material was. It was based upon the assumption that the function of the New Testament is to provide a complete, ready made and final theology, which only needs to be pieced together by the student and then reproduced; whereas, in truth, if we use the New Testament in that way we shall merely falsify its real witness. Its function is not to provide us with a ready-made theology of the Christian faith (for the task of theology has to be done over again in age after age, and is never finished), but rather to witness to the faith. It comes from an age when Christian theology, as yet in its infancy, was but beginning to tackle the problems which have occupied theologians ever since; and to interpret and assess its theological beginnings in the light of later controversies would be an historical and theological blunder. The New Testament gives us not the final theology but the supreme and classical testimony to Christ. And no one can maintain that this testimony, as a witness of faith and devotion, as an expression of the actual Christian attitude to Christ, falls short of the highest or savours of anything 'heretical'. There is nothing lacking in the practical Christology of the New Testament. In its conception of the coming and the work of Christ, 'everything is of God', and the love of Jesus is the love of God in a sense which makes nonsense of Arianism. So its whole theology is Christological, and its whole Christology is a witness to God as 'the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ'.
The same thing is essentially true of Patristic thought. The questionings of the Patristic writers about Jesus were questionings about His relation to the Father, and therefore were questionings about God. What kind of God could they be sure of? How far and in what way was God involved in the phenomenon of Jesus? That is the real significance of the Logos-Christology of the second, third, and fourth centuries, with its endless discussions, repeated and developed by one writer after another, about the nature of the Logos and the relation between the Logos and God. Sometimes these discussions appear to have little to do with Jesus. They have, in fact; everything to do with Him. For the belief that Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos was what gave these discussions such a burning interest for Christians. If Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, then the vital question was that of the relation of the Logos to God, because on that hung the whole question of the character of God and His attitude to men. Was it the very God Himself that was manifested in Jesus?
To the earlier Logos-theologians the Logos was hardly a 'personal' being, but was the Wisdom or Glory or Reason or Word of God; or, more definitely, God's creative and condescending and redemptive purpose which leads Him out of His eternal self hood into the life of mankind. Thus when Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement and Origen set themselves to grapple with the I question as to whether the Logos was of the very being of God I Himself from all eternity, the discussion was not on some remote I point of ancient metaphysics. The question was: Is the redeeming purpose which we find in Jesus part of the very being and essence of God? Is that what God is? Is it His very nature to create, and to reveal Himself, and to redeem His creation? Is it therefore not some subordinate or intermediate being, but the Eternal God Himself, that reveals Himself to us and became incarnate in Jesus for our salvation? When we come to the Arian controversy, the same issue becomes still plainer. It was not a matter of theological hairsplitting, or a dispute about a diphthong. It was not an argument as to whether there was in Jesus a supernatural incarnation of the heavenly pre-existent Logos or Son of God, for the Arians themselves believed that the Logos or Son of God, who had existed from before all ages in glory as a heavenly being above all angels, had. come to earth through a virgin birth, lived a supernatural life in a human body, was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven, to be worshipped with divine honours. They believed all that. But what availed all that, when they did not believe that this Logos was of one essence with God the Father? To the Arians God was remote, inaccessible, incapable of directly approaching the created world. And thus it is not the eternal God Himself that comes to us in Christ for our salvation, but an intermediate being, distinct from God, while God Himself is left out, uncondescending, unredemptive. That is what Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea would not be content with. They could not accept such a Christology because it involved a hopelessly unsatisfying theology, a sub Christian view of God. 'Arius never speaks of the love of God.' The Arian Christology was far simpler, far easier to state, far more readily popularized, than the paradoxical doctrine maintained by Athanasius and the Church. But it was again a case of the oversimplification which loses half the truth. And the more difficult Christology of Athanasius and the Church (however much it may have needed, and will need, restatement in successive ages) genuinely enshrined the truth of the Gospel, not only because of what it tells us about Jesus, but because of what it tells us about God.
Dr. H. G. Wood, referring to Cicero's complaint that the gods of Epicurus do nothing, asserts that what appealed to the ancient world in Christianity was God's action in sending Christ. It gave them a new view of God, which nothing else could do, and which could not be fully expressed except by the doctrine of divine Incarnation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth.' Thus Christology is bound up with the whole Christian apprehension of God, and to leave it out would be to sink, perhaps unawares, to a sub-Christian theology. 'The saying of John', says Calvin, 'was always true: Whosoever denieth the Son hath not the Father. For though in old time there were many who boasted that they worshipped the Supreme Deity, the Maker of heaven and earth, yet as they had no Mediator, it was impossible for them truly to enjoy the mercy of God, so as to feel persuaded that He was their Father.'
That is why those who wish to have God and the Jesus of history without Christology must be answered with the question: Are you sure that you know what you mean by God?
pp. 65-71D. M. Baillie "God Was In Christ"
