Reply #24: Some thoughts

[Stunster]

in response, though I'm not sure if they fully or even partly address the questions you raise.

I suppose I've known people whose vocabulary doesn't include 'divinity'. In that sense, they might be considered agnostic about it. Yet they would regard Christ as 'Lord', or 'Savior', or 'Redeemer', and maybe even as 'Son of God'. I'd call them Christians, though what they mean by these titles might not be clear to them. That is, if you asked them, they couldn't give you a clear answer.

I think the idea behind Spirit Christology might be the theological articulation of the inarticulate Christians I'm imagining in the preceding paragraph. There was this guy, Jesus, and God bestowed the Holy Spirit upon him, and that's what enabled him to become Lord and Savior and so forth. The pre-existent Logos drops out of the picture. The Trinity = the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit. This is not the orthodox doctrine in which the Person of Jesus is the divine Word. Rather, it is the human person of Jesus, but with the Spirit filling his personality. But I think this is not the most common kind of belief among Christians. They are much more likely to be into a "He came down from heaven" story.

I suppose there are versions of Christianity in which Jesus gets replaced, for the purposes of faith, with the Meaning of Jesus, and that this Meaning is God's Meaning Communicated and Revealed to us---or something like that.

Whether this really counts as Christianity strikes me as a semantical question which would only be of interest to theology-bothering types. I think it's too abstract for the average believer. And I don't think it's what St Paul or St Peter or any of the early Christians were on about. As Jews, they didn't have the conceptual resources with which to spell out in precise detail answers to all our theological conundrums. I think that what happened was that they came, via experience, to the conviction that one could no longer talk adequately about God without reference to Jesus, and that whenever one talked about Jesus one was talking about God's definitive and uniquely salvific self-revelation to humanity. Fairly quickly, I think, it dawned upon Christians that only God could definitively and salvifically reveal Godself, and so if that's what Jesus had done, Jesus must be God in some sense. I think St Paul saw this pretty clearly. He is clearer than anybody that we do not save ourselves. What saves us a) is Jesus, and b) has to be God. St John's Gospel introduces new conceptual resources with which to express the same idea.

It's important to remember that the first Christian communities were not comprised of professional theologians. Yet it is remarkable how quickly they were able to formulate the trinitarianism strongly implicit in different parts of the New Testament.