Marginal Christianity

May 19, 2015 J. R. Daniel Kirk For the past six and a half years I have been working on a book whose end is now in sight. I’m calling it A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels . The question that has pushed me to endure through all of the trials and tribulations of the writing has been this: What does it matter that Jesus was fully human? Through no fault of the churches I grew up in, I think that I had a fairly flat understanding of the identity of Jesus and what it meant: Jesus is God. Therefore, all of the awesome stuff Jesus does he does (a) because he is God and (b) for the express purpose of demonstrating his deity. Jesus is human. This is because (a) we suck, so (b) Jesus has to be able to die for us. The only value to be found in his humanity was his death. Or, if we wanted to expand it a little bit, as in Hebrews, we might say that he occupied the same sucky existence we have (temptations to sin and the like) but mana...

Orthodox christology has insisted on both the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ.   In practice, however, the emphasis has fallen on the “fully divine.”   Jesus’ humanity has usually been used to anchor his story in first century a.d. Palestine and to highlight his solidarity with us viz-a-viz his human energies and emotions.   Liberal christologies did more justice to his humanity and its normative or at least insistently exemplary character.   Unfortunately, it did so at the cost of rendering the “fully God” side of the statement opaque or non-existent.   I want to suggest that if we take both the Orthodox and liberal views seriously we can fashion a more adequate and fully Orthodox christology. The orthodox insistence on the full humanity and deity of Jesus Christ is, in my judgment, well-founded though often its execution leaves something to be desired.   Liberal christologies contribute that “to be desired” element by raising the human Je...