The Identity of Jesus Christ, Expanded and Updated Edition

The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology

Frei

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781630874612
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is a book about Jesus of Nazareth. It is not a book about story, nor about narrative theology. Hans Frei was not a theologian of story or of narrative in any general way, and this book is neither about the narrative quality of our existence and the gospel's relation to that quality, nor about the narrative shape of the Scriptures as a whole and the call on us to place ourselves within that narrative.Rather, this is a book about the way in which Jesus of Nazareth's identity is rendered by the Gospels--largely the Synoptic Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke, and especially in the passion and resurrection sequences--by means of a certain kind of narrative.--from the Foreword by Mike Higton

Part One

The Problem of Presence

1

Christ Shares His Presence

One way or another there has been a Christian belief that Jesus Christ is a contemporaneous person, here and now, just as he spans the ages. Tο the non-Christian and the “natural,” unbelieving person in us, all this is, of course, a very difficult claim at best. How can one think that somebody once on this earth now lives eternally and that he does so in such a way as to be accessible to all subsequent generations? The difficulty becomes disconcerting when the claim is extended to say: to believe in Christ is to believe that he shares his presence in a very particular way with you personally. To be sure, this claim is not made with equal stress by all Christians. Some talk more of Christ’s presence in or with the church, rather than with individuals. Others find the notion of Christ’s presence distasteful to deal with directly, letting the matter rest as an implication. Still, whether it is presence to “us” or to “me,” whether the claim is held explicitly or implicitly, the claim is there. In many ways Christians acknowledge Christ as personal presence, and this is deeply troubling to the nonbeliever.

In our own time the difficulty of considering the personal element in Christ’s presence is compounded. Detailing actual personal experience requires moving well into one’s own and one’s neighbor’s private sphere of life. This can be particularly embarrassing because, in modern life, the private and public sectors are quite different, something not nearly so true for Christ’s early followers. The practice of public confession of private sin in the presence of the Lord and his congregation was an appropriate action in the first centuries after the church’s birth and, to some extent, perhaps even as long as the nineteenth century in North America. Today, such an invasion of private life seems a much more dubious thing. The dissociation of private and public spheres, whether good or bad, has been long in the making. It is not over yet, despite the present fashion of a reverse movement, allowing the media to bring the private person before a vast impersonal public. There is still something awkward if not specious about the direct public display of private experience—sexual, psychological, or religious. Members of Christian churches who have undergone the shock of group-therapeutic endeavors to weld them together into a common body on the basis of a radical challenge to their private reserve, their hostilities, and so on, know of the tense question about the genuineness of such procedures.

Mixed in with the awkward relation between public and private experience is the troublesome issue of the inner certitude of faith. It is a question that afflicts Protestants in particular whenever the issue of how Christ can be present is raised. Christians often become earnest, insistent, and zealous advocates of the credibility of a faith in Christ’s presence. Perhaps this is due to the vividness of their sense of that presence, perhaps to the opposite sense. It may be that believers are not really sure and cannot really believe unless they can convince others. Both lack of certitude and dissociation of private and public experience make talk about “presence” a dubious kind of testimony in our modern cultural setting. Thus, it is wiser to approach the question of what it means to speak of Christ’s presence indirectly rather than head on. We shall, then, in the interest of indirection, be first governed by the question, Who is he? We must try to comment on the claim in the introductory section that the very affirmation of his identity also involves the claim to his presence. But we shall have to emphasize the fact of his presence as an abiding mystery. It is a mystery because there is no precise parallel to it in ordinary human knowledge. Even though there is a firsthand quality about persons’ identity when they are present, so that the two are in fact given together, still they are in principle separable items of understanding. Ordinarily, we can think of persons as special, unsubstitutable human beings without their actual presence. But the Christian claim is that this cannot be done with Christ. The non-present reminiscence of him is that of an ordinary or extraordinary, vaguely or sharply portrayed mortal and not that of the Christ.

Except for outright spiritualists, most of us believe that the identity of a person is intimately linked with and not merely remotely attached to his bodily presence. Indeed, it is silly to ask who a person is if he has not been present somewhere, and presence means that he had or has a body. To have an identity means among other things to have, nay, to be a body, a human fact. There is unity between who a person is and his factual presence in embodiment. Still, there is a great difference between this and the claim we have made concerning the unity of Christ’s presence and identity. To ask about any other man, “Who is he?” does not bring him into the questioner’s spatial presence. We can think of anyone without having him actually before us, and certainly our thinking of him does not constitute his presence.

In the case of Jesus Christ, however, Christians claim we cannot even think of him without his being present. But it is not the power of our thinking that makes him present; it is he who presents himself to us. Furthermore, we do not have the capacity within ourselves to hold the unity of his identity with his presence in our minds. If he is effectively rendered to us in this unity when we think of him, it is due to his powerful goodness. Its bestowal, in effect, means that we may not think his presence and identity apart from each other. If we do, we no longer think of Jesus Christ, but of some ephemeral ghost of him, whether we call that ghost the “historical Jesus,” supposedly portrayed by the Gospel, or the “Christ of faith” who is an ineffable and indefinable spiritual force in human experience.

But even though there is no precise parallel between the unity of identity and presence in Jesus Christ and their coincidence in ordinary human existence, there is an area of resemblance between them. The difference is that we can think the two elements of personal being apart in any other person, but not in Jesus Christ. The similarity is that in both cases they are, in point of fact, given together in any and every individual. To pursue the similarity: even if our knowledge of a given person’s identity does not depend on or require her specific and physical presence, every time we think of her there is a sense in which that person is “present.” When a person whom we have met is identified, her identity—or that which makes her uniquely the person she is in distinction from all others—is recognized through the aid of memory and imagination. If we are to know her identity, we require, if not his physical presence, then the closest thing to it: her presence to us on the inward plane, passed along by memory and its less earthbound twin, imagination, from the physical to the inward remembering and thinking level.

Most likely, even a person of the historical past whom we have not met, such as Napoleon, Washington, or Lincoln, must be present to us in some manner in the imagination if we are to know in any significant way his identity—that set of describable characteristics that make him who he is and none other. The imagination is the cement by which, in ordinary experience of absent human beings, the separable elements of identity and presence become joined effectively for our own imagined representation of these persons. But in all such cases, unlike that of Jesus Christ, the imagination, or the person doing the imagining, is not forced into uniting the content of imagination with the grasp of actual presence. Here, then, the similarity between ordinary apprehension and the apprehension of Jesus Christ comes to an end. For in his case we are forced to consent to the factuality of what we represent to ourselves imaginatively. We must affirm that to think of him is to have him actually present.

Identity Requires Presence

Jesus Christ is known to the Christian believer in a manner that incorporates ordinary personal knowledge, but also surpasses it mysteriously. To the non-Christian, this mystery becomes an insurmountable difficulty, for there is no precedent for it in personal acquaintance.

Now this special mystery of Christ’s presence, as we have sketched it so far, is irrevocably connected with certain attendant claims. There is, as we have already stressed, no presence of a person, whether in fact or imagination, that can be conceived without a physical or historical, a spatial or a temporal locale. In the case of factual rather than imagined presence, this locale is obviously no mere matter of our own necessary representation of a presence to our imagining selves. Instead, the physical and temporal locale must pertain to the person present himself. So the claim that Christ is present, although signifying much more than certain attendant physical and historical claims, must have such assertions for its basis. One must, in short, say that he was raised from the dead, ascended on high, and from thence imparts his Spirit. In fact, Christians do claim that he is wholly unique as one who lived and died in Nazareth and Jerusalem and is now present as that very same person because he was raised from the dead. His having been raised from the dead is not his presence now, but it is the necessary local basis for his presence now. The manner and means of his new life after death as well as the mode of his presence now constitute a different question, and for some, perhaps, a very difficult one. But we shall have to insist that whatever these are, they are the fit instruments of showing forth who and what he uniquely is. The means of grace are the presentation of Jesus Christ and of no one else.

The factual basis necessary for the claim of presence makes it imperative that we pay close heed to what the facts are, as every fact, human or otherwise, bears identifying marks. For that task we must turn to the New Testament and attend the story that narrates the identity of Jesus—in the manner in which any human fact is identified by his particular story. Before we do so, however, we must point up the importance of the corresponding idea of presence, the meaning of that word, and why we choose nonetheless to begin with identity instead. Why is the notion of presence more problematic than that of identity in this particular context?

2

The Enigma of Christ’s Presence

We must specify the idea of “presence” more closely before we turn to the Gospels to see how they delineate the “identity” of Jesus. I have already indicated in what way the notion of presence undergoes change when applied to Jesus Christ rather than to other persons. In the instance of Jesus Christ we are forced to consent to the actual presence of the one imaginatively represented, even though he is not apprehended by the outer senses. This is not the case with other persons.

But not only does imagination have to perform special feats in regard to the appropriation of Jesus’ presence; there is the additional fact that, although talk of Jesus Christ’s presence is proper in some ways, in other ways it is not. We must now try to delineate the difference and in the process indicate why we should talk positively first of the identity of Jesus.

The word “presence” is one of a number of personal terms that defy definition. But sometimes description can help where definition is difficult. The first and most obvious sense in which presence is used is that of physical proximity. Though we have suggested that the claim to Christ’s presence must have a spatial and temporal basis, it is obvious that the phrase “the presence of Christ” does not mean his physical proximity to us. The necessary substitution of imagination for the work of the senses is enough to remind us of that fact. Most of us feel intuitively that belief in a physical or even quasiphysical, extrasensory presence of Jesus Christ involves the conjuring up of some highly abnormal visions. Most Christians do not talk of Christ’s presence now in terms of physical space and time.

Christ’s Presence as Sacrament and Word

The idea of physical proximity may, however, also remind us of a different way of communion with Christ, one that does not smack of hallucination or abnormal visions. We call this manner of his presence “sacramental,” and this, in the tradition of the church, has been the meaning nearest to the actual physical presence of Christ. But, however near in meaning physical and sacramental presence can be said to be to each other, they are not identical. In the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper the Lord is said to be present in such a way that he actually communicates himself. That is to say, he is the real celebrant and the agent of Communion. Nevertheless, though sacramental presence is claimed to be a real presence, it is not a physical presence. Though it is the nearest thing we have to the physical presence of Christ, it is not identical with the latter.

In addition to physical proximity and relation and the corresponding sense of the sacramental presence of Jesus Christ, the term “presence” also denotes symbolic, especially verbal, communication between human beings. As we have said, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper puts us in mind of the physical presence. Does human communication likewise merely remind us of “the Word of God,” or do we actually mean the same thing by words human and divine? Orthodox Protestants, though insisting that the Word of God and the words human beings speak are quite different, do believe that the term “word” may be applied literally to God’s speech just as it is applied to humanity’s. By and large, this means that they find God’s presence more nearly in his Word, that is, the text of the Bible and the expository sermon, than in the sacrament. Traditionally, the situation has been the reverse for Catholics. The doctrine of transubstantiation has meant for them that Christ’s presence in the sacrament is to be conceived in a manner similar to the proximity of other substances.

In both instances, Word and sacrament, we have a hint that their use is not literal, but analogical, when applied to the presence of Jesus Christ. We shall assume that this is indeed the case. Even then, there may be an order of priority between them that makes one the prime analogy, the other the secondary analogy to the presence of Christ. I shall not try to settle that question here. For present purposes, the important thing is that they are both analogies. In the process of analogical conception each must undergo drastic change. The transposition of physical to sacramental presence involves a picture for the senses, but on the inner plane of imagination rather than on the outer plane of actual vision. Similarly, the transposition of verbal communication to the Word of God involves an extended use of human language, such as metaphor or simile, rather than verbal communication by means of direct divine-human discourse. Granted that verbal forms and visual pictures are not disconnected, since, after all, we are unitary beings and our imagination shares in that unitariness, extended verbal forms, such as parables, are nonetheless rather differen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Publisher’s Introduction
• Foreword
• Introduction by Joshua B. Davis
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Problem of Presence
• Chapter 1: Christ Shares His Presence
• Chapter 2: The Enigma of Christ’s Presence
• Chapter 3: Does Jesus Have His Own Presence?
• Part 2: The Problem of Identity
• Chapter 4: Identity—A Person’s Uniqueness
• Chapter 5: The Savior as Specific Man
• Part 3: Distortions of Christ’s Identity
• Chapter 6: Redeemed Redeemer in Myth and Gospel
• Chapter 7: Jesus Christ and Modern Christ Figures
• Chapter 8: The Pattern of Exchange
• Part 4: The New Testament Depiction of Jesus Christ
• Chapter 9: Identity Description and Jesus Christ
• Chapter 10: The Enacted Intention of Jesus
• Chapter 11: Jesus and God
• Chapter 12: Jesus as Self-Manifested
• Chapter 13: Jesus Identified in His Resurrection
• Part 5: The Presence of Christ
• Chapter 14: The Pattern of Christ’s Presence
• Epilogue: A Meditation for the Week of Good Friday and Easter
• Appendix