Simple God Stuff

John1:1-4 & 14 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

During this holiday season I would like to reflect on the second most important theological subject of Christianity. That subject, of course, is the study of Christ’s incarnation; namely, Christology. Christology is second only to the study of the blessed Trinity.

Dr. Phillip Cary, Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University, in his series of lectures done for The Teaching Company on the history of Christian theology, makes that case that Christianity is the most doctrinal of all the major world religions. In fact, as he puts it, Christianity virtually invented doctrine. In contrast, Islam and Judaism are more “religions of the book” in that Moses and Mohammad delivered a corpus of inspired texts. Therefore, Islam and Judaism are primarily focused on the application of those texts to daily life.

On the other hand, Jesus did not write any texts. Consequently, Christianity is focused on the person of Jesus. In a very real way, Christianity is a faith more than any other religion. It is a faith in a person. And, because it is a faith in a person, it has always been supremely important to get it right as to who Jesus really was or is. The texts of the New Testament are largely theological reflection regarding the identity of Jesus and the implications of that identity.

The oldest recorded Kerygma (Greek for proclamation or announcement) is Peter’s sermon in Acts 2. The climatic declaration of Peter’s sermon is that by virtue of his resurrection, Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God and is declared to be both Lord and Messiah (vv. 33-36). The proclamation of this exaltation was summarized in the ancient church as a creedal statement; namely, “Jesus is Lord” (1Cor 12:3). One might say, therefore, that all further theological reflection about Christ is the unpacking of this creedal statement.

What does it mean that Jesus is Lord?

John, the most theological of all the gospels, answers this by revealing that the Divine Logos (the Word) is none other than Jesus of Nazareth incarnated in human flesh. The Divine Logos/Word—according to John—is God, Creator, the Light as well as the historical human being known as Jesus. To say the least, John Chapter 1 is, perhaps, the most stunning religious claim found in all major world religions. Both Islam and Orthodox Judaism consider this claim to be blasphemous. However, for our purposes, we might say with Paul Harvey, “And the rest is history.”

The history of Christological doctrinal development until the 5th century was the story of how Christians came to fully articulate the biblical notion that Jesus was/is both human and divine. The humanity and divinity of Jesus stand at the very center of Christianity. Take away this fundamental revelation and all the other doctrinal teaching of Christianity fall like a house of cards.

The Council of Nicea defined divinity and humanity of Christ this way.

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man…”

The Definition of Chalcedon in 451 articulated it this way.

“We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God…”

These truths are not only central to Christianity, they are the central meaning of Christmas.

In the “Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 11” Thomas Aquinas describes the nature of intellectual beings, the difference between the human and angelic intellects, as well as the intellect of God.

I will quote Thomas’ thoughts and try to paraphrase them for the TFD reader.

“Consequently, the highest degree of life is life according to intellect, since the intellect reflects upon itself and can understand itself. But there are several degrees of intellectual life: for the human mind, although itself capable of knowing, takes its first steps toward knowledge from without, since apart from images, it cannot understand, as we have shown (II, 50).”

Here Thomas notes that humans stand at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom because of our intellectual capacity to reflect upon our own thinking and understanding. In phenomenology (the study of first-person structures of consciousness) this ability is termed “self-reflexive thinking.” The “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” states:

“Thus, reflective self-consciousness is at least a higher-order cognition… All of this suggests that first-person experience presents me with an immediate and non-observational access to myself, and that consequently (phenomenal) consciousness consequently entails a (minimal) form of self-consciousness. To put it differently, unless a mental process is pre-reflectively self-conscious there will be nothing it is like to undergo the process, and it therefore cannot be a phenomenally conscious process.”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/

In short, the Stanford Encyclopedia is indicating that without some ability to self-reflect, the “I” (or self) cannot emerge. As such, normal humans have this ability to think about their own thinking and, therefore, we have a “self” that we know and claim as our “I.”

However, Thomas immediately notes that humans are reliant upon information and stimuli outside us in order to know things—“for the human mind, although itself capable of knowing, takes its first steps toward knowledge from without, since apart from images, it cannot understand…” In other words, we gather information with our senses to build up a body of knowledge from which we are able to reflect upon and understand. Without this external sense-perception we are intellectually hampered (think of the story of Helen Keller).

Thomas then describes the angelic intellect.

“So intellectual life is more perfect in the angels whose intellect does not begin from something extrinsic to obtain self-knowledge, but through itself knows itself.”

Thomas’ point is that angels understand themselves without having to take in sense-perception. They don’t have to rely upon feeling, touching, smelling, etc. in order to know things. He simply states this as the angel “through itself knows itself.” In the Summa, Thomas gives a detailed justification for this understanding of the angels (II, 52); however, I will summarize his main point by simply stating that angels don’t need to know things through their senses because they are spiritual beings without bodily senses. They don’t need or have senses because they are not material (or bodily) beings.

Thomas continues by describing the highest order of intellectual being, the intellect of God Himself.

“Nevertheless, the highest degree of perfection is not found in angelic life inasmuch as, although the intelligible species is completely within them, it is not their very substance, since to know and to be are in them not the same thing, as already explained (II, 52). The highest perfection of life belongs therefore, to God, whose knowing is not distinct from his being…So in God the intelligible species must be the divine essence itself.”

Put in simple terms, Thomas notes that, even though angels do not have to rely upon external sense-perception, they do not have knowledge as part of their very nature. God, however, has knowledge of all things within Himself (as part of His nature; i.e. He is Wisdom) without having to rely upon anything outside Himself. As He is self-existent—having life in-and-of itself—He also has knowledge of all things within His very nature and divine Person. He cannot be surprised by any event nor does He need to wait for things to happen outside Himself to know something.