1. He is often reduced to merely a "great teacher," as is the case in many New Age-type groups.
2. His divinity is denied and outright rejected, a heresy that stretches back to Arius in the 3rd century.
3. Many cults and heresies focus on Jesus the man rather than having a proper understanding of the hypostatic union (Jesus being two natures - fully man and fully God - in one Person).
However, it is not only cults and heretical schools of thought that reduce Jesus in such a way, but even self-proclaimed "Christian" theologians, in particular those of a more liberal bent. In recent years for instance, the "Emerging Church" movement that has infected American Evangelical Protestants has tended to emphasize the humanity of Jesus over His divinity, and in doing so they often teeter on the verge of heresy by practically dismissing His divinity altogether. A good example is this picture which recently has circulated about the "real Jesus," a speculation on what He looked like, and to be honest it makes our Lord look like a caveman:
People who come up with this sort of stuff often do not even realize they are bordering on the heretical, and when Jesus in His person is diminished in such a way, it also becomes reflected in the attitudes concerning Jesus we hear. One such example happened that I experienced about six years ago, when I was sitting in a graduate New Testament Theology class at my alma mater where I received my Bachelor's some years earlier. A student in that class, a Korean-American who identified as a Pentecostal, actually said in a class that Jesus was essentially not omniscient, and that there is no way (at least in the mind of this misguided classmate) that Jesus could know anything on earth because He too was "evolving." Mind you, this was a guy who was saying this who supposedly identified as a conservative Pentecostal! Mentalities like this, however, are becoming par for the course, and now even supposed "Evangelicals" are rejecting basic things such as the Atonement - one example of this is Rob Bell, a rather controversial and well-known pastor and author whose 2010 book, Love Wins, espoused a heretical universalism that in essence denies the need for the Cross and the need for accepting Jesus as the Way, Truth, and Life to gain salvation and reconciliation with the Father, as John 14:6 reminds us. And, Bell is not alone - a host of Evangelicals and former Evangelicals such as Don Earl Paulk, Carlton Pearson, Brian McLaren, and others espouse similar views. Many claim to embrace this heresy as a sort of "new revelation," but in referring back to Mascall's text, we see it is just the same repackaged nonsense that people such as Paul van Buren were embracing decades earlier, and that Arius and other heretics were peddling even in the earliest centuries of the Church. Picking up there, Mascall addresses the faulty Christology embraced and preached by van Buren, and shows in essence that diminishing Christ's divinity is one avenue of secularization of the Church.
Trying to make Jesus "more human" is something that understandably many Christians desire - especially among Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, who emphasize the need for a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ as being pivotal. Thing is, the facts have established that Jesus was human, but they also affirm that Jesus was also fully God as well. In Mascall's text, beginning on page 47 and continuing on for several pages, he describes in detail the Christological position van Buren embraces, and essentially it breaks down into these elements:
1. The Logos-Christology, according to van Buren, was developed by early Christians in order to defend against the charge that Christians worshipped a mere man - in other words, according to this idea, the divinity of Christ was an "invention" of Christians as an apologetic defense against their detractors.
2. Like Bultmann and others before him, this divinizing of Christ was a "mythological notion" that served a sort of psychological purpose for its time.
3. Van Buren asserts that because of this "invented" divinity attributed to the man Christ, His humanity was diminished - for van Buren, it is almost a turn of the tables against orthodox Christology as for him denying Jesus was "only a man" denies He is a man in all other senses.
4. For van Buren, the hypostatic union (Jesus as fully God and fully man together) that is accepted as truth by the Church and is professed in the historic Creeds is self-contradictory, or at best, meaningless.
5. Also, for van Buren, he recommends a revisionism of Patristic affirmations of Jesus which is based on linguistic empiricism to the extreme - this means essentially rejecting the Incarnation.
As Mascall notes on page 49, van Buren's attitude lands him in complete denial of many essential Christological truths, and also of all forms of natural theology as well as even of genuine religious experience outside the Christian sphere. For van Buren then, affirmed truths about the Godhead which refer to Jesus as God the Son in particular can be accepted only if re-interpreted as statements about Jesus devoid of dogmatic standard. I am now going to add a few thoughts of my own to this as it relates to my own field - catechesis - and also I want to show how van Buren is no different than Arius of the past or of contemporary cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses which also deny the divinity of Jesus.
The historic Creeds of the Church (Apostle's, Nicene, and Athanasian) all affirm that Jesus is God Incarnate, and that He is one person of a Triune Godhead. Statements in the Nicene Creed about Jesus for instance, that He is "very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by Whom all things are made," state very clearly the Church's belief regarding the person of Jesus. Theologically, of course, this is what is called the hypostatic union, meaning that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, or two natures in one Person. It is one of those things which is rightly called a "mystery of faith," in that it can be understood and accepted, but not always articulated linguistically. For an extreme linguistic empiricist such as van Buren, this creates a problem - if it cannot be explained by the human mind in clearly-defined terminology, it is then "myth" and must be viewed as such by people like him. Herein lies the problem then - if the Person of Jesus is diminished to a "mere man" with no supernatural attributes whatsoever, it only follows then that other aspects of doctrine concerning Christ - the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, etc. - must then be denied as well. It means then, essentially, a denial of the very salvation we profess to believe as Christians, and this is a big problem. In denying those aspects of Christology, and then redefining them on human, linguistically-empirical terms as "human" only, one forfeits the identity of being Christian and in essence becomes a heretic - and, despite being nominally Anglican and claiming to be a "Christian theologian," van Buren is in essence a non-Christian in that he fails to accept fundamental truths of the Christian faith because they don't mesh with his rational explanations. Sadly, that is endemic today even in what used to be considered a fairly safe haven of "conservative" Christianity such as the Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, and is no longer merely the domain of liberal "mainline" theologians and Biblicists. Further, Mascall includes this discussion here for a very important reason - in order to secularize the Church, cardinal doctrines must be redefined in naturalistic terms and confined to linguistic empiricism in order to "demythologize" Christianity. However, that leaves an important question - is a "demythologized" Christianity, devoid of the supernatural and the mysteries of faith, truly even a Christianity at all? Or, is it merely "sanctified atheism" or a generic "deism" which has a "Christian" facade? This is really the fundamental issue of the entire discussion.
In popular culture too, we see this mentality marketed in entertainment and other cultural venues, such as the Eric Bazilian composition that was made popular by singer Joan Osborne in 1995 called "What If God Were One of Us?" or John Lennon's 1971 humanist anthem "Imagine." The problem with popular culture is its own secularizing influence on Christianity, in that there are supposed self-professed Christians who acclaim the spiritual profundity of these types of songs, although the songs themselves are heretical. In his 1878 encyclical Inscrutabili Dei Consilio, the late Pope St. Leo XIII notes that often society and the Church conflict in regard to these issues, and therefore for a Christian to base theology on a figment of pop culture such as a popular song is, for the late Pontiff, a conflict of interest - he says in the encyclical that "the very notion of civilization is a fiction of the brain if it rest not on the abiding principles of truth and the unchanging laws of virtue and justice, and if unfeigned love knit not together the wills of men, and gently control the interchange and the character of their mutual service." Further he writes, "Now, the source of these evils lies chiefly, we are convinced, in this, that the holy and venerable authority of the Church, which in God's name rules mankind, upholding and defending all lawful authority, has been despised and set aside" (Pope Leo XIII, Inscrutibili Dei Consilio, published April 21, 1878, and available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_21041878_inscrutabili-dei-consilio.html - Accessed 3/22/2018). Also, in contrast to the diminishing attitude of van Buren's linguistic empiricist position regarding the person of Christ, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the moral law finds its fullness and unity in Christ, and that Jesus Christ is in person the way of perfection (CCC 1953). Christ is therefore the end of the law (natural, moral, and otherwise) and only He teaches and bestows the justice of God (CCC 1977 and Romans 10:4). If Christ is then stripped of His divinity and is only merely a human being, then none of this is possible and it means that there is a hopelessness for the redemption of humanity. For the secularist, then, it means a moral relativism free of the restraints of moral law and even in contradiction of natural law - the secularist ironically affirms naturalism, while at the same time denying the reality that natural law has a supernatural origin. Therefore, when the divinity of Christ is diminished and the "holy and venerable authority" of the Church has been despised and cast aside, it means that moral law becomes solely the domain of individual interpretation. And, that leads to some further implications.
St. Symeon the New Theologian notes that the acceptance of Jesus as God the Son is a spiritual glory, and that encompasses the hypostatic union. He says, "He (natural man - my add) cannot perceive spiritual glory solely through his intelligence, just as those blind from birth cannot know the sun's light solely through their intelligence" (St. Symeon the New Theologian, "Practical and Theological Texts," in St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarius of Corinth, The Philokalia, Volume 4. G.E.H. Palmer, Phillip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. p. 31). Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas notes that Christ is pivotal to soteriological hope in that "rather than impugning God's goodness and omnipotence, evil instead provides the opportunity for God to display goodness and omnipotence even more clearly because God responds to the evil introduced by human sin with an even greater good: Christ." (St. Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on the Divine Nature: Summa Theologiae I, 1-13. Brian Shanley, O.P., trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.: 2006. pp. 199-200). In synthesizing what SS. Symeon and Thomas have said, here it is in a nutshell - Jesus is God the Son as well as man, and His Incarnation is a spiritual glory that cannot be grasped by mere empirical language and intelligence in that it represents a greater good, a demonstration of God's love, in that God responds to the problem of evil by providing the ultimate good, descending Himself in the flesh to save mankind. The salvation of mankind is intrinsically related as well to the preservation of the good of civilization, in that a redeemed mankind can then positively impact society. The secularist fails in trying to improve based on his own efforts and merits, and by casting the Church aside and diminishing Christ to a "mere man" devoid of divinity, it means that evil is allowed to reign. But, for the secularist, evil is redefined, and what God and His Church call evil is now touted as "virtuous" by the secularist (note Isaiah 5:20 here). As John Horvat notes in his book Return to Order (York, PA: York Press, 2013), "In this grandiose conception of self, the self-made man sees himself as the product of his own personal ingenuity and strength. He is the ultimate judge of what is right and wrong" (Horvat, Return to Order, p. 34). In other words, the secularist in essence becomes an arbiter of morality, and by diminishing Christ and divorcing Christian doctrine from the Church (secularization), it essentially means an unraveling and breakdown. The secularizing theologian tends to justify his actions, as Mascall elaborates regarding van Buren's views in particular on pages 50-51 of his text, by stating that such a person doesn't necessarily deny God, but they "secularize" Jesus - in essence, they are turning Jesus into either a revolutionary or a great moral teacher/philosopher. As continues on page 52 of Mascall's text, those like van Buren in essence say that Jesus is "created" to essentially carry out God's sovereign plan and that Jesus is not in possession of the plan alone, as He cannot be divine. Van Buren's "demythologizing" also seems to be foundated not on his own conclusions alone, but also owes much to the influence of Bultmann as well as another writer, Schubert M. Ogden (born 1928), and his views will now be discussed.
Schubert M. Ogden (born 1928)
Ogden is an American theologian who was a protege of Bultmann's and had corresponded with him up until the latter's death in 1976. His take on theology is that doctrine is distinct from experience, and he placed a greater importance on the latter rather than the former. Human experience, therefore for Ogden, determines theology, and therefore must be judged for credibility on the part of human experience rather than theology as understood by the historic teachings of the Church. Philosophical inquiry, then, determines this credibility. From the outset, it looks as if Ogden is trying to re-establish the connection between theology and philosophy that was severed during the Enlightenment, but in reality he is a theological Averroist in the tradition of Marsilus and others - theology is subservient to human experience and wisdom, and is shaped by it according to him. The book Mascall references of Ogden's in regard to the current discussion is Ogden's 1961 text Christ Without Myth. As Mascall notes on pages 53-54 of his text, the problem the views of both Ogden and his mentor Bultmann creates is that it necessitates a required demythologization which warrants a rejection of all belief in a transcendent order of reality - instead, belief for Ogden and others holding this perspective is a reformulation of "mythology" as a description of the religious experience of the Christian. If you will recall Archer's "Central Narrative Convictions" discussed earlier, it means then that the "religious story" of the individual is merely subjective, but since "myth" serves a therapeutic purpose in this scheme, it is not rejected entirely but instead is interpreted then as an expression of man's existential understanding - hmmmm!!! In the cliche "Houston, we have a problem!" there is an underlying redefinition of CNC's then as being merely "coping mechanisms" rather as a response of faith to a God who is real. This seems to also line up with Merold Westphal's assertion as noted earlier that "tradition" is defined by him as merely a type of "positive prejudice" that can be arbitrarily classified as either "legitimate" or "enabling" based on individual understanding or misunderstanding. The subjugation of Tradition to being a mere arbitrary "prejudice" also plays into Ogden's assertion that belief is based on subjective experience and must be "demythologized" in order to get to the rational fact. This subjectivism then becomes the basis for a secularization - arbitrarily divorcing those things viewed as "subjective" from an individualistic stance is a matter of experience, and therefore one "experience" is as valid as another, and thus the concepts of "right" and "wrong," as well as morality itself, becomes redefined. To assert there are absolutes, then, is "myth" and thus is subject to redefinition for the secularist. Unfortunately, that even puts the person and divinity of Jesus Christ under the microscope, and this in turn undermines what Christianity truly is.
A few concluding observations are warranted here. First, the corruptions of the secularist in no way takes away from the idea of the Central Narrative Conviction - a CNC is, in essence, our individual response to a transcendent reality beyond ourselves, and indeed culture and experience play a part in that. However, this is to be distinguished from denying universal truths and fundamental faith of the Christian Church, as these are indeed transcendental to us - how we receive and live them however is unique and incommunicable to our personhood as individuals, and rather affirms the supernatural reality of God's existence rather than denying it. Second, the reality of Jesus as a person is without dispute - more people witnessed Jesus as alive and a real person in His earthly lifetime than they did William Shakespeare or Julius Caesar, so Jesus is a historic reality. Also, the orthodox Christology in regard to the hypostatic union (Jesus being fully God and fully man - two complete natures in one Person) is likewise beyond debate for the Christian - rather than being the subjective expression of a "myth," the divinity of Jesus is central to what it means to be a Christian, and although not necessarily articulated by human language or wisdom, as a mystery of faith it is affirmed true nonetheless. As SS. Symeon the New Theologian and Thomas Aquinas have established, natural human wisdom cannot always fathom supernatural realities, and it is the height of arrogance to even attempt to or to dismiss them as mere "mythology." Science and natural reason can explain so much, but they are not infinite wisdom as there is also a metaphysical dimension to life and existence as well.
Third, and finally, the "demythologizing" of Christ's divinity has consequences for civilization as a whole. In "demythologizing" and secularizing important tenets of the Christian faith, it guts the essence of what it means to be truly Christian. And, it also opens the door to a relativistic morality which in turn can have catastrophic consequences on a society. We have seen the worst manifestations of this in recent decades, and unfortunately if continued unchecked it could prove to be society's undoing. Faith and life are essentially interconnected, and as life is lived out in society, our faith shapes the way we live it out. Hence, this is why Mascall's seminal work is vital, and as an issue this needs to be addressed in 2018 even more so than in 1965, when his text was first written. In the next segment, I will delving more into the connection between these "theologians" such as van Buren and Ogden, and how they also are connected to and influenced by some poisonous philosophical views from Heidegger and even Nietzsche.
