Should Jesus Be Demoted?

“We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.” These words by Robert W. Funk are cited at the head of Chapter Seven of my book The Limits of Liberalism, which I am currently updating and slightly revising. So, what about it? Should Jesus be demoted?

The Traditional/Orthodox Position

Jesus of Nazareth has been a problematic person to many ever since he walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee and was crucified outside the city walls of Jerusalem and, according to his followers, resurrected.

Jesus was a problem for the Jewish religious leaders who thought he was guilty of blasphemy. Jesus was a problem for the Roman political leaders who thought he was probably a dangerous insurrectionist.

Jesus soon became a problem for Christian thinkers as well. There were some who espoused Docetism, the view that Jesus was a divine being who only appeared to be human. That idea was explicitly branded as a heresy by Ignatius (A.D. c.35~107).

Then there was Arius (256~336), who propounded that Jesus was neither fully God nor fully human but rather a type of demigod. His view was labeled a heresy at the Council of Nicaea (325), which concluded that Jesus Christ was both “true” God and a “true” human being.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church  states clearly the orthodox view, which is also held by most traditional Protestants: “He [Jesus] became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man” (1994 ed., 464). 

The Liberal Position

The traditional view of Jesus has long been called into question by various Christian thinkers.

In contrast to the view of the Catholic Church as well as the Protestant Reformers and most of their followers through the centuries, according to which the primary message about Jesus is his death and resurrection which brings about the atonement of sinful humans, the liberal position emphasizes the life and work of Jesus before his death.

Liberal Christians follow Jesus not because he was “God incarnate,” but because he was and remains an exceptional and exemplary human being. And according to many liberal theologians, the human Jesus was “promoted” to divinity by the faith of the early church.

Robert W. Funk, cited at the beginning of this article, was the well-respected New Testament Scholar who founded the Jesus Seminar in 1985. Funk (1926~2005) made that striking proposal in “Jesus for a New Age,” the epilogue of his book Honest to Jesus (1996, p. 306).

Funk, and many other liberals, seem to think that a choice has to be made: either Jesus Christ must be acknowledged as an eternal divine being or as a “humble Galilean” sage who lived some 2,000 years ago.

But why does it have to be either/or?

The Paradoxical Position

Last week I happened to run across an article by Daniel P. Horan, a youngish (b. 1983) Catholic theologian. His fine piece is titled “The heresy of oversimplified Christianity.”

Horan says well what I have said and taught for decades—but maybe not so clearly. For example, he explains that heresy results from “mistaking part of the truth for the whole truth in a matter of faith or doctrine.”

He then asserts that this explanation “reveals what is so appealing about heresies and why so many Christians inevitably fall for them.” Heretical positions are usually oversimplified and reductionistic statements.

Thus, and these are my words, heresies are always appealing because they are easier to understand and to affirm than the traditional/orthodox position.

To quote Horan again, “The truth is that Christianity is not a religion for those who seek easy answers or black-and-white thinking.” He goes on to assert that “false Christianity promotes ‘either/or’ approaches to faith and morals” whereas “true Christianity has always been a ‘both/and’ tradition.

That is why in Chapter Seven I insist that we don’t have to take an either/or position with reference to Jesus Christ as Funk and many liberals do. As I say there, “Surely our minds can expand to the extent necessary to affirm and embrace a paradoxical view of Jesus Christ as both human and divine.”

The Universal Christ

Many of you are familiar with the name Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar who was born in Kansas in 1943 and who has long lived in New Mexico. A few of you may even remember “Listening to Richard Rohr” (pun intended), my 2015 article about him. This article is about his highly significant new book.

Rohr’s Potent Book

The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe was issued on March 5 in hardback & paperback, and on Kindle. According to this National Catholic Reporter article, that potent book debuted at No. 12 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

As indicated in my previous blog article, I spent 30-minutes (or more) every day for a couple of weeks carefully reading Rohr’s book, and I found it to be of great profundity.

Perhaps because I have been reading Rohr’s daily meditations for the last few years, I found the first part of the book more helpful than the latter chapters, which were mostly ideas that he had previously explored in his meditations.

Rohr begins his book with a fairly long quote from Caryll Houselander (1901~54), an English mystic whom I had not heard of before. Reflecting on her words, Rohr refers to “the Christ Mystery” as “the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time” (p. 1).

That is the basis for his thought-provoking exposition of the meaning and significance of the universal Christ.  

Rohr’s Main Point

More than anything else, Rohr emphasizes Incarnation on a far broader scale than most of us have ever seriously considered. Incarnation begins with Creation, he says, and thus we live in a “sacramental universe.”

Rohr’s viewpoint is one of thoroughgoing panentheism. He is clear about that point: “I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul” (p. 43).

Thus, God is seen as present throughout and within the whole world. Rohr starts his fourth chapter with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, which I have long liked:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

“Christ Is Not Jesus’s Last Name” is the title of Rohr’s first chapter, which I found to be the most challenging of the book. There he states clearly that “the first incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1” (p. 12).

He goes on to say that “‘Christ’ is a word for the Primordial Template (‘Logos’) through whom ‘all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him’ (John 1:3)” (p. 13).

It was that “Template” (“Logos”) that became flesh in Jesus. So, Rohr clearly affirms both the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth and the universality of Christ.

This is all closely related to what I wrote about in the third chapter of my new book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now, although I wrote it before having the benefit of Rohr’s lucid book.

The title of that chapter is “God Is Fully Revealed in Jesus, But the Christ is Not Limited to Jesus.” Rohr makes that point more emphatically than I was able to do there.

Rohr’s Key Emphasis

There is so much more that needs to be said about Rohr’s thought-provoking book, but the following words summarize a key emphasis found in it:

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reason to fight, exclude, or reject anyone (p. 33).

We Christians need to think long and hard about those words—and about Rohr’s entire book.