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.”