"So when a New Testament writer speaks of 'God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ', how is he to be understood? He does not mean something like William and Mary, jointly sovereign. Nor does he mean something like the Eastern Roman Emperor and the Western Roman Emperor, co-rulers of an empire divided for administrative and defence purposes. What he means is something much more like 'The King, and the King's Ambassador', God and the one who reveals, speaks for and represents God.
To prove the point we have to read some New Testament writings with that model in mind, and we find in general that it fits. In the Old Testament religion there was a great variety of different kinds of men of God: prophets who spoke for God, priests who regulated society's relation to God, wise men who were spiritual masters and ethical teachers, and kings who ruled Israel under God. If we could imagine one comprehensive figure who united all these functions and was plenipotentiary in all God's dealings with men, that would be the figure that the New Testament writers take Christ to be. Such a figure is not himself God except in the very restricted sense that an ambassador is royal and may in certain formal contexts be treated as if he were the King.
An ambassador is in a sense royal, but is not himself the King. By paying certain royal honours to the ambassador you do not question or detract from the sole monarchy of the King he represents: on the contrary, you affirm it. To honour the ambassador is to honour not the ambassador himself but the King he stands for.
This model suggests how it was possible for the early Christians to use extremely exalted language about Christ without feeling that they might possibly be infringing monotheism. If we use the model as a guiding thread in the discussion that follows then the extremely complex New Testament language about Christ may begin to make sense; but of course we must be critical and not dogmatic, which means that we do not impose the model on the evidence, but use it as a hypothesis and look out for any points at which it breaks down. To be truly scientific about religious thought we must always look for the difficulties.
One point of detail is significant. Unlike English, Greek makes a distinction between 'God' without an article in front of it, and 'the God', with an article. Without an article, the word 'God' is being used predicatively, and has rather the same meaning as the English adjective 'divine'. Thus in John 1.1, 'the Word was God' means roughly, 'the Word was divine'. With the article, 'the God' means God the Father, the God of Israel, Yahweh, God the unique individual as known by his proper name. So in the same verse, 'the Word was with (the) God' means 'the Word was with God the Father'. The distinction between these two ways of using the word 'God' is important, but unfortunately the English language does not mark it clearly. As a result, our English translations of John 1.1 read, very confusingly: 'The Word was with God, and the Word was God.' It would be less misleading to translate: 'the Word was with the Father, and the Word was divine.'
However, even this will not quite do as a translation because it could suggest that there is a class of divine beings, of whom the Father is one and the Word another; whereas for all Jews, including the early Christians, there is only one God. To avoid this difficulty the line ought to be retranslated, 'The Word was with God the Father and the Word was the Father's own Word', to stress that the Word is not an independent divine being but is the only God's own self-expression.
If all this is correct, then even John's language about Jesus still falls within the scope of the King-ambassador model, though the model is here coming under some strain. And John's doctrine raises the general problem of intermediary beings."
Don Cupitt, _The Debate About Christ_ Fortress Press; (November 1981) pp. 91, 92
No comments:
Post a Comment