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So I mean both of those by the post-Easter Jesus.
And then to frame the question using that language, the question I want to address and I think all of us are addressing is "Does the historical study of the pre-Easter Jesus matter?" And then I'm going to add "for Christians and for the church?" If people want to talk about how it might matter for other reasons, that's fine; but I'm going to focus on does it matter for Christians and for the church.
And I'm going to make five statements. The first one is a negative statement; the next four are positive statements.
The negative statement: In an ultimate sense, the quest for the pre-Easter Jesus doesn't matter. And by that I mean the very obvious point that for centuries people have been Christians and some of them have lived the lives of saints without any awareness of the historical Jesus at all, knowing only the canonical Jesus and the living Christ that is mediated by Christian sacrament and tradition and so forth. So in an ultimate sense, no.
But I think for four reasons the historical quest for the pre-Easter Jesus does matter in a penultimate sense. Let me turn now to those four positive reasons.
First, when we don't make the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus we risk losing both. This is what happened to me and, I think, to many of us growing up in the church. When I was a child—and for that matter, an adolescent—I didn't know about this distinction. And certainly, when I was a child I probably couldn't have understood it even if it had been around. The result was that I lumped everything that I heard about Jesus into a single pot producing what might be called the composite Jesus. And thus, in my mind, Jesus became a divine figure of the past.
And both of those phrases, "divine figure" and "of the past," are important. When I say a divine figure I mean, of course, that I took it for granted that even as a historical person Jesus of Nazareth was the embodiment of God in human form, and as such had a divine mind and divine powers and so forth; and thus, he ceased to be a credible human being. And I lost track of the utterly remarkable human being that he was.
More subtly and less obviously, I also lost the post-Easter Jesus because, for me, Jesus was a divine figure of the past. Here some two thousand years ago, on earth for thirty years more or less, then after his resurrection and ascension gone, now with God, will come again someday. But in the meantime, not here. And thus, I lost the living Christ as a figure of the present.
So when we don't make the distinction, we risk losing both; when we do make the distinction, we get both. My other reasons go more quickly.
Second, when we don't make the distinction we risk losing the political dimension of Jesus, and that's because the most common Christian understandings of Jesus throughout the centuries have been doctrinal and perhaps spiritual, what we might call religious. And his death is understood in religious terms. His vocation is understood in religious terms. And we lose track of the fact that he was executed because he challenged the domination system of his day. But when we do make the distinction, we recover the political dimension of his life and his death, and we recover the political meaning of Good Friday.
The third reason that this matters is grounded in incarnational theology. And this is quite obvious, it seems to me; but let me say it anyway. Given the foundational Christian claim that Jesus is the Word and wisdom and Spirit of God incarnate, it becomes important to ask: What does such a life look like? What does the embodiment of the Word made flesh look like? What does the embodiment of the wisdom of God look like? What does the embodiment of the passion of God look like?
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