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He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
John 1:10-11

The church has become uncertain of Jesus, even uncomfortable with him. In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) the issue has surfaced whether Jesus is Savior, or whether God alone is Savior. Is Jesus the means of salvation for all humanity, Christians or otherwise? Or is he simply an expression of salvation, one among other possible expressions? The Christian gospel differs most radically from all other religions in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Yet it also seems true that the church is scandalized by the Incarnation no less than the world is.

Believers inevitably experience anguish whenever the church reopens the question of the significance of Jesus Christ. We instinctually sense that the foundation of salvation is in trouble. And it is. If the history of the church teaches us anything, however, it teaches that the foundation of salvation is endangered in every generation.

Church history is sadly replete with a tendency to forsake Christ—often with subtle theological sophistication. I am not thinking only of the great Christological heresies of the second through fourth centuries, in which every conceivable option to the dogma of the full humanity and full deity of Jesus Christ was advanced and entertained. Those controversies exposed a tendency in the early church that has remained to the present, even if subsequent expressions of it are less dramatic than Athanasius's battle with the Arians.

Many medieval theologians replaced Christ with the church and its alliance with Western culture known as "Christendom." During the Reformation, Luther and Calvin sought to emancipate the gospel of the saving efficacy of Jesus Christ from its captivity to an ecclesiastical system and a corrupt papacy that substituted relics and works for Christ and the gospel. The radical reformers, in turn, accused these "magisterial" Reformers of subordinating Christ and the gospel to other cultural icons.

Think of the experiments to prove God's existence and derive knowledge of God via philosophical argumentation, including the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. Not one of the traditional arguments for the existence of God mentions Jesus Christ. Think of the hardening of Protestant orthodoxies in the centuries following the Reformation: many seemed to believe that Sabbath observance or abstaining from alcoholic beverages was more important than what one knew, believed, and proclaimed about Jesus Christ.

Think of the debate over evolution that has pitted science and Christianity against one another for nearly two centuries now. Is it not remarkable that nearly all disputants in this debate neglect the existence of Jesus Christ?

Think of the modern dialogue between Christianity and other religions. The first article of the gospel compromised or surrendered is inevitably the Incarnation, in order to make Christianity appear more compatible with other faiths. Think of the mantra of 19th-century liberalism—"the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man"—and its conspicuous omission of Jesus Christ from the saving equation. Think of the historical research on Jesus extending from the Enlightenment to the Jesus Seminar: its philosophical presuppositions render Jesus a mere mortal like one of us. Think of issues like prayer in public schools or abortion. The church has attempted to engage secular culture with arguments of natural law or freedom of religion or divine command theory, but with little or no reflection on the significance of the Incarnation for such issues.

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February 4 2002, Vol. 46, No. 2