Book Briefs: April 5, 1985

Christ The Victor, Christ The Center

The Person of Christ, by David F. Wells (Crossway Books, 1984; 205 pp., $7.95 pb). Reviewed by Robert E. Webber.

Theological issues rarely make front-page news. However, when the book The Myth of God Incarnate was published in July of 1977, the secular press immediately turned it into a front-page controversy.

John Hick, the book’s editor, argued that the notion of God becoming incarnate as man must finally be acknowledged as a myth. The Reformers, he argued, dropped the supernatural concept of the sacraments. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theologians dropped the idea of a supernatural Bible. So now, in the twentieth century, the time had finally come to be honest about the last myth—the Incarnation.

Hick’s heresy illustrates the dilemma of modern theology. Unable to verify in any historical or logical way the supernatural assertions of the New Testament, many moderns have resorted to a mythological interpretation of the life and times of Jesus. Not so David F. Wells, who tackles the tough questions pertaining to a supernatural Christology in The Person of Christ: A Biblical and Historical Analysis of the Incarnation.

From the very beginning of Christianity, the bottom line has always been supernaturalism. Thus Wells, professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, offers in his book an apology for the supernatural Jesus, and consequently enters into dialogue with all those who reject orthodox theology.

Appropriately, he begins the study of Christology not with an arsenal of texts, but with the Christ event itself and with a description of the cosmic nature of Messiah’s work. Christ is, as Paul reports in Colossians, not only the creator—the one in whom all things consist—but the redeemer, the one in whom all things are recapitulated, restored, renewed, and recreated. He, the Christus Victor, has destroyed death, trod down the Devil, and dethroned the powers of evil. The choice between a mythological Jesus and a historic, supernatural, and cosmic Christ starts here. And the choice one makes, like a stone cast into still water, sends ripples in every direction.

An Excerpt

“It is abundantly clear from this overview that the New Testament has provided its own categories for interpreting the figure of Jesus, and we do violence to its thought if we supplant them with others more familiar or congenial to us. The Protestant liberals did this, choosing to replace the Kingdom by the category of conventional biography; the Bultmannians are doing it by discounting the human and historic significance of Jesus and eliciting his contemporary meaning through existential verities. In the one case the in-breaking of God with and in Jesus was muted, and in the other the significance of this in-breaking is seen to come, not so much through Jesus, but in each believer. Thus these theologians have developed hermeneutical categories which are reductionistic, and the result is that the real significance of God’s action is largely or completely lost.”

Faith’S Core

Christology is now and always has been the central issue of the Christian faith. When Peter preached his Pentecost sermon, the central theme was that “this Jesus whom you crucified” is Lord and Christ. One of the earliest Christian confessions was “Jesus is Lord.” Primitive hymnology such as John 1:1–14 declared that the pre-existent Logos became flesh and manifested the glory of God. And the Christological hymn of Philippians 2:1–11 affirms the divine descent into human form and the human ascent into the heavens followed by the exaltation of Jesus.

These liturgical affirmations, which reflected the experience of the earliest Christian communities, soon became the objects of reflection and intellectual inquiry, as well as theological speculation. It was not enough for the church simply to affirm the deity of Christ and the coalescence between the human and the divine. As the faith moved out into the hellenistic culture, intellectual questions about Christian experience inevitably arose. How is Jesus related to the Father? And what kind of language best describes such indescribable matters as the union between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus? This shift from an experiential Christianity to an intellectual Christianity raised—and raises—numerous questions about Jesus’ identity that Wells addresses forthrightly from a supernatural perspective.

This orientation on the supernatural Christ does not, however, keep Wells from addressing the proof-texting supernaturalist who does not think theologically. Indeed, Wells is concerned about those Christians who have been stumped by wrong-headed theology. What do you say, for example, to cleancut missionaries from the Jehovah’s Witnesses who insist that “Jesus really isn’t God” because “the New Testament teaches that he’s the Son of God, the first-born of creation, but not the same essence as God”? Or, what do you say to your neighbor who says, “Oh, I certainly hold Jesus in great respect. Surely he is a window to the Father, the leader of a great humanitarian ideal, the originator of love as the central religious motif. But God? Hardly.”?

Unfortunately, there are too many supernaturalists who give weak and even heretical answers to these tough questions. For example, a few years ago this reviewer lectured to an Inter-Varsity group at a Midwestern secular university. During a discussion of Christology, a man stood to his feet and insisted he could solve the problem of the relationship between the human and divine in the person of Christ. He proudly announced that “Jesus was a human shell in whom the Logos resided.” Because this was the essential argument of Apollinarianism, a heresy of the early church, I retorted with tongue in cheek, “You’re a heretic. We ought to burn you at the stake.” I later discovered he was the faculty adviser.

This illustration points up still another value of The Person of Christ—Wells’s methodology. It approaches the Christological issue from a biblical, historical, and contemporary perspective, while speaking to a major problem that has plagued evangelicals since their beginning: the disdain for history and tradition. We tend to leap from the New Testament text to the present, disregarding 2,000 years of history. Cheers for Wells, who does not do that. He painstakingly leads us through the major early church battles, the undermining of supernaturalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the presuppositions of the modern reformulation of Christological thought. Consequently, The Person of Christ is not only an example of good methodology, but of solid scholarship.

Wells is no theological sissy. He tackles his thesis with a John Wayne resolve, swaggering into the antisupernatural town with both barrels blazing, pumping biblical, historical, and theological bullets into his falling targets. And his book is no bus station handout. It is a treatise for the serious student, the thinker. Wells does not tolerate the monosyllabic set who are satisfied with nine-verse tracts.

So get your theological dictionary, your Roget’s Thesaurus, and discover again that a supernatural Jesus, a supernatural Bible, and a supernatural working of God through the sacraments do indeed belong to a seamless robe.

Robert E. Webber is professor of theology at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

An Affinity For Life

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, by Lewis Thomas (Bantam Books, 1984; 168 pp., $5.95 pb). Reviewed by Daniel Pawley.Daniel Pawley is an assignment writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In his autobiography, The Youngest Scientist, Lewis Thomas, the esteemed chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, revealed fragments of his evangelical upbringing. Raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, this son of a doctor and a Protestant fundamentalist mother attended Sunday school in a ramshackle church near Flushing, New York. Though he now says little about those church roots, one wonders what effect they might have had on a life and career that deals so profoundly with the mystery and majesty of our living Earth.

Thomas’s first two books of essays on science, The Lives of a Cell (Bantam) and The Medusa and the Snail (Viking), seem almost worshipful. While he speaks freely of evolutionary processes, he seems to give credence to a specifically created universe. He seems compassionate, and his reverence for the myriad forms of cosmic and human mystery struck me, the reader, as worthy of my attention as a Christian.

Now, in his latest book of essays, Thomas again plays the part of the compassionate (and sometimes angry) scientist. Through the lenses of science and the humanities, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony explores moods of a world hardening under the awareness of potential nuclear war.

Using Mahler’s music as an illuminant for commenting on the tedious threat that nuclear war poses, Thomas writes, “There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially in the final movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the same time a quiet celebration of the tranquility connected to the process.… Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a huge new thought: death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity.… My mind swarms with images of a world in which thermonuclear bombs have begun to explode.”

A literary critic once observed of writer William Faulkner that the key to his compassion for the people of his beloved Mississippi was his moral outrage at the hypocrisy and decadence of the Old South. Thomas, a medical doctor and research pathologist, also writes as one who has been morally outraged—but by our Pentagon’s stockpiling of nuclear armaments.

With the money we spend on thermonuclear weapons research, Thomas asserts, “we could be building Scarsdales on Mars if we had a mind to. We could be gardening out in the galaxy.… We could begin paying attention to all our children, everywhere on the globe, and their children still to come. We could even begin learning enough about each other to begin growing up as a species, liking each other, on the way to loving each other.”

Also, like Faulkner, Thomas’s outrage gives way, in the long run, to a sense of unforced compassion, as when he shifts his focus toward the effects of nuclear awareness on youth. “How do they stand it?” he asks. “How can they keep their sanity? If I were very young, sixteen or seventeen years old, I think I would begin, perhaps very slowly and imperceptibly, to go crazy.”

Nature-Boy Enthusiasm

To understand Thomas’s thinking, one must consider his never-ending capacity to appreciate the natural world. “I rely on nature,” he stresses. And it is precisely his affinity for the living, thriving cosmos that leads to his despair over the grim thought of nuclear annihilation. “It’s not just that there is more to do, there is everything to do,” he pleads on behalf of biological and medical research.

With the nature-boy enthusiasm of a modern-day David, Thomas catalogs his fondness for living organisms through melodic, scientific psalms. Childlike, he delights in the mysterious biological ways of cats and bees. In his essay depicting seven wonders of the modern world, he elucidates the nature of certain bacteria that can find peace only in water temperatures of 250 degrees centigrade; a species of beetle that performs precisely timed-and-measured functions in eight-hour increments; and, most wonderful of all, a chattering human child.

Marveling over the lowly termite (in language that might be suitable for describing Christian fellowship), Thomas explains, “There is nothing at all wonderful about a single, solitary termite, indeed there is really no such creature, functionally speaking, as a lone termite, any more than we can imagine a genuinely solitary human being; no such thing. Two or three termites gathered together on a dish are not much better; they may move about and touch each other nervously, but nothing happens. But keep adding more termites until they reach a critical mass, and then the miracle begins. As though they had suddenly received a piece of extraordinary news, they organize in platoons and begin stacking up pellets to precisely the right height, then turning the arches to connect the columns, constructing the cathedral and its chambers in which the colony will live out its life for the decades ahead, air-conditioned and humidity-controlled, following the chemical blueprint coded in their genes, flawlessly, stone-blind.”

Having eyes and a mind for such profound mysteries, one wonders how anyone can peer so deeply into the created universe without concretely acknowledging a scheme, a creator. Thomas avoids such visible affirmations. However, in breaking down the components of nature and the language used to describe it, he challenges a few long-standing scientific notions. Of “Big Bang,” the commonly accepted theory of our world’s beginnings, he charges, “It could not, of course, have been a bang of any sort, with no atmosphere to conduct the waves of sound, and no ears. It was something else, occuring in the most absolute silence we can imagine.”

Clearly, Thomas sees what few of us have the training or the accuracy and magnitude of vision to see: the world. And what he sees, he would like to continue to see, in new and advancing ways, without the intrusion of nuclear war. Boiling down the consequences of such a prospect, he turns to his thesaurus to note that “words like ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ are too frivolous for the events that would invariably follow a war with thermonuclear weapons. ‘Damage’ is not the real term; the language has no word for it. Individuals might survive, but ‘survival’ is itself the wrong word.”

Under the potential sizzle of a thousand nuclear suns, Thomas feels deeply the medical doctor’s prospective despair at not being able to heal. Still, as reviewer John Updike commented on one of Thomas’s earlier books: “His [Thomas’s] willingness to see possibility, where others see only doom, is tonic and welcome.” I quite agree. However, with the publication of Late Night Thoughts, one notices how such “possibility” has begun to melt into the apparent doom of Thomas’s own nuclear prophecies.

He has not given up, though, and it is not as if he is without solutions. Indeed, he offers capsules of intriguing advice. To the world’s military leaders, for instance, he suggests, “Maybe the military people should sit down together on neutral ground, free of politicians and diplomats, perhaps accompanied by their chief medical officers and hospital administrators, and talk together about the matter.… After a few days of discussion, unaffectionately and coldly but still linked in a common and ancient professional brotherhood, they might reach the conclusion that the world is on the wrong track, that human beings cannot fight with such weapons and remain human.…”

But it is here that the theologically minded person must depart such ideology. Despite the immense value and encouragement found in Thomas’s twin capacities for compassion and reverential appreciation of nature, his solutions to the dark dilemmas that face mankind (while admirable for their practicality) remain forever shallowly humanistic.

Like Faulkner, he articulates the problems masterfully and discovers his compassion in the process. Yet, without the full assurance that answers lie in humbly acknowledging and beseeching the Creator Himself, only the problems remain.

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