I was a teenage fundamentalist - part four

     Barry Gittins calls us to pay homage to the Godman: Jesus, son of God, son of man.

It’s getting closer to Christmas, my favourite time of the year. I’m eyeing my Chrissie CD collection with due approbation. Do I rock out with my faded, jaded rock compilations, croon away with Bing and Frankie, or go classical with Handel and Bach? Regardless of my choices, some common themes in the lyrics will emerge.

Christmas conjures tales of a census and a backwoods (backwards?) township. There’s a newborn king, a ‘virgin’, an innkeeper’s stable, angels, shepherds and astrologers. There’s also a somewhat prophetic mission on the part of Christ’s parents to seek asylum - in Egypt of all places, (the irony of Israel’s savior returning to the Pharaoh’s lands should not be lost on anyone). Oh, and there’s infant genocide, which, while a cogent part of the Advent action, generally goes no farther lyrically than the Coventry carol.

Like many of the Rubicon community, I’ll be carolling at times; puffing away on a yet-to-be-determined brass instrument and wishing people a happy and/or merry Christmas. The combined message of the carols, as with my CDs, will be clear: Emmanuel. ‘God is with us.’

The Salvation Army’s belief system makes it abundantly clear that we see Jesus as the pivot in human history and celestial action. As the fourth doctrine suggests, Creator joined creature:

‘We believe that in the person of Jesus Christ the Divine and human natures are united, so that He is truly and properly God and truly and properly man.’

That somewhat controversial statement (the sheer cosmic impact of those words) may be lost on us. An event such as the incarnation is so provocative in its scope and impact that it contributed (following the rejection of its occurrence) to the horrors of the holocaust and two millennia of anti-Semitism aimed at ‘Christ deniers’. Affirmation of faith in Christ clearly separates the world’s monotheistic faiths, and people have been dying for that belief that Jesus was God, or a variety of beliefs along those lines, since the Christian church commenced.

It’s the nature of Jesus that has people scratching their heads. Do we believe God’s capable of such a decision and action? If you were the lynchpin of all existence, would you condescend (literally ‘come down together’, or ’sink willingly to equal terms with inferiors’) to be born, live and die as a human being? Not everyone seems capable of believing God would do so.

The Army’s handbook of doctrine, Salvation Story, notes several non-kosher theories about Jesus throughout the Christian era, such as Arianism (denying that Jesus was fully divine), adoptionism (stating that Jesus was a human bloke chosen as ‘Son of God during his lifetime’), Docetism (denying the ‘full humanity’ of Jesus) and Ebionitism (seeing Jesus as a normal bloke to whom God gave superpowers).

What would it have been like, to celebrate Christ’s mass back when the church was taken up by Constantine’s Roman Empire but was still sorting out its theology? Doctrinal stances were hot potatoes; volatile and inflammatory intellectual properties that could get you tortured, burned at the stake or otherwise obliterated?I still believe Christ followers would have spent their time sharing tidings of comfort and joy, and heralding Christ’s coming as ‘the Word’ who was ‘with God in the beginning’ - but perhaps they’d have done it a bit quietly.

I first read one of my all-time favourite science fiction novels (1939, my copy was reprinted in 1979) when I was 15 - L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall. The hero, a mousy American archeologist named Martin Padway, is mysteriously transported from 1930s Italy back to Rome, circa 500 A.D. As Martin struggles to survive and transform the world around him (any missiological parallels emerging?) he finds that the nature of Jesus is a pressing issue indeed, prompting bar-room brawls and heated arguments aplenty.
Surrounded by the likes of Eunomians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Orthodox and Catholics, a running gag kicks in whenever the temporal interloper, finding himself glowered at suspiciously, fears for his life. ‘I’m what in my country is called a Congregationalist,’ he offers. ‘That’s the nearest thing to [insert new aggressor's doctrinal stance here] that we have.’

As Christians and Salvos we choose to take ‘on faith’ a lot of things that the people we live around and with won’t sign off on. That’s part of ‘being in the world but not of it’. The tricky aspect of living comes when we assume that everyone else thinks, believes and feels the way we do, or should.

I learnt a valued lesson in the ’80s during my ‘wonder years’, while collecting for the Red Shield Appeal. I asked the donor for his Christian name, to write on his receipt, only to hear loudly and clearly that he wasn’t a Christian (a Jewish Aussie, by today’s politically correct lights he’d been understandably offended by my linguistic presumption).

Jesus will be getting great press and exposure in the next few months, but at what level of discussion? As sweetfaced baby Jesus, a la the grace offered in the 2006 comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby? Or as the man of sorrows who came quixotically to give us ‘life in all its fullness’? 
 
C.S. Lewis’ much-cited analysis of Christ’s claims is helpful here: the old scholar demanded we see Jesus as either a) God’ son, as advertised; b) a loony; or c) a liar. Christ’s chief apostle Simon Peter, Rocky to his friends, wasn’t one to mince words. When Jesus asked him for feedback, Peter declared ‘you are the Christ, the Son of the living God’.

The Bible says Peter to be a man of no guile; Peter was a bloke who scripture says, among other adventures, walked on water with Jesus, had his missus healed by the Lord, caught a net-breaking boatload of fish miraculously, eye-witnessed a transfigured Christ chatting with Moses and Elijah, and celebrated with and repented to a resurrected, unrecognised Jesus after another fishing bonanza.If Peter was a ’standup bloke’, honest as the day is long, then Jesus was God. If one instance of the supernatural is taken as true, then other instances are also true.

Still, many people, unbelievers and believers alike, struggle with the notion of the virgin birth.  Christ’s supernatural/natural lineage is at stake at Christmas.

The Apostle Paul in Romans writes that Jesus was born of ‘the seed of David according to the flesh’ and was also the son of God according to the Spirit ‘by the resurrection from the dead’. That’s a direct link to the Salvos’ ‘truly and properly God and truly and properly man’ viewpoint.

In Galatians, Paul speaks of salvation through Jesus, God’s son, who was ‘born of a woman’ (without going into questions of paternity).

People who agonise over the semantics involved have pointed to the translating of the word ‘virgin’ in a messianic prophecy in Isaiah (7:14) as the Hebrew word ‘almah’, which means a young girl who may or may not have been a virgin (some linguists say the use of the word ‘betulah’ on the other hand would have meant she was definitely not ‘known’ in the biblical sense). The subsequent translation into the Greek word ‘parthenos’, which can be translated to mean young woman or virgin, has fuelled further angst.
The virgin birth accounts are in the gospels of Matthew (which also rattles off Joseph’s geneology) and Luke. The gospel of Mark kicks in with accounts of Isaiah’s prophecy about John the Baptist, while the gospel of John mystically describes the Word becoming flesh and making ‘his dwelling among us’.

Critics of the virgin birth accounts say the old world was prodigiously littered with divine or semi-divine potentates and virgin births. But Jesus, unlike figures such as Pharaoh Amenkept III, Ra, Perseus, Romulus, Mithras, Genghis Khan, Krishna, Horus, Melanippe, Auge and Antiope, Alexander the Great and Augustus, is honoured through the year, every year, as the son of God. That’s staying power in the face of scandal (unwed teenybopper Mum), rancour (internal and external to the church) and numerous death sentences (we tend to forget, in this age, that people have literally died for their belief in Christ’s divinity).

Christ’s birth, emanating from a virgin’s womb as presented by the scriptures, is sung of by children and adults alike. It will be so to the end of the ages.

Jesus is God’s son. Saying that, in all honesty I don’t know or care if Jesus was born of a virgin; or if he was the result of Mary and Joseph’s premarital union. Because I love scripture and am guided by it I am happy to accept the umpire’s whistle on this one, as with numerous other accounts that challenge our scientific understanding of life. I see Jesus as God’s son, regardless of how he got here. And if I accept that God was able to create life from nothing, which I do, then a virgin birth is a cinch; ‘easy peasy’ for the One whose will separated light from darkness, oceans from dry land, hope from dread.

Truly and properly God. Truly and properly man. Look at the words attributed to Jesus. Examine the way we lived. Look at his teachings, his miracles, his integrity under intense pressure and the hope he inspired and inspires still. C. S. Lewis’ options are still there for us. Pick a), b) or c) as you will. I’m going for a) myself. I believe Jesus was the son of God.

Die for my sake and you will live, Jesus told his peers. If you live for your own sake, you’re gone; you will lose your life in the bigger picture. That’s a message of God’s love for ‘others’. That’s the message Jesus distilled from the rabbis and scriptures of Judaism. That’s the kernel of faith in a God of love that keeps the Christian church alive.

We lose out when we fail to perceive God’s presence and purpose in ourselves. How much more, then, when we don’t see God in his son, Jesus? The subsequent challenge is to see Christ in each other.

Writer: Barry Gittins is a Melbourne-based writer, lifelong Salvationist, husband (to Trudy) and father(to Emily and Benjamin) who seeks God in everyday encounters. A frustrated poet and playwright, he has worked for the Salvos’ Australia Southern Territory in various roles since 1991: as a journalist (for Warcry, The Young Soldier/Kidzone, The Musician),technical writer and CD-ROM author in corps program (mission development), senior review editor (Warcry) and editor (On Fire). He currently works as a social program and policy consultant (writer/researcher) for the social program department.

 

2 Comments to I was a teenage fundamentalist - part four

1. Hi Barry,

   Interesting article. I myself don’t care one way or the other whether he was born of a virgin or had supernatural powers or whatever. I do believe that he was the son of God, but then, according to John, we are all the exact children of God (goes far further than just ‘adoptionism’). For me, there is sufficient evidence that Mary wasn’t a true virgin - but it doesn’t change the power of what I believe.

   I also need to comment on something else you said - about the continuing belief over time in Christ as Son of God. Let us not forget that Christianity is only 2000 years old. Many of the other ‘religions’ (and others) that you talk about, were practiced and worshiped for much longer periods than that. Who knows what we will believe in another 2000 years?

   Yours in Christ,
   Graeme.
Graeme Randall on November 15th, 2009

2. Barry

   Good one today—-The heart of our faith is to be found in our doctrine that clearly defines that Jesus is truly and properly God and truly and properly man. Mindboggling but true.

   I have over the years used the question/comment to people– that Jesus can only be one of three things: Liar, Lunatic or Lord. C.S. Lewis truly understood the only options we have.

   Thanks again Barry

   John Stephenson
John Stephenson on November 16th, 2009

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