40 - Christ in Chiaroscuro

Christ in Chiaroscuro
By Gabriel Fackre

"With the motifs of vision and reality, light and darkness, and the interpretive tools of Logos and Shalom, we have the essential ingredients for a restatement of the doctrine of the person of Christ. Or in the language of the Nairobi Assembly of the World Council of Churches: Jesus Christ Frees and Unites. ' "

THERE is a refrain running through all recent theological experimentation that both reveals something fundamental about our times and captures an important facet of the gospel. It is the motif of vision. The word itself appears frequently in contemporary theology and has wide currency in our culture. The reason is that the opening years of the second half of the twentieth century were visionary times and prophets dreamed great dreams. Imaginative, political, social, psychological, ecological, personal, ecumenical goals were projected and acted upon with high expectation. The motif of vision is also an ocular metaphor expressing the visual as well as the visionary, suggesting the significance of the media that have been so formative in the same epoch.

The biblical tradition is no stranger to the imagery of vision-from the sight of creation beheld with satisfaction by Yahweh, through the temple vision of Isaiah, to the giving of sight to the blind by Jesus, and the Johannine vision of a new heaven and new earth. The time of this imagery may well have come in our time, not only in terms of its explicit biblical usage, but more so in illuminating the center of Christian faith. We take this motif-metaphor as a clue for doctrinal reformulation.

But it is an incomplete clue. The 1970's have been marked by a rising awareness of the clouds that cross the horizon of high expectation. Sanguine forecasts of earlier futurists have given way to nightmare scenarios. Exuberant promises of "coming of age," friendship with the earth, movement toward peace and freedom, etc., have not been kept.

Gabriel Fackre is Professor of Theology at the Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, Mass. He has also taught at the Lancaster Theological Seminary and at the University of Hawaii. This past year, Dr. Fackre was on leave at Cambridge University where he worked on his forthcoming Systematic Theology. In this connection, he prepared two major articles on Christology, the first, dealing with the Person of Christ, is presented here; the second, dealing with the Work of Christ, appeared in the Andover Newton Quarterly, Nov., 1975, under the title "A Theology of the Cross."

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Hopes are constantly shattered by realities. The vision of the late twentieth century is not a static one but is on pilgrimage, as a pillar of fire that makes its way along a night journey. Our age is characterized by both affirmation and anguish, dreams so compelling, yet reality so intractable. The larger clue to what moves us is vision-and-reality. And it is a perception about which Christian hope and Christian realism have something to say.

Vision-and-reality may serve as an idiom for the restatement of the person of Christ. And with this primary metaphor we make use of a secondary, supporting one that is also widespread in contemporary society and frequently found in the pedagogy and hymnody of the church, namely, light and darkness. Vision is the horizon light that lures us forward; yet night shadows are everywhere to be seen. Is it dusk or dawn? To struggle with that question is to be contemporary.

Can we make use of the powerful fight-and-darkness themes so prevalent in the Scriptures and the Christian tradition, while at the same time affirming that "Black is beautiful"? The use of light imagery assumes that it can be rescued from white racist captivity (viz. the concept of black light, and the interpretation of darkness as the absence of vision, light and color, rather than as synonymous with the color "black").

I

In composing a chiaroscuro doctrine of Christ, we can employ other themes that facilitate the connection between Christian faith and contemporary culture. One is drawn from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.

In the early centuries, Logos provided the church with a vehicle for interpreting its belief about Christ to a society familiar in one form or another (Platonic, Stoic, Gnostic, Philonic) with such a universal principle. While its wide and varied significations (1300 in Philo alone) made for considerable ambiguity, the thread of common meaning was a conviction about the existence of an organizing principle in the cosmos, an "architect's plan." Given the particular philosophical climate, this design was viewed in rational terms, being understood as "reason" or "word." When the Logos theologians used the term, they declared that the cosmological ground-plan had appeared in Jesus Christ. The Prologue of John's Gospel explicitly (and other Johannine literature and the Epistle to the Hebrews implicitly) provided a platform within the New Testament for declaring that the Logos had become flesh. In this conversation with culture, it became natural to state the concept of divine design in rational and auditory terms as the "Word of God." In subsequent usage, reinforced by the assumptions of print and/or verbally-oriented societies and sub-communities, Logos continued to be understood as "Word."

The term Logos is, of course, for us archaic. Even its cognitive-verbal clothing may be wearing thin. Yet it represents a quest for, and

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assertion of, "meaning" in the universe that continues to be real and powerful. In the movements and moods of this epoch, there is either a longing for or conviction about a goal worth pursuing in the world, a dynamic that moves it, or a purpose that pervades it. We can translate Logos in this contemporary visual and visionary era, therefore, as the "Vision of God." In continuity with, yet distinct from, the ancient tradition of visio Dei, this is not our vision of God, but God's vision of and for us.

In handling this Logos tool, we must remember the wounds it has inflicted on its own users. Its danger lies in allowing society to determine its content. The fundamental reference point for its meaning must be the Christian story and its central chapter, Jesus Christ. The person of Christ is not the supreme exemplification of either some transient sensibility or some "eternal truth of reason." The continuities with the human situation that the Logos theme provide must be held in tension with the discontinuity of a "Vision of God" that is both finally revealed and finally fulfilled in the incarnation and the atonement. The Logos, as interpreted from within faith, helps us to understand and answer culture's questions, yet it must also do its work by questioning culture's answers.

Logos is a formal concept expressing the "thatness" of universal meaning in Jesus Christ. Shalom is a biblical tool we can use to shape its "whatness." The Logos principle derives mainly from the New Testament; the Shalom concept, from the Old Testament.

In fixing upon the Shalom reference point within the lore of faith, we seek to be sensitive to two considerations: (1) the Marcionite temptations which attend efforts to be faithful to the Bible and free of cultural accommodation. Thus alleged Christocentric interpretations not infrequently fail to take into account their Old Testament environment. (2) The moment of pregnancy for a biblical accent. There is a ripe time for its appearance and high visibility. The word and idea of Shalom are meaningful on both counts. It is a biblical theme that connects with the visual and the visionary. Most of all, its vision of fulfillment is the frame of reference in which Jesus understood his own mission, and his life, death, and resurrection embodied and transfigured the concept.

The content that Shalom pours into the divine purpose is best captured in the imagery of the prophetic seers of the "Vision." They project on the screen of the future pictures of wolf and lamb together, swords beaten into plowshares, a child with its hand over the asp's nest, each human being under vine and figtree. It is a portraiture of wholeness, of peace, and of freedom involving nature, humanity, and God. This future-oriented vision is caught initially by the people of Israel in their liberation out of Egyptian bondage and movement toward a land of milk and honey. And its contours are marked out by the sharp lines of the "Law" of that land. In Exodus, Law, and Prophet there emerges a dream of liberation and reconciliation before and with God, in the midst of neighbor and nature. The power of this vision continues

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to move those who struggle for wholeness and hope in self and society. And the agonies in the pilgrimage toward that dream are known by prophets now as then.

With the motifs of vision and reality, light and darkness, and the interpretive tools of Logos and Shalom, we have the essential ingredients for a restatement of the doctrine of the person of Christ. Or in the language of the Nairobi Assembly of the World Council of Churches: "Jesus Christ Frees and Unites."

II

"In the beginning was the Vision, and the Vision was with God, and the Vision was God" (John 1: 1). The Vision of Shalom is the "indwelling (endiathelos) Logos," the everlasting counsel of wholeness, freedom, and peace.

As the Word has its origin in the One who speaks it, or Wisdom in the One who knows it, so the Vision has its source in the Envisioner. Comparable to the most decisive trinitarian analogy, Father and Son, these are attempts to draw parallels from our experience that express the unity and distinctions pointed to in the Johannine text (John 1:1) and developed in the classic Christian teaching about God. As Athanasius observed in the Nicene debates that there can never be a father without an offspring, so in this analogy an envisioner cannot be conceived without a vision. There never was a time when it was not. It is in this sense that the Son eternally pre-exists in the Godhead. He is the content of the divine intentionality. As in the Augustinian thesis that the Son is the knowledge by which God knows "himself," so the Son is the Vision by which God sees himself. He is the "effulgence of the divine splendor, and the stamp of God's very being" (Heb. 1:3), God of God, Light of Light.

The Envisioner is no "pure visionary," able to fantasize but not to facilitate. God is empowerment as well as envisioning. The Holy Spirit is the enabler of the eternal Vision. God is able to bring the dream to reality. Father, Son, and Spirit are Envisioner, Vision, Power.

Because the Spirit is the guarantor of fulfilled dreams, Vision is to be understood as the promise as well as the possibility of God. Vision is the resolve and covenant of God, the spiration of intent as well as its aspiration. The Spirit is the pledge, the "assurance of things hoped for," and as such distinguishes Christian hope with its promise of fulfillment from other hopes surrounded by their "maybes." It is in this sense that the second person of the Trinity is the Hope of God.

While the divine intention is empowered by the Spirit, it cannot be thought of as a serenely sketched or carefully detailed blueprint of things to come. The Vision of God is fulfilled in a way commensurate with the divine nature. Or, to adapt a phrase used by Emerson in another context, the end pre-exists in the means. The word "vision" and its companion symbol "light" point to the lure of a long-suffering love, rather than the coercions of a despot. While fruition is assured,

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how the goal is to be reached is shaped by the covenant partner. God is the Hound of Heaven willing to follow our most devious trail of flight. Thus time is integral to the fulfilling of the divine will, for time is the maneuvering room given by the Envisioner of liberation as well as of reconciliation. Our choices must be won if in the end we are to be free to be together. Since God "takes time seriously," the outworking of the hope of God becomes a story, the drama of the moves and countermoves of a stubborn love in quest of its partner.

III

"The Vision then was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him" (John 1:2-3). By the "law of the Trinity" all the subsistences in the Godhead are present in each of the Deity's acts. As the odyssey of Light begins, Envisioner, Vision, and Power are all at work in creation; the Spirit and Son of the Father fashion the world. Thus the universe is formed by the Logos prophorikos; it is made for the destiny of Shalom. By the power of the Spirit the intention of God is etched on all there is. A reflection of the vision is to be seen in the patterns and rhythms of nature. And the capacity to discern the purpose of creation is given to one creature formed with eyes to see the light, made "in the image of God." "All that came to be was alive with life and that life was the light of men" (John 1:4). The Logos prophorikos includes the Logos spermatikos, seeding humanity with its percipient graces. The world of humanity and nature is made in order to be drawn toward its luminous goal.

Or so it was in the Edenic purposes of God. How can we express the goodness of this creation and at the same time honor what happened, and happens, when the dream meets the reality of choice by those called to pursue it? For the cosmologies of another age, a paradisiacal before-the-fall is believable. We in turn mumble about the intention before the act, yet wonder if this psychologizing does justice to the opening chapter of the tale once referred to as "original righteousness." Can it be conceived as a good world evolving to the level of a developed freedom, and at this stage of creativity having those gifted with such choice saying a lethal "No!" to the vision? However expressed, the abysmal fact of human malevolence intrudes upon the movement outward of the eternal purpose. A shadow falls across the path of light. Human sin turns upon its heel away from the invitation toward the envisioned future. The Holy Spirit is taken away, and human vision loses its power.

In this old aeon, a dimmed human sight can see only the distant contours of a promised land it cannot reach. Its transcendent unity is intuited in the myths and mysteries of the world's religions, however that unity is relocated from its position out and ahead to one conceived to be in, or down, or back. The mind of the philosopher and scientist,

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the eye of the artist and reformer, the conscience of everyone, darkly perceive the outlines of the end that claims us. God has not left us without a witness to the goal for which we are made. Yet these intimations come as yearnings, elusive imperatives, broken by our untruth, ugliness, and perversity.

The Christian story tells of a companion to human sin, the Devil. The Evil One accounts for that surd of militancy against the divine intent that cannot be neatly traced to human willfulness, and one asserted to be the occasion for it. While this satanic power was viewed in other times as personal, it comes to us in the impersonal onslaughts of high technology warfare, systemic oppression, subterranean psychological drive, historical and natural cataclysm. We experience its reality as impersonal force. The ally of sin comes dressed in the mask of Evil rather than Devil. The work of these partners is the demise of the dream. The wages of sin and Evil are death.

IV

How will the promise be kept, the vision penetrate darkened hearts, death turned into life? A patient love signals rebel humanity. So a pillar of fire moves before a people chosen for a special disclosure of light, pointing the way out of slavery into freedom and toward a far country of righteousness and peace. The leadership of this pilgrim band is given sight to see the law of this promised land. And when it is violated, an unswerving Envisioner illuminates the horizon for still other seers, prophets who look toward the future and glimpse the lineaments of Shalom in vine and figtree, leopard and kid, plowshare and pruning hook.

It is the grace of Israel to see more clearly. What is dimly perceived by the common eye irradiates the horizon of a tiny near-Eastern tribe. This people of God has 20-20 vision of the goal for which we are made, and is, as such, the conscience of humanity. And the human race, comfortable in the illusions of its myopia, pours out its rancor on an Israel that reminds it of what it chooses not to see.

As the covenant-people lived with the luminous, its prophets increasingly apprehended the ambiguities in its own history. Thus the "Day of the Lord" threatened to turn into night. It seemed that where Shalom became visible it came at the same time under attack from within and without. The visionary people were scattered, their seers and exemplars drank the cup of suffering. Who will deliver Shalom from its defeats? Surely the God of Israel will not forsake the promise. Will some empowerment come to the powerless dream? Will a messianic king of glory usher in the day? Is the historical suffering of the vision itself a clue to how victory will come? The unresolved question of the relationship of the divine faithfulness to an ungrateful creation, the determined pursuit by God of the vision and the unremitting assault upon it, sets the stage for the decisive act in the Christian drama.

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V

"The Vision became flesh; he came to dwell among us and we saw his glory, such glory as befits the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth" (John 1: 14). The doing of God in history and nature becomes the being of God in our world; Logos prophorikos (promised) becomes Logos ensarkos (enfleshed). The light that signalled from a distance through the darkness draws near. Upon this man Jesus a spotlight fell and bathed him in its radiance. He lived and moved and had his being in it, and we "beheld the light in the face of Christ."

"The girl's name was Mary. The angel that went in said to her, Greetings most favored one! The Lord is with you" (Luke 1:27b-28). Where there is gracious favor toward, there is also power in. In trinitarian terms, where the Envisioner projects the vision, there also is power. Father, Son, and Spirit are together at Incarnation. The "virgin birth" is a traditional way of expressing this empowerment. At the conception of the Holy Spirit something really happens in history evidencing the eternal procession toward and into time. How can this empowerment be stated in an epoch moved by its own kind of miracles? The commanding miracle in a time sensitive to the collision of vision and reality is their friendship, the presence of Shalom in a world of hate and hurt. Thus the empowerment of the vision is best communicable as the radiance in Christ of the light that shined upon him.

The miracle of love must be expressed free of the Docetisms and Monophysitisms that erase the real humanity of Jesus. The very metaphor we are using has lent itself to this dehumanization, with the historical Jesus disappearing in a blaze of light (the patristic figure of a glowing coal). Against this it must be asserted that the one to whom light became proximate was a man of Israel with flesh and history of a piece with ours. This solidarity with us means growth, struggle, temptation. He was "of one substance" with our humanity, sharing our finitude including that point so gingerly treated by the very Fathers and Councils that made formal declarations of his consubstantiality with us (his perception of the way things were, that finite mind taken from him by the Apollinarians and even imperilled by orthodoxy). He saw the world as a first century Jew, out of a gestalt of memory and hope which furnished him with the framework for understanding what was happening in his time, and materials for his own self-understanding.

He was what we are in all respects except one. On him shone the full light of the divine glory. Its intensity and omnipresence in his life was so compelling that he could not "take his eyes off of it." An overwhelming vision claimed unswerving attention. He beheld the divine glory with "unclouded vision." This undeviating orientation to the purpose of God was the issue of proximate light. It was constituted by an illumination of the perception of the events of his time, and an empowerment to enact a role in the drama he saw unfolding. This

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expression in him of the "wisdom of God" and the "power of God" took the form of: (a) his teaching about the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, (b) his self-understanding as a participant in that action of the future, (c) his conduct toward this vision that gripped him.

VI

From the "new quest" among biblical scholars, through the effort to "begin from below" in Christology, to a post-critical tendency in exegesis that seeks to relate but not capitulate to fashions in biblical studies, there is a current determination to root the meaning of Jesus Christ in the data we have about what he said and did.

(1) Jesus pointed to and prayed for the onrushing future. The reign of God was coming toward the world, the rule in which the pure in heart would see God, the peacemaker would be vindicated, the prisoner released, the lame walk, the dead be raised, and the Kingdom come. In political, personal, and natural idiom he portrayed Israel's ancient hope of Shalom. For him this New Age was at hand when humanity, nature, and God would be free and peaceful before and with each other.

This pointing was more than the future-orientation of the prophet. "At band" meant here as well as near. The power of evil was even now under attack and losing ground to the coming King. And this heavenly favor toward us manifests itself as power among us as the finger of the Regent even now casts out of the world the occupying armies of the Evil One. That is why the sick are healed, sins are forgiven, demons exorcized, temptation overcome, and faith empowered. And we are called to pray that this Kingdom finally come on earth in the power of its fulfillment and the glory of its light.

(2)Who is this Jesus who tells this tale? He is the first wave of the inbreaking future. Through him the powers of the New Age find expression. He has authority over the demonic and makes the wounded whole. Through him others are put in touch with the flow toward freedom and reconciliation. He is liberator and peace, the firstfruits of the Kingdom that shall be. He is in unity with the new realm and on terms of intimacy with its King. While the debate over the meaning and self-application of the titles of Jesus continues to wax warm, there is an impressive body of scholarship which holds the view that Jesus saw himself to be of a piece with the divine initiative being taken in the Kingdom's arrival.

From Jesus' self-understanding it is a short step to the church's declaration that in Christ "dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9), and the varied expressions of this unity in the names and categories ascribed to him. He is the Son of the Father, the second Adam, Lord, Logos. Here is the one in whom vision became reality, light penetrated darkness.

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(3) The way of life of this man confirms his pointing and self-understanding, He does what he says and is. His faithfulness to and exemplification of Shalom establishes Jesus as "proper man," the prototypal human being whose existence fulfills the hope frustrated by Adam. He is truly human in a normative as well as descriptive sense.

The intention of the traditional concept of the perfect humanity and "sinlessness" of Jesus can be expressed with the help of the imagery of vision and light. Jesus' true and fulfilled humanity was constituted by his clear-sighted perception of, and unswerving obedience to, the vision. He saw the light and lived and moved and had his being in it. Because the light drew near to him, it so captured his gaze and orientation that it possessed him. He followed its path to the end. The tales of temptation at the opening and close of his ministry portray the persisting invitation of the powers of darkness to turn aside from the direction of light. But his commitment was undeviating, the "set" of his will and behaviour arrow-straight. The lure of the light of Shalom guided the life he lived toward those honored citizens of the Kingdom, the wretched of the earth, the despised, the persecuted, the peacemaker, the stranger, the poor, the prisoner, the sick, the sinner. In his love, he was the love announced to be arriving. And his final act, the acceptance of Calvary, crowned his career of suffering servanthood.

In grasping the relation of the historical Jesus to the doctrine of the Person of Christ, we make passing reference to the current discussion of his political role as that question is raised both by those who hold him to have affinities with the Zealot tradition or seek accreditation for an apolitical or even anti-liberation understanding of the Christian faith. The portraiture of Jesus as a revolutionary, however well-intentioned in its effort to demonstrate the liberation implications of faith, is not supported by the evidence. How could it be otherwise if we are correct in our understanding of Jesus as the one who saw himself, and the one who in fact was, the enfleshment of a Shalom in which swords are beaten into plowshares, neighbor does not rise up in anger against neighbor, and all dwell in peace and freedom from hate and hurt? On the other hand, to draw a straight line from this transcendent future unity to a life-style of interiorized piety, disdainful of worldly thrust toward political liberation, is faithless to both Bethlehem and Calvary. The impact of Incarnation on ethics is, on the one hand, the definition of the vision that both claims and judges us, without which we would have no ultimate reference point for our conduct. On the other hand, it dignifies that arena in which we grope toward the vision, that grubby world of hard political, economic, and social choices. The crucifixion of the vision both shows us its depths as suffering love and makes clear the terms on which we in this dark valley must pursue it-in brokenness and approximations of the perfection in which it appeared in Christ, in anguish and penitence for actions of lesser evil necessitated by obedience to the vision in a corrupt world, and thus judged by, as well as lured toward, its horizon light.

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When we speak about the cross, we have reached the boundary between Incarnation and Atonement. From the side of Incarnation, the cross is seen as the deepest penetration into our history by the light of God. If Bethlehem and Galilee, birth and life, give us the esse of enfleshment, then Jerusalem and Golgotha, passion and death, give us its plene esse. On Calvary, there is the same selfless love as earlier, but now subjected to its heaviest attacks, and disclosing in its response its profoundest resources and deepest reality. "Greater love has no man than this . . ." Suffering and dying love is Shalom at its fullest. And here, at the same time, the disclosure turns into action; on the cross God does, as well as is. The Incarnation is crowned and completed by the Atonement, the redemptive suffering, death, and resurrection of Shalom that defeat the night powers. The Work of Christ is the issue of the Person who is very God, very human, truly one, the vision enfleshed and empowered.

VII

The doctrine of the Person of Christ can be understood in terms of a God who is what is envisioned and does what is dreamed. The Incarnation is at the center of a saga of the vision of God and its struggle with a recalcitrant reality. As the drama unfolds, the indwelling purpose moves out in creative and beckoning love, only to be spurned by an abused freedom. In patience, Shalom returns to confer special vision on a chosen people, and finally enters a rebel humanity to absorb and overcome its last assaults. This is the story of the God who keeps a promise. At its heart is an event in which vision intersects reality, one that points toward a fulfillment in which vision becomes reality.