290 - Jesus: The Death and Resurrection of God

Jesus: The Death and Resurrection of God
By Donald G. Dawe
Atlanta, John Knox, 1985. 205 pp. $15.95.

Mediation is a difficult task, in diplomacy, labor relations, or theology. The challenge is to create a new alternative that overcomes the previous oppositions; the temptation is to split the difference without creating a new synthesis. Donald Dawe, Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, knows the problems of mediation. He is one of the few Americans who has written on the mediating theologians of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, his new book can be read as an essay in mediation. It seeks to mediate subtle theological issues to a broad audience. It seeks to mediate between traditional and modern christological metaphors. It seeks to mediate among Jesus, Christianity, and other religions.

The book has two sections joined by a common issue: the finality of God's revelation in Christ. The first, much longer section develops the outlines of a christology through a discussion of the meaning of salvation and its relation to Jesus. "Coinherence" "revelation," and "transformation" are the leitmotifs. In Jesus, humanity and divinity coinhere. Such language of coinherence, which Dawe calls the traditional metaphor for the God-world relation, is contrasted with the metaphors of distance and alienation that typify modern understandings of God and world. As one

291 - Jesus: The Death and Resurrection of God

with whom God coinheres, Jesus reveals God. In Jesus' death and resurrection, we see that God both is transformation and works transformation. Death and resurrection are the transformation of humanity on to a new level of existence in which human potentialities are fulfilled. The risen life is within space and time but not limited by them.

But how does this transformation relate to the plurality of religions? In the second section, Dawe seeks a middle way through the heatedly argued options. He rejects the assertions that all religions are equally true, that all are equally false, or that Christianity is exclusively true. Jesus is the revelation of the salvation, but that salvation is not the sole possession of the church or the Christian religion. Wherever the pattern of death and resurrection is realized, there saving transformation is at work.

The mediations Dawe is attempting require precision of thought and language. The avoidance of technical discussions makes the need for clarity even greater. Unfortunately, at decisive points clarity is lacking. Myth, symbol, and metaphor are used interchangeably (for example, on page 23, where Lessing's ditch is a symbol, a myth, and a metaphor). The sense in which "coinherence" is a metaphor never becomes clear. At times, Dawe speaks of God participating in our suffering and death, but, in the chapter on the death of Jesus, he speaks only of the death of a false image of God: God as covenant protector. (His discussion of God's covenant with Israel is strikingly negative.)

Most problematically, the central theme of the book, the relations among Jesus, salvation, and the plurality of religions, remains ambiguous. At times, the event and person of Jesus is the saving reality. The risen Jesus permeates all things, making new being possible. At other times, Jesus only exemplifies or encodes a pattern of death and resurrection which is thoroughly separable from him. New life comes from repeating the pattern of Jesus' life. To say that the Hindu encounters Jesus in Hinduism is one thing; to say that the Hindu encounters in Hinduism the pattern of self-renunciation and dedication to God which Jesus exemplified is another. Both christology and inter-religious dialogue will take quite different shapes depending on which path is taken. Similarly, Dawe usually speaks of Jesus as the absolute or final revelation of God only for Christians, but he also asserts that Jesus' "continuing work as Second Person of the Trinity is universal in scope" and that "Jesus, as exalted Lord, is omnipresent." How such assertions can form part of a single outlook is hard to imagine.

The temptation in mediation is to emphasize different themes in different contexts. The difficulty is then to put together the differing emphases into a single coherent and consistent understanding. My difficulty with Dawe's essay in mediation is that, despite its virtues, I cannot construct the single understanding.

Michael Root

Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary
Columbia, South Carolina