Just Another Crucifiable 1st Century Jew?

Last updated on: December 14, 2015 at 12:08 am by Scot McKnight

Just Another Crucifiable 1st Century Jew? 2015-12-12T22:11:50-06:00 Scot McKnight

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It is Samuel V. Adams’ contention that the historical method cannot lead us to knowledge of God, and so his book — The Reality of God and Historical Method — is both a critique of N.T. Wright’s “critical realism” and an attempt to ground knowledge of God in theology (not history). There is a longstanding tension between NT experts/exegetes/historians and systematic theologians, not least because the latter often don’t do exegesis, assume conclusions, carry on the dialectics of the history of theology as if that history can all be assumed, and then also because the theologians use categories not organic to the NT and its world. Theologians, Adams contends, as he carries on the Kierkegaard to Barth to TF Torrance theological tradition, don’t think the historian can take us to God.

That theologians and historians proceed differently is well known, but few are as explicit about it as Adams. Here is a good example of what I mean:

… that this knowledge comes about in a reconciled relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It is this God, revealed in this way, of whom theology must speak, and it cannot do so apart from the sort of confession that Chalcedonian Christology affirms. Apart from this, Jesus is just another “crucifiable first-century Jew?” (142, added emphasis)

Think with me about this for a moment. Does this not mean that no one could understand God until Chalcedon? (Ironic that he opens by quoting the apostle Paul from Colossians 1:15-20.) The apostolic tradition recorded in the NT is hereby swallowed into a mode of thought from four centuries later, right? What does this say about the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura?

The historian doesn’t operate the way Adams does. The historian seeks to know what the text says or what the event was or what was said by investigating know-able evidence in context and then draws conclusions on the basis of that knowledge. The historian of the NT will bracket Chalcedonian categories, not because he or she disagrees with them but because of anachronism. As I read Adams, one can’t know unless one assumes Chalcedon, which is a way of saying the only ones who know are the theologians, orthodox ones at that, and Barthian-Torrancian at that.

He makes the limits of the historian known in this:

But to reiterate, knowledge that this is God with us is not derived from historical reasoning, but from the new birth that comes from God (142, added emphasis). [Thus, epistemology is rooted in soteriology, and that means the new birth dips us into knowledge of God in Christ and only in the new birth can this happen.]

This Chalcedonian Christology is reshaped or clarified by T.F. Torrance’s understanding of the relation of God to humans in Christ, in the hypostasis. Torrance breaks this into two movements: the anhypostasis and the enhypostasis. The former focuses on “God the Son” coming “to his creation” and assuming “humanity.” Logos/God the Son comes to humanity to become the person of Jesus Christ. The second term, enhypostasia refers to what he calls (mistakenly for the exegete, for the historian) “the return of the Son of Man,” by which he means “humanity, Christ’s human nature, is brought into the Godhead in this particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, by way of God’s ‘taking up’ humanity into the trinitarian communion, through the one hypostasis that is the Son of God, now fully human and fully divine” (146). Leading to these:

Knowledge of God is realized for humanity only in the knowledge that the Son has of the Father. We are given the gift of participation in this knowledge by the gift of the Spirit, who, in the act of rebirth, makes us to be subjects, in Christ, of God as object (147).

It is human subjectivity taken up into the subjectivity of the Son as one subjectivity that makes the incarnation such a profound and transformative doctrine for our understanding of what it means to be reconciled to God (147).

Which brings Adams back to the problem at hand: NT Wright’s historical method called critical realism and its inadequacy for knowledge of God. Here are Adams’ own words, by way of question:

Anhypostatically, when one is investigating the person of Jesus Christ—his aims and intentions as well as his acts—one is investigating the one divine subject, the Son of God. Yet enhypostatically, when one is doing this, one is also investigating the fully human nature of this one divine subject. How does one investigate, according to the normal methods of the historian, the subjectivity of the Son of God, even as he is given to us in his assumed full humanity? (148)

Framing it that way would probably drive off the historian. Adams creates a closed circle of language and categories that can only be known and investigated by way of a Barthian-Torrancian hermeneutic.

Adams finishes this christology section with a look at the baptism, and has an unusual interpretation. Inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus was real and our resurrection will be real, he has this to say about a life toward death prior to our real death:

My suggestion is that the act of going in (or under) the water, symbolically or actually, rather than being simply a remembrance of Jesus death, or a sacramentally effectual washing, or a crossing of the Jordan, or an ordeal that must be gone through symbolically, is in fact the pledge that the life the baptized will now live is a life of discipleship lived on the way to the cross (150).

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