To have and to hold (cultivating correct Christology)

In this post modern culture of emergent villages and emerging churches, I find it absolutely necessary to plumb the depths of Christs’s humanity and humility as well as His divinity and exaltation.

It seems that the emergents overstress His mission of social values and His humble humanity. In the same breath, it also seems that evangelicals put most, if not all attention, on His divinity and exaltation in His sovereignty at the expense of a real revelation of His man-hood. Both of these realities need to be explored and appreciated simultaneously because we do, after all, believe Him to be both fully God and fully man, being fully the one while also being fully the other. The ancient church Fathers referred to this doctrine as the hypostatic union. I fear in this generation we are on the verge of minimizing Christ’s life altogether by separating these two entities through hyperactive speculation devoid of encountering His actual person.

I, in turn, feel that it would be of great benefit to the church in America to wrestle with Kierkegaard’s question of contemporaneousness with Christ, the question of if I were a contemporary of Christ, would I have clung to Him and His claims and received Him in the fullness of what He said and did as I do now, post resurrection and post historical framework of His life? This question forces us to lay aside religious presupposition and find Him in reality, doctrine aside for the time being, to grapple with Him like Jacob did in the flesh (Gen. 32:22-32). Without a correct understanding of His humanity we will be lacking in the full revelation of His divine nature; likewise, if we cling to His sovereignty without knowing His humanity, we will lack confidence and assurance of His priestly function to heal and deliver with compassion and sympathy.

Exploring this in such a way may have with it the potential to be the beginnings of bringing clarity to the term “Christian” in the west. My point is not to solve the schism between post-modernity and evangelical orthodoxy but to bring our attention to the fullness of Christ. All else is a waste of time and resource.