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Recently I’ve been reading J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement, an exploration of atonement from an Anabaptist perspective that assumes the nonviolence of God. Weaver discards both traditional Anselmian substitutionary atonement and Abelardian Moral Influence atonement, embracing instead the earlier conception of atonment (popular with the church fathers) “Christus Victor“. In Christus Victor, Christ’s death is seen as a ransom to the Devil; Weaver reformulates this theory as “narrative Christus Victor”, explains the death of Christ not as a desirable facet of God’s plan for humanity or as instance of “divinely-sanctioned violence”, but rather as the inevitable result of a life lived in opposition to the violent powers of oppression in the world. The Resurrection thus demonstrates that the rule of these powers is shattered forever, and that the Kingdom of God is breaking into the world. Narrative Christus Victor emphasizes the entire life and work of Christ as central to the concept of atonement — not just the crucifixion and resurrection, which are here viewed as the natural result and final victory, respectively, of Christ’s message.
In three consecutive chapters of the book, Weaver examines the challenges to traditional substititonary atonement made by black theology, feminist theology, and womanist theology. Contextual theologies are especially valuable in considering the nature of Christ’s work becuase all three grow out of the historical situations of oppressed groups — exactly the sorts of group that Jesus himself focused on (Luke 4.18f). These examples of what might be termed “theology from the margins” all deal significant blows not just to traditional atonement, but also to traditional conceptions Christology.
Black, feminist, and womanist theologies stand largely outside of the doctrinal tradition of the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds, and a central point that Weaver makes is that these creeds are just as contextualized and just as much a product of specific historical circumstances as are the theologies of various oppressed groups. In other words, the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition is not a definition of “universal orthodoxy” any more than, say, the writings of James Cone, but the white European church has long assumed that this tradition is normative because of its status as the church of the privileged. All three of the contextual theologies that Weaver discusses note that the Christology embodied in the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition de-emphasizes the ethical character of the Incarnation in favor of abstract metaphysical definitions (hypostasis, etc.). Indeed, the portion of the Nicene Creed that talks about Jesus skips straight from his birth to the crucifixion, without so much as a mention of his ministry. Black theology in particular notes that the philosophical abstraction of traditional orthodoxy allowed slave owners and other oppressors to be “good Christians” while systematically ignoring Christ’s ethical message.
All this is not to say that the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds lack value in seeking to understand the person of Christ. But I believe that the Christology embodied in these statements is incomplete, and indeed is rather unimportant when compared to the things that are left out — especially ethics. Those of us who don’t hail from marginalized groups (i.e., those of us who are born into privilege) must recognize that our theological tradition is contextual too, and that its defects (especially its separation of metaphysical Christology from ethics) have been used to inflict oppression and injustice against others, including other Christians. We must supplement our philosophical Christology with what I would term a “narrative Christology”, a doctrine of Jesus that focuses on his ministry and life, which embodied a particular ethical message that should be normative for all Christians. A properly-formulated narrative Christology would reflect the insights of the contextual theologies of the oppressed and would help return the privileged segments of the Church to a fuller knowledge of what it means to be Christian.
Narrative Christology could very well be non-creedal, drawing from the Gospels alone rather than from “standardized” statements. But if a creed were needed (either for liturgical purposes or to help elevate narrative Christology to the status of the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition), I would suggest one like this:
We confess Jesus Christ of Nazareth, born of Mary in the lowliest of places and amidst the oppression of Empire. We confess his message, a proclamation of good news to the poor, of liberty to captives, of sight to the blind, of freedom to the oppressed.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth resisted the temptations of the systems of the world. He healed the sick, cast out demons, fed the hungry, and preached to the poor. He brought a message of peace into a world of violence and a message of love into a world of legalism.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth challenged the hypocrisy, corruption, and oppression of the religious and political leaders of his day, and that he announced a new Kingdom in the midst of the old. We confess that for this, he was arrested, brought to trial, and crucified, the death of a criminal or insurrectionist.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth arose from death. We confess that in his resurrection he triumphed over the powers of oppression and evil that had killed him, and that in his resurrection he demonstrated the final efficacy of the message he proclaimed.
In the life and the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth we place our faith. Amen.
Narrative Christology, whether in creedal or non-creedal form, thus fills a critical gap in the most emphasized parts of traditional Christology. It is my hope that methods of Christological exploration like the one I describe here can be used to bridge the gaps between the theology of the church of privilege and the theologies of the oppressed. Vox victimarum, vox Dei.
On his blog Unorthdoxology, David Henson recently asked a question: What if God had become woman instead [of man]? I’ve asked questions of this sort myself, such when I pondered the possibility of Jesus returning as female in the Second Coming. But now, triggered by Henson’s post and by some reading I’ve been doing, I want to address a much more fundamental question. Why, the first time around, did God decide to become man? For someone like me, who believes that the Bible teaches the full equality of men and women (and who believes that God transcends gender), this is an important question, with real implications for understanding the Incarnation.
The past week or so I’ve been reading Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be. Wink is brilliant. This is the second book of his that I’ve read (the first being the short work Jesus and Nonviolence), and already he is one of my favorite theologians, with N. T. Wright and Stanley Hauerwas. The Powers That Be is based on his award-winning Powers trilogy, and concerns Jesus’ message about what Wink calls the “domination system” of the world. Wink puts forward a view of the powers of the world as fallen but redeemable, and advances a methodology of nonviolence to further the redemptive grace and love of God.
I haven’t finished reading the book, but I have completed Chapter 3, which details Jesus’ answer to domination. The chapter has a section on Christ’s interactions with women. It blew my mind. I had already figured out that Jesus treated women unconventionally for his day (read John 4), but it wasn’t until I read Wink’s analysis last night that I understood the full extent of the Gospel portrayal of Jesus’ radical notions on the value of women. As Wink writes, “his approach to women had no parallel in ‘civilized’ societies since the rise of patriarchy over three thousand years before his birth”.
For example, in Luke 13 Jesus heals a women, and thereafter calls her a “daughter of Abraham”. Wink notes that this title is found nowhere else in ancient Jewish writings; by inventing it, Jesus made the radical claim that women were coequal with men (“sons of Abraham”) in the Covenant with God, not participants in the Covenant through their husbands or fathers. An even more disquieting (for patriarchists) statement by Christ is found in Mark 3. Jesus states that “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”. Wink writes: “Note the deliberate omission of the father…. That this omission … is no accident is shown by Jesus’ statement ‘Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father–the one in heaven’ (Matt. 23.9). In the new family of Jesus there are only children, no patriarchs.” Christ makes these claims not to devalue the legitimate role of fathers in families, but rather to utterly undermine the oppressive patriarchal domination systems that characterized ancient Israel.
This leads me back to my original question: Why did Christ come as a man? –especially in light of his clear hatred of patriarchy and his loving treatment of women? I believe that it is this very rejection of patriarchal oppression that explains God’s choice of gender for the Incarnation. Had God been born a woman, her rejection of patriarchy could indeed have spurred women to action, and ultimately led to female liberation; yet, in a patriarchal culture, it would have done nothing for men. But in the context of the first century, the repudiation of male domination by a man would have brought notice and even wonderment (see John 4.27) among other men. The Kingdom of God alone can set the oppressed and the oppressors free. God could have easily freed women by coming by as a woman (for obviously women do not need men to save them); but Christ came as a man so that, by treating women as equals and modeling their liberation, he could also free men from a system that was turning them into oppressors and thus was destroying their humanity. Jesus’ message, a message made possible by his maleness in the Incarnation, does the impossible: it redeems us all, liberating women and men alike.
As a Christian with a high view of Scripture, I believe in the full equality of women and men.
I fully support women’s ordination. I think that the idea that men have some kind of inherent moral authority over women is not only wrong but dangerously wrong. (For those of you who think that these views don’t align with Scripture or with my asserted high view of the latter, take a look at this site.) I also do not believe that God has an inherent gender: he is neither inherently male, nor is she inherently female. The biblical portrayal of God as male is primarily due to the necessities and norms of the cultures within which the Bible was composed, not to some actual divine gender quality. Men and women equally bear the image of God (Genesis 1.27).
As a Christian with a high view of Scripture, I also believe in the second coming of the divine Jesus Christ, an event referenced throughout the New Testament. (Incidentally, the modern American idea of a ‘rapture’ is, in my opinion, a theological absurdity based on a serious misreading of the one single biblical text with any hint of the idea.) The second coming of Christ has been a key belief throughout the history of Christianity.
Believing then that men and women are equal, that God has no gender, and that the divine Jesus will return, a question naturally arises.
What if Christ returned as a woman?
Just asking this question would shock a heckuva lot of people. In fact, some of you may already be branding me a heretic, or at least a misguided wannabe theologian with too much time on his hands. But I believe that if we take the Bible seriously, this question must be asked.
I brought up this idea to my cousin Mike, an actual theology student (at Yale), to see if he could think of any biblical objections to the idea. Nothing. He found the possibility intriguing. He had, as usual, an interesting insight: Christ returning as a woman would catch many Christians totally off guard, just like Christ’s original coming, as a humble carpenter and itinerant preacher, caught many of the Jews totally off guard, since most expected a liberating warrior-messiah-king. To expand on Mike’s thought: Maybe, like the Jews before the Incarnation, we’re reading the biblical descriptions in a way that totally leaves out what could actually happen. There’s a nice symmetry there, and it’s consistent with the way God works in the world (ie, in upside-down, least-expected ways) to think that Jesus could show up as a woman.
The return of Christ to Earth is often spoken of as a surprising event, unlooked-for, ‘like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5.9). What better way to surprise the world than for God to appear in female form?
