Jesus' Question: "Who do you say I am?" was not addressed only to his first disciples, but to all of us at all ages and countries. How many times have we asked ourselves this question and perhaps failed to give an adequate answer to suit the context of our personal problems?
Peter's answer, approved by Jesus himself, was also in the context of his biblical times: "You are the Christ" - the Messiah as prophesied in the Old Testament. That answer was quite accessible to Jesus's Jewish listeners, but not to us any longer. Too much has changed since that time in our overall worldview!
Peter's answer was even unsatisfactory to believers of the first five centuries when the Church had already cut itself off from Judaism, and became more gentile and philosophically sophisticated. Influenced by Greek philosophy, theologians started asking doctrinal questions about the person of Jesus and His salvation. They disagreed to such a point that in 325 Constantine summoned bishops from the East and West to the first Council at Nicaea to save his Roman Empire from splitting.
The questions asked at the seven councils in Asia Minor were numerous: "Who was this Jesus in whom we believe? Was He divine? Was He only human? Or both? If so, what was the nature of this union? Or was He part divine and part human? If two natures, how many persons, one or two? And so on.
Unfortunately, the Greek philosophical terms used at the Councils to give adequate answers to these difficult ontological questions were alien to the Gospel. In fact many of the difficulties at the Councils, and after, arose, and still arise, from this unsettled terminology. In 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the Christological formula (truly God and truly man) was a theological answer to the nature of Jesus's salvation.
During his lifetime, Jesus often referred to His death as ransom for the sins of the world. But only God can forgive sins - and therefore Jesus must be truly God. To save all humanity, and not just part of it, Jesus must also be truly human.
So far so good. But when it came to the union of these two natures, theologians were at a loss for words. The problem was shelved but not solved by the two doctrines of hypostatic union and communicatio idiomatum - what pertains to one nature of Christ pertains also to the other. Martin Luther, true to this doctrine, rightly maintained that God actually suffered and died on the cross. Luther was logical, but can God ever die? The Church's other interpretation, that Jesus only died in His humanity, is more theologically true, but also illogical.
The word hypostatis (person) has always been problematic. The famous Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, did not use the term 'person' with reference to the three members of the Trinity. He preferred the term 'mode of being', because the modern use of person as implied in the traditional doctrine of three distinct, coequal and coeternal persons might signify the existence of three different members with own wills and minds. Chalcedon was an attempt to live with this tension.
That is why the famous Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, on the 1,500th anniversary of Chalcedon asked a very provocative question: "Chalcedon - end or beginning?" In fact Chalcedon's formula did not end the debate, because it was neither exhaustive nor final. It was also inaccessible to reason as Hans Küng says.
In the 18th century, the heyday of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the two mysteries (the Trinity and the divinity of Christ) were the first to go. Man made independent use of reason free from Church authorities and divine revelation. It was the age of Liberalism. Liberal Protestant theologians, influenced by this Enlightenment mentality, wanted to explain Scripture only by reason, free from dogmatism. Christology had to be interpreted in a form intelligible to their own time. Reimarus and Lessing were the pioneers of this vision.
According to Reimarus there was no trace in Jesus of the revelation of new mysteries transcending human reason, like divine Sonship and the Trinity. That was a deathblow to Christian faith in general and to Chalcedon in particular.
However, the three most important Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, took quite a different road from that of the previous liberal theologians.
Karl Barth, for example, harshly criticised his liberal mentors for having made religion a matter of this world. In his Church Dogmatics (1932-67) he emphasised the validity of classical orthodoxy as presented in the Church creeds and patristic theologies, such as the divinity of Christ and divine revelation.
Hans Küng believes that the mentality of 'Jesus becoming man' (homo factus est) is alien to Jewish and originally Jewish-Christian thought, and derives from the first Hellenistic councils. In his book Credo, Küng writes that "In the context of the history of the Jew Jesus, the Greek conceptual model of 'incarnation' must to some degree be buried. 'Becoming man' means that in Jesus, God's word, will and love took on human form.
In His life Jesus did not act as God's double (a second God). Rather, He proclaimed, manifested and revealed the word and will of the one God. Jesus is in human form God's word, God's will, God's image, God's Son. He who sees me sees the Father' (John 14:9)." And Küng continues that in his original sense one can confess, "Credo, I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, Our Lord. (Credo, 60, 61). Rome refuses to associate with Küng's 'Low Christology' - the usual bitter fight between the magisterium and contemporary theology!
Various are Christological trends nowadays, such as Liberation Christology of Latin America, where Christ is identified with the poor as their liberator - Christ's salvation also as liberation from social, political and economic oppression. Chief exponents are Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutierrez, Segundo and Jon Sobrino. Another Christological trend is Feminist Christology which reveals the anguish of many women who feel badly treated by the male dominance in the Church. When referring to God, feminist thinker Elizabeth Johnson prefers to call Him "She who is".
We also encounter other intercultural Christologies in Africa and Asia where native theologians of previous missionary lands started to strip off the Western clothing of the Gospel and develop their own culturally relevant Christologies, known as African and Asian Christologies.
Who knows what Post-Modern Christology has in store for us? John Hick, for example, argues for a Pluralistic Christology. According to him, it is God, rather than Jesus, who is the centre of all religions of the world. Pluralism means that there is one Ultimate Reality and a plurality of varying human images of that Reality as experienced in the great world religions.
Karl Rahner has a completely different view as regards the salvation of the whole world. He firmly believes that salvation is available to all people who follow the light of their conscience, but also believes that salvation always comes from Christ, whether to those in the Church or to those outside it. According to Rahner however the latter attain their salvation only by virtue of the extension of God's grace in Christ to them. To make these convictions theologically understandable, he affirmed the view of 'Anonymous Christians' which should not be taken apart from his theological system.
The famous American theologian, Raymond Brown, in his book The Virginal Conception and bodily Resurrection writes: "Under re-examination today are the doctrines of creation, or original sin, of the Incarnation, and the human nature of Jesus, as well as, the virginal conception of Jesus and his bodily Resurrection." (p.11)
Some readers who took the trouble to walk with me through this long theological labyrinth of Christology may sincerely ask whether one can talk of Christ's kaleidoscope or rather of Christ as Cinderella in the hands of theologians?
One might also ask whether Chalcedon had not been Jesus's Pandora's box? But as Heraclitus says that the world is ceaselessly changing; like our worldview today. We are living in a different world where new difficult tensions crop up every day. We are justified in asking: how does Jesus come into our social, political, economic and international problems? What is His salvation for these post-modern problems?