Wayne Northey: For any who embrace a peace theology, the profound implications of the “What It Means to Say” in the title (A Paradigm Shift in Christian Theology: What It Means to Say “God is Jesus”) are indeed foundation-shaking, or a paradigm shift as the title suggests. But for whom?, we respond.
That “God is Jesus” is commonplace for Christian peace theologians/peacemakers of every era. The “paradigm shift” I suggest is really therefore with two kinds of believers:
- those throughout Church history who have refused to read the New Testament as God’s final or ultimate self-revelation in Jesus may in fact feel confronted to genuinely wrestle with this (though this is nothing new);
- and those unwilling to wrestle to apply the implications of such a patently manifest theology to the realpolitik of whatever era and place may feel challenged to do so. (Okay this too is nothing new!)
In this writer’s view, there is no finer study on this at a profoundly exegetical level than Mennonite New Testament theologian Willard Swartley’s magnum opus:Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
The above said, the reality simply is this: a vast majority of theologians of every stripe for the greater part of two thousand years of Church History have been doing an end-run around the New Testament teaching — with all its implications — that “God is Jesus”. Given the track record, I ask: “Is that likely to change?” My cynical answer is built into the question…
I’m not entirely comfortable saying “God is Jesus,” for the reasons you clarify in the article (assumptions re: Jesus only theology, modalism, etc.). Because we are Trinitarians, we can say Jesus is God, but technically not God is Jesus… and yet, as Paul says, “ALL the fulness of the Godhead (divine nature) was embodied in Jesus.”
In any case, I absolutely get and track with your point. Zahnd and I would say that God is completely revealed in Jesus Christ, who is the one and only true image of God, or as Hebrews says, “The radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of God’s likeness.” To see Jesus is to see his Father, and this has implications. To the degree that the image of God we conceive is unChristlike, it is also heretical in the most formal and tragic (practically) sense.
Hi Brad.
Thanks for your comment. It is obviously directed to the author (Roger E. Olson) of the piece I highlight on my website with the title of the posting above.
Your two Scripture citations underscore that we’ll never get a clearer revelation of God than in Jesus – and your work consistently points to that. So my commentary is really to move Olson’s article, written with the history of doctrine in mind, to the very practical outworking of the kind of Christology he (and you and Brian Zahnd – and thank God also a long lineage of others over the centuries) points to with reference to peace/peacemaking, THE central organizing theme of the New Testament, as demonstrated by the meticulous exegetical work of Willard Swartley (as noted above).
Thanks for your reply, Wayne. It was as thoughtful as I’ve come to expect from you. Wonderful.