[[Dear Sister, I have read some of this blog and I wonder when you write about the hiddenness of eremitical life if you don't disparage Jesus by referring so strongly to his humanity. Jesus was God, a Divine person, so to speak of his "ordinariness" or even his faith in God demeans him. How would you respond to that objection?]]
Great question. Thanks. I suppose my response goes back to one of the first theology classes I ever had. This was an undergraduate Introduction to New Testament and made an impression I have never left behind. The professor asked us who Jesus was or is and he let us answer in all of the ways we thought not just described, and identified Jesus, but also how we most honored him. I said something about Jesus being the Son of God and John (Dwyer) smiled, nodded, and said, "Okay, bearing that in mind, tell me who God is!"( After all, if the best, truest, or even the highest thing we can say about Jesus is that he is the Son of God, we really should be able to say who God is apart from Jesus.) But of course, Jesus is the One who reveals God exhaustively to us; he shows us who God is in ways that transcend any of the partial revelations we have in the Hebrew Scriptures or in other religions. Moreover, he makes the Creating, Saving God present in space and time in ways not achieved except fragmentarily in the Law, Prophets, Judges, and others. (Remember to reveal in this usage means not only making visible and making known, but also to make real in space and time.)
So, the question, I think, is really how does Jesus do that, and then, what does this mean about his humanity? First, I believe Jesus reveals both who God is and what it means to be truly human. He does both in exhaustive and definitive ways and paradoxically, he does both at the very same time. I believe that this is a major part what the Christological Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, for instance, were trying to say in the categories of that day and age. Secondly, I recognize that Christology can be done either "from above" or from below"; one starts with Jesus' divinity, the other with Jesus' humanity. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses and each must address these if people are truly to understand who Jesus was and is for us. One of the weaknesses, I believe, in all Christology from above is that in starting with Jesus as God, it never really properly "gets to" much less esteems Jesus' humanity; nor does it really see Jesus' humanity as a true model for or source of our own. I believe it also may prevent us from treating our earth with the reverence and responsible stewardship we are called to.
Doing Christology (and all theology in light of this) "from below" not only shows us the depth of God's kenotic love, it also reveals how truly we who are called to authentic human life fall short of or "miss the mark" of that very goal. When we do theology beginning with Jesus' humanity it is very much easier to see that what it means to be truly human means to live in an ineffably intimate relationship with God (we cannot be truly human alone!!) and to become entirely transparent to the Love-in-Act of the God who wills to be Emmanuel, God-With-Us. What I have said about eremitical hiddenness and extraordinary ordinariness (cf Hiddenness and Extraordinary Ordinariness, and Essential Hiddenness) is meant to indicate that whenever our reality is allowed to become all that it is created to be, meaning whenever God is allowed to be God-With-Us in and through us, nothing at all is "ordinary", or, maybe better, the extraordinary we so easily denigrate, demean, and diminish, is really and truly extraordinary, even sacramental. We, like Jesus, are called to make God really and truly present in this world. Jesus reveals this is the very nature of what it means to be human just as he reveals God as Emmanuel!
I realize this is not a complete answer to the implications of your questions, and certainly it is no Christological treatise, but to be honest, I don't have the energy or the motivation to write such a thing, and certainly not on this blog! I do not deny the aim of what the Christological Councils wanted to affirm about Christ and his relationship to the one he called Abba, Father, and certainly I have studied these Councils (and the language they used!) but even so, I do not speak, live, nor understand reality in terms of the language (words and categories of thought and understanding) that were used in those Councils. Further, I believe that that language itself fell far short of capturing or expressing the paradoxes of the Christ Event fully and definitively revealed on the Cross!
Now, I completely agree that all human language falls short of the heart of our faith, a Mystery that is ineffable, but the Greek categories of the Christological Councils in some important ways, made faith harder rather than easier and introduced obstacles into the way we see ourselves and the world God entrusted to us. (cf for instance, "Pebble, Peach, Pooch, Person: in Elizabeth Johnson's Come Have Breakfast, pp 159-168 as a critique of "the so-called "hierarchy of being".) Semitic thought, and certainly Christianity itself, is profoundly paradoxical where Greek thought is not. This means that being people of faith in God and his revelation in Jesus the Christ, calls for us to let go of certain categories of thought if we really want to understand what the Christ Event and the NT reveals to us.
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