a wonderful savior

To pick up where I left off last time (and yes, I know I’ll have to catch up a few days sometime; I started this entry on Wednesday, and have been hung up finishing it)… Here’s an excerpt from the second chapter of Philippians, which I linked to last time:

…being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name…

Jesus’ martyrdom (and resurrection, which I’ll address in a different entry) is qualitatively different from the others I mentioned before. Everything in Jesus’ life was supernatural, in the sense of stretching beyond what what is possible for each of us. I can imagine he had charisma (that’s part of what I think was meant when people said he “spoke with authority”) and compassion (favorite verse for elementary school kids to memorize when required to choose one: “Jesus wept.”), but that he displayed them in ways just enough subtly different that every act was miraculous.

At this point, to further contemplate who Jesus was requires a bit of mysticism. I generally make no secret of the fact that I spent several years, at the end of high school and the beginning of college, holding onto anti-Trinitarian theology. I couldn’t make sense of Jesus being God incarnate—not just from an essential perspective, but from a redemptive perspective. I mean that I wasn’t just confused about how Jesus could be both God and man (that’s a mystery never to be explained), but why Jesus could be a savior if he was something so different from us. In one of Paul’s most meaningful but most perplexing metaphors, he describes Jesus as the “last Adam”, exactly paralleling Adam in that sin entered the world through Adam while the world is saved from sin through Christ. For that to be so, I reasoned, Jesus had to be just like Adam in the beginning—wholly created, without any mark of wrongdoing—so that he could choose the right way on behalf of humanity and lead us back to God. (Which reasoning, at the time, obliged me to believe in an historical Adam.) Jesus was still to be exalted as our eternal ruler (good, just, and able to perfectly instruct and uplift us) and our intermediary with God (only the righteous can be in God’s presence and live). But it made no sense for him to be God, as well. (The time when I began to turn from a strong anti-Trinitarian position was when my dad explained to me that Trinitarianism isn’t an answer to the question of God’s nature—it’s simply a statement of that question.)

That position doesn’t really stand up to other parts of the Bible, however. The opening of John’s gospel and the opening of the letter to the Hebrews, among other places, acknowledge that God (the Father) made the world through Christ. I have no idea what that means, but it at least means Jesus is eternal. And Isaiah prophesied that his suffering and death would in fact take the place of our punishment; he humbled himself, then was humiliated.

So much more to say, but it’s gotten late once again and I’ve taken too many days off. So I’ll pick up some of these threads later.