A Challenging Thesis

The thesis submitted by Philip McCosker for the doctor of philosophy degree at Cambridge University is a challenge to even the most skilled theological scholar. He ploughs deep furrows in the field of philosophical theology and more specifically the area known to theologians as Christology, also known as the study of the person and work of Christ. The topic is indeed mysterious, mystical and paradoxical.

McCosker stated his hypothesis thus: “that one textual marker of the mysteriousness of the mysteries of Christianity – one of the expressions of the theological mystery – can be loosely described as its paradoxicality.” The mystery of which he writes is the true nature of Christ as both divine and human, as contained in the Chalcedonian Creed, “truly God and truly Man…. Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis.”

Without doubt this is a very abstruse discussion with which few will wish to grapple. To provide a theological basis for his argument McCosker looks to the work of several late mediaeval and renaissance theologians in the Roman Catholic tradition with mystical attributes, namely Bonaventure (c.1217-1274), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c.1327), Nicholas of Cura (1401-1474) and Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629). 

By no means limiting himself to these “base authors” (McCosker’s term), he also refers frequently to the ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle as well as Church Fathers of the early Christian Church in both its  Eastern and Western traditions. It was the participation of these so-called Church Fathers in the many church councils that led to the formulation of the historic creeds of Nicea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). These creeds determined the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - held by most Christian traditions to this day.

McCosker’s concern is the paradox that persists in the context of this doctrine and especially as related to the difference and identity of the relationship between God and Jesus Christ. His discussion begins with a definition of paradox in its many forms. Then he analyses four distinct “configurations” or “models” of paradox related to the nature of Christ: Mixture of the divine and human; Middle, Centre and Circumference; Enhypostasia; and Kenosis. 

None of these models fully satisfies our human need (or McCosker’s theological referents) to describe exactly what we mean when we say, as many New Testament authors assert, that Jesus Christ was at one and the same time, both divine and human. McCosker’s purpose is to analyse the core issue in what we mean by the connective and.

If McCosker has any preference for the above four models, it is enhypostasia. He feels that his base authors “will show the intrinsic connection between this doctrine in chistological expression and its expression in theologies of the Christian life. (McCosker’s italics) It directly and explicitly relates to and deeply influences our lives in the everyday world as Christians.

The term enhypostasia is a Greek word that denotes how “the Son and the Father have some kind of reciprocal … existence whereby they can be said to be ‘in’ each other.” At the start of his chapter on enhypostasia McCosker lists two quotations from the New Testament exemplifying the term: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” (John 14:11) and “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20)

After searching the writings of the Church Fathers without much success, McCosker turns to his ‘base authors’. There he found that “this christological model yields a christological account of the christian life in various ways in Eckhart, Nicholas and Berulle with their different accents.” However, McCosker also found that with regard to his investigation of the various models of paradox, “that paradox appears to involve two senses of opposition. The divine is characterised by a peculiar kind of opposition such that it can assume humanity ‘within’ its own hypostasis.”  One would therefore conclude that the true nature of Christ in inevitably bound up with the nature of God. This places the whole subject of the nature of Christ as both divine and human in the realm of a mysterious and mystical reality we name “God.”

McCosker’s least favoured model is kenosis which he sees as prominently held by modern Protestant theologians from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. McCosker found no evidence of kenosis (based on Philippians 2:5-11) in the writings of the Church Fathers and rarely in his select “base authors.” Even in the title of his chapter on kenosis: “a wrong turn: divine or human?” his conclusion regarding this model is “at base – an exclusive, displacing one. This model did not display the parsings which the other models, especially mixture and middle, did. God and humans are conceived in this model as in competition: in the theories of the modern kenoticists this model is of the “or” kind, even though most of the kenoticists only gingerly dip a toe in the corrosive waters of this logic, not diving in as Gess does.” (W.F. Gess was a German theologian of the 19^th century “who thought that God straightforwardly desisted from being divine when human and … gave up inessential attributes while incarnate.”)

Our Christian doctrine of Christ rests finally on our doctrine of God. By also sounding his base authors’ doctrine of God, McCosker finds that “most of the authors we have looked at reveal a paradoxical core of the descriptions of God…. All our authors share a view of the unity of God which is dynamic and overflowing; for none of them is God static, fixed, and definable…. An adequate christology depends on an adequate doctrine of God, and vice versa.”

McCosker realizes that his analysis does not exhaust the subject. His final words are prophetic: It preserves, we may say, an open wound in the craft of theology. It encourages us not to lose our sense of wonder at the newness of the Gospel and the person it reveals, and to discipline our theology to that wonder, and make our theology appropriately and precisely humble.

It would have been a thrilling experience to have been present when Philip McCosker faced his examiners who listened to his presentation of his thesis and defended it against their challenges. His aunt and uncle live in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and were the source of McCosker’s thesis for my review. Educated at both Harvard and Yale Universities, McCosker is Research Associate to the Norris- Hulse Professor of Divinity and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University. He is currently engaged in the preparation of a book based on his thesis with the title, Christ the Paradox: Reconceiving Ressoucement Theology. 

WHAT IS SCRIPTURE?

In our Bible study sessions as a group of seniors, we never did answer that question. The late Professor Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, former distinguished scholar of comparative religion, at McGill and Harvard Universities, openly acknowledged that whatever else it may be, scripture is a human activity. In his final work, What Is Scripture?  (Fortress Press, 1993) Smith also asserted that no one tradition, religious or secular, no one civilization is adequate to do justice to our modern awareness of the multiplicity of scriptures. Smith further questioned whether for all practical purposes today “scripture” is a viable category.

One of the basic functions of scripture throughout the ages has been to make real for religious people at least that God has something to say to humanity. For those non-theists who insist that there is no God, scripture in the sense of some literature having existential meaning might say that the universe has something to communicate to us.

One of Smith’s conclusions is worth quoting: One might wonder whether any theist today, confronted with our vaster diversity of scriptures throughout the world and the diversity of readings of those scriptures over the centuries might emulate these Buddhist theorists by speculating that God has in fact remained (verbally) silent, yet has set up the human situation in such a way that diverse peoples in diverse conditions would have scriptures capable of letting Him/Her/It enter their lives and capable of guiding them to Him/Her/It and to spiritual richness.

Secularists would argue that the universe is silent and scripture is a strictly human function. Yet that does not explain why there is a nearly universal human propensity to create scripture and to find in them inspiration, nurture and moral guidance that makes sense for their daily living.

Is the age of scripture coming to an end? Some would say that it is. Yet the fundamental historicity of scripture over several millennia suggests that humanity has not yet reached that point. There is as yet no historical evidence that the transcendent dimension of human thought has disappeared. To quote Smith again: It has been one until now standard element, yet only one, in the complex patterns in and by which human beings  have lived…. The basic question is not about scripture, but about us.

A daily devotional posting on the internet by the United Church of Christ (USA) has been given the title, God Is Still Speaking. The assumption of these daily readings based on brief excerpts of the Christian Bible assumes that the religious practice of opening to the transcendent spiritual reality we call God is still valuable in the present world with all its violence and vicissitudes. But as is so much else today, making use of the scriptures of any religious tradition in any way is still a matter of individual choice.

PAUSE AT THE THIN PLACES.

 “Thin places – where heaven and earth come closer.” That was the heading of a New York Times article three years ago. “This column will change your lives,” roared another article in the usually sedate Guardian in London, UK.   “We’re in the territory, here, of the ineffable: the stuff we can’t express because it’s beyond the power of language to do so.” Ireland is littered with these places a writer on travel in Ireland wrote.

So what are they, these places where the veil between our earthly – or earthy – existence and a transcendent, spiritual existence vanishes?

To me they are not places so much as experiences.  Totally unexpected moments of delightful ecstasy when one sees and hears and knows that one is closer to the infinite, transcendent reality we call God. An experience we simply cannot have in the hurly-burly of everyday life.

And yet I had one such experience recently in, of all places, a hospital emergency room. No, it wasn’t a room; it was a warren of corridors where patients like me waited endlessly for attention from a nurse or a doctor or someone to transport us to another part of the hospital for more extended care.

I lay in that place for forty-eight hours before being moved to the RAZ, a large room - called a zone not a ward - where one waited in a bed slightly more comfortable. Sooner or later one would be assessed more completely while waiting for a bed in the medical or surgical ward where more extensive treatment could be given.

This thin place had happened earlier during a sleepless night as the business and desperate noises of emergency medicine went on all about me. I was in pain but not as severely as others nearby. Not like the young man in the throes of withdrawal from drug addiction and had lost his methadone. Or the older man like myself calling out endlessly for someone – anyone - to help him find his wallet then finally demanding to see the police to lay charges on whoever had stolen it.

In the midst of this cacophony of an emergency department in crisis, I suddenly felt how grateful I was for the care I was being given in such hectic circumstances. My immediate need for pain relief had been met by a young nurse with a hypodermic needle applied to my left buttock.

Perhaps it was the morphine taking effect that launched me into the ecstasy I experienced. I felt lifted beyond my immediate situation and wrapped in the warmth of a presence I had rarely experienced before. I realized that I needed to make some changes in how I was living toward the end of my ninth decade. My communication of faith and the religious life available to anyone would henceforth have to be in a different form. With means like this blog I could reach beyond the circle of a few friends who gathered on Tuesday mornings for coffee and conversation about scripture passages I had pointed out in some preliminary notes posted online a few days earlier.

Furthermore, my wife’s declining health was a major factor in whatever changes I had to make. This revelation of future possibilities reminded me of another moment all of sixty- four years ago when another thin place experience had made me realize how marriage would involve endless sacrifice reflecting the sacrifice of Christ himself. So I proposed marriage to the young woman. She accepted and our lives together since then have fulfilled for both of us all that thin place prophesied.

When the momentary ecstasy dissolved into the reality of my surroundings, I knew that I had been richly blessed by my stay in that emergency ward. My experience could only be described as being given the best of care in the worst of circumstances.

Thank God we can pray daily that the new hospital we can see from the windows in our senior residence suite will be opened as promised by the end of this year. In the meantime, we can pause to experience the richness of spiritual life in those thin places.