And the aftertaste remains, so far as I can tell, in the mouths of a good many of the grandchildren. Hence the use of hermeneutics in the service of a. religious apologetic of the second, i.e., personal variety.
The Identity of Jesus Christ by Hans W. Frei
Introduction: The Approach to the Problem
The Problem of Presence
Christ Shares His Presence
It is a mystery because there is no precise parallel to it in ordinary human knowledge. Still, there is a great difference between this and the claim we have made concerning the unity of Christ’s presence and identity.
The Enigma Of Christ’s Presence
34;sacramental," and this, in the tradition of the church, has been the meaning nearest to the actual physical presence of Christ. In the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper the Lord is said to be present in such a way that he actually.
Does Jesus Have His Own Presence?
That is to say, does Jesus’ presence depend upon a literal and physical resurrection, or is it possible to think of the resurrection symbolically. They have done so by connecting the presence of Christ directly with the interior life of the Christian.
The Problem of Identity
Identity -- A Person’s Uniqueness
But the main reference in the description of the self as conscience is not the relation between past and present in the self. So far we have suggested that identity occurs at the point of total integration of the self by itself.
The Savior as Specific Man
In other words, we shall not cull them out of the Gospel as separable themes. Further, we do not arrive at the convictions and intentions of the authors by supplying them out of our own frame of reference and then attaching them to the Gospel writers. By claiming the unsubstitutable singular identity of Jesus in the resurrection, and the self- focus of his presence there, we are in their eyes denying the very. possibility of the presence of Christ now.
In connection with the search for the direct presence of Christ, we mentioned the tantalizing symbolic quality of so many of the signal events in the Gospels. This being the case, I shall not attempt to evaluate the historical reliability of the Gospel story of Jesus or argue the unique truth of the story on grounds of a true, factual "kernel" in it. In the next chapter we shall try to distinguish the Gospel story of the Savior from a common savior myth of the period.
Distortions of Christ’s Identity
Redeemed Redeemer in Myth and Gospel
Another is the manner of the savior’s activity, concerning which there are at least four interrelated distinctions between the Christian and Gnostic stories. The Gospel story is a demythologization of the savior myth because the savior figure in the Gospel story is fully identified with Jesus of Nazareth. This is also true of the Christ figure in Paul’s letters and of the Son in the Fourth Gospel.
Secondly, they differ in their accounts of the manner of salvation and of the savior s activity. In other words, the unity of presence and identity in the Gnostic myth lies in the acceptance of the common loss of both. For one thing, the unity of the latter lies solely in the savior’s own singular, unsubstitutable, and self-focused being.
Jesus Christ and Modern Christ Figures
This is the element in the story which stands in such marked contrast to the Gnostic savior myth. In the third place, there is a certain pattern in that unique personal existence which provides the bond between the individuality of the Savior and the cosmic scope of his activity. Furthermore, there is provided in the pattern of the suffering servant a continuity between Jesus and the history of Israel, and hence a way of identifying the followers of Jesus with one another.
Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (to be looked at in the next chapter) sets forth a version of the pattern of saving action in the form of an exchange. It is an abidingly innocent fall, consummated in the transfiguration of the very sacrifice the evil world extracts from the innocent man. With it goes another pattern, that of an increasing dominance of God’s initiative over that of Jesus in the last stages of the Gospel story.
The Pattern of Exchange
But this, we shall claim, is an obvious distortion of the original because there is no single clue -- not even love -- to unlock the character and deportment of Jesus in the Gospels. The pattern of exchange, or the vicarious identity of the Savior with the sinful, is sharpened to the point that the extreme. The question is not easily answered, but the answer spells the success or failure of the novel.
But it is kept from becoming stylized into an artificial figure or action, because there is an enrichment of the specific individual’s humanity. In Chapter 6 we asked if the identity of Jesus Christ -- completely one with his presence -- is perhaps simply a myth, like the identity of the savior in other dying and rising savior stories. The Gospel story’s specific identity of the Savior is bound to be. wholly different from that of any other equally specific savior, and they cannot be grouped into one class.
The New Testament Depiction of Jesus Christ
Identity Description and Jesus Christ
The identity of the Christian savior is revealed completely by the story of Jesus in the Gospels and by none other. The Persistence, Elusiveness, and Ultimacy of a Person’s Life The focus of the second category for identity description, embodied in the question, "Who is he?" is somewhat harder to specify. It is one of the bases for the coherence between public and private meaning in the use of words.
Neither the possessive relation to nor that of manifestation of the subject suggests that the body is a mere external accretion to the "real" self. There is no way to state more simply the identity of the self as manifest in and yet identical with its embodiment. Recall that we have stressed that intention is implicit action and that the name and the body are identifying marks of the self.
The Enacted Intention of Jesus
It is like that of the novelist who tells us from the inside, as it were, of his subject’s. Jesus’ obedience is set forth more clearly in the events of the final stage of his career. It is so by virtue of the coincidence of the intention of Jesus with that of God.
But, once again, it is in the connected narrative sequence of the last events of the Gospel story that we look for the coincidence of Jesus’. Shortly before, in the upper room, he had spoken to his disciples of the cup they shared as the blood of his covenant,. We may note the coexistence of Jesus’ power and helplessness when he stands silently before the accusations of the Roman governor.
Jesus and God
Yet, despite this fact, a distinction between the agency of God and that of Jesus remains, as the cry of the cross clearly indicates,. Up to this point his efficacy had come increasingly to the fore in the steadily decreasing scope and activity of Jesus and the increasing tempo of the authorities’. But when we turn to the actual accounts of the resurrection, the hand of God is scarcely in evidence at this point in the story.
Jesus of Nazareth, he and none other, marks the presence of the action of God. The identity of Jesus who preached and died and that of the risen Lord are one and the same. The task of transforming a narrative into such a scheme may be hardest of all in the case of the Gospels.
Jesus as Self-Manifested
Nonetheless, he retains something of the symbolic quality that he had in the first part of the accounts. Thus his witness to and embodiment of the Kingdom of God define who he is, but he is now, much more than in the infancy narratives, the. We find something of the same double emphasis in the reply to the question from John through his disciples concerning Jesus’ identity,.
It is in terms of these signs of the Kingdom that he is to be identified. We are still at a point at which Jesus is characterized by means of the Kingdom of God. This manifestation is expressed by a focus on Jesus alone in the passion account and the simultaneous fading out of the Kingdom of God and its titles.
Jesus Identified in His Resurrection
We should ask, then, if the Gospel account of the resurrection can be understood to be a myth. The literary structure of the account, we have said, points in favor of the thesis that the resurrection account (or, better, the passion-resurrection account as an unbroken unity) is a. For the believer, on the other hand, the claim of the narrative concerning the resurrection is not.
It seems difficult, further, to deny that the question of fact tends to be raised beyond the literary analysis of the account. It is the primary content of what little we have in the way of description of the sequence of Jesus’ life in the earliest preaching of Christians. This, it appears, is the testimony of the New Testament and, hence, the understanding of believers.
The Presence of Christ
The Pattern Of Christ’s Presence
Fourthly, when Christians speak of the Spirit as the indirect presence now of Jesus Christ and of the Cod who is one with him, they refer to the church. Reference to the Spirit is the affirmation of Christ’s indirect presence in this unity, which constitutes the very being of the church. The intention-action pattern of the story that is the church differs from that of Jesus in at least two respects.
History is public history -- the intention-action pattern formed by the interaction of the church with mankind at large;. This is the Christian’s hope in the future mode of the presence of Jesus Christ, of which the interaction of life in the church and the world is for him a token and a pledge. What in the meantime of the spatial and temporal manner in which the present mode of Christ’s presence is effectively there for the believer.
Epilogue: A Meditation for the Week of Good Friday and Easter
In the sweep of this narrative we are bound together, able to identify with and recall afresh its sorrow, its sense of the innocent victim dying at the hands and in behalf of the guilty. Two things bear mention here: first, the sense of recall, reenactment and identification in the retelling of this story gains from its association with ritual performance. One of the extraordinary things about this story is that, in the words of Romans 6:9-10, Christ died to sin once for all.
The shape of the story being mirrored in the shape of our life is the condition of its being meaningful for us. Many of you will recall Schweitzer’s perverse but great account of Jesus’ ministry and hope in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The crosses of Christ’s many brothers and sisters are not identical with his cross, any more than the shape of our life is identical with the shape of the events of this week in the Gospels.
