In olden times (my youth) we often talked about the Word. That is, this product was the Last Word of Whatever, meaning there was no way to make a better product. Hence, the Last Word. Or, that product was the First Word in Whatever, meaning, well, the same thing as being the Last Word.
The Word, you see, communicates. The Word, Logos, speaks, resonates, echoes.
About 500 hundred years before the Advent of the Christ, prominent Greek philosophers adopted the Logos to convey information about that which gives shape (form) and relationship movement and meaning) for the material world. In the philosophical/theological sense the Logos gives form, shape and life. We can take the Word as that, when adapted to the Christ, offers to believers a life of meaning for now and hope for hereafter.
Skeptics look at the ancient history (500 BC, as noted above) and rush to the gnostic heresy. In that ancient mess Jesus is spirit only, if anything at all. Jesus as spirit does not need to be divine, at least not solely divine, apart from humankind. To the gnostics we are all spiritual, potentially divine, with a divine spark that needs only to be fanned into flame. The writer of the epistle I John is answering the gnostics in I John 1:1 when he writes, “The Word was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have handled-this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life.”
Do what you will with the story, the early Church teaches Jesus as the God-Man, fully divine and fully human. There is no way to find otherwise. Jesus demonstrates just how we are to live as Human before God.
And Jesus makes Himself visible, audible and tactile for our senses during His earthly life. He is the most amazing. In fact, He is incomparable.
When we have such a subject for our adoration (worship) how shall we look away from Him? Yet our Post-Christian theological education, whether institutional or ecclesiastical, seems Hell-bent (literally) on ignoring Jesus, or, at least, diluting or at hand, diminishing Him.
Why?
The despised Apostle Paul (despised because he suggests Corinthian women learn to be quiet in church and tend toward their husbands) flies all over Galatian Christians for being so easily bewitched by another gospel. The Galatian Christians have counted the cost to follow Jesus and are less interested on second thought.
I think the Post-Christian American church with its rich CEO pastors and their entourages of sycophants has decided it just costs too much. I read Niethzche, I read Jung, I have some small understanding of Sartre but the Word of Truth is Holy Scripture and its great Hero is Jesus, the God-Man, the Word Become Flesh.
When you have Jesus you have what you need. When you do not have Jesus it does not matter so much what you possess.
Note: I want to finish three books this weekend:
- Lincoln and the American Struggle by John Meacham
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzche
- The Christian Doctrine of the Attributes of God by Herman Creemer
See you Monday