Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

We had a lively conversation about many things in Java and Jesus at ORUCC on Sunday, December 9th, including the meaning of the title “son of God.” I thought it would be good to follow up the conversation with some further reading and writing on the issue. This post contains some scholarly insight I have found helpful. While I appreciate the historical and sociological understanding, I do hold hope that they lead, most of all, to deeper proclamations of faith in our lives. I am deeply committed to helping us claim or reclaim Jesus at the core of our Christian faith. I think Borg and Crossan, in their own ways, help us see beyond just language. Following these two short readings are some questions for consideration.

Winton Boyd

The Meaning of our Christological Language
(from The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg, p. 86ff)

Four statements about titles (Son of God, Lord, Messiah, Word of God, Wisdom of God, Great High Priest, Lamb of God, Light of the World, Bread of Life and so forth) given to Jesus are important/

1. The language is all “post Easter.” A strong majority of mainline scholars think it is unlikely that Jesus said these things about himself; he probably did not speak of himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth. Rather, this is the voice of the community in the years and decades after Easter. It is not the language of self proclamation, but the community’s testimony to Jesus’ significance in their lives….As such, it is very powerful. The community affirms: we have found this person the light in our darkness, the way that has led us from death to life, the bread of life that nourishes us even now…Indeed, for me this language is more powerful as a testimony of a community that if I try to imagine it as language a man used about himself.
2. All of this language is metaphorical. We see this most readily by putting a number of these titles in a single sentence: “I believe Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Light of the world, the Bread of Life, the Word of God, and the Son of God.” To state the obvious, Jesus is not a lamb or a sheep, nor a flame or a candle, not a loaf, not a word. These are all metaphors.

But we have tended to literalize at least one of the Christological titles, namely “son of God.” We have done so in part because of a literal reading of the birth narratives and in part because of the prominence of “Son of God” in the creeds…

But “Son of God” is a metaphor lie the rest. It affirms that Jesus’ relationship to God is intimate, like that of child to parent. To echo language from John’s gospel: the son knows the father, and the father knows the son, and the son is the father’s beloved. This relational understanding of “son of God” is found in the Jewish world of Jesus. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is called son of God, as are the kings of Israel and Judah.

3. Christological language is language of confession and commitment. Metaphor means “to see as.” To say, “Jesus is the light of the world” is to say” I see Jesus as the light of the world.
4. Jesus, is for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in human life.

Finally, to paraphrase William Sloane Coffin: “for us Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus.”
To paraphrase Krister Stendahl: “we as Christians can sing our love songs to Jesus with wild abandon without needing to demean other religions.”

John Dominic Crossan writing in God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), says, early in the book, that “(t)here was a human being in the first century who was called ‘Divine,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘God,’ and ‘God from God,’ whose titles were ‘Lord,’ ‘Redeemer,’ ‘Liberator,’ and ‘Saviour of the World.’” “(M)ost Christians probably think that those titles were originally created and uniquely applied to Christ. But before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus.”

Crossan cites the adoption of them by the early Christians to apply to Jesus as denying them of Caesar the Augustus. “They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. Either that was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majistas and we call high treason. ”
In 42 BC, Julius Caesar was formally deified as “the divine Julius” (divus Iulius), His adopted son, Octavian (better known by the title “Augustus” given to him 15 years later, in 27 BC) thus became known as “divi Iuli filius” (son of the divine Julius) or simply “divi filius” (son of the god). He used this title to advance his political position, finally overcoming all rivals for power within the Roman state. The title was for him “a useful propaganda tool”, and was displayed on the coins that he issued.

Questions to ponder:
1. If Borg is right that Jesus is the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like, and Crossan is right that in calling Jesus “son of God” the early Christians were committing “high treason, ” what are the implications for how we live our faith today? What does it look like to proclaim our faith in today’s culture?

2. If “son of God” or “Light of the World” are not the language we speak, or do not fit our experience – how would we describe Jesus’ role in revealing God to us? What metaphors would we use?

3. Many of us find the arrogance of exclusivist Christians hard to stomach. Are we able to see beyond their limited and often literalized use of biblical language to see the power and possibility of Jesus, in a way similar to William Sloane Coffin or Krister Stendahl? Is it the faith of the early church we struggle with, or the faith of certain segment of the Christian church today? Is there still something within the Christian confession we can affirm and celebrate?