Quaker Theology #14

We Are the Missing Link -- Page 3

Hence, Wink offers a nicely ironic defense of anthropomorphism, that favorite whipping-boy of the moderns. The human brain simply humanizes all perception. To see God in human terms means that whatever God is in the fullest sense (which we cannot know), it is consistent with what Ezekiel saw and what Jesus of Nazareth tried to live. God is not different from our perceptions, just more.

Or, if you prefer, we can just as easily say that we are theomorphic. One of the important things Wink does throughout this book is to help us stop thinking in either/or terms. He invites us to engage with the full range of valences in the divine-human paradox. This perspective should be liberating to an American religious culture and a Religious Society of Friends polarizing and entrenching into orthodox versus humanistic camps.

Wink draws from a wide variety of sources for his synthesis. He cites Nicolas Berdyayev, the Russian philosopher who wrote in 1914 that we are on the verge of an "anthropic revelation," a Christology of humanity. But he also quotes the neo-orthodox Protestant theologian Karl Barth to similar effect: "God is human – genuine deity includes in itself genuine humanity" (p. 49). Wink summarizes that the final answer to Feuerbach is prayer, that supreme act of human imagination (p. 46).

The other key antecedent to "Son of Man" in the gospels`comes from Daniel 7. There, the prophet prophesies (ca. 167 B.C.E) a succession of four oppressive empires, each envisioned as a terrible beast. These are followed by a vision of "one like a human being" coming on clouds of heaven before the throne of God, to receive universal and everlasting dominion on earth. Wink views Daniel’s vision as a counter-movement to Ezekiel’s. In Ezekiel’s vision, God approaches the human, seeking incarnation. Ezekiel himself becomes a mediating figure. In Daniel’s vision, humanity approaches God, seeking transformation. The teachings and life of Jesus as "Son of Man" are the product of a mutual attraction, witnessed by these two Hebrew prophets (p. 54).

Wink cites more "Son of Man" imagery in Jewish literature of the intertestamental period. The growing chorus of witnesses to this coming Human Being suggests that humanity was ready for a new revelation. Humanity was beginning to see itself as a species, thanks (and no thanks) to the world-unifying Alexandrian and Roman empires. Jewish texts such as 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra speculate upon the Son of Man as a coming mediator (albeit primarily between God and Israel). Elsewhere, in a similar vein, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue projects messianic glory upon Caesar Augustus as savior of Rome and bringer of world peace. So Jesus appears at a moment of readiness for a new, human archetype. But in contrast to the exalted figures envisioned in Jewish and pagan literature of the day, Jesus will present the world with a strikingly mundane Human Being (p. 62).

Jesus’ Words Concerning the Son of Man

The book proceeds to investigate the Son of Man sayings most likely uttered (in some form) by Jesus himself. For example, Jesus defends his disciples against criticism for picking heads of grain on the Sabbath, asserting that the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath. Here, the title apparently includes not just himself but his disciples. When Jesus cites the example of David and his soldiers taking bread from the temple, it is not to compare himself with David (and thereby garner messianic implications to himself). Rather, he invokes a comparable situation of human need. The Son of Man is an emergent human being, "something of God within us" (Wink states in crypto-Quaker fashion, p. 72). It is not God as such, but God at work in concrete human circumstances. Or, following Elizabeth Howes’ Jungian terms: the Son of Man is not the Self but a catalytic agent at work between the ego and the Self.

In defending his healing of the paralytic, Jesus claims that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins. Neither here nor in any other case does Jesus appeal to God’s authority for his words or actions. After his death, the Church slowly narrowed the authority of the Son of Man onto the person of Jesus, and those individuals as successors duly ordained to forgive sins. But in these words, Jesus speaks open-endedly.

In another case, Jesus asserts that blasphemy against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. Wink reasons that because the Son of Man is a mundane process of emergent humanity, it proceeds on a trial-and-error basis, inevitably making mistakes along the way. Therefore, it may be spoken against.

By contrast, the Holy Spirit is divine immanence drawing us toward full humanity. To blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to call good evil. Ordinary sin amounts to calling something evil good. Everyone does that and will be forgiven. But blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is very rare, as it curses the source of good (pp. 85-86). Wink’s book is full of novel, inventive, and tentative interpretations like this one. As such, they should be taken as experimental, not authoritative, in the same spirit that Wink understands our emergent humanity.

Thirteen times in the synoptic gospels, Jesus speaks of the coming rejection, suffering, and death of the Human Being. Wink reckons that, once Jesus began his move toward Jerusalem, he probably took that fate for granted. John the Baptist had been recently martyred. And although Ezekiel was not martyred, God warned that "son of man" too that he would face rejection, contempt, and suffering (Ezek. 2:1-3:11). Wink stresses that Jesus’ death was necessary, not as God’s will, but owing to the willfulness of the powers. In their rebellion from God, they will move to silence anyone who exposes them (p. 102).

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