18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,d not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. [1]
As our creator, God desires an intimate relationship with us. But where God would desire intimacy, we have become estranged. The work of Christ within this context is simply reconciliation. It is in this light that these two verses, quoted above, from 2 Corinthians have become for me a creedal statement of Christology. Who is Jesus? The One through whom God is reconciling the world to himself. And what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? It means that we have been entrusted with the message of reconciliation.
Historically, the Church has had an infatuation with Jesus ‘being’ as opposed God was ‘doing’ through Jesus. The Chalcedon Formula and the Athanasian Creed are prime examples of this. At times we have maintained that in order to answer the question of what God was ‘doing’ in Jesus, we of necessity had to come to understand Jesus being. The importance that we gave to doctrinal formulations regarding the Trinity was elevated to the extent that the Athanasian Creed concludes with the statement “One cannot be saved without believing this firmly and faithfully.”My conviction is that our obsession with the ontological question of who Jesus is has distracted us from the more important question of the work God is doing in Christ, namely reconciling the world to himself. Further, I would contend that we’ve stated more in our Trinitarian Doctrines than our human reason allows, and certainly more than one can conclude on the basis of scripture.
So Jesus is referred to as “the Son of God” in the scriptures. How would the evangelists or any contemporary of Jesus have understood such a phrase? In the Hebrew Bible the phrase “Son of God” or “sons of God” and other such references occur with a variety of meanings. The NRSV translates “sons of God” in numerous places as “heavenly beings”. It is also a reference to Israel or Ephraim or Jacob. In Psalm 2, the reference “you are my Son; today I have begotten you” is a reference to the Davidic King, and by extension the phrase “Son of God” becomes a Messianic title. Elsewhere, “sons of God” carries the connotation much more similar to ‘children of God’ in contemporary usage.
My point is that the question of ontology regarding Jesus being designated “Son of God” developed far beyond what would have been understood by the first disciples. I also find myself wondering if our focus on the question of Jesus’ being has resulted in a distraction from the work of reconciliation that God is doing through Jesus. To put it differently, if in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, have we in seeking to define Christ’s being, and by so doing, defining who are truly Christian, created the very estrangements that Christ’s reconciling work was meant to overcome? God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself—how then has it happened that our proclamation of Christ has often been so divisive, and has not reflected the message of reconciliation that was entrusted to us?
Finally, if God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, does anything else matter?
