Abstract
Daniel Kirk’s weighty book aims to build a defence against ‘the rushing tide of conversation about divine Christology and reclaim some ground for exploring the most important thing that the Synoptic Gospels tell us: he is some kind of human Christ’ (p. 581). The ‘divine Christology’ he means is the scholarly tendency known as ‘early high Christology’ espoused in recent decades by such scholars as Larry Hurtado, Richard Hays, Chris Tilling, Simon Gathercole, Kavin Rowe, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, and myself. There are, of course, differences between some of these scholars and others, but all agree that from a very early stage of the Christian movement Jesus was accorded divine worship and regarded as truly divine. Kirk does not question that ‘divine Christology’ is to be found in the Pauline literature, Hebrews and John, but aims to exempt the Synoptic Gospels from it entirely. Essentially he is reclaiming a view that has been taken by a great many exegetes in the past and remains common: that the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus, not as inherently divine, but as a human being who acts as God’s eschatological agent, performing divine ‘functions.’ This is sometimes known as ‘functional divinity’ by contrast with ‘ontic’ or ‘ontological’ divinity. Kirk is right to see that the general effect of ‘early high Christology’ is to query such a distinction, though the label ‘ontological’ is controversial. In my own case, I have used the term ‘divine identity Christology’ in order to refer to key divine ‘functions’ that define God’s unique divinity and cannot be simply delegated to other figures who are not God. But, in order to do justice to the Jewish ways of thinking about God that the New Testament reflects, I proposed thinking in terms of ‘divine identity’ rather than divine nature or divine being and so I refer to early Christology as ‘divine identity Christology’ rather than ‘ontic Christology,’ though in a broader sense, of course, ‘identity’ is a matter of who someone really is.
The argument of the book can be stated quite simply. From extensive evidence in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature Kirk constructs a paradigm of ‘idealized human figures’ who ‘share in ascriptions, actions, and attributes otherwise reserved for God alone’ (p. 176). He then argues in great detail that nothing said about Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels falls outside such a paradigm. The Jesuses of these Gospels are not ‘inherently’ divine. Their ‘human Christology’ is ‘a high, human Christology,’ because in Jewish literature such human figures are variously represented as playing roles otherwise belonging to God alone.… [They] can be depicted as the very embodiment of God, God’s visible representation, God’s voice, the exhibition of God’s rule and majesty (p. 4).
The Jewish texts, he claims, ‘demonstrate that being identified with God as such is not a novel development that entails a redefinition of monotheism’ (pp. 10–11). Although he finds Jewish precedents for all the kinds of ‘divine’ things that are said about Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, he does think that the Jesus of these Gospels is unique. He is the royal Messiah, who acts on God’s behalf as his human agent to restore God’s rule on earth, and he is also the Second Adam, who restores humanity’s dominion over creation, a participation in God’s rule that God had always intended for humanity and achieves in Jesus. Both are unique but entirely human roles. In this way, Kirk aims to restore the humanity of Jesus to the key theological place that it deserves and that he fears has been neglected in the rush to ‘early high Christology.’ This is not, he maintains, a matter of ‘low Christology’ but of ‘high human Christology.’
The first chapter (‘Idealized Human Figures in Early Judaism’) is the most original contribution. It surveys a very wide range of material from the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish literature. The figures range from Adam and David to the high priest Simon and the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch. These figures are all related to God in an especially close way that Kirk calls ‘identified with God,’ but what this actually means varies enormously: they may rule on God’s behalf, reflect God’s glory, have various divine qualities bestowed on them, be called sons of God, receive worship and so on. Even Israel, the people of God, can appear as an idealized character. What Kirk claims to show is that monotheistic belief imposed no limits on what Jewish writers thought could be said about idealized human figures. Repeatedly, he says that God shares with chosen human agents ‘actions, ascriptions, or attributes otherwise reserved for God alone’ (e.g., p. 174). But the figures that assume ‘roles and attributions that are typically being reserved uniquely for God alone’ (p. 45) are so numerous (‘innumerable,’ he says) that one wonders how these roles can possibly be said to be ‘reserved uniquely for God alone.’ In fact, he never discusses or even refers to texts that express these uniquely divine roles or characteristics and so it is impossible to understand how he resolves the contradiction.
The argument of this first chapter is very frequently presented as a refutation of my thesis about ‘divine identity Christology’ in the New Testament (somewhat surprisingly because I have published very little about the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels). It completely fails to refute my thesis because it rests on a very basic misunderstanding of it. What I did was to identify ways in which Jews of this period frequently expressed the defining difference between God and all other reality and thereby identified what it was about the God of Israel that made him unique. The most useful features of God’s unique identity for this purpose were: that God is the only Creator of all things and the only sovereign Ruler of all things. These claims enable a very clear distinction to be made between God and everything else. God is the only Creator of all things; all other things are created by him. God is the only sovereign Ruler of all things; all other things are subject to him. I also connected with these aspects of the unique divine identity the Jewish insistence that only this God is worthy of worship.
Kirk has to leave aside the identity of God as sole Creator because none of his idealized human figures share in God’s creative work; nor does Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. It is in connection with God’s identity as sole sovereign Ruler that Kirk misunderstands me. He points out that many of his idealized figures, such as David or Adam, rule on earth on God’s behalf. He thinks this refutes my claim that the exalted Jesus uniquely ‘shares the unique divine sovereignty.’ But I made it perfectly plain that, of course, God’s rule is administered by many human (and angelic) agents who exercise limited rule in subordination to him. What is unique to God, in the Jewish texts, is that he rules all things, heaven and earth, the whole cosmos, and all other rule is subject to his sovereign authority. Someone who, in my terminology, shares God’s unique sovereignty shares in the whole of this cosmic rule, as the exalted Christ does when he is called ‘the head of every rule and authority’ (Col 2:10). This cannot be said of any human ruler on earth, even if they rule the whole earth. The unique cosmic sovereignty of God is standardly symbolized by the great cosmic throne at the summit of the universe, ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’ (Eph 1:21). In Jewish literature this throne is reserved for God alone (sometimes Wisdom sits beside his as his advisor, indicating that the only co-regent he needs is his own wisdom), and no human being sits on it until the New Testament, often with reference to the special way in which early Christians interpreted Ps 110:1, claims that the exalted Christ now sits beside God, sharing his sovereignty over all things. This is what puts him on the divine side of one of the defining differences between God and all creation.
Kirk frequently takes me to task for ignoring all the various human figures who he says are ‘identified with God.’ I was well aware of them, but it should be evident that they are complete non-starters for challenging my thesis. I have discussed the two cases of a human figure who might be thought to sit on God’s own cosmic throne and reign from it (Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian [Kirk in fact agrees with my contention that Moses rules only on earth] and the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch). Kirk provides no other instances. He cites cases of people sitting on thrones (he seems to think Matt 19:28 a particularly clinching case)—their own thrones and not in heaven—as though they disprove my argument. They show only that God delegates limited shares in his sovereignty, while necessarily reserving his absolute sovereignty over all other rule, from his cosmic throne, to himself. So Kirk misses the main point of my argument: that the focus of early ‘divine Christology’ was Jesus’s exaltation to sit beside God on his own heavenly throne. This is not irrelevant to the Synoptic Gospels, which, of course, make several key allusions to Ps 110:1 (Kirk discusses these without any reference to my argument).
Most of this first chapter therefore is irrelevant to his claim to refute my thesis about divine identity Christology. If he really wanted to refute that he should have focused exclusively on the very few cases where it might be argued that a human figure shares God’s own cosmic throne and (because this is relevant) the cases where a human figure is worshipped. As far as I can see he claims only five texts in the latter category (Ps 45; Ps 72:11; 1 Chron 29:20; Parables of Enoch 62:6, 9; the Latin Life of Adam and Eve). Since the act of bowing down before someone can be an acceptable acknowledgment of superiority, rather than the worship that belongs exclusively to God, all these are debatable. Moreover, only one of them (the Parables of Enoch) was probably written in the late Second Temple period. The Latin Life of Adam and Eve is a later Christian text that should carry no weight at all (the relevant passage is not even in the Greek version of the Life). This is pitifully weak evidence for the claim that idealized human figures in Jewish literature were regularly worshipped. I have given some detail in this case because the way that Kirk presents a large mass of very varied material in this chapter can be very misleading. His summary conclusions generalize from, in some cases, very few or even only one text that make the point in question. He says, for example, that idealized kings in the Hebrew Bible are ‘enthroned at God’s right hand,’ a point made only in Ps 110:1, which he has not even discussed up to that point. He continues: ‘At times, they are even depicted as sitting on God’s own throne’ (p. 109), whereas only one of the texts discussed (1 Chron 29:23) says this. Examples of such misleading summaries—designed, it seems, to build up artificially composite pictures grand enough to match the New Testament accounts of Jesus—could easily be multiplied.
If I am focusing so much on his case against me, it is because this is a very polemical book and in this chapter he refers constantly to me as spokesperson for the view he is refuting. I will make one more, very serious complaint: his confusing use of terminology. My own carefully chosen way of stating ‘divine identity Christology’ is to say that the effect of the New Testament texts is to ‘include Jesus in the unique divine identity.’ This states my view as precisely as possible in a few words. Kirk, as far as I can see, never quotes my use of that terminology. Instead, he often says I say that ‘Jesus is identified with God’ (e.g., p. 37). In fact, I hardly ever use that language, because it is either too vague (as Kirk’s use of it with reference to his ‘idealized human figures’ shows) or misleading (as if Jesus were identical with God). I do say that Jesus ‘shares the unique divine identity,’ but not (unless I have forgotten) that he ‘shares in the divine identity,’ a formulation Kirk uses of his idealized human figures. Thereby he often gives the impression that he is taking up my terminology about sharing the divine identity and showing that it could be applied to any number of idealized human figures. By ignoring my precise terminology (‘included in the divine identity’) and obscuring my precise argument about sharing God’s cosmic sovereignty on his own heavenly throne, Kirk obfuscates my argument, making it seem as undiscriminating as his own, and fails actually to engage with the nub of my case.
I have focused so much on chapter 1 because he himself calls it ‘the most important leg’ of his project (p. 42). The following five chapters on the Synoptic Gospels are devoted to showing that they depict Jesus not as ‘ontologically’ or ‘inherently divine’ but as the kind of idealized human agent of God he has so plentifully documented in the Jewish literature. Much of his exegesis can be found in many commentaries and studies: his contribution lies partly in bringing it all together. One of his more distinctive lines of argument (not, of course, without precedent) concerns the Son of Man. He takes the view that the human-like figure in Daniel 7 was originally intended as a kind of ‘second Adam’ who restores the human dominion by following (as the representative of ‘the holy ones’) a path through suffering to exaltation, and attributes this interpretation of Daniel to the Gospels, where Jesus is ‘the Human One’ (Son of Man = Son of Adam), who represents Adam’s God-given dominion when he rules as king in God’s kingdom. This is close to Kirk’s own theological concern to give renewed attention to the significance of the humanity of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels: ‘a vast field of Christological reflection is ripe for the harvest,’ he concludes (p. 582). This is not the place for me to engage with that theological project, but, since it is presented as a biblical-theological project, he will have to consider how to combine the Synoptic understanding of Jesus, as he sees it, with the Christology of other parts of the New Testament, where (he admits) Jesus is seen as pre-existent and as participating in God’s work of creation in the beginning. He will have to consider whether a Jesus who is ‘inherently divine’ cannot also be fully human (as those of us who espouse ‘divine identity Christology’ have always assumed he can).