Thursday, November 5, 2015

6A. JESUS AS MEDIATOR:

  
    I avoid referring to Jesus as a mediator between human beings and God because the reference is burdened with meanings derived from its use in transcendentalist theologies.  In its own right, however, it offers a clear illustration of the import of Wittgenstein's insistence that the meaning of a word depends on its use in a distinctive form of life.

    Working from Wittgenstein's insight, I suggest that the hollow center of a hierarchically structured transcendentalist theology is filled a distinction between some version of emptiness and some version of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians, the antagonists share a meta-narrative which implies that Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross offers the reparation needed to restore the relationship between God and humans severed by the sin of Adam.  In this context, the strand in the Catholic theological tradition targeted by Luther and Calvin argued that the repository of grace merited by Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross was dispensed by a hierarchically structured ecclesiastical institution.  To eliminate all such mediations, Luther formulated a doctrine of faith alone which implied that Jesus was the sole mediator, while Calvin's more political bent drew a fusion of a political theocracy and a doctrine of eternal predestination from an emphasis on God's absolute dominion over all.



    As my analysis of the meta-narrative shared by Aquinas and Luther shows, the polemical structure of the misplaced dispute over Jesus' role as a mediator is grounded in the assumption that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned.  In far too many instances, it is supplemented by stories inscribed in the Jewish Scriptures which depict Israel's God as a jealous and wrathful God.  And as a result, it depicts the Incarnation as a response to sin in a way that defines Jesus' saving (or justifying) activity as a sacrifice offered to appease divine justice and restore the relationship between Creator and creature severed by Adam's transgression. 

    In an equally literary context, however, the Prologue of John echoes the Heraclitian metaphor which depicted the whole of reality as a dynamic operation of a divine Logos in a hymn which places the eternal Word at the center of life in the Trinity, the act of creation, the course of human history and the lives of each and every unique individual.  This hymn formulates the seminal Trinitarian theology which provided the meta-narrative which generated the doctrinal assertion that the incarnate Word is both fully God and fully human.  On its part, the meta-narrative attributes the act of creation to an outpouring of divine love.  In this context, the obvious willingness of the Word to become fully human reveals the longing on the part of each of the divine Persons to be intimately involved with human beings.  And when this revelation is supplemented by the statement in John, "I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly", the Incarnation reveals that each Person in the triune God is actively involved in urging flawed human beings to embrace the quest for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    In this incarnational theology, Jesus' passionate involvement with each individual urges finite and flawed human beings to discern the Father's providential activity in all events in their personal histories and the Spirit's word of love spoken in their tangled depths.  And the Father and Holy Spirit, in turn, urge these same individuals to allow Jesus to love them into a more fully human existence characterized by responses witnessing to personal integrity.

    In this quest, Jesus is a mediator of sorts between the Father and Spirit, on the one hand, and finite and flawed human beings, on the other.  With a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful love, he willingly accompanies them on a quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence in this life.  On the journey, those who discern and respond to his activity and that of the Father and the Holy Spirit experience that graced moments that reveal his longing to usher us into the divine life of the Trinity at the end of our journey.  But experiences processed by the language generated by this incarnational theology also reveal that Jesus comes to us through one another.  He is not a jealous Savior who insists that he is the sole mediator between the triune God and human beings.  And he rejoices in the longing of the Father and the Spirit to be intimately involved in our flawed interactions, our journeys down paths which lead to dead ends, and even the events which bring out the worst in us.

    Regarding the passage from this life to the next, the incarnate Word reveals to us that we can spend an eternity there in the most passionate involvement with the triune God and the communion of saints and never exhaust an infinity.

     In sum, Jesus is the way to intimacy with the Father and the Holy Spirit and to the intimacy with loved ones called for by his commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you."  If the metaphor of the "way" is mapped onto the metaphor of "mediator", he is mediator because he is fully human, not because he offered a sacrificial death on the cross.
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