THE UNIVERSAL CHRIST A RE-ORIENTATION WITHIN CHRISTOLOGY

We live in an increasingly pluralistic and interconnected world in which we are as Christians called to profess the reality of Christ as risen. By implication, something that is real is for all people and is not just the product of one culture among many. This is the predicament of contemporary faith: that we profess the reality and universality of the risen Christ as Lord, in a globalised world, in which we are confronted by forms of cultural difference on all sides. We are called to do this, and yet we have no developed theology of who Christ is as universal. How can we profess something so fundamental to Christianity, of which we have no proper theological understanding? How can we profess to others what we cannot make sense of, explicitly, even to ourselves? And how can we build unity and common purpose with others within and beyond Christianity if we do not have a real understanding of what must be the ultimate hospitality and radical inclusivity of Christs body, namely Christ according to his universality. It seems right then that at such a moment of rapid pluralisation and contact between cultures, we should step back and look again at what it means to proclaim the universality of Jesus. What is needed perhaps is a more explicit theological account of what is implicit in faith: not only the reality of Christ over and above the community who proclaim his name, but also the universality which is implicit in the claim of Christs Lordship (if not a universal Lordship, then which parts of the creation are to be excluded?). Such a new theological account of what is arguably already a given of faith, would need also to be a re-reception of the ancient Christian doctrine of the exaltation, something we associate in particular with the accounts of the Ascension of Christ in the synoptics and Acts and, theologically, with the Letter to the Hebrews. In fact, the return of Christ to heaven is a fundamental part of the doctrinal fabric of the New Testament (not only christologically but also pneumatologically, as we think of the link between ascension and Pentecost, and indeed ecclesiologically as we think of Pauline theologies of the Headship and also Priesthood of Christ, and indeed of the en christo). We must be prepared then for the possibility that a retrieval of the doctrine of the universality of Christ will have resonances in a number of fields of theological inquiry.

The theological re-orientation I am presenting here has three moments or dimensions. The first is primarily critical and historical and concerns our present situatedness (and we will call this Theology in the World). The second is primarily constructive (and we will call this Transformation Theology). But a retrieval of the doctrine of the exalted Christ is a re-orientation in Fundamental Theology. It has implications for how we do theology therefore. And so there is of necessity a third, applied dimension (which is not practiced as such in this paper). Let us begin with the critical phase or Theology in the World. If theology is a science, then we need to consider what it has as its ground and object. Not rock formations certainly, or the sorts of things that are emerging bit by bit from the Hadron Collider. But nevertheless, we feel, the object of theology is not really like that of mathematics or even philosophy in the sense of being abstract. We do not study ideas as such, nor is it faith itself which we most think about in theology. Rather, it is Christ the incarnate Word of God in whom we find most fundamentally the object of our reflection. And since our claim is that he still lives (and more importantly, since this is the experience of our faith), then we have to see Christ as the past and present material and formal object of our theological thinking. And theres the rub. Christ as Present Material and Formal Object of Theology Those who encounter Christ in faith, and who feel that he commissions or calls them into a new life in the Church (or to the return to new life in the Church), are in effect recognising Christ as the present formal and material object of faith. Christ is present to them in his Lordship, in the fullness of his humanity and divinity, as one who shares our human history. Lordship here signals more than an idea: the response of faith is within practical reason leading to things done and indeed to a new life lived rather than to a new set of ideas about how the world might be. We are addressed by this presence in the fullness of our own embodied humanity, and in the midst of the complex particularity of our own mortal existence. But what is the theological analogue to this: where do we find Christ as present material as well as formal object not of faith but of our theology? This cannot be the Palestinian Christ, nor even the post-Resurrection Christ of the noli me tangere, since these both belong to the past. But it cannot be the Christ we encounter in

the Eucharistic Real Presence of Catholic tradition either, or the Divine Word in the word preached of Protestant tradition. Nor can it be the Christ of the Christian arts. It cannot even be the poor and vulnerable of Mt 25: not even the scriptural word itself. And it cannot be any of these things since classically they are all places of Christs mediation. They are all ways in which the living Christ is made present in the world. And something that mediates cannot be what is mediated. If we have no robust theological account of the Christ who is mediated, which is to say namely the Christ who is wounded, risen and exalted, then is there not a risk that what was classically understood to be mediatory of the presence of Christ becomes instead his substitution? If we read exaltation in a distinctively modern way, as signalling Christs absence rather than his fuller presence as universal in his identifiability or particularity, then it is only natural that we will need something else to take his place: Church (especially Eucharist), Bible, Holy Spirit perhaps, the social act. And if we do that, then a subtle change will come upon these things. They will become what Paul Janz has called end-stations of faith: modes of human self-authentication and of closure. Once again, this is not a risk within faith but more particularly one within theology as this sometimes informs faith. We may think of a Catholic bishop for instance presented with evidence of malpractice in his clergy who considers the potential damage to the reputation of the institutional Church as a Eucharistic community on the one hand and the interests of vulnerable children on the other. In the context of an educated theological perspective on the world, it may be that the fact that we have robust and authoritative accounts of how Christ is truly present in his Church (in Eucharistic theology) but very little account, perhaps even no account at all, of how Christ is truly present in those who are vulnerable of Mt 25, could be influential here. It is easy, for instance, to place the exalted and eschatological Christ of Mt 25 in the domain of faith rather than theology and so to give this Christ less status in an educated theological environment. The same difficulty of substitutionism and the loss of a theology of the exalted Christ may have further effects. Neither Pentecostalism nor the Salvation Army for instance can easily find a theological accommodation of their own distinctive but modern paths of Christian witness and life. It seems to me that the Pentecostalist concern

not to subordinate the Holy Spirit to Christ, but to capture the Holy Spirit in the Spirits own originality, and the concern of the Salvation Army to emphasize the self-giving in Christ the Christ in us - of the social act in the life of faith, both affirm something fundamentally positive about how Christ is present on earth: about how he can be present as mediated. But in neither case are these traditions particularly helped by modern theology, which precisely lacks theologies of Christ risen and exalted, which is to say the eschatological Christ of Pentecost and Christ in the vulnerable poor. And so both struggle to find their way to the theological centre of contemporary Christianity despite the fact that they are arguably the two most successful, properly global, new Christian movements in the contemporary world. The Second Scientific Revolution In stepping back and looking again at what it means to proclaim the universality of Christ in the world, in accordance with his Lordship, we have to bring to mind the reasons why we lost the doctrine of the exaltation of Christ in its classical format, as a community, in the first place. One reason of course is simply that this took cosmological expression. Christs Lordship was evidenced by his ascent to heaven. His being at the very highest point of heaven (as Thomas Aquinas has it) was not only the cause of our salvation (to quote Thomas again) but also the reason why his Lordship was real and universal. It came to expression within the physical structure of the known universe. The loss of this cosmological perspective inevitably had profound repercussions for Christian theology, as we see already outlined in the Eucharistic debates of the early Reformation. But we do not see the emergence of a genuinely new and properly modern theological method until a much later date. The place of theology in the curriculum of the University of Berlin (founded in 1810) secured its social respectability and legitimacy in the intellectual life of the German people as it did a little later in the national lives of other Western peoples. But of course it did so at a cost. That cost was the implementation of a new academic method which stressed system and science, in parallel with the other humanities disciplines (first and foremost Philosophy as the core method and discipline of the University of Berlin). The new theologian was an authoritative research specialist who belonged to a college of such specialists. It was of course entirely natural that

Theology as a discipline took this course, and we are all beholden to it. It has given us a very rich, two hundred year old tradition of outstanding theological work by gifted individuals who have developed very powerful articulations of what Christian faith means or can mean in contemporary society. This has been a tradition of apologetics, whereby secular society has been invited to recognise the point of being a Christian in the light of the dominant rationalities or forms of human self-understanding of the day. In this way we can track the evolution of theologies influenced by Idealism and Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Anthropology or Cultural Studies, Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism. Theologies which are concerned rather with acts and practices, or with the living shape of discipleship, weave like a thread through this tradition, and find their fullest expression in the work of Bonheoffer amongst Protestants and perhaps Schillebeeckx amongst Catholics. The turn to apologetics was a natural shift for theology to make at this point for its fundamental rationale in the pre-modern period was the meaning of the world itself, as understood through scripture: as the dynamic, enchanted sphere of creation in which, as we have noted, physical height came to be identified with spiritual exaltation and in which matter itself could become mediatory of the divine presence. Sacramentalism at its origin was a distinctively scriptural way of seeing the every day world of space and time. It is only against this background that we can make sense really of the pre-modern doctrine of the exaltation of Christ as meaning that he is present in any place and time in the fullness of his divinity and human particularity. He is the one in whose body, wounded and glorified, the new creation itself unfolds, laying its claim perpetually upon us, calling us into his body the Church. And with the loss of Christian cosmological meaning (which is not at all the same as arguments about who created the world or where the world comes from), it was inevitable that Christian theologians should turn to other kinds of rationality, those fostered by our own subjectivity, which now increasingly came into view in new and fascinating ways. Over the last two hundred years the modern theological tradition has benefited enormously but has also been limited by the turn to the subject which has been so deeply characteristic of Western intellectual and social culture in general. It has produced a host of different ways of making sense of ourselves and so also making sense of or

representing what it is to be a Christian. In the main these have reflected not only the particular aspects of our humanity which we have sought to privilege and value, but also and perhaps more deeply the different ways in which we human beings are meaningmakers. Consciousness, existence, interpretation, language and experience have all had their part to play. But the limit for theology of course resides in the fact that theology arguably has as much in common with neighbouring science departments, as it does with those departments of arts and humanities and social science, with which it normally aligns itself. Theology has a stake not just in the nature of the human but also in the nature of the world: not just in meaning-making, but also in meaning discovered. This alliance with natural science was a point well made by Alan Torrance at Kings last week during his first Colin Gunton Memorial lecture, and of course it is a message that we have also received from the pen of Alister McGrath. It is undoubtedly the case that in opting for the turn to the subject, theology has also paid a price: the division and finally alienation between Systematic Theology and Practical Theology which Stanley Hauerwas, for instance, has repeatedly lamented. And the alienation perhaps between academic theology and the Church is also indicative of the gulf that can seem to separate academic theology from the everyday reality of Christian discipleship. The dubious presupposition throughout as exemplified in John Milbanks audacious theory of the trickle-down effect - is that in dealing with ideas theology is also dealing with the concrete reality of life in which the Holy Spirit is at work, shaping human acts and practices at the centre of the worlds becoming and of the coming reality of the kingdom of God. Perhaps we might suspect some hint here of a Zwinglian elision between human spirit and Holy Spirit: a powerfully influential symmetry which is however entirely the product of German-speaking modernity rather than our ancient biblical languages. There is no need here in fact to debate the advantages and disadvantages of the way we have done theology over the past two hundred years. At least such a debate does not form part of this paper or indeed of this project. My sole concern here is to point to the origins of the apologetic trend in modern theology and its causes and then to point to the fact that these causes now seem to be no longer in place. Indeed, to be alive today is to know that what once put the turn to the subject in place is now superseded, or at least

in the process of being superseded. Which we think it is will largely depend on whether we understand the nature of a scientific revolution to lie in scientific advances as such which seem now already to have happened or in the social, political and economic transformations which follow from them but which might take a generation or so to become embedded. Do we think then that what we might call the first scientific revolution of the early modern period began earlier with the little read Copernicus and Kepler or later with more widely read Galileo and his famous telescope? We certainly seem to be in the middle of a second scientific revolution (or maybe we should think of it as the second phase of the first one, which defines modernity). What is underway certainly has its ideological aspects but it is nevertheless most fundamentally simply a redescription of the human and so also of course a revolution in our self-understanding, through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, genetics and modern cosmology. It is impossible to read the small print of early modern thought (down to the reception of Kant), without realising that the issue which most deeply concerned people was the question of our freedom. How could we be free in a deterministic universe, in which science could manipulate and predict causal forces? These same Newtonian forces operated in our own bodies. The choice between Idealism and Dogmatism (to use Fichtes phrase), Rationalism and first Romanticism and then Existentialism, or the present opposition between social and human sciences on the one hand and natural science on the other, pivot around the opposition between the kind of deterministic knowledge we have about ourselves as quanta and the subjectivity that is author or possessor of that knowledge. The stark opposition between Newtonian physics and pure subjectivity left us inevitably with a degree of dualism which was moderated only by the extent to which we learned to be indifferent to it. Where the material universe and our own bodies in their determinism came to an end, free subjectivity took over. We have been free in our minds, in other words. What is happening now of course is that we better understand that consciousness and materiality together form an immensely complex, dynamic, intricate and intimately interactive whole in an evolutionary story which reaches back over billions of years. And if materiality and mind form such a unity, we can no longer think of ourselves as being free outside materiality at all but only free within materiality. This is not at all a form of reductionism (despite the call of some,

unwisely, for such a view). The scientist who calculates or images brain activity also dances, falls in love and can be moved, like Ignatius of Loyola, by the sight of stars. But he or she is no more likely than Ignatius to be able to explain how all that astonishing and vital subjectivity emerges from what is at the end of the day unimaginably complex material form. The mechanism that explains how this is possible eludes us, and in the view of one leading cognitive neurologist Adam Zeman, for instance, is ever likely to do so. But if the aftermath of the first scientific revolution is marked by a certain anxiety about freedom (which is still present in Dostoeveskys Notes from Underground of 1864 for instance), then perhaps we are experiencing this same unease once again today. We need now to be very much more specific about what freedom might mean. There is a good deal of interest in the freedom we feel for instance in being responsible for our own actions, and the sense we have that others too are responsible for what they do. Our freedom is glimpsed in our responsibility. It is if you like, a distinctively ethical freedom. But if consolation is required, a freedom of the ethical act is very much one which is within rather than outside materiality; and perhaps we might think that to be free within materiality, as complex materiality, is the only real freedom and so the only freedom worth having. As such, of course, it is something that we can recognise from within Christianity: more easily perhaps than we can recognise the licentious freedom of a consciousness that knows it is free because wants to be free. Real human freedom is likely to turn out to be almost a burden, as Sartre observed. But we will need to state it in our own contemporary terms: the thrilling but also challenging event of our precarious space as neural networks fire in our absurdly complex brains and the tensions or wave patterns require a Dirigent or conductor to signal the right opening and the right rhythm. In this way we can resolve the unparalleled complexity of our own materiality in a movement which, as Adam Zeman has observed, makes us something like music: all waves, patterns, dialogues and rhythms. The Where Question

This change in fundamental human self-understanding which is underway in our society means that we can no longer do theology as we have done it over the last two hundred years: since the foundation of the University of Berlin, in fact, the paradigm model of the modern research university, and birth place of modern Systematic Theology. What is required however is not a new theology: yet another paradigm. What is required rather is a re-orientation of theology. As what is primarily critical theology, Theology in the World has two stages: firstly theologys critical interrogation of itself and secondly a realignment with Christ as the present material as well as formal object of theology. Both of these moments which are moments within a re-orientation - come together in a single, open theological question. This is the where of Christ. The where question is in fact among the most ancient of questions the asking of which defines the Christian Church. We can consider how Jesus himself often turned out to be where he was not expected to be, not even by his disciples: with tax collectors and prostitutes. But the where question becomes absolutely central to the Church with the resurrection of Christ. It was posed most urgently with the discovery of the empty tomb. Where is he was then answered in different ways in the post-resurrection narratives of encounter on the road to Emmaus and on the shore of Lake Galilee. With the ascension, and following the cosmology of the day, the early Church also answered the where question regarding the exalted Christ by reference to his place beside the Father in heaven. He was at the very highest point of the universe, from where his presence filled all things. During the period of modern theology, the where question became redundant (so that even Bonhoeffer assimilated it into the question of who Christ is). This is thought-provoking given the attestation of Christs presence in space and time which is integral to faith. Furthermore, it is paradigmatically represented in scripture in St Pauls encounter with the commissioning Christ on the road to Damascus (which St Paul claims to be the ground of his faith and source of his theology). Although this belongs to primary revelation as St Paul insists (and so must be listed with the appearances on the road to Emmaus and on the shores of Lake Galilee), it is nevertheless indicative of our own encounter with Christ in faith where he disrupts us and calls into a new, ecclesial, Spirit-centred way of living. St Paul encounters Christ in his universal though still

identifiable embodiment, and so unlike the other apostles - shares with us the exalted, post-Pentecost embodiment of Christ. A theology which is prepared to ask the where question, without presuppositions, is opening itself up to the reception, once again, of Christ as its present material as well as formal object. It is consolidating the dynamic of mediation rather than substitution. This has several implications. In the first place, where is not in fact the same as who. Part of the openness of the where is an openness not just to the Easter event but also to Easter space and time, which places that event within our own transformed human history. A further implication of a Christological where then is the reflexivity of the individual theologian herself who needs to ask also where am I?. If I am drawn to the person of Christ, in the ecclesially dense areas of life, those crowded spaces of conflicting interests and the human struggle to do the good, then I have to recognise that the where of Christ is reflexive and is the awareness that it matters also where I am when I do theology and who I do it with. This may seem a strange point to make with respect to a university discipline (surely theology, like physics, is done in a university in the company of colleagues). But in fact there are useful parallels to be explored. If we can say that theology is paramountly concerned with reflection in the Church, and so in those places where the Church is both militant and emergent let us say, and if the theologian in his or her reflection is critically dependent upon the wisdom of the practitioner who is working for the kingdom (as the Salvation Army like to say), then there are parallels with ethnography, on which there is of course a considerable literature. (Pete Ward runs an international research group in this area of course). One of the finest theoreticians of the ethnographic method is Johannes Fabian who coined the term coeval and coevalness by which he means that the researcher must genuinely share the here and now of the informant since too much emphasis upon the writing down of local knowledge, which is someone elses knowledge, will always tend to objectify and reify the informant and the researchers relation with the informant, thus disrupting the living, generous and multiply open learning of that exchange. Of course, a theological account of the ethnographic method would have to go further than this. We shall need to say for instance that a theological orientation which understands that Christ is its present material and

10

formal object will need to recognise that the relation between researcher and informant or practitioner must itself be grounded in the presence of the exalted Christ himself, as one who is both in us and thereby also in the midst of his gathered Church. In this way, a truly ecclesial sharing or unity becomes possible at the point of generation of a transformational theology: one which is concerned with the continuing transformational power of Christ risen and the exalted, and of the Holy Spirit, in the world. Theology in the World and Transformation Theology The where question, with its methodological implications, sets out a critical agenda for systematic theology in the contemporary world. On the grounds of this, it is argued, theology needs to undergo a re-orientation. A re-orientation is not the same as a new theology. And so Theology in the World is not the same as Transformation Theology (a new constructive theological project which is also underway at Kings). The former can be compared with a new musical tonality, and the latter with an early piece of music composed within that tonality. Unlike Theology in the World, Transformation Theology has more markedly constructive dimensions to it, concerning the agency of Christ in the world, who as unending Priest and as Head of the Church, shapes our bodily lives in and through the Holy Spirit in terms of self-offering acts. In Transformation Theology, Christ the priest is alongside us where we are called to act in his name. The divinity in him is always present in hiddenness: never seen directly. During his mortal life, it is the human body that conceals that divinity from view, but with his resurrected form, his human body begins to undergo transformation as glorification, moving in and out of objectivity. With his exaltation, his glorification is complete and we can no longer see him. Indeed, for the pre-modern Christian that transformed glorified body was still within the universe but was now concealed from us by the creation itself, and specifically by the great distance which separated us from him in heaven (always a physical as well as spiritual distance in pre-modern cosmology). In this tradition, it is his emergence from hiddenness - riding on the clouds - which will mark his final return. In its thinking through of the meaning of the exaltation for us today, Transformation Theology keeps the ancient principle of Christs presence in hiddenness, which is the concealment of his divinity through a material medium. But it follows the

11

sacramental rather than cosmological tradition, so that if the water is the mode of the Divine Spirits concealment in baptism and so the Spirits presence on earth, and if the bread and wine are the mode of the concealment of Christs exalted body in the Eucharist and so his presence there, and if the earthly minister is the mode of concealment of Christ who is present as the true minister in the sacrament, and so forth, then in this way, we can say also that our own bodies can become the mode of his presence in hiddenness where we act in love, in our own creaturely freedom, in his name. By allowing our own living embodiment to become the mode of his concealment, we become ourselves, sacramentally in the extended sense of this word, the mode of his presence as we act freely in the world. He can act in us, precisely through the perfecting by the Spirit of our own creaturely freedom. In his exaltation, the living Christ reaches out through us to touch the world. This is, I think, a particularly strong account of the priesthood of all believers, which is grounded in the Priesthood of Christ himself, so closely linked in scriptural texts with the exaltation. It is a theology of the priesthood of Christ, acting through us, his doulos or servant in Pauline terms, which looks not to a metaphysical or cosmological account of how what is up above can also be in what is down below, but rather to the Holy Spirit who transforms space and time in such a way as to make us proximate to the exalted Christ and he to us: such as to make him acting in us and we acting in him. This is also a theology of the act which parallels the theology of Eucharistic presence, I think. If in the Eucharist, Christ is present in hiddenness in the bread and wine that we consume bodily and so take within us, then in the loving act he is present as hidden in our acting bodies. In both cases he is present as the living act of sacrifice, as we find outlined in the Letter to Hebrews has it. In both cases he is hidden as being in act, and we need to recall that it is only by living the life of grace that we can be admitted to the Eucharistic community in the first place. The active following of faith, in a real discipleship, precedes admittance to the Eucharistic community: reminding us once again how important it is that we should close the gap between academic theology and Christ as he is present to us, commissioning us into the new life of his Church. I cannot end this paper without returning to the criticism that for the last two hundred years, we have forgivably though also mistakenly thought that our subjectivity

12

somehow hovers above, or is added to our materiality (rather than emerging complexly from it). We have sought to express the meaning of the Christian life theologically in terms which reflect our own human capacity to be meaning-makers. This has been a wonderful interlude in the passage of theological time; never has theology been such fun. But at the same time, we have in an important sense been missing the point. The Christian life is not ultimately about how we make meaning, it is about how we discover meaning in Christ and in the life of enacted belief, or living faith. We have pointed to the natural parallel with scientific meaning which, at its purest, is always discovered. To use the term discovery about meaning is always to suggest that the meaning we are talking about is a partial grasping of the meaning of the world. We can never possess this meaning conclusively, since we are ourselves part of that meaning: as this complex materiality, we are ineradicably one with this tumultuous world of birthing stars, colliding galaxies and quantum fluctuations. There is nothing at all in our bodies that does not also exist elsewhere. This is not a deterministic universe for us today but one where the central baffling theme is how utterly random quantum fluctuations of incalculable number became this stable, beautiful and seemingly fine-tuned universe, in which, mark you, we do theology. That the universe has meaning is transparent in science itself. If it did not, then we could not know it. The existence of science is proof that the world is meaningful and that our place in it, even if contingently arrived at, belongs to that meaning (or else we could not be scientists). My question then is the following. If we can grasp fine-tuning outside us when we reason as observer, then why not also inside us when we reason as agent? If the human brain is itself the most complex system we have ever encountered in the universe, then why can it not be that under conditions we can learn to think from within its fine-tuning from within our fine-tuning wisely? If Christian faith, against all the odds (and in parallel with other world religions, of course) is able to endure, with its repeated calls to discipleship, then it may be that this follows from the fact that we can learn over time to think with the grain of the universe, as Hauerwas puts it or with Wisdom as David Ford advocates. And we can do that not because we are terribly clever, or even in ourselves overly wise, but because we are followers of him who was the Wisdom of God incarnate, the one set above all the powers of the cosmos, whose

13

body is the seed of the New Creation. In following him, we remain close to him and he to us. So when we act for him, by acting in his name, we also act in him, since through the Holy Spirit his continuing intentional life acts in us. Let us bring our theology back to this Christ then, who descends and ascends, and in whose life we share at the very moment we become the mode of his hiddenness in our Spirit-filled acts, bearing the weight of his glory in this expectant world. Oliver Davies Professor of Christian Doctrine Kings College London

14