If God in Christ is Fully Human, What Does that Mean For…?

Let us now continue and deepen our conversation and focus on the Creeds insistence that God in Christ is “fully” human…

“He for the sake of our humanity and for the sake of our wholeness (salvation), coming down out of what is above (beyond) and enfleshed out of the spirit of holiness (otherness)…”

I think that there is a lot to be considered and grasped whenever we engage freer translations of various texts which have become, through rote recitations, too comfortably familiar to be challenging alive with new insights. The original Greek words of the Nicene Creed, in its consideration of Jesus, is again ripe with that creedal stress on unity, on oneness, which we have thus far highlighted in our exploration of the Creed’s formation. Jesus is indeed understood as being for us, for our humanity and nothing could emphasize this more than the notion that God in Christ does this by becoming human, through the divine embrace of becoming human flesh, becoming like we are. This is for our “salvation” - which is less a concept of “saving” or mere deliverance than one of being brought to a wholeness of being which has always been the intended fulfillment of who we are created to be. “Saving” somebody from the icy waters of a raging river is simply not enough. What happens after one is plucked from the waters may be what restores a rightfully fuller and healthy sense of ourselves. Biblical “salvation” is about that ongoing presence and activity of God in our midst bringing us all to that place where we are well and whole together. Coming out of that which can perceived as “above” or “beyond” us, as well as the inference that God en-fleshed in Jesus is a act out of a spirit of “otherness” (Hebraic and thus biblical references to “holiness” seem grounded in a presumption of “otherness”), speak to how God is perceived as overcoming any and all perceived boundaries or barriers to oneness. To the composers of the Creed, our atonement (our at-one-ment with God and one another) cannot help but call into question all perceived gaps between what is above, beyond, or other than us.

“Out of the spirit of holiness…and Mary the Virgin…”

And Mary the Virgin. The Greek word for virgin should ring with a prominent familiarity for all us. It is equivalent to the English word Parthenon. Mention of the Parthenon should bring to mind the rather iconic ruins of that ancient Greek Temple which stands in the midst of Athens. That Temple, in all likelihood, derives its name from the nickname of the goddess considered the patron goddess of Athens itself: Athena the Virgin. There are undoubtedly innumerable possible connections we could pursue in coming to terms with what all these associations may have held in the minds of the original composers of the Creed at Nicaea. However, leaving those to the imaginative work of academics, let me instead take an historic aside here, albeit related, but giving us a perspective on what was and what was to come in regards to, what I consider, less regard for Mary than for her virginity and, subsequently, the whole sordid history of the Church “having sex on the brain” - which Bishop Michael Marshall has famously quipped “is the absolute worst place to have it!”

First, there can be little doubt that the question of Mary’s virginity has had wide-ranging consequences in regards to Christian perspectives on human sexuality. Aside from all the ways in which the tale of a virgin birth was not so much a declaration of a unique historic event as it was just a way to mirror a long history of stories typifying the birth of significant personalities, scriptural support for a reading of Mary’s virginity and, thus the virgin birth, as anything more than typological, is rife with a history of questionable translations. The primary source from the Jewish scriptures is Isaiah 7:14. There, in the original Hebrew, it is stated that a young woman who is with child will be a sign for the people and the child she shall bear will be called Immanuel (which in Hebrew means “God is with us”). When the prophet wrote these words, it was a time when all hell was coming down on the people of Israel. The Assyrian Empire set out to conquer the territories of Israel. These were strategically significant lands that were extremely valuable as they were essentially the crossroads for land trade between all nations to the north (both east and west) and all nations to the south. About the year 720 B.C.E. the Assyrians began, for them, a typical deportation program that they instituted in all their conquered lands. Those exiled were separated and dispersed throughout Assyrian lands so as to force them into an assimilation which denied them opportunities to cling to their own cultural identity and ways. Numbers here are sketchy but it is estimated that perhaps as much as 80% of the existing population of Jewish people were impacted by this policy. History remembers these as “The Lost Tribes of Israel”. Isaiah, looking to foster hope among those who were not exiled, called attention to the young who were daring to raise children into such a world. The sign was not a virgin birth but rather a hope expressed in a simple willingness to risk having a child in that world.

Nearly five hundred years later, the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek for the benefit of a culture which for the most part no longer spoke Hebrew. Both the Hebrew and Greek languages had two separate words to denote the concepts of “a young woman” and “a virgin”. For reasons not exactly clear, the 3rd century B.C.E. translators used the Greek word for virgin instead of the less precise other designation. Fast forward again to the end of the 4th century C.E. when a priest in Rome named Jerome was commissioned to commence a translation of biblical books into Latin. While claims were made that Jerome’s work was a translation from the original Hebrew and Greek writings, evidence suggests, with a stunning record of excuses and claims of lost documents from Jerome to parties interested in learning from the veracity of his translation from the Hebrew, that Jerome may not have had any working knowledge of the more ancient and practically dead language. Instead, as he was rather gifted in regards to Greek, it is more likely that he translated the Jewish scriptures from the existing Greek translation. This only perpetuated the still continuing issue of reading back into Isaiah’s original words a “virgin birth” which was not being claimed there.

One further aside: Jerome was a contemporary of a guy named Augustine, who would arguable become the Church’s first acclaimed theological authority - at least within the Western Latin-speaking churches (Augustine was never held in high regard by the Eastern churches). There is no way to underestimate the impact of Augustine’s thoughts and opinions on the Western Church, both good and bad, right down to our own day. Among these were Augustine’s own views on human sexuality which derived, in large part, from some particular perspectives he developed out of his own personal experiences and hang-ups which rose out of his younger days before he became a Christian and for which Christianity provided for him - at least his understanding of it - a means to escape his rather neurotic attitudes toward all things sexual.

Case in point. Having freely and flauntingly engaged in what we might identify as the typically liberated life-style of the privileged elite, Augustine, at 17, met a young woman who he seemed to have genuinely loved. Within a year of their acquaintance, he fathered a child with her and they took up residence together. Augustine’s mother, claiming to be a devout Christian, rather effusively declared the woman not worthy of their class. It took fifteen years but his mother finally caused the end of that relationship by having Augustine, then in his early thirties, pledged to an 11 year-old heiress. He, unable to stem his carnal desires, took up residence with another lover and, when that ended, became a Christian convinced that all his sexual desires carried not the impulse of love but merely lust. Over the course of the next nine years, his mother died, his son died, he got ordained a priest, and, selling all he possessed, he committed himself to a celibate monastic order, and became a bishop. Among some impressive theological works, he also put forward some highly questionable but popularly influential ideas including that original sin was passed on and inherited from the time of Adam through the sexual act thereby demonizing it. He also found himself continually fighting the thoughts of an equally impressive theological British Christian who had the audacity to claim that human beings can be cooperatively and positively engaged in their embrace of God’s love and grace. Augustine insisted that people were so totally depraved by original sin, we had no capacity to help ourselves.

Needless to say, all these things have contributed throughout the centuries to some very unhealthy attitudes about human sexuality. In addition to what history tells us, I am not convinced by arguments that insist upon upholding Mary’s “virginity”. I fail to see what is gained by defending such and easily see all that gets lost if we do defend it. What I do admire about the witness of Mary is that in a time, perhaps no less trying than the times of Isaiah or even our own, Mary said “Yes” to a hope for the future when it might have been a lot easier to say “Not Now”.

“And One Lord Jesus Christ…through…Mary the Virgin and in-humanness…”

The phrase “in-humanness” (in-humankind) finds an echo in the words of Athanasius, one of the more influential participants at the Council of Nicaea, who once claimed that: “God became human so that humanity might become more God-like”. A sentiment dear old Augustine would have found argument with. (P.S. Augustine, for all his theological prowess, never knew a lick of Greek.)