Jesus and Christ

The fundamental Christology of the New Testament, Barth insists ( The Doctrine of the Word of God (Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 2) , pp. 15-7), is that “God’s Son is called Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Son.”

But this cannot be understood in the sense that Jesus fulfills some prior conception of Son of God, or Christ, or Word of God: “That would be an arbitrary Christology, docetic in its estimate and in its conclusions . . . . An object which is really God only so far as man sees in it the confirmation and fulfillment of his own imported conception of God and therefore clothes it with the character of God, God’s Word or God’s Son – such an object is God only in a quite frivolous sense; it remains fundamentally what it is, an object. Although and just because docetic Christology clothes its object, the man of Jesus of Nazareth, with that character . . . in the last resort in His objectivity, as a man, Jesus is a matter of indifference.” It can so so far as to “abandon Jesus, the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth” while retaining Christ; it can see this abandonment of Jesus as “a peculiar triumph of a strong faith.”

It’s a powerful point, but it still seems to me to share something of the liberalism that Barth is intent on rejecting. Why start Christology with the New Testament? The Hebrew Bible presented a fundamental Christology prior to Jesus – one that is neither arbitrary nor docetic. Jesus comes clothed in a prior conception of God, but those are clothes prepared by the Father in the history of Israel.