Prepositional Christology

          Who Jesus Christ is and what he did, does, and will do for us and our world is the central question of theology.  Not only is he the most profound person our world has ever seen, he is the most perplexing as well.  Our attempt to talk about who he is and what he did/does/will do is among the most difficult and demanding tasks in intellectual history.  In this short piece I want to try to sketch out some of that discussion in a way that all of us can better grasp the profundity, perplexity, and mystery of his person, this One who questions all our answers and answers our deepest though often unknown needs.

          I’ll do this using four prepositions.  God comes to us in, with, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ (Messiah).

          God comes to us in Jesus of Nazareth.  However we explain God’s presence in this human Jesus, the New Testament is clear that God is somehow in him.  Jesus is not only fully human, he is truly human.  And true humanity, as it should have been in Adam and Eve, is life filled with God.  Each of us in the uniqueness of our particular lives become who and what God designed us to be when filled with his life.  Thus the New Testament calls Jesus the new or second Adam – humanity as God intended it to be.

          God comes to us with Jesus of Nazareth.  God with Jesus means that humanity is not alone.  And never will be!  God and humanity are inextricably, that is, covenantally, bound together.  God with us; we with God.  God with us, faithful to his commitment to us even when we are not faithful to him.  After all, he is called “Immanuel,” God-with-us.  But he is also “Adam” and “Eve,” men and women as we should have been with God.

          God comes to us through Jesus of Nazareth.  The power of God at work in Jesus is the Holy Spirit.  Jesus lives his life of loving fidelity to the Father not by virtue of his “Divinity” but by virtue of the Spirit (Luke’s gospel makes this abundantly clear).  Through this agency of the Spirit, God to us in Jesus; yet at the same time, through this same agency Jesus makes himself available to be so used as an exemplar of God-intended humanity.

          Yet, and this is unique and crucial, God also comes to us as Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus is not simply one in whom God dwells.  Nor one whom God is with.  And not just one through whom God works.  This could and has been said of other religious figures.  And all this is true of Jesus, as we have seen.  But the Bible takes all this to another level altogether.  God is so intent on drawing close to his human creatures that he has come to us as one of us!  Call it with theologians the “incarnation,” or with Karl Barth, the “miracle of Christmas,”  or with Eugene Peterson that in Jesus God has “moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message), the who is from all eternity equal to and in face-to-face communication, communion, and community has become human!

          In, with, through, and as Jesus Christ God has come among us.  He has a face and a name, a history which shows us who he is and how he is disposed toward us.  This is scandal for some and glory for others of this mind-boggling, jaw-dropping truth.  The Christian faith is not about how “godlike” Jesus is (as if we already know who and how God is and can fit Jesus into that paradigm), rather about how Jesus-like God is!