Harder To Talk About God

I was visiting with one of our majors yesterday, and the conversation turned toward Christology and Jesus’ agony in the garden. How are we to make sense of what is happening in that moment when Jesus prays to the Father, “Not my will, but yours”? If Jesus was fully God, was the will of the Son, as the Second Person of the Trinity, opposed to or in conflict with the will of the Father? According to creedal orthodoxy, such a conflict would be impossible.

And if this seems to be an esoteric conversation, it isn’t. If the will of the Son and the Father are separated and in conflict, then the Father is inflicting something upon the unwilling Son. Given the problems with such a view, a properly Trinitarian perspective upon the crucifixion of Jesus is that there is no division between the Son and the Father. They are One.

Still, how do we resolve the narrative of Gethsemane, where we read of Jesus experiencing an agony of soul and a struggle of the will, with Trinitarian dogma? What is going on with Jesus’ dual identity as both human and God?

The Trinitarian and Christological formulations that came to define “orthodoxy” were worked out across various church councils. Two of the most significant were Nicaea (325 AD) and Chalcedon (451 AD), where foundational Trinitarian and Christological dogmas were settled upon. What is interesting about these formulations is how the dogmatic consensus resisted simplification. At the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity sits a paradox: How can One be Three? And at the heart of Christology sits another paradox: How can Christ be both fully human and fully divine?

Christian dogma sets a fence around these twin mysteries and says to human reason, “You shall not pass!” Human reason, however, is not so easily deflected. Inquiring minds are going to press. And what the mind tends to press for is simplicity, to collapse the paradox and dispel the mystery. Consequently, heresy tends toward a brute literalism and crude simplicity. The mind finds these “answers” to be comforting. Thus, heresy, as the refusal of mystery, has a perennial attractiveness to black-and-white, concrete theological minds. Here’s the way Rowan Williams has put it: the goal of the creeds was to make “it harder to talk about God.” Heresy was, and has been, a way to make God available to the human mind. To make talking about God easier. But wherever we see this thirst for literalism shove aside mystery, theological reflection is soon to go off the rails.