God crucified (Paperback)

Though brief, God Crucified certainly shakes the piles under the house. The inadequacies of the Chalcedonian confession have been well documented, but does a repudiation of the two natures doctrine mean that we must all become antirealist constructivists? I've not thought so and God Crucified gives good grist to the mill of the many who seek to be both biblically realistic and non-reductionist - indeed in really seeking to be biblical, one thereby avoids both reductionism and abstract speculation, as God Crucified shows.

Of course, there's noting remarkable about the contention that the Chalcedonian confession doesn't get it right. At least since Harnack we've heard that the big mistake in trying to understand Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed was made with the re-contextualisation of the primal Jewish faith in God through Jesus, for the Greco-Roman world. We've been told that Gentile mythology and Hellenistic philosophy conspired to turn the teacher from Nazareth into a demigod from heaven, and eventually, through convoluted speculative arguments, to give him the same ontological status as the creator of the cosmos. In short, the problem is Greek categories - the wrong concepts and questions give rise to inadequate conclusions. With this latter assertion, Bauckam agrees.

However, Bauckham contends that the problem with the Chalcedonian conclusion isn't that it asserts Jesus' unqualified humanity and divinity. Rather, Bauckham says that the journey to Chalecedon was an entirely unnecessary trip - the highest possible christology, consistent with a personalist, Trinitarian understanding of God, is already clearly expressed in the very Jewish writings of the New Testament!

Bauckham contends that the earliest christology is every bit as 'high' as, indeed is superior to, Chalcedonian christology. In fact, the metaphysical debates of Hellenistic, post-apostolic Christianity concerning the person of Jesus Christ were regressive compared to the christology of the New Testament itself. By stressing that the appropriate category is neither 'nature' nor 'function' but 'identity', Bauckham pronounces a plague on both ontic and functional approaches. He works with what he says is "... the key category of the identity of the God of Israel - which appropriately focuses on who God is rather than what divinity is ....".

Bauckham holds that New Testament christology came about by the radical, unprecedented, but nonetheless very Jewish primary move of directly identifying Jesus with God. In Jesus the New Testament writers found the answer to the central, ongoing question in the biblical story: Who is Yahweh? Bauckham joins N.T. Wright and others in calling this identification of Jesus with Yahweh 'christological monotheism'.

If anything, the identification of Jesus with Yahweh was as much forced upon the first believers by their unwillingness to compromise Yahweh's uniqueness and sovereignty as it was a consequence of their need to recognise the revelation of Yahweh in Jesus.

In asserting that Second Temple Judaism was uncompromising in its monotheism, Baukham stands clearly contra to christological developmentalists like James Dunn and those scholars who, like Larry W. Hurtado, attempt to find a model for christology by conjecturing that Judaism always been 'binitarian', or attempt to find a model in semi-divine intermediary figures supposed to be found in early Judaism. Bauckham considers those attempts "largely mistaken".

Those with an eye for a title will have intuited that God Crucified owes not a little to the insights of Jürgen Moltmann but, to my mind, deserves no brick bats for that. Bauckham is deliberately light on footnotes - Moltmann barely gets a mention, but keeping his thought in mind helps one see Bauckham's clearly made contentions in the context of a wider theological enterprise.

But God Crucified is not in any way Moltmann regurgitated. The strength of this book is that it sketches an argument with huge dogmatic implications by revealingly what would be obvious from a selection of well-known New Testament passages, if we weren't so hoodwinked by the story of evolutionary christological development. Of particular note is Bauckham's consideration of Paul's well-known reworking of the Shema' (Deut. 6.4) in 1 Corinthians 8.4-6. Bauckham's comments about verse 6 encapsulate his thesis.