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Accepting faith in Christ’s divinity
archived from: 2006-05-04
by: Craig Maier

In 1813, four years after leaving the presidency of the United States, Thomas Jefferson “wrote” a “gospel” of Jesus Christ. Actually, he didn’t really write anything. Convinced that the Gospels were full of superstition, he carefully went through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and cut out everything he believed couldn’t be proved, and then pasted the remaining texts together in something that approached a chronological order.

In Jefferson’s life of Jesus, the moral teaching of Jesus stayed, but the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection all had to go. For Jefferson, Jesus Christ was really a “wise teacher” but nothing more.

Though they probably have never heard of Jefferson’s quirky gospel, there are those in the modern world who would tend to agree with him. Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” reflects this trend. Jesus, Brown argues, was just a nice person, and common sense and reason says as much, he writes. Brown’s book is more sleight of hand than actual substance, but it can easily lead people astray.

This month, the film version of “The Da Vinci Code” will hit a multiplex near you. In an attempt to unravel “The Da Vinci Code” phenomenon, the Pittsburgh Catholic is offering a series of articles examining the claims the book makes. This week, the series will take a look at what the book has to say about the divinity of Christ.

“The Da Vinci Code” tells the story of Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor caught up in the search for the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend. At a decisive point in the story, Langdon enlists the help of Leigh Teabing, another Grail “expert.” Through their conversations, the reader learns the alleged “truth” about Christianity.

The “truth,” as one has come to expect from conspiracy novels, isn’t flattering. Among many other things, Teabing announces that Roman Emperor Constantine arbitrarily declared that Jesus was the divine Son of God at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. “Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet,” Teabing says, “a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.”

So, Teabing says, Christianity is essentially a lie to dupe the masses. “It was all about power,” he says. “Many scholars claim that the early church literally stole Jesus from his original followers, hijacking his human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.”

For Christians, these allegations, mentioned almost in passing, are simultaneously confusing, disturbing and infuriating. Brown, through the character of Teabing, merely asserts them without any proof. But perhaps Teabing’s strangest suggestion is that “the vast majority of educated Christians” have always known that Christ’s divinity is a lie and that, in the end, Christ’s divinity really doesn’t matter much.

“Constantine’s underhanded political maneuvers don’t diminish the majesty of Christ’s life,” Teabing says. “Nobody is saying Christ was a fraud, or denying that he walked the earth and inspired millions to better lives.” Like Thomas Jefferson, Teabing suggests that Jesus’ “message” is fine, as long as we remember to cut out anything that suggests he was anything more than a normal human being.

In the modern world, even many who consider themselves good Christians may subscribe to Brown’s view, emphasizing the “message” of Jesus over his divine nature and mission. But can we really just do away with the idea that Christ is the Son of God? The answer is no.

“I and the Father are one”

“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God.”

Catholics repeat these words from the Nicene Creed at Mass because Jesus’ divinity is so crucial that it bears repeating. Christians believe God entered history as a human being, embracing human life and dying to save it.

The Christian belief in a God who would become a human being is completely unprecedented. Other religions may have great teachers, profound wisdom and beautiful stories, but Christians are Christian because they have Christ.

Christians can sometimes forget how scandalous Christ is. From the beginning, Christians struggled to understand what Christ means. How could God, who is perfect, enter an imperfect world? How could a living, breathing person actually claim to be equal with God?

Contrary to whatever Brown wrote, this is exactly what Jesus said and what the earliest Christians believed. The Gospels, which were written in the earliest days of the Christian faith, offer ample evidence to the early Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus makes some remarkable claims. He tells the disciples, “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30). He declares himself, with God, to be Lord of the Sabbath (Mk 2:28). He says that to abide in him is to abide in the Father (Jn 15:7-10). In these statements and so many others, the Gospels show Jesus taught that he was both human and divine.

Those who reacted so angrily to Jesus’ statements obviously understood what Jesus said about himself enough to persecute him and his followers. And Jesus’ followers obviously understood and believed what he meant enough to accept death at the hands of Jewish and Roman persecution rather than deny what he said.

The essential truth

In the early church, though, certain questions about Jesus persisted. Some fringe Christian groups doubted that Christ ever took human form, for instance, but was a sort of spirit that floated around. Others thought Christ’s divine and human natures were completely separate. The human nature suffered and died, they believed, while the divine nature remained untouched.

One of the greatest challenges to the understanding of the nature of Jesus came from an Egyptian priest named Arius. Deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, Arius believed God was too perfect and unchanging to enter history. Jesus, he argued, had to be some sort of created being that was similar to God but not the same.

The Arian heresy, as his argument came to be known, was popular in many areas, but its popularity couldn’t hide the fact that it denied what Christ taught. The Council of Nicaea in 325 convened to confront the problems Arius created.

The council, which Brown says was where the church “voted” Jesus into divinity, did no such thing. In reality, it defended and affirmed Jesus’ own teaching — that he was “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” Jesus Christ was both human and divine, the two natures joined in a mysterious and inseparable way.

The early church found Jesus’ dual nature so important because it understood that Christianity isn’t a set of ethical principles, interesting ideas or philosophical constructs, but the means of salvation. Christ must be both human and divine because it is the only way for humanity to be reconciled to God.

“The man Jesus Christ, who is God’s true Son, is the only one who could offer the Father a fitting atonement for sin,” Bishop Donald Wuerl wrote in “The Catholic Way.” “Not only does God save us, but he brings about salvation in a generous way, in a manner that honors the humanity he saves.”

“If Christ was not truly one of us, then he did not participate in the human nature that died and rose,” Bishop Wuerl wrote in another passage. “Hence, the restoration of creation and certainly the restoration of our fallen human nature would not be accomplished.”

Like the early church, we need Jesus Christ, and we need him because he is human and because he is divine. Those who would strip Jesus of his divinity, as Brown does, create a Christ who is a wise teacher who says nice things and wins popularity contests. But Brown’s Christ cannot save.

The real Jesus, the Jesus of the faith, has always been a stumbling block for those who would follow a savior of their own creation or demand “proof” that only faith can give. “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,” St. Paul told the Corinthians in the first century. Nevertheless, he urged, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Cor 1:22-25).

The church’s teaching about Christ’s divinity is the essential truth, the cornerstone of Christian faith. And it always was.

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