In the interest of "full disclosure," I probably should say that my personal theology leans to the human Jesus rather than the divine Christ. Given my training in history and the fact that I worked as a professional historian for many years (albeit in a church setting), it is hardly surprising that I find Jesus of Nazareth a fascinating and challenging historical figure. Still, there was something go on in Jesus that doesn't go on in the rest of us. That "something" lies deep within "the Christ event," and we should approach it with some trepidation and a realization that it defies human categories and easy dogmatic descriptions. Indeed, it seems that the rush to embrace Jesus, the Son of God and sing high praises to Him, is always in danger of turning doctrines about the divine Jesus into idols that twist the actual person of Jesus, the Christ, into human renderings of what we think he should be.
The Asian theologian, Kosuke Koyama, has written a book entitled, No Handle on the Cross, in which he makes the point that we can't own the cross with our human ideas and doctrines about it. It is not something we can "handle," manage, or control. That goes for Jesus in general, and having to wrestle with the fact that he was just as human as the rest of us and bound by our human limitations should make us wary of over doing his divinity. We should have to always be straining to glimpse the "living Christ." He should remain slightly elusive, never quite in focus so that we can't envelope Him and thus turn Him into something of our own making. The historical person of Jesus, thus, grounds us in the way God moves among us, which is itself elusively and obliquely—and patiently. Amen.
