This is the ninth posting in a series of postings reflecting on Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Living Buddha, Living Christ (Riverhead Books, 2007; originally published in 1995). The introductory posting, setting the stage for the series, is (here).In Thich Nhat Hanh's view, there are two ways to understand the Buddha and Christ. Each of them was, first, an historical person. And each of them, second, is also today a living person: the living Buddha and the living Christ. In the case of Jesus, he is both the Son of Man and the Son of God. Thich Nhat Hanh shows little interest in the historical versions of the Buddha and Christ and focuses, instead, on the living ones. He describes the living Buddha as being "the Buddha within ourselves who transcends space and time." He is linked to ultimate reality, "transcends all ideas and notions and is available to us at any time." In Jesus, we are able to "penetrate the reality of God," who is made known to us through Christ. Jesus was "animated by the energy of the Holy Spirit." (pages 35-36)
It is interesting and, perhaps, instructive to watch a friend of the Christian faith seem to do the same thing we Christians do, which is to give lip service to the doctrines of the incarnation of God in Christ and the two natures of Christ, divine and human, and then to prefer one over the other. And Thich Nhat Hanh even seems to prefer the one the vast majority of Christians prefer, namely the divine nature of God. For much of our faith's history, Christians have put their trust in the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, to such an extent that Jesus' humanity seems to be not much more than a formality.
Historically, however, it took decades stretching out into centuries to work out the divine nature of Christ. The earliest church knew that Jesus of Nazareth was a real, historical person with the limitations of human nature. They knew that the great majority of people who met him had no sense of his being in any way divine and that as Jews it was not possible that they would. The very earliest Christians, the ones who knew Jesus personally, themselves did not see him as "fully man, fully God," and in fact it took time and thought for them to see that God was in Jesus in a way unlike the rest of humanity. It was only in the long centuries after that faithful Christians increasingly emphasized the majesty of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Like Thich Nhat Hanh, they preferred the living Christ to the historical Jesus.
Since the rise of science and modern historiography, the emphasis on the divine Christ at the expense of the historical Jesus has become problematic. Let me pursue that thought in the next posting and here simply note that Thich Nhat Hanh seems to do what all Christians do, which is to prefer one Jesus or the other, the human one or the divine one.
