Leaning on the Historical Jesus (xi)

This is the eleventh 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 posting number nine (here), we saw that Thich Nhat Hanh looks at Jesus in two ways, as the Son of God and the Son of Man, and I observed that he seems to prefer the "living Christ," the Son of God, over the historical person of Jesus, the Son of Man.  The "seems" is important because from a Christian theological perspective his understanding of Jesus is not  quite that simple or clear.  For one thing, as he goes along Thich Nhat Hanh comes back to the life and teachings of the historical Christ, observing that, "Jesus lived exactly as He taught."  He is thus a model for our own religious practice, which is based as much on his historical life as on his teachings and means that his life and teachings are more important that faith in him (page 36).  Whatever it is that makes Christ the "living Christ," thus is rooted in the actual life that Jesus of Nazareth lived and not in his eternal, timeless, and spaceless divine nature as the One through whom creation took place (John 1).

For another thing, Thich Nhat Hanh conflates the three persons of the Trinity in a way that most traditional or orthodox theologians will find unacceptable.  Jesus is the Son of God because he was "animated by the energy of the Holy Spirit."Jesus was also the Son of God because he had God the Father in him; he could not otherwise have been the Son.  Thich Nhat Hanh claims that all of this shows the "nature of nonduality in God."  (page 36) I take this to mean that in his view functionally God is not Three but rather One, which brushes aside the orthodox Christian insistence that each of the three persons of the Trinity is in fact distinct from the other two.  Historically, we have said that each person of the Trinity is not the other but all three are one in God.  Thich Nhat Hanh pretty much ignores the "is not" aspect of the Trinity—as do many Christians, in practice.

What seems to be happening here is that Thich Nhat Hanh tends (strongly) to understand God as being Present in reality while leaving aside our Christian perception that God is as much Beyond as Present.  Thus, the "living Christ" lives in us, and God the Father and God the Holy Spirit also live in us as they live in the "living Christ."  The God who, again, stands Beyond time and space and created all that is doesn't really come into the picture at all.  Let me pursue that thought in the next posting in this series.