Christ: God, Man & Hero
Jesus Christ & the Pattern of Christian Manhood
by Leon J. Podles
Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnate. He is the Logos, the Word of God made flesh, having taken upon himself a complete human nature. He is fully and completely human. There is nothing lacking in him that makes up a full human being. He has a body, a mind, a soul, a will. He is God’s complete utterance. The Father has nothing more to say than what he has said in his Word. The Son is consubstantial with the Father, receiving the fullness of divinity from the Father.
These dogmas were hammered out in the debates of the first centuries of the Church, and express in words the limits within which Christians can think about Christ. They cannot believe there was a time when he was not, as the Arians claimed, or that he had no human will, as the Monothelites claimed.
But these philosophical formulations, while necessary to safeguard the faith of the Church, do not express all the aspects of Christ that can capture and transform the imagination. We do not live by syllogisms, however much truth they express, but by vivid icons and apprehensions. Jesus in Scripture is the Suffering Servant, the Lamb of God, the Faithful and True, the Son of Man. These images stir the mind and heart, and assist in the conversion of the whole man, who is not simply intellect. An image that sums up and expresses what Jesus is in the world is Jesus as Hero.
The Hero
We speak loosely of any courageous person as a hero. Courage is essential to heroism, but it does not make the hero. A hero involves a story, a mythos, a plot. But because myth has a misleading overtone of untruth, I will speak instead of the story or the narrative of the hero.
A hero leaves the everyday world, faces challenges, sufferings, and even death, is transformed through them, and then returns to the ordinary world, usually as a king. The pattern is simple, and can be found in the epic of Gilgamesh and in Walt Disney’s cartoon Hercules and in thousands of stories in between.
The story of the hero has been explored by folklorists, literary scholars, and Jungian analysts.1 However, the clue to the presence of the story of the hero in almost all cultures lies not in folkloric borrowings or “solar myths” or Jungian archetypes, but in human nature, specifically in the nature of the human male, and in the story of the life of every male who sets out to become a man.
The hero is universal because he represents what every man should be. His experiences are those that a boy goes through in the process of becoming a man. Jung postulated a collective unconscious, but that is an unnecessary postulate.2 Stories of heroes are found throughout the world simply because boys become men throughout the world.
The Facts of Life for Men
Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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