Mortal Remains
Polar Composites
by S. M. Hutchens
In the December 23, 2016 New York Times online Opinion Pages, Peter Wehner, a member of the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, wrote a piece titled "Humanizing Jesus," in which he did his Christmas best at bringing the Lord down to earth for the consumption of the people—a pious exercise, to be sure, for the teaching of the Christian faith is that this was precisely and literally what he came for. This struck some of my correspondents, however, as a suspicious operation, for many of us have spent a good deal of time in our churches attempting to save the Lord of heaven from being treated as common earth—Jesus our ol' buddy, the best guy we know, qualified above all others for the honorary presidency of the Possum Lodge International.
There have always been opposing, and I think necessary, tendencies in the church to emphasize the Lord's exaltation or humiliation. Both answer to reality and human need. Where one impulse is felt to be lacking, the other tends to assert itself. Where the refulgently fearsome King is emphasized, the gentle and approachable Jesus follows; in the wake of Pius IX, Thérèse of Lisieux; in the home of the powerfully ordered Puritan spirit, all sorts of subjective arrangements with Jesus.
I believe God himself placed many polar forces at work among his people, particularly, and probably at the base of them all, the opposition of prophetic-fideistic (-Mosaic) religion and priestly-sacramental (Aaronic) religion, between subjective and objective understandings, and institutional and free expressions of the faith. These are brothers struggling in the womb, joined and reconciled in, and only in, the Lord himself. The Scriptures bear witness to the Son of God and the Son of Man, but nothing in-between—only their unity in the Mystery of our Faith, the Person of Christ Jesus.
I am not therefore surprised when I hear someone with conservative Reformed associations speaking of the necessity to "humanize" Jesus, for the disciplined but arid scholasticism typical in those quarters (the same is found historically among Lutherans and the Roman Church, which is the mother of us all) invariably gives rise to a pietistic reaction within its own precincts.
As long as these impulses are found together and not allowed to exclude one another, Christian life, with the Blessing, is possible. Whenever one overcomes the other without comprehending it, the faith dies, the departure of the Spirit in whom they are joined producing the qualities of death we would expect: the rigid unresponsiveness of dead orthodoxy on the one hand, and on the other, sectarian heterodoxy—gaseous decomposition brought about by the excitations of teeming but alien life.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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