My last post addressed Christ's mediation, an older christological concept. In this post I'd like to address what I think is a newer christological concept: the idea of Christ's "presence."
"Presence" has quietly snuck its way into theological discourse. For example, the Baptist theologian James McClendon describes presence as a special Christian virtue. He says the virtue of presence is founded in the stories and beliefs we have about Jesus Christ: "God's presence with us is one of the great gifts of the gospel, associated with the incarnation of the Word, the giving of the Spirit, and the return of the Lord; in Christian history his presence is celebrated in every eucharistic meal, invoked at every baptism, and claimed anew at every gathering of disciples" (Ethics, 115).
McClendon finds clear reflections of this christological presence in the behavior of Christian people. He gives examples of Christians embodying the virtue of "presence" like the presence of Clarence Jordan's Koinonia farm in Georgia, or Catholic religious who live in prisons and jails in order to be present to the prisoners inside.
In the next few posts I may explore around to see the roots of this theological idea of "presence," which has become pretty much a set piece of christology and moral theology in certain theological circles, although not in others. I am also interested to see what the examination of new and old christological concepts teaches about the task of christology and theology itself.
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I'm not sure if you read this part or not, but I think it's worth bringing up. I just read through a section of Mclendon's "Doctrine" where he deals with presence. In this section, the presence of Christ occurs within the Resurrected Christ, and it is a type of knowing, where we know Christ and he knows us. Mclendon argues that there are four types of knowing/presence of Christ to his church: worship, witness, work, and word. The church experiences Christ's presence (a relational, reciprocal knowing) in all of these acts.
ReplyDeleteNice post, Matt. A Christology of presence seems more necessary these days, if for nothing else than because of the rise of the Historical-Critical methodology. In "Jesus of Nazareth," Benedict XVI notes that the H-C method is important and useful, but also has limitations - the chief one being it automatically deals with past events, and works to keep them within that temporal framework. Mclendon's focus on presence is really an argument for Christ's interruption of the present. Maybe "presence" has been sneaking in because of a response to the limitations of H-C?
After reading this I thumbed through my copy of "Doctrine" and yep, there's several reflections on "presence" there. I think I got the Bonhoeffer quote in my "preaching and theology" post from there too. So McClendon probably started this whole "presence" line of thinking for me.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you're 100% right that all this presence talk, at least from Bonhoeffer on, is about finding ways of dealing with historical reconstructions of Jesus. I'd have to read McClendon more closely to talk about this (maybe I will in a future blog post), but I wonder how well he is actually able to describe Christ's presence, philosophically and theologically, as an alternative to them. I feel like he has certain "anti-metaphysical" commitments that would cause issues down the line. Thinking out loud here - this might be a paper soon.