Brian Hamilton-Vise

Practical-ontological Christology

In an old essay, J. Denny Weaver argues that a Christology for the believers’ churches–that is, above all, a Christology that maintains an intrinsic ethical dimension–needs to be a “narrative” Christology rather than an “ontological” one. Anabaptist theology has always affirmed the orthodox “ontological” claim that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, he admits, but that affirmation has been basically unconnected with its more deeply-rooted concern for following Jesus. That concern is more ably helped along by a “narrative” Christology that focuses in on the historical career of Jesus of Nazareth.

This dichotomy between ontological and narrative Christology is, to put it bluntly, worse than useless. I’m sure Weaver would say that he doesn’t want a strict dichotomy between the two, that their boundaries are and should be fluid; but there’s no question that he pits the two against each other. And to do that is to render any decent Christology impossible from the beginning, since no proper account of the person and work of Jesus (though this seems far too obvious to have to argue) can make do without both ontology and history.

One need only look to Michael Sattler to see how manifestly false it is that ontological considerations played no part in the “practical Christology” of early Anabaptism (though this would be no different were we to examine the thought of Marpeck or Menno). For Sattler, the story of Jesus’ willing obedience even in suffering becomes visible in us precisely because we, by faith and baptism, have been made–even ontologically–members of his body. It is only because he is both human and divine that Jesus can be at once the man of sorrows and the unity of the church in God. Sattler does not “begin” with a “narrative Christology” that gives him his ethics before moving more abstract considerations of Christ’s cosmic bodiliness; his ethics already depends on the conviction that Christ’s body is such that we can be made members of it, and that in being united with him, “one-essential Son of God the Father,” we are united with God himself.

18 November 2008 | Comments (1)
Tags: Christology, Ecclesiology, J. Denny Weaver, Michael Sattler