Rehabilitating Christology
By Tripp Fuller • Mar 25th, 2009 • Category: media, thinkingThere is hardly anything as depressing as a progressive Christian who has a hard time saying anything about Jesus. Not just theologians or pastors but just any one who ventures to think about Jesus after biblical criticism in a historical situation that is religiously pluralistic with plenty of visible scars of Jesus followers doing damage to others in Christ’s name has trouble getting started. This video is a pretty fun way of examining how you can ratchet up your Jesus-Talk and I would be interested in hearing where the HBC Deacaons jump of the Christological train Clayton is describing.
Tripp Fuller is married to an awesome lady Alecia and has a handsome little baby boy named Elgin Thomas (aka E.T.) and Pebbles, the Schnoodle. He and Alecia are both graduates of Campbell University (where they met), the Divinity School of Wake Forest University and ordained ministers. He is working on his PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. A few other things he digs are books, cigars, pipes, Shaq, guitar, pirates, fishing, the Counting Crows, and good conversations about Religion and Politics. The podcast is the most time consuming hobby he has ever had besides reading and blogging through Wolfhart Pannenberg's 3 volume systematic theology. Follow Tripp on Twitter | Tripp on Facebook
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Thank you for this creative discussion of the Christology! This is a topic that has been troubling me lately, as well, and I’ve just written two blog posts about it (“Priests, Women, and Hermaphrodites” and, more recently, “Holy Mary, Mother of God”). I have never been comfortable calling Jesus a good teacher and leaving it at that, but the Christology is troubling for me because of the insidious ways intolerance is woven into salvation via sexuality, so as a progressive (emerging?) Christian, I’m working out a theology that I can get excited about in response to this.
In my many “field trips” to churches and conversations with other Christians, I come across arguments that the humanity of Jesus is tied into his masculinity in such a way that people (usually implicitly, though my blogs above are about an explicit version of the argument) deny the full humanity of particularly people whose sexuality isn’t easily boxed into “male” and “female”…and, in a further implicit way, deny the full humanity of women, as well.
Now, I think there are ways to look at the Christology that don’t require defining humanity in terms of sexuality in such a negative way. Luce Irigiray and other feminists have written creatively at length in response, and queer theology is a growing movement in response, too. So this is a very exciting way of looking at the Christology, I think, that deserves a shout-out precisely BECAUSE we need Jesus to be “taken up” with God, for God to be changed…because if God needs a “full human being” to be taken up into God’s presence…if God needs a PERFECT human being to be taken up into his presence, what would that “perfection” look like, and what would we use to define it?