Fundamental Theology: Jesus “Reveals Man to Man”
We turn now to some basic claims made in Christian theology. Section 22 of Gaudium et spes (“Joy and Hope,” one of the most important decrees of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, 1962–65), begins with a bold one: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him who was to come, namely, Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”1 The mystery of what it is to be human—the mystery that we meet whenever we meet a human being—is fully seen only in the mystery of the incarnate Word, that is to say, in Jesus of Nazareth. Gaudium et spes here explicates the thought of Saint Paul (a footnote directs us to Rom. 5:14, although the argument extends from verse 12 through verse 21). If we translate the Latin homo as “human” taken as a noun, we could say that the first human, Adam, is a figure of the final (novissimus, newest or latest, ultimate) Adam. And that final Adam, Jesus Christ, fully manifests the human to the human.2
Dear reader, here is a sad truth: you and I fall short of being humans. We own up to this when we admit to being sinners. Sin is not something we add to ourselves and need to get rid of (although it can feel like that; our sins constitute a “burden” that “is intolerable,” according to a traditional prayer, and the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of “the sin that clings so closely” [12:1 NRSV]).3 Rather, sin actually is a defect, a falling short on our part of living up to our nature, a failure to be human in the full sense. We sinners, who live among sinners, never have seen in the flesh a totally real human being. The astonishing claim is that Jesus is the one, true, complete human being.
So when we say that Jesus is like us in all things except sin, we are not saying that we have something, “sin,” which Jesus fails to have. It’s the opposite: Jesus has something that we do not have—namely, full humanity from which nothing has been broken off and taken away.
And yet, sinners that we be, we do have Jesus. Gaudium et spes 22 makes another remarkable claim: “By His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man.”4 This teaching was frequently cited by Pope John Paul II in his anthropological/christological re-presentation of Catholic social teaching. John Paul emphasized that the dignity of every human being comes from a union with Christ—a union that is there even when that person is unaware of it and even prior to any missiological announcement of the gospel.5 How it is possible for this to be true is a project that theologians continue to work on. Yet in whatever way the theology works out, these two claims will remain foundational: (1) only in Jesus can we see what true humanity is, and yet at the same time (2) Jesus has “in some fashion” (quodammodo) united himself, already, with every human being.
This means that “in some fashion” what we are looking for, when we seek to understand friendship (or anything else about being humans), is already there, because even though we are sinners and thus less than fully human, in every instance the human being has been united with Jesus, the Word of God in the flesh, who is the one fully human being. Nevertheless, what we seek can be seen in truth only in the light that is shed by that same Jesus.
What Christianity gives us is the interpretive principle: to see what a real human being is, we must look to Jesus. I said earlier that the doctrine of creation—the discovery that God is the creator giving existence to everything that is—can give us confidence to study friendship without particular reference to Scripture or some other divine message. To this we may now add that the doctrine of the incarnation can give us confidence that when we study human things, there is a certain graced reality already there (because the incarnation means that Jesus has already united himself, somehow, with every human being). But the recognition that we are sinners must significantly caution our study. For when we look at friendship in the world—in philosophical thought, in our own experience, and wherever else—we are not looking at full humans. We need the light of Christ in order to see our true humanity.
To put this in one sentence, we will need to look to Jesus if we are to understand what friendship is in the fullest sense.
God’s Love
Friendship is a kind of love, so let us think for a bit about love.
It’s considered unproblematic and almost trite to say that God loves people. But actually “God loves people” is nearly the strangest of all possible sentences. This idea is not something the Bible gets to quickly or easily. One does not find the word love at all in the creation stories that open the book of Genesis, or in the stories of the flood and the tower of Babel, or in the stories of Abraham, until God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.6 Here is the first appearance of “love”: God identifies Isaac as “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Gen. 22:2). This first instance of love is parental; it may be that it is noted in order to emphasize the radicalness of the filial sacrifice.
Isaac, perhaps because he was almost sacrificed by one who loved him, seems to have more of a need for love than any person before him. When he takes Rebekah to be his wife, we are told “he loved her” (Gen. 24:67), and not much later we are told he loved his elder son: “Isaac loved Esau . . . but Rebekah loved Jacob” (25:28). And unlike anyone else up to this point, Isaac is also said to have a love for something (as opposed to someone): he is known for his love for “savoury meat” (27:4, 9, 14)—a love that plays in a famous deception scene.
Late to appear, love continues in Genesis as something problematic. Jacob’s love for Rachel but not for Leah causes intrafamilial discord. Shechem’s love for Dinah threatens Israel’s integrity and leads to violence. Israel’s (Jacob’s) love for Joseph over his other sons precipitates their jealousy—and so forth. As a whole, the book of Genesis seems hesitant to speak of love, knows love only as something between humans (except for Isaac’s love of savory meat), and presents it as a source of strife or a sign of blindness. Nowhere in Genesis is love connected with God.
The first claim that love might be connected with God is in Exodus, when God gives the Decalogue, specifically in the commandment not to make graven images. God says he is jealous but also merciful, “shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Exod. 20:6). These words presume that it is possible to love God, and they suggest that those who love God and keep his commandments could constitute a large number—namely, “thousands.” But once stated, this claim of the possibility of human love for God does not reappear in the canonical order of Scripture for a long time. Interhuman love, however, is spoken of in increasingly positive terms. For instance, a servant might attest to his love of “my master, my wife, and my children” (21:5). For interhuman love, the supreme command, of course, is to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev. 19:18; cf. 19:34).
Only when we get to Deuteronomy do we find it said, finally, that God can and has loved people. Moses tells the Israelites that God chose them “because he loved thy fathers” (Deut. 4:37; note that Israel is being taken as a singular, “thy”). Looking back as it were to Abraham with his wife, Sarah, and their descendants (but not, it seems, to the descendants of Abraham through Hagar or Keturah), Moses interprets God’s call of them, and all that God did with them, as his love for them: “He loved thy fathers.” This leads naturally to a repetition of the claim of his mercy toward those who love him (5:10, reprising the comment in Exod. 20:6 noted above) and to the command to “love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deut. 6:5). Whereas in Exodus it is not said that God loves people (although he does show mercy to “thousands” who love him “and keep [his] commandments” [20:6]), in Deuteronomy it is said plainly. God loves the people he has chosen (chap. 4), he shows mercy to those who love him in return (chap. 5), and the love of God, the keeping of his commandments, is to “love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (chap. 6).
Why do the canonical Scriptures unfold with this initial reticence to speak of love, particularly of the love of people for God and, with even greater reticence, the love of God for people? It is clear that the Bible invites us to ask this question, for the question lies implicit there in the text. But it is also clear that the Bible does not give an explicit answer.
There is, however, a clue to be found in the context. We note that it is in the midst of the promulgation of the Decalogue that we are first told that God will show mercy to those who love him (and thus that it is possible for people to love God). That is to say, it is precisely when God is giving the law to his people that he speaks of people loving him.
What might we make of this? Although it was necessary for God to promulgate the law for his people, that necessity had a tragic character to it. In fact, all law has a tragic character. We must have laws against identity theft, for instance, only because people steal identities. It would be better if there were no stealing! But once a law has been promulgated, people will be tempted to think that simple obedience to the law is enough. However, it is not enough for us merely to avoid stealing from one another!
Divine law partakes of this tragic character. One cannot relate to God merely as a matter of external obedience. It is not sufficient, for instance, to avoid making idols; one needs to relate positively to God, and that is to love him. The true keeping of the law is accompanied by love.
But I think something even deeper may be going on here. Perhaps the emergence of love is brought about not only as the necessary counteraction to external legal obedience to the law that God has spoken but also as something that God makes possible by his speaking anything at all—that is to say, only in a context where God speaks to people is it possible for people to love God. The Scriptures seem to demonstrate that God must first speak to us before we can love him. Obviously, he spoke to Abraham. And then half a millennium later, God spoke to Moses, and at that time, in the context of giving the commandment to love him, revealed that he had loved Abraham. But why would we need God to speak to us before we could love him?
The Creator Cannot Love His Creation
You cannot love something that is fundamentally unequal to you. If something is immensely more powerful than you, your love is going to be that of a timid servant to an overbearing master. Such servants always know that at any time the master could crush them.
If something is immensely weaker than you, your love will always be mere benevolence, a bestowal of “charity” that cannot help but perpetuate, to some extent, the existing inequality between you and the object of your benevolence.
If I say I love my cigar, and you ask me why I love my cigar, and I answer that it’s because it has such interesting things to say, you will likely ring up my bishop and tell him he has a problem on his hands.
Nietzsche famously rejected God because no matter how well-intentioned God might be, the divine-human relationship would always be a master-slave relationship. If God is the creator of the world, God is fundamentally unequal with his creation, and therefore he cannot love it. Love demands that the parties somehow be on an equal plane.
To shift the analogy, think of the relationship of an author to the story she writes. The author could be very pleased with her story. She could find herself thinking all the time about her characters and the lives they lead. But if she claims, say, to be having a picnic with one of her characters, it’s time for us to call the proverbial doctors. And if she writes a story in which the characters claim to be talking to her, we would probably find that really weird. A few authors have ventured such stories. In The Comforters, for instance, the magnificent Scottish novelist Muriel Spark has one of her characters hear an unseen typewriter clicking. That character comes to realize that she has an author and that she is incapable of escaping from the novel she is in. She hears a sort of chorus (the author’s?) say exactly what she herself is doing. The character never gets to talk with her author—she can’t. And she quite resents being trapped in a story.
Here’s the point: to claim that God loves people and that people can love God is to make the claim that, in some sense, God and people can be equal, on some sort of equal footing.
The Bible’s implicit claim then, which gradually dawns upon us as we read it in its canonical order but which is finally clear in Deuteronomy, is that God is more than our creator. He doesn’t only hold us in existence. He also somehow makes it possible for us to love him, and that is because he has loved us all along.
If God speaks to Abraham—if indeed God and Abraham can have a conversation—then somehow God and Abraham are on the same level. That means that God has lifted Abraham up from the level of being a creature only or that God has become more than merely a creator.
That God and Abraham speak with each other is a significant point of the narrative from Genesis 11:27 to 25:10. It takes a while, but finally God reveals his mind to Abraham, stopping by his tent, receiving his hospitality, and at last asking (the question is posed so that the reader will understand), “Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” (18:17–18). On one level, God is saying that he will educate Abraham in the ways of being a ruler, which is important because through his people all the people of the earth will be blessed; therefore, his people must be governed well. Abraham needs to learn hard lessons about judgment and how the law always, unavoidably, brings bad consequences. (We need, for another instance, laws against murder, but sometimes the guilty will go free and more innocents will be harmed by them, and sometimes the innocent will be caught up in the punishment of the guilty. It is impossible to mete out justice perfectly.)
But there’s more, I think. All the nations of the earth are going to be blessed through Abraham because God, talking with Abraham, puts himself and Abraham on the same level. Abraham, that is to say, is a blessing because he shows everyone who has ears to hear that conversation between God and a human being is possible.
So from these early chapters of Genesis the Scriptures make it clear that God is an author who wants to be a character in the story he has created. And that, of course, is what he finally brings about in the fullest sense in Jesus.
But God the Creator Does Love, and Speak
Implicit in the (very strange) claim that God has spoken to people is the possibility of people being given by God the ability to be on some sort of level with him. This same implicit possibility lies behind any claim that God loves people. God’s speaking and God’s loving thus come to the same point: verbal intercourse between the creator and the creature.
This is beyond our understanding. We cannot see how an author could become a character in his story, nor how a character could come to speak with and love and be loved by her author. There are interesting efforts in fiction and film to explore this possibility—in film, I recommend Stranger Than Fiction—but they always fall short of showing its consummation.
Still, there are many things in Christian faith that are beyond our comprehension, and yet we hold them to be true. The greatest of them all is the claim that Jesus Christ was dead on Friday and alive on Sunday.
We would have to reject the claim that God speaks with and loves people if the claim were a contradiction: contradictions are incoherent things (like square circles) and they cannot exist. And it would be a contradiction to say that Muriel Spark really communicated with Caroline Rose, the principal character of her novel The Comforters. In fact, if a character in a novel had, in the novel, a conversation with her author, the “author” in the novel could not be the same as the actual author of the book. Any real conversation between character and author would always slip away and be unachievable, because it would be a contradiction.
Yet it is not a contradiction to claim this about God because God is not a created thing. Muriel Spark is a creature, and her novels are themselves creatures. And a creature that is a human being cannot be identical with an idea (another creature of a sort) that is put into a novel any more than, to repeat an example I have used in an earlier book, Fred could be at the same time both a man and a duck. (He could be half-man and half-duck, but he couldn’t be fully man and fully duck. Humans and ducks are both creatures; to be two different kinds of creatures at the same time and in fullness is impossible.) But Jesus can be God and human at the same time because to be God is not to be a creature. So it cannot be proven to be a contradiction for God to be both creator and creature. Nor need it be a contradiction for God to be both author and character.
However, if we did not have the revelation to which the Scriptures attest, we would have no reason to say that God has spoken to his people, has loved and desired to be with his creation, and has finally become one with us. There is no necessity to any of this, it is a weird thing to say, and we do say it only because (we believe) it has happened.
What then has happened with regard to friendship? The next chapter will follow the unfolding of friendship, through the Scriptures, both among humans and between humans and God.
When I speak of God’s love for us as “weird,” I mean that it is not only mysterious, unusual, or strange but also in a sense “uncanny,” beyond our “ken.” God’s love does not fall into any category (just as God himself cannot fall into any category): it is weird, and while the most wonderful thing in the world, it is also unsettling. Job must have felt this weirdness when the voice spoke to him from the whirlwind! On the other hand, I repudiate any sense of the “weird” that involves fate or the loss of freedom (as in the “weird sisters” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). God’s love liberates us—another aspect of its surprising strangeness, as we will see.