The ecumenical council of Chalcedon has
beautifully described the truth about the 2 natures of Jesus. It is that Jesus
was not God only or man only, but truly God and truly man, perfect in divinity
and perfect in humanity. As a consequence of this, two approaches came about on
the study of the nature of Jesus Christ. A descending Christology that
emphasizes or starts with the divinity of Jesus and ascending Christology that emphasizes
or starts with His humanity. In differentiating the approach - descending or
ascending don’t mean anything like “better” or “worse.”
So a descending Christology looks specifically
at things as Christ’s pre-existence, being the 2nd person in the
Holy Trinity and his relation to the other persons in the Trinity, and how His
divinity was manifested during His public life as accounted for in the Gospel.
Ascending Christology on the other hand is interested in things like the fact
that Jesus like us, gets hungry, thirsty, tired, angry at times, and how these
humanly characters play on God’s work of incarnation and redemption.
The difficult part now is to identify my preference
in my own catechesis as I have never thought before of the two approaches.
Going deep into my thoughts and coming into play my first reflection paper
where I mentioned John 3:16 –“ for God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten son…” and considering now my
second favorite scripture passage – Phil. 2:5-10 - “Who, being in the form of God, did not
cling to being equal to God, but emptied
himself taking the form of a slave…” which we popularly call in the seminary as
the Philippian Hymn, I would probably say that unconsciously I have been drawn
to use the descending Christology on my catechesis.
I have always mused on the idea that God, in
His perfection, would even consider stripping himself of His divinity and will
become human. For me, it is a divine act and glimpses of God’s actions in my
life can only be understood when I come to appreciate what God has done for me
on the cross.
That is my thought process and how I get
convicted of the reality of God. But the way I have understood Scriptures is
not the scholarly way. I have written in my second reflection paper on this
course that theology without prayer is dead
and the best theological lesson is the worship of the Church - that our way of
understanding the divinity of Jesus is connected to the Church’s teachings,
worship, prayers and ethics. And the best and foremost ways of validating our
beliefs about Jesus come from our actual knowing of Jesus, our own experience
of Him both collectively as a Church and individually. Our belief about Jesus
is communal, and reflects the common experience of those who know and have
known Jesus. Without
realizing that as I minister to people God has entrusted to me in my ministry
in RCIA, I have been using the ascending Christology. That in hindsight, looking
into the identity of Jesus a fully human gives me a more compelling argument on
His salvific work. That people remember the human Jesus who walked by the
shores of Galilee healing the sick, feeding the hungry, driving out demons… the
witness of the Church is about what she remembers from what she saw and heard
from the man called Jesus.
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