Can You Be a Christian If?

So far, Systematic Theology class has been studying the incarnational aspect of God--in short, Jesus Christ, or the even fancier term, Christology.  We will study doctrines of Christology, the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology), the Trinity, and Salvation.  My professor says that Systematic Theologians see all these doctrines as so intertwined/entwined/interrelated that they can't be separated.  His metaphor is the Jazz quartet where each instrument listens to the others; they are distinct, yet they need to be heard together to get the full effect.

We cover a lot of ideas in class, many of them coming from the field of Systematic Theology, some of them heretical on some level.  Of course, depending on one's view of theology, of church history, of Biblical interpretation, one century's heresy is another century's doctrine.

Last night, my professor said, "You don't have to believe in the Trinity to be a Christian," and this morning I work up thinking about that idea.  I also thought, what if Jesus wasn't Divine?  And then I wondered, can I be a Christian if I don't believe Jesus was Divine?  The earliest church was divided over the idea of who Jesus was, and the question Jesus asked is still very relevant:  "Who do you say that I am?"

Some theologians settle on the 2nd person of the Trinity and leave it there.  Other theologians focus on the fact that Jesus came to the marginalized.  We've spent at least a week trying to discern if Jesus came as a full partner in the Trinity (what does it mean to be begotten?).  Maybe the Spirit was the one shaping Jesus--but is that after God took on human flesh or was it the Spirit, choosing a human and shaping that human to become Divine?

Theologians have spent centuries thinking about this issue of equality, and I suspect very few of them would adopt the idea of Spirit choosing a human to create into a sacrificial aspect of the Divine.  It is interesting how many theologians focus on a 2 natures Christology to solve the problem--but it creates other problems.  How much of Jesus is human and how much Divine and what is the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this?

I don't have easy answers, but I am interested in the aspects that snag the interest of my fellow students.  For example, early in the class, we spent a lot of time on the crucifixion and whether or not Jesus was allowed to have broken bones (the spear in the side instead of the breaking of legs, which would be traditional).  

You might ask why anyone would care about broken bones, and you would be surprised at the ways in which that issue might be important, might be framed in terms of the prophecies of Isaiah and the Psalms.  I wrote more about this class session in this blog post.