The Trinity and Christology

Christology is the Christian name for the study of Jesus Christ. It studies who he was, who he is, what he has done, and what he will do.

In my last post, I suggested than an imbalanced approach could (and often does) lead to a skewed emphasis on Christian existence. Those who focus too heavily on the Father tend to focus on dogma. Those who focus too heavily on the Spirit tend to focus on presence and experience. Those who focus on the Son, I said, tend to focus too heavily on action. What we need, I said, is a Trinitarian Christianity that can balance action, doctrine, and experience.

Since that post, I've been reflecting on what I'd written, and I've decided things are more complicated. There is in fact a connection between Christology and the Trinity, and between our perspectives on both.

Consider the connection: God the Father is God as transcendent, hidden beyond the veil of infinity and eternity. God the Spirit is God as immanent, present and working in the world at all times. Jesus Christ is God as temporally transcendent and immanent. Through Christ, God acts in history, either present in the incarnation or absent in the ascension. And this temporal aspect of Christology is what connects Christology with my Trinitarian discussion last week. Because different aspects of Christ are revealed at different times in history, any focus on a single time period in the entirety of Christ's historicity will create an imbalance in our overall understanding of God.

For example, suppose one focuses too heavily on the cross. This creates a tendency (not a necessity, one can still find a balanced understanding despite an imbalanced focus) to focus on Christ in weakness at his highest point of submission to the Father, at the pinnacle of his inaction. Thus, to focus on Christ at the cross is, to a degree, to actually focus on the Father as the one who pours out wrath on Christ, whom Christ glorifies, and as the one to whom Christ reconciles us. In essence, it creates a risk (but not an inescapable one) of reducing theology to a discussion of God, to dogma.

Likewise, reducing a focus on Christ to a focus on the incarnation creates a tendency to focus on the action of God. Christ in the incarnation is, in some ways, the pinnacle of God's action in the world, the decisive inbreaking of God to dwell among humans in the flesh. It is the foretaste of the coming victory,the height of God's action, but it does not indicate the ultimate submission and passivity associated with the cross.

Likewise, were one to focus too heavily on the ascenscion, on the departure of God's immanence in a specific, particular, embodied location to be replaced by the universality of the Holy Spirit embodied in a global Church, then there would be a tendency to focus on immanence and experience. On the presence of God universally as the anticipation of the return of Christ during the end times, the inverse of the ascension.

I think this is a step closer to a balanced understanding of a Christian existentialism, an understanding of Christian being. Still, I would be wise to consider these things more, to compare my claims with historical manifestations of imbalances (which I have only done in a cursory fashion in my head), and to seek to understand why some imbalanced groups have been able to avoid imbalanced life in Christ.