Monday, March 15, 2010
Questions about the Psychology of Jesus
The traditional teaching (at least since the fourth century)
is that Jesus was God. Most Christians accept this without thinking seriously
about the internal life of Jesus. Here is one example. Jesus is depicted many
times as praying to God. At his death, he says “My God, My God, why have you
forsaken me.” What is the psychology of Jesus? Did he know he was God? When?
What is the relationship between Jesus and the Father? If Jesus is co-equal,
why is Jesus praying as a traditional Jew might to the Father? There is a truly great book by Michael Casey, Fully Human, Fully Divine: An Interactive Christology. I think it's time to go back and read it.
cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com (comments open here and there)
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/03/questions-about-the-psychology-of-jesus.html
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I come from outside the tradition, so it may be that my responses to this verse are as much literary as religious. But these seem to me to be among the most powerful and important words in the Gospels, and Christian belief would lose much of its charge if we failed to acknowledge Jesus as fully human. One thing the passage points to is the place of doubt within, not outside of, religious tradition. See Stephen White's book A Space for Unknowing: The Place of Agnosis in Faith (2007). And from my own forthcoming book, Constitutional Agnosticism, there is this passage:
Indeed, despite the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus’ self-knowledge, his awareness of himself as literally his father’s son, Jesus himself, in one of the many paradoxes of incarnation, is wracked with profound, and profoundly human, doubt. Among the most wrenching of the final scenes of Jesus’ life are his wish, on the eve of his crucifixion, to have his burden pass from him, and his dying words on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The New Testament, G.K. Chesterton wrote in one of his powerful apologetics for Christianity, “portrays a god who, by being wholly present in the dying cry of Jesus, even doubted and questioned Himself."