Dunn's Christology in the Making (4)

For the last three days I have been reflecting on a different book by Jimmy Dunn, who passed on Friday. Here are the books so far:

1. The Evidence for Jesus (1985)
2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970)
3. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977)

On the fourth day of Jimmy, his writing gave to us, Christology in the Making: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, whose first edition came out in 1980.

1. Once again, Dunn somehow managed to write a book to which anyone writing on Christology would have to refer. A lot of people disagreed with key parts of it, but you had to engage it. Not that Dunn did this, but if you have a unique, perhaps controversial position, if you defend it really well, then everyone will quote you, refer to you, ask you to appear on panels, write chapters in compilations, etc.

Growing up, I might have just assumed that the disciples knew Jesus was the pre-existent divine second person of the Trinity from the start. Without thinking, I would have referred to Moses and David as Christians--the question wouldn't have occurred to me of how you could be a Christian if you'd never heard of Christ because he hasn't come yet.

If you'd have asked me at 20, I would have assumed (though I had never asked the question) that the disciples had a full knowledge of Jesus' divinity from the moment of his resurrection. There are indeed many scholars right now who would say that's not far off. We might call those scholars the "early high Christology club." That may actually be the majority of scholars right now.

2. Dunn did not take that position. Dunn was in the "late, low, and slow" Christology camp, as David Capes has described him. Dunn believed that the initial Christology of the earliest Christians was not unlike the Jewish groups that would come to be seen as heretics in the second century, groups like the Ebionites. He thus saw the worship of Jesus and the divinity of Jesus as an understanding that did not really blossom until the late first century. The Gospel of John for Dunn was thus the end of a decades long development of Christological thinking.

Here we should point out that this perspective was very common among biblical scholars of the mid-twentieth century. In that sense, Dunn might perhaps be seen as one of the old guard who lived to see the work of Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham win the hearts of the next generation. Who knows if the endless sinusoidal wave of scholarship will eventually swing back in the other direction.

It is an intriguing question for those of us who believe in both the full humanity and divinity of Christ. "What did Jesus know and when did he know it?" Mark 13:32 seems to indicate that Jesus did not access his omniscience when he was on earth. So when did he come to know he was the Messiah? At his baptism? Presumably he did not come out of the womb speaking fluent Aramaic. When did he realize he was the second person of the Trinity? After the crucifixion?

3. There are arguably many insights to be had from this book, many of which I have passed along to my students these last 23 years. When you consider chapters two (The Son of God) and three (The Son of Man), I have consistently taught my classes that their initial impressions of these expressions are likely to be different from those of the New Testament audiences. Son of God might suggest to us that Jesus was fully God. Son of Man might suggest to us that Jesus was fully human.

Of course we believe he was. But Dunn rightly raises the question, "What would those who first used this language about Jesus expect their hearers and readers to understand by the phrase?" (13). For example, Son of God was a royal title. If you look at Old Testament texts like Psalm 2, they were originally about human kings. This is true even of Psalm 45, which flat out called the human king "God" as it celebrated his wedding.

Dunn details the difference between Jesus' sonship in the Synoptic Gospels and John. "In the Johannine writings the divine sonship of Jesus is grounded in his pre-existence" (58). Contrast this fact with the earliest New Testament writings, where "the resurrection of Jesus was regarded as of central significance in determining his divine sonship" (35).

The model of development that Dunn concludes was not unique to him. He unfolds a scenario where the earliest Christians identified the locus of Jesus' sonship with his resurrection, with passages like Acts 13:33, Romans 1:3, and Hebrews 1:5 in view. Correlate this with Jesus' Lordship also finding its focus in the resurrection (Acts 2:25; Phil. 2:11; Rom. 5:9).

Then in Matthew he sees Jesus' divine sonship brought back to Jesus' birth. Then in Hebrews and John it is brought back to Jesus' pre-existence. In all this he considers John a later development (thus late and slow high Christology). "The style is consistent in John... and so consistently different from the Synoptics that it can hardly be other than a Johannine literary product" (30).

I might add that, whether Dunn is correct or not, the question of whether a high Christology is correct is a different question from when the church came to fully understand it. Those of us who are Nicaean Christians believe a high Christology is correct. This can be true whether the earliest Christians immediately understood so or whether it took a few decades for all the lights to come on. The biblical texts can obviously be read in terms of a high Christology whatever might have been in the bubbles above their author's heads.

4. "Son of Man" similarly takes on some different connotations when you know some of its background. The term at least at some points alludes to Daniel 7:13, where one light a "son of man" comes riding on the clouds to the earth in judgment. It can thus be a fairly exalted referent.

Now Dunn's book has a bit of evidence that early twentieth century scholar Rudolf Bultmann did not have in his early career. [1] The parts of 1 Enoch that speak of a heavenly Son of Man were not found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dunn leans toward dating this part of 1 Enoch, the Similitudes, to the late first century. He thus attributes those parts of the Gospels that think of Jesus as the heavenly Son of Man to a time decades later than Jesus. Accordingly, he does not see Jesus' self-referential use of the expression "Son of Man" as an indication that Jesus believed he was pre-existent.

5. One of Dunn's most distinctive positions comes in chapter 4. I don't know of any prominent New Testament scholars who have followed him on his "last Adam" interpretation of the Philippian hymn of Philippians 2:6-11. However, he shows us how there can be different interpretations of a text whose meaning seems obvious to us. Sometimes what is obvious to us is as much a matter of our inherited "glasses" as what we are actually seeing.

Dunn takes the logic of the hymn to be, "Although Jesus was the image of God (like Adam), he did not consider equality with God something to try to grasp (unlike Adam)..." On this approach, the hymn need say nothing of Jesus' pre-existence at all. It can be read as a statement that "Jesus is the last Adam" who did not repeat Adam's failure.

This is probably not the logic of the hymn, but it is darn clever. :-)

I will say that Dunn does give what I think are some penetrating interpretations of other passages that probably do allude to Adam or allude to Adam in a way that does not imply pre-existence. Both here and later in his Romans commentary, Dunn gives a persuasive interpretation of Romans 3:23 as all humanity lacking the glory of God than was intended for Adam a la Psalm 8. And I find quite convincing that 1 Corinthians 15:47 is not about incarnation, but resurrection.

Indeed let me say that Dunn provides in this chapter what is to me convincing exegesis in every instance except Philippians 2. This suggests that we are prone to see the pre-existence of Christ in many passages because of the hindsight of the Gospel of John rather than from careful exegesis of these passages in context. Paul's Christology, one might argue, was far more oriented around the resurrection than the incarnation.

6. It is with allusions to Jesus as the wisdom of God that Dunn finally sees the pre-existence of Christ entering into early Christian thinking. At first he would see such language as somewhat metaphorical. Yes, 1 Corinthians 8:6 speaks of Christ as the one "through whom God made all things," but Dunn thought this was an identification of Jesus with "the creative power and action of God" (182). Similarly, he interpreted Colossians 1:15 and Hebrews 1 to think of Jesus as "the eschatological embodiment of the wisdom of God" (211).

Dunn thus concludes that "the earliest christology to embrace the idea of pre-existence in the NT is Wisdom christology" (209). But he did not believe Paul, Matthew, or Hebrews understood this language literally in relation to Jesus as a person. He was hardly alone at that time to think such things. Eduard Schweizer in 1959 wrote that "The idea of the pre-existence of Jesus came to Paul through Wisdom speculation" (163).

7. We thus reach chapter 7 and the background of the Logos, the Word of God. The Gospel of John gives us the clearest expression of the pre-existence of Christ in the New Testament. And we are not surprised to find that a number of pages in this chapter are devoted to Philo.

From the Joseph Beth bookmark still in this book, it's clear I read a good deal of it before I went to England. Philo appears throughout the pages of this book. No doubt my interest in Philo was significantly piqued by this book. It was here that I was introduced to someone I would conclude was quite wrong about Hebrews, L.K.K. Dey. [2]

In the end Dunn reduces the logos in Philo to metaphor: "in the end of the day the Logos seems to be nothing more for Philo than God himself in his approach to man [sic], God himself insofar as he may be known by man" (228). I think Dunn was mostly right here, although I myself would later conclude that there are a few places where this understanding of Philo may fall a little short, especially when Philo is mixing the Pythagorean with the Stoic (cf. Quest on Exod 2.68).

Another reason I suspect Dunn took me on as an advisee was that I played the C.K. Barrett card of a combination of eschatology with Platonism in Hebrews. Throughout Christology and also in Partings, he espouses a view of Hebrews as the wed-ding of these two worldviews. I did not quite end up supporting his interpretation, although perhaps I came closer to him than others.

8. In the end he concludes that it is only really with the Gospel of John that we find full personal pre-existence in the New Testament (thus slow, late, and low). "The author of John 1:1-16 was the first to take that step which no Hellenistic-Jewish author had taken before him, the first to identify the word of God as a particular person... The Fourth Evangelist was the first Christian writer to conceive clearly of the personal pre-existence of the Logos-Son and to present it as a fundamental part of his message" (249).

At the time he wrote, his scheme of development fit the Zeitgeist well, a Christology that started with the resurrection, worked back to the birth, and finally ended with pre-existence in John. In some ways, Dunn was one of the last major proponents of this perspective. In 1988 Larry Hurtado would write, One God, One Lord. Then Richard Bauckham would begin a series of studies that have coalesced in Jesus and the God of Israel.

The early high Christology club currently holds the day.

[1] Bultmann used texts from 1 Enoch, Philo, and elsewhere to synthesize a "Gnostic Redeemer myth." He saw a high Christology as early on the basis of a home-brewed synthesis of background texts. His schema, however, was not unlike the kind of hermeneutical synthesis I described in relation to dispensationalism and nineteenth century entire sanctification--it is a synthesis done from outside these texts looking in rather than exegetically from inside these background texts.

[2] I worked through Dey's monograph my first semester in Durham. Let's just say I learned a lot more about Philo from his book than I did about Hebrews.