Without divine speech from above that gives the true facts about Jesus and the authoritative interpretation of his identity, Christology loses its integrity, uniqueness, and truthfulness, and it is set adrift to wander into the mire of pluralism. A Christology from below undercuts the epistemological grounds for a normative Christology. Only a Christology from above provides the warrant for the Bible’s and the Church’s theological confession of Christ.

Throughout the ages, the Church has always confessed that Jesus is God the Son incarnate and thus the exclusive Lord and Savior. Why? For this reason: because the Church’s confession is grounded in specific theological convictions, warranted from the entire canon of Scripture. To know who Jesus is and to speak of him rightly, the Church has always done a “Christology from above,” namely, from the vantage point of Scripture. The Bible provided not only the raw data but also the theological framework for understanding Jesus’ identity. The Church argued that we can only rightly identify who Jesus is by placing him the context of the Bible’s teaching and storyline. In fact, any attempt to do Christology by some other means only leads to a Jesus of our own imagination.

However, since the rise of the Enlightenment, these theological and methodological convictions were no longer viewed as credible. As a result, when Christology was done on other grounds, Jesus was no longer viewed as unique but only as a masterful religious leader. Why did this occur? Although the answer is complex, it was primarily due to entire worldview shifts. Over the last 400+ years, we have witnessed the truth of the phrase, “ideas have consequences.” After the Reformation era, certain “ideas” arose that challenged and then rejected the way the Reformers and most people in the West thought about God and his relationship to the world. More specifically, ideas about the ability of human reason, the nature of reality, and our knowledge of it led to crucial shifts in “plausibility structures.” Beginning with the Enlightenment, and continuing through modernity and now postmodernity, the intellectual rules that determine how people think the world works and what is possible, have shifted away from orthodox Christianity to deny its basic presuppositions. This is why many in the West stumble over the Church’s confession of who Jesus is, in all of his uniqueness and glory. For many, it does not seem plausible. The question asked by Gotthold Lessing many years ago is asked today: “How can one man who lived and died so long ago have universal significance for all people?”

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