Franciscan Penance Library

JESUS AS THE SON OF GOD

In the New Testament, Jesus is often referred to as the “Son of God”.  In part II of Introduction to Christianity, Professor Joseph Ratzinger describes how this title came to be ascribed to Jesus.   Professor Ratzinger had previously outlined the “stock idea” that Jesus was originally a Jewish preacher proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God and the end of the world.   Since this concept was not intelligible to Gentiles, he was then transformed in some unknown way to a miracle working “God-man”.   This led  eventually to the Christian creedal formulation of Jesus Christ as “True God and True Man”.   Professor Ratzinger strongly rejects the connection between the pagan “God-man” and the Christian “Son of God”.  The concept of the divine man or God-man occurs nowhere in the New Testament.  Conversely, nowhere in antiquity is the “divine man” described as the “Son of God”.  These are two important facts.  Historically the two concepts are in no way connected; they have nothing to do with each other either in language or content.  The Bible is not familiar with the divine man, nor is antiquity familiar, in the realm of the divine men, with the idea of “Son of God”.

Where does the term “Son of God”, as used in the New Testament for Jesus Christ, come from?  The expression “Son of God” stems from the “king” theology of the Old Testament, which itself rests on the demythologization of oriental “king” theology and expresses its transformation into the “Chosen People” theology of Israel.  The classical example of this procedure (that is, of the borrowing of ancient oriental “king” theology and its biblical demythologization into the idea of election) is provided by Psalm 2:7, and thus by the text that at the same time became one of the points of departure of Christological thinking.  In this verse the following oracle is delivered to the king of Israel: “I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you.  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.’” This dictum, which belongs in the context of the enthronement of the kings of Israel, stems, as we have said, from ancient oriental coronation rites, in which the king was declared the son begotten of God, though the full scope of the notion of begetting seems to have been retained only in Egypt.  There the king was regarded as a being mythically begotten by God, while in Babylon the same ritual was largely demythologized and the idea that the king was the son of God was already conceived as the conferment of a legal sanction.   

When the formula was taken over by the Davidic court, the mythological sense was certainly set aside completely.  The idea of a physical begetting of the king by the Godhead is replaced by the notion that the king becomes son here and now;  the act of procreation consists in the act of the election by God.  The king is son, not because he has been begotten by God, but because he has been chosen by God.  The reference is not to a physical event but to the power of the divine will that creates new being.  In the idea of sonship so conceived, the whole theology of the Chosen People is now also concentrated.  In older passages of the Bible (Ex 4:22, for example) Israel as a whole had been called Yahweh’s firstborn, beloved son.  When in the age of the kings this description is transferred to the ruler, this means that in him, the successor of David, Israel’s vocation is summed up; that he stands for Israel and unites in himself the mystery of the promise, the call, the love that rests upon Israel.  Thus, we can see that the kings of Israel were considered to be the son of God in the sense that they stood for all of Israel. 

There was problem with all this, however.  The promise “I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession” was never fulfilled in the kings which came after King David.    …….the mantle of the psalm, borrowed from oriental coronation ritual, was far too big for the shoulders of the real king on Mount Zion.  So it was historically inevitable that this psalm, which seen from the angle of the present must have appeared almost unbearable, should grow more and more into a profession of hope in him of whom it would one day really be true.  This means that the “royal” theology, which had first been transformed from a theology of begetting into one of election, now went through a further change and turned from a theology of election into a theology of hope in the king to come.  The coronation oracle became more and more a reiteration of the promise that one day that king would come of whom it could rightly be said: “You are my son, today I have begotten you.  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage.”    

Professor Ratzinger then tells us how the oracle in Psalm 2 was applied to Jesus.  The words of the psalm were probably first applied to Jesus in the framework of the belief in the Resurrection.  The event of Jesus’ awakening from the dead, in which this community believed, was conceived by the first Christians as the moment at which the happenings of Psalm 2 had become a factual reality.  The paradox is certainly no less striking here, for to believe that he who died on Golgotha is at the same time he to whom these words are addressed seem an extraordinary contradiction.  What does this application of the psalm mean?  It means that people know that Israel’s royal hope is fulfilled in him who died on the Cross and, to the eye of faith, rose again from the dead.  For Christians, Jesus Christ rules as king from the Cross.  Kingship does not consist of privilege and power but rather obedience and service.

The apparent “failure” of Jesus on the Cross actually confirms him as the “Son of God”.  The Son of God idea that in this way and in this form---the explanation of Cross and Resurrection by Psalm 2----entered into the profession of Faith in Jesus of Nazareth has truly nothing to do with the Hellenistic idea of the divine man and is not to be explained in any way from it.  On the contrary, it is the second stage in the demythologization of the oriental concept of kingship, an idea already partly demythologized in the Old Testament.  It defines Jesus as the true heir to the universe, as heir to the promise in which Davidic theology culminates.  At the same time it becomes evident that the idea of the king, which to this extent is transferred to Jesus in the title of “son”, becomes intertwined with the idea of the servant.  As king he is a servant, and as the servant of God he is king.  This interplay, so fundamental to belief in Christ, is adumbrated in the Old Testament and anticipated linguistically in the Greek translation of it.  The word pais, which the latter uses to denote the servant of God , can also mean “child”; in the light of the Christ event this ambiguity must have become a pointer to the way in which the two roles coincide in Jesus. 

There was in fact one connection in the ancient world to the Christian designation of Jesus as the Son of God.  For we must, after all, observe that there was in fact one linguistic and objective parallel to it in the Graeco-Roman world.  The only thing is that this parallel did not consist in the idea of the “divine man”, which simply has nothing to do with it.  The only real ancient parallel to the description of Jesus as the Son of God (which expresses a new understanding of power, kingship, election, indeed, of humanity) occurs in the description of Emperor Augustus as “son of God”.  Here we do indeed encounter the exact phrase with which the New Testament describes the significance of Jesus of Nazareth.  In the cult of the Roman emperor, and not before, we see the return in late antiquity, in conjunction with the oriental concept of monarchy, of the title “son of God”, which otherwise did not exist and could not exist simply because of the many possible meanings of the word “god”.  It reappears only with the return of the oriental concept of monarchy from which the designation stems.  In other words, the title “son of god” belongs to the political theology of Rome and thus refers to the same basic context that also gave rise, as we have see, to the New Testament “Son of God”.  Both usages proceed in fact, from the same native soil and point back to one and the same source.  So both in the ancient East and again in imperial Rome, the title “son of God” is---let us be quite clear about this----a piece of political theology.  In the New Testament the phrase has been transferred to another dimension of thought as a result of the reinterpretation in Israel by a theology of election and hope.  So from the same root completely different things grew up; and the conflict---soon to become unavoidable---between the acknowledgment of Jesus as the Son of God and the acknowledgment of the emperor as the son of God represented for all practical purposes a clash between demythologized myth and myth that has remained myth.  The Roman god-emperor, with his all-embracing claims, could certainly not allow, alongside his own pretensions, the continued existence of the transformed “king” and “emperor” theology that lives on in faith in Jesus as the Son of God.  To that extent martyria (testimony) was bound to turn into martyrium, the challenge to the self-deification of political power.

It is difficult to see how the Jewish moral teacher of the end of the world could have been embellished into the Son of God by the early Church as liberal theology claims.   For this “embellishment” earned many early Christians intense persecution and martyrdom from the Roman Empire.   This clash between Christian theology and the Roman cult of the emperor did not end until the Edict of Milan stopped the persecution of Christians in 313 AD.  Of course, the Edict of Milan did not stop the persecution of Christians for all time.  Throughout history and right up to the present time Christians are being persecuted for believing in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  For this belief means that no political program is absolute but stands under the judgment of God.

-- Jim Nugent, CFP