Martin Samson (PhD cand.)
Flinders University: Humanities and Social Sciences; Theology
"Developing Pauline Christology as a Spiritual Quest for the Historical Jesus"
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore epistemologies and methodologies for making Christology relevant to theology and worship communities. It will include a development of theological scientific method that can bridge conversation with positivist methods.
The line of argument is that the Historical Critical approach and the four quests for the historical Jesus have placed Christology, the search for knowing how Christ works in our world, at risk of been seen as religious myth. However, for Paul, knowledge of the historical Jesus was not based on physical evidence, meetings or texts. He based his knowing (pepeismai: persuaded through experience) on his spiritual experience at Damascus (Romans8:38-39). He gave us a Christian anthropology (1Cor:15) that tells us how Christ established a new basis for experiencing the spirit. I name the process of our coming to understand it: the spiritual quest for the historical Jesus. Paul did not create a theory of knowledge but his anthropology, based on the first and second Adam, creates the Christological basis for an epistemology is one which restores the unity of reality which had been lost in the process of cognition. (Steiner, Pagels)
In 1 Cor:15 Paul can be read as saying that through Christ the necessary changes in the human condition were brought about for cognition to overcome the duality of consciousness. The soma psychikon of the first Adam, as the first protos, provides the physical body which is subject to the senses, sin and death, and the soma pneumatikon, as the last eschatos, of Christ which is subject to charis, grace, reverence, freedom and beauty of the spirit. (Hiebel, Coakley)
These ideas have a Western Christian tradition of developing spiritual senses for perceiving God, and an eastern Christian tradition in Theosis and the Mystical Union with God. The term ‘spiritual sense’ is used to designate non-physical human perception, rather than the non-literal interpretation of scripture. The physical and spiritual senses could be seen as two different sets of powers or faculties, two states of the same fivefold sensorium directed as different aspects of the same object. This paper will propose that the transformation comes through Christ working within us. In this sense an epistemology correlating with Paul’s saying: Not I but Christ within me (Gal 2:9-21) gives rise to a post-positivist theological scientific methodology that can provide spiritual evidence based/scientific studies if Christology. I will argue that this provides Christology on equal footing with positivist methods and opens up the possibility of Christology having dialogue with noetic sciences too.