The Cosmic Person in the New Testament - Part 5

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

In Part 4 of " The Cosmic Person in the New Testament " , we concluded with these

words:

 

(P.121) In contrast to the Jews the Gnostics generally took up the concept of

the heavenly man and gave it their own interpretation. They held that Adam, the

first man, was perfect. He was the archetypal man. The world had fallen away

from him and redemption consisted in restoring everything as it had been in the

beginning. The end, in other words, was the restoration of the original state.

That is typically Gnostic. In Judeo-Christian tradition, however, there is

always a movement of ascent towards an end. (P.122) The world is understood as

moving forward in an evolutionary ascent towards its ultimate fulfilment and

there is no question of simply going back to the beginning.

 

The archetypal man is said to have been made in the image of God. In the New

Testament Jesus is conceived as the 'eikon tou theou', the image of God. He is

the one who, as primordial man, comes from heaven. Thus Jesus says in St. John's

Gospel, " No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the

Son of Man " (John 3:13).

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs. 121-122

 

Here now, is Part 5.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

The Cosmic Person in the New Testament - Part 5

 

(P.122) There is a very interesting passage in St. Paul's letter to the

Philippians where he speaks of Jesus being in the form of God, the 'morphe tou

theo' (Philippians 2:16). Most exegetes take this to mean that he was God, but I

prefer to follow Oscar Cullmann who, in his Christology of the New Testament

(1967), presents most clearly and convincingly another point of view. The Greek

word 'morphe', form, is the same as 'murti' in Sanskrit. God has no 'morphe' in

Himself. Jesus being in the form or the image of God means not that he was God

but that he was this primordial man who was precisely and by definition the

image of God. He was the form in which God was revealing himself, the

manifestation, that is, or the 'morphe' of God. What happened was that he

emptied himself of that 'morphe', that heavenly state, and took the form of a

man. The universal man became a man and took the form of a slave and, as the

suffering servant, accepted death, even death on the cross. So the heavenly man

becomes a man and that man accepts suffering and death, and therefore God raised

him up. God raised him up from death and gave him a name which was above every

name in heaven and on earth. In other words, he was exalted to the supreme state

as Lord and as Christ, but not precisely as God.

 

St. Paul developed this further, not using the title Son of Man, but referring

to Christ as the second Adam. In the first letter to the Corinthians for

instance, he wrote, " The first man (Adam) was from the earth, a man of dust; the

second man is from heaven " (1 Corinthians 15:47). (P.123) Here Paul is using the

same image but he sees the " heavenly man " coming at the end, not at the

beginning. Again, he wrote in the letter to the Romans about this first Adam

" who was a type ('typos'), of the one who was to come " (Romans 5:14). So in

Paul's view Adam is the man who fell, and he is a type of the new man in Christ

who is to come and fulfill all things. Paul speaks constantly of the new man in

relation to the old, a good example being his exhortation to put off the old man

with his evil works and put on the new man created in the likeness of God

(Ephesians 4:22,24). And also in the letter to the Ephesians there is the

beautiful text to which we referred above, which says that he has " broken down

the dividing wall of hostility (between the Jew and the Gentile), that he might

create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace " (Ephesians

2:14,15). This is the idea of Christ as the new man who re-unites broken

humanity in himself, and in this sense is the new Adam.

 

The letter to the Colossians goes further than this when it speaks of Christ as

" the image of the invisible God " (Colossians 1:15). Christ is the image, the

icon, of God who is invisible, and an image in the deepest sense is that which

reflects, so the text is saying that Christ reflects, or manifests, the

invisible God. It goes on in the same verse to refer to him as " the firstborn of

creation " , which is to say that Christ is not only the man who comes at the end,

but the man who was in the beginning. This is the ancient idea that the

spiritual world comes first and the heavenly man is the archetypal man, the man

who was in the beginning, who is the exemplar from whom all humanity derives.

The original man is precisely the archetype, or the firstborn, of creation. And

" in him all things were created...all things were created through him and for

him " (Colossians 1:16), but, as we saw previously, not by him. God creates all

things in Christ, through Christ and for Christ, for this archetypal man. The

text of Colossians goes on to say that " in him all things consist " (Colossians

1:17). (Page 124) In him all things come together and hold together. He becomes

that centre which gathers the whole creation into unity. Finally it is said that

" in him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily " (Colossians 2:9). We can see

now precisely how it can come to be said that Jesus is God. He receives the

fullness of the Godhead bodily " , that is, in his human being. He is the Cosmic

Man in whom the fullness of the Godhead is revealed.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs. 122-124