The Givenness of Things

SON OF ADAM, SON OF MAN

Existence is remarkable, actually incredible. At least tacitly, awareness of this fact is as prevalent in contemporary science as it is in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Job. Those who follow such things will be aware, for example, that reputable scientists can hypothesize other universes where beings precisely ourselves live out other lives, or where our consciousness subsists immortally. Our reality might in fact be a hologram. Contemporary physics permits and indulges extravagant notions of the possible, many of them quite beautiful. There is no need to credit any of these theories in order to reject the claims of the old commonsensical science to have discredited the Christian mythos, which is actually rather restrained by comparison with them, loyal as it is to what might be called a sacred thesis concerning the origins and the nature of things. Implausibility, a word that needs looking into, no longer affords reasonable grounds for rejecting this grand statement about the place of humankind in the cosmos, this account of a grand enactment of human value. So I have returned to the original language of my faith, crediting its Word as meaningful in the very fact that it is aloof from paraphrase. I accept it as one among the great givens to be encountered in experience, that is, as a thing that presents itself, reveals itself, always partially and circumstantially, accessible to only tentative apprehension, which means that it is always newly meaningful. In this it is like everything else, but much more so.

The human sense of the sacred is a fact. Like mathematics or human selfhood, its existence is not to be reasoned to by way of positivist or materialist premises. It is a given, a powerful presence, whose reality it is perverse to deny on the basis of a model of reality constructed around its exclusion. Granted, a million complications follow from giving primacy to Christianity, even assuming there is reasonable consensus around the meaning of that word. A million complications follow from imputing value to religion indiscriminately. Nevertheless, to avoid these problems is to close off the possibility of exploring any religion, here Christianity, deeply, in its own terms. In what follows I propose that certain Christian tenets that have been challenged and devalued should be considered again.

I have taken my title from the genealogy in the Book of Luke. Son of Adam, that is, of man, and Son of God are profoundly resonant phrases for Christianity, which have become over time virtual synonyms for each other and for the figure we call the Christ. Their appearance here, in Luke’s genealogy, should remind us that they address the matter of sonship, literal descent, which was central to messianic tradition before Jesus. And they transform it.

Both Matthew and Luke acknowledge the difficulties involved in satisfying the expectations of their culture that the Messiah should be identified by, among other things, his having a place in a particular line of human descent.

(Perhaps I should say here that when I say “Matthew,” “Mark,” or “Luke” I mean the text that goes by that name. I adapt the sola scriptura to my own purposes, assuming nothing beyond the meaningfulness of forms, recurrences, and coherences within and among the Gospels, at the same time acknowledging that different passions and temperaments distinguish one text from another. I have solemnly forbidden myself all the forms of evidence tampering and deck stacking otherwise known as the identification of interpolations, omissions, doublets, scribal errors, et alia, on the grounds that they are speculation at best, and distract the credulous, including their practitioners, with the trappings and flourishes of esotericism. I hope my own inevitable speculations are clearly identified as such.)

When Christianity made dogma of the virgin birth, it seems to me, with all respect, to have put the emphasis in the wrong place. In the matter of improbability, conception in the Virgin Mary is not categorically different from conception in ninety-year-old Sarah. Is anything too hard for God? The astounding claim, from a scriptural point of view, and the claim that is secured by the virginity of Mary, is that God is indeed, in some literal sense, Jesus’ father. The circumstances of his birth have an importance to early writers far beyond any credibility the Christian narrative is assumed to derive from their miraculous character, especially weighed against the skepticism they aroused even in antiquity, and beyond their placing Jesus in the series of improbable births that recur in Scripture, from Isaac to John the Baptist. Throughout biblical history, epochal lives had begun from two parents as well. So to be a second and greater Moses or David or Elijah would not require this singular, extraordinary birth. While Luke draws attention to God’s fatherhood of the whole of humankind, the special case of the divine paternity of Jesus means for these writers that he is himself God, and that he participates profoundly in human life without any compromise of his divine nature. This is an extraordinary statement about the nature of human life. The role of Mary, notably her virginity, has been interpreted in ways that have caused anxieties about the flesh, and reifications and disparagements of it. These are anxieties the Incarnation, to my arch-Protestant mind, should properly allay. Granting that our physical life is fragile and easily abused, precisely on these grounds it craves and should not be denied the whole blessing of Jesus’ participation in it.

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Incarnation, Resurrection — where do these ideas come from? It is almost a commonplace that Paul invented Christianity. Paul is often said to have imposed a massive conceptual superstructure on the life and death of a good man, perhaps a holy man, who would not himself have dealt in these daunting abstractions. Then what was the character of the movement that was already active before the Gospels were written, even before Paul’s conversion? We can catch some glimpses of it. In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul is generally taken to have been quoting a hymn when he holds up to them the example of Christ, who surrendered “equality with God” and “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” To be able to allude to a hymn implies a community that knows and values the hymn, which in turn implies a stable culture, however small. The Gospel writers might have known this hymn, or one like it. From Jesus’ birth to his exaltation it tells the story they tell. The Gospel writers can evoke at the same time a figure so persuasively human that his life seems sufficient in itself, without any reference to his transcendence. This means that his Incarnation, his life on earth, was real. Theologically speaking, this is a crucial point.

The “messianic secret,” concealed by the veil of flesh that obscured Jesus’ character and meaning from his contemporaries and followers, was of course no secret at all to the Gospel writers or to the primitive church. The truth of Jesus’ nature and role was the point of the telling, withheld in the narrative, to the extent that it is, because Jesus would not have been understood even by his disciples if he had revealed it earlier than he did. His reticence permitted him in his life and his death to give new content to an expectation that had been mulled for generations. The story is so familiar to us now that we can forget how strange it would have sounded in anticipation of Resurrection and Pentecost, before the meaning of death was transformed, and while the emergence in the larger world of the movement to be called Christianity was hardly to be imagined.

It would be interesting to know when or by what means these writers came into possession of the stories of his birth. It is an extraordinary achievement on the part of the writers that they make the full revelation of his epochal meaning simultaneous with his rejection and death. To the extent that there was secrecy involved — yes, Jesus forbids even the fact of his healings to be revealed, though they clearly became widely known, and yes, he forbids the disciples to reveal who he is, as they finally begin to understand — still, it is hard not to hear rueful amusement in his reply, when John sends messengers to Jesus to find out whether he is the one who is to come, or they must wait for another. The blind see, the lame walk, good news is preached to the poor. Jesus seems to have been healing people in meaningful numbers. Yet he remained among them as a son of man in the usual sense, someone to be betrayed for a little money, denied by friends, abused by authorities, and killed with approval of a mob. This seems remarkable, objectively speaking. But it is consistent with his being merely a man. His “secrecy,” which he intends but which still seems largely the effect of the blindness of human eyes and hardness of human hearts, appears meant to cast off all the protections and immunities that might come with his claiming special status. Everyone abused and martyred since the world began should have been able to claim special status, of course, if there is anything to the idea that we are children of God. In his life the man Jesus shows us what we are, sacred and terrible.

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What did the ancient church take from these earliest teachings, those reflected by the hymn in Philippians? In his homilies on the letters of Paul to the Corinthians, expounding on Jesus’ saying “the Son of man came not to be served but to serve,” John Chrysostom says that if this service of love “were everywhere in abundance, how great benefits would ensue: how there were no need then of laws, or tribunals or punishments, or avenging, or any other such things since if all loved and were beloved, no man would injure another. Yea, murders, and strifes, and wars, and divisions, and rapines, and frauds, and all evils would be removed, and vice unknown even in name.” And “if this were duly observed, there would be neither slave nor free, neither ruler nor ruled, neither rich nor poor, neither small nor great.” There is a tendency, I think, to suppose that the earliest Christians were drawn primarily by this new cult’s seeming to offer a charm against death. That this idea is taken seriously is an effect of the ebbing away of Christian thought properly so called, together with the anthropologizing of religion. There is no doubt some justice in the fact that condescensions once projected onto distant cultures are now brought home to discredit the historic center of Western civilization. It is important to remember the beauty in the old dream of a world reconciled to God and itself, here through the figure of the selfless servant. Chrysostom had Christian Scriptures, of course, as Paul did not. But he would have been speaking to congregations more like Paul’s than any we can imagine, people who would have known the stigma of servitude and poverty, and the harshness and turbulence of ancient life. In their best moments such people were clearly worthy to shape the faith. It is moving to think how servants and slaves must have felt, hearing their lot and their labors proposed as the pattern of a sacred life, and as a force that could transform the world. It is moving as well that others, free, prosperous, even aristocratic, were drawn by such preaching.

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Certain expectations needed to be addressed if Jesus was to be understood as Messiah, this is to say, if he was to be understood as the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people. The Gospel writers’ claims for Jesus of Nazareth are based on or expressed in the faith that he did not proceed from any paternal line. This complicates the matter of conventional patrilineal genealogy, which would be assumed to trace the Messiah’s origins to David. They address the matter boldly, argumentatively, making no concessions, and in terms that are full of radical meaning. Matthew begins with “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” But what we find, if the word is given its conventional sense, is a genealogy of Joseph, who, as Matthew points out immediately and establishes at length, is not the father of Jesus. The genealogy might be read as a claim of royal descent which has passed into obscurity after the monarchy itself is destroyed, so that an ordinary carpenter might share the blood of kings. But again, except by a kind of ascribed status, no claim made through Joseph is presented as bearing on Jesus. This might mean that, though the argument by lineage for his being Messiah could be made if it were simply conceded that Joseph was indeed his father, the truth of Jesus’ origins, and therefore of his nature, is too essential to permit recourse to this very available expedient.

Matthew’s genealogy might be considered a history of Israel itself, as it bears the marks of divine Providence, in the equivalence in human generations of the time that passes between the great events signified by the names Abraham and David and by the deportation to Babylon and, after them, by Jesus. Understood in this way, it does not defend the claims made for Jesus, but instead asserts them. Rather than arguing for an unbroken ancestral line, the writer punctuates the series by drawing attention to its signal moments, including the exile, which would be extraneous if the point were to document ancestry, but which is very relevant indeed if the point is to present Jesus as the next defining act of God toward Israel. Matthew transforms the biblical convention of genealogy, making explicit what had before been implicit, that these names and generations were not primarily significant for fixing the identities and claims and obligations of those who found a place in them, but as preserving a record of God’s mindfulness of Israel over time, and of his acting toward them decisively through the lives of particular human beings. The otherwise rather surprising appearance in the list of Rahab and Tamar, both Canaanite women, of the Moabite Ruth, and of Bathsheba as “the wife of Uriah,” is consistent with this reading, since each of them had a crucial part in the history of Israel.

It should be taken as an important consequence of Matthew’s setting Jesus in this context that his humanity and his place in the history of Israel are both affirmed. At the same time, John the Baptist is quoted in Matthew as saying, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Luke contains very similar language: “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In other words, so much for genealogy. If it is true no necessity makes it true that God acts in history in the ways recorded in these narratives of descent. This again addresses questions raised by the claim made by Jesus’ followers that he had no human father, that he did not in any ordinary sense have a place in the line that proceeded from David. In Jesus God brushed away this web of contingency.

Luke famously departs in another way from conventional genealogy, moving from Jesus in the near term back through the generations to Adam, whom he calls “son of God.” Like Matthew he traces the line of Joseph, though again like Matthew he is careful to stipulate that Joseph was only the putative father of Jesus, his father “as was thought.” Luke’s play on genealogy could be taken to dismiss altogether the practice of counting off the generations, except when the counting is exhaustive enough to acknowledge that all humankind are the children of Adam, therefore “made in the likeness of God,” as in the preface to the first list of human generations in Genesis 5:2. This is so primary an article of faith that no tracing back through time would be needed on one hand or sufficient on the other to establish it. Again, so much for genealogy.

A saying that recurs in all three of the Synoptics is Jesus’ quotation and interpretation of Psalm 110. In verse 4 this psalm invokes Melchizedek, the mysterious pagan priest who appears in Genesis to bless Abraham and receive a tithe from him. The text in Genesis gives Melchizedek no paternity and no age at death, departures that are taken to set him outside the mortal run of things, to make him, as the psalm says, “a priest forever.” Jesus draws attention to the first words of the psalm, “The Lord says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool,’” and asks, “If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son?” In Matthew, this is his response to the reply of the Pharisees, whom he has asked, “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?” If Jesus’ meaning is that the Christ is greater than and other than even the great kings of Israel, it is notable that he makes this argument by rejecting the concept of messianic sonship, despite the attenuated claim made through Joseph in the two genealogies, and for Jesus, though only as he, like Abraham and David, has a place in the sacred history of Israel, or as he is a son of Adam.

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Jesus’ origin as son of God, shared, as Luke says, by Adam, makes ancestry moot and opens the way to universalism, the movement of the knowledge of God beyond the ethnic, cultural, and historical boundaries of its first revelation, to all those other children of Adam, to humankind. This movement was already taking place through the efforts of Paul and others before the Gospels were written. If this expansion into the world, epitomized in an astounding event at Pentecost and by the conversion and mission of Paul, seemed to the Evangelists to be a realization of Jesus’ purpose and an expression of his nature, then it would follow that the teachings of Jesus in which it was anticipated would receive special emphasis in their recounting. The Gospels were written in light of the emergence of what came to be called Christianity, and subsequent to the events recounted in the Acts of the Apostles. If their writers took the spread of the faith to be the presence and work of the resurrected Christ—“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also”—then of course every foreshadowing of it during his lifetime would seem essential to an understanding of him. Any account made of him before they had witness of his impact on the larger world would have been entirely premature.

There are those who worry because the Gospels were probably written decades after the death of Jesus, as if his mortal life were all that was relevant to questions of his nature and his meaning, which the passage of time could only obscure. But for his early followers, a flood of new meaning would have become apparent in the aftermath of his death. They would have other bases for interpreting what he did and said, and what his resurrection meant, which would, very reasonably, shape their telling of it. The Incarnation is, by itself, the great fact that gives every act and saying of Jesus the character of revelation. With the Resurrection, it is the grand and unique statement of the bond between history and cosmos. The disciples, the Temple authorities, and the general population can have had no notion of what was transpiring among them, unprecedented as it was. The Gospel writers and readers would know much more. They might know, for example, that people in distant cities were moved and changed by the vision expressed in the hymn in Philippians, and might take it to be true that the Holy Spirit is at work in the emergence of the faith, and in its forming character. In light of such knowledge it would seem appropriate to assume, as they did, that the words and actions attributed to Jesus have a meaning unlike and in excess of virtue or wisdom or morality, chastisement or consolation, all of which would be the marks of teacher and prophet, all of which are temporal and will pass away.

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We can assume, at a minimum, that there was indeed a historical Jesus of Nazareth, as there were a Thales of Miletus and a Pythagoras of Samos. Ancient teachers whose disciples attested to their teachings are numerous. We are in the habit of assuming the fragments that survive give us these philosophers, to the extent the accidents of transmission and loss will allow, granting that this extent cannot be reckoned. We have four accounts of the teachings and the life and death of Jesus, three of them largely consistent with one another. Their differences should surely be taken as evidence that they were the work of very human witnesses, receivers of the tradition and interpreters of it. God honors us with important work. And where they are similar, this might be taken as evidence of a particular emphasis and centrality in the teaching, whether explicit or implicit. If Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been put in separate rooms and told to write from memory a fifty-page summary of the Gospels, their two versions would be alike in important respects and different in important respects. And both would be sound and valuable.

Many have questioned the reliability of the biblical narrative as history, therefore its credibility as the basis of belief. Like the genealogies in Matthew and Luke which dismiss genealogy, the Gospels might be said to testify against themselves in the fact of their unreconciled differences, at least when they are judged by the standards of the literary forms to which they are presumably compared. This kind of comparison itself raises questions, of course. The accounts of the life and death of the Persian Cyrus the Great vary markedly, and the tales of his abandonment in infancy and adoption by a herdsman certainly have the character of myth or folklore. Yet no one questions that there was indeed a Cyrus. He left a wake of consequence the mighty do leave, and records, and relics. Jesus, of course, had little status while he lived. Obscure as he was, it is notable, perhaps miraculous, that his life is attested at all. If we knew Cyrus only by ancient accounts of his life, there would be as good grounds for doubting his historical reality as for questioning the historicity of Jesus. The mythic elements in the tale of Cyrus’ infancy are conventions that mark him out as no ordinary man, reflecting his historical importance. If the circumstances said to surround Jesus’ birth are in fact retrojections of the same kind, they cannot reasonably be taken as casting doubt on his existence, though they very often are.

There are great differences between the accounts of origins of the Persian conqueror and the Jewish carpenter, one being that Jesus’ birth and the circumstances of his life were of his own choosing. As Chrysostom says, “He took to himself a mother of low estate”—ironically, a prerogative no mere emperor could dream of. He fulfilled an exalted purpose in living and dying an obscure figure in a minor province. His birth was indeed humble, consecrated by the sacrifice of two pigeons. As a boy he impressed the elders in the Temple, but this did not bring him to a more elevated condition, as youthful kingliness is said to have done for Cyrus. He did not, like Oedipus, find his way to a destined role at odds with his apparent origins. If Jesus had become king of the Jews in the ordinary sense, his narrative would indeed follow this ancient paradigm very closely. Instead, in his truest nature, human and divine, he really was to be found among those who hungered and thirsted and were sick and in prison. If all the tales and myths and histories of greatness obscured and greatness revealed hover behind the Gospels, they are there to be overturned, with all the assumptions that give them currency in the human imagination. It is not alien to the divine nature to be aware of the stories we tell ourselves and to be articulate in their terms. After all, we live by stories, as God knows, and the books of Moses tell us. If we say Jesus explicitly and purposefully rejected the expectations, that is, the anticipated narrative, that had grown up around the promised Messiah, then against the background of these expectations his life takes on particular meaning. His self-characterization as a, as well as the, Son of Man, speaks precisely to this point.

In the Gospels the phrase “Son of Man” is spoken only by Jesus himself or is directly attributed to him as speech, in contexts that imply, whatever else, complex reference to himself. It is notable that, as often as he uses these words, no one else uses them to speak of Jesus or to him, not even the Gospel writers in passages of exposition. The Gospels also record as exclusive to Jesus the prefacing of statements with the word “amen.” Together the preservation of these usages suggest care on the part of the writers and the tradition to respect the particularity of his speech and therefore, so far as possible, of his meaning as well. That is to say, the phrase “Son of Man” is retained without paraphrase or interpretation. Another pattern appears to me to have been remembered and preserved. In response to mention of God, the Son of God, or the Christ, Jesus replies with reference to the Son of Man, as if this image should always figure in any conception of holiness. In the nature of the case this occurs most frequently when recognition of Jesus as Christ begins to emerge as a question, later in the Gospels. So its context tends to be called apocalyptic, as if this adjective, without definition, by itself gave a sufficient account of his meaning. The richness of the phrase “Son of Man,” the thousand suggestions in the fact that Jesus adopts it for himself, are lost if he is taken simply to be identifying himself with the anticipated figure of the Messiah.

It is notable also that the sayings of Jesus in which the phrase “Son of Man” appears are reported with a high degree of consistency from one Gospel to the next, though the sequence and the immediate contexts in which these sayings occur can differ markedly. I take this to suggest that they are something ipsissima verba, remembered as teachings with special authority, of greater interest to his tradition than the particulars of circumstance, perhaps even tacitly interpreted by the context in which they are placed by individual writers. A documentary theory that implies dependency on written texts to account for their stability within these significant variations would require a good deal of inelegant splicing. If there were sayings collections behind the Gospels that were written as well as oral, as I assume there were, it would still be remarkable that only Jesus uses this phrase, which is, in its ordinary meaning, perfectly commonplace, meaning simply a man, a human being. He spoke the language of his time and people, in awareness of the associations particular words and phrases acquired, through scriptural contexts and their elaborations, and in the streets as well. In the ordinary course of things, embedded as they were in centuries of use, their senses would interact. It is surely among the mysteries of Incarnation that Jesus could take on human language as well as human flesh, and that he could find it suited to his uses. The problem, if that is the word, of putting divine utterance into plain language gives particular interest to a phrase he turned to frequently, as he did to the phrase “Son of Man.” If we grant that it is Christ we are speaking of, then we must be struck by his insistence on just this phrase.

The phrase had, of course, an extraordinary meaning, drawn from Ezekiel and Daniel, later elaborated in the extrabiblical 1 Enoch. I note here that this is a slender basis for establishing its meaning when Jesus used it. It is usual to say that in apocalyptic writings the Son of Man, or “one like a son of man,” appears in the last days. But this seems not to be what disciples hear when Jesus says these words. Seemingly they would be readier, if not better able, to interpret his presence and his teaching if they did hear it. Or they would have taken it up as a title, or at least have pondered it, asked him about it, if the apocalyptic associations of the phrase seemed to be important from the perspective of Jesus’ contemporaries. Scholarship tends to see in the Gospels the appropriation of this language by their writers or the early church for messianic uses. I suppose this could account for its being unassimilated into the narrative. But the fact that the phrase is so distinctively Jesus’ could as well mean that it is Jesus himself who makes the appropriation, from vernacular speech as much as from Scripture, giving the phrase a meaning that is in fact not wholly prepared in Scripture or apocalyptic. This reading is no more speculative than others. I assume that Jesus was, at very least, a man of unusual gifts. If Shakespeare’s language is not exhaustively anticipated by his precursors and contemporaries, there is no reason to assume that the language of Jesus must be.

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It is striking that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews interprets the phrase not in the context usually called apocalyptic, but as it occurs in Psalm 8, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man [here Adam] that thou visitest him?” The writer of Hebrews says, “It has been testified somewhere,” then quotes the psalm at length. About the writer’s suppression of the name of David as the psalmist, Calvin says, “Doubtless he says one, or some one, not in contempt but for honour’s sake, designating him as one of the prophets or a renowned writer.” If this is an instance of tact, it is consistent with the fact that discretion in Scripture can reflect a special veneration, as for example in respecting usages unique to Jesus. Calvin says that for various reasons in Hebrews, Psalm 8 “seems to be unfitly applied to Christ.” He concludes, “The meaning of David is this, — ‘O Lord, thou hast raised man to such dignity, that it differs but little from divine or angelic honour; for he is set a ruler over the whole world.’ This meaning the Apostle did not intend to overthrow, nor to turn to something else; but he only bids us to consider the abasement of Christ, which appeared for a short time, and then the glory with which he is perpetually crowned; and this he does more by alluding to expressions than by explaining what David understood.” The writer of Hebrews says, “He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brethren.” This comes shortly after an extraordinarily exalted account of the nature of Jesus, “through whom also he [God] created the world,” and who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” If the psalm is considered as being helpful to an understanding of Christ in his humanity then human nature and circumstance are its primary subject. This makes it only more fitly applied to Christ, whose humanity gives extraordinary power to the question “What is man?”

It is at this point that this discussion has meaning beyond explication de texte. “What is man?” can be translated without loss into certain other questions — What are we? What am I? In order to broach the matter in the plainest terms, let us say for just a moment that in our addressing it God is not a given. There is no disputing the fact that we human beings have abilities not found in other animals, for example, the ability to split atoms. While this is factually true of very few of us, generations of thought and experiment, and the material wealth we create as civilizations, have enabled those few. So their achievements are in a sense communal. We can preserve and transmit learning and technique with amazing efficiency, for weal and woe. Our brilliance manifests itself in forms that are moving and beautiful, which does not alter the fact that we are a clear and present danger to ourselves, and to every creeping thing that creepeth on the face of the earth. This is an inversion of the dominion over the earth celebrated in the psalm, but dominion nevertheless, in its most radical sense. In other words, we are fully as exceptional as the psalmist would have us believe. There is something inversely godlike in our potential de-creation of the biosphere.

The fact, or at least the degree, of human exceptionalism is often disputed. In some quarters it is considered modest and seemly for us to take our place among the animals, conceptually speaking — to acknowledge finally the bonds of kinship evolution implies. Yet, in view of our history with regard to the animals, not to mention our history with one another, it seems fair to wonder if the beasts, given a voice in the matter, would not feel a bit insulted by our intrusion. History is the great unfinished portrait of old Adam. In the very fact of having a history we are unique. And when we look at it we are astonished. Only in myth or nightmare could another such creature be found. What a thing is man.

Say, however, that God is a given, the God of the psalmist and of Jesus. Then it is possible to claim a dignity for humankind that is assured because it is bestowed on us, that is, because it is beyond even our formidable powers to besmirch and destroy. Say that the one earthly thing God did not put under our feet was our own essential nature. The one great corrective to our tendency toward depredation would be a recognition of our abiding sacredness, since we are both, and often simultaneously, victim and villain. The divine image in us, despite all, is an act of God, immune to our sacrilege, apparent in the loveliness that never ceases to shine out in incalculable instances of beauty and love and imagination that make the dire assessment of our character, however solidly grounded in our history and our prospects, radically untrue.

It is not uncommon for those who are respectful of Christianity and eager to rescue some part of it from the assaults of rational skepticism to say Jesus was a great man, and no more than a man. A teacher, a martyr to intolerance, from whom we might learn compassion. He is defined in terms of an equivalence, his mystery anchored to what is assumed to be a known value. But what is man? What does it mean to say, as the Gospel writers say and insist, that Jesus was indeed a human being? What we are remains a very open question. Perhaps some part of the divine purpose in the Incarnation of this Son of Man was and is to help us to a true definition.