John Cobb on the Unique "I" of Jesus
The "I" of Jesus, rather than standing over against
the divine "I," identified its authority with that of God.
The "I" of Jesus was constituted by his prehension of God.
- John Cobb
Imagine that, moment by moment, your perspective and emotions and goals are guided by the living spirit of God, such that your sense of identity coalesces with God's aims. Your way of experiencing the world is dominated by your experience of God. You are, in these moments, a God-nourished "I."
Your "I" has not merged with the divine or been replaced by the divine. It's not that your ego has dissolved like a drop of water into the ocean. You are still "you." But your "I" is so identified with God's love and aims, that the love and aims flow through you. This means that you speak with a special kind of authority. God is not a distant authority on behalf of whom you are speaking. Your own words and deeds are God's authority in action.
The authority at issue is not a special knowledge of all that is possible or how the world works. It is not even a special moral code or law, originating in God, that you have been given. You may well be in error on many things. The authority is a nourishing energy and a social aspiration that your sisters and brothers can live in harmony and justice. This nourishing energy, then, and not a special knowledge, is your authority. When you forgive and love someone, they feel forgiven and loved by the infinite reality at the heart of the cosmos. Your love and forgiveness are their way of experiencing God. For them, your presence has a shining quality to it. A light has been added to the world through you.
This is how John Cobb imagines Jesus. He was a unique "I."
Please note, God is likewise an "I" for Jesus. Or, perhaps better, a "You." In the language of Jesus, God is "Abba." Cobb believes that the people of Israel, including the prophets, experienced God as an "I" who was different from them and who communicated with them, indeed called them, into holiness. Sometimes they responded to the call and sometimes they rebelled, but they had an "I" to "I" relationship. God could address them and they could address God; God could act in their lives and they could act in God's life; God could feel their presence and they could feel God's presence,. The relationship of the people of Israel to God was not just a transactional relationship; it was also, often, a loving relationship with intimacy and pathos. It was covenantal.
Jesus was unique in that he (Jesus) so identified with the divine "I" that Abba's feelings became enfleshed or incarnate in his own personhood. When Jesus said "I," it was Abba's living spirit at work in the world, the Logos, saying "I." Whereas prophets are people who hear the call of God and respond to it, without making claims to their own authority, Jesus embodied a post-prophetic way of hearing and responding to the call.
Here is how Cobb puts this point in the essay below.
The prophetic "I" was formed in relation to the divine "I." Israel knew God as "I" before individual Hebrews entered into this structure of existence. The prophet knew himself addressed by the divine "I" and as he became aware of the tension between the requirements of that "I" and his own thought and feelings, he found himself called to responsibility for his actions in a new way.
He thus became an ‘I" in relation to the divine "I." The relation was one of encounter, or demand and response. The prophetic "I" embodied no authority. It exercised freedom in response to the authoritative command of the divine "I." The prophet’s word had authority only insofar as it articulated the divine word.
Here the contrast of Jesus with the prophets is most clear. He spoke on his own authority which was at the same time the authority of God. The "I" of Jesus, rather than standing over against the divine "I," identified its authority with that of God.
Among the religious leaders of mankind this is a unique role. It differs from the mystics and ecstatics as much as from the great Hebrew prophets. The "I" of Jesus was neither merged with the divine nor replaced by the divine. On the contrary it retained its autonomous existence but in such a way as to identify its perceptions with God’s.
*
"A Whiteheadian Christology" was published in 1971. As I write some fifty years later, John Cobb is 97 years old. A pioneer in Christian process theology, he is in process himself. The "John Cobb" who wrote the essay below, published in 1971, is not the "John Cobb" of today. Today he is less preoccupied with the nuances of Whitehead's metaphysic; he does not speak of God as "he" or human beings as "man," he is much more concerned with the natural world and the survival of life on earth than he was fifty years ago.
Moreover, it seems to me, his approach to Jesus is different. Whereas in the 1971 essay below he spends a great deal of time discussing the structure of Jesus' existence, he now focuses more on the work of Jesus and his (Jesus') beckoning us to live in cooperation with one another and the natural world.
Still, the essay from fifty years ago is noteworthy in how it makes a metaphysical case for God being present in Jesus in a unique way. Here is how he puts it:
We can intelligibly and with some indirect historical justification assert that God’s presence in Jesus constituted Jesus’ essential selfhood. The one God was thus uniquely present in him. At the same time, Jesus was fully human and no aspect of his humanity was displaced by God. It was a thoroughly human "I" that was constituted by Gad’s presence in Jesus.
Four Questions
As I read the essay, four questions may emerge.
1. Was Jesus absolutely unique?
Had no one prior to Jesus ever embodied the post-prophetic mode of living, such that God's presence constituted their very selfhood? On this Cobb is open to the possibility that others did embody it, in which case they, too, had unique, post-prophetic identities. But Cobb does not know of evidence of their existence. He knows of mystics and shamans, saints and sages, but he does not know of individuals who, shaped by prophetic ways of living, entered into post-prophetic modes of existence in the way Jesus did. His claim is not that Jesus was wiser than any other person, or that Jesus was free from error, or that Jesus was enlightened like the Buddha. But his claim that Jesus was unique, just as the Buddha was unique, too.
2. Did Jesus' way of experiencing God give him perfect knowledge or freedom from error?
Cobb says No.
The theory here developed provides no basis for the older view that Jesus’ message was infallible either because it was the direct word of God himself or because God revealed these truths to Jesus in such a way as to preserve him from error. We may assume that God provided Jesus with no peculiar conceptuality, that he guaranteed no freedom from sharing in the errors and misconceptions of his time. The presence of God in Jesus in no sense entailed the presence in Jesus of the divine knowledge.
3. Was Jesus always "at one" with God?
In this essay he does not answer the question, but in Christ in a Pluralistic Age he proposes that Jesus did not always feel identified with God's presence.
Just as a prophet is not continuously receiving the Word of the Lord, a mystic is not continuously in ecstasy, and a Buddhist is not born enlightened, so also we may assume that the distinctive structure of Jesus' existence did not characterize his infancy or remain constant through sleeping and waking states. When it emerged and how steady it became are subjects on which we have little information. The stories of his temptation in the wilderness, his struggle in Gethsemane, and his forsakenness on the cross are not historically reliable, but they witness to the belief on the part of his disciples that he was not continuously free from the tension between his "I" and the Logos. To affirm today that he was fully human entails this same assumption. But our attention is directed also and primarily to the new thing that occurred in him. That new thing was the full incarnation of the Logos. (Christ in a Pluralistic Age)
4. Was Jesus God?
As I read Cobb, he offers a way of saying "yes" to this important saying. At the very least he says that God was incarnate in Jesus even as Jesus was fully human, and that God was incarnate in a way that is different from ways in which God is also incarnate in other people and the natural world. But the incarnation of God in Jesus is not akin to adding oil to water, as if one substance displaces another. It is akin to one person incarnating the feelings of another, such that, in the case of Jesus, God's feelings became Jesus' feelings.
For Cobb, this mode of incarnation is not merely psychological, because for him feelings are at the very heart of what it means to be human at all. Whitehead's metaphysic does not separate feeling from being; rather it equates them. To feel is to be, and to be is to feel. For Cobb, Jesus was truly God incarnate in his own special and unique way, and we likewise are incarnations of God in different ways. So are the hills and rivers, trees and stars. Incarnation includes, but is not limited to, Jesus.
Jesus today
In Christ in a Pluralistic Age Cobb speaks of God’s immanent presence in the world as the Logos, thus linking Jesus with the idea, found in the Gospel of John, that he (Jesus) was the Word made flesh. The implication is that, even for Jesus, the activity of the Word becoming flesh was an experiential process in Jesus' own life. Sometimes Jesus felt identified with the Abba whom he so loved, and sometimes not. If this is true, we must let Jesus be a verb, not a noun. He, too, was on a journey.
And if he (Jesus) is with us still today, then perhaps even now he is in process along with the world, still beckoning the world into a new way of living, grounded in love; and still absorbing the sins and sufferings of the world, at the right hand of his Abba. There is no reason to think that death is the final story, not for Jesus and not for us.
Let the "right hand of the Father" be a metaphor for that mysterious domain after death in which the light of God still shines in and and through all who dwell there. And let one of its inhabitants, a Jew who died too young and so violently, be a special light for all who feel inclined to live from the Logos, helping the word become flesh anew, again and again, in a healing spirit of love.
- Jay McDaniel, 5/2/22
Your "I" has not merged with the divine or been replaced by the divine. It's not that your ego has dissolved like a drop of water into the ocean. You are still "you." But your "I" is so identified with God's love and aims, that the love and aims flow through you. This means that you speak with a special kind of authority. God is not a distant authority on behalf of whom you are speaking. Your own words and deeds are God's authority in action.
The authority at issue is not a special knowledge of all that is possible or how the world works. It is not even a special moral code or law, originating in God, that you have been given. You may well be in error on many things. The authority is a nourishing energy and a social aspiration that your sisters and brothers can live in harmony and justice. This nourishing energy, then, and not a special knowledge, is your authority. When you forgive and love someone, they feel forgiven and loved by the infinite reality at the heart of the cosmos. Your love and forgiveness are their way of experiencing God. For them, your presence has a shining quality to it. A light has been added to the world through you.
This is how John Cobb imagines Jesus. He was a unique "I."
Please note, God is likewise an "I" for Jesus. Or, perhaps better, a "You." In the language of Jesus, God is "Abba." Cobb believes that the people of Israel, including the prophets, experienced God as an "I" who was different from them and who communicated with them, indeed called them, into holiness. Sometimes they responded to the call and sometimes they rebelled, but they had an "I" to "I" relationship. God could address them and they could address God; God could act in their lives and they could act in God's life; God could feel their presence and they could feel God's presence,. The relationship of the people of Israel to God was not just a transactional relationship; it was also, often, a loving relationship with intimacy and pathos. It was covenantal.
Jesus was unique in that he (Jesus) so identified with the divine "I" that Abba's feelings became enfleshed or incarnate in his own personhood. When Jesus said "I," it was Abba's living spirit at work in the world, the Logos, saying "I." Whereas prophets are people who hear the call of God and respond to it, without making claims to their own authority, Jesus embodied a post-prophetic way of hearing and responding to the call.
Here is how Cobb puts this point in the essay below.
The prophetic "I" was formed in relation to the divine "I." Israel knew God as "I" before individual Hebrews entered into this structure of existence. The prophet knew himself addressed by the divine "I" and as he became aware of the tension between the requirements of that "I" and his own thought and feelings, he found himself called to responsibility for his actions in a new way.
He thus became an ‘I" in relation to the divine "I." The relation was one of encounter, or demand and response. The prophetic "I" embodied no authority. It exercised freedom in response to the authoritative command of the divine "I." The prophet’s word had authority only insofar as it articulated the divine word.
Here the contrast of Jesus with the prophets is most clear. He spoke on his own authority which was at the same time the authority of God. The "I" of Jesus, rather than standing over against the divine "I," identified its authority with that of God.
Among the religious leaders of mankind this is a unique role. It differs from the mystics and ecstatics as much as from the great Hebrew prophets. The "I" of Jesus was neither merged with the divine nor replaced by the divine. On the contrary it retained its autonomous existence but in such a way as to identify its perceptions with God’s.
*
"A Whiteheadian Christology" was published in 1971. As I write some fifty years later, John Cobb is 97 years old. A pioneer in Christian process theology, he is in process himself. The "John Cobb" who wrote the essay below, published in 1971, is not the "John Cobb" of today. Today he is less preoccupied with the nuances of Whitehead's metaphysic; he does not speak of God as "he" or human beings as "man," he is much more concerned with the natural world and the survival of life on earth than he was fifty years ago.
Moreover, it seems to me, his approach to Jesus is different. Whereas in the 1971 essay below he spends a great deal of time discussing the structure of Jesus' existence, he now focuses more on the work of Jesus and his (Jesus') beckoning us to live in cooperation with one another and the natural world.
Still, the essay from fifty years ago is noteworthy in how it makes a metaphysical case for God being present in Jesus in a unique way. Here is how he puts it:
We can intelligibly and with some indirect historical justification assert that God’s presence in Jesus constituted Jesus’ essential selfhood. The one God was thus uniquely present in him. At the same time, Jesus was fully human and no aspect of his humanity was displaced by God. It was a thoroughly human "I" that was constituted by Gad’s presence in Jesus.
Four Questions
As I read the essay, four questions may emerge.
1. Was Jesus absolutely unique?
Had no one prior to Jesus ever embodied the post-prophetic mode of living, such that God's presence constituted their very selfhood? On this Cobb is open to the possibility that others did embody it, in which case they, too, had unique, post-prophetic identities. But Cobb does not know of evidence of their existence. He knows of mystics and shamans, saints and sages, but he does not know of individuals who, shaped by prophetic ways of living, entered into post-prophetic modes of existence in the way Jesus did. His claim is not that Jesus was wiser than any other person, or that Jesus was free from error, or that Jesus was enlightened like the Buddha. But his claim that Jesus was unique, just as the Buddha was unique, too.
2. Did Jesus' way of experiencing God give him perfect knowledge or freedom from error?
Cobb says No.
The theory here developed provides no basis for the older view that Jesus’ message was infallible either because it was the direct word of God himself or because God revealed these truths to Jesus in such a way as to preserve him from error. We may assume that God provided Jesus with no peculiar conceptuality, that he guaranteed no freedom from sharing in the errors and misconceptions of his time. The presence of God in Jesus in no sense entailed the presence in Jesus of the divine knowledge.
3. Was Jesus always "at one" with God?
In this essay he does not answer the question, but in Christ in a Pluralistic Age he proposes that Jesus did not always feel identified with God's presence.
Just as a prophet is not continuously receiving the Word of the Lord, a mystic is not continuously in ecstasy, and a Buddhist is not born enlightened, so also we may assume that the distinctive structure of Jesus' existence did not characterize his infancy or remain constant through sleeping and waking states. When it emerged and how steady it became are subjects on which we have little information. The stories of his temptation in the wilderness, his struggle in Gethsemane, and his forsakenness on the cross are not historically reliable, but they witness to the belief on the part of his disciples that he was not continuously free from the tension between his "I" and the Logos. To affirm today that he was fully human entails this same assumption. But our attention is directed also and primarily to the new thing that occurred in him. That new thing was the full incarnation of the Logos. (Christ in a Pluralistic Age)
4. Was Jesus God?
As I read Cobb, he offers a way of saying "yes" to this important saying. At the very least he says that God was incarnate in Jesus even as Jesus was fully human, and that God was incarnate in a way that is different from ways in which God is also incarnate in other people and the natural world. But the incarnation of God in Jesus is not akin to adding oil to water, as if one substance displaces another. It is akin to one person incarnating the feelings of another, such that, in the case of Jesus, God's feelings became Jesus' feelings.
For Cobb, this mode of incarnation is not merely psychological, because for him feelings are at the very heart of what it means to be human at all. Whitehead's metaphysic does not separate feeling from being; rather it equates them. To feel is to be, and to be is to feel. For Cobb, Jesus was truly God incarnate in his own special and unique way, and we likewise are incarnations of God in different ways. So are the hills and rivers, trees and stars. Incarnation includes, but is not limited to, Jesus.
Jesus today
In Christ in a Pluralistic Age Cobb speaks of God’s immanent presence in the world as the Logos, thus linking Jesus with the idea, found in the Gospel of John, that he (Jesus) was the Word made flesh. The implication is that, even for Jesus, the activity of the Word becoming flesh was an experiential process in Jesus' own life. Sometimes Jesus felt identified with the Abba whom he so loved, and sometimes not. If this is true, we must let Jesus be a verb, not a noun. He, too, was on a journey.
And if he (Jesus) is with us still today, then perhaps even now he is in process along with the world, still beckoning the world into a new way of living, grounded in love; and still absorbing the sins and sufferings of the world, at the right hand of his Abba. There is no reason to think that death is the final story, not for Jesus and not for us.
Let the "right hand of the Father" be a metaphor for that mysterious domain after death in which the light of God still shines in and and through all who dwell there. And let one of its inhabitants, a Jew who died too young and so violently, be a special light for all who feel inclined to live from the Logos, helping the word become flesh anew, again and again, in a healing spirit of love.
- Jay McDaniel, 5/2/22