Abstract
James Dunn is Professor Emeritus of Divinity of the University of Durham. His work on New Testament Christology will be familiar to readers of this journal. His Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (1980) appeared just a little over 30 years ago. This short book addresses a single question: did the early Christians worship Jesus? Two thousand years of Christian history and liturgy might appear to make such a question redundant. The genesis of this book is a scholarly conversation with two other New Testament scholars teaching in British universities, Larry Hurtado of Edinburgh and Richard Baukham, late of St Andrews. In published work, both claimed that there was evidence that cultic worship of Jesus was practised within a few years of Christianity’s beginning. At the outset, Dunn clearly indicates his substantial agreement with his two dialogue partners, but he is concerned that ‘the whole picture be brought into view and that texts that indicate a greater complexity … are not neglected’ (p. 4). He goes on to make an important theological point: ‘worship of Jesus is only possible or acceptable within what is now understood to be a Trinitarian framework. Worship of Jesus that is not worship of God through Jesus, or more importantly, through Jesus and in the Spirit, is not Christian worship’ (p 6, emphasis added).
There are four chapters in this book. The first explores the language of worship used in the New Testament. His conclusion is that there appears to have been a certain reserve or caution in the New Testament in applying the language of worship to Jesus but that the fact that it is used at all, even with such reserve, is without precedent in the Judaism of the time. In the second chapter, he describes the practice of worship as it is known from the New Testament sources. This includes prayer, hymns, sacred spaces, times, meals and people, and finally sacrifice. In the conclusion to this chapter, Dunn rephrases his initial question and asks ‘Was earliest Christian worship possible without and apart from Jesus?’ or was earliest Christian worship in part directed to him as well as made possible and enabled by him (p. 58)? Worship of Christ inevitably raises the question of monotheism which is treated in the third chapter. Divine intermediaries are known from later Jewish biblical and extracanonical sources such as angels, the Spirit, hypostasized Wisdom, the Word/Logos and exalted humans. None of them ever received worship and so the Second Temple ‘provided no precedent to which the first Christians could appeal’ for the way that Jesus functioned in their devotional practice (p. 90). The fourth chapter, ‘The Lord Jesus Christ’ turns its attention to NT texts where Jesus appears to be the object of worship by his followers. It begins, provocatively enough, by asking the question ‘Was Jesus a monotheist?’ Under it there is a more serious question, namely, whether Jesus would have approved of the worship which his followers later ascribed to him. Crucial to the argument of this opening section is a survey of the evidence of Jesus’ own ‘God-talk,’ particularly his Abba address for God and his sense of his own God-given authority. It is in this chapter too that Dunn engages most fully with his dialogue partners, Bauckham (Paul’s use of ‘Jesus is Lord’ and including the divine title) and Hurtado’s suggestion that Paul as a Pharisee persecuted the earliest Christians because already their worship of God included Jesus. Dunn devotes a special section to the Book of Revelation as, unlike other New Testament books, ‘its affirmation of the deity of Christ is unqualified’ (p. 130). What emerges, however, from this careful survey of the evidence is that there is a tension in the NT, something which Dunn sensitively highlights: ‘their use of theos in relation to Jesus was probably with a similar qualification that there was much more to God than could be seen in and through Jesus. In short Jesus was the Last Adam as well as Lord, mediator as well as saviour, the one who prayed for them as well as the one whose name they invoked’ (p. 145).
For all the complexity of the theme it addresses, this is a highly readable book. James Dunn’s style and his ability to make complexity accessible are to be admired. The ancient liturgical ending to Catholic prayer, ‘to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit’ is in itself testimony of just how profound and central to the faith of Christians are the questions he has addressed here.