The Mystery of Christ Thoughts on Ch. 1

John Behr's premise is compelling: our starting point for theology should be an examination of how the earliest Christians came to believe what they did. Our tendency is to start with statements such as the Nicene Creed, but the creeds cannot be properly understood apart from the process that led to their creation. Upon this premise Behr writes The Mystery of Christ, a brief systematic theology.

For Behr, then, theology starts at the cross viewed in light of the resurrection. This was the event in which Jesus was revealed as God. But even this could not be understood without Jesus revealing it to his followers, through the breaking of bread and opening of the scriptures. Already at this point I was sold on Behr's project. Here is a theology that flows directly from the Gospel accounts of Jesus, is immediately concerned with the transformation of the believer, and provides a justification for the worship of the church from the very beginning.

This theological method has some interesting consequences. Most prominently, Behr suggests that we need to "take seriously the exegetical practices of the apostles and the early Christians." This is rather challenging, because in modern eyes early exegesis often looks either esoteric or naive. I have long believed (in theory) that we should be reading the Church Fathers. But whenever I have actually done so, the things they say about scripture have often been too weird to be of any use. After reading Behr, though, I think that the problem is we assume they were reading scripture the same way we are, but coming to strange conclusions. In fact though, the ancient Christians had a whole different way of using scripture.

There is the most distance between us and them when we read the Old Testament. For the earliest Christians, the Old Testament spoke directly about Christ, and it was the only scripture they had. We don't view the OT in this way, though. Scholarship tends to view it as a Jewish story that Christians have latched on to. Evangelicals read it as the OT as the story leading up to Christ, with a few prophecies about him thrown in.

Behr describes a radically different way of doing theology. I like it very much on a theoretical level. I have not yet figured out how it will affect my faith on a more practical level, but I think it will.