Second live Q&A, and this week we went to Nicaea. Here’s the setup, in case you’re new: Constantine called the council, funded the bishops’ travel, set the agenda, chaired it, and personally suggested the technical term homoousios — that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Joerg’s method is to notice who pays for the trip. The boss funds the conference, the boss owns the product. Which means bringing Jesus up into the Godhead looks like a great move of respect right up until you notice it also removed him from Galilee and assimilated him to an imperial first person. But here’s the part that makes this class worth taking: Joerg’s move is to read it backwards. Let the second person define the first. Suddenly the creed becomes dangerous to empire, and Constantine — who moved away from Nicaea late in life for reasons nobody fully understands — may have figured out it was blowing up in his face. We also got into the Christological vacuum and what rushes in to fill it, why Chalcedon accidentally underwrote the self-made man, how Hellenization was a class matter, and what the Theodosian Code’s protection of church asylum asks of congregations right now. Next week: Anselm. Get ready.
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Highlights from the conversation
- The surplus, one more time. Carol asked for the concept plainly, and Joerg gave the cleanest version yet. Everything is produced — that’s why we say constructive theology. The labor metaphor: you work, you get paid, and what you produce is worth more than what you got paid for. The difference gets siphoned off as profit. Same with theology. The dominant system normally captures all the benefit. The surplus move says: some of that accrues to us, and we’re going in to reclaim it. Which means don’t just look at your bookshelves. Look at lived religion, real struggles, the underside. Jacques Lacan on women’s surplus enjoyment under patriarchy — the thing produced that the dominant system can’t fully expropriate — is the analogy Joerg uses in the book.
- The Christological vacuum, and what rushes in. Rosa noticed that the creed names conception, birth, death, and resurrection, and skips the entire life and ministry. Joerg’s answer: nature abhors a vacuum, and what rushes in is wherever the pressure is greatest. In 325, that’s imperial logic filling the blank by default. But the same mechanism runs today. Bultmann and Tillich also weren’t interested in what Jesus actually said and did — and what filled that space was what Germans call Kulturprotestantismus. A bourgeois, middle-class Christ doing what the middle class needs. In the US we call it civil religion, and Joerg is clear that it has a conservative version and a liberal one.
- Read the creed backwards. Dimitri’s question, and the hinge of the whole session. If Nicaea puts Father and Son at the same level, Constantine appears to have assumed the first person defines the second — imperial God on a throne, and now Jesus is domesticated to match. Joerg’s reversal: let the second person define the first. Jesus’ life and ministry looks nothing like an emperor. He rides into Jerusalem on a donkey while the Roman governor rides a horse — mimicry, mockery. He’s offered power over all the kingdoms of the world in the temptation narrative and declines, which raises the possibility that top-down imperial power is the devil’s power, not God’s. Tripp’s addition: the New Testament already says Jesus is the image of the invisible God. If they’re co-eternal and of the same essence, then what God looks like is what Jesus said, did, and endured. Joerg’s story from a Texas panel on biblical authority: his more pious colleague said you read the Bible through the lens of the creeds. Joerg said it’s the other way around — read the creeds through the lens of the Bible, plug the table-flipping in the temple back into the doctrine of the Trinity, and you have a revolution.
- The Trinity as an anti-fascist doctrine. Russell asked where Joerg lands on the social Trinity. He’s for it, and he doesn’t understand the pushback — Boff, Moltmann, LaCugna all developed it, and the basic claim is enormous: at the core of reality is the equal relationship of three, not a hierarchy. Conservatives can’t argue against it without abandoning orthodoxy, so they’ve invented functional hierarchy alongside ontological equality, which Joerg calls nonsense. And there’s precedent: Erik Peterson claimed the doctrine of the Trinity against Nazi fascism, arguing that at the heart of reality there is no top-down hierarchy. Not modalism, not tritheism — unity in difference. Which is the foundation of what Joerg calls deep solidarity: solidarity built on putting differences to work rather than on sameness.
- Chalcedon, and how solidarity became bootstraps. Clarissa’s question, from a section of the book Joerg didn’t have time for in the lecture. Nicaea (325) said the Son is homoousios to Patri — of the same substance as the Father. Chalcedon (451) added a second one: homoousios hemin — of the same substance as us. Real equality with Christ as brother, powerful stuff. But the same failure repeats. In Nicaea, divinity got defined by the empire. In Chalcedon, humanity got defined by the empire. So dominant humanity now sets the terms for Jesus’ humanity, and you end up with the self-made man and the American dream. Joerg’s fix is symmetrical: if we flip the tables on divinity by reading the first person through the second, flip them on humanity too. Let Jesus’ humanity define what human means — not the billionaire, the businessperson, the movie star.
- What Athanasius did, and why we keep the creed anyway. Adam asked what we owe a doctrine we inherited through intimidation and the invention of a tidy heresy called Arianism. Joerg’s short answer: probably not much. But we don’t put it in the dumpster, because there’s a surplus worth mining — and because Constantine himself moved away from the creed late in life, likely because he realized it had the potential to deconstruct the empire he’d built it for. Joerg’s related note on Audre Lorde: he doesn’t always agree that the master’s tools can’t dismantle the master’s house. Sometimes they can, and this may be one of those times. Tripp’s addition, on reading the chapter again: Whitehead’s Galilean vision in Process and Reality — the flickering image Caesar’s lawyers edited over but never extinguished — has striking parallels to the Christological surplus.
About our guest
Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com
Previous Episodes w/ Joerg
- Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses
- Why Religion Matters Now
- Theology in the Capitalocene
- Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern
- the End of Religion & Business as Usual
- Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar
- Different Gods, Different Religions?
- Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes
- The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More
- Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer
- Economics, Theology, and Discipleship
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