Michel Henry, _Words of Christ_, trans. Christina Gschwandtner (1)

NOT AT ALL sure I can do justice to this argument--not that that has stopped me before.

Henry argues that Jesus's own words, as  transmitted in the gospels, are convincing evidence that Jesus is what he says he is, i.e., the Christ, the son of God. Not because we can simply take Jesus at his word, but because, given what he talks about and how he talks about it, his claim to be divine is more plausible than other available explanations.

For a couple of reasons, I found this whole approach utterly unexpected and refreshing. First, I grew up in and am more or less still influenced by a liberal, mainline kind of post-Emersonian Protestantism that downplays (without quite dispensing with) the divinity of Jesus. Prophet, teacher, visionary, fighter for social justice, resister...Jesus is our guy, certainly, and we pray in his name, but we do not put that much emphasis on his being God, precisely. It's not so much that we deny his divinity as just prefer that it not come up.

Second, Henry is coming at the question not so much as a theologian as a phenomenologist, that being what Henry (1922-1002) was; he has a lengthy entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

So, we are talking about Being. The fundamental point about our being is that we know we are alive, we are participating and experiencing life, but we are incapable of sustaining this life we have all by ourselves. We need a continual intake of food, water, oxygen, for one thing, and then so on up Maslow's hierarchy. For another thing, the day will come to all of us when life, for all we can do, departs. We are endowed with and sustained in this astonishing thing, Being, by something not ourselves.

Another fundamental thing about our being is that there is an outside and an inside: experience involving the senses and interaction with things external to us, and another kind of experience that seems private, inaccessible to others--consciousness, reflection, thought. Here too a kind of otherness arises, as our thoughts do not simply mirror what we are presented with from outside, but seem capable adopting a configuration of their own.

Henry argues that Jesus seems perfectly cognizant of these and other aspects of Being, and has a unprecedentedly lucid account of why Being is the way it is. In fact, Jesus' intimacy with Being is so pronounced that ultimately the best explanation is that he is the author of Being. He understands it as completely as he does because he created it.

We'll have to pick this up later.