“The Fire and the Cloud” // A Conversation with Chris E. W. Green

Hello friends!

I’m taking a quick break from our series on Benedict to bring you a really special treat.

Fifteen years ago this fall, I left my position as a teaching pastor at a church in Oklahoma and headed west with my wife and kids to help some friends plant a church.

I was naturally curious about who might fill my position after I left, and was really intrigued by who they brought in: a guy by the name of Chris Green, a preacher and professor at a local university who hailed from the Pentecostal world but was obviously deeply immersed in the Great Tradition. I started listening to his sermons—at first just to keep up with the happenings of my old community, but before long, because every time Chris talked, he said something that lingered with me for days and often weeks and sometimes months. 

We soon struck up a friendship. And I have to tell you, that friendship has proved to be one of the great blessings of my life. As I’ve often said, Chris is astonished by Jesus. And that astonishment is contagious. Every time I interact with Chris, I’m left more slack-jawed than before at the radiant figure of Jesus Christ, more eager to search for his face in the text of Scripture, more determined to give him away to the church I serve and the world I’m part of. 

In that vein, Chris (who you can read more about here) is in the midst of a three-book series on Jesus. The first one, All Things Beautiful, is what he calls “an aesthetic Christology”, an attempt to discern the face of Christ in the arts by taking the church calendar as its interpretive key. It’s fantastic. I learned a ton. 

The second book in that series is now out. The Fire and the Cloud: A Biblical Christology, is vintage Chris. The moment I opened it, I knew I was in for a ride. It didn’t disappoint. Many circuit-blowing moments. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

In the interest of bringing F&C to my friends, I thought I’d conduct a little interview with Chris and post it here—for your edification, to be sure, but also so that you’ll go buy the book! Let the reader be advised: it’s a demanding read, but well worth it.

Enjoy.

A

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[AA] Well, Chris, you've done it again: produced a work that is at once faithful to the creeds and canons of the Church and also completely (and wildly) original at the same time. The Fire and the Cloud is tremendous. Well done.

I want to start by asking you a question about your method. The subtitle of the book, of course, is "A Biblical Christology." What the reader might expect is a close reading of core New Testament texts followed by an engagement with the Old, and then some nice, tidy conclusions to wrap each section up. You do none of that. In fact, you do almost the opposite: starting with a close reading of the OLD Testament before engaging with the New, and going out of your way to state that there will be no nice, tidy conclusions. Why?

[CG] You have Robert Jenson to blame for that. He convinced me that because the OT is what the apostles knew as Scripture we cannot be grasped by Jesus as they were unless we learn to read these texts as they did. If we do not see him in the light of the OT, we will not see him at all. We won’t be able to recognize him when he passes by.  

As for refusing nice, tidy conclusions, I don’t think we have much of a choice. Thanks to the wisdom of the Spirit, the Scriptures just won’t work on us as they’re meant to if we’re coming to the texts trying to win arguments and fix problems. Well, they will work—but only to break our paradigms.   

[AA] On that topic, an overriding concern of F&C is the question of supersessionism [the doctrine that the Church has replaced Israel in the plan of God] and the damage that has done over the course of the last two thousand years—the way that our beliefs about Israel have not only often led to violence against the Jewish people, but in the process have massively marred our witness. In fact, one way of reading F&C is as a biblical treatise against supersessionism. Can you talk about where that came from for you?

[CG] That realization began, I think, when I first encountered Jenson’s theology of Israel. But it hit home when I read Willie Jennings’ Acts commentary. He convinced me that anti-Jewishness is an original sin for the church and that replacement theology, because of what it does to our reading of the OT, warps and wounds everything we say and do.

[AA] I appreciate you bringing up Jenson here. Because his view is so pivotal to your argument, I wonder if you wouldn't say a few sentences about how he sees the relationship between Israel and the Church in the plan of God.

[CG] Jenson makes a distinction between “old Israel” and Judaism, but insists that Christians cannot regard either as another religion or a false faith. The Church and the Synagogue are “twinned,” he says, the same company split and sent on “detours” toward the Kingdom of God. Old Israel had been promised a journey that would end in the city of God. But Christ’s ascension meant there was no straight line from here to there. And that is all within God’s wise purposes. The promises of God cannot fail, therefore the Synagogue continues to exist and Israel perseveres in the Jewish people as well as in the Church. Rather than opposing or frustrating the Church’s mission, their election grounds and orients our own calling in this “time between the times.”  

[AA] For sure. Still, one of the real challenges we face with the question of supersessionism is that so many of our New Testament texts seem to imply that the Church/new covenant has in fact replaced Israel/old covenant. I'm thinking here of the writer of Hebrews who says (of the OC) that "what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear" (Heb. 8:13). Or Paul's allegorical reading of Hagar/Sarah in Galatians. How do we read these texts in a non-supersessionist way? Maybe another way of asking this is: how do we account for the real difference the advent of Christ makes to how we read the story of Israel without doing so in a way that negates the ongoing goodness of Israel in the plan of God?

[CG] What is “old” is not the covenant per se, the Law as such. How could it be? The Lord does not change and his word endures forever. What “passes away” is not his promise but our misunderstanding of it. As Origen says in his homilies on Numbers, the Law turns into an “Old Testament” only if we persist in reading it “according to the flesh.” Read in the Spirit, those very same texts renew us by returning us to and relocating us in the life that is the source of our lives. 

I don’t mean to be unfair to those Christians who’ve held replacement theologies. There are, as you’ve said, a number of texts that seem to suggest exactly that. Ephesians 2, for  example, says Christ has created in himself one new humanity by “abolishing the law and its commands and ordinances" (Eph. 2:15). But Jesus was clear, was he not? “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt. 5:17). And so was Paul: “Do we then overthrow the law through this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Rom. 3:31). The coming of God in Christ does not mark some change in God’s relation to the world. Israel is not rejected and replaced. The Law is not annulled. What is overthrown is the glory of the time before that coming, the time of preparation and anticipation. The church exists not because of the failure of Israel but because of her faithfulness. Christ has not put an end to the covenant but made it possible for Jew and gentile alike to become one family. What we’re witnessing now, historically, is the working out of that becoming, that at-one-ment. 

[AA] I love that, Chris. And I agree. But just to play the devil's advocate here—Israel and the Church are hardly functioning like one family, and beyond any of the obviously sinful reasons why that might be the case, one critical reason for that is surely the question of Jesus, whom Paul called "a stumbling block to Jews" (1 Cor. 1:23). We don't see eye-to-eye on what, for Christians, is the pivotal question. What account does your theology make of that?

[CG] These are difficult waters, to be sure; we can see even the apostles struggling to navigate them. Two things, at least, seem clear, however. First, we must never forget that Jesus is the realization of Israel’s God’s hopes for us. He cannot and does not want to be known apart from the One he obeys and to whom he prays. Remember what his name means: YHWH is salvation. Think too of Mary’s and Zechariah’s songs in the opening pages of Luke’s Gospel: the coming of Christ establishes (and does not annul) the holy covenant, exalting forever the Lord God of Israel, Abraham’s Friend, David’s Father. Second, Jewish critiques and denials of Christians claims about Jesus are an essential counter-witness, a helpful cross-pressure, which forces us to attend more carefully to our words and to the words of Scripture.

At the end of Luke’s Gospel, we read of two disciples on the road to Emmaus who are kept from recognizing Jesus. Their not-seeing lasts only for a moment. For others, that moment takes more time. Now, in this “meantime” between Christ’s “going away” and “coming again,” God, as only God can, is working in both the Synagogue and the Church (and in the different Christian traditions), as well as outside them, for the good of everyone. And that is of course impossible for us to comprehend. That’s why Paul, at the end of Romans 11, is left at a loss for words, delirious, reduced to praise. 

[AA] Shifting gears a bit—coincidentally, I happened to be rereading Henri de Lubac's Scripture in the Tradition right before I picked up your book. De Lubac, of course, is one of the giant figures from the last hundred years on the importance of reading the Old Testament like the church fathers did—that is, "spiritually", discerning Christ. Interestingly, he makes the point that we ought to learn to follow the intuitions of the fathers in this regard without feeling bound to slavishly reproduce their results—results which, as often as not, led to what you have described as "flattened" readings of the Old Testament. 

A good example here is your treatment of Joseph. Historically, interpreters have lauded Joseph as a morally exemplary figure, some even describing him as the perfect "type" of Christ (a claim the NT doesn’t make!). Without giving the whole chapter away, talk to us about how the instinct to read Christ into the Joseph story flattens out Joseph, and makes a true discernment of Christ in the Joseph story less likely.

[CG] Rowan Williams says the Bible is the territory in which we can expect to meet with the living God. But we tend to treat that territory as if we own it, as if it were our private property, which turns the God of the text into a hostile or, worse, our slave. We need to be able to recognize Jesus’ living image in Joseph’s story rather than imprinting a dead likeness of him on it. But we cannot do that if Joseph’s own humanity is lost on us. What matters is not that we read Scripture but how we read it. The form of our interpretations makes the shape of our lives. Casting Joseph as nothing but a type of Christ cuts the mysteries of the texts down to the size of our explanations.

[AA] Yes. And how much do you think that in losing Joseph's humanity (or the humanity of any OT character), we lose our own, and with it, a real sense of the mystery of God's grace? I'm thinking here of how our instinct to hold Joseph up as a pure type of Christ, a moral example, obscures how the text paints him as vain, opportunistic, not always very cognizant of God, and ultimately responsible for the subjugation of an entire nation... and yet the carrier of the promise and blessing of God.

[CG] Exactly! To treat Joseph as only a type is to dehumanize him, to refuse to see his face—and just so to stymie the work of the Spirit in our own lives. If we cannot receive Joseph as the texts, in God’s wisdom, give him to us, then we cannot receive the Christ who is his life. And the same goes not only for everyone else in the Scriptures but also for everyone else in our world. 

[AA] Okay, so staying with the question of discerning Christ in the Old Testament, Chris, I think what I love so much about how you read Israel's Scriptures is that there's a kind of playfulness about it. You seem to possess a rare (one might say rabbinic!) freedom to wonder and suggest and try things out without fear or feeling a need to press to a once-for-all-time conclusion. I get the impression that that approach is not simply a matter of personality for you, but a matter of conviction. So here's the question—to what extent do you see interpretive playfulness as a form of faithfulness?

[CG] For us, work and play are opposed. For God, they are one. We might even say we’re made for playing because we’re made by it. In Gregory the Theologian’s words, the Word plays in all kinds of forms. Maximus takes that to mean creation itself is the game or plaything of the child Jesus, and he has good scriptural reasons for thinking so. Wisdom, according to Proverbs, is God’s delight, “playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov. 8:30-31). There is interpretative work to do, of course, but I suspect interpretative play allows us to get closer to the heart of the Scriptures. 

[AA] Absolutely. And as with all genuine play, there are rules and parameters, norms that make the game what it is. So, Chris, I wonder if you wouldn’t let us into your mind for a moment. Do you have principles or guidelines or “rules” that give you eyes to see Christ at play on the pages of the OT text? Maybe another way of asking this is: how can the ordinary believer grow in their ability to spot the Second Person at work in Israel's story?

[CG] If Jesus is who the New Testament claims he is, we cannot predetermine how he will show up in these stories for us—no more than we can predict how he will show up in our lives. We can only be ready for him to surprise us, quick to recognize him. 

We can, I think, learn and sharpen the skills of recognition. But that’s better caught than taught, if you know what I mean. The best thing we can do is get close to people who have that knack, and apprentice ourselves to them. 

[AA] Agreed. And who have been some of those folks for you? The ones who have taught you best how to spot the living Christ at play in the pages of the OT?

[CG] Too many to name, but my children have to be at the top of the list. Their reactions to these stories are always so pure. Origen, Maximus, Meister Eckhart have been essential for me, along with Jenson—especially his Song of Songs commentary. Old-time Pentecostal preachers and psalmists. Poets and mystics of every stripe. Students. Colleagues. Friends, including the folks in the Open Table community. You. I’ve been blessed. 

[AA] Last question. Today, right now, this moment: who is Jesus Christ for Chris Green?

[CG] The one who's praying for me.