Why We Look to Jesus

Or, How not to have a sub-Christian Spiritual Formation

Sub-Subtitle: Jesus Shows Us Who God Is and How to Be Human

We Christians look to Jesus as Revelation and Response.

Whatever discipleship or spiritual formation means, it means looking to Jesus, looking at Jesus.

We look to Jesus as the revelation of God, for Christianity has always declared that Jesus is fully God.

• And we see the shining face of God who delights in us.

But we also look to Jesus for how to respond to the revelation of God, for Jesus is also fully human.

• And we see one who lives fully within God’s delight.

Uniquely Exclusive

Christian spiritual formation, Christian discipleship, is uniquely exclusive in focusing on Jesus as the Truth (as the revelation of/as God) and the Way (as the human way to respond to this revelation), which leads to Life (John 14:6).

We only look to Jesus to know God and to know how to live with God.

We have faith in Jesus because of his faithfulness as God (in his divinity) and to God (in his humanity).

Theology Matters

Theologically orthodox claims about the full humanity and divinity of Jesus are not secondary to Christian spiritual formation, to be discarded when one becomes more advanced, more mature, and less constrained by “right thinking” and “demands for conformity”.

That kind of thinking about “maturity” is a modern, Western, mostly-privileged myth.

The full humanity and divinity of Jesus is the essential engine that leads to orthopraxis—right living.

(And of course, tragically, orthodoxy and orthopraxy have been separated such that many claiming orthodoxy don’t live how Jesus lived. But in noting that tragedy, let’s not fall to the opposite distortion that Jesus is mostly an inspiring human whom we should emulate.)

Let’s keep wondering at, and wandering with, the “Word made flesh” who shows how to live in the fullness of life (John 1:14; John 10:10).

Anything less is no longer Christian spiritual formation.