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49 chapter three The Evolutionary Achievement of Jesus In the previous chapter I offered a response to a question that Pope John Paul II once addressed to evolutionary science, whether an evolutionary perspective would throw any light on Christian beliefs, specifically on the significance of the human person as created in the image of God. In answer, I proposed that human altruism, which puzzles many evolutionary scientists, can provide a theological link between God and his human creature in that altruism originates in the life of the divine Trinity of persons as they interact in self-donation to each other and are operative in the work of creation, and that this divine altruism is expressed in the act of creation and finds an image in the human creature to provide a basis and a potential for transforming members of the human species into a mutually caring community imaging God’s own community of love. All this is operative through the supremely altruistic teaching and death of Jesus Christ, who is, according to Paul, “the image of God” (Col 1: 15). In this way the Word became a member of the human species for the purpose of teaching his fellows how to live a truly ethical life against the inherent evolutionary tendency to competitiveness and self-centeredness by instructing us, and also inspiring us by his own example, to live a life of complete altruism. This, I suggest, is the common link between the inherent and creative generosity of God, the devoted life of his son, and the life in Christ concentrated on the service of God and neighbor that is the evolutionary calling for God’s human creatures who are created bearing the image of an altruistic God. In this chapter I turn to another, related, theological question put to evolution by Pope John Paul II on the same occasion: Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear upon what he described as “the problem of Christology”?1 The pope is not clear what precisely the 50 The Evolutionary Achievement of Jesus nature of the problem is. In her study Christ and Evolution, Celia DeaneDrummond explores the implications of Darwinism for Christology, and does so largely in a way that is influenced by the works of von Balthazar and his attraction to theodrama and by the works of Bulgakov with his emphasis on wisdom.2 Her introductory chapter,“The Challenge of Darwinian Evolution,” provides a very readable summary account of the modern scene of evolutionary science.3 She tends to understand any modern challenge posed by the incarnation as stemming from the fact that we now appreciate that God united himself with a human nature that had evolved and is still in evolution. She asks,“How might Christ’s human nature and divine nature be related, given current understanding of humanity in evolutionary terms?” and“Is there a way of expressing belief in the divinity of Christ that also allows for an understanding of human nature as radically embedded in evolutionary history?”4 However, she does not make clear just why human evolution as such should be considered as creating a new challenge to Christology, traditionally understood as the assumption of human nature (in whatever state it may be) by the Word of God. Part of a reply to the pope’s question presumably will lie in any contribution that evolution can offer, not just to the constitution of Christ as God-man, viewed in traditional terms as a hypostatic union, but more specifically to the role of Christ within God’s purpose in creation. Accordingly , I aim in this chapter to examine what I call the evolutionary achievement of Jesus: That is, in his accepting death as a human being and in his rising from the dead, he achieved a new phase of evolutionary existence for the human species, into which he could then usher his fellow humans. In this way he would save them from individual death and extinction, which appeared to be the evolutionary fate of all living things, and would impart to humans through their association with him that richer share and eternal communion in the divine Trinitarian life that is God’s evolutionary design for them. saving humanity from death Such a major step forward for our species indicates from the start that the evolutionary role of Jesus was incomparably more than as an ethical exemplar and leader, valuable as that is, and as Enlightenment thinkers envisaged him, if they considered him at all...

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