I have been thinking about Sabellianism recently.

I know this seems like an unpromising place to begin a blog, but bear with me for a moment.

It was on reading an email from a friend where he touched on What Would Jesus Do bracelets, one of a series of emails that he circulates to our little church from time to time, that I began to think about it.

Not that he is a Sabellian of course. The last official Sabellian probably died in the third century. They seem to have believed that Jesus Christ was purely divine, without humanness, and therefore could not truly have suffered or died, among other things ( ), and I’m sure that my friend meant nothing of the sort really. The thing about heresy, the reason that it’s a problem, is that it gets hold of one side of the truth and pursues it until it is no longer true, leaving behind the complexity of the real encounter of God and humanity to follow logical abstraction to its end point. As Christians, we have to wrestle with the reality of a God who is far beyond our abilities to understand, but yet who has revealed himself to us.

The upshot of this is that there are two equal and opposite errors that we can fall into as Christians, and the way into them is the What Would Jesus Do bracelet.

One trap Christians can fall into is the Buddy Jesus syndrome – a tame, domesticated Christ, who is there to be your buddy. (Obviously.) Someone the kids can relate to. What C S Lewis refers to, in the Last Battle, as a “tame lion”, someone who never judges us, who is always on our side, no matter what we have done. An undemanding friend, who doesn’t expect too much of us, who we invoke mainly as a way of putting an impressive sounding gloss on what we already think, justifying us in doing what we were going to do anyway.

This is a caricature of a really valuable insight of Christianity: Jesus called God Abba – Daddy – an image of astonishing closeness, and showed us that we could have an intimate relationship with God, who numbered all the hairs on our heads, and who cares for us as a father for his children. His identification with us is total. But it is only one part of the picture.

The opposite trap is to over-emphasize the transcendence of God. The God of the Jews was a remote, frightening figure – emphasis very much on Take off your sandals, Moses, because this is holy ground (Exodus 3:5), who dwelt (in some sense) in the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest was allowed to go once a year, with a rope tied around his ankle so that, if he died, he could be hauled out without someone else having to go in there. This is the God, creator of the infinite spaces between the stars and the unending aeons, the God whose majesty I sometimes glimpse while looking up at the stars at night. All this is true – God is holy and majestic, and more wholly other than us than any created thing can possibly be – like comparing the picture of an apple with the actual acid sweet reality of the thing itself. We are created, he is the creator: we might not have been, He of necessity is, and no relationship of contingent existing things can come close to the difference between the two.

But he humbled himself to become like us, and given that God’s revelation of himself is going to be infinitely superior to anything which we can come up with for ourselves, it would be, at the very least, foolish to ignore it in favour of our own picture of what God “must” be like.

This is the tension which we hold as Christians, and it is something which we all have to wrestle with. On the one side we have God as a sleepy beneficence in the sky, and Jesus some sort of superior self help guru, and on the other side He is so unutterably other than us that it is impossible to say anything about Him, and certainly impossible to approach Him.

The point my friend was making, I think, is that WWJD bracelets are a temptation to think of Jesus as being just one of the guys – that WWJD really means: Who Would Jesus Date? – and, though this is a good question, if you lose sight of the other side of the paradox, that God is also that which stands above and behind the universe, then Jesus loses his distinctiveness, and you aren’t following God’s incarnation any more, but what Lewis calls “That phantom, my religion.”

And yet, and yet… there is an important truth in WWJD, in spite of the naffness (IMHO) of bracelet wearing. We are supposed to clothe ourselves with Christ (Romans 13:14), and are reminded that he was tempted in every way, just as we are, but did not sin (Hebrews 4:15). These passages only make sense if the writers believed that, in some important way he was as human as we are – that his temptations were real temptations, his pains were real pains. It wasn’t just some sort of show put on by God to deceive gullible humans. The question “What would Jesus do” has a real content – he was a human like you and I, and he had to wrestle with analogous things. And, given that Christianity isn’t about memorizing a bunch of rules, but entering into a relationship, being born again, what would Jesus do cuts to the heart of the question. It is only because he was human that he was confronted with the same questions and problems we are confronted with, and only because he was (and is) God that his answers and actions are so completely right.

It is only in the real humanity of Christ that I can find comfort. Only if he was really human can his words reach me in the midst of my own temptations and pains – and, simultaneously, only if he was also God.