My friend, Arjen, over at his blog Qualitative Theology has recently posted a provocative post challenging T. F. Torrance’s view that Christ assumed a fallen human nature (a view I follow Torrance on) in the incarnation. The post is entitled: Did Christ Assume a Fallen Human Nature? You can find it by clicking on the title I just provided.
Here is a bit of what Torrance had to say on this:
[N]ow when we listen to the witness of holy scripture here we know we are faced with something we can never fully understand, but it is something that we must seek to understand as far as we can. One thing should be abundantly clear, that if Jesus Christ did not assume our fallen flesh, our fallen humanity, then our fallen humanity is untouched by his work — for ‘the unassumed is the unredeemed’, as Gregory Nazianzen put it. Patristic theology, especially as we see it expounded in the great Athanasius, makes a great deal of the fact that he who knew no sin became sin for us, exchanging his riches for our poverty, his perfection for our imperfection, his incorruption for our corruption, his eternal life for our mortality. Thus Christ took from Mary a corruptible and mortal body in order that he might take our sin, judge and condemn it in the flesh, and so assume our human nature as we have it in the fallen world that he might heal, sanctify and redeem it. In that teaching the Greek fathers were closely following the New Testament. If the Word of God did not really come into our fallen existence, if the Son of God did not actually come where we are, and join himself to us and range himself with us where we are in sin and under judgement, how could it be said that Christ really took our place, took our cause upon himself in order to redeem us? (Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation, 62)
What do you think; do you have problems with this like Arjen, at the moment, does? Or, do you follow what Torrance is articulating? Maybe you have further questions about this; let them fly. If you read Arjen’s post first, I think that Torrance would want to jettison the kind of modal logic that Arjen employs, somewhat, against Torrance’s position (albeit with a sympathetic tone). Torrance was not a fan of the kind of Aristotelian anthropology that thinks of man in terms of essence/accidents; in fact it is this kind of thinking that Torrance is seeking to undercut by providing a theological anthropology that operates from strictly biblical and theological suppositions. It is for this reason that I think Torrance’s point here could successfully stand up under the scrutiny which Arjen subjects Torrance’s view to. In other words, there are two different modes of theological discourse going on here (you will have to read my comment at Arjen’s to see what I am getting at).
Bobby, thanks for posting this. This very question is one that I have felt to be one that I need to study further. I agree with Torrance’s position and his reasoning. Their really is only one human nature. So for Christ to assume humanity he had to assume the one human nature that was created in Adam. But since Adam fell into sin the question becomes to what extent that fall affected human nature in general.
This question brings me back to the other post about Eastern Orthodoxy and original sin. Did sin change human nature ontologically or did it only mar it or become a sickness or occlude it from its true expression? I like what EO says about that, but am still working on it.
In either case Christ had to represent us fully as man and as mediator. So he cannot have a human nature different than our own.
I thought Arjen raised good questions at the end, but I agree with your comment over there and here that the essence/attributes dilemma was not helpful. How Christ heals human nature is through union with Him through the Spirit.
Arjen asked why we don’t see more fruit since Christ “somehow ontologically bent our human will back, into obedience to Godβs will,”. My thought is that the fruit is seen now in this age in our obedience in faith and will be realized fully in the resurrection. The fact that the world is being brought to Christ however slowly in faith is the fruit. Perhaps there is more fruit being realized than being seen.
Potential and actual, he had to have the potential to sin, but never actually did. As far as him “becoming” sin for us, the scape goat in Lev. that had the sin Symbolically placed on it no more had the “nature” of sinful humanity and therefore it should be the place we look for the understanding of the very Hebraic idea of what’s going on with christ (“the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”) and our sin. My point is the talk of “natures” and ontology seems far away from the point of sacrifice and the thing sacrificed. This type of talk seems so convoluted and grounded in philosophy and not the conceptual world of jewish sacrifice theology. Anyway that’s my take. I know the potential and actual thinking is philosophical language, but it is just how I make sense of the question so I’m a bit double minded in this, but I do want to try to get at what Jews would teach about the sacrifice.
The problem comes in when we suggest that there might be a fallen human nature and an unfallen human nature — in ontological distinctiveness from one another. The vaguely Lamarckian claim that what it is to be human after Adam is to be a different kind of being than what it was to be Adam originally. Or perhaps it’s a sort of theological epigenetics: sin corrupting the genome, so that it would be irrelevant to this variant of humanity for God to become the original of the species. And certainly, Augustine attributed mutations to sin corrupting human nature.
But the first and most basic fact is not that Christ had a human nature — it is that Jesus was a human child who was born, grew into a man, and died. That God became human in the incarnation, not that God took up a human nature — and then which one. The “nature” abstraction only has a derivative reality, just as when we speak of the divine nature we can only point to the species that embodies the genus: God. And so it is first important to say that Jesus was actually human, and did not sin. We cannot permit the latter to become an alteration to the ontology of the former. But we have tried, even ontologically “purifying” Mary’s line backwards to justify it!
I have to follow TFT, but through the critique: we have to say that there are two natures in Christ, and that they are the same as the two natures in the situation he exists to redress. There is God; and there is creation, “a corruptible and mortal body.” Perhaps our problem is that we have elevated Adam above the human — as Augustine did — and tried to make the point of origin, like the telos, incorruptible and immortal.
@Bobby, thanks for picking up my discussion of what TFT has to say about Christ assuming a fallen human nature.
@Jon, I agree with you in a certain sense that Christ has a human nature, which is not different from ours. He is flesh of our flesh, so to speak. However, you will agree with me that He is different from us as well. Otherwise, He couldn’t be our Saviour…
@Kenny, I like your pointing back to the roots of our theological thinking about salvation and atonement. But I don’t think it excludes philosophical investigation. Instead, I like to see it as complementary.
@Matt, your initial point strikes me as hitting the mark. If the problem comes in by suggesting a difference between an unfallen and a fallen nature, it means the solution to this problem is assuming that there is only one human nature. And that human nature was created ‘unfallen’. And so must Christ’s human nature have been unfallen… I’m not sure, that’s what you’re saying, but that seems to me the consequence of your starting point.
AT you said, ” Does he mean bij βfallen natureβ, that βbeing fallenβ is an essential property? That however seems very implausible, because it would make the Fall necessary, instead of contingent.”
I would say obviously humanity was created ‘good’ and ‘fell’. Therefor what it means to be human after the ‘fall’ is ‘fallen’. Torrance’s point seems to be by saying with St. Gregory that the unasumed is the unhealed is that it is our humanity that He has taken on Himself in the Incarnation, and not another. You can’t after the fall seperate a fallen from an unfallen human nature, because it is the unfallen that has fallen and so there is not another. Of course one doesn’t want to say it’s ‘essential’ in a way that humanity was created this way, but once it has fallen in the words of TFT, ‘it is what it is and not another thing’. What has happened has happened and there is only a humanity that has fallen, and that is the humanity that Christ recieved from Mary. Human Nature didn’t become something else, but it isn’t what it should be, though now in Christ it is.
Also in your post you made it sound as though Torrance has some presuppositions that causes him to change what the church teaches, that being unfallen human nature of Christ, to fit his theology. To me this is completely wrong. Torrance is thoroughly read in the fathers, and get’s it first from Irenaeus, and then Athanasius, Cyril, Nazianzen, Hilary, etc. Oh and from scripture itself π
@AT, I wouldn’t say that Christ’s human nature must have been unfallen — though I agree that there is only one human nature. Saying that it is unfallen still suggests that the fall changes human nature, that it makes a difference to talk about fallen or unfallen nature, and that Jesus being without sin determines which nature. But if, following Augustine, we posit that the fall is a disease of the will, Jesus has a healthy humanity in the midst of a human population struggling with its malaise. Jesus becomes the means of healing.
Put differently: I have to follow Gregory Nazianzen on the simple fact that God assumes human nature in its fullness, or humanity is not fully redeemed. If that’s the logic of the messiah, then in Christ God becomes one of us as deeply as we are human. I do not have to follow the notion of a radical fall in which our choice to act as though God were not undoes some component of our created nature. We are disordered, but we remain human creatures, God’s good creation by nature.
Jesus does not assume the disease — but it happens to him from without. He takes on the full brunt of its effects. He dies as surely as we do, from sin. And in the resurrection we see that the disease is not the end, even though we, too, die under its onslaught. It is not sin itself, but its power over our life, that is destroyed. The disease is not redeemed — our nature is redeemed from the power of disease. We are redeemed to be set in right relationship with God, to be creatures before the creator in right paths and to return to God from every wrong path, every time. This is not the erasure of our capacity for wrong, but the sign of our capacity for right as we become what we were made to be. As he was what he was made to be, having found himself in human flesh.
And all that requires that human being is human being, plain and simple. We cannot assert that Jesus assumes a nature we do not possess, so if we say that our nature is fallen, we have to say that his was, as well. Therefore do not say that. Escape the trap of making the fall bigger than God’s creative act by allowing that it changes human nature. Assert that the truth of human nature is always its created nature, that it is what God made it even while it is suffering under a self-imposed disease. And the problem disappears!
@ Matt, with all due respect, I don’t think your proposition solves the problem.
By saying, “Jesus does not assume the disease”, you pretty much take back the statement you made earlier that you have to follow Torrance on this one. Torrance would not agree with you here. The whole point of what he is saying, and Nazianzen, and Irenaeus for that matter, is that He does take up the ‘disease infested humanity’ but when He does it He does it with out being infested Himself. That is the whole point of Irenaeus talking about Him taking up our ‘leperous humanity’ yet in doing so He heals it. When He touched lepars He did not get leprasy, but He healed the Leprasy.
I agree with you that talking about the nature like we do sometimes isn’t helpful, but in any case we shouldn’t be dualistic about it. Our humanity has something ontologically wrong with it. It is corruptable now, we die, we’re alientated etc. So to say that about humanity is to say that about human nature, because that is what it means to be human now. You can’t talk about nature as being abstract like that. It’s just to say that is the stuff that makes us human, and at this point in the game being human is in a ‘fallen’ state, meaning, something has gone terribly wrong, yet praise be to the Lamb, He has made us new!
These are great comments, and I have enjoyed the mini-discussion as I’ve read them throughout the day today (unfortunately I was at work and couldn’t jump in). I am going to be unable to comment on each of your comments.
I am too tired to provide a proper thoughtful response. Maybe tomorrow when I’m bright eyed and bushy tailed π .
Thanks Arjen for kicking this off with your post!
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