I just finished reading a really provocative and intriguing essay by Ho-Jin Ahn in the Scottish Journal of Theology. In it he takes Oliver Crisp to task(at least at the ground clearing level)on Crisp’s argument that Christ could not have assumed a 
fallen sinful humanity in the incarnation; since according to Crisp (and the scholastic [speculative] tradition from which he argues), if Christ truly took on a depraved humanity, then he would have needed a Savior himself. Ahn helpfully relocates Crisp’s placement of this discussion from the Augustinian “original sin,” and moves it into the realm of christology (which is where this dialogue ought to take place!). Ahn, in the process of relocating this discussion, develops John Calvin’s understanding on this issue; Ahn looks, in a dialectical way, at Calvin’s commentaries and his Institute. In a nutshell, what Ahn concludes is that Calvin might ‘appear’ to hold to something like Crisp (that Christ assumed an unfallen human nature), but in the final analysis, and at an interpretive/functional level, Calvin thinks from a view that sees Christ entering into the depths of our fallen humanity and redeeming us from the inside out through his vicarious humanity for us. Here is Ahn’s conclusion:
[I]t is unreasonable for some theologians to argue for Christ’s unfallen humanity in the context of the doctrine of original sin because Christ himself overcame the power of sin and death in his fallen humanity. In the case of Calvin’s understanding of Christ’s humanity, we see that there is a tension between the nature and the state of Christ’s person. Calvin believes that Christ assumed our true humanity, lived a perfect life, and was sinless according to the Chalcedonian Definition. Thus, Calvin denies the fallenness of Christ’s humanity in order to preserve the doctrine of Christ’s perfect innocence. However, unlike others who are in favour of Christ’s unfallen humanity, Calvin forcefully affirms the vicarious humanity of Christ in our corrupted state. Calvin affirms that Christ had to suffer from our existential problems according to the narratives of the Gospels. Moreover, the mortal human nature which Christ assumed shows solidarity with sinners and the vicarious humanity of Christ pro nobis. If Calvin were to accept the idea of the fallen nature of Christ, his thoughts on Christ’s humanity for us would be more persuasive. Yet it is noted that Calvin’s theological logic is ‘anti-speculative’ in that he focuses on what Christ has done for us in his true humanity.
Nevertheless, Calvin argues that the body of Christ himself is the temple of God through which we can come to the throne of God’s grace. Although Christ assumed our mortal body controlled by the power of sin and death after the Fall, Christ sanctified the body in his own person as the Mediator between God and all the fallen humanity and decaying creation. Furthermore, the reconciliation with God is not just attributed to the crucifixion of Christ in an external and forensic way but to the perfectly holy life of Christ who assumed our mortal body as a saviour in an internal and ontological perspective. Calvin’ s biblical views on the mortal body and its sanctification through the whole life fully describes the paradoxical character of Christ’s mystical incarnation in which Christ became a true human being like one of us without becoming a fallen sinner. I conclude that, according to Calvin, the vicarious humanity of Christ means that for the sake of our salvation Christ assumed a mortal body like ours and lived a perfect life in our miserable state. Therefore, Christ’s fallen humanity for us is the guarantee of reconciliation. [Ho-Jin AhnSJT 65(2): 145–158 (2012) C Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2012 doi:10.1017/S0036930612000026, Ahn’s bio/contact: Korean Central Presbyterian Church of Queens, Bayside, NY 11364, USA ho-jin.ahn@alum.ptsem.edu]
I concur with Ahn, and appreciate his insightful analysis on Calvin’s view of the vicarious humanity of Christ. Ahn would make a great Evangelical Calvinist; since the vicarious humanity of Christ is one of the touchstones of what it means to work within the mood of Evangelical Calvinism. It is this kind of Christ conditioned view of salvation that gets us into the trinitarian depth dimension of salvation that the classic forensic-juridical view of salvation simply cannot provide. Calvin is front and center for us, and shines brightest right here; that is when he emphasises the center of salvation in Christ.
The reality is, as Ahn develops in his essay, as Gregory of Nazianzus is oft quoted ‘the unredeemed is the unhealed’; and if Christ did not vicariously (participatorily-representatively) enter our fallen human state, then we are of all men most to be pitied. Alas, we remain in our sins, and we have no real hope or answer to our sin problem; which is a depraved heart toward God (who is salvation in his very life!). If Christ does not participate with us (fully), then we cannot participate with him fully in the divine plenitude of his shared life with the Father and Holy Spirit; in other words, we are not saved. This is why understanding and meditating on the vicarious humanity of Christ is so fundamental to the Christian’s life and spirituality; because it represents the very heart and deep caverns of the Gospel itself.
PS. This is the doctrine, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, I am slowly researching towards my PhD. If you would like to help provide funding for me towards the PhD, please contact me via email (growba@gmail.com). Blessings.
repost
There’s still a basic mistake, I continue to think, in the idea that there are two human natures, and that the Fall actually has any effect on our nature as creatures. I’m far too much of an Augustinian here to follow Gregory Nazianzen.
Which is as much as to say that I can’t follow the earlier traditions, esp. Irenæus, when they go for the idea that the Pauline parallel between Christ and Adam means that Christ has to partake of a different kind of generation and nature than the general run of post-Adamic humanity. Gregory does the right thing in the wake of this, which is to insist that, if there is a human nature that Christ assumes, it has to be the human nature we have, the nature possessed by humanity after the Fall. If he is human in some miraculously other way, such that his human nature and ours are not the same, then we have not been united with God in Christ. (Which is actually a different idea than the Irenæan one, in which Christ undoes Adam as an individual of comparable nature, and then we are adopted into Christ.)
The real problem I see here, is that you cannot make the two ideas work together. If you hold the idea of an unfallen human nature, and that Christ must have it in order not to be subject to sin, and you pair that with a Gregorian theotic atonement by unity of the natures in Christ, such as will hold throughout the ecumenical councils, you have a problem. Theosis and differentiating human natures are two mutually exclusive ideas.
Similarly, if you hold that there is only one created human nature, and it is not fundamentally altered by sin, you have no need for the immaculate conception and all of the related bits designed to protect Jesus from Adamic contamination. The idea that the human nature itself has become toxic necessitates a new human nature, from scratch. If there is nothing toxic about human nature, then it is the right alignment and ordering of that nature in Christ—which is only disordered in us, not substantially altered—that produces the lack of sin.
Matt,
What about the concept of Christ putting to death our ‘flesh’ in his body (like Romans 8:3 as I recall). Are you suggesting that the ‘flesh’ is the disordered part in us? But if so, what is distinct about using the language of disordered from the language of ‘sinful nature’ or something NIV’ish like that? How do you avoid an equivocation? How would you exegete, in light of this, something like Ephesians 2 where it says ‘that we were dead in trespasses and sin’? The language of dead connotes something that needs to be recreated or resurrected; or to start from scratch. Not in an ideal or metaphysical sense, but in a sense wherein the archetypal humanity of Christ as the image of God aligns with the ectypal humanity in the resurrection; Christ in the incarnation entering the far country of ‘fallen’ humanity and recreating it in a way that is indeed so realigned.
What you are positing almost sounds Thomistic, as if the ‘essence’ of humanity remained untouched by the fall, while the accidents of humanity are what have become ‘disordered’; disordered in such a way as to impinge upon the ‘essence’ but not so far as to undo it relative to its original createdness.
Matt, bear with me, I am thinking out loud.
So archetypal/ectypal correlates with the an/enhypostatic idea.
We’ve done that bit before, on the flesh. There is nothing alien about flesh to the human nature. It is not two things to say that God took on human nature, and that God became flesh and blood.
What is disordered in us is, in Augistinian terms, the faculty of the will. You have to realize that Augustine wasn’t having any of the “flesh is evil” bandwagon that was so prevalent at the time. He was, in fact, attempting to fix it using the doctrine of sin and the doctrine of creation.
And yes, the idea that the essence, the nature, the basic being of humanity is not fundamentally othered by the fall does sound Thomistic, because Thomas was doing Augustine just there, only he was also mapping Augustinian concepts into Aristotelian terms. I wouldn’t say “untouched,” but our human being is not something else because of the fall, no matter how disordered our existence may be from responsible and obedient relationship with God. That disorder does not impinge on our essence, what kind of creature we are, the nature of our being as God’s good creatures.
When you deal in archetypal humanity vs. ectypal humanity, you can have nothing to do with Gregory. That’s the idea of two human natures: one damaged by sin after the Fall, and the other created to be the match of Adam’s before the Fall. And that’s the early patristic understanding pf Paul’s language of Adam and Christ, turned from an illustration into the point and mechanism itself at the expense of the entire rest of Romans.
And as to the language of sin and death, and the flesh, the scriptures certainly don’t all speak with the same voice. Let’s tackle Romans 8. First off, 8:3 says nothing about putting the flesh to death. It’s not an easy passage in Greek, but it certainly doesn’t contain SARX in the accusative. The language of the passage speaks of judgment against sin, the direct object, conducted EN TH SARKI. This and the prior DIA THS SARKOS are both instrumental uses, not objective. And it is OMOIWMATI SARKOS AMARTIAS that God in Christ has carried out this judgment. Flesh is involved, inasmuch as when we sin, we sin in the flesh. And your average vice list from the period is replete with “sins of the flesh,” and 1:18-32 is no different in its citation of this rhetorical topos. And to properly condemn sin—not creatures—the judgment is executed in the flesh as well.
And the verses that follow do speak ill of the flesh, in opposition to the spirit, in terms of what guides human action and intention. And the framework for that has been set up in prior chapters. Romans 8:10 even speaks of the body dead because of sin, which recapitulates 5:12-21. This is the end of a point that began there! Sin entered into the world, and produced death. Not the flesh to blame here, but sin producing death, inflicting it upon human flesh. Enslaving human flesh. But what does the Spirit, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, do with these bodies that sin has killed? It restores them to life. Not as anything else—not as some new creature, certainly—but as dead bodies that now live in the Spirit of God. Bodies that now owe nothing to this sin-bound flesh, as discussed in ch. 7—bodies that are no longer enslaved to sin, but flesh that now lives to God and serves God, and not itself.
I hope that makes more sense of the matter, especially since Ephesians 2 is working the same ground. Dead because of sin, but alive because of God. But not something new because of it—not a new kind of humanity, which Paul never says, but alive in Christ where we had been dead in sin. To get a new kind of being, you need to move on to the resurrection of the dead as a topic.
Matt, thanks. Let me ponder your thoughts and exegesis. You are asking me to consider a paradigm shift; let me think about whether or not I think what you are arguing is worthy of that kind of move … it probably is. I know this seems self-evident to you at this point, but I need to think about it myself before I own what you are saying. I like your bit of exegesis on Romans 8, that’s good; I like to see Greek grammar doing what it is supposed to do in the context of a theological frame or exegetical approach. Good stuff! Let me stew.
I am pushing a bit of a shift (as long as we’re talking human nature and not the “flesh” bit, which I think is a tangent), but basically because I think it handles a bit of the problem I hear in Crisp. And I’m doing it by going for Augustine, which is precisely where I see the differentiation between the doctrine of original sin, and the idea of fallen or unfallen humanity. Which is where Ahn has gone for Calvin instead, to arrive closer to Chalcedon. That’s where the idea of “Christ assumed our true humanity” appears, and the idea of distinguishing the nature and the state of his humanity. One shared, common human nature, but lived without sin. One mortal, genuinely morally conflicted human existence (no “state of grace” such as Galahad experiences), lived without sin and in solidarity with sinners.
But that’s exactly where I think Ahn is mistaken, when he then suggests that Calvin would be “more persuasive” if he were to divide the notion of “true humanity” and “accept the idea of the fallen nature of Christ.” This I cannot help but see as Ahn missing the point in exactly the way Crisp has, but on the other side of that paradigm. Crisp says “unfallen” and Ahn says “fallen,” and they both miss the point of their sources. And part of the problem (hard to say without the article in front of me) may be that Ahn uses “mortal” as though it suggests “fallen”—which is certainly an idea at home in Augustine’s Edenic ideal of humanity, but in Augustine the idea doesn’t support a divided concept of human natures.
But you will have to hash it out yourself, of course; I expect no less! 🙂
Matt, thanks … I think you’re onto something. And yes, as I recall, Ahn does refer to mortal as ‘fallen’ … maybe Ahn just needs to read his NRSV more 😉 .