By God’s Grace theology is not contingent on the purity of the theologian, but instead it is contingent upon the purity of the object/subject of theological enquiry; that it is, it is contingent upon Jesus Christ and the triune God He reveals to the world. This is Good News, even evangelical, in the sense that if theology was contingent upon the purity of the theologian the Christian would never have the capacity to actually do theology; indeed, there would be no Christianity at all. And this is the point: theology is only possible because God in Christ re-conciled humanity to God by freely electing our humanity for Himself, and in this exchange, He has taken our reprobation, and given us His elect status in His resurrected and re-created humanity. The resurrection is where the possibility for theology obtains. Robert Dale Dawson describes how this is true as he explicates Barth’s theology of resurrection:

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

The point I want to draw out from this, in our present context, is to simply press the foundational nature of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for the possibility of ALL things; including theology. Genuinely Christian theology has an objective and holy ground in Christ alone. This is why theology is not contingent on the purity of the theologian; it is because the Gospel reality itself declares that all human being is filthy and wretched above all things, and this reality, even for the redeemed—simul justus et peccator—does not simply go away after someone spiritually becomes united to the living Christ. Indeed, and often, as a person comes into an intimate relationship with Christ, up against His holiness, the person, like Peter on the fishing boat, realizes how unclean they actually are before the One whom they stand. But this is the Good News, even though this is the case, even though we are indeed depraved sinners, God did not leave us as orphans in this far country of our disheveled un-humanity; He has made us new, indeed He makes us new every morning in the Sun of Righteousness who shines on us afresh and anew each moment by the Holy Spirit’s come-alongside and comforting and convicting work in our lives.

In sum: even though we daily sin, we have an Advocate with Father in Jesus Christ. It is this advocacy that allows the would-be theologian to have a continual possibility for seeing God afresh and anew; even in the midst of our ashen and fallen status as we continue to sin even as ‘saints.’ Even so, it still requires that we live in a repentant posture before God, from the vicarious repentance Christ has won for us in His resurrected humanity. In this repentance the sinful Christian, as partakers of the divine nature, in and from the vicarious humanity of Christ, has the capaciousness to enter into the banqueting table of God’s inner-life, through the evangel of Christ’s life for us; and even as sinners, we can bear witness to God’s Who for us in Christ—indeed, especially as we are sinners.

This gives me great hope. As the Apostle Paul once noted of himself: ‘I am the chief of sinners.’ I have this same sense of myself. Without the Gospel entering into this world in Jesus Christ there would be no possibility for theology. Even as we continue to sin as Christians, even daily, it is God’s Grace in Jesus Christ, that allows us to still do the work of theology; indeed, it is in this wisdom of God, in the wisdom of the cross, that the possibility for theology has come to a bountiful fruition. He is God’s theology for us, in us, and with us. He has trail-blazed a path for us, in His risen and ascended humanity, that leads us all the way into the inner recesses of His shared and triune life with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He continuously reaches down, and elevates us out of the crap-barrel of our bodies of death, that we might experience the pleroma, the very plentitudinousness of His ineffable yet revealed life. This gives hope for all Christians. All Christians can do theology precisely because God has first done theology for us in the free giving of Himself for us in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s affirmation for us that we can do theology; Jesus Christ is the assurance of things hoped for, things not seen, but seen for us in His Yes and Amen for us. This is why theology is possible: it is because Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, always living to make intercession for those who will inherit eternal life; indeed, He has included us in this elevated life of intercession and holy fellowship, of the kind that has been obtaining for all eternity in the filial and eternal bliss of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s rapturous perichoresis and interpenetrating life of the Holy kiss.

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.