Jesus is both the object and subject of God’s salvation for the world, for us. It is from this ground, from the realization that we are participants with Christ’s vicarious humanity, that we come to have the same type of safe and secure relationship with the triune God that the Son has always already had with the Father by the Spirit for all eternity. The emphasis is upon unio cum Christo (‘union with Christ’), as the ground of our daily Christian existences as Christian people in the world. Most Christians in the West, unfortunately, still struggle under what TF Torrance identifies as the ‘Latin heresy.’ He associates this dualistic heresy with the neo-Platonic theology of Augustine. It is Augustine’s formative impact, according to TFT, that has led the Latin church to think a God-world relation from within a competitive frame.

Conversely, within a classical Calvinist or Reformed frame, but within almost all Westerly understood Protestant and Catholic frames of soteriology, people think of themselves apart from God’s vicarious life for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ. In other words, they think in terms of the ‘elect’ and ‘reprobate,’ this holds true for both Catholics and Protestants. There is an inherent dualism between grace and nature built into this type of Latin theology such that, at best, God is thought of as the ‘perfector of nature’ rather than the protological ground of nature, and as this ground is given externalization in His life of covenantal grace as He has elected that to be His mode of life for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. When people think this way, as if our lives are not “essential” (by God’s free election for that to be so) to God’s life, to God’s life of Immanuel, ‘God with us,’ then there is this type of individualist separation between God and humanity, such that individual humans are always attempting to attach themselves to God; whether that be through a demonstration of ‘good works,’ through the Mass and reception of the sacraments, through church attendance, and church service, so on and so forth. This competitive type of relationship with God results in an unnecessary anxiety for people, even if they don’t identify it as such. They are constantly seeking ways to shore up this gap between themselves and God. They will construct apparatus like decrees, primary and secondary causation, freewill inherent to the human agent, so on and so forth, in order to bring some sort of dénouement to this sense of abstraction from God’s life.

As Barth rightly identifies, along with what we might identify as the Athanasian-Cyrilean axis, as TF Torrance does, we ought to think our humanity necessarily from God’s humanity for us. By implication this means that Christ in His humanity believes for us, He repents for us, He dies for us, resurrects for us, ascends for us, mediates as Priest for us, and comes and is coming again for us. The point: We are not thrown back on ourselves in an effort to know, and thus rest in God. God first knew us in Christ, that we might know Him as He has always already known Himself in the eternal Logos, in Jesus Christ. Barth writes:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2.19) [sic]. The fact that I live in the faith of the Son of God, in my faith in Him, has its basis in the fact that He Himself, the Son of God, first believed for me, and so believed that all that remains for me to do is to let my eyes rest on Him, which really means to let my eyes follow Him. This following is my faith. But the great work of faith has already been done by the One whom I follow in my faith, even before I believe, even if I no longer believe, in such a way that He is always, as Heb. 12.2 puts it, the originator and completer (ἀρχηγὸς καὶ τελειωτής) of our faith, in such a way, therefore, that every beginning and fresh beginning of our faith has its only starting-point in Him, indeed, the only basis of its awakening. It is the only basis, but it is also the overwhelming and compelling basis. It is “he that dwelleth in the secrete place of the most High,” and abides “under the shadow of the Almighty,” who says to the Lord: “My refuge and my fortress: my God, in whom I will trust” (Ps. 91.1f). It is he who believes, he who may believe, and does so. It is he who, believing, stands in the communion of the saints; who has received, receives and will receive the forgiveness of sins; who hastens towards the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life. His faith is the victory which has overcome the world. But that it is this victory does not rest with him, but solely with Him in whom believes, in whose faith he believes. It rests upon the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ—born a man for us, dying for us, risen for us, reigning for us in the glory of God—is also his refuge, his fortress, his God: the secret place in which he dwells; the shadow under which he abides. Yet all the same he may believe, and it is this which makes his faith mighty, immovable and invincible.[1]

Barth rightly underscores the New Testament basis for the Christian’s stance before God. It isn’t something that comes along and perfects a presumably ‘pure nature.’ The new covenant basis for the Christian’s stance before God is, indeed, God’s stance for us in Christ, as the eternal Logos assumes human flesh, a human nature, and, indeed, stands before God in the robes of His eternal and majestic righteousness for us. When this is the case the Christian isn’t left as an orphan wallowing around in their own muck and wonder, striving to find the Holy Ground of God’s life for them somewhere yonder in the vestiges of a nature ostensibly charged with the grandeur of God; a grandeur, that is, that is abstract from God until God arrives and “adds” to it, gives it a perfecting grace such that nature comes into its own before God.

When I enter the fray of the online world, especially the popular theology world, it’s as if they have never imagined the type of theological universe, among the Patristics and others, described for us vis-à-vis the implications of the New Testament realities. I must admit such diatribing becomes exhausting rather quickly. I’d say it’s time for people to move onto meatier things, and abandon things like the ‘Latin heresy,’ and such. We, as Christians, are beholden to think the Christian existence from the analogy of the incarnation; to think life, a God-world relation, a God-human / human-God relation from the homoousios person, Jesus Christ. When we do this we elide the trivialities that occupy so much of the so-called theological space in the Christian world, we move past the speculative philosophical constructs invented to supposedly speak intelligibly about the Christian reality, and instead arrive at a place where we are actually thinking after Deus dixit, ‘God has spoken.’

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §37 [541-42] The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 48-9.