Category Archives: Incarnation

” . . . the illusion of an abstract monotheism”

Posted on by

There is no God, but the One God; and we know this One God by the Son of God made flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This One God is not known any other way. He is not known by the philosophers nor made known by the philosopher-theologians. He is only and ever centrally known as He has freely made Himself Self-known in the face of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; indeed, He would have no face for us without the Holy Spirit. The genuinely Christian God is One (de Deo uno) in Three (de Deo trino), Three in One in eternal koinonia from His a se existence. It is by the humility of this God, as exemplified by the free obedience of the Son in the Father by the Holy Spirit, whereby this God becomes known. The theological Philistines have attempted to reason their way to this God, but only because they first became aware of this God by this Godโ€™s Self-revelation; even as inchoate in His mediated presence through the Hebrews. In other words, it was only ever because of this triune Godโ€™s gracious stooping to the sons of men that the notion of One God was contrived in the first place. And the mesmerizing thing about this God is that He has always already been vulnerable enough in His inner and triune life to make this impossible a possibility; that is, to be willing to be made known, even with the possibility of being mistaken for some type of mechanistic simple Monad of the brutish thinkers. Even so, this God has contradicted such triteness; even by Him becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the Roman cross. There is no space for the monadic on the scandalous cross; this God is altogether too complex to be imagined, even in the greatest of the philosophical imaginaries among us. This God, the triune and eternal God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perichoretic bondedness, has taken on human blood in His own humanity as the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.

Someone else gets at the aforementioned much more eloquently thusly:

As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also the Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, he is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality he is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract โ€œmonotheismโ€ which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.[1]

Well said, Uncle; well said.

Please notice maybe an almost unnoticed profundity when Barth refers to the history that obtains between and in and among the fellowship of the triune persons. It is within this space, this Father-Son-by-the-Holy Spirit relationship wherein all of human history and being takes place; indeed, as the electing God, the elected Man, the eternal Logos, the Son of God, graciously and freely chose to become us that we, by that act and actualism of Grace, might become human before God. It is His history, within His own Self-predestined and inner-triune life, whereby the creation obtains; wherein the redemption, the recreation, the elevation of humanity occurs. Just as the Son, before the foundation of the world, is freely Logos incarnandus (โ€˜the Word to be incarnateโ€™), it is within this freedom of Godโ€™s life by which the whole created order finds its determination. This, in the Eschaton, in the final and consummate reality actualized, and finally realized, is how it is that humanity becomes and is sustained as humanity simpliciter. That is by Godโ€™s freedom, by the obedience and humility intrinsic to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, within the mysterium Trinitatis, by which anything, not least of which, humanity, exists at all; as worshippers and witnesses of their very life before God, by God, in God by the Spirit anointed humanity of the free God, the Son of Man, the Man from Nazareth, the Son in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ.

[1] Karl Barth,ย Church Dogmatics IV/1 ยง59 [203] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Editionย (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.

The Father’s “Love Child” for the World

Posted on by

The *world* even the *churches* speak of love, as if all it needs is love. This is true. But only God *is* love. Only God *is* Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no other independent category of “love,” that is not first a predicate of God’s eternal life within itself. So, when the world, and even the churches, speak of love, they ironically bear witness against themselves; that is, if they claim that all we need is love, but are thinking of that in purely horizontal, human, and profane ways (which they are). The world’s only salvation is to be ๐‘–๐‘›โ„Ž๐‘Ž๐‘๐‘–๐‘ก๐‘Ž๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘œ ๐ท๐‘’๐‘– (inhabiting God); this is, finally, to inhabit true love; this is what the world, and even the churches need. They speak this word over themselves, as the high-priest prophesied about Jesus and didn’t know it. The world’s hope, our only hope, is to be unioned with the Father’s “love child” for us; even so, as He came as a babe in a manager.

The Good News that We Are Sinners: The Incarnation is Greater than Sin

Posted on by

Jesus is our life; He is Godโ€™s humanity all the way down. โ€˜He who knew no sin assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.โ€™ Our sin is ever before us, but it is only now before us in the glorified face of Jesus Christ. We can never deny that we were, and continue to be (in this in-between) sinners, insofar that the humanity of God bears witness of this reality to us all our live long days. But it is this grace of God that has shown up for us in these last days that anchors our souls by His, by His in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. And in His victory, while underscoring our failure, we come to participate in the power of His resurrection, of His re-created humanity, as our new humanity, just as sure as it is His humanity for us as the imago Dei (cf. Col. 1.15ff). Thus, even in our sin, even as we stand justified before God in Jesus Christ (simul iustus et peccator), whether we live or die, we stand in the standing of God for us. This is the beauty of the incarnation of God, the Word enfleshed (Logos ensarkos); it tells us that we are not our own, that we have been bought with a price, the blood of Jesus Christ. It indicates that our humanity is gifted to us moment by moment, afresh anew, by the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit continuously bonds us to the resurrected humanity of Christ, just as sure as the Spirit continuously bonds Christโ€™s humanity to ours, as ours. And it thus can be said, โ€˜by His poverty we have been made rich.โ€™

Karl Barth has his own way of explicating the themes I was just referring to:

It was and is His good will to give us in Him our Head and Advocate; to establish and ordain our whole relationship to Him in His relationship to His person, and therefore to reveal the truth of our existence in His. As this happens, as from all eternity, an in what God has done in Him at the heart of time, we are those who are loved and known by God in Jesus Christ, all self-judgment to which we might submit ourselves is absolutely subordinated to His judgment. Any reconstruction of our actual meeting with Him can be only a reflection of the meeting with man which He has willed and accomplished in the person of His dear Son. In this meeting we are in truth what we are. And there is no escaping the truth of what we are in this meeting. Before the voice of this reality, the voice of denial, my voice as the voice of the transgressor, is necessarily silenced. In place of every weak theory of our relationship to God and to His command there comes the powerful theory of this practiceโ€”the theory of our actual relationship to God. And in this place of the weak self-judgment in which we cause ourselves to be exculpated there comes the powerful self-judgment in which we must and will declare that we are guilty, because we ourselves, as the sinners we are, can only repeat the divine sentence, adding to it not at all either for good or evil. There, on the cross of Golgotha, hangs the man who in His own name and person represented to me, my name and person, with God; and who again in His own name and person represented God to me in my name and person. Everything, therefore, that God has to say in His relationship to me is originally and properly said to Him; everything that I have to say to God in this relationship is originally and properly said by Him. All that I have to do, therefore, is to repeat what is already said in this conversation between God and the Son. But what takes place in this conversation is that in the person of Jesus Christ I am addressed as a sinner, a lost son, and that again in the person of Jesus Christ I confess myself to be a sinner, a lost son. In this conversation the voice of denial is absolutely silenced. For in the death of Jesus Christ, this conversation between the Father and Son is conducted with me and about meโ€”with me and about me in His person as my Advocate before God. Even in the soliloquy and self-judgment which I cannot escape in face of the divine colloquy and judgment the voice of denial cannot be raised. I am not one who, as a hearer of this divine conversation, and a participator in this divine judgment, can either hear or make any kind of excuse. At the point where God deals with me, where He has sought and found me, at the cross of Golgotha, I am exposed and addressed as a sinner. Indeed, I have found and confessed myself to be this. I have nothing to add to what is said and confessed there, nor to subtract from it. The transgression in all transgressions, the sin in all sins, namely, that I should refuse the name of a sinner, can only die. The only thing that I can do is recognise that my sin is really deadโ€”the sin from which I cannot cleanse myself, the sin which I cannot even recognise and confess, the sin which I could only see awakening, and myself awaken, to constantly new forms of life if it were not already dead in the fact that God has pronounced and executed His sentence on His beloved Son in my place, and that the latter has accepted it in my place. This is the execution of the divine judgment which takes place as God gives us His command; for He gives it as He is gracious to us in Jesus Christ, as He gives us this His beloved Son to be our Head and Representative, as by Him He speaks to us and causes us to speak to Himself, as by the Holy Spirit He accomplishes our unity with His Son, for which He has destined us from all eternity. In the same Holy Spirit, in which that divine conversation is conducted and divine judgment fulfilled at the cross of Golgotha, it is also true that they both happen in our name and in our place and that we are actually made participators in them, called to faith in Jesus Christ, awakened to the knowledge of our unity with Him, and therefore given a share in the confrontation with God. In this confrontation, there is no escaping, or trying to escape, the recognition and confession that we are transgressors. On the contrary, we are ready to live as those who are in the wrong before God, expecting every good from our continuance in this knowledge and confession, and fearing nothing more than attempts to remove ourselves from this position.[1]

This is the liberating reality of the Evangel, God in Christ constantly declares to us, in His Yes and Amen for us, that He first became Godโ€™s No for us, in His free election to be human. This No is always borne witness to by the fact of His scars and stripes for us, and yet, dialectically, it is by these that we are healed moment by moment. โ€˜If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.โ€™ โ€˜If we say we have no sin, we lie, and the truth is not in us.โ€™ It is the indicative of the incarnation of God whereby, and ironically, our sin becomes the occasion for Godโ€™s righteousness to break through with the bright healing โ€˜Sun of His Righteousness.โ€™ And thus, it is our freedom, in Godโ€™s freedom to be with us in this way, in the humanity of Christ, that we can freely admit, we can genuinely confess that we are sinners yet redeemed. Itโ€™s as if Martin Luther understood this when he spit at satan thusly: โ€œSo when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: โ€˜I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!โ€™โ€[2]

[1] Karl Barth,ย Church Dogmatics II/2 ยง39 [750-51] The Doctrine of God: Study Editionย (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 175.

[2] Martin Luther, Reference.

John Calvin’s Gospel of Wonderful Exchange Inspired by Irenaeus

Posted on by

A beautiful passage from Calvinโ€™s French Institutes. It is clearly inspired by Irenaeus, and wonderful exchange theology.

For the words of the Lord are: โ€œThis cup is the new testament in my bloodโ€ (Lk. 22 [20]; 1 Cor. 11 [25]), that is, a mark and witness of a promise. Wherever there is a promise, faith has a basis on which to rest and by which to give itself happiness and comfort. Our souls can receive from this sacrament a great sweetness and fruit of consolation in recognizing that Jesus Christ is so incorporated into us and we into Him that we can cal all that is His โ€œours,โ€ and all that is our we can call โ€œHis.โ€ Therefore we dare to promise ourselves with assurance that eternal life is ours, and that we cannot fail to reach the kingdom of heaven any more than Jesus Christ Himself can. And on the other hand, we cannot be damned by our sins any more than He can, because they are no longer ours but His. Not that any fault is imputed to Him, but because He has constituted Himself as debtor for us and has acted as the good debt-payer. This is the exchange which He has made with us by His infinite goodness: that in receiving our poverty He has transferred to us His riches; in bearing our weakness He has confirmed us in His power; in taking our mortality, He has made His immortality ours; in coming down to the earth He has opened a way to heaven; in making Himself Son of man, He has made us children of God.[1]

See Irenaeus, โ€œPreface,โ€ in Against Heresies, book 5, where he writes: โ€œThe Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.โ€ And the Apostle Paul who inspired both Irenaeus and Calvin famously writes: โ€œFor you knowย the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, thatย though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become richโ€ (II Cor 8.9). In my view there is not richer reality than what Calvin, Irenaeus, and the Apostle Paul point us to in the reality of what God in Christ has accomplished for us; that is, that God became human, that we, by grace, not nature, might become God as sons and daughters of His who are partakers of His triune life as we are participants in the mediating life of Jesus Christ.

By the way, the passage from Calvin is taken from his section on the Lordโ€™s Supper. Holy Communion has got to be the most profound act Christians can participate in as participants of the body of Christ. It bears witness to the reality that Calvin speaks to: of God become man, that we might become who He is by way of the adoption of holy Grace. This is the sort of theology I revel and get lost in all my days. When I stray from this, I stray from the reason for thinking theologically at all. Soli Deo Gloria.

[1] John Calvin,ย Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition,ย trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 546-47.

What is the Ground of Christian Salvation?: A Reference to God’s Vicarious Humanity in Christ as the Basis for “Christian Everything”

Posted on by

Confession is enough. According to Holy Scripture becoming a Christian requires the following:

5ย For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, โ€œThe man who does those things shall live by them.โ€ 6ย But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, โ€œDo not say in your heart, โ€˜Who will ascend into heaven?โ€™ โ€ (that is, to bring Christ down from above) 7ย or, โ€œ โ€˜Who will descend into the abyss?โ€™ โ€ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8ย But what does it say? โ€œThe word is near you, in your mouth and in your heartโ€ (that is, the word of faith which we preach): 9ย that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10ย For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. 11ย For the Scripture says, โ€œWhoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.โ€ 12ย For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. 13ย For โ€œwhoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.โ€ โ€“Romans 10.5-13

And there is a theological ground to this that is rarely to never discussed or acknowledged. When we reflect on the theo-logic implicate to the Incarnation of God, what we start to see is that God in Christ has freely chosen our humanity for His. In this assumption of our humanity He does for us what we could never do for ourselves; given our incurved predilection to seek first our kingdom and our rightness. He chooses what is best for us; what we were created for; He chooses the life of the Triune God for us, and re-conciles us to Eden lost into the Greater recreation of Jerusalem restored. In other words, and this is the Calvinist aspect of the Evangelical, because of our sub-human totally depraved statuses we could never seek God first; so, He has freely chosen to say Yes for us. It is this doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ that informs everything I say, do, and think as a Christian.

Here is the Athanasian Creed which articulates the significance of the Incarnation in regard to eternal life obtaining for each of us:

But it is necessary for eternal salvation that one also believe in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ faithfully. Now this is the true faith: That we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is both God and human, equally. He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity. Although he is God and human, yet Christ is not two, but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into flesh, but by God’s taking humanity to himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of his essence, but by the unity of his person. For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human. He suffered for our salvation; he descended to hell; he arose from the dead; he ascended to heaven; he is seated at the Father’s right hand; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. At his coming all people will arise bodily and give an accounting of their own deeds. Those who have done good will enter eternal life, and those who have done evil will enter eternal fire.[1]

We might want to quibble with the idea of the performance based understanding of salvation that the last clause makes things sound like; but in a theosis theory of salvation, we might also want to frame this in the Luther-esque understanding of a โ€˜bad tree producing bad fruitโ€™ and a โ€˜good tree producing good.โ€™ The point being, the Incarnation is the key logic that should stand behind any theory of salvation.

TF Torrance eloquently articulates these truths in regard to salvation, and its Christological conditioning this way:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.[2]

In order to press this further let me refer us to my friend, Jason Goroncy. Here is something he wrote in his chapter for our first Evangelical Calvinism book. He is detailing what this Christ-conditioned lens of salvation looks like; in particular, as that was developed in the soteriology of the Scot, John McLeod Campbell (someone TF Torrance admires, among other Scottish theologians):

While Western orthodoxy has mostly stressed the Godward side of the atonement, Campbell laid the weight on the creaturely side, following Anselm: โ€œNone therefore but God can make this reparation . . . Yet, none should make it save a man, otherwise man does not make amends.โ€ Campbell recognized that an adequate repentance by those disabled by sin, while required, was morally impossible, and therefore if such were to be offered it would have to be by God, albeit from our sideโ€”that is, God in fallen flesh. This is because, Campbell argued, genuine repentance involves seeing the sin (and sinners) โ€œwith Godโ€™s eyes,โ€11 viewing broken humanity from within, feeling the deep sorrow ย that sin creates and confessing the righteousness of Godโ€™s judgment upon it. As R. C. Moberly recalls, sin โ€œhas blunted the selfโ€™s capacity for entire hatred of sin, and has blunted it once for all.โ€ Only one, therefore, who could see things as they really are could make an adequate confession both of Godโ€™s righteousness and of human sin. Such confession is not made in order to avoid sinโ€™s consequences but precisely that sinโ€™s consequences may be embraced in all their dreadfulness, โ€œmeeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and exhausting that divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man.โ€

Genuine repentance and confession for โ€œThe sin of His brethrenโ€ would have to come from one who, as it were, stood on Godโ€™s side in the human dock.14 What was impossible for sinners was possible for this man who in the fullness of the hypostatic union penetrated into the depths of our humanity to see sin as God sees it, and to condemn sin as God condemns it, and yet do so from our side and as our head. That is, in โ€œThe High Priest of redeemed humanityโ€ such confession and condemnation of sin happened not only with โ€œgreat sorrowโ€ but from the side of sin. So Campbell: โ€œThis confession as to its nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the side of man. Such an Amen was due in the truth of things. He who was the Truth could not be in humanity and not utter itโ€”and it was necessarily a first step in dealing with the Father on our behalf. He who would intercede for us must begin with confessing our sins.โ€

Christโ€™s โ€œperfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of Godโ€ has value for humanity insofar as Christ, โ€˜spiritually speaking . . . is the human race, made sin for the race, and acting for it in a way so inclusively total, that all mortal confessions, repentances, sorrows, are fitly acted by him in our behalf. His divine Sonship in our humanity is charged in the offering thus to God of all which the guilty world itself should offer,โ€ as Horace Bushnell notes. In offering that perfect response from the depths of humanity Christ โ€œabsorbsโ€ the full realization of Godโ€™s judgment against sin. Standing as God, Christ knows โ€œa perfect sorrowโ€ regarding sin. And, standing with no โ€œpersonal consciousness of sinโ€ but fully clad in fallen flesh, Christ is able to offer โ€œa perfect repentanceโ€ that is required from humanityโ€™s side offering that perfect โ€œAmenโ€ to Godโ€™s mind concerning sin. With this responseโ€”even in the midst of Calvaryโ€™s darknessโ€”God re-speaks those words first heard over Jordanโ€™s waters: โ€œThis is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.โ€ And in response, humanity cries out โ€œOur Father, hallowed be thy name.โ€[3]

Goroncy helps fill things out for us. The most important aspect to grab onto is how the logic of the Incarnation is brought to its soteriological conclusion. In other words, and I think this is an inescapable conclusion, if the eternal Word of God became human, His humanity becomes the fully โ€˜in-steadโ€™ humanity for us. Not as a cipher or instrument, per se, but as the โ€˜personalising humanityโ€™ that genuinely gives us space, in our own particularity, to be human before God; that is, human in and from the recreated/resurrected humanity of Jesusโ€™s priestly and vicarious humanity for us. This is the Word of Godโ€™s Grace; it is Christ become human and in this downward trajectory He unites us to an upward vector that He has always already and eternally shared in glory with His Father by the bond of the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

I still have Kanye Westโ€™s conversion on my mind. I have been shocked, once again, by how much apparent confusion there is โ€˜out thereโ€™ in regard to what Christian salvation actually entails. Kanye, like all of us, has an antecedent voice, a voice that has said, and continues to say Yes to the Father for Him. It is this that gives substance and heft to Westโ€™s confession of faith before the world; it is the confession of Jesusโ€™s faith being echoed in and through the vocal cords of Kanyeโ€™s voiceโ€”through every Christianโ€™s voice. This is the miracle and mystery of salvation, and it is one we should rejoice in whenever and in whomever we see it obtain. We are seeing the miracle of God becoming human borne witness to; not directly, but indirectly as we someone else come to the realization that they are now participants in the plenitude of the Triune Life. This is the Evangel, and it has already succeeded in Westโ€™s life, just as sure as Jesusโ€™s Yes can never be turned into a No.

 

[1] Source.

[2] T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.

[3] Jason Goroncy, โ€œTha mi aโ€™ toirt fainear dur gearan:โ€ J. McLeod Campbell and P.T. Forsyth on the Extent of Christโ€™s Vicarious Ministry,โ€ in eds. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 255-57.

Christ as the first-fruits and first-born from the death of death: Reflecting Further Upon Sin and Its ‘Sensuous Origin’

Posted on by

As I continue to get into researching โ€˜sinโ€™ I am doing so through reading, in part, stuff from Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck. I am reading a section he has from his Dogmatics, Vol.3, called The Origin of Sin; how fitting. I wanted to share a section from him which he entitles The Enigma of Sinโ€™s Origin; in it he gets into how folks have attempted to understand what in fact sin is, andย tellingly, where it is generated from, from within the human being (if it is). He focuses in, in this section, on the theory that sin is somehow generated by the sensuous; as such, if this is the case the remedy would be some form of self-deprecating, self-denying asceticism. Note:

The Enigma of Sinโ€™s Origin

[312] The question of the origin of evil, second to that of existence itself, is the greatest enigma of life and the heaviest cross for the intellect to bear. The question, Whence is evil? has occupied the minds of humans in every century and still waits in vain for an answer that is more satisfactory than that of Scripture. Insofar as philosophy has taught us anything significant in this matter, it is, broadly speaking, a strong proof for the scriptural truth that this world is inexplicable without a fall. All the great thinkers, even if they were ignorant of Genesis 3 or rejected it as myth, have, despite themselves, given tacit or explicit support to this simple story. And insofar as philosophy looked for a solution to the problem in another direction, it has gotten off the track and sadly gone astray. This applies first of all to the Pelagian explanation of sin, the many objections to which have been touched on above and will come up at length in our discussion of the essence and propagation of sin. But it applies further to all the systems that trace evil not to a creaturely act of will but to the nature of humanity, the world, or God.

In the first place, sin cannot be inferred from the sensual nature of the human race. If that were the explanation, sin certainly would always have a sensual or carnal character. But this is far from being always the case. There are also spiritual sins, sins of a demonic nature, such as pride, envy, hatred, enmity against God, which, though less visible, are absolutely no less serious than the sins of carnality; and these cannot be explained by sensuality, any more than the existence of fallen angels can be explained on this basis. If sins originated from humanityโ€™s sensual nature, one would certainly expect that they would be most vigorous and numerous in the early years of life, and that to the degree that the mind became more developed it would also exert firmer control over it and finally overcome it altogether. But experience tells a very different story. To the degree that people grow up, sinโ€”also sensual sinโ€”has a stronger grip on them. It is not the child but the young man and the adult male who are frequently enslaved by their lusts and passions; and mental development is often so little able to curb sin that it tends rather to make available the means of seeking the satisfaction of oneโ€™s desire on a larger scale and in more refined ways. And even when at a later stage in life the sensual sins have lost their dominance, they still secretly stay on in peopleโ€™s hearts as desires or make way for others that, though more spiritual in nature, are no less appalling. Accordingly, if this explanation of sin in terms of sensuality is meant in earnest, it should result in seeking release by suppressing the flesh; but it is precisely the history of asceticism that is best calculated to cure us of the error that sin can be overcome in that fashion. People take their hearts with them when they enter a monastery, and from the heart arise all sorts of sins and iniquities.[1]

Clearly from a biblical and properly oriented theological perspective this explanation falls quite short; as Bavinck himself develops. But it is interesting to see how people attempt to philosophize about things, particularly sin.

What if sin has so incapacitated the human intellect, what if the so called noetic effects of sin have so savaged the humanโ€™s capacity to self-reflect properly that they are left aimless in their search for attempting to penetrate the mystery of the human situation and pollution? One thing that is clear, even for unregenerate minds and hearts, is that people can look around and know that things are eschew; radically so! But even this, according to Scripture is not a โ€˜naturalโ€™ perception; according to John 16 the Holy Spirit convicts the world of: sin, righteousness, and judgment. In other words, without the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the attending work of the Holy Spirit, there is no access to the real human condition; there is no access to the actual problem which according to Jesus resides in the deceptive nature of our corrupted hearts (relative to their orientation to God).

What the Bavinck quote should illustrate for us is that sin, human depravity and pollution is an unknowable โ€˜quantityโ€™; it is a surd of inaccessible magnitude. As Barth orients this discussion, we cannot even begin to know what sin is apart from Christ, and Godโ€™s holiness on display therein; and even at this entry point sin remains a surd, an enigma. God in Christ did not come to explain sinโ€™s origin, or even its general whereabouts, he came to destroy it and put it to death (cf. Rom 8). In light of the holiness of God revealed in Christ, yes, sin is amplified, it is given a gravitas as we observe the depths and reach it took for it to be dispelled; i.e. Godโ€™s personal enfleshment. What the coming of God in Christ shows about sin is that human beings, autonomous as sin would have them to be, are in no place to deal with its corroding and parasitic power. It takes the very โ€˜beingโ€™ ousia of Godself in the person (hypostasis) of Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos, and ground of all reality to penetrate into the marrow of sinโ€™s possessive non-being and nothingness to reverse its beguiling trajectory; to do nothing short of re-creating all things, with Christ as the first-fruits and first-born from the death of death (per John Owen also cf. Col. 1.15ff; I Cor. 15; II Cor. 5.17).[2]

 

[1] Herman Bavinck, The Origin of Sin, accessed 03-16-2017.

[2] This paragraph is largely and loosely inspired by a Barthian and Torrancean perspective on a Christologically concentrated hamartiology and doctrine of creation/re-creation.

To Be ‘In Christ’ and the Bigger Picture of Salvation

Posted on by

In Christ, this little phrase is ubiquitous throughout the writings of St. Paul. If you are a Bible reader this phrase, โ€˜in Christ,โ€™ will be very familiar to you, and maybe also very encouraging to you, if not somewhat mysterious sounding. Indeed, there is mystery to it (think of John Calvinโ€™s unio mystica), but not so much that we cannot press into it with very fruitful and edifying understanding imagodeitowards our own spiritual formational understanding of what it means to be children of God.

Karl Barth has a very insightful way of understanding what this phrase means, and it is related, of course!, to his unique doctrine of election; it is also related, more generally, to a doctrine of creation and theological-anthropology. Barth is concerned to highlight the reality that Jesus Christ himself is indeed the โ€˜first-fruitsโ€™ of Godโ€™s creation, in his vicarious humanity for us (see Col. 1.15ff); he is concerned to show that Jesus Christ is really what it looks like to be a human being, and not concerned in abstraction, but concerned in the concrete reality of His humanity serving as the ground of human life and the imago Dei who humans were originally created in as images of the image (and now recreated in, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ).

This makes Barthโ€™s conception unique, not because his conception of Christโ€™s vicarious humanity is outside the bounds of historic Christian orthodox teaching, but unique instead because Barth worked within the Reformed tradition. For the Reformed tradition in general to be โ€˜in Christโ€™ relative to soteriological thinking has to do with declarative reality for the elect; it has to do with the electโ€™s positional relationship to God, as God declares them to be forensically justified in and through the penal substitutionary work of Christ. This is different from Barthโ€™s emphasis. Barth (and TF Torrance et. al.), as I noted above, has more to do with ontological reality; that is, what reality, for Barth, stands as the ultimate ground of what it means to be human? Answering this question, for Barth, is to answer the question: what does it mean to be โ€˜in Christ?โ€™ Barthโ€™s response is this:

โ€œIn Christโ€ means that in him we are reconciled to God, in him we are elect from eternity, in him we are called, in him we are justified and sanctified, in him our sin is carried to the grave, in his resurrection our death is overcome, with him our life is hid with Christ in God, in him everything that has to be done for us has already been done, has previously been removed and put in its place, in him we are children in the Fatherโ€™s house, just as he is by nature. All that has to be said about us can be said only by describing and explaining our existence in him; not by describing and explaining it as an existence we might have in and for itselfโ€ฆ. For by Christ we will never be anything else than just what we are in Christ. And when the Holy Spirit draws and takes us right into the reality of revelation by doing what we cannot do, by opening our eyes and ears and hearts, he does not tell us anything except that we are in Christ by Christ.[1]

Barthโ€™s concern is bigger than simply being concerned with a doctrine of salvation; he is more focused on the big picture of Godโ€™s good creation. Yes, sin entered the picture and humanityโ€™s plight went wild in the wilderness of that sin, but sin was not a subversion of Godโ€™s plan nor its dictate. In other words, humanity always already had a ground and location apart from sin, and that ground and reality was, like we noted earlier, the humanity of Jesus Christ, whose image humanity was originally created in and recreated โ€˜in Christ.โ€™

Barthโ€™s conceiving, then, has more to do with ontology and humanityโ€™s orientation relative to God in that ontology. Enclosed within that reality is where a doctrine of salvation and/or soteriology can be premised and built upon, not the other way around (as the Augustinian method has it, the method upon which Reformed-orthodox theology is built).

[1] Karl Barth, CD I/2, 240 cited by George Hunsinger, Evangelical Catholic And Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themesย (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), Loc. 4577, 4583 Kindle.

Knowing God by God in Christ in Incarnation and Resurrection

Posted on by

Thomas Torrance has made the point that the Incarnation of God is a novum, that there in fact is no genuine analogy from creation from whence we can conceive of such a mysterious thing as God become man. As such, if we are going to think scientifically about God, and in particular, about God become man, that we will allow that reality, that revelation itself unfold and impose upon us its resurrectionown measures and categories of understanding from which we will come to a genuine knowledge of God. What this means then is that we will be unable to start from a general theory of God and attempt to integrate that with who we see revealed in Jesus Christ; in other words, natural theology will not work, instead we will have to work from what TF Torrance calls an epistemological inversion, meaning that knowledge of God is contingent upon His willingness to reveal Himself to us rather than our ability to discover Him through profane modes of human inquiry. Thomas Torrance writes:

The mystery of Christ is presented to us within history โ€” that historical involvement is not an accidental characteristic of the mystery but essential to it. That is the problem.

Let us first put it this way, recalling the bi-polarity of our theological knowledge. If God has become man in the historical Jesus, that is an historical event that comes under our historical examination so far as the humanity of Jesus is concerned, but the fact thatย Godย became man is an event that cannot be appreciated by ordinary historical science, for here we are concerned with more than simply an historical event, namely, with the act of the eternal God. So far as this event is a fact of nature it can be observed, and so far as it is historical in the sense that other natural events are historical, it can be appreciated as such; but the essentialย becomingย behind it cannot be directly perceived except by an act of perception appropriate to the eternal event. That act of perception appropriate to an eternal act, or divine act, would surely be the pure vision of God, which we do not have in history. Here on earth and in time we do not see directly, face to face, but see only in part, as through a glass enigmatically, in a mystery. We see the eternal or divine act within history, within our fallen world where historical observation is essential. Faith would be better described then as the kind of perception appropriate to perceiving a divine act in history, an eternal act in time. So that faith is appropriate both to the true perception of historical facts, and also to the true perception of Godโ€™s action in history. Nor is it the way we are given within history to perceive Godโ€™s acts in history, and that means that faith is the obedience of our minds to the mystery of Christ, who is God and man in the historical Jesus. What is clearly of paramount importance here is the holding together of the historical and the theological in our relation to Christ.

If the two are not held together, we have broken up the given unity in Christ into the historical on the one hand, and the theological on the other, refracting it into elements which we can no longer put together again. We then find that we cannot start from the historical and move to the theological, or from the theological and move to the historical without distortion, and nor can we rediscover the original unity. We can only start from the given, where the historical and the theological are in indissoluble union in Christ.[1]

As corollary with this, and in terms of applying this approach to the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ; likewise, there is no analogy available to us in nature from whence we can construct an analogue towards being able to think a God-man into resurrection. Instead, all we can do, by an analogy of faith, as it were, is to think this reality from what has been given to us and for us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so if the resurrection, if the Incarnation are allowed to dictate and set the terms from whence we think God become man, and what He has done for us in resurrection and re-creation, we will end up doing theology, and in fact living the Christian life under much different constraints than what is commonly conceived of in Western Christianity in general, and in North American evangelicalism in particular. George Hunsinger writes about this, and how important it is for the resurrection itself to take on the magisterial place it ought to have in our thinking about God in Christ rising again from the dead over against historicist/apologetic modes of knowing and thinking resurrection as is so commonly the case, again, in North American evangelicalism:

The position to be taken here is that an event extraordinary in kind will, of necessity, involve modes of knowledge and significance that are also extraordinary. From the standpoint of the churchโ€™s faith, although ordinary ways of knowing, including modern critical methods, need not be ruled out, they cannot be allowed to control the discussion, nor can their relevance be more than secondary. Likewise, Christโ€™s resurrection is necessarily of uncommon significance. While its revelation may overlap with other, more familiar forms of religious experience, it will necessarily displace and transcend them by virtue of its own singularity. In short, the churchโ€™s faith in Christโ€™s resurrection, as attested by the apostles and affirmed by the creed, cannot be understood, if the resurrectionโ€™s uniqueness is not allowed to determine the modes of knowledge and significance appropriate to it. Otherwise, the nature of the resurrection will be determined in advance by resort to inapplicable categories.[2]

I hope the significance of this is appreciated by you!

[1] Thomas F. Torrance,ย Incarnation,ย 6-7

[2] George Hunsinger, Evangelical Catholic And Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), Loc. 3874, 3879, 3884 Kindle.

Reading Scripture In the Life of the Trinity, In Theosis

Posted on by

I must admit, ever since encountering Patristic theology and their hermeneutics in seminary (back in 2002) for the first time, my compass for hermeneutical theory began to take a tailspin. And then a little later, as I continued to dig, and engage with Thomas Torrance, Karl Barth, John Webster, Matthew Levering, and even some Puritans, my compass became even more erratic. I was trained, informally, as an evangelical (growing up as the son bible-compassof a Baptist pastor), to study the Bible inductively, and really through the rationalist history of religions school and German higher criticism that sliced and diced Scripture into manageable, and even unrelated pieces. When I entered Bible College (the first time in 1992, and then 1996-97 at Calvary Chapel Bible College, and then finally my alma mater 1998-2001 at Multnomah Bible College) I began to be taught, formally, how to interpret Scripture, again, in a fragmented way, which could only at the end of my Bible study attempt to integrate Jesus into my biblical interpretation somehow. This culminated for me (which at this point looks like it will be my terminal degree), in 2002-03, when I entered seminary at Multnomah Biblical Seminary; I began work on an MA in Biblical Studies, which included course work, crowned with a Masterโ€™s thesis paper, which I had to defend in order to earn my MA. I chose to do my thesis paper on I Corinthians 1:17-25, which was an exegetical analysis of that pericope. I successfully defended that in 2003, and earned my MA in Biblical Studies. But what this paper did (100 pages as it was), was demonstrate and illustrate how I used to study the Bible back then; very analytically, inductively, expositionally, verse by verse, and through hermeneutical premises that were and have been largely absent from the bulk of the Christian church. In other words, even though my passage of consideration was about Jesus and the cross, my method of interpretation was not premised, hermeneutically, upon the reality of Jesus and the cross; instead it was premised upon premises provided for evangelical Bible study that were provided for it by people who are not evangelical (historically and even culturally understood), and who might even be antagonistic to the Christian faith. In the end I actually liked what I was able to produce for my Masterโ€™s thesis paper (my examiners did too), but I wonder what it would have looked like if it had been given shape under hermenutical pressure that was more intentionally Christ centered?

Is it even possible to exegete under a โ€˜Christ-centeredโ€™ and Trinitarian pressure? The early church believed it was possible, and proceeded without apology to exegete the Old Testament as if it was all about Christ; and under the Apostolic mantle provided for that method by the authors of the New Testament themselves. Donald Fairbairn (a Patristics expert par excellence) has just helped me, immensely, to think about this issue once again, in a very helpful and definitive way. My compass has been wandering here and there, hermeneutically, I have been deeply influenced, as I mentioned, by T. F. Torrance, and in particular to this issue, by his book Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics; but I have had problems, quite frankly, trying to practically conceive of a way to interpret and apply Scripture in a way that is genuinely Christ centered, hermeneutically, and at the same time, critically available to the tools provided by what might be called โ€˜modernโ€™ exegesis (literary, canonical, historical, etc.). This is where what Fairbairn, in a straightforward and succinct way has helped me with today; he has placed hermeneutics, at least in the way I am appropriating it, within the realm of the Greek Christian understanding of theosis, so in the domain of Christian salvation (soteriology)โ€“this would fit well, in some respects, with Matthew Leveringโ€™s idea of participatory history. Let me share the two paragraphs from Fairbairn that have helped and edified me today; I hope they will be edifying for you too:

Roots Of Patristic And Modern Old Testament Interpretation

At this point, we as evangelicals should notice a significant incongruity latent in our situation. We accept (albeit with reservation) a method of biblical interpretation that historically arose among scholars who rejected most of our core convictions about the Bibleโ€“that it is from God, that it is a book telling a single story, that its various writings are fundamentally unified, that its central subject is Christ. Furthermore, without giving the matter a lot of thought, we reject allegory as a way of interpreting the Hebrew Bible, a way that is found in the New Testament and that was widely used in the early church, even though that kind of interpretation grows out of the same convictions that we share. It is indeed ironic that when a church father who shares all of our basic convictions argues for a connection between this Old Testament passage and that New Testament reality, we reject his argument out of hand because our masters in the school of modern interpretation (masters who do not share our convictions) have branded such exegesis as allegory. And it is even more ironic that our adherence to a plain-sense, nonallegorical method is so intense that the New Testament itself disturbs us when it connects the Testaments in a way that sounds like allegory to us. We wind up thinking that Paul and Matthew were allowed to handle the Old Testament this way because they were divinely inspired, but surely we must not handle the Old Testament this way.

If we recognize the incongruity I have been discussing, then we should also see that there is more than โ€œmere allegoryโ€ going on when the church fathers interpret the Old Testament. In contrast to modern liberals (who might see no unifying theme in Scripture) and in partial contrast to modern conservatives (who tend to organize Scripture around concepts such as the covenant or the dispensations which have governed Godโ€™s dealings with humanity), the church fathers tended to see the scarlet thread, the unifying theme of Scripture, as Christ. Again, this unifying theme places the emphasis in a rather different place than we do. We today start with ourselves and ask how God relates to us. The church fathers started with God, and especially with Christ, and asked how we participate in Christ. This is why virtually all of patristic thought saw theลsisโ€“humanityโ€™s becoming somehow a participant in the divine lifeโ€“as the link between God and humanity. Furthermore, this is why one strand of patristic thought, the one I think is most fruitful for us today, understood theลsis in terms of the Fatherโ€™s relationship to the Son and saw our participation in this relationship as the scarlet thread of the Christian faith. If one does theology in the way the church fathers did, with the life of the three trinitarian persons at the heart, then one will seek to find those trinitarian personsโ€“especially the preincarnate Sonโ€“throughout the Old Testament.[1]

This is the way that T.F. Torrance sought to interpret Scripture (just read his two volumes: Incarnation & Atonement), and it is the way that I personally believe is the most fruitful and edifying way for Christians to engage in as exegetes.

So instead of using dispensations (as I was trained to do), or โ€˜the covenantโ€™ (as people who attend places like Westminster Theological Seminary are trained to do) as hermeneutically regulative for the biblical interpretive process; along with Fairbairn, Torrance, the Patristics, Barth, Webster, Levering and others, it is better, in my estimation, to allow our hermeneutical theory and practice to be established by the One who has given revelation of Himself to begin with; and it is better to practice exegesis from within this relationship, within the realm of โ€˜salvationโ€™ or โ€˜reconciliationโ€™ and โ€˜participationโ€™ in Godโ€™s triune life mediated through Christ. Does this mean that we cannot employ modern critical tools while doing exegesis? I donโ€™t think so. But what it means is that we wonโ€™t let those tools (whatever they are) be the basis for our hermeneutical theory. In other words we wonโ€™t just read Scripture โ€˜as literatureโ€™ (because it is more not less than literature, it has a different location from other literature, ย what might be called โ€˜profane literatureโ€™); we wonโ€™t just read Scipture โ€˜as historyโ€™ (because it is more not less than history, it is where God providentially has interpreted through His Son for us, His life for us, and our life for Him through the vicarious humanity of Christ through Apostolic Deposit); and we wonโ€™t, then, read Scripture but within the domain of grace, and in particular faith, which is established by its rule in Jesus Christ.

ย 

 

[1] Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction To Theology With The Help Of The Church Fathers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 114-15.