Category Archives: Vicarious Humanity

Being in a Personal, Relational Relationship with God, On Triune Terms

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God is not an analogue to analyze. God instead is a triune and eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God (de Deo uno) in three persons (de Deo trino) to be inhabited, through Christ, and enjoyed. The Christian is in an immediate relationship with the triune God through union with Jesus Christ. We are indeed, as Christians, in an intimate and personal relationship with the living God. Not because we are persons in relationship with God—thus predicating what God’s relationality and personalist reality must be—but because God is eternally personal and [onto]relational within the inner-reality (in se) of His life. In other words, we have intimacy with God not because of some type of from below emotionalism we foist upon God, but because of who He is as personal and relational within His inner being.

It seems to me that there are some, especially those of the intellectualist orientation (often academics), who want to poo-poo the idea that Christians ought to be in this warm-hearted love relationship with God. They want to think, seemingly, that because of an identifiable movement within Protestantism, particularly as that is found in the work of Phillip Jakob Spener and Nikolaus Ludwig, count von Zinzendorf, in 17th and 18th century Germany, and then later in England, through the Keswick spiritual tradition, and also in America, within the revivalist movements, and many more threads, that such intimacy talk and religion vis-à-vis God can be dismissed and relegated to an index and categorization of church history (and sociology). Indeed, while many movements within the history of the church can be described by the intellectual and theological historians, this in and of itself doesn’t negate the theological substance that may or may not stand behind these types of shifts and orientations among the people of God through the centuries.

I am simply wanting to register that at a purely theological level the idea that the Christian is growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ entails a deeply personal and warm-hearted relationship with God, indeed, a dialogical (prayerful and worshipful) one, wherein the sheep can know the Shepherd’s voice. And this, as already noted, is not because of anything inherent to an ‘below’ urge from us to God. But instead, it is from an ‘above’ movement of who God freely has chosen to be for us in Jesus Christ; and this in correlation with who God eternally is in His triune Self. This is how the Christian encounters God, by the Spirit, through whom we affirm that Jesus is Lord. The Christian doesn’t encounter a speculatively produced pure act (actus purus) or pure being God whose reality is adumbrated by our philosophical negations and projections upon what this being must be like. No, the Christian, by definition, only is such as they come into encounter with the One who is their Brother, who is their Father, in the bond of the Holy Spirit. God determines, He pre-destines who He is in Himself to be who we become in Christ by Grace (not nature); that is, co-heirs with Jesus Christ, beholding the glory the Son has eternally shared with the Father in the bondage of the Holy Spirit.

The sum of it is that we ought to pursue this personalist, relational relationship with the living God because that is what He has already determined to be the case for us in Jesus Christ. We ought to be in doxological adoration of who He has Self-revealed and exegeted Himself to be for us in Jesus Christ; in the kerygmatic reality of the Good News that He is in proclamation. He isn’t a God out there, but a God with us, and God ‘closer to us than we are to ourselves’ (per Barth). That said, He isn’t available to be taken captive by our own untoward passions and desires. He instead sets the frame in the sobriety of His own life for us. As such, our worship and relationship with Him is predicated upon this type of discoursing, dialoguing intercourse with Him wherein what it means to be personal, relational, and intimate is dictated by who He is for us, rather than who we are towards Him (in our fallen frames of dust). He sets the boundaries of relationship relative to who He is, and because He created us to be in relationship with who He is, our re-creation in Christ finds a relational correspondence, in a fitting way, as that has been already laid for us in His telos (purpose) for the world in Jesus Christ.

Hopefully the reader is seeing how I am attempting to thread this needle. I.e., We are in a personalist, onto-relational relationship with the living and triune God on His terms rather than an abstract set of terms that we determine about Him based upon our own fallen and broken dispositions.

Thanks for reading me thinking out loud again.

Just Believe to be Saved: Against the Accretions that Sully the Gospel

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Tradition. All Christians, indeed, all people in the main operate via traditions. For the Christian, as Jesus teaches, good tradition doesn’t nullify the Word of God but magnifies it. I’m afraid too many Christians have gotten away from the simplicity of the Gospel through the accretions of various traditions. The Apostle Paul warned the Corinthians against becoming entangled in doctrines, and accretions that nullify the simplicity of a pure devotion to the risen Christ. Too many Christians have allowed a spirit of sectarianism, which itself is an absolutization of traditions, to sully the way they view the Gospel and justification before God. The Bible is quite clear on what it takes to be justified before God, it is to be ‘in Christ,’ in union with Christ (unio cum Christo). The Bible says, against many traditions accreted through various liturgies, catechisms and confessions (taken in sectarian ways), that whosoever believes on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved [full stop]. If someone operates with a tradition that nullifies this simple kerygmatic proclamation, and declaration, then they are operating with and from a bad tradition. If someone heaps a bunch of dotted “i’s” and crossed “t’s” on top of the simple Gospel message, that is ‘believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,’ then we can know that this person has been taken into a mechanism of deceit wherein they are saying more than the Word of God does.

The Way of God pro nobis (for us) doesn’t leave justification/salvation before God up to us getting the right details of worship correct. Indeed, to conceive of salvation as if a cluster of details is to betray an actual and biblical understanding of the Gospel. The Gospel isn’t a basket of propositions strung together in some sort of right and/or magic stringing together of things; that only this or that “tradition” in the Church gets right; or more, who gets management over. The Gospel by definition is not something we possess; indeed, it is not a thing at all. The Gospel is in fact God’s being in becoming for us in the incarnation of His life for us in Jesus Christ; and if He be for us who can be against us? The Gospel is the triune perichoretic life of God in action and actualism for us. It is His life in-breaking into this world, personally, through the Son enfleshed, and by this in-breaking His assumption of our flesh, that we might come, by the grace of His life, to assume His resurrected flesh for us; indeed, as He is the firstborn/first-fruits from the dead for us. My basic premise is that: salvation is indeed the event of God’s personal and relational and eternal life for us. It is His unilateral Self-predestined Self-givenness for us. It is of the type of self-givenness that we have no say over, it is simply a gift given. He offers it to all, and makes the way simple for all who will. His life is perspicacious, inherently so, so far that there is no convolution when it comes to what He is gifting us in Himself for us; which is indeed, the Gospel. The details of the Gospel are profound, and indeed eternal; but it isn’t the implications and soundings of the depths of the Gospel—which indeed run for eternity—that are required to apprehend in order to be saved. No, it remains simple: believe on and in the person, Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. And this isn’t a belief that is self-generated by some type of capacity that lies latent within us; as if we could habituate in a certain pattern of ‘faith’ in order to arrive at a saving faith. No, the Gospel says we are dead in trespasses and sins, and that our only hope is the vicarious faith and repentance of Christ for us. He has done for us, in our assumed humanity, what we could never, nor would never do for ourselves, left to ourselves.

I wanted to write this post, off the top, to simply underscore the simplicity of the Gospel message. It isn’t tied sectarianly to this tradition, or that denomination, on the continuum of the Church catholic. The Church is possessed by her head, her Lord, Jesus Christ. We don’t possess the Church, just as we do not possess salvation. Salvation possesses us, just as salvation possesses His Church. We are not our own, we have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Jesus Christ. When you feel that nagging Pelagian urge to imagine that you have come to some type of understanding of the Gospel wherein you and your tradition alone possess the Gospel, just know you have a false Gospel that nullifies the simplicity found in the Word of God for the world, in Jesus Christ.

An Athanasian Reformed Reading of John 6:44-45: On Unconditional Election and the Effectual Call

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There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45. I believe it is the better more theologically acute way one must exegete John 6:44-45, among many other passages, in light of Christological orthodoxy. In other words, I will suggest (not argue here) that everyone reads the text of Scripture through theological lenses; and since that’s the case, it is best to exegete Scripture from good theological premises, rather than bad ones. I would simply assert here that both White and Flowers, respectively, offer a reading of John 6 that are based on bad theological premises.

Here is the passage in the English translation (NASB95):

44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

White argues that all who are drawn of God will necessarily come to God (so, what he takes to be a prima facie argument for unconditional election vis-à-vis the effectual call). Flowers argues that the drawn ones who come to God are those who have not only heard, but have actively learned from the Father, and through this, said drawn ones freely choose to come to God based on their innate human freedom to do so (he believes the capacity comes, situationally, as people hear the call and learn from God of His way for them; but this based on an ontic capacity built into the human agent to accept or reject the call of God). So, in nuce, we can see how White clearly is thinking from the typical Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, and how Flowers, respectively, ends up emphasizing the human agents’ intact libertarian freewill to say yes or no to God’s offer of salvation.

The Athanasian Reformed alternative sees the eternal Son of God, as both the electing God and elected (archetypal) human for all of humanity. So, we can affirm unconditional election and the effectual call, but only under radically reified terms. So, for the AR, we maintain that what does the necessary work here, theologically, is a robust affirmation of a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (which is really just the Chalcedonian and Nicene understanding of the homoousious; i.e., that Jesus is both fully God and fully human in His singular person as the Christ). In this sense, the eternal Logos is both ‘unconditionally elect’ and ‘effectually called’ insofar that He freely chooses to become us that we might become Him by the grace of adoption (think of II Cor. 8:9 and the mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’). In this frame, Christ, God’s personal grace for the world, from within the triune Life, as the mediator between God and humanity, as our High Priest, enters into the sinful reprobate status all of humanity is born into; putting it to death at the cross; and rising anew as God’s humanity for the world, the second and greater Adam, the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ God’s ‘firstfruits,’ whereby humanity, in Christ’s humanity, the only genuine humanity coram Deo (before God) has been truly humanized in and from the humanizing humanity of Jesus Christ. As He, in His vicarious humanity said Yes to the Father for us, we by a correspondence of His faith, by the same Spirit’s breath now have the freedom of God to say yes and amen to God, acknowledging all that God has provided for us in His salvation for all of humanity (which is first His humanity for us).

So, for the AR, total depravity/total inability, to use those terms, is indeed a real problem for a humanity incurved upon itself (homo incurvatus in se). But what is different for AR is that on the one hand grace isn’t an abstract quality given to the elect, like created grace is, as maintained by the classical Calvinists (like White); on the other hand, grace, and being unilaterally placed into God’s grace is a necessity if fallen humanity is going to have the capacity to indeed seek God and receive His salvation for them. Further, contra the Arminian, or Flowers’ so-called provisionism, fallen humanity, again, is in need of God’s unilateral movement of placing us into His re-created and elect life in Christ, if in fact we are going to be able to speak of a genuine human freedom. So, against the Provisionists, AR maintains that in order to be truly human before God, that is to have genuine human freedom for God, that that must first be provided for all of humanity in and through God’s disruptive gracious humanity as that penetrates our dead humanity, giving us a new and real human life in His.

Hence, God’s unconditional election is inclusive of all of humanity, since the only humanity to be assumed in the incarnation was the fallen humanity. Jesus was “effectually called” (and I put that in quotes because AR does not affirm the Aristotelian causal theory that classical Calvinists do), freely coming for us, taking all of humanity with Him, as the second Adam, to the right hand of the Father. Why all of humanity does not finally affirm God’s election for us in Christ, seeing that all of the conditions for salvation have already been fully actualized in God’s humanity for the world, remains an aspect of the surd-like and inscrutable mystery of sin. All are elect in Christ, but not all finally come. We know why people do come, but sin keeps us in the dark in regard to why some don’t ultimately repent and acknowledge what God has already done, provided, and actualized for them in the real humanity of Christ.

In closing, with reference to John 6 and its grammar: verse 44 says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Here, the doubly consubstantial life of Jesus, who is both the eternal Son, who is fully God, and who is also fully human, is theologically present in this clause. That is to say, in the analogy of the incarnation, the ‘Me’ and the ‘Father’ (insofar as the person and works of God are indivisible) are in reference to God’s life, and at the same time, in reference to God’s life of salvation actualized for the world in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Theologically the “draws him,” with reference to the ‘him,’ remains in the singular, insofar that the [hu]man who was first drawn of God, was God’s particular humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. He will indeed be “raised up on the last day” whereby every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and all of humanity, all of those who have repented, out of Christ’s repentance for us, will be exalted in consummate form with Him as the new creations we have become as participants in Christ’s new and resurrected humanity for us.

In a canonical way it is fitting then to close this post with reference to another Apostle, Paul:

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for he who has died is freed from sin. -Romans 6:1-7

What we have been referring to as election and the vicarious humanity of Christ also finds biblical reference to Paul’s theological motif of ‘in Christ’ theology. It is really a doctrine of union with Christ that we are concerned with, and what is the entailment of a proper doctrine of pre-destination and election; insofar that what salvation involves first involves God’s choice to be for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And this free election of God’s becomes what we grammatically call the hypostatic union wherein God and humanity are united as God becomes humanity that we might become partakers of the divine nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But you see then how this involves a doctrine of unio cum Christo (union with Christ).

Countering the Abstract Faith of Augustine and Pelagius with the Concrete Faith of Christ

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An abstract notion of saving faith, based on an abstract, or even undefined doctrine of election, always must attempt to make itself concrete. It must seek a way to fill in the gap created by a notion of faith wherein the believer believes out of an idea of faith that is seemingly inherent to them, or individually gifted to THEM.

The antidote to this abstract notion of faith is to come to understand that people believe or trust out of Christ’s vicarious faith for us. It is by His poverty for us that we have become rich; that we can become rich; by saying Yes and Amen in echo of his Yes and Amen that He is for us in the bosom of the Father. In this scenario the believer doesn’t have to figure out a way to make “their salvation” concrete; they don’t have to figure out a way for salvation to be a more sure word for them. The fact that God incarnated for all of humanity by assuming our humanity for Himself reveals the fact that God has already decided to save humanity in His humanity for us in Jesus Christ. This isn’t to suggest that there are a bunch of anonymous Christians running around out there, we must still acknowledge that He alone is salvation for us; but the way that has been forged is through Christ’s humanity penetrating into the depths of our humanity; putting it to death; raising anew as the new humanity before God, with God. When He raised, He raised us with Him. He provided humanity with the possibility to say Yes to God, whereas prior to His Self-penetration into our lives through incarnation, we had no capacity to say Yes to God. We were born dead in our trespasses and sins. Those sins only allowed for us to love ourselves; to have an inward curvature of the heart; to operate in a sphere of competing loves that all are cored by a basket of self-loves. We were trapped with no way out of our feckless statuses as sinners. But Christ, God’s Good News for the world has made a way for us; indeed, as He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life for the world, for us.

An Anthem: The Christian’s Immortality

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As a Christian, as those in union with Jesus Christ, in union with the One who alone dwells in unapproachable Light and Immortality, we live an indestructible life; because our life is indestructible. Our energy is resurrection power of the immortal type; the type that rises from the dead, ascends, and comes again and again, and finally again. Nothing can stop us; death is no match for us; because Life came, assumed death, looked at it, mocked it to its face, and left it in the abyss of nothingness. The Christian is always on the verge of breaking into the eternal reality, never to suffer again. The Christian is unstoppable, because the Christ is first in us that we might be in Him. Let’s keep steaming ahead because one day very soon the heavens will be rolled back like a scroll, and the glory of the Almighty God in Jesus Christ will finally break through, once and for all, in consummate and consuming form. Don’t lose heart, Christian; Jesus is King. Maranatha

A Devotion: Christ, ‘Closer to us than we are to ourselves’

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5 One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. 7 For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; 8 for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. -Romans 14:5-9

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. 19 For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. -Colossians 1:15-20

 

Two things I want to accomplish with this post: 1) I want to devotionally reflect on my desire to live an all-consumed life for and in Jesus Christ; 2) in the process of this reflection, particularly as those are signaled in the above passages, I want to notice a parallel I just noticed as I set out to write this post. I want to notice how Christ’s vicarious life for us, as noted in the Colossae correspondence, serves as the antecedent and pre-destined ground for our lives as those are first conditioned by Christ’s life for us as we see the call on our lives in the Romans’ correspondence.

Just at a very existential and ontic level, or in a very concrete way, I’ve been pondering, once again, what it really means to live the Christian existence. Life is so busy, and there are so many distractions here and there, it is seemingly impossible to slow down enough to sit back and really contemplate what it’s all about; what is this life all about? One dominating theme that pervades the entire canon of Holy Scripture, with particular fire in the New Testament, has to do with the Christian not being their own. That is to say, the New Testament, as the fulfillment of God’s life for us in the shed blood of the Son, Jesus Christ, makes it very clear that we have ‘been bought with a price; the price, the blood of Jesus Christ.’ It is as Christ assumed our humanity, by the Spirit’s hovering work, that we too might now assume His resurrected and ascended humanity by the wooing of the Spirit’s work. In this sense, He is always already, that is the Christ, is always first and last, as the ground of our lives. As a result, everything is new and apocalyptic; charged with the wonder and mystery of the Son of God become the Son of Man; constantly, even now with eyes of faith, inhabiting the triune life with the ascended Son, at the right hand of the Father. So, even in the busyness of daily, seemingly mundane life; even as we trial and travail; even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ that the life of Christ might be made manifest through the mortal members of our body; it is the wisdom of God to confront and encounter us right there. It is God’s cruciform wisdom to meet us in the very places that seemingly would keep us from God—that is, in the busyness of everyday life. Whether that life be in a season of seeming blessedness or cursedness, it is the wisdom of God to have entered into all of that, even before the foundations of the world, and charge it with the power of His resurrected life in Jesus Christ. It isn’t a feeling; He simply is the reality; and He is the reality whether we can recognize it in the moment or not. As Barth rightly says: “He is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” We cannot escape our humanity, because our humanity has chosen to be closer to us than we are (consciously) to ourselves; our humanity, is a gift, that is gifted afresh anew, moment-by-moment, as Christ always lives to make intercession for us. We love in and from the wondrous life of God for us in Jesus Christ whether we “feel” it or can recognize it or not. This is the Christian reality. It is of a city not of our own making; it is of a city whose Maker is the living God. And this is not a mythical or abstract or ethereal thing. No, the Kingdom come and coming again and again, and finally once and for consummate all, is as near to us as the face of God is smiling upon is in the face of Jesus Christ. He is an ever-present help, and He only desires the good for us, never the bad. But this concrete reality can only be seen and heard with the eyes and ears of faith; the faith of Christ for us. This is the what the evangel is in the ‘ical’ of our Christian identification in the world. But we like the Levitic priests must step into the Jordan first; we must get our feet wet; trusting that God will make a dry path for us to walk through, even when it only looks tempestuous, foreboding, as if the stormy waters look to have a demonic life of their own.

Whether we live or die it is for the Lord! This is true, because as Paul so inspir-ationally has written for us: Christ is the firstborn from the dead; He is the very ground of our lives. This is our confession as Christians, and it isn’t one that we have constructed; it is the reality because God in Christ confessed it for us first. Our lives, on a daily basis, are only (and totally!) an echo of Christ’s for us. The burden is on Him as He is before ALL things; as He is the firstborn from the dead who is thus Lord of both the dead and the living. There is no escaping His reach. We might try to drown ourselves in the deep, in the tempest of the waters; because we might despair of this life. But even in the deep He will meet us, and swallow us whole, as if a great fish, taking us to where He has already deigned we will be. We might be living in death, but He meets us there, as the Lord of the dead, and makes us alive with Him as he folds our death garments as His, rolls the stone away from the crypt we had attempted to hide away in, and brings us into the freshness of life resurrected, life ascended.

To God in Christ alone be the glory. amen amen

We Are Not Instruments Anymore than Jesus Is

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The thing about being a co-heir with Christ is that you are not looked upon as a mere instrument in God’s hand anymore than the Son is. That is, you aren’t simply some dispensable tool the Lord uses and tosses away. No, He has adopted us into His very life, by grace; such that when we suffer, He first suffered for us; when we are in turmoil, He first was in turmoil for us; when we die, He first died for us; when He first resurrected and ascended, we now too will resurrect and ascend to be with Him forevermore. So I take heart.

All of Humanity in Christ

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The incarnation (homoousion) implies that all of humanity is re-created in the image of God, insofar that Christ is the second and greater Adam. In other words, the incarnation works from the reality that Jesus is the image of God (Col. 1:15) for us, and as such as He assumes our humanity as His own, He re-creates and exalts humanity in His humanity for us; just as His humanity is archetypal humanity, such that what it means to be genuinely human before God, is who Jesus is for us in His vicarious humanity. This presents us with what might be termed a Christological objectivism. That is, that whether or not humanity consciously affirms the ground of their [human] being, whether or not they affirm that they are images of the image of God in Christ, they are indeed such. This implies that God is for the whole world in His free election for us in Jesus Christ. This says, that God’s life for the world is determinative, whether we acknowledge it or not. So, in this frame, the Christian Gospel is necessarily an inclusive reality, insofar that the basis for what it means to be human before God is the same for the Christian and the non-Christian alike. The difference between the former and the latter is that the former repents and acknowledges that this is the case, whereas the latter rebels and fights against their very being, their very salvation in Jesus Christ. This rebellion, of course, results in untold chaos and destruction as we see evinced all around us. But what remains the case is that all of humanity is held and funded by God’s grace to be for us rather than against us. The first Adam, whose fallen humanity yet remains in the remnants of these fallen bodies of ours, remains nonetheless. The Christian, because they actively have the Holy Spirit present in their lives, have the resurrection power of Christ, to resist the desires of the first Adam; those who remain in rebellion to their life in Christ (non-Christians), remain enslaved to the first Adam’s desires and affections, driven by his typologically fallen spirit of self-incurved delight and self-actualization. But the objective reality remains: all of humanity, insofar as Christ is that for us, is held in God’s image, God’s humanity for the world in Jesus Christ.

The Vicarious Humanity of Christ as the Deus Dixit ‘God has spoken’ For Us: Against the Dualism of the ‘Latin Heresy’

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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.

But that Sounds like Arminianism; that Sounds Like Universalism: Barth’s Relational-Universalism Funded by His Actualism

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George Hunsinger offers six helpful motifs in order to grasp the way that Karl Barth maneuvers in his theological developments. One of those, and significantly, is Barth’s so-called actualism. In this post we will see what that entails for Barth, according to Hunsinger; and then see an example of that from Barth, in his Church Dogmatics, as that pertains to human agency in salvation vis-à-vis a doctrine of Christ conditioned election. In other words, the question of “freewill” in salvation will be viewed from the vantage point of Barth’s unique framing of these things through his particular deployment of an actualistic understanding of being in becoming in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

Hunsinger writes the following in regard to Barth’s actualism:

“Actualism” is the motif which governs Barth’s complex conception of being and time. Being is always an event and often an act (always an act whenever an agent capable of decision is concerned). The relationship between divine being and human being is one of the most vexed topics in Barth interpretation, and one on which the essay at hand hopes to shed some light. For now let it simply be said, however cryptically, that the possibility for the human creature to act faithfully in relation to the divine creator is thought to rest entirely in the divine act, and therefore continually befalls the human creature as a miracle to be sought ever anew.1

Fittingly the aforementioned broaches both the divine and human sides of the soteriological complex. That is, humanity’s relationship to God, in a God-world / Creator-creature combine, is given its full measure by way of up-pointing the fact that without the Creator unilaterally becoming what humanity was always already intended to be vis-à-vis God, that the possibility for humanity to elevate to such altitudes would always remain the great impossibility. Thus, God’s intervention, His invasion into our lives, His disruption into the fallen, His irruption of our self-possessed selves is required; typically, when God does something so sui generis, so apocalyptic, so unexpected and against the grain of natural observation, we come to call this: miracle! As such, Barth’s actualism entails the idea that God has already decisively acted for us, by becoming us, that the impossible possibility might become possible, and actual, in His humanity for us. This is the unilateral nature of Barth’s motif of actualism as that pervades his total theological project.

In my current reading of the CD I came across a clear example of how Barth’s actualism informs his understanding of human agency in salvation. This evinces a clairvoyant picture of how an actualized humanity, in Christ’s humanity, funds the way that Barth thinks about the possibility for humans simpliciter to say Yes (or No) to what is in fact the reality of humanity before God. That is, humanity is determined by the humanity of God in Jesus Christ. Here Barth writes about people who hear the Word of God proclaimed to them, about them, as that it shaped by the measure of what humanity actually is. The question is whether or not individual people will submit to their new humanity in Christ, or for some inscrutable reason (for such is the love of the darkness) continue to reject the Yes of God for them in Jesus Christ. So Barth,

The promise says to those who hear or read it; Thou mayest not hear or read at this point something said about another. Thou art not in the audience, but in the centre of the stage. This is meant for thee. Thou art “this” individual. Thou art isolated from God, and therefore a godless man. Thou art threatened. And yet thou standest indeed under a wholly new determination. It was for thee that Jesus Christ Himself bore the divine rejection in its real and terrible consequences. Thou art the one who has been spared from enduring it. And it is for thee that Jesus Christ is the elect man of God and arrayed in the divine glory. Eternal life and fellowship with God await thee. Jesus Christ died and rose for thee. It is thou art elect with Him and through Him. And now that all this has been said to thee, it is the event of what thou for thy part shalt say and do (or not say, and not do) which decides whether the ancient curse will again be laid on thee with what is said, or the eternal blessing will come on thee in utter newness. In and with that which thou dost now say or do (or not say and not do), thou must and shalt give answer to that which has been said to thee, and either way (persisting in thy ungodliness or turning thy back upon it, for thy salvation or thy destruction) confirm its truth.2

Some might say this sounds like Arminianism redivivus. But this would miss the reality of Barth’s functional actualism. What Barth is saying is that salvation has been exhaustively realized without remainder in Jesus Christ. As such, salvation isn’t something waiting for your approval or mine, it isn’t something with potency waiting to be actualized. For Barth, salvation has already been fully actualized in God’s Yes for humanity in Jesus Christ’s Yes and election to become human for us. Some will say this sounds like universalism. It is, but because of God’s freedom, it isn’t a fatalistic universalism; instead, it is a universalism that is circumscribed by the life of God in Christ, which necessarily entails that what He does has universal consequences. But this is different than a deterministic or decretal universalism in the sense that by way of ‘actualism’ the question under consideration isn’t an abstract humanity, but one that has always already been in relation to its Father, the Creator. So, it is a relational-universalism conditioned by the Son’s primal and cosmic relationship to the Father by the Spirit. In this sense, the logic of Barth’s actualism as applied to salvation is universalistic. In the sense that the Son-Father/ -by Holy Spirit relationship is all that there actually is. Grasp this, and you’re on your way. Pax Vobiscum 

 

1 George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16-18.

2 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §35 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 111.Â