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.
Category Archives: Vicarious Humanity
All of Humanity in Christ
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 Godâs 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 Godâs 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 Adamâs 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 Godâs image, Godâs 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’
Jesus is both the object and subject of Godâs salvation for the world, for us. It is from this ground, from the realization that we are participants with Christâs 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 (âunion with Christâ), 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 âLatin heresy.â He associates this dualistic heresy with the neo-Platonic theology of Augustine. It is Augustineâs 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 Godâs vicarious life for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ. In other words, they think in terms of the âelectâ and âreprobate,â 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 âperfector of natureâ 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 âessentialâ (by Godâs free election for that to be so) to Godâs life, to Godâs life of Immanuel, âGod with us,â 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 âgood works,â 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 donât 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 dĂ©nouement to this sense of abstraction from Godâs 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 Godâs 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 meâ (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 (áŒÏÏÎ·ÎłáœžÏ Îșα᜶ ÏΔλΔÎčÏÏÎźÏ) 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 âhe that dwelleth in the secrete place of the most High,â and abides âunder the shadow of the Almighty,â who says to the Lord: âMy refuge and my fortress: my God, in whom I will trustâ (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 Christâborn a man for us, dying for us, risen for us, reigning for us in the glory of Godâis 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 Christianâs stance before God. It isnât something that comes along and perfects a presumably âpure nature.â The new covenant basis for the Christianâs stance before God is, indeed, Godâs 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 isnât left as an orphan wallowing around in their own muck and wonder, striving to find the Holy Ground of Godâs 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 âaddsâ 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, itâs as if they have never imagined the type of theological universe, among the Patristics and others, described for us vis-Ă -vis the implications of the New Testament realities. I must admit such diatribing becomes exhausting rather quickly. Iâd say itâs time for people to move onto meatier things, and abandon things like the âLatin heresy,â 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, âGod has spoken.â
[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
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 Barthâs 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-Ă -vis a doctrine of Christ conditioned election. In other words, the question of âfreewillâ in salvation will be viewed from the vantage point of Barthâs 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 Barthâs actualism:
âActualismâ is the motif which governs Barthâs 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, humanityâs 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-Ă -vis God, that the possibility for humanity to elevate to such altitudes would always remain the great impossibility. Thus, Godâs 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, Barthâs 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 Barthâs 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 Barthâs actualism informs his understanding of human agency in salvation. This evinces a clairvoyant picture of how an actualized humanity, in Christâs 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 âthisâ 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 Barthâs functional actualism. What Barth is saying is that salvation has been exhaustively realized without remainder in Jesus Christ. As such, salvation isnât something waiting for your approval or mine, it isnât something with potency waiting to be actualized. For Barth, salvation has already been fully actualized in Godâs Yes for humanity in Jesus Christâs Yes and election to become human for us. Some will say this sounds like universalism. It is, but because of Godâs freedom, it isnât 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 âactualismâ the question under consideration isnât 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 Sonâs primal and cosmic relationship to the Father by the Spirit. In this sense, the logic of Barthâs 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 youâre on your way. Pax VobiscumÂ
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
Leithart and Torrance on the Primordiality of the Virgin Conception as New Humanity
She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.â All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
  âBehold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuelâ (which means, God with us). -Matthew 1:21-23
Peter Leithart offers some important insight on the significance of the Virgin Birth of the Messiah, Jesus. It has nothing to do with sinlessness, per se; and everything to do with something deeper than that: with what it means to be genuinely human before God. This impacts our sinful statuses, indeed, but the frame, exegetically understood, isnât about sinlessness; the frame goes to an antecedent reality, and what it means to be genuinely human before God. This is the significance of the incarnation of God in the womb of Mary: it is only the sort of work that the Creator God, who is Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, can accomplish.
Matthewâs point is different. He says nothing about Jesusâ sinlessness here. The emphasis is on Jesus as the Deliverer from sin, not on Jesusâ own freedom from sin. This episode is framed as part of a creation story. Like 1:1, verse 18 uses the word âgenesisâ (ÎłÎΜΔÏÎčÏ, translated âbirthâ). In this creation context, the references to the Holy Spirit (vv. 18, 20) allude back to Genesis 1:2. Mary is the âearthâ over which the heavenly Spirit hovers to form a new creation. Joseph rising from sleep to take his wife reminds us of Adam in the garden (Genesis 2:18-25), taking Mary as his wife just as Adam took the newly created Eve as his wife.
This virgin birth is thus a sign of Godâs new initiative, of Godâs new creation, which begins with the creation of the new Man, Jesus. Our salvation does not comeâit cannot comeâfrom inside humanity. We are not capable of saving ourselves. God has to come in from the outside if we are going to be saved. We cannot repair the damage of sin or construct a new creation by our own initiative, by our own reproduction, by our own expertise or power. The virgin birth passes a judgment on all human efforts at self-salvation, all our prideful pretense that we can put the world right through political or technological or educational means. If the world is going to be put to right, God must enter the world from the outside, because everything that comes from within humanity is corrupted and weak.
We can also note Isaiahâs and Matthewâs use of the name Immanuel, âGod with us.â The virgin birth means that Jesus is God with us, God in human flesh, God who has taken on human nature to be with His people and to save us. The virgin birth thus tells us something about the nature of Christ. It is not as if Joesph and Mary had a son who later became the Son of God. It is not as if there as a pre-existing human being who was later infused with Godness. Rather, the virgin conception and birth shows that Jesus only exists as the humanity of the Son of God. There is not even a single moment when the humanity of Jesus exists by itself. It is always, from the moment of conception, the humanity of the Son of God. It is Godâs humanity. And this means that Jesus really is God-with-us, God near us, God entered into human nature, into human history, in the fullest possible sense. There is no distance between God and Jesus, not ever for a single second. Donald Macleod has written, âGod was involved in a peculiarly direct and intimate way in the creation of his humanity. To deny the virgin birth and introduce instead human sexual activity is to distance God unacceptably from the production of the Holy One.â To touch the humanity of Jesus is to touch the humanity of God. To see and hear Jesus is to see and hear God in human flesh. Because of the Virgin Conception and Birth, Jesus truly is, in the most direct way possible, both God and with us.1
T.F. Torrance fills out the richness that Leithart has identified for us, and in concert with that; but with an application of the analogy of the virgin birth to the possibility for âsaving faith,’ Torrance writes,
By that we are guided to think and given to understand something of our own salvation and recreation. As in the annunciation of the word to Mary, Christ the Word himself became flesh, so in the enunciation of the gospel, we surrender in like manner to Christ the Word now made flesh, and there takes place in us the birth of Jesus, or rather, we are in a remarkable way given to share through grace in his birth and to share in the new creation in him. That is the Christian message â the Christmas message. It is not of our self-will or free-will that we are saved and born anew from above. âBut to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.â Here there is a âbecomeâ dependent on the âbecomeâ of âthe Word become fleshâ, grounded in it and derivative from it. What happened once and for all, in utter uniqueness in Jesus Christ, happens in every instance of rebirth into Christ, when Christ enters into our hearts and recreates us. Just as he was born from above of the Holy Spirit, so we are born from above of the Holy Spirit through sharing in his birth. Just as in the birth of Jesus there was no preceding action on our part, or human co-operation, such as the co-operation between a human father and a human mother, just as there was no prior human activity there, so in our salvation and in our knowledge of God there is no a priori, no human presupposition, no Pelagian, semi-Pelagian or synergistic activity.2
Thematically, both Torrance and Leithart see the primordiality of the virgin birth as the event sui generis; of the sort that only an otherworldly reality, extra nos, could conceive. In order for salvation to actualistically obtain for all of humanity, the particular humanity of God graciously invaded the crust of the broken human body and offered His primal life, the Bread of Life for the world, in the humble womb of a backwater country-girl named, Mary. By this move of God, this âhovering,â humanity came to be humanity once again, the moment the Spirit conceived the humanity of the Son out of the âseed of the woman.â He inspired this âseed,â the womanâs seed, the day that He took woman from the rib of the first Adam, in preparation for the parousia of the second and Greater Adam for whom the world was created. It is from the miracle, the protological first, and the eschatological second, that the Spirit of God brought reconciliation between God and humanity, as that elected reality was given actual/temporal flesh in the Virgin Conception. MagnificantÂ
1 Peter J. Leithart, Matthew Through New Eyes: Volume One: Jesus as Israel (Louisiana, Monroe: Athanasius Press, 2017), loc. 801, 810, 817 kindle.
2 Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 100-02.
Augustine and TF Torrance in Deified Rapprochement?
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the 
world because of sinful desire. -II Peter 1.3-4
The above passage is the locus classicus for many a Patristic theologian, in regard to articulating a doctrine of theosis vis-Ă -vis salvation. But typically, this articulation is only reserved for theologians of the âEasternâ persuasion; the Westerners are often left out. Indeed, the primary Latin theologian, the progenitor of all that is holy in the West, St. Augustine himself, is painted as someone who suffered from this lacuna of theosis in his soteriological oeuvre. But as, David Vincent Meconi has iterated: â… Augustine far outpaces any other Latin patristic writer in his use of the technical term deificare and its cognates.â1 Meconi writes further,
Augustine was unique among the Church Fathers in arguing that the human person was the only creature brought into the world incompletely. Whereas the other days of creation receive an âand it was good,â Augustineâs very careful reading of Scripture alerted him to the fact that God does not stamp the sixth day with its own exclusive declaration, âesset bonum,â but instead on the sixth day God overlooks all things together and declares that all things together (cuncta) are very good (cf. Gen 1:31). As such, the day on which humans are created is still incomplete, pointing to something beyond itself. Adam is thus presented as âforeshadowing another something still to comeâ (Gn. litt. 3.24; CSEL 28.92). This is how Augustine accounts for the divine dynamism inherent in the human soul; although created naturally good, the imago Dei still longs to be like God, and in Adamâs very humanity, how that will be accomplished is foreshadowed.
This desire of a copy to be like its paradigmatic archetype was something Augustine had worked out very early on. In his Solilooquia (386â87) he famously admits to wanting to know nothing more than âGod and the soul,â and the two meet in his subsequent discussion on the imago Dei where Augustine cleverly depicts himself [A] talking to reason personified [R]:
R: Does it not seem to you that your image in a mirror wants, in a way, to be you and is false because it is not?
A: That certainly seems so.
R: Do not all pictures and replicas of that kind and all artistsâ works of that type strive to be that in whose likeness they are made?
A: I am completely convinced that they do
(sol. 2.9.17; Paffenroth 2000, 72-73; cf. c. Acad. 3.17.39).
This move is essential to understand. Deifying union with God for Augustine is not the abolishing of human nature but its only true fulfillment. The heart is inquietum outside the divine life for which it has been created. Sin depersonalizes and destroys. Growing in likeness with God restores the otherwise fragmented self. âI shudder inasmuch as I am unlike him, yet I am afire with longing because I am like himâ . . . . The doctrine of the imago Dei allows Augustine to explain deification as the consummation of all human impulse and agency, the copyâs full share in its model, the final rest for which every human person is created.2
I wanted to point this up because, often, TF Torrance, my homeboy and teacher, is known for his critique of Augustineâs theology, in general, which he identifies with what he calls the Latin Heresy. This heresy, for Torrance, is simply the idea that Augustine suffered too much from his commitment to neo-Platonism, and the inherent dualism (between the eternal and the temporal / the spiritual-material) therein. But in relief, Meconi might help provide a constructive point of rapprochement between Torrance and Augustine; at least when it comes to thinking soteriologically about a God-human relation.
1 David Vincent Meconi, S.J., âAugustineâs doctrine of deification,â in David Vincent Meconi, S.J. and Eleonore Stump eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 208.
2 Ibid., 212-13.
Ecce Homo, Jesus is the Man! He was First Human for Us that We Might Be Human in Him
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the lawof the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. âPsalm 1.1-2
I once read a biblical exegete, H. A. Ironside, ironically, identify âthe manâ in Psalm 1 to be none other than, Jesus Christ. This interpretive tradition goes way back into theological 
history. Some might think this is just Barth, or Torrance, or maybe some Germans in the modern period, like Emil Brunner or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who emphasized the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; the Son of Man; the Son of David. But we see these emphases found in Calvin, Luther, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Nicene theology in general. Here is a succinct statement on this interpretive tradition provided by a German, and teacher of mine, named, Helmut Thielicke:
This character of the imago Dei as an alienum, something alien, is supremely brought out by the fact that as a proprium, as a true ontic possession, an attribute in the strict sense, it is ascribed solely and exclusively to Jesus Christ. It is is ascribed to him as a proprium, not merely in the sense that in him alone it has remained intact, but above all in the sense that it is present in him. In the absolute sense Jesus Christ is the only man. More precisely, he is the only man who fulfills humanity; he does not possess humanity merely in the negative mode, as an unrealized possibility. We can say this, of course, only if we at once add the safeguard that âhumanityâ cannot here be understood as an a priori concept expressing a knowledge of man enjoyed prior to and apart from Jesus Christ. If it were so understood, then Jesus Christ would be understood as merely fulfilling, or having to fulfill, an idea of humanity deriving from our own sovereignly creative consciousness. Our thinking must take the very opposite course. We must first learn from Christ and perceive in himâecce homo!âwhat man is. We must first learn from his divine likeness wherein the divine likeness of man consists. For manâs divine likeness is fulfilled only in Christ, in our participating in his divine likeness.1
This changes everything! There is no humanity prior to Christâs humanity. There is no imago Dei outwith the Deus Incarnandus, the eternal Son, to be incarnate for us. He was not created in our image, but we His! When you encounter theologies that attempt to think of an abstract humanity, as we find in classical Calvinisms and Arminianisms, as that is provided for by their respective doctrines of election and reprobation, you ought to run. Jesus, the elect of God for us, the Anointed One, He is the Man, Christ Jesus, the mediator between God and humanity in his hypostatic unioned person. This is in fact, the Word of the Lord; in flesh and blood.
Niceno-Predestination: God’s Pre-destination for us in Jesus Christ
If Christians knew Nicene theology, they could avoid the oft combatant atmosphere that typifies much of Western (and especially popular) theological discourse. When it comes to 
the locus of predestination / election-reprobation the divisiveness amplifies to an all-out battle cry. Because Christians, in the main, donât realize that they can (and ought to) think all things from the grammar developed at the Niceno-Constantinopolitano-Chalcedony ecumenical Church councils, namely, the homoousios, the idea that the Son enfleshed in Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human in His singular person, they devolve into an abstract and discursive mode of theological (or atheological) reasoning. When this mode of âtheological reasoningâ is applied to the question of predestination we end up with a bi-polar malaise that results in something like the âCalvinists V the Arminians.â In other words, when people come to think that their only alternative for thinking about the complex of predestination is to defer to the philosophers, said thinkers end up thinking abstractly about Godâs election (or not) of particular individual people. This is partly because the philosophersâ intellectual ambit is limited by their flatlander experience of the cosmos; that is, the philosopher, no matter how genius, can never gain the God-view vista required for accessing a reality that is purely grounded in Deus revelatus (God revealed). And so, the Christians operating out of this intellectual impoverishment end up thinking about an absolutely heavenly reality, grounded in Godâs inner-triune-life, from non-heavenly categories. As such they donât think of humanity from Godâs pre-destined and elect humanity for them in Jesus Christ.
Karl Barth summarizes what I take to be the theo-logical outcome of taking Nicene theology to its reductive conclusion with reference to a doctrine of predestination:
The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and the elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally Godâs election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God.1
For Barth, and for the implications of Nicene theology, when we think of predestination, the referent isnât you and me, at a first order level; the referent is Godâs life for us, as He freely elects our humanity for Himself in the Son. In this sense, a doctrine of predestination is radically re-oriented, such that the battle of âwho is elect,â as if individual people were under consideration, is taken off the table; full stop. This is not to say that individual people arenât entailed by Godâs pre-destinating of Himself to be for us (pro nobis); indeed, it is to say, alternatively, that all of humanity has been invited to the âbanqueting table of God.â It is to say that all of humanity has a concrete place in the Kingdom of God in Christ just because Godâs Kingdom is grounded in its lively center in Jesus Christ; who just so happens to be garbed with our humanity. The question remains open though, will a person repent and say yes from Christâs Yes and amen for them, or not? In other words, a Nicene informed doctrine of predestination says that all of humanity is already elected for God, because God has already elected Himself for them in Jesus Christ.
The âclassicalâ retort to this, the one funded by a heavy-handed philosophical account, attended by its usual Aristotelian theory of causation and substance, might be that the Nicene account I am describing results in an undercut of Godâs sovereignty; and thus, a notion of Divine double-jeopardy is injected into the mix. They might say this because they operate with what Barth calls the decretum absolutum (absolute decree) logic of what Thomas Torrance calls logico-causal necessitarian determinism. This is the idea that God has baked certain necessary features of causation, such as His primary and then secondary causation into the created order, which requires that certain outcomes obtain one way or the other per Godâs unrevealed and arbitrary decree. On this account, this is all to make sure that God remains Sovereign, which entails His eternality, impassibility, immutability, and other characteristics.
When such thinking encounters my type of thinking on predestination it simply cannot countenance the idea that an individual human agent might have the means to âthwartâ Godâs predetermined predestination of all things. But of course, if this theory of causation is rejected from the get-go, as it should be, then that sort of dilemma never obtains. I clearly reject the decretum absolutum logic, and instead think from the filial-logic that funds the orthodox theology developed in the Nicene advancements.
Conclusion
A doctrine of Predestination ought to be thought from the consubstantial natures (both Divine and human) of the Theoanthropos Godman, Jesus Christ. If this is done predestination will not be thought of from an abstract center in ourselves, but instead from the concrete center of Godâs free life for us in Jesus Christ. Pre-destination’s referent will be understood to be God, at a first order level, and our relationship to Him, as human beings, will only be thought from within the tremendum of the gracious movement of God for us, and us for God, as that is actualized in the One Man, Jesus Christ. This is the genuinely Christian confessional understanding of a doctrine of predestination. If you check it against Holy Scripture, as you always shouldâespecially as good Protestant Christiansâyou will find that not only does the Christological and Trinitarian grammar, developed in the Nicene theology, coheres with the Scriptural witness, but that when that is applied to our current doctrine of predestination (and any other doctrine worth its Christian salt), that in corollary fashion, it also coheres with the biblical categories.
At the end: Jesus is Godâs predestination for the world. This is the revelational doctrine of pre-destination. If this is accepted the typical theatrics that surrounds this doctrine dissipate into the inferno of Godâs white-hot love for the world. We can get back to focusing on Jesus rather than ourselves this way. Oh, what a thought!
1 Barth, CD II/2:1.Â
A Reflection on Galatians 6:14-16: The World Crucified to Me, and I to the World
14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. âGalatians 6:14-16
This has got to be one of my favorite passages of Holy Scripture. The idea of the world being crucified to me, and I to the world could not underscore the Primacy of Jesus Christ more! The amount of concrete hope this gives me is unsurpassable. When I look at the world, like the Psalmist, there is nothing of this world [system] that I desire. To know that the very ground of my life is rooted in the new creation of God’s vicarious humanity for me in Jesus Christ gives me hope inexpressible. To know that this ‘Israel of God,’ Jesus Christ, is the ground of all reality, and that His life, ever anew and afresh, breaks into the surly bonds of this dying creation is more hopeful than anything this world has to offer. And that’s precisely the point: this world has nothing to offer me except pain, suffering, and death. It is only the new creation, the new humanity of God for us in Christ wherein this old world under an unwanted futility springs to life. It is as the hope of tomorrow disrupts the anguish of today, that today comes to be in-spired by its full redemption in the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. This primal reality, that is the resurrected and ascended humanity of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ, gives this weary soul a hope and power to live life from that is unsearchable in its wonder.
None of this reality is contingent upon what I have done for God; it is purely dependent upon what He has unilaterally done for me, for us in Jesus Christ. Again, this is the hope; that is that this old world has already been put to rights; that this world of old has been put to death and raised anew in the re-created humanity of Jesus Christ. This is the hope, the reality that this world could never imagine; and even if it could start to it would never have the power to make it real. At base, it is this primal event in Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection that puts the world on notice that the only place where real human life happens is in its death, burial, and resurrection in Jesus Christ. It requires eyes of faith to see this; for the Christian walks by the faith of Christ, not the sight of the heart that is darkened beyond feeling. I live my life by this faith; its touchstone is the smiling face of Jesus Christ shining through this broken vessel that I typically know as my body. ‘For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (I Corinthians 3:11). The Christian life is purely about God’s work for us, and none of our works for Him; this is God’s grace, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s work for us, just as He is God’s eternal Logos who freely elected our humanity for Himself that we might come to participate in His Divine Life of Triune intimacy. This is what the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world comes to: that is, the indestructible life of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah; the eternal Son of the Father in the bond of Holy Love breathed over by the koinonial refreshment of the Spirit. This is my inhabitatio Dei. To God Alone be the GloryÂ
Holy Communion: Remembering that Human Life is in Christ’s Blood
The late, John Webster, wasnât just a Christian theologian par excellence; he was also a pastor. The following comes from part of a sermon he gave on Maundy Thursday. A major thrust of his sermon was to remind the parishioners that Holy Communion is not something that re-enacts or re-presents the death of Jesus Christ; indeed, as Webster presses, the Eucharist is a memorial event wherein we, as the Church, remember the already finished work (in the perfect tense: my insight) that Jesus alone accomplished once and for all in the givenness of His life for the world. As Webster presses this point, and rightfully so, he offers a beautiful description of what, in the history has been called: the mirifica commutatio (âwonderful exchangeâ). Here Webster is underscoring the idea that what God in Christ has done, has been done; indeed, what has been done God alone could accomplish on our behalf. I found Websterâs rendition of the âwonderful exchangeâ edifying, and so I want to share it with you now.Â
What was done there and then? What is it about the Lordâs death that the Eucharist proclaims or testifies? Isaiah, whose Servant Song provides the bass line of our thoughts this Holy Week, tells us that the wounding and bruising and chastising of the Servant is âfor our transgressionsâ (53:5). The cross of Jesus, celebrated in Holy Communion, is the climactic event in which God acts to win the world back from the darkness and misery of sin. In some way, the death of this one changes the entire course of human history; it intercepts and breaks the whole course of human wickedness; henceforth, because of what this man does and suffers, nothing can be the same. Why not? Because in this little scrap of an event one Friday afternoon, this unremarkable bit of human evil, God takes our place. He enters without reserve into the reality of our situationâinto our situation, that is, as those who have damned ourselves, who have cut ourselves off from life and put ourselves into hell, all because we made up the lie that we can be human without God.Â
But God does not leave us in the hell we have made for ourselves. In the person of Jesus his Son and Servant, he comes to us; he takes on his own back the full weight of our alienation and estrangement; he freely submits to the whole curse of our sin. He takes our sin upon him, and in so doing he takes it away, fully, finally, and conclusively. And of all thatâof that miracle of grace on Good Fridayâthis evening is a memorial, the memorial of that his precious death.Â
That was what was done. It was done not by us, but by God himself in the person of his Servant and Son. And it was done by God alone. Because reconciliation is thus Godâs work, Godâs exclusive work, then this sacrament in which we remember the cross of Christ is also Godâs work. Here, in this assembly at this table, God is at work. And Godâs work here is to present to us, to make present to us, what took place on Good Friday. We donât make Good Friday real by re-enacting it, or by thinking and feeling about it. God in this sacrament declares to us what Good Friday made true: that he is our reconciler; that sin is finished business; that we can repent because God has forgiven; that the promise acted out in the death of Jesus stands for all time and for each human person. In this memorial, God turns us backward; but he also makes present to us the limitless power of what the Son of God suffered. The God who was at work there and then is at work here and now, proclaiming to us his promise of cleansing, acceptance and peace.1Â
The Apostle Paul describes the âwonderful exchangeâ this way: âFor you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become richâ (II Cor. 8.9). Webster brings out so many rich insights in his telling of what in fact unfolded in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The following clause, in particular stands out to me: âas those who have damned ourselves, who have cut ourselves off from life and put ourselves into hell, all because we made up the lie that we can be human without God.â This is the depth dimension of the Evangel. What it genuinely means to be human is to be human before (in and from) God. To declare that âweâ can be human devoid of God, devoid of a coram Deo life, is indeed: Hell! Â
Holy Communion is to remind us, moment by moment, that we are not our own; and that if we persist, indeed, perdure in the lie that we can be our âown man or woman,â that we will only dissolve into an abyss of hell. But Christ has entered into that deep abyss, and by the life which is in His blood, we can truly experience what it means to be human before God; indeed, to be human is to be in union and fellowship with God. This is who Jesus is for us, and what the Eucharist is to continuously remind us of until it is finally consummated in the eschaton as that finally comes in the Eschatos of Godâs life for us in Jesus Christ. Maranatha Â
1 John Webster, Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 61-2, Kindle Edition.