Category Archives: Vicarious

Salvation for All, but for Some: The Universality of God’s Grace, and the Particularity of Christ’s Faith in Salvation

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Okay, I don’t know how else to do this, so I am going to transcribe George Hunsinger on Karl Barth and Barth’s understanding of the dialectic between the universality of grace, and the particularity of existential faith (for individual homelesshumanpeople); and how all of this reflects a kind of tension latent within the pages of the New Testament itself. So this gets at what I am often asked in regard to how I, as an evangelical Calvinist, can sustain a view that believes in universal atonement, but not universal salvation (or Christian universalism). This quote is quite lengthy, but I want something of substance to refer my readers to; and I also want there to be enough context present so you the reader can appreciate (even if you end up disagreeing somehow!) how Barth reconceived of this ongoing problem for the classical theological approach (and I mean the debate between the classical Calvinists and Arminians). I think most people who are classical (indeed all of them) will be dissatisfied with Barth’s approach, because Barth does not give in, and thus resists the human philosophical urge to provide explanation in the kind of classical scholastic kind of rounding off way of things. Let’s get started (caveat: in the future, if anyone wants to challenge how I can maintain the universality and efficacy of saving grace [so called], and the particularity and efficacy of saving faith [so called] the only way I will engage with you around that, is if you actually read this whole post first).

Here is Hunsinger on Barth and the dialectic of the universality of grace and the particularity of faith:

. . . just as the inexplicability of the mode by which the events are related is taken as a sign that in and of itself the created order has no access to ultimate reality.

For reasons such as these, theology must content itself with description and resist the temptation to explanation. In the case of such events it must content itself with describing the mysterious facticity of the that, which facticity intrinsically excludes the possibility of explaining the corresponding how. It is in just such terms that Barth disavows the possibility of explaining the mode by which the events of grace and faith are related. The patter of this relation—its ordered and differentiated unity—can be described, but its mode defies explanation. The pattern is a conjunction of opposites and therefore of irreconcilably antithetical assertions. The unity of grace and faith occurs in such a way that grace is always universal and unconditional in its objective efficacy and validity, yet at the same time faith is always necessary and indispensable in its existential receptivity and freedom. A theology which could explain how this unity occurs as it does or how it occurs as a unity would be explaining the modus operandi of the Holy Spirit.

How gladly we would hear and know and say something more, something more precise, something more palpable concerning the way in which the work of the Holy Spirit is done! How does it really happen that the history of Jesus Christ, in which the history of all human beings is virtually enclosed and accomplished, is actualized, in the first instance only in the history of a few, of a small minority within the many of whom this cannot so far be said, but even in the history of the few typically for the history of the many? How can it really be—the question of the Virgin in Luke 1:34—that there is an actualizing of this history in other human histories? By what ways does God bring it about that in the perverted hearts, in the darkened knowledge and understanding, in the rebellious desires and strivings of sinful  human beings—for that is what even the few are—there takes place this awakening, in which they can know Jesus Christ as theirs and themselves as his? How is there really born in them the new human being who knows and recognizes and confesses Jesus Christ? How can there be in history such a thing as Christianity, and human beings who seriously want to be Christians? (IV/1, 648-49 rev., emphasis added)

It is as important and unavoidable to formulate such questions, Barth contends, as it is to leave them unanswered, except for the obviously indispensable appeal to the miraculous and mysterious mode which informs the work of the Holy Spirit as confessed by faith. “The confession credo in Spiritum Sanctum does not tell us anything concerning this How. It merely indicates the fact all this does take place, did take place and continually will take place” (IV/1, 649). Moreover, the evident reticence of the creed at this point is simply a reflection of the reticence of the New Testament itself. “Even the New Testament . . . does not really tell us anything about the How, the mode of his working” (IV/1, 649). Beyond simply describing and asserting the facticity of the Holy Spirit’s working, all questions as to its explanation are consistently repelled. To try to go beyond the New Testament at this point would obviously, Barth believes, be futile.

Barth therefore resolves to work within the terms of this inexplicability. The pattern of dialectical inclusion is used, as indicated, to describe (but not explain) how the history of each and every human being is objectively enclosed in that of Jesus. That same pattern is then used in conjunction with the pattern of actualism to describe (but not explain) how the history of Jesus is in turn objectively included in that of each and every human being. The objective moment of salvation is thereby understood as being at once fully actualized once and for all and yet not encapsulated for imprisoned within its central and definitive form of temporal occurrence. Without compromising this central and definitive form, the objective moment as such assumes secondary and derivative form by actualizing itself in relation to the history of each and every human existence. The actualization of the objective moment of salvation in this twofold form (central and derivative) is (descriptively speaking) a condition for the possibility of its subjective actualization by faith. The existential moment of salvation is thereby understood as occurring entirely within the context established by the objective moment.

The existential moment may therefore not be spoken of as making the the [sic] objective moment real or concrete, as though the objective moment were somehow unreal or abstract as such until the moment of its existential appropriation (a commonplace but ultimately blasphemous way of speaking). Nor may the existential moment be spoken of as effecting a transition from being outside to being inside the objective moment, as though the objective moment did not already include each and every human existence within itself, or as though the existential moment could somehow contribute itself to the objective moment in such a way that the objective would otherwise be deficient. Nor, finally, may the existential moment be spoken of as effecting a transition from being potentially to being actually saved, as though the objective moment were not already in itself the real, valid, and efficacious actualization of salvation for the sake of all. Each of these mistaken ways of speaking makes the event of existential appropriation less incomprehensible and mysterious, Barth believes, than it actually is in its scriptural attestation.[1]

For Barth to think about grace and efficacious faith (saving) must be done through the mystery of godliness,

By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:

He who was revealed in the flesh,
Was vindicated in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Proclaimed among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Taken up in glory.[2]

There is no wiggle room for trying to construct causal concepts that are both foreign to the text of Scripture’s disclosure, and to the categories revealed in God’s Self revelation in Christ. The conditions and context is descriptively provided for in Christ, and the subsequent understandings of grace and faith therein; but, for Barth, there is no room to move beyond what ends up being a resounding tension between these two ontic and salvific realities; the tension is preserved by the christological tension present, itself, in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. We are left in a spot where we can engage in description, and attend to the implications of that as we can; but we have no warranted allowance to move beyond, in order to satisfy our sense of manageability and control in these matters.

As you read this accounting of Barth from Hunsinger, what should have stood out to you most prominently is the role that the vicarious humanity of Christ plays in this. Salvation is objective, actual, efficacious, and realized in Christ for us and with us, in his vicarious humanity. All that needed to be accomplished for salvation for the world (Jn. 3.16) and humanity, has already taken place in the humanity of Christ for all of us. If we want to posit, like classical Calvinism & Arminianism does, that salvation is only real and efficacious when the elect humanity (of individual people, in this account of things) appropriates salvation by faith, then we have just predicated the actualization and realization of salvation upon certain human beings instead of God (even though these human beings were unconditionally elected by God). But I hope you can see the problem with this. It abstracts God’s salvific work from his person in Christ, and makes an aspect of it contingent upon creation and human reception (even if it has been vouchsafed by an artificial, but necessary for this system, positing of an absolute decree of election and reprobation by God). This is a problem for various reasons, which we will have to tease out at a later date (but hopefully you can see how this is a problem on your own).

Blessings.

[1] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 113-14 [nook edition].

[2] I Timothy 3:16, NASB, Updated.

Knowledge of God: Avoiding Heresy for the Pew Sitters

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Remember that game chutes and ladders, you played as a kid, or maybe still do with your own kids (or  not). For some reason this game popped into my head when I was thinking about what it means to have a Christ conditioned churchpewsunderstanding of how we have knowledge of God. The rest of this post is simply going to be me thinking and conversating out loud.

I think the issue of dualism has got to be put to bed, and Thomas Torrance, as well as Karl Barth hammer this point home. The reality is, is that you as a human being and God as God are not in competition. There is no ladder high enough, no tower of Babel grand enough to reach the heavens. You aren’t trying to climb your way up to God, not in salvation, and not in knowledge of God. And yet, most people, most pew-sitters have been fed this non-stop for years and years; and so this way of thinking about God has become intuitive, to the point that to suggest something different might sound alien or even like sin. Surely, the pew-sitter and most of her pastors would never say such things; they would never say that they believe that they can climb their way up to God (this would be to deny faith alone, in Christ alone, by grace alone) in salvation. But, their informing theology demands this. If we don’t believe that our humanity—is grounded in Christ’s humanity—then necessarily we now are functioning with a dualist conception of how humanity relates to God, and we must now endeavor to build a bridge to God out of our own resources, even if we qualify our resources by saying they have been given to us by grace. We have now, at this point, functionally denied what is implicit to the ecumenical Church Council of Chalcedon, which in a nutshell is this:

(iv) The Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, which affirmed that in Jesus Christ there are two distinct natures in one person, and that in the one person of Christ they were hypostatically united ‘unconfusedly, incontrovertibly, indivisibly, inseparably’, or ‘without confusion, change, division or separation’. This was affirmed against the Eutychians and Monophysites. [Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation.]

And so we are operating in heresy, and we don’t even know it.

This is a rather hard topic to broach in a kind of accessible way, but I hope this is making some sort of sense for all of you pew-sitters out there. I am sure that you do not want to operate as a functional heretic, but you are if you don’t start thinking from what happened in the Incarnation of Christ (which is different than thinking about it or affirming it). This also gets into issues that orbit around theories of the atonement, but I will save that for another time.

This post is only simply intended to provoke more questions, than provide answers.

The Role of Imagination and Affections in Human Action and Christian Formation

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I am currently reading James K. A. Smith’s new book (the second volume following his first, Desiring the Kingdom) entitled: Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. At first I was leery, I was afraid that what, in reality Smith was imagineoffering is something like a virtue ethics (which is quite intellectualist in orientation). But to my welcoming, he is not; he is offering a kind of modified affective-literary rich liturgical anthropology as the basis for promoting a proper Christian understanding of spiritual formation and even critical cultural engagement. I was first put onto “affective” thinking by Ron Frost’s work, and his promotion of what he calls “Affective theology,” as he has retrieved that primarily from his PhD work on the Puritan Richard Sibbes, and the Augustinian anthropology that funded such an approach. I am happy to see that Smith is taking this kind of affective thinking and developing it even further, and by engagement with contemporary literary theory, neuro-science (which Frost would allude to often in his own work, in an incidental way), and some French theorists.

Now the above might sound somewhat obtrusive, or rather academic (and some of it is!); but Smith is aiming at providing a trajectory that is accessible for thoughtful pastors and lay people alike (he says so in the introduction of his book). With this in mind I wanted to whet your appetite by quoting a good summary of what is going on in Smith’s book, and offer a response to that afterwards. Here is Smith on the reality of affections and emotion (different from feeling, as he qualifies), and the role it plays in formation; whether that formation be actually into the image of Christ, or deformation into the tacit narratives and thus emotion-laden planes of reality:

Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. Moreover, because of this neglect and our stunted anthropology, we have failed to recognize the degree and extent to which secular liturgies do implicitly capitalize on our embodied penchant for storied formation. This becomes a way to account for Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism, and various stripes of egoisms. These isms have had all the best embodied stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies.

A proper response to this situation is to change our practice—to reactivate and renew those liturgies, rituals, and disciplines that intentionally embody the story of the gospel and enact a vision of the coming kingdom of God in such a way that they’ll seep into our bones and become the background for our perceptions, the baseline for our dispositions, and the basis for our (often unthought) action in the world. While the goal is renewed practice, we cannot simply return to a fabled past, nor can we simply impose foreign practices. In order to generate a desire to renew and reorient our practices, we do well to engage in reflection to help understand why this is needed. So while the goal is practical, the way there is theoretical…. The kinaesthetic link between story, the body, and the imagination is implicit in historic Christian wisdom about spiritual formation and liturgical practice. However, rather than merely excavate that from historical sources, in this chapter I will engage Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment as a catalyst for us to remember the incarnational, sacramental wisdom that is ours. No one has better mapped the interplay between the imagination, perception, the body, and narrative.[1]

This resonates, a little, with Thomas Torrance’s idea of tacit knowledge, which he appropriated from Michael Polyani. But as I was transcribing this quote from Smith, it dawned on me, a bit; what I think Smith is proposing in his liturgical anthropology is a mode of spirituality that becomes heavily bedded down in ecclesiology, and thus not primarily, Christology.

I think Smith might be onto something; I think the affections (or his “emotions”V. “feelings”) have something very important to say to us about how we process and engage with reality as embodied persons. But my concern, in the end is that this is not going to have the kind of Christ concentration — anthropologically — that Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth, for example, provide for us. My concern is that with all of the good intention, the focus will end up being on how we are able to manage and manipulate our surroundings, our liturgies, such that we have to master our domain through habitus (habiting or habituating) practices that are self derived or abstract from the vicarious humanity of Christ himself; i.e. which is apocalyptic, and breaks in on our lives moment by moment by the Spirit, afresh and anew unhampered by our intentionality.

Obviously the key here, once again, is to try and travel a path that does not so objectify human action, in God’s action in the Incarnation in Christ for us, that we lose any sense of responsibility and subjectivity that moves from us, ourselves. The key, I think, is to have a proper understanding of the relation between nature and grace; the latter being the reality that predicates a proper concursus between God and man — and that proper concurrence must be understood, by way of order and grounding, by happening first in Jesus Christ’s humanity with us. And we, by the same Holy Spirit, and grace, act and become from Christ and not just toward him.

Anyway, more to come …

[1] James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 39-41.

An Open [Instead of Shutdown] Theology of Grace and Election Funded by God in Christ: It is Good For All, Not Some, That’s What the Bible Says.

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This is an always an cantankerous subject among Christian theology and its students; the role between the objectivity of salvation accomplished by God in Jesus Christ, and the existential appropriation of that and inclusion in that (or not) by the human agent. Karl Barth offers the best way forward on this impasse (that will just not pass via classical and traditional attempts), by grounding both the objectivity and existential reality of salvation—surprise!—in the calvinist-vs-arminianvicarious humanity of Christ. With an emphasis on the universal scope of salvation, in Christ, Barth provides a better grounding (in a theological-anthropology and a Triune-shaped doctrine of God) for accessing this variegated conundrum that just won’t seem to let go for many a Christian thinker. But I think we ought to let this go, and rest in the vicarious humanity of Christ; and rest in the dialectic kind of tension that is present if and only if we follow a God who is dialogically present, and dynamically given, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here is how George Hunsinger comments on this in the theology of Karl Barth:

The history of every human being is seen as included in that of Jesus. The history of Jesus is taken as the center which establishes, unifies, and incorporates a differentiated whole in which the history of each human being as such is included. This act of universal inclusion is his accomplishment and achievement. He enacts our salvation as a gift which is valid and efficacious for all. The validity and efficacy of this gift cannot be denied without compromising (among other things) the absolutely unconditioned and therefore gratuitous character of divine grace in him. This denial would therefore be unjustifiable within the web of Christian (or biblically derived) beliefs. The inclusion of every human being’s history in that of Jesus is therefore described according to the pattern of dialectical inclusion.  No one is excluded from the validity and efficacy of what took place for our salvation in Jesus Christ. In his history is objectively included the history of each and all.

Conversely, the history of Jesus is viewed as included in that of every human being. Although this history and what it accomplishes occur in definite sequence in time and a definite location of place, they are not encapsulated in that time and place in an unqualified way. On the contrary, they are present, in a mysterious and differentiated way, and in ways known and as yet unknown, to the history of each and every human being as such. Just as their history is enclosed in his, so is his enclosed in theirs, with all its efficacy and validity. The continual, miraculous, and mysterious presence of his history (and therefore he himself to theirs (and therefore to themselves) cannot be denied without denying (among other things) his resurrection from the dead. Therefore his denial, too, would be unjustifiable within the web of Christian beliefs. The inclusion of Jesus’ history in that of everyone else’s is therefore described according to the pattern of actualism. The once-for-all event of Jesus’ history, without ceasing to such, reiterates itself so as to be present to the history of and each and every human being. In the history of each and all, his history is objectively included. [George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, 110-11. Nook]

Barth eludes the usual approach to this theological conundrum; indeed the point of entrance (a faulty presumption about the elect and reprobate) that leads to this as a theological conundrum. By seeing grace as the reality that predicates and grounds humanity, the humanity of God for us in Christ, it is impossible to deny its universal and ontological reality; if we do—as Barth would contend—then we would have to deny the mystery of God become human. It is not possible then to dissect creation, and humanity as its crown, into a sufficient and efficient mass; as if God’s grace in salvation is sufficient for all of creation, but only efficient for the particularly elect. If grace funds all of creation (as Romans 8:18ff requires), then it does. Barth allows the dialectic of Scripture to be truly dialectical in this regard; which then invites continued dialogical engagement with our Triune God. Barth’s theology of creation and grace does not shut down inquiry, but opens it up toward and from our Triune God who is full of mercy and grace.

Union With Christ: unio cum christo/with Marcus Johnson

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Our Thesis number Five from our edited book is this:

Election is christologically conditioned.

This follows on as a corollary from the thesis above. Christ’s work is perfect and requires no supplement, such as the faith of an individual. In forms of Classical Calvinism the subjective elements of salvation have tended to christjesuschrist.jpgdominate its theology so that an experimental predestination (syllogismus practicus) developed and faith was separated from assurance in an unhealthy manner as Christ was separated from his work. The resultant crises of faith and assurance threw believers back onto themselves and their own works for assurance, rather than onto Christ our perfect mediator and redeemer. Christ has been sanctified, and in his sanctification he has sanctified the elect in him. Believers find their subjective sanctification in Christ’s objective work, and not the other way round. This reflects the duplex gratia Calvin made so much about and yet contemporary Reformed theology has tended to separate—through union with Christ flows the twin benefits of justification and sanctification. 25

Thomas F. Torrance is instructive as he comments on Scottish Calvinist, John Craig’s approach to articulating what a christologically conditioned doctrine of election looks like; with a carnal and spiritual union providing its orientation:

Craig regarded election as bound up more with adoption into Christ, with union with him, and with the communion of the Spirit, than with an eternal decree. The union of people with Christ exists only within the communion of the redeemed and in the union they conjointly have with Christ the Head of the Church. . . . Union with Christ and faith are correlative, for it is through faith that we enter into union with Christ, and yet it is upon this corporate union with Christ that faith and our participation in the saving benefits or “graces” of Christ rest. John Craig held that there was a twofold union which he spoke of as a “carnal union” and a “spiritual union.” By “carnal union” he referred to Christ’s union with us and our union with Christ which took place in his birth of the Spirit and in his human life through which took place in his birth of the Spirit and in his human life through which he sanctifies us. The foundation of our union with Christ, then, is that which Christ has made with us when in his Incarnation he became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; but through the mighty power of the Spirit all who have faith in Christ are made flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. It is only through this union, through ingrafting into Christ by faith and through communion with him in his Body and Blood, that we may share in all Christ’s benefits—outside of this union and communion there is no salvation, for Christ himself is the ground of salvation. . . . 26 27

Thus election is grounded in a personal union with Christ through his “carnal union” with humanity in the Incarnation, and our “spiritual union” with him through his vicarious faith for us by the Holy Spirit. Christ, in this framework, is known to be the one who elects our humanity for himself; by so doing he takes our reprobation, wherein the “Great Exchange” inheres: “by his poverty we are made rich.”

24. Historical antecedents to such an approach in which a doctrine of God correctly shaped their doctrines of Christology and soteriology would include, amongst others, Richard St. Victor and John Duns Scotus. For both, Theology Proper was robustly Trinitarian, thus relational, personal, and pastoral.
25. See further in Johnson, chapter 9.
26. Torrance, Scottish Theology, 52–53.
27. See further in Habets, chapter 7.

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And I just read this in Marcus Johnson’s new book One With Christ (Johnson is a double contributor to our edited book as well):

Augustine opens his Confessions with one of the best-known passages in Christian literature: “For you [God] have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Calvin likewise affirms that the perfection of human happiness “is to be united with God.” Both were expressing a basic scriptural truth—the greatest need and desire (whether conscious or not) of human beings, fallen and estranged from God, is to be restored to the One who created us and loves us, and apart from whom we perish. This is precisely what our union with the God-man Jesus Christ accomplishes. The apostle John records various ways in which Jesus spoke of this reality: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (v. 11). Jesus speaks of including believers in the intimacy he has with his Father: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me” (17:22-23); “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (v. 26).

As staggering and incomprehensible as it may seem, our union with Christ is a union with the triune God, for Christ incorporates us into his relationship with his Father. And because Christ is identical in nature (homoousion) with the Father, to be united to the person of Christ (through his incarnate humanity) is to be united to the whole Christ, the One who is fully human and fully God in one person. As it turns out, the doctrine of the hypostatic union is more than mere christological ontology—it tells us that the One who took on our flesh unites that flesh indivisibly to his deity so that we experience fellowship with our Maker again. This is good news indeed!

For the Word of God is a divine nature even when in the flesh, and although he is by nature God, we are his kindred because of his taking the same flesh as ours. Therefore the manner of the fellowship is similar. For just as he is closely related to the Father and through their identity of nature the Father is closely related to him, so also are we [closely related] to him and he to us, in so far as he was made man. And through him as through a mediator we are joined to the Father. (Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John) [Marcus Peter Johnson, One With Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 42-3.]

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Union with Christ is a very central piece of the puzzle for the way we Evangelical Calvinists conceive of election and salvation in general. I hope you can see the significance of this through these offerings, and that the depth dimension of what it going on in God’s life in Christ, and thus in our lives in His, is given even that much more gravity as you contemplate the wealth of riches we all have been given in the wonderful exchange that has occurred in Christ’s life for us and with us.

I think Marcus’ section here really helps expand our thesis above, and helps, hopefully, even makes more exciting what we our a part of as children of God.

First in the Son, and Then Us: The First ‘Christian’

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Myk Habets, friend, brother in Christ, colleague in all things Evangelical Calvinist, and Jesusholymentor wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of Otago back in 2006, it was on the doctrine of Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance (the title of the published version with Ashgate). In Chapter 2, Incarnation: God Became Human, Myk gets into identifying more than just this theme of theosis in the theology of Thomas Torrance, but an actual doctrine of theosis. I read Myk’s book (twice) back a few years ago (and even reviewed it for the The Pacific Journal of Baptist Research, which Myk serves as the senior editor for; you can read that review here), and found it very enlightening, and even formative towards a deeper grasp of Torrance’s thinking on many things; in particular, the issues revolving around Christology and salvation (theosis). And it is this area that I want to broach throughout the rest of this blog post.

Torrance believed that Jesus, as the homoousion (God-man) person that he is, and in his vicarious humanity for us, serves as the bridge, the nexus, the locus wherein there is a Godward to manward and manward to Godward movement (a movement of grace in line, with how Torrance would term it, the ‘logic of Grace’); and thus Jesus is the primary point and reality of all things (cf. Col. 2:3), He alone has primacy over all of creation (cf. Col. 1:15ff). Because of this reality, and because Torrance believed that Jesus is the archetype humanity and the ‘image of God’ (Col. 1:15) for us, he could believe and articulate this kind of thinking (as explicated by Myk Habets):

Torrance’s earliest mention of theosis occurs amdist a discussion of christology, when, commenting on the relevance of the hypostatic union for men and women he writes, ‘And in this God-Man we partake in grace, as members of his body, reconciled to God through him and in him, and even it is said, are incomprehensibly partakers of Divine nature!’ Here as early as 1938-39 we have a bold statement on the orthodoxy of theosis and how it functions within Torrance’s theology. As Yeung observes:

When God became man He was no less God, for He was not diminished by the development of the body, but rather ‘deified’ the body and rendered it immortal. ‘Deification’ did not mean any change of human essence, but that without being less human we are by grace made to participate in divine Sonship. (Yeung, Being and Knowing, p. 113)

Because of Christ’s hypostatic union a trinitarian movement is accomplished in his life from the Father through the Son in the Spirit, along with a doxological ‘return’ in the Spirit through the Son to the Father. This movement takes place first in the Son and then in believers by the Spirit of the Son. We share in the love of God through the grace of Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit. This is what Torrance calls the evangelical, doxological theology the trinitarian life and love that God is. This constitutes an internal relation as the Son is homoousios with the Father and the Spirit and hence this trinitarian structure is at the same time christocentric, ‘for it is only through Jesus Christ that we know the Father and only through him that we receive the Holy Spirit. Everything depends on the indivisible inner relation in being of the Son and the Spirit to the Father …’. [Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, 62-3.]

This is what Myk Habets, and I, mean, as Evangelical Calvinists, when we use the language of a ‘Christ conditioned’. Everything starts and ends in Christ. The ‘eternal life’ that we have received in salvation, is the ‘eternal life’ that Jesus first received first for us, in His vicarious humanity. We experience this kind of life (the kind that Jesus has by nature), as we participate in and from Jesus’ humanity by grace and adoption into God’s life. Salvation, then, cannot be said to be something that is present in you (accidents), or something that you activate because of ‘effectual grace’ (monergism); in a Christ conditioned purview, everything is personlised, realized, and actualized for us, in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ (his ‘priestly’ humanity). And so we look to Jesus, continuously, and not ourselves. Because He first loved us, that we might love Him.

If Jesus is not the ground of Humanity and Salvation, then Who?

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I sincerely wish people could finally get this. I don’t say this in a patronizing way, or in a way where I am intending to insult those who have not gotten (or accepted) this yet; but my concern is that people are failing to appreciate the barthderspiegelconsistency with which they say that they affirm that Jesus is both fully man and fully God (the Chalcedon formula), and yet stop short, and don’t proceed to follow the logic of this to its conclusion. That is, as even John Calvin understood (in his mystical union with Christ theology), without receiving through participation who we are as gift from the life of Christ for us, then we have no substantial ground upon which to live as redeemed human beings in right relation with God. In other words, as Protestant theology has always affirmed, salvation is something that comes from with-out us, and not from something intrinsic within us (like created grace or something); in order to radically affirm this, and the logical implications of Chalcedon (that Jesus is both fully man and God in his one life), we ought to accept something like what Karl Barth (through George Hunsinger) suggests here:

[…] To say that Jesus Christ is the “pioneer of faith” (Heb. 12:2), Barth suggests, is not to say that his faith is merely the exemplar of ours, but that it is the vicarious ground and source of our faith. “There is vicarious faith,” writes Barth, “… only in the form of the faith which Jesus Christ established for us all as the archegos tes pisteos (Heb. 12:2), who empowers us for our own faith, and summons us to it, even as he stands there in our stead with his faith. Through his faith, we are not only moved but liberated to believe for ourselves” (IV/4, 186). Our faith may be said to exist “as a predicate” of his in the sense that whatever is real and true “in this Subject” is the foundation for whatever is correspondingly real and true in us (cf. II/2, 539). In short, our subjective apprehension of God does not exist independently, but only insofar as its source, mediation, and ground are found in the humanity of Jesus Christ. [George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, 96, Nook.]

One reason this matters, the existential reason, is that it keeps us from looking into the abyss of ourselves as the source of faith and trust towards God; something, that as us Reformed would like to emphasize, that is not present in us, but without us in a ground and life that is stable, secure, and free in itself–God’s life in Christ. If Jesus is not the ground of our humanity and salvation, then who is?

Theses on the Vicarious Humanity of Christ

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Christian Kettler provides his nine thesis statements on the vicarious humanity of Christ in the theology of Thomas Torrance:

crucifixion1. Christology includes the “double movement” of the way of God to humanity and the way of humanity to God, contra Docetism and Ebionitism. The “Creator Son,” “the Word of God,” is identical with Jesus of Nazareth (Athanasius). Thus, the radical significance of Christology is “the coming of God himself into the universe he created.”

2. God coming as a human being, not just in a human being removes all possibility of a “deistic disjunction” between God and creation. The possibility of the interaction of the living God with space and time is opened up.

3. The vicarious humanity of Christ is the heartbeat of salvation history. From the circumcision of Abraham to the Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, the interaction of the humanity of Christ with creaturely form provides a basis for the knowledge of God and the reconciliation of humanity within the structures of space and time.

4. However, the reality of the humanity of Christ, as the reality of the “Creator Son,” “the Word made flesh,” is not limited to the structures of space and time. This is what is expressed in the Reformed doctrine of the so-called extra Calvinisticum, the significance of the vicarious humanity of the risen and exalted Christ.

5. The reality of the vicarious humanity of Christ stresses the inability of fallen humanity to know and respond to God. The Lutheran emphasis on finitum capax infiniti paved the way for the nineteenth century doctrine of the religious capacity of the human spirit.

6. This integration of the divine and creaturely provides the basis for the mediatorial ministry of Christ.

7. The divine Logos in human flesh, as the vicarious humanity of Christ, communicates the very life of God in humanity (Campbell). Salvation is based on the communication of this life (Irenaeus, Athanasius). In this way, Christology is dynamically related to soteriology. In effect, Christ becomes the “very matter and substance of salvation.”

8. The work of the vicarious humanity of Christ is based on the twin moments in salvation of substitution/representation and incorporation. Christ not only takes our place, and becomes our representative, thereby creating a new humanity (substitution/representation), but also incorporates us into this new humanity (incorporation). Our actions become his actions. Our life becomes his life, the life of God.

9. The “correlation and correspondence” produced by the vicarious humanity of Christ provides an “inner determination” of life. There is a “reciprocity” of being which creates “wholeness” and “integrity” and presents a “contradiction” to the forces of darkness. [Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 127-28]

*repost

A Good Friday Reflection: The Death of Christ as God as Love In Vicariousness

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The Good News (the ‘Gospel’) is that Jesus died for everyone, which is what we are celebrating this Good Friday evening. There is something very profound that happens in the atoning work of Christ, of course! And as usual there are various readings of the implications of what Jesus did, and these readings are informed by how we first think of God. I think one of the most important premises that we can read the atonement from is that God loves us first that we might love Him (I John 4:19); and God loved us first, because He is love (I John 4:8). It is this love that was demonstrated so many years ago now at the cross. It is this love that holds all of the treachery and vicissitudes of human history together. Without this love, nothing makes sense; everything is aimlessly bounding as Jude says ‘like wandering stars’.

Holbein Dead Christ, detail

Thomas Torrance offers us some enlightening words on the significance of Christ’s death as he reflects on the theology of John Knox:

[S]everal comments on this understanding of Christ’s sacrifice may be in place. While traditional forensic language is used, the atoning sacrifice is not to be understood as fulfilled by Christ merely as man (which would imply a Nestorian Christology), but of Christ as the one Mediator between God and man who is himself God and man in one Person. This means that ‘the joyful atonement made between God and man by Christ Jesus, by his death, resurrection and ascension’, is not to be understood in any sense as the act of the man Jesus placating God the Father, but as a propitiatory sacrifice in which God himself through the death of his dear Son draws near to man and draws man near to himself. It is along these lines also that we must interpret the statement of the Scots Confession that Christ ‘suffered in body and soul to make the full satisfaction for the sins of the people’, for in the Cross God accepts the sacrifice made by Christ, whom he did not spare but delivered him up for us all, as satisfaction, thereby acknowledging his own bearing of the world’s sin guilt and judgment as the atonement. As Calvin pointed out in a very important passage, God does not love us because of what Christ has done, but it is because he first loved us that he came in Christ in order through atoning sacrifice in which God himself does not hold himself aloof but suffers in and with Christ to reconcile us to himself. Nor is there any suggestion that this atoning sacrifice was offered only for some people and not for all, for that would imply that he who became incarnate was not God the Creator in whom all men and women live and move and have their being, and that Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour was not God and man in the one Person, but only an instrument in the hands of the Father for the salvation of the chosen few. In other words, a notion of limited atonement implies a Nestorian heresy in which Jesus Christ is not really God and man united in one Person. It must be added that perfect response offered by Jesus Christ in life and death to God in our place and on our behalf, contains and is the pledge of our response. Just as the union of God and man in Christ holds good in spite of all the contradiction of our sin under divine judgment, so his vicarious response holds good for us in spite of our unworthiness: ‘not I but Christ’…. [Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell, 18-9.]

As usual, there is a lot packed into a little space by Torrance. There are two things I want to focus on: 1) God initiates for us, because of who He is, Love! He does not initiate for us after He has chosen us, but He has chosen Himself, His own being as Father of the Son consummated in the communing love of the Holy Spirit; and as a result of this shape of God’s inestimable Triune self, as a result of His over-abundant life, He has showered this upon us in Christ, His Dearly beloved Son. And all of this ever before He gets to us. He chooses us not arbitrarily or in an ad hoc fashion, but instead, because of who He is in Himself. There is no abstract notion, no speculative conceiving upon ‘who’ God has chosen for Himself; He has chosen Himself in His Son who is for us by the conciliation of the Spirit. He has not chosen us based upon an utilitarian mechanism of Divine favoritism, or upon the meeting of some sort of conditional law-code; He has chosen us because He is Love, and He has embedded the trajectory of all of creation and re-creation in Love, the Father in Love with the Son. 2) And so God, because He is love, and because the greatest exemplum of this is in His Son on the cross, has hidden us in Himself, in the Yes of the Son first pronounced in contradiction as the No to sin. We have no resource in ourselves, we have no assurance to be groped for in the excesses of our humanity; He has left no room for us to shimmer around in our strength and angst. He has taken us all the way down to the grave in Himself and brought us back up in the resurrection and ascension. Our Yes comes from His Yes for us. We say Yes by the same Spirit that Jesus said Yes from, and it is through this Divine undertaking of super-abounding Love made intimate in the Son for us that we find rest; even, and especially in the death of ourselves.

So God is Love this Good Friday evening, and God’s Love is Yes for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ seated at the right hand of the Father. There is nowhere to look this evening, but in anticipation of what Saturday will bring, and Sunday morning will hatch anew. I look forward to the resurrection! amen.

‘From’ Christ, not ‘For’ Christ: “Why don’t you have a category for obedience?”

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I have lots of people email (instead of comment) me about my various posts here at the blog. Recently I received an email from someone who wondered why I didn’t have a category (in my categories for the blog) designated as “obedience”? I haven’t emailed this person back yet, but I thought before I did that I would respond to this rather interesting observation here at the blog first (it seems fitting for me to do so).

adam-eve-garden-of-eden-1To start with, I do have a category entitled “ethics,” which deals with issues and instances of concrete instantiations of Christian obedience (or disobedience); and then I do deal with Christian obedience in many posts, but they aren’t under a specific category of “obedience,” but instead those can be found under the category of “salvation” (and then a lengthy process of weeding through this posts will ultimately yield results that show I have dealt with questions that are oriented around Christian obedience). But I would like to answer this question with more particularity, and clarity on why my blog does not emphasize this category (as important as it is!). My blog does not emphasize this category (in the way my interlocutor is wondering, I presume) because the way I think of our relation to God in Christ, has Christ in the way; and I mean in the way of you and me (logically, theo-logically). Historically, and classically, Evangelicals (given their hybrided dependence upon Reformed/Covenant theology) have emphasized relation with God through a mode of emphasizing law-keeping conditioned by forensic categories of thought (just read an Evangelical systematic theology if you don’t believe me). And insofar that I have eschewed this classical mode, I have abandoned emphasizing law-keeping (code for ‘obedience’, usually) as the emphasis by which I understood relationship with God, and how I conceive of Christian holiness (or obedience as its subsequent expression). To provide an example of where the Evangelical heritage comes from, theologically, in this regard; let me quote Kim Riddlebarger (a contemporary advocate of Covenant Theology, and member of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast, along with Michael Horton), as he sketches the original and lasting relationship and way that he (and the classically Reformed) think of how God and man (God/world) relate to each other through the Covenant of Works (or Creation):

[A]s redemptive history unfolded, the first Adam—the biological and federal representative of all humanity—failed to do as God commanded under the terms of the covenant of works. The Lord God said to Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). This covenant of works or, as some Reformed writers speak of it, the “covenant of creation” lies at the heart of redemptive history. Under its terms God demanded perfect obedience of Adam, who would either obey the terms of the covenant and receive God’s blessing—eternal life in a glorified Eden—or fail to keep the covenant and bring its sanctions down upon himself and all humanity. Adam’s willful act of rebellion did, in fact, bring the curse of death on the entire human race. This covenant of works is never subsequently abrogated in the Scriptures, a point empirically verified when ever death strikes. This covenant also undergirds the biblical teaching that for any of Adam’s fall children to be saved, someone must fulfill all the terms of the covenant without a single infraction in thought, word, or deed (Matt. 5:48; 1 Peter 1:16). [Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding The End Times, 47.]

Much could be said in critique of this conception of things (and I have already said much, just check my category “critiquing classical Calvinism”), but in order to not get side-tracked from the point of this post, let me stay particular to my intention. In predictable form (since Covenant theology has Creation preceding Covenant), Riddlebarger allows Creation to condition Covenant instead of seeing Covenant (God’s life of gracious love) conditioning Creation (one serious fall out of this theological ordering is that Jesus becomes conditioned by creation instead of conditioning creation himself as homoousion—I digress!). In other words, when Reformed thinkers like Riddlebarger, and his whole tradition, start theologizing and biblical exegeting they start where Riddlerbarger starts, with Law (or the Covenant of Works/Creation). And yet, as Ray Anderson has highlighted (along with others), what should be understood (first), is that God spoke and created (which is an act of grace as corollary with His overflowing life of Triune love). So what grounds any relation with God, first, is not Law-keeping, but the fact that God spoke (which is grace)! This might seem to be a subtle shift, but it is profound!

Following this shift of emphasis, what becomes primary is not my personal obedience (and Law-keeping), but God’s in Christ for us. As Thomas Torrance has written (as I just quoted this in a post below this one),

[…] Under the gracious impingement of Christ through the Spirit there is a glad spontaneity about the New Testament believer. He is not really concerned to ask questions about ethical practice. He acts before questions can be asked. He is caught up in the overwhelming love of Christ, and is concerned only about doing His will. There is no anxious concern about the past. It is Christ that died! There is no anxious striving toward an ideal. It is Christ that rose again! In Him all the Christian’s hopes are centred. His life is hid with Christ in God. In Him a new order of things has come into being, by which the old is set aside. Everything therefore is seen in Christ, in the light of the end, toward which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth waiting for redemption. The great act of salvation has already taken place in Christ, and has become an eternal indicative. [see full text here].

This does not mean that personal obedience is not important, but it frames it in a way that allows me to keep my eye on Christ instead of first looking at myself (and then reflexively looking at Christ: i.e. reflexive faith], as if I, myself, can somehow be abstracted out of the only true humanity which is Christ’s. So I “seek first His kingdom and righteousness, then all these other things will be added unto me” (and I only seek first, because He first loved (and sought) first that I might love Him, through Him by the Spirit). My relationship with God is not dependent upon my obedience, but Christ’s obedience for me (us); and so this ought to go along ways in illustrating why I don’t have a separate category (apart from Christology) for obedience in my sidebar. Thomas Torrance in his (posthumously published) book Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ really captures the import of this shift and way of framing things from God’s gracious Self directed life for us in contrast to the Legalistic emphasis that the classical Covenant of Works flows from:

(iii) The holiness of the church is its participation through the Spirit in Christ’s holiness

 This holiness is actualised in the church through the communion of the Holy Spirit. He only is the Spirit of holiness, he only the Spirit of truth; and therefore it is only through his presence and power in the church that it partakes of the holiness of Jesus Christ. Since the holiness of the church is its participation through the Spirit in Christ’s act of self-consecration for the church, then that is the only holiness, the only hallowing of the church there is. That is the holiness which was actualised in the church when it was baptised with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the union of the church with Christ was fulfilled from the side of the church as well as from the side of Christ.

The church is not holy because its members are holy or live virtuous lives, but because through his presence in the Holy Spirit Christ continues to hallow himself in the midst of the church, hallowing the church as his body and the body as his church. Thus the true holiness of the members is not different from this but a participation in it, a participation in the holiness of Christ the head of the church and in the holiness of the church as the body hallowed by Christ. Participation in this holiness however involves for the members of the church a life of holiness, just as it involves a life in Christ, of faith relying upon his faithfulness, of love that lives from the overflow his love, of truth that comes from the leading of the Spirit. Because the church is the body of Christ in which he dwells, the temple of the Holy Spirit in which God is present, its members live the very life of Christ through the Holy Spirit, partaking of and living out the holy life of God. Therefore personal holiness, and all the qualities of the divine life and love found in their lives, are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. [Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement, edited by Robert Walker, 386-87.]

There is a lot to comment on here as well, but I must limit myself. I will just say that it is this reversal of things (i.e. placing the Covenant of Grace [God’s life Pre-destined]) from Law to Grace that explains why I don’t have a category explicitly labeled “obedience”. It isn’t because I don’t think Christian obedience is important, it is because I think the gr0und of this emphasis is roundly rooted in Jesus Christ for us (and thus I have a category for Christology instead). It isn’t that I don’t think personal obedience or holiness are important, I do! Instead, it is because I am persuaded that focusing on Christ and God’s Triune life of gracious love, and participating in that from the Spirit’s unioning activity will produce obedience and the life of Christ through the members of our bodies as they are constantly given over to the death of Christ that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our body. We obey, only because Jesus obeyed for us first. We don’t obey to ensure that we are one of the elect that God purchased from the mass of “perdituous” humanity; we obey because God loved us first that we might love Him back through the mediating and priestly Spirit anointed humanity of Jesus Christ. It is only through this framing of things that I feel I can live out this exhortation from St. Paul:

 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. ~Galatians 5:1

Without the freedom of God for us in Christ I live under a burdenouss yoke that really ends up being hell; which, I am pretty sure this is what Jesus came to save us from (ourselves), and for Himself (and His shared life in the Monarchia or God-head). So obey, but only from Christ by the Spirit, not for Christ so you can find God’s approval.