I’ve “known” Ryan Hurd for many years now; through online engagements and personal correspondences. I’ve only known Hurd in his classical Reformed context as that has taken place during his time at New Saint Andrews College, and then as he has been an instructor for Davenant Hall. My last correspondence with him was quite a few years ago; he and I were discussing his entrance into the PhD program in theology at the University of Kampen (he was just getting started then). There was no indication that he was wrestling with the types of ecclesiological matters that have now finally bubbled up in his recent announcement. In case you don’t follow online theological matters closely, Ryan just wrote a post for his Substack that announced his (and his wife’s) movement into Roman Catholicism. If you don’t know of Ryan his primary theological interlocutor over the years has been the ‘Angelic Doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it was this hook that finally captured Hurd’s total intellectual and spiritual development. I have always contended that if you’re going to be a Thomist (follower of Thomas Aquinas), then for consistency’s sake you ought to be a Tridentine Roman Catholic (a Catholic after the Council of Trent). Ryan clearly arrived at that same conclusion. Here is a piece of what he wrote for his Substack announcement:
This occurred in my case. And here is where we find the reason for me becoming Catholic. Of course, there are always many reasons for a thing like this, a whole host and all very different. Actually, it is my impression that people often cannot point to really a single reason within the mass of them; but in my particular case, I can do so easily. The reason, for me, is precisely what initially determined me to the Catholic part on these contradictions. The name of that reason is Thomas Aquinas, and particularly his auctoritas.
Auctoritas is a condition of a person comprising both his knowledge in a science, as well as his moral goodness. The former is how you know that he is not deceived; and the latter is how you know that he does not deceive when he testifies as to which part is true. When such a person does testify, you assent to that part merely on account of that person’s condition (propter auctoritatem)–and then you proceed from there.
Over time, it happened that Thomas’s auctoritas became supreme in my intellectual experience. Obviously, it is not supreme absolutely speaking–Thomas would be the first person to tell you that. But it is so in my experience–especially as I have undergone the confirming process of (1) assenting initially merely because Thomas said so; (2) eventually found rationes; and then (3) locked the proposition down in a demonstration and achieved scientia. All throughout this, my learning process, I have never found Thomas wanting, not even close. He has never steered me wrong. And over time, my intellect has become habituated to proceed about contradictions in precisely this mode (I have articulated this elsewhere as simply what it means to be a Thomist).
As I became intellectually obliged to follow Thomas wherever he leads me, so withholding my assent became intellectually unjustified–even regarding those contradictions where, initially, I had no reasons for the Catholic part, or even my remaining Protestant doubts. Remarkably, I became obliged to conclude Catholicism, merely because Thomas had told me to do so. And in the end, I listened.[1]
Why have I maintained that to be a Thomist most organically leads to being a Tridentine Catholic? Primarily because of the hierarchical chain-of-being and theory of causation present with Thomas’ appropriation of the Aristotelian categories and causation. Steven Ozment writes,
The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[2]
It is this theory of real hierarchical relations finding their causal and actual force from the Unmoved Mover, God, that in my view entails an ecclesiological theory wherein the Catholic church fits best. Why? Because it makes sense that if there is One God, One primary cause, that in a chain-of-being movement from highest to lowest, that within that chain there be one Church, one people of God. And on analogy even within the structural framework of the said Church, there be a hierarchy of one (like the Pope represents) that works its way down into diffuse levels of leadership out into the various priests, so on and so forth. Indeed, just as in Thomas’ theory, he sees the angels with a similar hierarchical structure within the angelic structure itself. And again, this all starts with the actus purus (pure act) or Pure Being of the singular God.
Does this mean that the hierarchical theory of God’s being in action must necessarily lead to the Roman Episcopy? No. But the most organic iteration of it, I would argue, given the Dominican’s ecclesial space for reasoning, is in fact the Roman Catholic church. And of course, this is why the Nominalists and the via moderna posed such a problem for the prelates within the Roman city. For sure, as the nominalists maintained, there were no real or necessary relations between God and the world. If the ‘moderns’ were right about this we can see how the authority of the Roman church could easily be called into question. If God merely related to the world through covenants and ad hoc words (think of the potentia theology), then the centrality and the necessity for the Roman church to mediate God to the world, could not theologically make an argument for the authority of the papacy. But then this is why I think that to be an ecclesiological Thomist is to be Roman Catholic. Aquinas constructed his theory by deployment of and synthesis with the Aristotelian categories toward buttressing the authority and reality of the Holy Communion of Roma in view. Even if early on his theology wasn’t as enthusiastically endorsed as it finally became post and contemporaneous with Trent.
To draw this back in: Hurd, as I have briefly sketched, I think, is being consistent with the aims of Thomas’ ecclesiology and its coherence with the Roman ecclesiology and theory of church government and authority therefrom. There was once another Reformed fellow, in his case, a Presbyterian, named Jason Stellman; he too, within his Presbyterian (Aristotelian) theological commitments arrived at the same conclusion as Ryan Hurd. As a result, he also swam the river Tiber. Surely, there are many former Reformed folk who have made this move. And I would argue for similar reasons to Hurd’s. Ultimately, I have greater respect for people like Hurd who see that the pressure of Thomas’ thinking, if held consistently, ought to lead all of his adherents to Vatican City, Italy. Of course, there are better ways to be genuinely Protestant. And so, I would invite Hurd et al. to abandon Thomas’ project altogether and recognize what it truly means to be a biblical Christian. There are theological, dogmatic ways for doing that; and ways that do not require a sacrificium intellectus. But alas, that was never Hurd’s way to begin with; that is, to be Protestant.
[1] Ryan M. Hurd, Why I’ve Become Roman Catholic, accessed 04-10-2026.
[2] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.
The early Christian community spoke of the scandal of the particular–the God of the universe revealed in flesh and blood. They felt the strange, incongruous power of this idea. They felt too the awful strangeness of beholding the very image of God in a human being broken and beaten and hanging on a cross. The scandalous, revelatory power of the particular. It has a special claim on the Christian imagination. It shapes and refracts what we find significant, how we live, against what powers we struggle.[1]
–Douglas Burton-Christie
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
–I Corinthians 1:18-25
The Christian is no stranger to strangeness; indeed, it might even be said that the Christian is no alien to the foolishness and weakness of the things of God in Christ. It is this theme, the scandal of particularity, the foolishness and weakness of the cross, the notion that the very God who upholds all of seen and unseen reality by the Word of His power, became flesh and dwelt among us; that He dwelt among us even as a mere man, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. It only takes a matter of moments of meditation, spirated by the Holy Spirit, to become consumed by this tremendum mysterium et fascinans, the majesty and reality of the cosmic Christ; the notion that the eternally triune God freely and graciously became ensarkos. I think if most people, especially Christians, allowed this fact to become the very grist of their daily lives, that all there would be left to do is worship. How does this God of gods squeeze Himself into the flesh and blood of a particular human being, into a man from the squalors of the Galilee in Nazareth? It remains a miracle; for some to the point that it is the ultimate skandalon upon which they cannot get past; and instead, indeed, they inhabit a stumbled-existence all the days of their vain lives. God forbid it if this becomes the trajectory of the professing Christian.
Barth writes presciently on this particular scandal of Eastertide,
It is content simply to tell the story—this is how it was, this is how it happened. There is interpretation only in the lightest and sometimes rather alien strokes, of which we have to say much the same as we did of what we called the softenings occasionally found in the first part. The real commentary on this first part and the whole is, of course, the Easter story, which we can describe as the third and shortest part of the Gospel history. This tells us that God acknowledged this Jesus of Nazareth, the strange Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, by raising Him from the dead. It tells us of forty days in which this same One—whose history this was and had to be—was again in the midst of His disciples, differently, but still actually in time and space, talking with them, eating and drinking with them, beginning with them a new Gospel history, the time of His community, the time of the Gospel as the good news about the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, the time of the proclamation of this event. He Himself was and is this event, the origin, the authority, the power, the object of the proclamation laid on the community. He Himself, He alone: He who was alone and superior and majestic in Galilee; He who was again alone but beaten and humiliated in Jerusalem, in the very midst of Israel. He, the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, lives and rules and speaks and works. He is Himself the word which is to be proclaimed to all creatures as the Word of God. That is what the Easter narrative tells us. It gathers together the sum of all that has been told before. Or, rather, it tells us how the sum which God Himself had already gathered together in all that had gone before was revealed as such to the disciples—again by Jesus Himself. The Easter story is the Gospel story in its unity and completeness as the revealed story of redemption. The Easter story is the record of how it became what it was (in all its curious structure a history of redemption) for the disciples—not by their own discovery but by the act of God in the word and work of Jesus Himself. It tells us, therefore, that this history, Jesus Christ Himself as He exists in this history, is significant in and by itself. It tells us that all the significance which Jesus Christ as the subject and subject-matter of this history can acquire for individual men by means and as a result of proclamation (which has Him as its origin and object), has its basis and truth and practical and theoretical power in the fact that He is significant in and by Himself—even as He exists in this history. What is significant in itself has the power to become significant and will in fact become significant. But only that can become significant which is already significant, and in such a way that this being is the power of the corresponding becoming.[2]
Χριστὸς ἀνέστη Christ is risen! He is risen!
[1] Douglas Burton-Christie, “The Scandal of the Particular,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) vii-viii.
[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [227] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 220–21.
There is no God, but the One God; and we know this One God by the Son of God made flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This One God is not known any other way. He is not known by the philosophers nor made known by the philosopher-theologians. He is only and ever centrally known as He has freely made Himself Self-known in the face of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; indeed, He would have no face for us without the Holy Spirit. The genuinely Christian God is One (de Deo uno) in Three (de Deo trino), Three in One in eternal koinonia from His a se existence. It is by the humility of this God, as exemplified by the free obedience of the Son in the Father by the Holy Spirit, whereby this God becomes known. The theological Philistines have attempted to reason their way to this God, but only because they first became aware of this God by this God’s Self-revelation; even as inchoate in His mediated presence through the Hebrews. In other words, it was only ever because of this triune God’s gracious stooping to the sons of men that the notion of One God was contrived in the first place. And the mesmerizing thing about this God is that He has always already been vulnerable enough in His inner and triune life to make this impossible a possibility; that is, to be willing to be made known, even with the possibility of being mistaken for some type of mechanistic simple Monad of the brutish thinkers. Even so, this God has contradicted such triteness; even by Him becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the Roman cross. There is no space for the monadic on the scandalous cross; this God is altogether too complex to be imagined, even in the greatest of the philosophical imaginaries among us. This God, the triune and eternal God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perichoretic bondedness, has taken on human blood in His own humanity as the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.
Someone else gets at the aforementioned much more eloquently thusly:
As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also the Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, he is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality he is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract “monotheism” which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.[1]
Well said, Uncle; well said.
Please notice maybe an almost unnoticed profundity when Barth refers to the history that obtains between and in and among the fellowship of the triune persons. It is within this space, this Father-Son-by-the-Holy Spirit relationship wherein all of human history and being takes place; indeed, as the electing God, the elected Man, the eternal Logos, the Son of God, graciously and freely chose to become us that we, by that act and actualism of Grace, might become human before God. It is His history, within His own Self-predestined and inner-triune life, whereby the creation obtains; wherein the redemption, the recreation, the elevation of humanity occurs. Just as the Son, before the foundation of the world, is freely Logos incarnandus (‘the Word to be incarnate’), it is within this freedom of God’s life by which the whole created order finds its determination. This, in the Eschaton, in the final and consummate reality actualized, and finally realized, is how it is that humanity becomes and is sustained as humanity simpliciter. That is by God’s freedom, by the obedience and humility intrinsic to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, within the mysterium Trinitatis, by which anything, not least of which, humanity, exists at all; as worshippers and witnesses of their very life before God, by God, in God by the Spirit anointed humanity of the free God, the Son of Man, the Man from Nazareth, the Son in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [203] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.
The online and non-online Christian world is occupied by interminable and ongoing debates with reference to both theological and exegetical conclusions vis-à-vis an a priori, yet typically, uncritically received hermeneutical framework. And even if this or that person claims this or that theological framework, say a Calvinism or Arminianism, a Hellenism or Hegelianism, an asserted literal biblical hermeneutic or allegorical/spiritual, so on and so forth, there is almost zero discourse having to do with the ideas that stand behind said frameworks. That is, there is little to no awareness about the informing ideas and intellectual histories that have given rise to the array of hermeneutical expressions that we live with today. Indeed, there is this type of uncritical non-self-reflective reception of whatever hermeneutic said person receives and deploys in their respective engagement with the text of Holy Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ (I just snuck some of my hermeneutic in right here).
What I am primarily referring to, particularly on the theological side, is a prolegomenon. A prolegomenon, especially when the student flips open a systematic theology book, is often the first section of said book. It is explaining the theologian’s theological methodology and the various theological-intellectual priors they are utilizing to arrive at their respective theological conclusions vis-à-vis the array of theological loci that typically populates a systematic theology. But even among the theologians who present a prolegomenon for their systematic theologies, respectively, they often simply reveal that they too have uncritically received a particular style of a so-called ‘classical-theistic’ commitment. That is to say, this or that theologian often will give the company lines as their prolegomenon; and as far as that goes, that can be helpful for the reader, in terms of knowing what to expect. But even at this level if the theologian is just repeating what has been handed down for the centuries, within their respective theological “group,” all they end up doing, ironically, is modeling a way to uncritically receive, rinse, and repeat a theological methodology that has been cleanly packaged for them by their prior giants. This model for doing theology is not helpful in my view, and only ends up contributing to the perpetuation of what I was referring to in my above paragraph for this article.
So, it might seem like I’m griping just to gripe. But I want to suggest something. I want to suggest that all theologians and biblical exegetes need to spend the time criticizing their own received interpretive traditions, their hermeneutics, respectively, and consider their source and synthesis. In other words, be sure, as a theology or Bible reader and doer, that you, the theologian, spend the time looking at what is informing your theological and exegetical conclusions. Make sure, in other words, that you understand the theological ontology and subsequent epistemology that stands behind and informs the way you think theologically in general. Ask the question: does my theological methodology (hermeneutic) have a ground in the heavenlies, in the ascended Christ, or does it only have an earthly and abstract fount of knowledge? In other words, consider whether or not your theological methodology has a genuinely Christian ground, and one that works from the interior theo-logic presented by the implications of the incarnation of God in Christ, or if it only reflects a prior logic deduced from the abstract and speculative ratiocinations of a naked humanity; one that relies on philosophical witticism rather than Christian revelation.
Without this type of self-criticism and deep self-engagement, as far as understanding what stands behind and within our theological and exegetical conclusions, theological discourse will only continue to go by the bye. Now, I am not so naïve to think my exhortation here will fall on ripe ears, per se; at least not in general. But what I am hoping is that by at least highlighting this matter it might have the effect of waking some folks up. Maybe they have never even stopped to consider that they have a hermeneutic; that they have prior theological and philosophical commitments informing their respective conclusions. I think this issue plagues most of the Church; not just among the laity, but the “specialists” alike. And until people recognize this fact, they will continue to frustratingly bang their heads against their interlocutor’s walls.
A word from American theologian par excellence, Jonathan Edwards, on the beauty of the triune God:
It is unreasonable to think otherwise, than that the first foundation of a true love of God, is that whereby He is in Himself lovely, or worthy to be loved, or the supreme loveliness of His nature. This is certainly what makes Him chiefly amiable. What chiefly makes a man, or any creature lovely, is his excellency; and so what chiefly renders God lovely, and must undoubtedly be the chief ground of true love, is His excellency. God’s nature, or the Divinity, is infinitely excellent; yea it is infinite beauty, brightness, and glory of itself. But how can that be true love of this excellent and lovely nature, which is not built on the foundation of its true loveliness? How can that be true love of beauty and brightness which is not for beauty and brightness’ sake?[1]
For our purposes we will ignore the implicit analogia entis procedure of negative knowledge of God in Edwards’ above rumination, and simply focus on his conclusions.
Along with Edwards I think we need to ‘Make the Beauty of God Great Again’ (MBGGA). Not that we can predicate anything of God, but indeed, we must bear witness to the reality that is in fact lovely, beautiful. In the above statement Edwards refers to brightness as a synonym of beauty with reference to God. What this conjures for me is Genesis 1, and the Light of God’s Grace made known at God’s first Word: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.’ God’s Light is the primordial Light of the world, indeed the Light that will finally make the Sun and Moon no longer necessary in the Eschatological Light of the Son of Man as His presence in the abode of the Father by the Holy Spirit is unquenchably diffuse throughout the New Heavens and Earth, the Heavenly Zion as that spans the expanse of a de-futilized creation.
Further, implicit and at the base of God’s life for Edwards is that God’s beauty is fitting in the sense that God is a perichoretic relationship of interpenetrating filial and pneumic subject-in-being onto-relating Self-givenness one in the other eternal life. But it is precisely this, for Edwards, at least in my riff of him, that God’s love is indeed beautiful; that is, that God is not a philosophical monad, but instead a relationship of eternal persons in koinonial singular being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such it is the mysterium Trinitatis that is deserving of all praise and worship. The mystery of God’s eternal life to be basked in by His creatures in Christ, in a doxological wash of bliss and beholdenness. The beauty of the triune God becomes the purpose of the human ensouled body. It is here, in this magnificent beauty of the Father, the Son in His bosom, hovered over by the Holy Spirit that the people recreated in His image in the face of the Son, Jesus Christ, that the sons of God long for; indeed, the revealing of the sons of God as they are unfurled from their bodies of death, and finally brought into the consummate participatory Beatific vision of the triune God. And for the Christian why wait? Even though our bodies of death attempt to keep us clinging to the dust of our earthly origin, the excellency of God’s life in us raises up over and again in the intercession the Son continuously makes for those who will inherit eternal life.
Amen.
[1] Jonathan Edwards cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: The Age of Enlightenment and Awakening 18th Century, Volume 5 (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2023), 364.
Years ago, and for years and years I would publish a blog post every single day. Over the years, if you have been following me for any length of time, you will have 
noticed that that pace has slowed. In fact, as of late you will have probably noticed that my publishing output here has slowed down quite a bit; i.e., I think I’m averaging just about a post in a half every seven days. I just wanted to acknowledge that. I’m not the young whippersnapper I once was when I first started the blogging game. But let it also be known: whereas most of the OG theobloggers have passed away (I mean their blogs), I am still here. And Lord willing, I plan on continuing to blog right up until the Eschaton. I always plan on being a theological learner, reader, and communicator; as such, the blog platform, and you my readers, serve me well in that regard. So thank you for that!
Anyway, just a bit of housekeeping with reference to the blog. Don’t be surprised if sometimes my posting slows down a little more even than it already has. But to be sure: I’m here to stay 🙂 .
Not only is Jesus Very God, but he is also Very Man. This is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan-Chalcedonian settlement in regard to the hypostatic union of Jesus person’ being both fully God, at His very being, and fully human as the ground of His being the Man from Nazareth in the Galilee. This post is meant to dovetail with the other side of this union where we looked at the way that Barth treated the personhood of Jesus Christ as ‘Very God.’ But without Very God, the Son of God, becoming Very man, we would of all people be most to be pitied. This is the stuff of the Gospel itself.
If God did not freely elect to become human, as both the electing God and the elected man, then there would be no way into reconciliation with the inner and triune life of God. We could not become partakers and thus participants in the divine nature if God did not first become us in Christ. As any good Bible reader understands, fallen humanity left to its own devices only remains in a vicious circle of self-love; a life constrained by the love of self, and its base desires, rather than being constrained by the love of God in Christ and His holiness. It took God to invade our war torn and dead sub-humanity, and re-create it such that the fallen person can finally be elevated into the throne-room of God’s life as the Son ascends with us back to the glory He has always already eternally shared with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. All of this to say: the ‘man’ (human) part of the Gospel is just as important as the God part, insofar that without God becoming us it would be absolutely impossible for us to pierce into His inner and triune life and be saved. So, the man part, funded by the God part, both hypostatically united in the singular person of Jesus Christ is in fact the Euaggelion (Gospel). And for this we should be full of gratitude and worship to our Father who is in heaven.
Barth writes:
This means primarily that it is a matter of the Godhead, the honour and glory and eternity and omnipotence and freedom, the being as Creator and Lord, of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is Himself God as the Son of God the Father and with God the Father the source of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence with the Father by the Holy Spirit. That is how He is God. He is God as He takes part in the even which constitutes the divine being.
We must add at once that as this One who takes part in the divine being and event He became and is man. This means that we have to understand the very Godhead, that divine being and event and therefore Himself as the One who takes part in it, in the light of the fact that it pleased God—and this is what corresponds outwardly to and reveals the inward divine being and event—Himself to become man. In this way, in this condescension, He is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. This is the will of this Father, of this Son, and of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. This is how God is God, this is His freedom, this is His distinctness from the superiority to all other reality. It is with this meaning and purpose that He is the Creator and Lord of all things. It is as the eternal and almighty love, which He is actually and visibly in this action of condescension. This One, the One who loves in this way, is the true God. But this means that He is the One who as the Creator and Lord of all things is able and willing to make Himself equal with the creature, Himself to become a creature; the One whose eternity does not prevent but rather permits and commands Him to be in time and Himself to be temporal, whose omnipotence is so great that He can be weak and indeed impotent, as a man is weak and impotent. He is the One who in His freedom can and does in fact bind Himself, in the same way as we all are bound. And we must go further: He, the true God, is the One whose Godhead is demonstrated and plainly consists in essence in the fact that, seeing He is free in His love, He is capable of and wills this condescension for the very reason that in man of all His creatures He has to do with the one that has fallen away from Him, that has been unfaithful and hostile and antagonistic to Him. He is God in that He takes this creature to Himself, and that in such a way that He sets Himself alongside this creature, making His own penalty and loss and condemnation to nothingness. He is God in the fact that He can give Himself up and does give Himself up not merely to the creaturely limitation but to the suffering of the human creature, becoming one of these men, Himself bearing the judgment under which they stand, willing to die and, in fact, dying the death which they have deserved. That is the nature and essence of the true God as He has intervened actively and manifestly in Jesus Christ. When we speak of Jesus Christ we mean the true God—He who seeks His divine glory and finds that glory, He whose glory obviously consists, in the fact that because he is free in His love He can be and actually is lowly as well as exalted; He, the Lord, who is for us a servant, the servant of all servants. It is in the light of the fact of His humiliation that on this first aspect all the predicates of His Godhead, which is the true Godhead, must be filled out and interpreted. Their positive meaning is lit up only by this determination and limitation, only by the fact that in this act He is this God and therefore the true God, distinguished from all false gods by the fact that they are not capable of this act, that they have not in fact accomplished it, that their supposed glory and honour and eternity and omnipotence not only do not include but exclude their self-humiliation. False gods are all reflections of a false and all too human self-exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not a truly divine being.
The second christological aspect is that in Jesus Christ we have to do with a true man. The reconciliation of the world with God takes place in the person of a man in whom, because He is also true God, the conversion of all men to God is an actual event. It is the person of a true man, like all other men in every respect, subjected without exception to all the limitations of the human situation. The conditions in which other men exist and their suffering are also His conditions and His suffering. That he is very God does not mean that He is partly God and only partly man. He is altogether man just as He is altogether God—altogether man in virtue of His true Godhead whose glory consists in His humiliation. That is how He is the reconciler between God and man. That is how God accomplishes in Him the conversion of men to Himself. . ..[1]
Very meaty stuff!
Without getting too distracted let me lift up one aspect of this, particularly as found in the second paragraph above. Some critics might latch onto the fact that Barth writes, “. . . the conversion of all men to God is an actual event.” They might claim that this makes Barth a dogmatic universalist (or maybe some Christian universalists might want to take this in the positive from Barth). But that would be to miss Barth’s theology. Barth has just got done communicating that ‘the man’ Jesus Christ is the conversion of God for all of humanity in actuality. Even so, whilst this christological objectivism is rightly present in Barth, this should not lead the reader to imagine that Barth is operating from some type of Aristotelian theory of causation; to the contrary. Barth’s primary focus is on the primacy of Christ’s archetypal humanity as the humanity ‘converted’ to God. And within this, it can be (and should be) explicated that for Barth’s theology this entails all of humanity after Christ’s. So, there is a universalist aspect to the incarnation and its implications for Barth, just as there is for the Apostle Paul. But it would be wrong and foreign (to Barth’s total theology) to conclude that this necessarily leads to all of humanity subjectively bowing the knee to Christ as their Savior. This freedom in Christ for God has now been recreated in God’s freedom for us in Jesus Christ. But it is still required that by the power of the Holy Spirit a person says ‘Yes’ to God, from God’s ‘Yes and amen’ for them in Christ, in order to become full participants in the actual humanity of the Godman, Jesus Christ. In other words, the way of salvation has been ordained for all of humanity in and from Christ’s humanity. But the lost person must still recognize this reality and finally acknowledge (repent in Christ’s repentance for them) that without them echoing Christ’s yes and amen for them that they will be left out on the shadow-side of God’s lefthand of final judgment. Which in the end remains as mysterious as the first fall of humanity in Adam and Eve’s rebellion to God’s Word.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [130–31] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 125–26.
From the conclusion of my personal chapter from my second edited book (with Myk Habets), “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith” Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the “Faith of Christ”.
CONCLUSION
What we have come to see is that assurance of salvation, dogmatically understood, is fully grounded in Jesus Christ. From Calvin, to Barth, to Torrance, union with Christ and the vicarious humanity of Christ provides the foundation for how to understand assurance of salvation and how it should be framed; that the faith of Christ for us is the only real saving faith, as such elect people can only participate from that faith for them. It is this reality, as we have seen, that allows the seeker (of assurance) to realize that indeed assurance is of the essence of faith; precisely because faith is a reality that comes from God in Christ and not individual human beings. We also came to see, particularly in Barth and Torrance, that election and reprobation should be understood to be fully concentrated in the vicarious humanity of Christ. Again, what this does is to evacuate the question of whether or not Jesus died for me, and instead allows all of humanity to keep their eyes fully on Jesus because Jesus, in this frame, died for all of humanity. As a result, any space that could allow for anxiety has been erased, and Jesus is understood to be the one that stands in the gap between God and all of humanity in his vicarious humanity. We have come to see that from this vantage point assurance is the essence of saving faith because to think salvation is to fully think Jesus and not ourselves. Assurance for the Evangelical Calvinist, then, is of the essence of saving faith because it is not an individual’s faith that saves them, but instead it is the vicarious faith of Jesus Christ. We look to Christ, then, and no one else, not even ourselves; particularly when we think things salvation. Jesus Christ is assurance.