Delinquent
Well, I have been a quite delinquent in submitting posts this fall. I have been busy with my teaching schedule, writing papers, developing a theology course/blog for our church, etc. I hope to resume regular entries in the new year!
Merry Christmas, All.
Thoughts from Hauerwas: On Reformation Sunday
My wife recently put me onto the blog, Called to Communion, and in particular a recent post by Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Stanley Hauerwas. In this piece he is grieving the so-called celebration of Reformation Sunday.
He concludes with this petition: Pray that on Reformation Sunday we may as tax collectors confess our sin and ask God to make us a new people joined together in one mighty prayer that the world may be saved from its divisions.
Just for Laughs
Over at Cake or Death, artist Alex Baker has compiled a wonderful assortment of posts with a variety of irreverent and funny cartoons. Here is one I found particularly humorous! Enjoy.
Idols that save?
Many of us have that object with its grandeur so great that life seems to cease when it is taken away. I am sure many have witnessed the trap of idols present in the churches today (or fallen pray to them) . . . the objectivity of the traditions, or the scriptures, or the icons, or the sacraments have enslaved some to revere or cherish them with such amplified focus that the objects themselves usurp the glory and wonder of the One who grants us freedom to revere and cherish Himself. For many these traps stand not in the way but rather as the way of salvation or damnation. For Linus, his beloved blanket serves as such an idol:
Robert Short. The Gospel According to Peanuts (WJK Press, 2000), 60.
Ecclesial Pandemics: The Warning Signs
The threat of viral influenza pandemics riddle the headlines (and my inbox). Moreover, policies and best practices are being iterated to help manage the so-called threats . . . yet I find myself neither worried nor fearful. Yet, with articulate skill, Kim Fabricius has revealed the signs and symptoms that correlate with two, often neglected, viral “divine” influenza strains; neo-liberalism and conservative evangelicalism!
In his piece, Fabricius is able to, with insight, offer these viral strains some therapeutic guidance: “Neo-liberals, the problem is not that you are too critical, but rather not critical enough; and conservative evangelicals, the problem is not that you are too biblical, but not biblical enough. Let the healing begin!”
You can read about these influenza strains in the Church here:
Reform Magazine, Sept. 09 Issue, Divine Flu
Faith and Theology Blog, 17 Sept 09 Post, Divine Flu: A Health Warning
A Creed to Read
The Creed of St. Gregory, Bishop of Tours:
St. Gregory, Bishop of Tours (596)
I believe, then, in God the Father omnipotent. I believe in JesusChrist his only Son, our Lord God, born of the Father, not created. [I believe] that he has always been with the Father, not only since time began but before all time. For the Father could not have been so named unless he had a son; and there could be no son without a father. But as for those who say: “There was a time when he was not”, I reject them with curses, and call men to witness that they are separated from the church. I believe that the word of the Father by which all things were made was Christ. I believe that this word was made flesh and by its suffering the world was redeemed, and I believe that humanity, not deity, was subject to the suffering. I believe that he rose again on the third day, that he freed sinful man, that he ascended to heaven, that he sits on the right hand of the Father, that he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, that it is not inferior and is not of later origin, but is God, equal and always co eternal with the Father and the Son, consubstantial in its nature, equal in omnipotence, equally eternal in its essence, and that it has never existed apart from the Father and the Son and is not inferior to the Father and the Son. I believe that this holy Trinity exists with separation of persons, and one person is that of the Father, another that the Son, another that of the Holy Spirit. And in this Trinity confess that there is one Deity, one power, one essence. I believe that the blessed Mary was a virgin after the birth as she was a virgin before. I believe that the soul is immortal but that nevertheless it has no part in deity. And I faithfully believe all things that were established at Nicæa by the three hundred and eighteen bishops. But as to the end of the world I hold beliefs which I learned from our forefathers, that Antichrist will come first. An Antichrist will first propose circumcision, asserting that he is Christ; next he will place his statue in the temple at Jerusalem to be worshipped, just as we read that the Lord said: “You shall see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.” But the Lord himself declared that that day is hidden from all men, saying; “But of that day and that hour knoweth no one not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father alone.” Moreover we shall here make answer to the heretics who attack us, asserting that the Son is inferior to the Father since he is ignorant of this day. Let them learn then that Son here is the name applied to the Christian people, of whom God says: “I shall be to them a father and they shall be to me for sons.” For if he had spoken these words of the only begotten Son he would never have given the angels first place. For he uses these words: “Not even the angels in heaven nor the Son”, showing that he spoke these words not of the only-begotten but of the people of adoption. But our end is Christ himself, who will graciously bestow eternal life on us if we turn to him.
More von Balthasar: Contingency and Human Being
Nowhere is humanity more conscious of its contingency than where each sex must convince itself of its relatedness to the other: neither can be in itself the whole human being; “opposite to” it there is always the other way of being human inaccessible for it. And it cannot be claimed that sexual union takes away this contingency and . . . lets the union turn into the absolute, sufficient to itself: because normally, in this union, a child is begotten, which allows the objective finality of the union to transcend the subjective experience and to perpetuate the process of contingency. Thus the other side of creatureliness sets disclosed: that henceforth, every progressively becoming human being owes its existence to a sexual process, generation, and birth.
– Hans Urs von Balthasar. The von Balthasar Reader, p. 75
Contemplating Trinity!
After a recent conversation with a dear friend about the disvalue of theological hypotheticals . . . of speculating above and beyond what, rather who, has been revealed to us, I have discovered this very appropriate quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar:
Contemplation’s object is God, and God is triune life. But as far as we are concerned, we only know of this triune life from the Son’s incarnation. Consequently we must not abstract from the incarnation in our contemplation. We cannot contemplate God’s triune life in itself; if we did we would sink into a vacuum, a world without substance, into conceptual mathematics or day dreaming. . . . In binding our contemplation to the humanity of his Son, God is giving more, not less. He gives us a concrete vision of triune life by involving us in it through grace and our serious discipleship of Christ. This vision is simply the inner illumination of the obedience of faith rendered to the Father, together with Christ, in the Spirit.
~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, 193.
Theology?!?
Theology can only be theologically defined. Theology is science seeking the knowledge of the Word of God spoken in God’s work – science learning in the school of the Holy Scripture, which witnesses to the Word of God; science labouring in the quest for truth, which is inescapably required of the community that is called by the Word of God. In this way alone does theology fulfil its definition as the human logic of the divine Logos. In every other respect theology is really without support. While, seen from the viewpoint of an outsider, it hovers in mid-air, it depends actually upon God’s living Word, on God’s chosen eyewitnesses, and on the existence of God’s people in the world. This dependence is its foundation, justification, and destination.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology – An Introduction, (Eerdmans, 1963), 49-50.
From an Auckland Academic
The following is a brief essay submitted by a graduate student and friend living and studying in Auckland, NZ. Scott Kirkland is a witty and engaged young academic who has suggested his life consists of a simple mixture of Barth, beer, and breath . . . but I may suggest that his life of scholarly solitude is just a facade . . . I mean, I’ve seen his facebook photos! He is truly enjoying the life of a student and scholar.
Anyway, Scott has provided us all a glimpse into some of the research he is interested in and the works he is crafting. This piece is on Torrance’s vision of the vicarious humanity of Christ. Enjoy!
Thomas Forsyth Torrance (1913-2007)
The vicarious humanity of Christ is perhaps one of T.F. Torrance’s most creative doctrines. I will explore here briefly, some thoughts of mine on Torrance’s doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ. First of all though we need to understand how exactly Torrance gets there. Once we have done that, we shall investigate very briefly a couple of epistemological implications of the doctrine.
The Homoousion
As the gospel moved from Hebrew soil into Greek culture and thought dualistic patterns of thought about God and reality began to emerge in Christian reflection. God was seen unknowable by virtue of his eternity and totally otherness. A split emerged between the divine world of timeless ideas and created reality. This of course was reflected in how the church began to understand Jesus.
20th-century icon of the church fathers of the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325 CE)
Ebionite and Docetic Christologies emerged on the theological landscape because of this dualistic mode of thinking. Torrance however contends that both of these ways of understanding Jesus were inadequate for what is presented in the Gospel. So, the Nicene theologians developed the language of homoousios to explain the relation of Jesus to the Father and the Spirit:
We believe in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being [homoousios] with the Father, through whom all things were made.[1]
The homoousion was then formed to combat both Arianism, and these ways of thinking (Ebionite and Docetic) which have inherent dualisms in them. The hommousion was then:
used as a theological instrument to make clear the fundamental sense of the Holy Scriptures in their many statements about the relation of Christ incarnate Son to God the Father, and to give expression to the ontological substructure upon which the meaning of these biblical texts rested… [it was] in the context of the Nicene declaration of faith an essentially exegetical and clarificatory expression to be understood under the control of the objective relation in God which it was forced to signify.[2]
Torrance argues that “The homoousion is the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology. With it everything hangs together; without it, everything ultimately falls apart.”[3] As we can see from this statement, the homoousion carries heavy significance for Torrance’s theology. For Torrance it was the very essence of the New Testament because it signified the relationship of Jesus to the Father but also of Jesus to us.
The homoousion is in direct relationship with the doctrine of revelation. Because Jesus Christ is in very being God, he is the revelation of the divine nature. So Torrance states that, “If the revealing Word and the saving act of the incarnate Son of God are not external but internal to the Being of God, then we are given, in some measure at least, knowledge of God in his internal relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”[4] So it is in Jesus’ action toward us ad extra that we discover something of the nature of the Trinity in se.
If Jesus is homoousion with the Father then the relationship within the Being of God is not static, but dynamic. Revelation is not knowledge of a static being located somewhere other than in space and time, “…God the Father made known to us through him (Jesus) cannot be some static, immutable, impassable Deity utterly remote from us, but the dynamic Living God, whose Being is inherent in his Word and Act…”[5] This is how Torrance understands the nature of revelation; Jesus has revealed to us in Word and Act the very nature of the divine relationship.[6] So “Jesus Christ is the revelation of God.”[7]
The homoousion also has important implications for the doctrine of reconciliation. Just as Jesus is the self communication of God in revelation, he is the very content of reconciliation. “In Jesus Christ the Giver of grace and the Gift of grace are one and the same, for in him and through him it is none other than God who is savingly and creatively at work for us and for our salvation.”[8]
So the homoousion signifies the fact that Jesus Christ has entered into the darkness of fallen humanity as God himself. This implies that there is both an ontological union between Jesus and the Father but also between Jesus and humanity.[9] The incarnation is therefore a redemptive act just as much as the cross and the resurrection are. If there is not an ontological union between man and God in Christ then redemption cannot take place for us because this process has nothing to do with the Being of God.
The homoousion is crucial for understanding both the revelation of God to us and the reconciliation offered in Christ. For Torrance it is the very foundation upon which the gospel is constructed. As soon as we lose the homoousion we lose the gospel.[10] To develop his picture of the gospel more fully we must investigate the nature of the hypostatic union. This will in turn allow us to speak of the vicarious humanity of Christ.
Hypostatic Union
Andrej Rublëv's Savior: An icon of Christ discovered in 1918.
The hypostatic union is the idea that “in Jesus Christ the Son of the Father has personally entered into our human existence.”[11] Jesus is in his Being both fully God and fully human, united in one person. So we speak of the hypostatic union. For Torrance, “There can be no doubt that the Chalcedonian formulation of the Union in Christ was one of the greatest and most important in the whole field of theology…”[12] The fundamental position of Leo’s Tome is adopted by Torrance, who states that it “conserves so wonderfully the whole mystery of the God-Man in the negatives inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivisie, inseparabiliter…”[13]
However, he would like to fill this dogma out “in accordance with its own fundamental position, in a more dynamic way, in terms of the incorporating and atoning work of the Saviour…”[14] The hypostatic union is just as critical for soteriology to Torrance as the homoousion. If Jesus is not ontologically united to fallen humanity in the hypostatic union, then there is no salvation.[15] Thus, Christ’s life and death are instrumental in redemption. Jesus takes upon him fallen humanity, lives the sinless life that we could not live, and dies vicariously for humanity. “…the incarnate Logos Christ acts personally on our behalf, and does that from within the ontological depths of our human existence which he has penetrated and gathered up in himself.”[16] Thus, the atonement cannot be seen as a transaction which takes place in isolation from either God or humanity. It is a covenant transaction which takes place from both the depths of the Being of God and from the depths of fallen humanity.
Torrance is adamant that the humanity that Jesus took upon himself was nothing other than “a particular humanity- that of a person, Jesus of Nazareth. It was not simply some Platonically ‘ideal’ humanity.”[17] This guards Torrance from what he terms the ‘Latin Heresy.’[18] The ‘Latin Heresy’ is what Torrance sees as the dualism which has plagued western theological reflection.
What Karl Barth found was at stake in the twentieth century was nothing less than the downright Godness of God in his revelation, for the Augustinian, Cartesian and Newtonian thought built into the general framework of Western thought and culture had the general effect of cutting back into the preaching and teaching of the church in such a way as to damage, and sometimes even to sever, the ontological bond between Jesus and God the Father…[19]
In Torrance’s understanding, the ‘Latin Heresy’ would lead one to believe Jesus took on a pre-lapsarian human condition (i.e. a humanity untouched by the effects of sin), not a post-lapsarian condition (i.e. a humanity effected by the fall). If Jesus assumes only a pre-lapsarian condition then the atonement can only be seen as an external forensic transaction which has no ontological bearing upon fallen humanity, thus dealing with sin but not with original sin. If Christ took upon himself the fallen human condition, the atoning work of Christ takes place from within an ontological unity with humanity, thus, in his very Being dealing with original sin.[20] As Gregory of Nazianzus states “the unassumed is unhealed.” In arguing this Torrance sees himself recovering something which was taught in the patristic period but had been demolished later under the pressure of the ‘Latin Heresy.’
From Irenaeus to Cyril of Alexandria the church had everywhere taught… by assuming our fallen nature, our humanity diseased in mind and soul, our actual human existence enslaved to sin and subjected to judgement and death… he converted our disobedient human being back into true filial relationship to the heavenly Father.[21]
Therefore, Torrance would argue the unity between God and fallen humanity in the person of Jesus Christ is essential to the entire gospel. The way in which the hypostastic union is understood is tied up with the anhypostasis-enhypostasis couplet, we shall now investigate this relationship.
Anhypostsis-Enhypostasis
Torrance speaks of the anhypostasis and enhypostasis of Christ. This will clear up some of the workings behind Torrance’s logic of human response. The anhypostsis-enhypostasis couplet was one which Torrance inherited from Karl Barth,[22] tracing it back to Cyril of Alexandria.[23] While Torrance’s former teacher H.R. Mackintosh regarded the distinction as “a finer species of Apollinariansim”[24], Torrance himself saw it as a necessary edition to an adequate Christology.
Anhypostasis is the term which for Torrance indicates that there is no independent human personality inhabited by the eternal Logos. This means that there is no room for asserting that there would have been a man Jesus of Nazareth apart from the incarnation. This eliminates all forms of Adoptionism in Torrance’s thinking.
Enhypostasis indicates that there is a human being in the incarnation by virtue of the hypostatic union. There is no independent human hypostasis but there is a complete human hypostasis in Jesus Christ in union with the Logos. So then, the human person Jesus has his subsistence only in its union with the Logos of God. Together with the anhypostsasis Torrance wards of any Nestorian dualism between the two natures of Jesus. He also undercuts any monophysitism, because there is a real human Jesus in the incarnation.
This is extremely significant for Torrance as it means that all of grace also means all of humanity. There can be no understanding of the incarnation as an act which is not wholly an act of God. But it remains equally true that the incarnation is wholly an act of humanity. Thus, “In revelation, therefore, we are not concerned simply with anhypostatic revelation and with human response, but with anhypostatic revelation and true human response enhypostatic in the Word of revelation.”[25] Torrance calls this the ‘logic of God’s grace’ as it reveals the way in which humanity is not lost in the process of redemption but is upheld in the Son of God, no less being simultaneously an act of God.
Vicarious Humanity
These brief explanations of part of Torrance’s Christology allow us to give expression to the vicarious humanity. The vicarious humanity states that Jesus as the Second Adam, the true human, represents all humanity before the Father through his life, death and resurrection. That means that the whole of Jesus’ response to the Father through his life is vicariously our response. This is what Torrance calls ‘total substitution’. Our human response to God is then not our own but a participation in the truly human response of Jesus. Far from depersonalising our response, the vicarious humanity personalises our response in Jesus, the true human.
Torrance, following Barth’s priority of revelation and faith, [26] understands the dogmatic enterprise as resting upon an encounter with the triune God at an experiential level of faith. Faith then becomes a pre-requisite for dogmatic endeavours, as it is this level which Torrance sees as indispensible to all dogmatic enterprise. However, if faith is understood as being vicariously held by Christ then dogmatic enterprise rests solely on Christ giving himself to be known. This avenue of understanding faith as given and necessarily tied to dogmatic integrity could be explored more fully in relation to vicarious humanity, i.e. if faith is understood vicariously then the dogmatic enterprise does not rest on my ability or inability to maintain an elevated level of faith, but rather on Jesus and his faith on my behalf. Theology becomes an exercise undertaken solely in grace, not dependent upon intellectual capacity or systematising power, but fundamentally grace mediated by Christ.
If theology is faith seeking understanding[27], then theological activity cannot take place outside of a faith relationship with Christ. If this is true, but also the vicarious humanity of Christ is true, then the faith which I am given to understand with is not my own but is in fact the faith of Jesus Christ. I cannot undergo theological knowing apart from grace. There is no room for me somehow producing faith of my own which will give me access to the knowledge of God; rather, I share in the knowledge that Jesus has of the Father, by virtue of his own human response to God. Christian epistemology is then intensely grace based. I share in the Son’s knowledge of the Father, in the Spirit who gives me to participate in the vicarious faith of Christ.
[1] Nicene Creed
[2] T.F. Torrance, ‘The Deposit of Faith’, Scottish Journal of Theology (36, no 1, 1983), 11
[3] Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, (T & T Clark: Edinburgh, 1980), 160-161
[4] Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, 40
[5] Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, 40-41
[6] Note Torrance’s explicit Barthian overtones. See Barth’s discussion of the Word as Speech and Act in: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 14 Vols. Vol 1/1 Trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1964), 125-162
[7] Torrance, Mediation of Christ, (T & T Clark: Edinburgh, 1992), 33
[8] T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church, (T & T Clark: Edinburgh, 1988), 138
[9] This leads into Torrance’s discussion of the nature of theosis. For a discussion of this in more detail see Colyer, How to Read T.F Torrance (IVP: Downers Grove, IL, 2001), 79 also Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2009)
[10] Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 144
[11] Torrance, Mediation, 89
[12] T.F. Torrance ‘Atonement and the Oneness of the Church’, Scottish Journal of Theology, (vol. 7, no. 3, 1954) 246
[13] Torrance, ‘Atonement and the Oneness of the Church’, 247
[14] Torrance, ‘Atonement and the Oneness of the Church’, 247
[15] Torrance, Trinitarian Faith,154- 190
[16] Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 156
[17] Habets, Theosis, 97
[18] Torrance, ‘Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy’, Scottish Journal of Theology, (vol. 39, no. 4, 1986), 461-481
[19] Torrance, Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy, 463
[20] Torrance, Incarnation and Atonement, 12
[21] Torrance, Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy, 463
[22] See K. Barth The Gottingen Dogmatics: Introduction in the Christian Religion, Trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 152-167
[23] Torrance, Patristic Theology, 227
[24] H.R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (2nd edn., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1913), 218.
[25] T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCM Press, 1965), 131
[26] Barth, CD I/1, 3-24
[27] See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 14 Vols. Vol 1/1 Trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1964), 17-24
