Christianity and Other Religions

More on the general topics of the previous post:

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The fact that Jesus Christ is God forms the beginning of my views on how Christ relates to religious plurality. Others such as John Hick may reject this idea, but it seems to me to be the consensus of biblical and traditional sources which I regard as having authority in such areas. To reject this idea as Hick does because it gives a consequence one does not want is clearly question-begging. Against people like Hick or Samartha, truth should not be sacrificed for the sake of supposed practical benefits. There is such thing as absolute truth (to deny this would be to undercut that very denial, since it itself would have to be an absolute truth) and religions make claims of absolute truth, hence the truth or falsity of the claims of various religions matters indeed. Christ being God, he speaks truth and hence to reject or relativize his truth for some other gain is foolhardy to the extreme. Every religion, then, cannot be on a par since they make conflicting truth claims and hence at most one religious figure making these conflicting claims can be correct. At most one can be the ultimate authority who should not be relativized or rejected.

Since Christ is God, though, to reject Christ is therefore to reject God. Contra Hick and some other pluralists, then, Christ the one true God in the flesh. A theocentric vision of world religions such as advocated by Panikkar or Knitter, then, does not do justice to the Trinity, for it leaves out the Second Person in favor of the First (other thinkers would leave out the Second in favor of the Third). But the Trinity cannot be so divided, for we have one God working in the world who is not only Father or Holy Spirit but also Jesus Christ, the Son.

As God, then, Christ is unique – every other revered human’s life or teaching is at odds with Christ’s at some point or admits to being no different from other humans (unless it is by degree). As God, Christ’s life and teaching are perfect and of divine authority. Hence, everything inconsistent with those is to be rejected – he is the unique way, truth, and life. To treat Christ as if he was on par with other human religious leaders, then, as some pluralists do, is simply wrong. Mohammed, Buddha, or whoever else there may be do not teach all things consistently with Christ and since Christ is God, they are not and he is ultimate revealer and mediator, not they. He is the measure by which they are to be measured and none of them meet the standard.

The religious systems organized by and around these other figures, then, since they are not endorsed by Christ and conflict with his authority (I am putting pre-Christian Judaism to the side for the moment), do not have God-given authority since they lack Christ’s authority. These other religious systems, then, contain much that may be false, harmful, or keeping people from accepting Christ. With those who see religions as God-instituted systems for salvation, we can say that there is some truth in them and remnants of or distortions of memories or interpretations of actual revelation from God, but against those same thinkers, we must also say that the religious system itself as a whole cannot be seen as instituted by God in the way that biblical religion has been since these systems clash with rather reside in the authority of Christ. Jesus approved of the Old Testament as authoritative and of God and himself as the culmination of rather than contradiction of that revelation. Christ and his church then are seen in the New Testament as the continuation and fulfillment of Old Testament promises, the church as the continuation of and enlargement of God’s same covenant people. While not everything was revealed immediately in the Old Testament and was fulfilled and broadened in the New, this, unlike in other religions, was a matter of partial understanding or incomplete revelation, not misunderstanding or distorted revelation.

Other religious systems, then, contrary to some Roman Catholic thought, are not fulfilled by Christ or his teachings. Rather, as agreed by thinkers such as Tiessen, we can acknowledge that there may be true aspects in other religions which, when removed their contexts in those other systems, understood rightly and stripped of errors and reinterpreted in the light of Christ, the rest rejected or given entirely different content, then we may have something useful which finds a home in the context of Christian proclamation of Christ. Christ, therefore, is not the fulfillment of other religions, even if they contain some pointers to him or material that may be true or useful when transported into a new context. Rather than having, as in the Old Testament, partial revelation which is then completed by Christ, these other systems have much that must be rejected, though they may have useful points of contact to be used in dialogue or evangelism.

Humans are sinful and in need of redemption, which Christ alone provides since God provides salvation and Christ is God. Christ, in part, saves in virtue of his role as representative of his covenant people, who he cures from the curse of the Law, sin and death by taking these onto himself on the cross. Some Jews, who naturally belong, are removed in virtue of unfaithfulness, while some Gentiles are added in virtue of being incorporated into that people, who are understood as the body of Christ, the sign of which is faith. It is in Christ, then, that the defeat of sin and death become a reality, not in some other religions. And rejection of Christ, far from being a mere choice of religious ways to God, is rejection of God himself and either a cutting off or staying out of Christ and hence out of the covenant people and hence outside of the scope of Christ’s saving work. Such a person, then, devout in their own religion though they may be, has hence put themselves outside of salvation since, as already stated, salvation is from Christ himself for he is himself the God who saves. Far from being a way to God or a way to salvation, Christ is the way to God, the way to salvation – one, unique, unequaled and unsurpassed, Savior of his people.

So Christ is God’s ultimate, final revelation since he is God himself. Even if someone is able somehow to respond in faith to God and be part of the covenant people, part of Christ, without outwardly or knowingly being so incorporated because they have yet to hear the gospel (responding to genuine revelation and the internal call of the Spirit, not some other religion), such a person would still need the gospel and the church’s proclamation of Christ as well as outward knowing participation in the body in order to develop properly as a saved person. Initial salvation does not abrogate the need for growth in sanctification and the becoming of who we were really and truly meant to be in Christ.

Because of this, then, leaving people without the gospel because God will “take care of them” (as I have heard some people with inclusivist or pluralist leanings sometimes state) or because we accept their own faith in their own religion is illegitimate. The human destiny, after all, only finds its culmination and fulfillment in Christ and Christ alone. A knowledge of the gospel is more beneficial for a saved person than being without it, assuming inclusivists are correct that some unevangelized persons might be saved, which would require a grafting into Christ, into the people of God, without explicitly knowing it. For in knowing the gospel, we come to Christ in a more intimate, more explicit way and hence, since Christ is that ultimate revelation of God, we come to know God in a more intimate, more explicit way as well. We come to know God and his ways in a more perfect manner in Christ.

We ought, then, to engage in dialogue with other religions both so we can be better informed as to the religious beliefs and commitments of others and hence be able to understand them and their situations better so that we can better serve and witness to them, and also so that we can come to understand our own faith better and understand the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ and his difference from all other teachers or religious figures throughout history. It will also help persons of other religions to know more about Christ and our own convictions concerning him and can help them to be clearer on what they think and how it relates to Christ and the proclamation of him. If the Spirit moves such a person, that person may even come to accept Christ through this process or at least be more open to some lesser forms of God’s revelation, though they might not be to the point of salvation yet.

Tolerant engagement in both dialogue and proclamation, then, should be how we are related to persons of other religions in light of both the supremacy of Christ and the plurality of religions around us. We must both make peace with others who disagree with us in order to get on in the world and yet also not shy away from the truth which is found in Christ and Christ alone, making disciples of all nations and bringing them into a saving knowledge of that same Christ who is the unique Savior and God over all.

Tiessen on Salvation without Hearing the Gospel

Some thoughts on Tiessen's Who Can Be Saved?. For an online class I took.

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The goal of Terrance Tiessen’s book Who Can Be Saved? is to assess the possibility of salvation in Christ and in other religions and how we as Christians ought to respond. Tiessen gives a rough taxonomy of views about the salvation of the unevangelized (among which he includes everyone from infants to adults who have not had the opportunity to hear the gospel for whatever reason), dividing these into the categories of ecclesiocentrism (called by the professor “exclusivism” or “particularism”), agnosticism, accessibilism (called by the professor “inclusivism”), instrumentalism, and relativism (this last at least falling under the professor’s “pluralism” category). This is a taxonomy that seems in some ways more comprehensive than that used by the professor since it includes categories that were not included by him (though the professor may have a better taxonomy for pluralism, even if some of those listed as pluralists Tiessen would put in the instrumentalist category and others in the relativist). Tiessen wants, in this book, to argue for and lay out an accessibilist view, according to which it is possible for some unevangelized non-Christians to be saved.

Tiessen starts with a Calvinist view. He thinks everyone, including infants, need to be saved but that Christ’s salvific work is for the elect alone. Everyone, on his view, has the revelation necessary to respond to God with faith, whether in a general or particular, individual form, or in the form of the gospel or Bible which is in the care of God’s covenant people. Only the elect, however, are given the effective grace which moves that person in faith to God. Without such effective grace, such a response cannot happen (even though, he claims, everyone has been given universally sufficient grace at one time or another which enables them to make a response of faith). This does not negate the freedom of the human individual, however, since Tiessen is a compatibilist and believes that human freedom and responsibility are compatible with everything being determined. This makes his view rather unlike that of other Evangelical accessibilists such as Clark Pinnock who is neither a Calvinist nor a compatibilist regarding free will (and hence unlike the professor as well).

On Tiessen’s view, everyone is judged according to how they responded to the revelation actually given to them and are not held accountable for revelation of which they were unaware. Hence, someone without explicit knowledge of the gospel could be saved in the case where they have responded in faith to the amount of revelation of God they do in fact possess. Tiessen cites various Old Testament believers and others as examples of this. These arguments in Tiessen I found personally surprising as I had not thought explicitly about the passages he brings up in quite that way before and the real life examples he brings up are equally interesting. However, for Tiessen, it is still best for people, saved or not, to come to a full knowledge of God in Christ and for God to be glorified in the church and through the spread of the gospel, hence mission in love is still essential to the task of the church.

Since everyone has revelation necessary for faith, Tiessen also holds that infants or the unborn are also saved by faith, their response to divine revelation. Because he assumes substance dualism, holding the mind to be an independent entity from the body, he thinks the infant’s mind can go beyond any biologically-linked limitations. In addition, he holds that infants – and, indeed, everyone – meets Jesus at the moment of their death and they will respond to that revelation in a way in keeping with their response to previous, lesser revelation. So if an embryo responded in faith to the revelation given to it in the womb, at its death (say, because of a miscarriage), it would meet Christ and respond with faith in Christ. The elect, then, will always at the moment of death respond to Christ with faith.

I agree with his conclusions in his book, in line with some of Clark Pinnock’s thinking, that people in other religions might sometimes have fallible experiences of God or have access to flawed or demonically distorted reports of genuine revelation and that God in his providence is able to use these as a bridge to faith. And this is so even though, contrary to relativists and instrumentalists such as John Hick and others mentioned by the professor, these other religions are neither instituted as systems by God for salvation nor are they themselves as those systems instruments of salvation. This, as Tiessen maintains, provides some impetus for dialogue but not interreligious worship, which would be unfaithful to the gospel.

There are a couple of problems with Tiessen’s book I would like to address. First of all, considering his own self-classification, if an ecclesiocentrist is someone who says that every saved person meets Jesus while still alive, Tiessen seems to be an ecclesiocentrist, contrary to his claims otherwise, since he thinks every person meets Jesus while still alive. He thinks his position is different because one meets Jesus at the moment of death, but that moment can be understood in one of two ways: either as the first moment of being not-alive or the last moment of being alive. If the former, then the meeting is only after death. That would be the view of Clark Pinnock and would indeed allow him to remain an accessibilist, but this is in fact a view which Tiessen rejects. If the latter, however, then the meeting is indeed while the person is still alive and hence Tiessen is no accessibilist after all. If, on the other hand, ecclesiocentrism requires that a person cannot be saved until that moment of meeting Christ, however, then Tiessen does not accept it after all, since he thinks people can be saved prior to that meeting. But then why have that meeting in the first place? Tiessen seems to retain some ecclesiocentric leanings here, contrary to the general thrust of the rest of his book.

Furthermore, Tiessen tries to answer objections to his Calvinism by positing universally sufficient grace that enables all to believe at some point or another. But only those who receive effective grace actually believe. It is not clear, then, what the point of sufficient grace is. It is not really sufficient, after all, since there is no actual belief or faith without effective grace. Hence, it is not really clear what sufficient grace really does. It is supposed to create for everyone the possibility of faith but it in fact does not, since effective grace is what is required, without which faith cannot happen. Sufficient grace is supposed to make a person responsible for their rejection of Christ and hence accountable for it – guilty and blameworthy – but it is not clear how it does so if that requires a possibility or capability of faith which sufficient grace does not seem to provide.

More importantly for this issue, it is not even clear why it is even important in the first place given that compatibilism about free will is assumed. It might indeed, after all, be determined that a person will not respond without effective grace, but absolutely everything that ever happens is determined on the sort of view Tiessen holds, hence acceptance or rejection of Christ does not seem any different from any other action a person might take. And Tiessen does indeed seem to want to see us as responsible for our own sins (he believes freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism, after all). Hence, universal sufficient grace does not seem to actually do anything for Tiessen. In regards to responsibility and faith, it is effective grace and compatibilist freedom which do all the theoretical work.

Interestingly, then, Tiessen seems simply to have some strong incompatibilist intuitions in common with Arminians such as Clark Pinnock and others who reject Calvinism. Hence, he posits something that would really only make sense or even be required within a non-Calvinist, incompatibilist framework. In that sort of a framework, such grace would simply be a version of Arminian prevenient grace, granting the ability to each person to respond in faith to Christ (the main difference being that prevenient grace is often seen as always in effect whereas this version from Tiessen is applied at least once in each person’s life but is not necessarily present throughout every life). Given such an ability, a person may exercise their will to turn to God or not – no further effective grace is needed since they are incompatibilistically free to choose either way due to the grace given them.

This makes somewhat clearer what motivates Tiessen so strongly to allow for the salvation of infants. After all, one could see the fact that an infant did not live to hear the gospel as evidence that they were not in fact elect – if God elects someone, he brings them to a saving knowledge of the gospel. One could connect salvation of the children of Christians with belonging to the covenant people for whom Christ died and hence bring in Old Testament saints in the same way, but Tiessen’s motivation for allowing salvation of infants outside of that does not seem to derive from his Calvinism; their lack of being elect should be no more problematic than Calvinistic election in general. In fact, it is simply one instance of it, no different from others, particularly given Tiessen’s strong belief in original guilt. Again, the intuition that we need to leave room for the salvation of such infants seems like it may in fact derive from some non-Calvinist intuitions to the effect that everyone needs to be given a chance to genuinely choose for or against God with their incompatibilist free will. This seems to be connected also with his ecclesiocentric leanings mentioned above. Indeed, he feels some need to say that even infants or aborted embryos meet Christ and can respond to revelation prior to being dead.

However, Tiessen does not argue well enough for the possibility that infants or other mentally undeveloped or impaired persons are mentally equipped to have faith or understand any revelation in the first place. He simply accepts substance dualism without any real argument and assumes the abilities of the mind outstrip the functions or expressions of the brain, even though there seems to be a very tight empirical correlation between them. Many Christians, by contrast, have other views of the mind-body relation which would not necessarily allow for a natural mental ability in embryos or infants to respond in the way Tiessen wants (Thomistic views, for instance, see the soul or mind as the form of the body whereas animalist theories view the person as simply identical with the body), unless that be after death, if at all (which would fit more with Pinnock’s view, rather than Tiessen’s). These other views, however, are not even considered by Tiessen, but the possibility of their truth should have been taken into account or else argued against explicitly. Tiessen seems driven to this view, however, by his ecclesiocentrist and incompatibilist intuitions even while he wants to maintain a strict accessibilist and compatibilist point of view. It would be better, in my mind, to maintain a cautious agnosticism about infants outside the church than to adopt Tiessen’s overly-speculative theories.

Why the Reformed Tend to be Nestorian and the Lutherans Monophysite: The Degeneration of Christological Language in Incarnation-Talk

Something I wrote up for an online class:

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COMPOSITION VERSUS HYPOSTATIC UNION IN THE INCARNATION

The goal of this paper is to explore what Evangelicals should think about the Incarnation and argue that we should think about it in terms of a hypostatic union. My main thesis is that much confusion and argumentation over the Incarnation could be avoided by a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union rather than some other form of union. This is extremely important since a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union preserves the orthodox Christian viewpoint that the person of Christ is identical with the Divine Person of the Eternal Word of God and that this Divine Person has become human. Otherwise, various difficulties occur, which push one either in the direction of Monophysitism or Nestorianism.

In the course of my paper, I will first examine the views of Eutyches and Nestorius who each have an understanding of the Incarnation as a composition of Christ out of the two natures. I will then show how a common way of speaking about Christ’s two natures encourages this viewpoint and that this tendency, when coupled with different assumptions, has led to Monophysite tendencies among Lutherans and similar-minded thinkers and Nestorian tendencies among Reformed thinkers. A common way of stating the communicatio idiomatum is involved in these tendencies. Following this, I will show how the ancient, traditional Christian notion of the Incarnation as hypostatic union avoids these negative tendencies, affirming unity and yet maintaining the integrity of each nature.

I. The Problem: Incarnation as Composition

I.1. The Early Heresies: Nestorius and Eutyches

In much discussion throughout Christian history, both the divine and human natures of Christ have had a tendency to be spoken of as if they were subjects of attribution in their own right and the unity of Christ has similarly thus often been spoken of as if it was a matter of combining of the two natures to form one person out of this combination. This tendency, of course, derives from the early church and such a tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in the theologies of Eutyches and Nestorius, where the person of Christ was seen as a result of a combining of divine and human natures, understood as distinct entities and subjects of attribution. On such a view, Christ is said to be divine because he is partly produced out of divinity and he is said to be human because he is partly produced out of humanity.

The difficulty of attaining a unified person out of this combination was resolved by mingling the natures in some way. Nestorius does this not by an actual mingling of the two themselves but, following Theodore of Mopsuestia, by a mingling of their respective appearances, that of God and that of man, so as to produce the appearance of a single person, Christ. Because of this, human predicates could be applied to the divinity and divine to the humanity, but this was only in appearances, a matter of words only. Strictly speaking, the divine only applied to the divinity and the human to the humanity, but because of the single appearance of Christ, they could both be applied to Christ.[1] So one could say, for instance, “Christ died on the cross” or “The man died on the cross” in virtue of Christ being partly compounded out of the human, but not “God died on the cross”, even though one could also say “Christ is God” in virtue of being partly compounded out of the divinity. The subjects of the divine properties and human properties, respectively, however, remain the divine nature on the one hand and the human nature on the other.

Eutyches, on the other hand, took the same starting point – Christ as the result of the combination of the two natures – but when he gained unity for Christ through the exchange of properties, it was not merely a matter of words as with Nestorius. Instead, this was a real exchange of properties for Eutyches, resulting in a kind of Monophysitism as the distinction between the two natures was blurred or lost. If this was understood as the Word actually changing by taking on human attributes, it would result in a loss of divinity. If, on the other hand, it was understood as the humanity being overtaken by divinity, it would result in a kind of Docetism and a loss of full humanity.[2]

Considering Christ a result of the compounding of the two natures, then, requires finding a tight unity between the natures, the tightest on this picture being a blending of the two, anything less failing to account for the unity of the person in Christ. If one takes this blending as merely notional, we have Nestorius’s view. On the other hand, if one takes this blending as a real, metaphysical blending then we have Eutyches’s view, some form of Monophysitism which renders Christ either not fully human or not fully divine, with either both natures being destroyed or one taking backseat to the other. A more Docetist version would uphold the divinity at the expense of the humanity, whereas a Kenotic view would uphold the humanity at the expense of the divinity. In either case, Christ ends up a third thing in addition to the two natures, composed out of the two.

I.2. Modern Turns: Reformed and Lutheran

In modern times, people still often speak as if the two natures were themselves the subjects of the divine or human attributes, giving at least the appearance or tendency because of this way of speaking, even if it is not meant literally, of a notion of Incarnation as a compounding of the two natures to form a single person out of them. This tendency, unchecked, gives rise to precisely the Nestorian and Monophysite troubles enunciated above: Christ is seen as unified in virtue of an exchange of properties between the natures and the key division between those holding to this is whether to opt for a mere verbal exchange or a real one.[3]

In the Reformed tradition, one sees the tendency towards composition-talk resulting in a distinctly Nestorian tendency as Reformed thinkers tend, in contrast to Lutherans, to speak of an exchange of attributes between the two natures as a merely verbal one. John Calvin, for instance, could speak of some things as attributed to one nature, some to the other, and some to the composite whole, as if Christ was this third, composite thing just as a man is an additional thing dependent on and composed out of body and soul. Being combined into one thing, the attributes of one nature could be spoken of as if they belonged to the other, even though in reality they did not.[4]

On the Lutheran side, there is the opposite Monophysite tendency either in a Docetist or Kenotic direction. There is here a tendency to speak of a real exchange of attributes between the two natures rather than a merely verbal one. Diverse writers, for instance, have accused Martin Luther himself of believing that the person of Christ is the result of the union of the two natures – the unity of the person results from the unity of the natures rather than vice versa.[5] Lutheran Jan Siggins, for instance, both holds that Luther’s early work treated the two natures as sometimes too distinct[6] and also speaks as if for Luther the union of the two natures results from the fact that we can attribute the properties of one nature to the other and that this is so since “we can understand how Christ’s human properties can be predicated of God, or divine properties of man […] because the human nature shares in the glory of all the properties which otherwise pertain to God, ‘to worship this man is to worship God’”.[7] That is, worshipping the man Jesus is worshipping God since God’s properties have been bestowed upon the man. Or at least that is what Siggins’ language suggests, whether that is what he intended or not. It certainly seems that we have two subjects: the human nature, “Jesus,” and the divine, “God”, and that by an interchange of properties they form a single unit.

Because of this Incarnation-as-composition tendency, we also have the tendency to speak of the communicatio idiomatum – the fact that we can say things like “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” – as an exchange of properties between the two natures since these themselves are viewed as the subjects of these respective kinds of properties. Hence “God the Son suffered and died” could mean that the divine nature, understood as the subject of the properties, suffered and died, and “The man Jesus created the world” could mean that the human nature, again understood as subject, created the world. “God” then is understood as referring to the divine nature, being the subject of divine properties, “Jesus” as referring to the human nature, being the subject of human properties, and the union of the two “Christ”, resulting from some kind of exchange of these properties between the two. Hence, the frequent claims that followers of Calvin make the communicatio merely verbal and the uncomfortableness of some Reformed thinkers to say that things like “God died” go beyond something merely verbal.[8] From this we get claims such as that of G. C. Berkouwer, that “the man Jesus Christ has his existence immediately and exclusively in the existence of the eternal Son of God”,[9] appearing thereby to give separate referents to “the man Jesus Christ” and “the eternal Son of God”. Hence also the felt need of many Lutheran thinkers to combine or mix the properties in some way to come out with a single person as result, so as to be able to truly say things like “Jesus created the world.”

While the Reformed tendency is clearly Nestorian, then, the Lutheran tendency is towards either a Docetic or a Kenotic Christ.[10] By tending to speak of the Incarnation as if it was by a compounding of the natures, there is the obvious danger of getting a third thing, neither God nor man but a mixture or compound of the two. If one tries make sure the person so compounded is fully God, the humanity must thereby suffer – we have a Docetic Christ, the divinity pushing out the human. On the other hand, if one tries to make sure the person is fully human, the divinity must somehow suffer or be put in check – we have a Kenotic Christ, the humanity pushing out the divinity.[11] Moderate Kenoticist Millard Erickson, for instance, considers it obvious that in order for Christ to be fully human, he must give up “the privilege” of exercising his divine attributes.[12] Tellingly, he speaks of the attributes of one nature being added to the other, the divine attributes being restricted to their exercise through the humanity.[13]

The respective Nestorian and Monophysite tendencies of the Reformed and Lutheran camps, then, seems to arise largely as a result of the tendency to see and speak as if the two natures, as subjects of attribution, are compounded together in the Incarnation so as to form a single Christ. One need only look back to the church’s history, however, to see that the view of the Incarnation taken by the Church Fathers as it was developed in the great Christological controversies provides a very different take on things, one which avoids these tendencies and indeed was meant to combat them.

II. The Solution: Incarnation as Hypostatic Union

Evangelicals should avoid the heretical-seeming tendencies of both the Reformed and Lutheran camps. To do this requires abandoning seeing or speaking of the natures as subjects of attribution or of Christ as being a compound out of these. Otherwise, the natures invariably come to be seen as opposing one another and something must be done resolve that tension – either by making the union more a verbal one or by restricting or modifying one of the natures. The traditional, orthodox view, however, defended and developed in the Ecumenical Councils, treats the Incarnation not as a compounding of one person out of two other entities but rather as hypostatic union. That is, the unity of Jesus in the Incarnation is not founded on any special relations between two independent subjects but rather in the single hypostasis or person of the Divine Word who assumed a human mode of being (i.e., became human).

This is Incarnation as a coming to be a man, not a metamorphosis into one, a single person possessing two natures by first being divine and then being human as well. The two natures are not the subjects of the divine or human attributions but the Word Himself is that subject, who has both divine and human characteristics. Rather than the unity of the person resting in the unity of the natures, the opposite is the case, one person possessing both natures as hypostatic or personal modes of being, one subject of attribution existing as both human and divine.

The Divine Word in the Incarnation did not change in regard to his atemporal divinity but rather from eternity assumed temporal humanity to himself as an additional way of existing.[14] Rather than requiring some restriction or alteration of one nature or the other, this version of the Incarnation is both real, not merely verbal, and yet without conflict between the natures as the Word has two modes of existence and there is no need to try to smash or assimilate them together in order to get a relation of unity between them, since the unity comes via the one Person who exists in both manners. In fact, it is precisely because the Word in his divine nature remains unchanging and omnipotent, unrestricted and unchanged in his divine attributes, that God here is able to become man – that is, to take on a new mode of existence.[15] And this can happen without any restriction or alteration of either of the two natures since it is not they who are the subject or grounds of unity but rather the Divine Person of the Word Himself.

Hence, strictly speaking, the communicatio idiomatum which allows us to say “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” is, contrary to how it is often formulated, not a matter of one nature trading attributes with the other – the natures are not the subjects of attribution, nor are they referred to by “God” or “Jesus”.[16] The only referent and only subject of attribution here is the Divine Second Person of the Trinity. Hence, since this person created the world in his divine nature and suffered and died in his human nature and is the referent of both “God the Son” and “the man Jesus”, both “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” are literally true and not merely verbally so and this is the case even without the two natures exchanging properties since it is one person who is in possession of both the divine and the human properties and hence who is both God and man.

The communicatio idiomatum, then, is not about an exchange of properties between natures but rather the possession of both sorts of properties – having both natures and being the subject of their respective attributions – by a single hypostasis existing in both ways. Much confusion can be cleared up by this point alone – some attributes are indeed only human and hence are only had by the Word in virtue of having a human nature (that is, in virtue of being human), but it is still the Divine Word who possesses them (and all that without the divine nature changing or being restricted in any way).[17]

III. Conclusion

Against Stanley Grenz, then, the ancient notion of Incarnation as hypostatic union in no way involves a mythological god transforming into a human, any implicit Docetism, or a conception of the Word apart from Jesus.[18] On the contrary, it is precisely the hypostatic union which guarantees the falsity of these pictures by guaranteeing the integrity of the two natures and the singleness of the person who is both fully human and fully divine[19] – it is Jesus the man who is eternal God who takes upon himself a temporal, human life without any change in his divinity. Grenz’s criticisms, instead, find a target only in the ancient misunderstanding of the Incarnation as composition.

In sum, then, there is a common mistaken way of speaking to the effect the natures are the subjects of divine or human attributions and this leads to a mistaken view of Incarnation as composition and hence to a view of the communicatio as sharing of properties between natures, which in turn leads to grave difficulties with Nestorianism or Monophysitism and all the problems attending these. To avoid this, we should speak only of Jesus Christ as the single subject of these attributions, the Divine Person who took on humanity. We should not speak of “God the Son” or “Jesus” any differently, since these are not two natures, but one and the same person existing both fully divinely and fully humanly. Doing this will hopefully then resolve some of the difficulties between Reformed and Lutheran thinkers as we think more clearly about the Incarnation.

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[1] J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Fifth Edition (New York: Continuum, 1977), 315-316; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?: The Word’s Becoming in Incarnation (Still River, Massachusetts: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985), 43-44.

[2] This, at least, was how the consequences of Eutyches’s views were seen – his own thoughts are widely thought now to be rather more muddled and inconsistent. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 331-335; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 61-62. In keeping with common usage, however, I will continue to attribute these views to Eutyches in the interests of brevity.

[3] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 105-106.

[4] See, for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. J. Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1936), 527-529.

[5] E.g., Yves M.-J. Congar, Dialogue Between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. P. Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966), 394; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 104-105.

[6] Jan D. Kingston Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 219.

[7] Jan Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ, 231-232.

[8] For this distinctly Nestorian phenomenon in Calvin, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 529.

[9] G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, trans. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 309.

[10] It is no accident that some Reformed thinkers have also ended up with a Kenotic Christology, since the underlying Christological tendency in thinking of the Incarnation as a union by composition is the same.

[11] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 106. For a criticism of strong versions of Kenoticism, see Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 307.

[12] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh: A Contemporary Incarnational Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991), 549-550.

[13] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh, 555.

[14] See, for instance, Donald Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 54; Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 104; and the discussion of Cyril of Alexandria in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 54-55.

[15] Weinandy quotes Karl Rahner to this effect in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 174.

[16] Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction: An Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 77-81 assumes precisely this confused manner of speaking of Incarnation and the communicatio in his exposition of Christological history and the Lutheran-Reformed debates. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the hypostatic union.

[17] Cf. John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 202; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 98. Note that the truth of the Lutheran view of the acquisition by the human nature of the divine attributes occurs in the belief of the Church Fathers that Christ’s human nature was divinized in its union with the Divine Person. That is, Christ was the original subject of theosis, a process we too can undergo without any injury to our human nature, this process being understood as a perfection or completion of human nature rather than its transformation into something else (which Lutherans have a hard time avoiding). Theosis was seen, after all, as a participation in God’s energies or operations, which indwell us, not as a taking on of God’s essence. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 321-322; John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 133-134; Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition, trans. and ed. S. Rose (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), 184.

[18] Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 309.

[19] On the issue of a divine being leaving heaven to become human, see Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 86.

Pneumatological Trends

One of the key trends in recent theologies of the Holy Spirit seems to be a movement away from confining our concern for the Spirit only to the spheres of personal salvation, understood as a purely “spiritual” matter, or mediation through institutionalized church hierarchies. There seems to be a greatly increased acknowledgement of the holistic nature of the human person and hence of the Holy Spirit’s work not only in personal spiritual matters for a person but also in physical, economic, ecological, and communal matters as well.

Thinkers such as Pannenberg, Moltmann, and ecological thinkers, for instance, rightly stress the Spirit’s role in creation and in sustaining and creating life, thus giving the Spirit a more biblical, more universal role than has often been done in Evangelical theologies where care for creation both by the church and by God have been shamefully set aside, probably partly due to an overreaction to perceived theologically and politically liberal excesses and the wish to avoid guilt by association.

There is also the important theme of the Spirit’s involvement in sustaining and empowering community and justice and liberation, such as can be found in various pieces in the writings of Zizioulas, Welker, African theologians, and ecological and feminist thinkers. Again, this is an important emphasis that was long neglected by Evangelicalism but which I think, with the mainstreaming of a lot of Evangelical concerns for justice and racial reconciliation, can quickly be reinfused into the Evangelical heritage – it only requires us to take those concerns just mentioned and relate them more directly to the Holy Spirit.

Notes on Stanley Grenz's Christology

I'm now reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God for an online class. Here are some thoughts about his Christology so far:

Grenz’s Christology is based on the idea of Jesus as both revelation of God and revelation of true humanity. The strength of Grenz’s view is how he derives such ideas from Scripture and then uses them both to demonstrate Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and to show how Jesus’ humanity reveals to us how we are to live loving each other as a community. Unfortunately, there is not much more to his view and very little in the way of explanation, despite claims otherwise. The key problem is that Grenz continually confuses demonstration of Christological truths with explanation of them. Over and over, when he goes to explain something all he does instead is offer evidence for it, which is not in any way the same thing. In particular, he uses a “from below” method, focusing on Jesus’ earthly life, to demonstrate Christological truths but then confuses this with having explained them.

The key problem is found in his attempt to explain how Christ is both God and human (303-305). He says, looking at Christ’s human life, that Christ reveals both God and true humanity. The most full representation or revelation of a thing, of course, is something which is identical to it. Hence, it follows that Christ is both God and true human. But this does not explain how he is both God and true human. Being fully God or fully human is what makes it the case that he reveals God or true humanity, not vice versa. So that Jesus is both God and man follows from his revealing God and humanity but it is the former that explains the latter. Hence revealing both cannot explain being both since the dependence is the other way around. Grenz has confused demonstration (that Christ is God and man) with explanation (how Christ is God and man).

His attempted explanation of the Incarnation, for instance, does little more than simply say again that the man Jesus reveals God and true humanity and hence Jesus is both divine and human, another instance of confusing demonstration with explanation. If Jesus is God, though, then he is eternal and the question remains how then to explain an eternal God becoming human, something which a view of the Incarnation ought to do. Grenz (308-311), however, simply sidesteps the issue by offering misgivings of standard views (which really affect popular expositions of such views or ways people have taken them rather than the views themselves) but without offering any actual alternative.

Grenz’s problems lead to a problematic take on pre-existence, where Grenz claims that Jesus “belongs to” God’s eternity but does not really explain this and instead changes the subject – he shifts from ascribing the revelation of God to Jesus to ascribing it to his 30-something-year-long earthly life. He then speaks as if this series of events was eternal, which it literally speaking is not. He then proceeds to use pre-existence as a metaphor for the significance of Jesus’ life in history, which is a distinct issue, even if literal pre-existence is what makes this significance possible. Grenz, ultimately, seems to tie Jesus so closely to his earthly life that he does not seem to address in any satisfactory way a divine life logically prior to it and existing in eternity. This seems to be due mostly to his confusion between a “from below” method of demonstration with an actual explanation, which may require taking the results of that method and going further to explain them. Unfortunately, he does not do this, either in his take on pre-existence or in the other Christological issues I already discussed.