"You Asked for It" Week 4: "How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?"

More notes for the next sermon (these are a bit rougher than last time since I was a bit rushed in getting it out):

Here are some thoughts I put together! Hopefully some of these prove useful:

“How could a loving God send people to hell?” When people ask this question I think they often have a couple worries in mind:

1. It seems unloving to deprive people of heaven forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.

2. It seems unloving to have people tortured forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.

That is, the problem is both with what the damned don’t get as well as with what they do (and the amount of it too).

Underlying worry 2 is an idea of hell as involving literal torture applied to the damned. While this is a popular picture of hell, the biblical images of damnation are a bit more nuanced. In the Bible, damnation is described in terms of fire, darkness, shame, rubbish, destruction, and death. These pictures are ways of depicting judgment and separation from God and his kingdom. In other words, hell or damnation involves a split between the person and God and between the person and God’s rule on earth. That’s the center of the concept, not hell-as-torture-chamber with God-as-head-torturer.

So just as we can think of heaven as the place of God’s presence and will - and hence of Christians as already in heaven and bringing heaven with them to the earth (Ephesians) - so we can also think of hell as the place of God’s absence and deviance from his will - and hence of people as already in hell in their separation from God and bringing hell with them to the earth. “War is hell”, “I went through hell”, and similar sayings, then, aren’t so far from the truth!

This helps us not only understand worry 2 but worry 1 as well. The damned fundamentally, at the core of their being, do not want God’s kingdom - they don’t want themselves or how they live or think conformed to God’s will nor do they want to live in a world that does so; they simply don’t want the kind of relationship God offers nor do they want to value things the way God values them. Some may want some kind of heaven or paradise or a divinity - just not the actual one on offer!

Not only do the damned not want God’s kingdom, they would not be able to enjoy it even if they were somehow to find themselves there. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.’s paraphrase of John Henry Newman: “Heaven is not for everyone: it is an acquired taste, and hard to acquire while our taste buds still resemble a crocodile’s back. An unholy person would be restless and unhappy in heaven.”

In sum, the damned are not fit for the kingdom of God nor do they want to be. The kingdom and the damned simply cannot work together. The damned are unfit for the kingdom like a fish is unfit for dry land and would suffer there. Placing the damned into God’s restored creation would be like shoving a rusty tool into the moving gears of a working engine - both will be ruined.

In the kingdom of God, in God’s restored creation, God’s will is done. By definition, the damned are outside this - they do not conform to God’s will nor do they want to. So when the kingdom fully comes to earth and God’s will is fully done and earth and heaven are made one, the damned cannot, will not, and would not take part in that. In character, in deed, and in will, they place themselves outside the kingdom and outside what is to them God’s intolerable presence.

This ability to place ourselves outside God’s will - to place ourselves into a state of hell! - is part of our original design. We were designed to be God’s helpers in shaping creation - and part of that creation is ourselves - and are given the freedom to conform to God’s will or not. Hence, we can shape ourselves in a way in conformity with that will or not. In other words, we can make ourselves through our actions into who we will become – we decide in the present our future character. We become our choices.

In a sense, then, God does not send people to Hell, we choose to become it.  Romans 1:28-32.

“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it.  You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it.  But there may come a day when you can no longer.  Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine.  It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell.  In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” C. S. Lewis

Being condemned to Hell is nothing other than being condemned to self.  Hell is our chosen “freedom” from God. “There are only two kinds of people – those who say ‘Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, ‘Thy will be done.’  All that are in Hell choose it.  Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” – C. S. Lewis

As others have said, the gates of hell, therefore, are locked from within. God doesn’t want to exclude anyone from his restored creation but some people voluntarily exclude themselves. This is why responding to the gospel and turning to Christ is so important - it is a turning to the kingdom, to God’s will and his future restored creation. Those in Christ are ultimately conformed to his will - they embrace it, they want it, they live in harmony with it around them.

(None of this, of course, answers questions like “What about babies” or “What about people who never hear or understand the gospel?” While these are great questions, they are separate from the question considered here, whether a loving God could send anyone to hell - the question here is could not who!)

(There is also the further question of whether God will allow the damned to continue in their ever-deteriorating state or instead will ultimately purge them from creation - traditionalists say yes to the former, annihilationists like John Stott say yes to the latter. That obviously goes beyond the current question!)

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.

Aquinas and Christmas

Like the great councils of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III, Aquinas addressed, in his own theory of the Incarnation, many of the Christological concerns that had been prevalent during the patristic period. Indeed, one way to see what he is doing is to try to do justice in a philosophical framework to the insights of these great councils, seeing Christ as having both a human nature and a divine nature and these as united in the one person of the divine Word, each with its own characteristic activity and operations. In my previous paper, I showed how the councils just mentioned addressed these concerns; in the present paper my concern will be to show first of all how Aquinas addresses these. As his own views entail that in some sense Christ is not a human person, I will also show how Aquinas can maintain this in light of Christ’s full humanity. Similarly, in regards to Christ’s full divinity and full humanity, I will describe how it is that Aquinas thinks Christ’s human will can be the principle of its own self-determining action but always as an instrument of and in cooperation with his divine will.

In the Incarnation, what is most essential perhaps is that God becomes man. However, to do justice to the divine transcendence requires explaining this in a way that does not impinge on the transcendence and immutability of God. The distinction between the two natures in Christ provides the beginning of a way to do justice to this. Since God qua God – that is, as existing in and through the divine nature – cannot change, then it must be something else that undergoes a change, since obviously some change does occur with the advent of the Incarnation. So it must be the Creation itself which undergoes change, not the Creator. After all, one can say that the divine Word does change in the sense that at one time certain predicates (such as being a man) cannot be applied to the Word but then later one is indeed able to apply such predicates. But that is compatible with there being no actual change in the Word himself as existing in his divine nature since the change which results in a change in which predicates can be appropriately applied may be in something outside of that divine nature.

This change, which is not in the Word in his divinity but in creation, involves the creation by God of a human nature in personal dependence on the Word as the Word’s own. A bit of creation, in this way, has been taken into the divine life, conjoined to God. It is not a pre-existing human nature but a created nature created precisely as a way of being for the divine Word, itself dependent upon the Word and lacking its own separate individual existence distinct from and apart from the Word since it is itself a mode of the Word’s own existing.

For Aquinas, this change in creation and subsequent relation of dependence of the humanity of the Word on the person of the Word involves the coming into being of new mixed relations rather than relations in which each term is really related to the other. Instead, the human nature is really related to the Word as one of its two modes of existence. The relation is real in it as it comes into existence united to the Word. This involves a real effect in the humanity without a change or any kind of effect in the Word in his divine existence, guaranteeing thus both the possibility of full humanity and full divinity since the two natures thus remain unmixed yet united in the one person of the Word, the human nature subject to change and really related to the divine but the divine nature still immutable and only in ideal relation to the human nature, the relation being in the human nature alone. Because God thus remains immutable in becoming human, we can truly say that it is God in Christ who has become a mutable man, not some other entity which in becoming a human would be subject to change and hence devoid of the divine transcendence proper to God. This works precisely because it is one and the same divine Word who, in addition to his divine nature, has conjoined to him a human nature in addition, thus permitting the communication of idioms when speaking of Christ.

Christ has a full human nature, however, composed of a fully human soul united to a fully human body. The problem is having this body/soul compound and full humanity in Christ yet not have it constitute its own person in addition to the divine person of the Word. A Boethian conception of personhood would let any concrete nature capable of consciousness and freedom to be a person, in which case there would be a human person in addition to divine person of the Word. Aquinas, however, requires of personhood or being a hypostasis that it be complete and existing independently of other things. In this sense, there is only one person in Christ for Aquinas, the divine person of the Word.

A union of joined body and soul, however, would in normal circumstances result in the existence of a human person. In Christ there is no such person but only a human nature since the human nature of Christ does not exist apart from all other hypostases but instead exists only in dependence on the person or hypostasis of the Word. Otherwise, the human nature would have its own human person, existing apart from the Word. The divine person, then, takes the place of the human person, preventing the human nature of Christ from being the mode of existence of a separate human person. If we understand a human person as a human nature existing hypostatically in itself, then on Aquinas’s view, there is no human person of Christ, only a divine person existing compositely in both divine and human natures.

For Aquinas, a person or hypostasis is not equivalent to the modern notion of a personality or a stream of consciousness but an individual existent. Personhood is a matter of who, not of what. The hypostasis of someone specifies who it is, its nature specifies what it is, giving the way in which that who exists. Being fully human, however, is a matter of what one is – one’s nature – not who one is – one’s hypostasis. Whether or not the person who has the human nature is divine or human does not impact the full humanity of that person, since being a divine person in no way effects what that person is. Insofar as they have a full, working human nature, that person is thereby fully human. The absence of a human person does not, in Christ, involve an absence of anything in his humanity but rather is the result of its addition to the divine person. Christ, then, is fully human and in that sense, subsisting in a human nature, can be said to be a human person. But Christ’s personhood does not arise from the human nature on its own, existing apart from everything else, and in that sense Christ is not a human person, but in such a way that his full humanity remains intact.

All this shows, then, that on Aquinas’s views it is truly God who is redeeming us as a man, but in such a way that the divine Word retains his divine transcendence and yet also possesses full humanity and unites both divinity and humanity in a single person. To show, however, that Jesus’ humanity is truly a mediator in our salvation and not simply an instrument of God (and hence is a full humanity and able to save human beings through his life, death, and resurrection), Aquinas must elaborate a dyothelite position which allows for truly human acting and willing. Otherwise, the divine will and activity crowd out the human and it becomes the divine nature alone which is active, the human nature being merely a passive participant and not a truly human source of human willing and human activity. It is the human suffering and willing of the divine Word in a genuinely human fashion that is redemptive, after all.

In Aquinas’s view, it seems that there is first of all a coordination of the divine will and human will in Christ rooted precisely in the fact that it is one person who possesses both wills, both principles of genuinely divine and human activity. The human will of Christ receives its principle of activity and is moved towards the intentions of God by the divine will. In this way, the human will of Christ acts as an instrument of the divine will in bringing about the divine ends. It is not a mere instrument, however, as the actions of the human nature of Christ are mediated by his human will, which is free and self-determining. It is, hence, a conjoined will as the will of the very divine person using it as an instrument, but also an instrument of the rational order with its own principle of action moved via that principle by another principle of action, the divine. It is hence not passive in this interaction but actively pursues and chooses for itself the intentions and goals of the divine will.

The human will of Christ, hence, is moved by the divine will to freely act and is graced by God in its hypostatic union with the person of the Word with the grace necessary to do so. This grace perfects in some way the human nature of Christ, as human nature is always perfected through the infusion of divine grace, which thereby makes Christ’s will free to always follow the good. In this sense of freedom, freedom to do the good, the hypostatic union and corresponding instrumentality of the human will of Christ in fact guarantee the freedom of that will rather than take away from it. The divine will, then, moves the human will of Christ towards freely pursuing the good and the divine ends, but through the self-determining and active principles of the human nature, not directly and without that mediation. As a conjoined will being used by a divine will, the influence of that divine will is one from the inside (internal to that person), as it were, not an external or coercive one. This may very well require, as perhaps Aquinas, White and Crowley seem to think (see, for instance, White 415, 421), a progressive human knowledge in Christ of who he is and of God’s will in given situations, graced upon him as part of the cooperation of his human nature with his divine, thus helping to secure a psychological unity for Christ as a single, integrated person of unmixed humanity and divinity. As already said, this grace perfects Christ’s humanity rather than detracts from it. By always being aware of the good and will of God, Christ, because of his graced human nature and will, always acts in accordance with the good and divine will, the human and divine wills thus being coordinated and yet their own principles of genuinely free activity in the person of Christ.

The person of the divine Word, then, acts as a single person precisely through this coordinated cooperation of his two natures and two wills. The Word is fully God, transcendent and unchanging even in the Incarnation. The Word is fully human, possessed of a union of body and soul with a functioning human life and active, self-determining will. It is one divine person who exists in and acts through each of these natures; there is not a distinct human person in Christ. Hence, it is in Christ truly God who redeems and truly through his own humanity and its activities and will that he does so. Aquinas appears, then, to have further elaborated and defended the very balancing of the various Christological concerns that was so vigorously defended by the great councils of the church.

Patristic Christology

I have finally finished all my commitments for this semester at the GTU! I'm currently applying both for philosophy employment (please pray for that) and for New Testament PhD programs at the same time and will see where Providence takes us. In the meantime, I'll make a couple of posts from the papers (mostly summarizing my own synthesis of course materials) I wrote for my Historical Development of Christology class. Here's the first one:

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Arius, Apollinaris, and Nestorius represented respectively for the early church three different foils for the development of Christological doctrine. In response to the Christological imbalances in the views of these thinkers and others after them, the successive ecumenical councils of the early church progressively centered in on a truly balanced Christology, taking into account Christ’s full humanity, full divinity, and unity, while at the same time maintaining the transcendence of God within the mystery of the Incarnation. In this essay I will consider each of the three heterodox thinkers listed above and show how Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III all redressed in their particular ways the doctrinal mistakes of those three.

Arius was the first early heretical thinker to provoke his own ecumenical council devoted to adjudicating his views. It is arguable that one of the key determining factors in Arius’s Christology was his concern to protect the transcendence of the divine as he understood it – to keep the divine immutable and well-removed from the earthly realm of becoming and corruption. Arius’s God is, in effect, not so different from modern Deist versions of the deity, if not even more aloof from his creation, if that is possible.

The Logos serves in Arius’s thinking, as in Origenist theology of the period, as the intermediary in creation between God and the world, keeping the two firmly apart. But since the Logos is thus involved in creation, the Logos cannot be transcendent in the same way God is. With the rejection of a Platonic view of levels within God and a focus on divine transcendence as essential to divinity, this apparently lower being, the Logos, cannot have a share in that divinity. As such, the Logos must be created by God Himself, all else coming from the Logos directly rather than God in his unsullied distance from Creation.

Apart from cosmological considerations, Arius’s understanding of transcendence also pushes him towards a rejection of the Son’s divinity because of his view of the Incarnation and the nature of the unity of the Incarnate Son. Arius takes onboard the Logos-sarx framework then fashionable in Alexandria, according to which Jesus Christ had a human body but instead of a rational soul in the way other humans do, he had the supreme Logos as his rational, animating principle (I will return to this framework below in discussing Apollinaris). As such, since Christ underwent suffering and change, the Logos as his vital principle also underwent these. But since the divine nature is immutable and impassible, not to mention transcendent, the Logos cannot possess the divine nature as its own.

Arius, then, certainly protects divine transcendence as well as the unity of Christ – the Logos is not an additional entity but rather takes the role of the soul in the man Christ, thus combining Logos and human body in one incarnate being. The Platonically-influenced thought was that if something is the rational, animating principle of a human body then that basically makes it a human soul. However, the Logos was very different from a human soul, hence the worry with Logos-sarx Christology that Christ’s full humanity had been compromised. Christ becomes a kind of super-creature with a human body but something very different from the human mind or soul possessed by the rest of the human race. While preserving the need for Christ to actually suffer and die, thus entering into human reality, that very human reality is compromised by replacing the soul with the Logos. Christ, rather than being a human being, becomes in this view of the Incarnation a new kind of entity, compounded of human bodily parts and the super-creature who mediates between God and man. And if Christ, as many argued, needed to be fully human in order to fully save humans – possessing every bit of human nature in order to redeem every bit of it – then this Christ is not able to redeem us as whole human beings, bodies and souls. Jettisoning divinity for Christ, Arius thus also ran afoul of the objection that his Christ, lacking divinity, could not save, since only God can save.

The Council of Nicea, called to address Arius’s views, succeeded in theologically resolving at least some of Arius’s imbalanced theology. Without addressing issues relating to the divine transcendence or Christ’s humanity or unity, Nicea did affirm the full divinity of Christ, declaring him same in substance or being (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father. The Origenist notion of levels of divinity in the Godhead via emanation from the ultimate, transcendent, unitary God was abandoned. This safeguarded both Christ’s full possession of the divine nature shared with the Father as well as his ability to save in virtue of this fact.

Since Nicea did not address the other issues involved in Arius’s view, however, it is not surprising to see Apollinaris accept Nicea and the full divinity of Christ (or at least attempt to do so) and yet fall into other problems related to Arius’s view, all stemming from Apollinaris’s acceptance of the same Logos-sarx framework as Arius. Like Arius, Apollinaris views Christ as a composite of the Logos and a human body, the former again replacing the human soul in Christ. But once the Logos is recognized as fully divine, the combination with the Logos-sarx view, while rendering Christ a true unity, in fact causes problems in almost every other area.

Since the Logos, on Apollinaris’s view, joins with a human body, it seems to form a new, composite entity, Christ (similar to the way it does in Arius’s view) – a tertium quid neither fully human nor fully divine but something else. Just as in Arius’s view, a human body with the Logos instead of a human soul is not fully human. Christ apparently also cannot be fully divine for the additional reason that since it would seem that the Logos, as the replacement for the human soul, would have to serve as the seat of Christ’s suffering and other experiences. But that would make the Logos passable. The Logos in such a case could not have the full divine nature, lacking divine transcendence and its impassibility. Being neither fully God nor fully man, Christ would then neither save as God nor be able to redeem whole human persons since he would lack whole human personhood himself. While it could be claimed that the Logos retains its impassibility, this would require a mere appearance of suffering and human experience and hence a retreat to a docetic Christ, a denial of the true reality of the man Jesus and his real suffering, human life and free obedience for our salvation as he is swallowed up in the transcendent divine.

The First Council of Constantinople condemned Apollinaris and affirmed the true, full humanity of Christ. Rather than a mere human body, his humanity was a full one, involving a combination of both body and soul, complete humanity for the salvation of human beings. It thus also safeguarded against a violation of divine transcendence as well as the danger of docetism since the Logos was not directly compounded with a human body (and hence helped save the reality of the man Jesus).

Without the Logos-sarx framework, however, the problem of accounting for the unity of Christ returned. If we start with the divine Logos on one hand – God – and this complete human being on the other – the man Jesus – then how do we account for their unity in Christ? The unity of Christ thus provides the central problem affecting Nestorius’s Christology. Nestorius accepted both a full human nature and a full divine nature in Christ, but seems to have had problems putting them together in such a way as to form a convincing unity, so averse he was to the danger of forming a tertium quid out of the two as Apollinaris or Arius did. Nestorius’s notion of a nature was that of an concrete individual entity and hence he thought of the incarnation as the coming together of two concrete individuals, which results in one new prosopon or phenomenal reality of unity. On Nestorius’s view, then, there is not a single subject who is the Logos and hence has divine properties and who is also the man Jesus and hence has human properties – existing both as God and as man. Hence, there can be on his view no communication of idioms – no applying of predicates of divinity to the man Jesus and no applying of predicates of humanity to the divine Logos, as would have followed were the subject identical. Mary, on this view, cannot be rightly said to be the Mother of God – the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος) or God-Bearer.

Nestorius, in trying to maintain full divinity and divine transcendence on the one hand, and full humanity on the other, thus trips over the issue of the unity of Christ, which in turns raises the issue of whether Christ on Nestorius’s view would be able to save, given that only God can save, since it would seem that one would not then be allowed to say that God lived, suffered, died, and was raised for our salvation. Human mediatorship in salvation is secured, but the role of the divine, being pushed out of the created world as in Arius’s view, seems to be damaged.

The Council of Ephesus responded to Nestorius by rejecting his views as providing insufficient unity for Christ. It is one and the same Logos who is at once God and man, to whom both divine and human attributes accrue and hence Mary is indeed Theotokos. As Cyril noted, divinity and humanity are united in the one hypostasis or person of the divine Logos, hence the communication of idioms is completely appropriate (it is, in fact, just an application of the logical rule Leibniz’s Law, also known as the Indiscernibility of Identicals) – we can say both that God truly suffered on the cross and that the man Jesus is creator of the world, Second Person of the Trinity, since these are really one person, God the Son. Unity is hence found in the person of the Logos, not in some special extra relationship added as an outside extra to Christ’s divinity and humanity. Hence the unity of Christ and the divine role in salvation were secured for the time being by the council.

Ephesus, however, did not solve the question that Nestorius’s view seems to have addressed fairly well; that is, how to maintain divine transcendence and full divinity in the face of full humanity, taking both the divinity and humanity seriously as demanded by Nicea and Constantinople I. The idea of dividing humanity and divinity into two distinct, unmixed natures seems to do this, allowing for full humanity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with divinity and for full divinity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with humanity. Hence, in divinity Christ can remain transcendent and divine, whereas in humanity he can be a full, though sinless, human.

The Council of Chalcedon takes on this important usage of the notion of two natures, but without adding in Nestorius’s interpretation of the notion. That is, Constantinople does not interpret the notion of a nature in terms of a concrete individual entity. The natures are not independent things added together to form Christ but, instead, the human and divine natures are distinct sets of characteristic properties or ways of being, united in the person of Christ as the one subject of these properties who thus exists in two fully distinct ways – the divine way and a particular human way. Without changing in the divine nature, the single person of Christ took on a new mode of existence in the Incarnation, which is a change in the created order rather than in Christ qua God. Chalcedon thus takes on the important insights of the two-nature view held by people like Nestorius but without the distortions caused by too-concrete a notion of what a divine or human nature might be. Chalcedon thus successfully integrates the insights of Nicea – that Christ is fully God – and of Constantinople I – that Christ is fully human – with that of Ephesus – that Christ forms a unity in the person of the divine Logos.

The Third Council of Constantinople clarified and further developed the Chalcedonian trajectory of Christology by addressing Christ’s full humanity not merely in the sense of the possession of an abstract, though concretely realized, nature but also in terms of a fully human way of life and activity, a human use of human freedom to form a truly human life, giving truly human obedience to the Father unto death. Without a distinctly human will and human activity, which were rejected by the monothelites, there is an inherent danger of a kind of implicit Apollinarism or even docetism, where the human life of Christ is consumed by rather than perfected by the divine life he also possesses. There is a danger then in the two directions of either failing to respect divine transcendence by, in effect, replacing much of the functionality of the human soul with that of the divine Logos, or, on the other hand, failing to respect the true reality of the man Jesus. In either case, a truly human life has been compromised and, if as in the West, it is thought that such a life and human obedience are important for our salvation, then such a view will certainly not do. If Christ is to save us by humanly taking on as free, human action, a human obedience unto death on the cross, this would seem to require that he actually act and will in his human nature and that he both have a human will and source of activity and that these not simply sit there inert, as good as absent from him.

The Third Council of Constantinople addresses this concern by investing in Christ a fully human reality – Christ, in addition to his divine will, has and uses a human will, a human principle of activity. Christ, in other words, acts in both of his natures, not simply the divine one. The real human existence, activity, and freedom of the man Jesus are thus at last properly ascribed to the one Logos who is at once also in possession of a divine existence, activity, and freedom, unified together in that one divine person who acts and exists in each nature.

In conjunction with the councils before it, then, Constantinople III guarantees that Christ is truly one of us – the perfect human being and representative of us as human beings before the Father and to us of what we as Christians can and must become in Christ. At the same time, however, Christ is guaranteed as where we are able in this life to directly meet God – not mediated through creation but the divine Son himself who, in virtue of his consubstantiality with the Father, reveals to us the Father as well. In Christ, we encounter God himself in the only way we are currently able to do so – the infinite taking on the finite in order to be revealed to the finite.

The orthodox view developed in the councils examined in this paper, then, does something that the heterodox thinkers do not – that is, present a picture of Christ which balances all the important considerations and truths we get from theology and Scripture. While the heterodox views latch onto and appear to do extremely well with certain considerations, they do so at the cost of others, failing to take into account other important considerations or truths and thus ending up with a lopsided theology as a result or even a Christ who perhaps cannot even save.