Tag Archives: Trinity

Baptized in the Spirit 4 (Frank Macchia)

Books, Theology, , , , ,

Baptized in the SpiritChapter Four: Spirit Baptism in Trinitarian Perspective (Cont’d)

Macchia considers the Baptism with the Holy Spirit in its trinitarian dimensions, first by reflecting on the significance of Jesus as Spirit-baptiser for an understanding of his divinity. Macchia suggests that Jesus’ resurrection alone is not sufficient to assert his divinity, but that his role as Spirit-baptiser also supports this claim, for only God can give God (110-111). If the risen Jesus gives the Spirit who is also God, then Jesus, too, must be divine. He was raised to be the Spirit-baptiser, the one who give the life-giving, life-transforming eschatological Spirit.

Without the role of Jesus as the one who bestows the Spirit, his resurrection would have lost its eschatological goal and the relationship of Jesus to his heavenly Father would have lost its strongest clue (111).

Second, BHS is itself a trinitarian act, being the inauguration and advancement of the cosmic and eschatological reign of the Father by the Son and in the Spirit. Through Jesus Christ, the breath of the Father is proceeding to all creation animating and renewing it that it may return to the Father in the Spirit and through Christ. In Spirit-baptism the triune God opens his life to embrace, gather and indwell the creation. Macchia is clearly influenced by Moltmann in this discussion as he grounds his discussion of the triune life in the biblical narrative of Jesus’ life, and adopts a relational view of the trinity.

Spirit baptism accents the idea that the triune life of God is not closed but involved in the openness of self-giving love. … The reign of God comes on us through an abundant outpouring of God’s very Spirit on us to transform us and to direct our lives toward Christlike loyalties. From the trinitarian fellowship of the Father and the Son, the Spirit is poured out to expand God’s love and communion to creation (116).  

Macchia attempts to side-step the question of the inner life of the triune God (125), but still favours a social trinitarianism that yet maintains an economic monarchy of the Father in which the “Son and the Spirit share the monarchy of the Father in mutual dependence and working in a way that implies the Father’s dependence on them as well. … Spirit baptism in the context of the inauguration of the kingdom of God means that the Father’s divine monarchy is not abstract but mediated by the Son and the Spirit in the redemption of the world” (124). God the Trinity is open to the world including human suffering:

In Spirit baptism, God seeks to tabernacle with creation in empathy with the suffering creation and toward its final liberation. After all, the Spirit of Spirit baptism is the one who groans with the suffering creation for its eventual liberation through Christ. Spirit baptism reveals profoundly what is implied in the incarnation and the cross (126).

Macchia brings this long chapter to a conclusion by considering Spirit-baptism in relation to the primary elements of Christian life which he identifies as justification, sanctification and empowerment. Although “Spirit-baptized justification” includes an alien element—that is, the gift of righteousness given to the believer by God ever remains grounded externally in Christ as his righteousness rather than our own—Macchia’s emphasis falls on justification’s transformative elements: through faith in Jesus the believer receives the Holy Spirit and so is united with Christ, is granted the imputation of his victory over sin and death, and thus participates in the new creation. Justification, in Macchia’s vision of the Spirit, is not simply a legal or forensic act which leaves believer unchanged, but includes the regenerating and sanctifying work of the Spirit. To be justified is to be “righteoused” by God (130). The “righteousness” involved in justification is a liberating and redemptive concept that reorders life toward justice and mercy (132).

Justification loses connection with the full breadth of its concrete substance in the life of Jesus as the Spirit-anointed Inaugurator of the kingdom of God if it is defined essentially as an abstract declaration realized in a juridical transference of merits (138).

Justified existence is thus pneumatic existence, Spirit-baptized existence. … In the here and now, the righteousness of justification produces a life dedicated to the reign of God on earth, to the weighty matters of the law, to reconciled and reconciling communities of faith, and to the justice and mercy of God in the world (139).

Turning his attention to “Spirit-baptized sanctification” Macchia insists that justification and sanctification are not two sequential aspects of Christian life, but the entirety of Christian life portrayed by one or the other of these two overlapping metaphors (140). Spirit-baptized sanctification concerns participation by the Spirit in the consecration of Jesus to the Father for the world, in solidarity with their misery. Sanctification refers primarily to an objective accomplishment through the Spirit as a sanctifying presence.

Like Jesus, the disciples were sanctified for faithfulness in the world and not for escape from the world (Jn. 17:15-16). Their sanctification and consecration was unto a holy purpose that required their engagement with the world, not their avoidance of it. If Jesus fulfilled all righteousness by bearing the burdens of the sinners, how can we interpret kingdom sanctification as an avoidance of the sinners? (143-144)

Finally, “Spirit-baptized witness” concerns charismatic or vocational empowerment for the service and witness of the kingdom. If sanctification implies being set apart for a holy task, empowerment is being granted the capacity for the fulfilment of it.

The sanctifying work of the Spirit needs to be released in life through powerful experiences of renewal and charismatic enrichment that propel us toward vibrant praise, healing reconciliations, enriched koinonia, and enhanced gifting for empowered service (145).

Macchia rightly identifies this idea as an essential aspect of the Spirit’s work in Christian life, and a particular contribution Pentecostalism can make to the wider Christian family. Christian initiation must include, says Macchia, a sense that the grace of God gifts Christians for ministry and mission (151). “There is no Christian initiation by faith and baptism in the full sense of the word without some sense of commissioning to service” (156). In this respect, Spirit-baptism as the initiation of Christian life indicates the inherently missional character of Christian identity. Nevertheless, the work of the Spirit is not simply initiatory but progressive and eschatological. Therefore, Christians may and indeed must, continually seek for a greater fullness of the life of the Spirit, anticipating fresh experiences of the Spirit’s sanctifying and empowering presence, so that they might truly participate in the life of God’s kingdom.

Reading Karl Barth on Election (9)

Theology, , ,

Church Dogmatics Study EditionSelection: The Church Dogmatics II/2:94-103, Jesus Christ, Electing and Elected.

In his prolegomena to the doctrine of election Barth argued for three things:

  1. That the doctrine of election is oriented toward grace; it is the “sum of the gospel.”
  2. The foundation of election is found in Jesus Christ who is the subject and not merely the instrument or mirror of election.
  3. The doctrine is located within the doctrine of God proper, for the election identifies God as the gracious God, gracious in himself and in all his works ad extra.

Now, in this new section, Barth turns to the substance of the doctrine. For Barth, Jesus Christ is the divine election of grace, the focus of election, and as such, also the subject and content of election. Jesus Christ is the beginning of all God’s ways ad extra, the ground and telos of all God’s creating, reconciling and redeeming activity.

He is the election of God before which and without which and beside which God cannot make any other choices. Before Him and without Him and beside Him God does not, then, elect or will anything (94).

That is, Jesus Christ is the name that God—as Father, Son and Holy Spirit—has from all eternity decided to bear. The election is the eternal self-determination of the one God; there is no God nor work of God nor decree of God other than that of this God who bears this name. In an extended statement crucial for understanding Barth’s doctrine he argues that,

In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God which could be the object of the love of God or the setting for His acts of freedom, God anticipated and determined within Himself (in the power of His love and freedom, of His knowing and willing) that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him. In the beginning it was the choice of the Father Himself to establish this covenant with man by giving up His Son for him, that He Himself might become man in the fulfilment of His grace. In the beginning it was the choice of the Son to be obedient to grace, and therefore to offer up Himself and to become man in order that this covenant might be made a reality. In the beginning it was the resolve of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God, of the Father and Son should not be disturbed or rent by this covenant with man, but that it should be made the more glorious, the deity of God, the divinity of His love and freedom, being confirmed and demonstrated by this offering of the Father and this self-offering of the Son. This choice was in the beginning. As the subject and object of this choice, Jesus Christ was at the beginning. He was not at the beginning of God, for God has indeed no beginning. But He was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of God’s dealings with the reality which is distinct from Himself. Jesus Christ was the choice or election of God in respect of this reality. He was the election of God’s grace as directed towards man. He was the election of God’s covenant with man (101-102).

Barth’s comments here must be understood in the light of his doctrine of the Trinity in which he distinguishes between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and his model of the Trinity as one divine subject in three modes of being (Church Dogmatics I/1). In this text, God’s triunity precedes his election. God exists and so elects as the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit; election is the work of the triune God. Thus the Father elects, the Son elects, the Holy Spirit elects, and yet this is not three electings, but the one divine electing of the triune God. There is in Barth’s theology, no social trinity in which the will of the Father differs from that of the Son and the Spirit after the analogy of three distinct human persons, where the will of the three is utterly distinct from that of the others, and may even be in competition or conflict with the others. There may be distinction in the manner in which this one divine will is expressed in the choice of the three persons, but no division or separation.

Barth, of course, goes further than this: Jesus Christ is in the beginning—not in the beginning of God “for God has indeed no beginning. But He was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of God’s dealings with the reality which is distinct from Himself.” Thus, election concerns not simply “the Son,” but Jesus Christ, the incarnate, the Son of God who is also the Son of Man. But how is this so, given that Jesus Christ is the man born in time?

In the eternity of God—that is, in the eternal wisdom and counsel of God, before there was any reality other than the life and being of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God, in the freedom of his love, determined that he would give himself to and unite himself with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Before anything else this is a divine self-determination, a reflexive action in which God determines God’s own eternal being to be God only in this way, as the One who is with humanity and gracious to humanity in the person of his Son. Jesus Christ, then, is the object and “result” of the divine electing.

But Barth will go one step more. Not only is Jesus Christ the object of the divine election, but because this is an act of divine self-determination, the Son who chooses this electing together with the Father and the Spirit is none other than the Son united with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, then, is the subject of election, the one who elects, as well as the object of election, the one who is elected.

Meanderings…

Culture, Theology,

Old BooksDarren Sumner has been writing on the Eternal Functional Submission controversy in Evangelical Theology. His careful work is worth reading.

In other words, there is no dispute that the Son submits to the Father in the economy, or in God’s life ad extra.  The thing under dispute — the only thing under dispute — is whether this submission also obtains in the immanent Trinity, in God’s life ad intra.  This is why specificity here is crucial.  But it is crucially absent from most of what Ware, Grudem, and their supporters have written.

*****

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

And not just in America! In Australia, too, this is a growing popular sentiment that in my view, threatens the intellectual heritage and cultural fabric of free societies. This sentiment is already very prominent in the often hostile and facile political discourse of our country.

The Atlantic argues that tertiary educational institutions have a responsibility to encourage robust thought and discussion, even where the views expressed might cause some offence. Students need to be encouraged to engage constructively in such discussions, rather than be wrapped in cotton-wool lest their feelings and commitments be challenged. A few more citations from the article:

If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings—then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.

Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for … democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.

The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.

For another article on a similar vein see Rachelle Peterson “On Reading Old Books.”

The Irrelevant Trinity

Theology,

Rublev Icon TrinityFred Sanders is correct to argue that the first step in speaking about the trinity is not to establish the relevance of the doctrine.  Rather, he argues for the reality of the immanent Trinity as the presupposition of the gospel, and the ground and origin of divine grace toward humanity and all created things. I particularly like his language of “God…in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds…”

The cry in our day always seems to be for a practical doctrine of the Trinity, for relevance, application, and experiential payoff. Indeed, it is true that the doctrine of the Trinity changes everything about Christian life. But the wisest Christian teachers have always known that shortcuts to relevance are self-defeating. In bypassing the deep sources of reality, they not only miss the truth but ultimately deliver less practical benefit. When it comes to the difference that the doctrine of the Trinity can make in our lives, it is crucially important that we begin with a recognition of God in himself before moving on to God for us. What we need to begin with is a profoundly impractical doctrine of the Trinity. With that in place, we can really get something done…

The Trinity isn’t for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. God is God in this way: God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustively full, and infinitely blessed. (Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God, 95, 62).

Susanna Wesley’s Trinitarian Theology

Theology, ,

Susanna_WesleyFred Sanders (The Deep Things of God, 68-69) tells a wonderful story of Susanna Wesley’s trinitarian theology:

“Her journal from about 1710 includes an impressive entry that shows how seriously she took the doctrine. She began by accusing the great Aristotle of falling into error when he taught that the world eternally existed along with God, “streamed by connatural result and emanation” from all eternity. She mused that “this error seems grounded on the true notion of the goodness of God,” which Aristotle “truly supposes must eternally be communicating good to something or other.” It is true that the Supreme Being is infinitely good and that his goodness is of a kind to be always inclined to give itself away to others. Without any further information, this speculation would demand an eternal world as the eternal recipient of God’s self-giving goodness. An eternally, essentially self-giving God would require an eternal world. But that sort of eternal world would make God dependent on the world for his own satisfaction. Without the world, God would be a frustrated giver.

“The conclusion, which Susanna Wesley found utterly unacceptable, would be that God depended on something outside himself to make possible his full self-expression. Pondering this mistake in the great Aristotle’s philosophy, Susanna mused, “It is his want of the knowledge of revealed religion that probably led him into it.” Aristotle’s problem came from the fact that he had no access to the revealed doctrine of the Trinity.

For had he ever heard of that great article of our Christian faith concerning the Holy Trinity, he had then perceived the almighty Goodness eternally communicating being and all the fullness of the Godhead to the divine Logos, his uncreated Word, between whose existence and that of the Father there is not one moment assignable.

“Susanna Wesley’s skirmish with Aristotle is a pretty tidy speculative engagement with the philosopher, and it is worth remembering that Susanna was not a theology professor but a full-time homeschooling mother when she wrote it. Little John Wesley was probably about seven years old at the time Susanna recorded these thoughts in her personal devotional journal. She obviously had a lively intellect and a mind for what mattered. What mattered, in her well-formed evangelical Trinitarianism, was that the deep Trinitarian background of the gospel stayed firmly in place so the astonishing graciousness of God’s free grace could be seen for what it is. … She knew that the gospel derives its power from the infinite background of who God is.”

The “Practical” Trinity – Catherine Mowry LaCugna

Books, Theology, ,

Catherine LaCugnaIn my Introduction to Systematic Theology class I often have students research one of the “great” theologians or engage a classical theological text. I am usually troubled that my selection is entirely male, although thankfully, that is now beginning to change with some outstanding female theologians emerging. The reason for the selection is simply that the history of Christian thought has, until recent decades, been largely a male story. This year, however, I decided I had to change this imbalance and so included a reading by Catherine Mowry LaCugna alongside those by Athanasius, Luther and Barth. I suspect that LaCugna’s God For Us will not actually be viewed in the future as a “classic,” although it was a celebrated volume when it was published in the early 1990s and still commands much respect today. The feminist Catholic theologian died prematurely in May 1997, at only forty-four years of age.

In our seminar we focussed on LaCagna’s final chapter, “The Practical Trinity.” LaCugna writes beautifully and passionately and has an amazing vision of “the household of God” understood through the lens of Jesus’ life and teaching.

The form of God’s life in the economy dictates both the shape of our experience of that life and our reflection on that experience. Led by the Spirit more deeply into the life of Christ, we see the unveiled face of the living God. God’s glory is beheld in Jesus Christ who is the instrument of our election, our adoption as daughters and sons of God, our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins, and the cause of our everlasting inheritance of glory (Ephesians). In order to formulate an ethics that is authentically Christian, an ecclesiology and sacramental theology that are christological and pneumatological, a spirituality that is not generic but is shaped by the Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, we must adhere to the form of God’s self-revelation, God’s concrete existence as Christ and Spirit. The purpose of the discipline of theology is to contemplate and serve that economy, to throw light on it if possible, so that we may behold the glory of God, doxa theou, ever more acutely.[1]

For LaCugna, the doctrine of the trinity is a way of contemplating the mystery of God and of ourselves, a heuristic framework for correct thought about God and ourselves in relation to God.[2] All correct thought about God begins here, with what God has actually done in the economy of salvation in Christ and through the Spirit. Here we may know the God who comes to us.

At the heart of all reality, including the household of God, is the personal God whose being God for Us by Catherine Mowry LaCugnais communion, the God who exists toward and for another. The reign of God, the household of God exists where this form of life—exemplified by Jesus—is evident and practised. Jesus is both the exemplar and the criterion of the reign of God, both in his life and in his teaching. According to LaCugna, Christian orthopraxis must correspond to what we believe to be true about God, and what is true about God is known via his activity in the economy of salvation.[3]

The divine archē, the divine origin and rule, is of great concern for LaCugna, who insists that the “monarchy” of God refers to the trinity rather than simply to the Father alone. God’s monarchy is “relational, personal and shared,” a rule of “personhood, love and communion.”[4] LaCugna resists the substantialist ontologies that have often characterised Christian reflection on the being of God. God is not a divine “substance,” but three persons. She argues that the Cappadocians understood the trinity such that “hypostasis (person) was predicated as prior to and constitutive of ousia (nature).”[5] This establishes the ontological priority of personhood over nature, and so provides the ontological ground of relation and communion.

LaCugna suggests that the doctrine of the trinity elaborated by the Cappadocians “dared the Christian imagination” to think of God differently, and so to relinquish all forms of domination and hierarchy.[6] This, perhaps, takes us to the very heart of LaCugna’s project: to stir and renew the Christian imagination in ways shaped by the triune God as revealed in the economy of salvation. That is, to imagine a church and a society grounded in values of communion, inclusion, relationship, personhood, equality, mutuality and generous self-giving service. “This is the lofty vocation of the members of the church of Jesus Christ, to be stewards (oikonomoi) of God’s economy, to serve others (diakonia), to preach the message of the reign of God (kerygma), to promote communion (koinonia).”[7]

Living trinitarian faith means living God’s life: living from and for God, from and for others. Living trinitarian faith means living as Jesus Christ lived, in persona Christi: preaching the gospel; relying totally on God; offering healing and reconciliation; rejecting laws, customs, conventions that place persons beneath rules; resisting temptation; praying constantly; eating with modern-day lepers and other outcasts; embracing the enemy and the sinner; dying for the sake of the gospel if it is God’s will. Living trinitarian faith means living according to the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: training the eyes of the heart on God’s face and name proclaimed before us in the economy; responding to God in faith, hope and love; eventually becoming unrestrictedly united with God. Living trinitarian faith means living together in harmony and communion with every other creature in the common household of God, “doing all things to the praise and glory of God.” Living trinitarian faith means adhering to the gospel of liberation from sin and fractured relationship: liberation from everything that misleads us into false worship, from everything that promotes unnatural, nonrelational personhood, from everything that displaces us to an exclusive household, from everything that deceives us into believing self-aggrandizing archisms.[8]

Why do I suspect that LaCugna’s work will not become a “classic”? Although I affirm her approach to the trinity in general terms, and appreciate her insights into the implications of trinitarian doctrine for practical Christian faith and life, I find that I cannot follow her in collapsing the immanent trinity into the economic trinity. I prefer to follow Barth here, and the tradition more generally, than Rahner or Moltmann. It is certainly the case that we know the immanent trinity only by means of God’s self-revelation in the economy, and that what we know of God via the divine self-revelation is true and faithful knowledge. Nevertheless, God is more than has been revealed though not other than what has been revealed. Further, if I understand LaCugna correctly—and I grant the point that I may not—her construal of the trinity makes God dependent on the creation for God’s own being and is thus a panentheistic doctrine of God that compromises both the divine sovereignty and the grace of creation and redemption. The tradition does not make this leap, and I suspect that future orthodoxy will not either. God, fully God within the divine triune being prior to and without the creature, turned toward that which is not God in creation and redemption graciously welcoming and including the creature in the divine life. Barth’s insistence on the immanent trinity retains this emphasis.

[1] LaCugna, God for Us, 378.

[2] Ibid., 379.

[3] Ibid., 383.

[4] Ibid., 390, 91.

[5] Ibid., 389.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 401.

[8] Ibid., 400-01.

New Volume on the Doctrine of God

Books, Theology, , , ,

Sonderegger_Katherine_photo2014I first came across Kate Sonderegger because she is a Barth scholar. Her early work was on Barth and the Jews, and she has written a number of Barth essays in various volumes. She is another of a growing number of prominent female theologians, one who has just published the first volume of a projected series on systematic theology. Her first volume is on the doctrine of God and here it appears she is establishing her credentials as an independent thinker, certainly breaking with the path blazed by Barth and followed by so many others in the twentieth-century. Sonderegger’s Doctrine of God begins not with the trinity but with the one God and then proceeds with a discussion of the classic attributes of this one God: God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. Michael Allen has conducted an interview with Kate about her new volume on the doctrine of God. (And part 2 of the interview also arrived today…)

I remember as an undergraduate writing an essay on the trinity in Barth and Moltmann, and coming down on the side of Barth who starts with the one God. Moltmann criticised Barth for this, but my impression was that Barth had the better of it. The biblical witness testifies to the unity of God and only then proceeds to discuss his triunity. Moltmann wanted to start with the triunity of God but in my estimation never quite made it back to establishing the divine unity.

The publisher’s blurb reads:

The mystery of Almighty God is most properly an explication of the oneness of God, tying the faith of the church to the bedrock of Israel’s confession of the LORD of the covenant, the LORD of our Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of divine attributes, then, is set out as a reflection on Holy Scripture: the One God as omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, and all these as expressions of the Love who is God. Systematic theology must make bold claims about its knowledge and service of this One LORD: the Invisible God must be seen and known in the visible. In this way, God and God’s relation to creation are distinguished—but not separated—from Christology, the doctrine of perfections from redemption. The LORD God will be seen as compatible with creatures, and the divine perfections express formally distinct and unique relations to the world.

This systematic theology, then, begins from the treatise De Deo Uno and develops the dogma of the Trinity as an expression of divine unicity, on which will depend creation, Christology, and ecclesiology. In the end, the transcendent beauty who is God can be known only in worship and praise.

Bruce McCormack on Modern Christology

Theology, , , , ,
colorful-jesus-painting
“Colorful Jesus Painting”

“The Person of Christ” in Kapic & McCormack (eds), Mapping Modern Theology, 149-173.

McCormack introduces his essay on the Person of Christ by noting that the doctrine of the person of Christ has to do with the ontological constitution of the mediator as divine and human. This duality of Jesus’ being has its roots in Scripture, and led to ancient debates culminating in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. Here the essential parameters of the doctrine were set: the union of two natures—divine and human—in the one person, Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Chalcedon did not fully settle the christological questions. The relation of the two natures to one another, and the identification of the Subject of the person’s activity continued to arise in the history of the church as matters of controversy. For example, in the seventh-century, the church debated whether, in fact, Jesus had two wills. The Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 681) concluded that he did, the human will functioning as any other human will, though always in agreement with the will of the Logos. The sacramental dispute between Lutheran and Reformed theologians in the Reformation period revolved around whether the attributes of the one nature may be applied to the other nature, or whether the attributes of each nature should more properly be attributed to the person of Christ. For example, may we say that Jesus’ humanity is omnipresent or that God can die? Or would we better apply these various attributes to the person of Jesus in his unique divine-human unity?

In the modern period, a growing awareness of human self-consciousness and development posed sharp questions to Chalcedon. Cyril of Alexandria had portrayed Jesus’ humanity as static, almost an inert instrument of the Logos who was the acting Subject of the man Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Constantinople III affirmed that each nature possessed its own mind and will. In 1848, then, David Friedrich Strauss argued that this must mean that Jesus was possessed of two personalities, one infinite and one finite. If this was so, it must inevitably mean that Jesus’ divine nature overwhelms his human nature with the result that his humanity differs from ours. Is Jesus fully and genuinely human? This modern concern is one that McCormack shares.

McCormack identifies the Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Hegel as the two men who set the agenda for modern christology. Schleiermacher conceived of God in classic terms of an absolute and omnipotent God standing outside the created order. Nevertheless God’s activity is directed toward the world as a continual causative power, guiding and sustaining the ‘system of nature’ as a whole. God’s whole creational and providential purpose finds its climax and goal in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is perfectly open to God and so possesses a perfect God-consciousness. So powerful is this God-consciousness that he is able to live a sinless life and so become the Redeemer who communicates the power of his own God-consciousness to others. But Schleiermacher is concerned about human development and so in his view, the divine essence unites itself to human nature in the person of Jesus only gradually. This allows room for personality development in the human Jesus, as McCormack notes:

It was only as Jesus’s “higher powers” (reason and will) developed that the uniting activity could produce that redemptive power that would emanate from him to those who came after. To be sure, the uniting activity was present in such a way that it kept him preserved from sin at every point—but always in a manner congruent with his stage of human development.[1]

Because Jesus has a perfect passivity with respect to God’s uniting activity,

he is the replication in human form of the pure activity which God is—an incarnation of God by any other name. And he alone can be this. It is in him alone that the creation of human nature is made complete (in his pure receptivity to God). This is something that can only happen once. Therefore, Christ is utterly unique, and what takes place in him is final (in the sense of being unrepeatable) and universal in its significance.[2]

Hegel, more a philosopher than a theologian, approaches the question very differently. Whereas Schleiermacher clings to classical theism, Hegel’s God is a being-in-becoming, a God who is realising his divine being in and through the processes of world history. God is not a being complete and external to the world. Rather, God is on a journey to become who he is; God requires another to become self-conscious. Thus, God posits another alongside himself, a finite creature, the world, and in the world, a particular finite and personal creature, who is yet identified with God himself: Jesus Christ. Now, God has another over against himself in whom he also recognises himself. This other—Jesus—is separate from God, the opposite of God, and indeed in his suffering and death experiences the very antithesis of all that God is. In Jesus Christ, then, God has created and embraced and experienced the extremity of human alienation, finitude and death, and has taken it into the very life of God, triumphing over it.

The God who identifies himself with the crucified Jesus by raising him from the dead is the God who is made known as Self-sacrificial love, a love that goes to any extreme to be reconciled with the object of his love. And in that all of this is revealed to those who follow Jesus, their knowledge of God is made to be the vehicle of God’s own Self-knowledge. God knows himself in and through their knowledge of him.[3]

Albrecht Ritschl
Albrecht Ritschl

McCormack then goes onto discuss other forms modern christology has taken, including the kenotic christology of Gottfried Thomasius, the moral-historical christology “from below” of Albrecht Ritschl, and the “classical” yet post-metaphysical christology of Karl Barth. McCormack refers to all these christological models as the “basic paradigms” which shape the contours of almost all other modern christologies, including those of Moltmann and Pannenberg, the liberationists and feminists, Walter Kasper and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

McCormack’s essay is typically thorough, learned and well worth reading. Yet a significant question can be raised about his treatment of modern christology. McCormack argues that,

Modern Christology was born in a reaction not so much against the theological values that sought expression in and through those categories [of the Chalcedonian formula] as against the categories themselves. We make a huge mistake at the outset if we understand modern Christology as simply a repudiation of the dogma of the church. Initially, at least, it was anything but that. … The modern period saw a transformation in the categories employed to explain the basic values that came to expression in the formula, but no abandonment of those values.[4]

McCormack identifies these values very simply in terms of the Chalcedonian formula: Jesus is both divine and human in one person. By limiting the theological values of Chalcedon and the broader ancient tradition in this fashion he can suggest that Schleiermacher, Hegel and Ritschl are, to some extent at least, “orthodox” in a Chalcedonian sense. He is, of course, certainly aware that this is a problematic suggestion and acknowledges with respect to Schleiermacher and Hegel,

For both, the triunity of God is the consequence of the divine act of relating to the world in Christ and through the church. The Trinity is an eschatological rather than a protological reality. And that means, as Schleiermacher put it, God is not differentiated in himself in independence of his union with Christ and with the church.[5]

Surely this is a fatal departure from ancient theological values in which God is eternally the triune God, and Christ and the Spirit are eternal God. Why, then, has McCormack argued thus?

[1] McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” 159.

[2] McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” 160, original emphasis.

[3] McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” 162.

[4] McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” 150-151, 157.

[5] McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” 163.

A “Romantic” Doctrine of the Trinity?

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Hegel stampSchleiermacher Stamp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred Sanders argues the interesting thesis that the doctrine of the Trinity in modernity is “Romantic” in its orientation. Although Enlightenment rationalism found no place for the Trinity, the Romantic impulse in modern thought funded a reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity according to:

a)      History: In rationalism, reason is supra-historical, necessary truth which must be real in all possible worlds. Here Lessing’s “ugly ditch”—the idea that accidental truths of history can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason—dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity to the realm of the unthinkable. Many modern theologians have been influenced by Hegel, however, and seek to relate God and history by having the latter as the medium within which the divine being is realised. Smith identifies Moltmann, Pannenberg and Jenson as examples.

b)      Experience: Romanticism insisted that truth may or even must be experiential and not simply rational. Schleiermacher grounded theology in experience, and some following him have sought to correlate the doctrine of God and human experience—something Schleiermacher did not do. Sanders’ argument is not as strong here as it was for his previous assertion. The key to this category of trinitarian thought is the collapse of the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity (Rahner, LaCugna). Elizabeth Johnson and other liberationists use the economic Trinity to explicate human experience. As such, the doctrine does not arise out of human experience—as Schleiermacher also insisted.

c)      Retrieval: As a response or reaction to the “thinness” of theology in Enlightenment thought, retrieval theologies hope to restore biblical and patristic priorities with robust and confident explications of faith.

Sanders ends by suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity was never really lost (and hence did not need to be “rediscovered”) in modernity, except among those who accepted Enlightenment criticism as primary. Under that pressure modern theologians transposed the doctrine into categories of history and experience. This certainly opened opportunities for trinitarian reflection which hitherto had not been explored, but also in some ways distorted the doctrine.

My interest is twofold: first, the idea that modern theologians have appealed to Romantic categories of thought to explicate their doctrine of the Trinity; that is, they appealed to one mode of modern thought against another. Second, while Sanders hints that these modern explications have some value in theological reflection, he is concerned that the doctrine itself has been reinterpreted in unwarranted ways. Stephen Holmes has argued that point more polemically in his recent The Holy Trinity: “In brief, I argue that the explosion of theological work claiming to recapture the doctrine of the Trinity that we have witnessed in recent decades in fact misunderstands and distorts the traditional doctrine so badly that it is unrecognizable” (xv). More on Holmes’s argument later.

See Sanders, F., “The Trinity” in Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Kelly M. Kapic & Bruce L. McCormack (eds); Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012) 21-45.