Chapter Eighteen CHRISTOLOGY TODAY: TRULY GOD AND TRULY HUMAN My heart is full of Christ, and longs Its glorious matter to declare! Of Him I make my loftier song, I cannot from His praise forbear; My ready tongue makes haste to sing The glories of my heavenly King. Fairer than all the earth-born race, Perfect in comeliness Thou art; Replenished are Thy lips with grace, And full of love Thy tender heart: God ever blest! We bow the knee, And own all fullness dwells in Thee. In the Introduction to Part Four, we recalled Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the key question in Christian Theology was not the ‘How?’ or ‘Why? questions, but the ‘Who?’ question: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Now in the last two chapters of Part Four we need to be reminded of that. So much of the history of Christology which we have been studying can appear to be talking about Christ behind his back, as if he were absent. It is of course inevitable that in examining the Church’s doctrine we have to think about just that – doctrine: and doctrine or teaching is inevitably conceptual, concerned with concepts and arguments and language. But if that is pursued merely as the relating of concepts abstracted from experience, then it becomes merely a theoretical academic game. The words and concepts must rather be used in the concrete context of the Church’s living relationship with the Lord as we hear the Gospel proclaimed and respond in praise and worship. Then we are living ‘out of every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’ (Matt.4:4), and the words carry meaning for us. They are our response to the exalted Lord, present with us in the power of his Spirit as he promised right to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20). The words refer to him and to us within the context of a real experimental relationship. Theology is therefore not so much dialectical as dialogical. Theology, and particularly Christology, is the language of confession: it is worship of Christ and proclamation about Christ in the presence of Christ. It is significant then that Bonhoeffer did not begin his Christology lectures with ‘The Historical Christ’, the historical doctrinal development, but with ‘The Present Christ’. And Charles Wesley’s ecstatic verse above reminds us that dogmatics arises out of doxology. Christology is the clarification of the Church’s confession of her Lord. The study of the Person of Christ arises out of that personal knowledge of the present Christ which each Christian has within the fellowship and the worship of the Church. That is our personal knowledge of the risen and exalted Lord who, though he is ‘in a sense absent’, is yet ‘in a sense present’ with us in the power of his Holy Spirit. He is the one to whom we address our prayers and praises, and through whom we also address our prayer and praises by the Spirit to the Father. We do not speak of Christ in his absence therefore: we can only speak of him appropriately and truly as in his presence. Charles Wesley has helped to remind us of that as we come to think in this chapter and the next about how we are to think and speak of Christ today. These are not the final chapters in our Christology. In Part Five, ‘Grace’, we shall address soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, but soteriology is in fact integral to Christology. The ‘Work’ of Christ is integral to the Person of Christ. So in Part Five, we shall not be leaving Christology behind. But here in these last two chapters of Part Four we shall first summarize the route we have taken and then look at some questions which have been at the forefront of discussion and debate in the last few decades. Here too we are concerned with doctrine – concepts and arguments and language. But as we think about questions raised in the contemporary scene, we need to try to see the significance of current debates for the worship of our Lord in our current context. The Way We Have Come: A Summary We preceded our study of Christology with a prolegomenon: the study of the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ in Parts Two and Three. We first examined the cultural context of Enlightenment modernity within which the modern discipline of History developed. We noted that it was limited as a legitimately secular discipline to what may be discerned kata sarka within the secular sphere, what Paul called ‘this present evil age’ (Gal. 1:4). It examines cause and effect, working with a methodological naturalism. Christians too inhabit this saeculum and so may play this game according to its rules, but they reject the metaphysical naturalism which goes with deism or atheism, the cultural assumptions of modernity. The writers of the first ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ thought they were working objectively within this modern secular rule-book, but in fact, as Albert Schweitzer showed, they were merely projecting their nineteenth-century concerns back into the first century. The second quest was a reaction against Bultmann’s extreme historical scepticism, but it still operated with Troeltsch’s deistic rules, and therefore could not cope with the resurrection of Jesus. The third quest has been much more positive about what the historical-critical method can establish about Jesus. N.T. Wright in particular, examining Jesus against the historical background of Israel’s story, presented a credible and persuasive picture of how a first-century Jewish prophet could bring about his own crucifixion in the belief that this would at last bring in the kingdom of God. The strong evidence for his resurrection, and the failure to find any other credible historical explanation for the astonishing rise of his movement after his degrading crucifixion, led us to the threshold of faith in him as not merely a prophet, but the exalted Son of God. This is seen to be credible against the background of the Mystery of the Holy One of Israel, necessarily hidden from us in our corporate sinfulness, yet active to make himself known throughout Israel’s history. It was this revelation which came to definitive culmination in the crucifixion and resurrection of the One who was thereby revealed to be his Eternal Son. That prolegomenon on the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ led us via the resurrection into confession of the risen Christ as Lord and God and so into New Testament Christology. Listening to the combined witness of the apostolic generation, authorized by Christ himself and embodied in the writings of the New Testament, we examined their one-in-two Gospel. This had its roots in Jesus’ own one-in-two preaching of the kingdom of God which was yet to come in glory and power but which was already present in him. In the apostolic Gospel, this was transformed into the narrative of crucified and risen One, the Man dying in agony within the suffering of this present evil age, yet now already exalted in glory to the place of universal honour and proclaimed to be Lord and God. This one-in-two narrative was the story of the one-in-two Saviour, one and the same Christ who was therefore seen to be both truly human and truly God. The full one-in-two story of his incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension was told in the Christological hymns embedded in the New Testament, most notably in the parabolic shape of the Carmen Christi in Philippians 2:6-11. Within the community of faith therefore, confessing Jesus Christ to be Lord and God, we joined in the Church’s exploration of the doctrine of the Person of Christ, fides quaerens intellectum. We then examined the developmental continuity from New Testament Christology into Patristic Christology. Given the clear answer to the ‘Who?’ question, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ the New Testament poses in effect two questions which it does not explicitly answer. In confessing ‘who’ Christ is, how do we hold together his deity and his humanity? And how do we hold together the deity of Christ and the unity of God? Laying aside the second question for the moment as far as that is possible, we concentrated on the first and followed the debates in the early centuries of the Church. The rejection of the various heresies can be seen as the exploration of the logical options open to those who reject the paradox of the Incarnation. These can be reduced to three: we can reject or compromise one or other of the ‘two’, either the deity or the humanity; we may so emphasize the ‘One’, the unity, that the two are compromised; or we may hold the two apart out of a desire to safeguard the infinite distance between them so that we compromise the unity of the One. No full explanation of the Mystery is possible within our finite, creaturely logic since we are dealing with the Incarnation of the Infinite within the finite. But the second article of the Nicene Creed restated the Mystery by retelling the parabolic narrative of the Christological hymns, making full deity clear in the homoousion. The full humanity and full unity were further clarified (though without the dynamic of the narrative) in the additional paragraph drawn up at the Council of Chalcedon. This did not define Christ, but it defined what we may not say if we are to be true to the Gospel. The terminology and concepts were drawn from the Hellenistic culture into which the confession of Christ was being contextualized, but it was the faithfulness to the one-in-two shape of the apostolic Gospel embedded in the New Testament which mattered rather than the particular terms and concepts. The one-in-two Christology of the Nicene tradition, whether or not we insist on the exact terminology of Chalcedon, is in continuity with the one-in-two Christology of the New Testament. To confess the Christ of the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Symbol is to confess the crucified and risen Lord of the apostolic Gospel. While the medieval period saw the sophisticated scholastic elaboration of the technical terminology of Christology, it was the solus Christus of the Reformation which in effect re-emphasized the homoousion of the Fathers. Christ alone was the Mediator. But while there was no dispute between the Reformers and Rome on the Nicene doctrine or the formal Chalcedonian Christology, soteriology tended to be separated from formal Christology as Protestant Theology developed. The doctrine of Christ tended to become just one doctrine among many others in the confessions and articles of the post-Reformation Church rather than the heart of the Gospel. There was also a tendency to focus on the work of Christ rather than his Person. Whereas Christology was central to the Theology of Irenaeus, Athanasius and Cyril, it seemed to be irrelevant to disputes over predestination, baptism, or Church government, and subordinate to the debate over the Lord’s Supper in the post-Reformation period of Protestant ‘orthodoxy’. In the Theology and preaching of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival led by Edwards, Wesley and Whitefield, Christology was orthodox, but while the Gospel was supposed to be the central theme, it was very often the atonement in isolation from Christology, or the reception of the Gospel in the faith and piety of the individual. The so-called ‘Liberal’ tradition, beginning with Schleiermacher, attempted to meet the challenge of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, but its creativity and contextualization of the Gospel in the new context of ‘modernity’ sadly led to new and different gospels. Christ was of interest only as an example of love or piety or a pictorial illustration of God’s self-realization in history. Although many in the tradition of the evangelical awakenings who tried to stay faithful to the Reformation were unaware of Søren Kierkegaard, it was the obscure Dane who most effectively rejected the accommodating romanticism of Schleiermacher and the Idealism of Hegel and who focused attention on the coming of Christ as the unique moment of God’s revelation in history. Foreshadowed by the rejection of Liberalism by Forsyth and others, the ‘Theology of Word’ of Barth and Brunner heralded a return to Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy. But it was also a new attempt to meet the challenge of Enlightenment modernity. Barth’s more radical Christocentric, Trinitarian thinking was still opposed during his lifetime by a self-consciously ‘modern’ and ‘Liberal’ tradition and was treated with suspicion by the heirs of more traditional evangelicalism, particularly the conservative Calvinist wing of his own Reformed tradition. That brief review brings us finally now to contemporary issues and debates of the last few decades. In the light of that history, how then should we develop and articulate the Church’s unchanging confession of Christ as Lord in the changing culture of today? In what follows, we shall take the one-in-two Christology of the New Testament and the Fathers as normative as we speak of the One who is truly God, truly human, but one Person, the Lord Jesus Christ. We shall consider the implications of the unique deity of Christ for Christian relationships today to other ideologies and religions. The humanity of Christ has been of primary interest in the modern era, but it is easily neglected or misunderstood by those who emphasize this deity. In the next chapter, Chapter 19 we shall consider how the true unity of this one Person requires clear thinking to guard the paradox which expresses the Mystery. (A) DEITY Jesus Christ is Lord Christology began at Easter and was first proclaimed at Pentecost. While Jesus was recognized as a prophet during his ministry, and as the Messiah or Christ by his band of followers, it was only from the Church’s first Pentecost that he was openly declared to be Lord and God. Although the apostolic Gospel was rooted in his own one-in-two preaching of the kingdom, it was only then, with the confession, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ that he was proclaimed to be the one-in-two Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. As we have seen from the work of Bauckham and Hurtado, right from the beginning of the Christian Church, he was worshipped as Lord and God. That changed everything. It was not that the faith of Israel was repudiated. Quite the contrary: the faith of Israel was held to be fulfilled and the Scriptures were re-interpreted as the ‘Old Testament’ even as the Scriptures of the ‘New Testament’ were being written. It was not that the God of Israel was repudiated. Quite the contrary: the Church still worshipped the One God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the I AM who revealed himself to Moses and who was declared to be One in the shema. But they now included the Lord Jesus Christ within the one God whom they worshipped. In our contemporary context, it is that one-in-two Gospel, and particularly the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord, which distinguishes the Christian faith from all that is opposed to the Christian faith and from all that only seems to be Christian. The exclusiveness of the worship of Old Israel therefore carries over into the exclusiveness in the Christian faith today. That is of course offensive. Was the hallmark of the ministry of Jesus not his inclusiveness? Are exclusiveness and discrimination not the great evils against which our ‘enlightened’ modern or postmodern civilization rightly reacts? Are these not offensive in the light of the great modern principles, the gods of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity? Should we not then in the name of peace and tolerance and civilization moderate our claims and agree that Jesus is only one way of many ways to God? There is of course a great deal which we must say in favour of tolerance, equality and inclusiveness. Tertullian declared, ‘It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion.’ After Constantine, the Christian Church was too often seduced into the notion that the power of the state should be used to compel conformity to the Christian establishment. One of the advances of the Enlightenment following the appalling wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the gradual acceptance that liberty of religion should be protected by officially Christian, as well as by professedly secular, states. But tolerance is a civic virtue which does not mean indifference to the truth. Christians surely ought to uphold freedom of religion and freedom of speech and the equality of all religions before the civil law. But the whole point of tolerance is to permit disagreement, and the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord is the point at which Christians have to disagree with other faiths. Dialogue with the great world religions with their rich cultures of literature and spirituality ought to be conducted in mutual tolerance and indeed, the highest mutual respect. But to do so, it must be honest dialogue which recognizes that each of the world faiths claims to be the right and true faith. Even the religious traditions of India, known as Hinduism, while they appear to be more ‘tolerant’ and ‘inclusive’, still claim to be the ultimate truth. By its very inclusiveness, Hinduism excludes the exclusive claims of other faiths, including the Christian faith. The uniqueness of the Christian faith lies centrally in its claim that the one, unique God became incarnate uniquely in Jesus. The claim to a unique grasp of the truth also characterizes the faith or ideology or ‘life-stance’ of Secular Humanism. Despite their championing of tolerance and inclusiveness, Secular Humanists claim that they are right (and therefore the great world religions wrong) in denying the existence of any reality which cannot be apprehended by the five senses. And secularism increasingly tends to claim precedence, even showing a degree of intolerance, at least in the Western nations. For Christians therefore, as for all other religions and ideologies, mutual tolerance and indeed friendly dialogue cannot be divorced from the honest presentation of the Gospel’s unique claims. Syncretism is fundamentally dishonest and dishonours all the world’s faiths. Despite the attempts to create pantheons, the world religions are mutually exclusive, and so in that sense, the Christian faith is no different. Christians believe that Jesus Christ alone is the exalted Lord, sovereign over all creation, who will return to establish his rule in glory and power at the end of ‘this present evil age’. However it also has to be said that it is certainly part of Christian faith that this universal Lord is also the inclusive Saviour who summons all to faith and obedience. Apart from one small minority tradition, all Christians proclaim with the New Testament that Christ died for all. The ministry of Jesus reveals the universal love of God for all, particularly the poor and oppressed and marginalized. There is no need for any to perish at the coming Last Judgment: ‘All may live, for Christ has died.’ But the same inclusive Lord will resist and condemn all the evil which brings suffering to his creatures, and that means that he will reject and exclude those who persist in their selfish ways and intentionally reject him. The Jesus of the Gospels and the writings of his authorized apostles make that crystal clear. That does not mean that we can infallibly identify who those people are, or consign the whole world outside the visible Church to perdition. The Last Judgment is his prerogative, not ours. But what this does mean is that the eventual peace (shalom) of all humanity and all creation in the age to come requires that all recognize him as Lord. Without that there is no unity and no peace. The deity of Christ is not negotiable for Christians. It is at this point sadly that the great modern tradition of so-called ‘Liberal’ Christianity fails. Moved by the apologetic motive to contextualize Christian faith in Western culture in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, it was never quite sufficiently clear on the deity of Christ and sometimes even denied him. It has been characterized by ‘degree Christology’, using superlatives about Christ which never quite amounted to an exclusive claim to uniqueness. But to use only superlatives for Christ is to dishonour him. Here in Christ alone God has become human: here alone God the Son became the Lamb who bore away the sin of the world: here alone God is finally and definitively revealed by his Spirit in his incarnate Son. At the very heart of the Christian faith is the solus Christus, the claim to the uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Son of the Father, and so the only human being who is to be worshipped as Lord and God. Uniqueness and Logic It is the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ shares in the uniqueness of God which makes Christian Theology such an odd form of discourse among the academic disciplines of this saeculum. Human logic, certainly in the Western tradition stemming from Aristotle, operates by classification into categories. This traditional system of logic tries to translate all figures of speech, reducing every statement to the strictly literal. Traditionally every word (and particularly every noun) has to have a fixed and definite meaning and to refer to a specific object in the real world. Even if the real world does not exist, this system of logic still claims ‘validity’. In this way, validity in argument can be usefully distinguished from truth claims. But categorization requires some way of relating particulars to universals (categories) and categories may be sub-sets of other categories. The problem is then how this whole way of thinking, devised to deal with the space-time world we inhabit, can cope with the unique One who is declared to be the transcendent Creator of the space-time world. Can this Creator Lord God also be included within our creaturely categories, even if only by consigning him to a category of one? Can our language and logic refer to him at all, or is meaningful discourse limited to objects within the space-time world? We shall defer a fuller discussion of logic, language, and God till later, but here we must simply note its relevance to Christology. The problem is seen to be an inevitable part of Christology as soon as we identify Jesus Christ as Lord, and so as one with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. If the uniqueness of God means that he cannot be reduced to finite categories, then here in Christology the problem is compounded. This One is said to be simultaneously unique as God, but also, as one of us, a particular human being within the space-time world. As a human being, he is within a category, subject to finite logic. He is also subject to causality within the space-time world. But as God, he is not. Using Gabriel Marcel’s distinction, we have to classify this, therefore, not as a ‘problem’, which is in principle soluble, but as a ‘mystery’. It is in fact the Mystery, ‘the Mystery of Godliness’ (I Tim. 3:26, AV). It may be plain to God, but it remains somewhat hidden to us, even at the moment of revelation. This man reveals God to us, but God is not revealed in such a way that he is caught within the categories of our finite, human logic where he would be under our control. He remains God. Christology therefore participates in the logical problems of all language about God. Our language and logic are ultimately incapable in and of themselves of referring to God. They can do so only by grace. That does not mean to say that there is no logic in Christology and that we may proclaim whatever illogical nonsense we please. A logical system like that of Aristotle is partly applicable in that we are speaking of One who is truly human. But the overall logic to which we are committed as Christians is the logic of the narrative of Christian Gospel, definitively laid out for us, for example, in the Christological hymn of Philippians 2:6 to 11, and in the second article of the Nicene Creed, further explicated (despite its limitations) in the Chalcedonian Symbol. It is the logic of the narrative of God the Son who assumed our human flesh in order to offer himself to the Father as the representative human being in atonement for our sin and who rose in his resurrection body as the first-fruits of the new humanity and the new creation. Everything we say about him is controlled by that story. As Christians we may say anything that is an implication of that, anything that is fully compatible with the apostolic Gospel. Human logic is taken up and assumed by the divine Logos, and, since the Word became flesh, then human logic retains a certain value. But since it is the Eternal Word who became flesh, human logic cannot provide a complete explanation. We must go, as the Fathers saw, from the cataphatic (that which is according to speech) to the apophatic (that which is beyond speech). What the declaration of the Gospel does require however is that we fall on our faces in worship. To worship anyone or anything other than God is idolatry. That is what we Gentile Christians learned from God’s people Israel. But the proclamation that this One who bore our sins is God Incarnate calls us to worship: ‘O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord!’ Christology and Trinity It is that confession of the deity of Christ which led the Church to articulate the distinctively Christian doctrine of God the Holy Trinity. While Christians hold that ontologically, God has been Father, Son and Holy Spirit from all eternity, noetically, that was only revealed to us through the incarnation of the Son. There was no doctrine of the Trinity in ancient Israel, nor in second temple Judaism, nor in rabbinic Judaism, nor in Judaism today. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity was drawn out and articulated in the early centuries of the Church as an implication of the teaching of the apostles in the New Testament, itself the drawing of implications from the teaching of Jesus himself. As has been argued, the New Testament itself demands the doctrine of the Trinity because it poses in effect that other question which we have not yet examined: how is the deity of Christ compatible with the unity of the one God. These two interlinked doctrines of incarnation and Trinity are therefore at the very heart of the Christian faith and the whole of Christian Theology has to cohere with these. Christology forms the centre and the doctrine of the Trinity gives us the shape of Christian Theology as a whole. But the deity of Christ must not be separated from his humanity and so today we must also equally affirm that in Christ, God has become one of us.
(B) HUMANITY If during the era of modernity the so-called Liberal tradition failed to rise convincingly to the proclamation of the full deity of Christ, it has to be admitted that the emphasis on the deity made in reaction by the traditionally evangelical and orthodox seems to have led to their neglect too often of the significance of his humanity. This only repeats a historic tendency to Docetism. Perhaps even closer is the error of Apollinarius. As a supporter of Nicene orthodoxy, he insisted on the homoousion, the deity of the Son who was of the same being with the Father. But in order to safeguard the unity, that very confession led him to deny that Christ had a fully human mind. It may be that, at least at the popular level, many supposedly orthodox Christians are actually Apollinarians or at any rate never fully grasp the full and true humanity of Christ. In contrast, the Liberal tradition tended to begin with the humanity of Christ. This reflected the culture of modernity, shaped by the fascination with ourselves and our own humanity which has characterised Western culture since the Renaissance. Protagoras’ dictum, ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ was in effect the motto of Renaissance humanism. The full atheist or agnostic ideology of Secular Humanism did not develop till the late nineteenth century, but it had its roots in the humanism of the Renaissance which was simply a new focus on the humanities. A humanista was a teacher of studia humanitatis, or artes liberales - grammar, rhetoric, history, literature and philosophy. The ‘humanities’ rather than divinity were to become central to the university curriculum. In the early Renaissance humanism of Francesco Petrarch, Lorenza Valla or Giovanni Pico del Mirandola this remained within a Christian framework, although with later writers such as Machiavelli and Montaigne a de facto secular approach developed. Erasmus and Colet however were clearly Christian humanists, and the Reformers Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon and Cranmer, all received an education in the humanities. Shakespeare, a century after the high Renaissance, can be regarded as the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. While he was a baptized Christian, his focus on human life and character rather than with the story of God is crystallized in Hamlet’s exclamation: ‘What a piece of work is man!’ By the time of the Enlightenment, Alexander Pope was declaring in An Essay on Man: ‘Know then thyself; presume not God to scan: The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ In the face of all this, it has been argued that Christianity is the only true humanism, and humanism in modern times certainly had its genesis within Christian culture and civilization. The very claim that the Eternal God became a human being, gives humanity a pivotal dignity in the universe, despite being dwarfed by its immensity. The danger of an anthropocentric focus, however, displacing the worship of the Lord God with the celebration and even the worship of humanity, has been with us since the first temptation ‘to be as gods’. This eventually came to fruition in the emergence of Secular Humanism, which, despite the small membership of Secularist and Humanist societies, has become all-pervasive as the plausibility structure in Western culture today. Humanism is the cultural context of the West influencing culture everywhere, and it is within that context that Christology has to be articulated today. Christians must not react to this by denigrating humanity, and a truly Christian humanism can find its foundation in the humanity of Christ. The key question then at this point (as it always has been for Christians) is how we give due weight to the true humanity of Christ without thereby compromising his deity. The Human Jesus of the Contextual Christologies One contemporary development which can be seen as arising from human concerns is the development of contextual Christologies which aim to understand Christ from the perspective of specific human contexts. We cannot undertake here a full assessment of contextual theologies and only have space to note that all of these can be seen to relate particularly to the humanity of Christ. The leading example is the development of Liberation Theology in late twentieth-century Latin America. Concern for the poor, trapped in economic structures producing extremes of wealth and poverty, led to aim of developing ‘base communities’ which rooted their theology in praxis, practical action, and rejected the reduction of Christian faith to private religious exercises. The point of Theology (echoing Karl Marx) was not to explain the world, but to change it. This called for a Christological focus on the historical Jesus and his ministry to the poor. Liberation Theology will receive fuller treatment when we come to examine soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, but what concerns us here is the way in which it encourages a Christology of the full humanity of Christ. The appeal of Jesus is that he lived for others, challenging prejudices and reaching out to the poor. Jon Sobrino, for example, makes his starting point the historical Jesus, formulating a Christology ‘from below’ in order to receive guidance from Jesus’ ministry, and noting that Galilee and Judea in his day suffered from the same poverty and injustice as Latin America today. The Chalcedonian Symbol starts from ‘above’ (so Sobrino claimed), but dogma is secondary and only guides us to Scripture where we read the story of Christ. He argued that the Bible begins ‘from below’ with the human Jesus identifying with the poor. Liberation Theology is therefore not unorthodox in its acceptance of the deity of Christ, but its main focus is on his humanity. The human ministry of Jesus is relevant to socio-economic conditions today, seen in the light of the modern social principles of equality and liberty. The perspective of Marx is used to insist that these principles must be reflected not just formally in political democracy, but in the economic structures of society. The same concern with equality and liberty is also reflected in the focus of other contextual Christologies on the humanity of Jesus. Black Christology, arising among African Americans, similarly focuses on the theme of liberation. According to James Cone, Black Theology arose from the experience of black people in a world of white oppression and exploitation, but also from revelation which comes to us through Scripture and is appropriated in tradition. For James Evans, African Americans can relate to Jesus Christ by relating the biblical figure of the Messiah as champion and hero to the great heroes of black history. Albert Cleage argued against the ‘white’ Christ and held that Jesus was literally black and that the Bible was written by black Jews. But J. Deotis Roberts recognized the historical Jesus and treated the idea of a Black Christ as symbolic rather than literal. It is a mythical construct which helps to overcome negative notions of being black, but ultimately the Christ of faith is not of any colour, but is the universal Christ in whom the ethnic peoples of the world are united. Like Liberation Christology and Black Christology, Feminist Christology is also primarily concerned with the humanity of Christ. Again we cannot attempt a full study of feminist Theology here but simply note that like Liberation Theology it can be related particularly to our understanding of what it is to be human and therefore to our doctrine of the humanity of Christ. Once again, feminism has arisen from the egalitarian and libertarian principles of modernity and was a reaction against the restrictions and limitations on women and what has often amounted to the oppression of women in traditional patriarchal societies. Feminist theologians have targeted the masculine language used for God in the Christian tradition. Classical Christian Theology insists that despite the use of the masculine gender to refer to God, God is beyond the division of the sexes and is therefore neither male nor female. But feminists have argued that the use of the masculine gender for God has shaped our culture and therefore lies behind the oppression of women. Their argument is strengthened by those Christian traditions which try to defend an exclusively male priesthood by reference to the maleness of Christ. More extreme feminists such as Daphne Hampson or Mary Daly have rejected Christian faith as irretrievably patriarchal, while the more moderate, such as Sallie McFague or Elizabeth Johnson, have proposed the use of female imagery to complement the masculine. It is certainly true that we have to recognize that language not only reflects but shapes our understanding of the world, and this question must be further addressed within the doctrine of God. But when it comes to Christology, the more radical feminism runs up against the stubborn fact that Jesus of Nazareth was male. Since that is the given, it is not surprising in the light of feminist concerns that the question has been posed how this male can represent the female half of the human race. The underlying issue here for both Black and Feminist Theology is once again what it means to be human, and how this relates to ‘the scandal of particularity’. One cannot be a human being without being a particular human being, and so clearly, that is also true in the case of the incarnation. God became incarnate not as a white European, nor an African American, nor as Chinese, nor as Indian, African or Arab. The offence of the scandal of particularity is that he became incarnate as a Jew. But to say that because he is a Jew, he cannot represent Africans or Europeans, or Hispanics or Chinese is quite simply racism. It is the fact that the human race is one race which means that the particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, born into the Jewish nation, is able to represent all humanity. And that also has a bearing on the division of the ‘sexes’ (the word coming from the Latin verb, seco, I divide). These are not two different races but a division within the one human race. Feminism has had to abandon any notion of a difference in essence between the sexes. Biblically, the marriage of a man and a woman results in their being ‘one flesh’, thus symbolizing and particularizing the truth that the whole human race is ‘one flesh’. ‘He has made of one (ex henos) every nation (pan ethnos) on the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26). Existentialism and post-moderns may object for their different reasons to the notion of one universal human nature. But the Christian faith does not need Platonist categories in order to insist on the given fact of the corporate unity of the human race and the one common human nature which we all share in consequence of being born (natus) from this common stock. It follows then that while the Son of God did not live on earth as a black woman or a Chinese mandarin, a European nun, or an African slave, that does not mean that he did not enter into the outward circumstances and the inner thought life common to all humanity. He shared our lot, including our temptations ‘on every point’, and he knew not only human life in a family and in the workshop, but the common human experience of suffering and dying. Feminists are right to insist, particularly in the light of the radical feminism of Jesus himself in giving women an unprecedented role among his followers, that in Christ ‘there is neither male nor female’. But that is an implication of the full and true humanity of Christ, including the particularity which that necessarily involves. But following this all too brief review, the question has to be raised whether these contextual Christologies really contribute anything to Christology at all. They are concerned with the implications of Christology – and indeed of the Gospel – to particular contemporary human contexts and that is clearly highly valuable to the ministry of the Church. But to draw out the implications of Christology for mission and ministry is not quite the same as contributing to our understanding of Christology. A similar point may be made about so-called ‘post-modern’ Christologies, if in fact there are any. Since it is difficult if not impossible to define post-modernity’, it appears to be even more difficult to define what constitutes a post-modern Christology. Even if we lay aside the more negative ‘ultra-critical’ school and focus on the ‘post-critical’ school of Polanyi, McIntyre and Ricoeur, their combined perspective really amounts to a more moderate, humble and self-critical late modernity rather than a great, new, positive synthesis. And their contributions are actually to epistemology, ethics and hermeneutics, not directly to Theology. It will take decades if not centuries to judge to what extent ‘post-modernity’ is really a major new cultural development, a turning point in the history of civilization, and to what extent it is a comparatively minor development, even an ephemeral cultural fad, blown out of proportion by those who lack historical perspective. Undoubtedly the taming of modernity is a significant cultural development, and some new developments in Christology may yet conceivably arise, but in the meantime it has yet to be proved that there can be a post-modern Christology any more than there was a truly modern Christology. The Human Jesus of the Kenoticists and Historians: The Psychological Model If contemporary contextual Christologies connect mainly with the humanity of Christ, then they can be seen to follow in the train of much Theology since Renaissance humanism burst upon the scene, teaching us to focus on the human. We noted that focusing on the human was characteristic of the classic Liberal Theology, closely allied to the first quest for the historical Jesus. Whereas that failed, as we have seen, to rise above a ‘degree’ Christology to an affirmation of his unique deity, the same charge cannot be laid against the kenoticists of the same period. Forsyth and his fellow kenoticists, Charles Gore and H.R. Mackintosh, affirmed the full deity of Christ. But the notion that the Son of God somehow emptied himself of some of the attributes of deity, or at least put them on hold at his incarnation, seems to be trying to gain a fuller vision of his humanity. According to the kenoticists, it was the human choices and the human faith and obedience of Jesus which won his victory and exaltation. And kenoticism certainly stands out against the impossible notion that the babe lying in the manger, being God, could comprehend all the elements of quantum physics and the theory of relativity. Whatever the theological difficulties of kenoticism, thinking of the attributes of deity as laid aside certainly helps us to imagine how Jesus ‘grew in wisdom and stature’ like any other human child. It is easier in that way to imagine the Irenaean picture of his developmental sanctification of our humanity at each stage of maturation. John McIntyre called this ‘the psychological model’ of Christology. It can be seen as having its modern origin in Schleiermacher’s concern with the piety of Jesus, his own ‘religious’ experience of God. The first ‘quest’ for the historical Jesus was really a pursuit of this ‘psychological model’ and it suffered eclipse with Bultmann’s scepticism since, according to him, the Gospels told us about the mind of the early Church rather than the mind of Jesus. But McIntyre saw a revival of the ‘psychological model’ with the revival of interest in the historical study of the life of Jesus. He saw it too in D.M. Baillie’s modern classic, God Was in Christ, in which attention is drawn to the moral and religious life of Jesus. What Baillie calls ‘the central paradox of the Christian faith,’ is the paradox of grace, ‘Not I, but the grace of God.’ And this, as McIntyre comments, is reflected in the attitude of Jesus: that he came to do the will of the Father, to speak of the words and to do the works that came from the Father. The ‘paradox of grace’, seen in the attitude of Jesus himself, is thus the clue to the paradox of the Incarnation. McIntyre saw the ‘psychological model’ too in expository preaching, instancing particularly the power of the preaching of his older contemporary, James S. Stewart, in the way ‘he so reconstructs the motives, attitudes, reactions of our Lord to those whom he confronts, that we ourselves are drawn into these self-same situations, ourselves confronted, challenged, judged, forgiven.’ This kind of preaching connects with congregations because psychology now so pervades our culture that people want to know how ‘a two nature person operates psychologically.’ Does this imply ‘that there were two streams of consciousness in his personality, two series of judgements, attitudes, reactions, each appropriate to the nature concerned?’ To dismiss such questions as irreverent or prying curiosity, McIntyre suggests, is to fail to understand how completely our generation has come to think in psychological terms. He finds that our doctrine of the Spirit is similarly impoverished because we stop short at the point where the issues really occur – ‘his involvement in the decision, the wills, the emotions, the cognitions, attitudes, character, reactions of ordinary men and women.’ It may be for such reasons that the ‘quest’ for the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ refuses to die but keeps turning up in a new form! Both the disciplines of History and Psychology focus on the human, and the historical method, as Dilthey and Collingwood have taught us, is not just a matter of chronicling external ‘facts’, but of inquiring into the ‘inside’ of events, the thinking and intention of the human agents. And when we turn to the third quest for the historical Jesus with its much more positive evaluation of the historicity of the evidence, this can certainly help us to do justice to the humanity of Christ without denying or compromising his deity. We particularly focussed on the reconstruction of the human life and thinking of Jesus by N.T. Wright as particularly helpful. While we examined it earlier as part of our historical prolegomenon before launching into Christology proper, we need to re-visit Wright’s account again briefly. Now we can understand how greatly it helps us as Christian theologians confessing Jesus Christ to be Lord, not to emphasize his deity in such a way as to lose the vision of his true humanity. According to Wright, one can give a fully human account of the intentions of Jesus. Regarded during his ministry as a prophet, he evoked the common understanding of the history of Israel as the people of God still in exile in the sense that they were under Roman rule and being infiltrated by Hellenistic culture. His proclamation that the expected kingdom or rule of God was now present in him has to be understood against that Jewish background. To say, ‘The kingdom is at hand,’ only makes sense in that context. His summons to repent was a call to reject nationalist violence and revolutionary zeal and to become part of the new people of God he was forming around himself. This new way of being Israel was laid out in his teaching, including what we know as ‘the sermon on the mount.’ He welcomed ‘sinners’, he challenged the four great symbols of the Jewish religion – the Temple, the Torah, the land and the exclusiveness of the Jewish nation, and he warned of the coming destruction of Jerusalem. He regarded himself as the Messiah and his actions and words in the last week of his life particularly reveal his intentions. The ‘triumphal entry’ into Jerusalem was the prophetic enactment of Yahweh’s return to Zion, while the cleansing of the Temple was a direct challenge to the authority of the chief priests and a prophetic interruption of the sacrificial system. Six ‘royal riddles’ followed: the saying about destroying and rebuilding the temple, the saying about removing mountains and the cursing of the fig tree, the double question about John the Baptist, the parable of the wicked vineyard tenants who killed ‘the son’, followed by the saying about the stone the builders rejected, the subtle aphorism about tribute to Caesar, and the question he posed about David’s son who was also David’s lord. Above all, the key symbol of the Last Supper revealed his intentions. At this Passover meal commemorating the exodus, Jesus prophetically identified the broken bread with his own body, the wine with his own blood, and used the Passover language of sacrifice and covenant. Wright concludes: ‘When we add the words, even in outline, to the action, there should be no doubt that Jesus intended to say, with all the power of symbolic drama and narrative, that he was shortly to die, and that his death was to be seen within the larger context of the larger story of YHWH’s redemption of Israel.’ Jesus saw his coming death as a battle not against Rome, but against ‘the satan’, and he would win the victory by himself turning the other cheek and blessing those who cursed him. He would defeat evil by letting it do its worst to him. And in the light of the teaching about sacrifice in the Levitical code, in Ezekiel and Zechariah, in the Servant Songs of Isaiah and in the book of Daniel, he believed that his sacrificial death would be redemptive. Wright sums up his conclusion: I propose, then, that we can credibly reconstruct a mindset in which a first-century Jew could come to believe that YHWH would act through the sufferings of a particular individual in whom Israel’s sufferings were focussed; that his sufferings would carry redemptive significance; and that this individual would be himself. And I propose that we can plausibly suggest that this was the mindset of Jesus himself. What is absolutely staggering about this is to visualize Jesus as a human being, forming this idea from his immersion in Israel’s scriptures, and deciding to act upon it by contriving circumstances to bring about his own excruciating death. To let go of the idea that he had some kind of Cartesian certainty that he would rise again, and to conceive that he went through with this as a human being, believing that God would raise him from the dead, gives us the most breath-taking picture of his human faith, not to mention his sheer physical courage. To conceive of Jesus deciding and doing all this as a human being, does not detract from our worship. It inspires us to love, worship and adore him as nothing else could. What language shall I borrow/ To praise Thee, heavenly Friend, For this thy dying sorrow,/ Thy pity without end? Our Human Nature Finally in this consideration of contemporary Theology on the humanity of the God-man, we come to the modern debate about the human ‘nature’ of Christ. So far we have been considering how he lived as a human being – his words and actions, his relationships to others, his faith and obedience. But the theological tradition speaks not only of his life and personal actions, but uses the concept of ‘nature’ (natura, Gk. physis), the humanity with which we are all born (natus). That is the word used in the Chalcedonian Definition (though not in the Nicene Creed). He is said to be not only ‘of one being’ (homoousion) with the Father, but also ‘of one being’ (homoousion) with us and therefore ‘acknowledged in two natures’ (en dyo physesin). ‘Nature’ (physis) appears to be certainly the equivalent, or even a close synonym of ‘being’ (ousia), and the latter has traditionally been translated in the Latin West as ‘substance’ (substantia). The concept of ‘nature’ has come under fire in the modern era. Schleiermacher thought it inappropriate that the Chalcedonian Definition used the same term to refer to both divine and human ‘natures’ when they were so totally incommensurate. But that criticism only holds if it is thought that the word is being used univocally rather than analogically. The strong individualism inherent in existentialism rejected the use of the term ‘nature’ even in reference to human beings. The post-modern mind might tend to object to the use of such a universal term for humanity as a reflection of the universal claims made illegitimately by Enlightenment modernity. Despite such objections, we have already commented in passing that ‘human nature’ is a term and a concept we cannot do without. We do not need any developed metaphysical system to observe that the human race is one in a way which makes it clearly distinguishable from other species. That human beings of all nations may intermarry clearly attests the unity of the race and since all human beings participate in that unity in virtue of being ‘born’ (natus) to human parents, some concept of common human nature seems to be required, not just as a matter of logic or metaphysics, but actually, concretely, and physically. However we understand it, and whatever we make of it philosophically and logically, the common human nature of the race is a stubborn and undeniable reality. The word also has a recognized role in the social sciences, particularly in Psychology, where there is a long-standing debate, for example, about how far the intelligence or the personality of a child is due to ‘nurture’ or ‘nature’. The concept of our human nature therefore has some connection with the concept of heredity and that reminds us that the concept is also based in the ‘natural’ sciences, particularly Biology and Physiology. The great scientific leap of Crick and Watson in Genetics and the whole development of the study of DNA and the human genome project underline not only the physical relationship of the human race with the whole of biological life, but also that it has its own distinct unity. The understanding of what it is to be human in the natural and social sciences also raises questions for the tradition philosophical view of the human being as composed of two ‘substances’, a body and an eternal soul. This view is seriously challenged today by the philosophical attack on the ancient notion of ‘the soul’ and by the philosophical rejection of the whole Aristotelian notion of ‘substance’. Developments in neuroscience also question the traditional notion of the soul. Some Christian psychologists and philosophers have argued that this whole anthropology, derived from Hellenistic thinking (and indeed, part also of Hindu culture), cannot be regarded as scientifically viable. At the same time, biblical scholars have denied that the traditional body-soul dualism it is truly a biblical anthropology. The view of human nature as a psychosomatic unity, coming from both biblical studies (particularly Old Testament) and from modern science, seems to be at odds therefore with an anthropology which comes more from ancient philosophy and ancient religions but has been read into rather than from Holy Scripture. This must be given fuller treatment at a later point, but here we simply need to note that Christology, while traditionally using the dualistic Hellenistic body-soul anthropology, need not be bound to it. Fallen Human Nature? The Augustinian-Calvinist Perspective But the issue which has caused some debate in Christology is whether we should think of the human nature of Christ as ‘fallen’ or ‘unfallen’. The modern debate may be traced back to the Scottish preacher, Edward Irving, who scandalized his Calvinist contemporaries and was dismissed by his fellow-Presbyterians from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for his teaching that the human nature of Christ was ‘fallen’ human nature. We have already noted that his concern was that when salvation was conceived entirely in terms of a penal substitutionary view which saw sin only as guilt, and salvation only as forgiveness and justification through Christ’s paying our debt on the cross, that all of this appeared to have little or no connection with sin, temptation and suffering as experienced in the life of the ordinary believer. To think of Christ’s active righteousness as victory over temptation won in the power of the Holy Spirit was deeply relevant to the believer struggling with temptation daily. Because Christ sanctified our human life by living in the power of the Spirit within our fallen, sinful flesh, sanctification in the power of the Spirit became possible for Christians today. Irving’s doctrine thus had strong implications for Pastoral Theology and the doctrine of the Christian Life. Irving was cited with approval for his doctrine of the fallen humanity of Christ by none other than Karl Barth. That Christ assumed our fallen humanity is the view adopted by a whole host of contemporary theologians across the denominational spectrum, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, T.F. Torrance, Colin Gunton and Thomas Weinandy. In Irving’s day, it was vigorously rejected as little short of scandalous by the whole Scottish Calvinist tradition, including the elder Marcus Dods and A.B. Bruce in the nineteenth century, and Donald Macleod in the twentieth. Outside of Scotland, it has also been rejected by Calvinists such as G.E. Berkouwer, Philip E. Hughes and Oliver Crisp. This is clearly a highly significant debate since it vitally concerns the connection of Christology with soteriology. Given that the Christian Gospel is focused on the Christ who saves us from sin and evil, then the way in which we understand the connection between human sinfulness and Christ’s human nature is obviously crucial. It is particularly significant for a doctrine of sanctification. But the difficulty of the question arises partly out of the enormous difficult of gaining some kind of clarity in understanding sin and evil. Technically, this is the area of Theology labelled ‘hamartiology’, but just as the doctrine of God eventually has to bow before the sublime Mystery and accept our limited understanding, so here too we are confronted with a very different mystery, what Paul calls ‘the mystery of iniquity’ (II Thess. 2:7, AV). Part of this is the whole question of Theodicy, how Christians are to understand the presence of evil in God’s good creation. Another aspect of this is the doctrine of ‘the Fall’ (to ptōma), a term coined by the Greek Fathers to refer to what is recounted in Genesis 3, particularly as it was used by Paul in his comparison and contrast of Christ and Adam in Romans 5 and I Corinthians 15. Hamartiology in the West is deeply influenced further by Augustine’s grasp of Paul’s doctrine of grace and his consequent development of the doctrine he named ‘original sin’ (peccatum originale), in which he developed both the corporate and psychological dimensions of human sinfulness. Without anticipating our later examination of this area of Theology, we need to note here that the Augustinian formulation, with both its acute insights and its more questionable aspects, has been deeply influential in the whole of subsequent Western Theology, both Catholic and Protestant. The underlying methodological question then is how this whole area of hamartiology is to be related to Christology, the doctrine of the Person of Christ. The doctrine of Christ was formulated through debate mainly involving the Eastern Greek-speaking theologians in the fifth century. Simultaneously the Western, Latin-speaking theologians were wrestling with Pelagianism, and Augustine developed his influential doctrine of original sin and the fall in that context. What is at stake here then is the question which of these is to be more fundamental. Clearly they are connected and influence each other: but which has theological priority? Should we first determine our doctrine of sin and let that shape our doctrine of Christ? Or should our doctrine of Christ guide us as we formulate our doctrine of sin? Do we understand light in terms of darkness? Or do we understand darkness in terms of light? Do we understand the solution in terms laid down by our plight? Or do we primarily understand our plight from our understanding of God’s solution? The modern debate about the human nature of Christ appears to have been skewed by the way in which Edward Irving formulated his doctrine of sin. Irving differentiated ‘original sin’, ‘constitutional sin’, and ‘actual sin’. Christ does not share in original sin, by which Irving means the guilt for Adam’s disobedience, and he does not commit actual sin. But he shares in ‘constitutional sin’, understood as the law of sin and death at work in the flesh. He takes this human nature from his mother, that is to say, humanity’s fallen, sinful substance. According to Irving, Christ’s human nature was ‘sinful flesh’ with all the propensities which constitute temptation, but his Person as the Son of God is sinless, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit he was victorious in suppressing ‘the flesh’ throughout his life all the way to death, thus sanctifying human nature. It is not surprising therefore that Irving’s contemporaries were scandalized, concluding that he had compromised – even denied – the sinlessness of Christ. Nothing could be more abhorrent to the Christian conscience. This largely explains the strong reaction of the Calvinist tradition, but unfortunately, it is not always understood that the major modern theologians who hold that Christ took our fallen humanity disagree significantly with Irving. While they hold that the Son of God assumed our fallen humanity and that his human nature remained fallen, that is to say, mortal and subject to infirmities, it was not sinful since it was sanctified by the Holy Spirit at conception. This has been shown to be the consensus of the Fathers. The Calvinist theologians fail to accept what the Eastern Fathers and their modern successors are saying because they come with a framework of thought built on the Augustinian doctrine of original sin rather than on Christ. The misreading of the Pauline concept of ‘flesh’ in the light of a strong concept of ‘total depravity’ brings them dangerously close to a Gnostic view of the body. Their Christology is being determined by their doctrine of sin rather than the reverse. This may be illustrated from Oliver Crisp’s recent contribution to the debate in which he explicitly refers to the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition as ‘classical’ Theology, ignoring the truly ‘classical’ theology of the Eastern Fathers who formulated the Church’s Christology. It is true that the whole modern Christian tradition, and particularly the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition, use the terms ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’ as virtual synonyms, so when we read modern theologians who say that the humanity of Christ was ‘unfallen’, we must remember that what they are saying is that Christ is without original sin, and that of course is correct. But Crisp concludes that that is the way which word ‘fallen’ must be used. He concludes: ‘What we must say, according to Reformed orthodoxy, is that being fallen entails being sinful (that is having the property of original sin).’ This understanding of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin is taken then as fundamental in determining our Christology. The Aristotelian logic is clear: if being fallen entails and includes being sinful and if Christ is sinless, then Christ cannot be held to have a fallen human nature. The logic is valid, but the question is whether the premise is true, that being fallen necessarily includes being sinful in all cases. In view of the rediscovery of the teaching of the Fathers on this point, may we not use these terms to make a very helpful distinction? Significantly, Crisp goes on to admit in substance what he denies in his use of language. He writes: ‘None of this denies the traditional picture of theologians like Augustine, who say that Christ’s human nature was affected by the Fall without actually being fallen.’ That is in substance what most contemporary theologians are saying, but they are using language differently, making a difference in meaning between ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’, in order to distinguish between the ontological and the moral effects of the Fall. In this they are following a most important distinction which arises from the Fathers, and it is at this point that the weakness of this Calvinist tradition is clear. They fail to wrestle sufficiently with the Christological doctrine of the Fathers and they make Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, not Christ, the foundation of their system. The Sanctification of ‘Sinful Flesh’ in the Christian Fathers T.F. Torrance has examined the patristic doctrine most thoroughly at this point, and Jerome Van Kuiken has recently demonstrated the patristic consensus that Christ assumed our fallen humanity in such as way that his human nature remained ‘fallen’ in the sense of being ontologically subject to the consequences of the Fall, but sinless in being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. But what is most important to note about this is that there are soteriological implications of this. This is not merely abstruse academic debate: it vitally affects our understanding of Christian sanctification. And making this distinction in language between ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’ brings greater clarity to what is at stake. The Patristic doctrine that Christ sanctified our humanity through his very assumption of it from his mother gives a firm basis for a doctrine of Christian sanctification. Without that, while there may be a Christological basis in the atonement for our justification, sanctification is in danger of becoming merely self-sanctification by self-discipline. In contrast to the way in which the Western Augustinian-Calvinist tradition bases its system on the doctrine of original sin, the Eastern Fathers begin with Christ. At this point then we may draw on our earlier exposition of the Christology of the major Fathers in Chapters 12 to 14 to summarize again very briefly what they teach on this specific point: Christ’s assumption of our fallen, sinful nature from his mother, so sanctifying it by the Holy Spirit from his conception and birth so that he, while ‘fallen’ in the sense of mortal, is sinless. We can only focus very briefly on five of the Fathers, highlighting with reference to this specific point what we have already said about their Christology: Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Alexandria. Irenaeus gives the overall perspective within which they all approach this. He sees that the birth of Christ is integrally connected with his death and neither can be understood except when they are seen together: ‘So if he was not born, neither did he die; and if he did not die, neither was he raised from the dead.’ The Son of God was born as a human being in order to save humanity from sin and from death. The future immortality of the human race is not based on a Platonist notion of the natural immortality of the soul, but on the fact that the immortal Son of God took our mortal humanity and raised our humanity immortal in his resurrection body. But the other dimension is that we not only needed to be saved from death: we needed to be saved from sin. And we needed more than forgiveness for our sins (justification): we needed to be delivered and cleansed from sin (sanctification). Therefore in Irenaeus’s development of the concept of recapitulation, the life of Christ, beginning with his birth, was the sanctification of human life at every stage, leading eventually to the completion of that sanctification in his death on the cross. But if it was our Adamic humanity which was to be sanctified and made immortal through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ, it was essential and vital that it was that same Adamic humanity, sinful and mortal, but sanctified in the very conception, which the Son of God united to himself in his incarnation. Otherwise his death and resurrection would mean nothing for us. Unlike the modern theologians, the Fathers rarely use the words, ‘fallen’ or ‘unfallen.’ But in one passage in the Demonstration, Irenaeus actually refers to the humanity of Christ as ‘fallen’: ‘And he demonstrated the resurrection, becoming himself ‘the first born from the dead,’ and raising in himself fallen humanity..., as God promised through the prophet, saying, “I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen.’ Note that fallen humanity is raised up in himself. What is so often missing in the modern discussion (perhaps because of the lingering influence of the Platonist doctrine of the inherent immortality of the soul) is the view that Christian salvation is not only salvation from sin: it is also salvation from eternal death. Salvation is not only a moral and relational matter: it also has an ontological dimension. When Irenaeus uses the word ‘fallen’ in this passage, it is clear that it is not salvation from sin which is the immediate context, but this ontological dimension of salvation from death. To say Christ took our ‘fallen’ humanity is to say that he took our mortal humanity in order to raise us immortal. But it is also to say that he took our sinful flesh in order to sanctify it. Irenaeus states explicitly: ‘For he too “was made in the likeness of sinful flesh” to condemn sin and to cast it as a condemned thing away from the flesh.’ This same double dimension of the ontological and the moral, salvation from death and salvation from sin, is also to be seen developed more fully in Athanasius. Again, there are these two dimensions, but Athanasius develops the point that the sanctification of our human nature begins in the conception and birth of the God-man. Using the Pauline term ‘corruption’ (phthora), he states that the Son took our ‘natural corruption’ (tēn kata physin phthoran) in order that through his resurrection he might bring us to ‘incorruption’ (aphtharsian) and immortality (athanasian). But the ontological dimension also implies the moral, that since the human nature he took from his mother was not only fallen but sinful human nature, his sanctification of our nature began from the very moment of conception: ‘Therefore neither when the virgin gave birth was he acted upon, nor when he was in the body was he polluted (emolumento), but rather he sanctified the body.’ If it was not our sinful humanity which he took, then he did not sanctify it in himself: ‘He assumed the form of a servant in making that flesh, which was enslaved to sin, a part of himself.’ But that did not make him sinful. Quite the contrary: from conception to death, the holy Son of God sanctified our humanity in himself. Gregory of Nazianzus dealt with issue in the context of the Apollinarian heresy. One of the reasons why Apollinarius would not allow that Christ had a human mind was that the human mind is ‘fallible and enslaved to filthy thoughts.’ But Nazianzen argues that that was precisely why the Son did assume a human mind – in order to cleanse it from sin! That is the background to his aphorism, echoed elsewhere in the Fathers, that ‘the unassumed is the unhealed.’ ‘If only half Adam fell, then that which is assumed and saved may also be half. But if the whole, it must be wholly united to the Begotten and saved as a whole.’ The sanctifying of our humanity is centred in the Son’s sanctifying assumption of our humanity in its sinful condition. Gregory of Nyssa expresses the same point pungently: ‘For though he took our filth upon himself, yet he is not himself defiled by the pollution, but in his own self he purifies the filth.’ A significant paper published over a century ago by the patristics scholar, J.H. Srawley, defended Nyssen from the charge that he held that the humanity of Christ was sinful humanity during his life. Srawley made it clear that Nyssen did not hold that: he taught that while Christ’s human nature was our fallen, mortal humanity, it was precisely his purifying of it from conception that was the basis for our sanctification. Finally, Cyril of Alexandria writes explicitly of ‘the fallen body’ (tou prospesontos sōmatos) being united with the Word. It was necessary ‘for the Word of God ... to make human flesh, subject to decay (phthora) as it was, his own.’ Van Kuiken quotes a sentence from Cyril’s Letter to Succensus: ‘It was vital for the Word of God... to make human flesh, subject to decay (phthora) and infected with sensuality (philēdonon) as it was, his own.’ Cyril makes it clear that, following Scripture, ‘flesh’ is to be understood as a synecdoche in Scripture for the whole human nature, mind as well as body, considered as a unity. ‘Christ must have taken a complete, postlapsarian psychosomatic unit, Cyril insists, “For what is not assumed, neither is saved.”’ Van Kuiken proceeds to demonstrate that Christ’s assumption of our fallen humanity in order to heal and save us was the consensus of the Latin as well as the Greek Fathers. Contrary to what has often been thought, the assumption of our fallen humanity in order to sanctify and heal us is not contrary to Christian tradition. It may not be the way we have expressed it in our modern tradition since the Reformation where we have used ‘fallen and ‘sinful’ as synonyms, but it is clearly the doctrine of the Christian Fathers. It is unfortunate that Edward Irving misread the Fathers at this point and even more unfortunate that Karl Barth appeared to endorse Irving uncritically without showing a sufficient familiarity with his writings. The Calvinists, already suspicious of Barth, consequently continue to reject the whole modern recovery of the patristic doctrine here. Out of the best motives, namely, safeguarding the sinlessness of Christ, this is in fact repeating Peter’s mistake: ‘God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.’ It is to refuse to allow that our Lord not only suffered the penalty or cost for our acts of sin upon the cross, but that his crucifixion brought about the death of that old humanity which he assumed in his incarnation. It was our old, Adamic humanity which he sanctified from conception through birth, life and death, offering himself as our representative to the Father. Only in this way could salvation include not only forgiveness of sinful acts, but healing and purification for our sinful condition. Conclusion In this chapter we have considered modern debates about the ‘two’ within the ‘One’ – deity and humanity. As truly God, the Lord Jesus Christ is worthy of our worship. Indeed we are bound to worship him as one with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, our Creator God who gave us life and being. But the fact that he is truly human draws out of us even greater and deeper and even more heart-felt adoration. It is the kind of human being he is, the self-sacrificing, compassionate teacher and healer, which reveals to us not only who God is, but what it means to be truly human. This our God was willing to come in the Person of the Son and take human flesh polluted by sin in order that he might identify with the lowliest and most defiled, and might cleanse and sanctify us in himself through his birth, life and death. Conversely, the sheer humility and selflessness of his becoming human, one of us, and the amazing compassion demonstrated in his human life climaxing in his death, reveal to us not only what true humanity is, but what kind of God he is. He is certainly to be feared as God, our Creator and our Judge, but this is not a servile fear. The revelation of the kind of God he is calls forth not just a profound reverence and awe, but deep, deep gratitude and life-changing consecration. My God, I love thee; not because I hope for heaven thereby, Nor yet because who love Thee not are lost eternally. Thou, O my Jesus, thou didst me upon the cross embrace, For me didst bear the nails and spear and manifold disgrace; And griefs and torments numberless, and sweat of agony; Yes, death itself – and all for me who was thine enemy.
Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ, should I not love thee well? Not for the sake of winning heaven, nor of escaping hell; Not from the hope of gaining aught, not seeking a reward; But as thyself has loved me, O ever-loving Lord. So would I love thee, dearest Lord, and in thy praise will sing; Solely because thou are my God, and my most loving King. [13,206 words]