Chapter Fifteen MEDIEVAL, REFORMATION AND EVANGELICAL CHRISTOLOGY O astonishing grace, That the reprobate race Should be reconciled! What a wonder of wonders that God is a child!
The Creator of all, To repair our sad fall, From heaven stoops down: Lays hold of our nature and joins to his own.
Our Immanuel came The whole world to redeem, And incarnated shewed That man may again be united to God!
In thinking about ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’, the authoritative writings of the apostles are clearly the starting point for Christian Theology. It is there, embedded in the books of the New Testament, written by the apostolic generation who witnessed his life, death and resurrection, that we find the Gospel. This is the Good News (euangelion) which the apostles first preached and which is the shaping presupposition for the four Gospels and the epistles. That ‘Gospel of God’ is ‘the Gospel concerning his Son’ (Rom. 1:1-3) and therefore Christology, the Church’s teaching about Christ – who he is and what he has done for us – has been at the heart of the Church’s preaching and mission ever since. In the patristic period, the great doctors of the Church clarified and expounded this Gospel, encapsulating it in the ‘rule of faith’ and the creeds as the hermeneutic by which we are to interpret the scriptures of the Old Testament as well as the New. Since the Trinitarian Creeds, centred in the Christological article, are formulations of the original Gospel which preceded the New Testament documents, this first contextualization of the Christian Gospel in the era of the Fathers is therefore definitive for all subsequent generations and all other contextualization of the Gospel in any culture. Given that the Fathers saw the apostolic Scriptures, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as their authority and that their interpretation of the Scriptures through the creeds can be show to arise out of the Gospel at the heart of the Scriptures, then we cannot be faithful interpreters of the Christian Scriptures without putting that Gospel at the heart of our Theology. The Chalcedonian Symbol is a further explication of that crucial second article of the Nicene Creed, and although Chalcedon has come in for much criticism, it has to be read as a footnote to the second article, an attempt to clarify it and rule out some misinterpretations. Christians today may not be obliged to accept the conceptuality of this late Hellenistic culture, but in order to be true to Christ, whatever terminology and conceptuality we use from our own culture has to express the same Christ-centred, Trinitarian shape of the Gospel.
While the Eastern churches continued to debate the Chalcedonian settlement for some centuries, the medieval Church in the West did not show the same creative thinking in Christology as the Fathers. Generally, the Western and Eastern Orthodox churches were true to Chalcedon during these long centuries, but it was only really at the Reformation that the Gospel, the euangelion, recovered its place at the heart of the Church’s life in the West. The ‘Evangelicals’ (to use Luther’s term, die Evangelische), or ‘Protestants’, were focused on the Gospel, the euangelion, and so swept aside all other mediators and reformed the Church (or at least part of it) in the light of Christ. In this chapter therefore, after a brief review of the highlights of medieval Christology, we shall look at the Reformation and at the Reformation tradition in the post-Reformation era, tracing one particular line of thought, Kenoticism, up into the late modern period. As with the chapters on Patristic Christology, the aim is not to give a full history but to understand the logic of the doctrinal developments so that we can come to current debates and discussions reasonably well informed.
(A) MEDIEVAL CHRISTOLOGY
Augustine’s Interpretation of the Virgin Birth
Western Theology throughout the medieval period and down to today has been deeply influenced by the mighty figure of Aurelius Augustinus (354-430), bishop of Hippo in the Roman province of Africa. Whereas the Eastern Church continued to debate Christology for several centuries after Chalcedon, in the West, the Chalcedonian Christology was largely undisputed, but was interpreted more in the light of Leo’s Tome than through the more sophisticated Christology of Cyril of Alexandria. And whereas the Eastern Church continued to be informed by several great Fathers – Athanasius, the three great Cappadocians, and Cyril – the one dominant thinker in the West was Augustine, and Augustine was not a particularly Christocentric theologian. He was certainly highly influential in the Western approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, but even his doctrine of the Trinity is closely entangled with his deep interest in human psychology. He never really lost the individualistic focus of his early theology, focused on ‘the soul and God, God and the soul’. In the context of the Pelagian controversy, the great themes of his thinking were grace, sin and predestination in the life of the individual Christian. Certainly in response to the Donatist controversy, he also developed his doctrine of church and sacraments, and, in the light of the sack of Rome in 410, his Christian philosophy of history. But the journey of the individual soul in its relationship with God was arguably the powerful heart of his concerns and this was to give Western Christian Theology a much more anthropocentric and individualistic cast than the Christocentric Trinitarian Theology of the East. Compared to the Eastern Fathers who critiqued their own Greek cultural heritage, he, the Latin rhetorician from the more provincial background of the Roman province of Africa, was perhaps more impressed and shaped than they were by Platonist philosophy.
Augustine’s conversion came in 386, five years after the Council of Constantinople of 381 at which the Nicene Creed was finally established. He was ordained a priest in 391, consecrated a bishop in 395 and died in 430, his ministry ending before the Council of Ephesus. The Chalcedonian settlement still lay twenty years in the future. But despite being a contemporary of Cyril of Alexandria and of the great Christological debates, Augustine made no significant contribution to those, and focused the mind of the West on other matters. But his concern with the doctrine of ‘original sin’ (peccatum originale), a phrase he coined, led him to have enormous influence in the West not only on soteriology, but also on one aspect of Christology, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. The doctrine of the Fall and the universal sinfulness of the human race was quite clear in the teaching of the Eastern Fathers, but in his struggle with the Pelagians, Augustine developed his doctrine of ‘original sin’ in its legal, psychological, and hereditary dimensions. Legally, he held that all Adam’s descendants shared in the guilt of his original act of disobedience since we were all ‘seminally’ present in him when he first sinned. Psychologically, original sin included the dominance of self-centred desire (concupiscentia), including specifically sexual lust, and that provided Augustine with an explanation for the hereditary nature of our sinful condition: this ‘disease’ of self-centred desire was passed down the generations by the sexual desire involved in the conception of every human being. Augustine’s development of the doctrine of sin will be critically examined later, but here we simply need to note the way in which this gave Augustine an apparent explanation for the sinlessness of Christ. Given the notion that sin was passed on sexually, the doctrine of the virgin birth (or more accurately, the virginal conception), meaning the absence of a human father, seemed to provide an explanation for the sinlessness of Christ. This was a new doctrine of the significance of the virgin birth of Jesus and was eventually to lead to a new doctrine about the sinlessness of Mary. Although incidental references are to be found in the Eastern Fathers to Mary as a ‘pure virgin’, Augustine’s interpretation of the virgin birth was eventually thought to imply the sinlessness of Mary, her ‘immaculate conception’, a notion which was opposed by many medieval theologians but eventually adopted by the Roman Catholic church in the nineteenth century. It also contributed to a very negative attitude (in contrast to that of the Old Testament) towards human sexuality. We shall have to examine Augustine’s doctrine critically.
From Boethius to Peter Lombard
A century after Augustine’s service as bishop of Hippo, Boethius (c. 480 – 524) was a Roman orator and civil servant in an Italy now ruled by the Arian, Theoderic, King of the Ostrogoths. The prescription of Arianism throughout the Eastern (Byzantine) empire by the Emperor Justin in 523, the support of the Roman Senators for Byzantine rule in Italy, and the publication of Boethius’ anti-Arian tractate, On the Trinity, led to his imprisonment and execution. Earlier he had written his tract Against Eutyches and Nestorius, and had tried to clarify the Christological terms, ‘person’ and ‘nature’. His definition of ‘person’ as ‘the individual substance of rational nature’ (naturae rationabilis individua substantia) became influential in the West, reinforcing the Augustinian tendency towards individualism. Accepting the Chalcedonian Christology of one Person in two natures, he also endorsed the doctrine that the incarnate Lord is ‘one of the Trinity’.
In the eighth century, Alcuin of York (c.535-804), the leading theologian at the court of Charlemagne in the brief ‘Carolingian’ renaissance, defended Chalcedonian Christology against the so-called Spanish ‘Adoptionists’, mainly by citing the authority of the Fathers. There was also a controversy over the perpetual virginity of Mary. But it was not till the eleventh century that a major work was published on Christology, Cur Deus Homo (Why God became Man) by Anselm (1033-1109), the archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm had already written On the Incarnation of the Word, but Cur Deus Homo was the more influential work. It was not so much an exploration of Christology as such, but an attempt to show why the breakdown in the relationship between God and humanity could only be healed by one who was both God and man. As such, it is usually regarded as the first treatise in Christian history to be devoted specifically to the doctrine of the atonement: how only the God-man could provide the necessary recompense to God for human offence against the order of God’s creation. We shall leave an examination of it therefore till we come to look more specifically at soteriology in Part V. But it confirmed the tendency of Western Theology to focus more on salvation than on Christ, more on his work than on his Person. Anselm was the forerunner of what has been regarded as the renaissance of the twelfth century, notable for a contribution to Christology by three contemporaries of the succeeding generation.
Anselm’s younger contemporary, Abelard (1079-1142), is generally credited with a somewhat different approach to the atonement, that God’s love, revealed in the cross of Christ, elicits our response of love so reconciling us to the Father. But in fact his main theological effort was directed to the doctrine of the Trinity, and his book of quotations, Sic et Non (Yes and No) juxtaposed quotations from the Fathers which appeared to be in disagreement. This was a significant step in educational method, provoking lively debate and discussion among his students in the new University of Paris rather than the passive acceptance of authority. His work on the Trinity, Theologia Summi Boni, was condemned however and Abelard, the troublesome intellectual, was strongly opposed by the great mystic and preacher, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). But Bernard himself, while opposing heresy, was himself a creative thinker, particularly on the humanity of Christ and the way in which Christ’s human love for us elicits our love for him and so for God. In his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard writes:
I think this is the principle reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with humans as a human. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal beings who were unable to love any other way, but first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to spiritual love.
Bernard therefore has a strong doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (the exchange of attributes). In Christ, ‘anthropomorphic language about God becomes the literal truth: in Christ, God has human feelings, hands, feet, and lips.’ Emero Stiegman notes: ‘Bernard is the principal literary source of that tender devotion to the humanity of Christ found in Western piety, from the nativity crèche of Francis of Assisi to the oratorios of J.S. Bach.’
The third of the three contemporaries in this influential generation was Peter Lombard (c.1096-1160). Encouraged by Bernard to study Theology, he became a notable exegete, publishing commentaries on the Psalms and Paul’s epistles. The second edition of the latter was influenced by the teachings of John of Damascus, just translated from Greek. But Peter’s most influential work was the Four Books of Sentences, a text book of Systematic Theology which was used in the divinity schools for the next four centuries. This was influential in shaping Theology in a ‘scholastic’ rather than monastic way: the aim was not so much cultivating the spiritual life as cultivating a deeper understanding of Christian doctrine. In a rather less provocative way than Abelard’s Sic et Non, this encouraged students to think critically and theologically. Book I is concerned with the doctrine of God, Book II with creation and fall. Book III is devoted to redemption, centred on the incarnation of the Word and the union of divine and human natures in his Person. Book IV deals with the sacraments and the last things. In his Christology in Book III, Peter expounds the hypostatic union, that is, the union of the two natures in one divine Person, but he finds that none of the standard ways of thinking explain the mystery. He taught that Mary, like her son, was exempt from original sin. Christ was open to temptation and to death but had a somewhat supernatural psychology since as a man he knew by grace everything which the Word knew by nature.
Thomas Aquinas
Coming from a landed family near Naples, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) made his reputation in the University of Paris, still a fairly recent foundation where intellectual inquiry was in tension (as in so many Christian colleges since) with the confession of faith. The recently discovered works of Aristotle were presenting a challenge to the prevailing Platonist tradition of the Augustinian Latin West, and it was Thomas’s achievement to create the new ‘medieval synthesis’ (as it is sometimes called) between faithful confession and intellectual inquiry. Theological lectures in the ‘schools’ (which gave their name to ‘scholasticism’) were based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, but the Summa Theologiae of Thomas (as we have already noted) was an immense and sophisticated master-piece which would always have to be included in any list of the greatest works of Christian Theology. We have already noted the analysis of Thomas O’Meara that the overall structure is that of exitus and reditus, going out and returning, or procession and fulfilment. Beginning in the Prima Pars (First Part) with God and the creation which he originates, Aquinas has extensive discussion of moral psychology, law and sin in Prima Secundae (the first part of the Second Part) and of the dispensation of grace in Secunda Secundae (the second part of the Second Part) before he comes eventually to Christology and the sacraments in Tertia Pars (Third Part). One could say that rather than beginning like the apostles with the Gospel of Christ and so coming to an understanding of the ‘grand narrative’ of the Bible - creation, fall and redemption, Aquinas begins with the grand narrative, interpreted according to his Platonist and Aristotelian framework, and brings in Christology rather late in the day.
Be that as it may, when he comes to his doctrine of Christ, it is largely a faithful reproduction of the Christology of the Fathers with some sophisticated elaboration and defence of the logic of the traditional terminology. But if there is any creative development in his Christology, it is not in his careful reproduction of Chalcedon, but in the way in which Aquinas sees Christology in the light of soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, and therefore we shall return to examine that when we focus on soteriology in Part Five.
(B) REFORMATION CHRISTOLOGY
Martin Luther
The Renaissance and the Reformation together are generally taken by historians as the beginning of the ‘modern’ era, and Martin Luther is therefore a pivotal figure in the history of the Church and indeed of the history of what we call ‘western civilization’. But in many ways he remains a medieval thinker and continues the perspective of the Latin-speaking tradition of western Europe. Although he became quite violently opposed to the Aristotelian scholasticism of late medieval theology, particularly the via moderna of Gabriel Biel in which he had been educated, he was not apparently directly familiar with the works of Aquinas. But he shares with Aquinas the strong soteriological interest which characterizes Western Christianity. For Luther, only a theologia crucis (theology of the cross) is truly Christian Theology. He was less interested than Aquinas in the sophisticated elaboration and defence of Chalcedon but, like Aquinas, his most creative thinking came by approaching Christology from soteriology. It was Luther’s existential quest for peace with God which led to his intellectual quest to understand what Paul meant by iustificatio, which may be translated into English as either ‘justification’ or ‘righteousness’. He was particularly concerned with what was meant by ‘the righteousness of God’ (Rom. 1:17) and it was the newly available Greek New Testament which opened the way to understanding that the righteousness (dikaiosunē) of God was his declaring the ungodly to be ‘just’ or ‘righteous’ through faith rather than making them ‘just’ as the Latin verb seemed to imply. For him, ‘justification by faith’, which he interpreted as ‘by faith alone’ (sola fide), was therefore the articulus stadentis vel cadentis ecclesia (the article by which the Church stands or falls). That is what led him to a Theology which was much more Christocentric than that of Aquinas.
While his intellectual context and culture was quite different from that of the Eastern Fathers, the focus on the solus Christus, that it was by ‘Christ alone’ that we are saved, can be seen to be the Reformation equivalent of the Nicene focus on the homoousion. For Athanasius and the Nicene Fathers, Christ alone was ‘of the same Being as the Father.’ The key word of the Nicene creed, homoousion, ‘of the same Being’, was a way of ruling out the implications of Arianism. It ruled out the hierarchy of mediators between God and humanity which was characteristic of various kinds of late Hellenistic religion. Christ was not merely the most exalted in a hierarchy. He was alone was the Eternal Son of the Father, God Incarnate. This was their way of insisting on the uniqueness of Christ, that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’ So also in the Reformation, Luther and the other Reformers were reacting against late medieval religiosity, sweeping away the hierarchy of saints and priests coming between the believer and God, and insisting in the solus Christus that ‘there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus’ (I Tim. 2:5).
As with the Fathers therefore, it was the pivotal role of Christ in the story of salvation which made Luther insist on the One-in-two, the one Christ in his true deity and true humanity. But this is where the perspective of Luther and the other Reformers complements the Christology of the Nicene Creed and Chalcedon. Although the integration of Christology with soteriology is clear in the writings of the Fathers, particularly Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen and Cyril, the focus is not as fully on the atonement through the death of Christ on the cross as it might be. Arguably the deeper wrestling with the understanding of the cross only begins with Anselm in the eleventh century. Further, even the second article of the Nicene Creed is not as full as it might be, for it does not include the key point of the Gospel that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures’ (I Cor. 15: 3). Certainly we may note that that specific central point of the Gospel is not made either in the hymn of Philippians 2! While ‘obedience unto death’ is there, it is not specifically stated to be ‘for our sins’. But the failure to mention that specifically in the creed is compounded when the Chalcedonian Symbol articulates Christology with little or no reference to soteriology at all, saying only that Christ was born ‘for our salvation’. At this point then, the Reformers provide a needed balance to the doctrine of the Fathers and bring out its true significance.
This begins with Martin Luther. In The Small Catechism, commenting on the second article of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther clearly articulates this integration of Chalcedonian Christology with soteriology. Also, a new note compared to the Fathers and the medieval scholastics (though perhaps owing more to Bernard), is the way in which the individual believer’s life of faith is integrated with Christology:
I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, delivered me and freed me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.
The ‘wondrous exchange’ or reciprocal substitution which we noted in the Fathers, particularly Irenaeus and Athanasius, is expressed not just with reference to humanity corporately as something effected objectively in Christ’s death and resurrection, but now with reference to the individual believer at the moment the believer comes to faith. Here Luther is perhaps reflecting the focus on personal piety in the later medieval period, seen for example in one of his favourite writings, the Theologia Germanica. So for Luther, Christ is the bridegroom, but it is not just the Church, but the believing soul, which is his bride:
Christ is full of grace, life and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul’s... By the wedding ring of faith he shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride’s. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all... Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ...
Given this echoing of the ‘wondrous exchange’ we noted in the thought of Athanasius, it is only to be expected that Luther’s Christology has a strongly Alexandrian flavour. If Christ through his death and resurrection takes our sin and death and in exchange gives us his righteousness and eternal life, then the accent will fall on the close union of deity and humanity within the one Person. It has been argued by Tuomo Mannermaa and others in what is called the ‘Finnish school’ that the Alexandrian view of deification (theōsis) is to be seen in Luther’s thought. Less controversial is that, following in the Alexandrian tradition, Luther has a strong emphasis on the communicatio idiomatum, the ‘exchange of attributes’ between humanity and deity in Christ. This led particularly to Luther’s argument that the human nature of Christ received the attribute of omnipresence or ‘ubiquity’ from his divine nature, giving a theological basis for arguing against his fellow Reformer, Zwingli, that Christ’s risen body was not just in heaven with the Father, but was actually present ‘in, with, and under’ the bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper.
Luther’s strong focus on the theology of cross (theologia crucis), that is to say, soteriology, the work of Christ, as the core concern of Christian Theology as a whole, was, as we have argued, a necessary complement to the patristic focus on Christology, the Person of Christ. It was part of his concern that Theology was not an abstract, academic pursuit, concerned with metaphysical speculations about God, but was embedded in the life of faith as dying with Christ. As one of his pungent sayings put it, ‘A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.’ His soteriological thinking also had a strong focus on the justification of the individual by faith, largely lacking in the Fathers. While these were both valuable perspectives and correctives, together they carried the danger of an over-reaction, namely that Western Theology would take Christology for granted, making Christ merely the necessary means of my individual salvation rather than the One who is to be adored for his own sake. This danger in Lutheran Theology can be seen encapsulated in the ambiguity of the aphorism coined by Luther’s colleague, Philip Melanchthon, in the first edition of his Loci communes: ‘To know Christ is to know his benefits.’ Melanchthon contrasted this with the abstract focus of the scholastics with ‘the natures and modes’ of the Incarnation. But this concern with the existential experience of salvation can easily topple over into a religious subjectivism which dismisses Christology and indeed all Trinitarian doctrine as merely abstract metaphysical speculation rather than the confession of praise which arises out of our encounter with the living God.
Philip Melanchthon gradually moved out from under Luther’s shadow, trying increasingly to present a moderate, balanced Theology which sought rapprochement with the other Reformation ‘evangelical’ traditions and even with Rome. Each successive edition of his systematic presentation of doctrine, the Loci communes, presented fuller examinations of the doctrines of God the Holy Trinity and of Creation which earlier he had tended to downplay as not directly related to ‘the benefits of Christ.’ Among the many controversies besetting early Lutheranism therefore was the tension between those who held strictly to Luther and Melanchthon’s followers, known as ‘Philippists’. Some of the controversies concerned Christology, notably the view of Andrew Osiander (1498-1552) that the Word would have become incarnate even had there been no Fall. This was rejected by both Luther and Melanchthon. By 1577 however, the various factions in the Lutheran tradition came together largely through the mediating work of Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586) in the Formula of Concord.
John Calvin
In Switzerland, the Reformation began not with the discovery of justification by faith, but with a desire to reform the worship and life of the Church according to Scripture. Their more radical reform of liturgy and church government was indicated by calling themselves (in distinction from the ‘Lutherans’) the ‘Reformed’ churches. The Frenchman, John Calvin, who became the leading figure in the Reformed Church of the city state of Geneva and also the dominating theologian of the ‘Reformed’ tradition, was the first Reformer to attempt a comprehensive account of Christian Theology in his Christianae Religionis Institutio (Institutes of the Christian Religion). Like the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas, this too must appear on any list of the pre-eminent works of Christian Theology. Like the Summa, the Institutio attempts a comprehensive Theology, but unlike the Summa, as part of the Reformation reaction against the Aristotelian scholasticism of the medieval period, it largely ignores philosophical argument. In fact, although it is a highly organized and comprehensive treatment of Theology, some might regard it as an attempt at Biblical rather than Systematic Theology. It brings together in an organized, thematic way Calvin’s understanding of the teaching of the Bible as he had expounded it in his series of commentaries on all almost the whole of Scripture. The work is organized however according to the shape of the creed, and Calvin’s engagement with doctrinal disputes both ancient and of his own day qualifies it as a work of not only Biblical but also Systematic Theology. It is not ‘systematic’ however either by employing a particular philosophical stance like Aquinas, nor by constructing a system from one basic starting point like the later work of Schleiermacher.
As with Aquinas, it is not so evident from this structure that Calvin is a clearly Christocentric theologian. It appears that, following the shape of the creed, the grand narrative of creation, fall, and redemption, gives shape to the Institutes rather than the particular narrative of the Gospel of Christ. Book I is entitled, ‘Of the Knowledge of God the Creator’ and Book II, ‘Of the Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ...’ As we noted before, following this credal order of creation before redemption, he presents the doctrine of the Trinity before he comes to a full examination of the Christology which required it to be developed. The deity of Christ is therefore explained while expounding the doctrine of the Trinity in Book I, Chapter 13, but we have to wait for his exposition of the humanity of Christ till we come to Book II, Chapter 12.
Once he comes to consider Christology however, it is evident that Calvin, like Luther, has recovered the soteriological perspective which was perhaps in danger of being somewhat obscured in the creed and Chalcedonian Symbol. Calvin begins Chapter 12 with Christ’s role as Mediator: ‘It deeply concerned us that he who was to be our Mediator should be very God and very man.’ He goes on to articulate an Irenaean integration of incarnation and atonement which later Protestant Theology was too often to lose:
Thus the Son of God behoved to become our Emmanuel, i.e. God with us, and in such a way that by mutual union his divinity and our nature might be combined. Otherwise neither was the proximity enough, nor the affinity strong enough to give us hope that God would dwell with us, so great was the repugnance between our pollution and the spotless purity of God.
The ‘wondrous exchange’ of Irenaeus and Athanasius becomes the governing principle. The ‘work to be performed by the Mediator’ was to make ‘sons of men’ into ‘sons of God’ and ‘heirs of hell’ into ‘heirs of a heavenly kingdom’: ‘Who could do this unless the Son of God should also become the Son of Man, and so receive what is ours as to transfer to us what is his, making that which is his by nature to become ours by grace?’ That was why he had to assume ‘a body of our body, flesh or our flesh, bone of our bones, that he might be one with us.’ He who was to be our Redeemer had to be truly God and man:
It was his to swallow up death: who but Life could do so? It was his to conquer sin: who could do so save Righteousness itself? ... Therefore God in his infinite mercy, having determined to redeem us, became himself our Redeemer in the person of his only-begotten Son.
In the light of the close connection of the Incarnation with the atonement, Calvin dismissed as speculative the view of the Lutheran theologian Osiander that the Word would have become flesh even had humanity not sinned.
In contrast to Luther, who emphasized the union so strongly in an Alexandrian way, Calvin, like the Antiochene tradition, emphasized the integrity of the true humanity of Christ and its continuing distinction from his deity even after the union:
When it is said that the Word was made flesh, we must not understand it as if he were either changed into flesh, or confusedly mingled with flesh... He who was the Son of God became the Son of Man not by confusion of substance but by unity of person. For we maintain that the divinity was so conjoined and united with the humanity that the entire properties of each nature remained entire and the yet the two natures constitute only one Christ.
This implies a more qualified acceptance of the communicatio idiomatum (exchange of attributes or properties):
There is a communication of idiomata or properties when Paul said that God purchased the Church ‘with his own blood’ (Acts 20:28) and that the Jews crucified the Lord of glory (I Cor. 2:8). In like manner, John says that the Word of God was ‘handled’. God certainly has no blood, suffers not, cannot be touched with hands; but since that Christ, who was true God and man, shed his blood on the cross for us, the acts which were performed in his human nature are transferred improperly (improprie) but not causelessly, to his divinity.
The Latin word here, improprie, implies that to cross-attribute properties like this is only a figure of speech. In line with that, Calvin denied therefore that the humanity of Christ actually became omnipresent or ubiquitous, and so denied that the body and blood of Christ were physically contained in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. He asserted the real presence of the risen Lord at the Supper, but it was a spiritual presence, that is to say, a presence with his people in the power of the Holy Spirit. And while only those united to Christ according to the Spirit were members of his body, yet, contrary to some of his later followers, Calvin asserted that the full and true humanity of Christ implied that ‘the salvation brought by Christ is common to the whole human race, inasmuch as Christ, the author of salvation, is descended from Adam.’
Calvin was also more in line with patristic Christology, both Alexandrian and Antiochene, in insisting that, while the Incarnation was real, it did not mean that the Word was contained within the flesh of Christ any more than the flesh and blood of the ascended Lord were contained within the bread and wine. While the Word was truly one with his own body in the Incarnation, and was truly active as a human being on earth, he did not abandon his role in ‘upholding the universe by his word of power’ (Heb. 1:3). The Lutherans dubbed this the extra Calvinisticum, but it was the doctrine of Athanasius.
(C) CHRISTOLOGY AFTER THE REFORMATION
If the Reformation with its solus Christus was a revolution in Christian thought and a re-assertion of the centrality of ‘Christ clothed with his Gospel’ (in Calvin’s phrase), the succeeding centuries can be seen as disappointing. What is immediately evident is the eruption of innumerable theological controversies which became entangled with issues of power and politics which led to the appalling period of so-called ‘religious’ wars. Someone has spoken of the ‘centrifugal’ effect of the Reformation, spinning off innumerable divisions and ‘denominations’ and sadly rending the unity of the Western Church. Theological debates became complex and often bitter. As far as Christology is concerned, despite the differences of opinion between the Lutheran and Reformed branches, echoing the contrasting emphases of ancient Alexandria and Antioch, all the magisterial Reformers were loyal to the Nicene Creed and to Chalcedon. The Anabaptists, rejecting the link between church and state which had enabled the Reformation, also rejected the use of the creeds in worship. Generally they took orthodox Christology for granted, but were more concerned with issues of ecclesiology and of personal faith and ethics. But the question must be posed whether the Theology of the Evangelical or Protestant churches remained true to the solus Christus. While their Christology was orthodox, was their Theology as a whole Christocentric and so truly Trinitarian? Was it shaped by the One-in-two Gospel of Christ and so by the biblical narrative of the sending Father, the dying-and-rising Son, and the sent Holy Spirit? Did Protestant theologians in the post-Reformation era take the creed with its Trinitarian shape and Christocentricity as the hermeneutic for the interpretation of Scripture and therefore the structure of their Theology? Or did some other patterns or paradigms in fact shape their thinking and determine their hermeneutic?
The Shaping of So-called Protestant ‘Orthodoxy’
The century between the death of Luther in 1546 and the emergence of the Puritan John Owen as the pre-eminent theologian of Reformed ‘orthodoxy’, at least in England, saw some significant developments. We cannot examine or document them in detail here, but a quick summary of some of the developments will at least pose the question whether Protestant Theology remained true to the solus Christus.
Common to both Lutheran and Reformed traditions was the revival of the Aristotelian thinking which had characterized the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and the medieval scholastics. Aristotelian logic shaped a new kind of rationalism which delighted in logical argument and fine distinctions, dividing Theology into neat divisions and sub-divisions. It was not that the Protestant scholastics thought that they could base Christian Theology on human reason, for they held very firmly to the sola scriptura. Our knowledge of God came from God’s revelation through the apostles and prophets found in Holy Scripture. This was a cardinal point in their dispute with Rome which had departed from true Catholicism by basing doctrines on Church tradition unsupported by Scripture. But when it came to interpreting the text of the Bible, they tended to lay great store by logical deduction from some core doctrines, and this kind of traditional formal logic was part of the heritage from Aristotle. It is highly ironic that Luther’s trenchant rejection of the Aristotelian scholasticism of the late medieval period should be followed two generations later by the embracing of scholasticism by his followers. In the Lutheran tradition, Martin Chemnitz, one of the architects of the Formula of Concord (1577), was the first major theologian of so-called Lutheran ‘orthodoxy’. His work of 1571, On the Two Natures of Christ, worked out the Lutheran view that in the hypostatic union, the humanity of Christ fully received the attributes of deity so that the body of Christ could be present in many places simultaneously as the Holy Communion was celebrated. But in the next generation it was Johann Gerhard (1582-1637) who became the greatest of theologian of scholastic Lutheran ‘orthodoxy’, and it was he who most strongly adopted Aristotelian metaphysics. Yet it is possible to argue that the strong influence of Luther kept the Lutheran tradition centred to a great extent on Christ and on justification by faith.
In the Reformed tradition, the revived interest in Aristotelian method was combined with other more substantive developments leading to what became known as ‘Federal’ Theology. It is enough for our purposes here to identify three aspects of this new theological development. First, it made the biblical concept of ‘covenant’ (foedus) the key to the interpretation of the Scriptures: secondly, it developed further Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, and thirdly, it arrived logically at the conclusion that Christ died only for the elect. It is difficult to disentangle these and a fuller examination of ‘Federal’ Theology must be left till we examine the doctrine of election. But briefly, it was probably the doctrine of predestination which was the underlying theme as part of the desire to glorify the sovereignty of God. Calvin had moved beyond Augustine in teaching ‘double predestination’, namely that God had not only predestined the elect to salvation, but that, far from simply passing over others, he had specifically predestined the reprobate to damnation and so, to attain this end, had fore-ordained the Fall. Calvin had expounded this doctrine at the end of his chapters on Christian faith and life, and it could be charitably interpreted as arising out of a truly pious desire to give God all the glory for our salvation. But his heirs now placed this doctrine at the beginning of their Theology, making it their starting point in the doctrine of God. They then developed the notion of several eternal ‘decrees’ which they speculated God had made in eternity: to create the world, to elect some individuals to salvation and others to damnation, and to fore-ordain the Fall in order to create this division. There were great debates about the order in which God had made these supposed ‘decrees’. This speculative doctrine of predestination then developed into a deterministic doctrine of providence, while still maintaining that this was compatible with human freedom.
This doctrine of predestination was linked to the second new development, the doctrine of the covenants. Here the Calvinist theologians took a biblical concept, but instead of focussing on the explicit covenants of Scripture – the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic Covenants, and the New Covenant – they applied the concept particularly to Adam in a way not found in Scripture. Before the Fall, God had made a ‘Covenant of Works’ with Adam, but when Adam failed to keep the covenant, God instituted the ‘Covenant of Grace’. This would only result however in the salvation of the elect, those whom God had foreordained to faith. Some extended this further to write of another covenant, the ‘Covenant of Redemption’ made between the Father and the Son in eternity. By this the Son had voluntarily agreed to die for the elect in return for their salvation. But the conclusion in logic from this whole development was that if God had ordained to save only the elect, then Christ had made atonement for them particularly. His death was sufficient to save the whole human race, but by God’s decree it was effective only for those he had selected. This doctrine of ‘Limited Atonement’ was reached not exegetically but at the end of a chain of logic providing the hermeneutic by which Scripture was interpreted, and at this point Calvinist Theology deviated from the mainstream Christian tradition. The doctrine of ‘particular redemption’ or ‘limited atonement’ was contrary to what the Church as a whole had always taught on the basis of Scripture. This whole development of scholastic Federal Calvinism was given definitive expression in 1619 at the Synod of Dordt, called by the victorious party in the Dutch civil war to exclude the Arminians from the Reformed churches. There has been considerable debate about how far this ‘Calvinism’ differed from Calvin himself, but it is very clear that while it is rooted in Calvin, it goes beyond him.
This is not the place for a full documentation of these developments, but this brief sketch is enough to indicate that there had been a rapid development of a whole new paradigm. One can trace its roots back through Calvin to Augustine, but the complete scheme of Federal Calvinism was an innovation. Ironically, once it had been affirmed at the Synod of Dordt in 1619, this unprecedented theological paradigm, unknown to Irenaeus, Athanasius or Cyril, or even to Luther and Calvin, became known as Protestant ‘orthodoxy’. It is only necessary to take note of it here in order to make the point that while this ‘orthodoxy’ was perfectly loyal to the Trinitarian creeds and to the Chalcedonian Christology, these had in effect been relegated. Trinity and Christology were now in effect merely two doctrines among others in the list of doctrines in the Reformed confessions, but they no longer gave shape to the whole of Theology as in the Fathers. Rather, with these highly speculative innovations, in what now claimed to be Reformed ‘orthodoxy’, Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, elaborated in the novel doctrines of the covenants and the decrees, actually shaped the interpretation of Holy Scripture and Christian Theology as a whole. Reformed ‘orthodoxy’ may have thought that it remained true to the solus Christus of the Reformation, but in fact this whole way of thinking was not shaped by the Gospel of the Incarnate Christ, crucified and risen, but on speculation about eternal decrees which logically and causally determined everything. Traditional formal Aristotelian logic ruled the day.
John Owen
Among the numerous theologians of so-called Reformed ‘orthodoxy’, none was greater than the Puritan John Owen (1616-1683). A Congregationalist, and therefore not part of the assembly of Presbyterians which drew up the Westminster Confession (1649), he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford by Oliver Cromwell. He was excluded from the mainstream of the Church in England as a ‘Nonconformist’ after the Restoration of Monarchy and the Elizabethan settlement of the Church in 1660, and his dense, scholastic, Latinized style of language and argumentation led to the neglect of his writings in succeeding generations. But as a theologian of immense erudition, well-read in the Fathers and medieval theologians, he was pre-eminent not only among English Puritans, but among the Reformed theologians of continental Europe and remained influential in the Calvinist tradition. Owen is perhaps the outstanding exemplar of so-called Reformed ‘orthodoxy’.
Negatively therefore we may see him as exemplifying predestinarian scholastic Federal Calvinism at its height. Alan C. Clifford has argued that this distanced him so far from Calvin that John Wesley was closer to the great Genevan Reformer! Owen has been defended by Carl Trueman who argued that it was not Aristotelianism which determined Owen’s theology, but Trinitarian theology. What is evident from Trueman’s analysis however that it is not the Trinitarian theology of the Fathers which shapes Owen’s whole scheme of Theology. What Trueman is really referring to is the ‘Covenant of Redemption’, which, according to the speculations of scholastic Calvinism, was made between the Father and the Son in eternity. It is difficult to see how such a notion is compatible with the unity of the Trinity, but it is this speculative ‘covenant’ which controls Owen’s Theology, not ‘Christ crucified’ or the patristic Trinitarian theology which arose out of the proclamation that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’ According to Trueman, the so-called ‘Covenant of Redemption’ between the Father and the Son ‘always has a logical and causal priority over the historical economy of salvation in Owen’s thought.’ Since that was held to define the number of the elect, Christology and atonement then are merely concerned with the means by which the pre-ordained scheme is carried out. It is no longer the Christological shape of the Gospel which determines the shape of the whole of Christian Theology, therefore, but the speculation about an intra-Trinitarian ‘Covenant of Redemption’ in eternity. Everything else follows causally and logically from that.
Since everything is determined in eternity, the concept of eternity is formative for the whole scheme and that in turn is shaped by ancient philosophy. With much of the Western tradition, Owen assumes Boethius’ definition of eternity as an infinite present and the Aristotelian view of God as actus purus. For Aristotle, the cosmos and everything in it was continuously moving towards its end by actualizing its potential. But God had no potential not yet reached since that would deny his perfection. With no potential yet to be realized, God was fully actually or ‘pure act’. While Aristotle sees God as the ‘Unmoved Mover’ drawing all the cosmos towards its ‘end’ (telos), for Owen, God’s eternal decrees have logical and causal priority before all, thus determining all that happens in the temporal cosmos he created. Time and history are real for Owen, but they are subordinate to eternity. What happens in history in the grand narrative of creation, fall, and redemption has in fact already all been determined in eternity. This whole metaphysical framework certainly supports, and appears to determine, Owen’s whole Theology rather than the One-in-two Gospel of ‘Christ crucified’ and risen.
Despite this overall assessment of Owen’s Theology however, a strongly positive account must be given of his Christology as such. Here he defended patristic doctrine against the Socinians, in particular the Englishman, John Biddle, and the summary of Socinian doctrine in their Racovian Catechism. Socinianism is historically important as the first significant appearance in modern times of the ancient Arian rejection of Christ’s full deity. Socinus was the forerunner of many in the ‘Liberal’ tradition which we shall trace in the next chapter except that he held to the sola scriptura. The Socinians affirmed without question the humanity of Christ, but argued that his ‘divinity’ could not be taken to mean strict deity as one God with the Father and Spirit. The Chalcedonian Christology of ‘two natures’ was logical nonsense since it was impossible for two natures with different properties to be ascribed to one individual and the Scriptures did not need to be interpreted in that way. The notion of the eternal generation of the Son from God was also incoherent since it would imply the division of God’s essence. Against this, Owen defended Nicaea and Chalcedon, making the important methodological point that human rationality is simply incompetent to judge what is possible or impossible for God. Revelation must have priority over reason, given that human language and logic cannot extrapolate from the finite realm of creation to the infinite and uncreated God. He defended Christ’s pre-existence as God, the second Person of the Trinity, and his role in creation.
According to Carl Trueman, Owen’s doctrine of the Person of Christ is logically dependent on his doctrine of the work of Christ since ‘the causal ground for incarnation is the covenant of redemption.’ Protestant ‘orthodoxy’ worked with two schemes for explicating the work of Christ: first, the two ‘states’ of humiliation and exaltation, and secondly, the threefold ‘office’ of Christ the Mediator, as prophet, priest and king. It was particularly in connection with the office of Christ as prophet that Owen developed his insights into the intimate connection between Christology and the doctrine of the Spirit. The Socinians saw the prophetic office as Christ’s proclaiming of the will of God, but for Owen, Christ can only reveal the Father if he is one with the Father. Humanity can have no true knowledge of God unless God is ‘manifest in the flesh.’ That leads us to the question however how Christ as a human being can know and so reveal the infinite God, and Owen is quite clear that the finite mind of Christ cannot have infinite knowledge if it is truly human. Trueman quotes his statement:
‘...nor had he in his human nature an absolutely infinite comprehension of all individual things, past, present, and to come, which he expressly denies as to the day of judgment, Mt. 24:36, Mk. 13:32; but he was furnished with all that wisdom and knowledge which the human nature was capable of...without destroying its finite being and variety of conditions, from the womb.’
For Owen, the communication of divine knowledge does not come to the human nature simply by the incarnation. Rather it is the initiation of Christ into his office as Mediator when he received the fullness of the Spirit at his baptism which gave him the knowledge he needed for his task. In contrast to medieval scholasticism, which tended to say that Christ did not come to know anything through his human experiences which he did not already know as God, Reformed Theology rejected the idea that the finite was capable of the infinite (capax infiniti). Christ as man was therefore not omniscient as the eternal Word was not contained within the flesh. There was therefore a real growth in knowledge of the human Jesus, but as the Spirit was the divine agent in creation, so he was in the humanity of Jesus. Trueman sums up Owen’s view in a way which allows for the growth in ‘wisdom and stature’ indicated by Luke (Lk 2:52):
In terms of the Holy Spirit in relation to the incarnation, while it was true that Jesus Christ received the Spirit at conception, this Spirit became progressively more active in terms of the gifts and knowledge he endowed him with throughout his life. It was not until his baptism, and the inauguration of his public ministry, that he received the fullness of the Spirit.
Alan C. Spence argues that with this ‘pneumatological Christology’, Owen satisfactorily combined the two ancient patristic traditions of ‘incarnational’ and ‘inspirational’ Christology. What is clear is that in line with the ancient Antiochene tradition, Owen and the whole Reformed tradition from Calvin onwards were the strong defenders of the real and distinct humanity of Jesus, including his limited human knowledge.
(D) THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE EVANGELICAL AWAKENING
The later re-awakening of Reformation faith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had its roots in the Puritan tradition of England and New England, the Presbyterian tradition in Scotland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the rise of Pietism in Germany. Once again, we are concerned here with only enough of the historical and theological context to enable us to understand the development of Christology.
Jonathan Edwards
The New England preacher, Jonathan Edwards, embodies the link between Puritanism and the eighteenth-century revival. The development of the protracted meeting among the New England Puritans had led to what they called ‘revivals’ or ‘awakenings’, including those in the ministry of Edwards’ grandfather, Solomon Stoddart, when nominal Christians were pressed to seek genuine ‘conversion’ or ‘the new birth’. Edward’s account of the revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, was re-published in London by the Puritan Isaac Watts and by John Wesley in 1737 and had a direct influence on the revival which is reckoned to have begun the following year with John Wesley’s ‘conversion’ at the meeting in Aldersgate Street in the City of London. Edwards died prematurely from a tainted smallpox inoculation shortly after his appointment in 1758 as president of the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton University, but he is regarded as the foremost theologian of the Evangelical Awakening. Robert Jenson named him ‘America’s Theologian’.
Stephen Holmes characterizes the Christology of Edwards as ‘Owenite’. He quotes two passages in which Edwards emphasizes like John Owen the full humanity of Christ in assuming our Adamic humanity:
A sermon on Luke 22:44 asserts: ‘Christ who is the Lord God omnipotent...did not take the human nature on him in its first, most perfect and vigorous state, but in that feeble and forlorn state which it is in since the fall...’ and Miscellanies asserts that ‘the [angels] saw him [Christ] in the human nature and its mean, defaced, broken, infirm, ruined state, in the form of sinful flesh...’
Clearly, this Reformed tradition of Owen and Edwards, in strongly insisting on the real humanity of Christ, was echoing Gregory Nazianzen’s opposition to the Apollinarian denial that the Word assumed our full sinful humanity, including the sinful mind. As Nazianzen insisted: ‘the unassumed is the unhealed’. In no way did this compromise the sinlessness of Christ, for even in assuming our sinful human nature, he sanctified it in his own Person. But only if Christ came right down to exactly where we are could he be our pattern and example in the power of the Holy Spirit.
But according to Holmes, there is an incoherence in Edwards’ Christology. On the one hand he emphasizes the distinct humanity of Christ in a thoroughly Antiochene and Reformed way. Holmes could have noted that this even verges on Nestorianism when Edwards writes of the human Jesus, ‘This man hath communion with the Logos.’ But on the other hand, Holmes sees the influence of the philosopher John Locke in the assertion that the unity of Person implies ‘the same consciousness.’ The term ‘Person’ is now not only an ontological word, as with the Fathers, but has acquired psychological content. But if personal identity requires identity of consciousness, and Jesus as a man therefore remembers his blessedness with the Father ‘before the world was’, it becomes difficult to safeguard the distinct human mind of Jesus with its growth and development in knowledge. Holmes points to the mitigating factor that Edwards’ Miscellanies are not a finished work written for publication, but a private note-book in which Edwards records his theological reflections.
Pietism and the Wesleys
One result of dry, academic Protestant ‘orthodoxy’ in Germany was that it provoked the rise of Pietism among the Lutherans. Led by Philip Jacob Spener (1635-1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), the Pietists encouraged Christians to gather in collegia pietatis, ‘colleges of piety’. These were small fellowship groups who gathered to pray and study the Bible not in order to engage in doctrinal disputes but to apply it to their lives. In England, the Puritans who were originally a movement to ‘purify’ the Church of England to make it more like Calvin’s Geneva, managed to combine a scholastic orthodoxy with a fervent piety. English Puritans and German Pietists were orthodox in their Christology, but were also characterized by the new individualism and a new focus on the individual’s subjective faith which the Reformation and Renaissance together had encouraged. Luther, much more than the Swiss Reformers, focused on the existential faith of the individual believer and (as we have seen) on the individual soul rather than on the Church as the bride of Christ. In one way this was quite biblical. Luther’s emphasis on the pro me, that Christ died ‘for me’, was a direct echo of Paul’s personal faith in ‘the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20). This was further strengthened by the Pietists’ emphasis on the ‘new birth’, understood as ‘conversion’, the moment when the believer first came to faith in Christ. But the danger in the whole focus on Herzensreligion (‘heart religion’) in Pietism was that in a sincere search for authentic Christian faith and experience, Christians became subjectively oriented around their own hearts rather than focused on Christ. But it was not at all that Christ was obviously sidelined.
The later Pietist leader, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf (1700-1756), who established the Moravians on his estate at Herrnhut, gave them a strong focus on the ‘blood’ of Christ which we see echoed in the preaching and hymnody of the Wesleys. But while there was this focus on the cross, orthodox Chalcedonian Christology in itself was somewhat taken for granted. It could be asked whether the focus was perhaps more on the crucifixion of Christ rather than the Christ who was crucified. And the impression is given that sometimes at least the real centre of interest was in the believer’s appropriation of life, forgiveness and holiness through the ‘wounds’ of the Lamb of God. Since both German Pietism and the evangelical awakening in Britain and her North American colonies was a reaction against a dead orthodoxy and nominal Christianity, that is understandable, but it carried with it a subtle temptation to a subjectivist and self-centred piety, a conversion-centred rather than a Christ-centred Theology. Christology was too often taken for granted.
This conflation of the Herzensreligion of German Pietism and the solus Christus of the Reformation comes out clearly in the passage in which John Wesley recounts the events of 24th May, 1738 in the old City of London:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
The meaning and significance of this well-known passage has been debated in numerous articles and monographs, but what we need to note here is that, having just been listening to a reading from Luther, Wesley articulates here the solus Christus of the Reformation. The subjective experience of the ‘warmed heart’ was not the cause, but the consequence, of faith in Christ. The subjective feeling of assurance was a consequence of a response to the Christ who had died for him. This was assuredly not ‘faith in faith’, a subjectively oriented trust in his own feelings (although Wesley continued to wrestle with that temptation), but a sure trust and confidence in the objective reality of Christ crucified. It is no wonder then that he would frequently record of his preaching, ‘I offered them Christ.’ And yet the temptation to look inward rather than upward was to characterize the whole evangelical awakening.
Wesley has been accused of a slight Apollinarianism in his Christology, a failure to do justice to the full humanity of Christ, who truly thought as a human being. But while that may be a recurring tendency in orthodox Christians in reaction to the modern tendency to focus on the humanity of Christ, this is not a serious charge against Wesley’s Christology. Randy Maddox notes that while he attacked Arianism and Socinianism, he has been seen, perhaps in reaction to those, as a ‘practical Monophysite’. This could be traced to the influence of Eastern Christology, but Maddox prefers to see it as ‘an expression of his conviction that God is the one who takes the initiative in our salvation.’ Kenneth Collins concludes that while Wesley ‘moves in the direction of monophysitism’, he is in line with orthodoxy. Since the two brothers shared the same theological perspective (despite clear but minor differences) we may surely take Charles’ Christology in his immense collection of hymns as a clear indication also of John’s doctrine. Here the full deity, full humanity and complete unity of Chalcedonian Christology are expressed with all the amazing versifying skill of English poetry of the Augustan age.
(E) THE LATER EVANGELICAL TRADITION
The Reformation gave birth to the Evangelical tradition. But in fact, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century there was a variety of Evangelical traditions. In the English-speaking world, many of these traced their roots back through the eighteenth-century Evangelical awakening led by Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys to the Theology of the Reformation. New England Congregationalists, the rapidly growing Methodist churches across the United States, evangelical Anglicans from the generation of Simeon and Wilberforce to the generation of Handley Moule and J.C. Ryle, evangelical Presbyterians from Thomas Chalmers to James Orr and James Denney in Scotland and from the Hodges to Warfield in the United States, Baptists, Anabaptists, and later the new Salvation Army of William Booth springing out of Wesleyan Methodism as part of the holiness movement – all of these, Calvinists and Arminians, recognized each other across denominational distinctions. The Evangelicals came together in the formation of the World Evangelical Alliance in London in 1846. Throughout the nineteenth century, they initiated and led the great advance in missionary endeavour which was to transform world Christianity.
But while they led the way in the international spread of the Christian faith and engaged in effective evangelism at home through the work of Finney and Moody right up to Billy Graham so that their churches grew, the Evangelicals did not seriously address the deep changes in Western culture which were challenging the Christian Church. The so-called ‘Liberal’ tradition which we shall examine in the next chapter attempted to do so, but Evangelicals did not really devote sufficient attention to the theological questions being posed in the post-Enlightenment world. If anything, their attention was directed to the theological debates among themselves over predestination, infant baptism, eschatology and the authority of the Bible. David Bebbington famously identified their four characteristics as ‘conversionism...activism...biblicism...and crucicentrism’. They tended to focus understandably on soteriology, preaching salvation through the cross of Christ, leading to an evangelistic emphasis on the need for personal repentance and conversion. But while this did mean a focus on the Gospel (euangelion), as befits ‘Evangelicals’, it was on the work rather than on the Person of Christ. Indeed the focus was often on the work rather than the Person. Christology was rather taken for granted so that the doctrine of the atonement was not integrated into the doctrine of Christ as it had been in the patristic period. It is arguable therefore that they did not live up to the true Christocentric centre of the evangelical faith of the Reformation, the solus Christus.
Against that background we can note the orthodox Christology of a few selected leading theologians in two of the Evangelical traditions, the Wesleyan and the Reformed, and take note of a more adventurous few who tried to think more creatively in ways which were not always accepted.
Wesleyans: Watson, Pope, Miley and Wiley
Richard Watson (1781-1833), the first Methodist to write a Systematic Theology, had to defend the eternal generation of the Son from the Father against the noted Methodist scholar, Adam Clarke (c. 1760-1832). Clarke defended the deity of Christ, but rejected the patristic doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son from the Father. For Clarke the biblical scholar, the title ‘Son of God’ only applied to Christ after the Incarnation. Watson argued from Scripture that the title ‘Son of God’ implied the doctrine of the eternal generation.
William Burt Pope (1822-1903) of Didsbury College, Manchester, following the footsteps of Richard Watson, defended the orthodox Christology of the Fathers and of the Reformation confessions. Before he wrote his three-volume Systematic Theology, A Compendium of Christian Theology, he had published The Person of Christ. He robustly defends the Chalcedonian Christology, distancing himself from the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum and maintaining the distinction of the two natures. He rejected the Kenoticist view developing in contemporary Germany, but strongly insisted on the centrality of Christology for the whole of Christian Theology:
But to those who receive the mystery it is the centre of all truth. This doctrine is at once the cross and the crown of Christian Theology: the burden it has to bear, the truth in which it glories. The unity of our Saviour’s Person as the God-man, in whom the divine and the human natures meet for ever, is in itself the supreme truth of the new Christian revelation, and in it bearing on all points of Christian Theology is of the most vital importance. For Pope, Christology is ‘the basis at once and the super-structure of the whole,’ and he deplores attempts stemming from ‘jealousy for the atonement’ to create a false rivalry between ‘Bethlehem and Calvary.’ The two must not be divorced. The relation of Christology to ‘the circle of Christian doctrine’ is ‘fundamental’: any error in Christology leads to a perversion of the Christian faith and a ‘perversion of its leading tenets.’ It is connected to ‘all the main principles of evangelical doctrine.’ Pope proceeds to demonstrate its vital importance for five ‘watchwords’ of Christian Theology – revelation, mediation, sacraments, the union of the believer with Christ, and Church.
Given the pivotal significance of Christology, Pope carefully rejects all the ancient heresies. He follows the Antiochene and Reformed traditions in strongly asserting the full humanity of Christ and therefore his limited knowledge as a man, but he takes the stronger version of the sinlessness of Christ, writing, ‘But in him was no sin, nor the possibility of sin.’ There may be a touch of Platonism when he asserts, ‘His human nature was the perfect realisation of the eternal idea of mankind.’ In writing about the relation between the Incarnation and the atonement, he keeps a certain tension. On the one hand, ‘The Incarnation is not so much one of the stages or acts of the Redeemer’s history as the necessary basis of all.’ It is therefore possible to say, ‘When the Son of God became man the human race was declared to be a saved race.’ But on the other hand, ‘The Incarnation was a means to an end.’ Only with the atoning death was salvation accomplished. On the question whether there would have been an Incarnation had there been no sin, Pope also sees truth on both sides of the debate. But it is for him a speculative question: we are in point of fact a sinful race.
The doctrine of the Person of Christ is expounded in Volume II of Pope’s Compendium, holding together the Person and work of the Mediator under the title, ‘The Mediatorial Ministry.’ Under the heading ‘The Divine Purpose,’ Pope is happy to use the language of ‘covenant’ and indeed of ‘decree’, but as with Calvin, there is one over-arching covenant of grace and one eternal decree of the redemption of the world which is progressively unfolded and is finally fulfilled in the Mediator. There is a slight problem with Pope’s use of language (not peculiar to him) in that he tends to speak of the eternal ‘personality’ of the Son of God and of the divine-human ‘Person’ as ‘the result of the union of the two natures’. Since the advent of the Psychology as a social science, and its use of the word ‘personality’ to refer to personality types, theologians have generally used instead the word ‘personhood’ as the more abstract term since we are not referring to three ‘personalities’ in God in the more recent use of the term. But the more subtle problem is Pope’s occasional wording that the ‘Person’ of Christ is the ‘result’ of the union. In strict Cyrillian usage, sanctioned by Chalcedon, the ‘Person’ is not the ‘result’ of the union, but the presupposition of the union, the one Agent who is continuous through the union and who becomes human so uniting the two ‘natures’. Despite the occasional use of the word ‘result’, this is in fact Pope’s doctrine. In his other major work, A Higher Catechism of Theology, Pope formulates the mediatorial significance of the Person of Christ with Irenaean simplicity: ‘As divine he represents God to man; as human he represents mankind to God.’
John Miley (1813-1895), Professor at the Methodist Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, published a two-volume Systematic Theology not long before he died. Taking Theism as the foundation of his thought and the Bible as his authority, his outline of Christology is orthodox, though quite perfunctory and not formative for his Theology as a whole. His one more original development was a chapter entitled, ‘The Sympathy of Christ’. Like Pope he interprets Chalcedonian Christology in such a way that while the divine Person of Christ is eternal, we have to think of a ‘Theanthropic Personality’ after the Incarnation. Consequently, although he rejects the Lutheran view of the communicatio idiomatum, we have to speak of a ‘theanthropic consciousness’. The divine attributes may not be communicated to the human nature, but the one Person is the subject of both natures. Christ sympathizes with us because he shares humanly in our suffering: this is the root of his ministry of intercession, particularly as developed in Hebrews. The profound mystery of the Incarnation lies in this union of the natures in the one Person. But here Miley takes the further step that we must therefore speak of sympathy and therefore of suffering in God.
Even our speculative Theology has too often removed God so far away from mankind as to deny to them his real compassion, or invested him with an absoluteness of blessedness which could not be affected by either the joys or woes of men. God is not such a being. He is our Father in heaven. He is love. He has pleasure in our happiness and sympathy with us in our suffering. He suffers with us. This is the meaning of his compassion which the Scriptures so frequently and earnestly express.
H. Orton Wiley (1877-1962) was the pre-eminent theologian of the Wesleyan holiness movement in the early twentieth century. If A.M. Hills (1848-1935) represented the tradition as it was shaped by Finney, Wiley steered the holiness movement back toward a more Wesleyan position. Wiley was president of Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) and when he finally produced his three volume Christian Theology in the 1940s, it was a judicious work of thorough scholarship. But standing in the tradition of Pope whose Systematic Theology had largely ignored contemporary trends in the 1880s, Wiley similarly ignored his twentieth-century context, presenting a very solid and orthodox Theology in the Reformation-evangelical tradition. He regarded Christology as ‘the very heart of Christianity’. One chapter included a ‘Scriptural approach’ which traced the events of the life of Christ in their theological significance and a historical section tracing the development of the doctrine in the Church with a brief account of the main Christological heresies. Beginning with ‘the miraculous conception and birth’, Wiley quotes the Anglican Reformer, Richard Hooker, in saying that the conception was also the assumption of human nature by the divine Son. Scripture (Luke 1:35) implied ‘that a change was to be wrought in the very constitution of humanity.’ Since Jesus was not just another individualization of human nature, but the conjoining of divine and human natures, then: ‘The instant human nature is conjoined with God in the Person of Jesus it becomes a redeemed nature, and furnishes the principle of regeneration for fallen mankind.’ The implication, although Wiley does not spell this out, is the Patristic doctrine that it was our unredeemed human nature which the Son of God assumed from his mother, but that it was regenerated and sanctified in the conception. The humanity of Jesus was consequently ‘spotless’ and ‘in some sense already redeemed’, and yet the final perfecting of the Son for his redemptive sacrifice had yet to come. This perfecting came through his normal development as a human being. Wiley quotes Irenaeus: Christ ‘sanctified every age’ – infancy, childhood, youth and adulthood and at last, death itself. This was the unfolding of ‘a pure and normal human nature apart from sin’ for Jesus ‘had none of the vitiating consequence of inbred sin.’ This does beg the question how Jesus could then be ‘tempted on all points as we are,’ and Wiley returns to that in his second Christological chapter.
The second chapter is a systematic presentation of the doctrine. A section on the deity of Christ, recounts his pre-existence as the Second Person of the Trinity, the identification of Christ with the ‘Jehovah’ of the Old Testament, and Jesus’ unique claims for himself. In the section entitled, ‘The Manhood of Christ’, Wiley writes again of his sinlessness. Again he states that it was the conjoining of the human nature with Deity which sanctified it, but he rather contradicts this by saying that it was ‘not a birth out of sinful human nature.’ Clearly, unless Mary was sinless – a medieval development in Roman doctrine rejected by all Protestants – then it must have been a birth ‘out’ of sinful human nature if he was genuinely ‘born of Mary’. Otherwise, it would not be the sanctification of human nature. Christ was not only free from sin, Wiley maintains, but from the very possibility of sin, and he was free from actual as well as original sin. He refers to Sanday and Headlam’s great commentary on Romans in maintaining that Christ’s birth ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8:3) does not mean that his flesh was sinful. There is still no satisfactory answer however to the question how the temptations of Christ could be real and not just play-acting if there was no possibility that he might yield to them. Sections on the unity of Christ’s Person and the diversity of the two natures follow. The succeeding chapter expounds the ‘Estates and Offices of Christ’ and two chapters follow on the Atonement, giving the biblical basis and historical development of the doctrine and a systematic account.
The Reformed Tradition: Edward Irving and the Calvinists
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was the significant leader of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland and so of the Presbyterian tradition in the early nineteenth century. Edward Irving (1792-1834) was his assistant before becoming minister of the Church of Scotland congregation in London in 1821. There his eloquent and dramatic preaching attracted the carriages of the wealthy and a new church was build to hold the crowds. His meteoric rise however was followed by a fascination with prophecy and the miraculous gifts of the Spirit. Tragically, he was convicted of heresy in his doctrine of Christ and in 1833 was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland, which still adhered strongly to the Protestant ‘orthodoxy’ of the Westminster Confession. His followers founded the Catholic Apostolic Church, but Irving was rather marginalized by the leadership of ‘apostles’ and died exhausted by his labours in 1834.
Despite his short and rather tragic career, Irving continues to be of interest as a forerunner of the Pentecostalism of the twentieth century and for his Christology, which was praised by none other than Karl Barth. The question arises whether his Christology was actually heretical or whether his condemnation was due rather to a rigid conservatism in the Kirk. Graham McFarlane argues that Irving’s Christology arose out of belief that the Reformed focus on justification linked to a penal substitutionary view of the atonement was not a sufficient answer to the human condition. Men and women did not only need pardon for past sins: they needed to be delivered from sin in their lives. In short, justification was not enough: they needed sanctification. The basis for this was to be found therefore not only in the atoning death of the Christ, but in his sanctifying life in the power of the Holy Spirit. Christology therefore had to take more account of the work of the Spirit in the holy life of Jesus. Atonement had to be integrated much more with Christology and Christology had to be seen in Trinitarian perspective.
But the key to all this was to give full weight to the true humanity of Christ. At this point, Irving was following in the footsteps of John Owen and Jonathan Edwards. He was also recovering a significant aspect of the Christology of the Fathers which we have also seen in Jonathan Edwards. Sadly, however, he gave it his own twist in a way which led to his conviction for heresy. The significant patristic doctrine is that Christ sanctified our human nature by taking our common Adamic sinful nature from his mother, but so sanctifying it from the moment of conception that, while it remained our weak mortal nature, it was so sanctified in himself by the Spirit that he was sinless. But Irving seemed at times to interpret this as meaning that the human nature of Christ remained sinful even when united to his divine Person so that it was sanctified throughout his life on earth by his sinless life of obedience. The ambiguity lay in the use of the phrase ‘fallen humanity’. Even though he made it clear that Christ was not subject to original sin, the word ‘fallen’ seemed to imply so. What appeared to be a compromising of the sinlessness of Christ so shocked the Church of his day that it led to a strong reaction. This was evident particularly in the Scottish Calvinist tradition, represented later in the Christology of the elder Marcus Dods and A.B. Bruce. But the assertion of this ‘orthodox’ tradition that the human nature of Christ was sinless tended to lead to the implication that it was an already sinless human nature which he assumed. This undermines the whole patristic doctrine that Christ sanctified our human nature through the Holy Spirit when he assumed it into union with himself.