Chapter Nineteen CHRISTOLOGY TODAY: ONE LORD JESUS CHRIST All-wise, all-good, almighty Lord, Jesus, by highest heaven adored Ere time its course began, How did thy glorious mercy stoop To take our fallen nature up, When thou thyself wert man?
Didst thou not in one person join The natures human and divine, That God and man might be Henceforth inseparably one? Haste then and make thy nature known Incarnated in me.
In my weak, sinful flesh appear, O God, be manifested here, Peace, righteousness and joy; Thy kingdom, Lord, set up within My faithful heart; and all my sin, The devil’s work, destroy.
It is common for those who criticize or oppose the Christology of Chalcedon to refer to it as the doctrine of the ‘two natures’. But that of course is quite wrong. That is not what the Symbol states. The Chalcedonian doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of the ‘Hypostatic Union’. This is not the union of two Persons or Hypostases, but the union of two natures in one Hypostasis or Person. Our Lord Jesus Christ is to be worshipped as ‘One Person in two natures.’ That makes all the difference. ‘We confess one and the same Lord Jesus Christ’, the two natures ‘coinciding in one person (prosōpon) and hypostasis, not parted or divided into two persons (prosōpa), but one and the same Son and only-begotten God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ...’ No doubt the drafting of the Symbol could have been better, and that might perhaps have saved much later dispute and division. Since the terminology of ‘two natures’ appears to dominate rather than that of the one ‘Person’, it is possible to misread the paragraph and think of a movement from the two natures to the one Person. But that would be a distortion. That is forgetting once again that the famous paragraph is a footnote to the second article of the Nicene Creed. Read in that context, it is clear that it should not be understood as indicating two independent movements from each end ‘coinciding’ in the middle. Rather, the shape of the second article of the creed reflects the shape of the apostolic Gospel embedded in the New Testament, most obviously in the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, the Carmen Christi. There it is made clear that the narrative which determines our interpretation of the Chalcedonian definition is of one Person, already God in ‘form’ (morphē) or ‘nature’, moving to assume human ‘nature’. The whole movement is from first to last the one action of God, not two independent movements from each side. The return movement of reconciliation, taking place even already in the descent and humiliation, is thus also made by this same one Person, now as the representative human, as he freely obeys God all the way to sacrificing himself on the cross.
Granted there is a synergism, a movement from God and a returning movement from the side of humanity, but it is contained within the monergism, for it is God who, as a genuine human being representing the whole human race, freely gives the perfect response in faith and obedience to the gracious saving initiative of God. And it is this man, representing and embodying all humankind, who is exalted as the movement is then completed in God’s exaltation of him to the highest honour so that all creation confesses him to be Lord. The exaltation of humanity in Jesus is God’s vindication (that is, justification) of him, and of us in him. God has accepted the perfect, loving sacrifice and the at-one-ment is completed so that all are called to trust in him and what he has done. To visualize this in the illustration we have used of the ‘Christological parabola’, there is an asymmetry within the symmetry of decent and ascent. The parabola is symmetrical, down to the nadir and up to glory, but it traces one movement from left to right. To speak of the ‘One-in-two’ therefore is to speak of the One who remains who he is, God the Son, while becoming what he previously had not been, the human being Jesus, in order, as Jesus, to complete the reconciliation of humanity with God. He did this as one who, by the Holy Spirit, was held securely within the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son, seen now in the light of the resurrection to be unbroken, even in the Godforsakenness of the crucifixion. The irreversible union of God and humanity in the unity of his Person is the guarantee of the effectiveness of his finished work of atonement.
In the last chapter, we focussed on the ‘two’, deity and humanity, using the Chalcedonian language of two ‘natures’. But now in this chapter we must focus on the One, and to do so, we shall focus on the Chalcedonian term ‘Person’. In worshiping Jesus Christ as ‘Lord’, we do not worship two Persons, One who is the Son of God and One who is the Son of Man. These are ‘one-and-the-same’. We worship one Lord Jesus Christ. But in order to clarify our thinking on this, we shall first examine the logic of the unity confessed in the Chalcedonian Definition and ask whether this must be rejected as incoherent and contradictory. What is the logic which can speak of two natures within this one Person, and is it coherent? As an alternative to the notion of complete and explicit logical consistency, we shall examine what it means to say that the unity of the two within the One is ‘paradoxical’. In the second half of the chapter, we shall then come to a positive statement of faith, thinking about the meaning and significance of our confession of our Lord Jesus Christ as ‘One Person.’
(A) UNITY AND PARADOX
The very structure of Christology as One-in-two has given rise in the modern era to talk of ‘high’ and ‘low’ Christology and to talk of Christology ‘from above’ and Christology ‘from below’. Oliver Crisp of Fuller Theological Seminary helps us to analyze this and clarify what these terms are used to mean.
High and Low, Above and Below
Clearly the language of height and depth is being used here as a visual model to help us think about the relationship of deity and humanity within Christology. A ‘high’ Christology is one which emphasizes the deity of Christ but may or may not be clear on his humanity: a ‘low’ Christology is one which emphasizes his humanity and will deny his true and full deity, while perhaps trying to give some explanation of some lesser meaning for ‘divinity’. Thus, as Crisp points out, not only Chalcedonian Christology but also Docetism has a ‘high’ Christology since Docetists deny the humanity but confess the true deity. Apollinarianism is also a ‘high’ Christology, denying that Christ had a human mind and so compromising the full humanity, but, since the divine Logos takes the place of the mind, absolutely crystal clear on the full deity. Arianism, whether in its ancient form or in the beliefs of the Watchtower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses) today, could be called a ‘high’ Christology, since it affirms that Christ pre-existed his birth at Bethlehem and was in effect a great archangel, the first creature of God through which he created all else. Ebionism, Adoptionism, and Unitarianism have ‘low’ Christologies since Christ is only a human being although he is special in being anointed or ‘adopted’ by God for the key role in the world’s history. This may be expressed as some kind of lesser ‘divinity’, often in order to claim to be a part of the Christian tradition.
The terminology of ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ means something slightly different from ‘high’ and ‘low’. These terms refer more to methodology and were coined by Wolfhart Pannenberg in his early reaction against Barth. He claimed that Barth, in continuity with the whole Christian tradition from the Fathers onwards, began his Christology ‘from above’, adopting a God’s-eye view and so beginning with the pre-incarnate Logos who then became flesh. According to Pannenberg, this meant that the Christian tradition repeatedly failed to do justice to the true humanity of Jesus. Instead, Pannenberg argued that, in view of the Enlightenment, we must begin ‘from below’. The historical-critical method could establish the historicity of Jesus – that is, his true humanity as a figure in human history – and could establish (as we have seen) the historicity of his resurrection. This was the order of experience in the lives of the disciples who first met this man and then came to believe in him as Lord and God as a consequence of the resurrection. Christology then was a matter of tracing the same route, beginning from below with the historical Jesus and rising ‘above’ to confess his deity. Pannenberg himself followed that procedure, and certainly professed the true deity of Christ. He did not endorse the Chalcedonian language of two ‘natures’, but his position was what might be called a variation of Chalcedonian Christology, affirming one Lord who was truly both God and fully human. Most others who have begun ‘from below’ fail, however, to reach ‘above’, that is, to confess the full deity of Christ.
It may appear that this is the order which has been followed in this volume. We began in Parts Two and Three with the scholars who have tried to establish the truth about the ‘historical Jesus’ and, through our study of the historical questions about the resurrection, came to the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord in Part Four. In fact, however, while that was the way in which the disciples came to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, it was only at the resurrection that they came to that full Christian faith. True, they had believed in Jesus as a great prophet and indeed as Messiah even during his life and ministry, possibly suspecting more. But a full and true Christology only began when ‘the proclaimer became the proclaimed’ (as Bultmann put it) and when Jesus’ Gospel of the kingdom became the apostolic Gospel of the crucified-and-risen King. Christology does not begin ‘from below’ with the historical Jesus: all that was said about that we carefully designated as a ‘historical prolegomenon’. And faith in Jesus Christ as Lord does not come about as a result of our intellectual ability to prove the historicity of the resurrection. It only comes about when God reveals himself to us by the Holy Spirit as the holy God of righteousness and love in the sacrificial death and glorious resurrection of his Son. Showing by historical argument that there is no explanation of the evidence other than the resurrection of Jesus from the dead has value in bringing us to the threshold of faith. But it is only when God takes away our sinful blindness and pride that we can cross that threshold by recognizing and confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. It is only when we put our trust in the crucified-and-risen Lord as the One who died for our sins and rose again for our justification that we enter in to salvation. That is true conversion (metanoia) of the mind and heart.
Christology therefore does not begin either ‘from above’ or ‘from below’. We do not move by our own insight from the deity to the humanity, or from the humanity to the deity. Christology only begins with what is already the given of the ‘One-in-two’. It only begins with the Gospel in which the two are already one. The identity of this man with God is not something we perceive by human insight, but by a faith and an insight which is given to us by the Holy Spirit. It is not achievement, but gift: not intellectual ability, but grace. And in the mercy of God, his Holy Spirit has been ‘poured out on all flesh’ (Acts 2:17) so that all may see and may respond and believe. Only the stubborn, self-centred resistance of our pride or the twisted vision of our self-deceit or the careless self-absorption of our sloth can stand in our way so that we spurn the self-giving God of Holy Love revealed in the crucified and risen Lord.
To put that another way: Christology does not begin with either of the ‘two’, deity or humanity. That would be a merely conceptual understanding. It begins with personal response (which includes the intellectual) to the One Person who is the One-in-two. John McIntyre analyzes ‘the given’ in Christology, listing the possibilities as ‘Scripture’, or ‘the historical core’, or ‘God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ’, or ‘the here-and-now Christ.’ We have to say that ‘the given’ in Christology is the one Person of Jesus Christ, the God-man, who reveals himself to us by the Holy Spirit in the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel embodied in the Scriptures and present to us today in the power of the Spirit. That is God’s inexpressible Gift.
The Chalcedonian Model
That leads us then to this question. If the One-in-two Saviour is given to us in the one-in-two Gospel, the narrative of his descent all the way to the cross and grave and of his exaltation to glory, what then is the role of the Church’s Chalcedonian Definition? We have argued that, when it is seen to be a further footnote on the second article of the Creed, it bears the same One-in-two shape of the Gospel. But how far is it necessary today to confess the faith in the language and concepts used at Chalcedon?
In the first place it may be significant that the famous paragraph of the ‘Definition’, what Aaron Riches calls the ‘précis’, drafted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 as a further explanation of the Nicene Creed, is not used liturgically in worship. The Nicene Creed (as well as what is known as the Apostles’ Creed) is used in worship in many branches of the Church, but not the additional explanation of Christology given in the Chalcedonian Symbol. The Creed affirms the homoousion, the confession that the Son is ‘of the same Being’ as the Father; but the Chalcedonian Symbol adds the thought that, as a human being, the Lord is also ‘of one being’ (homoousion) with us. It also adds the terminology of ‘Person’ (hypostasis and/or prosōpon) and of ‘nature’ (physis), referring to ‘one Person’ in ‘two natures’. Given that the Symbol is not used characteristically in the worship of the Church, how necessary is it? Is it not possible, like P.T. Forsyth, or Wolfhart Pannenberg, or Karl Barth, or indeed the Coptic Church and other so-called ‘Monophysites’, to reject some or all of that terminology and yet to be faithful to the Gospel, preached by the apostles, embedded in the New Testament, and expressed in the Nicene Creed?
John McIntyre helpfully suggested that we should look on the Chalcedonian Symbol as a ‘model’ and introduces us to the pioneering thinking of Ian T. Ramsey on the use of ‘models’ in Theology. The notion of ‘models’ later became associated with writers such as Sallie McFague, who was mainly concerned with developing new ‘models’ for God to suit our ‘ecological, nuclear age’. She advocated ‘metaphorical theology’ and defined a ‘model’ as ‘a metaphor with “staying power”.’ ‘From Aristotle until recently,’ she explained, ‘metaphor has been seen mainly as a poetic device to embellish or decorate,’ but it is now accepted that ‘what a metaphor expresses cannot be said directly or apart from it.’ For Aristotle, all figures of speech had to be translated into ‘literal’ language before we could work out the logic of an argument. But, as Sallie McFague, indicated, we have now come to understand that we cannot reduce everything to ‘literal’ language. All our language is in fact sign language, unavoidably shot through with metaphors and other figures of speech.
In fact however, it was the Oxford professor, Ian Ramsey (1915-1972), later Bishop of Durham, who pioneered the recognition of the use of models and metaphors in Theology. Ramsey drew on the way in which the use of ‘models’ was part of the methodology of the natural sciences. At the height of the classical physics of Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century, models were thought to ‘picture’ physical phenomena with literal accuracy, but it has come to be understood that models in science were not so much ‘picture models’ as ‘disclosure’ or ‘analogue’ models. The structure of an actual physical phenomenon is ‘disclosed’ by a model which has a structural similarity without being exactly the same. So in the era of Newtonian Physics and Cosmology, the universe was widely thought of as a vast mechanism, rather in comparison with clockwork, perfected in the seventeenth-century century and considered a marvel of the age. Each distinct cog in the mechanism causally moved another cog. But when James Clerk Maxwell was struggling to understand electro-magnetism in the mid-nineteenth century, and found that classical Physics with its model of the mechanism did not fit, he suggested the model of the magnetic ‘field’. It was not a matter of each distinct part acting causally on another distinct part: it was rather that the ‘field’ as a whole was a reality which makes the parts (such as iron filings round a magnet) move in the way they do. But both of these are models: the universe is not literally a machine or a field. Models are essential then to scientific thinking and method in that they are the ways in which we apprehend and express what we otherwise could not apprehend or express. And they often cannot he reduced to more ‘literal’ language. They have a normative role and they integrate whole areas of knowledge. Scientific theories are not expressed in literal language, but in models.
Like all metaphors, models are partly alike and partly different from the reality to which they refer. A metaphor is the comparison of two different things with respect to some way in which they are similar so that one always has to take account of the dissimilarities and well as the similarities. But metaphors do enable us to say what we otherwise could not say. Bishop Ramsey led the way in helping theologians to see that Theology, and indeed the language of Scripture, is highly metaphorical, and that some metaphorical language, such as calling God ‘Father’, goes beyond incidental metaphor to becoming a definitive model.
To speak of metaphors and models in Theology can be seen as the modern equivalent of what Aquinas and others defined in the medieval period as the use of analogy. Aquinas suggested that there were three ways of using a word, either univocally, meaning exactly the same thing every time, equivocally, meaning a different thing every time the word was used, or analogically. In analogy, we use a word in an extended sense of its original or literal meaning. The very word ‘analogy’ means to place a word (logos) ‘on’ (ana) another, that is, above, alongside or in comparison. According to Aquinas, our language about God is analogical. God is not literally our ‘father’, i.e. our male parent, but he is truly ‘Our Father’. This is an analogy, or, in the more recently adopted terminology, a metaphor. It is indeed a metaphor which Jesus himself made definitive for our understanding of God. That is to say, Jesus himself made it a ‘model’.
It is important to see then that the Chalcedonian Symbol presents us with an elaborate model for Christology. As a model, it is a set of metaphors drawn from late Hellenistic culture, dominated as it was by the traditions of Platonism and the categories and logic of Aristotle. It is not itself the Word of God in Holy Scripture, but it was an attempt by a major council of the Church catholic to give some definition to the Church’s doctrine of Christ, contextualizing it in the culture of the day. It did not claim to define Christ, but to define what must not be said about him, ruling out the distortions which had sprung up in the course of contextualizing the Gospel, in order that the truth of Mystery of Christ might be confessed and adored.
The Logic of the Chalcedonian Model
As a model however, the Chalcedonian Definition has what we may call an ‘internal logic’. We may examine that by tracing the origin in Greek culture of the terminology which it adopts, particularly the term hypostasis and the term physis (nature). The term prosōpon (person) is given as a synonym for hypostasis, and we sometimes translate hypostasis as ‘person’, but the two terms do not mean exactly the same. Prosōpon originally meant ‘face’, so it really refers to the outward presentation or ‘face’, whereas hypostasis is literally ‘sub’ (hypo) ‘stance’ (stasis), and so really refers to the underlying reality of something. The two words complement each other. One term which predates Chalcedon and in fact goes back to the original creed of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) is the concept of ousia, best translated as ‘being’, but often in the past translated into substantia in Latin, and so ‘substance’ in English.
John McIntyre helpfully elucidates the background to hypostasis and physis in Aristotelian philosophy, and particularly a passage in the Categories, in which Aristotle explains the distinction he wants to draw between ‘primary being’ (prōtē ousia) and ‘secondary being’ (deutera ousia).
Ousia in the most literal and primary and common sense of the term is that which is neither predicated of a subject nor exists in a subject, as for example, an individual man or horse. These are called secondary ousiai to which, as species, belong to the things called ousiai in the primary sense and also the genera of those species. For example, the individual man belongs to the species man, and the genus of the species in animal. These then are called secondary ousiai as for example both man and animal.
An individual man is thus a ‘primary being’ (prōtē ousia) and the human nature which he shares with others is ‘secondary being’ (deutera ousia). ‘Secondary being’ is therefore a ‘universal’, a reality common to many instances, which can only exist within actual, particular ‘primary beings’. But ‘secondary being’ is defined to include both a species, a specific, or immediate category (in this case, human nature or humanity), and the more general category, the genus ‘animal’, to which that species belongs along with other species. ‘Primary being’ and ‘secondary being’ are thus logical categories, but they reflect our experience of the real world around us. Unlike Plato, who believed that the universal Forms of things existed in the transcendent realm eternally and therefore independent of the particular things, for Aristotle, ‘secondary being’, the universals (e.g. human nature) only exist in particular things (e.g. particular human beings). . This is the logical scheme or set of categories which, as McIntyre points out, is the cultural origin of the Chalcedonian model. These were the given ways of thinking and reasoning in Hellenistic culture and so became the form in which the Greek Fathers contextualized the doctrine of Christ. By the time of Chalcedon, when the Fathers spoke of a hypostasis they were thinking of a protē ousia, a ‘primary being’, an actual, particular thing. They also used the word prosōpon, the Greek translation of the Latin word, persona, along with the word hypostasis, as a kind of synonym, but that, as we have seen, was a subordinate word for them. They certainly were not thinking of a ‘person’ in the modern sense of the word with all the psychological implications which that now carries. The word physis (nature) had an older usage which meant exactly the same as hypostasis, and at first that was the way in which Cyril of Alexandria used physis. But by the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, terminology had been defined in such a way that physis had come to mean deutera ousia, ‘secondary being’, the common being or essence shared by particular things, such as ‘human nature’.
As McIntyre points out, the problem inherent in using this logical system is the Aristotelian principle that ‘secondary being’ (a physis such as ‘human nature’) did not exist independently. It only existed in specific ‘primary beings’ or hypostaseis. The rule was that there was ‘no physis without a hypostasis’. A physis (nature) only had existence within a hypostasis, a concrete particular. Human nature only exists within individual human beings. There can be no physis anhypostasis (without a hypostasis) – a nature without a specific instance. Human nature, for example, only exists in particular human beings. McIntyre’s analysis is that it was the assumption of this rule of the Aristotelian categories which led to the opposing Christological heresies facing the Church at Chalcedon. The Nestorians assumed that rule and so insisted that if there were two physeis (two ‘natures’) in Christ, then there had to be two hypostaseis, two particular individuals or ‘persons’. If the human nature did not have its own hypostasis, then it was not real, and their whole insistence was on the reality of the human being, Jesus. At the same time the Eutychians, who took the extreme Alexandrian line, insisted that since there was only one hypostasis in Christ, there could only be one physis, one ‘nature’ which was a mingling of deity and humanity.
The source of all the debate and controversy then was the fact that the logic of the Aristotelian categories was assumed. It was within that cultural context that the debate was conducted. The genius of Cyril of Alexandria was to see that Aristotelian logic could not be allowed to control our understanding of the Mystery of Christ, that the Word had become flesh. In order to safeguard the Gospel, we have to see that the static categories of Aristotelian logic cannot cope with movement, with narrative, with this unprecedented event of the Incarnation. If we stick with the Aristotelian logic and say that every physis must have a hypostasis and that therefore there are two hypostaseis in Christ, then we have divided Christ into two hypostaseis, two ‘subjects’, two ‘Persons’ who exist in conjunction (synapheia). The particular logical system formulated by Aristotle therefore has to give way to the logic of the Gospel narrative so that we have to say that the Word of God assumed the common human physis – human nature – but not an already existing human hypostasis or Person. That is to say, the Word assumed an-hypostatic human nature. It is misleading to translate that as ‘impersonal’ since that word in English carries other connotations. But it is not part of this story to say that anhypostatic human nature, our common human nature existed somewhere before the moment of conception in some kind of limbo. Rather, the Aristotelian scheme seems to be affirmed when we say that the common anhypostatic human nature which the Word assumed was in fact located in a personal hypostasis, the person of the virgin mother, Mary. But the flesh of Mary was the flesh of all humankind.
The later development of the term enhypostasis by Leontius of Jerusalem, endorsed by John of Damascus, is also to be seen against the background of Aristotelian logic: the human nature (physis) of the God-man exists within (en) the person or hypostasis of the Son of God. But it was not till the twentieth century that the two terms anhypostasis and enhypostasis were fully brought together as a pair in a full exposition of their complementary meanings. Following the lead of Protestant scholastic theologians such as Heinrich Heppe, Karl Barth proposed that both words were needed to express the Mystery the best way we can. The Son of God, who was already a distinct hypostasis as one of the three hypostaseis in the Holy Trinity, took anhypostatic humanity – common human nature – from his mother. From being actualized in her hypostasis, the common human nature now became actualized within his divine hypostasis, so that it was from that point onwards enhypostatic in (en) him.
Logic, Models, and Paradox
Undergirding these questions about the use of the terms, physis (nature) and hypostasis (concrete actual being) is the whole Hellenistic and Aristotelian concept of ousia (being), sometimes translated as ‘substance.’ The whole Aristotelian scheme made a differentiation between the ousia - the ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ of something – and its accidental properties (quantity, quality, relation, habitus, time, location, situation or position, action, and passion). This was developed in Thomist philosophy and used to develop his doctrine of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine: the ‘accidents’ (the outward appearance) remained the same, but the substance changed into the body and blood of Christ. This whole Aristotelian scheme was rejected as meaningless, however, by the Empiricist philosophers of the Enlightenment, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. ‘Substance’ referred, said Locke, to ‘a something I know not what’.
This makes it very important therefore to come back to the point which Ramsey and McIntyre have helped us to see, that this whole Aristotelian scheme of logical categories is being used as a model. And it is not a ‘picture model’ which totally fits the reality it is trying to express. It is a ‘disclosure’ or ‘analogue’ model which is in some ways appropriate to the reality so that to some degree it ‘fits’, but which is in other ways inappropriate. The model is not the reality itself. The Chalcedonian scheme is not itself the actual Incarnation and there are points at which it does not ‘fit’ the reality. These are sometimes presented as logical ‘objections’, or ways in which the model seems to end up in a Christological problem.
One example is the objection that the doctrine of Cyril and Chalcedon is a refined Apollinarianism. Every human being, according to the Aristotelian logic is a human hypostasis who is one specific instance of the general human physis (nature), but according to Chalcedon, Christ does not have a specifically human hypostasis. The common human nature which became his, is, from the moment of Incarnation, enhypostatic in (en) the divine hypostasis of the eternal Son of God. So the charge is that, while Apollinaris denied that Christ had one part of a human being, the mind (nous), so Chalcedon is denying that Christ has another necessary part of what makes up a human being, namely the human hypostasis. John McIntyre picks up a possible answer to this in the thought of Ephraim, bishop of Antioch from 527. McIntyre interprets R.V. Sellers’ account of Ephraim as meaning that ‘while the two natures as such are not confused or compounded one with the other, the two hypostaseis are.’ McIntyre sums this up: ‘Accordingly the hypostasis of Jesus is a fusion of the human and the divine hypostasis: it is synthetos hē hypostasis.’ Whether that solution is accepted or not, it at least demonstrates that there are possibilities within the logic of the model to respond to this objection.
But perhaps the more significant response is that one of the weaknesses of the whole Hellenistic approach, Platonist or Aristotelian, is that it works with the notion that the human being can be divided into ‘parts’, either a dichotomy of body and soul, or the full Platonist trichotomy of body (sōma), animal soul (psyche) and rational soul or mind (nous). Aristotelian analytical theologians of today still seem to work with this Hellenistic anthropology. This is a point where biblical scholarship has made it clear that a biblical anthropology works rather with the psychosomatic unity of the human being, so that to spill too much ink on trying to perfect the Chalcedonian model at this point may be rather beside the point. It may be that we rather have to say that at this point, the Chalcedonian model simply does not fit and that we should not expect it to be able to give a full logical explanation of the Mystery of Christ.
Another example of a logical objection to the Chalcedonian model is the complaint that to speak of two natures in one Person is quite simply self-contradictory and must be dismissed as a ‘category confusion’. The very word ‘category’ draws attention to the fact that this objection too comes from within the Aristotelian system of logic. The claim that it is contradictory to say that one Person has both a divine nature and a human nature assumes that we know exactly what these natures are and can logically define them. That is scarcely true of ‘human nature’, and it is certainly false when applied to ‘divine nature.’ If one assumed a finite god, it might be possible, but it is certainly contradictory to say that we can give fines or boundaries for the infinite God of Christian faith, that is, that we can ‘define’ him. And since that is so, it is nonsensical to claim that the doctrine of two natures in one Person is contradictory. In the end, the Aristotelian system of logic works with definitions, ‘categories’, and the point is that the infinite God of Christian faith, the Triune Creator of the heavens and the earth, cannot be put into any category. The infinite Creator is not subject to the finite logic of his finite creatures and they simply are not able to contain him within their logical boxes. He can only be known as he reveals himself in grace and, by his Spirit, makes the words he gives us capable of referring to him.
Repeatedly it has been the pride of human intellect, insisting on subjecting the Lord God to our human logic, which has led some into heresy. Gregory Nazianzen complained in his great Theological Orations that the Eunomians or extreme Arians were ‘talkative dialecticians’ who thought that once they had defined God as ‘the unbegotten’, they could use Aristotelian syllogistic logic to prove that the Logos, being ‘begotten’, could not be God. In opposition to that whole way of thinking, Gregory the Theologian insisted on the apophatic element in our knowledge of God. Cyril faced a similar problem with Nestorius. Sticking pedantically to the logical rule of ‘no physis anhypostasis’, the Nestorians insisted that the human nature of Christ could not be real if there was not a distinct human hypostasis in the God-man alongside the divine hypostasis of the Word. Like Athanasius and Nazianzen before him, Cyril insisted that the terminology (onomata) must not dictate to the realities (pragmata) but rather, the reality or Truth of Christ, which is beyond our ability to define and control, must shape our use of language and logic. There is a point at which our ‘kataphatic’ Theology (that, is kata phasin, according to speech) has to give way to ‘apophatic’ Theology (that is apo phasin, beyond speech).
That implies that, although we must not use paradox as an excuse for lazy thinking, in the end of the day, once we have explored the capabilities of our models, and pushed them as far as we can go, we have to admit that no linguistic or logical scheme can capture the reality of the God-man or of the God who became this human being. The paradox of the Incarnation is not an actual or real contradiction. We are incapable of defining ‘deity’ and ‘humanity’ sufficiently to be able to say that. To speak of paradox is rather to say that it may appear to be a contradiction, but that actually it is the best we can do to express the inexpressible and to articulate the Mystery.
James Anderson provides a thorough examination of the role of paradox in Christian doctrine. Both the doctrine of the Incarnation, two natures in one Person, and the doctrine of the Trinity, three Persons in one God, are paradoxical. But Anderson, using the techniques of analytical Theology derived from Aristotle, argues that these are not real but apparent contradictions. Following Alvin Plantinga’s thinking, that ‘warrants’ for Christian belief can establish that it is not irrational to believe in God, Anderson develops ‘warrants’ for believing specifically in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity despite their paradoxical nature. He rejects the notion that we can dispense with the logical rules dating back to Aristotle, such as the law of non-contradiction. He also rejects the notion that theological language has no realistic reference and merely expresses pious thoughts.
One possible strategy Anderson notes is to employ the notion of ‘complementarity’, derived from Physics. The standard example is from the Physics of light, which was long thought to behave in a wave-like manner (again, a model), but which was discovered to behave in certain circumstances as if it were composed of discrete particles (another model). It was the leading physicist, Niels Bohr, who suggested that both models were needed to understand the phenomenon of light, and that they should be regarded as complementary rather than contradictory. Indeed in Quantum Physics generally, the models are used in a complementary way. Christopher Kaiser explored the way in which this may indicate that it is no less intellectually discreditable for Christian Theology to employ complementarity as a way of recognizing the puzzling reality of the God-man. Anderson hesitates to embrace this, since complementarity in quantum physics implies a major redefinition of ‘wave’ and ‘particle’, and he thinks that the Fathers at Chalcedon wanted to insist that ‘God’ and ‘humanity’ remained unchanged concepts. In fact, the novum of the Incarnation, the utterly unprecedented and unforeseeable union of God and humanity, does imply a revolution in both our understanding of who God is and of who we are! There is continuity of course: but the God-man reveals what is utterly new about God and what is utterly new about humankind. Another thinker considered by Anderson is Donald Mackay, Professor of Communication and Neuroscience at Keele, who gave a fuller account of complementarity in his Gifford Lectures of 1986.
Anderson prefers however to develop his ‘RAPT model’, the ‘Rational Affirmation of Paradoxical Theology’. While it would be irrational to affirm a real contradiction, the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity are actually each a MACRUE – a ‘Merely Apparent Contradiction Resulting from Unarticulated Equivocation’. There are no explicitly contradictory statements in the biblical basis for these doctrines: rather any contradiction is at best implicit. But they are merely apparent contradictions which arise because the terms are not, and cannot be, fully explicit. In speaking of three ‘Persons’ in One ‘Being’ or two ‘natures’ in one ‘Person’, we use the terminology in ways that are similar to, but different from the way these words are otherwise used. And although he refers to this at first as ‘equivocation’, Anderson comes to prefer Aquinas’s other word, ‘analogy’. The origin of this lies in the incomprehensibility of God, to which all major Christian theologians assent. God is apprehensible, that is to say: he may be ‘touched’ or truly known. Our thoughts and words can genuinely (by grace) refer truly to him. But God is not comprehensible: we cannot get our minds round him. We cannot ‘contain’ God in our thinking. That is to say: we cannot exhaustively understand and explain God. That may be partly because of our sin: but it is also because of our creaturely finitude. God is the ultimate Mystery, and it would be irrational to think therefore that we finite creatures can present a fully explicit and logical account of the Triune God or of the Incarnation of the Son.
The paradoxical nature of the doctrine of the Incarnation is also to be seen in specific conundrums which are sometimes raised. Was it possible for Christ to sin? Some, starting from his deity, have said that since God cannot sin, Christ could not have sinned. He was ‘impeccable.’ Others have said with the Antiochenes, that if it was impossible for him to sin, he did not face genuine temptation, therefore he was not genuinely obedient, and so could not have achieved our salvation. That implies the staggering thought that God loved us so much that he even risked his own integrity and deity in order to save us. We noted the ingenious suggestion of P.T. Forsyth that Christ could not sin, but did not know that he could not sin so that each temptation was real. But actually this is an unavoidable part of the paradox. Insofar as he was true God, it would seem that he could not sin: insofar as he was truly human, it would seem that he could sin. There we have to leave it. This is beyond our understanding and we cannot push this any further.
Similarly, this applies to the three standard attributes of God developed in the classical theism of Aquinas – omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Athanasius was clear that the Son was not limited to or contained within his body even during his sojourn among us, but was simultaneously omnipresent as the Logos upholding the universe by his word of power. This doctrine was later dubbed the extra Calvinisticum since Reformed theologians maintained this against the Lutherans. Perhaps that may be extended to say that even as incarnate, he was not only omnipresent according to his deity, but also omniscient and omnipotent. The Kenotists suggested a differentiation between fully active and latent omniscience and omnipotence: the Son laid aside these attributes for a time, regaining them through his human obedience to the Father. But once again, it is better to regard this conundrum as part of the paradox. We really do not know how the mind of Christ worked, whether at two levels – divine and human – or one: and we really do not know whether he temporarily laid aside his omnipotence or whether he was in full possession of this attribute while among us but voluntarily limited its use in day-by-day obedience to the Father. One way of approaching this is to regard these three classical attributes as merely negative statements. We do not actually know what it means to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent: we are merely saying negatively that God’s power, knowledge and presence are unlimited or infinite. The fines or boundaries which apply to us as human beings do not apply to God. So these conundrums are just specific instances of the paradox of the union of the infinite with the finite, the union of God and humanity. Because of our inability to define the infinite, we therefore do not have enough information to conclude that these are real contradictions. All we can say is that from our perspective as finite creatures, they are apparent contradictions – unavoidable paradoxes.
Once again, while we are to push as far as we can in understanding the doctrine, in the end Christian doctrine cannot contain God nor the Godman. We can only confess with the apostle: ‘Great is the Mystery of godliness: Who was manifested in flesh, vindicated in Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory’ (I Tim. 4:16). Appealing to mystery is not avoiding the issue, as a proud rationalist might think: it is the very point from which we have to begin if we really want to pursue genuine Theology concerned with the true God, namely, our ignorance and our total dependence on God’s revelation of just as much of himself as he will.
(B) THE ‘PERSON’ OF CHRIST
Given then that God has revealed himself in the Person of his Son, and given that we can only understand this as we are enlightened by the Holy Spirit, how does this word ‘Person’ help us to express this? What is the significance of speaking of the one ‘Person’ of Christ? How does this help us with the ‘who?’ question with which we have been wrestling since the Introduction to Part Four: ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ Can this word, ‘Person’, made official Church language by the Council of Chalcedon, help us to articulate our confession of who he is?
The Christian Origins of the Concept of ‘Person’
It is worth beginning with the observation that most students of Theology begin with the common assumption that a ‘person’ is by definition a human being. That is indeed what the word has commonly come to mean. And we think that we know what a human being is. In fact, the Humanities and Human Sciences are centred on human being. We are fascinated by ourselves. Characteristically in the modern era we have equated a human ‘person’ with an ‘individual’. Historically, classical philosophy thought of the real human being as an eternal, rational ‘soul’. The rejection of that concept in the Humanities and the Human Sciences, following the attack of Gilbert Ryle and others on the Cartesian dualism of mind and body as ‘the ghost in the machine’, still left us with the notion of the ‘individual’. Some contemporary philosophers still defend the classical notion of the soul, derived from Greek thought and traditionally read into Scripture. The Hebrew word for ‘soul’, nephesh, refers to the ‘life’ of the body rather than to a distinct substantive entity. But while most modern thought has ceased to think in terms of the Greek concept of soul, what has survived from it is the notion of the individual. The root of modern individualism can be seen to lie in the ancient Greek notion that souls have existed and will exist eternally as separate monads who only temporarily inhabit a body. According to this ancient Hellenistic view, we are not really the product of human parentage therefore: we are coeternal with those other souls whose temporary bodies were the source of our bodies. Our parentage is incidental to who we are! We are eternally self-sufficient spiritual individuals who temporarily inhabit bodies. A similar view of the soul is characteristic of the Hindu traditions.
While the Hellenistic concept of the soul has largely disappeared from modern secular thought then, its legacy is still with us – individualism. Modern experimental Psychology examines the behaviour, emotion and personality of the individual, categorizing individuals according to ‘personality types’. Sociology may have encouraged study of the societal setting of individuals, but nevertheless, despite dropping the ancient notion of the individual soul, the individual remains central to modern thinking about what it means to be human. The psychological development, the health, wealth, and ‘human rights’ of the individual have been central to modern ethical concerns. Persons are thought to be individuals who have intelligence, consciousness and will. They are thought to be independent agents who must be free to think and believe, and, most importantly, to choose. The concept of individual liberty particularly is central to modern social ethics and liberal politics. And it is this concept of the person as an individual which we then bring to our Theology and use to interpret the language of the ‘Person’ of Christ.
But that is not what the word ‘Person’ means in Christian Theology. There are some points of similarity of course, but to understand what is meant by the ‘Person’ of Christ, we must begin with the fact that the word ‘person’ was not used in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, nor indeed in Israel, to refer to individual human beings. The word simply does not appear in the Bible nor in ancient philosophy with that modern meaning. Where modern translations have the word ‘person’, the word being translated from Hebrew or Greek is actually ‘man’, ‘soul’, or ‘face’, and it this last word with which we must begin – panīm (פנם) in Hebrew, prosōpon (πρόσωπον) in Greek.
The psalmist tells us that we are to serve the Lord with gladness and ‘come into his presence with singing’ (Ps 100:2). But the Hebrew literally says that we are to come ‘before his face’ (באו גפניו) with singing’. The Greek equivalent, prosōpon, which appears rarely in the New Testament, is derived from pros ōps, ‘towards the eye, face or countenance’. At the heart of this is the notion of the face as that through which we communicate to and with other faces. But it is the Latin equivalent, persona, which appears to have been first introduced into Christian Theology. Tertullian (as we noted) introduced the language of tria personae in una substantia, three ‘persons’ in one ‘substance’, and while it is not entirely certain, it appears that he may have borrowed the word from drama, or indeed from the dramatic stage of the law court where only those who were legal personae (excluding slaves) could appear. The word seems to derive from classical theatre, where the actors wore masks, the personae, through which they sounded (per-sonare) their lines as they interacted and communicated with other characters. To put on a persona was to assume a role in the drama in which one interacted with others as the narrative of the drama was acted out. To this day, editions of classical dramas (the plays of Shakespeare for example) still list at the beginning the dramatis personae, the characters who will interact in the drama. Interaction and intercommunication are therefore central to the developing concept.
Basil of Caesarea did not particularly like using the Greek equivalent prosōpon to refer to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It seemed to him to be a cover for Sabellianism, that heresy which had developed at Rome. According to Sabellius, the one God simply took on the appearance of Three by playing three different roles but assuming the ‘masks’ (prosōpa) in sequence in the story of salvation, one after the other – first the Father, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit. Basil preferred Origen’s word hypostasis, meaning something like ‘underlying reality’. The Father, Son and Spirit were not just masks or passing appearances of God, but who he truly was from all eternity. But Gregory of Nazianzus was happy to accept prosōpon, used alongside hypostasis so that they complemented each other. The Three were three eternal realities (hypostaseis), but they were so in communication or fellowship with each other. They were not three stand-alone individuals. The Greeks settled on the phrase treis hypostaseis, mia ousia, as an equivalent to the Latin tria personae in una substantia. But the concept of ‘person’ which developed first in Christian Trinitarian Theology, does not mean a stand-alone individual, one whose being is that of an isolated self-sufficient monad whose relationships are purely optional and voluntary. On contrary, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three ‘persons’ whose very being is constituted by their relationships. The Christian God is not three individuals, but three ‘Persons’ who together constitute one indivisible God – one ‘Individual’! The concept of ‘person’, in contrast to the concept of the ‘individual’ is an inherently relational concept.
It was therefore in the development of Trinitarian Theology rather than in Christology proper that the concept of ‘person’ developed. But when the revised version of the Nicene Creed was adopted at Constantinople at the second ecumenical council in 381 AD, the word did not appear. The Greek Fathers generally adopted the formula of treis hypostaseis as the equivalent of the Latin tria personae, but neither word appears in the Nicene Creed. It was only at Chalcedon in 451 AD, that the words hypostasis and prosōpon became the official language of the Church by being included in the Chalcedonian Definition.
What does it mean then to say that the Lord Jesus Christ is one ‘Person’? We must avoid reading into this word all the modern developments which make ‘person’ the equivalent of ‘individual’. Nor must we confuse ‘person’ with ‘personality’, a psychological construct use to classify and categorize. Further, the modern concept of consciousness or self-consciousness was not part of the original theological meaning of the word. But one of the clear implications of the early history of the word within Christian Theology is that when we say that Christ is a ‘Person’, we mean that we can only understand who he is when see him within a context of relationships as these are acted out within the drama, the narrative of the Gospel and the fuller narrative of Scripture.
Modern Personalism
A further sophistication of the concept of Person took place in medieval Trinitarian Theology, notably in the thinking of Anselm and Aquinas, but we shall leave consideration of that till we come to focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. But in order to understand the way the word is used in contemporary Christology, it will be instructive to sketch briefly the development of a philosophical and theological movement known as ‘Personalism’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a broad philosophical trend, Personalism has deep roots in European thought, including as we have noted, Christian Trinitarian Theology. Two influential thinkers at the end of the patristic period can be seen to have shaped later developments. One was Augustine, who introduced a focus, notably in his Confessions, one of the greatest works of world literature, upon the interior life. Of previous literature, only the De Vita Sua (On His Life) of Gregory Nazianzen comes anywhere near Augustine’s Confessions as a self-examination of the inner life of consciousness and self-consciousness. That was to have a long-term influence on the concept of the Person. The other thinker was Boethius (480-524), a Roman Senator in the era when the Ostrogoths had taken over the rule of Italy. He coined the definition: ‘persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia’: a person is an individual substance of rational nature.’ Here in a typically Aristotelian way, the definition defines a person as an ‘individual substance’, that is a protē ousia or hypostasis, belong to the species or deutera ousia, the common nature which is rational. We have already suggested that the ancient Hellenistic concept of the eternal self-sufficient soul was the root of modern individualism, but Boethius’ definition of the human ‘person’ essentially as an ‘individual’ strongly promoted that tendency. The original theological understanding of the ‘person’ as constituted by relationships was absent. Boethius defined the ‘person’ as an ‘individual’ in a most impersonal way! Human persons were simply one category within an impersonal paradigm.
The modern movement of Personalism can be seen as embracing Augustine’s development of the concept of the person as involving the interior life of consciousness and self-consciousness, but rejecting the individualism of Boethius for a more relational understanding of personhood. It appeared in two forms, more strictly as a metaphysical system, and more widely in several schools of thought which overlap and combine with other philosophical developments.
In the strict sense, Personalism as a metaphysic was developed from the thought of the German thinker, Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–81) by the American Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), Methodist minister and professor of Philosophy at Boston University. Bowne’s disciples, Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953) and Albert Knudson (1873-1953) were the other leading figures in this school of Bostonian Personalism which was particularly influential in the American Wesleyan tradition. Lotze had been influenced by F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who had reacted against the impersonal nature of Hegelian metaphysics. Schelling’s thinking was still an idealism, in that mind and not matter was the supreme reality, but it was now a personal idealism. Personalism arose then in reaction to impersonalist ways of thinking which appeared to dehumanize. Those included Marx as well as Hegel, the philosophical positivism of Auguste Comte, and Darwinism. All of these seemed to devalue persons by making economic forces or society or the state or evolutionary naturalism the key to understanding the world, making persons incidental and even expendable. For stricter, metaphysical Personalists, reacting against all these ways of thinking, the point of departure for understanding the world and ethics was the absolute value of the person.
But more widely, a variety of schools of thought may be regarded as ‘Personalist’ in that they rejected impersonal systems, and while not developing a whole metaphysic like Bowne and Brightman, wanted to accord persons a significant place in their ethics and general outlook. In France, the Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) influenced the thinking of Gabriel Marcel, Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain and shared some concerns with the French existentialists. Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), though never identifying himself as a personalist, shared many of their concerns. In Germany, Personalism was wedded to the phenomenology of Edward Husserl (1859-1938), who attempted to lay aside preconceived philosophical assumptions and begin with the direct intuitive knowledge of the phenomenon, i.e. the thing in itself as it appeared to direct observation. In Poland, the most important personalist was the philosopher, Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005), who became the influential Pope John Paul II. This wider European personalism was strongly influenced by Thomism, the school of thought arising from the medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas.
The influence of Personalism in this wider sense can also be seen in the thinking of (among others) such different thinkers as Martin Buber (1978-1965), John Macmurray (1891-1976), and Michael Polanyi (1891-1976). Buber is noted for his 1923 work, Ich und Du, in which he differentiated between the personal reciprocal relationship a subject has in encounter with another subject (‘I and Thou’), and the way in which a subject acts upon an impersonal object (‘I and It’). For Buber as a Jewish thinker, the former characterized one’s relationship with God. As a Christian, Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931) was another representative of this ‘dialogical’ school. John Macmurray, the Edinburgh philosopher, emphasized the importance of action over theory and the relational nature of human beings. This perspective was presented in the two volumes of his Gifford Lectures, Self as Agent (1957), and Persons in Relation (1961). Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian scientist who developed a whole epistemology as a philosopher at the University of Manchester, demolished the notion of high, modernistic rationalism (particularly Bertrand Russell) that science was a totally objective pursuit. In his Gifford Lectures, published as Personal Knowledge (1958), he developed the view that all knowledge required a personal subject to do the knowing as well as an object to be known. Objectivity and subjectivity were not mutually exclusive, but all knowledge had both an objective and a subjective pole, and only persons could be knowing subjects.
Considered broadly, Personalism as a nineteenth and twentieth-century movement of thought, embracing many different philosophers and perspectives, has several clear themes. First, human beings were not just ‘rational animals’, as Aristotle had classified them, nor merely individual instances of a common rational nature (Boethius). In opposition to the influence of Darwinism, they were not merely different in degree from animals, but qualitatively different in kind. Only human beings can be truly subjects as well as objects. There has been some moderation of this stance of human ‘exceptionalism’ however to give more value to animals and plants. Secondly, this has led to a great emphasis on the dignity of all human persons, regardless of intelligence, ability or social standing. Human beings must not be reduced to being means to an end, particularly to being sacrificed for some political ideal as in any form of totalitarianism. Thirdly, personalists in the broader sense are concerned with interiority and subjectivity, seeing human beings as conscious and self-conscious, free subjects with both an objective subsistence (hypostasis) and a subjective subsistence (prosōpon). Fourthly, human persons are not predetermined or programmed but have the power of self-determination. Fifthly, human persons are social beings, not isolated individuals. Relationships are not optional additions, but essential to personhood.
It hardly needs to be said, that while the ‘Bostonian’ Personalism of Bowne may no longer be a persuasive and living school of metaphysics, these themes continue to have wide influence today even beyond the Christian Church. This wider Personalism is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but shared by many who are not orthodox Christian believers. While a Jewish thinker such as Martin Buber saw personal interaction between human beings and God in the narratives of the Old Testament, the full development of the concept of the person has arisen from Christian Trinitarian Theology. With that brief characterization of this modern fruit of Christian Theology more generally in the European philosophical tradition, we can more readily appreciate the new, modern and post-modern significance of understanding our Lord Jesus Christ as a ‘Person’. And in that context we shall turn to examine the Christology of T.F. Torrance, who wrote of the incarnate Son of God as ‘Personalizing Person’, and the ‘humanizing Man’.
Torrance on the Person of the Mediator
Torrance’s full detailed lectures on Christology at New College, Edinburgh, between 1952 and 1979, were published posthumously as Incarnation. But the crucial significance of this relational concept of the ‘Person’ was laid out in T.F. Torrance’s Didsbury Lectures, published as The Mediation of Christ. Torrance argued that much of the problem in our wrestling with Christology has been ‘the great European tradition of analytical thought which derives from classical Greece.’ With all its great value, this cultural context, stretching in European culture from Hellenistic times to today, shapes us so that we try to understand things too much by analysis. We therefore divide appearances from reality. But Torrance’s studies in the philosophy of science led him to understand that modern science since Clerk Maxwell and Einstein had developed ‘a more natural, integrated approach to the investigation of the universe.’ In Theology, ‘dichotomous ways of thinking’ have led us to ‘detach Jesus Christ from God, to detach Jesus Christ from Israel, and to detach Christianity from Christ himself.’ Our tendency to analysis therefore breaks up the very relationships within which the Person of Christ is to be known. Behind this, and shaping this, is the whole vast cultural development from Greece to the Enlightenment and beyond. The contextualization of the Gospel in this great tradition of European culture was necessary, but it still threatens to distort the Gospel. Somehow in today’s global multi-cultural Church, we need to appreciate the benefits which have come from this European tradition, but become sensitive to the continuing threat of distortion which any contextualization brings to the Gospel. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we have seen, this kind of analytical thinking shaped the kind of Historicism which too often lay behind the so-called ‘quest for the historical Jesus.’ Torrance summarized the dangers inherent in this:
In the analytic tradition of thought there takes place an abstraction of Jesus Christ from the matrix of natural or inherent relations in which he is found, and then an abstraction of the external appearance of Christ from the objective frame of events and significance with which he is bound up in the Gospel.
Torrance recommends that Theology follows contemporary science which has had to ‘turn away from the severely analytical and abstractive modes of thought inherited from classical physics and observational science, and develop dynamic, relational and holistic ways of thinking more in accordance with the modes of connection and behaviour actually found in nature.’ We have to think therefore in terms of ‘onto-relations’, relationships which constitute being – what things are.
The implications for Christology in particular are clear, as Torrance proposes in a twofold strategy:
On the one hand, we should seek to understand Christ within the actual matrix of interrelations from which he sprang as Son of David and Son of Mary, that is, in terms of his intimate bond with Israel in its covenant relationship with God throughout history. On the other hand, however, we should seek to understand Christ, not by way of observational deductions from his appearances, but in the light of what he is in himself in his internal relations with God...’
Torrance explains the latter as ‘his intrinsic significance disclosed through his self-witness and self-communication to us in word and deed and reflected in the evangelical tradition of the Gospel in the medium which he created for this purpose in the apostolic foundation of the Church.’ Following the resurrection, the early Church was seized by the basic insight in the light of which they understood all that had happened. The fundamental clue was the oneness of Jesus Christ with the God he called Father, and with the unique history of Israel. Torrance begins by exploring as the first part of his twofold strategy, Jesus’ oneness with Israel. Only in the context of Jesus’ relations with Israel can this incarnate Person be understood. He was born specifically as a Jew, within the culture of Israel, shaped by centuries of covenant relationship with the Lord God.
Christ in Relation to Israel
Torrance develops the insight that, for revelation to occur in Jesus, there was a need for ‘conceptual tools’, adequate modes of thought and speech, and God’s history with Israel was the way such tools were forged through their history and institutions. Like Jeremiah’s potter throwing the lump of clay on the wheel, or like a father shaping his children, God imprinted himself on Israel through the centuries, shaping a whole set of spiritual tools, adapting revelation to the human mind and adapting articulate forms of human understanding and language to the divine revelation. This was a harrowing experience, bringing intense suffering to Israel, ‘for divine revelation was a fire in the mind and soul and memory of Israel, burning away all that was in conflict with God’s holiness, mercy and truth.’ Revelation was ‘in conflict with deeply ingrained habits of human thought and understanding.’ Within this covenant partnership, there was a ‘running conflict between divine revelation and what St Paul called “the carnal mind”’. The more deeply God’s self-revelation pierced into the roots of human being, the more it intensified the enmity of the human heart against God, and in this, Israel represented us all.
Torrance illuminates the way in which Israel was thus elected by God to form a ‘community of reciprocity’ within the covenant. There was reciprocity between God and Israel: ‘I will be your Father, and you will be my son.’ This was corporate as well as personal, for it involved a brotherly covenant among the people. Israel as a whole, and not just Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, was ‘the Prophet’ sent by God to the nations. Thus, ‘unlike any other nation, Israel is not just a nation, an ethnos, but a people of God, a laos,’ a kind of church. They were the priestly people ‘entrusted with the deposit of divine revelation.’ But that revelation was not just in their Scriptures, as if these were ‘free-floating divine oracles’ which could be ‘detached from their embodiment in the whole historical fact of Israel.’ In the same way, the New Testament Scriptures are not ‘spaceless and timeless transcriptions of revelation’, but are ‘bound up with the apostolic foundation of the Church’ which provides the interpretative framework. God’s revelation to Israel ‘intersected and integrated its spiritual and physical reality.’ We can no longer separate space and time in the Kantian way ruled out by Einstein, Torrance argues, for now we realize that there is no space without time and no time without space. We therefore cannot detach the Old Testament Scriptures from the land any more than from the people of Israel.
God’s revelation of himself through Israel has thus provided ‘permanent structures of thought and speech about him.’ Torrance lists these, referring to ‘the Word and Name of God, to revelation, mercy, truth, holiness, to messiah, saviour, to prophet, priest and king, father, son, servant, to covenant, sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, atonement, and those basic patterns of worship which we find set out in the ancient liturgy or in the Psalms.’ The point is that without these ‘conceptual tools’, the Old Testament words and concepts which were embedded in the history and life and institutions of Israel, we could not express our Christian faith. ‘If the Word of God had become incarnate among us apart from all that, it could not have been grasped – Jesus himself would have remained a bewildering enigma.’ These are the ‘conceptual and linguistic patterns’ through which we recognize Jesus as Son of God and Saviour, and his crucifixion as atoning sacrifice for sin.
But Torrance emphasizes that the covenant relationship which God established with Israel was more than a means of abstract conceptual revelation, for revelation is inseparable from reconciliation. We only know something ‘according to its nature’ (kata physin), a principle Torrance takes from Athanasius, and therefore the knowledge of persons as distinct from merely physical realities has to be ‘a communion of minds characterized by mutual respect, trust, and love.’ Similarly, we cannot know God without being reconciled to him. ‘Knowing God requires cognitive union with him in which our whole being is affected by his love and holiness. It is the pure in heart who know God.’ The foundations of the covenant partnership were clear: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’
But Israel, like all peoples, was a sinful people. The covenant was established in pure grace, not with a people who were already holy, but ‘between God and Israel in its sinful, rebellious and estranged existence.’ But, as the book of Hosea insisted, God would not divorce Israel. The validity of the covenant did not depend on Israel’s fulfilment of contractual conditions, but on the unconditional grace of God. The love of God provided a vicarious way of response in the liturgy of atoning sacrifice. But ‘the closer God drew, the more the human self-will of Israel asserted itself’ so that the closer God came, the more Israel’s sin was intensified. This was not accidental, but God’s intention, for only in this way could God effect reconciliation with humanity at its worst. That is the context for the Incarnation in which God drew so near that God and humanity are one in Jesus, Emmanuel, ‘God with us.’
In this Jesus, however, the Jew in whom the Creator Word and man the creature, the God of the covenant and man the covenanted partner, are brought together, all the interaction of God with Israel throughout history, and all the intensifying conflict of Israel with God, are brought to their supreme culmination, so that from the moment of his birth at Bethlehem the road ran straight to crucifixion… Thus with the incarnation the conflict between Israel and God would reach its most intense form…
What Torrance wants us to see is that ‘the deep-seated human estrangement from God became the very means used by God in actualizing his purpose of love to reconcile the whole world to himself.’ The apostles deserted, betrayed and denied Jesus, but in the Passover meal with them, Jesus had inaugurated the new covenant binding them to him. They came to understand:
It was their sin, their betrayal, their shame, their unworthiness, which became in the inexplicable love of God the material he laid hold of and turned into the bond that bound them to the crucified Messiah, to the salvation and love of God forever.
The staggering truth is therefore, that, as Peter declared on the day of Pentecost, ‘Israel was elected also to reject the Messiah’ (Acts 2:23). Without Israel’s great sin in rejecting the Messiah, there would have been no crucifixion, and therefore no atonement, no forgiveness, no sanctification, no resurrection, and no hope of eternal life. God used our very sin, focused in Israel’s rejection of her Messiah, as the means of our redemption. That means that the relationship between Jesus and Israel, representing us in committing the greatest sin of all, has been irreversibly established once and for all. If God used our very rejection of him, the greatest sin of all, as the means by which he binds us to himself, then nothing can break this new relationship between God and humankind in the Messiah.
Christ in Relation to God
Having explored Jesus’ oneness with Israel, Torrance turns again to the other aspect of his twofold strategy, to explore Jesus’ oneness with God. The ‘Person’ of Christ – who he is – cannot be understood only by examining his relationship with Israel: even more basic is his relationship with the God of Israel, the One he uniquely called, ‘Abba, Father.’ Torrance argues that the onto-relational thinking characteristic of contemporary Physics since Clerk Maxwell and Einstein was actually foreshadowed in the Trinitarian thinking of the Christian Fathers.
Thus there arose the concept of person, in its supreme sense in God and in its subordinate sense in human existence, in accordance with which the relations between persons belong to what persons really are in their own beings. That is to say, the relations which persons have with one another as persons are onto-relations, for they are person-constituting relations.
Given Torrance’s point that persons are understood with reference to their relationships, we may add the comment that Jesus Christ did not become a Person when he was born of Mary. Since he is confessed to be the eternal Son of the eternal Father, then the priority of this divine relationship must be acknowledged. He truly entered into the matrix of human relationships when he was born of Mary, but his Person had been constituted beforehand by his relationship with his Father in the Spirit. He did not become a different Person at the point of his human birth. He certainly entered into new relationships which must be held to have affected who he now truly is, the God-man, but this did not make him into a different Person. His Person is still constituted by the relationships within the Holy Trinity. Only in this way could he enter into and so heal the distorted and broken pattern of relationships within humanity.
The ‘basic clue’ with which the early Church theologians worked, therefore (as Torrance adds), was ‘the Father/Son or Son/Father relationship.’ Of the host of biblical passages which they exegeted, Matthew 11:27 (paralleled in Luke 10:22) was particularly important, that ‘no one knows the Son but the Father and no one knows the Father but the Son.’ This mutual and exclusive relationship in the Holy Spirit (Luke 10:21) falls, Torrance emphasizes, within the very being of God. This is the central point on which everything turns in the Nicene Christology and Theology, namely, the homoousion, that the Son is ‘of the same Being’ as the Father. The implication is that this Person, constituted by his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit, who through his Incarnation has now entered into onto-relations with us, is uniquely qualified not only by what he does, but by who he now is, to be the Mediator between God and humanity.
Jesus Christ is Mediator in such a way that in his incarnate Person he embraces both sides of the mediating relationship. He is God of the nature of God, and man of the nature of man, in one and the same Person. He is not two realities, a divine and a human, joined or combined together, but one Reality who confronts us as he who is both God and man.
He is not merely ‘God in man’, but ‘God as a man.’ He is not merely the agent or instrument of the mediation: he is the mediation. He is the Word: he is the Truth: he is our Peace. It is not just what he does for us in dying for our sins: it is who he is for us which gives what he does for us its basis and foundation.
This is absolutely vital for the coherence of the Gospel. Only if this is so, Torrance points out, is Jesus’ forgiving of sins not merely the word of a fellow creature, but the forgiveness of God himself. ‘But cut the bond of being between Jesus Christ and God, and the bottom falls out of the Gospel of forgiveness.’ Only if this is so, is Jesus the final and definitive revelation of God. If it is not so, he has merely a ‘transient symbolical relation to God’, and it would mean ‘that God is not in his own Being what the Gospel tells us he is toward us in Jesus Christ.’ If there is ‘no oneness of being or agency’ between Jesus and the Father, then ‘Jesus would not be in truth or in reality the self-communication or self-giving of God to mankind, and in the last resort would have no more value than the embodiment of a myth vainly projected out of man’s subjective fantasies into God.’ If there is no oneness of being between Jesus and God, then we have no longer have a secure ground for claiming that God is love. If there is a gap between Jesus and God, then we have no assurance that the love Jesus shows throughout his earthly life is the true revelation of a loving God.
To claim that Jesus Christ is not God himself become man for us and our salvation, is equivalent to saying that God does not love us to the uttermost, that he does not love us to the extent of committing himself to becoming man and uniting himself with us in the Incarnation.
If God remained up in heaven as it were, but sent another to die for us, then we may k now that Jesus loves us, but we cannot finally be sure that God loves us. But because we know and believe that Jesus’ relationship with the Father in the Spirit is such that he is one with them in the unity of the Holy Trinity, we may utterly trust the definitive revelation of the God of love that has come to us in him. Torrance was reacting here to the doctrine of God which emerged in traditional predestinarian Calvinism when he rejected the notion of a ‘dark inscrutable God behind the back of Jesus Christ’ who may have elected us in love or may have damned us from all eternity. Such a god is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is not the God of love revealed in Christ. The pastoral implications of this are profound. Torrance tells of the dying soldier in Italy during the Second World War who asked him as the padre, ‘Is God really like Jesus?’ The homoousion is the assurance that God certainly is: ‘God is like Jesus.’ Such is the personal relationship of the Son to the Father within the unity of the Holy Trinity that we may utterly trust the God of love revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.
Torrance argues therefore that we cannot begin to understand who Jesus Christ is if we try to cut him off from God or from Israel. We can only begin to understand the Person of Christ when we see him in his inextricable relationships, first to God the Father in the Spirit, and secondly to Israel representing all humanity. These onto-relations are constitutive of who he is as the incarnate Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Mediator. It is against this background, in the light of this foundation, that Torrance wrote of the incarnate Son of God as ‘Personalizing Person’, and the ‘humanizing Man’. Building upon Torrance’s work here, we may go on to explore the way in which Jesus’ personal relationships during his life on earth are integral to his work as Mediator.
Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ
To put this final task in context, we need to review very briefly the line of argument in these two chapters on ‘Christology Today’. In Chapter 18, we began by reminding ourselves that in investigating Christology, we are not merely examining academic theories: we are confronted with a Person who is our Lord and who is present to us now in the Spirit. We focussed in that chapter on what Chalcedon called his two ‘natures’, his true deity and true humanity. The fact that he is God Incarnate gives Christian faith a unique and exclusive claim, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’ We examined then the logic of this uniqueness. Turning to his humanity, we noted that that has usually been the focus in interest in the modern era, and that is borne out by the ‘contextual Christologies’ – Liberation, Black, and Feminist. We then looked at the focus on his humanity in Kenotic Christology and in the ‘quests’ for the ‘historical’ Jesus, classified by John McIntyre as the ‘psychological model’. Still concentrating on his humanity, we then examined the question of whether the Son of God truly stooped to assume our fallen humanity in order to sanctify us and give us mortals immortal life through his resurrection.
These two chapters on Christology Today bring our formal discussion of this doctrine to a conclusion. Having focussed on the ‘two’ – two ‘natures’ – in Chapter 18, we have now focussed on the ‘One’ – the one Person – in this chapter. We have thus traced the ‘One-in-two’ all the way from New Testament Christology, through the patristic development to modern debates, and so to contemporary questions. We examined the logic, not just the logic of Chalcedon, but the logic of the One-in-two in the original apostolic Gospel which it reflects. The Chalcedonian Symbol is a landmark in the history of the Church’s doctrine, but we saw it as a ‘model’, derived from a specific cultural context, the Aristotelian logic of the late classical period. The model has its own logic, but that logic fails to contain the infinite God who has become finite while remaining infinite within its finite logic and definitions. The unfathomable Mystery forces us to express the Truth or Reality (alētheia) of Christ in unavoidable paradox. In the second half of this chapter, we went on to examine the term ‘Person’, a non-biblical word which has become the key to the expression of the Church’s confession of her Lord. While the word ‘nature’ is used for the ‘two’, the word ‘Person’ is used to speak of the One. We briefly traced the history of the use of the word in Christian Theology, and the expansion of its meaning through the broad movement of modern Personalism, and then looked at a specific example of this usage in the Christology of T.F. Torrance.
That brings us finally in this chapter and also finally within Part Four, our examination of Christology, back to the perspective with which we began our study of contemporary Christology at the beginning of Chapter 18. We need to finish by reminding ourselves once again that we are not neutral philosophers examining some theories from a detached, disinterested and neutral stance. To qualify as theologians at all, we have to be Christian believers – those who are committed not just to doctrines and beliefs, but who are committed to this Person, the Lord Jesus Christ. Only those how know God in Christ are qualified to speak of him, for no science can be based on ignorance and lack of experiential contact. Christian Theology can only be pursued therefore as something which arises out of confession: it is by definition fides quaerens intellectum. We are therefore not merely recycling second-hand academic knowledge about Christ. We begin with our first-hand encounter with him, Person to person. As Polanyi and Torrance remind us, all second-hand knowledge and all abstractive knowledge about someone or something has to be based on first-hand, intuitive encounter with that person or thing. It is only within the bi-polar relationship of subject to object that anything at all can be directly known. That is true whether the object of our knowledge is personal or impersonal. But if it is a person we seek to know, that knowledge relationship is reciprocal. And in this case particularly, our personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is dependent on his prior knowledge of us. He is the one who has taken the initiative in seeking us. So he is present today in the power of his Spirit wherever his people gather and wherever his Gospel is proclaimed to draw us into that relationship of genuine, outgoing, inter-personal love. It is not only true that he has assumed our fallen humanity in his incarnation in order to heal and sanctify us corporately through his life and death and resurrection. It is also true that he seeks to encounter us personally, Person to person. He wants to know us each in our uniqueness as human persons, each with our unique story.
That is why the reading and exposition of the stories of the four Gospels is so central to Christian liturgy and the Christian life. The risen exalted Christ, alive today in the presence of the Father, comes and encounters us by the Spirit in the reading and exposition of Scripture. It is here in Holy Scripture, where living witnesses recalled their stories of Jesus under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit rather than in the creed or the symbol, that we are brought face to face with Jesus. After his baptism and temptation in the wilderness, Luke tells us, he came ‘in the power of the Spirit into Galilee’ (Luke 4:14), and proclaimed his mission in the synagogue in the words of Isaiah, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.’ He encounters the sick and heals them, he liberates those bound by demonic possession, he heals the lepers, and on occasion he even raises the dead. All of these are personal encounters in his teaching, preaching, healing ministry (Matt. 4:23/9:35) where his astounding compassion moves us.
He calls his disciples – James and John, Andrew and Peter, and Levi, challenging them to follow him, to commit themselves to the journey without knowing where it may lead in sheer personal commitment to him. He tells his masterly stories – the Prodigal Son, the Lost Sheep, the Workers in the Vineyard, the Good Samaritan – puzzling and provoking us to thought, questioning our assumptions about God and about life. He challenges us to turn the other cheek and go the second mile, to build our house on the rock and not the sand. He challenges Zacchaeus and the rich young ruler to give up their riches and commit themselves to him. He flares up in indignation at the proud and hypocritical, denouncing the ‘whited sepulchres’. He affirms the law of God, but rescues the adulterous woman from stoning. He speaks kind but straight words to the woman at the Samaritan well. He speaks of justice and righteousness and peace and the coming of the kingdom. He champions the poor, the outcasts and the lepers. He throws parties for sinners.
These are not metaphysical discourses explaining the mysteries of heaven. These are apparently simple stories – narratives of personal encounter. And as they are read and expounded today with insight, even perhaps with humour, we glimpse this powerful, dominating Person who chooses to be meek and unassuming; this sharp intellect who leaves the intellectuals speechless, but who chooses to be silent before his accusers. And so we are drawn into the crowd around him, and we listen and our hearts are stirred and comforted and challenged. We know as we read or listen to these accounts that the risen Christ is present with us in the power of his Spirit and is speaking these words again to us today. So, as we encounter him through the narratives, we are changed into his likeness: we are made to image the Image. Through the personal encounter, we become by the inner work of the Spirit more truly personal: through these very human encounters, we become more truly human. We experience what Torrance meant when he said that Christ is the personalizing Person and the humanizing Human.
We follow him on the way of the cross. We hear him predicting the way this must certainly end as he goes to challenge corrupt authority usurping the temple of God. Yet he sets his face as a flint towards Jerusalem and Golgotha. We shout ‘Hosanna’ with the children. We see him furiously expelling the money-changers from the temple. We hear those last public teachings, the six royal riddles, the prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem, the barbed parable about the death of the son of the owner of the vineyard. We are admitted to the upper room where through the eyes of John we see him washing the apostles’ feet and speaking of his Father and the Spirit. Through the ears of Peter and his account given to Mark, we hear again the prediction of his death as ‘a ransom for many’ and see him transform the Passover meal into the communion in his body and blood. We are awestruck as he stands before Caiaphas and Pilate, dumbfounded as he is nailed to the cross, moved as he forgives his torturers, and confused and despairing as we hear him crying out to ask why God has abandoned him. With the disciples, hope is dead within us.
But that is not the last encounter. With Mary we are mystified at the empty tomb, but with the apostles we encounter the risen Lord in the locked room. With Cleopas and his companion we listen on the road to his exposition of the Hebrew Scriptures, and with speechless awe we bow with Thomas back in the locked room and hail him as the Resurrection and the Life.
So through the accounts of his earthly life and ministry, the present exalted Christ speaks to us again, and in the personal encounter we are called to confess him as Lord, to acknowledge our sins before him, to receive his forgiveness, won through his cross. We listen to his voice of guidance for our lives today, transmitted through his own teaching while here among us in the flesh and through the writings of his appointed and commissioned apostles.
So for us, it is not a matter of ‘religion’ or ‘religious practices’ which express our own piety. It is not a matter of a set of doctrines or theories, or a philosophy of life. It is not at its heart a matter of the good life or the philosophical life. It is not at its heart a matter of joining an institution or following a tradition or campaigning for a cause, although it may involve all of those. It is not even a matter of seeking salvation and security in the after-life. At its heart it is a matter of personal commitment to a Person. It is personal faith and trust in him issuing in glad obedience. Christianity is Christ. Everything else follows from this relationship of personal commitment to this Person in life and death.
The great treasury of the Church’s devotional literature and hymnody bears witness to this personal relationship to the Person of Christ down through the centuries. From contemporary songs of devotion to Jesus, we can trace this heritage back through the personal faith expressed in the great Victorian hymnwriters – Horatio Bonar, John Henry Newman, Henry Francis Lyte, Fanny Crosby, and Charlotte Elliott. Back in the eighteenth century, the rich devotional hymnody of Charles Wesley, William Cowper, and John Newton give us the words with which to express our personal faith and devotion to Christ. The German hymnwriters, Joachim Neander, Gerhard Tersteegen, and Martin Rinkhart as well as the hymns of devotion incorporated in the Bach cantatas and Passions, focus our faith on Jesus. The trail takes us right back to the Greek Fathers, with Gregory Nazianzen singing to the ‘Light that knew no dawn.’ But perhaps the great Latin poem attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux (but possibly written by a nun and, if so, the earliest extant poetry from the pen of a woman) may stand as representative of the great tradition of personal devotion to the Person of Christ. One section of it, Jesu, dulcedo cordium, reads:
Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts, Thou fount of life, Thou light of men, From the best bliss that earth imparts We turn unfilled to Thee again.
Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; Thou savest those that on Thee call: To them that seek Thee, Thou art good, To them that find Thee, all in all.
We taste Thee, O thou living Bread, And long to feast upon Thee still; We drink of Thee, the Fountain-head, And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
Our restless spirits yearn for Thee, Where’er our changeful lot is cast, Glad when Thy gracious smile we see, Blest when our faith can hold Thee fast.
O Jesus, ever with is stay; Make all our moments calm and bright; Chase the dark night of sin away; Shed o’er the world Thy holy light.