Master 272: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Part 3

In his contribution to the volume, Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Donald Fairbairn clarifies what was the central christological controversy at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451).  In "The One Person Who is Jesus Christ: The Patristic Perspective," he describes the various philosophical and soteriological commitments that informed the opposing positions, drawing from them guidance for how we, today, should think about Jesus Christ and the work that He accomplished.

According to Fairbairn, patristic scholarship for much of the twentieth century has tended to characterize the controversy that led to Chalcedon as centered on how to understand the relationship between Jesus' divine and human natures.  According to this view, one side tended to emphasize Christ's humanity, the other his divinity, and Chalcedon articulated a compromise position.  But Fairbairn argues that this characterization misrepresents the views of the particular individuals involved and fails to do justice to the other concerns that informed and motivated the controversy.

Fairbairn argues that this view gets the historical facts wrong.  The controversy at Chalcedon did not focus so much on the question of whether Jesus had a divine or human nature.  Rather, it focused on the question of whether Jesus was a divine or human person.  (This is my summary and I hope it accurately, if not comprehensively, represents the content of Fairbairn's essay.)  Now the difference between these two questions might not immediately strike you.  'What's the big difference between "nature" and "person" supposed to be?' you might wonder.  It may help to think of the Chalcedonian question like this: "Was Jesus a divine person who added a human nature to Himself, or was Jesus a human person who added a divine nature to Himself?"  Cyril, who defended the orthodox position affirmed the former while his opponents affirmed the latter.  Here is a passage from one of Cyril's letters where he makes this point and describes some of its implications.

"He did not make himself out to be God's Son, but he truly was so.  For he possessed the quality of sonship not from the outside, nor as something added, but as being the Son by nature, for this is what we must believe.  For we are sons of God by adoption as we are conformed to the Son who has been begotten [of the Father] by nature.  For if there were no true Son, who would remain to whom we could be conformed by adoption?  Whose representation would we bear?  Where indeed would the resemblance be, if we were to say that the original did not exist?" (100, from Paschal Letter 24:3, Fairbairn's translation)

To defend his position that it was a divine person (the Logos) who took to Himself a human nature in the Incarnation, Cyril points to the claim that the One who became incarnate (Jesus) was the natural Son of God.  He then goes on to explain why this is important.  If Jesus were not the Son of God by nature, then He could not serve as the model of sonship into which God adopts us when we are saved.  "Adoption" is essential to the kind of salvation that God has offered to us in Christ Jesus, but such a salvation is only possible if Jesus is, by nature, God and not just a man who received or was infused with some divine essence from the outside.

Fairbairn helps us understand Cyril's position in this passage: "First, Cyril sharply distinguishes the true Son, the Logos, from Christians who are adopted sons and daughters of God.  We are not begotten of God in the same way that the Logos is.  He is the unique Son of God, but we are children of God by adoption and grace.  The second noteworthy thing is that even though we are "merely" adopted, God grants us to share in the natural communion that has existed from eternity between the Father and the Son.  To state this differently, God does not simply grant us a relationship with himself, or some kind of fellowship with himself.  Instead, he grants us to share by grace in the very same fellowship that the persons of the Trinity share by nature.  To be saved, to participate in God, is to share this very communion.  In Cyril's mind, this is what God has given humanity at creation, and what he gives us anew in salvation." (95-96)

This view of salvation is at the core of Christianity.  Unfortunately, not many are really familiar with it.  Salvation, in many people's minds, amounts just to a ticket out of hell, some kind of credit arrangement in the bank of heaven, or the gift of a temporally limitless life free of suffering.  These point to some of the real benefits that come with the salvation God offers but how do they come to us?  Answer: They come to us as from a Father to His children.  When we are saved, God does not move us into a merely master-slave, lord-vassal, boss-employee, creator-creature relationship.  Rather, He moves us into a Father-son relationship.  And we know what that relationship looks like, not by looking at the flawed and broken father-son relationships that we see in the world, but by looking at the Father-Son relationship that existed (and exists eternally) between God the Father and God the Son.  If you've never thought about this before (whether you've been a long-time Christian or are just curious about what Christianity is about) you need to consider what we should expect of the saved life if this is what salvation is about.

One more main comment as we wrap up here.  You might understand what Cyril is saying and agree with his position; but you might still be wondering about why there's any disagreement.  Especially if you've been in the church a long time, the idea that God the Son took on a human nature might seem completely obvious, and the idea that Jesus was just a man infused with special divine powers or even a divine essence might seem really weird.  Why would Cyril's opponents think this?  And why should we be worried about such a view?

Well, first, Cyril's opponents could believe these other things about Jesus, in part, because they had a different view about human nature and salvation.  If you don't understand that salvation is the offer of adoption into a relationship and fellowship that, for eternity past, has existed only within the Godhead, then you won't see much need for it to be the case that Jesus was a divine person who took a human nature to Himself.  (Again, it would be good to reflect on your own thinking about this--and read Fairbairn's chapter for more information.)

Second, even though we (contemporary Christians) might intellectually assent the claim that Jesus was the divine and only-begotten Son of God who took a human nature to Himself, contrary ideas may still be present in our minds and influence our thinking about other matters.  Consider, for instance, how conflicted Christians sometimes feel about the idea that Jesus, while on earth, possessed certain divine attributes like omniscience or omnipotence.  Could Jesus be fully human and omniscient at the same time?  Many people balk at that idea.  More classically-minded Christians might be troubled by the idea that a fully-divine Jesus could actually suffer and experience death.  The person/nature distinction (which you might have been tempted to slide past) turns out to be really helpful for making sense of these ideas.  I won't delve into these issues here but allow Fairbairn to spark your thinking about them with this final quote:

"Many contemporary scholars assert, and many contemporary Christians often seem to agree, that a human nature subsisting in the person of the Logos is not a real humanity; that Christ could not really be human unless he were a man independent of the Logos.  This objection flows from an understanding of what it means to be human that is virtually universal, but from a Christian point of view, disastrous.  Contemporary thinkers mistakenly think that one is truly human only if one is independent of God, and tragically many Christians today unconsciously accept this recent concept of what it means to be human without realizing how thoroughly un-Christian it is.  From a biblical point of view, none of us were meant to be independent of God.  True humanity, humanity as God meant it to be, involves life in dependence on God.  Therefore, a person whose humanity actually subsists in the person of the Logos and who lives a life of utter dependence on the Trinity is not a less-than-human person, as much recent scholarship asserts.  Such a person is the most fully human person there is." (109-110)

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 271: Yosemite Panoramics

So I posted one of the composite panoramic pictures that I put together from my Yosemite trip in an earlier post.  Here are the five others.  As you can see, I left them in their raw form and did not clean up the edges so as to retain as much as possible.

These two were taken in Yosemite Valley.

These next two were taken on the drive up to Tuolumne Meadow.  The reason that Linda and I appear at opposite ends of this one picture is that we each had to photograph the other.

 

And this last picture is of the Tuolumne Meadow.  There are deer behind the trees on the right, but you can't see them in this picture.

 

--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 270: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Part 2

In his contribution to the volume, Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, J. Scott Horrell lays some trinitarian groundwork for doing christology.  In his essay, "The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity," he does more trinitarian theology than christology.  Of course the two are connected, since Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity.  But Horrell's focus is on how we think about God as a whole and his aim is to tighten, in our thinking, the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity.

What do these terms mean: "economic Trinity" and "immanent Trinity"?  These terms come out of the efforts of thoughtful Christians to systematize their understanding of God.  All our information about God comes through His self-revelation.  God reveals Himself through His creation, through His various acts on the scene of human history, and, most clearly, in the sending of the Son and Spirit.  By looking at creation, we can learn some things about God, in something like the way that we learn about an artist by looking at the work she produces.  In the Old Testament, we have a record of God's speaking to and interacting directly with people.  In this case, the recipients are not just inferring things about God but listening to what God has to say about Himself.  They are watching God intervene very intentionally in the world.  Finally, God reveals Himself and His character most fully through sending the Son and the Spirit into the world.

Over the course of His ministry and in the period immediately following His ascension, Jesus' followers came to understand that He was not just another prophet sent from God.  He was, in fact, God in the flesh.  It was in seeking ways to articulate what they learned about God through this that the vocabulary of "Trinity" was developed.  They learned that in order to speak adequately of what God had revealed about Himself, they needed to speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But in seeking to make sense of what they had learned about God, they also faced some challenges.  Jesus was divine, but he was also human.  So how much of what He did, who He was, and what He was like could be traced to His deity as opposed to His humanity?  To what extent could the relationships of the Father and the Holy Spirit to this God-man as they played out in the first century A.D. be used to gain insight into the relationships that existed eternally within the essence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  In order to address these questions, it became useful to distinguish between the 'economic' and 'immanent' Trinity.

We do not use these terms to refer to two distinct Trinities but, if you will, to two different ways of considering the Trinity.  When we consider the Trinity as it was manifested in the particular work (economy) of redemption and salvation as that was played out in human history, we are considering the economic Trinity.  When we consider God as He has existed for all eternity in Himself (immanently)--prior to and independently of His particular redemptive work--then we are considering the immanent Trinity.  One of the big questions for Christian theology is: to what extent does the economic Trinity (the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as manifested in human history particularly through the sending of the Son and Spirit into the world by the Father)--to what extent does the economic Trinity--furnish us with real insight into the immanent Trinity (the nature of God Himself).

Having set up the dialectic in this way, we can imagine two extreme perspectives.  (I don't know whether anyone actually holds these views, but they'll be helpful for us to consider.)  According to the one, God's activities in the world reveal almost nothing about what God, in Himself, is like.  People on this end of the spectrum might speak of "the way in which God has chosen to reveal Himself to humanity", where that implies that His way of revealing Himself (as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) corresponds to (almost) nothing that is actually true of God.  At the other extreme is the view that the revealed (economic) Trinity exhausts all that there is to God in Himself.  Someone on this view might hold that God has no existence apart from or independently of His involvement in human redemptive history.

Horrell defends a tight connection between the economic and immanent Trinity.  He does not identify the two but maintains that the one offers real insight into the other.  He defends a social model of the Trinity and the view that the one God exists eternally as three distinct centers of self-consciousness (persons) who enjoy genuine personal relationships, each mutually indwelling the other.  While affirming that the three persons are wholly equal in nature, he also defends the view that there is an eternal order (roughly, distinction of roles) within the Godhead.

At this point I've had a chance to read a bit on these topics and so (I hope) I'm getting better at using the vocabulary.  But if you're not used to it, don't be surprised if that last paragraph doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  There's definitely some study and work that's needed to get this.  But that's all I'll say on this for now.  If you want to read more, pick up the book.

--

God is in this place,

And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 269: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Part 1

I've started working through a book edited by Fred Sanders: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective.  I really appreciate and enjoy reading Sanders' work.  He's an associate professor of systematic theology and tutor in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.  He blogs at The Scriptorium and recently published a small but very dense book entitled, The Deep Things of God.  You can find recordings of some of his lectures on youtube, through the Biola website, or and on iTunes U.

Fred Sanders is so thoroughly engaging as a speaker and writer.  The consummate teacher, he presents deep and rich content, sprinkled with his unique brand of humor, informed by wide-ranging background knowledge, in a way that's accessible and that draws the reader/listener in to the learning experience.  I really cannot praise him highly enough.

As someone who is interested in studying (at the amateur level) Christian theology, I so appreciate that, while remaining solidly evangelical, Sanders has no difficulty dialoguing with theologians both ancient and contemporary.  He is actually helping me to understand and appreciate my own spiritual heritage--something from which many evangelicals could benefit.

***

 

In the introductory chapter to this collection of essays, Sanders sets the stage for the work that will follow of doing christology in trinitarian perspective.  Christology is the branch of theology that seeks to systematize our experience and understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  "Jesus died for me."  Behind this simple and familiar confession are layers and layers of truth and content and meaning that christology seeks to unpack.

Think for a moment about your respiration--your breathing.  Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.  You're doing it all the time.  It's so familiar to you that you don't think about it usually.  Yet behind this simple, familiar process that we so take for granted are a host of organs and tissues, complex biological and chemical processes, a stunning array of factors and elements that contribute to it.  They are the very things that make your breathing--that make your life--possible.

Something along the lines of this sort of reflection is going on when we sit down to the task of theology and christology.  The basic confession and even some of its underlying entailments, which combine to form an adequate christology, are familiar to many Christians.  But what does not seem to be so common is an appreciation of their underlying structure--all the stuff that actually makes the confession 'work'.  Is it important or worthwhile to seek to understand this?  Well, consider the following point by Sanders:

"Once upon a time, the people most committed to the gospel were the people most inclined to serious theological thought.  The deepest doctrines of Christianity, the ones that are not on the surface of the Scriptures but lie waiting in its depths, were quarried through disciplined theological meditation and patient discernment.  It was not academics or aesthetes with too much time on their hands who did this work, but busy pastors, suffering martyrs, and bishops overseeing the evangelization of entire cities.  As they preached and taught and suffered for the gospel, they worked out the deep logic of the revelation of the Trinity, the incarnation, and redemption.  The more seriously they took the life-changing power of the good news, the more concentration they devoted to the details of sound doctrine." (5)

I'm not going to suggest that everybody needs to spend lots of time studying theology.  But it's worth thinking about how much we are biased against such careful study by a (Christian) culture that sees no value in it and assumes that it's only the stuff of academics and aesthetes.  A good dose of real history helps us to challenge this bias.

***

(Yet) another thing that I appreciate about Fred Sanders (and I'll focus on that for the remainder of this post) is the way that he provides tools for framing theological explorations.  Here's an example:

"Though the body of Christian truth is made up of a great many doctrines, perhaps hundreds of them, there are only three great mysteries at the very heart of Christianity: the atonement, the incarnation, and the Trinity.  All the lesser doctrines depend on these great central truths, derive their significance from them, and spell out their implications.  Each of these three mysteries is a mystery of unity, bringing together things which seem, in themselves, to be unlikely candidates for unification.  The Christian doctrine of atonement describes reconciliation between the holy God and fallen man.  The Christian doctrine of the incarnation confesses that the complete divine nature and perfect human nature are united in the person of Jesus Christ.  The Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms that the one God exists eternally as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." (8)

This way of arranging our theological reflection is not original to Sanders, but he's the one from whom I've learned it; and it really is so helpful for organizing and structuring my own thinking about God.

The other example of this kind of framing tool is the set of Chalcedonian categories that Sanders (following a long tradition) introduces for conducting theology.  He points to the first four ecumenical councils (Nicaea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, and Chalcedon) as setting up the boundaries for doing Christology.  Nicaea I affirmed the deity of Christ, against the Arian heresy.  Constantinople I affirmed the humanity of Christ, against Apollinarianism.  Ephesus affirmed the unity of these two natures in Christ, against Nestorianism.  Chalcedon affirmed the distinctness of these two natures, against Eutychianism.

That may sound like just a lot of long words.  I won't lay everything out here.  (Fred Sanders does a much better job of that.)  The point is that in seeking to understand how it is that Christ saves, it became necessary for the church to clarify it's understanding of who Christ was.  He could only achieve the reconciliation of God and humanity if He was God.  Humanity could be redeemed in Christ only if He actually was human.  Reconciliation required that Jesus represent both parties involved.  They needed to be distinctly and really represented in Him.

--

God is in this place,

And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 268: Yosemite

I visited Yosemite National Park with Linda on Friday.  It was my first time there.  Seeing the whole valley open up as we came out of the entrance tunnel was really something.  It took an hour or so of driving through beautiful mountains to get to the national park, but the valley stood head-and-shoulders above anything we saw outside of it.  The massive rock formations and waterfalls were fantastic.

We didn't see that much of the park.  What we did do was go on a thirteen-mile hike that looped around the valley.  (Yeah, we were a little worn out by the end of that.)  The highlights of that hike were Yosemite Falls, El Capitan, and Bridalveil Falls.  We walked along the Merced River and through some beautiful open meadows.  And toward the end of the day we drove up to Tuolumne Meadow.  We'll have to visit Mirror Lake, Half-Dome, and the other major sites another time.

It was great to get away.  It was great to spend that time with Linda.  It was great to be hiking through all that natural beauty and get the chance to, once again, drink in the wonder of creation.

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.