Who Jesus is and the work that He accomplished cannot be separated from the Father and the Holy Spirit and their distinctive works. This is my very brief summary of Ware's main idea. He unpacks it in four major sections. First, he argues that "the identity of Jesus as Savior is inextricably tied to his being the Son of the Father, sent by the Father to accomplish the Father's will." (159) Second, he argues that Jesus' identity is similarly tied to his being "the Spirit-anointed Messiah whose very person requires the indwelling and empowering Spirit for him to be who he is and to accomplish what he has come to do." (171) Third, he defends the claim that "Christ's atoning work is inextricably tied to his accomplishing the work that the Father sent him to do, a work designed by the Father and carried out through the obedience and faithfulness of the Son." (174) And fourth, he defends the claim that Christ's atoning work is tied to his being the Spirit-anointed Messiah, whose very obedience, miracles, and fulfillment of the Father's will require the indwelling and empowering Spirit for him to accomplish what he came to do." (179)
Ware leads readers through just some of the biblical evidence supporting each of these theses. His approach, then, is less philosophical and more exegetical. He doesn't spend time speculating how atonement and salvation might have gone differently. Instead, he helps the reader to recognize and better understand the particular kind of salvation that God did accomplish.
This approach provides Ware with the space to tackle (if only briefly) a number of questions that arise at the intersection of Trinitarian Theology and Christology. For instance, he defends the view that the idea that God is, in Himself, Trinitarian, allows us to make the most sense of why the work of salvation unfolded in the way that it did. This is an extremely helpful point. As they become more thoughtful and reflective, I think, many Christians begin to worry about how much the revelation of the Son and Spirit actually tell us or can tell us about what God is like. Modalism, then, isn't lurking far off. But Ware highlights several Scripture passages that indicate that the Father-Son relationship preceded the Incarnation and that God exists as Trinity in Himself.
Ware also reminds us that Christ's atoning work was not His work alone but a work of the Trinity. "[W]hen you ask, just whose work ultimately is this work of salvation? or who designed the plan of salvation that is carried out historically in and through the cross and the resurrection of Christ? he answer from Scripture is plainly that the Father is the grand architect, the wise designer, of our salvation, brought into actuality by the Son he commissioned and sent." (174) Here is another important message for Christians to here. When talking about salvation, it's all-too-easy to present God as the bad-guy, the wrath-filled and demanding master who must be placated! Thanks be to Jesus for redeeming and giving us victory! And while there is something right about that, that doesn't capture the whole picture and actually leads us to misunderstand God and His relationship to us. Paul got it right. He didn't say, 'Thanks be to Jesus!' He said, "But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Corinthians 15:57) John 3:16 reads, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son…" The Father, because of His love for us, prepared the way for salvation and Jesus Christ accomplished it by being obedient to the Father's will.
In talking about the Holy Spirit's role in Christ's work, Ware offers some helpful remarks about how to think of Christ's dual nature. I would have liked to hear more about that (I wasn't really satisfied with all that he said) but that might have required a different kind of essay.
By connecting (or, perhaps, reconnecting for some of us) the atonement and the Trinity, Ware helps us to see that the Trinity really needs to be at the center of our thinking about God and His work. It's all to easy to think and talk about God in a very generic way. And when we're studying comparative religion, for instance, there's nothing wrong with grouping Christianity, Judaism, and Islam under the heading "monotheistic" religions. But if that's as deep as we get, we'll overlook the fact that the Christian conception of God is worlds apart from the Jewish or Muslim conception. We should expect that a Trinitarian God is (or would be) different from a Unitarian God. They would create differently, relate to people differently, be motivated differently, reign differently, and redeem differently. Ware helps us to barely begin thinking about how atonement looks when we take the Trinity seriously. If you'd like to think along these lines more, check out Michael Reeves' Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith.
--
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment