Tag: continental philosophy

Doctrine

The Transfiguration of Jesus

Alex Renner

The transfiguration is one of those odd episodes in the Gospels which seem disjointed as far as its place in the flow of the narratives go. Immediately before each of the Transfiguration accounts – found only in the Synoptics – Jesus proclaims that he will die, and that those who must follow after Him must follow Him in His treatment at the hands of the religious authorities and the world: that whoever wants to gain their lives must lose them. After the episode, it seems as if Jesus picks up where He left off: healing, traveling, preaching. The story comes as a weird break in an otherwise mostly coherent narrative stream.

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An icon of the Transfiguration.

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The Lukan account reads, “About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ (He did not know what he was saying.) While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. A voice came from the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.’ When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.”

Parallels with Mosaic Narrative

Following this, after Jesus and the disciples descend from this (literal) mountaintop experience, Jesus becomes disgruntled at “this generation” for their lack of faith. What is striking is to note is the parallel movement between this story and the story of Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments. Both figures ascend to the top of the mountain, where the Word of God and the presence of God are present, surrounded by light and cloud. Then, descending the mountain, they criticize the lack of faith of the people (Moses and the Israelites who have just been worshipping the golden calf and Jesus with the Israelites who are suffering under the weight of their own faithlessness). The presence of Moses alongside Elijah in the transfiguration narrative is striking, too, because he is no longer the protagonist of the story; he is off to the side speaking with the central character Jesus. Jesus is somehow, therefore, a true and better Moses, who is listened to by Moses and Elijah, signaling their inferiority compared to the Christ, to Christ’s mission as central to the fulfillment of the purposes of God.

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An icon of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

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It has been noted by other interpreters that one difference between the Decalogue narrative and the Transfiguration narrative is the Light that shines from Christ’s face. When Moses is in the presence of God, his face shines, and it continues to radiate as he descends the mountain to rejoin the people. Notice, however, that with Jesus, the light shining from His face is not a refracted light. It is not reflected from some other source, but radiates from Jesus Himself. It is as if the text were saying, “the Source of the light reflecting from Moses’ face in the Old Testament; here is its source!” The voice of the Father – “This is my Son, listen to Him!” – confirms this as well. Jesus truly is “Light from Light,” receiving all He has from the Father, His glory, infinitude, holiness, and righteousness.

Trinity and Spiritual Blindness

The blindness of the apostles never ceases to give me a disheartening sigh. Nowhere is the inability of man – his utter and total deafness to the Word of God – on clearer display than this scene. The text is clear on what was happening with them: “He did not know what he was saying.” Even during the moment of revelation, the very moment Jesus was shown for who he really was, the apostles did not understand. It is telling, too, that later on, immediately before Christ begins to suffer at the hands of the elders and Romans, Peter – of all people! – attempts to dissuade Jesus from his mission. Peter should have been the first one to have seen that Jesus’s mission culminated and was completed in the suffering he would undergo. It isn’t only that he did not “get it” in the moment of transfiguring on the mountain, its that he misinterpreted who Jesus was after the fact, as well. The text also hints that, just like the Israelites at the foot of Sinai were afraid at the Spirit-cloud (the text says they saw it “as a consuming fire”), so Peter and the disciples were afraid of the cloud and the light: “While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.”

Notice, too, the similarities to the baptism narrative. Here, again, is the Trinity on full display. The Son, the main character of the story, joined by Elijah (i.e., John the Baptist); the Father’s voice, which, again, points the surrounding listeners to Jesus, displaying His love for and approval of His Only-Begotten; and the Spirit, not in the form of a dove but surrounding the top of the mountain in the form of a cloud, reminiscent of the Spirit-cloud which dwelt on the top of Sinai and which led the Israelites through the wilderness. Here is the Trinity, the fullness of God’s presence. What is man’s response, symbolized by the apostles? Misunderstanding, blindness, and an inability to stay in the presence of God. Adam still cannot stay garden without having to leave it.

We should not be too harsh on the apostles, though. The Bible tells us over and over again that if the Spirit of the Lord does not build the house, the people labor in vain. In other words: no Spirit, no understanding, all the way down. Are we not in the same position as the apostles? Would we have seen – or will we continue to see – Jesus for who He truly is without the intervention of the Spirit, without the Spirit coming to us to open our eyes, to give us the rebirth Jesus says is necessary to enter the kingdom of God? Jesus Himself says, “It is better that I go away, for I am sending to you the One who will call to mind everything I have taught.” Last year I taught theology and church history to groups of ninth and tenth graders. One thing you cannot conclude without surveying the history of the Church is that the Spirit abandoned the Church after Pentecost. There is no activity of the Church – which actually does what is intended, to preach the gospel, to live for others, to see people’s lives changed by Jesus – without the Holy Spirit, because no one can interpret Jesus correctly without the Spirit. Jesus and the Spirit are two peas in a pod; the Spirit’s continual purpose is to point people to Jesus. This then helps us to see this mountain top scene correctly; the apostles do not understand because the Spirit has not given them the eyes to see. Where the Spirit is, there is understanding. If there is no understanding, there is no Spirit.

Revelation of the Son of God

It is not simply the case that the Spirit must flip the switch. We ourselves must also respond. There is still a way in which we are in the position of the apostles. We, like them, can choose to see Him according to the Spirit, or we can choose to see Him according to the flesh. See, the elders, the chief priests, the Romans: they refused to see Jesus according to this picture: the exalted King of Kings who mediates the presence of God and dwells with humanity on the mountain. They could accept that He was a teacher, but they could not accept His claims to be the Son of the Father. They refused to see Him how the Spirit told them to see Him. We are presented with a similar choice.

You see, there are many Jesuses which roam this earth. There is the political Jesus, the profound moral teacher Jesus, the comfortable diet hippie Jesus, the hard-nosed masculine Jesus, and innumerable other Jesuses which are very much worshipped and very much followed. None of these Jesuses are the Jesus to whom the Spirit points. Then, there is the Scriptural Jesus. The Jesus that the Church claims to worship; the One who the Nicene Creed says is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” the Only-begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. He is the only Way of Life, the Truth, the Bread of Heaven, the Light of the World, the Lamb Who was Slain before the Foundation of the World, the Alpha and the Omega, and the One who claims our allegiance. This is the One the Spirit wants us to see, know, and love. This is the Jesus of the Kingdom of God. This is the Christ on display in the light of the Transfiguration, the self-interpretation that the Scripture is giving us. Karl Barth writes, “The miracles of Jesus are to be taken as ‘signs’ in the sense that they point to what He already was, to the hidden presence of the kingdom of God which would later be unveiled during the forty days in an abiding manifestation, in a tabernacling of the Lord in the midst of His disciples—a disclosure which will become definitive and universal at the end of all time in His coming again.” The Scripture is so smart, it is always communicating more than we think it is. The Scripture is actually amazing in what it is always doing. The Scripture says here, “That guy, in the Old Testament, who was constantly referred to throughout the pentateuch, the psalms, the prophets, the king who proclaims the word of God on the holy hill of Zion, who is the promised Messiah who will come to liberate Israel and through Israel the rest of the world, who embodies the presence of God to people? Oh yeah, this is that guy. And by the way, this guy – who shines forth the light only God can shine – He will suffer and die as a criminal.” This is why Christ says, right before He goes up the mountain with the apostles, that He would die at the hands of men before then saying, “Some of you will not taste death before [you] see the kingdom of God,” pointing directly to what would immediately happen. It is as if He were telling us, “What you will just hear about – my transfiguration on the mountain – you must understand it in light of what will happen later, i.e., my suffering, my passion, my cross.” Barth confirms this interpretation: “The transfiguration is the supreme prefigurement of the resurrection, and its real meaning will not be perceived until the resurrection has taken place.” This is why the Risen Christ who visits the apostles still bears the marks of His cross in His hands, His side, and His feet. Could He not have chosen to rise again with a fully restored body, without His scars from the cross? Of course! But He is telling us something: He does not want us to know Him as the glorious King apart from knowing Him as the Suffering Servant. He is not king without being servant. In fact, they are one role in Him. He bears the truth he taught His disciples – “Whoever wants to be great in the kingdom of God must be the least of all, must be the servant to all” – in His own Person.

This is the Revelation of the kingdom of God. This is the presence of Jesus: self-emptying love, what Phillipians 2 calls “kenosis.” This is the eternal image of God: this self-emptying, outgoing, reconciling love at work from the creation of the world to the establishment of the New Jerusalem, coming out of heaven for man. And this is the charge for us: will we find ourselves in service to the other? Will we empty ourselves so that love can become actual, visceral even, for those in our lives?

Eschatological Element

Throughout the Scriptures, divine glory always invokes the end of days, in that it always calls people to respond with longing for the Day when God and Man will be perfectly reconciled, when Adam and Eve can once again dwell in the garden forever with God on the mountain. In that sense, the transfiguration is a picture of the new creation; what do we see? We see God in His fullness, shining forth with His glory which tells of His benevolence, love, holiness, and righteousness. And we see Man, perfectly reconciled to the will of God and rejoicing in giving Himself out for God. Jesus is both of these in His own Person, what one theologian calls the “Godward movement of Man and the Manward movement of God.” All of it happens on the top of the mountain, reminiscent of the “holy city” of Zion referenced in Revelation: “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal” (Revelation 21: 10-11). The transfiguration reminds us of our final destination: to be in perfect unity with God and people in the New Land He Himself has prepared for us. One commentator writes that “those with attentive ears and eyes can and must see it also—hidden glory—in the earthy ministry of Jesus, in the world of human need and gracious liberation that already exists, beginning right now at the foot of the mountain. Forget the booths, Peter; the Messiah has work to do.”

Indeed. The Messiah has work to do.

Kyrie Eleison

Happy thanksgiving!

Carroll, John T.. Luke : A Commentary, Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bham/detail.action?docID=3416788.

Barth, Karl. Aids for the Preacher. 1886-1968; edited by Geoffrey William Bromiley, 1915-2009 and Thomas Forsyth Torrance, 1913-2007, in Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1977), 314 page(s).

Close Reading

Karl Barth on “Blessed are the Pure in Heart”

Alex Renner

Karl Barth was the son of a pastor. As such, from a very young age he was intimately involved in the life of the church. When he came of age, he decided he wanted to study theology academically, and perhaps then to go into the pastorate like his father. Eventually, this is what he did. His first post, in the small industrial Swiss town of Safenwil, saw many of his most deeply transformative experiences happen to him. After his academic career came to a close he spent much of his time in a pastoral mode once again, visiting the prison nearest the town in which he resided to preach and teach the Gospel.

During his academic teaching career, being granted numerous professorships – throughout Germany and Switzerland – Barth never got rid of his pastor’s heart. In fact, he always wanted his theology (hence the name “Church” Dogmatics) to serve pastors in their attempts to preach the Word of God, administer the Sacraments, and tend the hurting hearts of their congregations. It is in this mode he delivered his sermon, “Make Me Pure of Heart,” an exegesis of the Matthean Beatitudes.

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Herr Karl, looking dapper.

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Like a true pastor, Barth wants his hearers to understand that, in the end, help comes only from God. Our best attempts, motives, social programs, and ministries, fall utterly short of true spiritual healing.

“Many high-minded persons with pure motives and champions of all that is good and true, venture into the darkness of the times; so many flaming outbreaks of new spirit, perchance, among the youth of a city or region; but the fire does not keep on burning, it does not break through, it does not spread farther. One feels more and more as if a mysterious barrier were thrust before us, as if we stood before a locked door which must first of all be opened from within if our endeavors to help are not to remain idle and meaningless gestures.”[1]

The enthusiasms of many young people have gone into the sorts of movements to which he refers. There are no shortages of them today. Barth then clarifies the purpose of this repeated, hopeless feeling; this proverbial beating of the head against the wall. What does God desire, in the midst of this seemingly endless striving? What is his purpose in it? To bring to a head the salvation of humanity, not from the spiritual heights, but from the depths of darkness.

“Perhaps all the many and wearisome exertions and efforts which we put forth are the last sure proof of our illness; as for example, in severe sickness the fever rises before the crisis; perhaps in the very distress of all these struggles and efforts something very simple, great, and healing for us must, and finally will, break through; a deep, clear, all-embracing knowledge of that which alone helps… The Bible at all events sees things in this light. ‘Immediately after the afflication of those days,’ so Jesus begins the passage in which He speaks of the everlasting help which shall make an end of all the sorrow of time and of the world; help, salvation, and deliverance really are the final end; but days full of affliction, days full of fear will precede this last end. Such was the experience of Jesus. Before the light of Easter stood the cross and the journey to Jerusalem. The place where all things change is not a height, not even a plain, but an abyss. And the greater the changes the greater the depth from which they arise.”[2]

I think of the moment during the eucharistic liturgy where, immediately following the fraction (the “breaking” of Christ’s body), the priest declares, “Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us! Therefore let us keep the feast!” In this moment, the priest lowers the host, breaks it loudly for all to hear, and raises it up again, giving his declaration. Here, the life of God is poured out to the world through the broken body of the Lord. Glory and life is found, not in a pacified trinitarianism, a social program of loveliness, but in the broken body of the God-man. Those who would gain their life must lose it for His sake. Life comes through death. We must commend ourselves to God – we who live in the deep darkness – to be healed.

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The fraction

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He continues:

“It seems to us to be too simple; and we are still too much distracted, too little gripped and penetrated by the seriousness of our condition to commend ourselves wholly to God as the only efficient helper of our lives. We are still too spiritually rich, too wise, too gifted, not to desire any other knowledge than that God helps. We are still not poor enough, not humble enough to permit this assurance to enrich and exalt us… Gladly would we permit ourselves to be helped in all our suffering and need, but again helped only by something human, by help which we can understand, which comes from us, and which is in accord with us. But just this cannot be.”[3]

We do not realize our condition. We must be brought low to be lifted up again. We must be destroyed to be recreated.

We will finish where Barth does: “He says it and what He says must be true, namely, that at the very place where we see only our affliction and our sins, only misery and death, there and just there we shall see God. This assurance can only hear, we can only believe, we can only wonder at, when it is told us again and again.”[4]

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Kyrie Eleison

[1] Karl Barth, “Make Me Pure of Heart” (Sermon), in Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McCracken (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2022), 202.

[2] Karl Barth, “Make Me Pure of Heart” (Sermon), in Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McCracken (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2022), 203. 

[3] Karl Barth, “Make Me Pure of Heart” (Sermon), in Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McCracken (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2022), 204-5.

[4] Karl Barth, “Make Me Pure of Heart” (Sermon), in Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McCracken (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2022), 207.

Doctrine

Humanae Vitae as (an) Outcome of Trinitarian Theology

Alex Renner

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The Encyclical

Humanae Vitae is the name of the papal encyclical written by Pope Paul VI in 1968 which addresses issues of the family and birth control. It was written before large amounts of the world decided to make artificial birth control a legalized medical reality, and the heart behind the letter was to call the nations of the world to moral account, to resist the “technical expedients” being made available to people. Technology was expanding its reach into most all areas of human life, and nations were heeding its call with an eery obedience. The technological attitude was spreading its worldwide campaign and the Pope sought to stand against it (or, at the very least, to temper its lust). In many ways Humanae Vitae is an artifact of the titanic theological war that has been waging for centuries between what popular theologians call the “disenchanted world” and the “enchanted world.” Or, antiquity and modernity. Platonism and materialism.

Masterfully, Paul VI calls into question technology’s function within the life of man. Behind all of his theologizing there lurks these palpable questions: What world-concept informs the urge to relegate all of man’s natural faculties to non-human entities? Further, what frame of mind must man hold in order to conclude that he is master of life itself, the belief implicated in the use of artificial birth control? Most importantly, what philosophical worldview is at work in the push to disallow the natural function of reproduction to “follow through” in producing children?

Paul VI’s letter reiterates the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching that artificial birth control runs contrary to the natural shape of Man as designed by God. He writes, “To experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator.”[1] Further, by its very nature artificial birth control seeks to hijack and suppress the natural workings of the person, holistically conceived. Paul VI writes, “We must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions – limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism.”[2] Crucially and theologically, for Christians, ABC contradicts the principle by which and through which those who have been baptized into Christ – the Selfless One – are to function: according to life, the divine life of the self-giving Trinity.

To that subject we turn.

The Principle of Livingness

It is the principle of what I call “livingness” which is at work in the Triune Life. We can see this in the simple Christian grammar which affirms – out of the relations of Sonship and Fatherhood – that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit “of Father and Son.” In other words, the Spirit is the Spirit “who is that relation of mutual love” between the two Persons. This “livingness” is the love which is essentially generative. It is productive of something, and, in this case, Someone.

The thing about love’s generativity is that you cannot have the former without the latter. Love, by its nature, is generative, productive of blessing, abundance, goodness. St. John’s famous dictum, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), a statement not simply attributive of the character of “being loving” but descriptive of the very Triune nature of God, gets at this idea. Paul VI describes love thus: “This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit… It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant… to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment… Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.”[3] Generativity is at the very heart of the Triune Life, seen in the self-giftedness of the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. Who God is, at His very base, is productive-loving-livingness. As a corollary to this love-logic, Paul VI concludes, “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.”[4] Similarly, commenting on the “conjugal act” itself, he writes, “The Church… teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the proceation of human life [emphasis mine].”[5]

When Christians are baptized into this God of livingness, they share in His life, taking on the contours of their newly given Father, Brother, and Comforter. They become more like the God into whose being they have been initiated, and become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). They take on this same livingness, this same generative, productive love-life, and start to mimetically model forth their love-God’s God-love.

Now Paul VI does not explicitly mention the connection between the Triunity of God and the generativity of the marriage relationship in Humanae Vitae. But I’m convinced it is why, at base, Paul VI had to say no to artificial birth control, because its sole purpose is the stifling of life and therefore of love, that love which only the Triune God can truly be. ABC may be comfortable; it may give a certain material stability; but it disallows the springing forth of new life, and therefore cannot be loving. This is because the soil has been poisoned, so to speak; life is not given the freedom to come forth, and life – being always good, always beneficial, always holy – comes directly from God who is life. In the same way Paul can say of the Father, that it is from Him “that every family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (Ephesians 3:15), so life, ζωη, is identified with the Person who is the Generated One (John 14:6), the One who gives His life to the world (John 3).

***Notice the difference here between what I am arguing and what stood at the center of the evangelical controversy surrounding “Eternal Functional Subordination.” The argument is not that the relationship of father-mother-child can be neatly mapped onto the Father-Son-Spirit relations, but that the same generativity that constitutes the dynamic of the God revealed in Christ is at work in the marriage relationship, as well. Of course, not univocally, but by participation and imitation.***

Conclusion

The Pope ends his letter with a series of charges given to the myriad groups affected and affecting the promulgation or use of ABC. Before he turns his attention to the married couple themselves, he describes their mission: “For the Lord has entrusted to them the task of making visible to men and women the holiness and joy of the law which united inseparably their love for one another and the cooperation they give to God’s love, God who is the Author of human life.”[6] Paul VI makes clear here that his mission is not to curmudgingly stifle the fun of married couples, but to uphold the Tradition’s definition of love as it has always been understood: as self-gift, all the way down.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 23.

[2] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 28-29.

[3] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 18-19.

[4] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 19.

[5] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 21-22.

[6] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), 36. 

book-review

Theology After Wittgenstein by Fergus Kerr

Alex Renner

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The two philosophers who most captured my imagination during my sophomore and junior years of college were Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Heidegger held a sort of demonic allure for me, if I’m honest, captivating me to go nose-to-nose with death unending and bid me keep staring. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, held a certain mystical aura around him that smelt of thick wisdom, his philosophizing yielding constant insights, myself sighing sighs of relief following hard-earned wrestling with his texts. Reading Wittgenstein was a rather different experience than reading Heidegger, whose works gave the reader the sense that they were being further pushed into the nothingness of Dasein.

Wittgenstein produced the most out-going living in me, too, if it can be put like that. His philosophy helped me see the sobriety that comes with submitting to my own intellectual and physical limitations, and in so doing freed me for them. His later philosophy invited me to a level-headed engagement with the language games and forms of life which define reality for me, and helped me see them from the proper perspective; i.e., from within them.

Fergus Kerr has written the definitive work on Wittgenstein’s relationship to the theological task in Theology after Wittgenstein.

I have a distinct memory of walking through a decrepit old used bookstore during a trip I took in college and finding an old book, published in the 70s, geared towards a theological analysis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. After finishing it, however (it was a rather small book), I couldn’t shake the feeling that its treatment just didn’t do justice to the breadth of Wittgenstein’s significance for theology. That little book was called Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Bearing of His Philosophy Upon Religious Belief. Upon finishing Kerr’s book, I found corroboration for the feeling I had upon putting that old book down.

The Myth of the Wordless (and World-less) Self

Before starting Theology After Wittgenstein, I imagined I would be reading a good deal about Wittgenstein’s influence, and not so much a treatment of his philosophy proper. This expectation was quickly undermined. Theology After Wittgenstein is primarily concerned to introduce the theological student to Wittgenstein’s corpus and major contributions, only secondarily applying such insights of his to the Christian framework. Of course, this feature does not therefore lessen the theological applicability of its insights, but was simply something I did not expect.

The first section attempts a bob and weave maneuver through Wittgenstein’s deconstruction of the “metaphysical myth” of Descartes’s philosophy of mind. In particular, Kerr focuses on how Wittgenstein can be used to help cure the Tradition’s tendency to posit a non-linguistic, un-mediated experience of God. In both ancient and modern forms, Kerr says, the Church has tended to hold out this experience as not only possible but preferable as the form of communion with God containing the most reality. The ancient understanding of bodily existence tended to see human bodies as an obstacle to a true and living faith, as something that must be purged and transcended. How some ancient theologians described the beautific vision hinted at a sort of ontological change that supposedly turns the blessed into beings not quite still human. In the modern world, the experience of the divine comes when the universal religious impulse, which is a decidedly psychological muscle, is tapped into; it is only through this stirring of the religious affections – a language-less activity – that God can be really reached. Here, too, one must transcend one’s boundedness in history so as to get in touch with “the really real,” i.e., the experience of religious ecstasy. What both epochs held can be summed up in the proposition: Who you really are is located somewhere behind or within your physical, world-bound existence.

The irony of the modern understanding of the self is that it looks strikingly similar to how the ancients characterized God (at least when describing his numerous “attributes”). Kerr writes, “The self who is free to survey the world from no point of view within the world often turns out to be the self who is totally impenetrable to anyone else – in this being once again rather like the hidden God of classical theism.”[1] Funny enough, and in line with contemporary theologians’ characterization of the Enlightenment’s effect on man’s self-understanding, Kerr claims that the modern man is just the Christian God without benevolence or love.

Continuing to diagnose, Kerr then says, “In the modern case, it is the natural universe that is to be represented as independently as possible of all human interpretation. In the ancient case, the self wants to lose itself in dispassionate contemplation of the reality that subsists in itself. In both cases, however, the subject is required to transcend human emotions, cultural and historical particularity, and the like, in order to encounter bare, that which is truly important.”[2] This is remarkably insightful.

The Limits of Our Language

In league with this conversation is the related discussion about the centrality of language. Part of Wittgenstein’s allure, especially when it comes to his later writings, is his teaching on the public nature of the Lebensformen, the forms of life, and the linguistic-constitution of humanity’s being-in-the-world (if I may use that term). Kerr writes, “Language is the conversation that is interwoven with the characteristic activities of human life.”[3]

In short: Wittgenstein’s contribution is to point out that it is a falsehood to think of language as the means whereby we pick things out in the world. Language is not the tool that exists between ourselves to communicate what we would otherwise communicate in some immediate way. Rather, language is what allows us to experience things at all. Language is the waters in which we swim; it is our constitution. To quote him directly, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”; meaning, know your place, human. You are not a god; you are bound by language.

Kerr says, “Wittgenstein’s wry… remarks are intended to provoke us into reflecting on the limits of our knowledge, and why we find these limits so chafing and restrictive. Why do we have to, or want to, devalue human ways of knowing in comparison with the unmediated knowledge that a god must presumably have? In questioning the validity of this (often hidden) object of comparison, Wittgenstein invites us to remember ourselves as we really are. Once and for all, that is to say, we need to give up comparing ourselves with ethereal beings that enjoy unmediated communion with one another.”[4] And this is not a bad thing to hear, especially for theologians.

Kerr continues on this point, this time in a theological key, that “a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman. This picture of the body gets in the way of our conversation with one another… Behavior as such is supposed to lack significance, in such a way that when it does appear significant it has to be because it is the outwardly observable effect of certain internal mental goings-on. The mind retreats from the face, just as the immaterial soul once disappeared behind the body.”[5] In other words, Kerr writes, the idea of the Metaphysical self has kept us alienated from the acceptance of the face-value truth of our own physical, historical, and linguistic limitations. We have been stuck in a metaphysical prison of our own making, one which has disallowed the materiality of our beings to come to the fore. It is in our refusal to accept this that we have become mistaken about who we are, and what are our capabilities.

“What if despising signs for their inert and inorganic materiality is to collude, however unwittingly, in centuries of discrimination against the mundane realities of how human beings live in community with one another?”[6] Absolute. Fire.

Fergus Kerr a Catholic Theologian?

Perhaps my one confusion about the book is really with the author. Fergus Kerr is one of the most prominent Dominican (meaning, Roman Catholic) theologians of the last fifty years. Perhaps this will betray a misunderstanding on my part, but does not the Catholic tradition stand as the arbiter and defender of the very conceptions Kerr uses Wittgenstein to dismantle? I may require a deeper reading of the Catholic Catechism to make this claim with more grounding, but it seems to me that the dualistic metaphysical world Wittgenstein seeks to tear down is precisely the one held up by many Catholic theologians (at least the ones who are committed to the Neoplatonism of some of its ancient thinkers). On the other hand, of course, Catholicism does a much better job of emphasizing the role of the body’s truth in relation to the whole of Christian life than Protestantism does, but Descartes was not a Lutheran. Just a thought.

I highly recommend you purchase and ponder Theology After Wittgenstein.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 18.

[2] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 25-26.

[3] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 30.

[4] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 45.

[5] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 46.

[6] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 48.

Quotation

Embodiment, Presence, Modernity: A Selection from Robert Jenson’s “Visible Words”

Alex Renner

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I don’t think I have read a more prophetic, life-giving, convicting, or true set of sentences in the past year than these written by Robert Jenson in 1978:

“Personal life occurs only in community. Just so, it can fail, according to either of its aspects, spirit or body.

            Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be spirit. I might perhaps still be a sort of abstract mind, perceiving reality beyond myself. But since I would not be drawn or shaken by that reality, I would not be drawn or shaken by what is beyond what I at any moment am. I would be changeless – which were I God, would be fine for me and disastrous for all else, and since I am not God, would be irrelevant to all else and disastrous for me. Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be self-transcendent in time.

            Insofar as late-modern ambition is that each of us shall be sole subject in his ‘own’ life, the possibility of spirit is attacked, and must be fought for with increasing explicitness and tenacity. To the exact extent that marriage indeed becomes a revocable arrangement between permanently ‘independent’ individuals, religion becomes self-realization, politics retreat to the ‘privacy of the voting booth,’ and in short the consumer ethic generally triumphs, our life is in the most primitive sense dispirited. Simultaneous lethargy and frenzy is the dominant characteristic of all those persons and groups in which late-modern abstract individualism is most consistently achieved. It is our society’s trick to make egocentricity a virtue; but it will not work, for my alienation from you is my alienation also from myself. 

            Our reality as spirit for one another is not self-sustaining. It can fail, regularly has, and now often does. If there is spirit that will not fail, we call such spirit God. God’s presence is the coming of such spirit. 

            Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be body. I would undoubtedly be an organism, and subject to Newton’s laws about masses in space. And we would impinge on each other, in the way of the celebrated billiard balls. But I would not be available to you, nor even to myself; there would just be this organic mass, fundamentally interchangeable with any other, and precisely as incomprehensibly and externally identified with a particular mind as Descartes found it. Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be available through time. 

            Our reality as bodies also can fail. The progressive disembodiment of late-modern civilization is full or ironies – as that Christianity is routinely attacked for, of all things, enmity against the body, often by persons visibly at war even with the organic condition of their own embodiment. Who devalues the body? Those for whom its gestures make no commitments, or those for whom they can make irrevocable commitment? Those who find freedom in casual nakedness, or those who reserve this most visible word for those to whom they have something extraordinary to say? Our society’s frenzy for the body is precisely frenzy for what we lack. Those who refuse all decisive commitment and so withdraw from availability, who have no grasp on the past, who wear instant clothes and make instant love and eat instant food, who forever are seeking identity, flit as wraiths through time, hungering for embodiment. 

            Body and spirit fail together. Were you pure spirit in my life, you would be nobody in particular, but a nobody who yet gave me orders. That is, you would belong to one of those impersonal but ruling collectives – bureaucratized corporations, militarized government, or the ‘media’ – that do in fact now determine so much of life. Were all others pure spirit in my life, these collectivities would appear to and in me as one and absolute, the dream of totalitarians would be fulfilled – and freedom and spirit too would cease. 

            The obvious outcome of the last paragraph must be the proposition: if there is body that does not fail, we call such body God. Therewith we have the great offense of Christian discourse about God… For indeed, God is a person; and that means that he is Spirit and Body.”[1]

[1] Robert Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 23-25.

Doctrine

Robert Jenson and the Logos Asarkos

Alex Renner

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Bruce McCormack’s landmark study on Christology, The Humility of the Eternal Son, leans heavily on the work of Robert Jenson to disprove the tradition’s positing of a bifurcated “Christological Subject.” He claims that this idea argues that there are two identities in God the Son: the “Eternal Son,” conceived as an identity of the Son abstracted from space and time, and Jesus Christ the human man. Jenson’s entire proposal is to reconceptualize the ontological framework within which claims about Christ’s identity can be made, and within that new framework to prove that Jesus Christ, the Jewish rabbi of the first century, “just is” the Eternal Son of the Trinity. He means, above all, to unify the Subject of the Gospels. How all of this can work out ontologically, you will have to read more of Jenson for.

I would like to share, however, some thoughts of Jenson’s written in his essay “Once More on the Logos asarkos,” where he explicates this very problem.

But before I start doing that, I would like to make one observation on Jenson reception, especially among who McCormack calls “evangelical Catholics.”

Reading Robert Jenson requires you to exercise intellectual empathy on an intense level. Frequently, evangelical readers of Jenson decide they want to read him, and, when they start doing so, quickly throw him away, labelling him a heretic of the worst kind. This is because those same evangelical readers come to his work with a preconceived understanding of the authority of ecclesiastical pronouncements, and, when they see that authority challenged – without asking about the epistemological framework that led to Jenson’s constructions – they react antagonistically. What I am convinced readers of Jenson do not understand, however – or do not try to understand – is that Jenson’s entire project is to do justice to the biblical witness concerning Jesus, God, and the God-world relation. His subsequent positions concerning how those two overlap and intertwine – God and the world, I mean – cannot (I repeat, cannot!) be understood apart from the first principles he begins with: the metaphysics he is convinced is posited by the Scriptures themselves. Jenson’s famous “Reply” essay, included in the same collection as the essay I will dig into here in a moment (Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics), strikes at this problem, too. There, Jenson in effect claims, “If you will not seek to understand the language I am attempting to speak – in accordance with the Scriptures and the Tradition – you will of course see me as a crazy heretic. So instead of labelling me as such, engage with my first principles. Then we can have a conversation.”[1]

Jenson is one of the most creative, insightful, brilliant, ballsy, and fun theologians I have ever read, and I say this for two reasons: one, he takes the Scriptures seriously enough as to take them “on their own terms,” i.e., as positing a metaphysic that makes sense of its inherent structures and symbolical world (a metaphysic, however, not totally equated with a Hebraic ontology); and two, he seeks to allow that metaphysic to determine everything about the Christian reality. All theological language he uses proceeds from and comes back to this metaphysical, scriptural basis. If for nothing else, these make him commendable to any scripturally-minded theologian (which is redundant term).

Now on to the essay.

Logos Asarkos

Jenson outlines four theses at the beginning of the essay, the first two of which are relevant for what I would like to highlight. The first thesis is:

“The very earliest christologians had it right. Jesus is the Son/Logos of God by his relation to the Father, not by a relation to a coordinated reality, ‘the Son/Logos.’ The Apologists’ creation of the ‘Logos Christology,’ which presumes the Logos as a religious/metaphysical entity and then asserts its union with Jesus, was an historic mistake, if perhaps an inevitable one. Great genius has subsequently been devoted to the task of conceptually pasting together God the Son/Logos and Jesus the Son/Logos of God, and we may be thankful for many of the ideas posted along the way. But the task itself is wrongly set and finally hopeless.”[2]

Right. From the beginning one can see the contours of Jenson’s penultimate concern: to bathe doctrinal reflection in his scripturally-derived matrix of relationality. It is Jesus’s relation to the Father that constitutes Jesus as the Son; further, it is not theologically permissible to posit – “behind the back of Jesus Christ,” we could say – some other than the one Jesus Christ is in revelation. This latter move is what locked in theological discourse to an alien metaphysical structure that would determine its terminology for all subsequent history; a discourse grounded in a system extrinsic to the Scriptural world (i.e., an imposed one).

His second thesis, intertwined with the first, runs thus:

“In whatever way the Son may antecede his conception by Mary, we must not posit the Son’s antecedent subsistence in such fashion as to make the incarnation the addition of the human Jesus to a Son who was himself without him. By the dogma, Mary is the mother of God the Son, she is Theotokos, and not of a man who is united with God the Son, however firmly. Thus the Church confesses that God the Son was himself conceived when Mary became pregnant – even if theology often labors to evade this confession’s more alarming entailments. That Mary is Theotokos indeed disrupts the linear time-line or pseudo time-line on which we Westerners automatically – and usually subliminally – locate every event, even the birth of God the Son; but that disruption is all to the theological good.”[3]

What is the thought that inevitable runs through the evangelical mind when a section like this is pondered? “This sounds like adoptionism, Patrick!” And indeed it would be, Patrick, if it was read with a Platonic metaphysic built in from the beginning. But assuming the Scriptural world is the world being engaged here – from within the Bible itself – then one cannot escape the reality that there is only One whom it calls the Son. Jenson here attempts to be radically consistent with the Scripture’s claim to Christ’s unity: to posit two persons from which one person can then be established is to perform some other maneuver than the maneuver taken by the scriptural narrative. Radically, Jenson says there is only one Jesus Christ, one Christological subject.

One cannot understand Jenson without taking into account his first principles mentioned earlier, one aspect of which I have not mentioned until now: Time. Time for God is not mere “negation of time,” as Jenson would say. But neither is it simple dependence on or boundedness “by” Time. Jenson says that God’s relationship with Time is that, in His freedom, He is able to be both free from Time and bound by Time. But this does not entail a relationship where God is “timeless,” as countless theologians have claimed. Rather, it is a real relation to Time; God is free towards Time in that He can choose to be both in it and out of it. But it is a mistake to read Jenson as totally beholden to a sort of Hegelian process-constitution, where God is totally bound by Time and Space.

One final note: I consider myself a Protestant. Particularly, I consider myself a Protestant concerned to do theology with and within – but not always in lock-step with – the Great Tradition. I am not convinced of all that Jenson has to say, and I find Jenson’s final conclusion to the problem of the unity of the Christological subject wanting in numerous ways. Yet, like McCormack, I praise Jenson’s efforts as those of a theologian seeking to construct appropriate theological language for this moment. In other words, I love reading Jenson because, as Lincoln Harvey has said elsewhere, Jenson is (or might be) wrong for all the right reasons.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Robert Jenson, “Reply,” in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 3.

[2] Robert Jenson, “Once More on the Logos asarkos,” in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics (Eugene, OR: Cascade books, 2014), 119.

[3] Robert Jenson, “Once More on the Logos asarkos,” in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics (Eugene, OR: Cascade books, 2014), 119-120.

Quotation

Robert Jenson: The Church is the Presence of Christ

Alex Renner

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“Plainly, for Paul the concept of personal embodiment is not itself a biological concept. We may discover what sort of concept it then is, and simultaneously declare our own usage, by first recalling our general interpretation that for Paul a person’s embodiment is his or her availability to other persons and thereupon to her or himself and by then again introducing German idealism’s subject-object distinction. That the church is the body of Christ, in Paul’s and our sense, means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me. Thus the primal posture of Christian prayer is not involution with closed eyes but an open posture, with eyes intent upon those speaking for the gathering. Yet we cannot rest with this first answer. In the New Testament, the church and risen Christ are one but can also be distinguished from each other; thus, for example, the church is the risen Christ’s ‘bride’ so that Christ and the church are joined as a couple. We may not so identify the risen Christ with the church as to be unable to refer distinctly to the one and then to the other. Protestants have for just this reason often feared such language as appears in the previous paragraphs. If we say only that the church is personally identical with Christ, it may seem that the church can never need reform or be open to it… Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ as the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us. Yet again invoking the distinction between community and association, we may say that the church as community is the object-Christ for the world and her own members severally, in that the church as association is objectively confronted within herself by the same Christ… But now a question can no longer be repressed: Why must Christ be embodied for us at all? Why is not a ‘spirital’ – in the vulgar sense – communion enough? That is, why is it not enough privately to think and feel Christ’s presence and to know that others in their privacies do the same? Why do I need to live in the assembled church? Or indeed why is it not enough that the bread and cup move me to inward awareness of the risen Christ and to a deeper feeling of communion with him – as is the understanding of most Protestants and not a few Catholics, whatever the official teaching of their churches? Why must we say the bread and cup are his objective intrusion, his body? Few have probed this question with such passion as Martin Luther. Were Christ’s presence in the assembly disembodied, it would be his presence as God but not his presence as a human, for as a human he is a risen body. And to the posit of Christ’s presence as sheer God, abstracted from his embodied actuality as Jesus, Luther can react only with horror: ‘Don’t give me any of that God!’ It is God’s hiding in human embodiment that is our salvation: Christ’s naked deity – were there in actuality such a thing – would be ‘nothing to do with us’ and just so destruction for us. Our salvation is ‘God incarnate… in whom are all the [divine] treasures… but hidden [emphasis added]’… The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. I am the one who died to gather them.’ And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers’… The metaphysics of Mediterranean antiquity, and for the most part those of subsequent Western tradition, of course do not allow for this simplicity. Therefore they are in error. The usual metaphysics suppose that what can be and what cannot be are determined by abstractly universal principles and never by a particular; thus the question of how the church with her sacraments can be the actual body of the individual human person Jesus can be settled only by argument that does not itself mention his particular personhood or the specific communion of the church. But this supposition of the Greek pagan thinkers is neither revealed nor an otherwise inevitable position. If the gospel is true, precisely the specific personhood of the individual human person Jesus is, by the initiative of the Father and in the freedom of the Spirit, the material determinant of what generally can be and cannot be.”[1]

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume 2: The Works of God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213-15.

Doctrine

The Son of the Father: T.F. Torrance on the Divinity of Jesus

Alex Renner

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T.F. Torrance is one of those theologians you can confidently say is a pretty homogenous writer when his whole corpus is considered. If you have read one of his books on theology – unless it is a highly specific monograph or journal article or something of the sort – you have read them all. This is not to be disparaging of Torrance’s work; he is one of my favorite theologians to learn and glean from. In fact, his sort of repetitive, lets-circle-back writing style fits in with his own theory of language and human understanding. For those who have read a good bit of his output, however, the thought can very well cross your mind when you approach a section you have read two or three times over elsewhere that, “He’s saying this again? Well alright…” Regardless of this aspect, his ideas are meaty and worth wrestling with.

Currently I am reading (for the first time) his Mediation of Christ, the book many veterans of Torrance commend to the newly-interested as the ideal starting place. Torrance has already mentioned Israel’s place in salvation history, Einstein, “onto-relations,” and the conceptual revolution he is convinced is taking hold in the Western world – all topics that fall into the “over-and-over” category – and is making his way to a treatment of Christology proper.

The Christology never gets old, though. Ask any regular reader of Torrance and they will tell you that coming away from sustained attention to his Christological and Trinitarian reflections makes you want to run to Church and perform a praise break. He writes in such a way as to lead his readers to a greater love and affection for the Lord Who has loved them in His own Person. He wants people to praise Jesus, and so he writes to fan the flames of his readers’ hearts.

Let us take his chapter, “The Person of the Mediator,” as an example. Here he lays out the importance of the Christian affirmation that Jesus Christ is “God of God, Light from Light,” i.e., just as much God as the Father is God. He says,

“The Sonship embodied in Jesus Christ belongs to the inner relations of God’s own eternal Being, so that when Jesus Christ reveals God the Father to us through himself the only begotten Son, he gives us access to knowledge of God in some measure as he is in himself… Jesus Christ is Son of God in a unique sense, for he is Son of God within God, so that what he is and does as Son of the Father falls within the eternal Being of the Godhead… Jesus Christ is to be acknowledged as God in the same sense as the Father is acknowledged as God, for it is in virtue of his Deity that his saving work as man has its validity.”[1]

Pretty solid, yet standard, Christian language concerning the Divinity of Jesus. So far, so good. Torrance is never content to simply state the official doctrinal language established by the historic Church, however; he is always looking to drive home the pastoral import of these traditional ways of speaking of God and Christ. So, of course, he continues:

“He [Jesus] does not mediate a revelation or a reconciliation that is other than what he is, as though he were only the agent or instrument of that mediation to mankind. He embodies what He mediates in himself, for what he mediates and what he is are one and the same. He constitutes in his own incarnate Person the content and the reality of what he mediates in both revelation and reconciliation.”[2]

Alrighty! So now Torrance is speaking to a question that the average, everyday Christian very well comes in contact with: Who (or what) does Jesus reveal? Himself! Torrance says. There is no reality or God apart from whom Jesus means to point us, since Jesus Himself “constitutes” that God we would look for elsewhere. It is God, in other words, who is on display in Jesus. It is God who heals the blind and cleanses the lepers; it is God who lifts up the poor from the dirt and gives them dignity as persons; it is the Holy One of Israel who condescends as a baby to unite us with Himself. Jesus is Himself the content of His own revelation. Jesus is Himself our salvation, and not simply the one Who points to it, as if it was something other than His very Person.

It gets even deeper, though. What are the consequences of holding a different opinion other than the one just expressed? What if Jesus really does point away from Himself to another reality, another thing called “salvation”? What if Jesus is not Himself God?

“If you cut the bond of being between Jesus Christ and God, then you relegate Jesus Christ entirely to the sphere of creaturely being, in which case his word of forgiveness is merely the word of one creature to another which may express a kindly sentiment but actually does nothing… 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 there is not unbreakable bond of being between Jesus Christ and God, then we are left with a dark inscrutable Deity behind the back of Jesus Christ of whom we can only be terrified. If there is no relation of mutual knowing and being and loving between the incarnate Son and the Father, then Jesus Christ does not go bail, as it were, for God, nor does he provide for us any guarantee in what he was or said or did as to what God is like in himself.”[3]

If Jesus Christ is not the Holy One of Israel, if He is not Himself God, then he is just a creature sending peace and blessing to us, ourselves creatures like him. We might could find a certain moralistic lesson in this, something close to an exemplarist religion where each person is trying his best to correspond himself to the good life, but we would still be in the dark about God. That is what Arius believed, and what current-day proponents of his thought still believe about God. If Jesus is not God, we would still have to guess at the character of the God who he supposedly represents. We would still have to guess whether, at the end of the day and regardless of the many assurances to the contrary, God is not actually just a sky-tyrant whose sole desire is to see humanity suffer and die. There would be no way of knowing this isn’t the case if Jesus is not Himself God.

And why is this? Why does Jesus have to be God for us to know the character of God? Because what Christians claim – what Jesus claimed about Himself – is that Jesus is God come to us as man. He is God, crossed over the divide of being onto our side of things. He is the God stepped from behind the curtain. He has said, “Here I am.”

Furthermore, the Bible’s portrayal of Jesus is one whose delight is in the restoration of people. Everywhere he goes, the Bible tells us, Jesus seeks to heal, restore, and bring to life that which has been destroyed by sin and death. God is good, life-giving, and holy, we know, because Jesus is good, life-giving, and holy.

And thank the Lord that that is true. Thank Jesus (!) that we do not have to guess about who He truly is, but we can rest in His blessed character shown not only among the poor and the widowed and the sick, but upon the cross, where the depths of divine love are on absolute full display.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 64.

[2] T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 67.

[3] T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 68-70.

Doctrine

The Scriptural Christ is the True Christ

Alex Renner

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There are many Jesus Christs that roam this world. There is the Muslim Christ – the one who did not die on the cross, who paved the way for Muhammad, who taught profoundly of a god; there is the Buddhist Christ, the person whose teachings pointed to the self-negation at the heart of true wisdom; there is the Republican Christ, the Christ whose sole passion is for the rights of individuals to forge their own path in life, who looks with favor on the American capitalist state and its democratic structures; there is the Liberal Christ, whose definition of love is something like self-actualization, self-care, self-liberation. There is even the Modernist Christ, the first-century Jewish man whose perfect God-consciousness helped the rest of humanity cultivate their own God-consciousnesses. This one even changed the face of the political, social, and economic state of the ancient world, and was a great moral teacher.

And then there is the Scriptural Christ. Or, in other words, the biblical Christ, the one whom the Christian Church worships. This Christ is the one for whom and through whom all exists (Col. 1), the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, who was God and was with God in the beginning (John 1), the one whose Spirit cries out “Abba, Father” within the hearts of Christians and groans with groans too deep for words (Rom. 8), the one whose sorrowful Passion propitiated the sins of the entire world (Isa. 53), the one who fulfills his own teachings about Blessedness with perfect consistency (Matt. 5), the one whose righteousness justifies and unites us with Himself by faith (Rom. 5-6), the one who is love (1 John), the one whose flesh and blood men and women must eat in order to have eternal life (John 6), the one who chose to empty himself and take on the form of a servant, forfeiting his privilege as the Son of God (Phil. 2), the one who entered the world alongside the Spirit to form the world from the waters of chaos (Gen. 1), and the one who has made peace by the blood of his cross (Col. 1).

The Scriptural Christ is the Person at the heart of the Old and New Testaments, the hermeneutical key to unlock its infinitely-deep structures. He is the one Christians meet when, in faith and in the Church, they read the Scriptures with the eyes the Scriptures themselves bestow. The logic the Bible invites its readers to inhabit and live within is a Christ-logic. There is no thinking about or with the Bible or its many sayings – across the wide variety of its genres and metaphors and imageries – without an inhabiting of this Christ-logic. The Scriptures will always be read in error when this Christ-logic is forsook for the latest philosophical or hermeneutical lens (which, to be fair, are many of the times interesting, well-thought-out lenses, but just not Christian lenses). To read the Bible correctly, says the history of the Church, you have to both start with and end with the Scriptural Christ.

Theologian John Behr teaches us this when he writes, in The Way to Nicaea, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it, so justifying the claim that Christ died and rose ‘according to the Scriptures.’ It is important to note that it is Christ who is being explained through the medium of Scripture, not Scripture itself that is being exegeted; the object is not to understand the ‘original meaning’ of an ancient text, as in modern historical-critical scholarship, but to understand Christ, who, by being explained ‘according to the Scriptures,’ becomes the sole subject of Scripture throughout… Christ, the Word of God, is often said to be the key to Scripture.”[1]

May the Church’s reading of Scripture not fall prey to the kind of scriptural interpretation that would approach its Book like any other ancient text, but may she read and interpret it as the locus of revelation, the place wherein her Lord may be seen, kissed, and loved.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology Vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-29.

Quotation

The Self-Understanding of the Theologian in Karl Barth’s The Christian Life

Alex Renner

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There is a blessed chapter in the Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Barth, called Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, where Barth is talking about the concept of wonder in relation to the discipline of theology. After claiming that Jesus Christ is the event that causes continuous wonder in the theologian, he turns to speaking about how, in response to Christ-centered wonder, the theologian is then forced to understand himself. He writes:

“The astonishment of the individual carries with it the fact that no one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself… Whatever, however, and whoever I may be in other respects, I have finally and profoundly become a man made to wonder at himself by this wonder of God… This confrontation occurs in even the most timid and untalented attempt to take seriously the subject in which I have become involved or to work theologically at all, whether in the field of exegesis, Church history, dogmatics, or ethics… In one way or another I am obliged to consider the question of the wonder of God. I may perhaps attempt to steal away from the confrontation and preoccupation with this wonder. But I can no longer be released from this confrontation. Theology undoubtedly gives the man who is concern with it something like a character indelebilis, an indelible quality. Whoever has eyes to see will recognize even at a distance the man who has been afflicted and irreparably wounded by theology and the Word of God. He will be recognizable by a certain earnestness and humor, whether genuine or spurious, real or only pretended. But the process and the way in which it was possible for him to become such a man will always be hidden, even from the theologian himself. This process will remain a deeply wondrous enigma and mystery. I no doubt know and recognize myself quite possibly in all my other opinions and inclinations, in all my other real or fancied or desired possibilities. By birth and nature we are indeed all rationalists, empiricists, or romanticists in some osrt of mixture, and we have no occasion to be astonished at ourselves in this respect. All that is simply a fact. But I become, am, and remain something unknown, a different person, a stranger, when I am counted worthy to be permitted and required to wonder with respect to the wonder of God. And this is what happens when I become concerned with theology. How could my existence with this permission and demand to wonder ever become an everyday, familiar, and trite fact? How could this attribute of my existence ever become transparent to me?”[1]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Barth, Karl. 2022. Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings. Edited by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McMaken. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 199-200.