Tag: lutheran theology

Doctrine

Characteristics of Reformed Christology

Alex Renner

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Vermigli on the left, pointing to the Scriptures. Brenz on the right, looking like Steve from Minecraft.

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I’m currently making my way through Davenant Hall’s translation of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ, written to combat the Lutheran Christology of Johannes Brenz, who had published his short On the Personal Union of the Two Natures in Christ shortly before. The history of Christological reflection in the Protestant tradition is truly a wonderful and formative one, which causes the careful reader to balk at those loud voices who claim that the early Protestant theologians were departing in some fundamental (as in, non-Christian or non-“catholic”) way from the tradition of reflection that came before the Reformation began. These men (on both sides) knew the Scriptures, and fought for their peoples and congregations, thereby making them pastors as well as theologians (i.e., the best sort of theologians). The best theological insights come from pastors who are concerned with the spiritual health of their flocks.

In my last post, I illustrated two diagrams, relating what I take to be the general contours of the Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the communication of attributes. The Lutheran understanding of the person of Christ (driven by a commitment to a corporeal sacramental presence) can be understood in reference to their doctrine of the genus majesticum, that divine attributes natural to the divine nature are communicated to the human nature at the moment of the union. Bruce McCormack writes on this point, “Their interest — given the requirements of their eucharistic theology — was to understand how the human nature of Christ might obtain a share in the divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and — most importantly where the question of the real presence is concerned — omnipresence.”[1] The Reformed, in contrast, rejected the genus majesticum and argued that if divine attributes like omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience were genuinely communicated to it the human nature of Christ would cease to be really and genuinely human, and so would only concede communication to the human nature those attributes which would keep Christ’s humanity intact (things like “divine life,” power, etc.).

These theological decisions were made from diverse commitments to understandings of the human, and the appropriate conditions for a Christian doctrine of the God-world relation (the “ontological divide”). Interestingly, each side ascribed to the other ancient heretical labels, the Reformed being labelled Nestorian because of their rigid separation of the natures, and the Lutheran being labelled Eutychian because of their supposed confusion of the natures. What each side rejected, even as the Reformed (also) rejected the majesticum, was what is called the genus tapenoticum. The tapenoticum claims that, just as the majesticum teaches the attributes natural to the divine nature are communicated to the human, likewise, the attributes natural to the human are communicated to the divine. Nobody saw this as desirable or even approximating an orthodox rendering of divinity (characterized by simplicity, immutability, and the like).

What I find so interesting in reading Vermigli is that he exposes a richer (which is really the more traditional) way to conceive of the differences between the Reformed and the Lutheran. For me, as for many young theologians who grew up in the (broadly) Reformed camp—which is the de facto reality if you are in any denomination that is non-Roman or non-Lutheran—I could probably tell you that the theological differences between the Reformed and Lutheran had to do with something involving predestination and the real presence. Now, these are true differences, worthy to be noted and discussed. Yet, these differences are less fundamental than the differences between the camps regarding their understanding of the person of Christ. As noted above, you don’t have something like the Lutheran real presence without a concomitant commitment to a doctrine of Christ that ontologically makes possible what is claimed in their sacramentology.

But this recognition of the difference in understanding is not a betrayal of the thought that these were two different Christs under discussion. The Christian (Scriptural) Christ was always the res towards which each side’s doctrine was pointing, but the language adopted and deployed—the distinct spiritualities and hermeneutical tendencies of these groups which nonetheless belonged to the same Scriptural family—led each side to vehemently fight the other. As I meditate on their differences, both between each other and in comparison to the late medieval Roman Church, I am led to the conclusion that the Reformed were the more “radical” in regards to their self-differentiation from Rome. The Lutheran camp seems to me closer in continuity to the thought-forms of the medieval fathers.

So, what are the distinct “characteristics of Reformed Christology”?

Here are a few that come to mind:

  • A commitment to locality: for a created nature to persist as a created nature, it must have a physical, definable location, shape, and size. Any fluctuation here and you have compromised the definition of created. This is of course what led to the extra Calvinisticum, that Christ’s body dwells, physically, in the empyreal realm, or highest heaven, which is (in some fuzzy way) a place that can be occupied.
  • A commitment to a distinction between the dimensions of reality (the different “realms of natures”). A created nature does not stop being a created nature when an uncreated nature is housed in (or hypostatizes) it. Similarly, an uncreated nature is not at all changed or effected when it joins itself to an uncreated nature. It is the language of “two natures unimpaired” I am getting at here.
  • A language pattern that corresponds to “composite Christology.” It is the God-Man, always in a sort of dialectical tension, that seems to be the reality towards whom the Reformed are pointing.

Each of these points seem to me upheld in those churches which claim(ed) the title “Reformed.” It is up to Reformed theologians today to maintain these inherent tendencies of the Reformed tradition, if indeed they are derived from the Scriptures.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Bruce McCormack, “Christology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology, ed. by Paul T. Nimmo and David A.S. Ferguson, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 65.

Quotation

Robert Jenson on Protology and the Futility of Free-Floating Interpretation

Alex Renner

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Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology Vol. I is a treasure trove of beautiful doctrinal insights. Near the end of his first section, he comments on what is needed to engage with the theological tradition in an honest way. Just like Webster argues in his magisterial Holy Scripture, Jenson posits that the only way a coherent doctrine of Scripture can be formulated and maintained is one grounded in the self-presentation of the God who is Trinity; i.e., the one who Jesus reveals in the Spirit by calling Him Father.

Here are two block quotes from Jenson sure to bless your soul and mind.

First, on Scripture:

“Whenever someone has tried to construe the unity of Scripture otherwise than by the identity of this God the book has fragmented, first into Hebrew Scripture and New Testament and thereupon into traditions and genres and redactions within each. And when communities other than the church – in modernity, the communities of various ideologies and particularly the surreptitious such community of supposedly autonomous scholars – try to appropriate the Bible for their own purposes, the book falls into mere shards – to which, of course, anyone is welcome… The modern attempt to interpret scripture ‘historically’ has been intrinsically self-defeating and has now defeated itself, since it has curiously supposed that to interpret the Bible historically we must abstract from the history for whose attestation the church assembled this collection in the first place, the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ.”[1]

The free-floating scholars out there, who claim to represent the rational person’s engagement with the biblical material, fall into meaninglessness. This is rooted in the Modernist’s blindness to his own placement in a history and a community; it would be better, I suspect Jenson would say, if the independent scholar would fly the banner of Atheistic Fragmentation as the community from which he wrestles with the material instead of the banner of View from Nowhere. Then, the presuppositional commitments the interpreter truly does hold would come to conscious explication, and wouldn’t be hidden beneath the false belief in one’s own prescient objectivity over and above the text.

Then, protology. Here is where Jenson sets forth his (self-avowed) revisionist theological agenda, one in the vein of Barth’s methodology but one that also decisively breaks with Barth at important points. He writes:

“God is not only identified by Exodus and Resurrection; he is identified with them. Thus we may state the point of this chapter yet one more time: the God to be interpreted in this work is the triune God. For the doctrine of the Trinity is but a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ. The primal systematic function of trinitarian teaching is to identify the theos in ‘theology’… For if a systematically developed discourse about God precedes the exposition of Trinity, there is danger that a nontrinitarian identification of God may be hidden in that discouse, to confuse all that follows. Western theology’s late-medieval and modern tradition has tended to treat first of God simply as he is God and only thereafter of his Trinity; the temptations posed by this ordering have recently been much discussed. The extent to which any particular theologian may actually have fallen to these temptations is doubtless often arguable. The present work seeks to avoid the temptation altogether, by breaking with this aspect of the tradition.”[2]

This point is one famously highlighted by Barth about the way in which to approach the theological task. Jenson and Barth argue that, instead of tripping up himself at the beginning of the race by forcibly inserting the God of ancient Hellenism into his doctrinal engagement with the Word of God, the theologian should instead consciously set out to exegete the Scriptures in a Christian way (i.e., in a Trinitarian way). The God of “general” Theism has no place here.

I am not finished with Jenson’s ST just yet. As I plow through it, however, I am struck by the way in which Jenson’s philosophical commitments alter his approach, sometimes in very strange color schemes. Nonetheless, his dependence on Barth shines through in some of the best possible ways… not least in his emphasis on the centrality of God as Trinity.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.

[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.