God of Salvation

God of Salvation Soteriology in Theological Perspective

Edited by Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae

God of Salvation The theology of salvation stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Very often the structure of Christian salvation is seen in terms of a single theme, such as atonement for sins, forgiveness, liberation or friendship with God. It is easy to reduce soteriology to a matter of merely personal experience, or to see salvation as just a solution to a human problem. This book explores a vital yet often neglected aspect of Christian confession – the essential relationship between the nature of salvation and the character of the God who saves. In what ways does God’s saving outreach reflect God’s character? How might a Christian depiction of salvation best bear witness to these features? What difference might it make to start with the identity of God as encountered in the gospel, then view everything else in the light of that? In addressing these questions, this book offers fresh appraisals of a range of major themes in theology: the nature of creaturely existence; the relationship between divine purposes and material history; the holiness, love and judgement of God; the atoning work of Jesus Christ; election, justification and the nature of faith; salvation outside the church; human and non-human ends; the nature of eschatological fellowship with God. In looking at these issues in the light of God’s identity, the authors offer a stimulating and tightly-argued reassessment of what a Christian theology of salvation ought to resemble, and ask what the implications might be for Christian life and witness in the world today.

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God of Salvation

Soteriology in Theological Perspective

Edited by Ivor J. Davidson University of St Andrews, Scotland and Murray A. Rae University of Otago, New Zealand

© The editors and contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data God of salvation : soteriology in theological perspective. 1. Salvation – Christianity. 2. Economy of God. I. Davidson, Ivor J. II. Rae, Murray. 234–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data God of salvation : soteriology in theological perspective / [edited by] Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae. p. cm. Includes indexes. ISBN 978-0-7546-6619-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-2167-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-2162-7 (ebook) 1. Salvation—Christianity. I. Davidson, Ivor J. II. Rae, Murray. BT751.3.G63 2010 234–dc22 2010032122 ISBN 9780754666196 (hbk) ISBN 9781409421672 (pbk) ISBB 9781409421627 (ebk) II

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK

Contents List of Contributors   Acknowledgements   Introduction: God of Salvation   Ivor J. Davidson 1

vii ix 1



‘It was the Will of the Lord to Bruise Him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God   John Webster

2

A Simple Salvation? Soteriology and the Perfections of God   Stephen R. Holmes

35

3

Salvation as Judgement and Grace   Andrew Burgess

47

4

Creation and Salvation in the Image of an Incomprehensible God   61 Kathryn Tanner

5

The Salvation of Creatures   Nicola Hoggard Creegan

77

6

Salvation and History   Murray A. Rae

89

7

Salvation and Atonement: On the Value and Necessity of the Work of Jesus Christ   Oliver D. Crisp

8

Salvation’s Setting: Election, Justification and the Church   Christiaan Mostert

9

Salvation Beyond the Church’s Ministry: Reflections on Barth and Rahner   Geoff Thompson

10

Salvation’s Destiny: Heirs of God   Ivor J. Davidson

Select Bibliography   Index of Biblical References   Index of Authors and Subjects  

15

105 121

137 155 177 187 191

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List of Contributors Andrew Burgess is Vicar of All Saints Anglican Parish Church, Nelson, New Zealand. Oliver D. Crisp is Reader in Theology, University of Bristol. Ivor J. Davidson is Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology and Head of the School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. Nicola Hoggard Creegan is Senior Lecturer in Theology, Laidlaw College, Auckland, New Zealand. Stephen R. Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology, University of St Andrews. Christiaan Mostert is Professor of Systematic Theology, United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne, Australia. Murray A. Rae is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics and Head of the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Otago, New Zealand. Kathryn Tanner is Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale Divinity School. Geoff Thompson is Principal and Lecturer in Systematic Theology, Trinity Theological College, Brisbane, Australia. John Webster is Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Aberdeen.

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Acknowledgements A number of the chapters in this collection were first presented at a lively colloquium on the doctrine of Christian salvation held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; the remainder were commissioned as further contributions to the theme. The editors are very grateful to all the contributors for their work. They also wish to express their sincere thanks to Sarah Lloyd and her team at Ashgate, especially Ann Allen, Sophie Lumley and Nikki Harris, for their enthusiasm, patience and skill in bringing the book to publication, and to Dr Brett Knowles for his assistance with the indexes.

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Introduction: God of Salvation Ivor J. Davidson

I The theology of salvation stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Historic Christian confession claims that the God who gave the world its being acts to redeem it from its current conditions of disorder, thus restoring otherwise lost creatures to fellowship with their creator. The reasons for this saving action lie entirely in God’s own character. There is nothing about creation that God needs, nor is there anything within creation that, either in anticipation or in actuality, summons an obligation on God’s part. Creatures have inexplicably chosen death rather than life, and brought disaster upon themselves; they possess no plea for extenuation of their responsibility, no means of releasing themselves from their bondage to self-destructive forces, no prospect of clawing their own way back to intimacy with their maker. Their folly deserves judgement, the tragedy of estrangement from their intended relationship with God, and the attendant chaos of dislocation within their own sphere in the spoiling of the conditions which properly make for their flourishing. All this the seemingly endless catalogue of worldly evil attests. Yet all this, Christian faith says, is no impediment to God’s primordial desire; the madness of the creaturely preference for self-dissolution, foreseen by God, does not block the divine will that contingent creation should know its creator still, should yet find its intended telos of peace and fulfilment in communion with him. In the unfathomable love that God is, God does not give up on his world, but moves in mercy to bring it back to himself. This loving commitment is traceable in God’s maintenance of creation, his sustaining of creaturely time and space, his gracious preservation of the universe from absolute implosion, his exquisitely variegated macro- and micro-cosmic work of engendering all that is authentically beautiful, good, just and true. It is evident in God’s freely-chosen involvement in human history, in the generosity with which he establishes relations with unworthy human subjects, pledging himself to be their God, keeping faith with them in spite of all their infidelities, promising to make his presence with them a source of blessing to all the nations of the earth. Climactically, the divine commitment means the unveiling of the wonder that stands behind the entire course of God’s covenantal self-binding as it unfolds in time: God’s gracious determination to come among humans in person, in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. In



God of Salvation

the history of Jesus of Nazareth, God is present with us as nowhere else, living a finite, fleshly existence, suffering and dying as human himself. The ‘becoming’ of the divine Son or Word – his taking of flesh and dwelling among us, his assumption and abolition of sin – is, again, a movement of loving freedom, not a process of divine self-realization or ontological experimentation; there is no requirement upon God, moral or ontological, so to act, nor is there in this action a modification of God’s intrinsic completeness. There is, to be sure, a divine journey, a path of commitment to worldly circumstance that is immeasurably serious, an undertaking to walk a road that leads to a real death. But if there is no straightforward insulation of divinity from the experience of the grave, there is also in this, at least as clearly, no suspension of God’s infinite abundance, no differentiation of his properties into the essential versus the optional, the eternally absolute versus the temporarily dispensable. There is but the enactment of that which God’s Godness is, and thus is seen to be capable of being. Just so, the drama is, for creatures, profoundly startling, disruptive of natural hypotheses about the conceivable relationship of divinity and finitude, shattering to instinctive assumptions that creaturely life must be immune from personal invasion of such a kind by any being supposed to be the originating agent and sustaining rationale of the cosmos. The story is radical in its sheer intrusiveness, in its unqualified censure of every notion – complacent or despairing – that whatever divinity there be could not do this. But the refutation is also, par excellence, gloriously positive news, for at its heart lies the declaration that the crucified Jesus is raised from the dead, that he indeed belongs by nature within the majesty of God, and that by virtue of what has occurred in his living, dying and exaltation, all things in heaven and on earth are different. In and as this figure, the message says, the one God of all has acted to secure reconciliation for the estranged – not merely to inspire or improve them (inexhaustibly evocative though his action assuredly is), but to do for them that which they never could achieve for themselves: bring them into fellowship with himself. Since that constitutive work is from first to last God’s own, its realization, like its conception and its means, also occurs in strict consequence of divine initiative. The Holy Spirit of God, the one who gives life to creation all the time, the enabler and sustainer of the incarnate Word and the agent of his resurrection to life, is the one through whose power his achievement becomes effectual for all its intended beneficiaries. The Spirit establishes relationship with the once dead, now living Jesus Christ, opening eyes and ears to the lordly majesty of his summons and the significance of his enthronement over all things. The Spirit calls individuals into personal communion with him, the ascended mediator and forerunner of his people; by that regenerative and adoptive summons, an innumerable family of brothers and sisters of this Jesus is gathered – the undeserving, the weak, the hopeless from every nation under heaven – to know in and alongside the exalted, forever enfleshed Son the reality of his Father as theirs. The recipients of such blessing belong by rights afar off, without natural title or claim; they receive mercy, and that

Introduction



of an order that far transcends moral absolution or judicial clemency: translated from death to life, they are led by the Son to the one he eternally calls Father. Such saving fellowship is an eschatological business, presently experienced in via, in anticipation of a consummation that is yet to be. But the pledge of its ultimate fulfilment is this same Spirit, who works to sanctify, renovate and empower those who are thus blessed with a genuine foretaste of what is to come. The Spirit is also pleased to render them an instrument of God’s liberating purposes for all creation, for not only redeemed human beings but a renewed physical universe will ultimately issue from that which was accomplished in the coming of the Son and the sending of his Spirit. Along with the elevation of humanity to its intended place in filial fellowship with God will occur at last – in such fashion as God determines and in whatever respect of creaturely freedom and status as he chooses – the renovation of creation as a whole, the bringing about of appropriate ends for all that God has made. As in the atonement effected in its outworking, such cosmic purpose does not preclude divine judgement, or the possibility that legitimacy of end may entail cessation of being or enduring exclusion from God’s presence. But it is the breadth and depth of the Spirit’s redemptive and perfecting sweep that deserve emphasis. As the materiality of the incarnation, resurrection and ascension powerfully establishes, salvation is no deliverance of creatures from the conditions of creatureliness, no release of humans from the restrictions of their worldly environment, no emancipation of the spiritual from the corruptions of the physical. It is the restoration of creation and creatures holistically – human and non-human, physical as well as spiritual – to their intended state. Such restoration is no mere repair job, a contingency measure to patch up a realm that is spoiled. It is the bringing of the world to an even greater blessing than first it knew: the structure of creaturely dignity and communion with God that is represented and effected in Jesus Christ. In the final arrival of the incarnate Saviour – the end for which creation groans – all reality will, in some sense, find itself summed up in him. In the saving actions of Christ and the Spirit, God reveals his essential character as the triune God. The God who has need of no society external to the plenitude of his own relational life so loves the world as to enter into union with its dust and atoms; bearing in himself the cost of creaturely alienation, he draws the estranged into the sphere of his eternally perfect communion with himself. The singleness of God’s purpose is of crucial importance here. There is no will or disposition of God the Father that is not shared utterly by God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, no resolution of differences between divine persons, no conflict in the compulsions of love and holiness that are co-essential to God’s inner life. If atonement’s motivation is singular, so too is its execution: each of the persons of the Godhead has a particular role appropriate to his identity, but there is no changing of the attitude of one divine person by another, no conditioning of a wrathful God into a gracious one by inner-divine appeasement, no price of salvation that is not absorbed by all of the divine hypostaseis together. The drama of atonement is constitutive history, the establishment of peace with God for creatures, but it is history that enacts the



God of Salvation

harmony of resolve and indivisibility of fellowship that are intrinsic features of God’s life in himself – just so does it open up the access it does to the personal structure of that life. II Soteriology’s concern is the exposition of this evangel, the application of mind and tongue to the wonders that God has done, and thus to the promulgation of God’s glory. Like all Christian theology, it is irreducibly an act of confession, faith’s acknowledgement of that which it finds to be the case, a consequence of transformative encounter and ongoing relationship with the one whose presence means life for the dead. Confession is obedience to a Word that is heard, a response of submission to a Subject who precedes us. That Subject’s sovereign selfdisclosure bears the responsibility for its own effectiveness, arresting, enlightening and transforming those to whom he gives himself to be known, confounding their pretensions to arbitrate reality for themselves, generating within them modes of thought, speech and action that attest the momentousness of his arrival as the one who really does make all things new. Such attestations are not less than human, and they are characterized by the riskiness, provisionality and brokenness of all human communication. They are also rich in their diversity, for God’s will for self-bestowal is effected afresh in such circumstances as God in his wisdom sees fit to choose: each situation gives rise to particular sorts of confessional wonder, doxologies specific to those who speak them, conceptual expositions couched in the vernacular of situated agents. There is no such thing as a docetic response to God’s call, and no response is ever free from the clothing of the time and space within which it is set. The appraisal of all language and ritual, the assessment of its resonances in settings other than its own, poses genuine hermeneutical challenges; styles appropriate in one place may not straightforwardly be accessible or pertinent in another. But confession is not spontaneous expressivism, the fictive play of private taste or personal adventure. Nor is cultural location fate, the ineluctable determination of contingent circumstance – and thus, say, a licence for repudiation of catholicity, an excuse for bare minimalism of kerygma, an obligation to yield meekly to the putative dictates of prevailing respectability in this situation or that. The lure of individualism and the obsession with present circumstance need to be tempered by the reflection that where we are is where the recipients of God’s mercy have always been – overwhelmed with divine largesse. If the knowledge faith claims is a knowledge whose reliability and transferability are afforded by the authoritative work of the divine Spirit, the primary setting of speech about this wonder is a field of divine action. That sphere embraces, but is not hemmed in by, worldly particularities. Wherever it is undertaken, soteriology takes place in the presence of God; amidst all the messiness of history, that same God is building his church.

Introduction



The awareness of that reality is no excuse, however, for intellectual laziness, a reason to bracket the human tasks of theological scrutiny in complacent appeal to God’s sovereign role in the disclosure of truth. Such resignation, tinged with piety though it may be, is a species of the same erroneous logic that supposes all proclamation of the evangel to be essentially superfluous, since God is finally capable of saving his elect regardless – or (to invoke a rather different preference) that it is mistaken to try to communicate divine mystery in human speech at all in so far as that mystery must in actuality impress itself upon us by some other means. Far from allowing us to prescind from interrogating the adequacy of our confession, the realization that theology is confronted at every turn by God’s prevenience presses us to take with absolute seriousness the obligation of attending to what it really means that this God should make himself known. This means, in particular, listening to the witness to God’s disclosure in the language of Holy Scripture, the Word that God has been pleased to generate, sanctify and employ as unique textual instrument of his self-disclosure. It means listening to Scripture’s witness in the company of others, past and present, who have found that the living one does indeed speak of himself in these pages, and who have found shorthand ways of reporting his speech that may be rather profound. It means prayerful petition of God for discernment, and for divine enabling to articulate faithfully what is heard. It means fresh acts of submission, a discipleship of mind and spirit that recognizes theological responsibility is not the calculation of doctrinal capital but a continual preparedness to test all things in accordance with the gospel of God. If that is so, soteriology must keep going back to its roots. This does not mean repetitious conservatism, for that is a form of the very domestication that is ruled out by a due sense of theology’s work as occurring within the presence of its living subject, God the Lord. Proof-texting from heroes and the dry recitation of orthodoxy are no more a guarantee of theological fidelity than they are a likely recipe for kerygmatic liveliness. Ecclesial authority, particularly that enshrined in ecumenical confession, has special status, and pleas to set it aside in the name of personal freedom, contextual immediacy or cultural correlation deserve to be treated with suspicion. Like everything else in theology, soteriology is undertaken not only in the presence of the Lord but also in the presence of his saints, within a community of belief and practice in which social, temporal and geographical boundaries bear only relative significance, and where we ignore our spiritual ancestry at our peril. But properly radical soteriology is anything but unthinking repetition: it is the vastly demanding – and endlessly exciting – task of tracing, again and again, the revealed identity-in-movement of the God who saves. Soteriology must be vigilant, then, that it does not replace the primacy of this responsibility with some other supposed obligation. If would-be exposition of Christian salvation is controlled by an intellectual scheme whose foundations are foreign to the logic of Scripture, or if the narrative patterns and language of Scripture are set aside in favour of some other idiom – one that is supposedly more sophisticated in conceptual terms, or more accessible to a cultural public for



God of Salvation

whom argumentation remoto Christo will naturally have greater appeal – there is considerable danger that some being other than the God of the gospel is in fact in view. Associations of Scripture’s God with the putative divinities of metaphysical reasoning are invariably precarious, and Christian investments in general theism have exercised a pernicious influence in all kinds of areas (contributing a very great deal, arguably, to the genesis of modernity’s atheisms). Not the least of these effects have been instanced in soteriological territory: in the treatment of divine sovereignty as an abstract force in election; in a priori construals of divine attributes such as love, justice or holiness and their putative relationships in atoning action; in accounts of reconciliation which make it sound like ‘plan B’ on the part of a monistic prime mover responding in disappointment, even surprise, to his creation’s waywardness; in expositions of atonement that risk implying cosmic good order, or the exercise of divine potency, or the sating of divine anger, is somehow more primary than divine generosity. That generosity itself is seldom represented well by general categories, such as – to cite some familiar fashions – hospitality, friendship, gifting, or pedagogy (socio-economic liberation, solidarity in suffering, and the repudiation of violence are widely favoured as didactic themes). Very significant truths about the ethics and politics of salvation may well be conveyed on the surface of that art, but the basic draughtsmanship misleads, in so far as it suggests that divine salvific action can conceivably be treated as a more impressive instance of something discernible elsewhere. Reconciliation certainly occurs in a world to which God is profoundly committed and in which God is ever at work in his triune grace, but it is far more than a particularly concentrated case of a general divine beneficence or a desire to coax creation towards a morally elevated existence. More specifically, God’s constitutive work of reconciling is simply non-resolvable into any pattern of divine openness, support or inspiration that is merely an exponential expansion of that which may be esteemed at a human level. To imply otherwise is to risk moralizing the gospel, or reducing its particulars to nominalist terms. If the language of ‘salvation’ and its correlates (emancipation, healing, wholeness, relational fulfilment, and so on) is to possess authentically Christian content – the terminology is hardly restricted, after all, to Christian discourse – it requires constant reference to the trinitarian story set forth in Holy Scripture, and that not simply as a formal matter but as expressly determinative of the substance of what is said about God and God’s ways with the world.

  A related point is that soteriology also needs to be rather wary of sketching a general or empirical account of creaturely sinfulness as a straightforwardly ‘known’ backdrop to redemption, or as a serious yet basically comprehensible ‘problem’ solved in the work of atonement. All too knowledgeable as they are at one level, sinners are also deceived about themselves; they only discover the magnitude of what sin is as they encounter in faith the divine assumption of it and the divine cancellation of its consequences. The implications for Christian evangelism are worth considering.

Introduction



Experientialism, in short, is a slippery thing. As confession, soteriology can be nothing less than witness to saving experience, the activity of Christians telling their stories about what their God has done for them. Such precisely is the model of Israel’s testimony to the one who delivered her through water, desert, fire and sword, and such is the pattern perpetuated by the Spirit-enabled worshippers of Israel’s risen Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 12:3): ‘Who is God? – The Lord who has redeemed us thus’. But what such witness emphatically does not do is to treat its language of redemption as merely the ultimate expression of a broader moral or existential state of affairs. Salvation-talk is personal and communal testimony, but it is not the individual’s or the community’s way of trying to describe as best they might what it feels like to be here renewed, reoriented or afforded authenticity of existence, far less the fruit of its asking how such feelings may prompt the generation of ciphers for a remarkable but enduringly numinous divinity (the ground of our being, the guarantor of our ethical ideals, the ultimate horizon of our wondering finitude). It is the recognition – under a divine pressure that involves pathos as well as liberation, confirmation of death before resurrection to life – that to encounter God’s salvation is genuinely to know the one who saves, for his saving work, attested in Scripture, is the reiteration and opening up in creaturely time of his eternal character. Such apprehension is never, of course, possession, for God is transcendent of any domestication by creaturely subjects: there remains a hiddenness about him even in his revelation; in his self-giving he does not give himself away. But the knowledge his Spirit effects is true knowledge, and it licenses bold confession. The boundaries of speech about reconciliation are marked out by the marvel of its positum: ‘This is the God who is known – by us!’ To be the recipients of divine mercy is to be drawn into personal fellowship with one who cancels our native assumptions (whether boastful or insecure) that such knowledge cannot be. Soteriology’s particular but spacious remit is to retell the grand sweep of this divine economy as announced in Scripture: to identify the source, occurrence and consequences of salvation by speaking of the nature of the one who lets us know him as he really is. III What difference might this make? How might soteriology order its material so as to do justice to the centrality of God, and in what ways might attention to the priority of God’s character govern what we say about core themes in the Christian theology of salvation? The chapters that follow are an attempt to reflect upon these questions. Penned by prominent contemporary practitioners of systematic theology in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand, they naturally differ in emphases and style, but share a conviction that Christian salvation is expounded best when it is seen not in terms of single constituent themes – forgiveness, justification, deliverance, liberation, and so on – but primarily as the good news



God of Salvation

about God, and all things else in the light of God. The classical components of an account of salvation – election, atonement, calling, justification, sanctification, adoption, glorification – all are properly appraised this way, and all the major loci of systematic theology, from creation to eschatology, are far more likely to be viewed thus in their appropriate inter-relation. What is God’s will for creation and creatures, human and non-human? How should we describe the nature of God’s covenant as it is worked out in worldly time? What is God’s relationship to history in general? What are the central events of the Christian story – the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ – really all about? How should we think about the atoning action that climaxes in the cross of Christ, and about the moral dynamics of God’s work of reconciling sinners? What does it mean to appropriate salvation? What is the church? What is an ethics of discipleship? What does it entail to proclaim the gospel? How ought Christians to view the fate of those who practise other faiths? Who and/or what is saved at the last? For the authors represented here, the answers to all such questions will look significantly different if the identity of the triune God is recognized as the essential determinant of our method. The opening chapter by John Webster sets the scene. Beginning with an exposition of why it is that soteriology is necessarily a derivative of the doctrine of God, Webster seeks to unpack some of the implications of that fact, focusing particularly on the antecedent conditions of salvation in the revealed mystery of the immanent Trinity. Soteriology requires, he argues, a theological metaphysics of God in se, for the history of salvation is divinely-willed history, a temporal sequence that is governed by a divine purpose. A starting-point in the dogmatics of the immanent Trinity is not the only legitimate way of approaching things, and it is important for soteriology also to offer a spacious exposition of covenantal history, which is indeed a genuinely constitutive material drama, not just an illustration of metaphysical realities. But over against contemporary tendencies to dissolve away the significance of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity, there is great reason to emphasize afresh that salvation is salvation because of its grounding in the nature of God himself. Webster expounds the point with reference to two traditions in Western trinitarianism: the relation between divine processions and divine missions, and (somewhat more controversially) the Reformed doctrine of a covenant of redemption concluded in eternity between God the Father and God the Son. In their respective ways, these concepts serve alike to underscore the essential background to reconciliation: ‘the infinite divine milieu which encompasses salvation’s temporal occurrence’. The human history of Jesus is commissioned history, the divulgence in time of a grace whose structure is shaped by the majesty of God’s perfect life in himself. The vital importance of trinitarian theology is a dominant note in the chapters which follow. Stephen Holmes takes as his subject the divine perfections or attributes of God, and the significance of what we might (very guardedly) call

Introduction



God’s properties for his work of salvation. As Holmes acknowledges, the doctrine of the divine perfections has been somewhat unfashionable in modern dogmatics, and even theologians who have insisted upon the centrality of the Trinity have not always succeeded in articulating their accounts of God’s attributes in sufficiently trinitarian terms. Sometimes it has been supposed that classical claims about God’s nature are frankly at odds with trinitarian logic. Holmes argues to the contrary, that a trinitarian conception of the divine perfections is a vital aspect of the grammar of properly Christian speech about God. Holmes considers three of the traditional ‘incommunicable’ attributes of God – divine simplicity, impassibility and aseity – and focuses on simplicity, the doctrine that God is essentially single and incomposite, as bearing particular importance. So far from being in tension with the theology of the Trinity, as is often alleged, simplicity is a crucial feature of classical Greek (and Latin) construals of the triune divine essence. If simplicity is taken seriously, the consequences for soteriology are profound. Accounts of salvation which suggest that God is ‘changed’ by the atonement, or presentations which pit God’s justice and God’s mercy against each other, or depictions which suggest that God somehow sets aside his justice under the stronger impulse of his love, are all deeply flawed. God is necessarily and eternally identical with all his perfections at once; ‘his life is a single, simple, glorious, unending stream’, and God’s attributes are neither dispensable nor separable in anything that God does. God manifests his glory as the one who is all that he is essentially in himself: it is this God who is the Saviour of his creatures. Andrew Burgess homes in on the vital relationship between two divine dispositions in particular: God’s judgement and God’s grace. Bifurcated in a great deal of Christian theology, especially in the West, judgement and grace crucially belong together. Judgement cannot be dismissed from any biblically responsible theology, for it is expressive of the creator’s rightful claim upon the whole of his creation. Shorn of judgement, grace becomes insipid. The grace of God essentially involves God’s judgement, for God reveals himself to be by nature the triune holy one, who is who he is in the unity of his saving action. God’s merciful response to sin and evil is encountered in the one Word God speaks – his Son. In the story of Jesus, we see grace and judgement at once: not the overcoming of judgement by grace, nor the setting aside of judgement in favour of grace, but the grace of the holy God who judges sin precisely in the context of his establishment of saving fellowship with sinners. Burgess goes on to consider the implications of the unity of judgement and grace for the relationship between justification and sanctification, and for the exposition of the moral dynamics of the Christian life. He looks briefly also at the complex question of final judgement, and suggests that even here, in an area where much remains unclear, it is important to maintain the integration in his two key themes. Even final judgement may, in some sense, be seen as a work of God’s   The term is of course imprecise, for God’s perfections are not features of his possession, but aspects of what God is.

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grace, provided we are prepared to take seriously what this may entail for the definition of that grace. The next two chapters consider the relationship between the doctrine of God and salvation by focusing on creation and creatures. Kathryn Tanner’s chapter offers a provocative reading of the possible soteriological significance of the classical claim that God is by nature incomprehensible. Traditionally (in Thomas Aquinas and others) that contention was a way of specifying the epistemic distance between God and creatures, not a description of how things are for God himself, for God was said to have complete self-understanding. Tanner however takes divine incomprehensibility to indicate a broader reality: the essential boundlessness and fullness of God’s nature, God’s singularity and transcendence of positive explication in manageable terms. If God is incomprehensible, and human beings are created in God’s image, what does this suggest about human identity, first as created then as redeemed? In much theology, exposition of the imago Dei has wanted to speak of humans as possessed of a clearly-bounded nature that is reflective of God, a status that sets off human life from that of all other creatures. Such anthropology has in turn often been connected with a vision of salvation as issuing in a divinely-intended human correspondence to God’s triune relationality. Tanner argues strongly in a different direction. To be created in the image of God is to have a nature that is not, in fact, clearly delimited at all, but instead open to formation in one direction or another; plasticity, not firmly bounded definition, characterizes human identity, and it is this that renders it possible for human beings to be re-formed in the process of salvation. The true image of God is the second person of the Trinity, the one who has the divine nature for his own, and who becomes incarnate for the salvation of those who, as fallen creatures, are not yet the image of God in the sense they are intended to be. As human, Jesus Christ is not a ‘comprehensible stand-in or substitute for an incomprehensible divinity’, but the very exhibition of incomprehensible divinity in human form. Christian salvation involves attachment to him, and being remade after the pattern of his humanity, gaining a new human identity in him. The results, Tanner contends, are startling. Human beings come to live a human life of divine character in something like the way Jesus Christ does; ultimately, in fact, ‘one with Christ, incomprehensible in his divinity, we take on the very incomprehensibility of the divine’. While Tanner’s focus is primarily on the effects of divine salvation for human beings, Nicola Hoggard Creegan endeavours to broaden the talk of creaturely salvation quite considerably. For her, soteriology has been unduly preoccupied with human ends: it needs to pay much more attention to God’s redemptive purposes for creatures in general. The impetus for such considerations derives in part from modern dialogue between theology and the natural sciences, the findings of which have posed particular questions about God’s will for pre-human and nonhuman life, and about what it may mean for God ultimately to bring completion, freedom and deliverance from suffering to all kinds of transient and vulnerable creatures. But the primary orientation comes, once again, from the doctrine of

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God. The God who saves is the God who is the creator, sustainer, redeemer and perfecter of all things, the one who elects to enter into irrevocable union with materiality, whose Spirit animates all life, and who surely has purposes for all that he has made. While there is much that we cannot say about the details of what this entails eschatologically, God intends that not just humans but creatures of all kinds should attain the glory of freedom and fulfilment in relation to their creator. And so: ‘There can be no narrow understanding of salvation’s end, for there is no narrowness in its beginnings’. The material circumstances of salvation’s outworking in space and time are also the concern of Murray Rae in his chapter on ‘Salvation and History’. Since there is no salvation other than that which God effects in and through the conditions God has established for creaturely existence, it is incumbent upon soteriology to offer an account of God’s relationship to worldly history. Such an account, Rae argues, needs to affirm that God is committed to the completion of that which he began in creation, and his work of redemption is his execution of his loving purpose in spite of creaturely resistance. For Christian faith, that sovereign and gracious reconciling work has occurred definitively in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But such claims face serious challenges, not the least of which is the very weighty Jewish protest: If the Redeemer has come, why is the world so unredeemed? As Jews and Christians agree, history itself cannot yield any adequate explanation of its circumstances; only God can explain. A Christian confession of salvation must say that the resurrection of Jesus is the site of that divine explanation, the place where history’s telos is established in the middle of time. The one who is the agent of history’s beginnings is seen as the one by whom history will finally be summed up. His resurrection is the pledge that death will ultimately be defeated because it has been defeated – that the world’s suffering and bloodshed, dreadful as they remain, will not, in light of this event, be the final word about its situation. In keeping with that promise, God establishes a witness to his commitment to renew all things at last: he calls forth and maintains a people for himself to testify (albeit brokenly) to his coming kingdom, and charges them to work and pray for that kingdom’s final arrival. In the task of prayer they are led by the ascended Christ: in him, ‘the world and all its concerns are present with God; he has taken responsibility for them’. The things that God has made are in the end gathered together in Christ and upheld before the Father. In this eschatological destiny, the completion and perfection of God’s creation, the glory of God’s character is revealed. ‘This is what the glory of God consists in, … that he brings to fulfilment his own loving intention to create a world that may participate in the communion of his triune life.’ A recurring issue in several of these chapters is the question of how the atonement wrought in Jesus Christ ought to be expounded in light of the doctrine of God. The concern here is not so much with discussion of the classical images, models or metaphors by which that topic is typically expounded in textbooks, but with the fundamental issue of how a properly trinitarian account of reconciliation will prevent erroneous construals of the cross. The subject of atonement is taken up

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from an additional angle by Oliver Crisp, who explores whether it is necessary for Christ’s work to possess a certain objective moral value in order for it to be acceptable to God. Over against classical theories of ‘acceptation’ and ‘acceptilation’, which variously argue that objective moral value is not necessary (‘acceptation’: God might have accepted some other act of atonement as adequate, but simply deems Christ’s act to be meritorious by assigning it a reward; ‘acceptilation’: God attributes such value as God determines to any atoning act, and value does not inhere in the act itself), Crisp defends the view that the atonement has to have an intrinsic value at least proportional to the demerits of the sins for which it atones, on account of the nature of God himself. God is by nature just, and sin has an objective moral (dis)value which objectively requires (in Anselmian terms) either punishment or satisfaction – the alternatives are determined by God’s essentially just character. An act of atonement must, accordingly, possess objective value: it cannot simply be an act to which God ascribes value by one means or another. This in turn entails that atonement be the act of a divine-human mediator, for such an act is necessarily of infinite objective value, and thus perfectly sufficient as recompense for sin. Much of the case is developed as an exercise in analytical reasoning rather than scriptural exegesis, but the burden of Crisp’s argument is again directly evocative of the nexus of soteriology and the divine being. God cannot act in a way that is inconsistent with his character; God’s character is intrinsically just, and retributive justice is one aspect of that; God must act to vindicate his name. But vindication of God’s name does not mean only retributive justice: it also means the display of God’s grace and mercy. While God might have created a range of worlds or no world at all, for God to create a world such as the one we have – a world in which creatures fall – and for him to act justly as he must towards this world in vindication of his name is also necessarily for him to act mercifully and graciously towards at least some of this world’s creatures. There is in this no infringement of God’s freedom, for God is not constrained by anything external to himself; the constraints come from God’s own nature. Given the nature God has, God must act justly – but he must also act graciously and mercifully towards at least some of the creatures he has made. Christiaan Mostert’s chapter considers the fruits of this atoning action, in God’s justification of sinners and his summoning of a people. The setting for both is, once more, God’s self-determination, the electing purpose by which God binds himself to be, in the economy of saving action, the God who is for sinful creatures in spite of all their antagonism to him. With Karl Barth, Mostert sees the doctrine of election as good news, the gospel truth that God in God’s eternal character is utterly committed to us. Theologies of divine choice which isolate election from its essential Christological context are fatally mistaken, for they abstract God’s putative determinations regarding creatures from God’s specific determination in respect of himself, God’s will to be the one who exists for and with humans. This does not mean that God is other than free and gracious in this choice, or that God somehow constitutes his own being in his primal decision, but it does mean that God wonderfully elects to be just the God we encounter in the enfleshed

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Word, the one who lives among us and takes upon himself our alienation from him. Justification is the actualization of this purpose in the concrete realities of creaturely life, and the church is the community of those who are so awakened and called by the Spirit to a new pattern of sociality in praise of God and for his service in the world. Only by anchoring the doctrines of personal salvation and ecclesiology in the enacted identity of the essentially triune God will we see them in their proper perspective. Geoff Thompson’s chapter also takes up the relationship between salvation, the church and the doctrine of God. Thompson looks at the traditional question of whether and to what extent the saving action of God may be said to occur beyond the church’s ministry. He takes as his conversation-partners two of the giants of twentieth-century European theology, Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. Both affirm that salvation occurs as a process of divine action that is not restricted to the life of the church, but their ways of presenting that claim differ significantly. In Barth’s case, the focus lies in the question of how the church may hear God’s Word of reconciliation mediated through non-Christian agents or realities, the ‘secular parables’ or ‘true words’ of God’s kingdom that are spoken extra muros ecclesiae. What is the relationship between extra-ecclesial divine speech and the Word of God in Scripture and gospel proclamation? Rahner’s interest lies more directly in the salvation of those who belong outside the church, particularly those who may be said to be, in some sense, ‘anonymous’ Christians, and thus recipients of the grace of God in Jesus Christ even though they do not profess faith in him as such. Barth’s primary context is his treatment of the sovereign work of Jesus Christ as mediator, the Lord who communicates himself in world-occurrence as he determines and is not restricted to ecclesial mediation; Rahner’s reflections take shape from his transcendental anthropology, and his way of framing the relationship between God’s universal grace and creaturely unbelief. The doctrinal idiom and the implications vary considerably, and reflect more than simple confessional differences between Reformed and Roman Catholic approaches. Fundamentally, however, the strategies share a common conviction: the question of salvific action beyond the church’s ministry can only be addressed with specific reference to the identity and character of God. For both Barth and Rahner, it is basic to the gospel of Jesus Christ that God’s saving will is universal in its scope, for that is God’s gracious self-determination. Whatever this means in terms of eschatology – whether apokatastasis or differentiated creaturely fates even so in respect of divine as well as creaturely freedom – salvation is God’s work; its reach can be duly described only by tracing its roots (once again) in the nature of the God who wills that this reconciliation should occur. The implications for a theology of religions, missiology and ethics deserve to be pondered further. Eschatology is further in view in the final chapter of the collection, by Ivor Davidson. What does it mean, at last, for the reconciled to be brought near to God? Davidson approaches the matter by considering the striking scriptural declaration that these objects of mercy are ‘heirs of God’ (Rom. 8:17): their end is to ‘inherit’ God himself. But what can that mean? Arguably the most suggestive way of

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broaching the question is via Paul’s theology of adoption, which complements Johannine depictions of the consequences of regeneration. Salvation is ultimately about becoming children of God, about being translated from a situation of alienation and estrangement to a place of exquisite fellowship with our creator. It means coming to share in the privileges of God’s only Son, and in his unique right to find his eternal fulfilment in the Father by the Spirit. The eternal Son is himself an heir of God, for incarnate, crucified, raised and ascended he has finished the work his Father gave him to do, and he awaits the day when he will share his Father’s presence everlastingly with all those who are his. To be adopted into filial relation alongside this Son by the Spirit is to become his fellow-heirs, and thus in the end to participate in his intimacy with his Father, his experience of the Father’s joy that redemption is complete. Conformed to the likeness of the incarnate Son, the true image of God, the reconciled will find their true human destiny in entering eternally into what it means to participate in the Son’s unfathomable bond with his Father in the Spirit. A foretaste of this is already theirs, for to be heirs is to be granted an anticipation of that final status, the assurance and access of those who even in their glorified state will know no higher honour than to be children of this Father. In the realization of their final telos as creatures, salvation’s scope will be found to embrace non-human creation as well: ‘The whole world is made for as well as by the Son, and will by the Spirit’s perfecting action be gathered up in him, at “the fullness of time”, to the glory of God the Father, restored and made new for relationship with him’. Salvation comes from God, is wrought by God, and is for God: in this lies the highest end of, and proper freedom for, all contingent things. A soteriology in which the nature and character of the triune God are central can never be some vague story of the world’s future. At the last as at the first, the news is news about God.

Chapter 1

‘It was the Will of the Lord to Bruise Him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God John Webster

I The chief task of Christian soteriology is to show how the bruising of the man Jesus, the servant of God, saves lost creatures and reconciles them to their creator. In the matter of salvation, Christian theology tries to show that this servant – marred, Isaiah tells us, beyond human semblance, without form or comeliness or beauty – is the one in and as whom God’s purpose for creatures triumphs over their wickedness. His oppression and affliction, his being put out of the land of the living, is in truth not his defeat at the hands of superior forces, but his own divine act in which he takes upon himself, and so takes away from us, the iniquity of us all. How can this be? How can his chastisement make us whole? How can others be healed by his stripes? Because, Isaiah tells us, it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; because God has put him to grief; because it is God who makes the servant’s soul an offering for sin. And just because this is so – just because he is smitten by God and afflicted – then the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand, and the servant himself shall prosper and be exalted. And not only this: the servant shall also see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he shall see his offspring. As it tries to explicate how God is savingly at work in the affliction of his servant, Christian soteriology stretches both backwards and forwards from this central event. It traces the work of salvation back into the will of God, and forward into the life of the many, who by it are made righteous. Soteriology thus participates in the double theme of all Christian theology, namely God and all things in God. The matter of the Christian gospel is the eternal God who has life in himself, and temporal creatures who have life in him. The gospel, that is, concerns the history of fellowship – covenant – between God and creatures; Christian soteriology follows this double theme as it is unfolded in time. In following its theme, soteriology undertakes the task of displaying the identities of those who participate in this history and the material order of their relations. The Lord who puts his servant to grief is this one, dogmatics tells us; this is his servant, these the transgressors who will be accounted righteous. So conceived, soteriology pervades the entire corpus of Christian teaching, and its exposition necessarily entails sustained attention to trinitarian and incarnational

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dogma, as well as to the theology of creatures and their ends. Indeed, no part of Christian teaching is unrelated to soteriology, whether immediately or indirectly. This does not mean that all other Christian teaching can be resolved into soteriology, or that other teaching is to be arranged around soteriology as its centre. Quite the contrary: making some variant of soteriology (such as the theology of the cross, or justification) into the rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum distorts the order and proportions of Christian dogmatics. Soteriology is a derivative doctrine, and no derivative doctrine may occupy the material place which is properly reserved for the Christian doctrine of God, from which alone all other doctrines derive. The question from which soteriology takes its rise, and which accompanies each particular soteriological statement, is: Quis sit deus? The answer which dogmatic soteriology gives to that question takes the form of an exercise in biblical reasoning. Biblical reasoning is the analytical and schematic presentation of the Christian gospel as it is announced in Holy Scripture. Dogmatics is a work of reason which is set in motion by, and at every point answerable to, the self-communicative presence and action of God the Lord; it operates in the sphere of God’s rule, in particular, that rule exercised in the work of revelation. Dogmatic soteriology can, therefore, only be undertaken as attentiveness to the commanding address of God in the gospel, the ‘word of reconciliation’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Further, attending to this reconciling message of the gospel requires that reason itself be reconciled to God, for in the aftermath of the fall reason has lost its way, becoming estranged from and hostile towards God (Col. 1:21). If it is to discharge its office, therefore, reason must acquire renewed pliability and consent to God, teachableness. In practical terms, this means that as an exercise of theological reason soteriology is at every point directed to the prophetic and apostolic testimonies of Scripture, since they are the sanctified creaturely auxiliaries of God’s revealing and reconciling presence. Through their ministry, God addresses and quickens. This is why soteriology is repetitio Sacrae Scripturae. How does this conception of the task of soteriology govern the way in which it goes about its work? First, it presses soteriology to order its presentation of the material with a firm eye on the dramatic sequence of the biblical economy of salvation, both in the larger plot of covenantal history and in the concentrated episode of the work of the Word incarnate. Second, soteriology will acknowledge the priority of biblical concepts and titles, drawing upon them as the normative prophetic and apostolic stock of language and ideas which constitute the governing material content of dogmatic reflection. Third, soteriology will allow itself only such conceptual inventiveness and argumentative reordering of this material as serves to direct us to the biblical positum – by, for example, drawing attention to features of the biblical economy through conceptual summary, or by setting forth the identities of the agents in that economy. Fourth, accordingly, soteriology will   G.C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), p. 10.   Commanding examples of this can be found in Thomas, Summa Theologiae 3a. 46–52, and Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (London: SCM Press, 1960) II, esp. II.16.  

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be cautious about ordering its material around some theme (such as ‘facing’ or ‘hospitality’), or as a response to a perceived problem (such as violence). Thematic or problem-oriented presentations are commonly nominalist and moralistic, since their centre of gravity lies not in the irreducible person and work of God but rather in some human experience or action of which theological talk of salvation is symbolic. Soteriology must fall under the rule which governs all dogmatic work, namely ‘the claim of the First Commandment’. To speak of dogmatic soteriology as biblical reasoning is to press home the noetic application of that claim. But what of the material extension of the first commandment – that the doctrine of God precedes and governs all other Christian teaching? The rest of my remarks are given over to reflecting on this matter, the argument proceeding in three stages: (1) A sketch of the setting of soteriology in the corpus of Christian doctrine is offered; this is followed by (2) an analysis of the subordination of soteriology to the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to teaching about the processions and missions of God’s eternal and living fullness, and about the eternal purpose of God; (3) a brief concluding note on the human history of the Saviour. The argument in its entirely is to be regarded as no more than an extended gloss on a statement of Thomas: ‘knowledge of the divine persons was necessary for us … so that we may have the right view of the salvation of humankind, accomplished by the incarnate Son and by the gift of the Holy Spirit’. Only on this basis, I suggest, can we understand why it is good and wholesome to confess that ‘it was the will of the Lord to bruise him’. II Insofar as it attempts a systematic presentation of its subject-matter, dogmatics has an especial concern for the scope and integrity of Christian teaching. Particular doctrinal loci are not treated in isolation or simply seriatim, but as ‘topics’ or ‘episodes’ in a unified movement. That movement is the history of fellowship between God and God’s creatures; systematic theology portrays this history and indicates its ground in the eternal sufficiency and glory of God. Of the elements    See David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).    See Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004).   From a (repetitive) literature, see Timothy J. Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).    Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 398 n. 1; consequently, Pannenberg notes, soteriology is to be treated ‘independently of existing and historically shifting hopes of salvation’ (p. 398).    Summa Theologiae Ia.32.1 and 3; my translation, reading donum rather than dona.

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of this history, which is the setting for a theology of salvation, we may offer the following summary description. The bedrock of soteriology is the doctrine of the Trinity. The perfect life of the Holy Trinity is the all-encompassing and first reality from whose completeness all else derives. God’s perfection is the fullness and inexhaustibility in which the triune God is and acts as the one he is. His perfection is not mere absence of derivation or restriction; it is his positive plenitude. God’s perfection is his identity as this one, an identity which is unqualified and wholly realized: ‘I am who I am’ – what the scholastic divines called the perfectio integralis in which God’s life is complete in itself. That completeness is fullness of life, the effortless activity in which God confirms his excellence as Father, Son and Spirit. God lives from himself, he is perfect movement, the eternally fresh act of self-iteration. This act is the ‘processions’ or personal relations which constitute God’s absolute vitality: the Father as the principle of the Trinity, the Son who is eternally begotten, the Spirit who proceeds – as this is the positive wholeness and richness of God’s life in himself. God’s boundless immanent life is the ground of his communication of life. God lives in himself and gives life. He is not locked up in his aseity; his blessedness is not self-absorbed, for alongside the ‘personal works’ of God’s self-relation there are God’s external works in which, of his own will, he brings into being life other than his own, the life of creatures. He does so graciously, without compromise of his own freedom; he is not constituted or completed by the works of his hands, since as their creator he transcends them absolutely. And he does so lovingly, bestowing genuine life upon all that he makes and ennobling the human creature by appointing it for fellowship with himself. In his free and loving act of creation, God gives to creatures their several natures and ends. To be a creature is to have a nature, to be a determinate reality having its being as this. And to have a nature is to be appointed to a history in which that nature is perfected. In the case of human creatures, the enactment of nature through time involves consent, that is, conscious, willing and active affirmation of nature. Human creatureliness involves (though it is not exhausted in) spontaneity. Beasts give no consent to their nature and end; human creatures do so, and their consent is necessary for the completion on the creaturely side of the fellowship with God for which their nature determines them. These summary references to the doctrines of God and creation form the deep background to the economy of God’s saving works, helping us to identify the agents in that economy. This, according to dogmatics, is ‘what goes on’ in created time: the high and eternal God who is life in himself gives life to creatures. Against this background, what is to be said of the divine work of salvation?



  See my essays, ‘God’s Perfect Life’, in Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (eds), God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 143–52, and ‘God’s Aseity’, in Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (eds), Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 147–62.

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Creatureliness is basic to being human. The nature and end granted by God the creator, and the consent in which they are enacted, are what it is to be human. Human being is being in fellowship, human history is the enactment of that being towards perfection. It is, however, inexplicably the case that creatures resist and repudiate their given nature and end, and refuse to participate in fellowship with God. Sin is trespass against creatureliness, but beneath that lies an even deeper wickedness, contempt for the creator in all its forms – pride, resentment, disordered desire, anxiety, self-hatred, a catastrophic regime of evil which the creature unleashes by creating a nature for itself and assuming responsibility for its own course. By sin the creature is brought to ruin, for as fellowship with God is breached, the creature is estranged from the source of its life and condemned to exist in death’s shadow. Sin humiliates the creature, robbing the creature of the dignity which it can have only as it fulfils its destiny for fellowship with God. What stands between the creature and death? What secures the fulfilment of creaturely being against self-destruction? This is the subject-matter of soteriology. Creaturely defiance and self-alienation from God cannot overtake the creator’s purpose; God will confirm his own glory by glorifying the creature. The form in which God realizes this determination is a special creaturely history, one which is highly particular but which represents and gathers into itself all human history. This is the history of divine election and of the covenant to which it gives rise – the history of God’s determination of creatures for fellowship on the sole basis of his mercy. In it, God undertakes to bring human nature to perfection in accordance with his purpose. Its human subjects are the patriarchs, Israel and the church, that is, all who stand beneath God’s promise and summons. At its centre lies the time of the Word made flesh. He enacts the covenant fidelity of God; as this one, God stands by his creature, and puts an end to its distress. And he does so, moreover, in the face of the creature’s contradiction of his fidelity. Faced by its Lord and reconciler, the creature consummates its hatred of God and of itself in an act of staggering wickedness: ‘You killed the Author of life’ (Acts 3:15). The slaying of God’s Son and servant is an undisguised attack on the one by whom he is sent, namely the life-giver himself – made even more base by the fact that ‘you asked for a murderer to be granted to you’ (Acts 3:14). If the wickedness is staggering, so is the absurdity: how can the creature who has no life in itself extinguish the one who is life’s archêgos? The Son’s death is comprehended within the life-giving purpose of the Father, and by it the wicked creature is turned back to God and blessed (Acts 3:26). In the Son’s death there takes place the death of death. The Author of life having demonstrated himself to be the one he is – life’s Author, majestically and limitlessly alive – God’s special history with creatures lies open at its further side, expanding and annexing to itself creaturely history. Through the Holy Spirit, creaturely history is directed to fulfilment; the covenant determination: ‘I will be your God’ is now fulfilled as the Spirit generates its creaturely correspondent: ‘You shall be my people’. Such, in brief compass, is one possible construal of the overall shape of Christian soteriology. It is structured as three moments or loci: the eternal purpose of the

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perfect God; the establishment of that purpose in the history which culminates in the ministry of the incarnate Son; and the consummation of that purpose in the Spirit. A soteriology will only attain the necessary scope if it attends to all three moments in their integrity and due order. In modern Protestant divinity, the first and third moments were routinely eclipsed, the first often replaced by an abstract theology of divine love, the third by moral or hermeneutical theory. Recent work has done much to correct this latter deficiency, notably in linking soteriology to pneumatology, thereby easing a constrictive focus simply on the passion. But we still await a soteriology in which the first article plays more than a negligible role. Reasons for the neglect lie ready to hand: the dominance of the ‘economic’ in much contemporary trinitarian dogmatics; hesitancy about the metaphysics of God in se; functionalist readings of the biblical materials; the high profile enjoyed by Lutheran rather than Reformed incarnational teaching. Left unchecked, these tendencies can promote a soteriology in which the foundations of salvation in the will of the Lord remain inadequately articulated. What may be suggested by way of a remedy? III The salvation of creatures is a great affair, but not the greatest, which is God’s majesty and its promulgation. ‘He saved them for his name’s sake’, the psalmist tells us, ‘that he might make known his mighty power’ (Ps. 106:8). Salvation occurs as part of the divine self-exposition; its final end is the reiteration of God’s majesty and the glorification of God by all creatures. Soteriology therefore has its place within the theology of the mysterium trinitatis, that is, God’s inherent and communicated richness of life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That soteriology has a trinitarian shape is relatively uncontroversial, at least in the more recent literature. So, for example, Christoph Schwöbel argues that 

  By way of contrast to Richard Swinburne’s comment that ‘It is possible to discuss redemption without needing to analyse what is meant by the doctrine that God is three persons in one substance’ (Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 152), one might consult from the recent literature: Vincent Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), pp. 143–71; id., ‘Atonement: The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices. From Metaphor to Transcendental?’ in Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), pp. 181–200; Michael S. Horton, Lord and Saviour: A Covenant Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 179–93; id., ‘Reconciliation in God’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Theology of Reconciliation (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), pp. 159–66; id., ‘Justification as Triune Event’, Modern Theology, 11 (1995): 421–7; Neil B. MacDonald, Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), pp. 225–45; Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2,

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‘the doctrine of the Trinity makes explicit the identity of the God of the Christian faith’;10 it is the ‘conceptual explication of the understanding of God contained within the relation to God of Christian faith’.11 In soteriological terms, this means, first, that the doctrine of the Trinity furnishes an identity-description of the agent of salvation, upon which a definition of salvation depends: ‘The character of that which is believed, experienced and expected as “salvation” can only be determined precisely by referring to the identity of the God who is believed in and worshipped as the subject of the activity which brings about salvation.’12 And, second, trinitarian teaching holds together creation, salvation and eschatological perfection by grounding them in ‘the unity of the trinitarian being of God.’13 The doctrine of the Trinity thus blocks soteriological nominalism and the isolation of teaching about salvation from the other loci of dogmatics. Yet more is required for an adequate theology of salvation. Working towards the doctrine of the Trinity by retrospection from the divine economy of salvation is certainly possible; but it may leave obscure the antecedent conditions of that economy in the life of God in se. If we only look at the saving economy as it were from the angle of its temporal occurrence, we may mischaracterize the kind of temporal occurrence which it is. The economy of salvation is the long history of the works of God, ingredient within the mystery of the Trinity. ‘Mystery’ (Eph. 1:9–10) is God’s self-disclosing act in which he sets forth his will; it emerges from and is fully charged with his unfathomable prevenient purpose. ‘Mystery’ is revelation in time, a ‘making known’; but its energy is from ‘before the foundation of the world’; and it takes temporal form under pressure from ‘the counsel of his will’. Salvation history is thus special history, reaching back into the immanent life of the triune God. Aquinas again: ‘Without faith in the Trinity it is not possible to believe explicitly in the mystery of Christ’s incarnation; the mystery of the incarnation of Christ includes that the Son of God took flesh, that he redeemed the world through the grace of the Holy Spirit, and that he was conceived of the pp. 397–464; Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Die “Botschaft der Versöhnung” (2 Kor. 5,19) und die Versöhnungslehre’, in Stephen Chapman, Christine Helmer and Christof Landmesser (eds), Biblischer Texte und theologische Theoriebildung (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), pp. 163–90; id., ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, in Gott in Beziehung. Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 25–51; id., ‘Reconciliation: from Biblical Observations to Dogmatic Reconstruction’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Theology of Reconciliation (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), pp. 13–38; Robert J. Sherman, King, Priest and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004); Alan Spence, The Promise of Peace: A Unified Theory of Atonement (London: T. & T. Clark, 2006). 10   Schwöbel, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 32. 11   Schwöbel, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 37. 12   Schwöbel, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 32. 13   Schwöbel, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 39; on this, see also Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, pp. 143–71.

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Holy Spirit’.14 The renewal of the world by Christ and the Spirit – that fact that, as Aquinas puts it, we now live post tempus gratiae divulgatae, after the revelation of grace – means that ‘all are bound to believe the mystery of the Trinity explicitly’.15 And for Aquinas that means confessing not only the trinitarian contours of God’s action in the economy, but also the antecedent personal relations within the Godhead which bear up the visible missions of Son and Spirit. If this is so, then soteriology – figuring out what happens when the servant is put to grief by the Lord – requires a theological metaphysics of God in se; only within the setting of God’s own life in its glorious self-sufficiency can the history of salvation be seen as divulging divine grace to us. Few theologians in the tradition saw this with greater penetration than Jonathan Edwards. A celebrated sermon from 1730, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, expounds ‘what God aims at in the disposition of things in the affair of redemption, viz., that man should not glory in himself, but alone in God’.16 ‘There is an absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on God.’17 Which God? The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: ‘that [God] be the cause and original whence all our good comes, thereon it is of him; that he be the medium by which is obtained and conveyed, therein they have it through him; and that he be that good itself that is given and conveyed, therein it is in him’.18 In this, of course, Edwards echoes ancient tradition:19 ‘There is an absolute dependence of the creature on every one [of the triune persons] for all: all is of the Father, all through the Son, and all in the Holy Ghost. Thus God appears in the work of redemption, as all in all’.20 And, crucially, that God does so appear is rooted in what Edwards elsewhere calls the ‘eternal and necessary subsistence of the persons of the Trinity.’21 The ground of salvation is the internal works of God. Yet we should not let this train of thought pass without pausing to note a worry which it might evoke. Does not this talk of God in se, of the antecedent purpose of God, of God’s eternal and necessary subsistence, quickly regress into metaphysics uncorrected by the gospel drama? Does it not fold the economy of God’s works – above all, the agony of the cross – back into pre-temporality, in such a way that the economy lacks any constitutive significance, as if we were saved by a divine plan rather than by its enactment? Do not Jesus and his death threaten to disappear? The objection has been raised on a number of occasions by Robert   ST 2a2ae.2.8 (my translation).   ST 2a2ae.2.8. 16   Jonathan Edwards, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, in Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 200. 17   Edwards, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 202. 18   ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 202. 19   Basil, On the Holy Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), XVI.xxxviii, pp. 61–5. 20   Edwards, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 212. 21   Jonathan Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, in The Miscellanies 833–1152 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 432. 14 15

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Jenson, who argues (with characteristic boldness) that formulations of atonement theory commonly assume that the saving power of Jesus’ death somehow lies behind the event itself with which it is not wholly identical. Jenson, by contrast, denies any such antecedents: The gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back. There is no story behind or beyond it that is the real story of what God does to reconcile us, no story of mythic battles or of a deal between God and his Son or of our being moved to live reconciled lives. The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling action and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours. Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.22

This is why he can elsewhere speak of ‘reconciliation in God’:23 God’s life is the evangelical drama, and the economy of reconciliation is, we might say, groundless. By way of response: To say that God’s eternity undergirds the history of God’s servant is simply to specify that history’s origin, character and end; it is not to reduce it to a mere illustration of metaphysical objects, or to neglect its covenantal or relational structure,24 or to translate moral drama into ontology.25 The history of salvation is divinely willed history; it is preceded and enclosed by the great statement of God’s eternal fullness: ‘In the beginning …’; it is necessary history, history of which we can only say: ‘it must be so’ (dei). Atonement, Barth wrote, is not a contingent event which might have turned out differently, but ‘a necessary happening’26 because its central agent, Jesus Christ, is ‘very God and very man, born and living and acting and suffering and conquering in time’, and ‘as such the one eternal Word of God at the beginning of all things’.27 To read the canonical   Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 189.   Jenson, ‘Reconciliation in God’, in Gunton (ed.), The Theology of Reconciliation, pp. 159–66. 24   See Horton, Lord and Servant, pp. 11–13. 25   See James Denney, The Death of Christ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), p. 236: ‘The Atonement comes to us in the moral world and deals with us there: it is concerned with conscience and the law of God, with sin and grace, with alienation and peace, with death to sin and holiness; it has its being and its efficacy in a world where we can find our footing, and be assured that we are dealing with realities.’ But Denney’s Ritschlianism betrays itself in his claim that the New Testament is ‘ethical, not metaphysical’ (p. 237). 26   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75 [hereafter CD]) IV/1, p. 48. 27   Barth, CD IV/1, p. 49. 22 23

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gospels is to read a history which is accidental only at its surface; the tensions of the whole, and of each incident in the whole, are pushed along by ‘the divine “must”’.28 If this is the case, then no small part of any soteriology will be the exhibition of the divine necessity by which the economy is ordered. Calvin was correct to indicate that the task of the theology of salvation is to ask about ‘the purpose for which Christ was sent by the Father, and what he conferred upon us’:29 soteriology concerns a history and its effects. Dogmatics answers those questions about the purpose and blessings of God’s saving work in time precisely by exploring that work’s ‘divine connection’.30 This does not entail that, in its actual presentation of its subject, soteriology must start from the dogmatics of the immanent Trinity. It would be quite possible to begin at some other point – with the fall and sin, or the cross, or the risen and exalted Christ. What matters is not the starting-point but the scope, scale and distribution of weight. In any given set of circumstances a theologian might judge it more prudent to start from (for example) grace as benefit rather than from the divine counsel. Provided that the full range of material is covered, without disproportion or distortion, and provided also that the material order is recognized even when the order of exposition may run in a different direction, method is arbitrary. Further, soteriology must always remind itself that the conceptual idiom and order of dogmatics is subservient to the idiom and order of Holy Scripture. The primary task of theology is commentary on the prophetic and apostolic texts, and its dogmatic-metaphysical explorations have little purpose if they do not serve this undertaking. In a theological culture such as our own, which instinctively conflates being and time, the proportions of gospel soteriology are best displayed by drawing attention to God in se. This is necessary; but it is not sufficient, and soteriology requires for its completion a spacious exposition of the history of the covenant – a joyful and demanding task which cannot be attempted here. Instead, I restrict myself to exhibiting how, correctly made, the distinction and ordered relation of created and uncreated being is soteriologically fundamental. ‘In the system of faith’, Aquinas tells us, ‘the study is first of God and afterwards of creatures; and this is a more perfect view …’.31

  Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 39.   Calvin, Institutes II.xv, p. 494. 30   Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 40. 31   Summa contra Gentiles II.4; on the relation of ‘on God’ and ‘on creatures’, see Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 41–3, 413–15. 28 29

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IV To consider these matters further, we may examine two somewhat unfamiliar and at first blush, perhaps, unpromising pieces of Christian dogma: teaching about the processions and missions of the persons of the Holy Trinity, and about the socalled ‘covenant of redemption’ or pactum salutis concluded in eternity between the Father and the Son. The first is the common possession of Western trinitarianism; the second is more domestic, having been developed by the federal divines of the Calvinist tradition, and persisting only in the dogmatics which stem from Reformed orthodoxy. Both are theological ideas of biblical resonance and great beauty; both seek to secure at one and the same time the supremacy of the first commandment in soteriology and the necessary soteriological application of the first commandment. If both appear speculative, we should call two things to mind. First, speculative theology is evangelically derived and evangelically responsible; but an account of the gospel which neglected theological metaphysics would soon falter in its attempts to speak of the God of the gospel. Second, talk of such matters remains in the realm of theologia ectypa, a dim reflection of God’s own archetypal knowledge of himself. This, at least, may check us lest – as Edwards put it – we ‘go upon uncertain grounds, and fix uncertain determinations in things of so high a nature’.32 Processions and Missions ‘Processions’ and ‘missions’ are formal terms to characterize God’s being as being in relation. More precisely, when taken together they signify that the relations between Father, Son and Spirit which constitute God’s eternal life in himself are the spring of his relations with the creatures whom he elects as his companions in the covenant of grace, and whom he saves and perfects through Christ and the Spirit. The divine processions are the eternal relations of origin in which God’s perfect life consists; in them he confirms and preserves his self-existent self-sufficiency. The Father begets the Son, God from God; God is this perfectly enacted paternity and filiation. And, further, God is perfect as the Father and Son who together breathe the Spirit, and so as the Spirit who proceeds from them. Paternity, filiation and spiration are the life-filled abundance of God’s being, his pure act in which he is who he is. To speak of these as relations of origin is not, of course, to refer to events in the past, for they are eternal relations and not completed acts of selfconstitution. The Son is the Son, not because he has been originated by the Father’s paternal act, but because God is eternally the relation of paternity and filiation. Nor does the language of origin indicate any subordination within the triune life. Between the persons of the Trinity there is ‘priority of subsistence’:33 the Father is the fount of the life of the Godhead, the one from whom Son and Spirit proceed, but who is himself a nemine, from no one. But there is no ontological disparity here; 32

  Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 430.   Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 430.

33

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there is ‘dependence without inferiority of deity’,34 and so no ‘natural subjection’.35 God’s unified, singular and wholly realized life is these relations; they are not as it were the process by which God becomes God; neither God’s unity nor his personal differentiation precedes them. These relations are what God is; the processions are the infinitely mobile, wholly achieved life of God; they constitute what Edwards calls ‘the economy of the persons of the Trinity’,36 the inner order in which God lives and to which the external economy of God’s works is anchored. The divine missions are the further movement of God’s being in which he relates to what he freely creates to be other than himself. In the context of soteriology, missions refer to the Father’s sending of the Son, the Son’s fulfilment of his office as reconciler, and the Spirit’s being sent to sanctify and perfect creatures. These missions repeat ad extra the relations ad intra (hence they can be called ‘temporal processions’). In speaking of the divine missions, we are, crucially, still in the sphere of God’s perfect life, his uncreated movement; but we look at it as it were from a vantage point in which our eye is trained on that divine movement as it draws near to creatures. The mission of each person is constituted, first, by the eternal procession of the person (the person’s orientation to the sender or origin), and, second, by the person’s orientation to the one to whom that person is sent (the mission’s destination). Again, ‘sending’ implies no inequality of status between ‘sender’ and ‘sent’; it simply indicates the mode in which each person enjoys full deity in its outward movement. The divine missions are thus the pure divine energy of God’s self-giving, the fact that his self-communicative and saving presence to creatures has its ground in God’s very self. Hence the rule: the divine missions follow the divine processions. This means, first, that the works of God repeat the immanent being of God and are ‘agreeable to the order of their subsisting’.37 It means, second, that the engagement of each person in its mission is not a ‘becoming’ on the part of the one sent, in the sense of an expansion of identity: the Son, for example, is not more Son by virtue of his obedience to the Father’s appointment of him to the office of redeemer.38 The divine missions are already anticipated, included within the life of relations which is God’s being. The realm of the divine missions is not contingent or mutable, for they rest on God’s unchangeable completeness. But, third, the processions 34

  Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 430.   Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 431. 36   Edwards, Discourse on the Trinity, in Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 135. 37   Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 431. 38  There is certainly a ‘new, particular determination’ of God with respect to the work of redemption (Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 432); but it is what Edwards calls ‘circumstantially new’ (p. 440), not God’s becoming what he was not; see also Thomas’s statement at Summa Theologiae 1a43.2 ad 2: ‘The reason that a divine person is present in a new way in anyone or is possessed in time by anyone is not a change in the divine person, but in the creature’. 35

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cannot be segregated from the missions. The ‘origin’ of each person is not a mere whence, but a whence which includes a whither. Filiation and sending, spiration and outpouring, are inseparable. Because God is this one, we are not required to choose between a-historical essentialism (which isolates the processions) and the constitution of God’s being as a temporal project (which isolates the missions).39 Origin is not divine self-absorption; mission is not divine self-completion. The technicalities are soteriologically charged. Using concepts to apprehend the mystery of the Trinity which the drama of salvation sets before us, they attempt to describe the history of saving fellowship by exhibiting its divine depth, the conditions of its occurrence which lie in the infinite recess of God’s very self. The conceptual apparatus is not a speculative replacement for that history, as if the latter were a mere shadow cast by a high metaphysical object: how could incarnation and passion be grasped without reference to their peculiar creaturelyhistorical intensity? Rather, the theological metaphysics functions a bit like the Johannine Prologue: this is where saving history is from, it says: it is from this that saving history is suspended, this is its divine agent, this its inexhaustible inner saving power. Why is this imperative in the theology of salvation? Because what happens in the Son’s work of redemption and the Spirit’s gift of life is – in a lovely phrase of Gilles Emery’s – ‘an embassy of the eternal, bringing a part of its home country into our history’.40 What we encounter with concentrated historical force in Son and Spirit is the reality in time of a divine movement of sending which is itself the repetition of God’s self. Saving history emerges from and points us back towards God’s entire adequacy. Here, at least, the adage quae supra nos nihil ad nos is untrue. The hidden life of God, precisely in its inaccessibility and completeness, is the ground of creaturely wellbeing. It is because of the divine processions and the missions which rest upon them that there is a creature, and a servant of God to come to that creature’s aid, and a Spirit to bestow life. The trinitarian setting of a doctrine of salvation thus has much to do with the matter of assurance. Salvation is secure because the works of the redeemer and the sanctifier can be traced to the inner life of God, behind which there lies nothing. And so, for Calvin, trinitarian doctrine locates the source of salvation in God, thereby eradicating fear. Commenting on the phrase ‘God sent his Son’ in 1 John 4:10, he writes: ‘it was from God’s mere goodness, as from a fountain, that Christ flowed to us with all his blessings. And just as it is necessary to know that we have salvation in Christ because our heavenly Father has loved us of his own accord, so when we are seeking a solid and complete certainty of the divine love, we have to look to none other than to Christ.’41 The waste and deprivation of sin is countered 39   See Gilles Emery, ‘Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?’ in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia, 2003), pp. 165–208. 40   Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, p. 368. 41   John Calvin, The Gospel according to St. John 11–21 and the First Epistle of John (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1961), p. 291. See also his comment on 1 Tim. 1:15:

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by God’s own self which overflows in abundance. ‘The secret love in which our heavenly Father embraced us to himself is, since it flows from his eternal good pleasure, precedent to all other causes.’42 This is why the servant has prospered; this is why he is authorized and able to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. But what of this ‘eternal good pleasure’ of God which Calvin mentions? To say a little of this, we turn to the theme of the covenant of redemption. The Covenant of Redemption Reformed federal theology was, in part, the attempt to envisage the history of redemption as an ordered execution in time of the pre-temporal divine will. The concept of the covenant of redemption, in particular, offers decided resistance to considering salvation history simply as temporal surface, by showing how it emerges out of the anterior reality of God’s acts of willing. Drastically oversimplified, the concept can be laid out in these terms. In order to carry out the eternal decree of God to glorify the elect, the Father and the Son conclude a pact in the matter of the salvation of creatures, that is, they agree together to enact the covenant of grace. The Son covenants to be the guarantor or sponsor of God’s covenant with creatures, undertaking to meet the obligations laid upon creatures, and so becoming the last Adam. This he accomplishes by keeping the law and by paying the penalty for the sins of others, so securing the salvation of those given him by the Father. In particular, the Son undertakes to assume human nature and share the fallen human situation; to exist under the law, obeying it perfectly and as second Adam bearing the punishment it prescribes; and to apply to others the merit which accrues to him, thereby effecting their pardon and regeneration. The Father, in turn, promises the Son to empower him for and sustain him in his redeeming work, to glorify him at its completion, to give him as a reward for his work the elect over whom the Son is head, and to commit all power to him in governing the world. Turretin summarizes the elements thus: The pact between the Father and the Son contains the will of the Father giving his Son as hypotroten (Redeemer and head of his mystical body) and the will of the Son offering himself as a sponsor for his members to work out that redemption (apolytrosin). For this the Scriptures represent to us the Father in the economy ‘For although God the Father a thousand times offers us salvation in Christ, and Christ himself proclaims to us his own saving work, yet we do not cease to be afraid or, at any rate, to wonder within ourselves whether it be so. Thus, whenever any doubt about the forgiveness of sins comes into our mind, we should learn to drive it out, using as our shield the fact that it is truth sure and certain and should be received without any controversy or demur’: John Calvin, The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 198. 42   John Calvin, The Gospel according to St. John 1–10 (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1959), p. 74 (on Jn. 3:16).

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of salvation as stipulating the obedience of his Son even unto death, and for it promising in return a name above every name that he might be the head of the elect in glory; the Son as offering himself to do the Father’s will, promising a faithful and complete performance of the duty required of him and restipulating the kingdom and glory promised to him.43

So expressed, the scheme immediately invites all manner of critical reflections. (1) The exegetical basis of the notion of an inner-divine agreement is at best insecure. (2) Talk of a ‘pact’ is less abstract than the formal language of processions and missions, and for that very reason more vulnerable to mythological adaptation. (3) The contractual and juridical idiom can quickly become less than fully personal, and encourage elaborations or extensions which go well beyond the original intention and allow the analogy of contract to acquire a logic of its own not strictly governed by material exegesis.44 (4) It assumes a decidedly voluntarist conception of the history of redemption. This is undoubtedly a restrictive idiom through which to describe the relations between Father and Son, as well as the relations between God and creatures. In both cases, it can tend to reduce those relations to an encounter of wills – an especially damaging move in trinitarian theology if it leads us to conceive of Father and Son as distinct centres of willing, reaching a subsequent concord, thereby undermining the peace and unity of the divine life. (5) Alongside all these lies a further objection, namely that it makes the history of redemption a mere shadow: emphasizing the pact concluded between Father and Son before time appears to mean that nothing is at stake in incarnation, cross and resurrection, since in one sense all has been decided in advance. The objections are substantial; but they need not be decisive, and it remains possible to allow the notion of the covenant of redemption to direct us to something indispensable in soteriology, which might be stated thus: the rescue of lost creatures is secured by the acts and sufferings in time of God’s Son and servant, supremely in his passion. His being led away like a lamb to the slaughter, his being taken away by oppression and judgement, his grave made with the wicked – all this does not take place in some time other than that in which Adam’s children live out their days under a curse, but precisely in their creaturely, bodily history. But what kind of creaturely, bodily history is this if it is indeed for our salvation? It is history which ‘realizes’ God’s ‘eternal purpose’ (Eph. 3:11), history which saves ‘not in virtue of our own works but in virtue of his own purpose and the grace which he gave us 43  Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1994), XII.ii.13, p. 177. 44   Hodge, for example, whilst emphasizing the fundamentally personal nature of the relations between Father and Son, nevertheless schematizes the pactum salutis in terms of contracting parties, promises and conditions: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (London: James Clarke, 1960), pp. 361–2; in this, he is followed in Louis Berkhof’s admirably clear presentation in Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958), pp. 265–71.

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in Christ Jesus ages ago’ (2 Tim. 1:9).45 It is history ‘suspended’ from the divine purpose; and that purpose itself extends from the perfection of God’s own life. By way of expansion, two things are to be said. First, soteriology in this register thinks of creaturely history as embraced by a divine conclusion. This conclusion or determination is not ex post facto, after the fact, but ex pacto divino, on the basis of the divine covenant. In salvation we are not in the realm of the fleeting or conditional, but the realm of history under the faithful promise of God to himself and therefore to us (this, if anything, is the real force of the language of ‘contract’). And the divine conclusion in the matter of redemption of creatures repeats the immanent relations of the Father who sends and the Son who offers himself to fulfil the Father’s will. Barth worried that the notion of a pact between Father and Son raises the spectre of an abstract divine will lurking behind the covenant of redemption.46 But the pact between Father and Son simply repeats their eternal personal properties and relations, behind which there is nowhere to go. If the older federal theology sometimes appeared to stumble, it was perhaps at this point – in so elaborating the contractual metaphor that the personal triune relations were in some measure obscured. Yet even here we should judge cautiously. Hodge is quick to draw attention to the mutual love, address and communication between the triune persons which lies at the heart of the covenant of redemption;47 Bavinck, similarly, in his magisterial treatment of the topic, subordinates the contractual to the personal: ‘The pact of salvation makes known to us the relationships and life of the three persons in the Divine Being as a covenantal life, a life of consummate self-consciousness and freedom’.48 The covenant of redemption is not as it were a point at which some amorphous deity takes shape; it derives from the antecedent identities or ‘character’ of the triune persons,49 and accords with the eternal personal order of God’s life. Like the divine missions, it looks back to the processions. Second, the ‘pact’ between Father and Son really does include the creature. As with predestination, so here: divine determination is not self-enclosed but open and intentional. The will of God for salvation is not mere cause but loving purpose. It accompanies and shapes creatures; it perfects them, bringing them to abundant life and not simply impelling them in a particular direction as just so much matter. God 45

  Calvin comments: ‘[H]ere Paul is dealing with what God determined with himself from the beginning, so that then he gave it people who were not yet born quite apart from any consideration of merit, and he kept it stored away among his treasures till the time came when he could make it clear by the result that he determines nothing in vain’: The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, p. 297. 46   Barth, CD IV/1, pp. 64–5. 47   Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, pp. 359–60. 48   Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), p. 214. 49   ‘Character’ is Edwards’s word: see ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 438.

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loves creatures by making a determination concerning them. And so the covenant which God makes with himself is at the very same time a covenant with creatures. The inner-divine pact and fellowship with creatures are inseparable; that about which God takes counsel with himself and to which he pledges all the resources of his very being is us. In the formal terms of Reformed federal dogmatics, ‘covenant of redemption’ and ‘covenant of grace’ (that is, God’s covenant with the elect) cannot be detached from each other, because they are embraced under the single reality of the covenant of the gospel.50 For the Son with whom the Father concludes his pact is the last Adam, the head of his people, the first-born. The covenant of redemption is not some isolated bit of intra-trinitarian metaphysics, but intrinsic to God’s dealings with creatures; that is why it is the covenant of redemption. To sum up: The pact of salvation … forms the link between the eternal work of God toward salvation and what he does to that end in time. The covenant of grace revealed in time does not hang in the air but rests on an eternal, unchanging foundation. It is firmly grounded in the counsel of the triune God and is the application and execution of it that infallibly follows.51

V So far my concern has been to trace the backward movement of soteriology, its reference to the infinite divine milieu which encompasses salvation’s temporal occurrence. But however necessary, this does not exhaust the task of a theology of salvation. From here, soteriology moves to presentation of the economy of salvation as it unfurls itself through time: because there are the processions and missions, because there is this inner-trinitarian pledge, then a creaturely history unfolds. This history is of God; and what is of God really is this history, the human history of the Saviour. By way of conclusion, I offer a remark on this second element. There is a reciprocal relation between trinitarian doctrine and the evangelical narratives of the Saviour. For, on the one hand, trinitarian teaching instructs us in how to read those narratives rightly, and does so by specifying the identity of their active subject. Trinitarian doctrine shows who indeed it is that bears our griefs, whose chastisement it is that makes us whole. On the other hand, trinitarian teaching is not an alien form imposed upon the history of the passion, for it emerges from and is reinforced by the very narratives which it illuminates, and which always   See, for example, William G.T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003), p. 680: ‘The evangelical covenant … may therefore be called (a) the covenant of redemption when Christ and his offices are the principal thing in view and (b) the covenant of grace when the elect and their faith and obedience are the principal thing under consideration.’ 51   Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, p. 215. 50

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retain material priority over any conceptual representation. To say that external saving history is just that – ‘external’, a sequence of acts and sufferings referring back to the infinite, groundless life of God in his inner relations – is not to reduce saving history to a mirage, but simply to indicate what takes place in that history. Processions, missions, covenant of redemption and the rest attempt conceptual penetration of the Saviour’s evangelical ministry and self-announcement: ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh’ (Jn. 6:51). Teaching about the Trinity thus clarifies what kind of human history is ‘of God’: ‘flesh’, certainly and inescapably, because this is what the eternal Word unreservedly became. Yet ‘becoming’ indicates a relation of Word to flesh which is not simple identity, and this particular mode of relation (in which the Word is not exhausted in his act of self-identification in the historical activity of Jesus of Nazareth) is fundamental to the Saviour’s temporal identity. Jesus’ human history is the taking place of a ‘descent from heaven’, a giving of living bread, the enactment and manifestation of the divine ego eimi. Certainly a full soteriology would be impossibly idealist without a presentation of the human history of the Saviour. But such a presentation could not proceed as if Jesus’ human history were in some straightforward way comparable with our own and narratable as such; it would need, rather, to exhibit the special character of that history, the mystery of its occurrence at the intersection of created time and divine eternity. Jesus’ history is incomparably and irreducibly strange, and the strangeness (as Donald MacKinnon put it in a searching essay) ‘may be judged rooted in, and expressive of, the way in which he lived uniquely on the frontier of the familiar and the transcendent, the relative and the absolute’.52 The human history of Jesus is the divulgence in time of divine grace. Yet if the force of ‘is’ there is properly to be seized, considerable restraint is needed: the human history of Jesus may not be allowed to become in and of itself soteriologically primitive or constitutive.53 Certainly, the humanity of the Saviour – his living of this human life – is soteriologically indispensable, for only in that way, as Calvin puts it, can we be reassured that Christ is ‘comrade and partner in the same nature with us’,54 that there is indeed naturae societas, fellowship of nature, between him and us. ‘Ungrudgingly he took our nature upon himself to impart to us what was his, and to become both Son of God and Son of man in common with us’.55 Yet already Calvin’s reference there to dei filius shows that Jesus’ human history  Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Prolegomena to Christology’, in Themes in Theology: The Three-Fold Cord. Essays in Philosophy, Politics and Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), p. 180. 53  For a recent argument that Jesus’ humanity is so to be regarded, see Spence, The Promise of Peace. 54   Calvin, Institutes II.xiii.2, p. 477. 55   Calvin, Institutes II.xii.2, p. 465. 52

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is not a quantity in itself. There is no human history of Jesus in se, in abstraction from its enhypostatic relation to the divine Word; the only history of Jesus which there is, is the history of the God-man. Jesus’ history is the Son’s mission in the world; the Son’s sending is not some additional element, superimposed upon the history of Jesus or concurrent with his ‘natural’ history as if that history could be considered as at least initially complete in itself without the relation it bears to the eternal Son. Jesus’ human history is exhausted in the fact that it is the form of the divine descent into the world, acting out in time (but not, as it were, constituting for the first time) the eternal relation of Father and Son. We can therefore scarcely hope to render the saving human history of the Saviour intelligible without appeal to teaching about Trinity and hypostatic union, by which its reference back to the infinity of God’s life is shown; only thus may it be seen as the divine katabasis which really does bring life: It was his task to swallow up death. Who but life could do this? It was his task to conquer sin. Who but very Righteousness could do this? It was his task to rout the powers of world and air. Who but a power higher than world or air could do this? Now where does life or righteousness, or lordship and authority of heaven lie but with God alone? Therefore, our most merciful God, when he willed that we be redeemed, made himself our Redeemer in the person of his only-begotten Son.56

The special character of Jesus’ saving history may be stated by speaking of it as a commissioned history, the discharge of an office. This is not to eliminate personal and historical spontaneity, for what is commissioned is precisely a personal history, not an inexorable divine process in which a human life is merely caught up like flotsam. But this personal, historical spontaneity is not that of a lost creature drifting through time, untethered to the divine telos, a mere accumulation of episodes. It is a doing of the works ‘which the Father has granted me to accomplish’ (Jn. 5:36). The enactment of these works constitutes the office and role of Jesus. But, again, his office and role are not external to his inner person, so that his real identity is somehow anterior to his function. For, like his humanity and divinity, Jesus’ ‘personal’ identity and his ‘official’ activity are inseparable.57 Is it then the case that ‘the atoning work of Christ is something which Jesus does as a man towards God’?58 If the work of the Saviour reinstitutes the covenant between God and creatures from both sides – if he is the high priest of the eternal covenant – then Jesus’ human obedience to the will of the Father is intrinsic to the

  Calvin, Institutes II.xii.2, p. 466.   On this, see the finely-drawn interpretation of Calvin on Christ’s persona in Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182–219, and, more generally, Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, pp. 58–87. 58   Spence, The Promise of Peace, p. 22. 56

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achievement of reconciliation.59 But a further question must be pressed: is there a man Jesus apart from the being and act of the eternal Word, and so apart from the being and act of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit? Is there a human obedience on the part of the man Jesus which is not a temporal repetition of the Son’s active consent to the will of the Father? There is no such one; there is only the human Jesus whose coming is the descent to us of the ‘very majesty of God’.60 And it is as the history of such a one that the human history of the Saviour is to be told: as the accomplishment of the incarnate Son, the servant of God who is exalted and lifted up, and very high.

59   See on this Horton, Lord and Servant, pp. 208–41; the covenantal framework which Horton brings to bear upon the topic enables him to integrate the deity and humanity of the Saviour much more tightly than Spence. 60   Calvin, Institutes II.xii.1, p. 465.

Chapter 2

A Simple Salvation? Soteriology and the Perfections of God Stephen R. Holmes

The doctrine of the divine perfections, or attributes of God, is somewhat out of fashion amongst contemporary systematic theologians, largely as a result of the resurgence of interest in trinitarian theology that has occurred over the past halfcentury or so. In the older dogmatics (even in Karl Barth) the implications of the doctrine of God for the rest of theology, and for Christian faith and life, were spelt out largely in terms of the divine perfections; the doctrine of the Trinity was confessed and explored in its ecumenical and conciliar development, but was in danger of having no consequences. This claim is perhaps surprising enough to warrant some further explication. Let me take three witnesses from main streams of the Reformed tradition prior to Barth: F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Charles Hodge and Herman Bavinck. Schleiermacher famously confesses his inability to find any direct connection of the doctrine of the Trinity to faith and life (and so, in his terms, any place for the doctrine in dogmatics): ‘… this doctrine itself, as ecclesiastically framed, is not an immediate utterance concerning the Christian self-consciousness, but only a combination of several such utterances’. Charles Hodge begins his own exposition of the Trinity with what appears to be a fairly deliberate and direct response to Schleiermacher, who, however, is never named. The Trinity, he claims, is at the heart of revealed truth, and it is of the essence of revealed truth to be useful: ‘Truth is in order to holiness. God does not make known his being and attributes to teach men science, but to bring them to saving knowledge of Himself’. When he tries to give content to this claim,

  This is true of Karl Barth’s statement of the doctrine of God in vol. II of the Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75 [hereafter CD]), which (remarkably) contains no section devoted to the Trinity; that Barth’s actual theological practice was rather different is obvious to any reader (already in CD I/1 §§8–12, of course).   F.D.E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. and trans. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999), §170.    Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), pp. 442–82.    Hodge, p. 442.

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however, it is striking that he immediately falls into (what he knows to be) the ancient heresy of modalism: It [the doctrine of the Trinity] is the unconscious or unformed faith, even of those of God’s people who are unable to understand the term by which it is expressed. They all believe in God, the Creator and Preserver … They … believe in a divine Redeemer and a divine Sanctifier. They have, as it were, the factors of the doctrine of the Trinity in their own religious convictions.

One page later Hodge demonstrates his awareness that what he has just described is not the ecumenical doctrine of the Trinity: ‘The terms Father, Son, and Spirit do not express different relations of God to his creatures. They are not analogous to the terms Creator, Preserver, and Benefactor’. Or, presumably, to Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Hodge apparently cannot defend the usefulness of trinitarian doctrine without distorting it. Bavinck does better, perhaps because of the robust focus on God’s relationships with the world that was characteristic of the Dutch neo-Calvinists. He again makes the point that theology is never a merely speculative science: ‘If God is indeed triune, this has to be supremely important, for all things, according to the apostle, are from him and through him and to him (Rom. 11:36)’. He offers three places where the doctrine is indeed important: the liveliness of God; the mediation of creation; and the foundation of theology. These sections read as strikingly contemporary: the Trinity reveals to us God’s life as real and as separate from the world; it reveals to us the genuine but relative independence of the world from God; and it forms the basic grammar of Christian confession. The first two points could have come from Colin Gunton; the last from someone influenced by George Lindbeck. The section remains, however, just a little over three pages, so hardly a major essay on the worth and relevance of the doctrine.

   Hodge, p. 443. It may be that Hodge is simply trying here to indicate the rudimentary, and perhaps implicitly modalist, unarticulated faith of ordinary Christians, and so is not guilty of modalism as I have charged. If so, however, his opening and strident claim of the usefulness of the doctrine of the Trinity is left completely without content. The only ‘use’ Hodge can hint at for the doctrine relies on modalism, and so he seems to leave us with a choice between an account of the Trinity that is merely useless orthodoxy, or an account that is at least heterodox.    Hodge, p. 444; see also his brief discussion of Sabellianism on p. 459.    Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2: God and Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), p. 331.    See particularly Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); also Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Triune Creativity: Trinity, Creation, Art and Science’, in Paul Louis Metzger (ed.), Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005), pp. 73–85.

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By contrast, accounts of God’s attributes, such as justice or love, drive the development of the theological systems for all three theologians. In the world in which they lived, having a chapter in a book on salvation that dealt with the divine perfections would have appeared merely bizarre: necessarily, the whole volume must deal with the divine perfections, since soteriology is grounded and built upon accounts of divine perfection, in its biblical and historical foundation, and in its (to them) contemporary expression. This situation is now almost precisely reversed. Soteriology is now typically, almost reflexively, understood through trinitarian narratives (Barth’s massive treatment of the theme in Church Dogmatics IV might be seen as the key turning-point, although the more general turn to narrative modes of thought in both academic theology and the wider culture in the second half of the twentieth century is certainly relevant, as is Aulén’s invitation to re-imagine what a doctrine of the atonement ought to look like in Christus Victor). Further, whilst what were once called the ‘communicable’ perfections of God – love, justice, mercy, wrath perhaps – still find some deployment in accounts of soteriology, the so-called ‘incommunicable’ perfections – eternity, aseity, impassibility, simplicity – are not only not deployed, but are routinely criticized as inappropriate accretions that should have no place in Christian theology. In this chapter, then, I want to give a brief outline of the doctrine of the divine perfections in the form in which it was generally accepted until Schleiermacher, highlighting particularly the role of analogy, and the central place, and necessary consequences, of an account of divine simplicity in that doctrine. Thus I will argue that simplicity, impassibility and aseity are not doctrines that can be discarded without consequence, but are a central part of the grammar of proper speech about God in classical Christian theology. To stress this point further, and to indicate that the modern assumption that simplicity is incompatible with trinitarian dogma is wrong, I will then give a brief overview of certain points of the Eunomian controversy, demonstrating that the development of the ecumenically-received doctrine of the Trinity in fact depended upon doctrines of analogy and simplicity. Having thus given some reason for accepting the complex of incommunicable perfections centred on simplicity, I will explore the consequences of these perfections for soteriology. On the Divine Perfections The doctrine of the divine perfections is fundamentally an account of how God is named, of how human language can adequately refer to divine reality. Words are applied to God descriptively on almost every page of the Christian Scriptures: ‘The Lord, the Lord, the gracious and compassionate God …’; ‘Holy, holy, holy    Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (London: SPCK, 1953).

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is the Lord Almighty’; ‘God is love’; ‘Our God is a consuming fire’. God is named repeatedly in Christian liturgy (‘… we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee; O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God …’). It is thus a datum of Christian theology that God can be named; the theological question is how words succeed in referring to God. The locus classicus for such discussions is, of course, the treatise on the Divine names in qq. 12–13 of the Prima Pars of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.10 Thomas’s treatment turns on two key ideas: analogy and simplicity. Human words when applied to God must refer differently from the way they do when applied to created realities, claims Thomas (‘Jane is good’ and ‘God is good’ are rather different claims), and so the usage is not merely univocal; on the other hand, when we speak of God’s goodness we refer to something recognizably similar to created goodness, so neither is the usage merely equivocal. Our language about God is analogical: it is composed of stumbling attempts to find human words that are at least partially adequate to the task of speaking divine truth. This has various important consequences, but in relation to the particular question of soteriology such reflections obviously limit certain forms of argument. The reality of God’s justice and mercy will often be to the fore in accounts of soteriology, but a doctrine of analogy limits our capacity to argue from our own more general conceptions of justice, for example, to what God ‘must’ do because he is perfectly just. Our perception of what it means for God to be perfectly just is limited significantly by our imperfect grasp of divine perfection, and so our use of the word ‘just’ when speaking of God is subject to the restriction of analogy. The doctrine of divine simplicity is Thomas’s answer to the question concerning the relationships of the divine perfections. God’s life is one, single and coherent; he is not divided into differing parts or pulled in different directions. Thus, all of our words used to describe perfection refer to the same single divine reality.11 The reality of God’s life is, of course, beyond our comprehension and beyond our capacity to describe, so we use words that imperfectly but adequately capture one or another aspect of that one simple perfection. This account has three consequences of relevance to this chapter. First, it implies that God’s perfections are not something different from God himself. It is not that God, being God, could then decide whether to be just, good, or eternal. Rather, all that God is, he is necessarily and eternally. God’s life is not a composite of his essence and those things he has chosen to embrace in addition; God’s life is simple. Second, if this is the case, and if God’s life is indeed simple, then there is a sense in which God’s perfections are not distinct from one another. Third, Thomas establishes a certain privileged place for simplicity amongst the divine 10

 Text and translation from the Blackfriars edition, vol. III (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963). 11  Thomas cites Augustine to precisely this effect: dicit Augustinus, Deo, hoc est esse quod fortem esse, vel sapientem esse, et si quid de illa simplicitate dixeris, quo ejus substantia significatur (Ia. 13, 2 sed contra, citing Augustine, Trin. VI.4).

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perfections, not because this divine name is less analogous than any of the others, but because it controls decisively how all other divine names are to be understood. For this reason many of the post-Reformation dogmatic treatises from every side chose to name simplicity first amongst the perfections (the Reformed often named glory last for similar reasons). This theme nonetheless needs careful treatment. It is routine in recent philosophical discussions of the divine perfections to rapidly assert that the doctrine of divine simplicity teaches that God’s justice is identical with God’s eternity.12 This assertion is merely non-sensical, and has been one of the reasons for the rejection of divine simplicity. Thomas does not claim this: explicitly, in Ia. 13:4 he asks whether the divine names are synonymous (utrum nomina dicta de Deo sint nomina synonyma), and responds with a clear negative. Rather, he claims, we perceive the single and simple perfection of God from a variety of angles or perspectives, and give it differing names to reflect those differing perspectives. If these two consequences are correct, then they are rich in implications for the doctrine of salvation. The first asserts that God cannot choose not to be merciful, just, loving or righteous: these perfections are not things God can lay aside, but are intrinsic to his life. The second suggests that we cannot ‘play off’ differing perfections of God against one another. The hymn that speaks of the cross as the ‘trysting place where heaven’s love and heaven’s justice meet’ may be fine poetry;13 it is poor theology, however, in that it suggests and assumes that heaven’s love and justice could ever be separated, even in thought. Finally, if God is indeed simple, as Thomas suggests, most of the other incommunicable perfections flow from this confession naturally.14 If God is simple, then God’s existence is necessarily dependent only on a single basis, which is (by supposition) his own good pleasure in his existence (in at least some streams of classical theology angels are simple beings, being entirely spiritual, and so similarly dependent on a single cause, but they are not self-caused, as God is; human beings, by contrast, are not simple, and so our lives are the result of many conflicting causes). This means, necessarily, that God is possessed of the perfection of aseity: his life is consequent on nothing other than himself. Aseity also has consequences, however: if God is a se, then God is also necessarily immutable and impassible, if both these perfections are properly 12

  See, for example, the debate between Mann and Morris, who both follow this line: W.E. Mann, ‘Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies, 18 (1982): 451–71, esp. p. 453; T.V. Morris, ‘On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies, 21 (1985): 299–318, esp. p. 300. 13   ‘Beneath the Cross of Jesus’, by Elizabeth C. Clephane (1830–69). 14  Of course, the reality is that all God’s perfections necessarily mutually entail each other, as aspects of the one, utterly coherent, perfection that is God’s life. Nonetheless, in the realm of our theology, working only with the analogical terms that we can grasp, certain directions of correlation are easier to grasp, or at least more thoroughly worked-through in the theological tradition, and so more available, than others.

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understood. Both are essentially claims that God’s life is not changed or damaged by anything beyond himself; immutability has historically been based on an assumption or claim that God’s perfection is such that he will not change himself.15 Impassibility, the claim that God does not ‘suffer,’ needs careful statement. Classically it had less (or perhaps nothing) to do with the emotional state that ‘suffering’ tends to imply to modern-day speakers of English; rather it recalls the older sense of ‘suffer’, meaning to be acted upon. Impassibility, thus understood, is the claim that God is always active, never passive, that God always does, and is never done to. So stated, it does not exclude the possibility that God might ‘suffer’ in the more common sense, though it does demand a careful specification of what such suffering might look like when predicated of the perfect life of God.16 Trinity and Simplicity In developing these arguments, I am conscious that in recent theology ideas such as simplicity, immutability and (especially) impassibility have been generally rejected, largely as a result of the renewal of trinitarian doctrine noted above. This rejection seems to me to be curious: accounts of how God is named, relying on something very similar to Thomas’s doctrine of analogy, and the assumption of a doctrine of divine simplicity were crucial components in the development of (what was to become) the ecumenically-accepted doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century. A sketch of the history highlighting this material seems worthwhile, therefore, in giving more reasons at least to consider the – admittedly unfashionable – doctrine of God I am outlining here. The Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity was developed largely through debate with the radical Arianism of Eunomius, a debate in which divine simplicity was assumed on all sides, and which turned in large part on a theology of the divine names. Eunomius operated with a strongly realist theory of language: words, if used properly, named things in a strict one-one mapping. To take one of Eunomius’s own examples, if God is named as both ‘light’ and ‘ingenerate’, then either there

15

 The standard logic runs: Any change must either make God more or less perfect; clearly God will never change himself to be less perfect; a change that made God more perfect would imply that something was lacking in his perfection initially, which is also impossible to believe. This logic has been criticized on the basis that it assumes an unexamined static notion of perfection; I suspect that this criticism is less telling than sometimes supposed: if God is indeed a se, then there can be no change in circumstances that would change what God’s perfection might look like. 16   See Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), pp. 159–70, for an example of how this might be worked out.

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are two things, or (at least) one of these words is being used improperly, or any rate metaphorically, which amounts to the same thing for Eunomius.17 The theory of language is clearly Platonic, with deep roots in the Cratylus. Jean Daniélou has argued for a more immediate influence from a form of Neoplatonism that owed something to Iamblichus.18 Regardless of its origins, the result for Eunomius and his followers is a strong argument against Nicene trinitarianism: God (the Father) is properly named ‘unbegotten’ or ‘ingenerate’;19 therefore the Son, being begotten, cannot be homoousios tô patri, or even homoiousios; his essence is simply different to that of the Father.20 The response to Eunomius was vigorous: we have full-scale works, or references to full-scale works, contra Eunomium by Apollinarius, Basil, Didymus the Blind, Diodore of Tarsus, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus and Sophronius.21 Perhaps the most interesting of these responses is the exchange between Eunomius and Basil, carried on after Basil’s death by Gregory of Nyssa. Basil argued that all our names for God are the result of epinoia – a difficult term to translate, which carries both the sense of ‘imagination’ and something more like ‘synthetic reasoning’. It is a word that, as far as I can trace, Eunomius introduced to the debate, in Liber Apologeticus §8, where he contrasts ‘expressions based on epinoia’ with ‘reality’. Basil picked up the word as a key term in his rival account of how language refers to God: the Scriptures, which must be held to speak properly, apply many different names to the same thing (Basil’s example is Jesus being named, for instance, ‘the way, the truth and the life’).22 Therefore, different divine names can and do refer to the same substance, and are the result of epinoia, which Basil understands to mean something like ‘ratiocination’. We look backwards, 17  A critical edition of Eunomius’s works may be found in Richard P. Vaggione, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). For this point see, for example, Liber Apologeticus §19. 18   Jean Daniélou, ‘Eunome l’Arien et l’exégèse platonicienne du Cratyle’, Revue des Études Grecques, 69 (1956): 412–32. See also, more recently, Lenka Karfíková, ‘Der Ursprung der Sprache nach Eunomius und Gregor vor dem Hintergrund der Antiken Sprachtheorien’, in Lenka Karfíková, Scot Douglass and Johannes Zachhuber (eds) Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium II: An English Version with Supporting Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 279–305, esp. pp. 279–85. 19   Eunomius, Liber Apologeticus §7; see also the confession of faith probably by Eunomius himself, in §28. As Vaggione notes, Eunomius does not distinguish conceptually between agenetos and agennetos, and the manuscript tradition shows much variation: Extant Works, p. 29. The authorship of the confession of §28 is uncertain, but there is no doubt that it represents authentic Eunomian teaching: Extant Works, p. 16. 20  I discuss Eunomius, Basil and Gregory further in a forthcoming article on the perfections of God and trinitarian theology. 21  Vaggione, Extant Works, p. xiii. 22  The text can be found in Bernard Sesboüé (ed.), Basil de Césarée: Contre Eunome (Sources Chrétiennes 299 et 305; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1982–83); there is no English translation of which I am aware. This point is made in I.7 (Sesboüé I.188).

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discover God to be without beginning, and so name him as ‘ingenerate’; we look forwards, discover God to be without end, and so name him as ‘incorruptible’.23 Eunomius attacks this theory in his Apologia Apologiae, which probably appeared after Basil’s death, and Gregory of Nyssa defends it in his own Contra Eunomium, and in his Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii.24 By the time Gregory has finished, the points implicit in Basil’s account have become clear. The divine essence is ineffable and simple; all divine names are our halting accounts of what we can grasp of God’s nature from the divine operations.25 However (and this argument is the heart of Gregory’s much-anthologized shorter treatise addressed ad Ablabium, usually known as Quod non sint tres dei, or ‘On not Three Gods’26), the unity of the three divine persons is established by the fact that they can be named with the same (single) name and can be seen to perform the same (single) action. There is one divine essence, single, eternal and simple, to which all of our language about God haltingly refers. It is important to make these points with reference to the Cappadocian debate with Eunomius because in much modern theology it is assumed that the idea of divine simplicity is incompatible with any adequately trinitarian account of God’s life. This claim might be correct, of course, but if it is then we need to accept that the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers (and, of course, the later Eastern tradition to John of Damascus,27 and the Western tradition of Augustine and Boethius)28 is fatally flawed. Soteriology and Simplicity So far, then, I have tried to outline what I mean by the doctrine of divine simplicity, and to give some reasons why it should at least be thought about seriously. I have also tried to indicate that if simplicity is accepted, other negative perfections must be accepted with it. If we follow the Cappadocian Fathers, and take simplicity, and with it aseity and impassibility, seriously, what consequences follow for   CE I.7 (Sesboüé I.192).  It is necessary to use Werner Jaeger’s edition, Contra Eunomium Libri (Gregorii Nysseni Opera vols I and II) (Leiden: Brill, 1960), to get the works in the intended order. Older editions and translations have the Refutatio as book II of the CE, and CE book II as either a separate work or book XII B of the CE. 25  On all this, see now Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to FourthCentury Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 133–221, 273– 301, 344–63. 26  The best text is to be found in Jaeger’s edition: Gregorii Nysseni Opera Dogmatica Minora (Gregorii Nysseni Opera vol. III,1) ed. Friederich Mueller (Leiden: Brill, 1958); the text is on pp. 37–57, with useful text-critical notes at pp. xxxi–xliii. 27   See De Fide Orthodoxa I.vii (and cf. Ps.-Cyril, De Sacrosancte Trinitate 10). 28   See Augustine, De Trinitate V; Boethius, Trinitas unus Deus 3–6. 23 24

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soteriology? I want in the remainder of this chapter to discuss a few of these, beginning with a consideration of the effect of salvation. Doctrines of salvation have to give an account of why salvation is necessary, to answer the ‘What is wrong?’ question. Simplicity, and particularly its correlate, aseity, places important limits on the answers that may be given to this question. If God is simple and a se, then nothing outside of God, which is to say nothing in creation, affects God’s life in any way; this includes human (or angelic) sin. God is not damaged, lessened or hurt at all by our failures, nor is God restored, repaired or set right in his own gracious act of salvation. Instead, and positively, God’s act of salvation is a gracious re-ordering of (at least some parts of) the created order. This claim may seem surprising from at least two angles. Firstly, ‘conservative’ accounts of salvation are often presented as stressing the way in which God is changed by the atonement;29 if what I have just claimed is correct, then such accounts are in fact remarkably radical and revisionary. Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, there is a biblical tradition of speaking of the atonement as affecting God: God’s wrath is averted by the death of Christ, or God is somehow ‘propitiated’ through the cross. What might we say in response to these points? First, the biblical argument should not be overplayed: whilst there is clearly no room here for a survey of all the biblical data, it is far more common in the Scriptures to find human beings as objects of atoning acts. In the Old Testament God ‘make[s] atonement for his land and his people’ (Dt. 32:43); Levitical sacrifices are means by which a person who is guilty may seek forgiveness (Lev. 4:20, 26, 31). Language of ‘cleansing’, ‘washing’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘restoration’, and so on is common, and all points to real change happening in creation, not in the life of God. The New Testament begins in the same key: ‘He shall save his people from their sins’ (Mt. 1:21); and John the Baptist announces that the task of the Lamb of God is to ‘take away the sins of the world’ (Jn. 1:29). The broad biblical witness concerning salvation is that it is something that happens to us, not to God.30

29

 For a particularly striking example of this, consider R. Albert Mohler’s address at the ‘Together for the Gospel’ conference in 2008 (an audio file can be downloaded from: http://t4g.org/08/media/ [accessed 5 August 2008]). Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, frames his discussion of the atonement in terms of a defence of historical orthodoxy in the face of recent deviations, and then asserts that the test of an adequate doctrine of the atonement is the belief that God’s attitude towards the sinner is ‘changed’ by Christ’s passion. Given Mohler’s strictures about ‘open theism’ elsewhere – and given, indeed, the rest of his lecture, which is rather more carefully framed – I assume that he did not intend to cast aside divine immutability in quite such cavalier fashion; but the lapse is remarkable. 30   John McIntyre helpfully comments: ‘very significantly, the NT nowhere says that God had to be reconciled to us; but we are to be reconciled to him’: The Shape of Soteriology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Death of Christ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), p. 41.

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Second, we need to consider the nature of soteriological language. It has become common in contemporary theology to speak of the various differing ways of narrating the saving event as complementary ‘metaphors’ or ‘models’; the sheer variety of biblical images for the work of Christ would seem to make this a necessity. If we do understand soteriology in this way, however, we need to be careful about reading too much out of the metaphors, because each will have a place where it breaks down and becomes misleading rather than illustrative. When Jesus speaks of giving his life as ‘a ransom for many’, for instance, he gives no indication of who it is to whom the ransom is paid. When the Fathers discussed the issue, they generally found every available answer to be theologically unhappy, and even when one or another thought he had a solution, it was not found generally convincing; the image is striking and helpful, but cannot be pushed too far. Third, what is changed in soteriology, properly understood, is a relationship. The end result of God’s saving act is that we stand in a different relation to him: adopted daughters and sons, where once we were alienated rebels. In different language, the primary Pauline image for salvation is incorporation into Christ, which is once again a relational reality. It may be that this change in relationship is consequent upon a change of status (our sins are forgiven, for example), but working with the good scholastic maxim that what is last in execution is first in intention, we may subsume all else under God’s intention through Christ and by the Spirit to change his relationship with his creation and with at least some of his human creatures. It is a commonplace of classical theology that there may be a change in a creature, and with it a change in the relationship of God to the creature, without any change in God. If, as argued above, we do best to think of all the differing perceptions we perceive in God as different aspects of God’s simple, unchanging life, then we might narrate atonement as a change of state in the creature, which places her in a position to perceive different aspects of God’s life. So she moves from being an object of God’s wrath to being a beloved daughter; God’s single perfect life of love and joy does not change, but she now perceives it as loving welcome rather than implacable wrath because of the different state in which she finds herself. For these three reasons I do not believe that there is good biblical reason to reject an account of soteriology which insists upon God’s aseity. What of the argument from tradition? Is it the case that the objective or ‘Latin’ tradition of soteriology, finding its classical exponents in Anselm and Calvin, found it necessary to speak of the atonement as causing a change in God? Anselm is abundantly clear on the point; indeed, the fact of aseity might be called the key doctrinal motor of his whole account of atonement, although he happens not to use the term in Cur Deus Homo. He insists on the doctrine first in connection with God’s honour, asserting straightforwardly that nothing in creation can ever add to or subtract from God’s honour, which is perfect and will remain so regardless of creaturely action.31 The creature who sins fails to give the honour 31  Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.15: Dei honori nequit aliquid, quantum ad illum pertinet, addi vel minui. Idem namque ipse sibi honor est incorruptibilis et nullo modo mutabilis.

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he should to God, and so damages the ‘order and beauty of the universe’, but God himself is not damaged in any way.32 This point becomes decisive when Anselm, having established the fact of human sin, poses his famous dilemma: aut poena aut satisfactio – sin must either be punished or satisfied. However, were human sin merely to be punished, Anselm claims, God’s purposes for his creation, which included the glorification of at least some of his human creatures, would have been frustrated, and ­– because God is a se – this is inconceivable. Therefore there must be a way in which satisfaction is made.33 Calvin is equally clear. In an interesting discussion of the biblical language of God’s wrath against sinners (Inst. II.xvi.2), Calvin notes that there is a problem: Scripture speaks of God as the implacable enemy of sinful humanity apart from Christ; yet if this were the only truth, God would never have acted in Christ to save, an act of love and mercy wholly at odds with enmity and wrath. Calvin’s answer is an explicit assertion that such biblical texts as Rom. 5:10 and Gal. 3:10 are accommodations, representing not the truth of God’s attitudes, but a figure of speech that helps us to understand what the truth would have been had God not chosen in love and mercy to save us. Thus Calvin simply and explicitly denies that there is any change in God’s attitude towards the elect: God is always loving and merciful towards them, hence the coming of Christ. An adequate soteriology, then, that takes these themes seriously, will insist that salvation is not a way of changing God, but a way of re-ordering the creation. God’s life is a single, simple, glorious unending stream of love and joy; in acting in Christ to save, he transforms us into creatures able to experience this life positively, rather than being destroyed by it. What, finally, might these themes from the classical doctrine of God tell us about God’s saving act? I have already indicated the central issue here: the doctrine of divine simplicity, properly understood, will insist that God’s perfections are not dispensable or separable. God cannot choose to lay aside his mercy, justice, or love without ceasing to be who he is; and God’s justice and mercy cannot be set against one another as if God were pulled in different ways, or faced some sort of quandary to which he needed to find a solution. Every act of God is simultaneously absolutely just and perfectly merciful, if God is indeed properly named as both just and merciful. These two claims provide ‘boundary conditions’ within which any theologically adequate account of salvation must fall. Of course, the force of these boundary conditions will depend upon the adequacy and definition of certain perfections of God. Much serious theological discussion concerning salvation has recently turned upon questioning the meaning of ‘justice’. A Latin, legal conception of justice, it is claimed, has infiltrated and

32  Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.15: … et universitatis ordinem et pulchritudinem, quantum in se est, perturbat, licet potestatem aut dignitatem Dei nullatenus laedat aut decoloret. 33   See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.25.

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distorted the biblical witness, which reflects a very different Hebraic worldview. Paul Fiddes summarizes the point nicely: ... legal language is actually being used to defeat a way of life based on mere legalism. To see how the metaphor works in this complex way, it is essential to recognise that it is not borrowed from a Roman law court, but from a Hebrew one where all procedure was civil. There was no public prosecutor for any case, and the scene is thus of two litigants going to court, one accused of a crime by the other. The judge puts the accused either in the right (‘justifies him’) or in the wrong (‘condemns him’) ... Now this Hebrew setting means that ‘justification’, while a legal term, is at root a matter of relationships.34

Deciding upon such points is beyond the scope of this chapter, except perhaps to note that they will turn to some extent upon one’s acceptance or otherwise of varieties of the ‘new perspective on Paul’. My point is simply that, once a decision has been taken on which words adequately name God’s perfection, and what nuances of meaning they carry, they cannot be set aside or placed in opposition. It is not difficult to find popular-level presentations of soteriology, particularly in preaching or hymnody, that offend against these strictures. On a more ‘liberal’ end, talk of God accepting us by ‘setting aside’ his justice is not uncommon; more ‘conservative’ accounts will tend to present salvation as a problem to be solved, with God’s justice and love set in direct opposition, and the cross almost appearing as a clever trick to satisfy both. More carefully theological depictions tend not to make such crass errors, but similar points can be found throughout the theological tradition. Perhaps the most striking example of the former position is in Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher does not set aside justice as a perfection of God; he reinterprets it fairly drastically, as the fixed connection between sin in general and evil/suffering in general.35 As a result, Christ’s bearing of the general evil of the world is sufficient to deal with the existence of sin. For Schleiermacher, this is straightforward, and as a result he can find no content to ‘mercy’ as a perfection of God, dismissing it as belonging only to the language of poetry and preaching (§85). An adequate soteriology will not accept any setting aside or opposing of God’s perfections. God’s life is a single, glorious and unending stream of joy and love; we speak of our differing experiences of this single act using diverse language, but all that language must be referred to the one origin. In acting in Christ to save, every possible aspect of God’s perfection is necessarily fully and completely expressed; if our accounts of salvation do less, they remain inadequate.

  Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: DLT, 1989), pp. 86–7. 35  This is not explicitly stated in §84 of Der christliche Glaube, second edn (Berlin, 1830), where justice is defined, but the point has already been made explicitly in §77, and will become a key motor for understanding Christ’s high-priestly act in §104.4. 34

Chapter 3

Salvation as Judgement and Grace Andrew Burgess

Theology often struggles to hold together notions of God’s judgement and God’s grace. Grace may naturally be aligned with terms such as ‘benevolence’ and ‘mercy’, judgement easily finds a place with ‘wrath’, even ‘vengeance’. Within this tension either set of categories may be traded upon or devalued according to the predilection of the theologian, but perhaps most common is a certain reticence regarding divine judgement. The tendency has been most marked in the West, and within that tradition we might well identify a form of the doctrine of election as an obvious example of the inclination to bifurcate judgement and grace. The development of the doctrine of ‘double predestination’ typifies a disjunction in God’s supposed dealings with humanity: some are elected to life, the recipients of unmerited divine favour; others are destined to death, and receive the divine judgement they deserve. Within such a frame, God’s justifying grace is sharply opposed to the movement of God’s wrath: both are seen as essential to the story of God’s action, but they are not considered to be necessarily united, or viewed as aspects of the singular action of the holy God. 

  Within the framework of this chapter ‘judgement’ will be used in its more negative sense, ‘to judge as unworthy’ (as aligned with condemnation), rather than in the straightforward sense of ‘making a decision’.    Feminist theologies in particular frequently dispense altogether with notions of God’s judgement, as part of a package of doctrinal material bound up with notions of divine transcendence, God’s identity as judge, and so on. Such material is labelled patriarchal, and discarded. I can agree with much of the critique, and would also reject much that is thus rejected; but this should not involve discarding essential doctrine so much as offering deeper and better understandings of it. For a classic presentation of a feminist repudiation of God as judge, see Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 151–3.   Readers will immediately think of Calvin and the Reformed tradition. Any simple claim that Calvin himself bifurcates judgement and grace would be most unfair, not least in view of Calvin’s remarkable (albeit largely implicit) integration of the two within his account of sanctification. Equally, any critique of the Reformed tradition as a whole on this score must certainly not be pressed, as significant figures within that tradition worked intentionally to address the issues at stake; Cocceius stands out as a striking example.    Justyn Terry’s recent study of the place of judgement in the doctrine of salvation also addresses this issue: The Justifying Judgement of God: A Reassessment of the Place of Judgement in the Saving Work of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007). Terry is particularly concerned to locate the notion of judgement as the core idea around which the

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When there is a separation, it becomes too easy to conceive of judgement and grace as opposite features of God’s activity. In turn, there is a potential even to split apart the agency of the Trinity by rendering poor descriptions of God’s activity in relation to sinful creatures. All this raises significant issues for any discussion of salvation. Saving grace may become essentially an avoidance of judgement, through the Son’s establishment of a way in which the wrath of the Father is nullified. Grace and judgement may be conceived as a binary opposition: God’s action towards humans is seen as a matter of either ‘judgement’ or ‘grace’. Though more sophisticated theologians may manage to hold the two in balance, many Christians seem unable to entertain the notion that grace and judgement might exist in any form of interrelation. One example might be the difficulty that often seems to attend the business of holding together images of a God of love and a God of judgement, and the enduring Marcionite leanings of many in relation to Hebrew Scripture. In more liberal Protestant circles, there is regular resistance towards Jesus’ own talk of judgement, let alone towards such material on judgement as may be found in literature such as the book of Revelation. The inability to understand how the grace of God essentially involves God’s judgement generates a dangerous infringement of the gospel, and a misapprehension of the entire thrust of God’s work. It is by no means the intention of this chapter to utilize any crude rejection of notions of judgement or of the readily associated ideas of wrath and vengeance. The biblical witness is thoroughly populated with descriptions of exactly these realities in God’s reaction to sin and evil, and talk of them is quite inescapable in any theology that takes that witness seriously – even if such escape were to be desired. Rather, the argument I wish to present here is that God’s judgement various doctrines of the atonement are to be organized if they are to be understood in their appropriate interrelationship. Terry’s work is largely consonant with the concerns of this chapter, but the overall shape of his argument differs significantly from that undertaken here.   A fuller treatment of the subject would naturally involve some discussion of the doctrine of the atonement. As this chapter unfolds it will become clear that some sort of notion of Jesus assuming the place of humans and bearing the judgement of God is necessarily involved. Nevertheless, the well-documented tendency of certain renderings of penal substitution to split apart the agencies of divine persons remains a serious concern if we are intent upon maintaining the unity of the triune God’s action. I recently came across a piece of drama, written to be performed in a worship setting at Easter, in which a character representing God the Father acts as judge and declares Jesus innocent of all charges brought against him, but then goes on to state that he must die anyhow in order to save people from their sins. Pieces of informal theology such as this are certainly an attempt to communicate a great truth: that the Father gives up the Son, the one righteous human, to death for the sake of sinners. But the way in which the work and attitudes of the Father and Son are depicted typically leaves us without any sense that what we are seeing is the single activity of the one God who is Father, Son and Spirit; it appears as though the Father decides the Son’s fate without any common will or strategy between them. The implicit notions of justice are also highly tendentious.

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is as fundamental to God’s movement towards creation as is grace itself. This movement toward creation, with its particular focus on the human creature, is God’s work of ‘salvation’. The unity of God’s action in judgement and grace is to be celebrated as the specific work of the triune Holy One; the term ‘salvation’ is simply the shorthand description for God’s unitary activity, encountered in repentance and faith. We shall begin with an examination of the essential unity of God’s relation to sinners in judgement and grace as an expression of God’s holiness, focusing on the holiness and unity of the Trinity as revealed in Jesus. We shall move on to consider the presence of judgement in God’s work of salvation, especially in the areas of justification and sanctification. We shall then briefly note issues relating to ‘final judgement’. In tracing this line, the logic will largely be directed against those theologies which rightly recognize the reality of God’s judgement yet oppose it to the movement of grace. The concomitant argument against a denial of the centrality of judgement to God’s activity will be for the most part left implicit, though it will feature in conclusion. The Unity of the Holy God Within a framework that opposes judgement to grace, the holiness of God is often aligned with the movement of judgement and wrath: God’s holiness is described primarily in relation to God’s opposition to sin and evil, and therefore in terms of God’s destruction of these realities in condemnation of all that is profane. Indeed the most usual starting-place for discussions of God’s holiness, amidst other divine attributes, is a characterization of that holiness as God’s utter difference from all else, especially from humans. One brief discussion of God’s holiness, by Colin Gunton, proceeds thus: ‘God’s holiness is his otherness, his sheer difference from everything else’. The author goes on to say much besides, but the starting-point is clear. Similarly, Pannenberg describes God’s holiness as God’s ‘separateness from everything profane’. Very significantly, this means that ‘the holiness of God, then, may be seen primarily in his judgement’. Pannenberg adds some very important notes besides, but the point remains: God’s holiness is most readily associated with God’s judgement. For this reason, phrases such as God’s ‘holy wrath’ or ‘righteous judgement’ sound appropriate in our ears – and they are – but ‘holy grace’ has an unfamiliar and uncertain ring to it, and may sound vaguely oxymoronic (‘loving judgement’ even more so). Why should this be? Is God’s holiness less involved in, or even to be seen as opposed to, the movement of grace, such that in saving sinners    Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 49.    Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 398.    Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 398.

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God somehow finds a way to bypass God’s own holiness and offer grace to sinners? Quite the reverse: discussion of the holiness of God – which lies at the heart of the doctrine of God – can enable reflection on the holiness of grace, and on the justice of God’s saving work. Elucidating the unity of God’s character in holiness strengthens the argument against bifurcation of God’s action in grace and judgement. The Holiness of God as the Reality of God’s Act and Being God’s holiness cannot be reduced to concepts such as aseity or moral rectitude, nor even straightforwardly aligned with God’s majesty or omnipotence. God is not holy by virtue of occupying a higher place – even (à la Kant) an infinitely higher one – on a continuum of righteousness, neither is God’s holiness simply the opposite of human sinfulness. To speak of God’s holiness is in fact to speak of the character, the reality, of the God who exists triunely as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While we must always acknowledge that God’s reality is in the first instance the reality of God in se – the reality of God prior to all creation, and all relationship with creatures – we must also say that the holiness of this God is an encountered holiness: holiness in action. Within the history of God’s covenant with creation, this means holiness in relation. God’s holiness cannot be defined as ‘sheer difference’ or as ‘infinitely greater holiness’; such definitions may point to a truth, but this kind of abstraction does not capture the holiness of the God who acts in history, especially the holiness we encounter in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That holiness cannot be ascribed to God merely as an attribute – one among many – but is, rather, shorthand for the integrity of God’s act and being: In the Bible God Himself is the One who is originally and properly holy … . But in this as in other respects the biblical teaching about God is not theoretical. It is given in the context of accounts of God’s action in the history inaugurated by Him. … He is indeed holy in and for Himself. But he demonstrates and reveals Himself as such in His establishment and maintenance of fellowship with man in his world.10

In the reality of God’s self-revelation (the concrete manifestation in relation to God’s creation of that which God is in se and thus prior to all relationship with creatures), God’s holiness is therefore not merely God’s opposition to sin and evil, or distance from the profane, but rather the unfailing orientation of God in action toward the creation and toward fallen creatures. This is an orientation which seeks  For an excellent treatment of this see John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). Webster has raised the question informally of whether his treatment may align judgement and grace so strongly that the respective force of each suffers. Whether that is so or not, it is a danger which the current chapter seeks to avoid. 10   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75) [hereafter CD], IV/2, p. 500. 

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the redemption of the creature, a holiness which, as Gunton notes, is expressed in ‘being for’ the creature.11 Thus, ‘God’s holiness is like his justice in being directed to redemption rather than to vengeance’.12 John Goldingay’s reflection on the character of God in relation to YHWH’s ‘rage’ at Israel’s unfaithfulness draws upon the fact that it is YHWH’s love-relationship with Israel that causes such anger to burn, and this itself reveals YHWH’s holiness to be an orientation toward relationship in salvation. This gives priority to God’s love over God’s anger, but not at the expense of a realistic depiction of that anger and its effects: ‘Anger is not a divine attribute in the same sense as love is; the instinct to love emerges from God without any outside stimulus, but God gets angry only as a reaction to outside stimulus. Yet God does get angry’.13 So, God’s judgement arises within the covenant relationship God establishes from eternity, and therefore within the frame of love for the creation. Grace and the Holiness of God To begin to talk of God’s redemptive work and the unfailing orientation of God toward the creature is to bring to the fore a significant theme: the unity of God in triune action as the story of grace. We can know and speak of no other God than the one we meet in the history of God’s action. To speak of God’s action is always to speak of God’s triune action, and to that degree always to speak of the internal life of God. The integrity of God’s act is anchored in the integrity of God’s being. Nowhere is God’s essential, inner-divine holiness more clearly on display than in the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, in his conception, birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension. As Robert Jenson has powerfully emphasized, the triune God is that one whose very identity is tied up with the incarnation, for there is no God the Father but the Father of Jesus Christ, no Son but the Son of this Father, and no Spirit but the Spirit of these two.14 This, of course, is what drives Barth’s revision of the doctrine of election: the determination of God in election is at base the self-determination of God to be this God, the God who saves via the incarnation

  Gunton, The Christian Faith, p. 55.   Gunton, The Christian Faith, p. 149. 13   John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2: Israel’s Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), p. 141. For a similar point see Tony Lane, ‘The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 138–67, at pp. 147–8. 14  There are considerable problems in the way in which Jenson works out this emphasis – see, for example, Andrew Burgess, ‘A Community of Love? Jesus as the Body of God and Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Thought’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 6 (2004): 289–300; and Webster’s essay in the present volume, esp. pp. 22–4 – but the basic case is unquestionably right. 11

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of the Son.15 The story of God’s holiness is therefore the story of God’s grace in the integrity of God’s own orientation in action, ultimately expressed in Jesus the Christ. As Barth reminds us, ‘Jesus Christ is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God’.16 Thus, as Pannenberg puts it, ‘beyond every threat of judgement the holiness of God also means hope of new and definitive salvation. In spite of human sin God is faithful to his election’.17 Judgement and Grace as the One Word of the Holy God If this is so, then judgement and grace can never be thought in opposition to each other, as if God chooses from two distinct options, either to save or damn, with only a hidden rationale. Rather judgement and grace must be seen together in the one word God speaks – the Son.18 God’s holiness is expressed in the unity of God’s being and action as God. In relation to fallen creatures, judgement is therefore part and parcel of grace. Grace is not the antithesis of judgement, and is not operative at odd moments on the basis of some temporary suspension of God’s justice and wrath. It is not that God’s ‘default setting’ is wrath, but that somehow the Son manages to alter that setting and elicit grace for the few. Grace is not an optional extra that God the Father may at times be persuaded to add to his set of dispositions; neither for that matter is grace God’s mode of kindness which refuses to judge or condemn. God’s judgement and grace are not two masks, only one of which God may wear at any given moment: they are to be seen together in God’s singular response to sin, rebellion and absurdity on the part of the creature. We might well, therefore, choose to speak of God’s ‘gracious judgement’. Such judgement is essential to holy grace because it involves God’s taking up the cause of the creature against the reign of sin and death even when it is the creature’s own sin and rebellion that 15

  The problematic nature of Barth’s doctrine of election is briefly addressed below. The drive for revision was nonetheless entirely correct. See further Mostert’s essay below. 16   Barth, CD II/2, p. 95. 17   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 399. 18  Richard Bauckham comments that Jesus’ role as witness to the saving truth of God is linked inextricably with the fact that rejection of that witness must inevitably bring condemnation. This itself ‘helps to explain why early Christians commonly understood Jesus as both Saviour now and Judge at the end, without any feeling of the incongruity that modern minds often find in that combination’: The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.106. The New Testament authors in general see Jesus’ word, ministry and victory as the source of both life and judgement to death. The Book of Revelation furnishes a particularly striking example, with Jesus readily portrayed as both Saviour and source of judgement, and God’s judgements as, moreover, a cause of praise: ‘All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgements have been revealed’ (Rev. 15:4).

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is at issue. ‘God’s love itself implies his wrath. Without his wrath God is simply not loving in the sense that the Bible portrays his love.’19 As Webster puts it: As the Holy One, God passes judgement on sin and negates it. Yet the holy God does this, not from afar, as a detached legislator, but in the reconciling mission of the Son and the outpouring of the sanctifying Spirit. That is, God’s destruction of sin is accomplished in his triune acts of fellowship with humanity, in which he condemns, pardons, and cleanses … putting an end to our unholiness.20

Judgement is not avoided in grace; nor is this merely a matter of judgement achieved in a once-for-all moment of salvation (the work of God we call justification), as though the remaining life of the Christian (involving the ongoing work of God in sanctification) were free of judgement. Rather, judgement accompanies the whole life of believers before and with God, and God’s grace continues to judge and condemn all that would lead such creatures into death and destruction. Barth is therefore able to describe God’s command, with its inherent challenge and condemnation of our failure, as itself gospel and as God’s reclamation of humanity for himself.21 The Sanctifying Judgement of God’s Salvation22 Closer attention must be paid to judgement and grace within justification and sanctification as the saving work of the Holy One. The essential insight involves recognition of the active reality of judgement, and in particular the unity of its subjective and objective power: that is, the unity of God’s action in justification and sanctification.23 It is not only that Jesus dies for fallen humanity, but that in him humanity too dies: God does not judge and condemn some abstracted version 19  Lane, ‘The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God’, p. 139 (emphasis original). 20   Webster, Holiness, p. 47. See also Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, pp. 141–2, on the Old Testament presentation of YHWH as far from the Western notion of the dispassionate judge, but rather as one intimately involved, who adjudicates with strong feelings. 21   See, for example, Barth, CD II/2, pp. 733–81 (§ 39), ‘The Command as the Judgement of God’. For Barth, of course, the argument ends up in a somewhat universalist position; as I shall argue below, we ought not to allow the unity of judgement and grace to drive a logic which finishes quite where Barth’s does. 22  For a current treatment of many of the issues addressed in this section, see Terry, The Justifying Judgement of God, particularly Chapter 7: ‘Responding to the Gracious Judgement of God’, pp. 173–201. 23   Barth rightly emphasizes the unity of justification and sanctification, describing an indivisible activity of God which must be carefully differentiated without loss to its essential unity: see, for example, CD IV/2, p. 501.

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of sin in the person of the Son, rather, in him real flesh-and-blood humans are judged and condemned. Further, in the Spirit those others are incorporated into Jesus in such a fashion as to have received God’s judgement upon their sin and be freed from it. We are dead to sin and alive to Christ, as Paul reminded the Roman Christians – and, as he further challenged them: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? … We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.24

And so: ‘The forgiveness of our sins in Jesus Christ is God’s judgement on us, only the revelation of forgiveness is the revelation of our sins’.25 It is thus that the unity of the triune God is displayed in God’s singular activity, when at the cross God puts to death all sin in order to raise sinners to life. ‘For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his’ (Rom. 6:5). The holy God lays hold of sinners and commands them as elect children, judged, condemned and saved in grace. It is here in fact that the great strength of Calvin’s approach lies, perhaps despite the particular shape of his doctrine of election, for, as he rightly discerns, the movement of God’s gracious judgement as we see it in the life of the Christian is identical with sanctification in the Spirit.26 God’s gracious judgement puts to death the life of rebellion and raises to life the children of God. The third book of the Institutes, devoted to description of ‘The Way in which We Receive the Grace of Christ’, offers this fundamental reminder: We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will therefore sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. … Conversely we are God’s: let us therefore live in him and die for him.27

24

 Rom. 6:3, 6–7.   Barth, CD II/2, p. 752. 26   That Calvin is able to write so admirably about sanctification, with his clear acknowledgement of the role of God’s judgement in the ongoing work of God in the Christian, does not sit well with a bifurcation of judgement and grace in election. Nevertheless, that Calvin is able to acknowledge so clearly God’s authority as the primary agent in sanctification undoubtedly stems from the very fact that he has such a strong doctrine of election, for it is election that most clearly establishes God’s agency and right as the one who claims humans as his own and does so against the movement of their own inclination to sin and rebellion. 27   John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), III.7.1, p. 690. 25

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Shockingly, and in the most humbling fashion, it must even be recognized that sanctification is itself an expression of God’s condemnation upon humans as the most unworthy sinners, for this condemnation is one and the same with God’s condescension. Webster puts it thus: ‘Sanctification in the Spirit’ means: it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And ‘Christ lives in me’ means: by the Spirit’s power I am separated from my self-caused destruction, and given a new holy self, enclosed by, and wholly referred to, the new Adam in whom I am and in whom I act.28

This separation ‘from my self-caused destruction’ is simply the realization of the power and might of God’s gracious and merciful condemnation of the sinner, witnessed precisely in God’s establishing of that same sinner as a saint. Such a saint, filled with God’s Spirit, has been put to death as regards sin, and is thus set free to live for righteousness. All this takes place in the ongoing mutual interrelation of the saving God and the people this God is active in claiming, so that the derived holiness of God’s people must be understood in terms of the efficacious word of condemnation which is ever and always our acquittal and new life.29 What, then, does it mean that God claims humans as covenant-partners and demands that they become participants in God’s own righteousness? That God wills to rule over him clearly means that He wants his obedience … That God has determined him for service clearly means that that He claims him for Himself … . When God becomes his Partner, as the Lord of the covenant who determines its meaning, content and fulfilment, He necessarily becomes the Judge of man, the law of his existence.30

The fruit of judgement is the life of obedience; the proximal goal of the covenant of grace itself. This is to say, the immediate end of God’s election is the formation of a people who live in this world as strangers and aliens: So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.31   Webster, Holiness, p. 84.   Goldingay notes that YHWH, unlike a contemporary human judge, can call forth repentance in such a fashion as then to pardon: ‘YHWH is thus not like a judge in a western law court, because such a judge has no power or right to pardon someone on the basis of their changing their way of life’: Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, p. 128. 30   Barth, CD II/2, p. 511. 31   Col. 1:3–4. 28

29

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The ultimate goal remains hidden with Christ until the eschaton, but God’s gracious judgement provides the motive force propelling God’s people toward that end, via the interim goal of concrete and practical holiness in the time of waiting.32 Justification and sanctification are united as the one word of God in judgement and condemnation within the economy of grace. God’s judgement may thus be recognized, wrestled with, but also accepted – and as such received proleptically – as that gospel word of supreme comfort: ‘See, I am making all things new’ (Rev. 21:5). The time between Jesus’ ascension and final parousia – in itself the time of the gospel33 – may then be described as the time of the operation of grace in judgement. Judgement expresses God’s claim upon the whole of creation as just that: God’s creation. Within this framework and within the electing holiness of God which is from eternity to eternity, the unity of judgement and grace is characteristic of the unity of all God’s works. Final Judgement? The discussion thus far has centred on the work of justification and sanctification, the twofold movement of ‘salvation’. But what of a final judgement that does not yield salvation, but death?34 Such judgement is frequently foreshadowed in the New Testament, and this is surely what lies behind a vision of God’s judgement as, at least to some degree, separable from God’s grace. Has the preceding focus on the discernible unity of judgement and grace in salvation clamped judgement and grace too tightly together, so that the full story is unable to be told?35 Is the solution merely to loosen the clamp, and perhaps to say that grace functions in a particular unity with judgement in salvation, but not necessarily 32  To call the holiness of the saints an interim goal is by no means to devalue what is of absolute value before God; it is simply to recognize that the biblical witness will not allow us to see the holiness of God’s people per se, corporate or individual, as the final goal in itself: even this outcome of God’s gracious action is subjected to eschatological relativization. The ultimate purpose of God’s glory remains supreme. 33  For more on this ‘time-between’ as a theological description of the present age, see Andrew Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 34   Whether this final fate – the ‘second death’ – is to be understood in terms of eternal punishment or ‘annihilation’ is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue. Just what a biblical theology of ultimate judgement entails remains a matter of discussion, but at least some of the evidence points toward something like annihilation. 35  As is often suggested, this may be the greatest weakness of Barth’s treatment of divine judgement. While Barth always insisted he was not necessarily a universalist, it seems difficult to see how his theology can be characterized otherwise in tendency at least. His descriptions of God’s election of ‘the rejected’ attempt to maintain the sovereignty of God’s will to save, and to avoid any idea that the creature’s turn to death and nullity might defeat God’s purpose. The logic is clear; but Barth is left with vast exegetical difficulties, which for the most part he simply elides.

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in just the same way in the case of ‘the rejected’? This appears to provide a straightforward solution. However, while the final outcomes are clearly different for the two groups, to proceed too readily in this direction would involve a betrayal of the case made for judgement and grace as the single response of the holy God to sin, and might well lead back into the same problematic bifurcation of God’s acts with which we began. Is it possible, then, to see God’s judgement when it brings death and not life as itself also the judgement of grace? Perhaps it is not necessary to see an eschatological judgement which yields condemnation and not forgiveness (for some) as opposed to grace, but rather itself as serving grace. In the space remaining there is not room for anything like a full treatment, but we may at least indicate a way forward. A strong thread in Jesus’ teaching offers a basic direction, for his warnings of coming judgement most often target those who consider themselves to be elect members of the covenant people, yet in reality refuse grace. A common theme is that the presence of Jesus himself brings the judgement of grace which may yield life or death depending upon the response of those who encounter him. So, for example, John’s Gospel furnishes us with examples of Jesus warning that it is those who have encountered him and failed to receive grace who are left with condemnation hanging over them, as in Jn. 15:22: ‘If I had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin. Now however they have no excuse for their sin’.36 Within such a frame the encounter of grace is the seed of life or death. In similar vein, Jesus describes his own mission in this world as ‘for judgement’ (Jn. 9:39–41), so that the blind will see and those who are ‘sighted’ – or consider themselves so – may be judged as ‘blind’. Grace itself brings forgiveness or condemnation; Jesus, the Saviour, declares divine judgement on sin, and the death of the sinner. Terry describes the encounter of the sinner with the gospel thus: The call to repent, then, carries great weight. Someone hearing this gospel of God’s gracious judgement may either accept this judgement as God’s judgement or reject it in favour of their own judgement. … Either there is a turning from the sin of unbelief, disobedience and ingratitude and a turning to Christ, or there is a hardening in that sin and a further distancing from Christ.37

Hence, we might address the classical reluctance to allow the sovereignty of God’s reconciling work to be compromised by the sinner’s refusal of forgiveness by acknowledging that God’s sovereignty need not be compromised, but may be expressed in a decision to allow the sinner to refuse. The final judgement of condemnation upon some may then be described as the judgement of grace itself. 36   Cf. also the examples in Matthew and Luke, where Jesus declares woe upon the communities who fail to recognize who is among them: Tyre and Sidon, even Sodom and Gomorrah, will rise to condemn them (Mt. 11:20–24; Lk. 10:10–15). 37  Terry, Justifying Judgement, p. 180.

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If this is so, it must bear fruit in a rethinking of grace itself. Seen in this perspective, grace is not simply ‘kindness’ or ‘favour’, but a total commitment to the redemption of creation via the total destruction of evil, including human evil and sin. Such grace is certainly ‘gift’ – indeed ‘free gift’ – and the salvation effected remains sola gratia: but it is also far more demanding than many contemporary accounts of grace might suggest.38 The ‘neo-orthodox’ realization that encounter with God’s word of grace always brings krisis was well-founded. God’s grace for the creature, and for the whole of creation, involves judgement, and that judgement is simply essential to the work of freeing the creation from evil and destruction. 39 God’s dealings with all humanity are always, for sinners, an encounter with the triune Holy One. If this encounter takes place in the judgement of grace, it may lead to either life or death. This in no way compromises the true and deep grace involved, for it is a grace which will not allow the creation as a whole to be subject to evil unto eternity. Conclusion Salvation is to be described within a framework shaped by the doctrine of God, in triune holiness. This salvation is the work of God’s judgement and grace, in addressing the creature and appointing the sinner to life. Any view of salvation which is anchored in notions of grace without judgement, or in opposition to judgement, must fall well short of a Christian understanding of the theme. Salvation is anchored in the single covenant of God with creation, a covenant of gracious judgement that entails blessing in acceptance and obedience, and a concomitant curse in refusal, which is a dishonouring of God’s sole claim upon the cosmos. In regard to those theologies which display discomfort with the very notion of judgement, let alone condemnation, and which therefore tend to dispense with judgement altogether, more must now be said. Without judgement, grace ceases to have the function of expressing God’s claim upon the whole of creation, for the   Some popular treatments of grace, such as Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), have much to commend them, but tend to evince very little recognition of the place of judgement in relation to grace, let alone as integral to grace itself. To that extent they sell the gospel short. 39  For a treatment of some key issues in relation to this, see Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). Boersma engages the current interest in ‘divine hospitality’, drawing as others do upon the work of René Girard, and arguing for an approach to atonement explicated in terms of ‘limited hospitality’, particularly in an attempt to overcome the opposition of violence and hospitality. In arguing for a genuine divine hospitality that is not essentially opposed to violence but is in fact necessarily violent, Boersma evinces concerns in many ways consonant with my assumptions here. For a different approach, see J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). 38

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radical divine assertion becomes watered down and readily susceptible to that shift which finally sees God as no more than a reference-point for human aspiration and moral striving.40 Without judgement, grace loses authority and becomes reducible to attitudes such as ‘kindness’. It may signify no more than God’s acceptance of any and all without the radical command to discipleship that is such a feature of the call of God throughout the whole of Scripture. The character of God’s holiness and the nature of God’s triune action are such that theology must ever hold together the unity of divine judgement and grace. If this vital linkage is not maintained, and if particular doctrines such as election, atonement, justification or eschatology are formulated in a way that tends to oppose grace to judgement or judgement to grace, the depiction of the depth of God’s saving work will be severely compromised. In the worst examples, the radical summons of the God of the gospel may be more or less lost from sight. God’s word of judgement, accompanying the faithful on their journey of obedience to the faithful one, is a word of comfort and grace, of hope and freedom. May it be heard: May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.41

40   We may note the link here again with theologies which dispense with God’s transcendence, despite the fact that transcendence need not mean – should not mean – divine distance from creation, or divine inaccessibility as such. The trend is to make God somehow ‘one’ with creation. For classic examples see Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1987); The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993). 41   1 Thess. 5:23–4.

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Chapter 4

Creation and Salvation in the Image of an Incomprehensible God Kathryn Tanner

The nature of God establishes the nature of both our creation and salvation because God’s intent in creating us is to save us by giving us the character of God’s own life. Behind the whole story of creation and salvation lies the general fact that God wants us to enjoy what God is in unity with him. We are created, in specific, to be the ones who might one day find our salvation in and through Jesus Christ, a human being who, in being the very Word of God, has the divine nature for his own, and whose life accordingly displays in human form the character of God’s own life across its course. In virtue of our union with Christ, by being taken up into his own life, we are to enjoy divine life and live a human life of divine character in something like the way Jesus did. There are as many ways of developing this correspondence between the character of God and the character of our own lives as creatures made to be saved in Christ as there are ways of talking about the divine nature. Correspondence via the trinitarian character of God’s own life is a commonly pursued avenue for doing this in contemporary theology. I concentrate instead here on the divine attribute of incomprehensibility, a relatively neglected theme for such purposes, and come at the question of our own correspondence to it via discussion of the way we image God in being both created and saved. If God is incomprehensible, I suggest, humans must be created in the image of God by having an incomprehensible nature. That incomprehensible nature is the created underpinning of their salvation; it is what allows them to be formed into the image of the incomprehensible God in the strongest possible way when saved in Christ. Christian theologians often maintain that God is incomprehensible, beyond human powers of positive explication through concepts and speech. This is not simply an epistemological matter, reflecting the distance between ourselves and God, but a matter of the divine nature. God is incomprehensible because God is perfect in an unlimited and unbounded way. God is without limits of time, being framed by no beginning or end. Existing in perfect simplicity, God is without internal limits or boundaries dividing the divine nature into manageable component parts or aspects for our comprehension. The absolute fullness of being and goodness, God transcends all divisions between kinds and exceeds all bounds of a particular nature or mode of being that might allow God to be set alongside others or encompassed by anything it is not. In its perfection, the divine cannot, in

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short, be comprehended or contained in any respect; it is simply not anything that we can get our heads around. Christian theologians, following Genesis verses to this effect, also commonly claim that human beings are created in God’s image. Putting the two ideas together, one might expect them therefore to develop just as commonly the way in which human nature reflects divine incomprehensibility. Theological discussion of what it is about humans that makes them the image of God frequently moves, however, in the opposite direction: such discussion often simply amounts to the effort to find some clearly bounded human nature of quite definite character that both reflects the divine nature and sets humans off from all other creatures. Humans are created in the image of God because, unlike other creatures, they have reason or free will or the ability to rule over others as God does. At least in part, this preoccupation with a well-bounded and clearly defined human nature seems fomented by theology’s isolated attention to humans in and of themselves, as if the image of God could be located in them, in abstraction from their relations with others, particularly the God they are to image. The underlying problem is simply the presumption that human beings have a definite nature to begin with, that could be considered in itself and perfectly well specified in its own terms. What Augustine attempts in Books 8–11 of his De Trinitate would be a prime illustration of the underlying problem – at least if one considers the influence those particular books have had on theological anthropology in the West. Augustine tries to support the intelligibility of rules for trinitarian speech – for example, the rule that persons of the Trinity are really distinct in virtue of their relations with one another but one and equal in their divinity – by finding analogues for those rules in the more familiar character and dynamics of the human mind and heart. The effect of this, however, is often in these books to turn attention away from human consciousness in relation to God – indeed, to turn attention away from its relations with anything not itself, whether above the human (God) or below it (sense objects). Only the internal dynamics of human consciousness – the self’s relations with itself – can mimic, for example, the perfect equality and union of distinct things which is the rule for the Trinity; in relations with anything else there is, if not distance or disunity, then at the very least a marked lack of equivalence among the things related. For these reasons, Augustine goes so far as to suggest that the mind is a better image of God when knowing itself rather than God. The strong impression from such discussion is that human consciousness is the image of God all by itself, in an ideally self-enclosed self-sufficiency – such as when knowing, loving, or remembering only its own pure productions. The antidote would be to consider human nature an essentially relational affair, indistinct apart from and clearly definable only in terms of its determination by what it is related to. Human beings would therefore become the image of God only in an actual relationship with God, which brings with it the only real correspondence with divine life and action to be found in human existence. Humans would be the  Augustine, De Trinitate 9.11.16.



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image of God, properly speaking, only, say, when actually contemplating God face to face in heaven, as Augustine himself avers in the culminating books of De Trinitate. Apart from such a relationship, there would be nothing much to say about the reflection of God in human nature per se. Humans would at most be only in a secondary, less proper sense the image of God in virtue of whatever it is about them that is a prerequisite for such a relationship (for example, in virtue of the cognitive capacities that when suitably expanded by God’s grace enable them to see God in that fashion). A more radical deflection, however, of concern for a well-bounded and welldefined human nature comes about in theologies for which human beings are not the primary image at all. If one reads the Genesis passages through New Testament, mostly Pauline ones, it is possible for the image of God to take on a primarily intra-trinitarian sense. The image most properly speaking – the express or perfect image of God (following Heb. 1:3) – is the second person of the Trinity. And what that image is to mean for us is then most properly demonstrated in the human life of the Word Incarnate. If we are to image God, we have to be formed according to God’s own image – the second person of the Trinity – in something like the way Jesus was. The Genesis discussion of human beings’ creation in the image of God can be viewed, then, in Christologically-focused trinitarian terms. Humans are not simply the image but ‘in’ or ‘after’ it, as the verses say (Gen. 1:26–7), because the image referred to here is itself divine – either the second person of the Trinity or the Word incarnate. Which one makes little difference since in the latter case the primary image is still the second person of the Trinity and the second person of the Trinity only becomes applicable to us in becoming incarnate. Since the Holy Spirit is thought to unite us to Christ and allow us thereby to be made over in his image, often a great deal of interest is directed to Genesis passages that could be taken to refer to the Holy Spirit – the spirit hovering over the waters (Gen. 1:2), or the living soul breathed into Adam (Gen. 2:7). The Holy Spirit itself was given to humans when they were created, in order to form them according to the image of God that is the second person of the Trinity; they thereby became a human image of that divine image like (but not exactly like) the Word incarnate to come, Jesus Christ. The theology of Cyril of Alexandria sees the full and explicit development of such a view: in the beginning … the Creator of all, taking dust of the ground and having formed man, breathed upon his face the breath of life. And what is the breath of life, save surely the Spirit of Christ …? But since He [the Spirit which is able to gather us and form us unto the Divine Impress] fled away from the human nature



  See, for example, Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15.   See, for example, Gal. 4:19; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10.



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God of Salvation … the Saviour gives us this anew, bringing us again into that ancient Dignity and reforming us unto His own Image.

With this more radical loss of a primary preoccupation with human nature per se as the image of God comes an odd refocusing of what is of interest about human beings, both when they actually image God in Christ and when considering their ‘capacities’ for it. In theologies that deny the possibly subordinationist import of talking about the second person of the Trinity as the image of the first – that is, ‘image’ does not mean any lesser degree of divinity – the second person of the Trinity is not comprehensible while the first is incomprehensible, but images it in its very incomprehensibility. And this holds for the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity too. The second person of the Trinity – whether the firstborn of creation by being the one through and for whom the world was created, or the firstborn from the dead by becoming incarnate for our salvation to everlasting life – remains in a strong sense an ‘image of the invisible’. Jesus is not the comprehensible stand-in or substitute for an incomprehensible divinity, but the very exhibition of the incomprehensible divinity of the Word in a human form or medium. Jesus displays in his life what it means to be an incomprehensible image in the flesh of an incomprehensible God. There would thus seem to be something incomprehensible about human nature as it is shaped by a relationship with God that makes it like God, and, secondarily, even something incomprehensible about it from the very start, one might say, which renders it capable of being worked over into a divine form. Like God who is incomprehensible because unlimited, humans might have a nature that imitates God only by not having a clearly delimited nature. Every other creature imitates God by expressing the goodness that God is in a limited form; they are good by being a definite something – a pig or a rock – indeed the best pig or rock they can be. Humans are a definite sort of creature distinct from others, and in that sense of course still have a particular nature; they are not God who alone is different from others by not being a kind of thing. But humans can still stand out by their failure to be clearly limited by a particular nature as other creatures are. Failure of definition by remaining ill-defined is not so much the point; what’s primarily at issue here is a failure of definition through excessive love. Humans seem to have an underlying concern for what is absolutely good per se – for God – for what is not merely good in certain respects but fully good in a perfectly unlimited way. They want in some sense to be that absolute good rather than any particular sort of thing, rather than the specific sort of creature they are, by being formed in and through a relationship with the absolute good – for example, by knowing the absolute truth that is God, the absolute good for human cognition, that comes by way of God’s very presence to the mind. The weirdly unlimited character of    Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, trans. E.B. Pusey (London: Walter Smith, 1885), 5.7.39, p. 550.    Cf. Col. 1:15.

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human nature and drives would then be the fundamental reason for traditional theological preoccupation with human intelligence and will when discussing the way humans are the image of God. These ‘faculties’ are of interest because of their excessive openness, one might say, because of their attraction to formation through what exceeds their own or any limited nature. Otherwise expressed, if humans are to be made over in God’s image – so radically reworked as to be deified in the way Jesus’ humanity is – then what is of interest about human nature is its plasticity, its openness to formation through outside influences and the unusually wide range of possible effects of such a process of formation in the human case. For humans to come to be in the image of God is an extreme case of coming to be oneself in relation to what one is not – God, the one who is most unlike creatures generally. All creatures are formed in relation to what they are not, but humans are such in an exaggerated way that opens them to a radical sort of reformation from without in the divine image. Irenaeus expresses this essential malleability to divine formation well: Offer to Him thy heart in a soft and tractable state, and preserve the form in which the Creator has fashioned thee, having moisture in thyself, lest, by becoming hardened, thou lose the impressions of his fingers. But by preserving the framework thou shalt ascend to that which is perfect, for the moist clay which is in thee is hidden [there] by the workmanship of God. His hand fashioned thy substance; He will cover the over [too] within and without with pure gold and silver, and He will adorn thee to such a degree, that even ‘the King Himself shall take pleasure in thy beauty (Ps. xiv.11)’.

Rather than leading self-sufficient lives, all living creatures become themselves by taking in things from outside themselves; seeds, for example, require food from without in order to germinate. Humans, because they are made to be in the image of God, require God for their nourishment. In heaven, indeed, God will be our only food and drink: while our present life is active amongst a variety of multiform conditions, and the things which we have relations with are numerous, for instance, time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God – that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all [1 Cor. 15:28], and instead of all, to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence ... . God [will] become ... locality, and home,

  Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds), The Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 4.39.2, p. 523.

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In the case of all other living things, whatever they take in is formed according to the limits of their pre-established natures. For example, the natural resources assimilated by a plant for its nourishment – light, water, nutrients from the soil, and so on – are transformed to conform to the plant’s nature. The plant remains itself, becoming merely a bigger and better version of itself, where there was genuine nourishment for the plant’s good. When human beings take in God as their proper nourishment, they come out, to the contrary, with a divine shape. They are turned thereby into the matter, so to speak, for a new divine organization of what they are. They become God’s image, rather than God’s becoming theirs; humans are reworked according to God’s pattern of living, rather than God being reworked according to a human one. Humans when they are formed in the image of God take on Christ’s identity, in short. Like what happens to light, water, and soil – but now with a peculiar reversal of consequences from the usual scenario – men, women, children, Greek and Jew, free and slave – all go into the process of reformation and come out with a Christ-like form. This is the purpose for us of God … to raise our flesh and recover his image and remodel man, that we might all be made one in Christ … that we might no longer be male and female, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free (which are badges of the flesh), but might bear in ourselves only the stamp of God, by Whom and for Whom we were made, and [having] so far received our form and model from Him, that we are recognized by it alone.

To generalize from this, one might say human beings are unusually impressionable, in a way that the language of image often unpacks in a quite specific way: they are like soft wax that a vast variety of seals might indent to their ‘image’; they are the mirror of whatever it is upon which they gaze. They take their identities from the uses to which they put themselves, like vessels that gain their character from whatever they are made to carry. Earthenware or pure gold, what goes into them for certain purposes establishes what they are; whatever their fundamental constitution as vessels, when full of shit (for example), they can only be shit-pots.

   Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. W. Moore, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ser. 2, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 452.    Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ser. 2, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 7.28, p. 237.    See Basil the Great, On the Human Condition, trans./intro. Nonna Verna Harrison (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), p. 72.

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This is not an entirely passive process of openness to influence but one that the exercise of human choice directs according to a variety of concerns or interests. Human life takes a variety of forms depending, in short, on what it is that people care about.10 Following changeable judgments about what it is that is most important to them – fancy cars, the respect of their peers, wisdom, and so on – human beings exercise self-reflective powers; they are able to make an object of themselves in projects of self-fashioning and re-fashioning. They attach themselves to these objects of desire and draw them into themselves, so to speak, as variable organizing principles of their lives. One can therefore say with Gregory of Nyssa that ‘human nature adapts itself to the direction of thought and it changes according to whatever form it is inclined to by the impulse of free choice’.11 This means – to return to a previous metaphor – that: [h]uman nature is in fact like a mirror, and it takes on different appearances according to the impressions of free will. If gold is held up to the mirror, the mirror assumes the appearance of gold and reflects the splendor of gold’s substance. If anything abominable is held up, its ugliness is impressed in the mirror – for example, a frog, toad, centipede, or anything unpleasant to behold.12

Reflective capacities of self-judgment mean humans can try to reshape in a selfcritical fashion even those desires they cannot help having by nature. Humans may have many desires that reflect fundamental human needs: desires based on the need for food, shelter, a sense of dignity or worth, human companionship, and so on. But what one makes of these desires is something else. One may have the natural desire to eat, for example; but one need not shape one’s life around the importance of food. Asceticism is an obvious case in point. Humans have the capacity, consequently, to use the passions of their animal natures (as Nyssa would term them) – their natural attraction, for example, to what benefits them – as instruments of either virtue or vice.13 That attraction may be the energy propelling them towards, say, profligacy – or God. Humans have the power to cultivate or discourage those natural drives and tendencies that they start out with whether they like it or not, making efforts, for example, to alter their intensities through stimulation or neglect, or to rework the way they figure in life as a whole. Indeed, these reflexive powers account for why human lives can become so horrible, much more horrible than those of other animals; the anger, for example, that an animal might fleetingly feel when faced with an opponent can be husbanded by the human mind – dwelt upon – so as to pervade all one’s dealings 10   See Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 11   Gregory of Nyssa, Fourth Homily, trans./intro. Casimir McCambley, Commentary on the Song of Songs (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1987), p. 92. 12  Ibid. 13   Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, p. 442.

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with others, in a host of variable forms – envy, malice, conspiracy, deceit – with the result that one’s whole nature is traced anew after that design.14 Human beings have plastic powers, self-formative capacities, and it is the fact that those capacities are not determined to one thing as natural desires are – the fact that those capacities need not incline in a predetermined direction according to the givens of one’s nature or essential definition (following a Thomistic understanding, for example, of natural desires) – that accounts for the heightened variability of their effects in operation. People turn out in wildly different ways, for better or for worse. Or, one might say the self-formative capacities of humans do have a nature but the particular nature of rational volition is just to have no definite nature to be true to, in the way that animals are true to their natures when acting properly, for their own good. Humans can think of a variety of things that it would be good to do in certain respects or for certain purposes, and what they decide about what is most important to them in the course of such deliberations decides in great part the character of their lives, the identity they come to exhibit in their acts – that is just their nature. The early Eastern church’s stress on free will as the image – or often secondarily, rule in the sense of self-rule – could now be taken in a new light, not as the promotion of some vaunted power in a positive sense, an imitation of divine omnipotence, but as an interest in the unusual plasticity of human lives absent any predetermined direction by nature. Free will is an indication of variability. Their unusual powers of self-determination mean humans can become anything along the continuum of ontological ranks, from the bottom to the top. Humans, it is true, are determined to God – their formation in the image of God is a formation for their good, by nature. But that is just not to be determined in any particular direction as other things are, since God is the absolute good and not a limited one. Understanding the image of God as the second person of the Trinity deflects attention from the character of human nature for a final reason: because there is a sense in which humans, considered in and of themselves, never become a proper image of God at all even when formed according to it. The image of God in a proper sense is just God, the second person of the Trinity. Not being God, humans can therefore never simply become that image in and of themselves through any process of transformation. Since there is no ontological continuum spanning the difference between God and creatures, one cannot hope to become the divine image, this perfect or proper image, by approximating divine qualities – for example, by improving one’s mental capacities in some gradual approach to God’s own perfect rationality. And yet, without abolishing or mitigating the difference between God and humans, humans do become the divine image – by attaching themselves to it. It is by being identified with what they are not that the divine image becomes their own. Humans become the image of God in the strongest sense (not imaging the image but simply identified with it) when they are not trying to be it at all, not   Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 18.3–4. p. 408.

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trying to image the divine image in a human way, but are brought near to it, so near as to become one with it. Humans, one might say, are never sufficiently fluid or flexible simply to be the image in and of themselves, to be made over into some good approximation of it; they cannot hope, therefore, to achieve a simple reproduction of the divine image in some perfect human imitation considered on its own terms. Humans, instead, have the image of God only by clinging to what they are not – that divine image itself – in love. There is only one perfect or express image of God – the second person of the Trinity – and that perfect image becomes humans’ own only through their exceedingly close relationship with it – for example, by its own actual presence within them, made their own by the first person of the Trinity through the power of the Holy Spirit on the basis of second person’s incarnation in human flesh. Humans show off, so to speak, the light that is the divine image itself – and are in that sense good images of God themselves – by exterior illumination, by glowing with a light that remains another’s and not by some phosphorescent assimilation of that light into their own natures as some now human property. All creatures can do this same showing off or shining back of the divine glory. Plasticity is not a prerequisite for it. Even now creatures can glorify God, glow with a kind of divine penumbra by pointing to, and in that sense making manifest, the goodness of the God who made them: the wonders of the world speak of the wonders of God. In the reformation of the world to come, when, for example, death will be no more, all creatures and not just humans can image the divine in the way we have just been talking about by living off, for example, the very eternal life of God, by drawing themselves on powers that remain divine, in virtue of a close relationship or oneness with God, that makes those powers their own. What is unusual about human beings – what makes them the image of God as other creatures are not even in the eschaton – is the way the character or identity of human nature itself is re-moulded in the process. Something happens to human nature itself when it is attached to the divine image and lives off its life. Its very own character is altered or transformed for the better thereby. Human nature is made to be open to divine influence, to be more fully itself by way of it. The character of human life itself therefore does not remain the same when clinging to the divine image and feeling its force. It is instead reworked in the image of God so as to become humanly perfect – perfectly virtuous, for instance, or perfectly pious. Because this refashioning of the human is not the divine image per se but specifically human perfection, it forms, in and of itself, only a dim, distant analogue of divinity. Human perfection, which follows from union with the divine image, is always an image of an image (Christ) of an image (the second person of the Trinity), in a radically inferior medium. Indeed, before the eschaton in which perfection is achieved, human life is an image of an image of an image in a thoroughly corrupted medium (one that is hard and unimpressionable to divine imprint). There are then different levels or degrees in which one might be the image of God. Let me give a systematic explication of them now, by correlating them with different manners of participation and talking generally about different kinds of

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ordinary images. On that basis I can then flesh out the different levels or degrees in the way humans image God in terms of their respective places in the story of creation, fall, and salvation. The divine image is the perfect or express image of God and therefore not an image by participation, by sharing, that is, in something it is not or is only in some imperfect fashion. The second person of the Trinity is like an image in that it both has a relation of origin with the first person (it is from the first person, begotten by it) and reproduces in itself what makes the first person divine. But this is a perfect imaging – everything that is divine about the first person is found again in the second – and therefore not an imaging by participation: an image by participation is not its archetype but a mere image of it in virtue of some inferiority. Unlike things that become images by participating in what they are not, the second person of the Trinity simply is what it images and therefore does not become an image by participating in what it is not. Unlike other images, it does not acquire the capacity to image something by, say, being impressed by it. Being an image cannot be an accidental acquired characteristic of that sort in the divine case since in divinity accidents are identical with essence – that is, divinity simply is everything that is said about it. The second person of the Trinity does not in any sense borrow from the first what it does not have; one cannot say that the second person of the Trinity ‘is made illustrious by the mere addition to Himself of features that were not originally His own, so that He shines as it were by reflected light from glories bestowed upon him, and not by his own natural lustre’.15 Instead, whatever the second person gets from the first is properly its own by nature; the second person of the Trinity is divine in and of itself and not simply in virtue of being the image of the first. Finally, unlike things that participate in what they are not, the second person of the Trinity does not participate in the divinity of the first in any variable degree (more or less is not applicable to its imaging of the first, being a perfect image) and whatever it images of the first person of the Trinity it does not stand in danger of losing (like, say, dry sand that is in danger of losing the imprint of one’s foot when one walks away). The relation between the second and first persons of the Trinity is for these reasons analogous to an imaging relationship that comes about in virtue of a shared nature. The second person, in other words, is something like a natural image of the first in the way a son might be the ‘spitting image’ of his father (this is taken to be the point of ‘son’ language in the Bible), and nothing like an image produced in a medium foreign to the original – say, the way a fleshand-blood person might be reproduced with paint on a canvas. Contrary to all that has just been said for the second person of the Trinity, human beings are mere images of God by participating in God. They are fashioned by God so that they image what they are not – God – in an imperfect fashion. They receive what is not their own and therefore they do not have it in the way God does, in a perfect or divine fashion – fully, unchangeably, and without susceptibility of loss.   Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 9.14.9, p. 255.

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Human beings are images of God by participation, moreover, in two major ways. At the very lowest level, human nature itself is an image of God – not just our rationality, free will or plastic capacities – but everything about us that is given to us by our creator. And the same holds for every other creature. Everything that creatures are or have for their good is received from God, and constitutes a kind of image of God in a created form if what God is always trying to give to others in creating them is the goodness of God’s own life. Creatures form created versions or approximations of God’s own goodness, following (for example) the principle that a cause contains its effects in a superior fashion: creatures image God in that God as their cause contains in a super-eminent divine fashion what they are. Participating in God is just what it means, indeed, to be a creature. God is (for example) life itself, life through itself, while everything else receives its life from God, without simply being it, in and of itself. Any creature therefore has life in some degree or fashion and can lose it. Expressing much the same thing in a Thomistic way, God does not participate in being but is it: to be God just is to be; in God there is no distinction between what God is (essence) and the fact that God is (existence). To participate in being is, by definition, not to be it, if participation means participating in what one is not; and therefore with participation arises a distinction between essence and existence, the very constitution of created things.16 Although we image God in and through what we are as creatures we do not do so independently of God. That is indeed one of the points of saying that we image God through participation. This is not an accidental mirroring of God, by chance or happenstance in virtue of what have become independently of God, on our own steam apart from any relation to God, the way a pumpkin might by chance or happenstance have grown of itself into the image of a human face. We image God because we have been fashioned by God. Indeed, we are the image of God only by participating in God, by continuing to receive what we are from God. To be a creature just means to lead an insufficient life of one’s own, to lead a kind of borrowed life. Creatures can be more or less the image of God in virtue of their particular created characteristics. We have seen this in the case of human beings – the way they are more the image of God than animals, and more the image of God in certain respects than others – in virtue primarily of the peculiar plastic capabilities that open them to reformation according to an absolute rather than merely partial or relative good. But this is still participation at the lowest level – participation in virtue of the character of created qualities themselves, participation by way of imitation in an ontologically inferior, because non-divine, medium. Even what we are to become by being formed in Christ’s image is a low-level image of God of this sort – in so far as the end product, so to speak, is a human state – a most excellent state indeed, but still a human one. The reflection of God in us, when the Spirit conforms us to Christ, is in this sense like the reflection of the sun in 16   See Cornelio Fabro, Participation et causalité selon S. Thomas D’Aquin (Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1961), pp. 468, 610.

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a mirror: the reflection is not at all like the sun itself in most respects – it is, for example, extremely small, relatively cool and dim enough for us to be able to look at it without being blinded, and so on. Indeed, the difference between God and creatures is the primary problem for this first sort of image through participation. The difference in media, so to speak, between the human image and its divine archetype makes too big a difference here; the divine simply cannot be imitated, strictly speaking, in what is not divine. Because God is their source, creatures must be imitating God in what they have of the good, as we have said; but the difference between God and creatures – the fact that they do not both figure within the same ontological continuum – nonetheless forbids the idea of any real approximation to the divine on the creature’s part. There is nothing in between God and creatures, as the idea of imitation, particularly when used to discriminate between one sort of creature and another, might suggest. One is either one or the other. There is only one true image, then – the divine image – which perfectly reflects its archetype. Anything short of that is hardly an image at all. In a second, much stronger sense of being an image by participating in what we are not, what we are not itself becomes part of us, an ingredient of our constitution. We are the image of God not by way of a human imitation of God, not by way of what we are ourselves, but in virtue of some sort of incorporation of what remains alien to us, the very perfection of God that we are not. God becomes part of us, an ingredient in our faculties, as a prerequisite for the excellent exercise of human operations. Cyril, for example, and Augustine, too, distinguish between our existence and our well being and claim that the latter is a function of God’s own entrance within us. We are rational creatures, say, and that is a sort of image of God – the low-flying kind – but when we know well, then we are the image of God in a stronger sense, in virtue of the fact that the truth itself, God, has entered within us to give us the truth. The excellent functioning of our native capacities is not a self-sufficient operation, then, in the sense of simply unrolling from our own capabilities, but requires a strong dependence on the very powers of God which have become ours for the taking – in some extraordinary gift of God to us of what is not ours by nature. The perfection of human living that is Christ’s and (to a lesser degree) ours in him would be the supreme case of this sort of thing – of human powers elevated through the entrance of God’s own powers, through the gift of the Holy Spirit itself forming humanity according to the image of the second person of the Trinity. Here we image God by living off God, so to speak, in the way a foetus lives off the life of its mother, living in and through or with her very life. This is the mirror that is bright not by anything that is its own but only through the presence of the sun’s own light. This – to use the more common biblical imagery perhaps – is the branch that lives on the alien sap of the vine to which it has been engrafted. These two senses of image by participation – the weaker and stronger – are obviously bound up with one another. The first sense of image by participation is, for example, the presupposition for the second: one cannot participate in God in the strong sense unless there is something to you apart from God – unless you

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are an image of God in the weak sense by having an existence and nature of your own as a creature. Those created capacities that image God (in a weak sense) more than others provide the openings, moreover, through which one becomes an image in the strong sense. Those capacities one might even say are the prerequisites for being an image in the very strongest sense. All things can come to live off the eternal life of God, when, say, that is the only life left to them. But God’s gift of God’s own self can become a true constituent of only certain sorts of created natures – ones whose functions are not limited by nature, those that inherently have room for God internal to them. The strong sense of image by participation is, finally, what enables the strongest version of the weak way human acts can be the image of God: by having the one we are not, Christ, the very incarnation of God, for our own, we should one day be able to live a human life that imitates God’s own in the most perfect way possible for mere humans. Putting these different ways of imaging God into a linear narrative, one could produce the following story of creation, fall, and redemption. We were created by God in the beginning with every good from God.17 And that must mean, following Cyril of Alexandria, that we had the gift of God’s own Spirit within us shaping our lives into the form of the second person of the Trinity. We were, then, images of God in both strong and weak senses: images of the strong sort, in virtue of our identification with the divine image in us, and, as a result of that fact working itself out in our lives, strong images of the weak sort – we were leading human lives informed by the Word in imitation of it. However, we were not yet images of both sorts in the strongest possible way, because of our own immaturity in the reception of them, an immaturity that was almost a necessary function of God’s showering us all at once with them. Because the gift of God’s Spirit that both made us an image in a strong sense and made us live well was ours from the beginning, we naturally failed to attribute it to God, seeing it as our natural power instead, thereby blurring the difference between creature and God. Or we naturally took it for granted and failed to realize how such a gift could be lost through our own inattention to its cultivation – for example, by failing to draw upon it, turning away from it, and therefore leading lives inappropriate to it. Such immaturity meant, then, that, even when receiving what God was giving us – the status of being images in both senses – we were not fully or properly receiving it. We were more images of both sorts from God’s side, so to speak – in virtue of what God was giving us – than from our own. From our own side, we only took from God what, being immature, we could receive, becoming images of God according to such poor initial capacities that we were not perhaps properly likenesses of God at all. In virtue of such faults of immaturity, both sorts of image were, one could even say, not just imperfectly received but never properly received at all – distorted from the start, lost in the very process of their being gotten. The very way in which   Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16.10, p. 405.

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one naturally lives according to the image of God when one has been created from the first with it and is thereby immature – with ingratitude, lassitude, and pride before God – is so serious a distortion of the weak sense of image that one might as well not be said to be an image at all. However otherwise wise or good one is, in the most serious respect one is neither. To be ungrateful, unappreciative, full of oneself, is, indeed, to be turned from God and thereby to lose everything – the divine image itself and with it all wisdom and goodness. With the distortion of the human or weak image goes the loss of the divine or strong image – a life turned away from the presence of God in its meaning for human life. And the loss of the strong image only makes the distortion of the weak image even worse – from prideful wisdom one falls to simple stupidity. All that is left is a weak image in the weakest sense – human capacities themselves as the image of God – without any of the divine powers (the divine Spirit of goodness and truth) that might allow them to be exercised excellently. Jesus Christ, the perfect human image of God because the perfect divine image, brings human life back to its perfect beginning – the perfect beginning that in a sense never was – so that it is capable of being really achieved in a way that will not be lost. Jesus does not just have the Spirit of God in the way a holy person might, as the gift of something that is not his own by nature; because Jesus is not just human but the Word itself become incarnate, he has the Spirit as his own. He gives to his humanity what he has by nature insofar as he is God. Insofar as he is divine, Jesus does not just have the divine image within himself through participation, but is it; and therefore his humanity can neither exhibit the divine image in an imperfect way nor lose it. Because he is the Word, he cannot, for example, fail in any respect to live a human life in conformity with the divine image; ‘obedience is part of his nature’.18 And if the Spirit of God is secure in the Word of God, it is also secure, irrevocable, in the humanity united to that Word.19 In virtue of our community of nature with the humanity of Christ – in virtue of the humanity we share with him, because the Word has made our humanity its own in him – we can have the Spirit that forms Christ’s humanity according to the divine image as our own too, with the same sort of consequences. Before Christ came, the divine image of the Word was simply foreign to us, even when we were being made over into it through the gift of the Spirit. Now that the Word has taken our humanity as its own, the Word has become in a sense proper to us, for all the difference in nature that remains between divine and human. We can be knit into the Word as never before in virtue of the fact that the Word has made our humanity 18   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, trans. H.C. Ogle and H.A. Wilson, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 2.11, p. 122, discussing the obedience of the Son to the Father. 19  Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, trans. J.H. Newman and A. Robertson, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 3.27.38, pp. 415, 407.

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its own in the incarnation.20 The Word now has us in a new way and that means we can have the Word too in a new way, beyond what was possible for us simply as Spirit-filled creatures. Unlike Christ’s humanity, the preceding weaknesses and faults of ours will have to be purged, erased, in the process, but our humanity might still some day see the holiness of Christ’s own life through attachment to him. While we may waver in our attachment to him, frail in faith and love for him, Christ nonetheless remains our unshakeable hope. In him our perfect imaging of the divine is achieved; in and with him it might confidently be ours, so that we need no longer fear its loss. In sum, then, we are an incomprehensible image of the incomprehensible both in our natural capacities, in virtue of our creation, and in what we become in relation to the true image, the Word incarnate, in being saved. Human created capacities imitate God’s incomprehensibility in only a negative and prospective way in virtue of their not being limited by a predetermined nature. Rather than being unlimited through inclusiveness, through unbounded fullness, as God’s perfection is, we are unlimited in our powers through lack, through a failure of pre-determination, by not being anything in particular to start with. We might one day come to imitate in our humanity the inclusiveness of the absolute being and goodness of God, but only when aided by God to become what we are not through salvation in Christ. As in what happened in Christ’s own human life, the new pattern of human lives formed in Christ’s image will follow the incomprehensible pattern of the Word’s own relations with the other members of the Trinity in all their richness. We will come in the process to be more than an imitation of the incomprehensible only in virtue of our taking on the identity of what we are not, the alien identity qua divine of the Word incarnate itself. By attaching ourselves to the incomprehensible that has attached itself to us (in becoming incarnate for this very purpose – so that we might attach ourselves to it), we become in the strongest sense incomprehensible ourselves. One with Christ, incomprehensible in his divinity, we take on the very incomprehensibility of the divine rather than simply running after it, working to reproduce it in human terms. The second person of the Trinity not only shows forth the true image in human form by becoming incarnate, but makes us like that image by uniting human nature thereby with the very incomprehensibility of the divine life. It is by being bound to the incomprehensible in and through Christ – and thereby gaining a new identity in him apart from anything one is oneself – that one comes to live a boundlessly full and good life.

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 Ibid, 26.33, p. 412.

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Chapter 5

The Salvation of Creatures Nicola Hoggard Creegan

Creation and salvation are by convention distinguished theologically, yet we cannot understand the latter without the former. By ‘salvation’ I mean the totality of the effects of God’s work in Christ and in Spirit, not just on earth but in the cosmos as a whole: the work of bringing not only humanity but creation itself to a point where it is no longer subject to frustration and in bondage to decay (Rom. 8:20–1). The salvation of humans is clearly related to salvation from sin, and from its consequences before God. But what about other creatures, and what about animals in particular? While higher primates do exhibit incipient forms of moral sentiment, animals appear not to sin: what could ‘salvation’ mean in their case? Yet, like humans, animals have participated in the suffering of creation – in predation and sickness, in the death of species, and as victims of catastrophes such as asteroid impact. If salvation is the work of the God who is the creator, sustainer and lover of all life, what might it mean for such creatures also to share in the effects of God’s redemptive action, to participate in the new life that God establishes in the work of salvation, and thus to experience God’s merciful completion to their earthly story? How might further consideration of the character of God shed light on this question? The God who Creates and Saves The triune God who saves is the triune God who creates, the one who, in Spirit and in Logos, has been intimately involved in creation from the beginning. This involvement is with all life, and so with forms of creaturely existence present within creation long before the appearance of humanity. All creatures, human and animal alike, are born from below of clay and from above as ‘inspirited’   Frans de Waal, Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 19, 161.    I will confine myself to talking of creaturely salvation in fairly general and collective terms; the question of what individual or particular salvation might conceivably mean for specific non-human creatures lies beyond the scope of this chapter.   On the Spirit and creation, see, for example, Denis Edwards’s applications of Irenaeus and Basil in Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (New York: Orbis, 2004), esp. pp. 26, 40.

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by God (Gen. 1:11–12, 24; 2:7), sharing breath given by divine animation. The Spirit, God’s dynamic life-force which hovers over the waters of creation (Gen. 1:2) and everywhere ‘blows where it will’ (Jn. 3:8), gives and sustains it all, and works renewal in creation as a whole, ‘companioning’ it in its distinctiveness, undergirding its freedom, and purposing for it deliverance from bondage to decay. The Spirit is deeply involved in the central acts of God’s redemptive process, anointing the Christ in baptism, upholding him on his earthly course, raising him from the dead, working within and without the community of his followers to make known the reality of his living presence for the whole world. The second person of the Trinity, the Logos, gives original substance to that world, and is the one in whom literally all things hang together (Col. 1:17). In the incarnation of this Logos, divinity takes on the matter and experience of human life in particular, but not only that: by extension, the incarnate one assumes the afflictions of all creaturely existence, for human life is embedded with the animal and has arisen out of it. It is worth pondering further the relationship between the incarnation in particular and God’s purposes for non-human life. Basic points of observation in a Christological context include the fact that animal metaphors are used to characterize central aspects of Jesus’ saving significance (the ‘Lion of Judah’ and the ‘Lamb of God’); animals may have witnessed his birth; and his animal companions are specifically mentioned in his story. A donkey bears him to Jerusalem. Particularly striking, as Richard Bauckham has argued, is the image of Jesus ‘with the wild animals’ in Mk. 1:13. In a mere four words, there is a possible glimpse of an eschatological vision of at-oneness between human beings and animals, a state in which humans exercise dominion but not the oppressive rule they have wielded in a fallen world order, where wild animals and humans live typically in fear of one another – a far cry from the garden harmony depicted in Genesis and assumed in the cryptic prediluvian mandate to all animals to eat only vegetables (Gen. 1:29–30). Bauckham suggests that the wild animals with whom Jesus dwells are not mere symbols of evil or accomplices of its purpose, nor are they there to test Jesus; rather his peaceful co-existence with them is mentioned in order to point to an aspect of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God in Jesus’ mission – harmonious relationship between humans and animals – and thus, by implication, to underscore the importance of animals in a redeemed human society, and to hint at the scope of God’s overall purposes for creatures.

  A term used by Ruth Page in God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 43.    Such companioning of course raises the problem of evil; I shall return in due course to the question of how to reconcile creaturely freedom with divine sovereignty.   Richard Bauckham, ‘Jesus and the Wild Animals (Mark 1:13): A Christological Image for an Ecological Age’, in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds), Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ. Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 3–21.

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All this is in keeping with deep-rooted traditions in Hebrew Scripture. The salvation provided by the ark embraces humans and animals alike (Gen. 6–8). Divine judgement bears consequences for both (Ex. 12:29); its deferral may take account of the presence of animals (Jon. 4:11). There is the classic image of Isa. 11:6: ‘The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling’. There is the revolutionary promise of Isa. 65:25: ‘the lion will eat straw like an ox’. Such passages point to salvation as the arrival of a peaceable kingdom, a vision often overlooked in the human rush for control of nature and mastery of all non-human life-forms. The idea that animals might in fact have a place in God’s new heavens and new earth is entirely consistent with the biblical presentation of God as the one who creates, upholds and indwells all things, and knows when the sparrow falls (Mt. 10:29). That the natural world evinces a degree of separation from God is its present tragedy, and the tensions between its inhabitants are one aspect of that, but nature as a whole is not devoid of God’s presence, nor is the discernment of that presence entirely obscured (Rom. 1:20). The salvation depicted in the gospels is not one of escape from the physical world, or of lack of contact and antipathy between creatures: it is a picture of a world at peace and at one, a peace in which the rampages of the stuff of the universe are healed. As signs of that transformation, the miracles of Jesus show his intimate grasp of the substance and form of the world: he turns water into wine, walks on water, calms the storm and heals the sick. The wildness of nature, a force that can kill hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes, is overcome in the new order initiated in his resurrection. His raised body is impervious to some of the laws of nature which bind us (Jn. 20:19), but it is not removed from the realm of the material. The animating Spirit and the essential form and active principle of the Logos who takes flesh are not secondary forces within the realm of creaturely existence alone. The triune God who acts so powerfully in the world is not one force among many others: the divine Logos may be imagined as the deep structure of being and life beneath and upholding that which we discern as law; the divine breath as something equivalent to a three-dimensional influence on a two-dimensional plane, coming from outside the sphere of creaturely existence but accessible to it in an intimate manner nevertheless. Kathryn Tanner speaks to this when she says, ‘The Christian theologian therefore needs to radicalize claims about both God’s transcendence and involvement with the world if the two are to work for rather than against one another’. The closeness of God is the presence of One who has been in long communion with all life, and One who is interested in the ultimate end of creatures in general.

   Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 46.

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Theology and Science If Scripture gives us ample reason to ponder God’s purposes for all creatures, attention has been further directed towards the theme by the findings and emphases of evolutionary science. Theology is not of course merely the passive recipient of scientific knowledge, condemned only to answer the questions sciences raises at the boundary: theology itself poses to science the reality of a deep-seated intimacy between God and the natural world, a radical contingency and dependence of the world upon God which is not wholly obscured within creation or by sin, even if it is only discerned by faith. In the exchange of perspectives that may thus be opened up between theology and science, theology may contend that the God of nature is the God whose presence has dwelt within the evolutionary process of which science speaks, a God of slow and sometimes indeterminate transitions and interconnections between species. This God must have been a very long time in relationship with our ancestors, with dinosaurs, and with small, scavenging creatures of the earth. The more we indwell this history, the more such creatures can be seen to possess in latent form many of the gifts of humanity. Especially striking is the vast hominid period, lasting between five and six million years, and covering up to twenty branching hominid species. In this period in which humanity was birthed – the time of the Australopithecus, homo habilis, homo erectus and Neanderthal – our hominid precursors exhibited many of the traits once thought to be distinctly human, and in particular evinced many of the emotions that characterize the apparatus of human life. Those who work with baboons and chimpanzees today report a perplexing but startling level of moral and affective emotions close to that of humans and yet definably not yet human. If the creator God is in intimate connection with all sorts of creaturely forms, God surely uses no being only for the end of supporting or bearing another: God must have some higher – ‘saving’? – purpose for such sentient ‘boundary’ creatures, and by extension for all less sentient beings as well. The context of ‘salvation’ language here is the reality that creaturely existence as we apprehend it is located in conditions of moral ambiguity: it is marked by suffering, decay, death and evil, as well as goodness, beauty and order. It is not utterly debased, of course, nor is it a mediocre average of good and bad, but it is characterized by both excellence and anguish, perfection and corruption. ‘The whole creation has been groaning in the pangs of childbirth right up to the present time’ (Rom. 8:22).    See Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1998), p. 225. Tattersall is at pains to point out both our uniqueness and the fact that we did not spring fully-formed into being. See also de Waal, Macedo and Ober, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 161–2.    ‘[T]o have a doctrine of the fall does not mean to believe that creation is totally corrupted or that it is corrupted in part. In a kind of negative version of the causality of gift, it rather remains entirely perfect – else it would not exist at all – and yet also

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Classical expositions of the origins of these conditions typically look to the Adamic fall as an explanation for the presence of all evil in the world. In itself this is problematic, however, not only in terms of natural science but also in the light of Scripture. The Genesis narrative has long served, and properly so, to separate God from any direct responsibility for evil and sin, and to place enormous responsibility upon the human for its wickedness, not least towards other creatures. But the primordial goodness of creation envisioned by this account is no simple picture of an Edenic paradise preceding a human Fall, or of a world ushered into cosmic disorder by human disobedience alone. There are many indications in Scripture as a whole that evil has non-human sources besides: in the serpent who beguiles the first humans; in the Satan who tempts Jesus in the wilderness; in the principalities and powers whose reach appears to extend to all manner of affairs on earth. Such realities dig deeper into the fabric of life on earth than some Western theology has assumed. To suggest that natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis are simply attributable to human fallenness is to overlook the complexity and pervasiveness of evil’s history. What of the aeons of creaturely suffering long before humans arrived? If the triune God of creation, the God whose Spirit and Logos animate all things, is at work from the first, and if that God’s character is indeed manifest in the order of things, where have God’s Spirit and Logos been through the long history of animal predation, the struggle for survival, the extinction of species and, finally, human tyranny? What does God intend for forms of creaturely existence whose presence within the world’s story is transitory or brutally short? Theology can only begin to respond to such questions when it treats them in the context of its claims about the character of God, the one who has gifted all creation with goodness and who continues to uphold and guide it in all its aspects in the direction of its ultimate fulfilment – a fulfilment secured and anticipated in the redemptive work of Christ and the Spirit. Some ways of proceeding here are problematic even so. An obvious example can be found in process theology, which has explicitly attempted to answer the problem of evil and redemption in evolutionary perspective. In process thought, God has both a transcendent and an immanent pole, and is therefore always inexpressibly close to the creation; but God’s transcendent powers are also limited, and God can only lure created matter in a certain direction. All organized entities ‘prehend’ – they have a measure of freedom, and are able to put some creative input into the next stage of their existence10 – and as such they may resist this divine lure. In such resistance, possible in any form of created being, lies the explanation for evil, which accumulates and cascades over long periods of time. Resistance is, quite simply, the result of freedom, and is to be found in all kinds of places, affecting the physical entirely corrupted through and through’: John Milbank, ‘Foreword’ to James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), pp. 11–20, at p. 17. 10   See John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1977), pp. 13–29.

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universe itself. Process thinking has extended a deep reach into theology conducted in the light of science, but in its various guises it has little biblical justification. Fundamentally, the God of process models is too uni-dimensional, too much like a weak force, to represent the God of whom Scripture speaks. Within a more broadly orthodox Christian perspective, two other kinds of contemporary approach to the dilemma of creaturely bondage deserve particular attention. Both invoke the idea of divine kenosis. The first is espoused especially by John Haught, but also by Ted Peters, Denis Edwards and others.11 Haught believes that creation is good but imperfect, and on a journey towards perfection. ‘Sacrifice can be interpreted in terms of the anticipatory, unfinished state of the universe.’12 God recognizes the blind alleys of the evolutionary process and wishes they were not, but God is ultimately – unlike in process thought – overseeing a ‘final cause’ of all creation, which will be its perfection.13 Haught also points to an expanded kenosis: whereas classically kenosis has been envisaged as the giving up of aspects of divinity as it were simpliciter, expanded kenosis emphasizes the emptying of certain dimensions of divine sovereignty – specifically, those which might be required by any God who creates or makes space for free creatures – ‘to the entirety of nature’.14 Evil, then, may be considered as the experience of the withdrawal of God – something that is required for life, non-human and human alike, but is not ever the final word upon it. A more recent theory of imperfection is to be found in Christopher Southgate’s intriguing book, The Groaning of Creation.15 Southgate is conscious of the need to account for the long suffering of animals and ultimately argues for their inclusion in the renewed order. He is unwilling, however, to grant a giving up of space by God in creation. He points instead to the significance of what he calls a ‘deep intratrinitarian kenosis’,16 in which the everlasting procession of the Son from the Father, and the Son’s giving back of himself to the Father through the Spirit, make possible the birthing of ‘otherness’. The ‘otherness’ of the Son makes way for the ‘otherness’ of the creature; it thus renders actual the creature’s freedom, including the potential for this creaturely freedom, both human and non-human, to become corrupt.   John F. Haught, Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); see also Ted Peters, God – The World’s Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 49, on prolepsis, the impact of the future within the present; and Edwards, Breath of Life, p. 100. 12   Haught, Is Nature Enough?, p. 183. 13   Haught, Is Nature Enough?, p. 184. 14   John Haught, ‘The Boyle Lecture 2003: Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature’, Science and Christian Belief, 17/1 (2005): 5–20, at 16–17 (emphasis original). For a somewhat comparable approach, see John Polkinghorne, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). 15   Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). 16   Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, p. 58. 11

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There is a measure of truth in these depictions, but they do not, to my mind, come close to accounting sufficiently for the realities of horrendous evil and loss within creation. They also do not explain the unevenness of the experience of evil. Theories of kenosis and imperfection are an inadequate way of understanding the mixture of perfection and corruption we experience around us, or of construing the invisible divine qualities of God’s eternal power and divine nature that Scripture speaks of our still being able plainly to discern, alongside all the evidences of evil, within created things (Rom. 1:20). I agree with these authors that we face a dilemma, but concur only partly with their solution.17 On such accounts God may at times be seen as ‘using’ evil to bring good, or as lacking ultimate powers (whether by nature or by choice), or as less than always ready for the specific form of relationship with the world that is enacted in God’s triune work of redemption. To speak of creation’s ‘incompleteness’ is in one sense true, but it may not be sufficient to do justice to the genuine hideousness of evil, or indeed to the expressions of perfection that are already present within creation. Creation and Fall What we glimpse in the biblical story, rather, is a more complex relationship between creation and fall. There is within God’s creation at large a struggle between good and evil in which humans are thoroughgoing participants but of which they are not the initiators. The struggle itself precedes us, or is outside us in some manner. The major way biblically of picturing evil as a reality that preexists human life is of course by reference to the powers of darkness, fallen angels, Satan and the demonic. There is no sense that God is at any point the author of evil, or that there is ever any sort of darkness in God (1 Jn. 1:5), but creatures with more responsibility and power than humans have already mysteriously come to set themselves against their creator; the context of human life is bedevilled already with a darkness and a power of evil ushered in neither by the creator nor by human agents. Humans fall, not when they invent evil and rebellion and thus wreak havoc upon creation for the first time, but when they bend their considerable intelligence and consciousness towards such pre-existing powers and away from God. From this perspective, it is the inexplicable action of other fallen creaturely agents that accounts for the depth and tragedy of evil not only in human experience but also, potentially, in pre-human and non-human life on earth.18 And the profundity of evil’s effects elsewhere ought not to be missed. There is evidence, for instance, not just of death and predation throughout evolutionary history but 17

 I have discussed the issue in two other papers: ‘Being an Animal and Being Made in the Image of God’, Colloquium, 39/2 (2007): 185–203; ‘A Christian Theology of Evolution and Participation’, Zygon, 42 (2005): 499–518. 18   See Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Powers in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 23–5.

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also of some level of premeditated violence; our closest cousins, the chimps, of course exhibit aggressive tendencies and other pre-aggressive sentiments today.19 What is theology to make of such phenomena? C.S. Lewis, T.F. Torrance, Michael Lloyd and others20 have all argued in various ways that the notion of a fall which pre-dates humanity would be consistent with the original goodness and perfection of creation by God but also offer an explanation for the marring of creation as we and others experience it.21 Not that any fall discourse is at all easy to understand. Such language reaches into realms over whose edges humans see only darkly. Robert Jenson describes these limits well when he says, ‘They [the creatures] who are neither human nor angelic … with us constitute “earth”; despite all their fascination and frequent spectacular oddity they are not the mystery of creation but that which is bounded by mystery, that which can be mysterious because there is heaven’.22 If we are to escape any kind of ultimate dualism, and to avoid any impression that the moral outcome of creation’s purpose is uncertain, it is important to acknowledge that nothing ‘explains’ or begins to answer how or why or when a fall of any sort might have happened. But the experience of fallenness gives us a glimpse of the mystery, long enough to speak a little of the battle within which creatures everywhere find themselves. As humans we appear to occupy a special place in that struggle, to have participated in – fallen into – cooperation with forces we cannot fathom. Science a