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 agrees with faith in affirming the uniqueness of the human mind, even while it points to the continuities with what has gone before, and the high levels of sentience which seem to have been present in our ancestors and to exist in primate colonies today. Such a combination of difference and continuity invites theological reflection. Torrance, for example, argues that humans were intended as the healers of creation, to have a ‘priestly function’, as the ones who might put all things right for God and under God.23 Humans were meant to be God’s agents, having authority over other creatures in the way that Jesus had authority over the elements, and as some rare individuals in recorded history appear to have had power over 19  For a balanced overview of this topic see James Silverberg and J. Patrick Gray (eds), Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans and other Primates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. Frans B.M. de Waal, ‘Aggression as a Well-Integrated part of Primate Social Relations: A Critique of the Seville Statement on Violence’, pp. 37–53. 20   C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 122; Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 123; Michael Lloyd, ‘Are Animals Fallen?’ in Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (eds), Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1998), pp. 147–60. 21  The complex issues surrounding the possibility of a bolder notion still – a pre- or extra-temporal fall – are too large to discuss in the present chapter. 22  Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 127. 23  Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order, p. 130.

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animals.24 Instead, humans have willingly used their God-given gifts in the service of rebellion against God, and in the process practised abuse and exploitation of their fellow creatures. Such a perverse choice may very well lie at the edge of human becoming.25 But the conditions in which humans find themselves are not unique to them, nor are humans the first to be so affected: all life-forms, including those long prior to and cognate with us, experience the enigmatic circumstances of a fallen state. But we return to the question of ends, of the will of the triune God for relationship with creatures in spite of all that evil involves for them. If fallenness affects all creation yet is no obstacle to God’s loving purposes, what is the nature of the salvation that involves not only the redemption of humans but the reconciliation of ‘all things’ from that plight (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20)? Two Models of Salvation In both popular and scholarly theology, soteriology is often done with a wash of ambiguous images which rarely give much thought to the threshold between humanity and humanity’s hominid ancestry. In depiction of the world to which divine salvation comes, some theologians talk about ‘the boundary’ or the ‘first humans’ as though there must have been a clean break in creation, or a moment at which God as it were breathed fresh Spirit into creaturely beings, thus constituting a form of life that was ontologically new. Others imply the historicity of Adam in one sentence and more existentialist understandings of the fall in the next. Still others refer to Adam without any thought at all of human pre-history.26 When it comes to elaborating the process of salvation itself, much Western discourse has collapsed everything into a very narrow story. Christ comes as a second Adam, and pays a debt specifically on behalf of humanity, without any substantive reference to non-human life. What humans have been unable to do has been done by Jesus in his offering of himself as a sacrifice to God on their behalf. Christ’s righteousness is imputed to them; the Spirit comes, secondarily, to sanctify these justified sinners, to empower them and form them in the community of the church. An evolutionary understanding of divine creation, coupled with the possibility of a pre-human fall, requires a much wider, much less anthropocentric, narrative of divine redemption, one that speaks of much larger expressions of bondage and suffering than are typically in view in talk about the forensic plight of sinful human 24

 A contemporary literary depiction of such a person can be found in Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002). 25   J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), p. 48. 26  For a discussion of the continuities between higher primates and humans at the level of DNA, see Graeme Finlay, ‘Homo Divinus: The Ape that Bears God’s Name’, Science and Christian Belief, 15/1 (2003): 17–27.

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beings. Whatever we say about the ancient traditions of cosmic apokatastasis, of God as ultimately ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28), Scripture points to a salvation that goes well beyond merely human deliverance: new heavens and new earth are finally in view, and not, surely, as a cancellation or supersession of present creation, but as the bringing of this creation and its participants to God’s intended purposes. Other historical motifs of salvation may at least partially fulfil what is needed here. An Irenaean emphasis upon recapitulation is one such. Here Christ comes to bear the burden of sin and of fallenness and to lift creatures up to God. If we emphasize God’s absolute opposition to evil then Christ can be understood as coming in a complex act of solidarity with and judgment of all the entangled powers and principalities of evil which inexplicably beset, enslave and mar not only human but also other created life.27 In identifying with human suffering, God identifies also with all creaturely tragedy: At Christ’s grave, as the Father and the Son endure the infinite pain of separation, and Christ is subjected to hell’s worst moments, we may see just how perfect, uncompromising, and implacable is God’s hatred of death’s curse and all it does to us – the lengths to which the triune community will go in the struggle to confront and overthrow that which hurts, disfigures, and destroys the creatures of God’s hand.28

The divine assumption of creation’s burden thus is also – to invoke another classical image – a demonstration of the immensity of divine love. Not only humans but the rest of the created world are drawn back to God, lifted out of the inevitabilities that have come so to condition their existence. And the coming of Christ to effect all this is indeed a victory over evil. It is not yet the end of the world’s suffering, but it is the pledge that this suffering will indeed have an end, and that it may meantime be embraced as an ongoing sharing in the life of the risen one. In a literalistic picture, God made it good, and humans messed it up. God comes to the rescue, but the rescue God brings is focused primarily on the redemption of humans from the world that their disobedience has spoiled. On a different account of creation’s fate, the dice were cast long before humans appeared on the scene. Life may be in a delicate ecological balance, but life as such is self-seeking,29 a drive that is modified only by the needs of the group or by latent axial emotions 27   Hans Boersma makes much use of Irenaeus in widening and pacifying the penal theory of atonement in Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). See also J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 19–68; Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), p. 38. 28  Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 525 (emphasis mine). 29   See Carolyn M. King, ‘Interpretations of Complexity in Nature: Teilhard to Maynard Smith’, in Stephen Pickard and Christine Ledger (eds), Science and Complexity:

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towards empathy and altruism. This is the genetic and evolutionary inheritance of humans and non-humans alike. An obvious question arises: if such inheritances are part of God’s creative will, how can creatures need ‘saving’ from that which is – in some sense, notwithstanding all the necessary caveats about God’s nonauthorship of evil – God-given? One might say, as Haught and others have done, that creation is marred by a condition of incompleteness, a state that requires the further work of God if creation is to be brought to its fulfilment. Or one might argue, as Moltmann does, for a Scotist view that God would surely have come into intimate solidarity with the world in any case, such is God’s love for creation; it is simply that the particular story we know is the incarnation of God in a realm marked by the specific kinds of brokenness and suffering that creatures have come to experience.30 The language of ‘incompleteness’, I have suggested, may not go far enough as a way of speaking about evil; but, as the Scotist position recognizes, neither does evil elicit from God a response of compassion or a divine desire for creaturely fulfilment that is somehow different from God’s purposes in creating in the first place. Whatever we say, there can be no narrow understanding of salvation’s end, for there is no narrowness in its beginnings. Salvation is a movement of the triune God which is in continuity with this God’s original love for all creation, this God’s fundamental desire that creation as a whole should be brought to its proper glory. Humans and non-humans alike are breathed upon by God, are alike afflicted by fallenness, and are alike embraced within God’s redemptive purpose that they should reach their true destiny of creaturely freedom and fulfilment in relation to their creator. ‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.’ Human salvation assuredly retains its uniqueness, and humans, as God’s image-bearers, have specific prospects and specific responsibilities.31 But if the God who saves is indeed the God who creates, the scope of the creed’s ‘us’ and ‘our’ may need some considerable conceptual expansion.

Interdisciplinary Issues in Science and Religion (Hindmarsh, SA: ATF Press, 2004), pp. 51–82. 30   Jürgen Moltmann, Science and Wisdom (London: SCM Press, 2003), p. 57. 31  Not least in respect of other creatures: the issues of animal suffering, the eating of meat, ecological responsibility and worldly entropy are quite properly part of any serious reflection on what human salvation may presently entail in ethical terms.

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Chapter 6

Salvation and History Murray A. Rae

The task of soteriology is to provide an account of how the things that God has made are to take their part in the working out of God’s purpose, and of how they shall constitute, thus, a fitting celebration of God’s glory. Salvation has to do with the perfecting of God’s creation, with the completion of what began when, through his Word and Spirit, God brought forth light in the darkness and gave order to the formless void. Precisely through the completion and the perfection of God’s creation, the love and the glory of God are revealed. Yet the purposes of God in creation encounter the resistance of human sinfulness. The creature has loved darkness rather than light (Jn. 3:19) and has brought chaos upon that which was ordered to our good. Salvation thus entails the overcoming of human sinfulness, the dispelling of darkness, and the re-establishment of God’s good ordering of things. Because salvation concerns the completion and perfection of the created order it is concerned with history. It is concerned with the conditions of our created existence, with space, time and materiality. A salvation construed ahistorically – in terms, for instance, of the immaterial soul’s escape from the conditions of created existence – is not Christian. It is not Christian on account of its discontinuity with the story told in Scripture of God’s dealings with the world and of their culmination in the person of Jesus Christ. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the God who comes among us in Jesus, offers no salvation other than that which is worked out in and through the conditions God has established for creaturely existence. What account may be given, then, of how God works through history to bring salvation about? The Questionability of Salvation The Christian account of God’s salvation of the world is Christocentric. It rests entirely upon the conviction expressed, for example, by Paul in 2 Cor. 5:19, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Salvation is accomplished and will be brought to completion because the redeemer has come, and on no other basis. If God was not in Christ, then there is, not yet at least, any salvation. These affirmations I take to be axiomatic for Christian theology. Salvation, being the work of God and not of humanity, depends upon the coming of the one whom Christians have learned to call the Messiah. We have learned that vocabulary from Israel, but Israel claims that we Christians have misappropriated the term. Jesus

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of Nazareth is not the Messiah, says Israel, and the proof of that, Israel further contends, is that the world is not yet redeemed. Martin Buber, in 1933, formulated the Jewish objection as follows: The church rests on its faith that the Christ has come, and that this is the redemption which God has bestowed on mankind. We, Israel, are not able to believe this ... We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations – that the world is not yet redeemed.

Buber presumed that there was evidence enough in 1933 to sustain this objection. In the decade that followed, during which six million Jews were exterminated, the evidence allegedly became irrefutable and the rebuke unanswerable. Emil Fackenheim, for instance, contends that: The Christian thinker prepared to face this trauma [of the holocaust] in the sphere of religious life comes, when persisting in his task, on yet another trauma – this in the sphere of theological thought. He must ask: What can be the weight and inner truth of his own theological thinking, conducted in the safety of Western seminaries now, when it pits itself against the cowardice, inner falsehood and downright depravity of Christian life and thought then and there – when there was a cost to discipleship?

And further: In the Christ God is said to have taken upon Himself in advance all possible suffering, and vicariously to have atoned in advance for all possible sin. But … in the Holocaust ‘more was real than is possible.’ The Holocaust was a world of evil – an Unwelt or antiworld – that was previously unthought and unthinkable. It ruptures philosophical thought. It also ruptures … art and literature. Are not then Christian thought and faith ruptured as well? Where is the sting of that death removed? Where is that sin vicariously atoned?

It is not wrong for Israel to insist that redemption means an alteration to history, a shaking of the foundations, and a turning of the world upside down. We have already noted that salvation entails the right ordering of things, the dispelling of darkness and the overcoming of the chaos and the disruptions of history. The   Martin Buber, Der Jude und sein Judentum (Cologne: Joseph Melzer Verlag 1963), p. 562, cited by Jürgen Moltmann in The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (London: SCM Press, 1990), p. 28.    Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 283.   Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 285 (emphasis original). 

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Christian confession that the redeemer has come requires, therefore, an account of how through the coming of Christ the bloody trajectory of human history, as it has in fact taken shape, will find its goal at last in a creation made perfect in him. We may well consent to Fackenheim’s contention that philosophical thought is ruptured by the holocaust, as are art and literature too. But that does not itself entail that the evil of the holocaust, as indeed all the evil of human history, is left unatoned. It was never the task of philosophical thought, nor of literary or artistic expression, to atone for human sin. Human words have no such power. Only the Word which brought forth life in the beginning can still the tumult of history and overcome the silent emptiness of death. We go back to the beginning then: if God’s Word has not been sounded in Christ, then there is not, as yet, any salvation. Where shall the Word of the Lord be Found? My response to Israel’s ‘no’ to the Christian claim that the Redeemer has come begins with an appeal to an epistemological principle that is learned from Israel’s own Scripture. It is that the brutalities of human history, and especially those that have been inflicted on Israel itself, require an explanation that must come from God himself. No other explanation will do, their ready availability notwithstanding. The destruction of Jerusalem is not inexplicable when construed merely as a political and social catastrophe. There are explanations available in terms of human greed and the will to power. The exile too can be accounted for in terms of the political expediencies of the day. Even the holocaust has explanations, deeply disturbing though they may be, that refer to the depths of human depravity and to the ease with which human moral sensibilities may be subordinated to the pursuit of a nation’s own misconceived interests. But Israel is not satisfied with these explanations. It is the theological crisis that requires explanation. The outrage for Israel, exceeding the social and political catastrophe, is that such things have been allowed to happen in a world that was thought to be the good creation of God, and to the people, moreover, whom God has elected to be his witness. Time and again in its history Israel has demanded that God explain; God is interrogated, is called upon to give an account of himself. Such is demanded of God precisely because neither the productions of human culture, be they philosophical, literary or artistic, nor history itself can yield an explanation that will suffice. Creation, providence, redemption, the blessing of Abraham’s seed and the overcoming of evil in the end – these are matters whose logic is revealed only by the divine Word. Jewish and Christian belief in these things is, accordingly, a matter of faith, and, as Karl Barth explains, ‘this means first that it is a hearing and receiving of the Word of God’. The books of Job and of Lamentations are among the most profound expressions of this point. There the creature offers its cry of anguish in the face of suffering    Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75 [hereafter CD]) III/3, p. 15.

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and evil. There it confesses that neither the calculations of human reason nor the exercise of political power can overcome the chaos it faces now. If there is to be salvation, if there is to be a recovery of meaning and hope amidst the horrors of history, then it will only be as God utters his redemptive and reconciling Word. This is a conviction held in common by Jew and Christian alike. Only God can explain. Only God can bring redemption for the murdered and the gassed, and for all the other victims of history’s terror. Only the God who gave life in the beginning can give new life in the end. History considered in itself might suggest that some other god is at work, a capricious and malevolent tyrant. Or it might suggest that there is no one who can save, that the life of the world and of human beings within it is prey, and will succumb in the end, to the competition of chaotic forces. Nineteenth-century commentators, by contrast, impressed by the scientific and supposed moral advancement of the human race, famously interpreted the course of human history as progress toward the perfection of humankind through human prowess alone. The First World War brought that dream to an end, to say nothing of the Second World War and the evil regime of the Third Reich. The contemporary world, reading the report of twentieth-century history, is marked more by pessimism and despair than by visions of human perfectibility. It is only the Word of God that can offer assurance of anything different. In language not yet attuned to more recent sensibilities with respect to gender, P.T. Forsyth wrote shortly after the First World War: ‘Nothing can give us footing or hope amid the degeneration of man but his regeneration by God’. Forsyth’s claim in his book The Justification of God is the same as that I have been attempting to advance here. Only God, in the end, can explain the course of history, for it is the creative and redemptive Word of God that is history’s basis and its goal. That is the theo-logic of Jewish faith too. Those who speak truly of history in Jewish tradition are those whose words, under the authority of the Spirit, are bracketed by the prophetic declaration, ‘Thus says the Lord’. It is through prophetic speech, through the prophetic declaration of the Word of the Lord, that history may be understood aright. Thus the question at issue between Christians and Jews is not first of all whether history is to be interpreted in this way or that, but where the Word of God is truly spoken and heard. The Word Made Flesh Christian faith proclaims that the Word of God sounded through Israel and in many and various ways through the prophets (Heb. 1:1) has in the man Jesus become flesh and dwelt among us. This news can only be confessed and proclaimed. It cannot be the subject of rational verification; nor can it be confirmed within the categories of secular historiography. These tools of human enquiry, subject as they   P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God (London: Latimer House, 1948), p. 21.



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are to the limitations of human understanding and to the impairments of fallenness, do not constitute an adequate authority for determining the veracity of the Word of God. Rather, God, through his Spirit, presents and confirms his own Word, giving eyes to see and ears to hear and working within those who are attentive a transformation of mind and heart. Whoever proclaims and whoever hears truly the Word of God has their understanding of things more and more conformed to a logic that is not of their own making, but is given by the one through whom all things were made. Between Christian and Jew, therefore, the question of where God’s Word is to be heard will not be settled by persuasive argument. Christian and Jew can encourage one another only to renewed and prayerful attentiveness, and at the same time bear witness to the other of what they have seen and heard. Both in the end, however, must trust in the power of revelation to speak for itself. What follows, then, is an account of what has been seen and heard by Christians in Jesus of Nazareth. It is an account directed especially to the question of how the world is changed by the redemption accomplished in Jesus Christ. We come then to ask: what is the nature of the Word that is heard in Jesus, in the one whom Christians proclaim as the Christ? The Word, first of all, is that spoken to Mary: ‘The Lord is with you’ (Lk. 1:28). The angel said to her, And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end … The Holy Sprit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God (Lk. 1:31–3, 35).

That is as Luke has it. Matthew, quoting Isaiah, puts it thus: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us’ (Mt. 1:23). In each case the message is given that history is not bereft of God, for in the person of the Son, conceived and sustained in his humanity by the Spirit, God comes into the midst of our human situation and makes history the locus of his own redemptive and transformative presence. If we apply the epistemological principle adduced above to this confession that God has come among us in Jesus, then we may see that the warrant for this claim cannot be provided by history itself. Søren Kierkegaard was one who saw clearly that, despite the efforts of those engaged in successive quests for the historical Jesus, the identity of Jesus as the Christ cannot be established by history. The claim of faith is not proven by the events of Jesus’ life as they are rendered by historical reason, nor by such effects of that life as are accessible to historical inquiry. If it   Among numerous reiterations of this point in Kierkegaard’s corpus see, for example, Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 26–31. Kierkegaard makes the point in agreement

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is true that Jesus of Nazareth is the Redeemer, if he is the Messiah promised by Israel’s Scripture, then history will not be able to explain this Way and Truth and Life of God. It will rather be the case that history is explained by him. That, indeed, is the claim implicit throughout the New Testament, especially so in the narratives of Jesus’ birth, in the Prologue and development of John’s gospel, in the affirmation of the letter to the Hebrews that the Son of God ‘sustains all things by his powerful word’ (Heb. 1:3), and in the more extensive affirmation of the letter to the Colossians that: [Jesus Christ] is the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together ... . And through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven by making peace through the blood of his cross.

We see in this passage the inseparable connection between creation and redemption. It is the one through whom all things were created who comes to his own, who holds them together, who reconciles them, who makes peace. Jesus Christ is not an isolated incident on the stage of world history, to be interpreted in terms of his impact upon the affairs of his own day or his influence upon succeeding generations. He is the one through whom the whole course and character of history are determined because through him all things came to be, and ‘through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things’. The question, as we have noted, therefore, is not: what will history make of him? The question is: what does he make history to be? We must begin at the end. That is, we must begin where the gospels end, with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. In beginning there, however, we begin also with history’s end, with history’s telos. The resurrection means, within the context of Israel’s eschatological expectation, that ‘the final saving reality of the deathdefeating resurrection life has already come in Jesus’. The telos, the final goal and end of history, is established in the midst of time. The resurrection signals that with G.E. Lessing, though Lessing, of course, supposes that the claims of faith must therefore be renounced. See G.E. Lessing, ‘On the Proof of Spirit and of Power’, in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), pp. 51–6.    P.T. Forsyth makes the same point: ‘… if the general course of history could explain Christ, that would reduce Christ to be but a product of history. Whereas it is more true to say that history is the product of Christ, and Christ explains history as it can never explain Him’: Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 217.    Col. 1:15–17, 19–20.    Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 211. See also Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man (London: SCM Press, 1968), p. 67.

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death will be defeated. The dead will be raised, including those dead who are the victims of human evil and sin. God has taken their side and justice will be done for them. God’s Word and Spirit of life and not the word of the sinful creature will be victorious in the end, precisely because they were victorious in the midst of time when the one slain by the forces of evil was raised by God from the dead. Just as the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus opened up the Scriptures to the two disciples who walked with him, and interpreted to them the things about himself (Lk. 24:27), so in the light of the resurrection the events of Jesus’ earthly life are to be understood. The resurrection shows Jesus to be the one through whom the new creation is begun, but it is begun also in Jesus’ ministry in which ‘… the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them’ (Mt. 11:5). These are signs, according to the apostolic witness, of the dawning of God’s kingdom in and through Jesus, a foretaste of the completion of God’s purposes in which the Creator’s gift of life to the creature will be realized in its fullness. Although Jesus here indicates that the coming of the Messiah results in an alteration to history, a transformation of the creature and an end to humanity’s afflictions, the evidence from history is by no means conclusive. Although the signs promise and the resurrection confirms that humanity’s afflictions will be brought to an end, the ministry of Jesus can, on account of its radical reordering of the expected shape of salvation,10 be interpreted by some as an affront to Israel’s God. Likewise, his implicit claim to be ‘the one who is to come’ (Mt. 11:3) may be regarded as the delusion of a blasphemer. Historical enquiry cannot decide the matter and so, of those who consider the case and confess that they believe, Jesus himself says, ‘blessed are those who take no offence at me’ (Mt. 11:6). Such are blessed because, in a world still labouring under an order that is passing away, they have been granted to see that the Saviour has come. As the events of Jesus’ ministry unfold in tension with the religious and political forces around him, it is the course and telos of history that is at stake. Each of the gospel writers signals this. In Matthew, for example, Herod is pitted against the child who is born in Bethlehem – the one seeking to make history through conspiracy and the sword, the other taking the way of servanthood and love.11 These tensions are played out throughout the gospel as the murmurings of religious and political authorities turns to open confrontation and then to the sinister determination to put an end to the history that is unfolding before them and to set history again on a course of their own design. 10  The salvation that takes shape in and through Jesus should not come as a surprise to those who have read Israel’s Scriptures, but human beings in their fallenness are prone to conceive salvation in terms of their own misconceived interests or in ways that accord merit to their own achievements, be they moral, intellectual or religious. Through the ministry of Jesus, however, participation in God’s saving purposes is typically granted first to those who were thought to be least deserving. 11   See Mt. 2:1–18.

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In Luke, the historic significance of the career of Jesus is indicated in the opening chapters by the recurring citation of Israel’s prophets and by the new prophetic utterance of Zechariah (Lk. 1:68–9). It is indicated again by the account of Jesus’ genealogy, stretching from Jesus himself back to Adam. All generations are gathered into the gospel story that Luke is about to unfold. Mark’s gospel, like Matthew’s, relates the mounting conflict between the control of history exercised by Israel’s established religious authorities and the very different history taking form through the life of God’s ‘beloved Son’ (Mk. 1:11). And in John the events of Jesus’ career are conceived as nothing less than a new creation, the redemption and transformation of the world. The history being fashioned in and around Jesus comes to a head in all four gospels with the drama played out at Calvary. On the face of it, human evil has its way. Jesus becomes, apparently, another victim of an insatiable ‘final solution’ whose weapon and outcome is death. As the earth darkens and Jesus utters his last cry, the work of the soldiers and the prosecuting authorities appears to be done. The dead body of Jesus is taken down from the cross and his history, at least, is ended in a tomb. In the midst of the darkness, however, there is one who confesses, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’ (Mt. 27:54). On any sensible reading of the history so far narrated that judgement seems unlikely. The promise of salvation has come to nought, and the one thought to be the Messiah has succumbed, apparently, to powers that bring death rather than life. But the gospels do not come to that conclusion. They proclaim, instead, that on the third day after Jesus was crucified, the tomb in which he was laid is found empty. Jesus is encountered anew as the one whom God has raised from the dead. The work of the soldiers and of the prosecuting authorities is indeed done, but theirs is not the last word. God utters a different verdict on the person and work of Jesus that confirms him as the one in whom history attains its goal. The human choice of death is overcome by God’s gift of new life. The drama of salvation worked out through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and through his ascension to rule and to intercede on behalf of the world, reveals what history truly is. History understood in the light of Christ is the space and time within which God establishes, nurtures and will perfect at the last a relationship of covenant love between himself and his creatures. In his life of loving obedience the Son of God reveals what the creature was intended to be and, in priestly service, takes the creature’s part in the covenant relationship with the Father. As the high priest on the day of atonement makes an offering on behalf of all Israel and takes all Israel with him into the holy presence of God, so Jesus Christ offers his own life, unmarred by sin, to be an atonement for the people and the one sufficient expression of creaturely obedience and love. In the midst of human history, chaotically arrayed through human sin, there is one who acts for us, who takes our place in the drama of redemption, who sees to it through his vicarious obedience that the covenant is not annulled.

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Salvation is revealed here as the victory of divine love and the revelation of God’s glory. God does not leave sinful humanity to its own devices but, without coercion or the violation of our creaturely freedom, comes among us in Christ to take our part in the working out of his purpose. In the midst of the world’s evil, and on behalf of both its victims and its perpetrators, there is one who intercedes, there is one who is faithful, there is one whose faithfulness ensures that the world is not cast off. God does not consent, therefore, to the creature’s determination that we should have the last word. He takes upon himself our evil and sides with those who have fallen prey to sin and death. He does this both in order to lay bare the truth of human sinfulness – he is the world’s true judge – and to reconcile and redeem that which lies broken and bereft of hope. God’s purpose, the true end of all things, is here declared in the midst of history, in the crucifixion and in the resurrection of Christ. As Oliver O’Donovan explains, it is through the death and resurrection of Christ that God gives his ‘final and most decisive word on the life of his creature Adam. It is, in the first place, God’s reversal of Adam’s choice of sin and death: ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15:22).12 ‘Adam’ has the dual sense here of the individual referred to in the creation stories of Genesis, and the whole of humankind gathered up symbolically in the life of the prototypical first human being. In the second place, and precisely because it is a reversal of Adam’s choice of death: ‘the resurrection of Christ is a new affirmation of God’s first decision that Adam should live’.13 O’Donovan further contends that: The work of the Creator who made Adam, who brought into being an order of things in which humanity has a place, is affirmed once and for all by this conclusion. It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause. If the creature consistently acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? It might have been possible before Christ rose from the dead to answer in good faith, Yes.14

History considered in itself is left with that verdict. For all the efforts humanity makes to fashion the world according to its own design, it cannot repair the damage that has been done. It cannot heal the wounds of history. It can only pretend, and not usually for long, that such wounds will never happen again. P.T. Forsyth again writes: ‘Without the judgement and destiny effected in the cross of Christ we can have no teleology of history. This is a thing that a philosophy of history cannot give. It cannot deal with the evil that is in the world. It cannot assure us that the 12  Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 13–14. 13  O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 14. 14  O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 14.

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holy will win the day at last.’15 What is true of a philosophy of history is also true of the course of history itself. Time left to itself does not in fact heal. Time merely enables us to forget. But it does not atone for the evil that has been done, nor can it repair the damage. There is, in that sense, no tikkun olam, as the Jews say: there is no mending of the world, not on a scale at least that can cope with the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or the many other evils that we could name. History considered merely as the striving of humanity through time cannot bring the dead to life. Even if, per impossibile, the nineteenth-century dream of utopia were to be realized one day, even if humankind were able to perfect itself, that progress and achievement could not atone for all the deaths that have gone before. Let me gather together the threads of the argument thus far. The claim is made, with greatest cause perhaps by the Jews, that history reveals one thing at least: namely, that the Redeemer has not yet come. It seems to me, however, that, whether or not this denial of Christian faith is true, the claim violates a basic epistemological principle that is learned from Israel itself. History cannot explain itself. Only God can explain. The world is God’s world, and Israel is God’s people. Only God can tell us, therefore, what is to be made of history, of its brutality toward the Jews, and indeed toward all other victims of evil. Christian proclamation is not in the first instance a report on history. It does not come forth with the news that our historical enquiries reveal that the Redeemer has come.16 Christian proclamation is, first of all, an invitation to attend to the Word spoken and made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. Christian theology, still attentively, is an effort to understand history, precisely in light of that Word. The report of history, therefore, the collected impressions of human beings as they survey what has become of the world, cannot be taken as conclusive for theology because any such conclusion rests on a procedure that is mistaken. The ways and will of God are not written unambiguously on the events of history, any more than they are written in the stars. Discernment of the purpose of God requires attentiveness to God’s Word. That is not for a moment to deny the historic nature of the events that constitute the life of the Word made flesh. It is rather to claim that our apprehension of them, our seeing them for what they really are, is not the result of human ingenuity but itself depends on God’s action through the Spirit in which he reconciles the creature to himself and gives eyes to see what our sinfulness otherwise obscures. A World Turned Upside Down But let us now recall the objection to Christian belief posed by Buber and Fackenheim. In the face of the Christian confession that Jesus is the Redeemer, the  Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 185.  Apologetics framed in these terms are profoundly mistaken, for their categories and methods of enquiry are inadequate to the task. The same fault is the Achilles’ heel of the various quests for the historical Jesus. 15 16

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promised one of Israel’s Scriptures, Buber responds as we have seen: ‘[w]e, Israel, are not able to believe this ... We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations – that the world is not yet redeemed’. If, perhaps, they were to concede the point made so far, that the report of history itself cannot yield conclusive knowledge of God, the Jews will go on to point out nevertheless, and rightly so, that the basic objection remains unanswered. The coming of the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures involves an alteration to history, not merely the alteration effected by the advent of any human being, nor even the more substantial alteration effected by a prophet or a divinely anointed king. As Buber points out, the alteration wrought through the coming of the Messiah is the turning of world history ‘upside down to its very foundations’. Here Christian faith offers its witness that the turning of world history upside down is precisely what does take place in the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection is that event in the midst of time that sets the world again on its trajectory to fullness of life with God. To be sure, that telos is not yet fully realized, the promised communion between God and his creatures has not yet been perfected, and it is not yet the case that every knee is bowed in joyful adoration; but the telos of history, its purpose and its divinely appointed end, is manifest among us in the resurrection of the crucified one, the one who gave his life as the perfect offering and response of humankind. The resurrection, as we have seen, means that humanity’s efforts to make history, in defiance of and in alienation from God, will not be successful in the end. It is the history we have made, represented in the shouts of the people to crucify the Son of God, and echoed wherever death is dealt to those made in his image – it is that history that is shaken to its very foundations. Humanity’s choice of death for the beloved Son of God, and the death inflicted over and over again in history by humanity’s determination to assert a lordship of its own, are what is turned upside down in the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. God’s purpose of life and not the history of death is what is re-established in and through Jesus, and will prevail in the end. History is therefore no longer the same after the resurrection because God’s verdict upon it has been heard and enacted. The world will have life and will have it abundantly. In Jesus Christ the final outcome of history is revealed. To put it as John Webster has done elsewhere in this volume: ‘history [is] embraced by a divine conclusion’.17 This is, admittedly, not an easy matter to comprehend within a linear notion of history and a punctiliar conception of what is real, but our difficulty here arises from our inclination to make absolute the perspectivally-constrained products of our own seeing and understanding: ‘It does not appear from here’, we may say, ‘that the world has been redeemed’. But, as did the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we must learn to see with God’s help. We must take our bearings from the places where the risen Lord is encountered still, above all at the table where bread is broken and wine is poured. Brokenness is discovered there to be evidence, not only of the suffering under which the world still languishes, but also of God’s 17

  Chapter 1, p. 30.

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presence within the world as the work of salvation is done. History is not bereft of God. He is to be found in its midst, thereby ensuring that, in time, his purposes will be complete. Witness How does the alteration to history that has been reflected upon here manifest itself in the world today? What difference is apparent in a world that has been reconciled to God? Clearly it does not mean that the tribulations of the world are at an end. The way in which the reconciliation of the world becomes apparent, I suggest, is that there is a witness, a remnant people established by God to show forth the fact that the world is not cast off but belongs still in the hands of God. When Emil Fackenheim asks repeatedly through the successive chapters of his book, To Mend the World, whether there can in fact be such a mending after the Holocaust, the answer he comes to eventually is that we can search for a mending of the world because there were in the midst of the Holocaust those who undertook repair by resisting the evils of Nazi Germany. Fackenheim tells briefly the stories of a few Christians who took a stand on behalf of the Jews, and of some Jews who ‘did not succumb to the Nazi logic of destruction’, thus denying ‘the evil logic its victory’.18 ‘The Tikkun’, Fackenhein writes, the mending of the world, ‘is a possibility because during the Holocaust itself a Jewish Tikkun was already actual’.19 There is something theologically important here which must, however, be articulated carefully and rather differently from the way in which Fackenheim himself puts it. Salvation, atonement and the mending of the world do not come about because there have been some who have been faithful. Rather, the faithfulness of the few constitutes a sign and witness to the decisive faithfulness of God. The faithfulness of a holy remnant is itself a work of grace, enabled by the Spirit of God who sustains life, and who will in the end give new life, even to those who are dead. Fackenheim himself sketches the content of this witness mainly in political terms. The Tikkun, he says is Israel itself, a state founded, maintained and defended by a people who – so it was once thought – had lost the arts of statecraft and sef-defence. It is the replanting of a land that had been reduced to swamps and desert. It is the gathering of a people, the preservation of biblical language, and the rebuilding of a city in and through which, on behalf of the accidental remnant of Israel and after unprecedented death, there is a unique celebration of life.20 Fackenheim acknowledges that: It is true – so fragmentary and precarious is the great Tikkun – that many want no share of it, deny it, distort it, slander it. But slanders and denials have no power  Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 301.  Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 300. 20  Fackenheim, To Mend the World, pp. 312–13. 18

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over those who are astonished – ever again astonished – by the fact that in this of all ages the Jewish people have returned – have been returned? – to Jerusalem. Their strength, when failing, is renewed by the faith that despite all, because of all, the ‘impulse from below’ will call forth ‘an impulse from above’.21

This is the Jewish witness that God has not abandoned his people; the Christian witness, in continuity with but nonetheless distinct from Jewish witness, consists in the new polity that has been established in Christ, that is sustained by the Spirit, and that has as its central features the right administration of the sacraments and the faithful preaching of the Word. The reality of the church, generated by rather than hoping to prompt ‘an impulse from above’, bears witness that God is already in Christ gathering sinners into communion with himself. It is important to be clear here that this witness is not something that the church accomplishes on its own account. The polity of the church, to draw upon a claim by Reinhard Hütter, is the poiesis of the Spirit.22 The authority and truth of the church’s life and of its witness rest solely on the reality of God’s presence as Spirit in its midst. This work of the Spirit is to be understood in eschatological terms as an anticipation and foretaste of the coming kingdom of God. The significance of Pentecost, following closely upon the resurrection of Christ, is that the reality of the end of history is already transforming the present time. Known classically as ‘the perfecting cause’, the Spirit is already poured out, is already bringing to bear the signs of reconciliation, is already bestowing resurrection life upon God’s people in anticipation of that day when all things will be made new. It is God who sees to it that he is not left without a witness, however insecure that witness may sometimes appear to be. Here we may adapt Fackenheim’s claim: it is true – so fragmentary and precarious is the church’s witness – that many want no share of it, deny it, distort it, slander it. But slanders and denials have no power over those who are astonished – ever again astonished – by what has been accomplished for the world in Christ. Christians must say of Israel too that its witness continues to be ordained and upheld by God. Profound though the disagreement is between Jews and Christians about the coming of the Messiah, there is no dispute that history can be redeemed only on account of the love and the mercy of God, and will be so only as the promise of the Messiah is fulfilled.

 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 313. The phrases in quotation marks are taken from Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965) pp. 27; 260 ff., 232 ff., and passim. See Fackenheim, p. 253. 22  Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), passim. 21

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Intercession Under his discussion of the life of the Christian under the universal Lordship of God the Father, Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics III/3, contends that prayer is an expression of the astonishment of which we have just spoken. Prayer, Barth says: ... derives from what the Christian receives. It is simply the human fulfilment of this receiving, the direct expression of the life of the one who stands amazed at what God is and does for him; amazed primarily, not at the majesty of God compared with himself, not at his own lowliness as contrasted with this majesty, but at the fact that God is actually for him, and that God acts for him.23

Prayer is a necessary theme in our discussion of what it means to inhabit a world that has been reconciled to God. The world continues to labour under an order that is passing away and, in consequence, a great deal of human life is, as yet, not conformed to the new reality that is established in Christ. That is not to be taken as evidence that the world has not yet been redeemed, for redemption means centrally that God has sent his Son into the world to uphold the world in prayer. Here the centrality of the ascension for the world’s salvation comes into view. The crucified and risen Christ who has taken human flesh ascends to the Father to sit at his right hand where he intercedes on behalf of the world. This is the completion of our reconciliation. The world and all its concerns are present with God; he has taken responsibility for them. Thus, strangely enough, Barth says, God’s hearing of prayer for the world really precedes the asking.24 The upholding of the world in prayer is preceded by the gift of the one who upholds it. ‘In the fact that Jesus is there, the world is already helped, and everything that creation needs ... is already provided.’25 The intercession of the church on behalf of the world, therefore, is properly to be construed as the church’s participation through the Spirit in the intercession offered by Christ. ‘The first and proper suppliant is none other than Jesus Christ himself.’26 He is the gift of God in person, given to stand before the Father in the place and on behalf of humanity itself. So far as the church is concerned, Barth explains that the community Christ gathers to himself through baptism is gathered so that there may be an office and ministry of witness at the heart of creation.27 Christian existence in a world that is reconciled to God is a matter of participation in Christ’s intercession for the world. Participation in that intercession is what constitutes the church’s witness. It is no accident that one of the instances of Christian witness that impressed Emil Fackenheim the most in the midst of the Nazi regime and its programme to 23

    25   26   27   24

Barth, CD III/3, pp. 270–1. Barth, CD III/3, p. 270. Barth, CD III/3, p. 271. Barth, CD III/3, p. 274. Barth, CD III/3, p. 271.

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exterminate the Jews was the witness of Prior Bernhard Lichtenberg. In response to the horrors of Kristallnacht on 10 November 1938, Lichtenberg ‘went to his church and prayed publicly “on behalf of the Jews and the poor concentration camp prisoners”. And he continued to recite his public prayer every day until, on 23 October 1941, he was at length arrested’ and tried.28 That is what Christian existence consists of in a world that is reconciled to God. It is participation through the Spirit in the Son’s intercession before the Father; it is a hopeful and a justified intercession, furthermore, because the Redeemer has already come. Conclusion The task of a Christian theology of salvation, I have said, is to provide an account of how the things that God has made are to take their part in the working out of God’s purpose, and of how they shall constitute, thus, a fitting celebration of God’s glory. The things that God has made take their part in the working out of God’s purpose by virtue of the fact that they are gathered together in Christ and are upheld before the Father. This is what the glory of God consists in, that he acts for the world in this way, that he brings to fulfilment his own loving intention to create a world that may participate in the communion of his triune life. The revelation and expression of God’s glory is simultaneously, therefore, the salvation and thus the glorification of the creature. The creature is in the end, and essentially, the one who is exalted to share in the Son’s communion with the Father through the Spirit. That is what salvation consists in. It is also what the freedom of the creature consists in. The freedom won for the creature by Christ means that neither we, nor the rest of creation, are held in bondage to sin and death. That means, I have suggested, that the course of human history, under threat from the sin-ridden determination of the creature to go its way in defiance of God, is shaken to its very foundations; things are not left to run their course, the course given them by the creature’s efforts to foist upon the world an order and destiny of its own making. Rather, the history of death and destruction is undone. God takes the side of the fallen and sinful creature, thus ensuring that there will come a day when every tear will be wiped from our eyes, when death will be no more, and when mourning and crying and pain will be no more (Rev. 21:4). That outcome, so Christians believe, is accomplished through the coming of the Messiah. The one slain before the foundation of the world has been raised by God as the firstborn of a new creation. History has both its beginning and its end in him.

 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 289.

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Chapter 7

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

Does Christ’s work have to have a certain intrinsic objective moral value in order for it to be acceptable to God as an act of atonement? This question is part and parcel of classical theological discussion of the atonement. Famously, Duns Scotus, and those who followed him, argued that divine justice does not require the death of the God-Man as recompense for human sin. On one understanding of Scotus’s position, God could have accepted some act of atonement that had less objective moral and forensic value, and still have been just in so acting. As Richard Cross puts it, ‘On Scotus’s account, an act is meritorious if and only if God assigns a reward for it’. But this doctrine, usually called acceptatio or acceptation, seems to be entirely wrongheaded to me. So does the related idea that the value of any act of atonement is entirely up to God and has nothing to do with any intrinsic merit the action in question possesses. This latter view, called acceptilatio, or acceptilation, is sometimes conflated with acceptation. In this chapter, I shall argue that both the notions of acceptilation and acceptation are mistaken. God  Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 104.  This could mean that any divine act could be an act of atonement. Or it could mean that there are only certain divine action types that could be acts of atonement, rather than any divine act. Acceptilation could be taken either way, although if the latter were adopted, some explanation of why only some divine action types might be acts of atonement would need to be given.    William G.T. Shedd makes this mistake in A History of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), pp. 348–9. Cf. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, third edn, ed. Alan W. Gomes (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003), p. 733. The historian of doctrine, R.S. Franks, concedes that ‘there has been … much confusion between acceptation and acceptilation’ in The Work of Christ (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962), p. 393 n. 5. A measure of this confusion can be seen in Louis Berkhof’s comment on what is allegedly Scotus’s theory: ‘a merit that is not at all commensurate with the debt owed is willingly accepted by God. This theory is generally called the Acceptilation Theory, but according to Mackintosh (Historic Theories of the Atonement, pp. 110–11) it should really be called the Acceptation Theory of the atonement’: The History of Christian Doctrines (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1969), p. 180.  

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must accept an act that has an objective moral value at least proportional to the demerit of the trespass it atones for in order for this act to be morally acceptable as an act of atonement. This encapsulates what I shall call the proportionality understanding of the value of atonement – or proportional view for short. I shall use this proportional view to draw out reasons for thinking that: (a) the atonement had to be an act of God Incarnate, and (b) this sort of reasoning about the value of the atonement implies a certain picture of the divine nature. Thus, the chapter aims to show how considerations about the value of the atonement have substantive implications for Theology Proper (namely, the doctrine of God). The argument proceeds in the following manner. First, a brief account of the theological construals of acceptilation and acceptation is given. Making sense of exactly what each of these two notions entails clears the ground for what follows. In the second section I offer some objections to acceptilation and acceptation. In a third section, I offer an argument in favour of the proportional view. In a fourth and final section of the chapter, I argue that these considerations have important implications for a doctrine of God. Acceptilation and Acceptation Like a number of historians of doctrine, R.S. Franks begins his discussion of acceptilation by noting its pre-Christian origins as a forensic concept in Roman law: According to its [Roman] derivation, acceptilatio means ‘a reckoning as received’, acceptum being the proper name for the credit side of the ledger. In Roman law, however, the term had a special technical use. It meant the discharge of an obligation by the use of a solemn and prescribed form of words, in which the debtor asked the creditor whether he had received payment, and the creditor replied that he had – no real payment, however, having taken place.

He goes on to say: In Christian theology, the term ‘acceptilation’ is commonly used in a loose sense to denote the principle of that theory of the Atonement, in which the merit of Christ’s work is regarded as depending simply on the Divine acceptance, and not on its own intrinsic worth. This theory was taught by Duns Scotus, who says that ‘every created offering is worth what God accepts it as, and no more’, and 

 R.S. Franks, ‘Acceptilation’, in James Hastings and John A. Selbie (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Pt. I (New York: Charles Schribner & Sons, 1911), p. 61. Cf. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrines, pp. 179–81; Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1985), p. 18, entries ‘acceptatio’ and ‘acceptilatio’.

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further, that Christ’s human merit was itself strictly limited, but God in his good pleasure accepted it, as sufficient for our salvation.

As Franks intimates, the theological application of acceptilation goes beyond its denotation in Roman law as some act according to which a debt owed is remitted without payment. But exactly what is added to the notion in theology is moot. I want to suggest that there are in fact two ways in which the theological application of acceptilation could be parsed. Both of these accounts are consistent with Franks’s claim that at the heart of the theological version of acceptilation is the notion that the merit of Christ’s work is regarded as depending simply on the Divine acceptance, and not on its own intrinsic worth. According to the first construal of this claim, God treats Christ’s work as if it had a value sufficient to remit or otherwise satisfy divine justice for the sin committed by fallen humanity, although it does not, strictly speaking. This first construal of acceptilation involves a kind of moral and/or forensic fiction. For this reason, I shall refer to it as Fictionalist Acceptilation. ‘Fictionalism’ in this context means that Christ’s work does not have this value although God may impute this value to Christ’s work. That is, God may treat Christ’s work as though it has or accrues a merit requisite to atone for sin, although, in fact, it does not possess or does not accrue this merit – indeed, it accrues no merit. We can put this more formally as follows: Fictionalist Acceptilation (FA): Christ’s work has no particular intrinsic objective moral value whatsoever, but God imputes a particular value to it.

FA requires the somewhat implausible assumption that Christ’s work has no intrinsic, objective moral value. This seems implausible because Christ’s work is usually thought to be a moral work, whatever particular moral value it is assigned or thought to possess. The idea that Christ’s work has no moral value – is morally neutral, as it were – until and unless God imputes some moral value to it, seems very peculiar indeed. Some indication of how odd this is can be had by comparing the tutor who says to her undergraduate student: ‘Your essay cannot be marked according to the university grading scheme because it has no intrinsic academic qualities whatsoever (whether good or bad). However, I will treat it as if it had the academic qualities requisite to a first-class piece of work and grade it accordingly’. Notice that the tutor is not saying that the student’s essay is so poor that it cannot score much of anything in terms of scholarly attainment. Rather, the tutor is claiming that the piece of work cannot be graded according to the university’s marking scheme because it possesses not a single academic quality that would make it eligible to be marked according to that scheme. This is precisely what is

 Franks, ‘Acceptilation’, p. 62, citing Scotus, Com. In Sent. lib. iii. Dist. 19.



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implausible about the claim that Christ’s work has no moral value whatsoever, that it is morally neutral unless God imputes some moral quality to it. But a second way of parsing theological acceptilation can be had, according to which God accepts Christ’s work as having a value sufficient to remit or otherwise satisfy divine justice for the sin committed by some number of fallen humanity simply because God stipulates that it has this value, although without this stipulation it would have no value whatsoever. This is different from the first ‘fictionalist’ account of acceptilation because on this second view the entire moral value of Christ’s work is attributable to divine fiat, which is all that is necessary for the work in question to have a certain moral value conferred upon it. In other words, on this way of thinking God says Christ’s work has a certain moral value, and thereafter it has that value. It is not that God treats Christ’s work as if it had a value it does not, imputing to Christ’s work a moral quality it lacks, which is what the fictionalist view requires. Instead, Christ’s work does have the requisite moral value necessary for it to be acceptable to God as an act of atonement because, and only because, God makes it so. But, crucially, if God did not stipulate that Christ’s work has this value, it would not have this value – which is why this is a version of acceptilation not acceptation. However, God does stipulate it has this value. So it has this value. This is rather like the difference between the tutor being willing to treat the student as if he had submitted his essay on time, though in fact he has not done so – applying no penalty to his essay (viz. the fictionalist construal of acceptilation), and the Vice-Chancellor of the University stepping in and pronouncing the student non-culpable for failure to submit his essay on time, where the speechact of pronouncing judgment upon the individual in question somehow brings about his having a new non-culpable status in virtue of the powers invested in the Vice-Chancellor (viz. the second, non-fictionalist construal of acceptilation). This non-fictionalist account of theological acceptilation we shall dub Stipulative Acceptilation, since it depends on God stipulating by divine fiat that a given act has a particular moral quality. We can put this more formally, thus: 

 Undoubtedly more would need to be said about this particular issue. For instance, something should be said about whether an act counts as moral only if the person acting is intending to act morally, is aiming at some moral outcome and so on. Similarly, one would have to say something more about the connection between responsibility and the morality of an action. But such qualifications only serve to strengthen my case: traditionally, theologians have thought Christ’s work was intended by him to achieve a certain moral outcome and that he was responsible for placing himself in circumstances where he could bring about such an act of atonement, and so on.   It is worth noting at this juncture that what is at stake in this distinction between fictional and stipulative accounts of acceptilation (and of acceptation, as we shall see) is less a difference pertaining to the effect or consequence of what God determines will be the case and more a difference in regard to the process or means (so to speak) of the divine determination of value.

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Stipulative Acceptilation (SA): Christ’s work has no particular intrinsic objective moral value whatsoever, until and unless God assigns a particular value to it, whereupon it acquires the moral value assigned by divine fiat.

There is a deeper theological issue upon which SA relies. The value or merit of a particular act depends upon the value or merit assigned to that act by God – which is, of course, the ‘stipulative’ element of this version of acceptilation. But this requires a version of theological voluntarism, specifically, the idea that the moral value of a particular action depends entirely upon the divine will or voluntas. In fact, SA implies that Christ’s work has a moral value if, and only if, God assigns some moral value to it, which entails a rather strong version of theological voluntarism. What, then, distinguishes acceptation from acceptilation? Richard Muller maintains that acceptation refers to ‘an act of grace and mercy according to which God freely accepts a partial satisfaction as fully meritorious’. In which case, the difference between the theological versions of acceptilation and acceptation is that, according to acceptation, God is in some sense willing to accept an act worth less than the value required to atone for human sin as sufficient to atone for human sin. The key difference is that acceptation presumes the act in question has some moral value, just not enough moral value to make it sufficient in and of itself to warrant atonement without the operation of divine grace.10 But as with acceptilation, acceptation could be taken in one of two ways. The first of these involves a version of fictionalism. We might frame it thus: Fictionalist Acceptation (FIA): Christ’s work has a particular intrinsic, objective moral value, but it does not have a moral value sufficient to atone for the sin of some number of fallen humanity, unless God imputes that value in addition to the intrinsic value such an act already possesses.

The Fictionalist version of Acceptation is somewhat different and rather more plausible than its fictionalist acceptilation counterpart. On this way of thinking, Christ’s work does have an intrinsic, objective moral value. It is just that the value



  Does theological voluntarism obtain in the case of Fictionalist Acceptilation too? Not in the same way precisely because, according to the fictionalist, God is imputing to Christ’s work a quality it does not have, rather than stipulating that it has this quality through an act of divine will.    Muller, Dictionary, entry ‘acceptatio’, p. 18. 10  For this reason, we might think of acceptilation as a rather extreme version of acceptation: the value of the work of Christ is less than it needs to be in order to be of strictly inverse proportionality to the demerit of sin. The difference between the two devolves on whether the work of Christ has some value, or no value (unless God ascribes or imputes some value to it).

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it possesses is not sufficient to atone for human sin.11 God has to supply what is lacking in the moral quality of Christ’s work in order to bridge what we might call the ‘moral gap’ between the actual moral value of Christ’s work and the moral value required to atone for human sin. And, according to this fictionalist acceptation, this occurs via God imputing a certain moral value to Christ’s work over-and-above the actual intrinsic value it possesses. This is rather like the college tutor saying to her undergraduate student, ‘Your essay is worth less than a first-class mark, but I will treat it as if it were a first-class piece of work and grade it accordingly’. The essay is worth something; but it is not of sufficient worth to merit a top mark. The same is true – the relevant changes having been made – of the work of Christ. Its intrinsic worth is not doing the moral work in making Christ’s act of atonement acceptable as an act of atonement; God’s willingness to accept it as such despite its not being of sufficient value is. The second version of acceptation, like the second version of acceptilation, is stipulative: Stipulative Acceptation (STA): Christ’s work has a particular intrinsic objective moral value, but it does not have a moral value sufficient to atone for the sin of some number of fallen humanity, unless God stipulates it has that value in addition to the intrinsic value such an act already possesses.

Here, as with the stipulative construal of acceptilation, theological voluntarism is implied, although a weaker version thereof.12 Like FA, STA means that there is a lacuna between the intrinsic value Christ’s work has, and the value necessary for a particular act of atonement to be a satisfaction for human sin. It is this ‘moral gap’ that God supplies by assigning the work of Christ a moral value greater than its intrinsic moral value. To return to our example of the undergraduate essay, this is rather like the tutor commenting, ‘Your essay is worth less than a first-class mark, but I will correct the text of your essay, providing the missing components that are required in order to make it into a first-class piece of work’. Whatever the morality of such an arrangement, it is certainly not merely a matter of imputing certain academic qualities to a piece of work that does not have those qualities. But this raises an important theological question, to do with how Christ’s work can have an intrinsic moral and/or forensic value that God then may supplement by stipulating that its actual salvific value is greater than its intrinsic moral/forensic value. Why would God bring about some act of atonement that has this moral 11

 This appears to be something like the view Franks imputes to Duns Scotus.  In fact, STA includes only a partial theological voluntarism because it allows that certain sorts of moral actions have an intrinsic, or inherent moral value independent of any divine assignment of moral value, though for Christ’s work to be counted as of sufficient moral worth to atone for sin, God must assign it a moral value greater than its intrinsic, or inherent, moral worth. In which case, we need some explanation of how an act comes to have some (but not enough) objective moral value in the first place. 12

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and/or forensic deficit that he then has to make good? One possible answer to this is that in creating the world, God ordains that certain sorts of creaturely action have a particular intrinsic moral value – for example, acts of human kindness or courage. Christ has a human nature. So certain sorts of acts performed by Christ have an intrinsic moral value corresponding to the fact that these actions are the actions of a divine person that has assumed a created ‘part’, in the sense of being acts performed by the Son of God through his human nature. The acts of Christ qua human have a certain intrinsic moral value as the actions of something created, in addition to the value they have in virtue of being acts performed by God the Son through his human nature. But even the most exalted human moral act does not have a moral value sufficient to atone for the sin of fallen human beings because created beings, being finite, can only perform acts that have a finite moral value, and (by hypothesis) the disvalue of human sin as a whole outweighs the moral value of any single human act. Hence, the work of Christ’s human nature in salvation, taken in abstraction, as it were, from the hypostatic union, cannot have the requisite value to atone for human sin. Accordingly, the only reason Christ’s work does have the value sufficient to atone for human sin is that it is an act of the God-Man, not an act of a mere man: his divine nature makes up the moral deficit left by the value of the act qua human, ensuring salvation. This means that the moral gap between the value of the human act of Christ (in atonement) and the value required for that act to be able to offset the demerit generated by human sin is supplied by God as the advocates of acceptation claim – in the person of the Son. It is the work of God the Son which bridges the moral gap that exists between the intrinsic worth of the moral act of Christ qua human, and the worth necessary for Christ’s work to be salvific. In which case, acceptation has got something right about the morally insufficient value of the human aspect of Christ’s work with respect to salvation. But whereas the defender of acceptation will claim that the atonement as a whole work of the God-Man is of less value than that requisite to atone for human sin, on this alternative view the atonement taken as a whole has the requisite value to atone for human sin, because it is the work of God Incarnate. So this reasoning actually supports the proportional view, not acceptation. To see this we will need to flesh out the proportional view. Before doing so, let us consider some problems with acceptilation and acceptation.13

13  One might object to any abstraction of Christ’s human nature from its ontological grounding in the hypostatic union because there is no way of isolating the moral value of Christ’s human actions from the sole context in which they are presented in the incarnation. In which case, the sort of reasoning I am attributing to advocates of acceptation has no theological purchase. Only reasoning that includes the value of the work of the whole GodMan can hope to make sense of the value of Christ’s work. I thank Ivor Davidson for pointing this out to me.

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Problems with Acceptilation and Acceptation If at least some creaturely acts have a moral value (perhaps an intrinsic moral value), FA cannot get off the ground. I know of no theologian who would seriously entertain the idea that no creaturely acts have any moral value. So I shall discount FA. Superficially similar problems beset SA. Here Christ’s work only has a moral value if God assigns a moral value to it. But if he does assign it a particular moral value, it has that value thereafter. This is superficially similar to FA because SA still requires that the work of Christ possesses no moral value in-and-of-itself, until and unless God stipulates it has a moral value. Notice that this is not the same as saying that Christ’s work has the merit it does purely because, in the mercy of God, Christ has been appointed the Mediator of salvation. This latter position is entirely consistent with the idea that Christ’s work has an intrinsic value requisite for the atonement of human sin, whereas the former is not.14 The real problem with SA is its implied voluntarism. For this means God could simply stipulate that a given work has a particular moral value, which it has thereafter. But then, why should the work of Christ, which is so costly to the divine Trinity, be the work singled out as the atonement for human sin? Without further qualification, Christ’s work seems an arbitrary and unnecessarily costly choice of action upon which to bestow the moral value requisite for atonement. Surely God could have chosen to bestow this moral quality upon any number of other acts with the same result. Take, for instance, the pricking of Abraham’s finger with a pin or the breaking of Mephibosheth’s legs. Perhaps, even the killing of a scapegoat would be an appropriate subject for SA-acceptilation. For it is not clear why, according to SA, the creaturely act of atonement must be the action of a human being if the core idea here is that God stipulates that a given act may have the worth requisite to atone for human sin. So it seems that these actions and many, many others (perhaps any old action by any given creature), could be made an act of atonement for human sin given the species of theological voluntarism informing SA. But this is to trivialize the atonement of Christ in a manner that is surely unacceptable.15 Although the defender of acceptilation can say some act of atonement is necessary for salvation (provided God cannot merely forgive sin without punishment), it remains true that, according to acceptilation, the choice of one particular creaturely action to

14   John Calvin adopts this latter view when he says, ‘Apart from God’s good pleasure Christ could not merit anything; but he did so because he had been appointed to appease God’s wrath with his sacrifice … . Christ’s merit depends on God’s grace alone, which has ordained this manner of salvation for us’, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.17. I (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), p. 529. 15  A similar point is raised by Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), pp. 487–8.

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constitute the act of atonement for human sin is entirely arbitrary.16 So, in sum, the claim common to the different versions of acceptilation, namely, that the merit of Christ’s work is regarded as depending simply on Divine acceptance, and not on its own intrinsic worth, requires the theologian to make assumptions most will find deeply implausible. What of acceptation – does it fare any better? The simple answer is that it does not. We have seen that both versions of the doctrine share in common the idea that theological acceptation is an act of grace and mercy according to which God freely accepts a partial satisfaction as fully meritorious. But this is morally dubious at best. It is true that there are analogues to this sort of arrangement in human transactions. I may accept an offer of twenty pounds as compensation for the destruction of a book although, strictly speaking, the book was worth more than that. There may be good reason for doing so – for example, you may be a poor student who cannot find any other financial resources to replace the book in question. But this is a sort of informal relaxation of the demands of strict justice that cannot apply in situations where serious felonies have been committed, like murder. The judge cannot let the culprit go free having been convicted of the murder because he is a poor student, or because he is truly sorry for what he has done. Justice must be served. And, in common with many classical theologians, it seems to me that divine justice must be satisfied in this way. God cannot simply waive away our sin, forgiving it without penalty. That would be to act unjustly, according to the strict letter of the moral law. Nor, for the same reason, can God accept some act as atonement for human sin that has less moral value than the deficit it is provided to offset. This applies to both FIA and STA, respectively. God cannot treat Christ’s work as if it has the requisite moral value, although its actual value falls short of what strict justice requires. Neither can he stipulate that Christ’s work has the requisite moral value, making it such that Christ’s work has a value that it does not, in the absence of divine fiat. Each of these acts is inconsistent with strict justice, where this notion of strict justice includes retribution – at least one central strand of which is that there must be a fit between punishment and sin. If human sin requires a certain punishment according to the divine moral law, then God must ensure that the punishment in question is met to the full either in the person of the sinner or perhaps in the person of some suitable substitute. Otherwise, the punishment does not fit the sin and strict justice (in conformity with the divine nature) is abrogated.17

16  Objection: God could require that the action be: (a) the act of a human (to atone for human sin), and (b) a moral action. Response: without some principled means by which to circumscribe the voluntarism at work in SA, it is difficult to see why we should grant the advocate of SA either of these qualifications, which appear to be entirely ad hoc. But even if they are granted it only reduces the size of the problem. It does not eliminate it. 17   Space prevents a fuller treatment of this topic. I have dealt with it elsewhere in ‘Divine Retribution: A Defence’, Sophia, 42 (2003): 35–52.

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The Proportional View This brings us to the proportional view, according to which Christ’s work as a whole must have an intrinsic objective moral value at least sufficient to atone for human sin in order for it to be acceptable to God. That is, an act of atonement must have a moral value at least proportional to the sin it atones for. We might put it like this: 1. (At least) some actions have an objective moral value. 2. Sinful human actions have an objective moral (dis)value which requires atonement. 3. God cannot justly impute or otherwise attribute (by divine fiat, say) a moral value or property to a particular action that the given action lacks. 4. Atonement for the sin of some number of fallen humanity must be an act that, taken as a whole, has a certain objective moral value in order to be acceptable to God. 5. That objective moral value must be at least proportional to the sin for which it atones in order to be acceptable to God as atonement for that sin. 6. Christ’s work is an act that, taken as an act of the whole God-Man (that is, without abstracting the human nature of Christ from the hypostatic union), has the requisite objective moral value at least proportional to human sin in order to atone for human sin. 7. So, Christ’s work is acceptable as an act of atonement. Although this reasoning forms a logically consistent whole, it raises several theologically controversial issues. The first proposition is controversial if, like the advocate of acceptilation, one thinks that no creaturely actions have an objective moral value, and/or that the only moral value any action has is a value assigned it by divine fiat. But not every theologian who is a voluntarist will want to deny that at least some actions have an objective moral value, provided ‘objective moral value’ is equivalent to ‘the moral value assigned this sort of act by divine fiat’.18 But I suppose very few theologians will be tempted by acceptilation because, as was suggested in the previous section, there is little theological support for the idea that no creaturely actions (or even, no human actions) have an intrinsic moral value. For one thing, it is very difficult to make sense of a biblical conception of sin if no human action has an intrinsic moral value. For then no human act can possess or generate a demerit for which salvation would be necessary.19 18  The problem here should be obvious: if the moral value of a particular act is determined by divine fiat alone, then it does not appear that such acts have an objective moral value. The value is, in one theologically relevant sense, entirely subjective, being the value assigned to that act by the will of one (admittedly divine) entity. 19   Even the concept of hamartia or ‘missing the mark’, used in the New Testament to denote human sin (for example, Mt. 1:21), carries a moral payload. Any human act that has the property of hamartia will ipso facto be an immoral act.

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The second proposition makes plain the idea that human sin generates an objective moral disvalue that must be atoned for. Those who maintain God may forgive sin without atonement will object to this. But, as per the foregoing, I think the intuition that God must, not merely may, punish sin, is correct. Otherwise, it looks like God permits some act of atonement when he could simply have forgiven human sin without cavil. And this seems morally inappropriate, to say the least. In the context of this chapter, the third proposition is probably the most contentious, since it effectively blocks acceptilation and acceptation. Those theologians sympathetic to some version of fictionalism with respect to the value of the work of Christ will object that God can impute a moral property to a particular action, and that this is just what God does in the case of the value of the atonement. There are other theological applications of fictionalism, including other ways in which fictionalism is applied to the atonement.20 One need not embrace all these theological applications of fictionalism to find the general principle that God might impute certain qualities or properties to a given thing, or a given act, credible. However, I do not find the application of fictionalism to acceptilation plausible, for reasons I have already rehearsed in the previous section of this chapter: such an application of fictionalism requires that strict retributive justice be set aside, which is, it seems to me, impossible if God is essentially just and if retributive justice is one aspect of divine distributive justice. For an essentially just God must act justly; and a retributively just judge must ensure that punishment fits sin (we shall return to this matter in the last section of the chapter). The fifth proposition contains the phrase, distinctive of the proportional view, that the value of the atonement must be at least morally proportional to the demerit of the sin committed in order to be acceptable to God. This gains some plausibility from its application elsewhere in fairly uncontroversial circumstances. For instance, if someone owes a debt to his bank and his friend agrees to pay that debt, the friend must pay the full amount owing. It would not be sufficient if he were to pay part of the debt. The bank would not be willing to waive the particular amount owed as long as some lesser ‘token’ amount was paid off; the full amount must be remitted. The fact that in other human transactions we might be disposed to waive the entire debt (if the money is owed to another friend, say, rather than a bank) does not necessarily undermine the point being made here. I suggest that in the case of a friend waiving all but a token repayment of a debt, the friend is forgiving the debt by forgoing payment. The debt is not paid; the debt is still owed; but the friend freely foregoes full payment of what is owed. This makes sense in human transactions of this informal variety (like the example of the damaged book, used earlier) because we are sometimes willing to relax the legal requirements of a debt for the sake of friendship. The fact that we would not be willing to do this in a more formal, forensic context only underlines the fact 20  I outline some of these in ‘Original Sin and Atonement’, in Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 430–51.

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that there are circumstances in which such legal relaxation is usually considered inappropriate. We may be in two minds about paying our debts, depending on the circumstances involved. But strictly speaking, where a debt is owed, it ought to be paid – that much is surely a tenet of natural justice that the vast majority of reasonable people would agree upon.21 Lastly on this point, the fourth and sixth propositions make it clear that the moral value requisite to atonement must apply to the work of atonement taken as a whole, not the value of Christ’s work qua human or qua divine, in keeping with what was said about the value of Christ’s whole work at the end of the first section of the chapter. But, even if we grant these controversial propositions, is the proportional view theologically adequate? Is it sufficient for Christ’s work to be merely proportional to the sin for which it is offered as atonement? Thomas Aquinas suggests it is not. In the Summa Theologiae he says: He properly atones for an offence who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offence. But by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offence of the whole human race … . Christ’s passion was not only a sufficient but a superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race.22

Here Thomas, like a number of classical theologians, presumes that the work of Christ was an act of sheer unmerited grace, something he was not obliged to carry out, an act of supererogation the merit of which he could use in a vicarious act of satisfaction, to atone for human sin. Similarly, in Cur Deus Homo Anselm of Canterbury reasons that atonement for human sin, being the work of the God-Man, must have a value greater than the disvalue of sin – indeed, an infinite value: Anselm. Consider also that sins are as hateful as they are bad and that the life which you have in mind [i.e. the life of the God-Man] is as loveable as it is good. Hence it follows that this life is more loveable than sins are hateful. Boso. This is something I cannot fail to appreciate. A. Do you think that something that is so great a good and so loveable can suffice to pay the debt that is owed for the sin of the whole world? B. Indeed, it is capable of paying infinitely more. A. You see, therefore, how, if this life is given for all sins, it outweighs them all.23

21

  Compare the argument of David Lewis, ‘Do We Believe in Penal Substitution?’, Philosophical Papers, 26 (1997): 203–9. 22  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica [hereafter ST] III.48.2 (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1948), p. 2278. 23  Anselm, Cur Deus Homo II.14, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, eds Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 335.

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Anselm’s case requires the following logical steps: 1. An act must outweigh the sin for which it is offered as atonement: ‘You do not therefore give recompense if you do not give something greater than the entity on account of which you ought not to have committed the sin’ (Cur Deus Homo I.21). 2. The gravity of human sin is such that fallen human beings owe God everything they are and are capable of doing: ‘If, in order that I may not sin, I owed him my whole being and all that I am capable of, even when I do not sin, I have nothing to give him in recompense for sin’ (Cur Deus Homo I.20). 3. The work of the God-Man, being the work of a person of infinite value and honour, generates a merit that has infinite worth (Cur Deus Homo II.14, cited above). 4. This merit may be used by the God-Man to satisfy divine justice on behalf of fallen human beings, since he does not require this merit for his own salvation, being perfect: ‘But Christ of his own accord gave to his Father what he was never going to lose as a matter of necessity, and he paid, on behalf of sinners, a debt which he did not owe’ (Cur Deus Homo II.18). What is important to note here is that, on the proportional argument and the reasoning of Thomas and Anselm, the demerit of sin is more than balanced out by the merit of Christ’s work. In none of these arguments is there a moral shortfall in the value of the work of Christ as an atonement that God must make up. Clearly, the proportional view is metaphysically weaker than those of Anselm and Thomas. But importantly, the concept of proportionality acts a kind of theological threshold here. If the atonement must be more than proportional in value to the sin it atones for (infinitely valuable, even) then its value is at least proportional to that sin. To see this consider the following three propositions: 1. Christ’s work is an act that as a whole has the requisite objective moral value at least proportional to human sin in order to atone for human sin. 2. Christ’s work is an act that as a whole has an infinite objective moral value because it is the work of the God-Man. 3. Christ’s work is an act that as a whole necessarily has an infinite objective moral value because it is the work of the God-Man. Proposition (1) is similar to the sixth proposition of the argument for the proportional view. (2) and (3) follow Anselm’s supposition that that the GodMan is a person of infinite value and honour, able to perform a vicarious act that generates a merit of infinite worth sufficient to atone for human sin. But whereas (2) presumes only that Christ’s work has this moral value, (3) affirms that the work of Christ is necessarily a work of infinite objective more value because it is a

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work of God Incarnate.24 There is an ascending order of modal strength here, where each succeeding proposition entails, but is not entailed by, the previous one. Each of (1)–(3) effectively blocks acceptation and acceptilation. But of the three, the last Anselmian proposition is surely the one on target: the atonement of Christ is not just proportional in value to the demerit of human sin. It is necessarily an act of infinite value outweighing the disvalue of all human sin because of the intrinsic dignity, honour and value of the person who performs it. Acceptation, Salvation and Theology Proper But why must Christ’s work have an objective moral value at least proportional to the demerit of human sin? Here, at last, we come to considerations touching the divine nature. Some theologians, including the advocates of acceptation, presume that divine justice may permit forgiveness, although God may have good reason to punish some sinners for their sin.25 In which case, God may forgive sin without punishment, though he may not. Others, like Anselm, claim that divine justice does not permit forgiveness. Sin must be punished either in the person of the sinner, or in the person of some substitute. Although there are eminent theologians on both sides of this debate, I favour a broadly Anselmian position. One could consistently maintain that God might have forgiven sin without punishment although he chose not to, and that the work of Christ necessarily has an infinite value because it is the work of the God-Man. Then, God chooses whether to forgive or punish sin, opts to punish, and sets in place the work of Christ as a means of atonement in the knowledge that this work necessarily has an infinite value. But I think the following is closer to the truth: God could not refrain from punishing sin because it would be unjust for him to forgive sin without punishment, and he is essentially just. Divine retribution is one aspect of divine distributive justice, whereby God distributes deserts for particular creaturely actions. In which case, not only is it true that God must punish sin – he  This is consistent with the idea, mooted earlier, that Christ’s human nature qua human nature has only a finite value. The reason why Christ’s work has an infinite value unlike the work of any other human being is that it is the work of God Incarnate. His work qua human is the work of a divine person. It has a value corresponding to the honour and dignity of the person performing it. 25   See ST 3a.46.2 ad 3. Richard Swinburne claims that ‘there would have been nothing wrong in God forgiving us without demanding reparation’: Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 149. But this is surely to fall foul of the Socinian objection that if God could forgive sin without reparation, he ought to do so. Otherwise, the atonement becomes a wholly unnecessary, morally repugnant act that God could have forgone without impunity. Moreover, Swinburne’s language seems to confuse forgiveness, where a wrong is remitted without payment of any kind, with punishment. The two concepts are, strictly speaking, antithetical. One can punish or forgive, but one cannot forgive by punishing, or by punishing forgive. 24

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is not free not to punish sin because it is in his nature to be just, and a requirement of justice is that sin be punished – but God must ensure there is a fit between punishment and sin. Either human sin is punished in the person of the sinner, or in the person of a substitute. God elects that the God-Man perform an act of atonement on behalf of human sinners, knowing that necessarily, such an act would have an infinite value, and would therefore qualify as a recompense for human sin of at least sufficient value to atone for that sin. And Christ freely takes up this role as Mediator of the means of salvation for human sin. The atonement, on this view, is, in some important sense, necessary for the salvation of fallen humanity. But necessary how? Surely in the sense of a necessitas ex suppositione, or necessity on account of supposition. In this case, the supposition in question is that, though God is free to create or refrain from creating this particular world, if he creates, he must create a world consistent with his divine character. It might be thought that the atonement has a consequential, but not absolute metaphysical necessity, due to the fact that God actually elects to bring about the salvation of some of humanity, though he might have elected to punish the whole mass of fallen humanity instead. Were this true, it would mean that there are possible worlds in which God creates but does not redeem humanity. But such a state of affairs could obtain only if we deny that God must display his mercy in order that his character as a whole is displayed in his work of creation. For then he can bring about a world where he does not display his mercy, contrary to what has been assumed thus far. But I deny this. God cannot act in a way inconsistent with his character. Amongst other things, this means that if he does create a world of creatures that fall, he must ensure that his grace and mercy are displayed in that world in the salvation of some fallen creatures, in order that his name is vindicated. What this means is that some act of atonement consistent with his divine mercy is required in order for God to display his attributes and vindicate his name. God is ‘constrained’ by his own character to create a certain kind of world, one where his grace and mercy are displayed in the salvation of some number of fallen creatures. But this is not to deny the consequential necessity of the atonement. It is only to circumscribe what we mean by such consequential necessity. The atonement is necessarily consequent on God choosing to create the particular world he does. He could not have created a world where he damns all fallen humans, given the sort of character he has. But he could have created other worlds than the one he does actualize. In fact, in good Thomistic style we can affirm that God could have created an infinite number of feasible worlds (that is, worlds consistent with the theological ‘constraint’ imposed by his own character), or (perhaps) with God not creating any world.26

26   I develop this line of argument in: ‘Is Universalism a Problem for Particularists?’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 63 (2010): 1–23.

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Conclusion On the theological account sketched out here, the atonement as a whole has to have a value at least proportional to the sin it atones for, on pain of God acting unjustly. I have offered some reason for thinking that the Anselmian account of divine justice, according to which God must punish sin in a retributive manner, is right. And I have tried to point out some of the most important implications this has for Theology Proper. It means God’s essential justice has a certain character. It also has implications for what we say concerning God’s reason for creating – and here I have opted for the view that God must, not merely may, display his justice and mercy in creation, thereby vindicating his name before his creatures. Finally, these considerations have implications for what we can say about the theologically vexed notion of divine freedom. It turns out that the God of salvation is a God of a certain character, who acts in accordance with that character, and cannot act any other way. This is perfectly consistent with a certain construal of divine freedom. It still means God exists a se, such that none of his actions is externally constrained. But the most theologically interesting upshot of the foregoing is this: if God in creating must create a world where this character is displayed in justice and mercy, then it appears that, although God may withhold his mercy from any given individual (in accordance with Scriptures like Rom. 9:18), he cannot withhold his mercy tout court. And this entails that the God of salvation not only must act justly, but must also act graciously and mercifully.27

27  I am grateful to Gavin D’Costa, Ivor Davidson and Paul Helm for comments on previous drafts of this chapter.

Chapter 8

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

I As its title suggests, this chapter is about salvation, the new life in and through Jesus Christ, promised and announced in the gospel, which it is the church’s singular responsibility to make known in word and deed in all times and places. Strictly speaking, salvation is experienced in the form of anticipation, but as such it is experienced in the reality of worldly existence. The fullness of salvation is an eschatological affair: it occurs when the reign or kingdom of God comes in its fullness at the end of the age. The shape and content of the new life ‘in Christ’ or ‘in the Spirit’ are characterized in the New Testament in many different ways, among these through metaphors of justification, reconciliation and redemption. It is always assumed that this life will be ecclesial, though this in no way suggests that it is not in the space and history of this world. There is a sense, then, in which the church is ‘salvation’s setting’, inasmuch as the concrete practices of this community give expression to the meaning and implications of the gift of salvation, and the church gives praise to God for this gift. But the experience of salvation, fragmentary and incomplete as it is, also has its setting in a theological framework, as distinct from its empirical setting, in the salvific plan (the eternal purpose) and action of God. The New Testament knows this as the ‘economy of the mystery hidden for ages in God’ (Eph. 3:9), which has come to expression in ‘the boundless riches of Christ’ (Eph. 3:8). The theology of the Eastern church has taken up the concept of the divine economy as a shorthand expression for the mystery of salvation and shared it with the church of the West. For the writer to the Colossians, this ‘mystery’ has a name: Jesus Christ (Col. 2:2). He is ‘the mysterion of God as the one who brings salvation to all creation, the inheritance … of the kingdom of God’.  

  See Christiaan Mostert, ‘Justification and Eschatology’ in Michael Weinrich and John P. Burgess (eds), What is Justification About? Reformed Contributions to an Ecumenical Theme (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 185–206.    See also Eph. 1:9 and the whole passage of Eph. 3:3–11; also Col. 1:26.    See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 39–42.

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To speak of the economy of ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God’ is to speak of God’s eternal being. In trinitarian terms, it is to speak of the essential or immanent Trinity, the presupposition of the economic Trinity. It is to think of what kind of God God is from ‘time before time’, as the Orthodox describe eternity. In this context Christian theology has spoken of God’s sovereign freedom to be as God in fact is. The very life of God, far from being determined by some other being, is self-determined. As Karl Barth puts it, ‘God’s being as He who lives and loves is being in freedom’. God is known through the economy, which is to say that God is identified narratively, through the stories of the people of Israel and definitively through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. On this basis God’s being can be described in more abstract statements about the divine attributes, or what is to be predicated of God as God. Colin Gunton refers to these as God’s ‘defining characteristics’. With support from Christoph Schwöbel, he argues that a theology of God’s being and a theology of God’s action are complementary; neither can be dispensed with. What is to be avoided, however, is the ‘pasting’ of Greek conceptions of divine attributes on to biblical conceptions of divine action, especially if this makes it impossible to attribute to God what the narrative of God’s action in the world in Jesus Christ requires us to say about God. God’s being is not reducible to God’s acts, but is expressed in and through them. As Barth writes, ‘[God] is not … who He is only in His works. Yet in Himself He is not another than He is in His works’. Only this gives finite human creatures the confidence to say anything at all about who God is and what God is like. Minimally, the economic Trinity is the lens through which we see the mystery of the immanent Trinity, God in se. However, to distinguish between the immanent (or eternal) and the economic Trinity is to speak of the being of God, not just about the human knowing of God. To speak about justification is to speak, if only implicitly, about the being of the God whose work salvation is, a work most fittingly described as the work of the Father through the Son in the Spirit. To ask about salvation is to ask about the character of the one who saves. Only a particular God is the author, the agent and the perfecter of the salvation which humankind knows through the testimony of Holy Scripture. In articulating the doctrine of God, however, it is axiomatic that the identity of the God who is creator of all things, visible and invisible, is self-determined; God is not caused to be what God is by anything else that exists. In classical terms, God elects to be who he is. Christian theology has used the notion of election first of

   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75) [hereafter CD], II/1, p. 301.    Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), p. 1.    Gunton, Act and Being, pp. 21 ff.    Barth, CD II/1, p. 260.

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all in relation to God’s own being, as ‘three-personed’ or ‘tripersonal’, and then in relation to that which is other than God. In the next section we consider the doctrine of election in both of these aspects. II Few doctrines of the Christian faith are more open to misunderstanding, indeed outright repudiation, than the doctrine of election. This is especially the case when election is equated with predestination, particularly double predestination: the doctrine that by divine decree some people are fore-ordained to everlasting life, others to everlasting death, irrespective of merits or faults of their own. It is a doctrine that has found its most fertile soil in Reformed theology. Calvin himself, though regarding this teaching as difficult, confusing and even dangerous, gives the following summary of the doctrine: As Scripture, then, clearly shows, we say that God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those whom he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. We assert that, with respect to the elect, this plan was founded upon his freely given mercy, without regard to human worth; but by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgment he has barred the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation.10

If this is to be heard as ‘good news’, as it is said to be, it is good news only to those who are predestined to salvation. If this decree is an actualization of God’s mercy, freely given, as it is said to be, it is a very selective mercy. To have ‘the door of life’ barred to one is no small matter. Karl Barth, for whom the doctrine of election is ‘the last or first or central word in the whole doctrine of reconciliation’,11 takes this doctrine in a very different direction from his patristic and Reformation forebears, especially Calvin. On the basis of the apostle Paul’s verdict about God’s calling of Israel, which has not been revoked, Barth declares that election is and must be about grace. ‘The doctrine of election is the sum of the gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in   See William J. Hill, The Three-Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), evoking a phrase by John Donne; also Gerald O’Collins, The Tripersonal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity (New York: Paulist Press, 1999).    John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (London: SCM Press, 1961), III.21.1, p. 922. Calvin also regarded the decree as ‘dreadful’: III.23.7, p. 955. 10   Calvin, Institutes III.21.7, p. 931. 11   Barth, CD II/2, p. 88. 

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freedom.’12 Election is about grace, and this means before anything else that it is about the love of God. It is not about an eternal decree of God abstracted from Jesus Christ; neither is it about God’s omnipotence or providence. For Barth, there is no other way to speak of election than Christologically. In Stacy Johnson’s words, ‘the figure of Jesus is the hinge upon which election turns, both ontically and noetically’.13 For what happened under the name of Jesus Christ is that ‘God Himself realised in time, and therefore as an object of human perception, the self-giving of Himself as the Covenant-partner of the people determined by Him from and to all eternity’.14 Barth then sets out on the most radical Christological reshaping of this doctrine: Christ himself is the divine election of grace. At the beginning of his discussion he announces the theme: ‘the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in his free grace determines himself for sinful man and sinful man for himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory’.15 If we are to speak of an eternal decree, it can only be understood in Christological terms. Election is thus an eternal determination which, at the right time, is given effect in a particular time and place in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is in the first place about God’s self-determination. ‘… in the mystery of what takes place from and to all eternity within Himself, within His triune being, God is none other than the One who in His Son or Word elects himself …’.16 At issue here is God’s disposition; God has determined upon a covenant of grace with the human covenant-partner who is already anticipated, as it were, from eternity. God the Father determines, in the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4), to send the Son into the world for its salvation. In the English-speaking world particular care needs to be taken with the idea of determination, since its typical context is the problem of free will and causal determinism. But that is not the semantic context here; to determine for oneself a particular kind of disposition and action implies no negation of freedom; it presupposes it. God is self-determining. At issue here, as Johnson says, is ‘an eternal determination [of God] at the beginning that reaches a concrete result within human history’.17 Barth’s discussion of election has recently been interpreted in a particularly radical way, as meaning that the covenant of grace is in itself already constitutive of God’s being from eternity. Bruce McCormack argues that for Barth the Logos asarkos is from the beginning the Logos incarnandus (the Word ‘to be incarnate’) though of course he was not the Logos ensarkos (the Word incarnate) till he came   Barth, CD II/2, p. 3.   William Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), p. 61. 14   Barth, CD II/2, p. 53. 15   Barth, CD II/2, p. 94. 16   Barth, CD II/2, p. 76. 17   Johnson, The Mystery of God, p. 59. 12

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and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14). This means that ‘there is no Logos in and for himself in distinction from God’s act of turning toward the world and humanity in predestination’.18 The (anticipated) act of reconciliation is constitutive of God’s being; ‘what God is essentially is itself constituted by an eternal act of Selfdetermination for becoming incarnate in time …’.19 The implication of such a view of the foundational status of election is that it makes the immanent Trinity identical with the economic Trinity. More contentiously, ‘the triunity of God’ is to be seen ‘logically [as] a function of divine election … The decision for the covenant of grace is the ground of God’s triunity, therefore, of the eternal generation of the Son and of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit …’.20 Unsurprisingly, this is strongly disputed by other interpreters of Barth, notably Paul Molnar, who consider that McCormack makes creation, reconciliation and redemption ‘necessary’ for God, and that a denial of God’s freedom is entailed by such a view.21 Molnar’s agenda is to safeguard the distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity. He argues that for Barth ‘the Trinity exists eternally in its own right’22 and that the covenant of grace expresses a logically subsequent will of God to direct ad extra the eternal love that is expressed in the intra-trinitarian relations. It is not possible in the space available to comment in detail on this difference of interpretation. It is difficult to see how McCormack can be accused of making election a necessity: God is still, on the latter’s view, a being who lives and acts in freedom. It is clear from the discussion of Barth above23 that God’s selfdetermination to be for humankind in a covenant of grace is as much from eternity as God’s self-determination as triune. Nor is there any threat of a collapse of the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity: that the Logos asarkos is also the Logos incarnandus – he does not become incarnandus in time – in no way removes the difference between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos, which is the point. However, if it should be important to establish a logical priority of God’s self-constituting triune being over God’s determination to be God for humankind or vice versa, one must incline toward the view of Molnar. The question hinges on the difference between God’s self-constitution and God’s self-determination. As to God’s self-constitution, the first thing that Barth says about God is that God simply is; God is self-moved.24 Unlike every other being, God is ‘absolutely [God’s] own, conscious, willed and executed decision’, executed once for all in eternity, and 18

  Bruce McCormack, ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 92–110, at p. 95. 19   McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, pp. 96–7. 20   McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 103. 21   Paul Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2002), pp. 62–3. 22   Molnar, Divine Freedom, p. 63. 23   Cf. esp. notes 14–15. 24   Barth, CD II/1, pp. 257–72, esp. pp. 269 ff.

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anew in every second of our time’.25 Precisely this God is revealed to be, and therefore is, from eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And precisely this God determines to be, ad extra, God the Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. If there is logically a first and a second – though this takes place in the intra-trinitarian life of God ‘before’ time – there is first God’s self-constitution and self-motivation, and then, second, God’s self-determination for humankind. If election is first a self-determination by God, it is also a self-determination in relation to humankind. God elects not only to be God in a particular way but also to elect humankind as God’s covenant-partner. Election is the self-determination of God for a covenant of grace with humankind. It is about a double determination, of Godself and humankind. Jesus Christ is vere Deus and vere homo, both the electing God and the elected human being. In Christ humankind is elected to covenant-partnership with God, and the scope of this election is unlimited. God is for humankind (Rom. 8:31), embraces people without exception, makes them God’s cause and reconciles them to Godself in Christ. Correspondingly, humankind is elected to ‘glorify God and enjoy God for ever’.26 In short, the doctrine of election has as its essential content the election of Jesus Christ. In him, from the beginning, God elects to be this kind of God and humankind is elected to be the recipient of God’s grace, elected for faith in God. Jesus Christ is elected to suffer and to die; he in whom God expresses his gracious Yes to humankind (2 Cor. 1:20) bears the No of God’s judgment, so that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1). The force of this primordial Yes, the steadfastness of God, is confirmed in the resurrection of Jesus from death and his ascension to the right hand of the Father.27 How much is contained in humankind’s election in Christ, and therefore how foundational the doctrine of election is for Barth, is suggested in the following lines: Being elected ‘in Him’, they are elected only to believe in Him, i.e., to love in Him the Son of God who died and rose again for them, to laud in him the priest and victim of their reconciliation with God, to recognise in Him the justification of God (which is also their own justification), to honour in Him their Leader and representative, their Lord and Head, and the kingdom of God which is a kingdom above all other kingdoms. It is as they love Him and laud Him and recognise Him and honour Him in this way that they can have their own life, their rejection being put behind them and beneath them, rejected with His rejection.28

In the incarnation of the Son, especially on the cross, God has taken the judgment that would fall on humankind’s rejection of the covenant relationship into Godself,   Barth, CD II/1, p. 271.   To quote from the sublime answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648). 27   Barth, CD II/2, p. 125. 28   Barth, CD II/2, pp. 126–7. 25

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to fall on the Son, Jesus Christ. In a cryptic statement Barth says that, in electing fellowship with the human being, God ‘elected our rejection’, God ‘elected our suffering’; but God ‘elected it as His own suffering’.29 Humankind, on the other hand, is elected to bear the image of God, becoming a participant in the image of Christ, who is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). The theological discussion of the human person, elected in Christ for fellowship with God, cannot be free-floating or plotted between various philosophical or sociological coordinates. That would be to miss what Barth calls ‘the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity’,30 the one possibility we have of knowing our true ontological determination. There is no Christian anthropology that does not stand in the closest relation to Christology. What the human person is, is learnt from the man Jesus, in particular in his relation to God and to other human beings. We stand in a history determined by the divine election, tangibly and visibly expressed in the life of Jesus Christ. We participate in his election and in his response, as vere homo, to the divine determination to be God for us. The human response to God’s gracious election of us to be God’s covenant-partner is actualized in the one person, Jesus Christ; it is at once a representative response on behalf of, and an exemplary response for, humankind as a whole. As such it enables and empowers those who abide in him to make their own response of gratitude and service, imperfect though that is bound to be. To be ‘determined’ for covenant-partnership with God is to be determined for life and freedom, for faith and fellowship with Christ. In the history that follows the eternal election of God and humankind in Christ, humankind is free to enter into the actuality of its election or not. This freedom hinges on hearing of this election (Rom. 10:14), a hearing which requires a thick description, for the capacity to hear can be dulled or distorted by all kinds of things, not least features in ecclesial life and practice that obscure the gospel. Nevertheless, Barth is right to say that ‘the purpose and meaning of the eternal divine election of grace consists in the fact that the one who is elected from all eternity can and does elect God in return’.31 The election that is actual from eternity becomes actual on our side when we ‘elect’ God in return and are made free for friendship with Jesus Christ (Jn. 15:15). Even where this does not happen, where the divine Yes meets with a human No, where the identity given by the divine election is declined, the riches of the divine Yes are not exhausted. Barth considers at some length the situation of those who ‘go on living as Satan’s prisoner’,32 culminating in the confrontation of the for of Jesus and the against of Judas, one of the most subtle and moving sections of Church Dogmatics. Those who stand with Judas live in their rejection, and the seriousness of this is not to be underestimated. But the last word is that Jesus died for Judas as 29

    31   32   30

Barth, CD II/2, p. 164. Barth, CD III/2, p. 132. Barth, CD II/2, p. 178. Barth, CD II/2, p. 450.

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much as for anyone else. The promise of election ‘always outlasts and excels and surpasses its rejection’.33 As for those who have never, even in the most minimal sense, ‘heard’ what the church proclaims, their election in Christ cannot be in doubt. For those with an unreconstructed view of election, the question whether people of other faiths or none might possibly be among the elect is likely to receive a negative answer. Those whose view inclines toward a universal salvation – not necessarily as a principle that conditions God’s freedom – will find as strong an impetus in this corollary of election as anywhere. The question is whether the doctrine of election, particularly Barth’s form of it, grounded in the election of Christ and the consequent election of humankind, can bear the weight of the biblical assumption that grace is received in faith and met with faithfulness. Katherine Sonderegger offers a picture of Jesus and his mission which reflects the fact that in our time the Christian faith is one among many faiths in the world and which is consistent with a strong emphasis on a Christologically grounded doctrine of election. ‘In our day, Jesus Christ goes his way into the world … as the stranger, an instrument of the Father’s working who carries out his Father’s business in season and out, but whose name and countenance are known by but a few.’34 III To move from election to justification – though we have implicitly touched on justification already and must return to election in connection with the church – is to move from God’s intentionality or determination to God’s action: the Father’s revelatory and salvific action in and through the Son. Here one may indeed speak of a becoming in God, a becoming in which God does not become other than what God is,35 but in which the church must speak of the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection. Here, in the economy of salvation God enacts the election of the creaturely covenantpartner which characterizes God’s self-determination from eternity. The term justification has a long history in Christian theology, beginning with the apostle Paul and including intense conflict at the time of the Reformation. We are led to the doctrine of justification by questions like these: how do we stand before God? How does God deal with us? What may we expect from God?36 To   Barth, CD II/2, p. 506.   Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Election’, in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner and Iain Torrance (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 105–20, at p. 116. 35   Alan Torrance, ‘The Trinity’, in John Webster (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 72–91, at p. 86. Torrance makes clear that such a view is to be distinguished from a range of other, superficially similar, views. 36  These are the three questions with which Gerhard Sauter begins his study of justification, which he regards as a foundational concept for evangelical (Protestant) 33

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speak of justification is to speak of grace, ‘grace alone’ as the Reformers insisted. It is to speak about the sufficiency of God’s ‘right-making’ or rectifying act in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Luther this was the article of faith by which the church stands or falls, and for Calvin it was, with sanctification, one of the two great gifts which Christians owe to Christ. In the history of this doctrine, justification became the currency in which various problems were fought over. In the theological arena it was discussed against the backdrop of different technical understandings of grace and different theological articulations of how people are set on the way of salvation. The vocabulary of justification has played no major part in the theology of the Eastern Orthodox churches, it has been central in Western, notably Protestant, theology. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church in 199937 has raised the profile of this doctrine in Catholic theology. That justification is prominent in the New Testament, especially in the Pauline corpus, is beyond dispute. It is associated with the forgiveness of sins, freedom from the power of sin, restoration to communion with God through union with the crucified and risen Christ, and incorporation into the one community, the body of Christ.38 As to the core truth of the doctrine of justification, the Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church declare: In faith we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the triune God. The Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners. The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Justification thus means that Christ himself is our righteousness, in which we share through the Holy Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.39

Although the term justification has a legal context – it speaks of being put in the right or being acquitted – the heart of the matter is relational.40 It is about being restored to a right relationship with God, simply because of the gratuitous goodness of God, not because we have earned it by building up moral or spiritual credit. It is about being given a new status before God, as children of God, heirs of all that theology: Gerhard Sauter, Rechtfertigung als Grundbegriff Evangelischer Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1989), p. 9. 37   Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). 38   Joint Declaration, § 8. 39   Joint Declaration, § 15. 40   Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: DLT, 1989), p. 87.

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God has to give us (Rom. 8:16–17). The metaphor of justification, in conjunction with others, expresses the reality of liberation from the crippling power and effects of our estrangement from God and the freedom for new life, a new relationship with God and membership in a community in which the customary polarity of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female (Gal. 3:28) ceases to be divisive. In the writings of the apostle Paul, particularly the letters to the Romans and the Galatians, ‘justification’ and ‘justify’ are associated negatively with works required by the law (Rom. 3:20, 28; Gal. 2:16, 21; 3:11; 5:4) and positively with the grace of God (Rom. 3:24; 5:21; Gal. 2:21; 5:4) and faith (Rom. 3:26, 28, 30; 5:1; Gal. 2:16; 3:11, 24). The most polemical passages occur in Galatians, in which Paul opposed the ‘Teachers’, the Christian-Jewish evangelists who had come into the churches of Galatia after Paul had gone elsewhere in his missionary work.41 He accuses them of ‘perverting the gospel of Christ’ (Gal. 1:7). The issue was God’s way of dealing with evil, God’s way of righting wrong. Paul’s opponents regarded the Law not only as a good thing – Paul agreed with them on that – but as the core of their good news, even for Gentiles. For Paul the good news was what God had done in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The great antithesis in Paul is between justification by ‘the works of the Law’ and justification through Christ crucified and risen, even ‘the faith of Jesus Christ’ (pistis Christou Iêsou, Gal. 2:16), and therefore in fulfilling his divine mission from the Father.42 It is not because of one’s faith but through faith that salvation is received. Paul is emphatic that God has provided a way out of sin through the death of Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 3:25; 4:25). Indeed, in baptism, as the name of Jesus is pronounced over new converts and the Spirit of Christ descends on them (1 Cor. 6:11), this action of God is made real for them. As an apocalyptic thinker, Paul always believed that God would put everything to rights at the end of the age, when every power would be destroyed and when the Son would hand the kingdom back to the Father (1 Cor. 15:24–8). What is radically new for Paul is that the death of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection from the dead have made a decisive beginning to this rectifying, salvific act of God. The cross marks the turning point from the old age (the age of Adam) to the new (the age of Christ). Paul understands himself and his contemporaries to live in a curious situation of overlap, their existence already determined by the power of the new age, with its new structure of belonging and obedience, yet empirically not having left the old age completely behind. Already they have been justified by God through Christ (Rom. 3:24; 5:9). The fellowship with God for which God

  J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1997), esp. pp. 117–26. 42  This may be the better translation on theological grounds. The matter is controversial and certainly has theological implications. See Martyn, Galatians, Comment #28, pp. 263– 75; also ibid., Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997), pp. 141–56. 41

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elected them from eternity has been actualized. God’s covenant of grace has been enacted and their hope for the future is secure. The doctrine of justification, though having its basis in the Pauline metaphor of justification, is more comprehensive and more fully (trinitarianly) articulated. Its centre is the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son who, though without sin, was made to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). Its framework, however, is the divine economy, the work of the three persons of the Holy Trinity for the reconciliation of the world with God. Robert Jenson sees it as ‘a triune event, a mode of the divine persons’ mutual life. Every work of God is begun by the Father, accomplished in the Son, and perfected in the Spirit, having its unity in their perichoresis.’43 The economy of salvation that is the content of the doctrine of justification is the work of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Its beginning is in the Father, who, in the fullness of time, sent the Son into the world (Gal. 4:4; 1 Jn. 4:9–14). It is also an act of the Son, who lived a human life in our space and time and experienced the brokenness of the world and its alienation from the Father. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him (Jn. 1:11). Without sin, he was made sin for our sake, that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). He suffered death on the cross, a nonsense to many but to believers the power of salvation (1 Cor. 1:18). In his obedience to the will of the Father, he gives effect to the Son’s commitment to the Father within the immanent Trinity. The Spirit empowers the Son’s faithfulness to the reconciling will of the Father, on the one hand, and, on the other, makes our justification a reality for us in our concrete experience, setting us free from slavery and guilt and bringing the new life of the future into the present. It is through the Spirit that we are able to cry, ‘Abba, Father’, and are given the assurance that we are children of God and heirs of all that the Father has in store for us (Rom. 8:15 ff.). In his person, Jesus Christ is God’s turning to humankind ‘in goodness, mercy and grace’,44 in which our election from eternity to be God’s covenant-partner is actualized. This covenant of grace is made effective and real in our concrete existence, in the ‘far country’ of our alienation and wretchedness. Without this it could not be said that God is the reconciling God. The negative aspect of our justification is that, without exception, we come under the judgment of God. The positive aspect, superbly stated by Barth, is that, God looks back to the fact that as His creature and elect covenant-partner man is from all eternity and therefore unchangeably His own possession: looking back to His own will and plan and purpose, and looking forward to the goal which, in spite of man’s being and activity and attitude as the man of sin, is still unchangeably set for him, since God Himself has set it.45 43  Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 300. 44   Barth, CD IV/1, p. 514. 45   Barth, CD IV/1, p. 515.

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This goal is the forgiveness of sin and the new life lived before God and with God, in which, though deserving rejection and condemnation, humankind receives acceptance and is set free from condemnation. God in Christ has set us free for freedom (Gal. 5:1), free to live in faith, hope and love. Though its riches can be articulated in ever-new ways, this is the substance of the doctrine of justification. IV Having argued that justification has its doctrinal setting in the self-determining election of God for the covenant of grace, we turn now to the subject of the church, the final part of this chapter’s title. Expressing it very modestly, Migliore says that the church is ‘not incidental to God’s purposes’.46 It would be better to say that the church is integral to the purposes of God. The basis upon which to establish the church’s place in the purposes of God is (again) the doctrine of election, God’s determination to enter into a covenant of grace. Migliore speaks of the goal of this election as ‘the creation of a people of God and not simply the salvation of solitary individuals or the privileging of particular nations or ethnic groups’.47 The discussion of election throughout its long history has mostly focussed on the individual person. Significantly, Barth takes up the election of the community before his discussion of the election of the individual. At the beginning of his discussion of election Barth states: ‘The election of grace, as the election of Jesus Christ, is simultaneously the eternal election of the one community of God by the existence of which Jesus Christ is to be attested to the whole world and the whole world summoned to faith in Jesus Christ’.48 Barth speaks of this community in its two forms, Israel and the church, but it is one community, one people of God. Jesus Christ has a relation to both: as the promised Son of Abraham and David, the Messiah of Israel, and as the Lord of the church, comprising both Jew and Gentile. The question of the relation between the election of Israel and the election of the church has been contentious from both sides. Sonderegger remarks, without exaggeration, ‘Scarcely any topic has awakened theologians more to the centrality of the doctrine of election than this theme, the election of Israel, which has proved a deeper and more troubling call to Christian conscience than that of religious pluralism itself’.49 The church may not see its own election except in continuity with that of Israel; its own roots are firmly in the story of Abraham and the people whose ‘father’ he became. Yet for most of its history the church has stressed a greater discontinuity. Only recently have Christians seriously thought that the church’s election does not ipso facto imply 46  Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 2nd edn. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 248. 47   Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, p. 89. 48   Barth, CD II/2, p. 195. 49   Sonderegger, ‘Election’, p. 117.

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the end of Israel’s election. The apostle Paul wrestled with this question, without complete resolution, in Romans 9–11, but he is adamant that God has not rejected Israel (11:1–2).50 The Jewish people may be ‘enemies of God’ for the sake of the Gentiles, but ‘as regards election they are beloved’ (11:28). Barth’s view is that the church ‘waits for the conversion of Israel. But it cannot wait for the conversion of Israel to confess the unity of the mercy that embraces Israel as well as itself, the unity of the community of God’.51 The Second Vatican Council’s ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’ affirms, following the apostle Paul, that ‘the Jews remain very dear to God, for the sake of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made’.52 As Israel was called to be ‘a light to the nations’ (Isa. 42:6; 49:6), so the church is called to announce to all the world that one has come who is ‘life’ and whose life is ‘the light of all people’ (Jn. 1:3–5). The whole community of God is called to serve God’s self-witness, making known what God has given and done in Jesus Christ and calling people to faith in him. With Israel, the church has heard God’s promise of salvation. In particular, it must become ‘for the world and Israel the living testimony for which it is determined’.53 God intends that humankind should have the fullness of life in ‘the new community of God’s own making’,54 delighting in the praise of God, enjoying all the gifts of grace and sharing in the responsibility of meeting the needs of the neighbour, both near and far. Thus the church does not begin with the commissioning of the disciples after the resurrection: it has a place in the divine intention from eternity. This requires an explicitly theological mode of thinking, which goes beyond the pragmatic drift of much ecclesiology and missiology. Sociologically, the church may appear to be an entirely contingent, optional organization, but this contingency is to be seen within a theological frame of reference. The passage about election from Ephesians 3:7–12 includes the church. The plan of the mystery of God must be made known to everyone through the church, ‘in accordance with the eternal purpose that God has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord’. To make a robust theological (and ontological) claim for the church, it is a chosen instrument in the economy of God.55 50

  Jenson suggests that Paul’s engagement with this question ‘perhaps lacks conceptual coherence, but remains the canonical challenge and example’: Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 335. 51   Barth, CD II/2, p. 213. 52  Austin Flannery (ed.), Vatican Council 2: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1975), p. 741. 53   Barth, CD II/2, p. 240. 54   Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, p. 89. 55   Colin Gunton argued that the doctrine of the church was deficient on account of its having ‘never seriously and consistently been rooted in a conception of the being of God as triune’: Colin Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (eds), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 48–80, at p. 48.

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Its existence is not merely the outcome of human decisions but a matter of divine election. Its kerygmatic work, doxological life and diaconal mission belong to the eternal purpose of God. The church is the setting in which faith is awakened and nurtured; it is the sphere in which salvation is received and ‘worked out’ (Phil. 2:12). The church is activated by the Spirit to be an anticipatory sign and an instrument of the reign of God. Particularly in its liturgical life, it manifests – though only in brokenness – the mystery of salvation,56 in which the image of God in humankind is renewed after the image of Christ. In this way among others, the Spirit works in the world. The church is a community on the way; it has not yet arrived at its destination.57 It is not yet the full visible realization of the reign of God, though that is its orientation. Wolfhart Pannenberg has made this central in his ecclesiology: The human society at which God’s eternal election aims will find its definitive form only in the eschatological fellowship of the kingdom of God. God’s work of election in history is oriented to those that are still on the way to this goal. It is oriented to a human fellowship that in the relations of its members with God and with one another is constituted by God’s righteous will and that thus forms an anticipation of the fellowship in God’s kingdom that is the final destiny of humanity.58

In Pannenberg’s discussion of election the focus changes from an eternal decision for humankind and for an elect community to election in history, in particular Israel’s sense of election as a chosen people and the church’s sense as elect in Christ. The first Christians believed that ‘the end-time community of the elect’ had been formed in their own fellowship.59 By sheer grace God had chosen them for this community, though there was nothing remarkable about them in terms of wisdom or power (1 Cor. 1:26–7). The basis of their election was belonging to Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:30; Eph. 1:4), in whom their election was manifest as their calling, made known to Gentiles through the message of Paul and others. In both Israel and the church election is not understood as a possession to be jealously guarded. Already in the story of Abraham the nations of the world are to be blessed in him (Gen. 12:3; 18:18). Later, as a light to the nations, Israel comes to know its wider mission or service (Isa. 42:6; 49:6). In the New Testament this same sense is both sharper, though no longer ethnically defined, and more urgent. To quote Pannenberg again:

  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, pp. 42–3.   The Nature and Mission of the Church, Faith and Order Paper 198 (Geneva: WCC, 2005), pp. 29 ff. 58   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 463. 59   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 456. 56

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As the eschatological community the Christian church bears witness to the saving will of God in Christ that reaches beyond it and is oriented to humanity as a whole. It bears this witness precisely by the gathering of believers into the fellowship that is grounded in Christ, a model thus being given of what is destined for all humanity and for creation as a whole … Thus particular election … stands in the service of God’s comprehensive will to save. We may describe the particular election of both individuals and the community as an anticipation of the fellowship in the kingdom of God that is destined for humanity in Jesus Christ. This anticipation constitutes the concept of election. The eschatological destiny of humanity that is manifest in Jesus Christ is present already in the event of calling to participation in God’s eternal election in Christ.60

This passage makes clear that the frame of reference is at once Christological, soteriological and eschatological. In addition, it is not primarily an individual matter, as in the traditional doctrine of predestination. In the election of Christ is implied the election of a community, and this community must see itself as elected for a universal mission. The church has no more justification than Israel for turning its sense of election into an arrogant separation of itself from the rest of humankind.61 A community that has a sense of its election will be conscious of its responsibility to live and work in the service of humankind, both in its own society and in the larger context of the needs of the world. As it does so, conscious of the brokenness of the world and its own life, it will point beyond its own provisional form to a final form, when it is fully taken up into the Son’s relation to the Father and the triune God is glorified in a reconciled and redeemed world.62 To speak of the election of a people of God for a universal mission is to raise the question of the number of the elect, in particular whether it is set or open. Frequently, this number has been thought to be fixed, the decree of election being understood as immutable. Barth subjected this idea to radical critique with his proposal that the divine No, the passing-over of those who are not elected, was borne by Jesus Christ on the cross. The logic of this solution moves in the direction of a universal salvation; Barth denied that conclusion on the grounds that God is not subject to any principle, even of salvation, but he never successfully rid his theology of the suspicion of universalism. Another approach, which avoids universalism, begins from the point of the ultimate aim of God’s election. Pannenberg describes this as ‘the fellowship of a renewed humanity in [God’s] kingdom’.63 On the basis of Rom. 8:29, those who are elect are to be conformed to   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 457.  This prohibition includes any nation or ethnic group that thinks it has a basis for a sense of superiority or a special role vis-à-vis other peoples in a doctrine of election. 62  In summary, Pannenberg says: ‘The election of Jesus Christ stands in the service of the election of the people of God, which for its part again represents our human ordination for fellowship with God’: Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 460. 63   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 523. 60

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the image of God’s Son; they are to participate in his filial relation to the Father. No limit can be set to the number of those who may so participate; it is potentially open to all. Such inclusiveness is the presupposition of the mission of the church to the whole world: to invite all people into participation in the Son’s relation to the Father. There is no guarantee of a universal participation in an inclusive salvation, but the logic of the gospel also precludes a fixed closure. V Those theologians who since the early centuries of Christianity have articulated a doctrine of divine election did not lack biblical warrant. Both Testaments of the Christian Scriptures bear witness to a divine choosing. The great problem in understanding such language has been that a choice for some seemed unavoidably to imply a choice against others. In its traditional form, the doctrine of election encouraged such an interpretation. The result is that in large parts of the church the theme became marginal or entirely avoided. This would not matter if there were no positive content in the doctrine, the neglect of which would obscure an important element in the theology of salvation, particularly as an elaboration of the doctrine of God. The claim of this chapter has been that, to the contrary, the subject of election is of profound theological importance, in spite of its widespread neglect and misunderstanding. Election provides the proper setting – the doctrine of God – for the theology of salvation, and for the justification of sinners of which this theology speaks. It connects the immanent and the economic Trinity. It grounds the divine economy in the eternal determination of God to be the kind of God who, in the economy, becomes human in the person of the Son. It offers a theological basis for God’s being for us rather than against us, notwithstanding our hostility to God. In the language of Barth’s bold claim, the doctrine of election is good news, nothing but good news! It has also been argued that the doctrine of election shapes the doctrine of the church in important ways. First, it raises sharply the question of the relation between Israel and the church as elect communities of faith, in particular the tension that marks the continuity and discontinuity between them. Second, when oriented to the reconciliation of all people with God, a robust doctrine of election saves the church from making its own existence an end in itself. Finally, it reminds the church of its ontological grounding in God’s eternal self-determination, which sets it free from anxiety over the vicissitudes of its institutional existence in the world. The church lives for the praise of the triune God and for the service of humankind, which longs for a new polity and a new sociality, even when it no longer knows that these have their possibility only in the reign of God. The church’s service of the world takes many forms, but is incomplete if it does not include the invitation to all people to participate in the relation of Jesus Christ to the Father, in which is found their greatest freedom and deepest joy.

Chapter 9

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

It is axiomatic to the Christian faith that salvation is of God. It follows, therefore, that when the different dimensions of salvation – its content, character and scope – are articulated doctrinally, they can never be separated from the doctrine of God. The aspect of soteriology to be explored in this chapter is that of God’s saving action beyond the ministry of the Church. At issue is how the possibility, scope and significance of such salvation are shaped by the identity and character of God. The question will be explored by studying the treatment of this theme by two of the major theologians of the modern period, Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. In their respective treatments, these figures can be shown to treat the nexus of God, church, world and salvation in similar yet ultimately different ways. For that very reason the comparison will help to shed light, albeit from one particular perspective, on the connection between the doctrine of God and soteriology. Both Barth and Rahner affirm the reality of God’s saving action independently of the ministry of the church: Supposing the knowledge of Jesus Christ which divides Christians from nonChristians, when imparted to the latter in fulfilment of the promise seriously given to the heathen too, brings forth from among them more rich and varied and useful fruits than among those who already know Him, so that the last are first and the first last? Supposing the Christian is deceived when he adjudges his fellow a non-Christian, because the knowledge of Jesus Christ has already found a lodging in him in a form which the Christian and perhaps the man himself does not recognise? [I]f it is true that a person who becomes the object of the Church’s missionary efforts is or may be already someone on the way towards his salvation, and someone who in certain circumstances finds it, without being reached by the proclamation of the Church’s message – and if it is at the same time true that this

   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75 [hereafter CD]) IV/3, p. 365.

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salvation which reaches him in this way is Christ’s salvation, since there is no other salvation – then it must be possible to be … an anonymous Christian.

Behind each theologian’s respective claims lies a cluster of common convictions about God’s saving orientation towards his human creatures. Yet, despite the common convictions and the prima facie close parallels observed in the above quotations, the doctrinal moves by which these convictions are unfolded differ significantly, and yield two quite different positions. Indeed, it needs to be acknowledged that notwithstanding the common concern with salvation beyond the ministry of the church, each theologian is focused on a slightly different aspect of such salvation. As will be shown in more detail in due course, the primary issue for Rahner is clearly the eternal salvation of non-Christians, whereas for Barth the main preoccupation is the question of how the church itself may hear the Word of reconciliation mediated through non-Christians, whose own eternal salvation is addressed more obliquely. Nevertheless, the overlaps in Barth’s and Rahner’s interests are more than sufficient to warrant a comparison, and it is an intriguing exercise to trace the respective ways in which both theologians make express connections between the theme of salvation beyond the church and the doctrine of God. In what follows I will begin by offering a brief summary of the main contours of each theologian’s proposal. In Barth’s case, although references to this possibility are seen across the Church Dogmatics, the issue is given its most systematic treatment in his account in CD IV/3 of ‘secular parables of the kingdom’ (or ‘true words’) heard extra muros ecclesiae. In Rahner’s, the issue is focused in his far-better-known idea of ‘anonymous Christians’ or ‘anonymous Christianity’. Following these brief summaries, I will then expound the common convictions of Barth and Rahner, convictions which draw heavily upon their basic affirmations about God. This will be followed by a more extensive discussion of the differences between them, on the basis of which I will propose not only that the differences arise from the respective ways in which – within the prior context   Karl Rahner, ‘Christianity and the non-Christian Religions’, Theological Investigations V (London: DLT, 1966), pp. 115–34, at p. 132.   For further discussion on some of the aspects of Rahner’s theology treated in this chapter and the question of eschatological apokatastasis, see Morwenna Ludlow, Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 176–9, 219.   Nevertheless, precisely because Barth’s treatment of salvation outside the church in the present age is so dependent, as will be shown below, on the freedom of God beyond ecclesial mediation, the issue inevitably overlaps with – whilst remaining distinct from – the question of Barth’s attitude towards an eschatological apokatastasis which, should it occur, ‘can only be a matter of the unexpected work of grace’ (CD IV/3, p. 477). For a discussion which links the issue of God’s gracious freedom and Barth’s ‘holy silence’ on the question of universal salvation see George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 242–8. 

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of certain affirmations about God – anthropology, Christology and ecclesiology intersect with each other, but also that precisely these differences allow Barth’s idea of ‘secular parables’ to mean something for the church that Rahner’s idea of ‘anonymous Christians’ cannot. I will conclude the chapter by returning to the question of the identity of the God who saves. The Main Contours of the Two Ideas Barth on ‘Secular Parables’ Set in the context of his account of Jesus Christ’s prophetic office in the Doctrine of Reconciliation, Barth’s basic claim is that as the living Jesus Christ speaks his universal word of reconciliation in the power of the Holy Spirit, he is the one Word of God. This Word is to be heard principally in two other forms of that Word, Scripture and church proclamation. There is also, however, what Barth describes as the ‘more complicated question of true words which are not spoken in the Bible or the church, but which have to be regarded as true in relation to the one Word of God, and therefore heard like this Word, and together with it’. They are, he says, ‘free communications of Jesus Christ in world events’. On this basis, the church must ‘be prepared to encounter “parables of the kingdom” in the full biblical sense’ beyond its own boundaries: ‘In the narrow corner in which we have our place and task we cannot but eavesdrop on the world at large’. The church must be grateful when it hears the Word even ‘in a secular parable’.10 Barth offers few examples and is unapologetic for doing so. His concern is the basis on which such parables are possible, a concern which must be addressed through dogmatic argument.11 Nevertheless, the short list of examples which he does offer indicates that he is referring to events in personal, political and cultural life in which bondage gives way to freedom, despair to hope, division to unity, and

  For more comprehensive expositions of the key text, see Aat Deckker, Homines Bonae Voluntatis: Das Phänomen der profanen Humanität in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik: Ein analytischer Kommentar zu einem Satzteil (Zurich: EVZ, 1969); George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 234–80; Geoff Thompson, ‘Religious Diversity, Christian Doctrine and Karl Barth’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 8 (2006): 1–24, esp. 10–14.    CD IV/3, p. 114.    CD IV/3, p. 131.    CD IV/3, p. 117.    CD IV/3, p. 117. 10   CD IV/3, p. 115. 11   CD IV/3, p. 135.

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falsehood to truth.12 And precisely because they do these things such events can be said to be occasions outside the church when God’s ‘grace and judgement will at least be sketched in outline’.13 An important aspect of Barth’s development of this theme is his insistence that such ‘secular parables’ speak to and are to be listened to by the church. This was already evident in some reflections on this theme much earlier in the Church Dogmatics, specifically in CD I/2, where Barth appeals to the biblical precedent of, firstly, those ‘outside the nation of Israel [who] seem … to have become genuine recipients of God’s revelation’ and who have ‘heard God and obeyed God’,14 and, secondly, ‘the unexpected confessors of the Messiahship of Israel in the New Testament’.15 Barth also speaks of the strangeness of this form of witness: it is borne by strangers who ‘from the most unexpected distances come right into the apparently closed circle of the divine election and calling and carry out a kind of commission, fulfil an office for which there is no name, but the content of which is quite obviously a service which they have to render’.16 Barth avoids designating this ‘service’ a form of general revelation by invoking instead the notion of a ‘second and outer circle’ of Christ’s own revelation, ‘which by its very nature can only be hinted at’.17 Because this is Christ manifesting himself there can be no possibility that this form of witness can be understood to rest on a natural knowledge of God. Rather than prepare for faith, it is recognised for what it is by faith: this form of witness is ‘a confirmatory and not a basic witness’.18 Similarly, in the pivotal text in CD IV/3, no attempt is made to ground the reflection on this possibility in the ‘sorry hypothesis of so-called “natural theology”’.19 ‘We do not’, says Barth, ‘leave the sure ground of Christology’ in dealing with this issue. Nothing could be further from our minds than to attribute to the human creature as such a capacity to know God and the one Word of God, or to produce true words corresponding to this knowledge. Even in the sphere of the Bible and the Church there can be no question of any such capacity. If there are true words of God, it is all miraculous. How much more so, then, in this wider field!20

Indeed, this appeal to the sovereignty of God has a corollary in the claim that secular parables can be raised up even from within the ‘unequivocal secularism or 12

    14   15   16   17   18   19   20   13

CD IV/3, p. 125. CD IV/3, p. 128. CD I/2, p. 210. CD I/2, p. 210. CD I/2, p. 425. CD I/2, p. 426. CD 1/2, p. 426. CD IV/3, p. 117. CD IV/3, p. 118.

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militant godlessness’21 of the modern era. The words spoken on this basis, which ‘sketch God’s grace and judgement at least in outline’, are to be heard by the church as making a ‘contribution to the strengthening, extending and defining of the Christian knowledge … [and] to the lending of new seriousness and cheerfulness to the Christian life and new freedom and concentration to the delivery of the Christian message’.22 Rahner on ‘Anonymous Christians’23 One of Rahner’s clearest statements about this idea is in fact the earliest, found in an essay originally published in 1960: There is such a thing as anonymous Christianity. There are men who think that they are not Christians, but who are in the grace of God. And hence there is an anonymous humanism inspired by grace, which thinks that it is no more than human. We Christians can understand it, better than it does itself. When we affirm a doctrine of faith that human morality even in the natural sphere needs the grace of God to be steadfast in its great task, we recognise as Christians that such humanism, wherever it displays its true visage and wherever it exists, even outside professed Christianity, is a gift of the grace of God and a tribute to the redemption, even though it as yet knows nothing of this.24

The reference to humanism here is important because it is a reminder that the idea of anonymous Christians was not originally generated by the encounter with the non-Christian religions which is where the discussion of it has been especially concentrated. It is humanism and what Rahner describes as ‘world-wide and militant atheism’25 which first raise the questions to which anonymous Christianity is Rahner’s answer. Subsequently, building on Vatican II’s acknowledgement that   CD IV/3, p. 121.   CD IV/3, p. 134. 23  For more extensive expositions of the idea see Anita Roper, The Anonymous Christian (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966); Eamonn Conway, The Anonymous Christian – A Relativised Christianity? An Evaluation of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Criticisms of Karl Rahner’s Theory of the Anonymous Christian (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 1–33. Although the secondary literature is vast, key critical discussions can be followed in Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness (Glen Rock: Newman Press, 1968), pp. 60–76; Gavin D’Costa, ‘Karl Rahner’s Anonymous Christian – A Reappraisal’, Modern Theology, 1 (1985): 131–48; Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 115–28. 24   Karl Rahner, ‘Poetry and the Christian’, in Theological Investigations IV (London: DLT, 1966), pp. 357–67, at p. 366. 25   Karl Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, in Theological Investigations IX (London: DLT, 1972), pp. 145–64, at p. 147. 21 22

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the manifold forces producing modern atheism could not be reduced ‘simply to dullness of the mind or perversity of the heart’,26 Rahner treats the accompanying lack of faith as a situation comparable to others which have caused the church to reflect on the salvation of those who through no fault of their own have not heard the gospel.27 There can be such a thing as ‘inculpable atheism’:28 there are men and women who are objectively atheists, but who subjectively live according to their conscience, and who are thus manifestly ‘acquainted with unconditional faithfulness, absolute honesty, selfless surrender to the good of others and other fundamental human dispositions’.29 They ‘know something of God, even if this knowledge is not present to [their] conscious reflection’.30 As such, they are anonymous Christians. Of course, Rahner does extend this idea to the encounter with other religions. And exactly the same line of argument is in place. It cannot be assumed that in the complexity of the dynamics between religions in a religiously plural world there has necessarily been an encounter between Christianity and the adherents of non-Christian religions. Rahner appeals to and extrapolates from a supersessionist understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Just as ‘Mosaic religion’ is only ‘invalidated’ at the coming of Christ, so too, Rahner argues, a nonChristian religion and the beliefs of its adherents are not ‘invalidated’ until there has been an actual historical and ‘existentially real’ encounter with Christianity.31 Up until such time, men and women cannot be responsible for their refusal of Christianity. So, on this basis he argues with respect to the non-Christian religions: ‘[I]t cannot be doubted that gratuitous influences of properly Christian supernatural grace are conceivable in the life of all men … and that these influences can be presumed to be accepted in spite of the sinful state of men and in spite of their apparent estrangement from God’.32 As with the modern atheist, so too with the followers of non-Christian religions: the absence of an objective acceptance of Christianity may in fact be only apparent and therefore non-culpable. Notably, although prompted in part by the immediate issues of atheism and the non-Christian religions, Rahner maintains that his idea of

26

 Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 149.   See his ‘Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church’, in Theological Investigations XII (London: DLT, 1974), pp. 161–78, esp. pp. 166–7. 28   Karl Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, in Theological Investigations VI (London: DLT, 1969), pp. 390–8, at p. 397. 29  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 159. 30  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 159. 31   See Karl Rahner, ‘Christianity and the non-Christian Religions’, in Theological Investigations V (London: DLT, 1966), pp. 115–34, at p. 119. He later adds, ‘the preChristian exists even to this day’ (p. 130). 32  Rahner, ‘Christianity and the non-Christian Religions’, p. 125. 27

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anonymous Christians is a matter of dogmatics. Whatever the empirical data, the possibility of anonymous Christians must be grounded in dogmatic argument.33 The Common Convictions It is clear that these two ideas share some common features. Each theologian is willing to affirm that such truth and rectitude as are found outside the church may be attributable to the extension of Christ’s saving work beyond the church’s visible boundaries. For Barth, there are ‘traces of God’s grace and judgement at least sketched in outline’ in certain ‘free communications of Jesus Christ in world events’. For Rahner, there are the ‘gratuitous influences of properly Christian supernatural grace’ at least conceivable ‘in the life of all human beings’. As already indicated, both theologians find a precedent in the Old Testament theme of God-fearing pagans. Both are clear that notwithstanding the particular vocation of the church, God is not bound to the ministry of the church. Both approach the issues as a matter of dogmatics. Both proposals are shaped, albeit differently, by the awareness of modern atheism. Indeed, it is in their references to atheism that both are led to make some of their clearest statements about the core conviction of their respective proposals. This merits closer attention. Barth affirms the possibility of secular parables being spoken from within the ‘militant godlessness’ of modern secularism. Yet this possibility is not explained by a simple appeal to an abstract notion of God’s sovereignty. It is a sovereignty whose character and execution is determined by the event of reconciliation between God and the world which has occurred in Jesus Christ: [W]e must not forget that, whilst man may deny God, according to the Word of reconciliation God does not deny man. Man may be hostile to the Gospel of God, but this Gospel is not hostile to him. The fact that he is closed to it does not alter the further fact that it is open for him. … No Prometheanism can be effectively maintained against Jesus Christ. As the One who suffered and conquered on the cross, He has destroyed it once and for all and in all its forms. But this means that in the world reconciled by God in Jesus Christ there is no secular sphere abandoned by Him or withdrawn from His control … .34

What must be noted here is that Barth has included in his explanation of the possibility of secular parables one of his most fundamental convictions about God. The reference to God who ‘does not deny man’, and who is ‘open for him’ is a strikingly condensed reference to Barth’s account of election. The God who can 33   See Karl Rahner, ‘Jesus Christ in the non-Christian religions’, in Theological Investigations VII (London: DLT, 1981), pp. 39–50, esp. pp. 40–1; and Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1978), p. 312. 34   CD IV/3, p. 119.

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raise up parables even from within militant godlessness is the electing God who in Jesus Christ has elected to be ‘for man’; an election according to which, as Barth had previously argued, ‘God wills to be, not without this creature, but with it, as the One who in His free love has bound Himself to it’.35 It is this basic orientation of God towards his human creature which makes secular parables possible even in the midst of the rejection of God. For Rahner, modern atheism can be a cultural barrier to the hearing of the gospel in the way that geography and history have themselves constituted such barriers. Just as the church has previously invoked a ‘salvation optimism’36 to ensure that such barriers were not deemed ultimately decisive for the question of the salvation of those separated by them, so it is appropriate, says Rahner, to do so in the context of modern atheism. In short, atheism is no more a barrier than geography or history to ‘God’s [infralapsarian] will for the salvation of all men in Christ …, and the availability of his grace’.37 The human person (including the atheist) ‘is always in a Christ-determined situation, whether he [or she] has accepted this grace or not’.38 More than that, this universal saving will of God is not just an abstract desire on God’s part. According to Rahner, the saving will of God exists as a universal and constant offer of God’s own self to all people: ‘We have only to assume this offer and the free acceptance of it … is always and everywhere present (on account of God’s desire for universal salvation, not because of the natural goodness of a moral act)’.39 What, however, lies behind this confidence in the universal saving will? Rahner answers with an appeal to what he deems core Christian convictions: [C]an the Christian believe even for a moment that the overwhelming mass of his brothers, not only those before the appearance of Christ right back to the most distant past … but also those of the present and of the future before us, are unquestionably and in principle excluded from the fulfilment of their lives and condemned to eternal meaninglessness? He must reject any such suggestion, and his faith is itself in agreement with his doing so. For the scriptures tell him expressly that God wants everyone to be saved (1 Tm 2:4); the covenant of peace which God made with Noah after the flood has never been abrogated: on the contrary, the Son of God himself has sealed it with the incontestable authority of his self-sacrificing love embracing all men.40

  CD II/1, p. 43.  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 150. 37  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 151. 38  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 146. 39  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 161. 40  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 391. 35 36

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The Differences Beyond these general parallels, the two ideas diverge in some very significant ways. Barth’s discussion is focused on the relationship between these true extra-ecclesial words on the one hand and the words spoken in Scripture and proclamation on the other. For Rahner, the affirmation of the possibility of anonymous Christianity leads to close and sustained attention to the anthropology that renders such affirmations doctrinally coherent. Where Barth places his most systematic account of true words in a wider discussion of Christology and the self-revealing nature of Christ the reconciler, Rahner articulates the idea of anonymous Christianity in the context of anthropology and the possibility of the human act of faith. Where Barth pays close attention to the significance and function of true words in and for the church, Rahner has almost nothing to say. Where Rahner pays close attention to the structure of human existence and the category of faith exercised by anonymous Christians, Barth has almost nothing to say. Nevertheless, the contrast between the two ideas cannot be reduced to a contrast between Christology and anthropology. Also influencing each idea is a particular ecclesiology, and it is in the variously weighted influences of Christology, anthropology and ecclesiology that the full significance of the difference emerges. These various specific points of difference will now be addressed, although the respective ecclesiologies only indirectly, through the two theologians’ respective comments on the ancient formula, extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The Christology underlying ‘Secular Parables’ By referring to the broader Christological framework in which Barth places his discussions of secular parables I am referring to Barth’s quite distinctive Christology in the Doctrine of Reconciliation where, in his treatment of Christ’s prophetic office, the history of reconciliation is also the history of revelation: ‘Revelation takes place in and with reconciliation. Indeed the latter is also revelation. As God acts in it, He also speaks. Reconciliation is not a dark or dumb event. … It is not closed in upon itself, but moves out and communicates itself.’41 This theme is developed by a long exposition of the statement, ‘Jesus Christ lives’. This life is nothing less than the event of Reconciliation between God and humanity. But it is lived in such a way ‘that as He lives, Jesus Christ speaks for Himself’.42 Developing themes which he once associated with the category of ‘the Word’, Barth continues by insisting that Jesus Christ ‘is His own authentic witness, [and] that of Himself He grounds and summons and creates knowledge of Himself and His life, making it actual and therefore possible’.43 As Jesus Christ   CD IV/3, p. 8.   CD IV/3, p. 46. 43   CD IV/3, p. 46; cf. CD I/1, §6, ‘The Knowability of God’, pp. 187–247. 41 42

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speaks for himself, however, he freely uses human witnesses to speak his Word: he ‘can make use of certain men, making them His witnesses and confessing their witness in such a way that to hear them is to hear Him’.44 Such is the basis of the hearing of the Word in Scripture and proclamation. It is exactly the same basis for witness of the Word raised up by God outside that ecclesial sphere. There is no other kind of act of the self-revealing reconciler, Jesus Christ, which gives rise to these secular parables. Barth introduces no new argument; he simply extends the argument he has already used to ground the possibility of hearing through Scripture and proclamation: He [the one Word of God] can make use of certain men, making them His witnesses and confessing their witnesses in such a way that to hear them is to hear Him (Lk. 10:16). He has actually entered into a union of this kind with the biblical prophets and apostles, and it is the prayer and promise in and by which His community exists that He will not refuse but be willing to enter into a similar union with it. Nor can any prevent Him from entering into such a union with men outside the sphere of the Bible and the Church, and with the words of these men.45

In all categories – Scripture, church and world-events – that there are witnesses to Jesus Christ as a Christological and not an anthropological possibility. Barth simply does not engage in discussing what it is about such witnesses that enables them to hear: they must ‘in some way be commissioned’; ‘God must have encountered [them] in some way’; these words of Witness ‘in some sense reflect … and reproduce … the Word of God’. They speak these words ‘quite beyond any capacity of their own’.46 Insofar as the possibility of these words lies – no more or no less than the words of Scripture and proclamation – in the possibility of Jesus Christ’s own self-revealing history, they share in the unity of the one Word which Jesus Christ is. This is a unity which Barth describes conceptually by recourse to the image of a circle and its periphery.47 In the image of the circle and its periphery it is not as simple as the one Word of God constituting the centre and the other words the periphery. Instead, the one Word of God constitutes the centre and the periphery.48 The other words consist of individual segments of the periphery. Yet, these words participate in the Word by virtue of being simultaneously related to the centre and the remainder of the periphery. It is not that Scripture and proclamation are somehow closer to the centre, secular parables more distant. In this conceptuality of circle and periphery there is no such gradation. Given, therefore, that these extra-ecclesial words are just as true as the words of Scripture and proclamation,   CD IV/3, p. 101.   CD IV/3, p. 101. 46   CD IV/3, p. 111, emphasis added. 47   See CD IV/3, p. 123. 48  On this see Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth, pp. 260–1. 44 45

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the question that most engages Barth is not that of their anthropological possibility, but that of their function in relation to the other words. The function of these words within the church is to make a ‘contribution to the strengthening, extending and defining of the Christian knowledge’.49 No less than the words of Scripture and proclamation, Barth understands these words to have the ‘character of affirmation and criticism, of address and claim, of a summons to faith and a call to repentance, and therefore of Gospel and Law’.50 In short, they are not anticipatory expressions of the one Word which are superseded by the church’s own knowledge of God. They themselves contribute to the church’s own hearing of the Word. Moreover, they do so with a certain shock value: the church receives ‘from without a surprising and perhaps not very welcome but salutary impulse’.51 They do not do so, however, independently of the church’s listening to Scripture or proclamation. They will ‘harmonise’ with, ‘illumine’, provide a ‘commentary’ upon and conform to the ‘general line’ of Scripture.52 Similarly, they will ‘lead us more deeply into’ but also ‘extend’ the faith attested in the church’s creeds, and will do so, moreover, not merely from the ‘inner movements’ of the creeds, but by what is ‘given by its Lord to learn afresh from without’.53 The functions given to the secular parables confirm their status as part of the differentiated unity which the Word is. Rather than being granted any independence of the Word, extra-ecclesial true words are granted particular functions within this differentiated unity. Rahner makes only the most tangential and oblique reference to the impact of the phenomenon of anonymous Christianity on the church’s own hearing of the gospel. Basically, he says little more than that this phenomenon calls the church to humility and to a non-judgmental attitude.54 The Anthropology underlying ‘Anonymous Christianity’ Rahner’s account of the possibility of anonymous Christianity is, in fact, doctrinally quite transparent (albeit couched in Rahner’s novel and particular conceptuality of nature, grace and transcendentalism),55 and the pivotal anthropology builds   CD IV/3, p. 134.   CD IV/3, p. 128. 51   CD IV/3, p. 129. 52   CD IV/3, p. 129. 53   CD IV/3, p. 127. 54   See, for instance, Karl Rahner, ‘The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation’, in Theological Investigations XVI (London: DLT, 1979), pp. 199–224, esp. p. 203. 55  At issue here is Rahner’s commitment to the Vorgriff auf esse, transcendental anthropology, grace as divine self-communication and his idea of the supernatural existential. Rahner’s use of these concepts is variously shaped by his engagement with modern philosophy, the neo-Thomist tradition and nouvelle théologie. See his ‘Nature and Grace’, in Theological Investigations IV (London: DLT, 1966), pp. 165–88, for a general statement 49 50

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on the fundamental conviction concerning God’s universal salvific will. To this fundamental conviction, two further principles are added. First, human existence is transcendental existence because, as created by God, it is oriented to the grace of God. As such the universal offer of grace does not confront human beings as something strange or alien. There is a ‘tendency towards God, which is on occasion quite implicit and incoherent and yet always completely permeates man’s being and existence’.56 In fact, over and above this ‘tendency’, there is an expectation of this grace. Yet Rahner is careful to explain that this expectation does not negate the gratuity of grace: ‘Man therefore is not only capable of hearing a possible word from his hidden God, but in the sense we have explained it is also positively expecting it, little as he has the least right to demand it’.57 Secondly, the offer of grace is mediated through categorial objects. The general thrust of the ideas associated with anonymous Christianity would prima facie suggest instead that the offer of this grace is preconscious, prelinguistic and located in some unmediated interior reality. In fact, Rahner is quite clear that this offer of grace – no less than the offer of grace announced in Christian proclamation – is a mediated offer. Whilst excepting the case of ‘genuine mystical experiences’, Rahner insists ‘[t]he transcendent reference of man to God is mediated through categorial objects’.58 This extends – on the basis of the grace-orientated human condition – to the point where the human condition itself can be such a categorial mediation of grace. Consequently, it is possible that without reflection human beings can accept God when they accept themselves in their own unlimited transcendence.59 In other words, this offer of grace is not ‘merely ontic or preconscious’.60 Rather, says Rahner, ‘we must conceive this grace as … entering consciousness and therefore engendering true faith in the theological sense, even though this is not yet reflective’.61 of the issues. Although all of the above concepts are integral to the idea of anonymous Christianity, the present chapter cannot enter into the wide-ranging critical discussion which surrounds them. For some important contributions to that discussion, see Stephen J. Duffy, The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), pp. 85–114; Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy, pp. 13–69; Thomas Sheehan, ‘Rahner’s Transcendental Project’, in Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 29–42. 56  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, pp. 392–3. 57  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 392. 58  Rahner, ‘Anonymous and Explicit Faith’, p. 55. 59   See ‘Anonymous and Explicit Faith’, p. 55. 60  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 398. 61  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 398. The contrast involved, therefore, is not to be understood as a contrast between internal and external, or pre-conscious and conscious, but between reflective and unreflective.

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By adding these two principles to the prior conviction concerning God’s universal salvific will, Rahner is able to argue as follows for the link between the universality of God’s grace and the possibility of responding to it in faith, even anonymously: In every conceivable historical and social situation of life a man can have direct saving access to God without necessarily being required to leave his objective situation … . Naturally the actual discovery of this immediate presence demands ‘metanoia’, faith, hope and love, but the universal possibility of salvation, as it is understood here, means precisely that the necessary turning to God can be achieved, either reflectively or unreflectively, from any conceivable existential standpoint … . This possibility is a categorial one and belongs to the basic structure of human freedom and human self-realisation.62

Although presented here in highly summarized form, it is apparent that Rahner’s developed account of the transcendental nature of human existence and the possibility of an act of saving faith on the part of those beyond the reach of the church’s ministry stands in clear contrast to Barth’s refusal to engage the anthropological question in the discussion of secular parables: their possibility lay in a divine ‘somehow’. Barth and Rahner on extra ecclesiam nulla salus Although early in the Church Dogmatics Barth had endorsed extra ecclesiam nulla salus,63 he later treats the formula with more nuance. The nuance is generated by disquiet regarding the ‘private Christianity’64 of mysticism and pietism. Against those movements Barth insists that ‘to be awakened to faith and to be added to the community are one and the same thing’.65 Yet at the precise moment he makes this point and invokes the ancient formula to do so, he makes it clear that this is not to be read as claiming any necessary mediating role for the church: We must … be careful not to maintain that participation in the salvation of the world grounded in Jesus Christ is bound absolutely to the mediation of the Church and therefore to its proclamation. We have to reckon with the hidden ways of God in which He may put into effect the power of the atonement made in Jesus Christ (Jn. 10:16) even extra ecclesiam, i.e., other than through its ministry in the world.66 62

 Rahner, ‘The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation’, p. 203.   CD II/2, p. 197; see also CD I/2, pp. 209–20. 64   CD IV/1, p. 689. 65   CD IV/1, p. 688. 66   CD IV/1, p. 688. 63

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Consequently, Barth prefers to uphold extra Christum nulla salus, which against the mystics and the pietists he can claim is fully consistent with extra ecclesiam nulla sanctitas as well as extra ecclesiam nulla revelatio, nulla fides, nulla cognitio salutis but not equivalent to extra ecclesiam nulla salus.67 This reference to the church’s mediation is a reminder that Barth’s rejection of extra ecclesiam nulla salus is not just an incidental rejection. It is fully consistent with his wider reticence towards any ecclesiology which fails to honour what he believes is the proper distinction between human and divine agency, a reticence which at least in part is given expression in his understanding of the church as ‘event’.68 It is this particular construal of the church and the associated freedom of Jesus Christ from the church which contributes to the possibility of secular parables and gives them the functions they have.69 Rahner takes a quite different approach. There really is, he writes, ‘no salvation outside the Church, as the old theological formula has it’.70 Whilst Rahner contributed a reforming spirit to the ecclesiological discussions in the Roman Catholic Church and provided a critique of the prevailing juridical and hierarchical understandings of the church, this never translated into any fundamental questioning of the mediating role of the church, a view reinforced by his understanding of the church as the sacrament of salvation.71 Therefore, for Rahner, incorporation in the church is ‘an unavoidable way of access’72 to salvation. If, however, God’s offer of salvation is universal then so   CD IV/1, pp. 688–9.   See, for example, CD IV/1, p. 652. 69   It needs to be noted in this particular context that despite Barth’s refusal to attribute a necessarily mediating role to the church, and notwithstanding his understanding of the church as event, his ecclesiology can resist the charge of occasionalism which has often been directed at it by Catholic interpreters. For a recent study which takes up these very issues, see Kimlyn J. Bender, Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), esp. pp. 277–84. At the same time, however, and notwithstanding the positive significance of Barth’s commitment to Christ’s freedom from the church manifest in his talk of secular parables of the kingdom, his resistance to ecclesial mediation and his associated account of the relationship of divine and human agency remains theologically problematic. As John Yocum has argued in his Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), it is in some tension with the understanding of mediation operative in Barth’s account of revelation through the Bible and proclamation. Yocum briefly draws attention to the account of secular parables of the kingdom, highlighting how Barth’s articulation of their relationship to the Bible and proclamation repeats some of the problems elsewhere identified in Barth’s account of the relationship between human and divine agency (pp. 126–9). 70  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 391. 71   See, for instance, Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1986), p. 18; Foundations of the Christian Faith, pp. 322–401, esp. pp. 342–6. On these themes, see Richard Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 72  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 391. 67 68

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must be the possibility of membership of the church, not just as a ‘purely logical possibility, but as a real and historically concrete one’.73 Rahner resolves this with regard to anonymous Christians by suggesting that: there must be degrees of membership of the Church, not only in ascending order from being baptised through acceptance of the fullness of the Christian faith … but also in descending order from the explicitness of baptism into a non-official and anonymous Christianity which can and should yet be called Christianity in a meaningful sense … .74

Consequently, when Christians meet ‘Christian pagans’ the latter ‘ought to be able to see from us that the official paths on which we are travelling are safer and shorter’.75 Concluding Reflections The comparison between Barth’s secular parables and Rahner’s anonymous Christians has yielded various results. The prima facie parallels do indeed reflect some common convictions, but also obscure some quite clear distinctions. Yet the differences do not simply mirror stereotypical Catholic and Reformed differences. Each idea is what it is, and differs from the other in the way it does, because of quite particular combinations of doctrinal moves. In Barth’s secular parables, framed by the conviction that God is for even those who deny him, Christology, anthropology and ecclesiology combine in such a way that the secular parables become part of the church’s hearing of the Word. Because they are more Christologically than ecclesiologically determined, these parables possess a certain ‘otherness’ vis-à-vis the hearing of the Word in Scripture and proclamation. In Rahner’s idea of anonymous Christians, Christology, anthropology and ecclesiology determine each other in such a way that the church can acknowledge God’s saving grace beyond its ministry. But because the final shape of the idea is fundamentally ecclesiologically determined, the church’s encounter with anonymous Christians is a one-way affair. It is necessarily so in light of the hierarchy of church membership which is built into the idea. On the basis of this comparison it is at very least arguable that Barth offers a resource for a wider range of encounters with the world than does Rahner. Whilst it is undeniable that Rahner – axiomatically – places no limits on where God is to be found, there is no imperative to listen to anonymous Christians in the way that Barth summons the church to listen to the free communications of Jesus Christ in world events. There is not the disruption or the shock associated in the encounter with anonymous Christians that there is in the hearing of secular parables. 73

 Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 391.  Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, p. 391. 75   Karl Rahner, Everyday Faith (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 129. 74

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Interesting though this particular aspect of the comparison might be it should not be pressed too far. After all, notwithstanding some common background, ultimately the two ideas emerge as responses to two different questions. The idea of secular parables is part of Barth’s answer to the question, ‘How does Jesus Christ speak his word of reconciliation?’. The idea of anonymous Christians is part of Rahner’s answer to the question, ‘What is the relationship between God’s universal grace and contemporary unbelief?’. Indeed, in response to those concerned that Rahner’s proposal patronizes the non-Christian, Karen Kilby observes: ‘The point is not to reassure the [anonymous Christian] that they are really all right, but rather to reassure the Christian that God is not unjust’.76 This is a reminder of the issue with which we began: in neither author is the question of God’s saving work beyond the ministry of the church divorced from the question of God’s identity and character. Even though the respective shape of the two ideas at hand is determined by doctrinal moves specific to each theologian, neither idea would be possible at all without their prior convictions about the universal scope of God’s saving will. Importantly, neither theologian says what he says about God’s saving will in abstraction. In fact, both say what they say as a correction. Both recognize that it is possible – a possibility realized at various times in Christian history – to think otherwise about God. Barth’s affirmation that ‘God is for humanity’ reflects a Christological reworking of the doctrine of election against a trend (associated with Calvin), according to which both God and salvation were defined not by God’s self-revelation in Jesus, but by notions of ‘power in abstracto, naked freedom and sovereignty’.77 Within this framework there is an inevitable equivocation about the scope of God’s saving will. According to Barth, however, in a Christologicallyreworked understanding of election there is ‘no obscurity about this good-pleasure of the eternal will of God’.78 And so, the doctrine of election ‘reminds us … that the good news … is good news only because it proclaims to us the salvation which is the will of the real Lord both of our life and of all life’.79 Obviously, of itself, this view of the electing and saving God cannot explain all Barth says about secular parables of the kingdom, but it is at least a necessary foundation for what he does say. Strikingly, Rahner contrasts his ‘salvation optimism’ with a Protestant ‘reticence’.80 Although he does not explicitly develop this particular contrast, it is clear that his own ‘salvation optimism’ is grounded in the centrality of Jesus Christ to God’s dealings with the world and is opposed to other interpretations of Jesus which suppress that optimism. Rahner’s target is, in part, a satisfaction theory of Jesus’ death. Such a view of Jesus’ death would restrict the gratuity of God’s grace: ‘the event of the cross did not originate in an angry God who   Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy, p. 151, n. 19.   CD II/1, p. 44. 78   CD II/1, p. 156. 79   CD II/1, p. 11. 80  Rahner, ‘Atheism and Implicit Christianity’, p. 150. 76 77

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demanded reparation, but from a God of gratuitous and merciful love’;81 the cross of Christ did not bring ‘about the will to save in God which otherwise would not have existed’.82 Christ’s work is not directed at God’s will but at the human rejection of God: ‘Christ and his salvation … are the deed of God which bursts open and redeems the false choice of man by overtaking it’. Obviously, of itself, this ‘salvation optimism’ grounded in the will of God to save cannot explain all Rahner says about anonymous Christians, but it is at least a necessary foundation for what he does say. Both Karl Barth and Karl Rahner allow for the possibility of God’s saving action beyond the ministry of the church. On this topic they differ in a number of significant ways, yet both argue as they do because of their prior convictions about the saving will of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the God revealed here who is gracious. When that God’s presence is encountered outside the visible church there is no licence to ignore it: ‘To pass it by indifferently would be to despise the grace of God’.83

81

 Rahner, ‘The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation’, p. 208.  Rahner, ‘The `One Christ and the Universality of Salvation’, p. 209. 83  Rahner, ‘Poetry and the Christian’, p. 366. 82

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Chapter 10

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

I Responsible Christian talk of salvation is inseparable from responsible Christian talk of God. To speak rightly of God is to speak on the basis of God’s initiative in turning towards us; that turning is God’s restoration of fellowship with us, his overcoming of the distance that has come to exist between estranged creatures and their creator. The genesis of this movement lies exclusively in God’s mercy, in the majestic goodness with which God determines that the alienated should not be for ever lost, that those who have chosen death should not perish, that all things should find their due end in relation to their maker. In the gratuitousness of his outreach, God bestows not mere data about divinity but himself, enabling us to know him as he is, establishing the conditions within which creaturely apprehension of his character can and does occur. His sovereign arrival provokes amazement and perplexity – ‘What does this mean?’ (Acts 2:12) – but theology’s work takes shape in the delight with which faith makes bold to answer that question: the one who presents himself to us, Israel’s God, the Lord of all, is he in whose name salvation is found. Soteriology’s subject-matter is the story of the incomparable lengths to which this God has elected to go for the blessing of the obstinate, the obtuse and the wicked (Acts 2:14–36). The theology of salvation is a conceptual paraphrase of this gospel, possible only in consequence of the divine mission to the world. Generated entirely by the constitutive reality of that outreach, and by the antecedent divine purposes which it effects, soteriology is bound to the particularity of the way in which the God of the gospel enacts, and thus makes known, his being in his reconciling acts in creaturely history. The ground of salvation, these acts declare, lies in the character of the God here disclosed. Eternally self-existent and self-maintaining, this God stands in need of nothing; his knowledge, wisdom and capacity are unfathomable; his being is complete and beyond possibility of jeopardy. The basis of such claims, and of a properly Christian exposition of their content, is not speculative metaphysics, the attribution to divinity of such conceptions of invulnerability, infinity and persistence as might denote maximal contrast with contingent existence. It is the evangel itself. God’s immanent perfections are not left to be guessed at by creaturely ingenuity; they are defined for us in speech-acts in time and space, acts that declare God’s absolute qualifications to be our Saviour. Our knowledge remains the knowledge of creatures: finite, fiduciary, situated, vulnerable. Its boundaries are determined by

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the transcendence of its Subject, who alone has perfect comprehension of himself (whose self-understanding is indeed inseparable from his essence), and vouchsafes to limited, fallen knowers such share as he chooses in his boundless self-knowledge; divine self-disclosure entails no obliteration of mystery for its creaturely recipients. Yet knowledge so granted is indeed knowledge effected by divine agency, by a revelatory work where the cognitive possibilities lie in God’s hands, as God in mercy sweeps away the barriers with which sin blocks our way. And thus it is a matter of faith’s delighted confession: prohibitive of spontaneous conjecture, excoriating of the idolatrous habits of our hearts, all-costly in its insistence that the process is never ours to control, it carries the joyful assurance that the giver is the God who wills to be known, and who moves to make this happen. That saving movement is no process of divine self-constitution – the realization of mere potential, the making good of some deficiency, the fulfilment of some kind of need. It is the reiteration in time of an eternal completeness, a repetition of the dynamic fullness in which the triune relations of God’s Godness essentially subsist. The news is glorious precisely in that it speaks of the free resolve of this God, in the inexhaustible potency of his self-sustaining liveliness, to communicate himself to others, and not to live his life only in his own space. But the address is also subversive. The message of salvation is the staggering announcement that just as God’s perfection is not completed by his outward movement, nor is it compromised by it. God displays his essential glory by demonstrating that, complete in himself, he graciously wills to share his life with creatures; that he is determined to carry through that will in spite of our absurd opposition to it; and that carrying it through means tabernacling among us, in ultimately exquisite lowliness. Taught by the gospel, we learn that divinity does not require to be somehow scaled down in order to have dealings with creatures; the business of reconciling sinners in worldly happenings is a confirmation of God’s splendour, not a job beneath his dignity. Execution of eternal resolve does not (as is sometimes supposed) spell dissolution of temporal drama, for all along its course the economy of redemption unfolds in the density of material circumstance: in the establishment of covenant with fickle heads of ancient families; in the vexations of commitment to wayward Israel; in the forging of a people fit for God out of all the rabble nations of the earth. Its central acts – the definitive exegesis of God’s identity – involve a virgin’s womb, a servant’s loud cries and tears, a violent death, a borrowed tomb. But the telos of all this history – resisted though it be by creaturely wickedness, folly though it remain to natural reason, remote though it sometimes seem even to eyes of faith – is not ultimately in question. It comes as the fulfilment of an invincible purpose: God’s self-chosen way to be God. That self-determination is not (again contrary to some recent readings of the matter) an eternal decision to be triune so as to effect fellowship with creatures; it is the free will of the God to whose character triunity is irreducibly primordial, whose relational life is dynamically replete regardless of any world. The pretemporal choice for relationship with creatures is nonetheless a choice to be the

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God whose eternal triunity, in all its fathomless plenitude, is lived for and with others. The consequences are accordingly secure: if the origins of salvation are anchored in the being of God, so is its final outcome. Its pledge is the resurrection of Israel’s Jesus from the corruption of the grave, his exaltation at God’s right hand, his Spirit’s effusion upon all flesh; its assurance the promise that his future and the future of the cosmos are of a piece. What is that outcome? Salvation’s end, for creatures, is not just deliverance from a dreadful fate – judgement, death, dissolution, the tragedy of separation from God – but a glorious prospect: the limitless fulfilment of due relation with the triune God, the knowledge and enjoyment of this God for ever. On the way to this destiny, its beneficiaries are klêronomoi … theou (Rom. 8:17): what God is and has, and what they shall yet be and have, are, in God’s free mercy, intimately connected. The eschatological lot of the redeemed is not selfish amusement or Elysian ease, but something far more profound: communion with the living God, proximate relation to ‘the perfect and imperishable glory of [God’s] own life’. Into that experience they have already, in measure, entered; though more is yet to be. Born of God, they have present fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ (1 Jn. 1:3); summoned to abide in God (1 Jn. 2:24; 4:15–16), their privilege is the very eternal life (1 Jn. 2:25; 5:11–13, 20) which the Father has in himself and which he has also given to the Son to have in himself (Jn. 5:26; cf. 14:6). The consummation of this relationship is not yet, but of its possibilities these heirs have, in via, by the Spirit’s work, genuine foretaste. Here is what salvation is for: the Lord is their inheritance; he is their final portion. But what might such claims possibly mean? The prospect of our end as a share in God’s own life seems intrinsically beyond exposition, a matter only for apophasis, a mystery that ‘does not yet appear’ (1 Jn. 3:2). Yet theology has crucial positive work to do: the task of pointing to the primacy and sufficiency of God, to the way in which God actually presents himself when, in utter freedom, he resolves that ‘He will not restrict Himself to the wealth of His perfections and His own inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. In declaring his identity, God declares something of what it is for which he destines creatures. The matter is indeed too high for us, its lineaments beyond more than preliminary indication, but God’s word of address affords a little of their measure, rebuking the narcissistic evasions that may lurk in our appeals to incapacity of thought and speech. We may but lisp, yet we lisp after Scripture. In the grand récit of God’s self-communication, everything is of course connected to everything else. As classical debates about the putative sequence of divine decrees or attempts to delineate an ordo salutis have rightly discerned 

 As most commentators are agreed, the genitive is objective.   C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, International Critical Commentary series (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), vol. 1, p. 419.    Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD] (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75) IV/1, p. 66. 

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(though sometimes inappropriately represented), the extension of divine mercy to creatures is a single but vastly ramified affair, the purpose of the God whose being is simple yet infinite in nature, ‘multi-coloured’ (Eph. 3:10) in the wisdom with which he carries out his eternal strategy. The sheer range of Scripture’s imagery for salvation, as is often said, resists straightforward formulaic reduction, and the church’s avoidance of an ecumenical definition of the matter (while its historical contingency ought not to be pressed, nor should its consequences be taken as a sign of riotous plurality or a warrant for open-ended expressivism) may stand as a warning against the risks of thematic précis. We take just one aspect of that manifold testimony, and mostly presuppose rather than spell out its essential links to other ideas. Our guiding question is this: What is it to ‘inherit’ God? II At the centre of God’s saving self-disclosure lie the events collectively designated ‘the gospel of his Son’ (Rom. 1:9). This Son is no mere agent of God, no product of the Father’s creation, brought into existence at his will at some temporal or pre-temporal ‘moment’. He is eternally begotten, true God from true God, of just the same order of being as the Father himself; co-eternal and co-equal, he is an essential reiteration of the infinite fullness that the Father is. Ingredient within the life of God, he uniquely knows the Father and is known by him. There is no conceivable restraint upon his access to the Father’s heart, or upon the Father’s intimacy with him; the beloved Son, he is turned towards, vocative towards, open to the Father eternally, perfect in fellowship with him through the agency of their common Spirit. Their communion is utterly realized and immediate, its ways of being and knowing free of labour, its structures transcendent of temporal succession as creatures experience such a thing; yet its character is not static perdurance or frozen poise, but the underived energy and movement of the divine being-in-act. The Sonship of the eternal Son entails, within the perichoretic dynamics of God’s inner life, his living for the Father in the Spirit. In such spacious relations of absolute love the being of God consists. This Son, the gospel says, is appointed to an office: to live out his Sonship at another level as well. The commission exists in no detachment from his antecedent relation to the Father, nor in any kind of expansion or reconstitution of it; it is a temporal enactment of what that relation essentially is. The sent Son is the one and only Son of the Father’s love, eternally receptive to him, eternally fulfilled in his commitment to him; it is ever his free delight to do what pleases his Father. Innerdivine appointment and compliance bespeak neither ontological subordination nor possible difference of purpose. There is no imaginable tension, no negotiation of deals or conciliation of conflicting instincts: only the absolute harmony effected by the Spirit, in whom the Son is eternally generated by the Father and through whose agency he is eternally bound to the Father in infinite love, joy and peace. The Son who journeys into the world’s far country does not do so in some assertion

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of himself over against the Father, demanding something that is not his or that in any way diminishes the other; he is always with him, and all that the Father has is his (cf. Lk. 15:31; also Jn. 3:35). Nor is any alien necessity placed upon him: ‘ungrudgingly’ he sets himself apart, in the Spirit’s power, for the work to which the Father sends him (cf. Jn. 17:19); his self-emptying is an act of personal choice, its climax a matter not of passivity but of self-giving (Jn. 10:17–18). His own willingness to take this road is an aspect of the distinction as well as unity that characterizes his relation with the Father. ‘Recognising and executing the right of the Father, He exercises His own right, which is specifically that of the Son.’ His temporal obedience derives from his eternally active participation in the Father’s good pleasure, and it is thus that he reveals his divine glory: in his intrinsic concurrence, his instinctive desire to honour the Father, we see his ‘supreme part in the majesty and disposing of the Father’. In the free determination of Father, Son and Spirit for a relationship with that which is not God, the single divine will that what God is in himself he should also be for others, it is settled that the Son should take flesh, should express his perfect commitment to the Father in the Spirit within the sphere of creaturely existence. Expression is not mere display, a demonstration of divine intimacy before essentially baffled and unbenefited spectators: it is the enactment of a common desire to redeem the lost, and just as such it finds them and overturns their condition. The purpose is utterly specific – to bless creatures – and it is as the Son who will become incarnate that the Son freely pledges himself. For this end, he receives exousia over ‘all flesh’ (Jn. 17:2) – not the acquisition of a prerogative he does not naturally have, for all things are his already, but the modal structure of his saving mission, whose purpose is that, enfleshed himself, he might give eternal life to all those given to him. He ‘receives authority, not so much for Himself, as for our salvation’. There is no human being, Jesus the Messiah, upon whom divinity alights or who is taken into special relationship with God. There is the eternally divine Son who wills to live a human existence, sent by his Father, sustained by his Spirit. The Christological ‘Son of God’ thus evokes but transcends that title’s historic associations with Israel and her kings. This royal servant is Son like none before him. He is the one true Israelite, faithful where his people has failed, with them by earthly pedigree yet vitally different in his credentials – and so too in    John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) [hereafter Inst.], 2.12.2.    Barth, CD IV/1, p. 564; on the logic of God’s single yet differential ‘right’ as necessary substrate of his work in dealing with ‘the wrong of man’, see the whole section, pp. 528–68. For an overtly social vision of ‘primary justice’ within the Godhead, cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Is There Justice in the Trinity?’, in Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (eds), God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 177–87.    Barth, CD IV/1, p. 209.    John Calvin, The Gospel According to St John 11–21 and the First Epistle of John (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1961), p. 135.

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his achievement. In his mission the covenant is renewed; the vocation of Israel is fulfilled to be the source of blessing to all the nations of the earth. He is not just a special prophet or a particularly inspiring leader: his origins lie in another realm entirely. He is Son not by designation but by name. For much of the plot, none of that is very visible. The servant in question is despised and rejected; his path of devotion to God involves travail and suffering, and climaxes in death. His kingdom appears to crumble in the finality of the tomb. According to some ways of thinking, the claim that the humanity of Jesus has its sole reality in the person of the divine Son, and bears the identity it does in consequence of a divine determination, somehow lessens its worldly authenticity. On the contrary: there is for the incarnate Son no absence of human development, no cancellation of decision-making by a finite mind, no immunity from temptation and trial, no insulation from the pressures of existence in the likeness of sinful flesh. At the last, there is no exemption-permit from the end to which a humanlyas well as divinely-willed commitment to the Father leads. Son though he is, he learns obedience through suffering (Heb. 5:8). Loved by the Father, uniquely entrusted with his secrets, his life and his judgement (Jn. 5:19–24), he also dwells among us as one to whom the Father is greater (Jn. 14:28), to be addressed not in the serenity of co-equal repose but ‘with loud cries and tears’, a possible Saviour from death (Heb. 5:7). In ‘simultaneous sublimity and lowliness’, he recapitulates Adam’s path in a world that sin has cursed, living his Sonship in a sphere where creaturely relation to God is broken, where Israel’s covenantal status is violated, where the conduct of its boastful heirs betokens diabolical rather than divine paternity (Jn. 8:39–47; cf. 1 Jn. 3:8–10). Natural siblings for this Son are nowhere in sight: his own people reject and kill him (Mk. 12:7–8; Jn. 1:11); their Gentile accomplices are children not of God but of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The cost of it all eludes our measure: the Son’s obedience is grounded in an indissoluble fellowship, in oneness with a Father who is always with him (Jn. 16:32) – but it means saying Abba in Gethsemane (Mk. 14:36), and calls forth a cry without filial language on Golgotha (Mk. 15:34). Faced with the final consequence of loving his Father and doing his will, this Son gives himself up (Gal. 2:20), and is not spared (Rom. 8:32). The heavenly declaration of his beloved status involves the silence of an earthly grave. He is raised from the dead, ‘appointed Son of God in power’ (Rom. 1:3–4). That appointment, once again, is not the elevation of a merely human figure to divine status, but the confirmation of who this figure already is: the Holy One of God (Acts 2:22–32; 13:34–7). The ‘begetting’ that occurs in his resurrection (Ps. 2:7 in Acts 13:33; Heb. 1:5) is no act of ontological generation, but an official exaltation, the confirmation that the achievement of this ‘one and the same’ divine Son in time and space is of determinative reconciling significance – that in his fleshly living and dying a matter is indeed ‘finished’ (Jn. 19:30). Justified in the    Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 515.

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Spirit (1 Tim. 3:16), he is glorified at God’s right hand, ‘leader and Saviour’ (Acts 5:31). Recognition of this fact involves a divine apocalypse, a gift of God’s good pleasure (Gal. 1:16), the work of the Spirit by whose agency the intrinsic splendour of the enthroned Jesus arrests otherwise uncomprehending creatures, ‘taking hold’ of them (Phil. 3:12) in a way that changes everything. But the message of its actuality is for all. In this news, the news climactically given in the Son (Heb. 1:2), salvation’s purpose is laid bare. III At the heart of the beneficia Christi of which the gospel speaks lies a specific blessing: the opening up of the eternal Son’s native sphere to others, the drawing of contingent beings into the realm of his intimate, eternally secure relation to his Father. By a work that is exclusively God’s own, sinners are ‘called into [the] fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 1:9). As the evangelists tell it, Jesus’ filial status and his mission are inseparably intertwined. In the liberty of his fellowship with God, his Sonship is revealed. He teaches his disciples to use his distinctive address to God, and presents himself as sovereign mediator of his unique knowledge of God as Father (Mt. 11:27). It is in working out that revelatory purpose – a cause that far exceeds the agendas of other first-century Jewish holy men – that he makes his way to Jerusalem and its cross. There is a strict and irreversible sequence: he is the Son, the one whose intimacy with Abba is direct and immediate; his followers’ access is derivative, possible only as a result of who he is and what he does. He is not just one son among others, or merely the first in a series, but the Son who alone has capacity to render his Father the Father of others. ‘[I]t belongs to the unique quality of his sonship that it can be shared … . It is the imperative of his filial mission (and therefore essential to his sonship) to mediate to others his own filial relation to God.’10 By and large – such is sin’s madness – the proposal is not welcome. It is because he speaks of God as ‘his own Father’ that his enemies seek to kill him (Jn. 5:18); whatever its possibilities for creatures, the ontological implications of his intimacy elicit not popularity but hatred. To those who receive him, however, Gentiles as well as Jews, the one with exousia over all flesh grants exousia of his own: the right to become children of God (Jn. 1:12). In accordance with the ancient covenant pledge their number, at the last, is not in fact negligible: it is unfathomable (Rev. 7:9). The Son enfranchises an entire world of sinners as children alongside him; through his sufferings they are brought to glory from every nation, tribe, people and tongue. Sharer of their humanity in all its vulnerability, by his fleshly actions he transforms their natural status as slaves and aliens rather than family-members,   For a useful overview of the testimony, see Richard Bauckham, ‘The Sonship of the Historical Jesus in Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 31 (1978): 245–60. 10   Bauckham, ‘Sonship’, p. 259.

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makes them fit for the presence of God, is not ashamed to call them his siblings: he and they have one Father (Heb. 2:10–18). Two sets of images dominate scriptural exposition of this process. One is the Johannine language of regeneration. Through the actions of the unique huios, who comes from God, others become tekna, children born of God. The eternal Son is related to God in an unparalleled way; only he is primordially given to have what ‘the living Father’ (Jn. 6:57) has: life in himself (Jn. 5:26). The many who are made children are never what the Son is:11 he possesses by nature what they receive as gift;12 it ‘belongs properly to him alone and exists by nature within him as a right’.13 Nevertheless, on the basis of the Father’s prevenient love (Jn. 3:16), this Son’s actions, rendered personal by the renewing agency of the Holy Spirit (Jn. 3:5–8), are truly vast in their effects: creatures come to have a share in the household such as only the one ‘who remains there for ever’ can give: the genuine freedom of belonging to God (Jn. 8:35–6).14 The unworthy, the doubting, the fearful are able to approach the risen Son’s Father as their Father too, as brothers and sisters whose access is after – yet alongside – his (Jn. 20:17).15 This is the context of their moral existence (1 Jn. 3:9); this the as-yet-unfathomable end to which they are called (1 Jn. 3:2), as those who have been ‘made free by the free One’.16 To ‘have’ the Son of God is thus to have life indeed (1 Jn. 5:12). And the country from which such love comes (cf. 1 Jn. 3:1) assuredly lies beyond this world. The other biblical register is the language of adoption (huiothesia), unique to Paul but with deep roots in the covenantal logic of Hebrew Scripture.17 As Paul sees it, in the light of Jesus Christ Israel’s sonship (Rom. 9:4) is not a matter of belonging to physical Israel; covenantal fellowship, the status of elect children, is by the Messiah’s achievement effected for Gentiles as well as Jews. This should come as no surprise, Paul assumes, since Israel’s calling always was to be, in the 11   Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, 2001), p. 70. 12   Calvin, Inst. 2.14.6. 13   Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 1.9 (91a). 14  On Jesus as Son in God’s house, cf. also Heb. 3:1–6. 15   On the significance of the sequence – ‘my Father and your Father’, not ‘our Father’ – see, for example, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 7.7–8; 11.19: grace and gift are not the same as nature, albeit the loving kindness of derivative privilege is ineffable. 16  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 41.8. 17   See, for example, Brendan Byrne, ‘Sons of God’ – ‘Seed of Abraham’: A Study of the Idea of the Sonship of God of All Christians in Paul against the Jewish Background (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1979); James M. Scott, Adoption as Sons of God: An Investigation into the Background of HUIOTHESIA (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992); Trevor J. Burke, Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006). Among many popular expansions of the issues, Thomas A. Smail’s short classic, The Forgotten Father: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Gospel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), remains an admirably lucid treatment.

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end, a source of blessing to the whole earth; not just a land but the world itself is now the promised inheritance of God’s people (Rom. 4:13).18 The covenant community remains the central subject of God’s saving purpose, but that community’s identity includes not only historic Israel but Gentile peoples, now grafted into the same stock (Rom. 11:17–24). Through faith they too are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise (Gal. 3:6–29; Rom. 4:1–25). Being God’s cherished possession never was, for Israel, about ethnicity, background, gift or potential (cf. Dt. 7:6–8); the dignity of covenant fellowship was always a consequence of divine love alone, and involved deliverance from bondage and nonentity in worldly terms. So too those whom God now constitutes sons and daughters belong by rights afar off, aliens and strangers to covenant privileges (Eph. 2:12–13).19 But the wondrous reversal of which justification speaks is the merciful transfer of such sinners from their natural state of estrangement and slavery into the fellowship and liberty of covenant existence. Justification’s corollary, the heart of salvation’s privilege, is filial belonging. Paul is everywhere careful to underscore the ontological uniqueness of Jesus’ status as God’s own Son, but maintains no semantic distinction between the huios himself and the recipients of his blessing, who by grace are also properly called huioi (Gal. 3:26; 4:6–7) as well as tekna (Rom. 8:16–17, 21).20 If huioi be thought restrictive, the purview is in fact no narrower in gender terms than it is in respect of race or class, for baptism disposes of native impediments to official standing. Here, unlike in the world at large, title is not restricted to males (Gal. 3:28; cf. also 2 Cor. 6:18), social background matters not a bit (Gal. 3:28), and Aramaic or Greek serves equally well as the idiom of the house (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6).21 The divine purpose is that the Son should be the first-born in an extensive family (Rom. 8:29). As adopted children of God, the brothers and sisters of the Son are heirs of God, but not heirs simpliciter: they are joint-heirs (sugkleronomoi)22 with the Son 18   See classically James D. Hester, Paul’s Concept of Inheritance (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968). For believers whose present existence may well be marginal, the promise is politically charged: their ‘imperishable, undefiled and unfading’ prospect, as it is elsewhere described (1 Pet. 1:4), is not some ethereal or other-worldly realm, but a transformed universe. For recent critical interaction with literature on Paul, see Mark Forman, ‘The Politics of Inheritance? The Language of Inheritance in Romans within its First-Century Greco-Roman Imperial Context’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2006. 19   Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity 12.13: ‘And we indeed are sons of God, but sons because the Son has made us such. For we were once sons of wrath, but have been made sons of God through the Spirit of adoption, and have earned that title by favour, not by right of birth’. 20  The Son himself is never teknon. 21  Though the reference to Abba first is likely evidence that a preference for Jesus’ own vocative was already well established in the prayer-language of Greek-speaking Christianity in Paul’s time. 22  The word is not found outside the New Testament.

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(Rom. 8:17). If his Sonship is utterly real in ontological terms, so too is their filial status. Huiothesia is no mere metaphor; it specifies a genuine transformation that has occurred and will occur for them in virtue of who he is and what he has done. Nor are they just given the potential to become sons and daughters, an entry into the possibility of inheritance subject to the fulfilment of conditions or the completion of further process: they have actual belonging, and actual privileges; indicatives not subjunctives describe their status. The business is of course a matter of grace from first to last. There is no way for such creatures to become heirs save by the Son’s achievement and their incorporation into him by the Spirit’s work. Of themselves they belong afar off, inhabitants of a place where filial blessings are unimaginable and thraldom of one sort or another is the only conceivable prospect (cf. Lk. 15:11–24). Once again: he is the Son, God’s own Son, essentially; they are made sons and daughters. It is in him, and only so, that they are allotted their inheritance (Eph. 1:11). The whole movement, as Paul envisions it, is Christocentric and trinitarian. Foreordained to this privilege by the will of God the Father, the beneficiaries of huiothesia receive a blessing secured ‘through’ (dia) Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:5). The attendant gifts are the work of ‘the Spirit of adoption’ (Rom. 8:15), who is also ‘the Spirit of Christ’ (Rom. 8:9) and ‘the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead’ (Rom. 8:11). Both the vital instrument (Rom. 8:15–16) and the essential fruit (Gal. 4:6) of adoption, it is this Spirit, ‘the Spirit of his Son’ (Gal. 4:6) – even ‘the Spirit by which the Son is Son’23 – who is the pledge of the final inheritance for which the Son’s adopted siblings wait (Eph. 1:14; cf. also Tit. 3:5–7). IV The world evoked by these scriptural images ought to startle us a good deal more than it probably does. The beneficiaries of salvation are destined for an inheritance alongside the Son; they are heirs with him, of God. But of what can the Son himself be an heir? There is nothing intrinsic to divinity that he does not possess, and – pace some accounts of incarnational metaphysics – no phase of his existence in which he is somehow without an aspect or two of his participation in the Godhead’s fullness. His eternal equality with God is not harpagmos (Phil. 2:6) – indeed, its essence is expressed in the lowliest of temporal service (Jn. 13:3–5), the antithesis of the obsessive self-interest that characterizes so much human behaviour (Phil. 2:3–4) – but his fleshly existence, including its ultimate fate, involves neither renunciation nor suspension nor diminution of his belonging within God’s infinite abundance.

23  Thomas G. Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995), p. 36.

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The incarnate Son remains at all times ‘source of life to all the universe’,24 the free personal subject of the flesh he takes, committed to it utterly yet neither reduced to it nor imprisoned by it. His violent destruction at human hands, the dreadfully real extermination of a temporal, carnal victim, is possible only in consequence of the prevenient will that the author of this existence should give himself up. In the darkness of Calvary an unfathomable depth is plumbed, but whatever it entails for the incarnate Son to be ‘forsaken’ there is no ‘rupture’ or stasis in his essential relation to his Father, nor do divine hypostaseis temporarily ‘lose’ their Fatherhood and Sonship – whatever that would mean.25 In the ultimacy of divine self-differentiation lies the ultimate in the divine unity; the possibilities of self-giving are determined by the possibilities of the otherness-in-oneness that is always basic to God’s being. In the event of the cross there is a ‘newness’, it is true – the enactment of unity in unprecedented form, the accommodation of death and its consequences within God’s inextinguishable life – but there is neither transitory nor permanent modification of God’s Godness, nor, per impossibile, any dilution of his triunely ordered freedom. ‘Passion and death are not a metaphysical piece of misfortune which overtook the Son of God who became man. God chose this “fate”.’26 The enfleshed Son’s lying silent in the tomb shatters classical (and modern) conceptions of divine ‘absoluteness’; but it is a demonstration, not a dissolution, of an utter capacity. Resurrection and ascension mean genuine exaltation, actual enthronement of the formerly dead Jesus ‘far above’ all created things (Eph. 1:21–2). But this occurs inasmuch as it is simply ‘not possible’ for death to hold him (Acts 2:24). The one who has laid down his life takes it up again, the exousia to do each in turn inherently his own (Jn. 10:17–18). The glory he receives from his Father is the glory he shared with him before the world was (Jn. 17:5, 24). The resurrection is a free divine act, a perforation of any natural sequence of worldly cause and effect, inexplicable in the logic of immanence: in the primary idiom, Jesus is raised from the dead. But it is also a verdict on the sufficiency of his divine-human selfoffering: ‘an act of justice on the part of God the Father in His relation to Jesus Christ as His Son’.27 There is reward here, to be sure, for the Father delights in all that his Son has carried out in fulfilment of their single intent, and honours him  Athanasius, On the Incarnation 17.   Pace Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 1974), pp. 151–2, 241–8; The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God (London: SCM Press, 1981), pp. 75–83. Moltmann does not scruple to speak of the cry of dereliction as ‘the breakdown of the relationship that constitutes the very life of the Trinity …’: The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, p. 80. 26   Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark/Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 102. 27   Barth, CD IV/1, p. 305. 24

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for it (Isa. 53:10–12; Jn. 17:4–5; Phil. 2:9–10). But the risen and ascended one acquires no status that is not his antecedently; he receives his due, having finished the work he was sent to do. His physical withdrawal and session ‘at the right hand of the majesty on high’ (Heb. 1:3), are, among many other things, but a fresh display of his transcendence of worldly limitations. The entire movement – the great ‘coming’ and ‘going away’ – is most certainly a material history, one in which the momentousness of God’s being pro nobis, God’s astonishing commitment of himself to finite time and space, is dramatically enacted; but it is not the story of the Son’s episodic journey towards majority.28 In a crucial sense, the Son waits for nothing: every prerogative of God’s Godness is his from the start. Yet this is not all. Just because the Son’s action is the temporal outworking of the divine will to save, and salvation is not effected instantaneously by eternal decree or even by the assumptio carnis as such, the Son’s mission has a future, and in his commitment to that work there is a temporal end for which he, the only-begotten Son, still waits. Glorified at God’s right hand, he is where by right he belongs, his bodily absence a spiritual presence to the world; as of now, he communicates himself in free majesty, just as he sees fit. His eloquence, in the Spirit’s power, is the declaration of his perfect adequacy, of the universal pertinence of what he has accomplished ephapax. But the posture of the exalted Lord is not static; it is teleological: ‘he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Cor. 15:25). There remain powers and authorities – sin and death – whose final conquest has yet to occur in time, assured though that conquest is in virtue of what has already happened in his living, dying and being raised. The spoils of victory presently belong to the risen one: he reigns. Yet there is a directedness about that state: it is a matter not of mere repose but of activity; and activity with an envisaged outcome. Alongside his heavenly ministry of intercession for his own, he has the worldly task of ‘doing away with’ all rule, authority and power, banishing every competitor to his Lordship by the sheer force of his communicative presence. Only then will the end come, when he has demonstrated conclusively his supremacy over every foe; only then will God truly be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:24, 28). Great care is needed in the articulation of this twofold reality: the completeness of the Son’s person and work on the one hand, his continuing temporal activity on the other. Much theology has stumbled at just this point, envisaging the futurity of the Son’s inheritance as evidence that his current status (even his hypostatic identity) is somehow transient, or so pressing God’s decision to define himself 28

 The narrative of the divine movement naturally involves dramatic sequence: ‘a little while’ of lowliness followed by coronation with glory and honour (Heb. 2:9; cf. also 12:2). Yet, as Barth’s creative reworking of the Christological status and the munus triplex in CD IV seeks to explore, there remains a fundamental simultaneity with which to reckon: in the history of the one person of the enfleshed Son is enacted the exinanitio of God and the exaltatio of the human at the same time. Such ‘actualism’ does not, of course, reduce divine being to its freely-chosen historical form any more than it speaks of a literal deification of human essence in the history of the mediator.

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in temporality that the history of God’s relations with creation is seen as literally determinative of the divine essence. The variants on such themes are many, but one regular symptom is an inflation of the significance of worldly agents, who effectively become co-constitutors of divinity, or, in the case of the church, the supposed means of the risen Son’s present availability even to himself.29 Such problems typify a mistaken conception of what it means to take seriously the historical enactment of God’s being. For the mission of the Son to have a future is not, of course, for his personhood to be in any way defective, or (pace Marcellus of Ancyra) for his kingdom to be but temporary, or for the current prosperity of his worldly presence (far less his self-understanding) to be contingent upon the vicissitudes of ecclesial mediation. Precisely insofar as it is a reiteration of his eternal relation to the Father, and charged with all the energy and completeness of that reality, his temporal work is utterly secure in its outworking, a disclosure of that which is actually true about who he is and what he wills; in its sheer effectiveness, it is a confirmation of his essential glory. In the course of his self-manifestation the Son ‘suffers no defeats’, and ‘is never at a halt or in retreat’.30 What he envisages is no mere aspiration, an end hoped for but not to be counted upon, for the one who sits upon the throne is where he is – ingredient within the eternal self-constancy of God – and as such his purpose is entirely sure. The outcome of his work is grounded in the sovereignty of God’s triune commitment to embrace within his own perfection the fulfilment of creaturely reality. To suggest that this conclusion is somehow uncertain – by talking, for example, of the future as ‘open’ or incomplete in some literal sense for divine persons – or, indeed, to speak of a future that represents (more securely, yet also reductively) but the final, inner-divine coherence of God’s dramatic commitments in history – is to confuse being and time in such a way that the immanent Trinity is collapsed entirely into the economic; thus is compromised fatally the eternal fullness of God’s life in se.31 The Son’s final inheritance is not the acquisition of divine abundance; it is his existence in the Father’s presence with glorified creatures beside him – more precisely, it is the significance of that reality within the structure of his essential fellowship with the Father. Here is the joy for which the Son endured the cross (Heb. 12:2), and for whose ultimate consummation he still waits: entry into the felicity of what it means to his Father that he should bring many brothers and sisters to glory (Heb. 2:10); that he, the eternal Son, should come – along the path of enfleshment and all that it entails – to share his life with the Father in the company of those given to him (Heb. 2:13; cf. Jn. 17:2, 6, 9–10, 24). The Son is an heir of the Father’s beatitude at a strategy of mercy brought to final completion, in the presentation of a people made meet to be with him where he is (Jn. 14:3;   Distorted applications of the totus Christus idea are of course especially in view here.   Barth, CD IV/3, p. 262. 31  Linear notions of time clearly do not help in this area, but the confusions are also widely prevalent in other attempts at the metaphysics. 29 30

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17:24), sharing his filial right to the Father’s favour, experiencing the light and joy that will everlastingly be his in the Father’s presence. As with resurrection and ascension, here too talk of the Father’s ‘rewarding’ of the Son remains appropriate, yet requires care: it is easy to slip into the idiom of commodified divine recompense, and then in turn (perhaps) of the supererogatory merit of the God-man transferred to fellow human beings.32 Such reification is quite removed from the biblical witness. There is of course no eschatological accumulation of substance, however notional, by the Son; no increase, however superfluous, in his ontological plenitude. As ever, the Son is always in the Father, the Father always in him (Jn. 10:38). Yet it is the divine ‘good pleasure’ (Eph. 1:5, 9) that the Son, freely but irrevocably incarnate, should at last come to his Father bearing others with him, fellows in his filial access – and that in this the Father’s eternally exquisite delight in his Son should find new depths of immensity, and manifest itself in fresh expressions of honour. Thus shall the incarnate Son ‘inherit’ God: for him, the future is, by the Spirit, his Father, and all that it means to be his Father’s Son, redemption’s purpose wrought. In virtue of both his status and his achievement, the incarnate Son’s title to this blessing is strictly his alone, and can never be handed away. Yet, precisely in the nature of its execution in covenant history, that title is opened up for others to share. Loved with no lesser love than the Father has ever had for his eternal Son (Jn. 17:23–4), contingent creatures are given ultimately to come with this Son by his Spirit to his Father, to be beneficiaries of the glory that is properly the Father’s gift to him (Jn. 17:22). Their rights, unlike the Son’s, are neither natural nor inherent; yet by grace they are, just as his, unalienable, eternally secure. They know along with him the Father’s approval, taste alongside him the profundity of what it means eschatologically for the Father to be well-pleased with his enfleshed Son, and to grant his Son to know it. In the end, they are given to experience no weaker claim than his to the Father’s heart, no lesser favour than the Father’s communicated joy in the Son of his love. Their future, no less than his, is, by the Spirit, the Father, and all that it means to be this Father’s children: such is redemption’s fruit. And if quantifiable gain for the Son himself is absent here, so too, of course, is loss: ‘he did not fear to have joint-heirs, because his heritage does not become narrow if many are possessors’.33   Cf., of course, in the context of the atonement as a whole, Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.19. The problem is not entirely absent from Reformed accounts of legal satisfaction as the fulfilment of divine conditions: the translation of the mediator’s virtue may bulk larger than the graciousness of his action. However counter-intuitive it may seem, a partial solution might yet lie in a nuanced version of the triune ‘covenant of redemption’ which, pace its many modern critics, may – with appropriate caveats – be posited as standing behind the Son’s temporal mission. Quite what such nuances might involve cannot be adequately explored here. For some reflections on the pactum salutis, see Webster’s essay above, pp. 28–31. 33  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 2.13. 32

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This is, as yet, unrealized eschatology. But it is not wholly a matter of far horizons. The evidence is the direct cry which the Spirit – whose ‘first title’ is the Spirit of adoption,34 and without whose distinctive agency in correspondence to the Son’s there would be no creaturely entry at all into the triune filial communion – already makes possible: Abba. There is nothing natural or contrivable about that confession; it employs idiom the slave can never instinctively muster. Fit for the densest of earthly settings – it is the Son’s prayer in his agony – it is also, as eschatological gift, an anticipatory entrée into the Godhead’s own discourse, a present as well as future expression of the manner in which the Son through the Spirit addresses the Father. The approach is stunningly simple, without need of diffuse supplement; yet the register is bold, the negation of fearful silence and self-absorbed reserve. Thus does the Son naturally commune with his Father by the Spirit who is love, and thus will the Son everlastingly find his fulfilment in speaking to the Father whose will he has done. The Son’s directness becomes available to others. And the extension of his prerogative is without respect of persons: Abba is not the closely-guarded token of the gnostic, but already the heartfelt call – the cry (Rom. 8:15; cf. Gal. 4:6) – of the weakest of saints. It is not merely a petition for help – though it must surely often be that for inhabitants of a still-broken world, as it was for the Son himself – but a confirmation of belonging: now as well as in a day to come, the Son’s Father is ours. Pilgrim faith requires no greater assurance than the warrant which the Spirit affords in the enabling of that cry, nor can richer pledge of divine love be found. Entry into this life means dying and rising with the Son in baptism, and a broader pattern of suffering with him as condition of being glorified with him. If the Son himself only enters his ultimate inheritance through passion, this is no less true for his adopted siblings, who meet God as their Father ‘only where the only-begotten Son has borne and borne away [their] sin’ – in the existence of conflict and commitment that reaches its unfathomable climax in Gethsemane and Golgotha.35 In Paul’s breathless rhetoric the syn- compounds pile up (Rom. 8:17, 29; cf. 8:16, 26, 28, 32): it is through personal participation in Christ and a life structured after his, in the power of his Spirit, that filial dignity is evinced. There is frank realism here: ‘the coming glory to be revealed’ (Rom. 8:18) is not attained other than by commitment to the Son’s path. In one sense, there is no progress on that road. Those who walk it are summoned indeed to grow in grace, and will yet enter into the fullness of the privileges grace affords, freed from the conditions of worldly struggle, and thus inherit God; but they will never become more than dependants of the Son’s Father, for more than this they cannot be. ‘They may and can be masters and even virtuosos in many things, but never in what makes them Christians, God’s children’; their approach to the Father ‘can never at any stage   Calvin, Inst. 3.1.3.   Barth, CD I/1, p. 458. The point is pressed by Rowan Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 107–27, at pp. 121–3. 34

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or in any form be anything but the work of beginners’.36 The principle holds good not only in regard to current-order existence. But the Spirit who sustained the Son on his worldly journey, upholding his bond with the Father even in the crisis of his final self-offering (cf. Heb. 9:14), the one through whose agency he is raised from the dead, alive and active, assured of the eternal fullness of his Father’s presence – this same Spirit is given to those called to follow in his steps, the perfecter who brings them also to their intended end and enables them to gain their complete inheritance in the Father along with him: ennobled creatures, children still. Compared with that prospect, present laments, real as they are (Rom. 8:22–3), find no ultimate calculus (Rom. 8:18). The divine determination is that the Son’s fellow-heirs will finally be conformed to the image of God that the Father’s Son is (Rom. 8:29), and thus find their true human destiny in likeness to him. In so far as that telos is presently anticipated in them by the transforming work of the Spirit, the Father already finds his adopted children ‘pleasing and lovable to him, since he sees in them the marks and features of his own countenance’,37 as expressed in his incarnate Son; at the last, when they shall be truly like that Son, the Father will find joy in their correspondence to the one who is the ultimate reflection of his glory and the exact imprint of his being (Heb. 1:3). If the end for creatures is the inheritance of God the Father with the Son by the Spirit, this outcome is in truth subordinate to the end for the Father himself – his pleasure in the possession of a people, in humanity brought to its intended place in fellowship with him, alongside his Son by the Spirit: ‘the spoils of the divine mercy’,38 for the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:14). Redeemed and glorified subjects, brought to resemble the Son in his relation to the Father through the Spirit, are thus God’s own glorious inheritance (Eph. 1:18), a creaturely counterpart to God’s fellowship with himself. In them he confirms his own majesty as only the triune God can do: not as a mirror for the self-obsession of a transcendent monad, but as the further recipients of the goodness that is forever communicated within the structure of God’s own life. V But this far passeth man’s capacity, that He calleth us heirs; not of some rich and mighty prince, not of the emperor, not of the world, but of God, the Almighty Creator of all things. This our inheritance, then (as Paul saith in another place), is inestimable. And if a man could comprehend the excellency of this matter, that he is the son and heir of God, and with a constant faith believe the same, this man would esteem all the power and riches of all the kingdoms of the world, but as dung, in comparison of his eternal inheritance. He would abhor whatsoever is   Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 79.   Calvin, Inst. 3.17.5. 38   Barth, CD IV/2, p. 100. 36

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high and glorious in the world; yea, the greater the pomp and glory of the world is, the more would he hate it. To conclude, whatsoever the world most highly esteemeth and magnifieth, that should be, in his eyes, most vile and abominable. For what is all the world, with all its riches, power and glory, in comparison of God, whose son he is? A man who could believe this, would desire to be taken out of this life from excessive joy.39

Perhaps in part because of the sheer transcendence of creaturely capacities to which Luther refers, the theology of salvation as destiny in the Father with the Son by the Spirit has, in truth, received a lot less exploration than it deserves. In large tracts of Western teaching, adoption has been quietly folded into justification – its essential presupposition, certainly, but by no means the exhaustion of its content40 – or subordinated to a generally forensic or judicial depiction of the God-human relationship.41 In a due concern to avoid the errors of substantialism and synergism, motifs such as representative satisfaction, imputation and alien righteousness have taken firm priority over the language of fellowship. Vital as many of the contentions here have been, the upshot, all too often, has been accounts of salvation in crassly transactional or impersonal terms, detached from the dynamics of the incarnational economy and (unsurprisingly) bereft of substantive yield in the areas of transformation or assurance. The role of faith has often been focused in excessively appropriational, even punctiliar, fashion, as the means by which (somewhat abstract) benefits are obtained – the instrument of a transition in standing more than the evidence of a Spirit-enabled living union with the Father’s incarnate Son. 39   Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Erasmus Middleton, ed. John Prince Fallowes (repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1979), pp. 252–3. 40  Nor even, pace so much Protestant divinity, the ‘centre’ of the narrative of reconciliation as such. 41  The Reformed tradition is the obvious exception to the trend, though even there the witness is hardly as consistent as one might wish. A primary hero of a via superior is of course Calvin himself, who, while he does not treat adoption as a distinctive dogmatic locus, locates the theme at the heart of his mature exegetical and practical construal of the duplex gratia afforded in union with Christ. Relevant textual studies include Garret A. Wilterdink, ‘The Fatherhood of God in Calvin’s Thought’, Reformed Review, 30 (1976): 9–22; Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pt. 2; Nigel Westhead, ‘Adoption in the Thought of John Calvin’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 13 (1995): 102–15; Howard Griffith, ‘The First Title of the Spirit: Adoption in Calvin’s Soteriology’, Evangelical Quarterly, 73 (2001): 135–53. On the notable contributions of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Reformed theology – which was, of course, nowhere near so prone to occlude the living dynamics of union with Christ as many have supposed – see Timothy R. Trumper, ‘An Historical Study of the Doctrine of Adoption in the Calvinistic Tradition’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2001; Joel R. Beeke, Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on Adoption (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008).

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Attempts to redress the balance have frequently collapsed into sentimental appeals to divine fatherhood as a general disposition of creatorial benevolence, images of sonship as pious behaviour illustrated in rather than constitutively enacted by the career of the Saviour. More subtly, they have drifted in the direction of construing God’s fatherly yearning and the vicarious action of the Son in primarily psychological terms, presenting atonement as divine sympathy more than objective achievement; the effects in creatures are, it seems, a matter of rekindled instinct rather than resurrection from death. In the process what is generally elided is a proper demarcation of the unique identity of the mediator, a meaningful place for substitutionary judgement upon sin, and much clarity about the nature of the Spirit’s work in regenerating and sanctifying the objects of God’s mercy. In Orthodoxy, of course, filial status tends to be subsumed under a much larger discourse of divine participation, of eschatological destiny as creaturely deification. In popular exposition, a later Byzantine, especially Palamite, version of theosis is sometimes taken to stand for Eastern tradition as a whole, an anachronistic move which flattens out diverse images of deification historically and sets up restrictive criteria by which to measure alternative soteriological idioms. In much recent Western enthusiasm for deification, attempts to effect reasonably straightforward alignments between theosis and the accounts of saving union to be found in (say) Thomas, Luther or Calvin frequently erode their case – and so weaken interesting claims about historical connections, or laudable concerns for ecumenical rapprochement – by treating later Greek depictions of deification as summative and reading real or alleged instances of participatory language in Latin theology in terms of their possible approximation to that standard. The rubric is too often Procrustean, and the identifying features of genuinely distinct ways of delineating the nature and shape of creaturely fellowship with God may well be lost.42 The best examples of Greek patristic logic are typically far more carefully focused on the primacy of the Son’s mediating work in deification and on his restoration of filial relation as fulfilment of, not escape from, creatureliness than are certain later technologies of spiritual ascent in the East or the theology of grace in the West; they are often also more careful than the latter at least in their pneumatology.43 Insofar as proper delimitations are drawn in contemporary theology between deification as a general principle and deification as a specific participation of redeemed creatures in the Son’s relationship of love with his Father, there may be potent points of contact between traditions; but each representative 42   J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the general importance of distinguishing between themes and doctrines, see Gösta Hallonsten, ‘Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity’, in Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (eds), Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 281–93. 43   The field is surveyed best in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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account needs to be judged on its own terms. To state the obvious bluntly: some presentations of what it means to enter by faith, through the Spirit’s action, into the Son’s fellowship with the Father – and thus of what it means and does not mean eschatologically to be in union with Christ – are far more biblically responsible than others. Only due attention to the scriptural narrative of what actually happens in the Son’s personal history, and of what it means by the Spirit to be caught up in that history – and thus to be both beneficiaries of and respondents to the Son’s obedience eternally – will afford participatory language the specificity it requires if it is to avoid the errors of metaphysical generality or an inadequate demarcation of divine and human identities. Some arguments about participation are self-consciously as general as possible, and involve overtly critical assessments of theology’s fatal mistakes in this respect: what is needed, it is said, is a putatively classic Christianized Platonism, an account of the methexis of all reality in God, over against an extrinsicism and nominalism that have had ruinous consequences in Western culture; only thus will Christian speech and action respond with proper confidence to the alternative theologies of secular modernity and the nihilism that lurks beyond them.44 Whatever else may be said about that case, as a soteriology at least it is inadequate, for despite heavy appeal to the significance of the incarnation in the overcoming of metaphysics, the particular historical-redemptive role played by the incarnate Son for those who are constituted his brothers and sisters is weakened by a vision of nature always already graced,45 and by a corresponding reduction of reconciling grace (in great measure) to the particular patterns of existence made manifest in and for the world by the body of which the Son is Head: the church. If the theology of salvation is to speak with evangelical precision of what it means for creatures to become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4), and to be ‘filled with all the fullness’ that is God’s (Eph. 3:19), it must attend to the way in which God elects to open up his being in the drama of divine saving action. In consequence of what is wrought in the historical achievement of the Father’s only Son – and by the correspondingly vital work of his Holy Spirit, who unites creatures to him, their brother man, and in him to the Father – the eschatological end of the redeemed is neither the result of some abstract divinization of human essence nor an extrapolation from a basic participation of all things in God, a general reality that is somehow rendered new by conscious participation in the liberating example of Christ. It is an elevation of human beings in particular into 44   John Milbank, ‘The Name of Jesus: Incarnation, Atonement, Ecclesiology’, Modern Theology, 7 (1991): 311–33, also in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), Ch. 6; id., Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003). 45   The bid here is of course to escape quasi-fictional accounts of atoning transaction or excessively passive images of the reception of grace, said to be associated with postReformation soteriology in particular. But the solutions might well look otherwise, and have arguably done so rather often within the Reformed tradition itself.

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a quite specific structure of consortium divinitatis. In matchless grace they are delivered from their natural estrangement and placed at the side of their creator, there to be ‘turned towards’ God the Father after the manner of the exalted Son’s eternal fellowship with him in the Spirit.46 In this they do not cease to be creatures; they are never absorbed or assimilated into God, never contribute to God’s own endlessly self-maintaining and complete life, never – of course – become ontological realities comparable to the eternally unique hypostaseis of God himself.47 Yet, in union with the incarnate Son by the Spirit, they come to share – collectively, as indeed the body with its Head – in what the exalted incarnate Son eternally enjoys: access to the infinite blessedness of the Father’s presence. Their belonging is always a creaturely version of an essential divine union, its ways of being and knowing never, per impossibile, a replication of the relations uniquely present there. But their position is none the less staggering for that, for its privileges are a genuine counterpart to the Son’s: creatures approach the Father as the Son does, receive from the Father a taste of the very reality that the glorified Son knows, by the same Spirit through whose agency this Son and his Father are eternally one. The recipients do, of course, give as well, in worship, adoration, celebration, and such giving is, again, an activity of gratitude alongside, led by, the enfleshed and exalted Son, and enabled by his Spirit. But it is also, once more, the giving of creatures, whose company is desired by the Father and whose appointed creaturely activities, now and everlastingly, are blessed by him and a cause of endless joy to him. They cannot give as divine persons give – though their giving is indeed ‘a reflection, a creaturely similitude’,48 of the self-donation that constitutes God’s triune life. The appropriate alternative to substantialist construals of participation is neither extrinsicism nor nominalism: it is a properly rich depiction of the action of the Spirit as the one who sets up human subjects in the place for which they were made – the sphere of intimate communicative fellowship with God – by uniting them with the Father’s incarnate Son and enabling them to come with that Son, as creaturely sons and daughters, to his Father. Such a vision is scarcely narrow. According to the apostolic testimony, the bringing of human beings to their appointed end does indeed have consequences for creation as a whole. In the gathering of human creatures to share his place at the Father’s side, the Son demonstrates his ultimate possession of all worldly substance, for it is not only the nations that are his heritage from the Father, or the ends of the earth that are his possession (Ps. 2:8): all reality is his, and all reality is affected by the divine will that his future should include others. Creation itself is presently in bondage; it groans, waiting for the final, physical redemption of the   Barth, CD IV/2, pp. 100–101.   Careful expressions of theosis as a doctrine have clearly always been concerned to enter these caveats; whether popular applications of the language of deification are always half so careful is another matter. 48   Barth, CD IV/2, p. 779. 46 47

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children of God, for that redemption – a dimension of adoption which remains as yet in the future – will in turn mean the transformation of all things, the entry of creation as a whole into ‘the liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:19–22). The revelation of the Son’s ultimate honour means the revelation of the glory of his adopted family alongside him; the revelation of that family brings with it freedom for creation as such – a freedom whose source and shape are not of human manufacture, but the work of God. 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 (Eph. 1:10; cf. Col. 1:15–20; Heb. 1:2). In such differential manner as its original purposer shall determine, all creation will, with the Son, the sons and the daughters, find its future in God. VI The eschatological character of the Christian gospel, all its talk of salvation as destiny, is simply radical. Rightly perceived, it is incapable of assimilation, resistant to degradation; it runs counter both to modern stories of hope and to postmodern refusals of teleology. In its message of the God who has come and is coming, the evangel repudiates any redemptive future that arises out of natural possibilities or is achieved by creaturely effort; it also disallows the reduction of all narratives of purpose to nothing more than the dangerous fabrications of human power. In all its breathtaking prospects, Christian hope is a matter of promise, and thus of faith, not works. Its assurance is exclusively a divine gift, not an item of capital; its practical corollaries are prayer and the servant ethics of the kingdom, not domestication or political abuse. The day has dawned in the once-for-all raising of the crucified Son from the dead; its light is shed abroad by the work of his Spirit, who calls forth and empowers a people as witnesses to the living one’s reality, his enthronement at the Father’s right hand, his coming day and its significance for all things – but does not cede to that people the task of bringing about this end in its final, fullorbed splendour. Christian hope is a matter of boldness even so: the church’s scandalous confession that the one who was, is; and that he is to be; and that in this last all manner of things shall yet be well. In that conviction, and in the ethical and spiritual responses which by God’s grace flow from it, faith testifies to a salvation that has come and will come, however bleak and unredeemed present circumstances may appear. Its confidence lies not in itself, but in the pledge of God to bring to completion the ergon agathon to which he has committed himself before the foundation of the world. The chief end of that work, for creatures, is God – creaturely existence within the relational infinity of God’s triune life – than which no greater honour and fulfilment can be. For God himself, the chief end is his unfathomable joy that they should be there.

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O’Collins, Gerald, The Tripersonal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity (New York: Paulist Press, 1999). O’Donovan, Oliver, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986). Page, Ruth, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996). Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Jesus – God and Man (London: SCM Press, 1968). ———, Systematic Theology (3 vols, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991–98). Peters, Ted, God – the World’s Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Polkinghorne, John, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations (23 vols, London: Darton, Longman and Todd/Baltimore and New York: Herder and Herder, 1961–92). ———, Everyday Faith (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968). ———, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1978). ———, The Church and the Sacraments (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1986). Roper, Anita, The Anonymous Christian (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966). Russell, Norman, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Sauter, Gerhard, Rechtfertigung als Grundbegriff Evangelischer Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1989). Schleiermacher, F. D. E., The Christian Faith, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928). Schwöbel, Christoph, ‘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. ———, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, in Gott in Beziehung. Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 25–51. ———, ‘Reconciliation: from Biblical Observations to Dogmatic Reconstruction’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Theology of Reconciliation (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), pp. 13–38. Scott, James M., Adoption as Sons of God: An Investigation into the Background of HUIOTHESIA (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992). Shedd, William G. T., A History of Christian Doctrine (2 vols, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999). ———, Dogmatic Theology, 3rd edn (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003). Sheehan, Thomas, ‘Rahner’s Transcendental Project’, in Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 29–42. Sherman, Robert J., King, Priest and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004).

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———, ‘God’s Perfect Life’, in Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (eds), God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 143–52. ———, ‘God’s Aseity’, in Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (eds), Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 147–62. Weinandy, Thomas G., The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995). ———, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000). Westhead, Nigel, ‘Adoption in the Thought of John Calvin’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 13 (1995): 102–15. Williams, Rowan, On Christian Theology (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Wilterdink, Garret A., ‘The Fatherhood of God in Calvin’s Thought’, Reformed Review, 30 (1976): 9–22. Wink, Walter, Naming the Powers: The Language of Powers in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). Wolterstorff, Nicholas, ‘Is There Justice in the Trinity?’, in Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (eds), God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 177–87. World Council of Churches, The Nature and Mission of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement. Faith and Order Paper 198 (Geneva: WCC, 2005). Yancey, Philip, What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000). Yocum, John, Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Zachman, Randall C., The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

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Index of Biblical References Genesis 1:2.........................................63, 78 Genesis 1:11–12.......................................78 Genesis 1:24.............................................78 Genesis 1:26–7.........................................63 Genesis 1:29–30.......................................78 Genesis 2:7.........................................63, 78 Genesis 6–8..............................................79 Genesis 12:3...........................................134 Genesis 18:18.........................................134 Exodus 12:29...........................................79 Leviticus 4:20...........................................43 Leviticus 4:26...........................................43 Leviticus 4:31...........................................43 Deuteronomy 7:6–8...............................163 Deuteronomy 32:43.................................43 Psalms 2:7..............................................160 Psalms 2:8..............................................174 Psalms 14:11............................................65 Psalms 106:8............................................20 Isaiah 11:6................................................79 Isaiah 42:6..........................................133–4 Isaiah 49:6..........................................133–4 Isaiah 53.............................................15–34 Isaiah 53:10–12......................................166 Isaiah 65:25..............................................79 Jonah 4:11................................................79 Matthew 1:21................................... 43, 114 Matthew 1:23...........................................93 Matthew 2:1–18.......................................95 Matthew 10:29.........................................79 Matthew 11:3...........................................95 Matthew 11:5...........................................95 Matthew 11:6...........................................95 Matthew 11:20–4.....................................57 Matthew 11:27.......................................161 Matthew 27:54.........................................96

Mark 1:11.................................................96 Mark 1:13.................................................78 Mark 12:7–8...........................................160 Mark 14:36.............................................160 Mark 15:34.............................................160 Luke 1:28.................................................93 Luke 1:31–3.............................................93 Luke 1:35.................................................93 Luke 1:68–9.............................................96 Luke 10:10–15.........................................57 Luke 10:16.............................................146 Luke 15:11–24.......................................164 Luke 15:31.............................................159 Luke 24:27...............................................95 John 1:3–5..............................................133 John 1:11........................................131, 160 John 1:12................................................161 John 1:14................................................125 John 1:29..................................................43 John 3:5–8..............................................162 John 3:8....................................................78 John 3:16..........................................28, 162 John 3:19..................................................89 John 3:35................................................159 John 5:18................................................161 John 5:19–24..........................................160 John 5:26........................................157, 162 John 5:36..................................................33 John 6:51..................................................32 John 6:57................................................162 John 8:35–6............................................162 John 8:39–47..........................................160 John 9:39–41............................................57 John 10:16..............................................149 John 10:17–18................................159, 165 John 10:38..............................................168 John 13:3–5............................................164 John 14:3................................................167 John 14:6................................................157 John 14:28..............................................160

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John 15:15..............................................127 John 15:22................................................57 John 16:32..............................................160 John 17:2................................................159 John 17:2................................................167 John 17:4–5............................................166 John 17:5................................................165 John 17:6................................................167 John 17:9-10..........................................167 John 17:19..............................................159 John 17:22..............................................168 John 17:23–4..........................................168 John 17:24..................................165, 167–8 John 19:30..............................................160 John 20:17..............................................162 John 20:19................................................79 Acts 2:12................................................155 Acts 2:14–36..........................................155 Acts 2:22–32..........................................160 Acts 2:24................................................165 Acts 3:14..................................................19 Acts 3:15..................................................19 Acts 3:26..................................................19 Acts 5:31................................................161 Acts 13:33..............................................160 Acts 13:34–7..........................................160 Romans 1:3–4........................................160 Romans 1:9............................................158 Romans 1:20......................................79, 83 Romans 3:20..........................................130 Romans 3:24..........................................130 Romans 3:25..........................................130 Romans 3:26..........................................130 Romans 3:28..........................................130 Romans 3:30..........................................130 Romans 4:1–25......................................163 Romans 4:13..........................................163 Romans 4:25..........................................130 Romans 5:1............................................130 Romans 5:9............................................130 Romans 5:10............................................45 Romans 5:21..........................................130 Romans 6:3..............................................54 Romans 6:5..............................................54 Romans 6:6–7..........................................54 Romans 8:1............................................126

Romans 8:9............................................164 Romans 8:11..........................................164 Romans 8:15..............................163–4, 169 Romans 8:15ff........................................131 Romans 8:15–16....................................164 Romans 8:16..........................................169 Romans 8:16–17............................130, 163 Romans 8:17....................13, 157, 164, 169 Romans 8:18..................................169, 170 Romans 8:19–22....................................175 Romans 8:20–1........................................77 Romans 8:21..........................................163 Romans 8:22............................................80 Romans 8:22–3......................................170 Romans 8:26..........................................169 Romans 8:28..........................................169 Romans 8:29..............63, 135, 163, 169–70 Romans 8:31..........................................126 Romans 8:32..................................160, 169 Romans 9:4............................................162 Romans 9:18..........................................120 Romans 9–11..........................................133 Romans 10:14........................................127 Romans 11:1–2......................................133 Romans 11:17–24..................................163 Romans 11:28........................................133 Romans 11:36..........................................36 1 Corinthians 1:9....................................161 1 Corinthians 1:18..................................131 1 Corinthians 1:26–7..............................134 1 Corinthians 1:30..................................134 1 Corinthians 6:11..................................130 1 Corinthians 12:3......................................7 1 Corinthians 15:22..................................97 1 Corinthians 15:24................................166 1 Corinthians 15:24–8............................130 1 Corinthians 15:25................................166 1 Corinthians 15:28....................65, 86, 166 2 Corinthans 1:20...................................126 2 Corinthians 4:4......................................63 2 Corinthians 5:19..............................16, 89 2 Corinthians 5:21..................................131 2 Corinthians 6:18..................................163 Galatians 1:7..........................................130 Galatians 1:16........................................161 Galatians 2:16........................................130

Index of Biblical References Galatians 2:20........................................160 Galatians 2:21........................................130 Galatians 3:6–29....................................163 Galatians 3:10..........................................45 Galatians 3:11........................................130 Galatians 3:24........................................130 Galatians 3:26........................................163 Galatians 3:28................................130, 163 Galatians 4:4..................................124, 131 Galatians 4:6..............................163–4, 169 Galatians 4:6–7......................................163 Galatians 4:19..........................................63 Galatians 5:1..........................................132 Galatians 5:4..........................................130 Ephesians 1:4.........................................134 Ephesians 1:5.................................164, 168 Ephesians 1:9.................................121, 168 Ephesians 1:9–10.....................................21 Ephesians 1:10.................................85, 175 Ephesians 1:11.......................................164 Ephesians 1:14...............................164, 170 Ephesians 1:18.......................................170 Ephesians 1:21–2...................................165 Ephesians 2:3.........................................160 Ephesians 2:12–13.................................163 Ephesians 3:3–11...................................121 Ephesians 3:7–12...................................133 Ephesians 3:8.........................................121 Ephesians 3:9.........................................121 Ephesians 3:10.......................................158 Ephesians 3:11.........................................29 Ephesians 3:19.......................................173 Ephesians 4:24.........................................63 Philippians 2:3–4...................................164 Philippians 2:6.......................................164 Philippians 2:9–10.................................166 Philippians 2:12.....................................134 Philippians 3:12.....................................161 Colossians 1:3–4......................................55 Colossians 1:15............................63–4, 127 Colossians 1:15–17..................................94 Colossians 1:15–20................................175 Colossians 1:17........................................78 Colossians 1:19–20..................................94 Colossians 1:20........................................85

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Colossians 1:21........................................16 Colossians 1:26......................................121 Colossians 2:2........................................121 Colossians 3:10........................................63 1 Thessalonians 5:23–4............................59 1 Timothy 1:15.........................................27 1 Timothy 2:4.........................................144 1 Timothy 3:16.......................................161 2 Timothy 1:9...........................................30 Titus 3:5–7.............................................164 Hebrews 1:1.............................................92 Hebrews 1:2...................................161, 175 Hebrews 1:3.......................63, 94, 166, 170 Hebrews 1:5...........................................160 Hebrews 2:9...........................................166 Hebrews 2:10.........................................167 Hebrews 2:10–18...................................162 Hebrews 2:13.........................................167 Hebrews 3:1–6.......................................162 Hebrews 5:7...........................................160 Hebrews 5:8...........................................160 Hebrews 9:14.........................................170 Hebrews 12:2.....................................166–7 1 Peter 1:4..............................................163 2 Peter 1:4..............................................173 1 John 1:3...............................................157 1 John 1:5.................................................83 1 John 2:24–5.........................................157 1 John 3:1...............................................162 1 John 3:2.......................................157, 162 1 John 3:8–10.........................................160 1 John 3:9...............................................162 1 John 4:9–14.........................................131 1 John 4:10...............................................27 1 John 4:15–16.......................................157 1 John 5:11–13.......................................157 1 John 5:12.............................................162 1 John 5:20.............................................157 Revelation 7:9........................................161 Revelation 15:4........................................52 Revelation 21:4......................................103 Revelation 21:5........................................56

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Index of Authors and Subjects Acceptation, 12, 105–18 Acceptilation, 12, 105–18 Adam, 28–9, 31, 55, 63, 81, 85, 97–7, 130, 160 Adoption, 2, 8, 14, 44, 105, 162–4, 169–71, 175 Analogy, 37–40 Animals, and humans, 18, 67–8, 71, 78–9, 81, 84–5, 87 salvation of, 77–87 Annihilation, 56 ‘Anonymous Christianity’, 13, 137–53 Anselm of Canterbury, 12, 42, 44–5, 116–18, 120, 168 Anthropology, 10, 13, 62, 127, 139, 145–7, 149, 151 Apokatastasis, 13, 86, 138 See also Universalism Apollinarius, 41 Apophasis, 157 Arianism, 40 Ascension, 1, 3, 8, 51, 56, 96, 102, 126, 165, 168 Aseity, Divine, 9, 18, 25, 35–46, 50, 155 Athanasius, 74–5, 165 Atonement, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 23–4, 37, 42–6, 48, 58–9, 86, 90–1, 96, 98, 100, 105–20, 149, 168, 172 and divine perfections, 42–6 and history, 3–4, 8, 23–4, 29–30 and judgement, 42–6, 48, 58–9, 105–20, 172 and love of God, 6, 9, 44–5 and unity of divine purpose, 3–4, 42–6, 49–53 Augustine, 38, 42, 62–3, 72, 162, 168 Aulén, Gustav, 37 Authority, 5, 33, 54, 59, 84, 92–3, 95–6, 101, 144, 159, 166 Ayres, Lewis, 42

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 141, 160 Barth, Karl, 12–13, 23, 30, 35, 37, 50–6, 91, 102, 122–36, 137–53, 157, 159, 165–7, 169–70 Basil, of Caesarea, 22, 41–2, 66, 77 Bauckham, Richard, 52, 78, 161 Bavinck, Herman, 30–1, 35–6 Beeke, Joel R., 171 Bender, Kimlyn J., 150 Berkhof, Louis, 29, 105–6 Berkouwer, G.C., 16, 24, 33 Billings, J. Todd, 172 Boersma, Hans, 17, 58, 86 Boethius, 42 Boundlessness, Divine, 10, 18, 61, 75, 156 Brümmer, Vincent, 20 Buber, Martin, 90, 98–9 Burgess, Andrew, 9, 51, 56 Burke, Trevor J., 162 Byrne, Brendan, 162 Calling, Divine, 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 57, 59, 123, 129, 133–5, 140, 147, 161–2, 170, 175 Calvin, John, 16, 24, 27–8, 30, 32–4, 44–5, 47, 54, 112, 123, 129, 152, 159, 162, 169–72 Cappadocian Fathers, 40, 42 Christianity, 136, 138, 141–2, 145, 147–9, 151, 163 Christology, 12, 31–4, 63, 78, 124, 127–8, 135, 139, 140, 145–6, 151–2, 158–61, 164–8 See also Jesus Christ, Incarnation, Hypostatic Union Church, 4, 8, 13, 19, 68, 85, 90, 101–2, 121, 128–30, 132–6, 137–47, 149–53, 158, 167, 173, 175 and Mediation, 13, 138, 149–50, 167 See also Community, Ecclesiology Clephane, Elizabeth C., 39

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Cobb, John B., 81 Cocceius, 47 Communication, 4–5, 13, 16, 18, 20, 26, 30, 48, 139, 143, 145, 147, 151, 156–7, 166, 168, 170, 174 Communion, 1–3, 11, 79, 99, 101, 103, 129, 157–8, 169 Community, 5, 7, 13, 57, 74, 78, 85–6, 102, 121, 129, 130, 132–6, 146, 149, 163 Completion, 10–11, 18, 77, 89, 95, 102, 167, 175 Confession, 1, 4–5, 7, 11, 36, 89–103, 156, 169, 175 Contextual theology, 4–5 Conway, Eamonn, 141 D’Costa, Gavin, 120, 141 Covenant, 1, 8, 15–16, 19, 23–5, 28–34, 50–1, 55, 57–8, 96, 124–8, 131–2, 144, 156, 160–3, 168 Cranfield, C. E. B., 157 Creation, 1–3, 6, 8–11, 14, 18, 21, 36, 43–5, 49–51, 56, 58–9, 61, 63–4, 70, 73, 75, 77–8, 80–7, 89, 91, 94–7, 102–3, 119–21, 125, 132, 135, 158, 167, 174–5 Creatures, 1–3, 6–20, 22, 24–31, 33, 36, 44–5, 48–53, 56, 58, 61–2, 64–5, 68–9, 71–3, 75, 77–87, 89, 91, 95–9, 103, 111–12, 114, 118–20, 122, 128, 131, 138, 140, 144, 155–62, 164, 167–75 Creed, Creeds, 87, 147, 158 Crisp, Oliver D., 12, 113, 115, 119 Cross, 8, 11, 16, 22, 24, 29, 39, 43, 46, 54, 94, 96–7, 126, 128, 130–1, 135, 143, 152–3, 161, 165, 167 See also Atonement, Crucifixion Cross, Richard, 105 Crucifixion, 2, 14, 23, 54, 96–7, 99, 102, 129–30, 175 See also Cross Cyril, of Alexandria, 63–4, 70, 72–3, 162 Cyril, of Jerusalem, 162 Daniélou, Jean, 41 Davidson, Ivor J., 13, 111, 120 Death, 1–3, 7–8, 11, 19, 22–3, 29, 33, 43, 47–8, 51–8, 69, 77, 80, 83, 86,

90–1, 94–100, 103, 105, 122–4, 126, 129–31, 152, 155–7, 160, 165–6, 172 Deckker, Aat, 139 Deification, 65 See also Theosis Deliverance, 3, 7, 10, 78, 86, 157, 163, 174 Denney, James, 23 Desire, 1, 6, 19, 67–8, 87, 144, 159, 171, 174 Destiny, 11, 14, 19, 47, 87, 97, 103, 134–5, 157, 164, 170–2, 175 Didymus, the Blind, 41 Diodore, of Tarsus, 41 Docetism, 4 Donne, John, 123 Drama, Divine, reconciliation as, 2–3, 8, 16, 22–3, 27, 96, 156, 166–7, 173 Duffy, Stephen J., 148 Duns Scotus, John, 87, 105–7, 110 Ecclesiology, 13, 132–6, 139, 145, 150–1 See also Church Economy, Divine, 7, 12, 16, 18, 20–4, 25–34, 56, 121–2, 128, 131, 133, 136, 156, 171 See also Church Edmondson, Stephen, 33 Edwards, Denis, 77, 82 Edwards, Jonathan, 22, 25–6, 30 Election, 5–6, 8, 11–12, 19, 25, 28–9, 31, 45, 47, 51–2, 54–7, 59, 91, 119, 122–8, 131–6, 140, 143–4, 152, 155, 162, 173 Emery, Gilles, 24, 27 Epistemology, 10, 61, 91, 93, 98 Eschatology, 3, 8, 11, 13, 21, 56–7, 59, 78, 94, 101, 121, 134–5, 138, 157, 168–9, 172–3, 175 Essence, Divine, 3, 9–10, 13, 27, 38, 42, 51, 70–1, 115, 118, 120, 122, 125, 156, 158, 164–5, 167, 174 See also Immanent Trinity Eternity, 2–3, 7–9, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 22–3, 25–34, 37–9, 42, 51–2, 56, 58, 69, 73, 83, 121–8, 131–6, 138, 144, 152, 155–9, 161–2, 164, 166–8, 170, 173–4

Index of Authors and Subjects Ethics, 6–8, 13, 23, 87, 175 Eunomius, 40–2 Evangel, 4–5, 23, 25, 31–2, 155, 173, 175 Evil, 1, 9, 19, 46, 48–50, 58, 78, 80–7, 90–2, 95–100, 130 See also Sin Exemplar, Christ as, 94, 127, 172 Existence, Existential, 2, 6–7, 11, 39, 46, 55, 62, 65, 71–3, 77–81, 85–6, 89, 102–3, 121, 130–2, 134, 136, 142, 145, 147–9, 155, 158–60, 162–5, 167, 169–70, 173, 175 Experience, 2–3, 7, 14, 17, 21, 45–6, 77–8, 82–5, 87, 121, 131, 148, 157–8, 168 Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, 145, 149–51 Fabro, Cornelio, 16 Fackenheim, Emil L., 90–1, 98, 100–2 Faith, 1, 4, 6, 11, 13, 21, 24, 31, 35–6, 41, 49, 75, 80, 84, 90–4, 98–9, 101, 123, 126–30, 132–4, 136–7, 140–2, 144–5, 147–9, 151, 155–6, 163, 169–71, 173, 175 Fall, Fallenness, 12, 16, 24, 28, 50, 52–3, 70, 73–4, 78, 80–1, 83–7, 93, 95, 97, 103, 107–11, 114, 117, 119, 156 Fatherhood, of God, 2–3, 14, 25–6, 131, 135–6, 158–70, 172–5 Fellowship, with God, 1–3, 7, 9, 14, 15, 17–19, 27, 31–2, 53, 127, 130–1, 134–5, 155–75 Feminist theology, 47 Fiddes, Paul S., 46, 129 Finlay, Graeme, 85 Flannery, Austin, 133 Ford, David F., 17 Forgiveness, 7, 28, 43–4, 54, 57, 112, 115, 118, 129, 132 Forman, Mark, 163 Forsyth, P. T., 92, 94, 97–8 Frankfurt, Harry G., 67 Franks, R.S., 105–7, 110 Freedom, 2, 3, 5, 10–14, 18, 30, 54, 59, 78, 81–2, 87, 97, 103, 120, 122, 124–5, 127–30, 132, 136, 138–9, 141, 149, 150, 152, 157, 162, 165, 169, 175 Free will, human, 62, 67–8, 71, 124

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Girard, René, 58 Glorification, 8, 14, 19–20, 28, 45, 69, 103, 126, 135, 161, 166–7, 169, 170, 174 Glory, Divine, 4, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 39, 56, 69, 89, 97, 103, 124, 156–7, 159, 165, 167–8, 170, 175 Goldingay, John, 51, 53, 55 Gorringe, Timothy J. 17 God, Act and Being, 1–4, 12, 18, 31–4, 45–6, 50–3, 118–20, 124–7, 155–7, 166–8 Attributes of, See Perfections, Divine Doctrine of, and Salvation, 1–4, 8, 10–11, 13, 15–34, 35, 42–6, 50, 58, 106, 118–20, 136, 137–8, 155–7 Enjoyment of by creatures, 61, 99, 126, 133, 136, 156–7, 167–8, 171, 174–5 Essence of, See Essence, Divine and Immanent Trinity Fullness of, See Plenitude, Divine See also under specific Perfections, Economy, Trinity, Triunity, Missions, Perichoresis, Processions, Purpose Goodness, of creation/creatures, 1, 6, 64–9, 71, 73, 80–3, 84, 86–7, 89, 91 of God, 22, 27, 38, 61, 64–9, 71, 73–5, 131, 155, 170 Gospel, 5–6, 8, 12–13, 15–16, 22–5, 31, 48, 53, 56–9, 95–6, 121, 123, 127, 130, 136, 142–4, 147, 155–6, 158, 161, 175 Grace, 1, 3, 6, 8–13, 18, 21–5, 28–9, 31–2, 37, 43, 47–59, 63, 100, 109, 112–13, 116, 119, 120, 123–34, 138, 140–4, 147–9, 151–3, 156, 162–4, 168–9, 171–5 and Judgement, 47–59 Gray, J. Patrick, 84 Gregory, of Nazianzus, 66 Gregory, of Nyssa, 41–2, 66–8, 73–4, 138 Gregory Palamas, 172 Griffin, David Ray, 81 Griffith, Howard, 171 Gunton, Colin E., 20–1, 36, 49, 51, 122, 133

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Hallonsten, Gösta, 172 Hampson, Daphne, 47 Haught, John F., 82, 87 Helm, Paul, 120 Hermeneutics, 4, 20 Hester, James D., 163 Hilary, of Poitiers, 163 Hill, William J., 123 History, 1–4, 8, 11, 15–24, 27–34, 37, 40, 43, 50–1, 80–1, 83–6, 89–101, 103, 121, 124, 127–9, 132, 134, 142, 144–6, 149, 151–2, 155–6, 158–9, 163, 166–8, 172–3 Atonement and, 3–4, 8, 23–4, 29–30 Telos of, 1, 11, 14, 94–5, 97, 99, 175 Hodge, Charles, 29–30, 35–6, 112 Hoggard Creegan, Nicola, 10, 83 Holiness, 3, 6, 9, 18, 23, 25, 35, 37–8, 47, 49–59, 74–5, 93, 96, 98, 100, 131, 138, 160–1 Holmes, Stephen R., 8–9, 36, 41 Holy Spirit, 2–4, 7, 11, 13–14, 17–22, 25–7, 34, 36, 44, 48, 50–1, 53–5, 63, 69, 71–5, 77–9, 81–2, 85, 89, 92–3, 95, 98, 100–3, 121–2, 125–6, 129–31, 134, 139, 157–9, 161–4, 166, 168–75 See also Pneumatology Horton, Michael S., 20, 23, 34 Hospitality, Divine, 6, 17, 58 Hütter, Reinhard, 101 Huiothesia, 162–4 See also Adoption Humanism, 141 Humanity, 1–6, 8, 10–12, 14–15, 17–19, 28, 31–4, 37–9, 43–5, 47–50, 52–5, 58–9, 61–75, 77–87, 89, 91–3, 95–9, 102–3, 105, 107–19, 122–8, 131–6, 138, 140–6, 148–50, 152–3, 159–61, 164–6, 168, 170–1, 173–5 Human nature, 19, 28, 61–75, 111, 114, 118 See also Anthropology; Image, Divine Hunsinger, George, 138–9, 146 van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, 85 Hypostatic Union, 33, 111, 114, 166–7 See also Incarnation Iamblichus, 41

Image, Divine, 10, 14, 41, 44, 48, 61–6, 68–75, 78–9, 87, 99, 127, 134, 136, 170, 172 Imitation of God/Christ, 64, 68–9, 71–5 Immanent Trinity, 8, 18, 21, 24, 25–8, 30, 122, 125, 131, 136, 155, 167 See also Essence, Divine Immutability, Divine, 39–40, 43–5 Impassibility, Divine, 9, 37, 39–40, 42 Imputation, 85, 107–9, 114–15, 171 Incarnation, 1–3, 8, 10–17, 19–22, 27, 29, 32, 34, 51, 63–4, 69, 73–5, 78–9, 87, 92–8, 102, 106, 111, 118, 124–6, 128–9, 131, 159–61, 164–8, 170–1, 173–4 See also Jesus Christ, Hypostatic Union Incomprehensibility, 10, 61–75 Inexhaustibility, Divine, 18, 27, 156 Inheritance, of God, 155–75 Intercession, 102–3 See also Prayer Irenaeus, 65, 77, 86 Israel, 7, 19, 51, 89–103, 122–3, 132–6, 155–7, 159–60, 162–3 Jaeger, Werner, 42 Jenson, Robert W., 20, 22–3, 51, 84, 131, 133 Jesus Christ, 1–3, 7–11, 13, 15, 21–5, 27, 28, 30–4, 41, 43–6, 48–57, 59, 61, 63–6, 69, 71, 73–5, 77–9, 81, 84–6, 89–99, 101–3, 109–12, 114–19, 121–2, 124, 126–36, 137, 139–40, 142–6, 149–53, 157, 159–65, 169, 171, 173 See also Christology John of Damascus, 42 Johnson, W. Stacy, 124 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, 129 Joy, Divine, 14, 26, 44–6, 158, 167–8, 170, 174–5 Judgement, Divine, 1, 3, 9–10, 29, 46, 47–59, 79, 86, 97, 115, 118–19, 123, 126, 131, 140–1, 143, 157, 160, 172 Final, 9–10, 49, 56–8, 118–19, 135–6 and Grace, 46–59

Index of Authors and Subjects Jüngel, Eberhard, 165 Justice, Divine, 6, 9, 12, 37–9, 45–6, 48, 50–2, 95, 105–20, 159, 165 Justification, 7–9, 12–13, 16, 46–7, 49, 53, 56, 59, 82, 85, 103, 121–2, 126, 128–32, 135–6, 160, 163, 171 Kant, Immanuel, 50 Karfíková, Lenka, 41 Kenosis, 82–3 Kerygma, 4–5, 134 Kierkegaard, Søren, 93–4 Kilby, Karen, 141, 148, 152 King, Carolyn M., 86–7 Kingdom of God, 11, 13, 29, 78–9, 93, 95, 101, 121, 126, 130, 134–5, 138–9, 150, 152, 160, 167, 175 Lane, Tony, 51, 53 Language, and God, 4–5, 37–8, 40–2 Soteriological, 4–7, 16, 44 Lennan, Richard, 150 Lessing, G. E., 94 Lewis, Alan E., 86 Lewis, C. S., 84 Lewis, David, 116 Liberation, 3, 6–7, 130, 173 Lichtenberg, Bernhard, 103 Life, 1–4, 7–11, 13, 15, 18–23, 25–7, 29, 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38–46, 47, 51–5, 57–8, 61–7, 69, 71–5, 77–83, 85–6, 90–103, 116, 121–4, 126–7, 130–5, 139, 141–3, 145, 149, 152, 156–60, 162, 165, 167, 169–71, 174–5 of God, 3–4, 8–9, 18–34, 36, 38–40, 42–6, 51, 69, 73, 94, 122, 126, 156, 158, 167 Lindbeck, George, 36 Lloyd, Michael, 84 Love, 1–4, 6, 9, 11, 18, 20, 27–8, 30–1, 37–9, 44–6, 48–9, 51–3, 62, 64, 69, 75, 77, 85–7, 89, 95–7, 101, 103, 116, 122–6, 132, 144, 149, 153, 158, 160, 162–3, 168–70, 172 Divine, 1–4, 6, 20, 27–8, 51–3, 86–7, 97, 124, 163, 169 Ludlow, Morwenna, 138

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Luther, Martin, 129, 170–2 Lutheran theology, 20, 129 McCormack, Bruce L., 124–5 MacDonald, Neil B., 20 McFague, Sallie, 59 McIntyre, John, 43 MacKinnon, Donald M., 32 Mackintosh, Robert, 105 Macedo, Stephen, 77, 80 Majesty, of God, 2, 8, 20, 34, 50, 102, 159, 166, 170 Mann, W.E., 39 Marcellus of Ancyra, 167 Marcion, 48 Martel, Yann, 85 Martyn, J. Louis, 130 Materiality, of salvation-history, 3, 8, 11, 32, 79, 89, 156, 166 Mediator, 2, 12–13, 36, 112, 119, 138, 148–50, 161, 166–8, 172 Mercy, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12–13, 19, 33, 37–9, 45–7, 55, 77, 101, 109, 112–13, 119–20, 123, 131, 133, 153, 155–8, 163, 167, 170, 172 Merit, 12, 28, 30, 95, 105–20, 168 Metaphysics, 6, 8, 20, 22–5, 27, 31, 117, 119, 155, 164–5, 167, 173 Migliore, Daniel L., 132–3 Milbank, John, 80–1, 173 Ministry, 13, 16, 20, 32, 52, 95, 102, 137–8, 143, 149, 151–3, 166 Missiology, 13, 133 Missions, Divine, 8, 17, 22, 25–33, 53, 57, 78, 128, 130, 155, 158–61, 166–8 Modalism, 36 Modernity, 6, 9–10, 20, 37, 42, 52, 137, 141–4, 147, 165, 168, 173, 175 Mohler, R. Albert, 43 Molnar, Paul, 125 Moltmann, Jürgen, 86–7, 90, 165 Morris, T. V., 39 Mostert, Christiaan, 12, 52, 121 Muller, Richard A., 106, 109 Mystery, 5, 8, 20–2, 27, 32, 83, 84, 121, 122, 124, 133–4, 156–7 Nominalism, 6, 17, 21, 173–4

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O’Collins, Gerald, 123 O’Donovan, Oliver, 97 Obedience, of Christ, 26, 28–9, 33–4, 74, 96, 116, 131, 159–60, 173 Ober, Josiah, 77, 80 Omnipotence, Divine, 50, 68, 124 Ontology, 2, 23, 25, 68, 71–2, 85, 111, 127, 133, 136, 158, 160–1, 163–4, 168, 174 Ordo salutis, 157–8 Orthodoxy, Eastern, 122, 129, 172 Pactum salutis, 25, 28–31, 168 See also Covenant Page, Ruth, 78 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 17, 20–1, 49, 52, 94, 121, 134–5 Parousia, 56, 59 Participation, in God, 11, 14, 55, 69–75, 77, 102–3, 124, 127, 135–6, 169, 172–4 Perfection, of creation/creatures, 3, 11, 14, 18–19, 21, 25–6, 30, 61–75, 89, 91–103, 122, 131, 170, 175 Perfections, Divine, 8–9, 18, 30, 35–46, 61–2, 155–7 ‘Communicable’, 37 ‘Incommunicable’, 9, 37, 39 Perichoresis, Divine, 131, 158 Peters, Ted, 82 Physical world, redemption of, 3, 8, 11, 79, 89, 156, 166, 174–5 See also Materiality Plasticity, human, 10, 65, 68–9, 71 Platonism, 41, 173 Plenitude, Divine, 3, 10, 17–18, 23, 61, 75, 156–8, 164, 167–8, 170, 173 Pluralism, religious, 132–3, 137–53 Pneumatology, 20, 172 See also Holy Spirit Polkinghorne, John, 82 Postmodernism, 175 Power, Divine, 6, 20, 27, 79, 81–3 Praise, of God, 4, 13, 52, 121, 133–4, 136, 170 Prayer, 5, 11, 93, 102–3, 169, 175 Predestination, 30, 47, 123, 125, 135 Process theology, 81–2 Processions, Divine, 8, 17–18, 25–32

Propitiation, 43 Providence, 1, 91, 124 Punishment, 12, 28, 45, 56 105–20 Purpose, Divine, 1, 3, 8, 10–15, 17, 19–22, 24, 29–30, 33, 45, 56, 61, 66, 75, 78, 80, 84–7, 89, 94–5, 97–100, 103, 121, 127, 131–4, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 163, 167–8, 175 Rae, Murray A., 11 Rahner, Karl, 13, 137–53 Ransom, 44 Rationality, Reason 16–17, 68, 71–2, 92 Recapitulation, 86, 120 Reconciliation, 2, 6–8, 11, 13–16, 19, 23, 26, 34, 43, 53, 57, 78, 85, 89, 92, 94, 97–8, 100–3, 121, 123, 125–6, 131, 135–6, 138–9, 143, 145–6, 152, 155–6, 160, 171, 173 constitutive vs. illustrative, 6, 8, 23, 94, 172 grounding in character of God, 15–34 outworking of, 1–3, 8, 16, 22–3, 27, 96, 156, 166–7, 173 Redemption, 1, 3, 6–8, 10–11, 14, 20–2, 25–33, 36, 51, 58, 73, 77–8, 81, 83, 85–7, 89–94, 96–9, 101–3, 118–19, 121, 125–6, 135–6, 141, 153, 156–7, 159, 168, 170, 172–5 final, 9–10, 13, 56–8, 85, 87, 89–94, 96–9, 103, 118–19, 135–6, 153, 174–5 Reformed theology, 8, 13, 20, 25, 28, 31, 35, 39, 47, 123, 151, 168, 171, 173 Regeneration, 2, 14, 28, 92, 162, 172 Religion, 13, 133, 141–2 Repentance, 49, 55, 57, 147 Representation, 3, 19, 126–7, 171 Resurrection, 1–3, 7–8, 11, 29, 51, 54, 79, 94–7, 99, 101, 122, 124, 126, 128– 31, 133, 157, 160, 165, 168, 172 Revelation, Divine, 2–7, 9, 11, 16–17, 21–2, 31–2, 35–6, 49–51, 54, 89, 91–8, 99, 103, 126, 140, 145–6, 153, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 167, 169, 175 Righteousness, Divine, 33, 39, 49–50, 55, 128–32 Roper, Anita, 141

Index of Authors and Subjects Russell, Norman, 172 Sabellianism, 36 Sacrifice, 43, 85, 112 Salvation, 1, 3, 5–14, 15–18, 20–33, 35, 37, 39, 43–56, 58–9, 61, 64, 70, 75, 77–80, 85–7, 89–92, 94–7, 100, 102–3, 107, 110–12, 114, 117–20, 121–4, 128–39, 142–4, 148–53, 155–9, 161, 163–4, 166, 171–3, 175 and Doctrine of God, 1–4, 8, 10–11, 13, 15–34, 35, 42–6, 50, 58, 106, 118–20, 136, 137–8, 155–7 Sanctification, 3, 5, 8–9, 16, 26–7, 36, 47, 49, 53–6, 59, 85, 129, 172 Satisfaction, 12, 45–6, 105–20, 168, 171 Sauter, Gerhard, 128–9 Saviour, 3, 9, 17, 31–4, 52, 57, 64, 95, 155, 160–1, 172 Schleiermacher, F.D.E., 35, 37, 46 Scholem, Gershom, 101 Schwöbel, Christoph, 20–1, 122 Science, 10, 35–6, 80–2, 84, 92 Scott, James M., 162 Scripture, Holy, 5–7, 12–13, 16, 24, 28, 37, 41, 43, 45, 48, 59, 79–83, 86, 89, 91, 94–5, 99, 120, 122–3, 136, 139, 144–7, 151, 157–8, 162, 164, 173 ‘Secular parables’, 137–53 Sesboüé, Bernard, 41 Shedd, William G.T., 31, 105 Sheehan, Thomas, 148 Sherman, Robert J., 21 Silverberg, James, 84 Simplicity, Divine 9, 35–46, 61 Sin, 2, 6, 9, 12, 15, 19, 23–4, 27, 33, 43, 45–6, 48–50, 52–5, 57–8, 77, 80–1, 86, 90–1, 95–7, 103, 105, 107–20, 129–32, 156, 160, 166, 169, 172 See also Evil Smail, Thomas A., 162 Socinianism, 118 Sonderegger, Katherine, 128, 132 Sonship, of Christ, 14, 25–7, 32–4, 135–6, 158–75 Sophronius, 41

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Soteriology, 4–12, 14–22, 24–7, 29–32, 37–8, 42–6, 85, 89, 135, 137, 155, 172–3 Southgate, Christopher, 82 Sovereignty, Divine, 4–5, 11, 13, 122, 155, 161 Spence, Alan, 21, 32–4 Spiration, of Holy Spirit, 25–7 Substitution, 48, 105–20, 172 Sufficiency, Divine, 17, 22, 25, 62, 157 Swinburne, Richard, 20, 118 Tanner, Kathryn, 10, 79 Tattersall, Ian, 80 Terry, Justyn, 47–8, 53, 57 Theodore, of Mopsuestia, 41 Theodoret, of Cyrus, 41 Theology, 1, 4–5, 7–10, 12–18, 20–2, 24– 5, 27–31, 35–46, 48–9, 56, 58–9, 61–5, 77, 80–2, 84–5, 89–91, 98, 100, 103, 105–20, 121–3, 127–30, 133, 135–6, 138, 140, 147–8, 150, 155, 157, 166, 171–3 Theosis, 172–4 Thomas Aquinas, 10, 16–17, 21–2, 24, 26, 38–40, 71, 116–17, 172 Thompson, Geoff, 13, 139 Thompson, Marianne Meye, 162 Torrance, Alan J., 128 Torrance, Thomas F., 84 Tradition, 8–10, 13, 22, 25, 35, 39, 41–4, 46–7, 65, 79, 86–7, 92, 108, 135–6, 147, 158, 171–3 Transcendence, 3, 7, 10, 13, 18, 32, 47, 59, 61, 79, 81, 147–9, 156, 158–9, 166, 170–1 Trinity, God as, 6, 8–11, 15, 17–18, 20–2, 24–7, 29, 31–3, 35–7, 40–2, 48–9, 61–4, 68–70, 72–3, 75, 78, 82, 112, 122, 125–6, 131, 136, 164–5, 167 Triunity, of God, 3, 6, 8–11, 13–14, 18, 21–2, 25, 30, 31, 36, 48–51, 53–4, 58–9, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85–7, 103, 124–5, 129, 131, 133, 135–6, 156–7, 165, 167–70, 174–5 Trumper, Timothy R., 171 Turretin, Francis, 28–9

198

God of Salvation

Union with Christ, 2, 61, 69, 103, 157, 161–4, 168–70, 171–5 Universalism, 13, 53, 56, 119, 135–6, 147, 149–51, 153 See also Apokatastasis, Judgement, final Vaggione, Richard P., 41 Vatican Council II, 133, 141 Vengeance, Divine, 47–8, 51 Vicarious action, 90, 96, 116–17, 172 See also Representation, Substitution Victory, 52, 86, 95, 97, 166 Violence, 6, 17, 58 de Waal, Frans, 77, 80, 84 Weaver, J. Denny, 17, 58, 86 Webster, John, 8, 18, 50–1, 53, 55, 99, 168

Weinandy, Thomas G., 40, 164 Westhead, Nigel, 171 Westminster Shorter Catechism 126 Williams, Rowan, 169 Wilterdink, Garret A., 171 Wink, Walter, 83 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 159 Word, of God, 2, 4–5, 9, 13, 16, 19, 23, 32–4, 52, 61, 63–4, 73–5, 89, 91–3, 95, 98, 101, 124, 138–40, 143, 145–7, 151 Wrath, Divine, 3, 6, 37, 43–5, 47–9, 51–3, 112, 152–3, 160, 163 Yancey, Philip, 58 Yocum, John, 150 Zachman, Randall C., 171