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The God Revealed in Jesus Christ

2010-10-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

A Brief Introduction to Trinitarian Theology

From http://www.gci.org/god/revealed
Posted 10/11/2010

If we want the most accurate picture of God, we don’t need to look any further than Jesus Christ. In Jesus we meet God as God really is. “He who has seen me,” Jesus said, “has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of the Father. No one has ever seen God, but Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Father, has made him known (John 1:18).

In the United States, this article is available in booklet form. If you would like a printed copy to be mailed to an address in the U.S.A., click here.

In Jesus’ words and actions, we hear and see what matters most to every human being—that the Father loves us unconditionally. He sent Jesus out of his immeasurable love and his unbending commitment to human redemption. To know Jesus is to know God, which means that what we believe about Jesus is our theology.

In one way or another, we all have a theology. Simply stated, theology is “God knowledge.” In other words, whatever we believe to be true about God is our theology.

And certainly every church and denomination has a theology. It’s the framework that undergirds and informs their doctrines and practices.

Trinitarian theology sees the doctrine of the Trinity as the central and foundational doctrine that forms the basis for how we read the Bible and how we understand all points of theology.

It deals with not only the “how” and the “why” of doctrines and practices, but most importantly, it begins with the “who.” It asks, “Who is the God made known in Jesus Christ, and who are we in relation to him?”

Trinitarian theology, then, does not simply refer to a belief in the doctrine of the Trinity (the Bible teaching that there is one God, who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit). It refers to a Christ-centered way of understanding who God is.

Christ-centered

Trinitarian theology is first and foremost Christ-centered. As noted by Thomas F. Torrance (a leading Trinitarian theologian of the 20th century), Jesus is the unique Word of God to humanity and the unique Word of humanity to God. Because of this, even Holy Scripture is under his Lordship.

Jesus indicates that he is the key to understanding Scripture. He said to a group of Jewish religious leaders in John 5:39-40: “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

We seek to read and interpret the Bible through the lens of who Jesus is. He is the basis and logic of our theology—for he alone is the final and the full self-revelation of God.

Relationship-centered

Because it is Christ-centered, Trinitarian theology is by its very nature relational. Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, has become one with our flesh in order to be our saving substitute and to represent us as his brothers and sisters in the very presence of the Father (see John 1:14; Ephesians 1:9-10, 20-23).

Because of Christ, we have a relationship with God! The Holy Spirit dwells in us. We belong to the Father and are, in Christ, the beloved of the Father.

This means that the Christian life and faith are primarily about four kinds of personal relationship:

the internal relationships of holy love shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit from all eternity,
the relationship of the eternal Son with humanity in Jesus Christ incarnate,
the relationship of humanity with the Father through the Son and by the Spirit, and
the relationship of humans with one another as children of the Father redeemed by Jesus Christ.

Early history

In the 20th century, Trinitarian theology was advanced in the West largely through the work of Karl Barth and his students, especially Thomas F. Torrance and his brother James B. Torrance.

But this theology is as old as the Church itself. Trinitarian theology formed the basis of early Christian teaching. This is reflected in the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. Early prominent Trinitarian teachers and theologians included Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nazianzus.

Irenaeus (died A.D. 202) was a disciple of Polycarp (who had studied with the apostle John). Irenaeus sought to show that the gospel of salvation taught by the apostles and handed down from them is centered on Jesus. He saw that the Bible presents the Incarnation as a new point of beginning for humanity. Through the Incarnation, the entire human race was “born again” in Jesus, delivered from the sin and death that had enslaved the world since Adam. In Jesus, humanity has a new beginning and a new identity.

The biblical foundation of Irenaeus’ thinking included Paul’s statements in Romans 5, where Jesus is presented to us as the “second” (or “final”) Adam of the human race. “In Jesus,” wrote Irenaeus, “God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man [Adam], that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man...” (Against Heresies, III.18.7).

Irenaeus understood that Jesus took all humanity into himself, both as our representative before God and as our perfect substitute before God, thereby renewing the human race through his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

Irenaeus taught that this renewing, or re-creating, of the human race in Jesus through the Incarnation is not merely a work done “by” Jesus. Our salvation involves much more than just the forgiveness of our sins. It means our entire re-creation “in” and “through” Jesus.

Athanasius (died A.D. 373) defended the gospel against false teachers who denied the Son’s eternal divinity. This defense led to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity affirmed at the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325. In his treatise On the Incarnation, Athanasius wrote the following:

Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in the place of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die…. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection… (section 8).

What then was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done, save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Savior Jesus Christ?…

The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image. Thus it happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord’s body; yet because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished. Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid (section 13).

Wherefore the Word…being Himself incapable of death, assumed a mortal body, that He might offer it as his own in the place of all, and suffering for the sake of all through His union with it, “might bring to nought him that had the power over death, that is, the devil, and might deliver them who all their lifetime were enslaved by the fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15) (section 20).

By his death salvation has come to all men, and all creation has been redeemed (section 37).

Athanasius and Irenaeus emphasized that the Incarnation, when the Son of God became a human being, affected all humanity. God chose to save humanity through the birth, life, sacrificial death and resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God. This is the essence of the gospel understood by the early church and revealed in the Scriptures.

Gregory of Nazianzus (died A.D. 389) wrote of how Christ shared in our broken humanity through his Incarnation:

That which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole. (Epistle 101)

Christ united himself with our actual condition, that is, with fallen humanity, not a pre-fall humanity, in order to redeem it. As J.B. Torrance was fond of saying, the doctor became the patient in order to heal us. It’s important for us to know that God, in Christ, really loves us enough to embrace us at our sinful worst.

Who are you, Lord?

“Who are you, Lord?” was Paul’s anguished question on the Damascus Road, where he was confronted by the resurrected Jesus (Acts 9:5). He spent the rest of his life answering this question and then sharing the answer with all who would listen. The answer, revealed to us in Scripture, is the heart of the gospel and the focus of Trinitarian theology.

Jesus is fully God and fully human, and that will never change. His Incarnation did not end with his death or with his ascension. It continues forever. He was resurrected and ascended bodily. He will return bodily, the same as he departed. So when we say Jesus Christ, we are saying God, and we are also saying “humanity.”

As the One who is uniquely God (Creator and Sustainer of all) and also fully human, Jesus, in himself, is the unique union of God and humanity. In and through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, all humans are included in the life and love of God. As the apostle Paul wrote, the man Jesus is the one mediator for all people—past, present, and future (1 Timothy 2:5).

For all humanity

The scope of Christ’s vicarious human life extends to all who have ever lived.

Likewise, the Bible declares that Jesus died for everyone—and that his death applies to everyone now. Relevant passages include:

John 12:32: “I [Jesus], when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”
2 Corinthians 5:14: “Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.”
Colossians 1:19-20: “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
1 Timothy 2:3-6: “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men.”
1 Timothy 4:9-10: “This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance…that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.”
Hebrews 2:9: “We see Jesus, who…suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”
1 John 2:2: “[Jesus is] the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
See also John 1:29; 3:17; Romans 8:32; 2 Corinthians 5:18-19; Titus 2:11; and 1 John 4:14.

These passages make it plain that Jesus died for all humanity.

Jesus, the second Adam

In Romans 5, Paul addresses believers, but what he says applies to all humanity—believers and non-believers alike. According to Paul, through Jesus, all humans are…

Justified through the faith of Christ (vv. 1, 18).
At peace with God (v. 1).
Standing in his grace (v. 2).
Reconciled to God through the death of Jesus (v. 10).
Saved through Jesus’ life (v. 10).

This justification, reconciliation and salvation occurred:

When we were “still powerless” (v. 6).
When we were “still sinners” (v. 8).
When we were still “God’s enemies” (v. 10).

God did all this for us before we were even born. The benefit of what Jesus did so long ago extends to the past, to the present and into the future. Paul says, “how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life” (v. 10)—showing that salvation is not a one-time transaction, but an enduring relationship that God has with all humanity—a relationship forged within the person of Jesus Christ—the one who, in himself, has brought God and humanity together in peace.

Continuing in Romans 5, Paul compares the first Adam to Jesus, calling the latter the “second” or “final” Adam. Note Paul’s main points:

“Just as sin entered the world through one man [Adam]…[and] all sinned…” (v. 12).
“How much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ [the second Adam], overflow to the many?” (v. 15).
And, “just as the result of one trespass [that of the first Adam] was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness [that of Jesus, the second or final Adam] was justification that brings life for all men” (v. 18).

Jesus has not simply done something for us, he has done something with us by including us in his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

Therefore, we understand from Scripture that…

When Jesus died, all humanity died with him.
When Jesus rose, all humanity rose to new life with him.
When Jesus ascended, all humanity ascended and became seated with him at the Father’s side (Ephesians 2:4-6).

When people become believers, they begin to know Christ and enjoy their relationship with him.

Salvation is re-creation

The miracle of the Incarnation is not something that happened “once upon a time,” now past. It changed how the entire cosmos is “wired”—it is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Incarnation changed everything forever, reaching back to all human history, and reaching forward to encompass all time as it unfolds.

Paul speaks of this transformation in Romans 7:4, where he says that even while we are alive, we are already dead to the law by the body of Christ. Jesus’ death in human flesh for us, though a historic event, is a present reality that applies to all humanity (past, present and future). “You died,” Paul says to the Colossians, “and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Even before we literally die, therefore, we are already dead in Jesus’ death and alive in Jesus’ resurrection.

Our union with Christ in his life, death, resurrection and ascension is expressed in Ephesians 2:5-6. Here Paul asserts that just as we are dead already in the mystery of Jesus’ substitutionary death, we have also already been “made alive together with him” and we are “raised up together with him” and “seated together with him in the heavenly realms.” All this comes from God’s grace.

God’s union with humanity in Christ includes every human being, even those who lived before Jesus came.

The faith of Christ

What does it mean to be saved by grace through faith? Does it mean that we are saved by something that we do, a human work of faith? If it is, what happens to us when our faith is weak or fails? The good news is that Jesus has done everything necessary for our salvation from start to finish, including believing for us. David Torrance writes:

We are saved by Christ’s faith and obedience to the Father, not ours. My brother Tom [Torrance] often quoted Gal. 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Such is the wording of the KJV, which I believe is a correct translation of the Greek….

Other translators, like those of the New International Version, apparently because they found it so difficult to believe we can live by Christ’s faith rather than our faith, have altered the text to make it read, “I live by faith in the Son of God”! – something altogether different! That translation takes away from the vicarious nature of Christ’s life of faith. It is by his faith [not ours] that we are saved and live! Our faith is a thankful response to his faith.

When we look back along our lives and ponder how disobedient we at times have been and continue to be, it is marvelously comforting to know that Christ gives us his life of obedience to the Father and that it is Christ’s obedience which counts. We are saved by his obedience, not ours. (An Introduction to Torrance Theology, pp. 7-8)

In our place

The Bible tells us that Jesus is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end (Revelation 22:13). That is why we can freely trust him to be our all in all and not even worry about whether our faith itself is good enough or strong enough. Thomas Torrance explains it this way:

Jesus steps into the actual situation where we are summoned to have faith in God, to believe and trust in him, and he acts in our place and in our stead from within the depths of our unfaithfulness and provides us freely with a faithfulness in which we may share…. That is to say, if we think of belief, trust or faith as forms of human activity before God, then we must think of Jesus Christ as believing, trusting, or having faith in God the Father on our behalf and in our place….

Through his incarnational and atoning union with us our faith is implicated in his faith, and through that implication, far from being depersonalised or dehumanised, it is made to issue freely and spontaneously out of our own human life before God. Regarded merely in itself, however, as Calvin used to say, faith is an empty vessel, for in faith it is upon the faithfulness of Christ that we rest and even the way in which we rest on him is sustained and undergirded by his unfailing faithfulness. (The Mediation of Christ, pp. 82-84)

But what about human choice?

If it is the life, faith and obedience of Jesus Christ that saves us and includes us in that salvation, what is our role? Before discussing the role of human response, it will be helpful to review the following scriptural truths: Through union with Jesus, all humanity is…

reconciled to the Father,
liked, loved and wanted by the Father,
accepted “in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6, KJV), and
forgiven (no record of sin and no condemnation).

The gospel declares not the possibility or the potential of these things being true for us, but a reality that we are urged to accept. By the Holy Spirit we may freely welcome the truth and walk in it, but God does not force us to accept the truth. God insists that love must be freely given and freely received; it cannot be coerced, or it is not love.

While the integrity of our God-given human freedom must be maintained, it must also be maintained that human beings do not start from a neutral point where they may equally and freely choose to love or reject God. Since the truth of every human being is already implicated in the truth of Jesus Christ, to reject God would be an anti-truth move and therefore an anti-free one. Truth and freedom always go together, as Karl Barth never hesitates to remind us:

The real freedom of man is decided by the fact that God is his God. In freedom he can only choose to be the man of God, i.e., to be thankful to God. With any other choice he would simply be groping in the void, betraying and destroying his true humanity. Instead of choosing freedom, he would be choosing enslavement. (Church Dogmatics IV.1, p. 43)

So what is our role? We may freely choose to respond to the gospel with thankful and hopeful hearts, encouraging and building one another up in the Body of Christ. As we celebrate the reality of grace together in our communities of worship, our lives are truly transformed.

Personal response

We must take care not to confuse what is true in Jesus for all humanity with each individual’s personal response to that truth.

We do not “decide for Christ” in the sense that our personal decision causes our salvation. Rather, we accept what is ours already in Christ, placing our trust in the one who has already trusted for us in our place.

When we personally believe the gospel, which is to accept what is already ours by grace, we begin to participate in God’s love for us. We begin to live out the new creation that God, prior to our ever believing, made us to be in Christ.

There is the general, or objective, truth about all humanity in Jesus, and also the personal, or subjective, experience of this truth.

Objectively, all people, past, present and future, are justified already; all are sanctified; all are reconciled in Jesus in and through what he has done as their representative and substitute. In Jesus, objectively, the old self has already passed away; in him, objectively, we are already the new humanity, represented as such by him before and with God.

However, although all people are already objectively redeemed by Jesus Christ, not all have yet personally and subjectively awakened to and accepted what God has done for them. They do not yet know who they truly are in union with Jesus.

What is objectively true for everyone must be subjectively and personally received and experienced through repentance and faith. Repentance and faith do not cause a person’s salvation, but salvation cannot be experienced and enjoyed without them. Repentance and faith are themselves gifts of God.

In the Scriptures, we find some verses that speak to the general/objective nature of salvation, while others speak to the personal/subjective nature of salvation. Both are real and true—but the personal is true only because the general is a pre-existing reality.

These two categories are found throughout Scripture—both sometimes occurring in one passage, as happens in 2 Corinthians 5:18-21. Paul starts in verses 18-19 with the objective/universal nature of salvation: “All this is from God, who reconciled [past tense] us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

Here is a general truth that applies objectively to all—all are already reconciled to God through what Jesus has done in union with all humanity.

Having established the general truth in 2 Corinthians 5:18-21, Paul goes on in verses 20-21 to address the subjective/personal: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.”

How can all be “reconciled” already and yet the invitation go out to “be reconciled”—suggesting a reconciliation yet to occur? The answer is that both are true—these are two aspects of one truth. All are already reconciled in Christ—this is the universal and objective truth—but not all yet embrace and therefore experience their reconciliation with God.

To be reconciled and yet not know and experience it is to continue to live as though one is not reconciled. Having one’s eyes opened by the Spirit to this reconciliation, choosing to embrace it, and then experiencing it does not cause the reconciliation to occur, but it does make it personally realized.

Thus, the evangelistic invitation from Christ’s ambassadors (verse 20) is to “be reconciled.” But this appeal is not to do something that would cause God to reconcile us; rather it is an appeal to receive the reconciliation that exists already with God in Christ. As we welcome the truth of the gospel, we can’t help but worship our Lord and Savior!

Part 2: Questions & Answers

Let’s now address several common questions and objections to Trinitarian theology.

Q Are you saying there is no difference between a Christian and a non-Christian?

A No. We are saying that because of who Jesus is and what he has done, all humans—believers and non-believers—are united to God in and through Jesus. As a result, all people are reconciled to God; all have been adopted as his dearly loved children. All, in and through Jesus, are included in the Triune love and life of God: Father, Son and Spirit.

However, not all people know who Christ is and therefore who they are in Christ. They are not believers.

One way to speak of the distinction between believers and non-believers is to say that all people are included in Christ (universally) but only believers actively participate (personally) in that inclusion.

We see these distinctions spoken of throughout the New Testament, and they are important. However, we must not take these distinctions too far and think of non-believers as not accepted by and not loved by God. To see them in this way would be to overlook the great truth of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done already for all humanity. It would be to turn the “good news” into “bad news.”

When we see all humanity in Christ, some of the categories we might have held in our thinking fall away. We no longer see non-believers as “outsiders” but as children of God in need of understanding how much their Father loves them, likes them, and wants them. We approach them as brothers and sisters. Do they know who they are in Christ? No—and it is our privilege to tell them of God’s love for them.

Q If all are reconciled already to God in Christ, why does Scripture say so much about repentance and faith?

A In the New Testament, the Greek word translated “repentance” is metanoia, which means “change of mind.” All humanity is invited and enabled by the Spirit to experience a radical change of mind away from sinful egoistic self-centeredness and toward God and his love experienced in union with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Notice Peter’s invitation to this change of mind in Acts 2:38-39: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

God does not forgive people in exchange for their repentance and belief. As Scripture proclaims, forgiveness is an unconditional free gift that is entirely of grace. It is a reality that exists for us even before we enter into it in our experience.

The gospel truth—the truth about Jesus and about all humanity in union with God in Jesus—is that God has already forgiven all humanity with a forgiveness that is unconditional and therefore truly free: “Therefore,” invites Peter, “repent and believe this truth—and be baptized by the Spirit with the mind of Jesus—which involves supernatural assurance that we truly are the children of God.”

Repentance is a change of mind and heart; it involves coming to know who Jesus is for us and who we are in him, apart from anything we have done or will yet do. Through repentance, which is God’s gift to us, our minds are renewed in Jesus through the Spirit and we turn to him and begin to trust him.

The Spirit moves us to repent because our forgiveness has already been accomplished in Christ, not in order to be forgiven. We repent because we know that, in Jesus, our sins have already been forgiven and that, in Jesus, we are already a new creation. In this repentance, we turn from the alienation within us as the Spirit baptizes our minds in Jesus’ acceptance and in the assurance that comes with it.

Q Why does Paul say that if you don’t have the Spirit, you don’t belong to Christ?

A Romans 8:9 says, “You are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.”

The sentence “And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” is not meant to be lifted out of context and turned into a proof that some people do not belong to God. In the context of this passage, Paul is addressing believers; he is not making a statement here about non-believers. He is warning disobedient believers who are refusing to submit to the Holy Spirit in their lives. In effect, he is saying, “You say that the Spirit of God is in you, and you are right. However, your life should be reflecting the presence of the Spirit of Christ.” As Paul says in verse 12, “We have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature…” (see verses 10-17).

Q If the world is reconciled, why would Jesus say that he doesn’t pray for the world?

A In John 17:9, Jesus says: “I pray for them [his disciples]. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.”

Just because Jesus said in one instance that he was not praying for the world, but instead for his disciples, does not imply that he never prayed for the world. It is just that right then, his emphasis was on his disciples.

It is also important to understand how John uses the word “world” (kosmos in Greek) in the flow of his Gospel. At times the word can refer to all people (who are all loved by God; see John 3:16) while at other times it can refer to the worldly “system” that is hostile toward God.

It is apparently this system that Jesus has in mind in John 17. Since this system resists God, Jesus’ prayer does not include it. He is not praying for the world in its current form, rather, he is praying for a group of people whom he can use to declare his love for the world.

Later on in his prayer, Jesus does have the whole world in mind. He prays that all of his followers “may be one, Father…so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Just as John 3:16 said, God loves the whole world and wants to save everyone.

Q If all are reconciled already to God, why does Scripture speak of hell?

A Scripture speaks of hell because it is the natural consequence of rebellion against God. That is why Christ came. God allows us to respond to what he has done for us in Christ. We are included in Christ, but we can refuse that inclusion. We are reconciled to the Father, but we can refuse that reconciliation.

However, such refusal does not negate what God has done for all humanity in Christ.

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis wrote:

There are only two kinds of people in the end; those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Q Why does the Bible talk about people whose names are not in the book of life?

A Revelation 13:8 says, “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.”

Revelation 17:8 says, “The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast.”

We need to consider the literary context of these statements in Revelation. John writes using a literary genre (style) known as apocalyptic. This genre, which was commonly used by Jewish writers in John’s day, is highly symbolic. There is not a literal “book of life.” The “book of life” is a figure of speech, a symbolic way of referring to those who are in allegiance with the Lamb. These verses in Revelation refer to people who reject the new life that Christ has already secured for them.

Q Why does Peter say it is hard to be saved?

A First Peter 4:17-18 says: “For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And, ‘If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?’”

The point of verses 17-18 is found in verse 19: “So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.”

Peter has been encouraging persecuted believers to live in accord with their identity as children of God and not like those who live in debauchery and idolatry (verses 1-5).

As part of his argument, he points out that persecution is participation in the suffering of Christ, and therefore if believers are to suffer, they should suffer for their faith and godly behavior instead of suffering for sinful and ungodly behavior (verses 12-16). His point is that believers, who know that Jesus, the Savior, is the merciful Judge of all, should not be living in the same base and evil ways as those who oppose Christ.

It is actually impossible for anyone to be saved—were it not for Christ. Christ has done what is impossible for humans to do for themselves, but those who reject Christ are not participating in Christ’s suffering; they participate in their own suffering as they reap what they sow.

Q What is everlasting contempt and destruction?

A Daniel 12:2 reads, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Second Thessalonians 1:6-9 says, “God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power.”

Both of these passages refer to the time of the final judgment when Jesus is “revealed” (sometimes referred to as the Second Coming or Jesus’ “return in glory”). This is the time when all humans will see clearly who Jesus is and thus who they are in union with Jesus. And this “revealing” presents to them a choice—will they say “yes” to their inclusion in Christ, or will they say “no”?

Their decision neither creates nor destroys their inclusion, but it does determine their attitude toward it—whether they will accept God’s love for them and enter the joy of the Lord, or continue in alienation and frustration (and thus in shame and everlasting contempt and destruction). The destruction is a self-destruction as they refuse the purpose for which they have been made, and the redemption that has already been given to them.

In the Judgment, everyone will face Jesus, the Judge who died for all, and they will have to decide whether they will trust him. Those who trust their Savior take part in the joy of the life God has given them in Christ. Those who reject him continue in their hostility and the hell that goes with it.

Q What about the “narrow gate”?

A Jesus says in Matthew 7:13-14: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Jesus is speaking of this life now—on this side of the general resurrection. In this day, most are living on the “broad road” of destruction. Though they are included in Christ, they live as if they were not. Only the “few” have in this time embraced the truth that is in Jesus—and it is he who is “the narrow gate.”

Jesus addresses a similar issue in Matthew 7:21-23: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”

These people have done miracles, and in doing so have deceived many. They claim to know Jesus, and though Jesus obviously knows them (he is omniscient), he does not see himself in them with regard to their actual faith or behavior, and so he proclaims, “I never knew you.”

Q But don’t we become God’s children only at the point of belief?

A John 1:12-13 says, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born neither of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”

We have already seen in Scripture that God has included everyone in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. When he died, we all died; when he rose; we all were born again in him. Therefore all humans are, from God’s perspective, already his children. He gives people that “right” long before they accept it.

Those who believe and accept Jesus enter into and begin to experience the new life that has been theirs all along, the new life that has been “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). In other words, what has been objectively true for them all along becomes subjectively and personally experienced when they become believers.

Q Is this universalism?

A Not in the sense that every person will be saved regardless of whether they ever trust in Christ. There is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). But Jesus’ atonement is universal (Romans 5:18).

Scripture shows that God, in Christ, has reconciled all humans to himself (Colossians 1:20), but he will never force any person to embrace that reconciliation. Love cannot be coerced.

God wants sons and daughters who love him out of a joyful response to his love, not zombies who have no mind or choice of their own. As has been revealed in Jesus Christ, God is love in his innermost being, and in God the Persons of the Trinity relate to one another in the freedom of love.

To hope that all people will finally come to Christ is not universalism—it is simply Christian and reflects the heart of God (1 Timothy 2:3-6; 2 Peter 3:9). However, we cannot profess to know whether every person will finally come to faith.

Q If we are included already, why struggle to live the Christian life?

A Some people do not like the idea that others who do not work as hard as they do will end up with the same reward as they (see parable of the laborers in the vineyard, Matthew 20:12-15). But this concern overlooks the truth that no one, no matter how hard they work, deserves salvation. That is why it is, for everyone, a free gift.

However, in Scripture we learn that our participation now in Jesus’ love and life bears good fruit and personal joy that stretch into eternity. Living in ungodly ways results in pain, anguish and misery for oneself and others. That is why God doesn’t want us to live that way. Consider the following passages:

1 Corinthians 3:11-15: “No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.”

Galatians 6:7-8: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.”

Q What about Christian mission? If all are included already in God’s love and life through Jesus, why do we proclaim the gospel to the world and make disciples for Jesus?

A It is Jesus’ union with each of us that provides the basis and foundation for every aspect of our life, including our participation in mission and ministry with Jesus. The love of Christ compels us to take part in what Jesus is doing in the world through the Spirit. We declare the gospel and invite all people to receive and embrace it. In doing so, we hope what is true of them already (in an objective sense) will be experienced by them personally (in a subjective sense).

Q How do we explain John 6:44?

A John 6:44 says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

The Jewish religious leaders were seeking to deflect Jesus’ seemingly outrageous claim: “I am the bread of life that came down from heaven” (John 6:41). This statement was tantamount to claiming divine status.

Jesus’ reply to the Jewish leaders’ complaint concerning this claim was that they “stop grumbling” (v. 43) and realize that “no one can come to me [the bread of heaven] unless the Father who sent me draws him…” (v. 44). Jesus’ point is that the people would not be responding, except that God was making it possible for them to do so.

In this passage, Jesus is not limiting the number of people who are drawn to him; he is showing that he is doing the Father’s work. Elsewhere he says: “When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). And since Jesus does only what his Father wants, John 12:32 shows that the Father indeed draws all people to Jesus.

Q If the entire cosmos is included in Christ, why is there still evil in the world?

A The fullness of the kingdom of God will not arrive until Jesus’ Second Coming. As Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:19-20).

In the meantime, we find assurance in Jesus’ words: In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world (John 16:33).

Q How does this theology compare to Calvinism and Arminianism?

A In comparing and contrasting Christian theologies, we are talking about different approaches among Christian brothers and sisters who seek to serve the same Lord. Thus, our discussion should reflect respect and gentleness, not arrogance or hostility.

Calvinism is a theology that developed from the teachings of the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). Calvinism emphasizes God’s sovereignty in election and salvation. Most Calvinists define God’s “elect” as a subset of the human race; Christ died for only some people (“limited atonement”). Those he did die for, however, were truly and effectively saved in the finished work of Christ, long before they became aware of it and accepted it. According to Calvinist doctrine, it is inevitable that those Christ died for will come to faith in him at some point. This is called “irresistible grace.”

Trinitarian theology’s main disagreement with Calvinism is over the scope of reconciliation. The Bible asserts that Christ made atonement “not only for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). And while Trinitarian theology rejects the restrictive extent of “limited atonement” and the determinism of “irresistible grace,” it agrees with Calvinism that forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, justification, etc. were all accomplished effectively by what Christ did. These gospel truths have nothing to do with what we do or don’t do.

Arminianism derives from the teachings of another Protestant reformer, Jacob Arminius (1560-1609). Arminius insisted that Jesus died for all humanity, and that all people can be saved if they take necessary, personal action, which is enabled by the Spirit. This theology, while not ignoring God’s sovereignty, tends to rely on a person’s human decision and free will. Its premise is that salvation, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, justification, etc. are not actually effective until a person has faith.

Trinitarian theology differs from Arminianism over the effectiveness of the reconciliation. Atonement, or at-one-ment between God and humanity, is only a hypothetical possibility for Arminians; it does not become an accomplished actuality until one’s decision of faith. Trinitarian theology, however, teaches that the atonement and reconciliation is objectively true even before it has been subjectively accepted and experienced.

While Calvinism and Arminianism emphasize different aspects of salvation theology, Trinitarian theology has attempted, as did Church Fathers Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory, to maintain in harmony the wideness emphasized by Arminians with the effectiveness emphasized by Calvinists.

Q What is perichoresis?

A The eternal communion of love that Father, Son and Spirit share as the Trinity involves a mystery of inter-relationship and interpenetration of the divine Persons, a mutual indwelling without loss of personal identity. As Jesus said, “the Father is in me, and I in the Father” (John 10:38). Early Greek-speaking Christian theologians described this relationship with the word perichoresis, which is derived from root words meaning around and contain. Each person of the Trinity is contained within the others; they dwell in one another.

Tips on Biblical Exegesis

In this booklet, we have sought to address typical questions and objections that arise as people consider Trinitarian theology. No doubt, there are other verses that bring similar questions or objections. What we have sought to do in this booklet is to demonstrate a Trinitarian, Christ-centered approach to reading and interpreting all passages of Holy Scripture.

Some object to the idea of interpreting Scripture. They say, “I just let the Bible say what it means.” This idea, though admirable, is not accurate. The act of reading is, necessarily, an act of interpretation. So the issue is not whether to interpret; it is this: What criteria do we use in interpreting as we read?

We always bring to Scripture certain ideas and advance assumptions. What we are urging here is that we come to Scripture with the truth of who Jesus Christ is as the beginning point and the ongoing criterion by which we read and interpret the Holy Scriptures. Jesus must be the “lens” through which all Scripture is read.

Therefore, in reading Scripture, we recommend thinking about the following questions:

How does this passage line up with the gospel, which answers the question, “Who is Jesus?”
Is this passage referring to the universal, objective salvation of all humanity in Jesus, or is it referring to the personal, subjective experience of accepting or rejecting that salvation?
What is the historical, cultural, and literary context?
How is this passage worded in other translations? Other translations can sometimes help us see passages from different perspectives. It’s also helpful to check Greek lexicons and other translation helps, because some of the richness and subtleties of the Greek New Testament are lost in translations into other languages.
For a guide to biblical exegesis, you may find it helpful to consult How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart (Zondervan, 1981, 1993) or Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers, by Michael J. Gorman (Hendrickson, 2009).

Key points of Trinitarian, Christ-Centered Theology

Following are some basic precepts of the theology presented in this booklet.

The Triune God created all people to participate through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ in the love relationship enjoyed by the Father, Son and Spirit.
The Son became human, the man Jesus Christ, to reconcile all humanity to God through his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension.
The crucified, resurrected and glorified Jesus is the representative and the substitute for humanity at the right hand of the Father, and he draws all people to himself by the power of the Holy Spirit.
In Christ, humanity is loved and accepted by the Father.
Jesus Christ paid for all our sins—past, present and future—and there is no longer any debt to pay.
The Father has in Christ forgiven all our sins, and he eagerly desires that we turn to him.
We can enjoy his love only when we believe that he loves us. We can enjoy his forgiveness only when we believe he has forgiven us.
When we respond to the Spirit by turning to God, believing the good news and picking up our cross and following Jesus, the Spirit leads us into the transformed life of the kingdom of God.

Recommended Resources for Further Study

To study Trinitarian, Christ-centered theology in greater depth, we recommend the following resources, listed alphatbetically:

Books

Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (Harper & Row, 1959; 130 pages)

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Eerdmans, 2000; 210 pages)

Graham Buxton, Dancing in the Dark (Paternoster, 2001; 310 pages)

Robert F. Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment (Eerdmans, 2002; 522 pages)

Elmer Colyer, How to Read T.F. Torrance (InterVarsity, 2001; 393 pages)

Gerrit Scott Dawson, editor, An Introduction to Torrance Theology, (T&T Clark, 2007, 179 pages)

Trevor Hart, Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology (Wipf & Stock, 2005; 248 pages)

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford University Press, 1993; 320 pages)

Michael Jinkins, Invitation to Theology (InterVarsity, 2001; 278 pages)

C. Baxter Kruger, The Great Dance (Regent, 2000; 121 pp.)

Paul Louis Metzger, The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular Through the Theology of Karl Barth (Wipf & Stock, 2005; 252 pages)

Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance (Ashgate, 2009; 382 pages)

James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (InterVarsity, 1996; 130 pages)

Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Helmers & Howard, 1992; 126 pages)

GCI articles

Grace Communion International has hundreds of helpful articles that address Christian belief and practice. Following is a list of articles (with web addresses noted) that unpack key aspects of GCI’s Trinitarian, Christ-centered theology.

Good News for Bad People www.gci.org/gospel/badpeople

The Gospel Really Is Good News www.gci.org/gospel/reallyis

Getting a Grip on Repentance www.gci.org/gospel/repentance

Predestination—Does God Really Let You Choose Your Own Fate? www.gci.org/god/predestination

“Theology: What Difference Does It Make?” www.gci.org/god/theology

“The Trinity: Just a Doctrine?” www.gci.org/god/trinity

“Foundations of Theology for Grace Communion International” www.gci.org/av/theology

The Manhattan Declaration

2010-08-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Manhattan Declaration

A Call of Christian Conscience

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

the sanctity of human life
the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
___________________________________

Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience

Drafted October 20, 2009
Released November 20, 2009

Preamble

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes – from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.

Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.

Declaration

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Life

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with sadness that pro- abortion ideology prevails today in our government. Many in the present administration want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense. Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. The Supreme Court, whose infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal protection, continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental constitutional right, though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions on abortion. The President says that he wants to reduce the “need” for abortion—a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and effective pro-life laws cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are snuffed out prior to birth. Our commitment to the sanctity of life is not a matter of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees of both major political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John Paul II described as “the culture of death.” We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable among us.

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable. As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries. The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning.” This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues. At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of “liberty,” “autonomy,” and “choice.”

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn children. Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear. We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and in every condition.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are witnessing cases of genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research. And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

Marriage

The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24

This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33

In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself. Marriage then, is the first institution of human society—indeed it is the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation. In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as “holy matrimony” to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits—the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves. Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country. Perhaps the most telling—and alarming—indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our society—and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the out- of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average—is paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love. We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life. In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of the marriage covenant.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct. We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward. We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are sinners who have fallen short of God’s intention for our lives. We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and forgiveness. We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it. Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners. For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to “a more excellent way.” As his disciples we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us, and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of sexual morality and the nature of marriage. Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard their unions as truly marital. They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a reproductive unit. This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human person, but truly part of the personal reality of the human being. Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual— on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation. That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law, consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians, believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is a denial of equality or civil rights. They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the status of being “married.” It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it? On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of marriage will not affect another cannot stand. Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships. Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships? No. The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and influential.

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages” sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral. Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends. Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what marriage is.

And so it is out of love (not “animus”) and prudent concern for the common good (not “prejudice”), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do otherwise? The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God’s creation covenant. Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and his church. And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is marriage.

Religious Liberty

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21

The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development. The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ. Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: “Did God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror? Not so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion is no attribute of God” (Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4). Thus the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God—a dignity, as our founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right reason.

Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law—such persons claiming these “rights” are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti- discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the judicial imposition of “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital “civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion. We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.¹ Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust—and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust—undermine the common good, rather than serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

Drafting Committee

Robert George
Professor, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

Timothy George
Professor, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

Chuck Colson
Founder, the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview (Lansdowne, VA)

¹Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America

Copyright 2009 Charles Colson, Robert George, Timothy George

Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology - A book review

2010-07-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

Neil B. MacDonald and Carl Trueman (eds.), Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster Theological Monographs, 2008), xiii and 181. £19.99 (paperback)

Reviewed by Jesse Couenhoven (November 13, 2009)

This collection of seven essays takes up John Calvin and Karl Barth’s views about the sacraments, the atonement, and the nature and function of Scripture. It will be of greatest interest to readers who are interested in thinking about Barth’s relation to traditional reformed theology, as most of the essays are written with that question in mind, and from the perspective of authors who favor reformed orthodoxy—but most of the essays also serve as capable introductions to Calvin or Barth’s thought on the topic they take up. As with any such collection, the essays vary in quality, and in their interests. Some essays compare and contrast the two theologians, while others focus on one. My own discussion of this text summarizes less than it concentrates on features I found salient in each of these essays.

The book lacks a typical editor’s introduction, but the first essay, Carl Trueman’s “Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology: Historical Prolegomena,” is meant to fulfill something like that role by “setting the scene” (3). Trueman’s main purpose is to offer an historical overview of Barth’s relationship to the confessional reformed theology that preceded him. In the earlier sections of Trueman’s essay, his central argument appears to be that Barth “did not…grapple with primary texts as one might have expected an historian of dogma to do” (20). Rather, Barth’s understanding of 16th and 17th century Reformed (and Lutheran) theology was mediated through authors like Heppe and Schmid. Scholars sometimes take a thesis of this sort as an opportunity to suggest that the figures in question might have more room for rapprochement than is commonly thought, but Trueman moves in the opposite direction: Barth’s misunderstanding of classic Reformed orthodoxy results in a radical break, a theology that might look, formally, Reformed, but which materially lacks continuity with the Reformed tradition. The final pages of the essay focus on this latter point by criticizing Barth’s attitude towards doctrine and Scripture. However, Trueman presents little evidence that Barth misunderstood the (imprecisely evoked) Reformed traditions about which Trueman worries; moreover, he fails to explain how such misunderstandings are connected to Barth’s well-known disagreements with Reformed orthodoxy.

Trueman makes a number of theological judgments about Barth’s views without seriously engaging Barth’s main theological works. Happily, however, the tone, content, and approach of the three pairs of essays that make up the rest of this slender volume are markedly more theological and irenic than the introduction. The final pair of essays, Stephen Holmes’s “Calvin on Scripture” and Craig Bartholomew’s “Calvin, Barth, and Theological Interpretation” might serve as a more appropriate introduction to the other four essays in the book, since they emphasize the import and challenge of encountering Scripture for both Barth and Calvin—a topic central to the essays in this book, which stress the principle that Scripture is the norm of Christian doctrine.

Against the background of modern theology that is poor at Scriptural exegesis, and historical criticism that lacks an interest in theological interpretation, Bartholomew focuses his discussion on what Calvin and Barth have in common. His task is made easier by the fact that he illumines Barth’s views by attending as much to what Barth actually does with Scripture as what Barth says about Scripture. Bartholomew notes that, unlike most academics today, Calvin and Barth share the view that God speaks to us through his written Word. Barth seeks to make room for historical criticism but does not allow it—or anything else—the hermeneutical priority which the Word itself should have. Bartholomew also disputes claims that Barth’s hermeneutics are postmodern, given that the latter does believe in divine authorial intent. This move highlighted for me a way in which Bartholomew’s discussion lacks nuance: Calvin believes that the human authors of Scripture knew and intended to write of Christ, but Barth is not committed to that view, which makes his view of the literal meaning of Scripture more open to différance than Bartholomew suggests. Bartholomew is right to insist that Barth’s hermeneutics are closer to Calvin than Derrida, but the fact is that he develops concerns of both thinkers in intriguing ways.

Holmes suggests the Institutes are not properly read as a summary statement of Christian doctrine but as an introduction to and preparatory for Calvin’s commentaries (150). I fail to see why the Institutes should not be all of these things at once, but resonate with Holmes’s larger warning that we should be careful about projecting our concerns onto Calvin’s writings, as well as his desire to make reading Calvin’s commentaries more central to reading Calvin. Holmes argues that, for Calvin, the “one constant message running through…Scripture…is simply the person and work of Jesus Christ” (155). At the same time, texts are written in ways that accommodate human readers, which leads Homes to ask how we might know what in Scripture counts as accommodation (159). Holmes’s answer is that Calvin could address this problem with an adequate account of Christological accommodation, one that gives us confidence that God’s revelation is trustworthy, but he appears to have hesitations about whether Calvin can offer us such assistance (161-2). It is natural to wonder whether Barth might be instructive on this front, but that is a topic about which Holmes is silent.

Calvin and Barth’s struggle to hear Scripture aright is highlighted in the first pair of essays in the book, Trevor Hart’s “Calvin and Barth on the Lord’s Supper” and Anthony Cross’s “Baptism in the Theology of John Calvin and Karl Barth.” Both are able and instructive introductions to the topics their titles mention. Not much new ground is covered, but these essays are thoughtful and fair in their treatment of the ways in which Calvin and Barth’s reading of Scripture led them in different directions.

The paucity of Barth’s mature writing on the Lord’s Supper makes it necessary for Hart to reconstruct the main components of Barth’s mature views and arguments about the topic, a task he handles ably. The main question, he indicates, is whether this Supper is a place where God “is active in nourishing and deepening believers’ union with Christ, as well as believers being active in receiving Christ in faith and obedience” (55). His argument against Barth’s decision to support mainly the latter half of that claim is that John 6 can be read as a commentary on the Supper (56). Hart does not, however, give his reply to those who do not read the passage as he does; his attention is not focused on defending a view but on his capable explorations of divine presence in the Supper. I find Calvin’s view of how Christ is present in the Supper, and how that differs from divine presence elsewhere, vague—but that appears to be an intentional feature of the view (44).

In a similar vein, Cross’s essay systematically contrasts Calvin’s sacramentalism with Barth’s anti-sacramentalism. Cross concludes that Barth’s distinction between water baptism and baptism by the spirit lacks an adequate biblical basis (80f). This is a point he asserts more than argues for; those who want Scriptural arguments will have to follow his footnotes. Cross helpfully distinguishes arguments about Spirit baptism from arguments about infant baptism, and one interesting moment in his essay is his brief mention of the fact that although Barth “disassembles the argument for it” and calls for reform, he “nowhere contests or rejects the validity of infant baptism” (79). Cross holds up that position as a model for Baptists (87), and I wish he had explored the implications of that idea further.

A final pair of essays cover Barth and Calvin’s doctrines of atonement, a topic where they have more in common than that of sacramental theology. Neil MacDonald’s “Barth’s Narrative Doctrine of Substitutionary Atonement” is the most original in the book. In brief, his argument is that Barth’s prioritization of the synoptic Gospels over John’s Gospel makes possible Barth’s greater emphasis on the role of YHWH in the passion narrative (98-9). He reads that narrative with a judicial framework, in which the judgment on Jesus is not merely Pilate’s but also the Father’s—an idea MacDonald suggests Barth got from Calvin (105f). This judgment is expressed not only in Jesus’ death but in his resurrection, which expresses that YHWH associates his own soteriological identity with Jesus (104), and which asserts that the eschatological judgment Jesus proclaimed in his earthly ministry has begun to be fulfilled in Jesus himself, partly because Jesus becomes the object of that judgment (108f). MacDonald emphasizes similarities between Barth and Calvin’s views, which makes more significant his reticence about the relationship between Barth’s doctrine of election and the topics he discusses. MacDonald also defends Barth’s position as preferable to Calvin’s because it is more rational by historical and philosophical standards (117), but such claims require a good deal more development: what “rational” means is, after all, a hotly disputed question.

Myron Penner’s “Calvin, Barth, and the Subject of Atonement” makes central the questions about election just mentioned, and is an excellent supplement to MacDonald’s essay, in addition to being a fine summary of central aspects of Calvin’s doctrine of atonement. For Barth, God first and primarily elects not individual human beings but Jesus Christ, and in him all of humanity, both to be reprobate and to be redeemed. Calvin, by contrast, defends the “particularist” view that individual human beings are elected either to redemption or reprobation. This difference in their theologies of atonement is linked to their Christologies: Barth tends to see Jesus as something like a Platonic form of humanity, whereas Calvin’s classical doctrine of the two natures insists that it is not human nature as such that is unified with the Word in Christ but a particular and individual human nature (140). Both locate Christ’s atoning work in “the whole course of Christ’s obedience” as prophet, priest, and king (127), but while Penner appreciates the richness of Barth’s view, he prefers Calvin’s development of this theory of atonement because he does not understand how the Holy Spirit plays a role in Barth’s theory, how anyone is reprobate on Barth’s view, or how Barth’s Christology speaks of a Christ who is really “like us” (144). These are good questions, but a sympathetic reading of Barth suggests that his answers have significant parallels with Calvin’s; for instance, Barth’s discussion of the “impossible possibility” is an attempt to be faithful to the mystery of the idea of reprobation (143), and he agrees with Calvin that the atonement is made real in our lives by the action of the Holy Spirit (134).

Altogether, this is a strong collection of essays. Many of them would be appropriate supplements in introductory or more advanced classes on Calvin, Barth, or both. Disagreements between the authors are evident, but that is a strength of the collection: many of Barth and Calvin’s differences are put on display, as well as their substantial agreements, and the reader is able to appreciate why one might prefer the views of one of these great theologians, or the other—and can also see how fruitful it can be to seek understanding along with both of them.

Defining Incarnational Ministry

2010-07-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

from OpenSourceTheology linked here.

A challenge to incarnational ministry. We note that the author, below, deals with Philippian, chapter but leaves out verses 12 and 13. How can we continue a discussion of relational ministry (that is what we are talking about, here, right?) without dealing with the ontological commentary that is chapter 2:12,13? --- jds

Apparently this was written sometime in 2007. --- jds.

From Open Source:

The most popular concept that has been used – even over-used – to describe effective Christian ministry in recent years is that of ‘Incarnational Ministry’. Many books have been written, many articles posted on the Internet, to explain the concept and explore its implications for contemporary cultural missiology (Google it and see!). Richard Passmore, in his book Meet Them Where They Are At, is perhaps the most pragmatic exponent of this view. Pete Ward, in Youthwork and the Mission of God and Danny Brierley in Joined Up both explore the same idea, as does Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Church, albeit within a wider ministerial context than the previous authors.

The notion, of course, is based on the belief that the principle of how Jesus ministered 2000 years ago in Palestine can and should be applied to how we seek to minister to others in the 21^st-century. We are to become, as Luther said so eloquently, “little Christs.” The fact that the Word became Incarnate and assumed human form is the fundamental raison d’etre for the church to seek ‘the form’ of contemporary cultural expression in its effort to relay the Good News which is the Christian Gospel. For the Emerging Church Movement, this is a foundational principle and underpins all our efforts to be culturally relevant in a postmodern era. To no small extent, the issue is primarily one of initiative. God took the initiative in assuming cultural identity through Christ and so we are to take the initiative in developing ministerial and ecclesiological forms that identify with the shifting patterns of contemporary society. It is no longer enough to assume that the world will come to us. It is no longer enough to assume that we should go to the world. The Emerging Church Movement is concerned to blur – even dismantle – the distinctions between “us” and “them” in an honest endeavor to present a Christ for today. This is no mere intellectual exercise. It is not enough to think as ‘they’ do: the Church must actively choose to operate beyond its own boundaries – beyond the safety of its own walls – in order to be fully incarnational.

It is an often-expressed criticism of Emerging Churches that, in blurring or dismantling the distinctions, the content of the Gospel is lost through the changing context of presentation. This need not necessarily be the case, however. In the same way that Jesus did not deny his divinity in assuming human form, neither need the church deny its eternal ontological holiness in becoming culturally relevant. In The Purpose Driven Church (p.238), Rick Warren states, “Fulfilling God’s purpose must always take priority over preserving tradition. If you are serious about ministering to people the way Jesus did, don’t be surprised if some of today’s religious establishment accuse you of selling out to culture and breaking traditions.” Holding the balance is, of course, difficult and the Emerging Church makes itself an easy target by sometimes getting the balance wrong. However, no journey towards self-expression is without its pitfalls and dangers and, just because we sometimes get it wrong, there is no need to abandon that journey. Indeed, if John Stott, writing in The Contemporary Christian (p.244), is right, we dare not abandon that journey: “On the one hand, [Jesus] came to us in our world, and assumed the full reality of our humanness….He fraternised with the common people and they flocked around him eagerly….He identified himself with our sorrows, our sins and our death. On the other hand, in mixing freely with people like us, he never sacrificed, or even for one moment compromised, his own unique identity. His was the perfection of ‘holy worldliness’. And now he sends us out into the world as he was sent into the world (John 17:18; 20:21). We have to penetrate other people’s worlds, as he penetrated ours – the world of their thinking (as we struggle to understand their misunderstandings of the gospel), the world of their feeling (as we try to empathise with their pain), and the world of their living (as we sense the humiliation of their social situation…).”

For the Church to be motivated towards an incarnational ministry, the Church must, like Jesus before us, be motivated by love. Furthermore, that love – to be truly incarnational – must be unconditional. This is not to suggest soft love but hard love. It will be hard for Christians to love and love and love again even when it faces rejection. Furthermore, Christians must be willing to challenge without condemning. If there is one prevailing fault of the Emerging Church Movement it is surely its unwillingness to stand against – even condemn – what is unbiblical. To be sure, the Emerging Church Movement is quick to condemn ecclesiastical practices it deems to be unbiblical but often does not hold to the same standards of holiness on ethical issues. Soft love, if it is to be truly incarnational, can never be an option.

Ultimately, incarnational ministry is about friendship. The witness of the Gospels to us is that Jesus was prepared to be the friend of sinners. Sadly, we often miss the humour and fun of the Gospel stories. Jesus at a wedding; Jesus having dinner with his friends; Jesus out for a walk on the beach or in the cornfields; Jesus sending up the Pharisees and the rich; Jesus telling tall stories; Jesus mocking the system. Not every social interaction by Jesus was taken as an excuse to proclaim the Gospel message. Rather, he sought to live the Gospel message by embodying the friendship of God to sinners. It is a truism of St. Francis of Assisi that we should, “preach the Gospel always. Only use words if you have to.” Embodiment, through friendship, is often more powerful than words. That is the testimony of incarnational ministry.

Beyond Incarnation

There is little doubt about the validity of this Biblical model for ministry. Which one of us would deny the power of relationship in the presentation of the Gospel? Which one of us would deny the need to embody the Gospel as – even before – we speak it? Certainly for me, I would never have embraced the Truth of Jesus Christ were it not for a small band of Christians who befriended me without any sense of obligation upon me some 23 years ago. I was acutely aware that they lived the Gospel and embodied the truths of Jesus long before I asked them to explain those truths to me. I imagine the same would be true for many of you too.

However, the importance of incarnation as a model for ministry is in danger of being dumbed down at best, lost completely at worst, because we have not really been prepared to wrestle with the true cost of incarnation for ministry. Too often for us, incarnation is an ideal we aspire to without becoming a lifestyle we embrace. When the Word became Incarnate, there was a whole lot more to it than merely embracing a contemporary cultural form and forming friendships within that paradigm. Incarnation was a costly business for the Son of God – and not just in reference to his eventual crucifixion. The act of incarnation itself was costly. To fully redeem this notion for ministry, we must redeem the costly nature of the act itself. Once this has been redeemed, we are in a better position to reflect on the costly nature of Christian ministry itself.

It is in Philippians 2:5-11 that we see this truth expounded most graciously. This passage, of course, is not about Jesus. It is about you and me. Paul begins in verse 5 by stating, “Let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus.” Christ is the exemplar but we are the objects of Paul’s concern here. In the verses that follow, Paul outlines the true cost of an incarnational ministry:

“The attitude that you should have is the one that Christ Jesus had:
He always had the nature of God
but he did not think that by force he should try to remain equal with God.
Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had
and took the nature of a servant.
He became like a human being and appeared in human likeness.
He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death
his death on the cross.”

If we are to move ‘beyond incarnation’ and ‘into incarnation’ in our ministry, we need to briefly unpack this passage to find out what it may entail.

Abandonment of equality

He did not think that by force he should try to remain equal with God

The history of the institutional Church in the Constantinian era is imbibed with the meta-narrative of power. This brief article is no place to argue the point nor go into details: the truth is self-evident. A system of rights and privileges is what has given power to the priesthood and/or presbyteral system, both in terms of personal and doctrinal authority. Sometimes, though not always, this has had negative implications and results. Nevertheless, power and position has traditionally gone hand in hand with the proclamation of the Gospel.

According to this Christological exposition in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, this was not the way of Christ. For him, the notion of relying on power and privilege was not an option in the act of Incarnation. Perhaps Jesus could have claimed equality with God, quite literally, as his divine right. But he chose not to do so. Indeed, as Motyer points out in The Message of Philippians (p.110), there may also be two other interpretations of this sentence which would carry even more profound overtones. First, that Jesus would not cling on to a position that could be exploited for self-advantage. Second, that equality could be grasped as a thief steals something that does not belong to him.

Incarnational ministry, after the model of Christ, begins with the foundational ideal that powers and privileges must not be claimed. We may have the ‘right’ to the benefits of a particular offices but that does not mean that we should necessarily claim them. Far less should we fall into the temptation of exploiting position and power for self-gain. The temptations for those in ministry are very real. We must pray for ourselves and for those in ecclesial authority for wisdom in the way we and they use the authority that God has given.

Abandonment of self

Of his own free will he gave up all he had

Rather than claiming his power and privileges, Jesus chose to give them up. Arguably, this verse in Scripture has raised more questions than almost any other. What does it mean for Jesus to have emptied himself? Did he somehow become less than he was? What is the content of this Kenotic Christology that has had so much ink spilled over it? However, as Motyer suggests (p.112) this may not be the question we need to ask. “We ought to notice that in asking the perfectly natural question, ‘Of what did Christ empty himself,’ we are, in fact, departing from the direct line of thought in this passage…It is not ‘Of what did he empty himself?’ but ‘Into what did he empty himself?’ Rather than the image of a jug of water being emptied out, we need instead to picture the water being poured into something. It is that something that makes sense of this passage…

Acceptance of servant status

And took the nature of a servant

…and the something is the something of servanthood. Complete and utter self-giving. As Gordon Fee says in Philippians (p.95), “This is how divine love manifests itself in its most characteristic and profuse expression. Christ entered our history not as kyrios (‘Lord’)…but as doulos (‘slave’), a person without advantages, rights or privileges, but in servanthood to all.”

Crucially, Jesus is the servant of all. He did not pick and choose whom he served. He was the servant of all. That is the hard part of ministry in and for the Christian Church – to be the servant of all. The temptation for those in Christian ministry is often to fall in to one or more errors with regard to servanthood.

First, we are tempted to be choosy about whom we decide to serve. It is often the case that our Churches exist for the acceptable and shun the unacceptable. I was Vicar of a Church a number of years ago in the East End of London. A bag-lady began attending our Sunday evening worship. After one month, a small group of respectable ladies, who had been regular worshippers for many years, came to me with an ultimatum. They brought my attention to the severe body odour problem which the bag-lady had (as if I hadn’t noticed it myself!) and then proceeded to say, “You need to make a choice, Vicar. This woman is ruining our worship. You must either ask her to leave the Church or we won’t be back!”

For a while, I missed this group of ladies…but not for too long.

Second, we are tempted to be servants – but not as an end in itself. We may choose to serve our community in order that they are converted to the faith. We may choose to serve our community in order that the reputation of the Church increases. We may choose to serve our community in order that we mark a particular liturgical season with due reverence. That is not the way of Christ. He served. Full stop. Christ became the servant of all and continued to serve even when the majority did not choose to recognise him. Jesus never served in order that… Jesus just served.

Acceptance of identification

He became like a human being and appeared in human likeness

Contrary to Docetic views, the Incarnation was full, real and complete. When people came into contact with Jesus, they came into contact with a man. To be sure, there is an ambiguity about this verse (“he became like a human and appeared in human likeness) that allows for the fact that this was no ordinary man. Jesus was one of us – and yet different. The God-Man embraces human culture and yet still remains above it. In the same way, we are called to a form of ministry that embraces the culture in which we live and work and yet remain somehow detached from it. We are called to be “in the world but not of it.” We are to be Jews when we are with Jews, Gentiles when we are with Gentiles. We are to be all things to all people so that we may win some for Christ. The hardest part of this Incarnational ministry that we are called to practice is holding in tension this paradox of cultural embracing-detachment in such a way that we remain authentic in love. As Stott commented in The Contemporary Christian (p.360), “In every non-Christian (and many Christians too), even in the jolliest extroverts, there are hidden depths of pain. We can reach them only if we are willing to enter into their suffering.” It is no easy task to enter into suffering in the way that Jesus does. However, nothing less is required of us in Christian ministry.

A controlled life

He was humble and walked the path of obedience

The Gospel narratives portray the image of a man who was utterly reliant on his Father. Jesus was completely obedient to God in regard to his activities (John 5:19), in regard to his judgements (John 5:30) and in regard to his speaking (John 8:28). Obedience is the model that Jesus gives us and obedience to the Father God is the teaching that he gives us through the Sermon on the Mount: obedience in conduct (Matt 5:15, 44, 48; 6:1), prayer (Matt 6:8, 9; 7:11) and daily reliance on him (Matt 6:31, 32).

A controlled death

All the way to death – his death on the cross

Paul stresses the incredible depth of Jesus’ commitment to humanity by the repetition of the word ‘death’ in this verse. His commitment was total, as Fee reminds us (p.97): “No one in Philippi, we must remind ourselves, used the cross as a symbol for their faith; there were no gold crosses embossed on Bibles or worn as pendants around the neck or lighted on the steeple of the local church. The cross was God’s – and thus their – scandal, God’s contradiction to human wisdom and power: that the One they worshiped as Lord should have been crucified as a state criminal at the hands of one of ‘lord’ Caesar’s proconsuls; that the Almighty should appear in human dress, and that he should do so in this way, as a messiah who died by crucifixion. Likewise, this is the scandal of Pauline ethics: that the God who did it this way ‘gifts’ us to ‘suffer for his sake’ in this way as well.”

And that is the ultimate call of Christian ministry; that we must be prepared to die to self (literally or metaphorically). It is, of course, a scandal even today. It is a scandal to an institution that it is called to renounce all power and privilege. It is a scandal to the rich and the spiritually powerful that we are called to assume the form of servants – without question and without motive. It is a scandal that the Body of Christ is called to give up everything that it has in order to model Christ.

It is a scandal to a traditional Church that it is called to die.

Ultimately, however, that is what Incarnational Ministry is all about. We belittle the concept if we continue to think about it merely in terms of building relationships and making ourselves culturally relevant. Incarnational ministry is as much about death as it is about life. It will be a courageous – and obedient – Church that seeks to model this form of ministry into the 21^st-century. Is the Emerging Church Movement brave enough to rise to that challenge and pave the way for a truly incarnational transformation of society?

The Jesus We'll Never Know

2010-05-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Why scholarly attempts to discover the 'real' Jesus have failed. And why that's a good thing.

Scot McKnight | posted 4/09/2010 09:33AM

On the opening day of my class on Jesus of Nazareth, I give a standardized psychological test divided into two parts. The results are nothing short of astounding.

The first part is about Jesus. It asks students to imagine Jesus' personality, with questions such as, "Does he prefer to go his own way rather than act by the rules?" and "Is he a worrier?" The second part asks the same questions of the students, but instead of "Is he a worrier?" it asks, "Are you a worrier?" The test is not about right or wrong answers, nor is it designed to help students understand Jesus. Instead, if given to enough people, the test will reveal that we all think Jesus is like us. Introverts think Jesus is introverted, for example, and, on the basis of the same questions, extroverts think Jesus is extroverted.

Spiritual formation experts would love to hear that students in my Jesus class are becoming like Jesus, but the test actually reveals the reverse: Students are fashioning Jesus to be more like themselves. If the test were given to a random sample of adults, the results would be measurably similar. To one degree or another, we all conform Jesus to our own image.

Since we are pushing this point, let's not forget historical Jesus scholars, whose academic goal is to study the records, set the evidence in historical context, render judgment about the value of the evidence, and compose a portrait of "what Jesus was really like." They, too, have ended up making Jesus in their own image.

Heyday for the Historical Jesus

In the 1980s, the central academic organization for biblical studies, the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), was energized in remarkable ways by a renewed interest in the historical Jesus, a project that had been abandoned for some decades. At that time, the Jesus Seminar, designed by former childhood preacher and fervent critic of all things orthodox Robert Funk, frequently made headlines. Noted scholars sat at tables and voted on what Jesus really said and did based on the historical evidence. Funk and others drew up their conclusions in books that supposedly revealed the real Jesus.

Some of these studies were outlandish, some much closer to orthodoxy and the canonical Gospels. The headline-grabbing names included Ben F. Meyer, E. P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Paula Fredriksen, and N. T. (Tom) Wright. I have sat in packed lecture halls to watch Tom and Dom go at it, and I've listened in as two friends, Marc and Tom, bantered back and forth about who was getting it right. Paula, a Catholic convert to Judaism, continued to warn the entire discipline that too many errors were being made about Judaism. Those were heady days, and I remember giving a paper to over 500 scholars about how Jesus understood his own death. The neon-light days for the historical Jesus are now over.

So, what did the loaded expression "the historical Jesus" really refer to?

To begin with, "Jesus" refers to the Jesus who lived and breathed and ate and talked and called disciples. This Jesus is the Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and, according to the witness of many, was raised again. Through historical studies, this Jesus has been set in his Jewish context. We might call this Jesus the "Jewish Jesus."

Then again, the four evangelists and the other New Testament authors, because they encountered Jesus in the context of how Scripture unfolded, interpreted Jesus by using terms like "Messiah," "Son of God," and "Son of Man," understanding him as the agent of God's redemption. We might call this Jesus the "canonical Jesus."

One more level needs to be observed: the church has amplified its understanding of "Jesus," because it has interpreted Jesus in light of theological concerns. Let us refer to this Jesus as the "orthodox Jesus," the second person of the Trinity, God from God and Light from Light.

But the historical Jesus is someone or something else. The historical Jesus is the Jesus whom scholars have reconstructed on the basis of historical methods over against the canonical portraits of Jesus in the Gospels of our New Testament, and over against the orthodox Jesus of the church. The historical Jesus is more like the Jewish Jesus than the canonical Jesus or the orthodox Jesus. Drawing distinctions between these various Jesuses is important in order to understand what has happened in the contemporary academic scene.

First, the historical Jesus is the Jesus whom scholars reconstruct on the basis of historical methods. Scholars differ, so reconstructions differ. Furthermore, the methods that scholars use differ, so the reconstructions differ all the more. But this must be said: Most historical Jesus scholars assume that the Gospels are historically unreliable; thus, as a matter of discipline, they assess the Gospels to see if the evidence is sound. They do this by using methods common to all historical work but that are uniquely shaped by historical Jesus studies. The essential criterion used in most historical Jesus studies is called "double dissimilarity." Even though it is riddled with holes, this method is still used by many historical Jesus scholars.

According to the criterion of double dissimilarity, the only sayings or actions of Jesus that can be trusted are those that are dissimilar to both Judaism at the time of Jesus and to the beliefs of the earliest Christians immediately after Jesus. One of the most noteworthy examples is Jesus' characteristically calling God Abba, a title for God rarely found in Judaism or in earliest Christianity.

This example, though, is problematic from the get-go: Abba (an affectionate term for "Father," something akin to "Daddy") is in fact not genuinely doubly dissimilar, for it is found in Judaism, if rarely, as well as in Aramaic in the New Testament; moreover, the word Father is found everywhere. But, historical exceptions aside, that Jesus called God Abba won the day as a historically reliable attribute, and therefore won the hearts of all historical Jesus scholars.

Other criteria were developed, criticized, dropped, and modified, but all have this in common: Historical Jesus scholars reconstruct what Jesus was like by using historical methods to determine what in the Gospels can be trusted.

Second, the word reconstruct needs more attention. Most historical Jesus scholars assume that the Gospels have overcooked their portrait of Jesus, and that the church's Trinitarian theology wildly exceeds anything Jesus thought about himself and anything the evangelists believed. These scholars pursue a Jesus who is less than or different from or more primitive than what the Gospels teach and the church believes. There is no reason to do historical Jesus studies—to probe "what Jesus was really like"—if the Gospels are accurate and the church's beliefs are justified. There are only two reasons to engage in historical Jesus studies: first, to see if the church got him right; and second, if the church did not, to find the Jesus who is more authentic than the church's Jesus.

This leads to a fundamental observation about all genuine historical Jesus studies: Historical Jesus scholars construct what is in effect a fifth gospel. The reconstructed Jesus is not identical to the canonical Jesus or the orthodox Jesus. He is the reconstructed Jesus, which means he is a "new" Jesus.

I can establish that the tomb was empty and that resurrection is the best explanation for the empty tomb. But one thing the historical method cannot prove is that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification.

Furthermore, these scholars by and large believe in the Jesus they reconstruct. During what's called the "first quest" for the historical Jesus, in the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer understood Jesus as an apocalyptic Jesus. In the latest quest, Sanders's Jesus is an eschatological prophet; Crossan's Jesus is a Mediterranean peasant cynic full of wit and critical of the Establishment; Borg's Jesus is a mystical genius; Wright's Jesus is an end-of-the-exile messianic prophet who believed he was God returning to Zion. We could go on, but we have made our point: Historical Jesus scholars reconstruct what Jesus was really like and orient their faith around that reconstruction.

This leads to a third point, one that needs renewed emphasis today: Historical Jesus scholars reconstruct Jesus in conscious contrast with the categories of the evangelists and the beliefs of the church. Wright is the most orthodox of the well-known historical Jesus scholars; I can count on one hand the number of historical Jesus scholars who hold orthodox beliefs. The inspiration for historical Jesus scholarship is that the Gospels overdid it, and that the church more or less absorbed the Galilean prophet into Greek philosophical categories. The quest for the historical Jesus is an attempt to get behind the theology and the established faith to the Jesus who was—I must say it this way—much more like the Jesus we would like him to be.

One has to wonder if the driving force behind much historical Jesus scholarship is more an a priori disbelief in orthodoxy than a historian's genuine (and disinterested) interest in what really happened. The theological conclusions of those who pursue the historical Jesus simply correlate too strongly with their own theological predilections to suggest otherwise.

The question that many of us in the discipline must ask is this: Can theology or Christology or, more importantly, faith itself be connected to the vicissitudes of historical research and results?

Whose Jesus will We Trust?

The last session on the historical Jesus that I attended at the SBL meetings met in a small room, and there were about 20 of us there. The session, during which I gave a short paper, tells the story of the discipline itself.

The scholarly hope that we would discover the original Jesus had crashed against the rugged rocks of reality, and on that day we witnessed the end of a disciplinary era. One by one, most of us had become convinced that no matter how hard we tried, reaching the uninterpreted Jesus was nearly impossible—however fun and rewarding it was and however many insights about the Gospels we discovered along the way. Furthermore, a reconstructed Jesus is just that—one scholar's version of Jesus. It is unlikely to convince anyone other than the scholar, his or her students (who more or less feel obligated to agree), and perhaps a few others.

German theologian Martin Kähler convinced his generation that faith in Jesus could not and should not rest on historians' conclusions about what did and did not happen and the consequent reconstructions that entailed. We must be willing to ask, Whose Jesus will we trust? Will it be that of the evangelists and the apostles? Will it be that of the church—the creedal, orthodox Jesus? Will it be the latest proposal from a brilliant historian? Or will it be our own consensus based on modern-day historical scholarship? There is an irreducible futility to the historical Jesus enterprise.

We have now seen the death of latest historical Jesus studies as we know them. Well, not for all, because some are busy trying to reconstruct Jesus for themselves and for any who will listen. Still, the enthusiasm is gone, and the critical proposals are more often met with a ho-hum "yet one more" than a hope that we may once and for all have found the one who was buried under the interpretation of the earliest Christians.

Sitting on my desk is volume four of J. P. Meier's Rethinking the Historical Jesus. What began as a two-volume venture has doubled, and one or two more volumes are forthcoming. Volume one generated all kinds of conversation; volume four entered the market with barely a notice. Sitting next to Meier on my desk is Martin Hengel's Jesus und das Judentum, over 700 pages and perhaps the last volume from the titan of scholarship. Someone will translate Hengel, doctoral students will read it, professors will use it, reviewers will say that it's brilliant, an occasional pastor will find it useful, but in a decade it will all be forgotten. Why? Historical Jesus scholarship has come to the end of the road.

Two recent scholars have read the obituary for historical Jesus studies. James D. G. Dunn, in both the hefty Jesus Remembered and the slender A New Perspective on Jesus, argues that the furthest we can get behind the Gospels is to the underlying strata of Jesus as his earliest followers remembered him. That is as far as we can go. That is the Jesus who gave rise to the Christian faith, and that is the only Jesus worth pursuing. In Dunn's view, the "remembered" Jesus contains the faith perspective of the earliest followers of Jesus, and behind that faith perspective we cannot go.

Dale Allison, whom I consider the most knowledgeable New Testament scholar in the United States, is less sanguine and more cynical than Dunn in his newest book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, which in my judgment plays Taps for the quest for the historical Jesus. After three decades of work in and around the historical Jesus, Allison sketches the variety of views about the historical Jesus and the supposed modern theory that if we put our heads together we will arrive at firm conclusions. Allison offers this depressing conclusion: "Progress has not touched all subjects equally, and whatever consensus may exist, it remains mostly boring."

We must be willing to ask, Whose Jesus will we trust? Will it be that of the evangelists and the apostles? Will it be the church's orthodox Jesus? Or will it be the latest proposal from a brilliant historian?

Allison admits this about one of his own books on Jesus: "I opened my eyes to the obvious: I had created a Jesus in my own image, after my own likeness." He's not done: "Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions." So, he ponders, "Maybe we have unthinkingly reduced biography [of Jesus] to autobiography."

On top of this genuine problem is the problem of method. Allison: "The fragmentary and imperfect nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical abilities should move us to confess, if we are conscientious, how hard it is to recover the past." With one ringing line, Allison pronounces death: "We wield our criteria to get what we want."

There is, in other words, no value-or theology-free method that will enable us to get back to Jesus. Allison is not a total skeptic; he thinks that we can get behind the Gospels to find some genuine impressions. But his book led me to conclude, "The era is over."

Two scholars, both highly devoted to the discipline of historical Jesus studies, come from two angles to relatively similar conclusions: the historical Jesus game has run its course and it cannot deliver us the original Jesus.

What has been Shown

I now make a confession. For the better part of my academic career, I have participated in studies of the Gospels and the historical Jesus. I am an insider to the conversation, and have been part of the steering committee for the SBL'S Historical Jesus Section. In fact, I was once asked to be the chair. Had that invitation come five years earlier, I would have eagerly accepted the responsibility. But that invitation came at the end of a long project of mine that culminated in my book Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory. I declined the position because I could no longer commit myself to historical Jesus studies. The last thing I wrote in that book was the first chapter, which was an essay about method and what historical Jesus studies can accomplish.

Attentive readers will observe that the first chapter relativizes the theological significance of historical Jesus efforts. I had tried my best to see where the methods would lead if I sought to examine if and how the historical Jesus understood his own death. Some of my results disappointed, because I wanted to be able to prove some texts as authentic that I found stubbornly resistant to the methods available to us. Historiography, I concluded, can only do so much. One day, while editing the final draft, I came across these words from Romans 4:25: "He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification."

This is what I said to myself: As a historian I think I can prove that Jesus died and that he thought his death was atoning. I think I can establish that the tomb was empty and that resurrection is the best explanation for the empty tomb. But one thing the historical method cannot prove is that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification. At some point, historical methods run out of steam and energy. Historical Jesus studies cannot get us to the point where the Holy Spirit and the church can take us. I know that once I was blind and that I can now see. I know that historical methods did not give me sight. They can't. Faith cannot be completely based on what the historian can prove. The quest for the real Jesus, through long and painful paths, has proven that much.

Scot McKnight is professor of religion at North Park University in Chicago, and the author of many books, including The Jesus Creed.

Related Elsewhere:

Go to ChristianBibleStudies.com for "The Jesus We'll Never Know," a Bible study based on this article.

Responses to this story include N. T. Wright: We Do Need History, Craig Keener: Jesus Studies Matter, and Darrell Bock: We Need Context.

Previous Christianity Today articles on Jesus include:

King Jesus the Disguised | There's a reason it's not easy to spot him. (December 22, 2006)

The Jesus I'd Prefer to Know | Searching for the historical Jesus and finding oneself instead. (December 7, 2008)

The Jesus We Never Got | Elijah stands for what I want in a God: someone to offer an escape route around life's messiest problems. By Philip Yancey (December 8, 1997)

Previous CT articles by Scot McKnight include:

Review: Brian McLaren's 'A New Kind of Christianity' | Brian McLaren's 'new' Christianity is not so much revolutionary as evolutionary. (February 26, 2010)

Five Streams of the Emerging Church | Key elements of the most controversial and misunderstood movement in the church today. (January 19, 2007)

The Mary We Never Knew | Why the mother of Jesus was more revolutionary than we've been led to believe. (November 28, 2006)

Predistination in critical review

2010-03-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Liturgical Christain doctrine and the notion of predestination (or limited grace).

Editor's notes: a wonderful article in review of the tiresome notion of election (some know this as "predestination"). It is our view that all are predestined "in Christ," which is not to say that all are predestined. The debate has been around since (at least) the days of Augustine and his thinking on the issue of limited grace.

Source: Telford Work.net

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2001

Election's Unhappy Returns

Is the doctrine of election worth the trouble?

In his review of the historical tradition, James McClendon concludes that "the doctrine of election or predestination in Scripture viewed as a whole seems fully to warrant none of the paths ecclesiastical doctrine has so far taken." He finds some hopeful signs, particularly in his own Radical Reformation tradition. Yet his redrawn contours of the doctrine rarely appeal to the tradition so far. "The old associations of the doctrine die so hard that (in my judgment) this part of Christian teaching is of little present service. We do well to emphasize the rule of God in every effective way, while exercising great reserve with regard to this Augustinian deposit."2

The Catholic appraisal is guarded as well. Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity was so compelling that it led the West to alter the Nicene Creed. His doctrine of the Church has determined Rome's ecclesiastical politics. His doctrine of original sin has flowered in Catholic anthropology, Mariology, and sacramental practice. John Henry Newman uses these legacies to illustrate his theory of the development of Christian doctrine:

The highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.3

But where is Augustine's doctrine of specific grace among Newman's illustrations? Augustine's doctrine of predestination was partially ratified at the Council of Orange, and adapted in Thomas' cosmology. But then it was largely disowned at the Council of Trent, and it has been fully elucidated only by those who repudiated Rome's ecclesial claims. Predestination is apparently a dead end in the Catholic tradition, a pruned branch of Newman's tree.

The appraisal is surely higher in the Reformed tradition, where (as Warfield put it) Augustine's doctrine of grace triumphed over his doctrine of the Church, rather than the other way around. Yet even here, Calvin's formulation of the doctrines of election and predestination have fared rather poorly. Within a hundred years of the Reformation, Arminius' followers radically reformulated Calvin's revived Augustinianism, and now dominate the Protestant landscape. The doctrine's primary legacy in today's Reformed traditions (Anglicanism, Methodism, evangelicalism, and even Presbyterianism) seems to be endless bickering and polarization among Arminian and Calvinist true believers, and exhaustion and apathy in the middle. Where the debate has ended, it has ended by sheer attrition — an Elizabethan Settlement without reconciliation or resolution. When one consults the American faithful in matters of election, one hardly hears a ringing endorsement, even though the doctrine played a formative role in the spiritual formation of the West and in the theological heritage of America herself.

A case in point: Before beginning my formal theological education, I personally killed two thriving Bible studies by bringing up election and predestination. In one I watched a woman take the book we were reading together, Michael Scott Horton's Putting Amazing Back into Grace,4 and throw it to the ground in revulsion. She was not amazed; she was horrified.

Augustine's doctrine of election thus fails votes of confidence from radicals, Catholics, evangelicals, and even many Reformed! Needless to say, Eastern Orthodoxy rejects it too (in the Confession of Dositheus). Yet rejection alone has never truly satisfied. As McClendon admits, "that God elects or chooses is a staple of Scripture's narratives," and "once we take seriously the divine prevenience both in creation and redemption, election seems inevitably to follow."5 What is a theologian to do? Ignoring the doctrine, however tempting, is no solution.

What follows is my personal penance for breaking up those Bible studies. To diagnose the problem, we will review (though cursorily) a particular feature of election's doctrinal history. To recommend a remedy, we will offer an exegetical and liturgical point of departure in the liturgical practice of Annunciation that casts election in brighter theological light. It does not solve the centuries-long debate between Calvinism and Arminianism, nor does it endorse one school wholeheartedly, but it does shift the terms of the debate in a constructive direction.

Children of Pelagius: A Brief History of the Doctrine of Election

It is ironic, though perhaps not surprising, that we owe the shape of the Western theology of election and predestination to Pelagius. He, like his opponent Augustine, sought to defeat Manichaean dualism. Augustine's arguments against Manichaeism rooted human responsibility for sin in the human free will, which, wrongly exercised, introduced corruption into God's originally good creation. Pelagius pursued the same line of reasoning toward righteousness that Augustine had pursued toward sin, with catastrophic results. His fatal error was treating human depravity as essentially symmetrical to human righteousness. It led his doctrines of sin and grace to root Christian holiness as well as human sinfulness in humanity's created nature. Good Christian practices would begin in a human will that is, if not essentially good, certainly capable of choosing God's baptismal grace and living righteously on its own power afterwards.6 Sin's power would be merely a consequence of people freely choosing it, and God's grace would be the provision of a one-time forgiveness for pre-baptismal sins, and the law of the sinless Jesus Christ as a normative example for followers to imitate. Furthermore, concentrating his account in the human microcosm led Pelagius and his followers to neglect the macrocosmic narrative of God's saving economy. Each human will effectively occupied the center of its now individualized salvation- or damnation-history.7

Pelagius' crucial contribution to the Church's doctrines of sin and grace was thus twofold: First, his teaching, well intended to strengthen the lax Christian morality of his day,8 instead unforgettably illustrated the trivialization of both sin and grace that inevitably follows when one roots the power to respond to God in the sovereign human will.9 The Church came to view it as "another gospel," a fundamental failure to appreciate the extent of God's prior favor and sanctifying gifts.10 In response, Augustine's emphatic reaffirmation of the power of both sin and grace fundamentally shaped Western Christianity. Second (and less often noticed), Pelagius' anthropocentrism powerfully influenced the terms of the debate and the subsequent soteriology of the West. Both Pelagius and Augustine came to be "so preoccupied with the salvation of the individual that they neglected to explore that healthier and saner dimension of corporate salvation which is a recurrent theme in both Old and New Testaments."11 The story of Jesus Christ became "incidental" to the theological battle.12

"It is surprising," says John Ferguson, "how little reference is made in the whole controversy to the personal life of Jesus."13 But the die was cast. Together, Pelagius' objection and Augustine's response moved the Western account of sin and grace away from a salvation-history centered in God's chosen people Israel and chosen son Jesus, toward innumerable personal histories of sinful inheritance, prevenient grace, and cooperative response. Augustine responded all too well to Pelagius' threat: The compelling narrative of his Confessions overpowered both Pelagius' pseudonarratives of free agents, and the biblical metanarrative of Israel, Jesus, and Church. As a result, he and his allies were defeated in their own victory. The doctrine of election drifted into the Western doctrines of single- and double-predestination: God predestines from eternity a fixed number of creatures to heaven, and (perhaps) the rest to hell. Election would not reemerge from their influence until the twentieth century.14

Augustine's bitter war against "Pelagianism"15 convinced the Church to repudiate Pelagian ideas in 431 and 529. While the Church never canonized the particulars of Augustine's own proposal, Augustinianism remained the dominant influence in the West ever afterwards, especially through Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. Revived by the Reformers, Augustine's doctrine of grace became a central distinguishing feature of Protestant theology.

However, Pelagius, Rufinius, Celestius, Julian, and the like were not Augustine's only opponents. Augustinianism has always had strenuous orthodox detractors. The Council of Trent repudiated the Protestant positions and Rome fought Jansenism for centuries, closing off thoroughgoing Augustinian predestination as a Catholic option. And within the Reformed wing of Protestantism, Arminianism arose as a revival of what one might call either moderate Augustinianism or (misleadingly) "semi-Pelagianism."

James Arminius' followers asserted in the Remonstrance of 1610 five famous objections to Calvinism. The Reformed Church of Belgium strenuously denied each Arminian claim in the Canons of Dort of 1619, today most widely appreciated in slogan form as the famous "Calvinist" TULIP.

The TULIP is Augustinian predestination reduced to its essentials. Yet both the Remonstrance and the Canons of Dort, and the confessional traditions they helped to shape, continued to accept Pelagius' frame for the issue of election — an individualized "order of salvation" rather than a story of personal redemption in the context of the wider story of God's chosen people.16 Both still basically honor the ancient limits of the Pelagian-Augustinian debate. By failing to criticize (or even notice?) the framework it had inherited from Augustine's argument against Pelagius, Calvinist Orthodoxy replaced Pelagian anthropocentric soteriology with more of an anti-anthropocentric soteriology than a vision of salvation truly centered in salvation's divine economy.

Or so it appeared to Karl Barth. Calvinism's greatest theologian since Calvin took the doctrine in a revolutionary direction.17 For Barth, Augustine's experiential doctrine of predestination opened up a division between human-centered and God-centered accounts of salvation that had plagued the Church ever since. The key to overcoming it was centering the doctrine firmly in Jesus Christ.

Barth's exposition of God's decrees radically reformulated the older Reformed doctrine of election. A truly theocentric soteriology must arise from the specificity of God's action in Jesus Christ. The Father proclaims in the Lukan Transfiguration scene, "This is my Son, the one I have elected" (ho eklelegmenos, Luke 9:34). Jesus is the elect one, the one on whom God's decrees of "Yes" and "No" fall. In God's eternal decree for fellowship with humanity in his Son, the two accounts are one: The electing God is the elected man. Barth located the doctrine of election not under providence or salvation, as the older infralapsarian and supralapsarian positions in Calvinism had, but under his doctrine of God, identifying God's twofold word of affirmation and negation with the divine Word who would become flesh. All God's chosen are finally rejected and accepted in him (Eph. 1:4). The countless human narratives of salvation find their coherence only in the metanarrative that centers in Jesus. Election is the therefore not a mystery hidden from the gospel of God, but the gospel itself, the Good News "in nuce." It is God's eternal will to narrate the cosmic narrative of creation and redemption.

What Happened to Israel?

Our historical survey is too brief to include many important nuances. Yet it still reveals a rarely noticed omission, ever since Pelagius and Augustine, of the sheer Jewishness of election in its biblical forms. In repudiating Pelagius, the Church failed to appreciate, let alone correct, the deep roots of his thinking (and its own) in worldviews foreign to Israel and its Scriptures. Pelagius' legacy is indeed a separation of the doctrines of election and predestination from God's saving activity, in Israel and specifically in Israel's Messiah.

This separation has given both the heretical and orthodox doctrines of election monstrous qualities that lead to doctrinal and practical abuse. They describe God in ways unpersuasive and unattractive to the faithful — lending themselves to caricatures at the popular level, and sometimes the formal level, of their long polemical history. The Pelagian God becomes a passive legalist. The Arminian God becomes a nominal sovereign who waits forever to rubber-stamp human decisions. The Calvinist God becomes a tyrannical micromanager whose mysterious actions are just simply by definition. The Barthian God rejects and accepts all of humanity on the cross. The scope of God's decrees ironically overpowers the concrete history of Israel, Jesus, and Church that supposedly reveals them, bringing Barth's doctrine of salvation to the brink of soteriological universalism. Barth can do little more than deny the logical force of his own argument and forbid the teaching of universalism. These alternatives are neither conducive to worship nor edifying to the saints. What then?

Perhaps one should move in the opposite direction, from the Church's practices of worship and edification to its doctrines. But even here we are met with a problem: Is election's liturgical point of departure the Arminian practice of altar calls? Or the Augustinian practice of infant baptism? Our selection amounts to an a priori conclusion. The practices by which people appropriate salvation are already built upon rival accounts of how people are saved.

Yet it is Jesus' story to which Christians witness, not primarily their own. And the Christian year, shaped around the narrative of Jesus and shared by Augustinians, Calvinists, and Arminians, commends a happier location for the doctrine of election: in its feast of the Annunciation. Annunciation points a way out of the Pelagian-Augustinian world in which the doctrines of election and predestination have arisen, putting these doctrines back into their proper biblical and liturgical perspective. Furthermore, to worshipers hungry for specifics about election that Barth will not offer, Annunciation offers more than a specific "Yes" and "No" addressed to Jesus Christ, or a blanket "Yes" and "No" encompassing all humanity. It does so by taking us back to an ancient sign of assurance of God's favor to an embattled, wavering Israelite king: "The young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14, Communion Antiphon, Feast of the Annunciation).

The Choosing of the Chosen

Though election is eternal (Eph. 1:4), and though it centers on Jesus (Luke 9:34), we only know so because election takes temporal shape (note the perfect tense, not the aorist, in Luke 9:34), in the history of Jesus' people Israel (note what follows in Eph. 2). Annunciation situates Mary's visitation in the contexts of Israel's salvation-history and Jesus' career. These contexts also happen to be the broader and the narrower historical contexts of divine predestination.

The two contexts merge in a young Jewess named Miriam, but begin to converge long before her time. Mary's story echoes not only God's promise to Israel through Isaiah, but even earlier choices on God's part: "When Israel was a child, I loved him; and out of Egypt I have called my son" (Hos. 11:1, cf. Matt. 2:15).

Here "Israel" of course stands for the nation of Israel — from which Jesus comes, which Jesus represents in his ministry (and his Matthean return from Egypt), and over which he reigns as king. But it first stands for Jacob, the second-born son who received a blessing from his father Isaac: "Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. ... Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you" (Gen. 27:29). God specially chose Jacob to receive his blessing, as he had chosen Isaac (telling Abraham, "offspring shall be named for you" [Gen. 21:12]). And Abraham himself, an obscure wandering Aramean, gained God's mercy for no apparent reason: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen. 12:2-3). Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's descendents were specially chosen by God as recipients of divine blessing and means through which others are both blessed and cursed. In other words, they are God's chosen, his elect.

The salvation-history that begins in Abraham and culminates in the conception of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-16) is our epistemological starting point for the Christian doctrine of election. And when we start here, we find features missing from the TULIP. First, Genesis' account of election is startling in how it concentrates on election as the means by which God's salvation is extended to others. It is not made immediately available to all; but neither is it restricted to those expressly elected. The overriding logic of election is not an appeal to arbitrariness as evidence of God's absolute power, but an appeal to God's mysterious way of blessing all the families of the earth.18

Second, the biblical accounts of election reveal a God who apparently prefers the weak to the strong. Thus an undistinguished Aramean and two second-born sons become the channels (not merely the beneficiaries) of God's salvation. Thus David, the youngest and shortest in a family of shepherds, founds an eternal royal line. Thus an adolescent village girl, engaged to a stonemason, is made the Mother of God. The theme of election as reversal permeates the biblical images of God's predestination. It unravels the caricature of a God who decrees blessings and curses autocratically. Insofar as reversal and mission characterize the biblical vision of election, they point out the continuity of God's choice over its arbitrariness.

Third, Augustinian and Calvinist doctrines of double-predestination have a symmetrical feel to them that is missing in the biblical accounts. If there are a decree of salvation and a decree of reprobation, they are not equal opposites. Rather, election's overriding concern is blessing.

Reprobation as a Means of Salvation

This asymmetry is easy to miss, since it is so counterintuitive: How can a decree of reprobation work to further salvation? The three most often quoted biblical examples of God's "predestination to damnation" offer an answer.

Jacob and Esau. The first example is Esau. Jacob deceives his father Isaac into receiving Esau's birthright and his blessing. While Genesis passes over his duplicity without much comment, Malachi attributes the reversal of fortune to God's favor, not to Jacob's or his mother's conniving:

Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. I have made his hill country a desolation and his heritage a desert for jackals. If Edom [Esau's people] says, "We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins," YHWH Sabaoth says, They may build, but I will tear down, until they are called the wicked country, the people with whom YHWH is angry forever. Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, "Great is YHWH beyond the borders of Israel" (Mal. 1:2-5)!

Paul in turn interprets Malachi in Romans 9, perhaps Calvinism's favorite prooftext for predestination:

When Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God's purpose in election might continue, not because of works but because of his call, she was told, "The elder will serve the younger." As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Rom. 9:10-13).

Following Augustine (and especially Luther), most Protestants have read Romans as an account of how individuals are saved by their faith in Jesus Christ apart from their own works-righteousness. Accordingly, Rom. 9 becomes an account of how individuals are predestined to salvation or predestined to rejection according to God's inscrutable purpose. Paul even anticipates the objection to such a predestination:

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses: "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So it depends not upon will or exertion, but upon God's mercy (Rom. 9:14-16).

This looks like an airtight prooftext of double-predestination: Paul even counters the Arminian objection before it is raised! But Romans is not about how individuals are saved by their faith in Jesus Christ apart from their own works-righteousness.19 It is about how Jews and Gentiles are saved by the "faith of Jesus Christ" (pistis christou), apart from works of the Torah such as circumcision. It is not about individuals as individuals, but an answer to the question of whether God has abandoned his elect — Israel — in the wake of their rejection of Messiah. "Has God rejected his people?" Paul asks in Rom. 11:1. "By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people, whom he foreknew" (Rom. 11:1-2a). Jacob and Esau are neither illustrations of God's division of humanity into two camps, nor types of those God conditionally elects. They and the nations they personify are salvation-history, in at least two significant respects.

First, from even before their births, Jacob and Esau duel for the inheritance of Isaac's and Abraham's blessings, and for roles in God's redemptive plan. On the rivalry between these two would-be patriarchs hangs the cosmic history of all humanity. Esau's rejection must be understood not as some arbitrary divine grudge, but in terms of God's promise to Abraham, through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed.

Second, God gives them both roles in the fulfillment of that promise. Israel is the bearer of God's favor for the world, while Edom is a reminder to Israel, then to the world, that YHWH is more than a regional deity (Mal. 1:5).

In Romans, Paul is showing that it is through Jacob — that is, through both Israel's election and Israel's hardening (11:7) — that Gentiles are grafted into the promises of a jealous God, and that it is through the nations — nations like Edom — that Israel will learn God's jealousy for herself and return (11:13-15, cf. Mal. 3). The Malachi passage fits beatifully. Yet Paul's use of it undermines the common notion of election dividing the world into the elect and the damned. In chapters 9-11, believing Israel is elect, while disbelieving Israel is both hardened, as far as the gospel is concerned, and elect, as far as the promise is concerned (11:28-29, 32). In Romans we do not find two neatly distinguished divine decrees that cleanly separate the world into sheep and goats. They overlap — and both are directed toward God's mercy.

Moses and Pharaoh. The second example follows Esau in Romans 9. God hardens Pharaoh's heart "so that I will gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army; and the Egyptians shall know that I am YHWH" (Ex. 14:4). While Pharaoh is another favorite Calvinist example for double-predestination, he too is hardly a random character in history. He plays a crucial role in Israel's deliverance, and thus in the world's deliverance through Israel. So Paul follows Jacob and Esau, paired in Rom. 9:12, with Moses and Pharaoh, paired in 9:15 and 9:17:

For the scripture says to Pharaoh, "I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth." So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills (Rom. 9:17-18).

The last verse here seems to warrant extending the idea of mercying and hardening (or blessing and cursing) to humanity in general as an Augustinian doctrine of double-predestination. And indeed, Paul seems to anticipate and counter the natural Arminian objection, "Why does he still find fault? For who resists his will?" (Rom. 9:19) with an appeal to the potter's right to mold clay however he pleases. However, here too Paul concentrates on God's redemptive purpose for all of humanity through those he molds. This is the theme of Isaiah 29, whose sixteenth verse he quotes. Egypt and all the earth learn YHWH's identity, and learn to call on his name, in part through Pharaoh's hardened heart. Never in Romans are God's different sovereign purposes taken out of their cosmic, narrative context and made decrees merely concerning the fates of individuals. Jacob and Esau, Moses and Pharaoh are pivotal figures in salvation-history through whose history Jesus emerges as the savior of "all" (Rom. 11:32).

Jesus and Judas. The predestination of Christians follows the same pattern, both within and without Romans. They are the pivotal figures in salvation-history-in-the-making, whom God has called, gathered, mentored, and sent out. Election is therefore to be understood in terms of apostolicity. Jesus' call to discipleship frames Ephesians' doctrine of predestination:

[God] chose (exelexato) us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined (proorisas) us in love to be his adopted children through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved One. For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to the purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (Eph. 1:4-6, 9-10).

Ephesians proclaims neither arbitrariness nor eternal mystery on God's part, but a consistent purpose and a mystery disclosed in Jesus Christ, and human agency in fulfilling that purpose. Chapters 3 and 4 make this even more abundantly clear: The purpose of predestination and divine grace is the growth and perfection of Christ's body, which we now see is cosmic in scope, including both Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 3:4-6, 4:12-16).

God's apostles and disciples are his Jacobs and Moseses in the new Israel. And Iscariot is his Pharaoh. Judas Iscariot is our third common illustration of God's decree of perdition. Jesus prays in John 17:12, "I have guarded [those you have given me], and none of them is lost but the son of perdition (ho huios tês apôleias; NRSV "the one destined to be lost"), that the scripture might be fulfilled." Judas, like Esau and Pharaoh, is not some random character chosen to suffer to illustrate God's power. He is an indispensable character in salvation-history, a representative of the disciples who finds himself on both sides of God's electing decrees. His life too fulfills Scripture (Acts 1:16). Through Judas' betrayal, the Son of Man is lifted up, and we are brought into God's promise.

Barth's Evasion

This narrative logic, prominent in Scripture but weak in the tradition at least since Pelagius, justifies Barth's stress on Jesus as the alpha and omega of God's election, as well as his innovation in calling Jesus both the elect one and the reprobate one. It is God's choice of him at the Jordan and on the cross that makes him a curse for us, and it is his curse that makes him a blessing for us (Gal. 3:13-14, following Deut. 27:26). Jesus is a short of mirror image of Iscariot. While Jesus too is the subject and object of both elections, his righteousness brings both to a happy outcome. They in turn apply to humanity, but only in him and in the salvation-history that centers on him. Jesus is the heart of God's choice of Israel and the Church.

Yet Barth's doctrine is too weak where its predecessors are too strong. The tradition before Barth concentrated on either the recipients of God's reconciling work, or God's decree that they be reconciled. To keep God's choice (which for Barth is God the Son, the eternal Word) from becoming extrinsic to God's nature, Barth reduces the doctrine to its Christological dimension. He replaces the classical doctrines of election with his doctrine of substitutionary atonement under a new name. Barth simply treats "election" as reconciliation in verbal form. The old doctrine is not radically reformulated at all. It is simply dropped. The Son assumes the roles of both the subject and the object of reconciliation, as if no other objects mattered. The result is a cross on which hang Jacob and Esau, Moses and Pharaoh, the beloved disciple and Judas Iscariot. Barth has not crucified the Father, but he has crucified practically everyone else. In Christ all seem to be crucified, buried, raised, and ascended — even the rulers and authorities who put him there (cf. Col. 1:15)!

Jesus is indeed the Elect One. But what about the secondary characters who are also called God's elect ones (Rom. 8:33), let alone his enemies? This, after all, is the question the Jewish and Augustinian doctrines of election set out to explain. Barth leaves us unable to answer. We must pass over in silence not only questions about our own elections and those of the saints, but even the Bible's eternal condemnations of God's opponents (Rev. 20:10).

How do we correct the excesses of classical doctrines of election without overcorrecting? We need a doctrine that encompasses God's will to reconcile, his Word of reconciliation, and its discrete recipients, who are agents of reconciliation in their own right. We need a doctrine that is more than merely theistic or anthropocentric or Christological, that still addresses the agency and destiny of particular human beings in the context of God's single plan of salvation. We need an act in which Jesus is the main character, but not the only character.

From Jesus to Mary: Annunciation as Election

Annunciation's promise is its focus on another "elect one of God."20 Annunciation celebrates the occasion when God reveals Mary's election to her. Mary is the ideal figure for a doctrine of election that avoids the weaknesses of its predecessors. No one but Jesus plays a more important role in Christology. Yet for all her importance, Mary remains a secondary figure. Her significance depends entirely upon Jesus.

Like Abraham, Mary has done nothing until her visitation to distinguish her. Only her membership in Israel (a matter not of her own choosing) offers any basis for God to regard her in any special way. So when Gabriel comes and says, "`Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!'" (Luke 1:28), Mary reacts the way an Arminian might react to the doctrine of election: "She was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be" (1:29). Is it a horrible decree? But Gabriel reassures her that the doctrine is one of comfort rather than dread: "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus" (1:30-31).

Arminians will claim that this annunciation rests on Mary's willingness, which comes in her fiat: "Let it be to me according to your word" (1:38).21 But there is no indication in the text that the angel is waiting for Mary's acceptance of his offer, or even that it is an offer. Everything he says in 1:31-35 is in the indicative: "You will conceive you will bear you will call."22 And Mary's fiat is prefaced by an admission that she does not expect a choice: "Behold, I am the handmaid (doulê, "slave girl") of the Lord" (1:38). She simply hears the message and assents.23 Thus the Catholic prayer for the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary has a surprisingly Reformed flavor: "O God, by Your divine decree the Word was made flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the announcement of the Angel."24

Yet Mary is not coerced. God's grace is not working against her will. It is causing her will. Mary is overshadowed but never violated, and so hers is a virgin birth.25

Next, the angel explains the reason for this extraordinary event. It comes in the familiar terms of Israel's salvation-history (1:32-33), in which Mary now takes a starring role. Mary's own account comes later in her Magnificat (1:52-55), which casts both Mary and her son firmly at the center of God's electing purposes. God's electing mercy towards Mary remembers God's electing mercy towards Abraham and Jacob, calling Mary back to the revolutionary military anthems of Miriam and Hannah. Choosing Mary fulfills the promises to the forefathers of Israel, reverses fortunes in an unjust world, and blesses the whole earth.26 We have already found just these qualities in the election accounts of Genesis, Romans, and Ephesians.

In Catholic and Orthodox Mariology, Mary personifies both Israel and the Church: Israel, because she stands at the end of Israel's pre-messianic lineage (Matt. 1:16), passing Jacob's election onto her son. The Church, because as the first person to hear and accept the Gospel (Luke 1:30-33, 38) and one of the few not to abandon him on the cross (John 19:25), she is the first Christian and a model for Christian discipleship. Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution of the Church refers to Mary as "a preeminent and altogether singular member of the Church" and as the mother of all Christians. In the Catholic assertion of Mary's immaculate conception, her preservation from original sin, Geoffrey Wainwright even sees a kind of correspondence to the Calvinist doctrine of election. In a special way, Mary was graced, favored, so as to be a worthy mother of the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity. Her election makes her both blessed among women, and a blessing to all who gain life in her son. In some similar way, God's special saving, electing grace towards all his people allows us to bear the Son's presence in ourselves, to each other, and to the world.

Protestants are right to be nervous about the trajectories of Orthodox and Catholic Mariology, and right to offer an alternative account of Mary's role in God's plan. But here too, Mary is a fitting exemplar for election. One helpful account comes from Millard Erickson's systematic theology, in his chapter on the Virgin Birth. He explores Mary in a distinctively evangelical way, as highlighting humanity's helplessness even to initiate the first step in God's salvation. Far from confirming her sinlessness or special standing before God, the sheer divine grace behind the virginal conception shows there to be "nothing particularly deserving" about her.27 One need not appeal to high-church traditions to locate election fruitfully in Annunciation. (And there may be more to Fundamentalists' insistence on the Virgin Birth than merely a reaction against modernistic naturalism.)28

Annunciation anchors election in both the Triune economy of salvation and human salvation-history. As a divine fiat, Annunciation is a Trinitarian speech-act. It decrees the eternal will of the Father, inaugurates the earthly mission of the Son, and performs the calling and creating work of the Holy Spirit. In Mary's body, promise meets fulfillment, God meets humanity, and Israel meets Church. Her unremarkable life is the Ground Zero of God's presence in creation. In her, the Triune economy does not merely decree salvation-history, but enters it.

Thus Mary's story crystallizes the themes of God's predestinating election. Like her Son, Mary bears the burden of the Father's commandments and the freedom of his promises, and the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within her. Her divine favor evokes not the favor of the world, but its suspicion (Matt. 1:19). She feels the joy of God's election as well as the sword of God's reprobation (Luke 2:35) — not merely by her being in Christ, but by Christ being in her. Her calling is not a personal soteriological finish line, but the beginning of an extraordinary life of service in personal relationship with God the Son.

Far from these blessings lifting Mary above and beyond her fellow disciples into some "co-mediatorial" role, they are the very blessings the whole Church experiences as it lives its cruciform life of Christian discipleship. Mary's unparalleled place in the divine economy is, paradoxically, our own. Annunciation crystallizes the doctrine of election precisely because like us, Mary is not Jesus, yet he is the source of all her significance. Mary's story never drifts free from the story of Israel, Jesus, and Church. The unsuspecting slave girl who forms the body and soul of her own Lord is neither a meritorious moral agent, nor a random beneficiary of a capricious tyrant. The Lukan Mary stands in good company. She stands beside Paul's Sarah and Rebecca as well as his Jacob and Moses (Rom. 9:6-18), and is among the friends the Johannine Jesus chooses (John 15:16) and for whom he prays (17:11-12). She is numbered within the Lukan crowds predestined to eternal life (Acts 13:48), and remains in fellowship with the Church in Ephesus and elsewhere.

Eastern Orthodoxy's favorite Old Testament type for Mary is the burning bush of Exodus 3. She is aflame with God's presence, yet the integrity of her created humanity is not compromised. In this image one sees the true harmony between God's sovereignty and purpose for creation, and human agency. God's predestinating election brings "a fire which does not destroy," not only to Mary the virgin, but to all those who through the ministries of God's chosen ones become dwelling places of God's Holy Spirit and members of the body of Christ. "I partake with fearful joy of the divine fire, I who am but a straw," reads the communion prayer of Simeon the New Theologian; "and, O strange miracle, I burn without being consumed, like the ineffable dew in the light, as once the bush."29

Mary's status as representative of election does not immediately solve all the problems involved in the old debates. Questions continue to haunt us, such as how to reconcile the perdition of even a few with the apparently unlimited extent of Christ's atonement, or how to understand a divine decree of reprobation in terms of God's justice. Yet Annunciation reminds us that if we are even to find these questions theologically intelligible, we must not abstract them from the concrete history of God's salvation manifested in Israel, Jesus, and Church, and offered to the ends of the earth.

Magnify the Lord: Calling a New Election

However, Annunciation is much more than an anchor for the doctrine of election and its related issues, and a point of departure for a stronger reformulation of them. It is itself an achievement and embodiment of the doctrine of election. The Magnificat, read during the vigils of the Annunciation, as well as at Matins in the East and Vespers in the West,30 is not only a beautiful expression of Jewish messianic expectation. It is a gold standard for faithful reflection on the doctrine of election. In the context of worship, it reflects the qualities of biblical election we described above. Mary's song is an eruption of praise in the face of God's favor, which has resonated with the entire worshiping Church — Orthodox, Protestant, radical, and Catholic.

Like a film rated "R", the Westminster Confession advises "special prudence and care" when teaching its doctrine of predestination. The Revised Common Lectionary adopts a simpler approach: censorship. Its readings for Ordinary Time long-jump over the texts of homiletical terror in Rom. 9-11.31 By contrast, the Magnificat has needed no such restrictions. Like the doxology that opens Ephesians, it preaches and it worships, even in contexts where Calvinism is unpopular.32 Indeed, it is most popular particularly in such contexts. Catholics and Arminians are not tempted to hurl the powerful and sovereign God of Luke 1 to the floor in revulsion!

The Remonstrance and the TULIP were never intended nor used as liturgical texts, and they should not be evaluated as such. On the other hand, Gabriel's announcement, Mary's and Elizabeth's monologues, and other Annunciation passages may in fact not only be ideal liturgical texts, but also excellent constructive theological texts. They are shaped not by Pelagius' anti-Manichaean agenda, nor by Augustine's anti-Pelagian agenda, nor by anti-Calvinist and anti-Arminian agendas in the Low Countries, but by the ecumenical agenda of Spirit-empowered corporate worship. They are narratively concrete rather than philosophically abstract. They actually comfort and strengthen the Church in the ways Calvinism intends predestination to do, and assure and empower the oppressed better than endless Arminian altar calls. They hold together Reformed respect for God's sovereignty and specific mercies, and Arminian respect for human freedom and God's limitless love. They are models for further reflection on the doctrines of election and predestination. It is in the Church's liturgies, after all, that the biblical visions of election have survived and prospered in the face of both the Pelagian and Augustinian visions.

The Christian practice of Annunciation honors the most vital aspects of biblical election: Its Jewishness; its origin in God's loving character; its themes of reversal, mission, and bias towards blessing over cursing; its salvation-historical particularity; its continuity rather than arbitrariness; its focus in worship; and its climax in Jesus Christ. All these are ways in which traditional doctrines of election could be improved. So let us consider a kind of "Marian TULIP" whose five points are informed principally by election as we find it celebrated throughout the first chapter of Luke:

— Total human capacity for receiving God's free gifts of redemption.
— Prior divine favor on the humble and excluded.
— Sufficiency of God's saving acts in Christ.
— Unrivalled power of God's mercy to accomplish his purpose.
— God's eternal faithfulness in fulfilling his covenant promises.

These five points reframe election and predestination in a more God-glorifying way than either the Remonstrance or the Canons of Dort, and better convey the sense of the faithful. They better reflect the hymnody and prayer language of worshiping churches. Unlike their alternative schemas (but like Rom. 8:30's chain of election), all five apply to Jesus himself, rather than merely to sinners, so that our Lord's election is no longer obscured. It is true that they lack the theological precision of both the Calvinist and Arminian formulations. They are susceptible to both Calvinist and Arminian interpretations. But they are not susceptible to Pelagian interpretation, so their interpretive leeway need not be considered a weakness. Indeed, it hints at ways the longstanding rift between moderate and radical Augustinians might be healed.

Hypothetically, then, let Pelagius rather than Elizabeth ask the incredulous question, "Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me" (Luke 1:43)? Let Mary represent the Church that came to him bearing the Gospel of salvation to which he responded with both faith and works. Its answer to him would be (1:46-55):

My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
For he has looked upon the humility of his slave girl.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
For the Mighty One has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He has put down the mighty from their thrones
And exalted the humble;
He has filled the hungry with good things
And the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his child Israel,
To remember his mercy,
As he spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and his posterity for ever.

Is that such a poor response?

1 This article is part of a Christology of the liturgical year now under development, tentatively entitled The Reason for the Season: Christology Through the Liturgical Year. Many thanks to Jonathan Wilson, Nancey Murphy, James McClendon, Christian Early, Brad Kallenberg, and Allen Tennison, for their helpful critical comments.

2 McClendon 1994, 183-185, 278.

3 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in Conscience, Consensus, and the Development of Doctrine (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 67.

4 Michael Scott Horton, Putting Amazing Back into Grace: Who Does What in Salvation? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

5 McClendon 1994, 182.

6 Rees, 15: "The very arguments for man's responsibility, exercised by use of his free will, which Augustine had deployed against the Manichees, were now being adapted by Pelagius to suit his own case that man had the power to save himself, always provided that he had accepted the saving grace of baptism of his own choice."

7 The sixteen arguments Jerome attributes to Caelestius (De Perf. Iust., ii-vii, 1-16) richly illustrate this. See John Ferguson, Pelagius: A Historical and Theological Study (Cambridge: Heffer, 1956), 62-64.

8 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 346-347.

9 "For [Pelagius], a good action could mean one that fulfilled successfully certain conditions of behavior, for [Augustine], one that marked the culmination of an inner evolution" (Brown, 371).

10 It is this unintentional but persistent failure that causes Rees to appreciate Pelagius as a "reluctant heretic," more worthy of pity than Gal. 1:8-9's anathemas (Rees, 131).

11 Rees, 127. Ferguson calls Augustine's interest "theological, Pelagius' anthropological" (90).

12 Ferguson, 68.

13 Ferguson, 168. In his sympathetic review of Pelagius, Ferguson admits that Pelagius' theology may be justly criticized for its "absence of any clear doctrine of the atonement" (183). Ferguson himself fails to appreciate the significance for election of Jesus' place in the history of salvation.

14 Is it fair to Pelagius to make him the scapegoat for all of Western Christianity? Pelagius is rightfully named as the instigator of the controversy (Ferguson, 159), in his objection to Augustine's prayer in Confessions 10.40. But the blame deserves to be shared, both by the Englishman who started it, the African who accepted his terms, and by the Europeans who appropriated Augustine's response without paying sufficient attention to its context or limits. Really, all are culpable who fail to appreciate the Jewish shape of election in Scripture.

15 With Augustine's appraisal of the logical consequences of Pelagius' teaching, Brown contends that "Pelagianism as we know it, that consistent body of ideas of momentous consequences, had come into existence; but in the mind of Augustine, not of Pelagius" (345). But by then Pelagius' thought had already been systematized and radicalized by followers like Caelestius (Ferguson, 58ff). For our purposes, Pelagianism is more important than the one after whom it is named.

16 While Arminius' Analysis of the Ninth Chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans does interpret Rom. 9-11 collectively rather than individually, it draws on Gal. 3-4 in order to develop a typological reading of the characters of Rom. 9 that generalizes them as types of "children of the promise" and "children of the flesh." Their narrative context in Israel's concrete history of salvation is lost. See The Works of James Arminius, trans. James Nichols and William Nichols (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1986), 3:485-519.

17 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics vol. II.2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 1-506.

18 Cf. McClendon's similar observation: "Jews and Christians must learn ever to construe divine election as election to service, service to others, so that Abraham's God (and now the risen Christ) is thereby disclosed, by serving all, to be the God of all the earth (Gen. 12:3)" (278).

19 This is not to claim that the text does not support such a conclusion. It only claims that the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith is not Paul's immediate argument. Says James D.G. Dunn in his Word Biblical Commentary: Romans 9-16 (Waco, TX: Word, 1988): "The theme [of Rom. 9-11] is Israel's destiny, not the doctrine of justification illustrated by Israel [Schlier]" (520). See also Dunn, "The New Perspective on Paul: Paul and the Law," in Karl P. Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), 299-308, as well as other essays in that volume.

20 "`Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you.' By this salutation, the archangel sets Mary apart from the very beginning. She is the Elect One of God." Catherine Aslanoff, ed. The Incarnate God: The Feasts of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), 1.55.

21 Despite the absence of textual indications and Mary's self-description as a handmaid, the passage is often read as an affirmation of Mary's sovereignty. Aslanoff mentions a nineteenth century Russian bishop's sermon in which he claimed, "In the days when the world was being created, when God pronounced the life-giving and powerful words, `Let it be,' the word of the Creator made creatures appear out of nothing. But on this unique day, when the divine Myriam pronounced her brief and obedient `Let it be so,' I hardly dare to say what happened then — the word of the creature caused the Creator to come into the world." See Aslanoff, 1.59, quoting Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1989), 172.

22 Stephen N. Williams' review of John Sanders' The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence in "What God Doesn't Know" in Books and Culture 3 (Nov./Dec. 1999), 16, offers a satirical angle on this insight.

23 Is God's choice of Mary conditioned upon foreknowledge of her response, as Arminians claim? Perhaps the answer is provided in Luke's account of God's appearance before Zechariah. The priest, whose life of virtue would satisfy even a Pelagian (Luke 1:6), nonetheless expresses disbelief at God's unexpected good news. Yet rather than taking away his promise of joy and gladness (1:14), Gabriel simply silences him — perhaps to keep him from praying for stones and serpents? — until the bundle arrives and his words give God the proper glory (1:64, 68-79).

24 St. Joseph Daily Missal and Hymnal (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1966), 825.

25 Lossky himself speaks of "mutual consent" of God and woman — "not a passive acceptance of the Annunciation, but an active surrender of Herself to God's will, a voluntary and independent participation of the Mother of God, and, in Her Person, of all creatures, in the work of Salvation" (173).

26 John Howard Yoder calls Mary "a Maccabean," resisting the spiritualizing of the Magnificat's themes over the centuries and locating her even more firmly in the salvation-history that had continued into the intertestamental era. See The Politics of Jesus, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 21-22.

27 Millard Erickson, Systematic Theology Volume 2 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 757. He continues, "There were probably countless Jewish girls who could have served to give birth to the Son of God. Certainly Mary manifested qualities which God could use, such as faith and dedication (Luke 1:38, 46-55). But she really had nothing special to offer, not even a husband. That someone apparently incapable of having a child should be chosen to bear God's Son is a reminder that salvation is not a human accomplishment but a gift from God, and an undeserved one at that."

28 The Virgin Birth is one of the "Five Fundamentals." See George Marsden, ed., The Fundamentals (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988).

29 Quoted in Aslanoff, 1.63.

30 Aslanoff, 1.58.

31 After apportioning a week for each chapter in Rom. 5-7, the lectionary devotes four weeks to Rom. 8, then jumps from Rom. 9:1-5 (week between August 7 and 13, Year A) to Rom. 11:13-16 and 29-32 (week between August 14 and August 20) and Rom. 11:33-36 (week between August 21 and 27). Rom. 10:8-b-13 does appear in Year C's First Sunday in Lent, but it too conveniently avoids the general thrust of chapters 9-11.

32 Eph. 1:1-10 is read on the Sunday between July 10 and 16, Year B.

Through the Veil: Karl Barth Should Be Allowed a Place in ‘Doctrine of Scripture’ Discussions

2009-10-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

(May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968)

In discussions concerning the doctrine of scripture modern evangelical theologians and scholars often dismiss the profound insight of Karl Barth. That is not to say Barth was always right. There is much to disagree about his theology, a great deal which needs to at least be given serious consideration when formulating ones own theological positions, and common ground that will help all as they walk toward the common goal of knowing God. Herein lies a brief exploration of why Karl Barth should be allowed a place in discussions about ‘doctrine of scripture.’

Karl Barth was schooled in the liberal ideologies that characterized theological thinking in the early twentieth century, particularly in Europe and especially Germany. He had a “revelation” akin to that of Martin Luther’s Romans 1:17 experiences in which Luther realized the errors being taught by the church. Barth saw in the world, especially post WWI, the inconsistencies of liberalism with the message God shows in the Bible. This led to his book The Epistle to the Romans. He considered his first edition inadequate and rewrote it shortly after its publication. The sixth edition has become a marker in conservative theology. Barth makes the serious theologian put aside any preconceived notions and enter into dialogue that starts with God, His Word, and His Will. It is exactly that challenge that makes Karl Barth controversial.

Controversy does not need to be the definitive word in our conversations about Barth. The pride of being the one correct position often clouds our judgments and hence interferes with the purpose of theology – understanding God and communicating that understanding to others. When a new voice – or a voice newly heard – arises, we should listen to the reasoning in the sound of the instruction instead of rushing to drown out that voice because it does not fit neatly into the arrangements of conformity. If Barth could put aside the conformities of the respected German liberal theologies of his day then he should be afforded the same due process in our discussions about the doctrine of scripture in our day. In fact, as Mark DeVine has noted about Albert Mohler’s observations, “many evangelicals who worked hard to cast Barth as an enemy of the gospel showed little evidence of having read him.[1] DeVine quotes J. I. Packer (God Who is Rich in Mercy), “Barth’s purpose of being rigorously, radically, and ruthlessly biblical and his demand for interpretation that is theologically coherent, is surely exemplary for us.”[2]

Packer rightly observes Barth’s most outstanding quality in his theology that should drive us to better understand him, and how we can bring his conclusions to a place where they bolster and strengthen consensus views instead of standing outside in a place of critically derived snobbery. Packer gives credit to Barth by saying “he laid constant stress on God’s sovereign freedom and lordship in grace, on man’s incapacity in his sin to feel after God and find him, on the reality of God’s communion with us through the Word that he speaks to us in Christ, and on the instrumentality of the Scriptures in conveying to us the knowledge of Christ and of grace that they exhibit.”[3] To hear Barth in his own words,

We talk of sovereignty, a command, an obedience, a willingness and allegiance unlike any other, because in him we meet a sovereign unlike any other. When Jesus rules God rules, and God rules when Jesus rules. That is why this sovereignty is quite unlike any other sovereignty, and why there is not other obedience on earth like this one.[4]

This view of God and the sovereignty of God is what drives Barth’s theology. Such a high view of God is indeed refreshing in this time of scholarship where individuality leads many a well-meaning preacher to deduce for himself the meaning from the text instead of letting the text reveal God to him. The distraction of trying to redefine each word of the Bible in an effort to maintain cultural relevance is not present with Barth. “There must be absolute confidence in holy scripture…”[5] The preacher must approach scripture as revealing God to the reader and hearer. “Scripture says the same thing, but it constantly says the one thing different ways.”[6] In essence, scripture is the written revelation of God to His elect. Through its pages He enables us to interact, fellowship, and worship Him. A Person is revealed therein and that Person becomes synonymous with the very scriptures themselves.

Barth identifies in A Shorter Commentary on Romans the person of Jesus Christ as being the motivation for Paul in his ministry and for his correspondences. “…Paul has at once spoken very substantially of the cause that moves him. This cause is a person (Romans 1:1)…This Lord has given him the grace of the apostolate (Romans 1:5) the office of an accredited ambassador, and this office commissions him to proclaim the Gospel, the good news.”[7] The words Paul communicates to the church at Rome are not the charter for Paul’s ministry. The words are how Paul describes what Jesus entrusted to him – the task and lifework that Paul would undertake.

What then do we do with Barth’s assertion that Scripture is merely a witness to the ‘Word of God’ and not actually the ‘Word of God?’[8] We should allow that Barth is at the very least not incorrect if he is not totally accurate. Today’s conservative evangelical thinking relies heavily on what Steve Wellum[9] identifies as the ‘Received’ view.[10] As can be seen already, Barth held scripture in high regard and viewed them as being the authority to which all must be held accountable. This holds closely to the Sola Scriptura principle that came out of the Reformation which is held by most conservative evangelicals today.

So where is the disagreement? Where those that hold to the supposed ‘Received’ view of scripture will stop at scripture only being the Word of God, Barth holds that the Word of God has a Trinitarian aspect similar to the Trinity. That is, it has a threefold meaning: Word revealed (Jesus Christ), Word written (scripture), and Word proclaimed.[11] Eberhard Busch, in The Great Passion, says of Barth that “the object of theology, that is, what Barth calls the ‘Word’ or ‘revelation,’ is truly identical with the person of Jesus Christ.”[12] Quoting from Barth himself (Der Götze wackelt),

The saying in John 1:14 is the center and theme of all theology…I have no Christological principle and no Christological method. Rather, in each individual theological question I seek to orient myself afresh to some extent from the very beginning – not on a Christological dogma but on Jesus Christ himself.[13]

“The Word of God is the Word that God spoke, speaks, and will speak in the midst of all men.”[14] Hence, the threefold elucidation of Barth fleshes out the one-dimensional stance of the so-called ‘Received’ view. It presents God as speaking now today and not just in the past. Busch says as much himself in the forward to The Word in this World, “the question is much more whether [we] hear and pay attention to what God says – not only said, but says.”[15]

It is the ‘we’ that brings Barth’s view of the doctrine of scripture to a place of compliment with that of the ‘Received’ view. The ‘Received’ view, in its attempt to get back to the original text, relies on a new evangelical magisterium[16] to provide meaning to the text for the congregations. This elitist’s ideology has become a prevalent form of theology in many churches. It drives polity, directs outreach, and derives leadership functions. By allowing Barth’s view to stand alongside the ‘Received’ view the text becomes a living text that speaks God’s Word to our hearts instead of a moldy document we can only understand correctly if someone else shows us how. Jesus as the Word is not just a figure in history but a living Savior. He becomes the object of all the functioning of the church as He is proclaimed.

As a Barthian view of scripture is allowed to come into our theological discussions then the church takes on a whole different dimension itself. Instead of being the social club looking for relevance in this world the church would rediscover its purpose of being – proclaiming Jesus, the Word. The community of the elect will coalesce into a community of faith. “It is the commonwealth gathered, founded, and ordered by the Word of God, the ‘communion of the saints.’”[17] The church has the self-realization of unmerited salvation. The rallying point shifts from the number of members to the discipling of its members. The Word stops being a static document sometimes read before Sunday school and rarely read in church services. Instead, the Word becomes the living person of Jesus Christ who the church gathers to worship and proclaim in all antiquity and in all eternity yet to come. “Christian community exists only where the promise [the Word] is heard and believed [and hence acted on].”[18] Furthermore, if God is to be realized in our churches then churches need to have God revealed to them. “God is revealed in Jesus Christ through the witness of Holy scripture.”[19]

The ‘Received’ view as the main point of reason for creating community becomes an incomplete rationale. While it provides a wonderful framework upon which to build a more complete paradigm its reliance upon the verbal-plenary [20] aspect of revelation is its only true strength. The danger is that the paper and ink of the manuscripts and its ensuing translations becomes the object of worship rather than the Giver. Without the perception that Jesus is the Word of God first and foremost as in Barth’s theology then the tendency is for the written word to take precedence and become worshiped, even if inadvertently, in His place.

In sum, our statement distinguishes the Word spoken in the existence of Jesus Christ from all others as the Word of God. When we think of these others, we do well to include even the human words spoken in the existence and witness of the men of the Bible and the Church. In distinction from all these, Jesus Christ is the one Word of God.[21]

Karl Barth has been a controversial figure in theological circles. Many are introduced to him via the vehicle of negative descriptions and derogatory critiques. A cut-and-paste sound-bite mentality pervades the discussions that may ensue about him and his theology with hardly any true substantive reading of his works. There are some that have dared to read Karl Barth and interact with him thereby keeping alive the dialogue that fuels healthy theological explorations. William Willimon opines in his introduction to The Word in this World, “We are a profoundly insecure people and the source of our insecurity is revealed to be not Islamic terrorists but rather the God who commands us in Jesus the Christ. I’m therefore hearing Barth’s sermon as a call across the years…to be the preacher that God has called me to be.”[22]“Preach on, Karl Barth.”[23]

[1] Mark DeVine. Evangelicals and Karl Barth: Friends or Foes?, (a paper delivered at the Annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Colorado Springs, Colorado 2001).[2] Ibid.

[3] J. I. Packer, Encountering Present-Day Views of Scripture, www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_views_packer.html

[4] Kurt I. Johanson. ed. The Word in this World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. (Regent College Publishing: Vancouver, British Columbia, 2007) 48.

[5] Karl Barth, Homiletics. (Westminster/John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky 1991) 76.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Karl Barth, A Shorter Commentary on Romans. (John Knox Press: Richmond, Virginia 1963) 15.

[8] S. J. Wellum, Systematic Theology I Handouts (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: Louisville, Kentucky 2007) 30.

[9] Ibid, 29.

[10] Lecture notes indicate that the received view is tied closely to the identity thesis that states Scripture is the Word of God, as brought out by B. B. Warfield. It states also that even if not provable the original manuscripts should be considered without error in all regards and allows that copies may themselves contain errors. Barth is not without fault in this regard as he believed the first eleven chapter of Genesis to probably be myth, though he viewed them to hold the same authority as the rest of scripture.

[11] Ibid, 30.

[12] Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan 2004) 30.

[13] Ibid, 30.

[14] Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: an Introduction. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan 1963) 18.

[15] Kurt I Johanson,. ed. The Word in this World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. (Regent College Publishing: Vancouver, British Columbia, 2007) 7.

[16] This borrows from the Roman Catholic view that only a select group could provide correct interpretation of the scriptures as only they had the scholarship and technical skill to necessary for such a task. This was one of the underlying issues of the Reformation – letting the commoner read for himself the Bible thereby hearing from God.

[17] Karl Barth. Evangelical Theology: an Introduction. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan 1963) 36.

[18] Karl Barth, Preaching to the Captives. CD ROM. 1957.

[19] Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man. (N. P., Pilgrim Press 1928) 195-6.

[20] Wellum. The Bible is the very Word of God itself in that all (plenary) is inspired of God, right down to the very words of the text (verbal).

[21] Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics. (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, 1994) 230.

[22] Johanson, 22.

[23] Ibid.

Tagged with: Baptist, Bible, Christian, Christianity, doctrine, doctrine of scripture, Karl Barth, religion, SBC, SBTS, scripture, Southern Baptist

Source: Through the Veil

2009-07-06T00:59:00.000-07:00

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Universalim - a list blogs discussing this issue

2009-07-06T00:55:00.001-07:00

Universalism in the Blogosphere

The theo-blogosphere is exploding with posts on universalism. In this post, I want to index these debates, and if people hear about other online conversations, please let me know and I will add them to this list. The posts are ordered chronologically, with the oldest first and the most recent last. Blogs are arranged alphabetically. The fact that I post these links on my site does not mean that I endorse any or all of the views expressed by the various individuals, particularly with regard to the online resources. I offer them in the hope that the dialogue will be furthered and our faith may be enriched.

Originally Posted July 21, 2006
Last Updated January 23, 2007
Note: this listing is the work of The Fire and The Rose

Christ in all the Scriptures/The Theology of G C Berkouwer:

John Hick’s Religious World (Dec. 18, 2006)
A Critique of J D Bettis, “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?” (June 9, 2007)
Two more footnotes to “Berkouwer and Barth” (June 19, 2007)

Chrisendom:

The logic of Talbott's universalism (Dec. 13, 2005)
Christian Universalism Pt. 1 (Feb. 3, 2006)
Christian Universalism Pt. 2 (Feb. 3, 2006)
Christian Universalism Pt. 3 (Feb. 4, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist (Aug. 4, 2006)
Universalism - a brief note on my position (Aug. 5, 2006)
Guest Post - part 1 of 2 (Aug. 14, 2006)
Guest Post - part 2 of 2 (Aug. 15, 2006)
Debating Christian universalism (June 27, 2007)
Useful Resources on Universalism for the Exegete (June 29, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 1 (July 2, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 2 (July 4, 2007)
The power of a question (July 5, 2007)
God is Love (July 10, 2007)
Debate with a Universalist (July 13, 2007)
Guest post: Gregory MacDonald (July 16, 2007)
Gregory MacDonald responds to a question (July 17, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 3 (July 29, 2007)
Gregory MacDonald responds to my previous post (July 30, 2007)
Hell behind us (Sept. 29, 2007)
The future of Christian Universalism debates (Jan. 16, 2008)

Connexions:

“What happens after death?” (July 10, 2006)
Death, judgement & hell: a little light reading (July 13, 2006)

Exiled Preacher:

Universalism? (July 12, 2006)

Experimental Theology:

Why I am a Universalist, Part 1 : Talbott’s Propositions (Oct. 17, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 2: God is not worthy of worship just because He’s God (Oct. 21, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 3: The Gift of Hell (Oct. 23, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: On Reading the Bible and Moral Coherence (Oct. 24, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 4: Moral Luck (Oct. 25, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Reading of Romans 9-11 (Oct. 25, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Comment on the Disjoint Between a Continuous Soteriology and a Binary Eschatology (Oct. 27, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 5: Salvation in a Post-Cartesian World (Oct. 28, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Reading of I Corinthians 15 (Oct. 30, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 6: Thanatocentrism and the Fetish of the Thin Red Line (Oct. 31, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Comment: A Soteriology for All Possible Worlds (Nov. 1, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist: Summing Up and Some Links (Nov. 2, 2006)

Faith & Theology:

Hans Urs von Balthasar: dare we hope? (Jan. 20, 2006)
Why I am not a universalist (June 23, 2006)
And yes, there is a hell... (July 11, 2006)

Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank:

“The Problem with Universalism?” (May 27, 2006)
Hoping that Universalism Is / Will Be True (June 6, 2006)
Underground Universalism (June 8, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist and “the ethos in some evangelical circles” (June 30, 2006)
Help with a Kierkegaard Quotation? (July 6, 2006)
Kierkegaard’s Own Words (July 12, 2006)
Follow-Up to “Hoping that Universalism Is / Will Be True” (July 24, 2006)
An Interview with The Evangelical Universalist (Oct. 25, 2006)
“Heretics” on Public Radio (Nov. 17, 2006)
Gregory MacDonald, “Can an Evangelical be a Universalist?” (Nov. 21, 2006)

God in a Shrinking Universe:

Universalism (May 18, 2006)

Jason Clark:

The Evangelical Universalist (July 15, 2006)

Leaving Münster:

Universalism (index of posts)
I heard a rumour ... (Mar. 7, 2004)
Versions of universalism (Mar. 27, 2004)
The horror of God’s unrestrained love? (Feb. 20, 2005)
These Christians should bow before Confucius (Mar. 2, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement (Mar. 4, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement 2 - more questions (Mar. 8, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement 3 - the unreached (April 1, 2005)
Universalistic prayer (May 7, 2005)
Universalism’s proof-texts (May 12, 2005)
Universalism, Scott McKnight and protestant purgatory (May 19, 2005)
Why do we hope? (May 20, 2005)
Howard Marshall refutes universalism's proof-texts (apparently!) (June 13, 2005)
Response to Howard Marshall (Universalism) (Nov. 21, 2005)
Why evangelise if there's hope for non-Christians? (March 20, 2006)
Hell has never been a fashionable destination! (May 9, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 1 (Oct. 24, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 2 (Nov. 8, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 3 (Nov. 25, 2006)
A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity: A Review (Jan. 9, 2007)
How will every knee bow? (April 28, 2007)
McLaren on Hell, finally! (May 11, 2007)
Radical inclusivism - not by way of an introduction (May 17, 2007)

The Lost Message:

A Case for Universalism? (March 27, 2006)
The Case for Universalism (May 15, 2006)
Musing Universalism (May 18, 2006)
The Challenge of Universalism (May 20, 2006)
McLaren on Universalism (May 20, 2006)
Biblical Universalism: An Introduction (May 21, 2006)
Biblical Universalism Part One: Romans (May 23, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist (July 21, 2006)

Nothing New Under the Sun:

Barth on universalism as hope and prayer (July 12, 2006)

On Journeying with those in Exile:

On Divine Vengeance (July 24, 2007)
Baudrillard and Christian Universalism: Freedom, Choice, Liberation, Martyrdom (Aug. 4, 2007)

Sean the Baptist:

Is Universalism the Next Big Thing? (July 3, 2007)

Sub Ratione Dei:

The Anonymous Universalist (July 23, 2007)
Interrogating Talbott’s Universalism (July 25, 2007)

Toward Jerusalem:

The Liberal Annihilationist, part 7: Universalist texts (Sept. 30, 2006)
The Liberal Annihilationist: Summary (Sept. 30, 2006)

The Truth Will Set You Free:

Universalism: Some Introductory Remarks (May 22, 2006)
Universalism - Some Hermeneutic Concerns (May 23, 2006)
Universalism: God's Justice and Mercy (May 24, 2006)
True Freedom? The Question of Universalism (May 25, 2006)
Universalism and Recapitulation - A Take on Dali (May 26, 2006)
The Cutting Edge of Grace - Some (semi) Final Thoughts on Universalism (May 26, 2006)

Online Resources:

Keith DeRose's page - “Universalism and the Bible” (pro)
The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry page - Universalism (contra)
Debate between Tom Talbott and Eric Landstrom
Christian Universalism.com
Christian Universalism Articles

Published Books:

Every Knee Shall Bow: The Case for Christian Universalism by Thomas Allin and Mark T. Chamberlain
Hope Beyond Hell by Gerard Beauchemin
The One Purpose of God by Jan Bonda
Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell: Papers Presented at the Fourth Edinburgh Conference in Christian Dogmatics, 1991 by Nigel M. De S. Cameron
Destined for Salvation: God’s Promise to Save Everyone by Kalen K. Fristad
What Does the Bible Really Say About Hell?: Wrestling With the Traditional View (Living Issues Discussion Series) by Randolph J. Klassen
The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald (pseudonym)
Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge
The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott
God Does Not Foreclose: The Universal Promise of Salvation by David Lowes Watson

New listings on Universalism (pro and con) by Barth and the Boyz:

Universalism and the Bible (http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/univ.htm#9.)

2009-07-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

All articles in this Library are listed by subject matter or title - see top of page.
all archival listings are hyperlinked to the article, itself. Click and read.

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The Meaning of Christ's Death discussed as atonement theory

2009-06-23T12:22:00.001-07:00

What Is The Meaning of Christ's Death?
byJason DulleJasonDulle@sbcglobal.net
Editorial note: The format is Barth and the Boyz / the content is solely and with censor the work of Jason Dulle.

Article Outline
The Problem
Alternative Interpretations in the Church
Biblical Teaching
Systematic Formulation
Apologetic Interaction
Relevance to Life and Ministry

The Problem
The death of Christ has held a place of prominence in Christian theology since the days of the apostles. Their stress on this aspect of Christ’s life is evident by their many references to His blood. That the divine stage of Christ’s crucifixion played a central role in Paul’s theology is evident from his words to the Corinthian church: "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (I Corinthians 2:2).
There is no doubt that Christ’s death occurred in history, but why was it emphasized as much as it was in the NT? What was the significance of Christ’s sacrifice? Why was it important? All historical event needing interpreting. Doctrine is the attempt to interpret the Biblical-historical story. It is not enough to say that Christ died. There is no good news in this message. The death of Christ on the cross is only good news if it is interpreted in a certain way. The question we concern ourselves with is how to interpret the cross.
The Biblical authors did not give us a full, or systematic explanation of the meaning of Christ’s death. Trying to piece their sporadic sayings together into one meaningful understanding is like trying to assemble a puzzle without the picture of the puzzle on the cover of the box to guide you—it can be done, but with much greater difficulty and caution. This paper attempts to make sense out of the Biblical data, constructing as accurate of a picture as possible, concerning the meaning of Christ’s death.
Alternative Interpretations in the Church
There have been several varied interpretations of the meaning of Christ’s death and several explanations as to who was effected by the giving of His life. There are also differences pertaining to the way in which man is affected by the atonement. We now turn our attention to these various theories.
Ransom Theory—Victory Over the Forces of Evil
This was the earliest theory to gain predominance in the church. It remained in this elevated status until the late Middle Ages with the advent of Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) Satisfaction Theory. The Ransom Theory varied in its explication over the centuries, but the most common explanation of Christ’s atonement was that it was a ransom paid to the Devil. There is a cosmic battle between God and the Devil, good and evil. Satan was able to establish control over mankind and is now the governing power over the world. His rights as the leader and authority over man were not set aside by God by taking man back to Himself, because God would not stoop to the methods of Satan. As a result all of mankind remained enslaved to an unfit ruler.
God made a bargain with Satan which entailed a transfer of the sinless soul of Jesus Christ for all other souls of men. Jesus’ soul became a ransom to be paid to the Devil. The Devil, who did not realize that Jesus was God manifest in flesh, agreed to this. After releasing all the souls of men back to God, the Devil realized that Jesus was God, and that His deity had been concealed from him. Because Jesus was the Son of God, He rose from the dead. In the end, God gained all the souls of men back to Himself including Jesus’ soul, and Satan was left with nothing. Christ was the victor over Satan, triumphing over evil.
It was the Devil, not God, who demanded the blood of Jesus. The atonement was primarily for Satan, not God or man. Man was affected by the atonement, but it was not done to change man toward God, or God toward man.
The Scriptural support for this theory comes from I Corinthians 6:20 where Paul said, "For you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body." Origen relied heavily on this verse. Mark 10:45 was also used as support: "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
Origen and Gregory of Nyssa were the early developers of this view. Most of the church Fathers subscribed to this theory. The major exceptions are Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus.
Satisfaction Theory—Atonement as Compensation to the Father
Anselm of Canterbury developed this view in medieval Europe under the feudal system of his day. Having a high view of God’s holiness and law, Anselm pictured God as a feudal lord who, to maintain His honor, insists on adequate satisfaction for any encroachment on that honor by His "surfs." Great attention is focused on God’s injured honor, to the neglect of the idea of a penal substitutionary death of Christ.1 Sin is seen as a failure to render to God due honor, which injures God’s person. This violated honor can be rectified either by the punishment of those who violated it, or by accepting satisfaction for the violation. God chose the latter method because a certain amount of men needed to be saved to replace the number of angels who fell from heaven.2
Man not only needs to restore God’s honor, but needs to make satisfaction (reparation) to God for dishonoring Him. The idea is similar to the modern idea of punitive damages. It is a price that needs to be paid above and beyond that which was accrued in debt. Unfortunately man could not provide his own satisfaction. To the medieval mind, "the recompense must be proportional to the dignity of the offended party, in this case God. Consequently, finite persons cannot make an infinite satisfaction for the offense committed against the Lord of the universe."3 Even if man gave his best he could only give back to God what was due Him, nothing more. Man needed someone qualified who could make an infinite satisfaction to God. Since God alone is infinite, only He could make such satisfaction. But if satisfaction was to be of any avail to man, man would have to be involved also. This necessitated the incarnation of God. As the God-man, Jesus Christ, in offering His life to God on behalf of man, went beyond that which was required of Him because He was sinless and had no need of death. Christ’s death brought satisfaction to God’s wounded honor for all of mankind.
In Anselm’s theory of the atonement, God is the one primarily affected by Christ’s death. The atonement was not directed toward man. Man did not need to be restored to God per se, for it was God who could not commune with man because of His wounded honor. Man desired fellowship with God, but God had to rectify His honor first. Christ died to satisfy something within God’s very nature, and thus restore fellowship between He and His creation.
Moral-Influence Theory—Atonement as the Demonstration of God’s Love
This view was first developed by Peter Abelard (1079-1142) in reaction to Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory. He did not agree that Jesus’ death served to satisfy God’s wounded honor, but saw the atonement as the perfect example of God’s love for man. He emphasized the divinity of Christ. Abelard contended that God has never needed to be reconciled to man, but that man, because of their sin and ignorance, has alienated themselves from God through fear. The natural response of sin is that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—hiding from the presence of God. What needed to be rectified, then, was our fear of God and ignorance of His love. Man need not fear God’s judgment because God’s love is so abundant toward us.
Christ showed us that God is not against us. He demonstrated through His suffering and death God’s great desire to relate to us in our pain and suffering. When sinners view God’s love for us through Christ, they will be compelled to cast off their fear of God, and fellowship with Him as was originally intended.
Abelard contended that Jesus’ death was not the purpose of His coming, but was a consequence of it. All of Jesus’ life demonstrated God’s love for us. His death was just the ultimate expression of that love.
Scriptural support for this theory comes from Luke 19:10 where Jesus said that He came to seek and save that which was lost. The idea here is that man cannot find their way to God because of the barrier of fear, but Jesus came to seek these souls out and demonstrate that they have no reason to fear God. Paul’s statement that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" was also used (II Corinthians 5:19).
Socinian Theory—Atonement as Example
This view of the atonement was developed in the sixteenth century by Faustus and Laelius Socinus. They did not accept any idea of Christ’s death being a vicarious satisfaction to God. Their view of Jesus was that of a purely human being. Their understanding of man was Pelagian, denying that man is inherently sinful and estranged from God. Man is inherently good, and can keep the law of God with the right motivation to do so. God is not a God of retributive justice so He does not demand satisfaction from, or in behalf of those who sinned against Him. In contradistinction to the Moral-Influence Theory which said Jesus’ death was the demonstration of God’s love for us, Socinus and Faustus said Jesus’ death was the most beautiful example to man on how we should love God and be humble. The death of Jesus shows us the love for God we need in order to be saved, and inspires us to believe that we can love God completely.
Scriptural support for this view is found in Peter’s statement to the scattered churches: "To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps" (I Peter 2:21). John’s injunction to believers to walk as Jesus walked also demonstrates the fact that Jesus’ life is a pattern to follow (I John 2:6).
Governmental Theory—Demonstration of Divine Justice
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was the major champion of this view. Being a lawyer and not a theologian, he stressed the law of God and the seriousness of the violations against this law. While the Moral-Influence and Socinian Theories paint a picture of God as being sympathetic to sin, the Governmental Theory elaborated on God’s holiness, law, and the seriousness of sin. It was not enough to simply do one’s best or respond to God’s love.
God is very holy and He gave man certain laws. Violations of those laws are not necessarily attacks on God’s person as Anselm had claimed, but they are an attack on God as Ruler over man. God is not like a creditor or a master who can forgive debt or sin. Because He governs man He must always act in the best interest of those under His authority. As a result, His justice must be demonstrated against sin. He could not just freely forgive sin, thus bypassing justice. God thought it to be in the best interests of man to send Christ to die.
Christ’s death was not just an example, but it objectively satisfied God’s justice. It was not a substitutionary death for us so that we could escape the penalty due us, but was a substitution for a penalty. It made punishment unnecessary. Grotius did not believe it even possible for one person to pay the penalty for another individual’s transgression of the law. Punishment, it is argued, cannot be transferred. Christ could not have borne our penalty.
Because of the atonement God was made able to deal with us mercifully. The atonement impacted God, but it primarily affected man. Millard Erickson explained that in the Governmental view "the purpose of Christ’s death was not to satisfy the demands of God’s nature so that he might be enabled to do what he otherwise could not have done, namely, forgive sins. Rather, Christ’s death enabled God to forgive sins or remit punishment in a new way which would not have unfavorable consequences or adverse effects upon humans."4
The atonement also demonstrated what would happen to us if we continue in sin. On the subjective level it also was a deterrent to sin by demonstrating the vile consequences that sin brings. Thus salvation was not for retribution, but for deterrence from sin.
Penal-Substitution
This view of the atonement was primarily popularized by the Reformers. They agreed with Anselm that sin was very serious, but they saw sin as breaking the law of God, rather than merely wounding His honor.5 God’s law is holy. The infringement of God’s law brings God’s wrath ad curse on the evildoers. To avert the wrath of God, Christ took the sinner’s place, making an atonement for their sins. Instead of us receiving death for our sins, Christ tasted death for everyone, that they might experience life.
Neoorthodox Editor's note: Barth did not think of himself as a neo-orthodox theologian.
Karl Barth maintained that Jesus’ death reconciled the world to God. He did not believe that Christ appeased the wrath of God against sinners, however. Because of the incarnation Jesus took humanity with Him to the cross, representing all men with Him. Jesus did not bear our sin in our place, but we were with Him in His humanity on the cross.
Jesus’ death achieved a cosmic victory. Ontologically (petaining to the nature and essential properties of existence)ly all men have been won back to God, but not all men have come to realize their redeemed status (epistemological). Once the Spirit brings the realization of redemption to a man’s mind, he will be saved.

Biblical Teaching
Pentateuch
The Levitical sacrificial system was based on the sacrificing of innocent blood for the sin of the worshipper offering the sacrifice. The worshipper would put his hand on the head of the animal to be sacrificed, and then slay it to YHWH. This was to make an atonement for worshipper (Leviticus 1:4; See also 4:20; 5:10, 13; Numbers 5:8).
The Day of Atonement was an annual festival in ancient Israel. On this day, known today as Yom Kippur, the high priest would sacrifice animals to atone for his own sins and those of the priesthood (Leviticus 16:11-14). Then he would sacrifice one of two male goats and sprinkle its blood on the mercy-seat in the Holy of Holies as an atonement for the sins of the people (Leviticus 16:15-19). Following this he would lay his hand on the other goat, and after confessing the sins of the people, would send the goat into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:8-10).
That which atoned for the sins of Israel was the blood. YHWH said, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11). Without the shedding of blood there could be no atonement for sin.
Atonement was also made for the Israelite males of twenty years old and upwards by paying a ransom price (koper) of a half-shekel. This was not for sin, but for YHWH, which was then given to the service of the tabernacle. In other cases, as explained above, the ransom was the life of an animal or even the life of a human (II Samuel 21:2-7). In such cases we understand atonement to mean " ‘to avert punishment, especially the divine anger, by the payment of a koper, a ransom,’ which may be of money or which may be of life."6
Poetry and Wisdom
David believed that the Lord had atoned for the sins of the faithful (Psalm 65:3). Another psalmist believed that in the Lord was full redemption, and that this redemption would be received by Israel (Psalm 130:7-8).
In Psalm 40:6-8, David speaking prophetically of the Messiah, said that God did not desire sacrifices and offerings, nor did He require burnt offerings and sin offerings. What God did require was that His law be in the heart of believers, and that they do His will. Mercy could be gained apart from sacrifices for sin (Psalm 40:11).
Another psalm declares that the Lord "will redeem Israel from all their sins" (Psalm 130:8). The Hebrew word here is padah, meaning the transference from one owner to another through payment of a certain price or suitable substitute.7 This is the only time, of the sixty times this word is used, that this word is used in the sense of redemption from sin. It draws its significance and parallel from its secular references, and the references in the Law to redeeming property and individuals with a certain price.
The Prophets
Isaiah prophesied of the coming suffering servant. It was said of him that "he took up our weaknesses and carried our sorrows" (Isaiah 53:4a). He was smitten of God, stricken, and afflicted (53:4b). He was also fatally wounded for our transgressions, the punishment bringing us peace was on him, and by His wounds we are healed (53:5). The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of all (53:6, c.f. v.8), which will lead to others’ justification. Language such as "carried" and "laid on," in connection with "for us" is clearly substitutionary. The fact that this suffering was penal is indicated by the fact that the punishment was for iniquity. The suffering servant was to suffer on behalf of others’ iniquities, bearing their punishment.
Daniel prophesied that a period of seventy weeks were appointed for Israel in order to "finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness" (Daniel 9:24). Immediately after this the Messiah is mentioned (9:26). It seems that Daniel was connecting the coming of the Messiah with this activity.
Synoptic Gospels
Matthew begins his gospel with the angelic announcement to Mary to name the baby conceived in her womb, Jesus. He was to be named such because He "would save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21b). Matthew also quoted Jesus’ words saying that "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom [lytron] for many [anti pollon]" (20:28; cf. Mark 10:45). Lytron (used only in these two references in this form) indicates the means by which release from something is made possible.8 This word usually carries with it the idea of a payment for release, and was commonly used in classical Greek and the LXX to denote a payment to release a slave from his bondage. The significance of anti is that it is used in the genitive to mean "instead of." Jesus gave his life for a ransom in our stead.
All three of the synoptic authors mention Jesus’ statement at the Last Supper when He said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you" (Luke 22:21; Mark 14:24; Matthew 26:28). Luke and Mark specifically use the preposition hyper, translated "for." This word means "in behalf of." Matthew uses peri, which is used in similar meaning. Here again we see the idea of substitution. Jesus was dying on behalf of others.
Pauline Corpus
The Apostle Paul has the most to say concerning the meaning of Christ’s death. He declared Christ’s death to be a redemption, and a propitiation for us through His blood (Romans 3:24-25). Jesus was delivered over to death due to our wrongdoing, and was raised again for the sake of our justification (4:25). This statement echoes the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. Jesus’ death was for us.
Christ’s death was wrought for us while we were sinners so that we might be reconciled to God once again (Romans 5:8, 10). It is through Christ that we receive the reconciliation (v. 11). It was we who needed to be reconciled to God. We had wronged Him, causing the rift in relationship, but God came in Christ to reconcile us back to Himself (II Corinthians 5:19-20). God made Jesus to be sin for us (hyper), so that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him (v. 21). Jesus was made to be sin on our behalf. His death was substitutionary. Jesus receives our sin while we receive His righteousness.
To the Ephesian church Paul noted that we have redemption by means of Christ’s blood, even the forgiveness of our sins (Ephesians 1:7; c.f. Colossians 1:14). Christ’s death also brought the Gentiles near to God, who were once alienated from Him (Ephesians 2:12-13). Though we were once enemies of God, being alienated from him, God reconciled us to Him, having made peace through the blood of His cross (Colossians 1:20-21). Christ’s death even took the barrier of the Law of Moses out of the way of the Gentiles by nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2:14). Now we are no longer subject to ordinances that are opposed to us.
In Paul’s pastoral letter to Timothy he noted that "Christ gave himself a ransom for all" (I Timothy 2:6). To Titus he also added that Christ gave Himself for (hyper) us, to redeem us from sin, and purify a people eager for good works (Titus 2:14).
Johanine Corpus
In John’s gospel he recorded John the Baptist’s assessment of Jesus, "Behold the Lame of God who takes away the sins of the world" (John 1:29). John saw Christ as the Servant of Isaiah 53:10 and 11 who would bear the sins of others. The mention of "lamb" brings to mind the sacrificial system in the OT, specifically the Paschal lamb for the Passover feast. John uses this same imagery in Revelation where the lamb is seen to be slain (Revelation 5:6, 9, 12; 13:8).
Jesus is the propitiation (hilasmos) for our sins. This Greek word has to do with expiation, the means by which sins are forgiven. It carries with it the idea of the removal of wrath.9 John used this word again in I John 4:10 when he said that it was not our love for God, but God’s love for us that He sent Jesus Christ as an expiation for our sins.
John believed that Jesus’ blood had the power to cleanse us from all sin (I John 1:7). It was for this purpose that Jesus was manifested (3:5).
Other New Testament Writings
Peter reminded his readers that they were redeemed (set free, liberated) with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without spot or blemish (I Peter 1:18-19). The Greek word for "redeemed," lutroo, was used for the freeing of slaves. The imagery here is that Jesus Christ has freed us from the bondage of sin so that we might live holy (vs. 14-17).
Probably the most significant contribution Peter makes to our understanding of the atonement is found in I Peter 3:18 where he said, "For Christ also has suffered once for sins, the righteous for (hyper) the unrighteous, so that he might bring you to God…" (I Peter 3:18). The purpose of the righteous Christ’s suffering was on behalf of (hyper) the unrighteous so that they could be brought to God. This clearly demonstrates the substitutionary death of Christ, and the fact that His death was for the purpose of reconciling man to God. According to Peter the death of Christ primarily affects man.
The author of Hebrews said that Jesus suffered and died so that "he could taste death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9). Again we see the substitutionary aspect of Christ’s death. Instead of man having to suffer death for our own sins, Jesus tasted that death for us so that we might escape it ourselves. Christ’s death also accomplished a spiritual defeat of the one who has the power over death, i.e. the Devil, and to deliver from bondage those who fear death (2:14-15). This passage would lend credence to the Ransom Theory of the atonement.
The author continues to say that remission can only come through the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22). For this reason Jesus shed His blood once, and thus "put away sin by the sacrifice of himself" (9:26). This offering was "to bear the sins of many" (9:28; c.f. 10:12). This seems to be another reference to the suffering servant of Isaiah.

Systematic Formulation
Our understanding of the atonement is highly dependent on our understanding of God and the nature of sin. So before we can examine a systematic understanding regarding the atonement, we must first examine these two key concepts.
God is a holy and just God, who cannot tolerate sin (Leviticus 11:45; Deuteronomy 32:4; II Kings 23:26; Isaiah 30:27-31; Lamentations 3:42). His holiness sets the standard of the law, while his justness demands that His law be obeyed. If His law is not obeyed, punishment must be inflicted on the trespasser.
It might be wondered why God is so strict concerning His Law, and why He needs to punish those who transgress it. God’s zeal for His law is due to the nature of the Lawgiver. The law of God is not some external code that God keeps or has made up specifically for mankind. Neither is God’s law arbitrary. He does not simply decide to approve this and condemn that. Rather God’s law flows from His nature. It is a portrait of His person. When we obey God’s law, we are not merely keeping a code of conduct, but relating to God Himself.10 The law has no inherent value or dignity apart from God. When we keep or break God’s law we are relating to God Himself. Sin is not merely the breaking of a law, but transgressing against the very nature of God, thus creating a personal attack on God Himself.11 Breaking God’s law, then, hinders the relationship between us and Him.
We must not think of God, however, as merely being a God of wrath. God’s mercy is seen all throughout the OT (Psalm 85:2; Isaiah 55:7; Micah 7:18). He is not a God who is looking to punish everybody who sins, every time they sin. Instead, God is slow to anger and eager to forgive (Jeremiah 26:12-13; Joel 2:13-14).
Because of Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, mankind is in a place of spiritual separation from God. As a result of Adam, all of mankind is in a state of spiritual death, condemnation, and judgment (Romans 5:12-21). Isaiah testified that our iniquities have separated us from God, and our sins cause Him to hide His face from us (Isaiah 59:2). Paul demonstrated the utter sinfulness of all men, declaring that there are none who are righteous who will seek after God, but all men have turned aside from Him (Romans 3:1-12). The natural result of our spiritual state is death (Romans 6:23; Ephesians 2:1-3). The only deliverance from this condition is the grace of God (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Having examined the nature of God and man, we now turn our attention to the nature of the atonement. We look first a the OT. The Aaronic sacrificial system did prefigure Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. It demonstrated that there was the necessity of reconciliation to God by blood; however, it did not reveal the nature of the reconciliation.12 This is important because we must find the deeper meaning of the atonement from the anti-type, not the type. The OT sacrifices were a precursor to Christ’s ultimate sacrifice, and thus give us some knowledge of the nature of the atonement, but it is the NT that gives us the broader meaning of its nature. For this reason the NT data carries greater weight for our understanding of the atonement. This is not to say, however, that the OT never painted us a good picture of the nature of atonement. Surely Isaiah 53 was a tremendous prophetic utterance concerning the nature of God’s atoning plan for the world.
Looking at the OT briefly, however, we will examine the central idea of atonement. The Hebrew word most commonly used for this concept is kaphar. It is used approximately 150 times. It is commonly believed that the basic meaning is "to cover." The authors of Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament have this to say concerning this idea:
There is an equivalent Arabic root meaning "cover," or "conceal." On the strength of this connection it has been supposed that the Hebrew word means "to cover over sin" and thus pacify the deity, making an atonement (so BDB). It has been suggested that the OT ritual symbolized a covering over of sin until it was dealt with in fact by the atonement of Christ. There is, however, very little evidence for this view. The connection of the Arabic word is weak and the Hebrew root is not used to mean "cover." The Hebrew verb is never used in the simple or Qal stem, but only in the derived intensive stems. These intensive stems often indicate not emphasis, but merely that the verb is derived from a noun whose meaning is more basic to the root idea.13
The meaning of kaphar is "to atone by offering a substitute."14 It is most always used in contexts speaking of the removal of sin or defilement. It was a symbolic expression on the part of the worshipper, giving an innocent life in the place of a guilty life.
Coming to the NT, we find that Jesus’ sacrifice of atonement was both representative and substitutionary. He was our representative in that he acted on our behalf in such a way as to involve us in his action. He was our substitution inasmuch as He acted in our place, causing our action in the event to be unnecessary.15 That Christ acted on our behalf is evident from the use of hyper in Romans 5:8; 8:32; Galatians 2:20; and Hebrews 2:9. These verses clearly demonstrate that Christ stood in for us. Christ did not merely represent us, however. He also became our substitute. By submitting to, and receiving the divine wrath for sin that we should have received, Jesus redeemed us from that wrath. He took the punishment for us so that we would not have to.
The reason Christ could be a suitable sacrifice for us is because He was sinless (II Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15). Being sinless, He did not have to pay any penalty for sin. Jesus did not have to die for sin as we do, but he willingly submitted Himself to death (Philippians 2:8) so that He could taste death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9), and thus destroy the power of death (I Corinthians 15:26, 54-55; II Timothy 1:10; Hebrews 2:14).
The idea of Christ’s sacrificial death as a substitution for us is very clear in the Scripture. It is said that because Christ died for all, "therefore all have died" (II Corinthians 5:14). If by one person dying, all can be said to have died, clearly the one individual stood in their place so that their death is no longer necessary. Paul said Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law "having become a curse for (hyper) us" (Galatians 3:13). The author of Hebrews said that Christ was "offered once to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:28). Peter declared that Jesus "bore our sins in his body on the tree" (I Peter 2:24). God made Jesus "to be sin for us" (II Corinthians 5:21). Our sins have been transferred from our account to Christ’s.
Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice completed the work of atonement. It was not necessary to perform many sacrifices as they did in the OT. Christ’s one sacrifice for sin, that of Himself, secured salvation for us (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12, 26, 28; 10:10). There is no more sacrifice for sin. The blood of bulls and goats are no longer necessary. Christ’s one sacrifice has forever perfected those who are being sanctified by Jesus Christ (Hebrews 9:12, 25-28; 10:10-14). The atonement is finished. All that is necessary for men is to receive the effects of the atonement by faith (II Corinthians 5:20).
How exactly did Jesus’ sacrifice affect the relationship between God and man? The effects of the atonement are seen in many areas, but the primary effects are propitiation and reconciliation/justification.
Propitiation has to do with appeasing someone’s wrath. That God possesses wrath against sin has already been established previously. If people die in their sins, without settling the matter with God first, they can only expect to face divine displeasure. This is none other than God’s abiding wrath against sin.
That God’s wrath against man because of his sin, needed to be appeased, is evident from a few explicit passages. Leviticus 4:35 says, "And he [the priest] shall take away all the fat thereof, as the fat of the lamb is taken away from the sacrifice of the peace offerings; and the priest shall burn them upon the altar, according to the offerings made by fire unto the LORD: and the priest shall make an atonement for his sin that he has committed, and it shall be forgiven him." The fact that forgiveness would only come after an offering to YHWH for atonement indicates that it was God who needed to be appeased for the sin committed.
Wrath is the divine reaction to those who sin (Romans 1:18; 2:5, 8; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19; 13:4-5; Ephesians 2:3; Colossians 3:6; I Thessalonians 1:10; 2:16). God’s wrath is his "settled opposition of his holiness to evil," not to the evildoer per se.16 In fact, if we do not give full credence to the wrath of God, and man’s deserving of such wrath, we make the forgiveness of God empty and meaningless.17
The clearest example of this is found in Romans where Paul said God presented Christ as a propitiation (hilasterion) to demonstrate His justice. The reason for this was because God, in His forbearance, did not visit His wrath in its fullness on the sins committed prior to Calvary. This left God open to be charged with being unjust. His righteousness and justice could be called into question. The death of Christ removed this attack by visiting on sin the judgment it deserved, thus showing God to be just, and the justifier of those who will believe in Him (Romans 3:24-26).
God’s wrath against sin is not contrary to His love for the sinner. Robert Culpepper made the case that "God’s wrath is an integral constituent of his love. The wrath of God is the active manifestation of God’s essential incapacity to be morally indifferent and let sin alone. It denotes the attitude of God in his holy love toward willful sin. God’s wrath is God’s grace. It is his grace smitten with dreadful sorrow. It is his love in agony."18 While God may will to redeem man because of His love for them, He must fulfill this desire according to the nature of His holiness, without denying His righteousness. This is why Paul said that "God put [Jesus] forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins" (Romans 3:25, RSV). God could not let sin go unpunished, or it would make God unjust. In order to fulfill the divine desire to forgive man of their sins, and yet remain just, God presented Christ as a propitiation for our redemption (Romans 3:24-25).
This conception of the Father should not give us the idea that the Father is the angry God in heaven, and that the Son is the meek and lowly God-man on earth who averts God the Father’s anger from humanity. The Scriptures do not portray the love of the Father for humanity to be the effect of the atonement, but rather the cause of the atonement.19 God desired to redeem man all along. God does not love us because Christ died for us, but it was the Father’s love for which caused Christ to die for us (Romans 5:6-8; I John 4:9-10). Even after saying that God demonstrated His love for us by having Christ die for us, Paul still maintained that we were enemies of God before we were reconciled (Romans 5:8, 10-11). Even while we were enemies of God because of our sinful state, God, in Christ, still died for our sins to reconcile us to Himself (II Corinthians 5:19).
Apart from God’s manifestation of love in Christ’s death, the only manifestation of God we would expect from God is the manifestation of His wrath. In Christ’s death God’s mercy and justice could both be met, thus allowing the Father to deal with the sin problem, and acquit the believer from all guilt. Jesus’ death assumed our legal guilt and made our forgiveness possible. Just as Adam’s sin brought condemnation to all men, Christ’s righteousness brought justification (Romans 5:16, 18). He assumed our sin so that we could assume His righteousness (II Corinthians 5:14, 21). Our guilt was transferred to Him as our vicarious sacrifice (endured or done by one person substituting for another) so that we would no longer experience God’s condemnation of our sin. In a very real sense Christ experienced the wrath of God against sin in our stead, so that we might experience life in Him.
Whereas propitiation appeases God’s wrath against sin, and hence the sinner, reconciliation primarily affects man. Reconciliation is necessary between individuals who have had a harmonious and peaceful relationship hindered by some offense so that there is a breach of relationship. Reconciliation, then, is a restoration of relationship with God. In our sin, we are estranged from God, separated from His face (Isaiah 59:2). We are hostile towards God in our carnal minds (Romans 8:7; Colossians 1:21), thus making us God’s enemies (Romans 5:8). It was in this state of being enemies of God that God reconciled us to Himself (Romans 5:8, 10). God is the one who initiated and objectively finished the process of reconciliation. He is the subject, and humanity or the world is always the object. It is not God who is being reconciled to man, but man to God. Paul said that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (II Corinthians 5:19), and again, "And you who were once estranged…has he now reconciled in the body of flesh by his death" (Colossians 1:21-22; c.f. Romans 5:10).
The reconciliation of man is pictured as a finished work. It is not a work which is being done, but a work that is done.20 After noting that God was reconciling the world to Himself through Christ, Paul pleaded with the Corinthians, "Be reconciled to God" (II Corinthians 5:19-20). It has already been accomplished on our behalf at Calvary, but it is not realized subjectively in the life of an individual until He receives it by faith.
The character of reconciliation is found in Paul’s statement that God "was not counting their sins against them" (II Corinthians 5:19). Reconciliation affects God’s attitude toward us. Because man is inherently sinful, which is in opposition to God’s holy nature, we are by nature the children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). God must count our sins against us. In the atonement, however, God, through Christ’s vicarious substitutionary death, was able to judge sin once for all, and thus no longer be hindered in His desire to show mercy and forgiveness to those who were unjust (Romans 6:10; 8:3; Hebrews 9:26, 28). As Peter said, "For Christ has also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive by the Spirit" (I Peter 3:18). Jesus’ death brought us (those who were unjust) to God. Through the atonement, God took care of the sin problem so that He could deal mercifully and graciously with man instead of pouring out His holy wrath. George Ladd said it this way:
For it is an ethical and religious necessity that the holiness of God manifest itself in wrath against sin. Reconciliation is an act of God, initiated by his love, by virtue of which God no longer counts people’s trespasses against them; it has to do with the divine attitude toward human beings as the result of which God no longer looks upon them as enemies, as occupying a hostile status. … Thus reconciliation makes a difference to God as well as to humanity.21

Apologetic Interaction
The Ransom Theory
The Ransom Theory has little to commend for it. It’s major weakness is that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to the Devil. There is simply no Scriptural support for such a teaching. The closest Biblical backing is found in Hebrews 2:14 where it is said that through death Christ destroyed the one who had the power of death, the Devil. All this verse demonstrates is that Christ’s death defeated Satan. It does not postulate the notion that Christ was a ransom paid to the Devil.
It is true that the Devil is the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), and that He is ruling over the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4:5; Ephesians 6:12), but there is no evidence that all the souls of men are in possession of Satan. Satan is not the ruler over hell. He is only one individual who will be cast there by God. God is the ruler over hell (Revelation 19:20; 20:20). Although man is fallen, and willingly subjects himself to the devices of Satan, he does not belong to Satan. God said that all souls were His (Ezekiel 18:4). The fact that man is fallen does not mean that man belongs to Satan. Every human belongs to God. This is why God can do with us what He pleases. He can bring us to Him in heaven, or send us away from Him to hell.
The idea that God made a bargain with Satan, exchanging the sinless soul of Jesus for the sinful souls of mankind, is lacking for Biblical support. Of the many Scriptural references giving the purpose for Christ’s death, nowhere is this stated as one of them, yet alone the primary reason. It must be asked why the Devil would even be willing to make the trade? What made a sinless soul better than the billions of other souls that the Devil possessed? Maybe it was the fact that God was giving Satan something that did not belong to Him, and this stroked Satan’s pride. Again, however, the Bible is silent.
The theory also states that the Devil did not know who Jesus really was (God Himself), and this is why he agreed to the exchange. However, the Bible indicates that the Satanic kingdom was very aware of who Christ was (Luke 4:41). The Devil was aware of Christ’s identity when he tempted Jesus (Matthew 4:3-11). If he was not aware of His identity, there would have been no need to be tempted in the ways that the Devil tempted Him.
Paul’s statement that if the "princes of this world" had known of God’s hidden wisdom, "they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (I Corinthians 2:8) is often used to support the idea that the Satanic kingdom was not aware of who Jesus really was. Although the phrase, "the prince of this world" is used of Satanic forces elsewhere (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; Ephesians 2:2), it is used in the singular, not the plural, presumably referring to Satan Himself. The Corinthian passage uses this phrase in the plural. Although it could be taken to mean that there is more than one demonic being in view here, the context demands otherwise. Paul declared that he worked miracles so that the Corinthians’ belief would not stand in the wisdom of men, and that the wisdom he spoke of was not the same as the wisdom of the world (I Corinthians 2:5-6a). He goes on to say that the wisdom he spoke was not understood by the princes of this world, "who are passing away" (I Corinthians 2:6b). This cannot be referring to demonic forces who are immortal, but to earthly rulers whose rule is always passing away with the changing of offices and passing of time. Grammar and context both point to the fact that it was earthly rulers who were not aware of who Christ was, not demonic rulers.
This view of the atonement also makes the Devil, not God, the originator of the atonement. God did not initiate the redemption of mankind, but the Devil, although unknowingly. It was he who demanded the blood of Christ. The Biblical portrait is that Jesus was the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (I Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8). The atonement was not a plan in response to Satan, but was planned for man’s redemption before there was ever a Satan to demand Jesus’ sinless blood from God.
The Ransom Theory also states that the atonement did not change man toward God, or vice versa. Again, this smacks in the face of many Biblical passages. Paul said, "And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now has he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight" (Colossians 1:21-22). The atonement did affect our relationship with God. It brought about our reconciliation.
This truth of this theory is found in its assertion that there is a cosmic battle going on over men’s souls—Satan trying to subvert them from God, and God trying to lead them to Himself. This is about as much truth that can be found in this historically popular, yet unbiblical view.
Satisfaction Theory
Anselm’s main thesis was that sin is the wounding of God’s honor. Jesus needed to offer satisfaction to repair this wounded honor so that God could offer mercy to man.
This view is commended for its high view of God’s holiness and the seriousness of breaking God’s law. It is also seems to be correct in claiming that Jesus had to be both God and man to make an atonement for us that would be efficacious. However, the idea that the only thing barring man from fellowship with God was God’s wounded honor is Scripturally lacking. Man was separated from God because by breaking God’s law, men are at enmity against God Himself. It is not merely God’s honor that is offended, but His person (Romans 8:7).
Socinian Theory
This theory states that Christ’s death was an example for us of the kind of love we should have toward God and the kind of life we should live. The problems with this theory are numerous. First of all, the main tenants that Jesus was only a man, God does not require vicarious suffering for sin, and that man is not inherently sinful have already been proven to be Scripturally false. God does require a sacrifice for inherently sinful man. Since the basic premises of this view are in dire contradiction to the abundant teaching of Scripture, there is not much else to commend this view.
This is not to say that there is not an element of truth in this theory. The truth lies in the fact that Christ’s death is an example for us to follow, as I Peter 2:21 and I John 2:6 attest to. We will suffer in the flesh as did Christ Himself. He is our example. The problem with the Socinian theory is that it takes this one aspect of the atonement, which is not given much attention Biblically, and makes it the thrust of the atonement. If Socinus would have read just a little farther in I Peter, he would have noticed that Peter taught that Jesus’ death was a vicarious sacrifice for our sins (I Peter 2:24).
Most importantly, if Christ’s death did nothing for us, it would not be much of an example. It would be a meaningless act. Jesus would have given His life for no purpose. Does God approve of men giving up the life that He gave to them, for no particular reason? There is honor in giving up one’s life for a purpose, but not simply to show how dedicated one is to God. God desires us to praise Him in our lives.
It could be likened to a man who set off a grenade and then jumped on it to show the rest of his platoon the dedication it takes to be in the Army. There would be no honor in such an act. It would not be viewed as an example for others to follow, but sheer stupidity. If however, the man jumped on a grenade thrown into the bunker of his platoon by the enemy, his act would be an example of dedication and would be honored. The Socinian theory of the atonement is both Biblically lacking for evidence, and is logically absurd.
The Moral-Influence Theory
Abelard’s main tenant was that Christ’s death was only an example of God’s love for us. It did not do anything for us spiritually, except to provide an example for us so that we could understand God’s love for us, cast off our sinful ways and our fears which kept us from fellowship with Him, and return to God.
Abelard’s view has much to commend it. He was correct in seeing that man was alienated from God because of sin and fear, and that man needed to be reconciled to God as a result. He was also correct in demonstrating that God is not against us, but desires for us to return to Him. Surely God’s sacrifice of His only begotten Son for us is a great example demonstrating God’s great love for us that can provoke us to return to Him without fear.
Where the Moral-Influence Theory falls short is not in what it affirms, but in what it does not affirm. Although Christ’s death is a great example of God’s love for us (John 3:16), this is not the totality of the teaching of Scripture. As in most false doctrines, there is a strong element of truth presented, but the element is only one aspect of the totality of truth. Abelard made this one aspect of the atonement the entire purpose of the atonement.
This theory denies any objective element to the atonement. Nothing was truly accomplished on our behalf at Calvary. There was no true atonement for sins. God could have forgiven us apart from Christ’s innocent death. There was no true obstacle in the way for God to forgive us our sins.22 His death is only subjective, giving us an example of God’s love to overcome our fear of Him. The wealth of Biblical statements cited previously demonstrate that God did need a penalty paid for sins. He needed to take care of the sin problem before He could justify man and restore him to a right relationship with Himself.
The Governmental Theory
The Governmental Theory’s main proposition is that Christ’s death was a demonstration to the world of the seriousness of sin, and the Ruler’s responsibility to judge that sin.
This theory is correct in its assessment of God’s holiness and the seriousness of sin. Grotius was incorrect, however, in His view of sin. Sin is not just an attack on God as a Ruler, but is an attack against God Himself. God’s law flows from God’s nature. It is not external to Him, as has been previously demonstrated. An infringement on God’s law is a personal attack on God. God Himself testified that sin was against Him personally (Exodus 32:33; Jeremiah 33:8). David proclaimed that his sin was against the Lord (Psalm 51:4).
Grotius was also correct in claiming that Christ’s death accomplished an objective basis for the forgiveness of our sins. He was wrong, however, in denying that this death was a substitution for the penalty of our sins, but rather a substitution for a penalty. He claimed that sin and punishment cannot be transferred from one person to another, but Paul made it clear that Christ was "made a curse for us," and God "made him to be sin for us" (II Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13).
His error is due to a misunderstanding of the nature of sin. It is not a physical substance that can be transferred from one person to another. Sin is falling short of God’s holy nature by transgressing His law. To transfer the guilt and responsibility from one to another is not impossible, nor is it unjust. Justice is not violated if someone else willingly takes the punishment for someone else’s crime so that the guilty individual may be justified.23
Neoorthodox
Barth was correct in asserting that Jesus’ death reconciles the world to God, but he took this idea too far, to the point that he bordered on Universalism (all men will be saved). He was also mistaken in His view that Christ’s death did not appease the wrath of God. This has been belabored previously, so nothing more will be said here.
His view as it pertains to how Christ’s death could be effective for all other men is basically federalistic (Jesus is appointed as the representative for all others). The Scripture does seem to teach this by calling Jesus the "last Adam" who was sent to reverse the effects of the first Adam’s sin (Romans 5:12-21; I Corinthians 15:21-22, 45). Barth is wrong, however, in his rejection of a substitutionary sacrifice of Christ for all others. Jesus may have represented all men at the cross, but this does not make all men physically present with Him. The Scripture affirms that He bore our sins by Himself on our behalf, so that we would not have to pay the penalty for our sins (Isaiah 53:6; Galatians 3:13; I Peter 2:24).

Objections to the Penal-Substitution Theory
Mercy and Justice are Incompatible
Some have seen God’s mercy and God’s justice to be at odds with one another. It is argued that God’s justice would lead to the punishment of mankind, while His mercy would lead to the forgiveness of mankind without exacting a punishment for their sin. This line of reasoning is a false dichotomy. It is not an either/or decision. God’s mercy and His justice both function in redemption. God’s mercy is what motivated God to act in history to redeem us, while God’s justice demanded the means by which that redemption would take place. God’s mercy led to His decision to redeem.24 His justice led to the particular method chosen to accomplish this end. Both God’s justice and His mercy are satisfied in the atonement.
The Concept of Substitution is not Just
This objection may seem valid at first glance. How could a judge be considered righteous if he knowingly accuses an innocent victim of a crime they did not commit, and knowingly acquits the real criminal of his crimes? Substituting the one for the other does not seem righteous. What must be remembered is that Christ willingly offered Himself as a substitute for us (John 15:13). His sacrifice was voluntary. The judge was not the one sentencing the innocent party against his will, but the innocent party requested to take the place of the guilty party. Jesus willingly laid down His life for us (John 10:17-18).
The Greek Preposition Does Not Support the Idea of Substitution
Many have claimed that hyper with the genitive case (in behalf of), which is the preposition usually used in connection with the idea of atonement or reconciliation, does not carry the idea of substitution. It is said that only anti (instead of) carries this idea, which is only used in Matthew 20:28 and Mark 10:45 (excepting the compound uses found elsewhere in connection with redemption). Although at first glance this seems to be a convincing blow to the idea of substitutionary atonement, on second glance this distinction between prepositions does not fit the logical or contextual usage.
If one acts of behalf of another, the one representing the other is acting in a substitutionary role. If I have been given the power of attorney over my spouse’s assets, when I act in a legal capacity for her, my presence is a substitute for her presence, rendering her presence needless. This idea of "substitution" is found in several passages which use the preposition hyper. In I Timothy 2:6 Christ is pictured as giving Himself as a ransom on our behalf. The reason for this was because we could not have been freed by ourselves. He had to act on our behalf, so that what He did could be considered to have been done by us. The only way this could be accomplished is if Christ was acting in our place. Whereas we could not redeem ourselves, He could, and did so by acting in our stead.
George Ladd has offered some tremendous insight in opposition to the idea that Christ only acted on our behalf, rather than in our stead. He said:
If…Christ voluntarily came under the blight of sin, entered into its deepest gloom, and shared with humanity its awful weight and penalty, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he not only died for me, but that he died in my stead, since because of his death, I shall not die, but shall live eternally with him. By suffering death, the penalty of sin, he delivers me from that very experience. In submitting to the judgment of God upon sin, he has delivered me from the same judgment. The rationale of this is difficult to understand unless Christ suffered the penalty and judgment of God in the stead of the sinner by virtue of which the sinner will never experience that awful penalty.25
The fact that Paul said that because Christ died, "therefore all have died" points to an objective reality that occurred in Jesus Christ at Calvary, which had effects on everyone who was not present there (II Corinthians 5:14). This is not a mere identification with Christ at His death, but is an accomplished reality performed by one man, and considered to have taken place in all men. Christ’s death accomplished my death. This can only be understood in the context of substitution. What should have happened to me will never have to happen to me, because it happened to Christ; and when it happened to Christ, it happened to me.
Although it was not as common to use hyper to denote substitution in Classical Greek, it was used sometimes (Plato, Republic 590a; Xenophon, Anabasis 7.4.9-10).26 The LXX uses the preposition for substitution in Deuteronomy 24:16, Isaiah 43:3-4, and in the apocraphyl book of Judith 8:12. The use of hyper in Hellenistic Greek (ostraca and papyri) is often used with the force of anti.27 It is used in the papyri of one who writes a letter in someone else’s stead. Although this could be interpreted as "in behalf of," the point is clear that one person is acting in the stead of another, so that the other no longer needs to perform the same action. Instead of Mr. A writing the letter, Mr. B wrote the letter for Mr. A. This is a clear example of substitution.
Daniel Wallace proposes that hyper and anti had little overlap in semantic domain in Attic Greek, but that this changed in the Koine period. Hyper began to be used much more frequently and its semantic domains were broadened to that it began to approach closer to the meaning of anti, although it never phased out the use of anti for the idea of substitution.28
Context dictates the force of any preposition.
Words have no inherent meaning. Meaning is derived from usage. The contexts of John 11:50, II Corinthians 5:15, and Galatians 3:13 give a clear indication that hyper can carry the force of substitution. A.T. Robertson went so far as to say that in these verses "hyper has the resultant notion of ‘instead’ and only violence to the context can get rid of it."29 In the first reference, Caiaphas said that it was better that one man should die hyper the people, that the whole nation would not perish. Jesus was to die instead of the whole nation, not on behalf of the nation. This was an exchange of one for the many. The other two references, though not as clear as John, do sustain the same understanding. Other passages also heavily lend themselves to this understanding, but are less conclusive (Romans 5:6-8; 8:32; Galatians 2:20; Hebrews 2:9). The use of hyper for substitution is even found in non-soteriological verses such as Romans 9:3 and Philemon 13.
To haggle over whether hyper can mean "instead of" is almost meaningless, because the logical necessity of acting on behalf of someone is that the original individual who was supposed to act, no longer needs to do so because of the actions of another. This is the meaning of substitution.
Objections to the Idea of Propitiation
Some find the idea that God’s wrath needed to be appeased before He could save man an abhorrent and unbiblical doctrine. They say that this makes God the Father into a wrathful God who desires judgment, and the Son into the one changing God’s attitude toward man from wrath to love.
As has already been stated previously, the Father is not the angry God in heaven, and the Son the meek and lowly God-man on earth who averts God the Father’s anger from humanity. Rather it was the love of God the Father that brought about the reconciliation of mankind to Him through the death of Jesus Christ. God had always desired to be merciful to man and to redeem him, but this merciful side of God could not override His holy wrath against sin. Likewise God’s wrath could not override His desire to show mercy. Both needed to be satisfied. God’s justice and mercy were satisfied as they met in the person of Christ. Through His death God’s mercy and justice could both be met, thus allowing the Father to deal with the sin problem, and acquit the believer from all guilt.
The Bible is abundantly clear that God hates sin, and that the sins of men anger God’s holiness. Without a removal of the sin problem, God could not deal mercifully with man. God’s nature is opposed to sin, and thus God is opposed to those who commit sin. His wrath against sin is only expected. Without something to avert this wrath toward man who committed sin, we could only expect punishment. Truly God’s wrath did need to be appeased, and God’s attitude toward man and his sin had to be changed for reconciliation to take place. Although the Scripture nowhere explicitly states this in such terminology, it is nevertheless safe to say from the general tenor of Scripture that Christ experienced the wrath of God in our place,30 thus appeasing God’s holy anger against us, allowing Him to deal mercifully with us.

Relevance to Life and Ministry
How exactly does the penal-substitutionary atonement relate to our personal lives and ministries? Is it irrelevant to the modern reader of Scripture? I do not believe so. It is relevant to us in many areas.
First of all this understanding of the atonement allows us to see the multi-facedness of God. He is not one-sided. Many times one’s conception of God is limited to one attribute or characteristic. Either God is viewed as the exacting judge in heaven who is just waiting to drop the hammer on anyone who drops the ball, or else God is viewed as a big grandfather in the sky who lets us get away with murder. God is not just a God of justice, and neither is He just a God of mercy. We know that God is both a God of justice and mercy. We need not view Him only as a policeman, or only as a friend. We need to both love God because of His mercy and love, and fear God because of His hatred of sin.
This understanding of the atonement also makes it clear to us that we cannot do anything for our salvation. Having been sinners by nature, all of us were destined to hell. There was nothing we could do to avoid this, or change our course of destiny. Our just sentence was death because of our sins. But God, who is rich in mercy, while we were without strength Christ died for us (Romans 5:6). It was God who made the move to save our souls. We did not first love Him, but He first loved us and gave Himself for us (Titus 2:14; I John 4:10, 19). Salvation began with, and will be finished by Christ. He accomplished our reconciliation to God. All we are left to do is receive the reconciliation by faith (II Corinthians 5:20).
If Christ did all that is necessary for our salvation, making an atonement for our sins in our stead, we can be assured that we will be saved when we continue to place our faith in Christ's work on our behalf. We can know that we have security in our relationship with Christ. It is not based on our own merits, but on His merits. Jesus is both the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). He can act in this capacity because He did all that was necessary to secure salvation for all those who will believe. What we must do is trust in what He has done for us, and await the redemption of our bodies.
On a more subjective level, the atonement should lead us to a greater hatred of sin. The Scripture declares that the beginning of wisdom is to hate evil (Proverbs 8:13). God’s hatred of evil and sin led him to make a tremendous sacrifice, i.e. the death of His Son, Jesus Christ. Sin is serious. God does not excuse sin. When we sin we sin against God Himself. It is God that we are hurting, and not just ourselves. God’s love for us in spite of our sin may be beyond our areas of knowledge (Ephesians 3:19), but this love was costly. It cost Jesus His life. The fact that God needed to come to earth as a human being, and suffer and die for us, so that we could be saved, should wake us up to the seriousness of sin. The next time we are tempted to sin we should look to Calvary and see the price with which we were redeemed, and in seeing both God’s hatred for sin and love for us, turn away from sin to righteousness.
For ministry, understanding the nature of the atonement is extremely important. Paul said that God "has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation" (II Corinthians 5:18). As ministers, our specific ministry is that of reconciling man to God. If we do not understand the nature of the atonement/reconciliation, we cannot effectively preach the message of reconciliation to an estranged world. A lack of understanding of the atonement will result in a ministry which is out of focus. The atonement defines for us our mission, i.e. the reconciling of lost souls to their heavenly Father.
Finally, the atonement is a motivation for us to live for God, as the Socinian Theory states. Paul said that the love of Christ compels us to no longer live for ourselves, but to live for Jesus Christ, the one who died for us and rose again (II Corinthians 5:14-15). When we look at Christ’s death, it compels us to live our lives in total obedience to God as did Jesus. Just as Jesus was so committed to the fulfilling the will of God, and pleasing God, that He went so far as to willingly give His life as a ransom for many, we also will experience this same passion when we look to Christ.

Works Cited
Campbell, J. McLeod. The Nature of the Atonement. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, 1996.
Culpepper, Robert H. Interpreting the Atonement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Denney, J. The Death of Christ. N.p.: n.p., 1950.
Elwell, Walter A. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984.
Erickson, Millard J. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985.
Farrar, F.W. "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought." No other information available.
Harris, R. Laird, Gleason L. Archer Jr., Bruce K. Waltke. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. Found on electronic media, BibleWorks 4.0.
Ladd, George Eldon. A Theology of the New Testament. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1993.
Lewis, Gordon L. and Bruce A. Demarest. Integrative Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996.
Louw, J. P., E. A. Nida. Louw-Nida Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. 2nd edition. United Bible Society: New York, 1988.
McGrath, Alister E., Studies in Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987.
Morris, Leon. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. William B. Eerdman Publishing: Grand Rapids, reprinted 1988.
Robertson, A.T. A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research. 2nd ed. New York: George H. Doran, 1915.
Wallace, Daniel B. Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 1996.

Footnotes
1. Gordon L. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapid: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996), 375.
2. Anselm borrowed this idea from Augustine of Hippo.
3. Lewis and Demarest, 375.
4. Millard J. Erickson, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), 791.
5. Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984), 102.
6. Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (William B. Eerdman Publishing: Grand Rapids, reprinted 1988), 166.
7. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, as found on BibleWorks, electronic media, 1998.
8. J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Louw-Nida Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd edition (United Bible Society: New York, 1988), as found on Bible Works, electronic media, 1998.
9. Morris, 174.
10. Erickson, 803.
11. Ibid.
12. J. McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, 1996), 109.
13. TWOT.
14. Ibid.
15. Lewis and Demarest, 401.
16. W.C. Robinson, "Wrath," found in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 1196.
17. Morris, 185.
18. Robert H. Culpepper, Interpreting the Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 406.
19. Dr. Campbell, quoted in F.W. Farrar, "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought," no other information available.
20. J. Denney, The Death of Christ (n.p.: n.p., 1950), 85-86 as found in George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1993), 494.
21. Ladd, 495.
22. Erickson, 820.
23. Lewis and Demarest, 413.
24. Alister E. McGrath, Studies in Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 284.
25. Ladd, 468.
26. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 1996), 383.
27. A.T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, 2nd ed. (New York: George H. Doran, 1915), 631 referenced in Erickson, 814.
28. Wallace, 387.
29. Robertson, 631, in Erickson, 814.
30. Ladd, 473.

Barth And Universalism Discussed -

2008-11-26T00:07:00.000-08:00

The article was taken from The Fire and the Rose , a David Congdon webpage. Understand that Congdon probably goes too far in assigning "universalism" to Barth unless one believes it possible to be a universalist without believing in universalism - Barth and the Boyz editor.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Why I Am A Universalist, § 5: The Doctrine of God, Part 4: The Doctrine of Election (Section IV)
Section IV: The election of the individual

Karl Barth says all that needs to be said on the subject of individual salvation in one lengthy passage from § 35 of the Church Dogmatics. If you are looking for Barth’s most clear and unequivocal endorsement of universalism, look no further. It is important to note that in this passage, he speaks about how the church community should present the Good News to unbelievers, to those who reject God entirely. He speaks first about the godlessness within the church and then about the godlessness of those who remain outside of it. What Barth says here has important ramifications for how we conceive of ecclesiology, to which we will return at a later time.
This, then, is the message with which the elect community (as the circumference of the elect man, Jesus of Nazareth) has to approach every man—the promise, that he, too, is an elect man.
It is fully aware of his perverted choice.
It is fully aware of his godlessness.
It consists itself of godless men who were enabled to hear and believe this promise, and who still need to hear and believe it.
It does and must reckon continually with the original godlessness of its members. It is fully aware, too, of the eternal condemnation of the man who is isolated over against God, which is unfailingly exhibited by the godlessness of every such man.
It knows what his perverse choice must cost him. It knows of the threat under which he stands. It knows of the wrath and judgment and punishment of God in which the rejection of the man isolated over against God takes its course.
And it also knows of the shadow into which every man does actually move because he desires and undertakes at all costs to be a man isolated, and therefore rejected, in relation to God; because he behaves and conducts himself at all costs as though he were this rejected man.But it knows, above all, about Jesus Christ. It is the community founded by His death and resurrection.
It belongs to Him as His property.
Its existence is defined by witness to Him. It proclaims Him and nobody and nothing else.
It knows men, therefore, only to the extent that it knows Jesus Christ. And so it knows the full extent of their godlessness, and the rejection that accompanies it.
But it knows something greater than that.
And it knows even that only in relation to this greater thing.
It knows what has become of this threat, how and where it has been executed.

It knows that God, by the decree He made in the beginning of all His works and ways, has taken upon Himself the rejection merited by the man isolated in relation to Him; that on the basis of this decree of His the only truly rejected man is His own Son; that God’s rejection has taken its course and been fulfilled and reached its goal, with all that that involves, against this One, so that it can no longer fall on other men or be their concern. [...] Their concern is still to be aware of the threat of their rejection. But it cannot now be their concern to suffer the execution of this threat, to suffer the eternal damnation which their godlessness deserves. Their desire and their undertaking are pointless in so far as their only end can be to make them rejected. And this is the very goal which the godless cannot reach, because it has already been taken away by the eternally decreed offering of the Son of God to suffer in place of the godless, and cannot any longer be their goal.This is the contradiction with which the community opposes the godless, who do not know all this.

It testifies to them that the way in which they find themselves was aimless even before they entered upon it; that their desire and undertaking were nullified before the world began. The revelation of this contradiction is the basis of the community itself. How can it meet any other man otherwise than with this contradiction? But it knows more than this.

It knows that God has removed the merited rejection of man, and has laid it upon His own Son, so that He might draw man to Himself and clothe him with His own glory. It knows that God is gracious to man, not only in a negative sense, not only by the removal of his rejection, but positively, in that He elects him. Indeed, the first and essential thing that He has decreed for him in His Son is his election to covenant with Him. He loves His enemies, the godless: not because they are godless; not because they seek to be free of Him; but because He will not let them break away; because in consequence they cannot really break away from Him. What is laid up for man is eternal life in fellowship with God. (CD II.2, 318-19; paragraph breaks added for readability)

Karl Barth’s argument rests on the “But” in the second paragraph: “But it [the community] knows, above all, about Jesus Christ.” This could be a summary of Barth’s entire theological program. Jesus Christ is “above all” human concerns about our eternal state, because in Jesus all concerns are rendered null and void. In him we have our answer. In him we hear the promise of God to each individual: Because you were there in my Son—because he stood in your place—you are my beloved, my elect. This is the gospel, the “good news” which we must proclaim to the world: We belong to God, and to no one else—especially not to ourselves. No one can escape the gracious grasp of the Holy One in our midst (Hos. 11:9), the God who “loves in freedom” and displayed this holy love in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the realization of God’s infinite grace. The verdict has been given, and Jesus took upon himself the punishment which we deserved. Apart from God we are doomed to perish. But we are never apart from God, because God claims us as God’s beloved children. Thus we may rejoice! We are not lost. We are not guilty. Our lives are hidden with God and we are promised an eternity of fellowship with our Creator as the special guests at the banquet table. Whether we all know it or not, we are invited as the elect of God, no longer rejected as God’s enemies. God determined before the creation of the world that we would share in the wedding feast for all eternity. And so we shall! Praise be to God!

After reading this passage, I am reminded of the quote I posted earlier on grace, from CD II.1:
Grace in itself means primarily that the sin of the creature, the resistancewhich it opposes to God, cannot check, weaken or render impossible the operationof divine grace. On the contrary, grace shows its power over and against sin.Grace, in fact, presupposes the existence of this opposition. It reckons withit, but does not fear it. It is not limited by it. It overcomes it, triumphingin this opposition and the overcoming of it. (355)

Karl Barth proves to be a theologian of grace from beginning to end—the grace of God’s self-revelation, God’s gracious being-in-act as the “one who loves in freedom,” and now God’s election of Jesus Christ as the divine election of grace for all humanity. What is significant is that this grace is not only connected to God’s wrath and judgment but is, in fact, realized in God’s judgment of sin on the cross in the person of Jesus Christ.I close now with a selection from an earlier section in CD II.2, but one which connects the election of individuals to the topic that will be presented next: Jesus Christ as the Judge judged in our place. Barth does not address this fully until the fourth volume, under the doctrine of reconciliation. So with this quote we finally end our discussion of the doctrine of God and move into Christology, reconciliation, justification, and the atonement.

Who is the Elect? He is always the one who “was dead and is alive again,” who “was lost and is found” (Lk. 15.21). That the elected man Jesus had to suffer and die means no more and no less than that in becoming man God makes Himself responsible for man who became His enemy, and that He takes upon Himself all the consequences of man’s action—his rejection and his death. This is what is involved in the self-giving of God. This is the radicalness of His grace. God must let righteousness reign, and He wills to do so. Against the aggression of the shadow-world of Satan which is negated by Him and which exists only in virtue of this negation, God must and will maintain the honour of His creation, the honour of man as created and ordained for Him, and His own honour. God cannot and will not acquiesce in the encroachment of this shadow-world upon the sphere of His positive will, an encroachment made with the fall of man. On the contrary, it must be His pleasure to see that Satan and all that has its source and origin in him are rejected.But this means that God must and will reject man as he is in himself. And He does so. But He does it in the person of the elected man Jesus. And in Him He loves man as he is in himself. He elects Jesus, then, at the head and in the place of all others. The wrath of God, the judgment and the penalty, fall, then, upon Him. And this means upon His own Son, upon Himself: upon Him, and not upon those whom He loves and elects “in Him;” upon Him, and not upon the disobedient. Why not upon the disobedient? Why this interposition of the just for the unjust by which in some incomprehensible manner the eternal Judge becomes Himself the judged? Because His justice is a merciful and for this reason a perfect justice. Because the sin of the disobedient is also their need, and even while it affronts Him it also moves Him to pity. [. . .] That is why He intervened on our behalf in His Son. That is why He did no less. He did not owe it to us to do it. For it was not He but we ourselves in our culpable weakness who delivered us up to Satan and to the divine wrath and rejection. And yet God does it because from all eternity He loves and elects us in His Son, because from all eternity He sees us in His Son as sinners to whom He is gracious.For all those, then, whom God elects in His Son, the essence of the free grace of God consists in the fact that in this same Jesus God who is the Judge takes the place of the judged, and they are fully acquitted, therefore, from sin and its guilt and penalty. Thus the wrath of God and the rejection of Satan and his kingdom no longer have any relevance for them. On the contrary, the wrath of God and the rejection of Satan, the free course of divine justice to which God Himself has subjected Himself on their behalf, has brought them to freedom. In the One in whom they are elected, that is to say, in the death which the Son of God has died for them, they themselves have died as sinners. And that means their radical sanctification, separation and purification for participation in a true creaturely independence, and more than that, for the divine sonship of the creature which is the grace for which from all eternity they are elected in the election of the man Jesus. (CD II.2, 124-25; paragraph breaks added for readability)
Posted by David W. Congdon at 10:53 PM
Labels: election, universalism

Editorial Note: we have included the printed discussion to this article in the belief that the conflicting views will help to increase interest in the subject and convince the reader to develop her own theology as to the scope of the atoning act - the Cross.

14 comments:
Shane said...
Bearing in mind your recent clarification that you do not intend 'universalism' to mean 'everyone goes to heaven', I agree with you that Barth has quite correctly shown the inadequacy of the view of limited atonement.Barth's reworking of the concept of election is brilliant. Christ himself is the electing and the elected, in a primary sense. All individuals are elected only in their relation to Christ, who has assumed human nature and born their sins.Yet, it is important to note that this position still does not imply that everyone will be saved. I am still waiting for the clarification you promised regarding the difference between redemeption and reconciliation, which I think will prove crucial in explaining this point. You have shown that Barth views Grace as something irresistable. In a certain way I would agree with this. But let us draw another careful distinction. God might have the power to overcome our individual decision, but this does not imply that he actually does so. Christ acts first to redeem us. We are capable of loving God because we are loved by God. But, Barth has not actually said that we love God only insofar as he loves us, which in my mind would completely elimate human freedom. Let's put it this way: Grace reconciles us to God and gives us the ability to love him. But reconciliation and love occurs only between two real agents. If grace forces us to be reconciled, then what is the meaning of reconiliation? Human life seems to lose all its moral seriousness. How can we genuinely love God if we have no choice to do otherwise? The splendor of love is its contingency. God does not have to love us, but he does. Likewise, it seems to me that the love we are called to return to him--if it is to be genuine love-- presupposes our possibility to withhold that love.It is this possibility of withholding which I think requires us to acknowledge the possibility that some will not be finally reconciled in the eschaton.shane

July 03, 2006 6:21 AM
D.W. Congdon said...
Shane,I think we need to assert that God's love for us and our love for God indeed establishes a relationship, but that does not entail reconciliation. The whole biblical witness shows that our election and reconciliation has never been in our hands. Did Abram ask God to elect him and establish the people of Israel through him? No. In a way, it was a denial of Abram's freedom, but in another way God gave Abram a radically new freedom through calling him to obedience. God's decision went in a single direction; Abraham had no role to play in God's election. But the promises of God -- flowing from the love of God -- were such that Abraham did not want it any other way. He was promised descendents like the stars in the sky and the reality that he would be a blessing to the world. He was not coerced into this, but rejection was not a valid option. God made a decision apart from any human response, and when God sought that response, the only choice left was and is: Thank you.The same goes for our reconciliation to God in Jesus Christ. God took this decision out of our hands and has done something to which we can only respond: Thank you. Paul affirms this time and again. I will use Romans 11:32 as the main example: "For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all." One could make the case that imprisonment is a violent image, one that deprives us of our human freedoms. But that would be a very modern liberal perspective, as if God is bound to respect what we think of as freedom. God removes us from the decision-making process so that we can make the right decision and use our freedom properly by saying "Amen" to what God has done for us. God keeps us out of the work of reconciliation in order that we might actually be reconciled, because reconciliation is a divine work which no human person is capable of effecting or completing.What you are talking about is the subjective appropriation of the reconciliation that has already occurred. A response of love and obedience is indeed demanded from God, just as it was demanded of the Israelite patriarchs. Except then it was for a very specific group of people, whereas now in Christ the response is expected from all people everywhere of all times. And this response will come at some time, though it may not be in this life (Phil. 2:9-11). Should we feel frustrated that "at the name of Jesus" we will all bow down, as if we have no freedom to resist? No, because when that time comes we will desire nothing else but to bow before our Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. We will submit to this act of reverence and obedience, because there is nothing else we could possible wish to do in the face of such glorious grace.

July 03, 2006 11:15 AM
D.W. Congdon said...
A brief discussion began a couple days ago on Barth and election, and a person made this very astute remark which I echo wholeheartedly; I could not have said it any better:"A Barthian 'universalist' has made his whole case once it is admitted, contra Calvin, that there is only one election. That's all 'universalist' need mean. 'Apokatastasis,' with its hint of fate or mechanics, is a red herring. The break with Calvin's doctrine is what rocks our world. It's the ding-an-sich. We're still digesting that - or stomaching it."

July 03, 2006 11:18 AM
Shane said...
David said, "God's decision went in a single direction; Abraham had no role to play in God's election." Actually, I think the example of Abraham contradicts your point. I agree that Abraham did not initiate God's election, but it is also the case that Abraham had a vital role to play in the fulfillment of the divine promises to which he was elected.Gen 12, 1-2,"Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing . . ."This seems like a conditional statement to me: if you go, I will bless you. Abraham could not have made God promise to bless him, but God's promise is directly tied to a commandment. Likewise in Genesis 17 when God gives Abraham a son by Sarah, he calls it a 'covenent' between the two of them, and requires Abraham to be circumcised in recognition of the covenent.We see the same thing also in Genesis 22, when God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice Isaac."By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice."Abraham's faithful response to the divine command surely has some significance. Would God have made a great nation of Abraham if he had remained in Ur rather than sojourning west? It seems to me that he would not have done so.Another important text here is in Gen 15.6, which says that Abraham, "believed (ve-he'emin) God and it was counted to him for righteousness." If I remember rightly, this is one of those verses which has been hotly debated by the New Perspective NT scholars and those of a more Lutheran bent.The exegetically interesting thing here is the verb. the triliteral root ('mn) seems to carry connotations of faithfulness, dependability, trustworthiness. (It is the root from which we get our english affirmation of trust in God, 'amen. The BDB lexicon gives the gloss "to trust, or believe in" someone for the hiphil stem, which seems to be pretty well attested. It would be interesting to see if there is a connotation here connecting 'believing' and 'faithfulness.' A quick glance at some of the other occurences of the verb in this stem makes me guess that there might be some connection there, which would be very theologically significant because it would mean that Abraham did have some part to play in the fulfillment of God's promises.The Lutheran and Reformed scholars want to deny this obviously. However, the apostle James (2.20ff.) interprets this verse as an affirmation of the necessity of good works for justification:"But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect? And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God. Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only."It seems to me therefore, that the example of Abraham contradicts the theological position which you are wanting to take, namely saying that God's grace happens without our consent or ability to resist.
July 03, 2006 12:28 PM
Shane said...
To say this another way:God wants covenant partners, not covenant robots.s

July 03, 2006 12:29 PM
Shane said...
To put it in Calvinist termsTotal DepravityUnconditional ElectionLimited AtonementIrresistable GracePerseverance of the saints.You are rightly rejecting L, but you are not being radical enough! I am trying to get rid of (or at least seriously qualify) the U, I and P too.
July 03, 2006 12:34 PM
D.W. Congdon said...
Of course Abraham was involved in the fulfilment of God's promises, since God wants us to be covenant partners. (But being a partner with God comes after the fact of God's self-determination to be the God of the covenant and to establish the covenant with Abraham.) I never denied the importance of being a partner and not a robot, but you are treading on dangerous ground it seems by denying the irrestibility of grace, the unconditionality of election, etc. The direction in which you are heading, if you are not there already, is synergism: that humans are necessary for God to accomplish the purposes of election and salvation. Is this really where you want to go? Do you really want to say that God needs us, that God does not save anyone unless that person does something to, in a sense, save herself?I think the Pauline witness is against such a position.

July 03, 2006 12:55 PM
Shane said...
well, i'm no theologian, so i have relatively little to contribute in a positive way here, but it seems to me that we are called into a sort of cooperative role. Syn-ergism is a new term to me, so maybe there is hidden baggage I don't know about, but it seems acceptable so long as we recognize a fundamental asymmetry involved. God grace precedes us and it is this alone makes our cooperation with the Spirit possible. Thus our becoming fellow-workers with God happens only in the sphere of the spirit, not the sphere of nature.Likewise, we should not construe syn-ergism as 'earning our salvation,' much less as 'saving ourselves.' Syn-ergism should point out that we are called to cooperate with the Holy Spirit's work of sanctifying us--we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Obedience to God's commands is an important part of cooperation, of course. We ought to obey God's commands because the Spirit is trying to teach us to be holy like Jesus. Our salvation does not depend upon our flawless performance of the divine law, however. It depends upon the forgiveness offered us through the cross by means of faith. Yet this faith, if it is the genuine article, involves the desire to cooperate with the Spirit more and more, to learn to live more righteously. This is my interpretation of the passage from James above.The question about the perseverance of the saints is whether a person who has initially responded to the Grace of God and has partaken of the Holy Spirit can ultimately and finally reject the faith and be cast away by God? I think Heb 6.4-8 forces us to say yes.I am not sure exactly what that passage is talking about, but I don't think it means that any sin after baptism is a mortal sin. Nor do I think there is any way to read this passage as saying that everyone who is elected will necessarily be saved.

July 03, 2006 1:29 PM
D.W. Congdon said...
I wonder, Shane, if what you are after is the distinction between justification and sanctification. We do not cooperate in our justification, but we are called to obedience in the process of sanctification by the Holy Spirit. You imply this distinction when you write: "Syn-ergism should point out that we are called to cooperate with the Holy Spirit's work of sanctifying us--we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling."I plan to comment on 1 Cor. 1:18 in a future post, but I will mention it now. The verse states, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." This is a present continuous concept of salvation, but the theological term is sanctification. The NT often speaks of salvation in a present continuous sense because it emphasizes the centrality of discipleship, obedience, and the doing of good deeds in accordance with the grace shown us in Jesus Christ. But I do not think we are then free to say that if we fail to perform good works and live up to some standard of discipleship, that we are in danger of losing our election. What we would have to say then is that we were never really elect; we were simply in the process of earning that election. Is this what we really want to proclaim as the gospel? Does this actually accord with the biblical witness? I agree that verses like the one in Hebrews gives that impression, but as I have said before, the argument cannot be won by counting the number of passages but by discerning what is the overall thrust of the Scriptures.The question you will need to address is: Where is the proper locus for human cooperation? What do humans rightly cooperate with God in accomplishing? Where is our rightful place?The tradition through and through has answered this question by locating our involvement outside of election and salvation, in the realm of obedience, ethics, and sanctification. I can only think of three times in church history where humans could cooperate in their salvation: (1) Pelagianism (and the later development of semi-Pelagianism); (2) medieval Catholicism (with the emphasis on sacramental works as necessary for achieving and maintaining one's salvation); and (3) Arminianism (as the rejection of Calvin's doctrine of election). I think one could rightly say that the specter of Pelagius runs through all the options, the idea that humanity has to do or achieve something for salvation.If we wish to use the idea of cooperation, then it must be passive and not active. We cooperate with God by receiving that which God has already accomplished in Jesus Christ. We do not actively do something, but we cooperate by allowing ourselves to subjectively become the new creature which God has objectively realized in the death and resurrection of Jesus. After that, we may cooperate actively in the journey of discipleship and obedience, as our lives are brought (still passively, by the Holy Spirit) into correspondence with the reality realized by God. The distinction between what we are "ontologically" (objectively) in Jesus Christ and what we are "ontically" (subjectively) is one that I employ in this regard, and it corresponds with the distinction between justification and sanctification.You also wrote: "God grace precedes us and it is this alone makes [sic] our cooperation with the Spirit possible."Here is where you need to be careful and think through what you want to say. If God's grace by the power of the Holy Spirit alone makes us capable of responding to God in faith, and if that grace is only given to a select group of people, then you have no choice but to affirm limited atonement.

July 03, 2006 3:19 PM
Shane said...
David, You have just made several interesting points in that post. Let me try to respond to a few.I think it is absolutely crucial to point out, as you do, that salvation is future or a present continuous idea. "to us who are being saved . . ." You are 'saved' only after the final judgment. Now clearly we need to clarify the relationship between salvation, justification and sanctification. It seems to me that most protestants view salvation and justification as essentially coterminous. If you are justified, then are 'saved'. Note that this is already slipping into viewing salvation in the past tense. If we take the temporal view of salvation you rightly have advocated, then we must either reject the coterminous association of justification and salvation, or claim that justification is also located in the eschatological future. I think we need to do a lot more exegesis at this point, but my instincts are that we should take the first alternative and look for a way to separate justification and salvation.But what then is the difference between justification and salvation? Salvation is about being welcomed into heaven. I don't think this is controversial. However, I think we are going to have to find a more controversial understanding of what justification is. For Luther, it seems like justification is just a forensic declaration. As soon as you have faith, God declares you righteous. Is it Luther's view that you will be saved because you have been justified? It seems that this is all separate from the process of sanctification, because Luther wants too strongly to avoid the idea that works are sufficient to guarantee one's salvation.On the basis of the passages we've mentioned so far in this conversation, I am inclined against this view. I am more inclined to think that it is justification and sanctification that should be coterminous and not justification and salvation. The words 'justification' and 'sanctification' themselves seem synonymous (at least in Greek): to be made righteous, to be made holy. (cf. 1 Cor 6.11 for an example where they seem to be used in apposition).Perhaps justification and sanctification are both properly said only in the present tense too. We are being sanctified and justified as we are being conformed to the image of Christ in the Spirit. Of course, at this point we do run up against an exegetical wall, because the NT does often use the words in a past tense. But perhaps there are a different ways to understand this that don't contradict my point.But what does this reworked understanding of salvation, justification and sanctification mean for election and for human cooperation? Well, if salvation is a future and/or a present continuous notion, then we have to acknowledge the possibility that at some future point in my life I might forsake the faith. Right now I am being saved because I have faith in Christ. By the spirit right now I am being sanctified and perhaps already am sanctified in some sense. But perhaps in 10 years I will decide no longer to be a Christian and will utterly desert the Church. At that point I will no longer be sanctified, and I will no longer be on the process of salvation. Consequently, I am no longer guaranteed to be welcomed into heaven when I die. But of course, none of this changes who God has elected to be for me, nor does it change the fact that God chose me to be redeemed (just like he chose everyone else). I suppose what I am saying is that God would allow me to resist my election, or my salvation or my sanctification. Cooperation with the Spirit then means at least not resisting the Spirit's work. However, it seems that it probably also includes something like affirming and nurturing the Spirit's work of sanctifying us.I don't find room for a distinction of this notion of cooperation into a passive and active sense. It seem to me that cooperation is necessarily active, insofar as it is an co-operation, but necessarily passive insofar as it is a co-operation. I don't think the two should be separated.Nor would I ever say that grace is given only to a select group of people, by the way. I think God is continually trying to give grace to people. I also think that most of us refuse his grace most of the time.shane

July 04, 2006 4:51 AM
D.W. Congdon said...
I think what is needed is not the dissociation of justification from salvation, but rather the clarification of the word "salvation." The word salvation must be viewed as a differentiated word, one that has both past, present, and future connotations. As a reference to the past, it is connected with justification and the reconciliation achieved on the cross. As a reference to a present continuous reality, it is connected with sanctification and the journey of faithful discipleship as those who are reborn as new creatures through the Holy Spirit. As a reference to the future, it is connected with redemption and the resurrection of the body, in conjunction with the universal revelation of God's grace and the coming of the kingdom. The word salvation needs to be seen in this threefold light, and when we have this in mind, the biblical text itself is properly illuminated.What I do not think is allowable is the notion that failure in our life of discipleship necessarily entails the loss of our salvation, precisely because salvation is not limited to what we do in the here and now — in fact, it has much less to do with the here and now and much more to do with what was accomplished by God in the past and what God will accomplish in the future. Salvation is primarily and properly in the hands of God alone, though God does call us to work out our salvation here in this life, as we should. The moment we reduce salvation to this present life, we inevitably raise ourselves over the triune God's activity in the past and in the eschatological future. We must not do this, for the sake of the gospel.Finally, I do think very strongly that we need to hold on to the distinction between passive and active. We cannot say that we participate actively in our justification. Co-operation is prohibited in the objective realization of our salvation. We receive what we cannot accomplish, which is the righteousness of God. Co-operation is not permitted in justification, but it is necessary in the present-tense working out of this reality.

July 04, 2006 11:38 AM
Shane said...
"What I do not think is allowable is the notion that failure in our life of discipleship necessarily entails the loss of our salvation."I agree with what you are getting at here, but notice that this sentence also seems to be implying a present perfect view of salvation ("I have been saved"). Nevertheless, I do still think that we have to say that faith without discipleship is not true faith. We might sin after conversion without this necessarily entailing that we will be eternally damned. But to claim that we have no role whatsoever to play in the story of our salvation seems to me to imply that discipleship is utterly unimportant to your salvation (which is another thing that the popular meaning of "universalism" connotes).I also find that I have to disagree with you about the notion of passive cooperation. It seems to me that this concept is incoherent. If a police officer stops you and asks for your driver's license, he wants your cooperation (i.e. taking it out of your billfold and handing it to him). If you remain passive, (i.e., sitting there looking at him and not saying anything), you will go to jail for being uncooperative.I think the helpful thing about the word 'cooperation' is that it locates a middle space between pure activity and pure passivity. I do not save myself (pure activity), nor am I saved without my will (pure passivity), rather I being saved by Christ because I am cooperating with the Spirit.Moreover, I think it is crucial to say that my ability to choose to obey or not to obey is conditioned by the Grace of God. God is the condition of the possibility of all human willing, so in some sense, God is acting even in our cooperating, but in such a way that our cooperation or refusing to cooperate is still genuinely our own action as well. ("in him we live and move and have our being")I know that this will seem pelagian to you. However, I do not think that it is so. I am not denying original sin and I am not locating the initiative in the human. Moreover, I have sketched why I think that we do not make choices unaided by the divine.

July 05, 2006 4:18 AM
WTM said...
I think that we all might find our thinking clarified in these matters if we left to the side the discussion of justification / sanctification / salvation and turned instead to a discussion of concursus, since the whole thrust of this argument is the 'cooperation' of the divine and human agent. Go read the appropriate section of CD 3.3.

We add these url listings for further discussion/reading taken from The Fire and The Rose.

Universalism in the Blogosphere

The theo-blogosphere is exploding with posts on universalism. In this post, I want to index these debates, and if people hear about other online conversations, please let me know and I will add them to this list. The posts are ordered chronologically, with the oldest first and the most recent last. Blogs are arranged alphabetically. The fact that I post these links on my site does not mean that I endorse any or all of the views expressed by the various individuals, particularly with regard to the online resources. I offer them in the hope that the dialogue will be furthered and our faith may be enriched.

Originally Posted July 21, 2006
Last Updated January 23, 2007

Christ in all the Scriptures/The Theology of G C Berkouwer:

John Hick’s Religious World (Dec. 18, 2006)
A Critique of J D Bettis, “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?” (June 9, 2007)
Two more footnotes to “Berkouwer and Barth” (June 19, 2007)

Chrisendom:

The logic of Talbott's universalism (Dec. 13, 2005)
Christian Universalism Pt. 1 (Feb. 3, 2006)
Christian Universalism Pt. 2 (Feb. 3, 2006)
Christian Universalism Pt. 3 (Feb. 4, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist (Aug. 4, 2006)
Universalism - a brief note on my position (Aug. 5, 2006)
Guest Post - part 1 of 2 (Aug. 14, 2006)
Guest Post - part 2 of 2 (Aug. 15, 2006)
Debating Christian universalism (June 27, 2007)
Useful Resources on Universalism for the Exegete (June 29, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 1 (July 2, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 2 (July 4, 2007)
The power of a question (July 5, 2007)
God is Love (July 10, 2007)
Debate with a Universalist (July 13, 2007)
Guest post: Gregory MacDonald (July 16, 2007)
Gregory MacDonald responds to a question (July 17, 2007)
Redemptive judgment in hell? Pt 3 (July 29, 2007)
Gregory MacDonald responds to my previous post (July 30, 2007)
Hell behind us (Sept. 29, 2007)
The future of Christian Universalism debates (Jan. 16, 2008)

Connexions:

“What happens after death?” (July 10, 2006)
Death, judgement & hell: a little light reading (July 13, 2006)

Exiled Preacher:

Universalism? (July 12, 2006)

Experimental Theology:

Why I am a Universalist, Part 1 : Talbott’s Propositions (Oct. 17, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 2: God is not worthy of worship just because He’s God (Oct. 21, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 3: The Gift of Hell (Oct. 23, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: On Reading the Bible and Moral Coherence (Oct. 24, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 4: Moral Luck (Oct. 25, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Reading of Romans 9-11 (Oct. 25, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Comment on the Disjoint Between a Continuous Soteriology and a Binary Eschatology (Oct. 27, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 5: Salvation in a Post-Cartesian World (Oct. 28, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Interlude: A Reading of I Corinthians 15 (Oct. 30, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Part 6: Thanatocentrism and the Fetish of the Thin Red Line
(Oct. 31, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist, Comment: A Soteriology for All Possible Worlds (Nov. 1, 2006)
Why I am a Universalist: Summing Up and Some Links (Nov. 2, 2006)

Faith & Theology:

Hans Urs von Balthasar: dare we hope? (Jan. 20, 2006)
Why I am not a universalist (June 23, 2006)
And yes, there is a hell... (July 11, 2006)

Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank:

“The Problem with Universalism?” (May 27, 2006)
Hoping that Universalism Is / Will Be True (June 6, 2006)
Underground Universalism (June 8, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist and “the ethos in some evangelical circles” (June 30, 2006)
Help with a Kierkegaard Quotation? (July 6, 2006)
Kierkegaard’s Own Words (July 12, 2006)
Follow-Up to “Hoping that Universalism Is / Will Be True” (July 24, 2006)
An Interview with The Evangelical Universalist (Oct. 25, 2006)
“Heretics” on Public Radio (Nov. 17, 2006)
Gregory MacDonald, “Can an Evangelical be a Universalist?” (Nov. 21, 2006)

God in a Shrinking Universe:

Universalism (May 18, 2006)

Jason Clark:

The Evangelical Universalist (July 15, 2006)

Leaving Münster:

Universalism (index of posts)
I heard a rumour ... (Mar. 7, 2004)
Versions of universalism (Mar. 27, 2004)
The horror of God’s unrestrained love? (Feb. 20, 2005)
These Christians should bow before Confucius (Mar. 2, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement (Mar. 4, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement 2 - more questions (Mar. 8, 2005)
Universalism and the atonement 3 - the unreached (April 1, 2005)
Universalistic prayer (May 7, 2005)
Universalism’s proof-texts (May 12, 2005)
Universalism, Scott McKnight and protestant purgatory (May 19, 2005)
Why do we hope? (May 20, 2005)
Howard Marshall refutes universalism's proof-texts (apparently!) (June 13, 2005)
Response to Howard Marshall (Universalism) (Nov. 21, 2005)
Why evangelise if there's hope for non-Christians? (March 20, 2006)
Hell has never been a fashionable destination! (May 9, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 1 (Oct. 24, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 2 (Nov. 8, 2006)
Interview with Gregory MacDonald , part 3 (Nov. 25, 2006)
A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity: A Review (Jan. 9, 2007)
How will every knee bow? (April 28, 2007)
McLaren on Hell, finally! (May 11, 2007)
Radical inclusivism - not by way of an introduction (May 17, 2007)

The Lost Message:

A Case for Universalism? (March 27, 2006)
The Case for Universalism (May 15, 2006)
Musing Universalism (May 18, 2006)
The Challenge of Universalism (May 20, 2006)
McLaren on Universalism (May 20, 2006)
Biblical Universalism: An Introduction (May 21, 2006)
Biblical Universalism Part One: Romans (May 23, 2006)
The Evangelical Universalist (July 21, 2006)

Nothing New Under the Sun:

Barth on universalism as hope and prayer (July 12, 2006)

On Journeying with those in Exile:

On Divine Vengeance (July 24, 2007)
Baudrillard and Christian Universalism: Freedom, Choice, Liberation, Martyrdom (Aug. 4, 2007)

Sean the Baptist:

Is Universalism the Next Big Thing? (July 3, 2007)

Sub Ratione Dei:

The Anonymous Universalist (July 23, 2007)
Interrogating Talbott’s Universalism (July 25, 2007)

Toward Jerusalem:

The Liberal Annihilationist, part 7: Universalist texts (Sept. 30, 2006)
The Liberal Annihilationist: Summary (Sept. 30, 2006)

The Truth Will Set You Free:

Universalism: Some Introductory Remarks (May 22, 2006)
Universalism - Some Hermeneutic Concerns (May 23, 2006)
Universalism: God's Justice and Mercy (May 24, 2006)
True Freedom? The Question of Universalism (May 25, 2006)
Universalism and Recapitulation - A Take on Dali (May 26, 2006)
The Cutting Edge of Grace - Some (semi) Final Thoughts on Universalism (May 26, 2006)

Online Resources:

Keith DeRose's page - “Universalism and the Bible” (pro)
The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry page - Universalism (contra)
Debate between Tom Talbott and Eric Landstrom
Christian Universalism.com
Christian Universalism Articles

Published Books:

Every Knee Shall Bow: The Case for Christian Universalism by Thomas Allin and Mark T. Chamberlain
Hope Beyond Hell by Gerard Beauchemin
The One Purpose of God by Jan Bonda
Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell: Papers Presented at the Fourth Edinburgh Conference in Christian Dogmatics, 1991 by Nigel M. De S. Cameron
Destined for Salvation: God’s Promise to Save Everyone by Kalen K. Fristad
What Does the Bible Really Say About Hell?: Wrestling With the Traditional View (Living Issues Discussion Series) by Randolph J. Klassen
The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald (pseudonym)
Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge
The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott
God Does Not Foreclose: The Universal Promise of Salvation by David Lowes Watson

2008-10-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Evangelicals and Karl Barth: Friends or Foes?
byMark DeVine
Delivered at the Annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Colorado Springs, CO (2001).
In 1980 Gregory Bolich published Karl Barth and Evangelicalism in which he
divided evangelicals into two camps in relation to the theology of Karl Barth—namely
friends or foes. Albert Mohler, now president of the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, further sub-divided evangelicals into three categories in his yet unpublished
dissertation entitled Evangelical Theology and Karl Barth: Representative Models of
Response. These two works bear witness to the inability of evangelicals, three decades
after Barth’s death in 1968, even to approach consensus regarding his theology. In this
paper I will suggest that Barth should not be regarded as an evangelical. His denial of
Biblical inerrancy alone must exclude him from the evangelical ranks. However, I will
contend that Barth’s theology can serve as a model for evangelical theology in certain
crucial aspects. I will also argue that ignorance and misunderstanding of Barth’s work
among evangelicals has led to inaccurate construals of his thinking and sad neglect of the
Barthian corpus. I will suggest that Barth be viewed by evangelicals as more friend than
foe, albeit with some serious blind spots. The chief purpose of my paper is to encourage
evangelicals to give Barth another look or perhaps, a first look before consigning him to
that contemptible class of dismissible and neglectable heretics one may and perhaps must
comment upon but need not read.

Evangelical Response to Barth
Evangelical assessment of Barth’s theology presents an extraordinary range of
contradictory conclusions. In 1954 Cornelius Van Til virtually identified Barth as the
worst heretic in the history of the church: “No heresy that appeared at any of [the
councils of Nicea, Chalcedon, and Dort] was so deeply and ultimately destructive of the
gospel as is the theology of Barth.”1 Few events frustrated Van Til more than the periodic
appearance of favorable assessments of Barth among evangelicals. The above quote was
prompted by evangelical praise for Barth’s affirmation of the virgin birth. Van Til’s
response, published in the Westminster Theological Journal essentially insisted that
Barth’s theological system precluded such an affirmation notwithstanding Barth’s own
clear statement on the matter.

Meanwhile the fundamentalist Presbyterian pastor and founder of Eternity
magazine, Donald Grey Barnhouse could gush “Barth is in the camp of the true
believers.” In 1986 J.I. Packer contended that Barth provided contemporary theology
with a “powerful Bible-based restatement of Trinitarian theism,” “Barth’s purpose of
being rigorously, radically, and ruthlessly biblical and his demand for interpretation that
is theologically coherent, is surely exemplary for us.”2 Among Evangelicals favorable to
Barth, perhaps Bernard Ramm could be viewed as Van Til’s evangelical opposite. In his
1983 monograph After Fundamentalism: The Future of Evangelical Theology, Ramm
called for recognition of Barth’s theology as the best model for the future of evangelical
theology.3 Ramm’s subsequent writings confirm his deep and grateful dependence upon
Barth.

While Van Til and Ramm retained their respective views, Carl F. H. Henry’s
reception of Barth’s theology developed over time. In his 1969 address in a plenary

1 Cornelius Van Til, “Has Karl Barth become Orthodox?” Westminster Theological Journal 16(1954), p.
81.
2 J.I. Packer, “Theism for Our Time,” in God Who is Rich in Mercy ed. Peter T. O’Brien(Homebush
West, Australia: Lancer Books, 1986), p.10.

session of the Evangelical Theological Society, Henry identified Barth as part of the
problem, not the solution, to the ongoing effort by evangelicals to preserve the
reformation doctrine of justification by faith within the Protestant community.4 But by
1995 Henry found himself pointing others to Barth as a faithful champion of orthodox
teaching on justification. In the article, entitled Justification: A Doctrine in Crisis,
Henry quotes Barth again and again against betrayals of the doctrine of justification by
faith he identifies emerging from numerous ecumenical efforts to reconcile longstanding
Protestant-Catholic doctrinal differences.5

This brief review of the vast range of evangelical opinion of Barth’s theology
only represents the tip of the iceberg. In certain cases contradictory readings of Barth can
be accounted for with some confidence. For example, it seems clear that Van Til ruled
out the possibility of development in Barth’s theology over time. Thus, he
unapologetically read Barth through the lens of his earliest writings despite Barth’s own
disavowal of many of those early views. Equally certain was Ramm’s insensitivity to
evangelical nervousness regarding Barth’s curious double-talk concerning the historicity
of Biblical accounts.

Can Barth be Understood?
Barth drew fire from the left and from the right. The difficulty of understanding
Barth should not surprise us. The sheer volume of his output alone presents would-be
interpreters with a daunting task. Barth also stands as one of the most original theological
minds the church has ever produced. Add to the mix profound developments in Barth’s

3 Bernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism: The Future of Evangelical Theology (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1983).
4 Carl F.H. Henry, “Justification by Ignorance: A Neo-Protestant Motif? JETS 1970.
5 Carl F.H. Henry, “Justification: A Doctrine in Crisis,” JETS 38/1 (March 1995) 57-65.

theology over the course of his career and the difficulties deepen. After critiquing Barth
negatively for several decades, following a personal encounter with Barth on his vist to
America in 1962, Carl Henry published an article entitled “The Enigma of Karl Barth”
which seems to mark something of a turning towards a discernibly more positive
engagement of Barth’s theology.

The answer to the question is “yes!” Barth can be understood, but only with great
and sincere effort. Understanding of Barth will require that we first read him. Albert
Mohler has rightly noted that many evangelicals who worked hard to cast Barth as an
enemy of the gospel showed little evidence of having read him.

Second, we must recognize that Barth’s views do change dramatically over time, especially
when we move from the Barth of the Romerbrief to the Barth of the Church Dogmatics.

Third, we must let Barth say what he says and take it at face value. Thomas Torrance correctly
complained that Cornelius Van Til simply refused to believe it when Barth showed his
conservative orthodox side in ways Van Til did not anticipate.

Still, even if Barth is understandable, is he worth our time? Does a cost benefit
analysis encourage the investment of time involved. A colleague of mine put it this
way—why pick through a hand full of bones for a tiny bite of catfish which then still
contains a bone or two—better to eat flounder. He’s got a point. But it is also true that
some of the church’s best teachers had glaring weaknesses and blind spots. I think
especially of the atrocious allegorizing of biblical texts of which Saint Augustine was
capable. I want to suggest that the effort to read Barth is worth it. But first I want to
address briefly certain common evangelical charges against Barth.

Universalism
In 1967, Joseph Bettis published an article in the Scottish Journal of Theology
entitled “Is Karl Barth A Universalist.”6 Once again we note the difficulty of simply
comprehending Barth’s views, much less forming a critique. No one can read very far
into any volume of the Church Dogmatics without concluding that, yes obviously, Karl
Barth was a universalist. But, Barth repeatedly and pointedly denied the charge of
universalism. Barth rejected what he understood as the only two options for limiting the
scope of God’s redeeming activity, namely Arminianism and double-predestination.
Barth’s statements in CD 4/3 make it clear both that Barth believed it proper to pray and
hope for the salvation of the whole world but that to advance a doctrine of universal
salvation would be impossible. Dale Moody, the late Southern Baptist theologian, studied
with Barth in Basel. During a final meeting in Barth’s study, Barth said, “dear brother
Moody, I hope that if, in the end, God saves the the entire world, you will not be too
upset.”

I would argue that several convictions combine in Barth’s theology to produce a
kind of universalistic inertia of a distinctively Calvinistic character. The first factor,
however is pointedly against Calvin. Barth accepts Calvin’s identification of the glory of
God as the ultimate divine purpose in creation and redemption. But, he rejects Calvin’s
contention that the divine glory might display itself equally according to the divine
justice in the case of the reprobate and of the divine mercy in the case of the elect.
Barth’s celebrated Christomonism combined with a denial that the divine justice and
mercy oppose one another results in a doctrine of election more akin to single
predestination but with the possibility of the universal scope of salvation held out as at
least something for which we might hope. Barth, like any good Calvinist, believes that
everyone for whom Christ died will be saved. Barth views Christ as the elect one,
resulting in redemption for all who are found in Him.

It should be noted that Barth’s distinctive tendency toward the affirmation of
universal atonement has a definite “Calvinistic,” or perhaps, radical Augustinian character
in that it powerfully contends for the sovereignty of God and the gratuity of salvation.
Barth’s bent toward universalism emerged from the same conviction which also resulted
in his rejection of both Arminianism and double-predestination, namely, God’s freedom
in salvation.

When one considers the relative dominance of reformed thinking within
evangelicalism, it seems curious that Barth’s view would have been seen as any more
threatening to the missionary enterprise than evangelicalism’s own reformed contingent.
For reformed Christians, obedience to the missionary mandate derives from gratitude and
love to God for his grace, the desire of beloved children to please their heavenly father,
and love for those beloved by God whom God wills to reach through the witness of the
Church. Thus, as regards the preaching of the word and the missionary enterprise, it
would seem that Barth should be in no more trouble with evangelicals than our reformed
sisters and brothers.

The real objection to Barth’s universalism for evangelicals must be the witness of
scripture. However, we evangelicals also should take seriously the rather formidable
biblical support Barth finds for the universalistic tendency at work within his theology.13

6 Joseph D. Bettis, “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?,” Scottish Journal of Theology 20 (1967) 423-426.
13 See, e.g., John. 12:32; Rom. 6:10, 11:32-36; Eph. 1:9-10; Col. 1:15-20; 1 John. 2:2.

For Barth, the biblical witness sets forth a combination of factors which come together to produce the universalistic bent of his theology.. These are (1) the objective reconciliation of all for whom Christ died, (2) that Christ dies At the same time, Barth acknowledges the biblical warnings of eternal damnation
together with the freedom of God in salvation and cites these factors as reasons for his
refusal to embrace universal salvation as a warranted conclusion for Christian
proclamation.14 Barth’s position is that the theologian has no prerogative either to affirm
or to deny universalism in principle since this is a derogation of God’s freedom.

The Bible: Revelation or Mere Witness to Revelation?
Here I want to address what has become perhaps the most common criticism not
so much of Barth, but of neo-orthodoxy, with which Barth tends to be identified. I believe
that the term neo-orthodoxy is misleading and virtually useless in comprehending the
theology of Karl Barth. In any case, it is often noted that neo-orthodox theologians
contend that the revelation of God or the Word of God cannot be identified with Scripture
but that the Word or revelation can be found within the scriptures. This view applies to
once, for all, for the sins of the whole world (1 John. 2:2), (3) the conception of Jesus Christ as the firstborn
of all creation, (4) the affirmation of true humanity as hidden in Christ, and (5) the understanding of
Christian hope as the unveiling of Jesus Christ which includes the manifestation of the children of God.
Once his distinctively high view of the freedom of God in the work of salvation is added to the above
theses, the justification for identifying Barth’s understanding as a universalistic “inertia” becomes clear. It
is an accumulation of factors which draws Barth toward the hope of universal redemption. It would seem
that reformed evangelicals must at least experience some unease in a cocksure denial of universal salvation
in face of the biblical affirmation that Christ died for the sins of the whole world (1 John. 2:2). At the same
time, Barth is confronted with clear biblical warnings of eternal damnation. In fact, just these biblical
witnesses, together with the same conviction of God’s freedom in salvation do give Barth pause, and are
identified by him as the cause of his refusal to accept universal salvation as a warranted conclusion.

14 On the “peril” attending superficial critiques of Barth’s univrsalism, see R.A. Mohler, Barth, esp. pp.
177-185 and Joseph D. Bettis, “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 20 (1967),
423-436. Cf. also CD 4:3, 477-478.

For evidence of the tension Barth experiences in dealing with the
issue of the scope of salvation, note this statement: “The old theologians used to end their work with the
doctrines of the eternal blessedness and eternal damnation, and in this context to ask how the blessed feel
when they think of the damned. The answer was that the thought does not trouble them: on the contrary,
when they look at the damned they rejoice that God’s honor is so great. It would be better if we restrain
ourselves here and not sing with Dante the song of paradise, much less the more famous song of hell. If we
want to understand condemnation correctly, we must hold fast to the fact that all men (we too!) are his
enemies--but that we all go to meet the Judge who gave himself for us. It is true that he is the Judge; there
can be no doctrine of universal salvation. Nevertheless, he is the Judge whom we Christians may know.
Would it not be better in the time of grace in which we still live to proclaim to men this good news, to tell
them who our Judge is, rather than to reflect on whether there is and eternal damnation?” Karl Barth,
Learning Jesus Christ through the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. Shirley C. Guthrie (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1964), p. 82. true Protestant Liberals but not to Barth. There is no higher-critical separation of the
gospel kernel from the mythological husk in Barth as one finds in the writings of Adolph
Von Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann. Barth stands under the Scriptures not beside or
above them as the higher critics tended to do. In fact, Barth’s aversion to the pretensions
of the higher critics becomes obvious in his decades long correspondence with Bultmann.

What is true is that Barth distinguished between the Bible as a human book
susceptible to historical investigation and interpretation and the revelation of God itself
which the Bible may become according to the working of the Holy Spirit. What did Barth
mean by this? What he did not mean is that the Biblical witness depends upon either the
internal witness of the Holy Spirit or its reception by man to become true. What he did
mean was that genuine understanding of the word of God, genuine reception of the
revelation of God always involves “profitable” understanding, or “salvifically
efficacious” understanding. Like Calvin before him, when the words only touches the
brain, understanding has not been achieved. Only those who encounter salvifically the
One to whom the scriptures bear witness can be said to have benefited from revelation.

Barth's conviction that God’s sovereignty extends to knowledge of himself caused him to
draw back from statements about the Bible which suggested general access to the
revelation God. Ironically, similar concerns related to God’s sovereignty and freedom led
Barth to oppose liberal and higher critical views of scripture and inerrancy. For Barth,
both views suggested a kind of exalted position of man above the Bible from which the
former could deny its authority and the latter could pro it up. What inerrantists in
America viewed as a necessary defence of Biblical authority involved, for Barth, an
appeal to some imaginary external guarantee in order to secure what the Bible could not
lose.

So, then, can Bath serve as a model for evangelical theology? I believe so, in certain
repsects.

Defining Protestant Liberalism7
Putting Doctrine in its Place
Barth identified the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher as the greatest threat to
the gospel and tended to account for most of what was wrong with modern theology in
defining Protestant liberalism 7 according to a failure in avoiding Schleiermacher’s influence.
According to his own conviction, Schleiermacher had partaken of the fundamental Christian fellowship producing experience of the United Brethren without sharing Moravian doctrinal
convictions or at least without sharing the capacity to articulate that experience in a form
recognizable within that community. Thus, nothing belonging integrally to
Schleiermacher's formative initiation into the Christian community biased him against
Kant's exclusion of metaphysical referents from the knowable realm. Convinced that the
experience he enjoyed at Niesky and Barby held the clue both to the highest fulfillment
of human nature and to the secret of universal truth, Schleiermacher also welcomed
Kant's insistence that the mind was not competent to comprehend the whole of reality.
However, since the precise nature of Schleiermacher's experience involved "neither a

7For what follows see my “Friendship and the Cradle of Liberalism: Revisiting the Moravian Roots of
Schleiermacher’s Theology,” Churchman 112/4 (1998), 339-356.

Knowing nor a Doing, but a modification of feeling," he was bound to reject Kant's
identification of the moral consciousness as the organ of human religion.8
Instead, feeling, according to Schleiermacher, is the unifying element which
comprehends the essential nature of the Christian self-consciousness most fully and in an
explicitly religious way. Doctrines then, odious to Kant in that they suggest
epistemological capabilities beyond their reach, are not dismissed by Schleiermacher so
much as they are dethroned and domesticated. No longer should dogmas judge of true
faith. Instead, true faith will assess doctrines as attempts to give expression to the content
of the Christian self-consciousness.9 Thus, attention to doctrinal formulation, both
historic and contrutive [sic], runs high in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehrer because it involves
the explicit attempt to give expression to the content of the Christian self-conscousness.
Whenever doctrines stray beyond their descriptive function, they tend to obscure
and even undermine true faith rather than confirm and nurture faith. Schleiermacher's
fascinating dialogue Christmas Eve displays clearly his view of the danger posed to faith
by an over intellectualizing fixation upon doctrinal and historical concerns.
Significantly, this Advent dialogue is set in a middle class German home quite
similar to those which would have hosted Schleiermacher's beloved salons. As various
guests arrive, the conversation gradually centers around the question of the virginal
conception of Jesus Christ and the broader question of the incarnation itself. The evening
is almost spoiled by the tense debating of the men who are bent upon an analytical search

8Christian Faith, 5-12; Soliloquies, 20 n., 30-31.
9Christian Faith, 76-93. See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline on the Study of
Theology, (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1966), . 67-68, 78-79.

for some conclusive understanding of those ancient events surrounding the birth of the
Christ child. At length, Ernestine, the hostess, and her young daughter, named
conspicuously, Sophie, rescue those gathered and salvage the spirit through music. The
evening ends with the entire cast singing Christmas hymns in unison around the piano as
Sophie plays and true Christian communion is achieved, not just without, but in spite of
the thorny questions of doctrine left unresolved.10

Evangelical Liberal?
B.A. Gerrish contends that the apparently oxymoronic labeling of Schleiermacher
as a liberal evangelical is actually redundant.11 According to Gerrish, Schleiermacher
belongs to the ranks of evangelicals because, as with Luther, it was his own distinctively
Protestant consciousness which served as the basis of his theological inquiry. Still,
Schleiermacher was a liberal because "he did not consider himself tied to old expressions
of [that consciousness]."12 Certain current trends among some self-identified American
evangelicals may indicate an unwitting drift toward proving Gerrish right.

The Psychologized Gospel
When one reflects upon the decidedly psychological focus of Schleiermacher's
theological program, the fascination of the church with the psychology of recovery and
self-esteem becomes particularly interesting. Schleiermacher depended upon his ability
to describe the actual events within the self-consciousness of his audience in order to win

10Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, (Richmond, VA:
John Knox, 1967).
11G. P. Fisher first described Schleiermacher's theology in this way in his History of Christian
Doctrine (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1897), 512.
12Gerrish, Prince of the Church, 32.

them to communion with the Savior as mediated by the church. Similarly today, many
pulpits relatively devoid of serious engagement with scriptural texts overflow with
elaborate descriptive construals of personal experience aimed as producing the
exclamation "Aha!, that sounds exactly like me." Audiences act as competent judges
while the message awaits their verdict. [but this is not 'liberalism.' only a misguided
existential expression of the true faith - jds]

From his early twenties Schleiermacher could only receive dogmatic confessional
demands as a distraction, even a barrier to his embryonic Christian experience.
Accordingly, for Schleiermacher, doctrine, far from functioning as a legitimate test of
genuine piety, had to prove its viability according to its descriptive power in relation to
one's own faith. This meant that the doctrine of the Trinity, the vicarious atonement of
Jesus Christ, miracles, and virtually the whole of the Old Testament were either retained
uncomfortably or denied altogether [rejected, as it were, because they did not go to the defining of the Christian
experience as an experience -- jds] Today, the fascination with the psychologist's power
to describe experience seems to beg the question of truth in ways strikingly similar to
Liberalism's original “turn to the subject.”

The Thirst For Community
Unlike his spiritual heirs within Protestant Liberalism, Schleiermacher never
succumbed to Enlightenment pressures toward autonomous individualism. While
focusing great interest in the uniqueness of individuality, Schleiermacher refused to
comprehend Christian conversion and spiritual growth apart from the community as the
necessary context for their genuine fulfillment. [in this, we have a check and balance to Schleiermacher's
enthronement of feeling - namely the community of believers with similar and shared experiences - jds]

Having set forth his own general understanding of communion as the very basis for Christian identity, doctrine was recognized only insofar as it proved supportive of that distinctive shared experience. Today certain interpreters of the emergent postmodern culture are celebrating an
apparent widespread longing for "community," "neighborliness," and "civility" as a
special point of entry for Christian proclamation and outreach. Supposedly, the church is
now in a position to offer its own rich tradition and practice of community as the answer
to the current human search. Indeed, rich possibilities of communal intimacy are surely
afforded within the body of Christ. But does this fact warrant supposing that the church's
own promise of divinely-wrought community will easily mesh with human searching
without distortion [indeed - what helps carry the straight line is dogma if, in fact, it is an extension of the
living Word of God. -- jds]

Market-Driven Church Growth
If apologetic doctrinal malleableness is an index to a post-Enlightenment loss of
theological nerve, some late twentieth century evangelicals may have more cause to blush
than would Friedrich Schleiermacher. However much he may have fallen short of his
aim, Schleiermacher did, after all, intend to ground Christian dogmatics upon its own
independent basis, namely, on reflection upon the Christian self-consciousness. [ is this not a contradiction of terms ? - jds] It followed that the relative strength or weakness within the self-consciousness of the
feeling of absolute dependence became the irreducible barometer of genuine Christian
piety [and , thus, an existential and personal standard is erected in this regard as opposed to a community of shared and similar experiences - resulting in the demise of any doctrinal or existential need for community except in the sharing of a faith in 'god' that is expressed in certian general terms. - jds]

In this aspect of his thought, Schleiermacher’s theology was comparatively more
dogmatic than say, that of Paul Tillich whose method of correlation assumed the burden
of discerning current ultimate questions before searching out an answer from the
Christian revelation. Schleiermcaher has the answer ready to hand, namely, the
heightening of the religious self-consciousness, the content of which is not open for
revision, namely, the feeling of being absolutely dependent.

Today, church growth strategists often speak broadly of meeting felt needs as a
means of access to the unbelieving ear with little consideration of the spiritually
debilitating effects of sin or of the necessity for the work of the Holy Spirit to convict and
draw those who are being saved. Such apologetic efforts would seem to embrace an open
ended and distinctly more robust “turn to the subject” than did Schleiermacher. Where
Schleiermacher insisted upon identifying the "felt need" Christianity proposed to meet,
one hears today of a sovereign audience which churches must satisfy first in order to
prepare the way for receptivity to the gospel. One reads of Jesus Christ conceived as a
product to be marketed. In a curious irony, it would seem that some evangelicals may
have unintentionally, even unconsciously, beaten Schleiermacher at his own game.

The Intrusion of Alien Norms [Coinsidentially, the whole problem of Wright's NP is embedded in these words - jds]
It may well be that the same person who studied Schleiermacher with the greatest
care and even love rejected his work most aggressively and fundamentally. For Karl
Barth the fatal step for Schleiermacher and for that matter, for any theology worthy of the
name ‘Christian’ is the temptation to acknowledge some alien norm external to the
Christian revelation by which to gauge its viability. Instead, advises Barth,
theology has first to renounce all apologetics or external
guarantees of its position within the environment of other sciences,
for it will always stand on the firmest ground when it simply acts
according to the law of its own being.13

The crucial intersection between Schleiermacher’s quest and so much that
informs both theologizing and church leadership today may not involve so much a
turning to the subject per se, but simply the act of turning itself. Once Christian

13Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, 15.

reflection lets itself become distracted from the one object of its witness, namely
God revealed in Jesus Christ according to the witness of Holy Scripture, the
intrusion of alien norms becomes inevitable. It matters not whether new tests of
theological viability issue from current psychological fads, postmodern hankering
for community or fascination with market techniques and managerial theory.
Once Christian proclamation begins to take its epistemological cues from outside
the norma normans of Holy Scripture as the witness to God’s revelation, a lack of
confidence in the possibility of theology itself is already exposed.

The result, too often, as Barth warned, is a Feuerbachian projection of human
dreams, hopes, and fantasies into the metaphysical realm. When this occurs,
anthropology replaces theology and, as Sidney Cave has put it so well, we “make our
poor experience the measure of what God is.” Unlike Schleiermacher, many today
seem oblivious to the erosion the church’s distinctive message as it becomes unwittingly
co-opted by psychological interpretations of the human predicament, market-focused
readings of church growth dynamics, and the agendas of various political
constituencies.14 However compromising of historic Christian affirmations
Schleiermacher’s mature theology turned out to be, the father of Modern [Protestant - jds] theology pursued his course with his eyes open. Having tasted of something he believed to be
universal and true in the rich religious milieu of Moravian piety, Schleiermacher plumbed
the depths of that experience, became its champion and spent himself in the quest to
discover and nurture this distinctive Christian self-consciousness in others.

14See e.g., Michael Scott Horton ed., Power Religion: The Selling Out of the Evangelical
Church (Chicago: Moody, 1992); and Os Guiness & John Seel eds., No God But God (Chicago:
Moody, 1992).

Without denying the profundity and genuineness of Schleiermacher’s experience
among the Moravian’s, the practice of defending Christianity on the basis of its power to
evoke and express the content of the human religious self-consciousness reverses the
proper relation between dogmatics and apologetics. Schleiermacher’s quest fits nicely
with the search for a universally verifiable religion, but not with attempts to articulate a
“Christian” theology where doctrines not only express the faith of believers but also test
the appropriateness of appending the adjective “christian” at all. Barth was confident his
former partners at the embryonic stage of the so-called neo-orthodox movement had
failed recognize and so resist the theological Copernical revolution in Schleiermacher’s
theology.

Theology as Science
“ . . . theology has first to renounce all apologetics or external guarantees of its
position within the environment of other sciences, for it will always stand on the
firmest ground when it simply acts according to the law of its own being.”15
At age 75 Barth remained capable of such sweeping dismissals of apologetics. Why was
this so? What did Barth mean by “apologetics?” The words “external guarantees” offer a
clue. Barth parted company with most of the other so-called Neo-Orthodox and Neo-
Liberal thinkers of his generation in his understanding of dogmatics as a science. In fact
Barth believed that virtually the whole of Protestant theology following Schleiermacher
had betrayed the gospel according to a kind of non-scientific, apologetically-fixated
theological method. From Schleiermacher and Ritschl in the nineteenth century to
Harnack, Bultmann, and Tillich in the twentieth century, protestant theology had,
according to Barth, abandoned genuine the-ology for anthropology. And, however

15 Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 15.

impressive the felt relevance of such efforts might turn out to be, for Barth, “one cannot
speak of God, simply by speaking about man in a loud voice.”16 The seriousness of Barth’s critique of protestant theology since Schleiermacher’s so-called “turn to the subject” becomes clear when we examine his understanding of theology as a science. All sciences, according to Barth, pursue knowledge of some object
or some subject matter. True science concerns itself first of all with the apprehension of
the subject matter in question. Insofar as science remains true to itself, it also remains
true to its subject matter. Thus it will not allow itself to become distracted, diverted or
otherwise preoccupied with secondary concerns such as the potential cultural felt
relevance of its findings. Truth about the subject matter must govern all. Accordingly,
science submits itself to its subject matter as to the means of apprehending the knowledge
it seeks. Differences in scientific method may be expected to vary according to the
subject matter in view. Subject matter determines method, period.

According to Barth, the subject matter of Christian Theology is “God revealed in
Jesus Christ through the witness of Holy scripture.” The uniqueness of its object
determines the means by which theology must do its work. God has given Himself to be
known by faith through the witness of Holy Scripture enabled by the ongoing work of
God the Holy Spirit. Thus, authentically scientific theology requires faith in the
theologian. The God whom theology wishes to know and of whom it wishes to speak
gives Himself to be known aright only to those who seek Him by faith. Scientific
theology will stand under Scripture, not beside or above it as the higher critics tended to
do. In his Epistle to the Romans, the so-called bombshell dropped into the playground of
the theologians, though Barth remained enamored with certain aspects of existentialist

16 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (N.P., Pilgrim Press, 1928), 195-196.

thinking (particularly with Kierkegaard) and his notion of theology as science had not yet
taken shape, even then Barth had rejected the pretentiousness of the still emerging higher
critical hermeneutical methodologies in favor of canon friendly approach to the Bible
which he saw in Calvin—“how energetically Calvin, having first established what stands
in the text, sets himself to re-think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls
which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and
the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and
the reader moves round the subject-matter, until a distinction between yesterday and today
becomes impossible. If a man persuades himself that Calvin’s method can be
dismissed with the old-fashioned motto, ‘The Compulsion of Inspiration’, he betrays
himself as one who has never worked upon the interpretation of scripture.17
(re: Barth and Henry) Might one suggest that Barth rightly recognized the
inaccessability of the claims of the gospel to historical investigation and the danger of
post-enlightenment obsession with prolegomena in ways Henry could not. In fact, I
would suggest that Henry presents an example of exactly the kind of captivity to
prolegomena Barth found unscientific. On the other hand Barth’s fierce protection of
theology’s independence from other sciences led to an impossible attempt to insulate the
historical claims of the faith from historical enquiry. Once the one insists that the events
recorded in Scripture occurred in space and time, which Barth does, the vulnerability of
Christianity to historical enquiry cannot be avoided.

The Last of the Church Fathers?
Barth has been dubbed the last of the Church Fathers mainly because of the
breathtaking scope of his theological goals and the equally stunning breadth of his

17 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Edwyn C. Hoskyns, trans. (London: Oxford, 1933), p.7.

knowledge over a range of theological disciplines from biblical studies to historical
theology to philosophy and dogmatics. Ina day when the weaknesses of over
specialization seem obvious, I would suggest that Barth’s Church Dogmatics presents a
model for evangelicals in at least two respects. First Barth makes available, through the
famous excursuses in the CD, the exegetical foundations of his theological construction.
More so that any systematic theology of which I am aware, Barth’s invites the interpreter
to think alongside him at the exegetical and hermeneutical level.

Second, Barth interacts with the virtually the whole history of exegesis and
theology to an extent unparalleled in the history of the Church. He interacts with the East
as well as the West, with the Early Church, Medieval scholoasticism as well as 18th
century pietism. Barth gives attention both to the whole history of the development of
doctrine and to the voice of the global historic church in a way that should make both
Jaroslav Pelikan and Thomas Oden beam.

Barth and the Boyz -- the library

The God Revealed in Jesus Christ

A Brief Introduction to Trinitarian Theology

Christ-centered

Relationship-centered

Early history

Who are you, Lord?

For all humanity

Jesus, the second Adam

Salvation is re-creation

The faith of Christ

In our place

But what about human choice?

Personal response

Part 2: Questions & Answers

Q Are you saying there is no difference between a Christian and a non-Christian?

Q If all are reconciled already to God in Christ, why does Scripture say so much about repentance and faith?

Q Why does Paul say that if you don’t have the Spirit, you don’t belong to Christ?

Q If the world is reconciled, why would Jesus say that he doesn’t pray for the world?

Q If all are reconciled already to God, why does Scripture speak of hell?

Q Why does the Bible talk about people whose names are not in the book of life?

Q Why does Peter say it is hard to be saved?

Q What is everlasting contempt and destruction?

Q What about the “narrow gate”?

Q But don’t we become God’s children only at the point of belief?

Q Is this universalism?

Q If we are included already, why struggle to live the Christian life?

Q What about Christian mission? If all are included already in God’s love and life through Jesus, why do we proclaim the gospel to the world and make disciples for Jesus?

Q How do we explain John 6:44?

Q If the entire cosmos is included in Christ, why is there still evil in the world?

Q How does this theology compare to Calvinism and Arminianism?

Q What is perichoresis?

Tips on Biblical Exegesis

Key points of Trinitarian, Christ-Centered Theology

Recommended Resources for Further Study

Books

GCI articles

The Manhattan Declaration

The Manhattan Declaration

A Call of Christian Conscience

Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience

Drafted October 20, 2009Released November 20, 2009

Preamble

Declaration

Life

Marriage

Religious Liberty

Drafting Committee

Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology - A book review

Defining Incarnational Ministry

from OpenSourceTheology linked here.

Beyond Incarnation

Abandonment of equality

Abandonment of self

Acceptance of servant status

Acceptance of identification

A controlled life

A controlled death

The Jesus We'll Never Know

Predistination in critical review

Liturgical Christain doctrine and the notion of predestination (or limited grace).

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2001

Election's Unhappy Returns

Children of Pelagius: A Brief History of the Doctrine of Election

What Happened to Israel?

The Choosing of the Chosen

Reprobation as a Means of Salvation

Barth's Evasion

From Jesus to Mary: Annunciation as Election

Magnify the Lord: Calling a New Election

Through the Veil: Karl Barth Should Be Allowed a Place in ‘Doctrine of Scripture’ Discussions

Universalim - a list blogs discussing this issue

Universalism in the Blogosphere

The Meaning of Christ's Death discussed as atonement theory

Barth And Universalism Discussed -

Universalism in the Blogosphere

Drafted October 20, 2009
Released November 20, 2009