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Fast forward a good amount of time (but not too much, say, between 2,500 years and 2.2 million years), and we come to the building of God’s dwelling place among his people, Israel (see Exod 25:10–40:33). Clearly, the look and materials employed throughout are meant to symbolize the original creation described in Genesis 1, and thus further represent, to use what has become the old cliché, “heaven on earth.”
Just as the Creator didn’t seek council with his creatures when preparing the garden, so too did he initiate and dictate to Israel the building of his new dwelling place, the tabernacle (Exod 25:9). In fact, we see that God doesn't leave it to his people to define the parameters of worship they will offer him.
The same holds true today—God provides the grand playground in which we’ve been called to play. Yet he has also graciously provided a fence for our protection. We (the church) are not to invent alternative ways to worship the living God—ways that are outside the fence and thus leave behind the essentials God has instituted; nevertheless, we are free to express our God-given creativity when worshiping him in each passing age.
In our time and place, riddled as it is with hyper-individualism and the temptation to live as if God doesn’t exist, we need now more than ever to recapture the biblically defined idea of sacred place, not as a building so much as that which presupposes and points to a personal God. “For where two or three come together in my name,” Jesus said, “I am there with them” (Matt 18:20). Not one, but two or three. And then the Christ comes. What this assumes is that our growth as persons (that is, our development into more fully image-bearing humans) happens only in relation to others—first with God in Christ by the power of his Spirit, and second with the temple of the Most High, his people. Only through this do we have a ready-made resistance against “the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age” (Eph 6:12).
Oftentimes, the best we can hope for (besides dying in our sleep) is that some of the good stuff we experience throughout life sticks. I know that those of us who mentor, teach, counsel, parent, and so on, hope the same for those in whom we invest.
First in my journal-like series about the stuff that sticks centers around a professor I had in graduate school at RTS-Orlando. He's not first in the series because he has priority of place or anything like that. He's just the first stuff that stuck I thought of when thinking through what this series would contain. His name is Ron Nash (1936-2006).
To get a glimpse of his life and work, follow that link attached to his name above. Professor Nash gets a spot here not because I'm a devotee—that I came to agree with his many views on Christianity and its relationship to culture or on philosophy in general (e.g., that almost the entire field can be boiled down to the fight between rationalism vs. empiricism—in other words, epistemology, as if that were the necessary starting point when doing philosophy). Nevertheless, a few moments during the time our paths crossed in the early 2000s have stuck with me:
- At an orientation dinner my first year, RTS staff and faculty were introducing themselves in no particular order. Nash happened to follow on the heels of the school's facility services staffer, who quipped, "I turn the lights off." He then immediately stood up and provided his title (professor of philosophy) with the pun, "And I turn the lights on." Nash clearly believed this to be his calling, and he took it very seriously, if not a little superciliously at times.
- His introduction to philosophy book, Life's Ultimate Questions, while by nature guilty of a little oversimplification, nevertheless serves as a great overview through a blatantly Christian lens, particularly at the college level, if not first-year graduate level.
- For my research paper in his "History of Philosophy and Christian Thought" class (first semester, first year), in which I attempted to give some credit to certain bits of "postmodern" thought then in vogue only to show how the so-called early church "logos doctrine" completed them, Professor Nash wrote on the back of page 5, "I believe you have no idea what you're talking about." (By the last page, however, he noted a couple positive remarks and so I managed a B grade.)
- Finally, during class one time, I began to raise a few concerns about this or that epistemological point he was promoting (apparent propositionalist that he was). Whatever the actual argument, I'm sure I was nudging the envelope toward something akin to skepticism (surprise, surprise), and after briefly berating me as relativist, he then held jazz hands up to either side of face, swished his hips from side to side, and at the same time asked, "What, are you a democrat?" Laughter.
So much for the stuff that sticks. I could go into further detail about how his apologetical method helped prepare me for future work on the manuscript of R.C. Sproul's Defending Your Faith, but that's best left for another sticky-stuff post. Suffice to say that despite his attitude in class, which endeared so many of us to him, he was the warmest man in his office. Truly caring. Truly hoping he had "turned on the lights." And he did, I think—or at least he played a significant role in my own quest to continue seeking the light.
“We all know the same truth, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”1
Lemme get the criticism out of the way: don't judge the book by its cover. Okay, moving on.
I don’t know Jason as a colleague. But I do know him as a friend, the sort that won’t always tell you what you want to hear but one that is primarily concerned with what’s true, the sort that will follow his convictions wherever they lead, even to his own detriment. That has to count for something in this seemingly God-forsaken short life.
It is to this life as “water spilled on the ground, which can’t be gathered again” (2 Sam 14:14), and its nagging absurdity before the face of . . . nothing—Deus absconditus, if you will—that Jason confronts in his new book, The Destiny of the Species: Man and the Future That Pulls Him. The title of it behooves me to attempt immediately to alleviate any fears that while Darwin and the question of the origin of our species sometimes serves as the foil throughout the following pages, this book is decidedly not another pathetic battle for the beginning. It is, in brief, to turn the heads of every reader toward last things first. No doubt, the question of human origins is important. But the destiny of our species—now, that’s something upon which to fix our gaze.
Even if we were to grant the neo-Darwinian synthesis its basic veracity (as I do), the point is still the same: Are we humans going to live down to our natural instincts? Or are we going to live up to the creator God’s goal, bearing his image, reflecting his glory? Saint Gregory of Nyssa frames it as follows: In discussing the creation of man, he starts with the premise that the cosmos depends upon the sustaining Word of God and that all things came into existence by this power. He’s quick, however, to maintain a Creator/creature distinction: the act of creation was no necessity. Rather, creation sprung out of the “abundant love” of God; his desire was to fashion a humanity with the express purpose to share in his divine goodness. This, for Gregory, remains part and parcel of what it means to be created in the image of God.2
The theme of a longing that “pulls” us toward our destiny (to use Jason’s language à la Peter Kreeft à la Aquinas) is not unique. Many others in times past have thought similar thoughts. But Jason does so for a generation in desperate need to hear them again, and he does so in such a way that this generation will hear them.
Starting with this theme of humanity being drawn toward its future, rather than driven by its past, Stellman confronts us with the challenge to live deliberately in light of this truth. And the only way to consistently live in such a way is to embrace, wholeheartedly, the destiny of the species as homo adorans—worshiping man. Otherwise, life as l’étranger in the face of the absurd is all that’s left. More than anybody else, those who say they already follow this way must resist storing up treasures that "moth and rust destroy." But damn that flesh, that old man—sin—ever seeking to throttle us from its grave. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The age to come dawns upon us; all that was accomplished and applied through the faithful life, the ignominy of the cross, the surprising resurrection, and the glorious ascension and rule of God’s messiah, has invaded our lives. Nothing can ever be the same. And the world—its people, plants, and animals—are aching and groaning toward that promised hope for the future, when the creator God, through his son Christ Jesus, by the power of his Spirit, will turn everything right-side up again (the felix culpa, as it turns out).
However, in the meantime, per Woody Allen, we do all know the same truth (that death comes for us all), and, indeed, how we live our lives—our thoughts, words, actions—the stuff that fills them up, is our way of coping with (distorting even) that reality. Which distortion, then, will you let have the final word? Death? Or eternal life on a renewed earth in renewed, resurrected bodies?
1 Woody Allen: A Documentary, directed by Robert B. Weide (2011; New York, NY: New Video, 2012), DVD.↩
2 From his Address on Religious Instruction, reprinted in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 275–77.↩
They're decent reasons, but they're also largely skin-deep. There's a more fundamental reason that Protestants ought to reflect on Rome when a pope is chosen, and it's teleological and twofold in nature. (Note my assumption: Catholic, Orthodox, and creedal Protestant communions are Christian communions. Each have their tares, their wolves, their covenanters who don't persevere.)
The first teleological fold is one major goal in which our hope as Christians is placed, a fixed post that our triune Lord promises throughout the various texts of sacred Scripture:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the Christians who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, we who are still alive and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever.
(1 Thess. 4:16–17)
In short, we Christians are in this together, forever—whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, the resurrection to life on a new earth is our great hope. The election of a new overseer of the largest Christian communion in the world ought to promote Protestant reflection, precisely because we share the same destiny with the Christians in that communion.
The second teleological fold may be particularly distasteful to Protestant ears that don't share my ecclesiastical sentiments. It has to do with a more finite goal, one that is hardly fixed: the reconciliation and reunification of Protestants and Catholics in this time between the times. This is by no means a given, but it is a hope, and one I believe all Protestants should share. Caring about and reflecting upon Rome at such a time as this comes naturally if you think and hope that one day the pope himself will one day be a pastor under whom your pastor (and their pastors) ministers, at least in a collegiate sense (as primus inter pares).
Yet most Protestants don't even consider that their respective communions are not to be ends in themselves. They've forgotten that they're branches shooting off the one, mother trunk, and instead believe the lie that they are trees themselves, every bit as robust and as life-giving as the tree from which they sprang. It's not true. Much of Protestantism is wilted, particularly in those places where God's Word and Sacraments are neglected.
I hope this doesn't come across as a romanticized version of reality or flat-out naïve (or "young and cool," even though I am young-ish and definitely cool). It's just that I don't care about the things you do, or at least I don't think they're as important as you think they are. Put another way, I think it's far more important to reflect on Rome and her pope and our shared destiny than it is to continue, unfazed, in the work of building up your own little fiefdom.
Update: It has come to my attention that the "you" in the above paragraph may be misconstrued to refer to Carl Trueman. That is emphatically not the case. Carl is one of the last persons I'd suspect to be guilty of creating his own little fiefdom. Generally speaking, my antagonist around here is the autonomous, demagogic, second-degree separationist Christian leader. That's who I'm carrying on my make-believe conversation with in the concluding paragraph—whether or not he/she actually exists.
This marks our sixth (and final!) post in this series, continuing my response to Schleiermacher's points of criticism regarding the hypostatic union:
The inability to know anything objective about God, coupled with his suggestion throughout The Christian Faith that Scripture is in totem only an expression of human experience, of discovering one’s relation to God, paves the way for Schleiermacher’s christological dead end (insofar as it’s truly meant as a replacement to Chalcedonian christology; but see n. 7 of the previous post). Barth’s retort at this point brings God-talk back from the ledge: On the contrary, the purpose of the inscripturated Word is to be discovered by God, to bring the reader “face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.”1 That “the subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world” is properly basic to the ecclesial reading of the Word.2 For Schleiermacher, knowledge of God is either scientific or mystical; he shows no awareness that knowledge of God can be objective (i.e., “warranted”) without being scientific, and therein lies one significant problem with his program. Instead of a cosmic God-event that can be known in a particular place and time through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we’re left with the scraps of forming new relationships based on a mutual vague awareness of being utterly dependent on . . . pure potency, a “Whence” incapable of immanence.
Some of the difficulties associated with the language used in the patristic doctrine notwithstanding, Schleiermacher, despite his caveat of “complete agreement” with the sentiments expressed in the christological creeds, displaces the doctrine of those creeds—one person in two natures—by reducing the God-man to a man (albeit archetypal and ideal) with one nature. If Schleiermacher at times seems to waver between Ebionite and Apollinarian (or docetic) solutions, we’d not be far from his fears about the restatement (replacement) of the ecclesiastical formulae:
It would be difficult for anyone to prove that there is anything docetic or Ebionite in this description. It could be called Ebionite only by one who feels that he must insist upon an empirical emergence of divine properties if he is to recognize a superhuman element in the Redeemer; and the only thing that could be regarded as docetic is that in the Redeemer the God-consciousness is not imperfect.3
As we’ve seen thus far, on the one hand (according to Schleiermacher), in Jesus one aspect of his human nature—his God-consciousness—is perfect and thus his humanity is potentially unlike humankind’s (a kind of higher form). This implies docetism, in that if the God-consciousness was determinative of his every move, without constraint, then there was no possibility of real human actions or growth (ibid., 398). Thus (so the criticism goes), “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed.”4 On the other hand, Jesus was not the incarnate Word, the pre-existent Logos made flesh, but a human like the rest of us, save for his perfect God-consciousness. By “empirical emergence of divine properties,” Schleiermacher means those very attributes the church has always confessed about the Christ since its earliest moments—that God the Son was born of the Virgin and became fully human, he talked, ate, healed, forgave, suffered, died, rose from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of his Father. But, again, Schleiermacher takes umbrage with the notion that God can be in any objective sense, apart from our mutual feelings of absolute dependence, revealed in nature or man and thus be known as an object doing anything anywhere.
This challenges the core of the patristic doctrine (not to mention collapses under the weight of its own incoherence5), and as such would be considered nonsensical in their day: Why, they would ask, would anyone even bother to have a savior if that savior isn’t also God, doing what God and only God can do? The christological creedal question of the process of the incarnation, of the manifestation of the unity of God and man in the person of Jesus, may just be the wrong foot with which to start in many instances today.6 Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s alternative doesn’t go far enough, or precludes unnecessarily the heart of the Christian faith for the sake of its "cultured despisers." While beyond the scope of this series of posts, Schleiermacher’s version of redemption as it relates to the redeemer also has implications here: there is no need for vindication on the day of judgment, no real need for the cross or the resurrection or ascension, and thus no atonement worth mentioning. If Schleiermacher’s redeemer lacks dignity and looks small, it’s because so too does Schleiermacher’s rendition of what redemption entails. Indeed, “his Christology is the incurable wound in his system,” and “if the Bible and classical Christian dogma are right to see in Christ this final word, then it must be said at least that in Schleiermacher’s Christology with its great quid pro quo, executed with so much intelligence and piety, we have a heresy of gigantic proportions.”7
1 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: repr. OUP, 1968), x.↩
2 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson, James K. A. Smith, Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 9.↩
3 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (§96), 391.↩
4 Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, in “Letters on the Apollinarian Controversy,” Christology of the Later Fathers, Edward R. Hardy, ed. (Louisville: WJK Press, 1954), 218.↩
5 “If no human concepts applied to God, at least one human concept would apply to him—the concept of being such as to escape characterization by human concepts.” From Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19.↩
6 This is not to deny in any sense the validity or veracity of the christological creeds. Indeed, they were indispensible in combating the undermining of the central gospel message of the triune God’s condescension, of salvation by grace through faith because of the God-man, and they still provide authoritative parameters within which the community of Christ must do the work it has been called to do. I reckon the works noted in the previous post (n. 6) to be about the business of accomplishing the same in our day (not least in our post-Schleiermachian hermeneutical world), but without the ecclesial authority, of course.↩
7 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1982), 107, 104.↩
This marks our fifth post in this series, now responding to Schleiermacher's points of criticism regarding the hypostatic union:
Schleiermacher's third and fifth points we can treat at the same time. In them, we come to the crux of his criticism: How can there be a real unity of person in two natures? This has produced, according to Schleiermacher, an unavoidable precipice on all sides—either the two natures are mixed and form a third (e.g., Eutychianism), or the two natures are kept separated at the cost of the unity of the person (e.g., Nestorianism), or one nature becomes less important than the other and limited by it (e.g., certain kenotic or docetic or Apollinarian views). In practice, Schleiermacher rightly notes that this often manifests itself in the church in one of two ways: so emphasizing Christ’s deity that his humanity is obscured and vice versa.
As alluded to in the previous post, Schleiermacher depends heavily on the definitions given to words like nature and person during the course of his criticism. This gets him off track, but not indefinitely. Nature, for example, before Chalcedon, necessarily implied a hypostasis (the substantive existence of being; the term came to approximate “person” [i.e., the one who has this substantive existence] during and after Chalcedon).1 After Chalcedon, however, “‘natures’ could no longer be understood solely in terms of capacities abstracted from existing individuals,”2 but came to mean an essence with the attributes proper to it—a concrete reality, a particular being with its particular attributes or nature. Thus, in the time of Schleiermacher there would have been no reason to obsess over the pre-Chalcedon implications of the word nature or uncritically apply the popular definition of the word person in his day to the equation.
The argument itself also reflects that of Apollinaris of Laodicea and his charge against the Arians. Along with his eagerness to emphasize the deity of Jesus and the unity of his person, came the denial of the existence of a rational human soul in Christ’s human nature, this being replaced in him by the Logos, so that his body was a glorified and spiritualized form of humanity. “The effort to conceive the unification of originally independently existing divine and human natures into a single individual in whom both natures nonetheless remain distinct leads inevitably to an impasse from which there is no escape.”3 Hence Schleiermacher’s criticism on this point.
While his approach to this dilemma “from the ground up” (so to speak) is commendable, his failure to bring us to the great mystery of the incarnation is not. Studying Jesus’ aims, beliefs, actions, agenda—his sense of calling or vocation—through the lens of history can bring us to the Definition of Chalcedon (albeit with different words). As with the opposing parties in the early church, the problem for Schleiermacher “is insoluble so long as Christology is developed from the concept of the incarnation, instead of culminating in the assertion of the incarnation as its concluding statement."4 His answer, however, falls outside the bounds of Chalcedon; or, rather, his answer finds itself playing in an altogether different playground—one without fences.
Along with Karl Barth, retaining the language of an utterly unique incarnation in “two natures” while maintaining reservations about applying the concept of nature uniformly to both God and humanity, may be a helpful way forward.5 The union of God and humankind in Jesus is sui generis—unique, singular and irreplaceable, and therefore must be understood solely on its own terms. To conceive of the manifestation of God’s Christ through the appropriation of psychology, that is, the inner life of humankind (e.g., gefühl), is to grant a more fundamental union of God and man (in that moment before thinking and acting). No, says Barth, the incarnation of the one God-man in two natures has no analogy, and thus it cannot be twisted into a mere type or exemplification of the feeling of absolute dependence.
Finally, we come to Schleiermacher’s restatement of the creedal affirmation of the existence of God in Christ. In it he focuses, rightly, on the historical particularity of Jesus’ human activity as the basis of the confession that in him God became man. Again, it’s not so much this method that creates the problem, beholden to (or kicking off!) modern hermeneutics as it is6; rather, it’s the definition he gives to God (and “his” relation to the world) in conjunction with what he says about the person of Christ that’s the problem. Put another way, what Schleiermacher takes away with his doctrine of God, he does not quite give back with his christology.7 We'll see how when I try to wrap this up next time.
1 See G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (London: OUP, 1969), 1,500.↩
2 Bruce L. McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” in Mapping Modern Theology, Kapic, Kelly M. and Bruce L. McCormack, eds. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 155.↩
3 Pannenberg, Jesus, God and Man, 287. He goes on to posit “mutual interpenetration of the natures as a way toward understanding the unity of Christ” as a way forward in this particular discussion, 296–307.↩
4 Ibid., 291.↩
5 See Karl Barth, CD IV/2 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 58ff. ↩
6 For some good examples of this sort of work using (primarily) exegetical and historical methods (focusing on the human activity—or vocation—of Jesus as signposts to his divine identity), see Richard Bauckham, God Crucified (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); David Bivin, New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus: Insights from His Jewish Context (Holland, Mich.: En-Gedi Resource Center, 2005); Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994); Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); N.T. Wright, Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) and Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), to name a few.↩
7 He may come close, arguably, with his christocentric vision of revelation. See Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (§94), 387–88: Just as the natural world becomes “a revelation of God to us only so far as we bring that conception with us,” so too does the existence of God in humanity become revealed insofar “as we bring Christ with us in thought and relate to Him.” He is the only “other” in whom there is an existence of God “in the proper sense,” and as such we are not able to see a revelation of God anywhere unless we have first seen it in Christ, in whom the God-consciousness was “a perfect indwelling of the Supreme Being as His peculiar being and His inmost self.” And since it is only through the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, that God-consciousness comes to possess others, and since, further, it is only in reference to him that the world can be said to contain a revelation of God, we can say that he “alone mediates all existence of God in the world and all revelation of God through the world, in so far as He bears with Himself the whole new creation which contains and develops the potency of the God-consciousness.”↩
10:46 AM
