What is Man, O LORD? On a Spirit Grounded Humanity

What is man, O LORD?

Since man has Him, the Spirit is certainly in man—in his soul and through his soul in his body too. It is the nearest, most intimate and most indispensable factor for an understanding of his being and existence. But while He is in man, He is not identical with him. We have seen already that this would imply a transformation of man into God, which is excluded by the fact that Spirit is a conception of activity. The Spirit is not transformed into the soul of man, although He first and supremely creates the soul of man and make is His own dwelling. Nor does he become corporeal, although as the Spirit of the soul He immediately becomes the Spirit of the body and man is ordained to be not only spiritual soul and besouled body, but also spiritual body. He does not merely become the human subject. The human subject is man as soul, and it is this which is created and maintained by the Spirit. Bur for this very reason the Spirit lives His own superior and alien life over against the soul and the human subject. He is not bound to the life of the human subject. He cannot, therefore, be reached by its death. When the subject dies, He returns to God who gave Him. In distinction from the human subject, He is immortal. Whether or not death is the last word concerning man depends upon whether He is given again and that “may” is renewed.[1]

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. –I Thessalonians 5:23

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. ¹⁰ And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. ¹¹ But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. –Romans 8:9-11

Barth is primarily engaging with the so-called trichotomous versus the dichotomous view when it comes to a human faculty psychology as found in I Thessalonians 5:23. In the prior context (in the CD) he has argued against the trichotomous position in favor of the dichotomous locus, in regard to human being being soul and body versus body, soul, and spirit. He argues, as the passage above illustrates and develops, that the Holy Spirit, particularly as He is referred to in the Pauline corpus, is the animating, the activating, the dynamic and grounding aspect of what it in fact means to be genuinely human as that is guaranteed in and from the plenitude of God’s triune life, mediated to humanity through the humanity of Jesus Christ, and given lively valence in and through the dynamism of the Holy Spirit. I agree with Barth here.

While a person still has life on this earth they are constantly being activated by the Holy Spirit. That is to say, even if a person is in the pagan status, the Holy Spirit, nevertheless is engaging them, wooing them with the breath of Christ, in regard to sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment. We have not been left as orphans. And even though we indwell these fallen bodies of death, by God’s grace, through the grace of God’s humanity, we remain related to Him in and through the hovering and activating work of the person of the Holy Spirit. But if, as Paul teaches, a person does not have the Holy Spirit, that is in a saving realization, in union with Jesus Christ’s humanity, then that person, ultimately will fall into dissolution and reap the wind and whirlwind of their self-possessed non-being; this is known as hell.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §46 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 157.

“Beggars All”: On Abandoning the Progressive and Legalist Mode of Salvation

I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse towards perfectionism; not in light of the Gospel, that is. And yet it is rampant, especially as given non-stop expression on “Christian social media” (I’m mostly thinking of X/Twitter). There are always these extremes on a continuum. There are those who think to be anti-legalist is to be progressive and loose to everything. On the other hand, there are those who think to be holy (saved) is to be legalistic to the point that all of what they say about others never applies to them; as if they have perfectly arrived; as if they just are one of the elect and everyone else is reprobate, or at least highly suspect. But both centers stem from the same type of “meism.” As if the human agent is the determiner, on either side, of what is good, and beautiful, and free. This, I take to be, the perfectionist impulse; which really is just a performative mood wherein a person, one way or the other, simply must assert their own self-contrived standing before God and others. Either they assert their “freedom,” or they assert their ”legalism”; both being given ground by the homo incurvatus in se.

We aren’t saved based on being so-called “free” or so-called “constrained by our obedience.” We are justified before God because He who knew no sin assumed our unrighteousness that we might become the righteousness of God in Him; it is because of His poverty that we are made rich in the beautiful garments of righteousness which He has robed us with. All our righteousness is like filthy rags; that doesn’t end once we become Christians. We live, moment-by-moment, afresh anew, by His righteousness for us; by His re-creating for us and in us and with us. We remain simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’), as such, we live by His mercy and grace as He always lives to make intercession for us.

Are there standards of righteousness and holiness that we bear witness to as Christians? Yes, but this by the Holy Spirit in Christ in us, and not just against the broken world out there, but the broken world “in here,” in our own fallen and broken hearts. We ought to call out unrighteousness and evil, exposing the darkness with the light of God’s Word, but in so doing we really are only exposing our own wretched hearts, outwith Christ’s heart for us. This ought to at least humiliate us to the point that we remain obedient, even to the death of the cross. And the ground of this obedience is funded by God’s eternal life of humility for us, as He freely chose to become us in the humanity of Jesus Christ (Deus incarnandus). We certainly do have freedom in Christ, but it is a freedom circumscribed by being for God, and not for ourselves. It is a freedom to be holy as He is holy. It is a freedom to bear witness to the world that the Son has set us free, free indeed.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to be looking for some type of balance between being libertine or legalistic. I am suggesting that we abandon that whole paradigm altogether. God’s righteousness in Christ confronts us in the living color of His flesh and blood life for us in Jesus Christ; indeed, as He continuously breathes and hovers over us, from within, by the Holy Spirit. His work is ‘out of nothing’ (ex nihilo), which means that our daily lives are totally contingent upon His Word and Way, and not ours. There is nothing inherent to this world system that supplies us with the sustenance we require to live in the free life that God has brought us into by yoking Himself with us in His freedom for us in Christ. We have a new creation life that comes from outside of us, as an ‘alien life,’ as if manna falling from the heavens in the morning dew each and every day. This freedom, this righteousness we have been given through union with Christ, and thus participants in the triune life Godself, is not a possession of ours, as if a self-possession; we, instead, are a possession of this righteousness’s. This cannot be stressed enough: our lives, as Christians, as human beings, are fully and continuously, moment-by-moment, contingent on God’s Logos. We bring nothing to this arrangement except our dissolute selves, which the Creator, the Sustainer, indeed, the Father in His eternal relationship with the Son, has entered into, in the Son’s assumption of flesh, taking the depth of our fallenness, which He alone can see, into the bones and marrow of His humanity, allowing that to have its final and just result in the human life lived in obedience unto the Father, finally eventuating in death, even death on a cross. We couldn’t and cannot do that. It takes the homoousios Theanthropos (GodMan) to do that for us. And while that event, in itself, is once and for all, it is an event that has ‘perfect tense’ reality insofar that we gain our reality before God, continuously, as events-in-happening, moment-by-moment, through God’s reality for us in His Melchizedekian life as the Son of David, our High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit His eternal life.

Since our lives are contingent in the above way, we have no space for boasting except in the fact that our God is indeed the living and triune God who has not left us as orphans. This ought to change the way we approach the world, others, and ourselves. We, as Luther was wont to say (paraphrase), “are beggars all.”

Barth on Adultery in the Church Dogmatics and 1 Corinthians 11

Photo copyright of the Karl Barth-Archiv in Basel, Switzerland

Almost seven years ago now I wrote a post based on Christiane Tietz’s just released essay (at that point) where she offers some of Karl Barth’s and Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s love letters, translated for the first time from their original German into English. My initial blog post ended up going relatively “viral” in the theo-blogosphere, and eventually, beyond. My post, and then series of posts, was referred to by an article written by Mark Galli at Christianity Today, and then at Mere Orthodoxy and other like outlets online. A little later my blog posts (as a series at this point) were referred to in an essay published by the Scottish Journal of Theology, and then in a book chapter published in a volume by Brill. Since then, Christiane Tietz went on to write a book called Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict where she addresses, even more fully than she did in her original essay, the Barth-von Kirschbaum relationship (among many other unrelated things vis-à-vis Barth’s theology).

These days I prefer not to opine on these things much. But in this instance, I am going to make an exception. On my current read through of the Dogmatics I’m in that section of III/2 where Barth, more broadly, is developing his theological anthropology, but in this particular instance is offering his treatment on the male-female relationship; particularly as that is situated within a biblical, New Testament frame, for marriage. He is engaging with the crux interpretum found in I Corinthians 11, wherein so-called complementarians, egalitarians, and everyone in between or beyond, have spilt much ink, and voiced many spoken words on the relationship between the sexes vis-à-vis God. For our purposes what I find informative about this passage from Barth is how it implicates his ongoing relationship with Charlotte. Indeed, what is ironic, as this is well-known in Barth studies, is the close role von Kirschbaum played in the composition of the Dogmatics (some even argue that she wrote large sections of it). What I think is important to note is that even given their relationship neither one of them shied away from still bearing witness to what Holy Scripture itself says with reference to the fidelity of Christian marriage. Even though what “they” write directly bears witness against them and their relationship, they still write it. Let’s read along:

We recall from 1 Cor. 11 that the knowledge of the true relationship between man and wife established and determined and limited by the knowledge of Jesus Christ stands in contrast to the enthusiasm for equality which will not accept the fact that they are both allotted to their distinctive place and way in the peace of God. Where it is not a matter of this intoxication but of the fulness of the Spirit, not of the boasting and defiance of man but of the praise of God, not of the establishment of one’s own right by one’s own might but of constant thanksgiving, there flows from the Gospel the necessity of the reciprocal subordination in which each gives to the other that which is proper to him. This is the meaning of the house-table: Suum cuique [To each his own]. It has nothing really to do with patriarchalism, or with a hierarchy of domestic and civil values and powers. It does not give one control over the other, or put anyone under the dominion of the other. The ὑποτασσόμενοι [submitting] of v. 21 applies equally to all, each in his own place and in respect of his own way. What it demands is ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Χριστοῦ [submitting one to another in the fear of Christ], mutual subordination in respect before the Lord. He is the Exalted but also the Lowly, the Lowly but also the Exalted, who causes each to share in His glory but also His burden, His sovereignty but also His service. And here there is only mutual subordination in full reciprocity. In this way order is created within the creaturely sphere, and humanity established. It is, of course, no accident that more than half of the table is devoted to the relationship of man and woman, and particularly their relationship in marriage. This relationship is typical or exemplary for the whole relationship which has to be estimated in the fear of Christ. In good or evil alike all relations between the sexes have their fulfillment and norm in the fact that this man finds this woman and this woman this man and therefore man the fellow-man to whom he is referred and with whom he is united. We stated at the outset that expression is given to fellow-humanity as one man looks the other in the eyes and lets himself be seen by the other. The meaning and promise of marriage is that this should take place between man and woman, that one woman should encounter one man as his, and one man one woman as hers. Where it takes place we have a good marriage; the marriage which can only monogamous. It is from this height that the whole field is surveyed. Again, it is accident that the list of admonitions opens with that to the wife and not to the husband (v. 22). That the participle clause ὑποτασσόμενοι is naturally continued in this way, and general mutual subordination has its first concrete form in the wife, is explained at once in v. 23 by the comparison: “For the husband is the head of the wife (a statement taken from 1 Cor. 11.3), even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.” Because her subordination stands under this comparison, the woman must see to it that it is not broken but maintained. And therefore the subordination of woman to man is the first and most interesting problem which arises in this field. Not man but woman represents the reality which embraces all those who are addressed, whether they be wives or husbands, old or young, slaves or masters, which claims even the apostle himself in his peculiar position, and from which he thinks and speaks and admonishes them to think and act. They are all the community which has in Jesus Christ its Head. They are all set in this place and called and gathered to this community by baptism. For none of them can there be any question of a higher or better place. None of them can ever think of escaping from or trying to climb above it. In the fulness of the Spirit they can only wish to remain at this place, listening, obedient and therefore subordinate to the One from whom and for whose sake the whole community exists, and without whom it could not continue for a single moment or in any respect, since it is the body which is snatched and rescued from the fire of perdition only in virtue of its union with this Head. The advantage of the wife, her birthright, is that it is she and not the man who, in relation to her husband and subordination to him, may reflect, represent and attest this reality of the community. The exhortation specifically addressed to her is simply a particular form of the basic admonition which applies to all. She is subordinated to her husband as the whole community is to Christ. The whole community can only take up the position in relation to Christ which is proper to the wife in relation to Christ as the wife in relation to her husband. This is what makes the admonition to the wife so urgent and inescapable. And this is what characterizes it as a peculiar distinction for the wife. If she does not break but respects the true relationship to her husband, the wife is not less but greater than her husband in the community. She is not the second but the first. In a qualified sense she is the community. The husband has no option but to order himself by the wife as she is subordinate in this way.[1]

So much depth of richness here. But for space constraints let me simply close this way: many of Barth’s critics “out there” (who typically haven’t read him very much or at all) simply dismiss him on the rather scandalous relationship he had with Charlotte; and I can understand this. Some, including myself, have wondered how that relationship might have impacted Barth’s (and Charlotte’s) capacity to remain faithful to the teachings of Holy Scripture (that is how they handled them); particularly with reference to texts like we find in I Corinthians 11. Hopefully this passage (which I shared in length for greater context) will help to cast some critical light on Barth’s tethering to the authority and teaching of the Sacra pagina. Does this excuse Barth (and Charlotte)? Of course not; may it never be. But what it should help to show is that neither Barth or Charlotte allowed their relationship to skew their reading and teaching of Holy writ. Even so, they remained in a posture of disobedience through their ongoing relationship (to death); and yet they continued so under the clear knowledge they held in regard to the principled and Holy expectations that God required for men and women, and society in general, to function in God’s ordered and desired way. They knew they lived in failure as a result of their relationship, and had to know the type of damage it was producing, firsthand, as Barth and Charlotte witnessed how it affected Barth’s wife, Nelly, and their children. It just goes to show the disaffected and irrational nature of sin; it remains a pernicious force, even for those who profess Christ. May we count ourselves, and the members of our bodies, as dead to sin and alive to Christ; afresh anew, moment by moment by the Grace of God in Jesus Christ. Kyrie eleison

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §45 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 108–09 [emboldening and brackets mine].

An Athanasian Reformed Reading of John 6:44-45: On Unconditional Election and the Effectual Call

There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45. I believe it is the better more theologically acute way one must exegete John 6:44-45, among many other passages, in light of Christological orthodoxy. In other words, I will suggest (not argue here) that everyone reads the text of Scripture through theological lenses; and since that’s the case, it is best to exegete Scripture from good theological premises, rather than bad ones. I would simply assert here that both White and Flowers, respectively, offer a reading of John 6 that are based on bad theological premises.

Here is the passage in the English translation (NASB95):

⁴⁴ No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. ⁴⁵ It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

White argues that all who are drawn of God will necessarily come to God (so, what he takes to be a prima facie argument for unconditional election vis-à-vis the effectual call). Flowers argues that the drawn ones who come to God are those who have not only heard, but have actively learned from the Father, and through this, said drawn ones freely choose to come to God based on their innate human freedom to do so (he believes the capacity comes, situationally, as people hear the call and learn from God of His way for them; but this based on an ontic capacity built into the human agent to accept or reject the call of God). So, in nuce, we can see how White clearly is thinking from the typical Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, and how Flowers, respectively, ends up emphasizing the human agents’ intact libertarian freewill to say yes or no to God’s offer of salvation.

The Athanasian Reformed alternative sees the eternal Son of God, as both the electing God and elected (archetypal) human for all of humanity. So, we can affirm unconditional election and the effectual call, but only under radically reified terms. So, for the AR, we maintain that what does the necessary work here, theologically, is a robust affirmation of a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (which is really just the Chalcedonian and Nicene understanding of the homoousious; i.e., that Jesus is both fully God and fully human in His singular person as the Christ). In this sense, the eternal Logos is both ‘unconditionally elect’ and ‘effectually called’ insofar that He freely chooses to become us that we might become Him by the grace of adoption (think of II Cor. 8:9 and the mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’). In this frame, Christ, God’s personal grace for the world, from within the triune Life, as the mediator between God and humanity, as our High Priest, enters into the sinful reprobate status all of humanity is born into; putting it to death at the cross; and rising anew as God’s humanity for the world, the second and greater Adam, the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ God’s ‘firstfruits,’ whereby humanity, in Christ’s humanity, the only genuine humanity coram Deo (before God) has been truly humanized in and from the humanizing humanity of Jesus Christ. As He, in His vicarious humanity said Yes to the Father for us, we by a correspondence of His faith, by the same Spirit’s breath now have the freedom of God to say yes and amen to God, acknowledging all that God has provided for us in His salvation for all of humanity (which is first His humanity for us).

So, for the AR, total depravity/total inability, to use those terms, is indeed a real problem for a humanity incurved upon itself (homo incurvatus in se). But what is different for AR is that on the one hand grace isn’t an abstract quality given to the elect, like created grace is, as maintained by the classical Calvinists (like White); on the other hand, grace, and being unilaterally placed into God’s grace is a necessity if fallen humanity is going to have the capacity to indeed seek God and receive His salvation for them. Further, contra the Arminian, or Flowers’ so-called provisionism, fallen humanity, again, is in need of God’s unilateral movement of placing us into His re-created and elect life in Christ, if in fact we are going to be able to speak of a genuine human freedom. So, against the Provisionists, AR maintains that in order to be truly human before God, that is to have genuine human freedom for God, that that must first be provided for all of humanity in and through God’s disruptive gracious humanity as that penetrates our dead humanity, giving us a new and real human life in His.

Hence, God’s unconditional election is inclusive of all of humanity, since the only humanity to be assumed in the incarnation was the fallen humanity. Jesus was “effectually called” (and I put that in quotes because AR does not affirm the Aristotelian causal theory that classical Calvinists do), freely coming for us, taking all of humanity with Him, as the second Adam, to the right hand of the Father. Why all of humanity does not finally affirm God’s election for us in Christ, seeing that all of the conditions for salvation have already been fully actualized in God’s humanity for the world, remains an aspect of the surd-like and inscrutable mystery of sin. All are elect in Christ, but not all finally come. We know why people do come, but sin keeps us in the dark in regard to why some don’t ultimately repent and acknowledge what God has already done, provided, and actualized for them in the real humanity of Christ.

In closing, with reference to John 6 and its grammar: verse 44 says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Here, the doubly consubstantial life of Jesus, who is both the eternal Son, who is fully God, and who is also fully human, is theologically present in this clause. That is to say, in the analogy of the incarnation, the ‘Me’ and the ‘Father’ (insofar as the person and works of God are indivisible) are in reference to God’s life, and at the same time, in reference to God’s life of salvation actualized for the world in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Theologically the “draws him,” with reference to the ‘him,’ remains in the singular, insofar that the [hu]man who was first drawn of God, was God’s particular humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. He will indeed be “raised up on the last day” whereby every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and all of humanity, all of those who have repented, out of Christ’s repentance for us, will be exalted in consummate form with Him as the new creations we have become as participants in Christ’s new and resurrected humanity for us.

In a canonical way it is fitting then to close this post with reference to another Apostle, Paul:

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? ³ Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? ⁴ Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵ For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, ⁶ knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; ⁷ for he who has died is freed from sin. -Romans 6:1-7

What we have been referring to as election and the vicarious humanity of Christ also finds biblical reference to Paul’s theological motif of ‘in Christ’ theology. It is really a doctrine of union with Christ that we are concerned with, and what is the entailment of a proper doctrine of pre-destination and election; insofar that what salvation involves first involves God’s choice to be for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And this free election of God’s becomes what we grammatically call the hypostatic union wherein God and humanity are united as God becomes humanity that we might become partakers of the divine nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But you see then how this involves a doctrine of unio cum Christo (union with Christ).

The Theological and Ideational History Behind the Deconstructed Culture Writ Large

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. –Judges 21:25

The human heart has never changed. Ironically, in our secular times humanity, in the main, has come to believe that we have “progressed” beyond our primitive forebears. Secular humanity of the 21^st century generally maintains that it has moved beyond the religious platitudes and superstitions of the pre-critical past, and moved onto greener and more enlightened pastures. But the secular age, in fact, is really just a mythology that needs to be demythologized by the lights of sound and theological consideration. This is what TF Torrance provides for us, as he sketches the inherent dualism that reigns over the spirit of the modern age. Dualism in the sense that the human spirit, in the secular, has been abstracted from its ground in its antecedent life, as that has been gifted to it through the Word of God. As TFT notes, the secular human has taken what once was an attribute of the living God, and immanentized it, or collapsed that attribute into the recesses of their own enslaved consciouses. As TF underscores, secular humanity has taken what was the genuine possession of the Creator, and attributed it to themselves. That is the capacity to determine the right way for oneself; the self curved into the depths of its own subjectivity, as if it alone knows and self-determines the good and the beautiful; or the distinction between the holy and profane.

Torrance writes the following:

The story of that development need not detain us further, but we may glance at two significant stages in it. The first of these is the immense impact of Cartesian dualism upon Protestant Christianity—that was an influence from the side of Roman Catholic philosophy, but it had its strongest impact in Protestantism where there had been asserted such a clear distinction between Grace and nature, the Creator and the creature. Once that distinction became distorted into a dualism, it tended to breed Deism, and Deism provoked the old antithesis of spirit and matter, and rampant spiritualism broke loose only to find itself faced with the menace of a positivistic and mechanistic interpretation of nature. It was in the midst of this that there took place the great ‘Copernican revolution’ initiated by Kant, which presents us with the other significant stage in the development of Protestantism which we must note. This is the stage in which the categorical imperative is identified with the self-legislating ego, the divine Spirit is identified with rational self-consciousness, or the inwardness of the human spirit, and out of which it lives, is the ‘Word’ which it hears in the depths of its own subjectivity.

The ’God’ of this Neo-Protestantism is the God who is correlated with the religious subject and its spiritual potentialities, the God who meets and satisfies the needs and answers the questions of ‘modern man’ (that creature that takes himself so frightfully seriously and imposes himself upon everything). Truth about Him is discerned within the religious subject himself, so that the business of theology is to examine the structure of the religious consciousness, particularly—so the stress developed as the nineteenth century wore on—in its historical and universal manifestations. It was within this context that Christianity was subjected to such exhaustive historico-psychological examination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which mean that Christianity was regarded essentially as a process, while the Reformation was regarded simply as a development in that process, when the essence of religion in the human spirit began to break free from its childhood bondage under external authority and the sovereignty of the inward religious experience was asserted, and its right constantly to create for itself new forms through which to express itself in ‘modern culture’.

In this light it was inevitable that Christianity even in its origins should have been interpreted as the product of the human spirit, and so from Strauss to Bultmann the thesis has been maintained that the Gospel does not go back so much to Jesus Himself as to the creative spirituality of the early Church, and therefore if we are to be true to Jesus who in His way provoked that creation we ought to create new forms of Christianity for our own day. This whole conception has been helped on immensely by the application of the concept of evolution to the development of the religious spirit and by the new ‘modern’ notion of history, stemming from Dilthey, as that which man himself creates and for which he is responsible. Thus the historical truth of the Christian faith is only that which man can envisage for himself, what he can make real for himself, and for which he can make himself responsible through his own decisions. Christian truth is that which has become and continues to become true in and through the history which man himself creates by his existential decisions. That is the only reality which he can acknowledge—that is to say, whatever submits to the creativity of his active reason.[1]

In general, when Christians deconstruct in the 21^st century, and reconstruct as Exvangelicals or progressive Christians, the aforementioned, as developed by TFT, in regard to the history of ideas, and their application to the human experience in the secular culture today, are the mechanics it obtains within. It’s really just the age-old story of the Genesis 3 narrative, and the fall of humanity into a dissolved status before God. It is the partaking of the forbidden fruit, over and again, whereby humanity believes the lie that the first Adam bit into; i.e., that we can be like God, knowing both good and evil. When the culture writ large, shorn of its ground in the living and triune God as its, attempts to exist in and from themselves, it is the intellectual hardware Torrance has identified for us, whereby a self-actualized person in the 21^st century instantiates itself.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 82–3.

H.A. Ironside and Karl Barth On: “There is no Man Behind the Back of Jesus”

How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
² But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night. Psalm 1:1-2

 

What does it mean to be genuinely human? This is a question philosophers, world religions, little kids, and others have been pondering for the millennia. Rather than speculate though, as Christians we have the more accurate way, the more concrete way; God’s way for answering said question. As is the case with everything in the Christian kingdom, our existences are contingent ones; existences that have a ground and condition from their antecedent reality in the One who has always already and eternally existed. The Christian’s conscious existence (over against the pagan’s unconscious existence) is a gifted, a graced, a given existence; an existence extra nos (‘outside of us’). Humanity simpliciter (simply, or at base) has an image, according to Scripture; and its image isn’t inherent to humanity writ large. Humanity’s image is in fact God’s image for us in the freely elect humanity of Jesus Christ; the humanity elected for us ever before the foundations of the world. When Adam and Eve were originally created, they weren’t created in an ontological vacuum; they were in fact created in the image of God: “¹³ For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. ¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:13-15). As such, one implication of this, is that humanity is humanity, humanity has sanctity and dignity, in and from God’s humanity for them, for us, in Jesus Christ. That is to say, to be human, is to be reconciled with God; since this is what humanity, in the ‘image of God,’ was created for. To be human, biblically understood, is to be in right relationship with the living and triune God; this is humanity’s telos (‘purpose’), to be in an intimate relationship, a penetrating relationship, a participatory relationship with God.

An old-time dispensational preacher and teacher, Harry A. Ironside (someone whose commentary set I’ve read completely back in my early years), has the following to say in his commentary on Psalm 1; in regard to the theme of our question on humanity:

The first Psalm is the inspired introduction to the entire book. We may say that we have here, in contrast, two men, the blessed man and the wicked man. The blessed man is the Second Man, the Lord from heaven; the wicked man is the first man.

Notice the opening verses. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

Who is this blessed man to whom our attention is directed as we open this lovely Old Testament book of praise and prayer? Observe in the first place that the tenses as we have them here do not exactly convey the thought of the original Hebrew. It may be rendered, “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.” He is not here expressing the blessedness of a man who was once a sinner and has been turned to righteousness and now no longer walks in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But he is telling us of the blessedness of the Man who has never done any of these things, the Man who never took his own way, the Man who never walked with the world as part of it, who never did a thing in opposition to the will of God. Who is that man?[1]

It is close to 30 years ago that I read the above from Ironside, and it has stuck with me since then. Ironically, this type of thinking is abundantly present in Karl Barth’s thinking and corpus as well. Clearly, there is a different informing theological and contextual/cultural background behind Ironside and Barth; but at a thematic (‘spirit’) level there is definitely some overlap between the two on an theoanthropology. Barth develops these things deeper and further than Ironside did, as a churchman and preacher, yet, I find it interesting that the same insight, about the humanity of Jesus, because of the pure force and witness of Holy Scripture, stands out to both of these men; men who, typically, would never be mentioned in the same sentence.

Here is how Barth begins to develop this theme, in regard to the humanity of Jesus, and how that implicates humanity in general—that is coram Deo (before God).

 

§45

MAN IN HIS DETERMINATION AS THE COVENANT-PARTNER OF GOD

That real man is determined by God for life with God has its inviolable correspondence in the fact that his creaturely being is a being in encounter—between I and Thou, man and woman. It is human in this encounter, and in this humanity it is a likeness of the being of its Creator and a being in hope in Him.

1.JESUS, MAN FOR OTHER MEN

Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life—without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him. He is responsible before God, i.e., He gives to the Word of God the corresponding answer. That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man, is decided by the existence of the man Jesus. Apart from anything else, this is the standard of what his reality is and what it is not. It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man. The man Jesus is man for God. As the Son of God He is this in a unique way. But as He is for God, the reality of each and every other man is decided. God has created man for Himself. And so real man is for God and not the reverse. He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos.[2]

Unlikely consorts, Barth and Ironside are; but in this thematic instance we can see how Barth complements and develops what Ironside only leaves in nascent form (indeed, and “metaphysically” differently than Ironside might have imagined). As an aside: this helps to illustrate my own in via. Many of the so-called “pietistic” “biblicist” evangelical preachers and thinkers hit upon themes, incidentally even, purely because of their warmhearted dedication to the Jesus and triune God of Holy Scripture. They would hit upon themes, deeply theological themes, purely because they were intent on following the contours of Holy Scripture. It is this background that made me “someone in waiting” for a Barth or a Torrance; they, respectively, because of their commitment to following the contours of the Bible, identified many of the same themes as these “North American evangelical pietists.” But because of their theological training, context, and background had the ideational resource to develop said biblical-theological themes that the pietists could only ever inchoately identify.

What it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be human, as Ironside and Barth, respectively, have both identified, is grounded fully in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. He indeed is ecce homo, ‘behold the Man,’ Christ Jesus. He is what it means to be genuinely human before God; uniquely as the Son of God. There is “no Man behind the back of Jesus,” He indeed is the Man from whence and towards which all of creaturely being has its being. To be concretely human in this world is to be in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ; since there is no world, or creaturely reality without His elect humanity come first (His is the inner reality of the covenant between God and humanity, of which the created order finds its external meaning).

 

⁵ For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, . . . I Timothy 2:5

 

[1] H. A. Ironside, Studies on Book One of the Psalms, accessed @ studylight.org 01-12-2024.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §45 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 1.

A Psychology on the Theological Rationalist

The following is a post I wrote ten years ago that has been buried on a tumblr account I once had. I thought I would repost it here (there are some grammatical errors present, but I’m too lazy to fix them).

Here is a short reflection on what I would like to call Theological Rationalism. 

In order to reflect upon what it means to be rationalistic; it is best to, at the outset, recognize that in my usage there is a difference between being a rationalist and being rational. The former smacks of an anthropology that is grounded in an intellectualism, meaning that a person or human being can be reduced down to their intellect or mind as their defining feature for what it means to be human (so an essentialism of the mind and its constituent properties)–what we might (and do) find in someone like Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology or even more pointedly in Rene Descartes’ epistemological (ontological) project of cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). This is the kind of anthropology that funds what it is to be a rationalist. I see this as distinct from being rational in that being ‘rational’ simply means that someone is reasonable (by whatever standards that might presuppose) in the way they think, communicate, and act; but being rational does not mean that someone’s ‘being’ can be reduced to their mind and its capacity to actively assign meaning to reality in an essential fashion.

With this distinction in mind, I would like to apply what it means to be a rationalist to theological practice and activity. For me in my experience as a Christian person, when rationalism is applied, as it is, in my North American Christian (and Protestant) context, is that we end up with a form of Christian Fundamentalism. I think the most stalwart and able representative of this kind of theological rationalism might be someone like Carl Henry. Although Henry was actually more informed and aware of his theological surroundings and history than who I really have in mind with this post.

In this post, I am thinking more of the kind of Christian I am most familiar with at a popular level. What happens for the North American Christian, often, is that all of their Christian identity can be reduced to one or two overarching totalizing meta-narrative or stories through which they compress and seek to interpret all else. In this way, they feel a sense of control, indeed even power over the circumstances of their life, and in particular, over their relation to God. The key to what I am getting at (without getting into some concrete examples) is to recognize that these kinds of theological rationalists have been trained and conditioned to think in this way; in other words, it is not that they are intentionally seeking to control their relation to God (although they are sometimes), it is that they have been sold a bill of goods that reduces God and his acts to their preconceived theological framework, which is based upon their own active intellect’s which believes that all of reality can be compressed therein. The emphasis then is placed upon their minds, and their capacity to provide propositional explanation for God, and all of the theological related to him.

The slavery enters into this situation at a very basic level; these theological rationalists believe that they are worshipping God, but who they are really worshipping is a construal of God and his acts which they have constructed and conjured up in a way wherein their understanding of God becomes the essential basis wherein God is assigned his being/person. The terrible reality of this is that this person is stuck in a vicious circle; because they might realize (at some point) that they are not living in a true refreshing kind of freedom, and so they desperately look to God for help. But this is the paradoxical problem, when they look to God, they have already denuded God of any Lordly and contradictory and transformative force in their lives, because they have captured God by the power of their own minds; they have made God contingent upon their capacity to explain God in the terms that their minds (and the history of ideas this associated with) have actively constructed, and all this in the name of God in Christ.

The only escape from this, from the absolutized subjectivity is to start fresh. It is, as Thomas Torrance might say, to engage in a dialectic and process of repentant thinking. It is to repudiate any kind of theological rationalism, and its anthropology, and to adopt a new attitude wherein the God who has revealed himself in Christ no longer is held captive by our own psyches and their desires to be comfortable and in control. It is to finally rest in the fact that God is God, and that he has contradicted all of our reason by way of the cross. Once we are able to renounce/repent of our wayward flesh made absolute; it is here where the theological rationalist finally will have the capacity to be theologically reasonable–and this, based upon a dynamic love of Christ that is not contingent upon me and my mind, but upon God and his relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

The Freedom of the Human Before God: Getting Beyond the Usual Debates

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free? These are the types of questions that have often plagued the Christian theological dialogue for centuries. Indeed, these theoanthropological loci have been the source of much consternation and division; that is, depending on how disparate Christian thinkers conclude on an answer to these questions. Often, whether in the theological or philosophical realms, answering these questions are reduced to, generally, two disparate tribes: 1) Arminian/Libertarian Free Agency, and 2) Calvinism/Compatibilist Determinism. There are of course other iterations of expression along the continuum that these seemingly two polar opposites are comprised of; but again, and generally speaking, this is what we have seen play out—with reference to our original questions—within the development and history of theological ideas (e.g., Augustine/Pelagius; Luther/Erasmus; Calvin/Pighius et al.)

In contradistinction, Athanasian Reformed theology, after Barth (and Athanasius), elides the seemingly unavoidable binary that the annals of history have been scorched by. We focus on the freedom of God as the only ground from whence any notion of freedom might be construed. The arguments surrounding freewill vis-à-vis human agency, before God, all start with an abstract soteriological question bequeathed to the church by, primarily, St. Augustine. Augustine’s bequeathment comes primarily from his commitment to Neo-Platonism, and how he thought of the relation between the eternal forms and their shadows in temporal history. Without getting into that now, we can only gesture at it for time and space constraints. It is Barth, as already noted, who offers an alternative way to reformulate these questions and answers; not from an abstract lens grounded in various humanity for whom God gave His life alone; but from the concrete humanity of God, as that is given for us in Jesus Christ. When Jesus is the ground from whence all theological questions flow, we are sure to be provided with the answers that God has freely chosen to bequeath upon us by His dearly beloved Son.

In the following passage from Barth, he is describing what, from his christological lights, a genuine human being is comprised by. In a way, without all of the context, when the reader reads this, it might sound like Barth is speaking abstractly about a needed performativity of humanity before God. But know, he is referring to God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ (and yet, dialectically so).

What can and does happen in the human decision as such is that man offers himself to God. He thanks God. He is responsible before God, i.e., he makes himself a response to the Word of God—no less but also no more than that. He gives what he has, i.e., what he is, and therefore himself. No less than this is required of him. Less than this is not sufficient to constitute true humanity. To offer himself and place himself at the disposal of God—it is to this that he is summoned and for this that he is strengthened and empowered. Doing this, he is established as a human subject, and posits himself as such. Failing to do it, he fails to realise himself as man. For to do this is his only possibility. Offering and disposing himself to go to God and to be obedient to the divine call: “Come,” he pushes open the gate and steps out into freedom. As he does so, he is a creature which transcends the limits of the creature. And in this way he is the human creature. No less than this is required of him. If he did not do this, if he decided differently, he would not be man. But also no more is required of him. It is not required of him that he should make himself into a gift which necessarily satisfies and pleases God. It is required of him rather that he should know himself and will himself on the basis of the fact that he is called by God; that he should affirm himself as the being which sets out on its journey to God and is therefore taking the step of freedom. But it is not required of him that he should place himself at the side of God, or that his action should decide or anticipate this justification before God. He can take the first step, but he cannot ensure that it will successfully lead him to the goal at which he aims. He cannot give mor than he has. It is not within his power to make himself right and acceptable and well-pleasing to his Creator, and therefore worthy of being with Him. This is a matter beyond his control. He cannot impart or attribute it to himself. He cannot ensure that he will come to God merely by setting out to go to Him. Hence his going to God, his responsibility before Him, must be of such a kind as to realise and express his limitation. It must be a pure self-offering. It must be free from any sort of encroachment. It must renounce any suggestion that man’s decision might anticipate the decision which only God can take. Man’s responsibility before God must consist in a self-offering to God which is referred to God’s own decision and dependent upon it. Only when it has this character does it happen that man comes as well as goes to God, so that he himself transcends the limits of the creature and is thus a human creature, real man.[1]

Barth’s claim that to be ‘real man,’ that the creature must transcend his own impotent limits, is functioning as something like a witness. A witness to the reality that what is required of ‘real man’ remains the impossible possibility that really and ultimately can and has only been achieved by the Son of Man for us. The underlying premise to Barth’s inklings on ‘real man’ is clearly in reference to who he takes to be the only real man in all of history: i.e., Jesus Christ.

Getting back to the opening of this article, the reader might be wondering how the aforementioned gets us past the binary that say Calvinism and Arminianism operate from vis-à-vis human agency/freewill in salvation. Barth, rather than starting in abstract people, those who have been “predestined” to be the elect of God, starts with the premise of a concrete person; the Theanthropos (Godman). What this move does is focus our attention on the altitudes God is expecting of [hu]man to genuinely be [hu]man. God has a holy requirement that a genuine humanity will meet in relationship to who God is. Since fallen humanity is unable to reach these heights it is has been required of God, if indeed reconciliation is to obtain between God and humanity, that God provide ‘Himself a lamb.’ It is God’s desire, because of who He is as eternal and triune love, within Himself, that God created to begin with. It is God’s desire to have fellowship and participation with us as counterpoints upon whom He, in His other-processive life, might fellowship and enjoy eternal bliss with. And it has always already been God’s free choice, to be God’s image for us in Jesus Christ (Col. 1.15); indeed, this has always been the goal of original creation in the first place: to elevate us in the humanity of Christ, His image for us, into eternal participation and interpenetration with Him by the grace of adoption. And so in this, He pre-destined Himself to be for us as He elected to be us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, that we might, again by grace, become one spirit with Him (I Cor. 6.17).

All of the above noted, the reader still might be wondering: “okay, so how does this implicate human freedom in salvation?” In a nutshell, it works off the assumption that there is only one genuine freedom for the human being to truly be free from—God’s, since God alone is free. This is how [hu]man ‘transcends the limits of the creature and is thus a human creature, real man.’ He or she moves within the freedom for God that God is first for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Jesus has trailblazed the way for a real humanity, as the firstborn from the dead, to become real humanity; that is rightly related to God, as God has always intended. By the Spirit, the human can now correspondently say Yes and Amen to God, from God’s Yes and Amen for them in the vicarious human agency of Jesus Christ. Our freedom as human beings before God is funded by God’s freedom to be for us; and in this freedom, as we become united to Christ, not just ‘carnally’ but ‘spiritually,’ it is herein whence the human being becomes genuinely human. This is because, following the logic we have been operating with thus far, based on the premises set by Barth, what it means to be really human is to really be resident in the bosom of the Father through participation and union with the Son. We seek God, therefore, because He has first sought us in Christ. He is free to do that, and ironically, by His very freedom, by Him penetrating the ‘unhealed’ of our fallen human natures through the hypostatic unioning in the incarnation, we become participant in His freedom. It is a freedom that only has eyes for the living God. And it is these eyes that portend the entailments of what it genuinely means to be human and free; that is in right and forever relationship with the God who created us just for this very purpose.

More to be said, of course! But hopefully you can start to see, maybe only in a liminal way (but hopefully more!) how this reframing of things, that is through a christological frame, gets us far beyond the usual antics that surround this long and entrenched battle between the saints of old and today.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §44 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 182.

The Gospel of Truth Confronting Our ‘Happily Sick’ Selves

The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our base desires at their very root; the desires we’d rather live our live-long days with. But the Gospel pronounces a disruptive and loud, No! Gracefully, the Gospel doesn’t just take us to the dark side of our fallen condition; it dialectically, and at the same time, elevates us into the Light and Life of God.

Read along as father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance explain how this looks in the theology of Kierkegaard:

To analyze Kierkegaard’s position more precisely, there are primarily two ways in which he considered Christ to be offensive. The more obvious of the two ways is that Christ proclaims a deeply countercultural message. While Jesus ultimately brings good news to the world, not everything he says will be immediately appealing, especially to elite members of society. For Kierkegaard, this point should be obvious to any sincere reader of Scripture. The reason Christ’s message is unsettling is that so many of us are content with the shape of our sinful lives. In the grip of “the sickness unto death,” we define ourselves according to our own finite ends in a way that is dead to God and in “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” As Climacus puts it, the sinner exists in a state of imprisonment in which he “holds himself captive,” and in this state, he is oblivious to the sickness that accompanies his overly positive view of his life. When caught up in sin, it is extremely difficult to notice, let alone take seriously, our state of despair. We are happily sick, so when the true world-changing gospel message is spoken into this situation, it cannot simply be taken as a message that supports us in our daily lives. When God assumes human form, God does not settle in with us in our “sickbed,” nor does God comfort us in our sinful ways. Rather, God reveals Godself by acts of revelation that seek to deliver us from sickness. Anti-Climacus writes:

Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher blubberingly and falsely introduces it—but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He will not be transformed by human beings into a cozy human god; he wills to transform human beings and he wills it out of love.[1]

We will pick up with the ‘second way’ next time. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard is onto what should appear to be the obvious: i.e., as fallen creatures we are more than comfortable with our fallen ways. Indeed, as fallen creatures, we aren’t even really aware that we are in fact, sick; more biblically, dead! As the Christology of Kierkegaard underscores, outwith Christ’s penetration into the soil and slum of our souls, we would simply run head-long, with glee, into the eternal abyss. But God’s love is greater than our blindness; and because God is gracious, He elects our humanity for Himself in Christ, and gives us His vicarious eyes. He gives us His eternal Light that we might see Light, and come to recognize the darkness that we so gleefully inhabit outwith His disruption into our humanity.

As an aside: the aforementioned has another implication. It implicates the way knowledge of God does or doesn’t work. If Kierkegaard’s theology is true on this front (and I think it is), this entails that fallen creatures left to themselves have no capacity in themselves, other than to see their darkness as light. Indeed, left to themselves, fallen humanity will construct God and gods in their light, which in fact, of course, is only their darkness in the end. The fallen creature needs God’s Life to assume theirs; bring their life up into His; and it is then only from that inhabitation that fallen humanity is elevated into a status and capacity, through union with Christ by the Spirit, that they can come to think and speak God’s thoughts Deus dixit (‘after He has spoken’). Natural theology simply doesn’t have the chops to offer a theological ontology/epistemology/anthropology that brings a fallen humanity into a genuine and viable knowledge of the living God. Christ alone remains the only mediator between God and humanity whereby fallen humanity can become adopted and elevated humanity as participants in and with Christ’s vicarious humanity for them/us.

Many other implications to be visited, but this will have to suffice for the moment.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 77.

A Very Theological Proposal: Gratitude as the Ground for What it Means to be Human, Coram Deo

“What is man that thou are mindful of him . . . ?” King David, as he stood before the grandeur of God, as He reflected upon God’s handiwork in creation, asked an age-old question, with reference to the who of humanity. In this instance, he wasn’t necessarily attempting to peer into the entailments of a theological anthropology, but instead simply standing in awe at the bigness of God relative to God’s compassion for us small little human beings here on the flatland. For the rest of this piece, I want to think about what it means to be human before God. Not from a philosophical or speculative vantage point, but from God’s concrete Self-revelation for us in Jesus Christ.

Philosophers of old, like Francisco Petrarch, impressed the idea that humanity is at its most virtuous, and thus most human, when it is turned into itself; when we live private lives wherein a cultivation of the virtues can obtain; with the result that humanity’s telos can be most realized in and through the developing virtues, the ultimate good. Petrarch, we might say, was a proto-Enlightened modern, in regard to his way of thinking humanity with reference to his turn to the subject attitude. But this isn’t the way Jesus thought of humanity, and its entailments coram Deo (before God). Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, within the Divine Monarxia, within the processions of God’s eternal life, within the origins of relation within God’s triune life, ecstatically receives His life as the Son in relation to the Father. Likewise, the Father, in return, receives His life as the Father from the Son, as the Son is the Son of the Father; and this implicates the warp and woof of the Holy Spirit’s life, just the same, within the koinonia of the Father/Son. So, in this frame, life is understood, under perichoretic pressures, in the sense that primordial and eternal life, that of the triune God, is a life of interpenetrating subject-in-being givenness; wherein what it means to be truly alive is to be in reception of the other, and vice versa. This is an ec-static existence, even within the immanent life of God. As such, Arthur McGill offers the following insight as he reflects on these matters from within the Gospel of John:

Now, the Gospel of John is totally preoccupied with the themes of glory, of fulfilled life, and of realized worship. John identifies these themes with the death of Jesus. However, the death of Jesus can only be understood when we know who Jesus is. The first part of John’s Gospel concentrates on showing us who Jesus is; the second part focuses on the significance of Jesus’ dying. John sums up everything that can be said about the identity of Jesus in the phrase, he is “from the Father.” He not only comes from the Father in a sequential sense. All that he has and is comes from the Father. The Father gives the Son of Man his knowledge, his purposes in will, his authority in judgment, and above all, his life. The Son has life in himself, not from himself, but from the Father. Yet, from the Father, the Son has life, life within himself. In all of this, John presents Jesus as living by what I have called an ecstatic identity—a being not by virtue of anything that is his own, but a being by virtue of what the Father continually communicates to him.[1]

McGill, I think, brings out the proper focus when thinking about the implications of this ecstatic identity. This is a fellowshipping mode of being; an intimate reality of how life has eternally been within the environs of God’s dynamic life of co-inhering love. But it is this life that stands as the antecedent basis out of which God elected to create us, humans. It is in the image that He freely chose for Himself in the face (prosopon) of the Son, wherein we as creatures come to have life as participants in and from His life. This is God’s grace; it is an act in His becoming for us. Not a pure act, but a gracious act based upon His type of life that indeed determines the shape of all created life; particularly the life created in His image, as images of the image of God in the Son (cf. Col. 1.15).

And so, life is really a matter of being Grace formed from within the womb of the Father; indeed, as the Son has always already and eternally been in the womb of the Father as the Son for us. These are deep matters, doxological matters, but matters that we must concentrate on if we might come to understand what in fact it means to really be human before God. The Apostle Paul pens the following: “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude” (Col. 2.6,7). Notice how the themes of this passage correlate well with the themes we have been considering in this short development. The theme of “received Christ Jesus the Lord” (so the ec-static identity, as McGill identifies that for us), and the theme of grace or “gratitude” as the expression of understanding that this is in fact the ground of our lives in and from the ec-static life of the Son in Christ for us. Indeed, if the Son’s life, in eternal relation to the Father, is one of ecstatic identity, one that is in constant relational reception of the Father’s life for Him, then how much more is it not the case that our lives, as participants with Christ’s life (participatio Christi), aren’t indeed lives that ought to be constantly consumed by God’s possession of us, as He primordially pours forth His life for us; indeed as He does so in constant relation with the Son for us, within the eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Barth helps us think about these themes with greater focus:

But at this point we can and must attempt a more precise and material definition. If the Word of God is which man is, and is therefore historical, is a Word of divine grace, if he is thus summoned to hear and obey this Word, i.e., to be, and to continue to be, in the hearing of this Word, then the being of man can and must be more precisely defined as a being in gratitude. That casting of his faith on God which we have described as the true history and being of man is not so audacious and strange and fantastic as may appear at first sight. Rightly understood, it is in the strictest sense a natural human action. In it the creature remains in full self-possession, and exercises as directly as possible the true being beside which it has no other. It is, as it is told by God that He is gracious to it. In daring to cast itself upon God, it corresponds to the Word without which it would not be this human creature. When we understand the being of man as a correspondence to this Word, we understand it as a being in gratitude. Gratitude is the precise creaturely counterpart to the grace of God. What is by the Word of the grace of God, must be in gratitude; and man’s casting of his trust upon God is nothing other or less, but also nothing more, than the being of man as his act in gratitude.

The term εὐχαριστεῖν or εὐχαριστία, like the objective term χάρις which it reflects, is one of the terms which is only used soteriologically in the New Testament. But in the New Testament the existence of the man Jesus is a soteriological, the soteriological reality, and therefore in Jn. 1, Col. 1 and Heb. 1 we can also see its ontological significance. If man as such is not to be understood apart from the existence of the man Jesus, we cannot avoid the term grace and its complement gratitude even in the description of the being of man as such. As the One who in Jesus meets him as his Saviour, and says that me is gracious to him, God is already the Creator of man. The creaturely being of man must as such be understood as a being claimed by this Word, and therefore as a correspondence to the grace of God, and therefore as a being in gratitude.[2]

Selah.

[1] Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology, 70.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §44 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 160.