What Happens with Jesus is How God is God

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

Christ Mourns His Dying Mother

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

This fourth selection is from Robert W. Jenson’s Systematics Vol. 1 (pp. 188-191). If you’re interested in an introduction to Jenson’s theology, see Lincoln Harvey’s excellent beginner’s guide (I did the cover art, believe it or not). You might also listen in on this discussion.

It was once a standard question: Is the work of atonement to be attributed to Christ's human nature or to his divine nature? The question itself was taken to be obvious. Anselmian theories of atonement attribute the work to the human nature; subjectivist and “classic” theories attribute it to the divine nature, explicitly or implicitly. But if the Christology of our earlier chapter is right, we should refuse both alternatives and attribute reconciliation to Christ according to neither nature but only according to both, jointly and simultaneously. If the Christology of our earlier chapter is right, then we must understand the Crucifixion, precisely as Jesus' human doing and suffering, as itself an event in God's triune life. Its reconciling efficacy, most fundamentally and baldly stated, is that this is the event in God that settles what sort of God he is over against fallen creation. Just so the Crucifixion—given the Resurrection—settles also our situation as creatures…

Why did Jesus have to die? Most directly stated: the Crucifixion is what it cost the Father to be in fact—and not just in somebody's projected theology or ideology—the loving and merciful Father of the human persons that in fact exist… According to [Jonathan] Edwards, Christ's suffering is the anguish God undergoes to be actually merciful within history; it is the pain of truly loving us…

We do not want to share the Son's relation to the Father, we do not want there to be a Father; and that is why the one who said, “When you pray, say ‘Our Father,’” had to die. The Father sends servant after servant and finally the Son. The vineyard-keepers kill each in turn; given the project that defines their lives, to have no one over them, they could not do otherwise. Who, then, delivers the Son to death? We can equally say: the Father does or we do. The eternal inner-triune decision made at the Crucifixion and Resurrection was between the parable as told, with a dead Son and the slaughter of the vineyard-keepers, and raising a Son who insists rather on forgiving them. The Father can have his Son and us with him into the bargain, or he can abolish us and have no Son, for there is no Son but the one who said, “Father, forgive them.”

But how, when the Father delivers Jesus to death, are they yet one God? And how are we the vineyard-keepers? Asking such questions, we invoke the Spirit. Father and Son are one God even as the Father abandons the Son in that the Spirit who will raise Jesus had come in advance—as Spirit, anticipation is his being—and “rested” on him from the moment of his dedication to this death, to be the bond of triune love also in abandonment. Just so, this abandonment and its suffering become integral to what the Spirit means for the Father and the Son, and so to the Love that is God. We are the vineyard-keepers in that the Spirit who will raise the Son finds his own identity only in the totus Christus, in the Son who is identified with us.

A few reflections:

1. Jenson’s reading of Matthew 21:33-41 is terribly compressed, but if you tease out the lines of thought you can see that it’s quite remarkable, not least because it forces us to break with our literalistic habits. Like the landowner, the Father sends his Son to get his will done. Like the vineyard-keepers in the parable, we conspire to kill the Son, striving to take his inheritance for ourselves. But unlike the landowner in the parable, and against all reasonable expectations, God not only forgives us but also delivers us from the powers that led us to do evil in the first place—so that we actually do come to share in the Son’s inheritance!

2. Less than careful readers of Jenson’s work often mistake him for some kind of process theologian. But when he says “this is the event in God that settles what sort of God he is over against fallen creation,” he does not mean God becomes a different God on Good Friday or Resurrection Sunday than he had been before. To conclude that, we have to assume there’s a timeline on which God’s being plays out, a before and an after for God as well as for us—and Jenson explicitly rejects this assumption.

3. Why does Jenson risk being so misread? Because he believes the Gospel requires us to insist that Jesus is God without qualification. He is the eternal Son, no one else. As he puts it elsewhere (“Jesus in the Trinity”), “Mary is the Mother of God. Unus ex Trinitate mortuus est pro nobis. One of the Trinity is a Palestinian Jew, who came eating and drinking and forgave sin and prophesied implausible glory. Jesus saves. These and more sentences like them are the great metaphysical truth of the gospel, without which it is all religious palaver and wish fulfillment and metaphorical projection. Jesus really is Lord, because he is one of the Trinity; and that is our salvation.”

4. Jesus’ death, for Jenson, is not a sacrifice to the Father but the gift of the Father, not a payment required to settle a debt with an abstraction (“justice”), but the expenditure of God’s personal devotion to us. And just because God is Trinity—not a trinity, but this Father known by this Son thanks to this Spirit—what happens with Jesus actually affords us our actuality. Or, said differently, what the Spirit makes possible for Jesus in relation to the One he calls Father determines how God is God in exactly the way that makes it so we become one with God—bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

5. Thus, it is not enough, Jens would argue, to say that the Father loves us for the sake of the Son. It is not enough even to say that the Father loves us with the same love he loves the Son. The truth is far more wonderful, far more scandalous. The Father does not regard us as Jesus’ associates, subjects orbiting around him, but as members of his body and sharers in his being, integral to his identity. There is no Son—and so no Father and no Spirit—except the one whose life involves your life and mine as surely as it involved and involves his mother’s. Hard, then, as it may be to think, what happens with Jesus is how God is God and therefore how we are ourselves. And because he is who he is, what happens with him is how God is our God and how we become God’s—and God!—with God.