With No Qualifications?

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

Vapor 2024

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)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

7. The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)

8. Jesus is Not Christ without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)

9. Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Williams, On Christian Theology)

10. Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)

11. He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)

12. The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified (McCabe, “The Mystery of the Cross”)

13. The Cross Enfolds All Possible Love (Nicholas of Cusa, “Moreover, For Our Sake He Was Crucified”)

14. I Let Him Hold My Hands Up (C.H. Mason, “Testimony”)

15. The Image of a Man, the Likeness (Jacob of Sarug, Homily on the Chariot)

T.F. Torrance has been called the greatest Reformed theologian since Karl Barth. The following selections are from lectures of his selected and edited by Robert Walker and published as Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ.

The doctrine of the hypostatic union asserts a union of two natures in one person. It does not assert the pre-existence and in that sense the eternity of the human nature, for the human nature of Jesus was a creature of God, and in Jesus himself the human nature had no independent hypostasis prior to the incarnation. But we must assert of the humanity of Jesus that it was given hypostasis, reality, real personal being, in the eternal Word, in the eternal Son, in the eternal hypostasis of God the Son. On the one hand, therefore, we must say that in the incarnation something altogether new happened, even for God, for God the Son was not always man but he now became man, became a creature, though without ceasing to be God. On the other hand, the relation of the incarnate Son to the Father did not arise within time. The life of Christ on earth was the obverse of a heavenly deed, and the result of an eternal decision…

Let us note that strictly speaking, we cannot say that Jesus is divine, any more than we can say that God is human. We can say that God has become man, such that he is now also man in Christ, and so we can say that Jesus is man and also God, but to talk about divine humanity is confusion, and a form of monophysite heresy: it is to deny his humanity. Christ is fully man, but while man, he himself in the whole course of his life is also God. Christ is God, true God as well as true man…¹

A few reflections:

1. We need to bear in mind that these are lines from a lecture, spoken in order to emphasize a particular point Torrance, as the teacher, felt needed to be made in the moment for those students. These lines do not and could not represent or sum up the whole of his thought. Indeed, they stand in tension with what he says elsewhere, all of which is a good reminder for those of us who do theology: “gotcha” readings always say more about us as readers than they do about the work we’re supposedly reading. I say that to say this: What I want to consider in these reflections is how these lines came to take the shape they took. What were the pressures internal to the logic of Torrance’s argument made him frame the matter as he did? Considering that, I believe, helps us get at how the work of theology is done and why that work is so often so “touch-and-go,” so delicate.

2. “Let us note that strictly speaking, we cannot say that Jesus is divine, any more than we can say that God is human.” At least two Torrance scholars—Geordie Ziegler and Jerome Van Kuiken—have told me that they take him to mean simply that Jesus is not solely divine. They say they believe that’s obvious from the immediate context of the statement, as well the broader context of TFT’s corpus. But as much as I respect their work and defer to their authority in these matters, I’m not convinced. First, why would such a benign statement require the “strictly speaking” qualifier that opens the statement? Second, why would Torrance immediately go on to explain that although it is of course true that Jesus is “man and also God” it is “confusion”—and heretical!—to talk about “divine humanity”? It seems clear to me, then, that Torrance is drawing a strict distinction between Jesus being (personally) God and (naturally) divine. True to Reformed principles, he wants to affirm that the divine was not humanized or the humanity divinized in and by the Incarnation. He is willing to risk sounding “Nestorian” in order to avoid the appearance of “Monophysitism.”

3. Now, compare that with this: “Maximus has said what had eventually to be said, and in the West has not yet been fully acknowledged: the man Jesus, exactly as his personhood is defined by the life story told in the Gospels, is the one called the Son, the second identity of God. Jesus is the Son, with no qualifications.”² Jenson, following Maximus, is affirming the teaching of Gregory the Theologian (Against Apollinarius 2): “The Word, in taking flesh, was mingled with humanity, and took our nature within himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with God: the stuff of our nature was entirely sanctified by Christ, the first fruits of creation.”

4. What differences can you see in these positions? What difference do these differences make? I would argue that these lines from Torrance’s lecture cannot help but leave the impression that there are two subjects in the Incarnation, two agencies—one being the divine Word, the Father’s Only-Begotten, the other being Jesus, the boy Mary delivered and raised, the man Pilate condemned and executed. In such a construal, Jesus must be taken to be something like an alter-ego or persona for the Son. Take, for example, this line: “God the Son… without ceasing to be God, now exists as a man, Jesus, who is fully and truly man with his own individual life.” Or this one: “The truly and fully human life of Jesus is grounded in the act of the Son or the Word in becoming flesh.” How might those lines have been written differently? How would Jenson have re-worked them to make them fit Maximus’ and Gregory’s vision? Something like this, I think: “Jesus, the Son, without ceasing to be God, is fully and truly human” and “The truly and fully human life of Jesus, the Word, is grounded in his own act of becoming flesh.”

5. It’s worth noticing that in other lectures Torrance does speak differently. Referring to the theology of Hebrews, for example, he says, “Christ is the revelation and the Word of God, God’s own Son who reveals him, for he is identical with him whom he reveals.”³ And in another, he acknowledges the worthwhileness of the Lutheran concern with the extra Calvinisticum: “the Reformed theologians had the agreement of the whole of the early church behind them, and indeed Calvin’s language cited above derived in part from that of John of Damascus. But the Lutherans had their important point: that with the incarnation of the Word, we must never think of the Word apart from the man Jesus, with whom the Word is for ever united, and from whom the Word is never apart. Now that the incarnation has taken place, we must say that the Son is none other than Jesus, and is identical with him.”⁴ He concludes, finally, that both the Reformed and the Lutherans are essentially right. The Word is fully united to but never wholly contained by the human nature of Jesus and the Revealed God (deus reveletas) must be distinguished but never separated from the Hidden God (deus absconditus). These are, he says, “two complementary aspects of the truth which belong to the mystery of Christ, and which we are unable to put into precise language in such a way as to express the whole truth in a unitary way.”⁵

6. You might ask if such subtleties aren’t finally useless or even dangerous, the playthings of academics who’ve nothing better to do with their time than split hairs? Jenson contends—rightly, I believe—that the difference makes all the difference, not merely for dogmatics but most importantly for prayer and preaching. It just won’t work to say, as the Nestorians did, that “the Son so ‘inhabits’ Jesus that the man Jesus is a temple wholly transparent to his presence, or that the Son is so personally ‘conjoined’ with Jesus that from our point of view they cannot be told apart, or that they too will be in fact one person at the End, after the suffering is over.” And it also won’t work to say that “Jesus is so perfect a metaphor or avatar of the Son that from our point of view they are indistinguishable.”⁶ (To be clear: I’m not accusing Torrance of saying these things, only suggesting that these lines in this lecture create a similar problem, one that tends to haunt Christologies shaped by Reformed pre-commitments.) I appreciate very much Torrance’s appeal in that later lecture to the mystery of Christ and the essential unfinishedness of theology. Still, I think we can and should agree that we must be able to say “Jesus is Lord” without immediately talking ourselves and others out of it.

7. One further note for now. Torrance wants to maintain that “talk about divine humanity is confusion.” In the later lecture, he says it even more sharply: “the idea of a divinisation of the human nature thus makes nonsense of the incarnation and reconciliation.”⁷ But is that what deification means? And does what Torrance calls Alexandrian theology and its emphasis on Christ’s assumption of humanity itself actually “throw into the background the significance of the historical Jesus as a single individual man”?⁸ This anthology is an attempt to show why the answer to both questions is No.

1. Torrance, Incarnation, pp. 177, 187. You can learn more about Torrance here and here.

2. Jenson, “With No Qualifications,” p. 22.

3. Torrance, Incarnation, p. 71.

4. Torrance, Incarnation, p. 220.

5. Torrance, Incarnation, p. 221.

6. Jenson, “With No Qualifications,” p. 18.

7. Torrance, Incarnation, p. 223.

8. Torrance, Incarnation, p. 210.