Incarnational ministry
The SST conference this year was particularly good. (The conference is always a great time of meeting old friends; this year several of the papers – Webster; Kilby; Sarot – were excellent as well, which is not always the case; and more folk from St Andrews attended than has been common recently, which was also a plus for me.) A recurrent theme of bar conversations (where all the best theology gets done at SST) was ‘buzzwords’: language that sounds positive and resonant, but on examination is unreflective, ill-defined, and so dangerously meaningless. ‘Participation’ was one such; ‘incarnational’ another. ‘Incarnational ministry’ seems still to be a popular phrase. As far as I can tell, its meaning, to the extent it has any, is a gesture towards a practice of Christian discipleship which involves simply being in a place, consciously refusing to challenge people or structures, but instead living a life of quiet piety and availability in the hope that this will serve as a witness to those around. It might well, of course, and there have been times when such a practice of mission was perhaps appropriate (the Mennonites survived by becoming ‘the quiet in the land’ in a bloodier age…), but is this really ‘incarnational’? Is this what Jesus did – quiet, non-confrontational living; service without preaching; being but never saying? It might not be wrong, but to dignify it by claiming it is uniquely true to the life of Christ seems to me rather ambitious. Jesus was not obviously quiet and non-confrontational; the authorities noticed Him, and feared Him, and did something about Him. ‘Incarnational ministry’ will not be quiet and non-confrontational either: by a holistic combination of word and deed, it will publicly and decisively undermine the authority structures of this world in the name of God’s Kingdom of justice and joy; it will mock our idols and critique our lives. It will be profoundly threatening to the culture it lives within. Truly incarnational ministry will end, invariably, in crucifixion – and the sure and certain hope of resurrection...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (3)
The third lecture, ‘Immutable in Passibility: The Contribution of Karl Barth,’ traced the origins of Barth’s Christology in Dorner and Herrmann. Jason has suggested in a comment on the second of this series that this was the best of the lectures; I would not disagree. It happens it was also the one I chaired. There is a danger with any great theologian that s/he becomes detached from historical context. St Thomas is studied as if Peter Lombard had never written, and Albert the Great had never responded; works on Calvin represent him as springing from nowhere, ignoring half a generation of Reformation debate that is crucial to understanding what he was about; all of us who teach, I fear, have painted the caricature of Barth that has him repudiating all he learnt in the German schools when he came to write on Romans. Bruce, by contrast, took us from the speculative idealism of Dorner to Church Dogmatics IV, via Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics, showing the connections along the way. The result was an impressively fresh vision of what Barth was about. Wilhelm Herrmann was the key here, at least to the thread I am trying to develop in these comments (there were other narratives going on in the lecture series; I judged this to be the main and controlling one, but I am open to correction on that). Herrmann’s rejection of metaphysics remains in Barth as a rejection of abstraction. The truth is not found in such conceptions as ‘humanity’ and ‘deity’, which are then applied to particular things; rather it is found in concrete actual events. We should not first consider what it is to be divine and then think about incarnation; we should consider the particular history of Jesus Christ, and discover any ideas about ‘divinity’ we may want to hold from there. This is some distance from Herrmann’s own, almost existential, take on the nature of Christianity, of course. Dorner’s influence is what is important in explaining the shift. Despite his heavy commitment to idealism, Dorner succeeds, at least in part, is shifting from substance to actuality in his consideration of Christology. That is, he narrates the incarnation on the basis of the particular event that happened, not abstracted accounts of what must have happened given the necessary properties of ‘divine nature’ and ‘human nature’. Barth completed what Dorner set out to do. His Christology makes use of classical metaphysical terms at times, and idealistic language at other times, but this is all merely a borrowing of language when it happens to become useful; these technical vocabularies do not indicate, still less demonstrate, a commitment to the underlying intellectual systems. (Bruce argued this point at some length, and completely convincingly to my mind. In fact, my major, perhaps only serious, criticism of the entire lecture series was that he argued this point too convincingly for one of his subsidiary theses to stand. More on than later, though.) So, for Barth we can only understand what deity means by listening closely to the gospel history. This means that (picking up the language of CD IV) humility, obedience, and the like are intrinsic to what it is to be God—specifically, to what it is to be God the Son. Dorner’s devastating critique of the nineteenth-century Lutheran kenoticists can be avoided by extending his own insights concerning incarnation: in the act of kenosis God the Son does not surrender what it is to be God; rather the act of kenosis is precisely what it is to be God the Son. However, this victory cannot be too easily won. (One of the—many—impressive features of these lectures was the repeated refusal to claim victories too early; problems were faced up to and addressed with seriousness at every turn.) If kenosis is what it is to be God the Son, then from all eternity this must always be true. Barth’s response to this is his doctrine of election: the gospel story mirrors the triune shape of God’s life; in the act of election the Son is determined for reprobation; suffering; rejection; self-abnegation; death. The Son empties himself—that, simply, is what it is to be the second mode of being of the divine...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (2)
Bruce McCormack’s second lecture, ‘Passibility in Mutability: The Failure of the Older Kenoticism,’ focused on the nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies of Thomasius and Gess, and on Dorner’s critique. The British kenoticists (Forsyth and Mackintosh), and Baillie’s objections, were there, but the treatment was slightly more cursory, I think because Bruce thinks that Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics should have been found decisive, and so no-one should have developed a kenotic Christology after it. ‘Kenotic Christology,’ for those who don’t know, takes its cue from the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which affirms that Christ ’emptied himself’ (heauton ekenosen, hence ‘kenosis’ and ‘kenotic’). A kenotic Christology understands what happened at the incarnation in terms of this self-emptying: God became human by giving something up or laying something down. As Bruce showed, the idea is very consistent with certain traditional themes of Lutheran Christology, and was developed at some length by a school of nineteenth-century German Lutherans, headed by the great Thomasius. (It later made its way into Britain, being embraced by, amongst others, P.T. Forsyth and H.R. Mackintosh,until D.M. Baillie’s God was in Christ put an end to it. The thesis of this lecture was, essentially, that the positions of Thomasius, Forsyth, and indeed any other kenoticism in the nineteenth-century pattern, will inevitably collapse into the radical kenoticism of Gess. Very crudely, Gess suggested that in the incarnation the divine Son simply chooses to stop being divine. This is obviously unacceptable, but the question is how you have any kenotic Christology which does not eventually affirm the same thing. If the divine Son voluntarily chooses to give up being omniscient, say, then either omniscience is not an essential property of divinity, in which case God is not omniscient at all (because there are no accidental properties in God; all that He is, He must be), or it is, and so the Son becomes something less than God in the act of self-emptying. Any account of kenotic Christology falls to such logic. First comment on this lecture: the historical narrative was simply stunning. It’s not really my period, but I have taught modern Christology at postgrad level, supervised on Forsyth, & recently examined a doctoral thesis on Dorner, and I do think I know my way around this stuff. Bruce’s knowledge of the detail of the texts, and insight into the grand sweep of the arguments, was nothing less than inspiring. Second comment: as Bruce indicated, the problem repeatedly in the nineteenth century was the assumption that the patristic hypostasis and prosopon could be translated into the English ‘person’ (or German ‘Person’), with all the connotations of those words in a post-Romantic age. Strauss, for instance (a quotation Bruce used): ‘to speak of two natures in one person is to speak of a single self-consciousness, for what else could a single person mean?’ However, it is clear that in the patristic construction of Trinity and Christology such ‘personal’ characteristics as ‘self-consciousness’, if considered at all, were attached to natures not persons—this was, for instance, the whole point of the orthodox solutions to the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. (This is why Barth preferred ‘mode of being’ to ‘person’ for the three hypostases of the Trinity; in post-Romantic terms, all that is ‘personal’ in God is one.) Bruce’s whole lecture was constructed on the suggestion that nineteenth-century German Christology, at least, was endlessly struggling with how to hold together the confession that the human nature is anhypostatic (it does not exist apart from in union with the divine Son) and that there is a genuinely human will alongside the divine will in the incarnate One (‘dithelitism’). I think this is an extraordinarily perceptive reading of the history, but I also think that, with a clearer understanding that the word ‘hypostasis’ does not mean ‘person’ in a Romantic sense, we can cut through the problem very easily. Footnote: anyone know how to enter Greek on a wordpress...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (1)
Bruce McCormack’s TF Torrance lectures went under the title ‘The Humility of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christology’. They represent the maturity of a project Bruce announced in an IJST article (‘Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’ IJST 8 (2006), pp. 243-51), and has developed in my hearing in papers given in a conference on Hebrews in St Andrews (to be published next year in McDonald, Driver, Bauckham, & Hart (eds), The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Eerdmans)), and at the 2007 Rutherford House Dogmatics Conference. No doubt the theme has also been worked on in public elsewhere. I published the IJST article, and questioned Bruce after the two earlier presentations. It was clear from the start that he was doing something interesting, but there were serious questions raised. Let me say at the start that in his TFT lectures Bruce has developed his proposal into something weighty and serious—more so than any similar reconstruction that I am aware of in recent English-language theology. The first lecture, ‘Immutable in Impassibility: The Role Played by Classical Theism in Creating the Unresolved Problems in Chalcedonian Orthodoxy,’ covered the development of Christology in the patristic period down to the Lutheran-Reformed controversies of the sixteenth century, with a particular focus on Cyril of Alexandria, the Chalcedonian settlement, and John of Damascus. Bruce argued, essentially, that all Christology in the patristic and Reformation periods was hamstrung by the fact that it was constructed on the assumption of a substance metaphysics. ‘God’ and ‘humanity’ were different sorts of things, that could not be mixed. Something was either one or the other. All patristic Christology was a series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to escape this basic logic, which however proved inescapable. Cyril’s attempt was the most interesting, but relied on an unacceptable Origenist subordinationism (this interpretation of Cyril comes from McGuckin’s St Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy). If I say that this was the weakest of the four lectures, understand that this is rather like talking about the weakest member of Arsenal’s midfield—in four performances, each stunningly good, one is inevitably going to be slightly less good than the others. Bruce was trying to deal with an immense amount of material (the whole development of patristic Christology, and the Reformed-Lutheran debates as well), and he would admit himself that patristics in particular is not his period. It seems to me that Bruce was using this background to demonstrate the necessity of his constructive proposal. That is, as far as I could work out listening to the four lectures, Bruce’s own account of Christology does not depend on anything in his account of this history for its validity; however, the pressure he feels for developing a new account of Christology does. One theme of these lectures is the problem of substance metaphysics. On McCormack’s account, all Christology prior to Hegel has been infected by this: the theologians assumed such metaphysics, and it prevented them from saying the things they wanted/needed to say, or at least from saying them consistently. As a result, classical Christology needs to be re-written for a post-metaphysical...
Read More
Recent Comments