Future rolodex entries - Christology, Pneumatology

From “Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics: Christology” by David Scaer :

“If the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is the center of Christian theology, then Christology is the foundation upon which rest justification and all the other articles of faith. Only that doctrine of justification is Christian which is based on the Christology revealed in the New Testament and later confessed by the ancient church in its Creeds and councils. It contradicts Luther’s theology to begin with faith and then argue to the necessity of Christology. An overemphasis on faith in the doctrine of justification may in fact make faith and not Christ the most important component of our salvation. As Luther himself put it, “He who wants to discuss sin and grace, Law and Gospel, Christ and man, in a manner befitting a Christian must for the most part, discuss nothing else than God and man in Christ.”

The orthodox understanding of Christ, which was prominently set forth by the ancient councils of Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, provided the normative standard for the Christology incorporated into the Lutheran Confessions. The ancient meetings of church leaders were called “ecumenical” councils because the great centers of Christendom in the Roman Empire were represented at the councils, including Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch. The decisions of these early church councils provided the foundation of a faith which is truly called “catholic” because it is this faith which has provided the doctrinal standard by which the person and work of Christ has been understood by Christians until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The sixteenth century Lutherans did not depart from this catholic and ecumenical Christology, but affirmed it as the correct teaching of the Holy Scriptures and made it the basis for their understanding of justification. As a testimony to the Lutheran fathers’ desire to remain faithful to the ancient faith stands the Catalog of Testimonies, an appendix to the Book of Concord, in which is listed the testimony of the early church fathers in regard to Christology. It is quite fascinating to note that at the time of the Reformation Lutherans and Roman Catholics accepted each other’s formal understanding of Christ’s person and work. This agreement on the formal aspects of Christology broke down, as far as the Lutherans were concerned, because the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by works was in fact a denial of Christ’s atonement. The Church of Rome did not permit its Christology, on which there was basic agreement with the Lutherans, to inform its doctrine of justification. But the point still remains that in spite of divisive disagreements in many other areas, the majority of Christian bodies have understood the person and work of Christ in terms set forth in the early church councils and Creeds.

The distinguishing factor of the early church’s Christology was the understanding that the person of Christ, the divine Logos, existed before His incarnation. The preexistent Logos together with the human nature form one person, the God-man Jesus Christ. This is the teaching of the Nicene Creed: “[Jesus] Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary.” Even those whom the ecumenical councils found to be heretical held some form of belief in the preexistence of Jesus. The Councils of Nicea in 325 A.D. and Constantinople in 381 A.D. grappled with the issue of the preexistence and definition of Jesus’ divine nature. The Councils of Ephesus, 431 A.D., and Chalcedon, 451 A.D., addressed the character of the relationship of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ. The former condemned the Nestorian error that Jesus had two centers of personality, one divine and the other human. The latter affirmed the distinctiveness of the two natures in one person against Eutyches, who held that Christ had “one nature, that of God made flesh and become man.”3 Nicea settled the issue with the confession that the Son of God, who had become incarnate as Jesus, was truly God and was óμοούσιος with the Father. Chalcedon reaffirmed the Nicean confession and explained that the divine and human nature exist, “without confusion, without change, without division and without separation.” The personal union of the divine and human natures of Christ does not in any way detract from the unique characteristics of each nature. Rather, each is preserved in such a way that Christ is only one person and not two. The difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each preserved, and both concurring in one person πρόσωπον and one hypostasis (ύπόστασις)—not parted or divided into two persons (προσώπα), but one and the same Son and Only-Begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from of old [have spoken] concerning Him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and as the Symbol of the Fathers has delivered to us.

The formulators of Chalcedonian Christology understood themselves as preserving the Biblical teaching on Christ as it had been set forth by Nicea and Constantinople. The Christology of the early church and its councils is clearly a Christology “from above.” It presupposed the preexistence of the divine nature. It is a Christology drawn from the Holy Scripture, the special revelation given to the prophets and apostles. This Christology “from above” prevailed in the church until the eighteenth century, at which time the Scriptures began to be understood merely as a collection of historical documents rather than as the divinely inspired Word of God. Since the eighteenth century the Scriptures have not been viewed as a unified whole, but rather as a collection of documents containing conflicting and competing Christologies. Thus it is proposed that Paul and John, who set forth the belief in the preexistence of the Son of God, represent a more advanced Christology than the “primitive” Christology contained in the synoptic gospels, a view which will be challenged in this volume. The New Testament writings are not seen as divine oracles, but only as the early Christian congregations’ expression of a Christology which evolved as the community progressed in its understanding of who Jesus was. Since this faith varied from place to place, there arose a variety of conflicting views about Jesus Christ. This variety of Christological opinions is reflected in the diversity of the New Testament documents. This view began to be accepted during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, was furthered by Schleiermacher, and has persisted to this day with few exceptions.

A noteworthy exception to this Christology “from below” is found in Karl Barth who claimed that the Incarnation was instigated by God. Though Barth is seen by certain leading Evangelical scholars as reviving the ancient church’s Christology,5 his emphasis on “the transcendent” may, in fact, make a real Incarnation impossible for him. The analogy of being (analogia entis), the concept that man has a natural knowledge of God because of the similarity between the Creator and the creature, is denied by Barth and replaced by the analogy of faith.6 In any event Barth does speak of the Trinity and Christ with the language of the ancient councils. Jurgen Moltmann, like Barth, speaks of two natures in Christ, but by attributing the death of Christ to the divine nature casts doubt on his understanding of the Incarnation. He speaks of the dying of the Godhead in the death of Jesus in a way which would not be possible for the early church which held that the Son of God died according to the human nature. In Moltmann’s opinion all of humanity is eventually absorbed into God because of the suffering of Christ. This view is not pantheistic, but it is panentheistic, which is the view that God is not only present but accessible in all things.

The views of Rudolf Bultmann, who claimed that Jesus was only a man, prevailed over Barth’s position and became the connecting link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bultmann perpetuated the minimal Christology of Adolph von Harnack by publishing Harnack’s book, What Is Christianity?, but at the same time could speak in “high” Christological language in referring to the Christ of faith. According to Bultmann, Jesus did not come from God as the Only-Begotten Son of God; instead, the church elevated Jesus to a position of divine honor through a process of theological evolution. This position had been stated before by the Unitarians who called Jesus “God” only in an honorific sense.7 Wolfhart Pannenberg, a Lutheran theologian at the University of Munich, has become prominent for his attempt to put to use the prevalent view that the New Testament is only a collection of historical documents. From this perspective Pannenberg attempts to construct a Christology “from below.” Pannenberg speaks of Jesus becoming God in the Resurrection, but dilutes this belief by extending the integration of the divine and human in Jesus in such a way as to include all of humanity in this union.8 Moltmann says men are absorbed into God, while Pannenberg reverses this scheme with the view that God is absorbed into humanity. In both theories the Incarnation is so universalized that its uniqueness in the person of Jesus is lost.

The abandonment of Chalcedonian Christology was caused by a restrictive historical approach to the Christology of the New Testament. This practice is not limited to Protestant theologians. Piet J.A.M. Schoonenbert, in his book The Christ, claims that the man Jesus gives a personality to the Word of God.9 The humanity of Jesus does not allow for the Incarnation of the divine Logos. In a way the problem of a separate human personality, addressed by Schoonenbert, was faced by the Council of Ephesus in its condemnation of Nestorius. Nestorius wanted to maintain the historical personality of Jesus, but he did it by posing two persons, one divine and one human.10 Nestorius spoke of one πρόσωπον of Christ, one “person” of Christ, one object of perception, “one external undivided appearance,” but each nature is distinct and not identical with the prosopon.11 Thus he speaks of Mary as Χριστοτόκος, the bearer of Christ, but not as the Θεοτόκος, the bearer of God. Nestorius, in preserving the unique characteristics of both the divine and human natures had sacrificed the unity of His person. The contemporary Christology “from below” simply does not take the preexistent divine nature into account. To preserve the human nature Schoonenbert eliminates the divine nature altogether, a position which was not an option even for the heretics condemned by the ecumenical councils. This approach characterizes most modern approaches to Christology. Edward Schillebeeckx attempts to harmonize Roman Catholicism’s commitment to the doctrine of the Trinity with his conviction that Christology must be approached “from below.” This allows him to speak of the Trinity from the perspective of Christology.

It is true that the question of how the Trinity is revealed to humanity must be answered from the perspective of Christology. The revelatory question can not be confused, however, with the ontological one which lies at the heart of the Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon. Jesus is the preexistent Son of God, the divine Logos, even though this knowledge comes to us only by means of His incarnation. Schillebeeckx is unable to move beyond speaking of Christ’s divinity in functional terms as the one in whom God gives us salvation. Another well known Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, who has been disqualified by the pope as a teacher of doctrine at the University of Tubingen because of his theological position, attributes to Christ only a functional deity.13 He is willing to use the Christological language of the Nicene Creed, but interprets this only in the functional sense of God revealing Himself in Jesus. As radical as these Roman Catholic theologians are, they are bound to tradition in a way that Protestants are not and as a result they make some attempt to incorporate the terminology of the ancient councils in their functional Christology. Such a view may be called a “Christology of revelation” because Christ reveals God without being God Himself. But like their Protestant counterparts, these Roman Catholic theologians are never able to move successfully from a Christology “from below” to one “from above.”

Their approach may be more deceptive. Their use of traditional Christological language of the Creeds hides their true intentions. Any Christology which goes no further than a discussion of the historical Jesus places itself in opposition to the Christology of the Scriptures as well as that of the early church. Christology “from below” was popularized by the late Anglican bishop and Cambridge don, John A.T. Robinson, in his books, Honest to God and The Human Face of God. He describes the divine and human qualities of Jesus with traditional language. But when he speaks of Jesus as “the personal representative of God: He stands in God’s place, He is God to us and for us,” he is setting up a different Christology from that of Chalcedon. In the last years of his life Robinson gave up his attempts at dogmatics and devoted himself to New Testament studies, where his views were surprisingly conservative. As a theologian, Robinson was not a particularly original thinker and only synthesized the views of others. A lack of clarity and an inability to grapple with the materials may have been his real problem. To him, nevertheless, belongs the credit of bringing views into the open which the majority of scholars have held for nearly two centuries, so that the laity could understand.

The issue of Christology “from below” came to inflammatory expression in The Myth of God Incarnate. As occurs in any collection of essays from a group of authors, it lacks unity of thought, except in its consistent denial of orthodox Christology and its substitution of a Christology “from below.” A debate began on British soil and soon raged throughout the English-speaking world. Frances Young, one of the contributors, “discovered” that even the apostle Paul did not have an incarnational theology. John Hick, the editor, finds the Incarnation pernicious because it implies that there is no salvation outside of Christianity. He calls for a recognition of God’s work through other religions. The Myth was answered by The Truth of God Incarnate. A subsequent volume in the debate, published in 1979 and appropriately entitled, Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, put the issue squarely on the table. Brian Hebblewaithe’s article asks, “Are the authors of The Myth still Christians?”

The real question is whether two Christologies, one which comes “from below” and goes no further and the other “from above,” which sees God as the prime and only mover in the Incarnation, can coexist. Hebblewaithe is unwilling to exclude the authors of The Myth from the church. Herein lies the contemporary dilemma the church finds herself in. If the church is only a human organization, then different opinions and views about who Christ is are tolerable. But because the Christian church, by definition, consists of those who confess that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God, as did Peter and the rest of the apostles, then any position which asserts that the Incarnation is a myth is intolerable. Throughout history the church has survived many errors in doctrine and practice, but a church which tolerates a Christology that believes the Incarnation of the preexistent Logos to be “mythical” and not factual history is in the process of destroying itself. Hence the leniency expressed in the excellent response to The Myth of God Incarnate is self-defeating. If Christology does not form the matrix within which the church finds its existence then there is no more church, only a poor imitation.

The current state of Christology “from below” is as dangerous as any error encountered by the early church fathers. The ancient church debated the relationship of the two natures in Christ. Modern Christology all too often understands Jesus in purely historical, human terms. In many theological circles, even those with a distinctive Lutheran heritage, a discussion of the relationship of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ which is faithful to the Scriptures and the ecumenical councils is impossible and is often ridiculed as theologically out of fashion and viewed as hopelessly antiquated and irrelevant. A Christology which wishes to remain faithful to Scripture and the early church Creeds teaches that in the Incarnation we encounter the Son of God, Jesus Christ. As Gerhard Ebeling points out, this was always Luther’s approach, who noted that Christology must begin “from below,” but then must proceed so that it comes “from above.”

The Scriptures begin very gently, and lead us on to Christ as to a man, and then to the one who is Lord over all creatures, and after that to one who is God. So do I enter delightfully and learn to know God. But the philosophers and doctors have insisted on beginning from above. We begin from below, and after that move upwards.22 Following the example of Luther, the Christology of this volume procedes from the Scriptures to the man Jesus and from that point to the confession that Jesus is God’s Son, the Christ, the eternal Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. At the same time the ancient Creeds and the other confessions of faith contained in the Book of Concord of 1580 provide the norm by which the Biblical faith is taught and confessed. The Scriptures are viewed as the inerrant Word of God, even when reflecting the historical situation in which they were composed. The Scriptures’ historical situation presented problems similar to those faced by the church today, e.g., the denial of the resurrection of our Lord. A serious consideration of history is required if one’s theology is to be truly incarnational. On this point we agree with those who do theology “from below.” They start at the right place, in history, with the historical facts. The One who comes to us as a humble babe in Bethlehem invites us to believe that He has come “from above.” A failure to believe the factual accounts of the origin of Jesus of Nazareth contradicts the testimony of the historical documents themselves. This present work will attempt to answer the points raised by those who do their Christology “from below” and consequently are able to go no further than seeing Jesus as the one who reveals God, but who is not God Himself.

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The name “Jesus Christ” indicates the two ways one is able to approach Christology, one way from history or “from below” and the other way through revelation or “from above.” It suggests that He is both human and divine. Strictly speaking, the term “Christology” suggests that those engaged in this study are already convinced that what is known about Jesus as the Christ comes through revelation. It presupposes the validity of the Old Testament. As Peter’s confession (Mt 16:16) makes clear, Jesus who is the Christ is also the Son of God. The angel’s announcement of Christ’s birth (Lk 2:11) reveals that Jesus is also Lord and Savior. These titles are used throughout the New Testament. Christology’s primary concern is Christ’s other-worldly origin from God the Father, assuming without debate that Jesus of Nazareth is an actual figure in human history.

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A number of opinions were circulating to explain the great deeds which the man from Nazareth was performing. Some understood Jesus’ relationship to God as being no different from that of the great prophets like Elijah or Jeremiah, or the more recent figure, John the Baptist (Mt 16:14). However, the only explanation of His relationship to God which Jesus Christ Himself found acceptable was Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Mt 16:16). Jesus explained that such a confession which comes “from above” does not originate in human speculation (Mt 16:17). Paul made it clear that only the Holy Spirit can engender the confession, “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor 12:3). Whenever people confess Jesus as Lord, the Holy Spirit is responsible. On the other hand, whenever people refuse to make this confession and instead view Christ’s relationship to God as being no more than that of a great religious teacher, a prophet like those of old, the Spirit’s work is rejected. Already in the New Testament era, the relationship of the human and divine natures in Jesus, as a true man from Nazareth and as the divine Christ, became the subject of Christology, with one nature being stressed to the neglect of the other.

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Unless the life of Jesus is believed to be historical, as reported in the gospels, Christology is impossible. St. Paul says that without the Resurrection there is no Christianity (1 Cor 15:12–19). The very fact that we exist today leads to the inevitable conclusion that there is a past history from which our origins can be traced and that this history is discoverable and has shaped our present existence. The existence of the church as those persons committed to the teachings of Jesus offers at least some evidence for the existence of Jesus as a figure in human history.15 The same can be said for the founders of Marxism, Buddhism, and Confucianism; but the argument is still valid. Christianity can not claim exemption from a historical critique of its origins without surrendering its claim to be the religion of the Incarnation. The Incarnation means that God is active in human history in one particular historical person—Jesus of Nazareth. The past continues to live in the present and determines the future. This is also true of the present reality of the church whose existence and shape has been determined by Jesus of Nazareth. To make the earliest Christian community the decisive factor for the church over the successive centuries, as Bultmann suggests, leaves the question of who or what shaped that earliest community unanswered. The most satisfactory answer is that Jesus is the decisive factor in the formation of the Christian church.

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The Apostles’ Creed does not include as long a section on the preexistence of Jesus as does the Nicene Creed. It focuses more attention on the life of Christ which began at His conception, but does identify Jesus as μονογενής, a term borrowed from John’s gospel. Μονογενής is best understood as meaning “unique” or “the only one of its kind.” For example, in Luke 7:12 the son of the widow of Nain is described as μονογενὴς υίός and the daughter of Jairus is also described with the same term. The traditional phrase, “the only begotten Son of God,” is somewhat redundant since a son is by very nature “begotten.” Therefore the phrase is meant to emphasize the absolutely unique relationship the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, has with the First Person, the Father. John describes (Jn 1:1–14,18) the Word as one who lived with God before the world’s creation, who shares in the Father’s being, and who was the agent by which the world was created (Jn 1:3). This λόγος is the only begotten from the Father (Jn 1:14) and is Himself called μονογενὴς ϑεòς ό ὢν εις τòν κόλπον το πατρός, “the only begotten God, the one existing in the bosom of the Father” (Jn 1:18). Throughout his gospel, John makes mention of Jesus’ preexistence. John reports Jesus’ claim that He existed before Abraham (Jn 8:53) and that He is one with His Father (Jn 10:30). Jesus says that the Son exists in the Father, just as the Father exists in the Son (Jn 17:21) and that Father and Son perform the same works (Jn 5:19–24). John is not the only New Testament author to write about the preexistence of Jesus. St. Paul also makes mention of the Son’s preexistence. In Galatians Paul makes it clear that “God sent forth His Son … ” (Gal 4:6).3 Nor is the Son’s preexistence absent from Matthew’s gospel where Jesus is identified as being God Himself. His birth fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that there would be one born of a virgin called, “God with us” (Is 7:14, Mt 1:21). Matthew relates Jesus’ words that only He and the Father know each other perfectly (11:27).4 When Jesus called Himself God’s Son (Mt 26:25; Mk 16:64) He was charged with blasphemy precisely because such a claim was viewed as one to equality with God and as such an existence prior to His human existence.

The charge that Lutheran theology depends exclusively on John and Paul for its doctrine of the preexistence of Christ is without foundation. Werner Elert correctly says of Luther: One need read only a few of Luther’s nearly 1,200 sermons on texts from the gospels to realize that although he let Paul sharpen his view of Christ dogmatically, he took the picture of Christ Himself from the gospels and the basis of this picture brought proof that Christ was something different from the angry judge.5 The ancient concept of a heavenly birth and an earthly birth for Jesus was picked up by Luther in the Small Catechism when he wrote, “I believe in Jesus Christ, true God, born from the Father in eternity …” The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son from the Father does not teach a one time action in the past, as the Arians held, but is meant to describe a continuing, permanent, and hence eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. The Father shares His essence with the Son in such a way that the Father’s deity is fully shared by the Son without suffering diminution in the process. Jesus is God’s Son, not only because He is preexistent but also because He shares in the eternality of the Father. Confessional Lutheran theology recognizes that Jesus is one person, or personality, but asserts that this person is the preexistent Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. He derives His eternal existence from God and thus is God Himself. However, only the Son is He who, “for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”

According to the New Testament the action is always initiated “from above;” as John says, “The Word was made flesh.” The Son of God is not changed in the Incarnation, but He enters into a relationship which He has not personally experienced before. He becomes man. In the Incarnation the Son of God assumed human flesh. But did He then assume a human personality? Or stated another way, did the Son of God join Himself to an autonomous human person when He became a man? The Scriptural and Lutheran response to the questions posed has always been no. In the Incarnation the Son of God took on flesh, but not another personality. Therefore the human nature of Christ is different from any other human nature in a negative sense, by ὰνυποστασια, anhypostasia (having no personality of its own) and, in a positive sense, by ένυποστασία, enhypostasia (subsisting entirely in the divine personality).6 Thus in the Incarnation there was begun the personal union of the divine person of the Son of God with the human nature, and thus there are in Christ Jesus two natures, divine and human, but only one person—the Son of God. Confessional Lutheranism has always taught that at the moment of our Lord’s conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary the human nature of Christ shared fully in the Trinitarian life of God.7 By virtue of the personal union of the divine Son of God with the Person of Jesus Christ, the God-man, rules the world and fills all things. The human nature is not absent from this universal rule, but shares fully in it.

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The Reformed are encumbered with an overly structured view of the universe and their classic axiom that the finite is incapable of the infinite (finitum non est capax infiniti). This means that, by philosophical definition, the human nature of Christ, can not embrace the divine nature. The principle of the incapability of the finite to be joined to or associate with the infinite attacks the heart of Christianity as a religion of God’s salvific revelation and easily unravels any meaningful Christology. If the finite is intrinsically incapable of entering into union with the infinite, then the finite has the possibility of being an obstacle to the infinite, and thereby, at this one point, superior to it. Taken to an extreme, the impossibility of a relationship between the finite and the infinite results in pure agnosticism, since any relationship between God and His creation becomes impossible. Human beings would never be able to know anything about God at all. Fortunately, the Reformed are inconsistent and do not draw this conclusion and thereby deny all knowledge of God, but it is the logical conclusion of their philosophical principles. They firmly hold to natural knowledge and man’s ability to understand the Scriptures, but the Spirit has to be added outside of the Scriptures for saving knowledge.11 In the question of salvation, they apply this principle when they teach that the certainty of salvation does not come through the preached or written Word, but through a direct indwelling of the Holy Spirit.12 When Calvin applied this principle to the Incarnation, he quite logically concluded that the Deity was so enormous that it can not be embraced by the humanity of Jesus. Lutherans dubbed this teaching the extra Calvinisticum.13 Had Calvin been even more consistent, he would have denied the Incarnation entirely.

The same principle is at work in the Christology of Karl Barth. The Word does not become flesh, but only assumes flesh. Barth’s distinction between “becoming” and “assuming” is very important. The humanity of Jesus mirrors the divine. Gustaf Wingren offers this assessment of Barth:

‘We find a line of thought in Barth which strongly emphasizes that the gulf between the divine and human remains unbridged even in the Incarnation. Thus the idea was presented, especially in Die Kirchliche Dogmatik III:2, that the humanity mirrors the divine in Jesus Christ. The idea of a mirror or a reflection occurs frequently in Barth’s writings, and it means everywhere the same: a distance between two spheres; and, in addition, a reflection of the relatively higher sphere in the lower.’15

In Lutheran theology God is not remote but is rather so close to man that the Incarnation is understood as a real expression of what God is like. It must be asserted, that in a negative sense, sin was the cause of the Incarnation; but yet, the Incarnation is not foreign to God, as if He were doing something unnatural.

Before the Fall God conversed with man (Gn 1:28–31). In Lutheran theology it is sin which separated man from God, but in Reformed theology, even before sin came into the world, there existed a natural chasm between the Creator and the creation. For the Reformed Christ is not only the Intercessor before God for sinful man, but also the Mediator between God as Creator and man as creature. The Reformed principle of the impossibility of the involvement of the finite and the infinite with each other is not an inconsequential philosophical principle, but one which gives meaning to the totality of their theology. Thus this principle, beginning with Christology, distorts all the articles of the Christian faith. For Calvin, the gap between God and man is bridged only in an incomplete way by the Incarnation and not at all by the Sacraments. In Reformed theology the immediate, internal working of the Holy Spirit on the heart of man bridges the gap between God and man.

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A similar attitude is found in the Reformed concept of revelation, when the Word is not viewed as the vehicle of the Spirit but as in need of a special, immediate working of the Spirit to be effective in creating and sustaining faith. The bridge between heaven and earth is spanned by the Spirt and not by the human nature of Christ.

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Confessional Lutheran Christology operates with both earth and heaven, not in Reformed spatial terms, but in the sense of the Nicene Creed, ‘things visible and invisible.’ The Incarnation and Resurrection appearances do not involve some sort of ‘space travel’ from heaven to earth, as if they are two places removed from one another. Christ was manifested in the flesh (1 Tim 3:16) and He appeared to His disciples (1 Cor 15:5-8). He makes Himself seen. With this understanding of reality, which does not see the universe divided into spaces, but into the distinctions of visible and invisible, the Formula of Concord predicates divine attributes to the human nature of Christ. The human nature, by virtue of the personal union with the Son of God, shares in all the majesty and glory which the Son had with the Father and the Spirit from all eternity. The human nature is said to receive all glory, honor, power, and might in time, and is exalted to God’s right hand of majesty and power. The true mystery of the Incarnation is not that in it God expressed a close and natural relationship with His creation, but that He assumed a form which had the same limitations imposed by sin on His creation, a fate all human beings have in common; The fact that in Christ God was made man is the great mystery of the faith, which must be, strictly speaking, kept distinct from the teaching that He was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. The latter truth is the way in which the great mystery of the faith was accomplished. Consequently, incarnation, in the sense of God assuming a created form, can not be viewed as completely alien to the nature of God, who is Creator. In the presence of such a mystery, that God assumed the form of a servant whose weaknesses made Him resemble all other human beings even to the point of His death, St. Paul calls on heaven and earth to bow the knee in wonder and amazement (Phil 2:5-11).

In the tradition of Chalcedon, Lutherans confess that Christ is one person or ego, but with the human and divine natures distinct in regard to their respective natural properties. The divine nature possesses by nature all the attributes of God, e.g., omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience and the human nature possesses typical human attributes such as hunger, thirst, and limitations of space and time. The personal union of the two natures in Christ is so complete that each nature is operative through the other, not in such a way that they are confused, but rather in such a way that there is a real communication of attributes between the two natures. Mary actually gives birth to God and therefore is quite correctly given the title of Theotokos, the God-bearer, and is known as the Mother of God. The union between the two natures in Christ is so complete that the Lutheran Confessions teach, ‘It was not a plain, ordinary, mere man who for us suffered, died, was buried, descended into hell, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and was exalted to the majest and omnipotent power of God, but a man whose human nature had such a profound and ineffable union and communion with the Son of God that it has become one person with Him.’

What is distinctively Lutheran is the understanding that because of this personal union, the man Jesus, whom the Formula calls, ‘the Son of man,’ always possesses the divine majesty with all of God’s attributes, a point which the Reformed have continued to oppose. Berkhof claims that the Lutheran assertion that the divine attributes are communicated to the human nature is tantamount to its denial. Luther had to face a similar charge; namely that his Christology was similar to the Eutychian fusion of the divine and human in Christ. The Reformer’s theology of the cross was a strong affirmation of Christ’s humanity.

When Lutheran theology speaks of the humiliation of Christ this is not meant to imply that at some point the divine nature of Christ relinquished its attributes, or that Jesus never did possess any divine attributes. Rather by humiliation it is understood that during the years before His descent and resurrection the divine attributes were not exercised in their full majesty and glory. In the nineteenth century some Lutheran theologians, led by Thomasius, held that the divine nature and not the human nature was the subject of the humiliation in that the divine nature was ‘emptied’ of all divine attributes. This theory, known as kenoticism, was a somewhat bizarre attempt to combine traditional Christology, revived in a renewed interest in the Lutheran Confessions, with then contemporary understandings of the historical Jesus. As developed by Thomasius, it made use of the view, popularized by Schleiermacher, that Jesus was an autonomous historical person who was developing a religious sense about Himself as divine.

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Confessional Lutheran Christology asserts that Jesus performs both divine and human actions at the same time. He knows all things, yet must learn and grow as any normal child. The world depends upon Him for its very existence, yet, as a babe in arms, Christ depended on the Virgin Mary for sustenance. According to His divine nature, Christ fills all things, yet, during the days of His earthly sojourn, He was confined to one place. It may be argued that in the history of Christian theology none understood the implications of the Incarnation better than did Martin Luther.

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Revere Franklin Weidner, Pneumatology, p. 90: “In the Gospel of John the central signification of faith is unmistakable. It is worthy of note that the noun pistis does not occur in the Gospel of John; but the word pisteuein occurs more frequently than in all the other three Gospels together. The whole object of the Gospel is summed up in this: ‘That ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His name,’ John 20:31. In every relation of our Lord the Gospel of John depicts that education which He gives to faith, to a faith which detaches itself from objects of sense and grounds itself upon His Word. They who saw and therefore believed, were reminded of the superior blessedness of those who had not seen and yet had believed, John 20:29. This faith has Christ Himself in the character of Savior as the substance to which it clings. In this faith in Jesus Christ, faith in God is consummated. The two are inseparable, ‘Ye believe in God, believe also in me,’ John 14:1.”

Have all of my thoughts been a description of loveless faith? “For faith is the beginning and the end is love, and God is the two of them brought into unity.”
— St. Ignatius of Antioch

“Of all these things none is hidden from you if you are single-hearted and if you direct your faith and love toward Jesus Christ. These are the beginning and the end of life: the beginning is faith, the end is love. The two bound together in unity are God. Everything else that belongs to goodness follows from these. No one who professes faith sins, and anyone who possesses love does not hate. The tree is known by its fruit.”

“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” (John 11:25). Believes, not acts as though he believes—and belief at least involves the mind.