We have been turning our attention to the question of whether God is impassible—that is, that God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer. Last time around, we explored how impassibility was a key element in the early Christian understanding of creation—that God made everything from nothing, and did so as a free choice out of pure goodness. This time around, we turn our attention to God’s law.
What do we make of a God who seeks to regulate and micromanage our lives—who forbids us from even gaining the knowledge of good and evil? Worst of all, what does it say about God that he demands that everyone spend their lives serving him and glorifying him? Surely here we see evidence that God is fundamentally selfish—even proud. Would a good God want our lives to be all about him? Any parent who did that with their children would be immediately seen to be guilty of monomania. Why is God a special case?
Rich, perfect and in need of nothing
Once again, this issue was addressed in the first couple of centuries of the Church’s existence; this accusation is as old as Gnosticism. Also once again, Irenaeus expressed a profoundly biblical response, once again drawing heavily on God’s impassibility. He states in Against Heresies book 4 chapter 14,
Nor did He stand in need of our service when He ordered us to follow Him; but He thus bestowed salvation upon ourselves. For to follow the Saviour is to be a partaker of salvation, and to follow light is to receive light. But those who are in light do not themselves illumine the light, but are illumined and revealed by it: they do certainly contribute nothing to it, but, receiving the benefit, they are illumined by the light. Thus, also, service [rendered] to God does indeed profit God nothing, nor has God need of human obedience; but He grants to those who follow and serve Him life and incorruption and eternal glory, bestowing benefit upon those who serve [Him], because they do serve Him, and on His followers, because they do follow Him; but does not receive any benefit from them: for He is rich, perfect, and in need of nothing. But for this reason does God demand service from men, in order that, since He is good and merciful, He may benefit those who continue in His service. For, as much as God is in want of nothing, so much does man stand in need of fellowship with God. For this is the glory of man, to continue and remain permanently in God’s service. (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation)
Why does God command obedience? It’s not because he needs it. Why must we serve and follow God? It’s not for anything God gets out of it. God is, to use the term, impassible. As Irenaeus puts it, God is “in want of nothing”; he does not stand in need of our service for “service [rendered] to God does indeed profit God nothing”. He receives no benefit from his followers following of him for “He is rich, perfect, and in need of nothing”. In a multitude of ways, Irenaeus stresses that we can give nothing to God; we cannot affect him one way or another. In his relationship with us, God is entirely impassible. He gets nothing out of our service to him.
Behind such a notion lies passages such as Romans 11:34-36:
“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
No-one has ever given to God that God should repay him; God is no man’s debtor. From God are all things; from his infinite, inexhaustible abundance, we exist and have our being. Even if we wrapped creation with a ribbon and gave it to God as a gift, we add nothing to him, for God was in no way lessened by making everything in the first place. As Irenaeus puts it, “He is rich, perfect, and in need of nothing”. God is impassible.
That impassibility makes any notion of a selfish law nonsensical. A God who can be given nothing has no need for his creatures’ worship, obedience, or service.
In relationship
Why then does God require us to glorify him, worship him, obey and serve him? Why not simply let us live our lives in peace and enjoy the gifts he gave us in creation without making such total demands upon us?
Here, again, Irenaeus points the way, bringing out the positive aspect of impassibility—that God is ever-giving and we are ever-receiving. For someone to be in the light, they must follow the light. By following the light, they remain in the light and get all the benefits that come from being in the light. But they add nothing to the light by following it and walking in it. The good that light offers cannot be detached from light and gotten independently of a relationship with light. One has to follow and walk in light to be illuminated. To be illuminated, one needs some kind of connection with light itself.
God is light. The word of God is the light that illumines everyone. In this powerful biblical image is the point that Irenaeus draws upon for his illustration. God’s greatest blessings that he seeks to give humanity—eternal life, light, goodness, love and truth—are not trading cards that God can give out and pass around. God can only give us such things by giving us himself. These are all qualities that are proper to God alone; only God is light, is love, has life in himself, is good, is true. For us to enjoy these blessings, we must, in some way, share in God’s own life. The gift and the Giver are, at the end of the day, one and the same. As John 17:3 says, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”.
So why does God command us to obey him, glorify him and serve him? Because this is what it means to be in relationship with him, and being in relationship with God is the only way to enjoy the blessings that properly belong to God alone. As Irenaeus says, “when He ordered us to follow Him … He thus bestowed salvation upon ourselves. For to follow the Saviour is to be a partaker of salvation.” and “But for this reason does God demand service from men, in order that, since He is good and merciful, He may benefit those who continue in His service”. We, not God, receive the benefit from our service of God. In his service, we find true blessing, and this is because he is impassible and we are passible, or as Irenaeus powerfully puts it, “For, as much as God is in want of nothing, so much does man stand in need of fellowship with God”. We need fellowship with God precisely because he needs nothing at all, being the source of everything worth having.
Here, again, Irenaeus is standing on Scripture. Consider Jesus’ words in John 15:5: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” Here we are told that continuing in fellowship with the Lord Jesus benefits us, not him. We bear much fruit as a result of the relationship, and without it, we can do nothing. The relationship exists for our sakes, not our Lord’s.
And how is such a relationship maintained? John 15:10 spells it out: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love”. We maintain the relationship by the kind of love that obeys Christ’s commands—the kind of love that follows, serves and glorifies him. That is, Jesus obeys the Father’s commands and remains in the Father’s love, and the Father and the Son glorify another and so eternally relate to one another (as we observed last time). So also we enter into a similar relationship—obeying and glorifying the Father through the Son. Our glorifying God is nothing special; it is simply what the Father and the Son do throughout the ages. But it is very special for us, for it connects us to the one who is life,light and truth, and it enables us to have a share in God’s own eternal life.
Our creaturely passibility cries out for God’s impassibility to overflow to us and lift us to a kind of life that is beyond anything we could naturally achieve. God gives; we receive—a beautiful partnership that rebounds to our eternal benefit. And within such a framework, the law—God’s demands that we love him, serve him, glorify him and follow him—are neither selfish, nor miserly. They are the path of life, for if we could live perfectly like that, we would have never died. God’s glory is the highest good for his creatures because contained within it is everything that makes God great and good, and when God is glorified, we receive the benefit of such a close connection with him. When Paul looks ahead to end of all things in 1 Corinthians 15:28 and sees that the final outcome of salvation will be that “God may be all in all”, this is not the annihilation of everything other than God, or all being swallowed up in God, but our utter exaltation, where we have communion with God to the absolute limit possible for a creature. Eden will envy us on that day.
In our context, we often seem to struggle with the issue of God’s glory. Apologetically, it is not unheard of for people to challenge the goodness of a God who demands people worship him (and sends to hell those who do not comply). In our teaching and preaching, we often stress God’s love for us (and rightly so), but the idea that he seeks his own glory is less clearly sounded. In our discussions about the gathering of the people of God (i.e. church), there is often debate about the place that praising and glorifying God has in an understanding of the meeting that often sees it predominantly horizontal terms: God speaks to us, we speak to each other about God, but almost nothing in the service is directed to God. We seem to have lost the sense that the most edifying thing one can do for a congregation is to glorify God and set forth just how great and good he is. To praise God publicly, leading people in glorifying him, is a genuine act of love for them. What should be instinctive has become problematic.
I suggest that these are all issues that could be helped with more impassibility in our diet. When we begin to grasp that God is neither benefited or harmed by our actions, but is a never-ending source of everything good that we receive, then we are in a position to bring together his love for us and his concern for his own glory. Far from being in tension, God’s impassible, invincible love is most profoundly expressed when he seeks his own glory—because in God’s glory, we are the ones truly glorified.
Thanks for these three articles, Mark. Some good stuff here. Some stretching ideas.
<i>because in God’s glory, we are the ones truly glorified.</i>
What a corker! And how wonderful of you to remind us of it, Mark.
Genesis 6:5-6:
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
Humans can cause God to grieve. Thus, we are all called to “Be holy.”
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+19:1-2&version=ESV
(BTW, I know the Christian idea that no Human can “Be [perfectly] holy”—well, sure. But you can _try_, right?)
Mikey Lynch and Gordon Cheng,
You are very welcome for the series, glad you found it profitable.
Scott Doty,
Thanks for your contribution, it’s a good highlighting of the connection between God’s grief and the call to holiness.
I agree that we can provoke God’s wrath, grieve him, and please him. My question is whether that means the same thing in our relationship with God as it does in our relationship with each other.
Genesis 6:5-6 does not only say that God was ‘grieved,’ it also states that God was sorry that he made man. The overwhelming majority of Christians have understood that this cannot be taken at face value. For God to be sorry that he made man in the way a human would be would mean that God had second thoughts about creating the human race. Such an idea would seem to contradict the Bible’s teaching about God’s perfect wisdom, his perfect knowledge of the future, and his control over the world, as well as his love for the world.
Consequently, most Christians read that ‘God was sorry that he made man’ and understand that it means something – and something very significant. But they don’t read it as a straightforward window into the internal life of God.
I’d suggest that Scripture’s language that God is grieved should be understood similarly – it means something, and something very significant, but it shouldn’t be read as trying to get inside God’s inner emotional life.
It is, as with all of Scripture, primarily a statement designed to speak to our relationship with God in space and time, not primarily to speak directly about what is happening to God in his internal world.
Hi Mark,
There’s obviously serious danger in questioning centuries of theological thinking, but where angels fear to tread… So here are my primary concerns with this doctrine:
1. Much theologising, particularly in this realm, is somewhat troubling because it is not derived from exegesis so much as an imposition of a framework on exegesis. One example of this has always been the treatment by some theologians and exegetes of the “image” and “likeness” of God in Genesis 1. It can also be seen in some theological treatments of the doctrine of the Trinity, but perhaps most pervasively it appears in theological treatments of the impassibility of God.
2. This particular theological framework ultimately appears to diminish the status of God’s revelation: God reveals in human language but, when referring to God, the language cannot mean what it means in all other contexts. It is no longer perspicuous in any real sense. If God is a speaking God and relates to us through language, if human language itself finds its roots in God, then this would seem to have implications for language about God in his revelation to us. Ultimately, notions of absolute impassibility call into question the effectiveness of God’s ability to communicate with us. This is particularly troubling when essentially passible language is said to have an impassible meaning!
3. It undermines the relational nature of God. If “image” does incorporate any notion of relationship (as suggested by the plurality of the image in Gen 1) then the language of relationship could be expected to reflect something of the nature of the Creator in the creature made in his image.
4. ISTM that the reason why God created is never comprehensively explicated in Scripture and hence any proposal is probably incomplete. Consequently the idea that God created so he could be good to someone/something cannot be said to offer a comprehensive account of God’s motives.
5. It seems to go too far to conclude that if God is affected by his creation then he needs it in some way. Surely this all reduces to matters of metrics — how things are measured, how “need” is measured or assessed. Are we less without things that affect us? Perhaps in some cases, but in all cases?
Hi Martin,
Just regarding your first point on the above concerns: being a theological student at MTC presently, I often hear this one bantered around.
It actually gets me thinking though: what evidence is there for this claim? Is it a claim from silence, or does it have substantial support?
Ie, “1. Much theologising, particularly in this realm, is somewhat troubling because it is not derived from exegesis so much as an imposition of a framework on exegesis.”
Anyway question is: what exegetical work through history have you interacted with on this doctrine? Just curious, because I’d be keen to know who the exegetical work to check out…
Thanks,
Mark
Hello Mark.
To fully answer your questions would go well beyond the strictures of this forum’s comments thread. In short, I’ve pointed to a couple of starting points. WRT the <i>imago dei</i> you could easily look at virtually any older commentary or systematic theology to see that the “image” and “likeness” are interpreted as “natural qualities” and “supernatural graces,” notions which bear no exegetical relationship to Gen 1.
Beyond this, examination of the use of the Bible in many of the theological debates throughout history will reveal exegesis with which many modern scholars would be uncomfortable. The allegorical exegesis which was not uncommon in the early church is only an extreme example of theology shaping exegesis without due appreciation of the historical, social, and linguistic context. Less extreme examples persist to this day.
Hello Martin, great to hear from you.
I love your five points – I think they open up the issues involved in this kind of question really well. I’ve done a basic draft of an interaction with each point, but I’m going to try and just polish each one a bit and offer four of them (interacting with your points 1,2, 4 and 6) to Karen as possible posts. I think the issues you raise push things out to issues beyond impassibility – and so they’d be great as the basis of fresh posts. We’ll see what Karen wants to do with them. From memory she was hoping to start a longish series of mine on forgiveness and repentance on Monday so she may not want to publish the four things as posts at the same time. If that’s the case I’ll add them as four comments to this thread in a couple of days.
Point 3 is sufficiently contained that I think I can just post my interaction straight to comments now, while we wait to see what happens with the rest.
My immediate question on reading this is: how does impassibility undermine the relational nature of God? How do you know that passibility is a requirement for relationships? What exegesis led you to that conclusion or, given your concerns in point 1, could this be an example of theologising that imposes a framework upon your exegesis?
My further thought has to do with how you see image in Gen 1 and relationship.
Deriving the idea that image involves being in relationship (rather than saying that image is something we are that makes being in relationship possible – which is the more classical view in the Christian tradition) from the fact that man and woman are in the image is, as far as I am aware, original to Barth. And the more I dip into German Idealism (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger so far) the more his reading of Genesis 1 seems to fit neatly into his intellectual context. The Hegelian tradition was trying to find a way to show how we aren’t something first, and then enter into relationships but that the relationships we are in define who and what we are.
So Barth saying that being in the Image of God means to be in relationship is profoundly biblical in the sense that it is a reading of the Bible that entirely reflects a respectable intellectual tradition among non-Christian thinkers of his context. It might seem profoundly biblical to us, because most contemporary evanglelicals are fairly strongly wedded to some kind of empirical foundationalism as their working epistemology (because our society is) and so good insights coming from the Continental Idealism tradition can illuminate aspects of life hitherto hidden in the powerful way that we generally associate with the Bible. Nonetheless, usually we don’t think things are profoundly biblical when they match up neatly with the views of the intellectual elites of the time, unless we happen to like the views. We normally accuse the person of imposing an unhelpful framework upon the Bible.
I am happy for someone to decide that this was one of the (few) areas that Barth got it right in his rejection of pre-existing tradition even though Barth was reading the Bible in of a “theologising framework”, once that person has seriously weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives. I’m somewhat less happy for someone who as their point 1 expressed concern about theologising imposing frameworks upon exegesis to then in their point 3 adopt a bit of Barth’s theology as though it is a self-evident exegetical observation that is immune to the same charge made in point 1 against alternatives.
I don’t find passibility to be self-evidently necessary for relationships. I find Barth’s exegesis about as convincing as suggesting that image in Gen 1 has to do with reproduction because the man and woman were commanded to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. His view is a contender, but I would question whether, when the Bible as a whole is taken into consideration, it is any stronger a contender than more classical alternatives.
I think we’re going to disagree reasonably sharply on all five points – but I think that disagreement, and the way you’ve brought the issues back to such important principles with such an economy of words, might make the discussion valuable more broadly than just impassibility.
Mark said <i>If that’s the case I’ll add them as four comments to this thread in a couple of days.</i>
Please do them as posts instead! Putting them in the comments thread is like hiding the best drugs in the cistern of the toilet.
Hmm, I have no idea why that analogy came into my mind.
Gordon,
Only an evil genius would think of such an analogy; the rest of us would just think ‘lights’, ‘bushels’ and ‘under’ (but perhaps not in that order…)
Hi Mark,
It will be interesting to see where this goes!
In my desire to be brief I may have obscured the logic in my thinking above. My point 3 derives from the preceding points: ultimately, if God relates to us through words but those words cannot be understood reliably (since, when talking about God they do not mean what they normally mean and), then our ability to relate to God through words and understand his self-disclosure in words is impaired. Hence impassibility has some bearing on our ability to relate to God and him to us. So in a sense point (3) was merely a restatement of (2) in terms relating to “image” for those who hold that the image incorporates, in some way, a relational aspect.
To restate the basic point: if talk about anger, love, changing one’s mind, and so forth do not mean, when applied to God, what they normally mean in all other contexts, then can we rely on any language about God to bear the same meaning it normally does? If that’s the case, all knowledge of God derived from Scripture is suspect! This certainly has some bearing on our relationship.
My reference to image is really no more than an aside. Barth’s interpretation of the image also illustrates my point about theology guiding exegesis, partly because he goes far beyond that which can reasonably be derived from the text and what would likely have been understood by the text’s original audience (you’ll note I didn’t mention Barth in my previous points). So, although it is possible that the plurals in Gen 1:26-28 imply a relational aspect to the image, I would not carry this anywhere near as far as Barth. That’s because the image is explicated in the text itself — the purpose or result is related to rule as the syntax and historical context indicate. This much is exegetically quite firm, what remains is whether this exhausts the significance of image or not. I think that the remainder of Scripture would suggest not, but it is rule that is on view in Genesis 1.
Hi Mark
Thanks for these posts. I may have missed this along the way – but does the impassability of God apply only to the Father? The impassability of God holds that “God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer” – but these are the very things that are claimed of Jesus.
To put the question pointedly – would you say that “on the cross God the son died”?
Hi Mark, I notice that you’ve posted a response to my third point, but comments are not allowed in response to that.
I’d like to point out that you have my name wrong, it is “Shields” not “Shield.”
Otherwise, I’ve posted a response on my blog here.
Hi Martin,
Humble apologies for getting your name wrong. It does put you in the same rarefied company as Mr Spock, but I’ll try and make sure I don’t repeat the mistake nonetheless.
Not sure what is going on with the comments being closed on the latest post. I’m hoping it’s just a quirk that Karen can easily fix. I’ll wait a day or two to see if we can make that happen, otherwise I’ll continue the conversation on your blog.
With your point:
It’s not really a you thing here, but a me thing. The building logic of your points is clear (at least to me). Ideally, I would have responded to each point in turn. But that would have then meant leaving your comment for a week until the second post went up (if I have correctly guessed Karen’s revised posting schedule) – which would seem a bit churlish to me, when that’s the only bit that’s going to be left in thiscomment thread.
I’ll leave your fine two paragraphs in your recent comment which expand your concerns on language as that is the subject of the next post in this new series and I don’t want to spread that discussion out over a couple of places. It is possibly where you and I might have our strongest and most important disagreement so as you say, that conversation could prove to be very interesting (and I hope worthwhile for people too).
As to the question of image, I quite agree it was an aside – hence this part of the discussion being in the comments. I also agree that, on balance, I think Gen 1 suggests that being in the image results in having dominion.
However, I think it is a jump that is not grounded in Gen 1 to go from ‘dominion’ to ‘relationship’. ‘Dominion’ involves our relation to that part of creation that is not personal – we have dominion over things not persons.
But ‘relationships’ usually is getting at our relation to personal realities – persons not things.
I don’t have a relationship with a rock, a tree, or even, I would argue, a pet animal. Not in the full sense of what ‘relationship’ is getting at. But I have dominion over them.
It is one of my bugbears at the moment that we seem to be so relationship obsessed that we see relations as immediate proof of relationships (which makes me suspect a theologising framework of the bad kind). It can be argued but when it is simply asserted that image incorporates relationships because it results in dominion then that’s bad theology passing itself off as exegesis, even if we might want to agree with the conclusions if a few more steps were put in the argument.
I will admit to being curious about a point I raised earlier. Do you have a reason for thinking that passibility is necessary for relationships and so impassibility automatically undercuts the relational nature of God?
Hi Tony,
You said:
You are more than welcome for the posts.
Depending on what sense the question was being asked, I would answer either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the question ‘Did God the Son die on the cross’.
Yes, in the sense that God the Son united himself to a human body and soul and that human being died. And whatever was true of that human being is proper to the Son of God.
No, if you are asking do I think that the Son of God ceased to be homoousious with the Father by becoming incarnate and so exchanged the divine for a human nature. The incarnation is an addition, not a subtraction – the Son has two natures, each with their own properties proper to them, not one nature.
Anything true of either nature can be predicated to the Son because he is eternally the one nature and has united himself to the other nature so that it is now proper to him as well. That’s why he’s true God and true Man.
As God the Son cannot die. That remains true after the Incarnation just as much as before it.
Anyone who denies this and claims that the Son died in both natures or that talk of two natures at this point is unhelpful theologising or whatever can make their case that Chalcedon and Nicea are wrong.
But in my view they need to make very clear to people that they reject both the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds. They are outside the bounds of orthodoxy and are claiming that the Church has been engaged in a form of idolatry for at least 1500 years. We worship someone as God who is, at least since the Incarnation, no longer really God in the sense that the Father is.
I’m happy to have that argument – the creeds are only true if they capture what the Bible teaches after all – but people need to be up front about the stakes they’re playing for.
So my basic position is that the Son is everything the Father is, except being Father. And that my salvation depends upon that remaining true in the Incarnation just as much as it depends on him becoming truly man.
Hi Mark,
I’m not connecting dominion and relationship except to suggest that dominion probably does not exhaust the significance of the image and so image may include some relational aspects.
You asked,
As I tried to explain on the newer thread, impassibility undercuts the possibility of knowing God through his words because it renders the meaning of those words opaque.
Hi Martin,
I think I read your third point as building on the previous two by arguing that God is inherently relational because the image in us is, and being impassible is necessarily incompatable with relationships. I can see now that it’s ‘just’ an extension of your language principle from point 2, and your concern is purely with the meaning of relational words that the Bible uses.
As to dominion, relationship and image, I think you might have originally claimed a little bit more for the connection between relationship and image when you said:
This seems a bit more than just saying that dominion doesn’t exhaust the meaning and so there’s room for relationship there as well. It is drawing a clear connection between the relational nature of image in us and the relational nature of God to make a point about relational language. And that point was meant to illustrate and reinforce your very important point 2.
So, at least for the moment, I think I’ll hold onto my criticism of what I think you said, although I’m all for us to agree that that’s not what you meant, and your point 3 was intended only to make a much more modest point: that dominion doesn’t exhaust the concept of Image and so maybe relationship might be there as well. I don’t think that helps your argument in two any – I think you need to argue that Image most likely has relationship in the mix for that to help your point 2. But I’ll defer to your authorial intent on this one.
Hi Mark
What am I missing?
I cannot see how saying that the two natures of Christ died on the cross contravenes both Nicea and Chalcedon.
It is certainly contrary to the statement “God the Son cannot die” (which I cannot find in Chalcedon or Nicea – and so am assuming is part of the doctrine of impassability).
Instead I think it could be argued that the view that the two natures died is in keeping with Chalcedon and Nicea that the two natures are indivisible and inseparable. By contrast the view that Jesus the man died but not God the son – divides the two natures at the point of death.
Thanks for your time
Tony
Hi Tony,
I apologise if I came over too strong in my tone in bringing the issues back to Nicea and Chalcedon. When I say, “Happy to have the discussion” I’m not referring to a comment thread on a blog. I’m referring to a teacher in the Church putting forward the idea in a more-or-less authorative way. Many have, so hence my brandishing of the virtual sabre. But that wasn’t at you – apologies for not making that a lot clearer.
I do have two difficulties with how you’ve argued for your position.
The first is:
Well, yes it is part of the doctrine of impassibility to say that God cannot die. I think if you had stood up at Chalcedon and said “Father and the Spirit are mortal” I think you would have gotten a heresy named after yourself.
So, no, you aren’t going to find the words “the eternal Son of God cannot die according to his divine nature” or something like that. You also won’t find words saying that a divine Person can’t lose an arm in an accident, get hungry, sin, grow in wisdom and strength, make a mistake, or anything else that everyone agreed was utterly impious to say about God.
But that’s not because those Creeds are open to those possibilities. It’s because the Creeds are utterly hostile to them.
Since you’ve brought in Chalcedon’s ‘indivisible and inseparable’ to do with the two natures let’s quote the passage:
You say that saying that the Son of God died in both natures neither separates or divides the two natures. Fair enough, I agree. But would you say that it does not confuse or change the two natures? Especially when the creed says:
Is the property of each nature being deserved? Only if God is mortal.
Why limit this to death, if you are right?
The Son of God came into existence in both natures when he was born and before then he did not exist. (That’s needed for him to be genuinely human).
The Son of God has flesh and blood in both natures.
The Son of God is hungry and eats food in both natures.
The Son of God grows in wisdom and stature and standing with both God and men in both natures.
The Son of God is a creature in both natures.
And then, in order to maintain some hold on the idea that the Son of God is divine we would say:
The man Jesus Christ is omniscient in his humanity.
The man Jesus Christ has always existed.
The flesh and blood of the man Jesus Christ are eveywhere.
The man Jesus Christ made everything in heaven and earth and did so as a man.
The orthodox view is that the Son of God acts as a single subject, and that anything you say about either nature you say about the whole person. The two natures
But that there are two natures each of which keep their own properties.
Whatever you say is true of the Father (apart from Fatherhood) must continue to be true of the incarnate Son or else he is not all that the Father is.
So either the Father is mortal, or the Son did not die according to his divine nature.
Hi Mark
No problems with the sabre-rattling – blogs should be a bit like college (IMHO) a place to fly a kite and have a robust (but healthy) disagreement.
Broadly speaking – I suppose for me – the suspicion/issue that I have had with the whole notion of impassability – is not that it constructs a framework – but that when it runs up against texts that do not fit its framework – it tends to say “this cannot mean what the text says it means”. For my mind the classic is “God made him who had no sin to be sin” (2Corinthians 5:21) – where its argued that the text cannot mean what it says – because of the impassability of God (I think Stott does this – though I have mislaid my copy of the Cross of Christ – where he argues that “to be sin” does not mean “be sin” but rather that “sin came close to Jesus”).
On the specific issue:
<blockquote>So either the Father is mortal, or the Son did not die according to his divine nature<blockquote>
I am not sure that I need to take either of the two options you have laid out. For my mind its like someone saying “well either the ransom was paid to God or the devil – which one was it?” – I just can’t help but think the question is the wrong one to ask – because it has been framed incorrectly.
<cite>Why limit this to death, if you are right?<cite>
Because I don’t think much (if anything) hangs on the other matters you’ve raised, and because I don’t think the Scriptures take me down that path.
But I do think the Scriptures push me to consider that on the cross Jesus (as God and man) dies. I cannot help but wonder if we are somehow diminishing the full scope of the horror, mystery and glory of the cross by saying something like “Jesus as man died on the cross but Jesus as God most certainly did not”.
I think what I want to say is “Tis mystery all the immortal dies”. And then in saying no more – be left reeling from the full weight of what should have been impossible occurring on the cross.
“They are outside the bounds of orthodoxy and are claiming that the Church has been engaged in a form of idolatry for at least 1500 years.”
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#antiquitatem
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke 11:2-4&version=ESV
Don’t mind me, though, I’m a weird “heterodox” “Binarian”, if that is even a word…
Hi Tony,
Well, a framework that does not have to smooth some details is either very, very good, or (far more likely) the product of tortured reasoning from start to finish. So I think you do have a problem with frameworks – you want them to give way as soon as they have to smooth a particular. And that means that they aren’t really a framework at all.
I could agree with you on this kind of point only if I thought the Bible was primarily ‘flat’ in its use of language. This is the other big dimension that I think is often missing in our discussions. (Something I want to blog on sometime.)
There is a spectrum of strategies when it comes to language. One end is what I think of as low risk low reward strategies, the other end is high risk high reward strategies. Academic and professional writing is a low risk low reward strategy – language is used with fixed technical terms, with careful complex sentences, where the rules of communication are designed to enable information to be expounded with a minimum chance of misinterpretation. It’s a safe way of communicating but it can’t do much more than make good arguments – it can’t stir the heart, prick the conscience, stimulate the imagination (except by means of careful arguments).
Preaching and, even more, poetry are high risk high reward strategies. Language is used in ways that are almost begging to be misunderstood: “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out;” “This is my body.” They capture the mind, stir the heart, but they often aren’t meant to be taken literally. And they don’t bother to stop and say, “By the way, don’t take that bit literally.”
And then, in the middle, you can use a mixture of the strategies. You can preach to people in a highly expositional style. And I think that’s what Paul does. He’s not writing to the Academy in his writings. He’s preaching. So that has to be taken into account.
Sometimes he says things with a bit of a rhetorical flourish to drive home the impact, not so much to be giving a precise account of the specifics. And sometimes he does the opposite.
We spend most of our time with Paul, so we tend to assume that he’s the baseline for biblical interpretation. But I think that at times he can be harder to read than OT poetry – because at least there we know we have to think carefully about the possible ways language could be being used.
As a consequence I see taking ‘he was made sin for us’ as a figure of speech as far more responsible than you instinctly feel it is – it could be wrong, and needs to be argued on its merits, but it is entirely in keeping with the Bible’s, and Paul’s, way of using language.
When you adopt high risk high reward strategies then the responsible hearer needs to ‘smooth’ the details in light of the message as a whole. That’s only a problem if you think that poetry and preaching aren’t proper ways of using language – and given the large amount of poetry in the Bible, God doesn’t share that conviction.
So I think frameworks smoothing details is far better grounded in the nature of Scripture than your concern acknowledges.
I’ll pick up the Christological issue with my next comment.
Hi Tony,
Continuing on to the specific issue…
Okay. For the record, I’m not overly happy with the idea that there are wrong questions to ask by and large. Asking ‘to whom was the ransom paid’ is a good question to ask. Because when we finally realised that the answer was ‘nobody’ that helped us get that ‘ransom’ was being used in a highly metaphorical way.
We have to be prepared for hearing “We can’t answer that question” and there are attitudes behind a question that can be wrong, but I think we should just ask our questions of Scripture and accept whatever answer it does or does not give.
I’m happy for you say that the choice between “the Father is mortal” or “the Son did not die according to his divine nature” is a wrong way of phrasing the issue.
But my point was that if you agree with Chalcedon then that’s the choice you have. That’s how Chalcedon framed the issue by saying that neither nature undergoes change or confusion because of the union in Christ.
So you can say that it is a wrong framing, but you are also saying that Chalcedon is wrong about a substantial issue that lies close to the heart of its Creed. You are then, outside the bounds of orthodoxy as defined by the Creed. You might be right, but either you or 1500 years worth of mainstream theologians are guilty of heresy – because that’s what Chalcedon thought was at stake in this. This one is a ‘high stakes’ game we’re sitting at.
That’s fine, as far as it goes. But unless the Bible is full of ambiguity and paradox, you still have to accept the implications of specific bits you think the Bible raises.
If we are somehow denying the incarnation by saying that the Son did not die according to his divine nature and we say that at every other point (or an awful lot of them) we are going to keep the two natures distinct then that has consequences.
That then means that the cross is a ‘special case’ – an anomaly. What the incarnation results in is different on the cross than at every other point. Two consequences then come from that:
1. The cross can no longer be the paradigm, the interpretive centre for our understanding of Christ. The rules are completely different there, so we can’t move from the cross to everything else.
2. The connection between Person and Work is lost. Who Jesus is – as shown by every other issue I raised – doesn’t really have much to do with the great Work of the Cross.
At some time you will either have to revisit those questions I asked and blur Christ’s humanity and divinity together there as well, or separate out the Cross from everything else and treat it as though it is a non-normative special case.
I’ll leave this here and pick it up in the third and final comment.
Possibly. But that’s the kind of abstract argument that I don’t like:
I can’t help wondering if we are somehow diminishing the full scope of God’s grace and love by saying “Not everyone will be saved/ Homosexual sex is inconsistent with the Law of God/ Faith in Christ is necessary for salvation”
I can’t help wondering if we are somehow diminshing the full scope of the glory of salvation by saying “We don’t become new Persons of the Godhead and get to create our own private universes when we are glorified”.
And so on.
This isn’t a go at you, because I see this a lot. But it’s a cheap way of arguing. We need to argue the particular features of our particular view – good and bad, comforting and unsettling, and not try and win with invoking some abstract notion of some quality that purportedly attaches to our view.
If the eternal Son of God really and truly dies on the Cross then 1500 years of Christians have concluded that that’s an awe-ful lot of horror, mystery, and glory.
But if he dies in his divine nature, then at a minimum, he had to stop working in his divine nature until his body was raised from the dead. Dead people don’t work. Christ is the one Meditor between us and God, the one in whom all things hold together, and the one through whom the Father always acts. Unless you opt for a view of ‘death’ that isn’t ‘death’ by any estimate that we normally have, then the view that Christ died in his divine nature begins to tear apart the whole shape of orthodox faith. People related to God but not through the Son (because he was dead), the Father continued to act but not through the Son, everything held together but not in the One by whom and for whom it was made.
I agree that I am holding back from the ‘full horror’ of your view of the cross but that’s because I think that horror involves either evacuating death of its full horror, or smashing the Christian faih into little tiny bits.
The problem is that “Tis mystery all the immortal dies” is said by someone who believed in Chalcedon and so did not believe what you want to say. If you are right, there is no mystery. Obviously the immortal dies on the cross. But the mystery is that the eternal Son truly and really died. God cannot die, and yet, somehow, the Son of God really and truly died. Behind Wesley’s line is the two natures each with their own properties but all true of the one Person that you want to deny.