D-

Gregory of Naziansus: “What’s not assumed is not healed” (lit., “not taken in, not healed”).

Defend that for me.

We already know that ‘forgiveness’ is unconditional. God doesn’t have to incarnate in order to forgive. So that moves us on to atonement/reconciliation. And we’ve said before that all that’s needed for us to experience God’s forgiveness and be reconciled with him is for us to take responsibility for our actions.

So, with those two things in mind, tell me what relation the incarnation has to either our forgiveness or the experience of reconciliation (which is just the healing of broken relationship with God). Explain Gregory’s argument to me.

Tom

Tom: We already know that ‘forgiveness’ is unconditional. God doesn’t have to incarnate in order to forgive. So that moves us on to atonement/reconciliation. And we’ve said before that all that’s needed for us to experience God’s forgiveness and be reconciled with him is for us to take responsibility for our actions.

Jeff: In a sense, to say "all that's needed for us to experience God's forgiveness...is for us to..." is to say that forgiveness is conditional. Wouldn't you agree?

Tom: So, with those two things in mind, tell me what relation the incarnation has to either our forgiveness or the experience of reconciliation (which is just the healing of broken relationship with God).

Jeff: Assuming the incarnation has a role in forgiveness/reconciliation, we need to explain how it has effects on those who could never know anything about it. Or do we even say that people HAVE to believe something about the incarnation, even post-mortem, to be forgiven? If not, then aren't we saying that there is no KIND of effect that the incarnation has universally? Zach, you would agree with this, wouldn't you?

Another thing: If fallen angels are reconciled, would the incarnation really have anything to do with that? I can't see how.

Zach, somewhere along the line I never picked up on your objection to this. I wouldn’t mind revisiting it.

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Tom: We already know that ‘forgiveness’ is unconditional. God doesn’t have to incarnate in order to forgive. So that moves us on to atonement/reconciliation. And we’ve said before that all that’s needed for us to experience God’s forgiveness and be reconciled with him is for us to take responsibility for our actions.

Jeff: In a sense, to say "all that's needed for us to experience God's forgiveness...is for us to..." is to say that forgiveness is conditional. Wouldn't you agree?

Tom: Not really. We went through all of this last year when we were debating forgiveness and anger. Can’t remember. But we made the distinction (a correct one I think) between God’s loving attitude toward us (i.e., forgiveness) and our experiencing the benefits of that (reconciliation), the difference between God’s not holding our sins against us, on the one hand, and our being restored relationally. I think forgiveness is a given of infinite love and can obtain on God’s part even if the offending party rejects God, while the enjoyment of relational intimacy require the offender to take responsibility for his offense.

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Jeff: Assuming the incarnation has a role in forgiveness/reconciliation, we need to explain how it has effects on those who could never know anything about it. Or do we even say that people HAVE to believe something about the incarnation, even post-mortem, to be forgiven?

Tom: This is where the discussion needs to go, ‘cause there’s something there.  In Brummer’s Atonement, Christology and the Trinity (2005), he talks about what’s necessary for relational intimacy to occur between two parties when the relationship has been wounded by one party’s offense. The offended party can unconditionally ‘forgive’ (which just means that party make the free choice to bear/suffer the pain of the offense without demanding retributive justice and exacting the just consequences from the offender). But for relational intimacy to be restored (i.e., reconciliation), the offending party must take responsibility for (repent of) its actions. This is where Brummer offers a rationale for WHY the incarnation and Cross are necessary. He says they’re the necessary means to making clear to the offender the nature of her offense, something the offender MUST perceive if she’s to take responsibility for what she’s done. So incarnation is necessary to demonstrating the will and purposes of God for human being (which we in our sin are sufficiently ignorant of and which the Old Testament Law was unable to accomplish) and (with the cross) to demonstrating the consequences which our offenses have for God, the suffering we have caused him. We have to perceive both the nature of our offense and the pain we cause those we offend before our taking responsibility can be an existential option at all. Incarnation/Cross are necessary in this two-fold sense.

Maybe, m-a-y-b-e, some will say, “It’s totally possible for a human being to perceive the nature of her offense to God and the depth of the suffering she's caused God without any knowledge of the incarnation and cross." I wouldn’t agree that this is possible, but let’s assume it is, on some minimal level. It doesn’t really matter. Such a person would only come into the most minimal experience of restored relationally to God. Communal existence, faith in relationship with others, etc., requires shared stories and reasons for existing. And there’s not enough ‘content’ to a community story that is also void of all gospel content, to enable that community to live fully, reconciled lives to God on earth and to really enjoy relational intimacy. But in the end, such a person would have no problems with affirming the incarnation as demonstrating the human being she (somehow) knew she failed to be and as declaring the depth of suffering which she (somehow) knew her offense caused God.  When she finally met up with the facts, she’d say, “Exactly! That’s what I sensed was my failure and offense all along.” There would still be the obtaining of relational intimacy that's fulfilled in response to finally coming to perceive the whole truth.

We can move closer to God without knowing about the incarnation and cross, but we really be said to BE 'restored' to the intimacy we were created for apart from perceiving the truth revealed in the incarnation and cross.

I seriously doubt whether fallen human beings make the necessary connections on their own, without divine revelation. But even if it were metaphysically possible, not all DO make the connection. MOST do NOT. And what would love do to provide the necessary means for THESE? It would incarnate and die.

Exactly.

What d’ya think? In a way, one can still agree with Gregory in a general sort of way, that God has to assume a mode of existence (human) that both educates us about the content of our failure as human beings (we need to see what God’s will for us as human beings is) and demonstrates the depth of divine suffering  which we are responsible for, both necessary means for making possible our taking responsibility for our offense to God and experience the restoration of relational intimacy.

Jeff: Another thing: If fallen angels are reconciled, would the incarnation really have anything to do with that? I can't see how.

Tom: I know Greg (and the Christus Victor model) sees the Cross as most fundamentally about the God-Satan relationship and us an implicated in that. I’m not sure. But all angels would have to do, if the ‘relational ontology’ we’re trying to describe really is an ‘ontology’ (about what’s metaphysically the case) then all Satan has to do is perceive the suffering he has caused God and take responsibility for it. That’s it. The incarnation/cross, IF it has anything of a ‘necessary’ nature to do with securing these in Satan’s case, would be the necessary means to opening up for Satan the possibility of such a perception. “You have to SEE what you’ve done to me before I take your apology seriously. So let me SHOW you what your sin does to me.” That’s all it’s about. THAT is a ‘relational’ ontology (I think!).

Perhaps angels, given the dimension of their perception into God’s will and experience to begin with, have all they need to perceive that apart from incarnation/cross. I don’t know. Perhaps also angels were not intended for the same relational intimacy human beings were intended for to begin with. Perhaps their existence really is more ‘utilitarian’. That might explain something too. Don’t know.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/24/2008 3:49:45 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 3/24/2008 10:09:39 AM (GMT-5)

From Bishop Kallistos Ware's "The Orthodox Way", chapter 4--God as Man
(pp73-77)

Salvation as Sharing

The Christian message of salvation can best be summed up in terms of sharing, or solidarity and identification. The notion of sharing is a key alike to the doctrine of God in Trinity and to the doctrine of God made man. The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that, just as man is authentically personal only when he shares with others, so God is not a single person dwelling alone, but three persons who share each other's life in perfect love. The Incarnation equally is a doctrine of sharing or participation. Christ shares to the full in what we are, and so he makes it possible for us to share in what he is, in his divine life and glory. He became what we are, so as to make us what he is.

St. Paul expresses this metaphorically in terms of wealth and poverty: "You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9). Christ's riches are his eternal glory; Christ's poverty is his complete self-identification with our fallen human condition. In the words of an Orthodox Christian hymn, "Sharing wholly in our poverty, thou hast made divine our earthly nature through thy union with it and participation in it." Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life; he "empties himself" and we are "exalted" (Phil. 2:5-9). God's descent makes possible man's ascent. St. Maximus the Confessor writes: "Ineffably the infinite limits itself, while the finite is expanded to the measure of the infinite."

As Christ said at the Last Supper: "The glory which thou hast given to me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are one: I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly united in one" (John 17:22-23). Christ enables us to share in the Father's divine glory. He is the bond and meeting-point: because he is man, he is one with us; because he is God, he is one with the Father. So through and in him we are one with God, and the Father's glory became our glory. God's Incarnation opens the way to man's deification. To be deified is, more specifically, to be "christified": the divine likeness that we are called to attain is the likeness of Christ. It is through Jesus the God-man that we are "ingodded", "divinized", made sharers in the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). By assuming our humanity, Christ who is Son of God by nature has made us sons of God by grace. In him we are "adopted" by God the Father, becoming sons-in-the-Son.

This notion of salvation as sharing implies two things in particular about the Incarnation. First, it implies that Christ took not only a human body like ours but also a human spirit, mind and soul like ours. Sin, as we saw (p.58), has its source not from below but from above.; it is not physical in its origin but spiritual. (I am's Note: the FALL OF SATAN...even before Adam's) The aspect of man, then, that requires to be redeemed is not primarily his body but his will and his center of moral choice. If Christ did not have a human mind, then this would fatally undermine the second principle of salvation, that divine salvation must reach the point of human need.

The importance of hit principle was re-emphasized during the second half of the fourth century, when Apollinarius advanced the theory -- for which he was quickly condemned as a heretic -- that at the Incarnation Christ took only a human body, but no human intellect or rational soul. To this St. Gregory the Theologian replied, "The unassumed is unhealed". Christ, that is to say, saves us by becoming what we are; he heals us by taking our broken humanity into himself, by "assuming" it as his own, by entering into our human experience and by knowing it from the inside, as being himself one of us. But had his sharing of our humanity been in some way incomplete, then man's salvation would be likewise incomplete. If we believe that Christ has brought us a total salvation, then it follows that he has assumed everything.

Secondly, this nation of salvation as sharing implies -- although not just unfallen our fallen human nature. As the Epistle to the Hebrews insists (and in all the New Testament there is no Christological text more important than this): "We do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but he was in all points tempted exactly as we are, yet without sinning" (4:15). Christ lives out his life on earth under the conditions of the fall. He is not himself a sinful person, but in his solidarity with fallen man he accepts to the full the consequences of Adam's sin. He accepts to the full not only the physical consequences, such as weariness, bodily pain, and eventually the separation of body and soul in death. He accepts also the moral consequences, the loneliness, the alienation, the inward conflict. It may seem a bold thing to ascribe all this to the living God, but a consistent doctrine of the Incarnation requires nothing less. If Christ had merely assumed unfallen human nature, living out his earthly life in the situation of Adam in Paradise, then he would not have been touched with the feeling of ourinfirmities, nor would he have been tempted in everything exactly as we are. And in that case he would not be our Savior.

St. Paul goes so far as to write, "God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sake" (2 Cor. 5:21). We are not to think here solely in terms of some juridical transaction, whereby Christ, himself guiltless, somehow has our guilt "imputed" to him in an exterior manner. Much more is involved than this. Christ saves us by experiencing from within, as one of us, all that we suffer inwardly through living in a sinful world.

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 3/24/2008 10:14:22 AM (GMT-5)

Das Nichtige, Emptiness, is never empty. 

God has filled it with Himself.

We are never alone.

We never HAVE been.

We've existed in and by Love.

Surely, God was in the house...

and we haven't known it.

 

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 3/24/2008 7:46:17 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 3/25/2008 12:00:10 AM (GMT-5)

Hebrews 2:18
Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

 

 

 

Hebrews 4:15
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.

 

More...

2 Corinthians 13:4
For to be sure, he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God's power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God's power we will live with him to serve you.

 

Ephesians 4:24
and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

 

Philippians 3:10
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,

 

Philippians 3:21
who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

 

Hebrews 2:5
[ Jesus Made Like His Brothers ] It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking.

 

Hebrews 2:17
For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

 

1 John 3:2
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

 

1 John 4:17
In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.

 

Revelation 14:14
[ The Harvest of the Earth ] I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one "like a son of man" with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.

 

Zach: I think I can smell what you're cooking, Tom. But I think there is an important distinction between the work of Christ (when it is perceived as unique metaphysical work) and the proclamation and continuation of his work.

Tom: Not sure I’m following ya.

Zach: If Jesus was performing the necessary rituals for saving sinners demanded by metaphysical law, then maybe Incarnation and Resurrection are necessary components of such a ritual. This is essentially what I was brought up to believe in the my baptist church. There is some super-human metaphysical law (of course these are not the terms used by proponents of this view) which force Jesus to incarnate and resurrect if he is to save/redeem/reconcile.

Tom: Right. And the metaphysical law is usually this: God’s been offended, but God loves and wants to forgive, but justice won’t let him forgive and embrace us (EVEN IF WE’RE SORRY AND BEG FOR FOGIVENESS) until some innocent member of the offending class/race suffers for everybody’s sin. God says, “Hey, I’ll be that perfect human sacrifice and appease myself. That way I'll satisfy the competing metaphysical rules which I myself am the grounds of!”

Zach: But the very implication of super-divine law is that God is not truly God.

Tom: Well, there are at least some good reasons to reject that picture of the atonement.

Zach: On the other hand you've got revelation and proclamation which are the terms I hear you speaking in. For clarity's sake I wont use "necessity" in connection with these terms because logical necessity has nothing at all to do with this.

Tom: Right. Logical necessity wasn’t the sort of necessity I was talking about anyway. (Logical necessity isn’t the only kind of necessity.)

Zach: Your (or Brummer's) understanding of reconciliation makes it a matter of communication. God's love and forgiveness are already there for the taking. Likewise our sin is already an impediment to reconciliation. What is needed is for sinners to be made aware of these truths so that they might respond.

Tom: Exactly. But this is not ‘extra-metaphysical’ so to speak. That is, forgiveness, reconciliation, perceiving our offenses and repenting of them, etc., are how relationships and intimacy work. So it’s metaphysical. It’s just not what your Baptist church taught you.l

Zach: So Christ's work does NOTHING to change God's love for us or offer of forgiveness.

Tom: What would it even mean to say that Christ’s work changes God’s love for us? No. Christ’s work IS God’s love, it expresses and embodies God’s love (and his offer of forgiveness).

Zach: There is no metaphysical work being done to appease God or the rules that supposedly bind him.

Tom: Exactly. If God is truly "appeased" then we have retributive justice and hence, no forgiveness. If the cost is paid, the debt's not 'forgiven'.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/25/2008 12:29:55 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 3/25/2008 3:58:00 AM (GMT-5)

Tom: God says, “Hey, I’ll be that perfect human sacrifice and appease myself. That way I'll satisfy the competing metaphysical rules which I myself am the grounds of!”

Zach: If you say that God is the ground of the rules of salvation, then isn't this equivalent to saying there are no rules of salvation to which God is (should I say, "was originally") bound?

Tom: I don’t think so. But I was just agreeing with you that it’s not the case that there are competing tendencies in God; nor are there objective metaphysical rules (about justice or forgiveness) that God has to conform to. When I talk about metaphysical laws, I don’t mean laws that constrain reality’s behavior (like the way the speed limit constrains the behavior of drivers who COULD drive faster but who obey the law). We talk abut nature ‘obeying’ physical laws, but it’s not technically correct. By metaphysical laws I mean laws that describe the regularity of reality’s behavior, so far as we understand it — laws like love requires freedom, freedom implies risk, and others. And that regularity, reality’s freedom to behave this way and not that way, is grounded in none other than God.

So, there’s no metaphysical law, no regularity of divine or created reality grounded in God, that says God can’t forgive unconditionally (where forgiveness just describes God’s free choice to suffer the consequences of our offense and not seek to exact the just penalty from us). But there are some laws which define/describe how interpersonal relationships behave and the conditions under which such relationships are broken, wounded, and subsequently healed and reconciled. Reconciliation, as far as I can tell, requires something from the offended party and something else from the offending party. From the offended party, reconciliation requires forgiveness, the willingness to suffer the consequences of the offense and not seek retributive justice. From the offending part, reconciliation requires penitence. And that’s where the cross comes in for me, because repentance in turn requires (by definition) of the offender an adequate understanding and appreciation on the injury/offense done to the offended. This is what one ‘repents of’, so it must be adequately perceived. Brummer is suggesting hat getting us to perceive that is what the cross is about.

But I agree with you, I don’t think that the incarnation/cross is what permits God the freedom to forgive us, nor is it what qualifies us (probably not the right word, but you get my point) to be forgiven by paying some objective metaphysical debt that we’ve accrued, so that God looks at the account and says, “OK, paid in full. Good, I can now forgive you if you repent.” If it’s paid, it’s not forgiven. If we’re forgiven, the cross can’t be about paying for, requiting as it were, the debt we owe God. That’s NEVER paid. God absorbs the offense and suffers the injury of our rejection without seeking to balance the metaphysical scales by exacting payment from God.

Just thinking through it.

Jeff? Corey?

Tom

Is that by Christensen and Wittung’s book (2008)? It’s got a chapter in it by James Starr (who did his doctoral thesis on Peter’s “partakers of the divine nature”). I’ve added the book to my wish list! Looks good.

The Greek phrase (from 2Pet 1.4) ‘theias koinonoi fuseos” may be translated “partners of the Deity” not “partakers of divine nature.” I’m not picking sides, I’m just pointing out part of the debate. Part of the problem too is that Peter supposedly says we partake in the divine “fusis” (“nature”), not the Son’s (or anybody else’s) “hypostasis” (“person”). But a few EO guys I read on 2Pet. 1.4 say something like, “Obviously Peter can’t mean ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘ousia’ (‘essence’) [for which ‘fusis’ (‘nature’) is sometimes synonymous], it must mean….” And what’s it come out meaning? Hypostasis! Hypostatic inherence in the ‘person’ of the Son turns out to be what “partaking of the divine ‘nature’” comes out meaning.

I’ll withhold judgment on 2Pet. 1.4. Haven’t really gotten into it and can’t do so from here. It’ll have to wait. But I’ve run across references to Starr’s work on this verse and want to check it out.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/25/2008 1:58:05 PM (GMT-5)