 |
|
Contents Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1
Rediscovering
the Trinity in the Local Congregation
Very often, in the church, when we people of God are asked
questions, our answers reveal very little communication in terms of God as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is
my belief that if God truly is triune, one God in three persons, as the
Christian doctrine of God teaches, then this ought to have profound meaning for
understanding the Christian life.
One of the reasons that Trinitarian thinking is lacking in the
congregation may be noticed in the sentiment of one of my former pastors. He would playfully say to us, “If you don’t believe in
the Trinity, you will lose your soul. If
you try to understand the Trinity you will lose your mind.” We would all chuckle; then tell ourselves we had better
believe it, and then move on to more practical Christian matters.
However, I have been haunted ever since by a certain question.
“Whatever God as Trinity really is, should this truth be so obscure to
Christians in our lives of faith that we have no real idea of what it means?”
At an academic level, in recent decades there has been a revival of
Trinitarian studies. Instead of looking at the doctrine of the Trinity as some
dusty old theology of the past, Trinitarian issues are now considered by a new
generation of theologians as the best grammar by which to proclaim the Christian
faith for a post-modern age. I will
take this same kind of hypothesis and apply a style of Trinitarian thinking, or
lenses, to the local congregation, with the hope that this kind of mental
framework will bring fresh discovery, liberation, and new found energies into
the lives of God’s people. Will
discovering who God is, and what that has to do with us, through a Trinitarian
vision of our lives bring renewal and reformation with it?
I believe it will.
However, the point of entry is to not abruptly confront one another
with the void in Trinitarian theology today, and consequently, the need for
rediscovery; rather, it is to find some common concerns, common issues, and
problems we all deal with and then ask how can an understanding of the biblical
vision of God, seen in the relationship Jesus Christ has with God the Father in
the Holy Spirit, help us in our understanding.
This is a realistic way of asking what the Christian doctrine of God
really means in our lives.
This then is the theological method.
Faith seeks understanding. If
there is faith in some acceptance of the Christian teaching that God is one
unique being and at the same time, three distinct persons, what does this mean
in our lives? This is not merely an
attempt to come to some kind of objective analysis of how three persons can be
one being; this is asking the question, if God is triune, what does this teach
us about the Christian life? So, in
the faith of the Christian doctrine of God, the question one should ask is, with
the Son of God coming to us in Jesus Christ, through the incarnation, what does
this say about important issues in the church, especially at the local
congregational level? Jesus Christ
is the human Son of God, living in the presence of God today in the power and
fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Somehow,
we are included in this. This truth
of who Jesus Christ is and what became of him has something to do with us. In asking what it has to do with us, we will specifically ask
what it says about prayer and worship, the very gospel of Jesus Christ, and the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
I will ask questions, along with the presupposition that in a real sense
the answer is in the questioning. The
questions themselves will point to certain aspects of what is believed to be
true, which in turn will point back to the mystery of the Trinity.
The first chapter is on prayer and worship.
The second and third chapters are on the gospel of Jesus Christ and the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, respectively.
Theology in its simplest sense is words about God and ourselves;
about ourselves and God. We might
all be theologians. And this work
is meant to foster dialogue at a congregational level, where new discoveries of
the real presence of God in Christ can be embraced and shared with each other. It is meant to move us into a deeper understanding of the
nature, unconditional love, and amazing grace of God so that God’s people can
rediscover the passionate love that God the Father has for all people through
Jesus Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. Rediscovery
in the Congregation
The purpose of this book is to provide a means to involve the
congregation in rediscovering the unconditional love and grace of God to us and
for us in Jesus Christ. To know
ourselves better leads to our knowing God better.
Understanding God in new and fresh ways leads to understanding who we are
in a better way. This comes
together among the congregation when there is fellowship and conversation
centered on and embraced by the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.
The importance of this in itself is what T.F. Torrance refers to as
“dialogical theology.” “The
Word of God encounters us in such a way that it creates for itself a sphere of
human and personal conversation in which the Word is addressed to each and to
all, but in which each helps the other both in hearing and in speaking it.
It is thus that dialogical theology has its essential place in the church
as the sphere of a two-fold conversation between God and His people and between
the different members of the Church in the presence of the Word Himself” (Theological
Science 135). The second person
of the Trinity is the Word. God as
persons in communion, communes in the Word.
Dialogical theology is a participation in the life of God.
The organization of what follows, envisions a small class or a large
class divided into small groups. The
layout represents about a twenty-two week period, with each class time together
divided up into a time for the facilitator either to introduce a topic or to
answer questions from a previous period. However,
the major time in each class should be spent discussing questions raised by the
issues at hand. These questions are
represented in each lesson plan. For
the facilitator, each class plan will provide an objective and a lesson. The student expectations will remain the same throughout the
course, to have read a few pages assigned and to prepare to discuss given
questions.
Again, the idea behind this book is that one facet of theology is
conversation involved in the Word of God. These
classes are meant to be conducive for this.
There are many group dynamics that will work their way into such
situations, and the pedagogical methods of bringing out conversation in such
times is beyond the scope of this project.
However, the small group atmosphere along with the time frame of this
course will lend itself to fellowship, communion and real personal interests. Dialogical theology will happen.
Prayer
and Worship CLASS:
1 Objective:
Introduction to the course, and specifically to the section on prayer.
LESSON: Introduction
One of the guiding approaches to conversation about God and our
beliefs is faith using thought and discussion.
Talking about what we believe helps us grow in our understanding.
In this class, we are accepting God as one God, whom we have come to know
as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Jesus Christ is who the church confesses as the Son of God.
He is the Son of God, and he is fully human.
We do not pretend to know all of what this means.
This is what we are going to talk about. Jesus Christ is resurrected in his new humanity.
He is in the presence of God the Father.
God the Son and God the Father are one in the Holy Spirit.
Now, what does this mean for us? This
is the major question we are going to ask throughout this class: What does all
this have to do with us?
We are going to be applying this kind of thinking, questioning, answering
and discussing to central and important areas of the church: prayer and worship,
the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s
Supper. We are going to start with
prayer and worship because in a practical sense this is where God starts with
us. And even this will be one of
our first questions for discussion. Discussion
Questions:
Homework:
Before the next class, read pages
7-15 of Chapter One, Prayer and Worship,
and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
Text
All of us who think about what it is to be Christian and what it is
to live the Christian life are in a real sense, theologians. It may very well be that “theology” has become a frowned
upon word in the church today, and probably so for some legitimate reasons.
But, it is inevitable that people of faith will wrestle and think, wonder
and even talk with one another about things that have to do with God and
themselves. Whether or not these
questions and issues are approached in a good way, a way that is helpful, that
refers to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is another question.
We will start looking at some of the key questions and issues of
the Christian faith, and we want to do so in line with thinking that is rooted
in faith and constantly in reference to God in Christ.
This is a way, a process of faith, open to reason, that will help bring
theology back to the congregation and that will use our looking to Christ and
the social doctrine of the Trinity to refresh and unburden people.
We start with prayer and worship because, in the community of
people looking for God, this is where God starts with us.
God’s finding us is discovered in what it means to pray and to worship,
and it is here that we feel and express the issues, questions, and even the
struggles that we have within.
In the chapter that follows, we will take some of the major issues
of prayer and worship, look at the questions we have, use these questions as a
starting point to reframe them as we look at the subjects themselves through
faith in who Christ is confessed to be by the church, what became of him, and
what this has to do with us. Our
focus will be Christological. And this leads to a larger vision of God in terms
of the Trinity. This learning process is somewhat circular. We will take some of what it means to think of God in terms
of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, one God, relating as a
communion of persons and apply this to prayer and worship. Out of this application will come new insights and
discoveries about God as triune, which will in turn help us in coming closer to
answers in our struggles.
We will essentially apply the same method to prayer and worship.
Looking at prayer and worship in the light of Christ, fully God and fully
man we will probe more deeply into what it might mean that prayer and worship
have their source in his life, and how we are included by the Holy Spirit in his
ongoing humanity, in the presence of God the Father, on our behalf.
Prayer is a constant struggle in the life of a Christian. Feelings of inadequacy, guilt, even faithlessness foster real
questions about the nature of prayer. Is
God really listening? Does God
actually care about me and my concerns? Do
my prayers ever leave the room? Does
prayer really matter or change things anyway?
What exactly is prayer? What
am I doing when I pray?
These are all very important questions, questions about God, the nature
of God, who God is, and what God’s involvement might be in the event we call
prayer. Obviously, these are
also questions about ourselves and who we are in relationship to God.
Where do we fit in this event we call prayer?
How do we understand our role? And,
of course, they are questions also about the prayer event itself.
What is prayer? Why do we pray? What
do we pray? What is happening when
we pray?
Before we allow these questions to move us into discussion
with others, they are posed to us in our souls as practical problems, dilemmas,
even obstacles to the peace and joy we want to know deep within.
Still, how we ask them is rooted and grounded in what we presuppose to be
true about God, ourselves, and this exercise we are calling prayer.
What we want to do is take the Christian doctrine of God, one
God in three persons, and in light of this teaching of the church, look more
closely at prayer. We do not
necessarily need to have reached an expert level in the doctrine of the Trinity. Still, we can imagine a God who relates within himself in a
manner of love and fellowship. It
is our hope that in doing so, in the very questioning itself, as conditioned by
the nature of God as confessed by the church, we will be taken into new vistas
and given insights regarding our questions of prayer. Karl Barth was fond of the rather scientific idea that the
answer is in the question. By
restructuring the questions themselves in Trinitarian grammar, we will be led
closer to the answers they yield.
In Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, he addresses
“prayer” under the heading of the doctrine of creation, and more
specifically, as he is presenting the command of God the Creator, he lays out a
discussion of prayer in terms of our freedom before God.
Prayer is the command of God to the creature, and therefore, in the
presence of God, the creature is free for prayer (Dogmatics
III.4, 87). But, this freedom
before God and this command, as understood in terms of freedom, can only be
truly seen in terms of Jesus Christ and his relationship to God the Father in
the Holy Spirit. Yes, we have
freedom before God, but what does this mean, and how can we begin to understand
this in and for ourselves? We
cannot in our own strength; we must first look to Christ.
Prayer is communication between God and us.
It has many forms: petition,
intercession, praise, thanksgiving, contemplation; but in all its forms, it is
communication and communion between God and humanity.
It is precisely here, in seeking a theological starting point that we
begin to take on a Trinitarian perspective by focusing our lenses on Jesus
Christ. As Michael Jinkins states,
when we begin to look at the world around us based on a belief that Jesus is
fully God and fully man, “Christ makes sense of the world we live in” (Invitation
23). Which means that as we look at
prayer, a communication between God and humanity, we begin to see the starting
point for prayer in the person of Jesus Christ.
Christ makes prayer make sense because prayer is revealed in Him.
He is the human fully God in his real sonship, who truly prays to God the
Father in freedom and in obedience to the command of God.
Whatever prayer might turn out to be, whatever our role in it
might turn out to be as we continue to frame our questions in a Trinitarian
manner, whatever God’s place in prayer will be revealed as, first and
foremost, prayer is not something that has its origin in us; rather, it has its
origin in the Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.
And therein lies the freedom, God’s freedom first, then our freedom as
a gift of obedience to God the Father from the Holy Spirit.
James B. Torrance of Scotland teaches us that the nature of
grace is twofold. God both comes to
us because we cannot reach God in and of ourselves, and God does for us what God
commands. Left to ourselves, we do
not have the capacity to do what God requires.
God comes to us and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
“The God to whom we pray and with whom we commune knows we want to
pray, try to pray, but cannot pray. So
God comes to us as man in Jesus Christ to stand in for us, pray for us, teach us
to pray and lead our prayers” (Worship
64).
Looking to Jesus Christ, understanding the scripture’s
witness to who he is, and being led by the Holy Spirit, and possibly ministering
to others in the same way is the pastoral means by which we begin to see our
struggles and find help in our time of need, all in the light of the triune God
of grace. Torrance writes,
While lecturing on the theology of worship for Fuller Theological
Seminary
in California, I was living in an apartment on Balboa Peninsula, 200
yards
from the sea. One day, as I
was about to have a swim, I saw an elderly gentle-
man walking slowly, pensively, along the shore.
I greeted him as I went into
the sea. When I came out, he
was just returning and came to ask me who I
was and where I had come from. I
told him I was from Scotland, a
Presbyterian minister on a lecturing-preaching tour of the states. His face lit
up and he said, “How astonishing that I should meet you just now!”
Then
he poured out his story.
After 45 years of happy married life, his wife was now dying of cancer.
She
had had surgery. “I’ve
been walking up and down the streets of Newport
beach at night, desperate, because I do not know how to face the future
without my wife—and without faith,” he added.
Then he said, “My father
was a Presbyterian minister, and I was brought up in a godly home.
But I
have drifted away from the church. When
you spoke to me,
remembering how my father was a man of prayer and had wonderful faith
when my mother died, I wish I had that faith.
I have been walking up and
down the beach trying to pray, but I can’t.
What did I say to him? Did I
tell him how to find faith and how to pray—
throw him back on himself? No,
I did not. I said to him, “May I
say to you
what I am sure your father would have said to you?
In Jesus Christ we have
someone who knows all about this. He
has been through it all—through
suffering and death and separation—and he will carry you both through
it
into resurrection life. He
has heard your cry for faith and is answering…
in Jesus Christ we have someone who is praying for you. He has heard your
groans and is interceding for you and with you and in you. (Worship 43,44)
Prayer, for us, starts with Jesus Christ who prays for us,
with us, and in us, and as our Lord, through the power of his Spirit leads us to
actually join with him in his prayers. God
the Father sent his only Son into this world to assume human nature, to become a
man. And with the Son doing this,
he brought with him, into the world in which we were created, the very
relationship he has had with God the Father from all eternity.
This relationship in the Holy Spirit is a circle of shared life and joy,
fellowship, fidelity, and trust. It
is based in communion. When we ask
questions about prayer, for instance “Is God really listening?”, the
question might better be phrased in some way that wonders about God the Father
listening to God the Son as Jesus Christ now lives out his sonship in
resurrected humanity. What is my
role in prayer? What am I doing in
prayer? What is happening when we
pray? These questions might better
be asked in terms of Christ’s relationship to us.
Where do I, or where does Jesus Christ fit into my prayers?
Are they, in fact, my prayers after all?
When we begin to ask questions that speak of God in terms of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in terms of the Son of God becoming man in
Jesus Christ, our very questions themselves seem to take on a deeper personal
level. To put it another way: when
we begin to look at prayer through Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God, the
big picture of prayer, and even our wrestling with prayer are asked in such a
way that we see the triune nature of God as the only true coordinates by which
to try and frame our struggles.
Hans Urs von Balthasar did ask some questions of prayer and
some questions of the various roles played in prayer by God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Spirit (Prayer
38-82). What is the Father’s role
in prayer, the Son’s, and the Holy Spirit’s?
The Father’s share is seen in the free outward flowing love
that makes God’s world, God’s realm, God’s reign open to us.
Herein lies the Father’s choice and election, that his world be opened
to us, that he himself would be made open to us in prayer.
The Son is the location, the one, the human being, the
personal human history where God manifests his world to us.
The Father’s role is to open the shared life of the Father, Son, and
Spirit to us, and it is the Son’s role to be the person, the mediator, the
Great High Priest where and in whom this all takes place.
The opening up, the giving, the sharing, has to have a point of
connection with us, a nexus, a place where we can receive, and this personal
location is to be the Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.
This is his role. It is in him that God opens up his world to us.
And the Spirit’s role?
The Holy Spirit makes it all possible.
The Spirit is the power, the potentency, the potential.
Let us remember that our subject is prayer, or as Balthazar is calling
it, “contemplation.” “Contemplation
{prayer} is made possible by” the Holy Spirit (67). The Father makes the choice to give the gift of prayer, the
Son’s person is where, in whom prayer is to be received, and the Spirit makes
it all possible.
I am reminded at this point of Barth’s very recognition
that our share in the self-knowledge of God is Trinitarian in its very nature.
In knowing God, here in prayer, there is revealedness.
There is a spirit in which we contemplate and are aware of God.
This is the work of the Holy Spirit.
There is the revelation itself, or himself, as the case in truth is.
Jesus Christ is the revelation of God.
In him and only in him are we encountered by the incarnate Word of God.
And for Barth, if there is this sense of revealedness in the Spirit, an
awareness of revelation in Jesus Christ, then what is implied is a revealer, or
like Balthazar, what is implied is one who made the ultimate choice to reveal,
i.e., God the Father.
To believe in order to understand, or to presuppose the truth
of the social doctrine of the Trinity, and then to think upon them, to question
who they are, what their roles might be, how they might relate to one another in
Christian exercises such as prayer and worship, sacraments, and ministry, open
whole new vistas of investigation, and we hope, bring with them new insights and
understanding to old questions.
Much the same is true when we move from prayer as dealt with
in our own personal lives, to prayer as looked at in terms of corporate worship.
That worship is often thought of in terms of prayer is evidenced by the
Episcopal Church’s worship book, The Book of Common Prayer.
Our struggles in prayer find themselves surfacing once again
when we enter into “church” and wonder about this event called
“worship.” Is God present? What makes this real? Where
is God in this? What am I supposed
to do in worship?
Once again, we are faced with trying to look at something in
the Christian life, some aspect of what it means to live in Christ through a
trust that Jesus Christ is in truth Lord, and that this trust will lead to a
greater vision in terms of the triune God of unconditional grace and love, to a
better understanding, even in framing our questions.
Let us ask about worship. Objective:
To learn about prayer and introduce the section on worship. LESSON:
Homework:
Before the next class, read pages
16-20, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
What is worship? This
is where we will start, and we will start with a description given by Thomas F.
Torrance: “Worship is primarily
the act of God upon us and arises in us an echo of his own transcendent nature
which we offer back to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, and takes
place as in the Spirit we are given to share through Christ in the
inter-personal communion of love and self-giving in the life of God” (The
Christian Doctrine of God 135). Already, the similarities to prayer are evident.
And the process of applying Christological focus and Trinitarian lenses
is much the same.
Let’s use the idea of the social Trinity and start with
exploring “the inter-personal communion of love and self-giving in the life of
God.” When we say “God is
love,” as we are told in 1 John 4:8, we are not so much to think of some kind
of generic spiritual essence, but ought rather to think that the triune God is
love. God is love in the sense that
God gives and receives love within himself.
This is love given and enjoyed between the persons of God. The Father has loved the only begotten Son in the Spirit from
all eternity. In return the Son,
who is forever the Son of his Father, loves his Father in a divine love.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love which proceeds from both the Father
and the Son. Yes, God is love, but
more precisely, the God who is love is expressed in the shared life of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The
source, the persons who love and who are loved, and who reciprocate in love are
the three persons of the Holy Trinity.
The first thing this tells us about God is that God is not
lonely. God is no lone first cause
sitting off beyond the heavens in need of glory and fellowship. The loving communion that God has in God’s own being is
God’s glory. God has no need for
fulfillment because God is complete and complete in love.
But the gospel of the triune God of grace as uncovered in Jesus Christ
reports that God does not will to be this God of love without us.
The very love which the Father and the Son have known and shared from all
eternity is poured out by God upon us in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
God is this inter-personal communion of love and fellowship, and just
because God is this God of self-giving love, God gives this communion of love to
us in Jesus Christ. Here again we
start with Christ.
God’s love is God, and God comes to us in worship.
It is in worship that we participate in the love Christ has for God in
the Spirit, and the love in return that the Father has for his beloved Son in
whom he is well pleased. This is
the love of the church. When we
love each other and share in the Spirit of “koinonia,” we share in the love
that flows dynamically by the Spirit in the inner life of the Trinity, out from
God to us.
What God gives to us, God gives to us through Christ, and our
response, in return, is taken by Christ back to God.
“Everything comes from God through Christ, in the Spirit, and
everything returns to God through Christ in the Spirit” (LaCugna 356).
Worship begins and ends in God, yet, it is mediated to us and involves us
through the “vicarious humanity” of Christ (T.F. Torrance, Reconciliation
182). God acts upon us, and acts
upon us with the very knowledge, faith, and love experienced both by God and
humanity in Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God who knows and loves the Father
as he always has but now with the mind and heart of a human being (Kruger
40-55). And this is for us.
The very fellowship God wills for us touches us in our humanity assumed
by Christ, and the response of thanksgiving and adoration that wells up in us is
taken back to God through the offering of the Son.
Worship is the gift, to the church, of participating in the communion of
shared life enjoyed by God the Father and the incarnate Son in Jesus Christ,
through the Holy Spirit.
Worship is not some valiant subjective response, therefore.
It is a gift
of grace which is realized vicariously in Christ and which is received
and participated in by the Spirit…the Father is the author of worship,
the son is the worshipper and the Spirit is the agent of worship, where
the worship may be identified with the presence of the Spirit….(Alan
J. Torrance, Persons in Communion 314)
From the very earliest times of the church, many of the
church’s prayers and responses to grace were understood as acts of the triune
God, with which we, the church, are called upon to share.
For example, in the “Thanksgiving of Serapion,” the prayer was made
like this: “May the Lord Jesus
speak in us, and the Holy Spirit, and may they praise you through us.
For you are above all power and principalities” (Jenson, Triune
Identity 32). Worship, which is
an event of the triune life of God, is communion and communication, first in
God, then given to us by the Spirit of Jesus Christ who participates in this
communion as a resurrected human being, “fully
God and fully man.” Worship is a
Trinitarian event into which we have been included by the grace of the triune
God of love.
Worship is an act of grace.
This is what distinguishes Christian worship from religious ritual.
God’s grace actually provides the response God demands.
In the person of Jesus Christ, God speaks a gracious word to us.
But because it is a word of forgiveness and atonement, it brings with it
judgment. What are we to be
forgiven of except that we have somehow offended the one who forgives?
We shrink up under this word of forgiveness.
Can we, in and of ourselves, really hear it and accept it?
Can we lift ourselves up out of the pit by our own hair?
Imagine after an argument, someone comes to you and says, “I forgive
you” (Worship 55-56).
Would we not all cringe under the judgment of guilt which comes
implicitly in their forgiveness? Of
course, if after a while, and giving it some thought, we accept their
forgiveness (and their judgment), then we have undergone a real change of heart,
or a repentance. But it is Christ, in our humanity, acting vicariously on our
behalf who receives the divine word of God’s forgiveness for us (because we,
in our pride cannot), and then, as the Good Shepherd, puts his acceptance and
response in us by the Holy Spirit. In
this sense, our response is only in response to his. He acts in our place, for us, with the response God requires
of us. This is so, with regards to
this issue of forgiveness and repentance, but it also extends out to all that is
required of us before God. In Jesus
Christ, there is both a word from God to us, and a response made for us, in our
own humanity.
This mediation by Christ takes our humanity and, therefore,
us into his service. Even though,
in the first instance, in him is both God’s Word and human response, both
sides of the covenant, we are not left out.
It is right here, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that worship becomes
real for us and truly human. And
because it is mediated in human nature for us and including us, we do not need
to leave our humanity at the door when we come to worship.
Neither are we called to be angelic or mindless androids.
We are called to be real human beings by the very nature of worship.
Christian worship is not the same as religious ritual for
this very reason. Our need to be
brought into the presence of God, the great need of humanity to reach God, has
been accomplished in the personal history of Jesus Christ.
We are with God in Jesus Christ, and God is with us. There is fellowship, shared life, joy, love, faith, hope, and
passion dynamically moving among the persons of God, and in Jesus Christ, who
stands in for all of us, we are included. “Religious
ritual is the human attempt to reach the transcendent…by contrast Christian
worship shares in a human-Godward movement that belongs to God and takes place
within the divine life” (Persons 314). We now
need to look into this divine communion and its relationship to human worship.
Our questions of what is our worship, what role do we play, and where
does God fit in, are asked more appropriately when we ask what the relationship
is between the Trinity’s communion and our worship. Objective:
To learn about worship and introduce the section on divine communion—human
worship LESSON:
Homework: Before
the next class, read pages 22-27, and be prepared to discuss the following
questions: 1.What
does it mean that humanity is created in the image of God? 2.How
should our being in the image of God in terms of being relational persons affect
our worship services as God’s people? 3.What
is the difference between trying to imitate Christ and freely expressing joy at
believing the truth of who we really are in Jesus Christ? 4.What
does it mean that our response to God’s grace is really a response to the
response that Jesus Christ makes on our behalf? 5.How
are divine communion and human worship united? Divine
Communion—Human Worship
What is the relationship, or, how are we to understand the
relationship that brings together Trinitarian communion and human worship or
liturgy? Let us begin with the
biblical notion that humanity is created in the image of God.
“In its basic form humanity is fellow-humanity” (Dogmatics III.2, 285). For
Barth, humanity is in relationship, humanity is in communion and therefore
“being in relationship” is the image of God in which we are created (Persons
180). The image of God that humans bear is not to be found in some
capacity or capability intrinsic to them that is the same as some element within
the nature of God. We do not look
for something in ourselves, some part of us that is God-like so that we can know
what God is like. Humans do not
possess the image of God; humans are the image of God.
We are the image of God in that we are persons in communion, persons made
and known as such in personal relationships.
“The person cannot exit without communion” (Zizioulas, Being
18). And, if we take this to be
true for humans, then in human worship and liturgy, when we as human beings,
persons created in the image of God, come together in real fellowship, it is
there that we most mirror God.
To start with, the relationship between divine communion and
human worship is an image seen in what essentially makes us human beings. We cannot be or find out who we are without others; it is
just as we are with each other that we become and discover who we are.
The truth and meaning of our lives is found in communion with each other
as the truth and life of God is a shared life of joyful fellowship between the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There
is an analogy between the communion that goes on in the inter-personal
relationships of God and the communion that goes on in our inter-personal
relationships as human beings. This
is the beginning of understanding the relationship between divine communion and
a human worship, but only the beginning.
Because the analogy between divine and human existence is one
of the relationship or communion, our liturgy must be something more than merely
an attempt to imitate what we imagine God to be in God’s innermost being. What do we do in worship?
How do we serve in worship? From
a Trinitarian perspective, shouldn’t worship then be an expression of our
humanity?
When we speak of an analogy, we speak of two entities in
simultaneous order. When we think
of imitation, we think of one thing following another.
One can imitate a memory or a prediction but not a simultaneous event.
When, in our worship, the communion that flows between the Father and his
incarnate Son, comes together through the Holy Spirit with our unity as a
community of faith, it is an event of the moment, an eternal event in the
heavens, pressing into service the corresponding human event in space and time.
What we have are two simultaneous, inclusively free events.
This means that at the heart of our worship should be expressions of
justified, liberated, free human beings living out relationships with each other
in Christ. Trying to imitate Christ
is not the same thing as freely expressing joy at believing the truth of who we
really are in Christ.
Karl Barth, in “Jesus is Victor” (Dogmatics
VI.3.1, 250) has a most illuminating conversation between Christ, in his
prophetic office, and the human being trying to resist the truth.
For Barth the message Jesus Christ, as the Prophet of God, has for his
people is “You are already at peace with God.
This is the ontological truth of your being.
It has been accomplished in me. You
are the human at peace with God, because you are in me as a result of the
incarnation.” Obviously for Barth,
this is the objective truth as it is in Jesus Christ, whom God was in,
reconciling the world to himself—which by the way, God accomplished.
And then there is the subjective truth as it comes home to the human
heart under the influence of the Holy Spirit (Dogmatics IV.I,645ff). Barth’s
dialogical scene goes like this:
The man to whom it is
said thinks that he is not like this new, peaceful,
joyful man living in fellowship. He
asks leave honestly to admit that he does
not know this man, or at least himself as this man.
The Word of grace replies:
‘All honor to your honesty, but my truth
transcends it. Allow
yourself, therefore, to be told in all truth and on the most
solid grounds what you do not know, namely that you are this man in spite
of
what you think.’
Man:
‘You think that I can and should becomes this man in the course of
time? But I do not have
confidence in myself to believe this. Knowing
myself, I shall never become this man.’
Word of grace: ‘You do well not to have confidence in yourself.
But the
point is not that you can and should become this man. What I am telling you
is that, as I know you, you already are.’ (Dogmatics
IV.3.1,250)
Hans Urs von Balthasar brings out the same truth: “Peace
with God in a good conscience is such an incomprehensible gift of
grace—because it fundamentally overthrows all the laws of ethics—that a
person involved literally does not know what is happening to him.
By rights, in any case, ought to have a bad conscience; his heart accuses
him. But more effective that this
accusation is the defense put forward by ‘our advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ the righteous’ (1 John 2:1); thus our lack of peace at the
psychological and ethical levels cannot prevail against the greater peace which
is made ours through grace: ‘by
this we…reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God
is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:19-20) (Prayer 47).
The subjective realization of the objective truth of the
gospel is what is celebrated in worship and what is celebrated as human beings
realize their freedom in Jesus Christ. Worship
is the joyful expression of thanksgiving and praise in response to the response
made on our behalf by Christ in the presence of God (the objective of who we
are) and the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts uniting us with Christ so
that what he believes, we believe, and what he knows, we know as our humanity is
exchanged for his glorified humanity (the subjective awakening to believe, see,
and participate in Christ’s being for us).
Worship is not law to be followed or a worked-up response of some kind
with the purpose of moving God. Worship
is the gift of being moved by God and the presence of the Holy Spirit uniting
our prayers with the prayers of Jesus. Understood
in this way, our worship is not to be an attempt on our part to try to produce
something for God, or to reenact something we think is happening with God, but
our worship, being a human action in faith, participates in the life of God
already, and by doing so, points away from itself to the ground of its being.
In the Epistles to the Hebrews, the Old Testament
“latreia” (worship) was understood as a parable (9:9), or a sketch or shadow
(8:5) “of the heavenly one.” “By
that is meant that the worship on earth is not a transcription of the heavenly
reality, but a pointer in observable form to a higher reality” (T.F. Torrance,
Priesthood 20). The
worship that God gives us is meant to turn our eyes from focusing on ourselves
and turn them to focusing on Christ, the author and finisher of our faith.
T.F. Torrance writes that we must draw near to God by
following the pattern of the Suffering Servant, and the example Jesus gave his
disciples in the Upper Room, where they had the Last Supper and where Jesus
washed their feet as an example of service
In this way, the way of service to others, and the way of humility in
suffering, if need be, for the sake of goodness, we come together as a community
for worship. This is the attitude
and the orientation in which we hear the call and come to worship; it is in this
way that we draw near to God. And
yet, only God the Holy Spirit can draw us into real worship.
When viewed separately, the relationship between divine
communion and human worship is a relationship of analogy.
God is a union of divine, personal, loving relationships in joyfully
shared life and communion. Humanity
is a community of fellow-humanity; we are the image-bearers of God as we relate
personally to one another in community. Our
worship, though a shadow, a sketch of divine communion, should not come
originally out of our attempt to rewrite, in our scripts, the divine fellowship;
rather, our worship ought to be a response of joy, in our community, to the
truth which we have heard and said “yes” to in Jesus Christ.
As we find the freedom to live as who we are in Jesus Christ and express
that liberation with one another in gratitude to our Lord and Savior, we find
ourselves under the Spirit’s control. Divine
communion and human worship are united; we as God’s people share in the
communion of the triune God. So,
“Communion is not something into which we enter, as it is something into which
we are drawn by the Spirit” (Persons
320).
We draw near to God in an attitude of willing, loving service
toward each other. Our view of
worship is Trinitarian and incarnational in that we believe worship does not
start with us; it starts with God and is a gift to us.
Therefore, worship is not something first and foremost we do; it is
something Christ does for us, with us, and in us. We are simply given the gift of worship through the Holy
Spirit who draws us, out of ourselves and into a share in the very communion
which Christ has with God in the Spirit.
What we want to do in our final section on worship is look
more closely at the role of Christ in our worship, for in Christ, God and
humanity are joined, and in Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit reaches a coming
together of divine communion and human worship.
Where does Christ fit into worship? Objective:
To learn about divine communion—human worship and introduce the section on the
role of Christ in worship LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
28-32, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
The
Role of Christ in Worship
Karl Barth once stated, “Thus everything that is to be
said about our participation in the person and work of Jesus Christ…consists
only in this: It lies in the nature
of what happens there in God, in eternal continuation of the reconciliation and
revelation accomplished in time, that in full reality it happens here also to
and in us…” (Dogmatics II.1, 157).
This was based on Barth’s understanding that we have not merely been
represented by Christ once, but because he is our great high priest in eternity,
we are continually represented by him (156).
The idea is a simple, yet profound one.
“Our flesh is therefore present when He (Jesus Christ) knows God as the
Son of the Father, when God knows Himself.
In our flesh God knows Himself” (151).
There is no knowledge of God apart from the self-knowledge of
God (Dogmatics II.1, 3-204).
God is known by God through the Trinitarian way of the Son’s knowing
the Father in the Spirit. This knowing within God is the experience of God’s own
shared life—a circle of love, joy, fellowship, truth, and devotion.
And any knowledge of God that we as creatures have is a gift of
participating in God’s own knowledge. This
gift of participating in the life and love of God is the divine will of God for
us.
For Barth (Dogmatics
IV.1, 3-22) the salvation of humankind is “God with us.”
This means, therefore, that the incarnation was not an afterthought with
God, but the primary election and eternal decree of God.
Before God was Creator, God was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in loving
relationship. Out of God’s own
being comes the decree to create an image-bearer and to bring this image-bearer
into the very life and being of God. The
means of bringing this about would be the incarnation of the Word.
The second person of the Holy Trinity would assume human nature so that
he could know the Father and be known by the Father as always, but now with the
mind, emotions, and will of a human being.
It is in our humanity, embraced from within by the Word, that the Son and
Father share their life in the Spirit, and because it is in our humanity, we are
now included in their life. Salvation,
for Barth, is God’s gift of life to us, and the way God gives us this life is
(1) objectively uniting us with the Son by the incarnation of the word (primary
objectivity), and (2) subjectively
awakening us to this by the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts (secondary
objectivity).
Irenaeus used the vision of the two hands of God, the Son and
the Spirit, by which God reaches out to us, embraces us, and pulls us back to
himself (Worship 66). The Son of God became what we are that he might take us back
to God to be with God as God truly is, the God of love, expressed in loving
relationships. Salvation is the
gift of life, accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, experienced
by Jesus Christ as he lives in the presence of the Father as a man, and
salvation is this shared life of the triune God put into the soul and worship of
the church.
The place of Christ in our worship is the twofold role of a
priest, to take us and our needs to God, and to bring God in the form of God’s
Word to us; it is the role of the mediator.
In Jesus Christ, we meet with God and God is with us.
In him as our High Priest, we see the double meaning of grace.
God comes to us in Christ, and Christ does for us what we cannot do for
ourselves.
What does Jesus Christ do for us that we cannot do for
ourselves? There are at least two
things that come to mind. As we
mentioned above, he prays for us because we do not know how to pray, and in a
real sense, he believes for us, because, left to ourselves, our faith is in as
much need of redemption as anything else.
Christ’s intercession for us is our truth as we journey
through this life, just as it is our reality when we are called and gathered for
worship. Even in worship, we do not
know how to pray as we ought, so the Spirit searches our hearts and prays to
God, and Jesus Christ takes us into intimate fellowship with God. We pray with Christ. We
worship with Christ. He takes our
prayers and makes them his, and he takes his prayers and makes them ours.
What are our prayers for the sick and lonely but echoes and
reverberations of prayers which start in the soul of Christ?
What are our prayers for the church and the world if not a participation
in the real prayers of the Lord of the faithful and unfaithful?
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray with Christ and in Christ,
calling God “Our heavenly Father,” and addressing God in the Spirit of
adoption that the Apostle Paul was so passionate about in the letter to the
Galatians. Our prayers are a
joining in the high priestly prayers of the Son of God, incarnate in Jesus
Christ.
To add an anecdote of my own, not too long ago I went to
visit a friend of mine who was dying of cancer.
She had lived her life as a member of the Christian community, baptized
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
As many people are when they come close to death, she was afraid.
She was also afraid that her faith might not be what it should be.
She said to me, “Tom, if I only knew that I had enough faith.”
My response to her was, “Helen, Jesus Christ has enough faith for the
two of you.” Her wonderfully
changed countenance witnessed to the truth that she found peace in the faith of
Christ for her.
Benefiting from the faith of another is not unheard of.
According to Mark’s Gospel (chapter 2), a paralyzed man, lowered
through a hole in the roof to by-pass the crowds around Jesus was forgiven of
his sins and then healed of his paralysis after Jesus recognized the faith of
his friends.
Karl Barth understood that we need justification even in the
act of believing. For Barth there
is only one human being who stands justified in the presence of God and who
fully believes in his own justification; this
human is Jesus Christ (Dogmatics IV.1,
608-642), and it is his faith that is put in us, by the Holy Spirit, when we
believe. Even our faith is his
before it is ours.
To quote St. Paul in Galatians, “It is no longer I who
live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal.2:20) and let me make a
substitution for “live” with the word “believe” -- It is no longer I who
believe, but it is Christ who believes in me -- is to capture the essence of the
place of Christ and faith in Christian worship.
Our prayers are real and they are ours.
Our faith is real and it is ours. But
they do not find their source in our potency, in our power, in our spirit, in
our being. No, they are rooted and
grounded in Jesus Christ who prays to the Father as a human being, and believes
in the Father, as a human being, and at the same time draws us by the Holy
Spirit to participate in his being human for us.
He stands in our place and prays, involving us in his prayers and making
them ours. He stands in our place
and believes, involving us in his faith and making it ours.
“So it is that faith is really a trust in Jesus’ seeing, in his
praying, in his believing, in his dying, and in his living” (Currie, Ambushed
by Grace 40).
The place of Christ in our worship is that he is the real
agent in worship (Worship 17). He is the liturgist. He
leads us in prayers which he has prepared.
He takes us to God. Yes, he
has a double role in the sense that he receives our prayers and our faith, and
he takes them and translates them into his own, offering them to God in his own
vicarious humanity. He is both the
leader of our worship and the object of our worship (Worship 65).
Christ leads us in worship in much the same way as he heals
us. He does not heal in the way a
doctor does by standing over us, diagnosing us, and then working on the problem.
He heals us by becoming the patient, taking the patient into his own
death, and then including the patient in his resurrection from the dead (Worship
52-53). We will pick up on this
idea later as we look at questions of ministry in participation with Christ.
Christ leads us in worship by becoming the worshiper, taking
us into his own worship of God in the Holy Spirit.
Who he is and what he does as the incarnate Son of God becomes for us our
worship as we are drawn by the Holy Spirit to participate in the eternal
relationship, that is the shared life of God the Father and God the incarnate
Son. Objective:
To learn about the role of Christ in worship and begin a concluding session on
prayer and worship LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
33-35, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
The social doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a very
practical teaching in the life of the Christian with enormous and radical
consequences for how we understand and practice the life we now have within God.
To begin to understand and view God as a communion of persons, into whose
life we have been drawn, in the most real sense, begins to make clear to us our
place, our meaning, our purpose in God’s story.
Prayer is a good place to start in this whole enterprise of
discussing key issues in our lives of faith, in terms of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit. At times
prayer might flow through us freely, as if under compulsion, with praise and
thanksgiving being poured out as if not to be contained, but at other times in
our lives it is difficult, and we wonder what it is all about.
Yet, as Barth showed us, it is commanded by God.
But, not only is it commanded by God, the power and means of obedience is
given to us graciously in Jesus Christ. The
Son of God became incarnate in the personal history of this man from Nazareth,
and through his life, death, resurrection, and return to our heavenly Father, we
have been placed in the closest proximity to God.
We are in and with Christ as he prays and worships with us, for us, and
in us.
So, prayer, like worship, is not something that begins first
and foremost in us but is a gift to us, a gift of the Holy Spirit that lifts us
above ourselves into the divine communion of the three persons of the one true
God. The three persons of the Holy
Trinity are a fellowship, a communion of persons.
Yes, they are divine, and in their image we have communion and fellowship
that is analogous to theirs. But
that is not the final word. We do
not simply imitate their communion in our communion.
“The Spirit of God, poured into our hearts as love (Rom. 5:5), gathers
us together into the body of Christ, transforming us so that ‘we become by
grace what God is by nature,’ namely persons in full communion with God and
every creature” (God For Us 1).
Our method has been to take some primary issues of prayer and
worship and try to bring them to the surface, and then ask them and discuss them
in terms of the Christian teaching of God, that God is one God, and as this one
God lives as a communion of three persons.
As we began to look at the problems of prayer and worship, we did so by
looking at them in the belief that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.
This is the way faith thinks, or in Anselm’s famous phrase, it is the
dynamic means of “faith in search of understanding.”
What we saw was that looking at prayer and worship through
Christological lenses, because it is impossible to look to Christ and not see
him in relationship to God the Father in the Holy Spirit, opens up for us the
much larger panorama of seeing all our own lives in the grammar and coordinates
of the triune God of grace and love. And
because we were able to look beyond ourselves and see that we are participants
in a much bigger story than our own, we were able to see that when we deal with
key questions and struggles in our lives of faith, we are not to be thrown back
upon ourselves to muster up the ability to conquer. No, we have a Lord who does for us what we cannot do for
ourselves but who does not leave us uninvolved.
This is our life we share with him and his life he shares with us.
We are pressed into his service and participate in his living for us.
Prayer is a logical place to start in dealing with some focal
issues in the Christian life. It
shows a pattern for understanding worship, the sacraments, and our own outward
lives of service. Furthermore, in
looking at prayer through Christ and the incarnation we have seen the nature of
God’s grace as it applies to our lives. Which
begs the questions, just how good is this news we are beginning to hear about
the Trinity, Christ, and our place in their life?
In the next chapter we are going to ask some of the key questions of the
gospel itself. What is the gospel
of Jesus Christ? And what does this
good news have to do with us and our lives in this time?
The
Gospel of Jesus Christ CHAPTER
TWO: THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST CLASS:
6 Objective:
To conclude the section of prayer and worship and to introduce the chapter on
the gospel of Jesus Christ LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
37-38 and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
Text
What is the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Or, how is the gospel of Jesus Christ to be understood in the light of
the Christian doctrine of God? How
can a faith in one God, as three persons in communion with each other shape the
message of the good news of Jesus Christ?
In the first chapter, an important starting point and method
for understanding prayer and worship was made by beginning to look at them with
the underlying acceptance that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.
To look first at prayer and worship with this belief was then followed by
a move into a wider vision of their reality in terms of God, who is one being
with three persons in fellowship and communion.
I started with prayer and worship because it is through and in these
events that we are encountered by God in Jesus Christ.
In this chapter the focus of attention is the gospel
of Jesus Christ. What is the
gospel? What exactly are we
speaking about when we speak about the gospel?
To what does the gospel refer? In
chapter one, we began with questions that concerned us when it comes to prayer
and worship. And, my attempt to
reframe these questions in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity was not to push
aside the questions of prayer and worship when asked in a most direct and candid
way, but to discover what truth may be uncovered in referring the questions as
quickly as possible to Jesus Christ and his relationship to God in the Holy
Spirit.
In thinking about the gospel of Jesus Christ, the subject
itself refers directly to Christ. Still
the work is to look at the “gospel” in terms of the full diety and full
humanity of Christ and how his two natures refer us to the triune God.
The word gospel (euangelion),
of course means most literally, “good news” or “good message.” That is a place to start, but its dictionary meaning is a
somewhat superficial answer to the question because it begs the deeper question,
then just what is this good news, what is this message?
Immediately, the little preposition “of” leads directly to Christ
Jesus himself. Everything to be
said about this good news is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ.
It is the good news of Jesus Christ.
But, what does it mean to say this, that the gospel is the gospel of
Jesus Christ? What does it mean to
say that all that can be said of the gospel of Jesus Christ can be found in his
person? Surely, it means that the
gospel is at least about Jesus Christ.
He is the focus of our attention even before we look at what this message
says about him. The gospel must
have to do with his teaching and what he accomplished.
God’s work in Christ speaks the gospel.
The gospel is the good news of what God has done through Christ for human
beings. But, again, this little
preposition “of” locates the meaning even closer to Jesus Christ himself. The
question “What is the gospel of Jesus Christ?” becomes the same as the
question “Who is Jesus Christ, and what has become of him?”
Then, because it is good news, this must also mean who he is and what
became of him has something to do with humanity, in other words, with us as
humans. Who is Jesus Christ, what
became of him, and how does this affect us?
What does who Jesus Christ is have to do with who we are?
That is much the same question as “What is the gospel of Jesus
Christ?”
Objective:
To introduce the gospel of Jesus Christ LESSON:
Homework:
Before the next class, read pages
40-46, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
Who
is Jesus Christ?
As Karl Barth was fond of reminding us, the answer is
often buried deep within the questions themselves and the very nature of the
questioning. “For being truly questioned by God and truly questioning about
God, he [the Christian preacher] will know God’s answer and so be able to give
it to God’s people, who with their question really want God’s answer, even
when they do not realize it” (Word of
God 123). For Barth, we are the
ones called into question by God, and therefore our questions in return should
be in truth a proper response.
Another way of saying this is that questions, suitable
theological questions, point us in the right direction.
According to Jinkins (52,53), theology at its best has been able to
preserve the kind of questions which lead us to the mystery of God in Jesus
Christ. “The questions we ask
largely determine the answers we get” (52).
In the last one hundred years, the importance of the “Who
is Jesus Christ?” question had a powerful voice in the teachings of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer. After his death, his
students put together a book made from his Christological lectures (53).[1]
Bonhoeffer believed that the abstract questions of “how this can be
possible?” are not the primary questions of Christian theology at all.
The question that Jesus put to Peter, “But, who do you say that I am?
(Matt16:15),” is the first and primary question of the Christian faith and
faithful theology (53). The church
is first called upon to believe in Jesus Christ and the power of his
resurrection. However, a major
problem that she faces today is the overwhelming desire to be fundamentally
useful (Currie, Ambushed 1). J.B. Torrance writes of this tendency towards usefulness as
the major weakness in the cultural Protestantism of today.
Is the Christian religion really to be a means to an end?
For sure, the problems of the world that face the church are extremely
important: racism, poverty, terrorism, social injustices of all kinds.
And the church naturally wants to know how to face them, how to deal with
them, what to do in response to these issues. But, the questions of how, when, and where—the pragmatic
questions need to be addressed in each and every generation in light of the
rediscovery of the who question. “Who
is God? Who is Jesus Christ?—‘Who do men say that I am?’—Who is the Holy
Spirit?” (Worship 69).
This is the primary question to ask in every age.
Furthermore, asking this question and rediscovering who Jesus Christ is,
every new time builds the solid foundation for hearing the call of God into
ministry and outreach.
Nicodemus’ conversation with Jesus, as given in The Gospel According
to John shows a question and an answer, both located in the very person of
Christ himself. What Nicodemus said to Jesus at night was “Rabbi, we know
that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do the signs that
you do apart from the presence of God” (John 3:2).
But, was it not really a question of Jesus? “Yes, this is what I seem to see in the miracles that
accompany you: you are a teacher, you have come from God, and God must be
present with you. So, this is what
I want to know; who are you? Who in
the world are you?” Jesus,
surprisingly enough, in his answer to Nicodemus told him something about who
they both are, “…no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from
above.” Nicodemus could see the
signs that implied to him God was present with Jesus, but he could not see the
kingdom of God because he was not born from above.
He could see what pointed to the kingdom, but he could not see the
kingdom itself. Only Jesus could see this.
Jesus could see the kingdom of God because he was the one born from
above. He was the one who had come
from God’s kingdom. He goes on to
say this later in the conversation, “…we speak of what we know and testify
to what we have seen…No one has ascended into heaven except the one who
descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (John 3:11-13).
The question implied by Nicodemus’ approach to Jesus should not
be confused with the question asked by the jailer in Acts 16:30, “Sirs, what
must I do to be saved?” Nicodemus
apparently, here at least, wanted to know about Jesus himself, who he was, not
what he had to do to be saved. Who
was this Jesus of Nazareth? That
was his question. Likewise,
Jesus’ answer to him should not be interpreted as if Jesus threw some
spiritual responsibility back on Nicodemus to muster up a way within himself to
be born anew, from above, to be born again.
Yes, Nicodemus “…must be born from above” (John 3:7).
This Jesus plainly stated. But,
even Nicodemus knew he could not do something so astonishing (vs. 4).
Being born of the flesh is flesh, and being born of the Spirit is spirit,
two different births; and furthermore, “…no one can enter the kingdom of God
without being born of water and Spirit” (vs. 5).
Yet, with all of this taken for what it actually says, it does not say
that Nicodemus was the one responsible to give birth to himself, anew of
“water and Spirit.” This
conversation is a testimony to who Jesus Christ is.
It is a witness to the “who” question.
Jesus Christ is the one born from above.
Yes, Nicodemus must be born from above, so here is his new birth from
above standing right in front of him, face to face, speaking to him.
Nicodemus’ new birth is located in the person of Jesus Christ. Who is Jesus Christ? He
is the new birth. He is the one
born from above on our behalf. He
is what must be for us. In him, in
who he is, is the location of a second birth, a new human, a being born from
above.
Must I be born again? Yes.
Have I been born again? Yes.
Where, when, and how was I born again?
These questions are all first dealt with in the answer to the question,
“Who is Jesus Christ?”
Having our new birth located in the person of Jesus Christ does
naturally raise a question of our experience of this truth.
We are to believe. We are to
experience his new being born from above. “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).
And yet, the truth of who Jesus is and who we are made to be in him is
not centered in our experience of him, but in the person of Jesus Christ prior
to any experience we might have.
Karl Barth told the story of a lady who approached an evangelist by
the name of Kohlbrugge, really wanting to know of his own conversion experience,
so she asked him, “Tell me sir, when were you converted?” his reply was, “Madam, I was converted nineteen hundred
years ago when Jesus Christ died on a cross for my sins and rose again” (Worship
75). T.F. Torrance tells much the same story about being asked by
someone whether or not he had been born again.
Professor Torrance’s words were similar; he told the inquisitor he had
been born again when Jesus was born to Mary and when Jesus rose from the
“virgin tomb.” When asked to
explain, this is what Torrance said: “This Tom Torrance you see is full of
corruption, but the real Tom Torrance is hid with Christ in God and will be
revealed only when Jesus Christ comes again.
He took my corrupt humanity in his Incarnation, sanctified, cleansed and
redeemed it, giving it new birth, in his death and resurrection” (T. F.
Torrance, Meditation 87).
In other words, our new birth, our conversion, our regeneration is what
has first taken place in the person of Jesus Christ.
It is in encounter with him that we begin to discover this.
Faith, in part, is the discovery of the gospel, what God has
already accomplished for us, upon us, and in us in the person of Jesus Christ. When Jesus, according to Matthew’s gospel, asked Peter who
he believed him to be, Peter’s answer was “You are the Messiah, the Son of
the living God.” “And Jesus
answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has
not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven“ (Matt. 16:17). The gift of faith that leads to discovering who Jesus Christ
is, is a revelation sent to the church from God in heaven.
Who is Jesus Christ in relationship to the one in heaven who
revealed his truth to Peter? One of
the questions Christians commonly ask is, “Is God just like Jesus?”
Is there a God behind the back of Jesus Christ?
How is God revealed to us in Christ Jesus?
Karl Barth has helped me more than any other theologian whom I have
read in terms of viewing the objective nature of God’s revelation in Jesus
Christ and our subjective participation in this event.
For Barth, the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ can only be humanly
understood with Trinitarian grammar and coordinates (Dogmatics I.1, 295ff). There
are three words for Barth that represent this event with Trinitarian grammar and
coordinates: revealedness, revelation, and revealer.
In the encounter with God, the truth of God can only be known in us
if there is a sense of revealedness. This
must, of necessity, be a gift to us. This
is a place where the subjective and the objective knowledge of God come
together. There is an ontological
divide between God and us, a divide we cannot cross, but a divide God can cross.
God is not separated from us in the way we are from God.
“It belongs to the sovereign freedom of God that God can cross over the
divide in an act of self-revelation” (Hunsinger, Read
Karl Barth 76). For there to be
a knowledge of God on our behalf, in us, and by us, there must be this sense of
revealedness made by God. It is an
awareness…a spirit…an awakening to the truth of the encounter itself.
Something, someone, some truth has been revealed to us and in us; in our
being there is a corresponding “ness.”
We experience it. We know it. And
for Barth this indicates the Holy Spirit. This
is the gift of God himself. A sense
of the revealedness of God is God the Holy Spirit.
And as Barth follows this line of thought, there would be no
revealedness unless there was a revelation.
One implies the other. The
“ness,” the subjective event has an object.
If there is a sense of revealedness, then prior to this revealedness
there must be a revelation. Something
objective, something outside our own minds, something outside the creaturely
sphere must be in order for us to know.
Even objectivity and subjectivity have their origins in God.
God’s primary objectivity and primary subjectivity are seen in God’s
own self-knowledge. God is object and subject within God’s triune being at the
same time. “God is first and
foremost objective to himself “ (Dogmatics
II.1, 16). This means,
furthermore, that God is first and foremost the subject who knows God. In terms of the communion of persons of the Trinity, the Son
fully and closely knows the Father in the Holy Spirit, and the Father, likewise,
totally and intimately knows the Son in the Holy Spirit.
This self-knowledge of God, and subsequently, humanity’s present share
in this, is one of the purposes in the incarnation.
It is through and in the Son of God becoming human that the
self-knowledge of God is brought into creation.
Revealedness implies a revelation.
Revealedness implies revelation, which means that the Holy
Spirit leads us to Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ was sent to us by the decision
of the Father. “God’s presence
is always God’s decision to be present” (Dogmatics I.1, 321). Revelation
implies a prior decision by a revealer, an election, a choice made by God.
“For God so loved the world that he gave (sent) his only begotten
son…”(John 3:16). The election
of God was to incarnate the knowledge that God has of himself as a means to
cross the ontological divide into the world of the creature.
The Son became human in order to know the Father as he always has, only
now with the mind, heart, and soul of a human being.
Revealedness means a revelation. Revelation
means a revealer. And this
Trinitarian grammar and framework to knowing the gospel of Jesus Christ is our
inclusion in God’s own life.
Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus
Christ is the Son of God, elected by God and sent to us, to become one of us, to
dress himself in our humanity, to, in essence, be for us a new humanity, a
humanity born from above. There
will be further work for God to do in Jesus Christ and in the next section we
will look at justification and atonement. But,
to close these paragraphs, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, “who has passed
through the heavens” to bring to us the relationship he has had with God the
Father from all eternity. Jesus
Christ is the Son of God, who in his birth from above has brought to us his
firsthand participation in the Trinitarian self-knowledge of God.
This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.
He is God’s Son born from above to bring God to us and us to God.
What did he do? What became
of him? Does God’s finished work
in Jesus Christ affect us? These
questions we will ask next, in the light of God being a glorious oneness in the
communion and fellowship of three divine persons. Objective:
To learn about the primary question in theology and introduce the section on
Justification LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
48-51, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
What
became of Jesus Christ?
This question certainly is a focus on Jesus Christ.
To ask what became of him presupposes that he went through a change in
his own personal history. What did
he go through? What did he
experience? And, where did he end
up in his life of service and sacrifice?
I am going to begin to think out the question of what became of Jesus
Christ in terms of the theological concept of “justification.” Jesus Christ became and is justified humanity.
Jesus Christ is the human being who presently lives in the presence of
God the Father as justified. In his
ongoing humanity, Jesus Christ, as the Son of God who was dead, but now lives,
communes with God in the Holy Spirit as a human whose very being is eternally
righteous with God. As the Son of
God, Christ knows himself as just, as righteous with his Father, and he knows
this in our humanity which he took to the cross, then to the grave, and finally,
back to God. There is therefore, a
real sense in which the faith Christians have in their own justification is the
very gift of participating in the self-knowledge and faith which Christ has in
his own justification. He knows
himself justified before God, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit, his faith is
worked into the believer’s heart.
Jesus Christ in his ongoing humanity is really justified before
God, and because our justification is a participation, rooted and grounded in
his, our justification is ontologically real.
It has to do with Christ’s being and ours coming together.
Our justification as grounded in Christ, is not just a declaration made
by God, “as if” we are justified; rather, it has to do with our being made
“good” by God in what became of Jesus Christ (Hart, Regarding
Karl 53). There is a sense in
which Jesus of Nazareth and his concrete personal history is objective to us,
yes; it is primarily objective to our own experience in that it is located first
and foremost in him and his history. But,
it is not wholly apart from our being; his personal life is not disconnected
from the root of who we are. Here,
by the Holy Spirit’s work, his story becomes dynamically inner woven (i.e., perichoretically
bound up) with ours. Somehow,
mysteriously, our being is bound up in his and therefore, his justification
becomes ours too (59).
It is in this relationship between the real justification of
Jesus Christ and our real justification in him that faith begins to show itself
as a discovery. Faith as it is
given to the believer and worked in the believer’s heart awakens the discovery
of what has already been accomplished by God in Jesus Christ.
It is an awakening to the truth and seeing things as they already are.
This then makes unbelief a denial of the truth, almost analogous to a
derangement. What is real is who we
are in Jesus Christ and our faith is healthiest when it corresponds to this
truth. Barth makes the following
assessment. “It {our
truth in Christ} is indeed a riddle. But
in spite of it, it is not a fairy-tale or a myth. Compared
with it, measured by the reality of it all, the things we think we know of
ourselves…are a fairy-tale and a myth” (Dogmatics
VI.1, 547).
The Son of God came into humanity in the incarnation. He took
humanity, all humanity into his being. He
assumed humanity. In his
crucifixion, the old humanity of the first Adam and Eve was put to death; in his
resurrection, our new humanity was raised to eternal life.
In Christ’s ascension, he took our new humanity back with him to live
eternally in the presence of God the Father’s Holy Spirit.
This life is his truth. And
he knows himself in this. He is
justified and knowledgeable of his own justification.
And all humanity is wrapped up in him.
His truth is the truth of all. To
discover this is the gift of faith. Faith
is the assurance that the truth of Jesus’ relationship to God is also ours and
the conviction that his new humanity is likewise, ours.
Not to believe this does not change the truth or the reality
of the justification; it is simply a denial.
And one may disbelieve himself all the way into an hellish existence, but
that doesn’t change the truth of who he is at the core of his being in Jesus
Christ.
When justification is viewed through these Trinitarian lenses
and faith is subsequently understood as a participation in the faith of Jesus
Christ and therefore a “discovery” of a truth that is already real and true,
then, subsequently, faith cannot be seen as an action that justifies in and of
itself. As Barth notes, we are just
as much in need of justification when we believe as when we do anything else (Dogmatics
IV.1,615).
Justification is not basically a matter of a judgment
regarding us and how we relate to the law.
This relationship factors in, but it is not the foundational
relationship. Fundamentally our justification has to do with God’s purposes in
creation and our covenant role in these purposes (Hart 52).
God’s purposes are that we share in the life God has with Jesus Christ
in the Holy Spirit, and our role in this covenant is to participate with Jesus
Christ as he stands in for us. Unfortunately,
the doctrine of justification by faith, when based in a legal understanding of
our relationship to God, presents faith as if it is the final action or work
that God brings in at the eleventh hour as a justifying performance.
In this way of thinking we earn our justification before God because we
believed. We couldn’t earn our
justification by obeying the law, so God made it a little easier on us; if we
will just believe in Jesus, then we will be justified.
This is often how the gospel is reduced, even in some Reformed circles.
“If you repent and believe, you will be saved; if you do not repent and
believe, you will not be saved.” Through
Trinitarian lenses, however, the gospel appears far more gracious.
“This is what God in Jesus Christ has done for your sake {justified
you}; therefore, repent and believe” (Hunsinger, Read
Karl 130). Objective:
To learn about justification and introduce the subject of atonement LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
52-54, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
Central to the New Testament witness of the work of God in
Jesus Christ, to the formation of a new covenant between God and humanity, and
central to the doctrines of the gospel itself, is the relationship of oneness
and undivided fidelity between God and Jesus Christ, God the Father and God the
Son. The church, at its deepest
level of knowledge, grapples to find new language for describing this oneness in
terms of a relationship of reciprocity and shared life known by God the Father
and God the Son in the power of God
the Holy Spirit.
One of the first examples of constructing new language use
was the term perichoresis, first used
in the 4th century (T.F. Torrance, The
Christian Doctrine 102). Originally
it was used to give expression to the relationship between the divine and human
natures in Jesus Christ but soon was used in the same way to give some
clarification to the relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Perichoresis is a Greek
compound, which literally means “near” or “about” (peri),
in certain cases, joined with “room” or “space” (chora).
It came to mean closeness of space or a sort of mutual containing,
overlapping, or mutual enveloping, mutual indwelling.
Out of this notion of relations between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
came the concept of “person, unknown in human thought until then.”
(The Christian Doctrine 102).
When perichoresis is used to
describe the relationship between the persons of God the Father and God the Son
in Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, then it comes to mean
that the Father is closer to the Son than he is to himself, and likewise, the
Son is closer to the Father than he is to himself, all in the reality of the
Holy Spirit. It refers to such a
thorough and complete sharing of the soul that the persons involved dwell in one
another. The fellowship of life and
being is so pure that there is union, at-oneness.
And the gospel declares to us that this relationship has not ended.
It is our inclusion into this relationship of dynamic mutual
ongoing and simultaneous interpenetration between the persons of God, which we
believe should shine the brightest light on our view of the atonement.
Our atonement, which is in Jesus Christ, provides an essential moment in
the ultimate plan of God for us. The
eternal decree of God is the incarnation and our inclusion in the triune life of
God through the incarnation. And
there is a sense in which we as fallen humanity needed to be remade so as to
have a full participation in the shared life of the triune God of grace and
love. There is the eternal decree
of God, but there is also the fall of humanity into the powers of sin which must
be dealt with.
When John Calvin wrote of the great exchange of humanity in Jesus
Christ, it was precisely here that he saw Christ, assuming our fallen humanity,
taking it to the grave in the crucifixion, and then having it raised to new
life, ascending to the Father, in himself representing the exchange, a new man,
born again from above, the first born of the dead, the second Adam. And in this resurrected humanity of Christ resides our new
humanity. In this—our new
humanity—is realized the successful work of the atonement.
We are in him, hidden with Christ in God, and by the power of the Holy
Spirit, we have fellowship in the new human being, alive in Jesus Christ.
This is our adoption and our ultimate election written of in the first
chapter of Ephesians (John Calvin, Institutes
I, 504-507).
It was the divine will of the triune God that we be adopted
into the circle of love and communion that is God.
It was this intent that sent the Son to pass through the heavens, into
the far country, and take on all that is natural and corrupted in our natures as
human. But, as Athanasius asked,
“What was God, being good, to do about the corruption of God’s good
creation?” How much of our
humanity would God take on and how far would it be taken?
God would take it into God’s very being and then take it down into
death. It is the goodness of God,
and the love and devotion of God to all of us, and the eternal will of our
election that represent the power of love behind the atonement. theology will happen.
Objective:
To learn about atonement and introduce the section on salvation LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
55-57, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
Salvation, in light of the doctrine of the Trinity is
first and foremost the gift of God, to humanity, in Jesus Christ, our share in
the shared life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
As an example of this understanding, for Karl Barth, salvation consists
in our being given a full participation in the incarnate life of Jesus Christ (Dogmatics
IV.1, 8). This, of course, implies
that had there been no fall into sin, there still would have been an
incarnation.
For the eternal decree of God is the incarnation.
It is the eternal will of God not to be God without us, and the plan for
God’s bringing us into this eternal life with the Holy Trinity was to bring
God and us together in the one man, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, begotten before all worlds would become
flesh, assume fallen human nature, and yet know and love the Father in the
Spirit as he had from before the foundations of the world.
Only now, he would know and love the Father with the mind, emotions, and
will of a human being. He would do this for us, and he would do this with us, giving
us the freedom to join in, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Before we understand salvation as a rescue from the powers of
sin, which it certainly is, from its positive beginnings, it is a gift of life
in its fullness, the gift of humanity’s share in the triune life of God.
Salvation is the gift of eternal life, where eternal life is perceived in
accordance with the life enjoyed by the communion of persons which make up the
Holy Trinity. The atonement for sin
realized in Jesus Christ was a move made by God to make our humanity fit for
this inclusion; in other words, right for our participation.
This sees the atonement as an act of God upon our humanity with the
purpose of bringing about the salvation God has decreed from the beginning.
It sees the atonement as an act of God, growing out of the love of God,
in order to fulfill the incarnation itself.
This view of the atonement implies something else, something
of the importance to our understanding of God.
From this position the atonement is understood as coming out of the love
of God for us and directed at us, not at God.
There is another view of the atonement that sees the atonement as
directed at God, as if God needed to be changed, satisfied, or appeased. If the atonement is from this other view, considered as a
divine penalty with the purpose of satisfying God, then the implication is often
that God the Father is not as for us as God the Son is until God is satisfied.
But, when the atonement is rooted and grounded in the incarnation, then I
see there was never a time when God is not for us in Jesus Christ.
This has wonderful possibilities for preaching for here the
atonement, as viewed from within a Trinitarian-incarnational paradigm serves
God’s purpose to give us a full share in the ongoing humanity of the Son of
God. Here the atonement is seen as
a moment when God assumes the sin of the world, in the assumption of all that is
human, in the death of Christ on the cross.
Furthermore, the atonement is seen as the full expression of God’s love
and relentless devotion to us. It
shows the God who is always, has always, and will always be for us, as opposed
to a God who has to be conditioned to return to love for us after the fall.
It portrays the God to whom the world is reconciled in Christ, as opposed
to a God who has to be reconciled to the world. Objective:
To learn about salvation in relationship to atonement and to introduce the
section on the vicarious humanity of Christ LESSON:
Homework Before the next class, read pages
58-60, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
The
Vicarious Humanity of Christ
There is a God-humanward movement in Christ.
And there is a human-Godward movement in Christ.
Christ deals with humanity on behalf of the Father, in making the Father
and his loving judgments known to humanity, and Christ deals with the Father on
behalf of humanity in a life of perfect devotion and obedience to the loving
will and judgments of God. In Jesus
Christ, God and humanity come together. Both
sides in Christ Jesus fulfill the covenant between God and humanity.
As an application of this for our purpose, in McLeod Campbell’s words,
Jesus makes “a perfect Amen in Humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of
humanity” (Campbell, Atonement 11).
It is through and in the vicarious humanity of Jesus
Christ that we come to know God the Father. Likewise, Jesus Christ, the Son of God who assumed our human
nature, in our name and on our behalf, in leading us to God made the “One True
Response” to the Father in his entire life of obedience, suffering, and
ultimately death on the cross (11).
What does this mean? It
means that Christ stands in our place and receives the word of God’s gracious
judgment and forgiveness, that our own repentance may have its rooting and
grounding in his. I’d like to use
an illustration used by J.B. Torrance to bring out the idea (Worship 55). If two people have
the misfortune to quarrel, and one comes to the other and says, in all
sincerity, “I forgive you!” It
is clearly not only a word of love and reconciliation, but also a word (perhaps
a withering word) of condemnation—for pronouncing his forgiveness, he is
clearly implying that the other is the guilty party.
Indeed it can be very hurtful, if not self-righteous, to say to somebody,
“I forgive you!” How would the
other person be likely to react? I
could imagine his immediate reaction as one of indignation.
Sensing the element of judgment, of condemnation in the word, he might
well reject the forgiveness, because he refuses to submit to the verdict of
guilty implied in it. He would be
impenitent. There would be no
change of heart. But, suppose on
subsequent reflection he comes back to his friend and says, “You were right! I
was wrong!” Implicit in his
acceptance of love and forgiveness would be his submission to the verdict
guilty. There would be a real
change of mind, and act of penitence on his part (metanoia),
conversion, reconciliation.
So it is with the gospel of the incarnation.
God in Christ has spoken to us his word of forgiveness, his word of love
which is at the same time the word of judgment and condemnation, the word of the
cross. But implicit in our
receiving of the word of grace and forgiveness, the word of the Father’s love,
there must be on our part, a humble submission to the verdict of guilty…But
who can make the perfect response…?...What we cannot do, God has done for us
in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ
stands in for us in our humanity, in our name, on our behalf, to make the
perfect submission to the Father. (Worship
55,56)
That is what is so wonderful about God’s grace.
Not only does God speak a word of forgiveness to us in Jesus Christ, but
he also provides for us in Jesus Christ one who can accept God’s judgment and
make the perfect response of penitence. So,
God accepts us, not because of our own repentance.
Rather, God accepts us in the person of Jesus Christ who has already said
“amen” for us, in death, to the divine judgment upon our sin through his
atonement.
The best way to view the atonement is in its very own light as an
outgrowth of the incarnation. The
incarnation was not an afterthought with God; it is the eternal decree by which
God purposed to bring the people of God into the life of fellowship, love, and
joy known by one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is God’s election to salvation.
Our adoption into this circle of life was objectively brought about
through incarnational union with Christ. As
Christ assumed our humanity, taking us to himself, he took upon himself our
covenant responsibility before God. He
stands in our place and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
He does not leave us out or take our responsibility from us, but he
provided the foundation upon which we may relate to God in the new covenant
drawn in his blood.
The suffering that Christ underwent, the judgment that he received
and accepted in our place was not merely suffering as suffering, or pain as
pain. But because there was the
stepping in to do for others what they are incapable of doing for themselves,
God must have taken the very pressure of sin in God’s very self.
This is what provides our atonement for sin. Objective:
To learn about the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ and introduce the section
on election LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
61-67, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
What
does Jesus Christ have to do with us?
In this section where I ask the question of involvement in the
personal life of Jesus Christ, I’m going to connect it to the subject of
election. God elects himself to
become with us and for us in the humanity if Jesus Christ.
This is where and how we find ourselves involved in the life of Christ.
The gospel of Jesus Christ can be summed up and stated in
terms of election. As a pastor, to
begin to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ in terms of election and the
freedom that it gives me to minister in the lives of others has been a source of
great hope, faith, encouragement, and expectation.
So, in what follows, I want to lay out the gospel of Jesus Christ in
terms of election and with a view in mind of a witness for Christ seeking to
share the power of the gospel in another person’s life.
Does God choose us, or do we choose God?
Where and how do God’s decision and our decision come together?
One of the first pictures of this that I was exposed to, presented
God as one who could see the end of things from the beginning. God looked into the future, saw those who would believe and
trust in Jesus Christ and therefore labeled them as the “elect.”
Besides a number of questions this picture of election raises, the main
difficulty I have with it is that it presents election not primarily to be with
God; rather it presents election as God placing his stamp of election approval
on those who have chosen to put their trust in Jesus Christ.
In terms of wanting to share the good news of Jesus Christ
with someone who might be new to the faith, I can’t think of a way to present
God here other than God already knowing whether or not the person will accept or
reject the gospel, and at the same time making God’s affirmation of the person
contingent upon his actions. As a
pastoral evangelist, what does one say? “Please,
accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior so that God will affirm your
election?”
This, admittedly simplistic view of our choosing God before
God agrees with our decision seems to place God at our disposal.
It does present God as one who knows love is a decision and is not
desirous of religious robots but wants us to love and trust God with our hearts
and wills: but it places so much of the power in our hands.
And further down the road, if our relationship with God is based
primarily in our decision to believe in God, will we not ask ourselves just how
genuine or real our decision has really been?
If election starts with us, will we not, in the end, be thrown back upon
ourselves with the impossible job of proving our election?
However, there has been another view of election that
gives more attention to the sovereignty of God.
This view sees election to begin with God.
Election begins in the eternal counsel of God, where before creation, in
eternity, God made a choice, picking, according to God’s own secret wisdom
those who will be the elect. These
would eventually choose God also because God would work this faith in their
hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. God
chooses the elect and then the elect, by God’s work and power will come to
trust in God and eventually reach their final glory in eternal life with Jesus
Christ.
Here, again, in this rendition of election, when
sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with someone who may not have yet come to
personal faith and trust in Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ cannot
really be directly spoken to the person. Because,
there is always the nagging question of whether or not the person is of the
elect.
The scene might be something like this.
As one sharing the gospel, you may paint a picture of God’s creation of
the world, speak of such things as the entrance of original sin, the biblical
witness that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and therefore
the universal need for salvation. Jesus
Christ may then be witnessed to as this savior, sent from God to save God’s
people from their sins. Jesus’
teachings, his life and ministry, and his atoning death on the cross, with his
resurrection from the dead may all be presented as historical fact, like a
documentary being shown on TV. But,
because you don’t know if your friend is of God’s elect, then all you can
really, honestly do is look away, pray, and hope that if this person is one of
the elect, that God’s timing for doing a work in her heart will be done now,
and she will acknowledge a new found faith in Jesus Christ.
Both of these views of election leave the person sharing the
gospel with the big question of whether or not God’s good news in Jesus Christ
really applies to the other. Will
my friend choose God? Or, will my
friend turn out to be chosen by God after all?
But, there is another view of election that seems to be more Trinitarian
and fully an expression of the good news of Jesus Christ.
And, as for the person sharing the good news, he or she may look the
friend square in the eyes and share with him what God has already done with him
and to him in Jesus Christ.
The second view I presented of election may be thought of as
a fairly general view that originated with Augustine in the 4th
century and found new expressions in the writings of the reformers, especially
Calvin and Luther. I mention this
because the view I want to share now owes most of the credit to Karl Barth, who
began his own presentation of election with addressing the questions being asked
and answered by these reformers (Dogmatics
II.2, 41).
In the time of the Reformation, with the severe life and
death struggles between the Protestants and the Church of Rome, with the
rediscovery on behalf of the reformers of the Word of God and the authority of
Holy Scripture, Luther and Calvin were asking why it was that some believed in
justification by faith alone and some did not.
And it was in search of an answer to this question that they turned to
the Scriptures for an answer. The
answer they gleaned for their question was the Bible’s texts regarding
election. From this, they came to
think some believe and some do not believe because not all are elected by God to
believe.
What I think is one of Barth’s major contributions to this
discussion is his recognition that this question was not the question election
was ultimately meant to answer. The
question of why some are believers and others are not is a valid question, and a
question that God ultimately knows, and a question that in some sense does
relate to the sovereignty of God, yet that does not mean that a doctrine of
election should be extracted from Scripture in order to answer that question,
especially if that is not ultimately why it is there.
The first presupposition of truly scientific thought is that the right
questions need to be asked of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.
The Old Testament witnessed to Jesus Christ in a spirit of prophetic
expectation, and the New Testament witnessed to Jesus Christ in a spirit of
accomplishment. Following this way
of thinking, then for Barth, the doctrine of election present in the Holy
Scriptures was not fundamentally to answer the questions of Luther and Calvin,
but to witness to Jesus Christ.
How does the Bible’s witness to election serve the
Bible’s witness to Jesus Christ? God’s
election in the Old Testament and in the New was a witness to God being able,
having the power, and the concern to enter into the created world and make
choices, elect and demarcate. God
can, does, and will make and carry forth elections in the world God created. Why? To testify
that God can elect to be for us. God
can elect to be our God. God can
elect God to be for us in our space, time, and history.
The doctrine of election, before it is a choice of certain nations,
communities, and individuals, is a teaching that God can elect, that God can
choose himself to be for us in Jesus Christ.
Here, God’s election and the good news that God’s election is for us
has been brought together, that is to say, on our behalf. Election has to do with God the Father, God the Son, God the
Holy Spirit and with us, all of us.
The gospel of Jesus Christ can be summed up from this initial
place with the doctrine of election. God
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit chose for the Son to become human in
Jesus Christ. The triune God of
love chose to enter our world and become one of us and one with us in Jesus
Christ. When the Son came, he took
on our humanity; he became one of us, assumed human nature.
He lives as the Son of the Father in the Holy Spirit as a human being.
He brought who he was into our world; he brought his loving communion and
fellowship with God in God’s Spirit to us.
By bringing his life with God to us he included us, in the triune circle
of life in God. On the cross, our
sinful selves were taken down into death. When
Jesus Christ died, we died. And
when he rose, we rose with him. It
is the basis of this election of God that St. Paul writes such things as “you
have been raised with Christ and seated at the right hand of God” and “your
life is hidden with Christ in God.” The
good news of Jesus Christ is about who Jesus Christ is in terms of being sent
through God’s election, what became of him, and what that has to do with us.
With this Trinitarian vision of election and its part in the
gospel of Jesus Christ, the person who is wanting to share the good news with
another now really has something to say. The
message is not just a message of this is what God might do for you if you will
do this, and the message is not just a “this is what God has done,” and then
hope and pray it was done for the person spoken to; this is a message aimed and
spoken to the person: “You are included.
God has already acted for you, with you, and in you in Jesus Christ.
You are in Christ. You are included in the life that Jesus Christ lives right
now, as a human being in the presence of God the Father in the Holy Spirit.
That’s the good news of what God elected to do for you, with you, and
in you in Jesus Christ. It is the truth. It
is your truth.” Objective:
To learn about election and begin a concluding session on the gospel of Jesus
Christ LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read page
68, and be prepared to discuss the following questions:
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the great news of an event
which God has already accomplished for us, with us, and has applied to us
through the incarnation on the Son. The
truth of the Trinity as it applies to us, takes God’s eternal love for us and
reveals how God has searched for us and found us in and by becoming one of us.
God has given himself in the beloved Son.
Humanity and God have been united in this, united in an inseparable way.
Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and savior.
This is the gospel we have to preach and teach.
Thomas F. Torrance gives a wonderfully clear and
straightforward presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
As for this chapter, the final words could not be better expressed. God loves you so
utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his
beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very Being as God for your salvation.
In Jesus Christ God has actualized his unconditional love for you in your
human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without
undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself.
Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are a sinful and utterly
unworthy of him, and has hereby already made you his own before and apart from
your ever believing in him. He has
bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for
even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease.
Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.
From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not
only as God but as man. He has
acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity,
including your personal decisions, and your response to God’s love, and even
made your personal decisions for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as
one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God
through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s
self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely
accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted in him.
Therefore renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your
Lord and Saviour. (Mediation 103,104)
Baptism
and the Lord’s Supper CHAPTER
THREE: BAPTISM AND THE LORD’S SUPPER CLASS:
14 Objective:
To conclude the chapter on the gospel and introduce the chapter on the
sacraments LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages 70-71, and prepare to discuss the
following questions:
Text
The church sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are
mysteries of God’s real presence with God’s children.
But, to say that they are mysteries is not to say that some understanding
of them cannot be gained. The grand
mystery in our lives of encounter with God is God.
Faith seeks more and more understanding. What I am giving expression to
is having the dimensions of reality defined by the witness of God’s love in
Jesus Christ and humanity’s inclusion in the personal communion of Jesus
Christ and God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The unpacking of this expression is meant to further
understanding.
The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ as witness to the
Trinity is that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were in
their being of divine communion before the foundations of the world.
This is witnessed to in the incarnation. God as one being, in some of Karl Barth’s favorite words,
“does not will to be God without us.” God
chose to create humanity with the purpose of including humanity in his divine
fellowship and communion as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Son of God came to us in Jesus Christ, was born on Christmas morning
and in becoming human, created a new and mysterious union with all creation and
within this creation with all humanity. The
Son of God entered into the heart of human history and into the heart of human
existence through the incarnation. The
Son of God made union with humanity. When
the Son of God died on the cross, humanity died on the cross with him. As the Son of God rose from the dead, humanity rose from the
dead with him. When the Son of God
returned to God the Father to live in the presence of God the Father in the
loving relationship of the Holy Spirit, humanity was taken into this
relationship in him. These are the
coordinates of human reality. Our
space-time continuum has been taken into the personal relationship that Jesus
Christ has with God the Father as a human being, and; therefore, creation
through human participation, now participates in the Trinitarian life.
The relationship between God and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ
defines humanity’s position in the truth of God. It is from within this reality that we have looked into the
mysteries of prayer and worship, the mystery of the gospel, and now the mystery
of God’s real presence in baptism and in the Lord’s Supper. Objective:
To learn about the notion of a sacrament and introduce the section on baptism LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
72-77, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
Often the questions which arise with baptism are about who should
be baptized, how shall they be baptized, and by whom?
These certainly are important questions that need to be addressed, but
before we can answer these, we should explore the nature of baptism itself.
To address this question, especially in social Trinitarian terms, is
foundational to bringing the
doctrine of the Trinity into simple contemporary language, that the church might
always be faithful to her true center in Jesus Christ.
To explore the nature of baptism, we need to ask certain
kinds of questions. What is Christian baptism?
What does it signify? The
reality to which baptism points will provide the answer of baptism’s nature.
T.F. Torrance points out in The Trinitarian Faith that
the New Testament, when speaking of baptism, uses an unusual word, baptisma, as
opposed to the more common word baptismos.
Baptismos is the regularly used word in literature outside the New
Testament that refers to the “repeatable rite of ablution or ceremonial
cleansing” (293). Baptisma , on
the other hand, refers not to the rite itself, but to the reality pointed to by
the rite, i.e., the unique event of human salvation in Jesus Christ (293).
When in our own subjective experience, we first begin to see
and accept the truth of our objective salvation’s reality located in Jesus
Christ, at this point the Holy Spirit is working faith in our hearts, and this
participation in the reality of the truth of Jesus Christ is the baptism of the
Holy Spirit. It is the work of the
Holy Spirit that brings us to see the reality of our new human existence located
in the person of Jesus Christ.
In the second chapter, justifying faith was expressed first
as the faith of Jesus Christ where he knows himself as justified in the presence
of God the Father, and then it was discussed as our participation in his faith.
It is the faith of Jesus Christ that is given to us as a gift by the Holy
Spirit. We, by the power of the
Holy Spirit participate in Christ’s vicarious human faith.
Also, in the first chapter our participation in the divine and human life
of Christ was seen as the basis of our prayer and worship.
Neither prayer nor worship starts with us, but with Jesus Christ who has
communion and fellowship with God the Father in the Holy Spirit. We are lifted by the Holy Spirit to join with Christ in his
prayers and communion on our behalf. There
is the objective truth of who Jesus Christ is in relationship to God; there is
the objective truth of Christ’s relationship with God, and this relationship
is in the Holy Spirit. When the
objectivity of the truth of Jesus Christ becomes a subjective affirmative
experience in our lives, this is the work of the Holy Spirit baptizing us into
the truth of God. The moment when the objective faith of Jesus Christ is made to
be a subjective experience in us we are being baptized into the life of Jesus
Christ. Baptism is a beginning, an
initiation into life in the Spirit. It
becomes a move out of the “flesh” and into the “spirit.”
When the apostle Paul writes of the two conflicts which Christians
experience in this world, he uses the terms “flesh” and “spirit.” In speaking of “flesh” and “spirit,” Paul, as an
apocalyptist, is speaking of two different time periods.
The time of the “flesh” is the time before the incarnation, death,
resurrection and ascension of Christ, when the world’s time is a time of sin
and death. In the experiences of
this time Christians experience levels of sickness unto death.
The time of the “spirit” comprises the times when Christians discover
and participate in righteousness, justice, and eternal life through
participation in the life of Christ. “Life ‘according to the flesh’ is a life that is
miscarried, life that has strayed into contradiction with itself, life which
suffers from the bacilli of death. Life
‘in the Spirit,’ on the other hand, is true life, which is completely and
wholly living, life in the divine power of life, life which has found the broad
space in the marvelous nearness of God” (Moltmann The
Source of Life 72). The
beginning of this divine Trinitarian life in the experience of the Christian is
baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Baptism into the triune life of God, therefore, has to do with
time, created time and eternal time. Eternally
and temporally, Christ for us, is prior to Christ in us.
Eternity in the triune life of God was before created time.
God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are in being prior to
creation and the creation of time. And
so there is a sense in which eternity past and eternity future exist before
time. Eternity in this way is a
gift into this present time. So,
time as we know it is not as much moving into the future as our future is, by
the gracious gift of God, moving into our created time.
We live and move and have our being in God.
Creation was created in Christ, through Christ, and by Christ.
“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold
together” (Col. 1:17). The life
of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit are eternal and their eternal life,
which contains our future life, is given to us in our experiences of their life
in our lives. Spiritual baptism is,
therefore, the initiation of our pre-established eternity through the inner
witness of the Spirit working its way into our here and now.
Spiritual baptism is existential and is the initial event of our truth in
Christ becoming a reality in our own personal experience.
Baptism is our initiation into an awareness of our existence in the
triune life of God.
Since God, prior to creation, is a communion of persons, when
we are baptized by the Holy Spirit into God’s life, we are then embraced by a
communion of persons and brought to see our already established place in their
fellowship. This may be an
important notion to consider when thinking about the relationship between the
community and the individual.
There are two views of the individual Christian’s relationship to
the community of Christians--the church, and the sacrament of baptism. One view emphasizes the predominance of the church over the
individual, and the other view emphasizes the predominance of the individual
over the church. In both cases, the
church is understood to be the community of spiritual human beings, who through
faith in the encounter with God are growing in the truth.
The individual is one of these spiritual beings.
In the case of the community’s predominance over the individual, the
individual enters a church which always precedes her.
She might enter the community as an adult, aware of her entrance, or
unaware as in the case of an infant. But
the presence of new life in the community comes before everything she is and
knows. In this perspective, the
faith of the community precedes the “ever becoming, ever changing, ever
disappearing, and ever reappearing acts of personal (individual) faith” (Tillich,
Systematic Theology vol.3, 218).
The situation is different in the view which places predominance
with the individual over the church. Here,
the decision of individuals to form a covenant with God is the act that creates
the church (Tillich 218) and is, therefore, prior to the church.
Of course, the presupposition is that the act of faith in the individual
human being is the work of the Holy Spirit.
The individual is formed by God into a spiritual being before placement
in the community of other spiritual beings.
It is within the first view that the argument for infant
baptism can be made. It is from the
perspective of the second view that the importance of adult baptism may be
higlighted. In terms of the Trinity
and the eternal being of God as a communion of persons, it is certainly
questionable as to whether there is any precedence of the individual over the
communion or vice versa. However,
with the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit in the writings of the Apostle Paul,
where he writes such things as, our lives are hidden with Christ in God, that we
have been raised and seated at the right hand of God in Jesus Christ, that our
lives are hidden in God with Christ, and that when Christ died for all that all
died, then Christ must be for us prior to being in us.
And this idea helps us to see the place of the Holy Spirit’s baptism in
our lives with Christ. The triune
love of God is for us before the triune life of God is in us.
The French Reformed baptismal liturgy captures this quite well:
Little child, for you Jesus Christ has come, he has fought, he has
suffered. For you
he entered the shadow of Gethsemane and the horror of Calvary.
For you he
uttered the cry “It is finished!”
For you he rose from the dead and ascended into
heaven and there he intercedes—for you, little child, even though you
do not know
it. But in this way the word
of the Gospel becomes true. “We
love him, because
he first loved us. (Worship 76)
The baptism of the Holy Spirit which awakens us to our inclusion in the
life of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is an initiation;
it is the beginning. The real
presence of God is the source of this beginning.
This life begins and continues in prayer and worship.
This life is grown and enhanced as we move deeper in our understanding of
the gospel. Central to the worship
of the children of God is the table where we are given a specific share in the
vicarious humanity of Christ. Objective:
To learn about Baptism and introduce the Lord’s Supper LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
78-80, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
The
Lord’s Supper
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that God has found us and
come to us in the person and life of this human being.
Humanity is no longer alien to God.
This is what we respond to with great joy, praise, and thanksgiving when
we come together as the church in Christian community.
In the faith that God has searched for us and found us in Jesus Christ,
we bring our own prayers and petitions to God.
But we understand what is our own as gifts from God the Holy Spirit.
Our closeness to God, our life in God, our fellowship and communion with
God is a shared fellowship. Worship
is the gift, to the church, of participating in the communion of shared life
enjoyed by God the Father and the incarnate Son in Jesus Christ, through the
Holy Spirit. Worship is a
Trinitarian experience.
At the center of worship is the table of Jesus Christ, where
through the Spirit, in remembrance of Christ, we celebrate our ongoing union
with him. Jesus Christ is present
at the table, through the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine.
He is really present, not merely in the Holy Spirit, but in all that he
is as Son of God and Son of Man. It
is at the Eucharistic celebration of the real presence of Christ that the church
knows at the center of her life, her salvific union in the incarnation of God.
This part of the chapter is not just a systematic presentation of
the foci of Eucharistic doctrine, though we will touch on them. In what follows, we will look at the doctrine of the Trinity
and the light it shines on our understanding of this center of the church’s
life, and in seeking balance, will investigate how the liturgical event of the
Lord’s Supper is a revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
The central mystery of the Christian faith is the Trinity.
This is the beginning.
Next, the focus will be the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist. Besides some Zwinglian
followings in “the holy catholic church,” a large part of the church
believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
What we often disagree on is how Christ is really present.
We will not attempt to explain how.
We will discuss the Eucharist in terms of the incarnation and pose the
question of its being an extension of the incarnation.
But mostly, we will argue for the real presence of the whole Christ in
the whole liturgy whose focal point is the Lord’s Supper.
As we think about the real presence of Christ, we will consider the
relationship between the signs and the reality they signify.
Still, this will stop short of being an explanation. In looking at the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Eucharist, we will discuss the sacrament as the proclamation of the gospel. In my own thinking, I see the doctrine of the Trinity, certainly as the basis of the gospel of Jesus Christ, if not, possibly, the gospel itself. This sacrament is proclamation, for it proclaims to us that God the Father, Son, and Spirit has brought us up into an adoption in which we are given the gift of sharing in their circle of life and joy. How the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper speaks this to us will be the focus of the third part of this section.
Finally we will examine sacrifice in terms of the self-giving
of God and the suffering of God, and what this might tell us about God’s
revelation of himself to us. God
reveals Christ as Lord in the Eucharist, and us as participants in Christ’s
giving of himself to God in worship.
The triune God of unrelenting love sought us, found us, and
reconciled us to God in Jesus Christ. In
the sacrament of the Eucharist, we experience our ongoing union with God in
Christ through the Holy Spirit. The
Eucharist can be seen more clearly in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity,
and the Holy Trinity, through God’s grace, encounters us in the Eucharistic
liturgy of the church. Objective:
to discuss the introduction to the Lord’s Supper and introduce the section on
the relationship between the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the
Eucharist LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
81-84, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
The Trinitarian Mystery of the
Eucharist Central to the Christian religion is the Christian teaching of God: one being, three persons. It is a mystery because it cannot be proven true in the way a mathematician can prove that there are 180 degrees within a triangle, and, yet it is the best expression the church has found to testify to the reality of God revealed in the personal history of her Lord Jesus Christ. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger recognizes, “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. Therefore, it is the source of all the other mysteries of faith; it is the light that illuminates each and every one of them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching within the ‘hierarchy of the truth of faith’” (Introduction 42,43). Following Cardinal Ratzinger, I want to concentrate and expound upon his belief that the Trinity is the source from which all the other mysteries of the Christian faith find their origin, and that this doctrine shines the brightest light on each of the mysteries of the faith. At the center of the church’s life in community is worship, the divine gift of the Holy Spirit, drawing God’s people to share in the communion that Jesus Christ enjoys with God the Father. And, at the center of this center are the Trinity and the Eucharist, the Eucharist being our fundamental experience of the real presence of Jesus Christ and our own ongoing participation in the circle of shared life, essential to the very triune God of grace and love. Thomas F. Torrance understands that the Eucharistic mystery is not just any mystery, but it is the same mystery as the paschal mystery of Christ (Reconciliation 106). Karl Barth refers to the mystery of the Eucharist in relationship to the death of humanity in the death of Jesus Christ when he writes of “…the one ‘mysterium,’ the one sacrament, and the existential fact before and beside and after which there is no room for any other of the same rank” (Dogmatics IV.1,296). In the same way, Robert Jenson sees in the Eucharist and Jesus’ bodily envelopment of all things “the last mystery” (Visible 49), the mystery to end all mysteries. All three of these Protestant theologians see the Eucharist in terms of mystery and in relationship to the mysteries of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. How Jesus Christ is present to us in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper can only be explained from where God stands. This is what is meant by Jesus Christ being really present “through” the Spirit, which of course, means more than just to say he is merely present “as” Spirit, or even as some kind of lesser spiritual reality. Rather, he is present in the Eucharist through the same “inexplicable creative activity” by which he was born to the Virgin Mary and raised again from the dead (Reconciliation 120). That he is really present in the Eucharist, through the Holy Spirit, however, is believed by most of the church; how he is present is the part of this mystery explicable only from the side of God. At the heart of the New Testament is the relationship between God the Father and God the Son revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the real presence of Christ, the whole Christ, which we believe to be present at the Eucharist. The real presence of Christ at the table is the real presence of the whole Christ, as delightfully expressed by Robert Capon. By sacrament, I mean a real presence, under a particular sign in a particular time and place, of something that’s already present everywhere. It’s not just a de novo production of that something or a mental reminder of that something, but the same old something itself present under a renewable sign. Take a kiss between two lovers; it’s not a third thing that merely represents their love; it’s their whole, already present love, re-presented—made really present again—at a specific point under a specific sign. The Eucharist, for example (to take the highest view of it), is precisely a sacrament. It’s not a transaction—not the mixing up of a fresh batch of the body and blood of Jesus so we can reinsert him into our lives. Nor is it merely a reminder of some wonderful things that a onetime Jesus did for us a great many Fridays and Sundays ago. It’s the real presence, under the signs of bread and wine, of the Jesus who has indwelt all our lives, in all his power, all along. (Heart 41,42) It is the gospel of the triune God and the big picture painted by this great news that allows such a view of the real presence of Christ in all our lives, through the power of The Holy Spirit, all the time. Salvation, in light of the doctrine of the Trinity is first and foremost the gift of God, to humanity, in Jesus Christ, of our share in this shared life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As an example, for Karl Barth, salvation consists in our being given a full participation in the incarnate life of Jesus Christ (Dogmatics V.I, 8). This, of course, implies that had there been no fall into sin, there still would have been an incarnation. For the eternal decree of God was the incarnation. It was the eternal will of God not to be God without us, and the plan for God’s bringing us into this eternal life with the Holy Trinity was to bring God and us together in the one man, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ as the one Son of God, begotten before all worlds, would pass through the heavens, become flesh, assume fallen human nature, and yet know and love the Father in the Spirit as he had from before the foundations of the world. Only now, he would know and love the Father with the mind, emotions, and will of a human being. He would do this for us, and he would do this with us, giving us the freedom to join in, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our adoption has already been accomplished for us in Jesus Christ. This is the gospel of the triune God. That we have a place in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, as he stands in for us, as our mediator before the Father, is the gospel of the triune God as it is proclaimed in the “visible words” of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The objective work of God has been accomplished for us in Jesus Christ, and as we will see below, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper provides the realm for the objective truth of who Jesus Christ is, what became of him, and what that has to do with us to enter, by the work of the Holy Spirit, in our own faith and knowledge. Our subjective experience began in baptism and is continued on through the Lord’s Supper. Objective:
To learn about the mystery of the Lord’s Supper in relationship to the mystery
of the Trinity and to introduce the section on the real presence of Christ in
the Lord’s Supper LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
85-93, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist The Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist, is the sacrament of our continuous participation in Jesus Christ, in all that he has done for us, and in all that he is presently doing for us graciously in the power of the Holy Spirit. By our continuous participation in the life of Christ we find that we live out of a center, not in ourselves, but in Christ who is our way, truth, and life. It is the sacrament of our union with the whole Christ, the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended Son of God (T. F. Torrance, Meditation 91). The Eucharist is the sacrament of our ongoing union with the whole Christ, in which, by the Spirit we are taken to have communion with Christ who is really present in every aspect of our lives. It is of importance that we understand the “real presence” of Christ, first in light of the truth that it is the real presence of Christ in all that he is. It is not just that we simply have present with us his body and his blood; we don’t merely have a share in a few parts of Christ, but under the signs of the bread and wine, which are the body and blood of Christ, we have communion with the whole Christ who is the Son of God and the Son of Man. This means, of course, that the presence of Christ with us is the presence of a human Christ who has a human mind and a human soul. That the Son of God is present with us in the Eucharist also indicates that the Son of God is present with us in his essential relationship to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. When, in the early church, there was an attempt to give expression to this relationship revealed between Jesus Christ and God the Father, the church used the idea of perichoresis, or interpenetration, i.e., mutual indwelling. The Father was in the Son as the Son was in the Father, all in the same way, in the Holy Spirit. It was a way to understand the oneness, the closeness, the span of unbroken communion with God revealed in Jesus’ life. What the term refers to is dynamic, always in motion, always alive. The Father dances within the heart of the Son in the Spirit, while at the same time, the Son dances in the heart of the Father in the Spirit. The Father and the Son are closer to each other, respectively, than they are to themselves. It is the ultimate picture of dynamic union. It describes the nature of the ontological relationship which flows within the Holy Trinity. And to say that Christ, the whole Christ, is really present with us in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is to say that we too are included in this shared life of mutual, dynamic, closeness enjoyed eternally by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To understand Christ, the whole Christ, and all that belongs to him as really present, is to understand that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are also, all together, closer to us than we are to ourselves, to use again that favorite phrase of Karl Barth. Furthermore, to look at the real presence of Christ in terms of the real presence of the whole Christ is to see that his presence with us is also represented in all that it is to be truly human. The signs of bread and wine remind us quite forcefully of the fleshliness of God in Jesus Christ. For God in Christ became human, to remain forever human, and continues to envelop us in his humanity, in the most profound way, through the sacrament of the Eucharist. The humanity of Jesus Christ, to whom we are united in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, is a humanity made up of body and soul. We will now take a look at some of what it means to have koinonia with the resurrected Son of God in Jesus Christ, as we share in his body and soul. Robert Jenson presents a rather convincing argument for the real presence of the body of Christ at the table (Visible 29-50 and Essays 220, 221). To start with, in his study of “body” in the New Testament, especially the writings of Paul, he discovered that “a person’s body is simply that person him/herself, insofar as he/she is available to others and so to him/herself” (Essays 220). From this Jenson defines body free from the confines of space. Though body has often been defined in terms of space, or at least its being in a place, for Jenson, body can now be defined simply in terms of availability. Georg W.F. Hegel, in his work on the subject-object relationship also provides Jenson with substance for his argument (220). As Jenson reads Hegel, this is what he hears: A subject that is related to an object only as a pure subject has the power of enslavement over the object. What does this mean? It means that to be known and yet not to know the one by whom you are known is to be, in some way, under its power. In Hegelian idealism, it implies enslavement. But, in the reciprocal knowing of the one who knows you, there is freedom. God is free, and because God is free, in God there is Trinitarian self-knowledge. The Father knows the Son in the Spirit, the Son knows the Father in the Spirit. There is a free Spirit of reciprocity essential to the nature of the triune God. Therefore, for Jenson, “body” is also essential to the triune nature of God. This, of course, does not mean that the Trinity occupies a place prior to the creation of space-time, because body is now defined in terms of availability. Body is the availability that enables freedom, and that is essential to the nature of the triune God because God is available to himself in the fellowship experienced between the Father, Son, and Spirit. So, Jenson can write of “the body of God.” This also implies that for God the incarnation is a perfect expression of the true nature of God, maybe not an anologia entis, but for sure an anologia relatio, an analogy of how God relates within the Godhead as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the body of the Son, incarnate of Jesus Christ, God sees and knows himself, in our humanity, which for Jenson is, in truth, our salvation. And he further argues that in the real presence of the real body of Christ in the Eucharist, God not only intends himself, but makes himself available to us in such a way as to enable our freedom. The Eucharist is the body of Christ, and really the body of Christ, in that where and when we celebrate the Eucharist, the Father and the Son experience their life in the Spirit, in the Son’s body, which is now the source of our true humanity. For Jenson then, “…the space occupied by the bread and cup…is God’s pad in his creation” (221), just because it is where God is embodied in creation. When we are at the table, if we follow the words of institution as they are laid out in First Corinthians and Luke, then we cannot restrict the real presence of Christ to the elements of bread and wine, especially the bread (Pannenberg 305). As the bread and wine are distributed and received, the promise of Christ’s real presence has more to do with the meal as a whole and is made with the partakers in mind. In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist, Christ’s presence, in the light of Easter, in the meal as a whole, is mediated through a recollection of the institution made by Christ himself on the night of his betrayal (305). This brings us to the significance of anamnesis, or remembrance. There is much more to be said regarding anamnesis than we will go into here. For our purposes we are considering it in relationship to the real presence of the whole Christ at the whole Lord’s Supper, along with the idea that when we are lifted up by the Holy Spirit to participate in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, we are therefore given fellowship in his human mind and memory. For John McLeod Campbell, the very essential nature of worship is that worship is the presentation of the “mind of Christ” to God the Father because what the Father accepts as our true worship is none other than the offering of his Son in Jesus Christ and our being united with him (T.F. Torrance, Reconciliation 139). But, what is the truth about this mind of Christ? According to Apollinarius, the Word did become flesh, the Son did become human, Christ did have two natures, one divine and one human, but because the human mind is corrupt and subservient to the flesh, the Son of God did not take on a human mind or a human soul. However, Athanasius didn’t quite agree with this. He saw Christ’s possibilities more in tune with his power to save us than in needing to protect his own divine nature. In his thinking, when the Lord for our sakes became human, it was impossible that the body he possessed have neither a human soul nor a human mind because salvation pertained to the whole human being, and the whole story would simply be a myth if it had to do with the body alone, or anything less than the whole human being. The reason for the incarnation was to redeem humanity, which means all of humanity. To quote Gregory of Nazianzus and Cyril of Alexandria together, who make the same point: “the unassumed is the unhealed” and “what has not been taken up has not been saved” (Reconciliation 112). The mind of Christ in worship, the mind of Christ in the Eucharist, is the human mind. What is of decisive significance for us here is not just that the mind of Christ is a human mind, but that the remembering that takes place in the Lord’s Supper is not just our remembering on a level that sees us as thrown back upon ourselves. “If we are to understand eucharistic anamnesis, we must see it not as merely an act of human remembering of which we are still the subjects but the self-representation of Jesus Christ by his Spirit “(Pannenberg 306). We remember because we are reminded, in the Holy Spirit, by the human memory of Jesus Christ communicating to us. It is here again that we can understand our participation in the ongoing humanity of Christ Jesus for us and our union with him through the Son becoming human and presence of the Holy Spirit. To quote St. Paul in Galatians 2:20, “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” It is no longer we who merely remember in and of ourselves; rather, it is Christ Jesus who remembers in us, for us, and with us because the life we now live, we live by the power of his faith. The Eucharistic anamnesis is the Spirit’s work of having us share in the human mind of Christ, as we have communion in the whole Christ, in his real presence at the holy table. According to George Hunsinger, for Karl Barth, koinonia is the ground of all being (Disruptive Grace 257). Perichoresis is defined partially in terms of “mutual indwelling.” Mutual indwelling can partially define koinonia also because perichoresis is, more precisely, the special case of koinonia that exists between God the Father and the Son (257). Fellowship, participation, communion, sharing, that is to say, koinonia, gives expression to the essence of all being in relationship. Hunsinger writes, The koinonia of the two natures of Jesus Christ in their hypostatic union is again unique to itself and not replicated substantively elsewhere. The koinonia of Christ with his people, in their mystical union, which for Barth includes Israel as well as the church, is yet again something singular with no exact parallel elsewhere. The koinonia among believers themselves, as established through Word and sacrament, making them members one of another in a way that recognizes but also surmounts the insurmountable barrier of death, is another instance of substantive uniqueness. The solidarity of believers with unbelievers in both sin and grace, and the status of believers as the vicarious forerunners before God of those who do not yet or not longer believe, is, though on a somewhat different level, still, for Barth at least, a kind of koinonia relation. (257) Koinonia is the dynamic reality of the relationships in God, between the two natures of Christ, between Christ and his church, between believers among themselves, and between believers with unbelievers. Applying the koinonia notion of the ground of all being to the relationship between the signs and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist has fascinating implications for our study. Again, Hunsinger: Moreover, what Barth has taught us about how to understand the koinonia relation may be surprisingly applicable to the sacramental question. Here I will have to remain cryptic, but I think it cannot be without interest that I Corinthians 10:16 reads: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a koinonia in the body of Christ? The bread we break, is it not a koinonia in the body of Christ?” If we were to apply Barthian logic of the koinonia relation as I have developed it in this essay to this statement about how the signum and the res are related, perhaps large segments of the church might converge around the results. “Sign” and “reality” would thus be seen as related by complete mutual coinherence, so that the sign was in the reality even as the reality was also in the sign, without separation and division, without confusion or change, and with the reality taking precedence over the sign. While the bread would remain bread, for example, it would properly be designated the “body of Christ” by virtue of its “sacramental union” (a term accepted by both Luther and Calvin in this context) or “mutual indwelling” with the body of the risen Christ. (276) The presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is real through the Holy Spirit. It may very well be that the relationship that exists between the elements and the real presence of Christ is a relationship to be understood in terms of coinherence, much like the relationship between of the two natures of Christ. Could it be that the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is very much like the incarnation, maybe an echo, maybe an extension, maybe a reenactment of the Word assuming flesh? Could it be that it is not so much the elements that are transformed, as it is the presence of Christ assuming them, and all who eat and drink them, perichoretically? These are fascinating questions, no doubt. Just as the Word or God assumed flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is an extension, or an echo of the incarnation. In the incarnation, the first change was not in humanity but in the second person of the Trinity who emptied himself to come to us. Does Christ empty himself once again to come to us in the Lord’s Supper? This question is not so much focused on the elements as it is on Christ. The presence of the whole Christ, in his fully divine and fully human nature, in both his human body and soul, “in” the elements and throughout the whole rite, speaks the very catholic good news of Jesus Christ. In the section that follows, we will press on to discuss the very visible proclamation of the gospel of the triune God of unconditional grace and love in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Objective:
To learn about the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper and to
introduce how the Lord’s Supper proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
94-100, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
The Sensory Proclamation of the Gospel We began this section on the Lord’s Supper with the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith, the mystery from which all the other mysteries of the faith proceed, and the mystery that sheds the brightest light on all the mysteries we encounter as believers. Certainly there is mystery involved in the proclamation of the gospel of the triune God itself. It is of value for us to remember at this point that originally the concept of sacramentum, a translation for the Greek mysterion, had a much broader application to the faith than it was later to be given. In its beginning, it denoted all the mysteries of the faith as they were offered to humanity in the church (Dogmatics I.2, 230). The event of the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is to say, the gospel of the triune God, is such an event. For Barth, the event of real proclamation is the function of the church that governs all other functions (Dogmatics I.1, 88). Real proclamation is the gift of God given to the church in which to participate. Yes, central to the church’s life is worship, that sharing in the incarnate Son’s communion with God through the Spirit. But worship is anchored in the Word and Sacrament. It serves the Word and Sacrament. The life of the church, in its liturgy, grows out of worship built upon and around the Word and Sacrament. In worship, rooted and grounded in the real presence of Christ through the Spirit, there is to be found the church’s proclamation of the gospel, which is in a real sense, a sacrament (a mystery) itself. Proclaiming the gospel is in itself, ultimately the work of God, in which the real presence of Christ is acting. One of the contributions of the Reformation was to see the “real presence,” not only in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but also in the preaching of the Word of God. I think it is a mistake to think Reformation thinking moved the real presence from the table to the pulpit, but I don’t think it is a mistake for us to see in Reformed theology that the real presence of Christ, in the preaching of the Word, is also at the pulpit. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of the triune God in that the good news of Jesus Christ is a message that witnesses to who he is as the Son of God incarnate, living eternally in the presence of the Father, and in this eternal life, holding us with him before God in the Spirit. Preaching and the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper are both proclamation of this Word of God. St. Augustine himself considered words, either spoken or written, as signs which point away from themselves to something else (“On Christian Doctrine” 523). This puts “words” in much the same category then as the bread and wine of the Eucharist. And if we remember the suggestion made regarding the relationship between the signs and what they signify by George Hunsinger, the words and the Word might be considered to enjoy that same kind of perichoretic relationship where they mutually indwell one another while remaining distinct and yet dynamically unified. Martin Luther thought of “the Word” as an external thing that can be grasped with the ears or read with the eye (Dogmatics I.2, 229). This, of course, is the Word of God and not the word of humanity, but as understood in relationship to human words, we begin to see the sacramental nature of proclamation in preaching. Foundational to the thinking of T.F. Torrance is the idea that when we are encountered by revelation, or by the Word of God, we are encountered by God. God is God’s Word. The Word of God is the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God who is homoousion ton patri; he is the same Word of God who is consubstantial with God, of the same essence of God the Father. For Torrance, when God gives us Godself in the event of revelation we receive nothing less than God. Torrance once wrote, “If it is not with God himself in his own being that we have to do in revelation, then it is not with theologia but mytholgia, not with theology but with mythology, that we are concerned” (The Trinitarian Faith 134). For Torrance, on an ontological level, we should not drive a wedge between the ultimate gift God gives us and God. Receiving the Word of God in proclamation of human words is to receive God in all the mystery of the real presence of Christ. Certainly, this is also true of the Eucharist. Similar to the event of being encountered by God in God’s Word is the truth that in the mystery of the Eucharist, and the real presence of Christ, and the real presence of God in Christ, and our being really hidden with Christ in God, we are confronted with the proclamation of the very good news of the Trinity. The celebration of the Eucharist speaks the gospel to us in a unique and most eloquent way. Jesus himself, in his reality, is the very gospel, or as Calvin was fond of saying, “being clothed in the gospel.” Often when we think of salvation, we think of the world having gone awry, and God having to do something to fix it. God, in this view, is like a handy man, making house calls, who comes to us, bringing along his ultimate tool, his Son Jesus Christ. Jesus is thought of here like a great cosmic crescent wrench used to make repair on the fallen and broken world.1 Of course, there are a number of things wrong with this picture. To start with, it sees God as far off and having to travel some distance to get to us. It might also be implied the need to fix the broken world is at some point news to God, i.e., after the fact. But, the real problem with this picture is that it sees God using Jesus Christ as an instrument by which to fix the world, when the gospel of the incarnate Son of God in Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, is that Jesus Christ is the finished work of God. The work God does to reconcile the world to himself is done in Jesus Christ. He is not a divine crescent wrench, he is reconciled and redeemed in humanity in himself. The gospel of the triune God of grace is the good news that the Son of God went into the distant land, assumed corrupt human nature, took it to the cross and into the grave, and then raised it, a new and glorified humanity, to live as a human being forever, never to return to some pre-incarnate state. Because God became human, humanity is no longer alien to God. There is no naked logos. And this is all for us. God is for us, with us, and in us in Jesus Christ. He became what we are in ourselves that he might take us back with him, to be with him what he is in himself. That this has already been taken care of, finished in Jesus Christ, is the sum of the message that governs all other events in the church. I want now to discuss two ideas pertaining to the proclamation of the Word made through the Lord’s Supper. Both come from Karl Barth. The first is that with relatively greater eloquence than even the preached Word, the Lord’s Supper, in a very strict sense, reminds us that our justification and sanctification are very real, as opposed to mere ideas, or “as ifs” (Dogmatics I.2, 230). Secondly, for Barth to see the Lord’s Supper as the finest way to proclaim certain aspects of the gospel might come as quite a surprise to some, but he also writes that even preaching the Word cannot stress the truth that “the Word became flesh” like the celebration of the Eucharist (230). For Barth, the justification and sanctification of humanity is wrapped up in the personal history of Jesus Christ (Dogmatics IV.1, 514-642). This is understood first through union with the Christ at an objective ontological level accomplished through the incarnation. When the Son of God became human in Jesus Christ, the triune God embraced all of humanity, and all of creation. In a sense, the Son of God’s coming to us justified our very existence. But, in a much more real sense, our justification is located in the justification of Jesus Christ because we are in Christ through the word of God assuming fallen humanity. This is real in comparison, especially, to forensic views of justification which see our justification in a judgment of God, in that God sees Christ in his very own justice and therefore, seeing us in Christ, judges us justified because Christ is justified. In this view, it is just “as if” we are justified. But, not for Barth. For him, our justification is real because Jesus’ justification is real, and we are in union with him through more than faith; we are united to him at the deepest ontological essence of our being incarnationally. To be sure, we are united with Christ as we participate on his faith. But, as an example of Barth’s realism, for Barth the doctrine of “justification by faith alone” does not mean that we are justified as a result of our faith, but that in the act of experiencing the faith of one’s own justification, the believer is given the faith of Christ as her own, in which to share in the faith Christ has in her justification grounded in his justification (629). To this real justification, the Lord’s Supper testifies because of the basic reality of the meal. It is not just a remembrance, though there certainly is the anemnesis. In the whole liturgy of the Eucharist, the whole Christ is present. He breaks his way into our presence, through the power of the of the Holy Spirit as the Word breaks its way into the space created for it, and as the bread is broken and the wine is poured at the table. This is real bread that is broken. This is real drink. The sacrament is real, and because of its concrete reality, it proclaims the real union we have with Christ, and therefore our real justification and sanctification in a simply eloquent way. In much the same way, the Lord’s Supper stresses better than anything else that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Maybe it is not so much that the elements are transformed to become the body and blood of Christ, but conversely, that as an echo of, or an enactment of, or even an extension of the incarnation, the Word of God assumes the elements of the bread and wine analogously to how ho logos sarx hegeneto in the grand mystery of the Trinity breaking into this world. “In a way which preaching can never do,” writes Barth, “the sacrament [of the Eucharist] underlines the words sarx and hegento” (Dogmatics I.2, 230). The Lord’s Supper proclaims the gospel of the triune God. The gospel is a witness to the objective work of God accomplished in Jesus Christ. This finished work of God in Christ was accomplished incarnationally through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ sacrificed his own life, in giving his life for humanity. He gave and he suffered, and his self-giving and suffering finds expression as God and the church are brought together at the eucharistic table. In what follows, we will examine the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, and how this brings God to us and us to God. Objective:
To learn how the Lord’s Supper proclaims the gospel and introduce the subject
of sacrifice in both the Lord’s Supper and the Trinity LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
101-105, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
Sacrifice, the Eucharist and the Trinity “For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (I Cor. 5:7). On the night that Jesus was betrayed, as he was celebrating the Passover with his disciples, he made a connection with the Passover meal and his passion, in which he would bring in a new covenant for God and humanity. When he said “This is my body…and this is my blood,” he made himself the mystery of the supper and extended the Passover for all in the Eucharist of the church. Therefore, the mystery of the Eucharist is rooted and grounded in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ (Reconciliation 106). And the paschal mystery of Christ can be seen more clearly in light of Christ’s own self-giving and suffering. This a meaning of the sacrifice: by discussing Christ’s giving his own life up, how the Lord’s Supper is related to his self-giving, and how the suffering of Christ involves the Father and the Holy Spirit. Han Urs von Balthasar locates, in the self-giving of Christ, at the Eucharist, the “ontological reason” for the happening of the gruesome events that followed (Balthasar Reader 282). The passion of the Christ happened because Christ willfully gave of himself. This actually has two important implications for Balthazar. It shows how the events of the crucifixion of Christ will and can have universal significance for the church, and it also shows how Christ kept control over his sacrifice in advance of the dreadful events to follow. Christ’s self-giving testifies, and actually gives a foundation to the universal significance of this salvific work because his life was given and not taken. The power is in his act of giving himself. Because he does give his life up, his words give witness to the same power being applied to his promise that as often as the community of believers celebrates the Supper in remembrance of him, and wherever the community celebrates the Eucharist, he is present “in” the whole event. This promise spans space and time. Where two or three are gathered in his name, there he is, in their midst. If he can give his life to his executioners, then he can give to his followers in the Eucharist. He has the power to give and to give universally, whenever and wherever his promise finds fulfillment. Christ gives himself over to death, to die for the sins of the world. This is his self-offering in the final act of atonement. As we stated above, worship in itself is the act of Christ offering his mind, soul, and all that he is now, as incarnately resurrected, to God the Father, in the joy and power of the Holy Spirit. This too is about the self-giving of Christ. In the Eucharist, which brings to our remembrance the self-giving of Christ in his passion, along with the universal ramifications this carries for soteriology, we see the same ability to give himself in worship. Christ gives himself to the will of the Father. And by the gift of the Holy Spirit we are lifted up to participate in his self-giving. In his self-giving, in the transforming of the Passover into the Eucharist, in his promises that “this is my body…this is my blood,” Balthazar writes, “he can have control in advance precisely over his being a passive object of another’s disposition” (Reader 282). That is to say, he will not allow the world to determine the meaning of his death. When Jesus, in the institution of the Lord’s Supper, gives his life to his disciples before he gives his life for them, he determines the meaning of his death. Jesus Christ reveals himself as God in his eucharistic self-giving. The New Testament portrays the entire self-giving of Jesus Christ as the incarnation itself. It is in becoming man in Jesus Christ that God in the second person of the Trinity gives the circle of shared triune life to humanity. For Balthazar and Barth alike, the Eucharist is an expression of the incarnation. Balthazar calls it the “final” expression of the incarnation (Reader 282, 283), while Barth refers to the Eucharist as a “repeated actualization of the incarnation” (Dogmatics IV.1, 54) and as “a part before the whole” (Dogmatics I.2, 231), which I take to mean an event in which we are brought by the Holy Spirit to participate in the ultimate sacrament of all, the incarnation. It is in the Eucharist, therefore, that the incarnation finds its “distribution” in the church. Sacrifice, the sacrifice of God in Jesus Christ is to be understood in terms of the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ, and it is to be thought of in terms of suffering. To sacrifice is to give and to suffer loss. In the passion of Christ, in the suffering of the crucifixion, it seems that we are brought very close to seeing something in the essential being of God. When looking at the essential being of God theologians categorize it in terms of ontology. As theologians approach studying the doctrine of the Trinity, three categories are often made by thinking of the Trinity in terms of the “ontological Trinity,” “the economic Trinity,” and the “social Trinity.” The ontological Trinity refers to God in God’s very being. It seeks to answer the question: “What is revealed to us to be essential to the very being of God?” The economic Trinity perspective attempts to deal with the questions of what is revealed about God in God’s lordship over the household of creation and God’s meeting our very human needs in working reconciliation and redemption. The questions of the social Trinity often deal with what the church can know about God’s inner self-relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Having said this, it is common acceptance among theologians that the nature of how we are encountered by God in God’s economy reveals something to us of the very essence of God. God’s act is in his being and his being is in his act. This brings us to see something of the true nature of the triune God in the suffering of Jesus Christ. Balthazar quotes Barth here:”…the suffering of Christ interprets the whole essence of God, and in particular the heart of the Father who, out of love, gives up his Most Beloved” (Theo-Drama V. 238). God the Father was no mere spectator. “In Jesus Christ God himself, the Father with the Son in the unity of the Spirit has himself suffered what this Man was given to suffer to the bitter end…what are all the sufferings of this world…beside this suffering of God himself, which is the whole meaning of the event of Gethsemane and Golgotha” (Dogmatics IV.3.1, 46)? We have now come full circle, back to the
great mystery of the Trinity. The
ultimate mystery, the ultimate sacrament is the incarnation, and in the
incarnation, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the shared suffering of
God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this gruesome crucifixion.
The sacrifice is that the Son of God in Christ gave himself to suffer
death, and in this death, the triune God of unconditional grace and love
suffered for us. In the Eucharist,
we are encountered by Christ, the Christ who suffered and was dead, and in this
encounter, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit to share in the relationship
Christ has with God in the Spirit. We are taken to be with the one God, who in the persons of
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit suffered.
In this mystery God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are
fellow sufferers with us, as we share in the sufferings of Christ.
Objective:
To learn about God’s sacrifice and suffering and move into the conclusion of
the class LESSON:
Homework: Before the next class, read pages
106-107, and prepare to discuss the following questions:
Central to the New Testament that witnesses to the work of God in Jesus Christ, to the formation of a new covenant between God and humanity, and to the teachings of the gospel, is a relationship of oneness and undivided devotion between God and Jesus Christ. The church has at its deepest understanding used gospel language and described it in terms of the relationship of joy and the shared life known by God the Father and God the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. This relationship was “humanized” or incarnated in Jesus Christ. The life of the Holy Trinity entered the scene of human history at the very level of being taken up in our lot as the man Jesus. Our salvation was to be accomplished in his life and work as the incarnate Son, and basically, the appropriation of salvation would be our participation in the incarnation itself. We are taken by the Holy Spirit and given a share in the human life Jesus Christ now has in the presence of God the Father.
Our union with Christ was accomplished objectively through the
incarnation and becomes subjectively real for us with the gift of faith.
The focal point around which all the experiences of faith revolve is the
Eucharist. It is precisely at the
table of the Lord that we participate in his vicarious humanity on our behalf.
There is a mutual enlightening that comes as we look at the Eucharist in
terms of the doctrines of the Trinity and as we approach the mystery of the
Trinity through the celebration of the Eucharist.
Christ is really present in this sacrament.
The whole Christ and his bride, the church, are brought together to share
in the circle of life essential to the triune God.
The very partaking of the broken bread and poured-out wine, in
remembrance of Christ, proclaims his death until he comes.
And in proclaiming his death, the sacrament speaks of the unconditional
love, forgiveness, and relentless devotion God has for all humanity.
The sacrament of the Eucharist proclaims the catholic gospel of the
triune God.
Christ is our great High Priest who takes us into the Holy of Holies.
He offers himself to God, and in himself he offers us.
We share in the communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Jesus
Christ. We share in his prayers for
his people, in his praise of the Father, in his suffering with fellow sufferers.
We share in communion with him, in koinonia.
This is all ours in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist
of the church. Objective:
To bring together an overall discuss of the conclusion to the chapter on the
sacraments and the course as a whole Activity:
Discuss homework questions. Conclusion
This course has been designed for learning to take place through
conversation based on some homework style preparation.
The overall layout for the facilitator is to start with answering
questions that might be present in the students’ minds.
This, in itself, is a way to foster dialogue.
After an initial discussion which may bring the conversation back into
place, the instructor is given an opportunity to introduce the next section.
Here is an opportunity to offer some personal lecture based on the
overall concepts of the course.
The three main questions throughout are these: (1) Who is Jesus Christ?
(2) What became of Jesus Christ? And (3) What does this have to do with us.
We are seeking answers to these questions in the Trinitarian framework.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God who became a human being through the
incarnation. He died on the cross
and rose again from the dead in a new humanity.
We are included in this. Jesus
Christ stands at the right hand of God, in God’s presence and fellowship.
And he stands in for us. He
does for us what we left to ourselves, cannot do.
By the work of the Holy Spirit, we are not left out; we are included.
These are the dimensions of our truth in relations to God.
How does seeing this as truth help us to find answers to the very real
questions we have in the Christian faith?
Summary and Critique
My personal goals in this book were an application of what I believe
my gift is as a teacher. I love to
learn, and I love to share what it is I have learned.
In my first pastorate, after only a few weeks in the church, one of my
seminary professors called me and asked me how he might pray for me. My answer was this: “When I was a high school mathematics
teacher, not only was I a teacher, I was a mathematician in my heart.
I am a mathematician. I
might not be the most gifted mathematician in terms of calculating ability, but
in my being I know what mathematics is. I
want this same thing in theology. I
have been to seminary; I have studied Greek and Hebrew, church history,
systematic theology, pastoral counseling, and polity…I know how to put
together a sermon: I know how to teach Sunday school, I’m learning
administration and pastoral functions, but in my heart of hearts I want to be a
theologian in the same way I am a mathematician.”
At this time in my church pastorate, I purchased Karl Barth’s Church
Dogmatics and committed myself to reading through them. It
took me about three years, but as I did, I slowly became a theologian.
Barth wasn’t all I read. I
read a number of others who were students of Barth: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, T.F.
and J.B. Torrance, Jurgen Moltmann, and Shirley Guthrie, to name a few.
In all this, I feel like my prayer was answered.
As I went through this stage in my ministry, there were a number of
subjects that spoke to me, and I wanted to begin to share them in my ministry.
The first was a rediscovery of the Christian doctrine of God in terms of
the Trinity. The second was the
involvement of God in humanity through the incarnation.
These two foundational aspects to theological life are what became for me
the guiding framework for an enormous transformation that I went through in my
own spiritual life. I began to
rework my understanding of many aspects of Christianity.
They are in this book because it was through the doctor of ministry
program and my final project, that I was able to bring them all together and
crystallize them. I will mention
them here to show what the subjects of my learning goals are, and then deal with
them more specifically in my theological reflections.
The foci of my theological birth, in terms of the Trinity and the
incarnation were the universal extent of the incarnation, the vicarious humanity
of Christ, the nature of prayer and worship being a participation in Christ’s
new humanity in fellowship with God, eschatological realism, election,
salvation, ontology, revelation, and the nature of truth. At
an epistemological level, it may be that the greatest discovery in my own
experience was that truth is personal, real, and already has hold of us in
Christ.
Through my years in ministry these
are the passions that have been brought to life in me. And
my goal has been to share them. That again, is what I think is part of being a
teacher, to share what is given in terms of learning.
I have taken the theological perspective, that might have been
coined by Anselm, “faith seeking understanding,” and have tried to apply
this in a very real and down to earth way in my life and in the life of
parishioners. “Okay, the
Christian doctrine of God is the Trinity. Whatever
this means, the church has tried to boil it down to one unique being in three
distinct persons. If this is real,
it ought to mean something in a way that touches my life so that I can sit at
the kitchen table and talk to my mother about it.
I’m going to accept that it is real, that it means something, and then
I’m going simply ask, ‘What does it mean?’, and finally, seek answers in
conversation with others and in language that is simple and clear. ‘
The goal of this book is to lay out a rediscovery of Trinitarian theology
from one minister to others and then set out a way to offer the basis for a
dialogue at the congregational level. This
was achieved, and at the same time, because of the very purpose and theological
method, there are ways to improve and move forward with this work.
One of the first hurdles that I experienced was to find a positive way to
engage brothers and sisters in theological conversation.
There is a sense in which many people in the church are turned off by the
very word “theology.” This
might very well be because theology is often rooted in tradition and history and
academic work. And, as I tell my
math students, “There is no royal road to Geometry;” it is likewise true
that dialogical theology takes effort. But,
pointing out the negative fact that not many of us are interested in
“theology” is not necessarily the best way to set the hook.
People of faith, who feel comfortable with each other, do want to share
in conversation about what they think and believe, what their experiences are,
and their own struggles and hopes. The
best way to create an atmosphere conducive to this kind of discussion is to be
real and human, to show that God is not ashamed of our humanity, that being
right with God is not based on whether our ideas are right or not, and that we
are free to express ourselves and that wherever we are, we are accepted by God
and therefore can accept each other. The
dialogue grows out of the reality that we are embraced by God in Jesus Christ
and included in their fellowship and love with each other in the Holy Spirit.
The first chapter was on prayer and worship.
Since the book is about rediscovering theology at a congregational level,
this is a good place to start. If
the dialog were taking place among a group of friends at a local coffee shop,
the whole discussion might start with asking why we are here and what does our
being here have to do with a divine being?
But, in the local congregation where we come together is in prayer and
worship.
This is where an application of the incarnation was applied to grace. It
was in J.B. Torrance’s Worship, Community & The Triune God of Grace
that I learned the importance of the nature of God’s grace in that God
comes to us and takes us back to God and also does for us what we cannot do for
ourselves. It is here that Jesus is
seen as the Son of God living in a new resurrected humanity in prayer and in
worship of God the Father. The Holy
Spirit who brings Jesus and God together in communion brings us to participate
in their relationship. This is
liberating because it does not throw us back upon ourselves to have to find
faith and how to pray and worship God. We
are told that Jesus Christ is doing this for us, in our place, and that we are
included. This is great news.
Some additional research called for here would be liturgical theology. Aiden
Kavanagh takes the point that liturgy is really where language with and about
God begins. His book On
Liturgical Theology is a great place to start.
Alan Torrance in Persons in Communion has a final chapter he
entitles “…Moving Beyond Barth’s Revelation Model,” where he calls for
theology to grow naturally out of doxology.
At a congregational level, one valuable exercise would be to have a
worship committee, in looking at the church’s liturgy, actually to discuss how
every part does or does not lend itself to the idea that our prayer and worship
are not something that starts with us, but that we are joining Christ, through
the work of the Holy Spirit, in his fellowship with God.
God coming to us and taking on our humanity does not present God
embarrassed to be human. Another
question we might ask in a worship committee setting is, “How are we fostering
being really human in our worship?”
The next chapter is “The Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
As an ordained minister in the PC(USA), my ordination is to being a
“Minister of the Word and Sacrament.” Theologically,
there are other dimensions to God’s Word than only the gospel of Jesus Christ,
but for my purposes this was another aspect to the order, Word then Sacraments.
In my own spiritual journey through this project in ministry, I
came to see that the Christian doctrine of God, the Trinity, is the gospel.
The good news of Jesus Christ is the revelation to us from God that God
is a communion of persons in divine relationship and that God as these persons
is one unique being. The good news
for us is that through the incarnation we have been included in the very nature
and truth of God.
As for my own spiritual growth, in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ
and how a Trinitarian framework contributes to this, there have been two major
areas. One has been the discovery
that our salvation is ontologically located in Jesus Christ.
I brought this out in chapter two with the section on Jesus in his
conversation with Nicodemus, according to John’s gospel.
The point was that Nicodemus was asking Jesus who Jesus is, and Jesus’
response to Nicodemus was that Jesus is Nicodemus’ birth from above.
This was absolutely astonishing for me personally, and one of the major
points that I want to share in my teaching and preaching in the church.
Another valuable area in my own growth through this whole project in
Trinitarian-incarnational ministry is the doctrine of election.
This might be Karl Barth’s greatest contribution to twentieth century
theology. The doctrine of election
is not first and foremost in the Bible to answer the question why some believe
the gospel and others do not. Election
is in the Holy Scriptures to give witness to the truth that God may and can
elect effects in the world of creation. In
this, God elects to be God with us. God
elects to come to us in the second person of the Trinity, in the Son, or the
Word, and God elects to be united with us in the person and personal history of
Jesus Christ. In God’s search for
humanity, God elected to be God with us and for us in Jesus Christ, and this has
been accomplished. God was in
Christ reconciling the world to himself, and in Christ, at an ontological level,
this is what God elected and this is what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ.
For me as minister, in an evangelistic setting, this has given me the
faith that I can look any human being in the eyes and tell her that she is loved
by God, embraced by God, and that her life is hidden with Christ in God.
This was accomplished by God in Jesus Christ.
This also tells me that faith is not what gets us into God, but that
faith is that which discovers or sees the truth that we are already in God
through Jesus Christ.
In terms of further work in the church, an evangelistic program or
ministry could be developed out of this truth.
These would be wonderful questions for discussion and actions to be taken
by evangelistic committees at the local congregational level.
For instance: (1) What is the gospel, in terms of evangelism, we are
preaching? (2) Are we finding ways
to reach people with the truth that they are already in God?
(3) Is our evangelistic message simplified to “If you repent and
believe, you will be saved; if you do not repent and believe you will not be
saved?” Or, is our evangelistic message more properly simplified to “This is
what God has already done for you in Jesus Christ; therefore repent and
believe?” (4) How can we minister the truth that God has already accepted us
and included us in the present life of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, and our
brother? This would be a wonderful
ministry to facilitate at the local congregational level.
The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are mysteries in
themselves. The word sacrament
originally referred to mystery. And,
as I pointed out in chapter three, the central mystery in Christian theology is
the Trinity. This brings these two
together. The overall focus in the
teaching about worship is that we participate in the worship Christ has in God
through the Holy Spirit, and this certainly applies to the sacraments.
As was also discussed in this section, the Lord’s Supper might be the
most poignant proclamation of the very gospel itself.
For me personally, this was another big step in my spiritual and
theological journey in this project. I
came to realize that the real presence of Christ is in the Lord’s Supper, and
that the Eucharist is an extension of the incarnation of the Word and a real
participation in the vicarious humanity of Christ.
The ultimate real presence of the mystery of God, or truest sacrament is
the incarnation, God with us in humanity in the personal history of Jesus
Christ. In worship, God is really present in the preaching of Word,
and God is really present in the Lord’s Supper.
Again, we are not to pretend that we know most of what this means.
Still, we have faith in this truth and seek understanding by asking what
it means to us in our daily lives.
In one local congregation, we decided to have the Lord’s Supper the
first Sunday of each month, each Sunday in Advent, each Sunday in Lent, and Palm
Sunday and Easter, and every liturgically celebrated Sunday.
The sermons were expository presentations of the gospel of Jesus Christ
in terms of the social doctrine of the Trinity, and they pointed toward the
Lord’s Table at the same time. Another
question that would be good for worship committees to deal with today, in light
of rediscovering theology at the congregational level, would be to ask the
question of the involvement of the people in the service of the Lord’s Supper.
What are we sharing in? What
does this mean for us? What are we
doing? A valuable study in this
area was done by David N. Power in Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving.
This discovery the Trinity has been the greatest time of spiritual growth
thus far for me. I have grown in an
understanding of the unconditional nature of God’s love for us, and the
radical nature of God’s grace for us in Jesus Christ.
And as a teacher, I have begun to find a way of giving to others what has
been given to me.
In my own experience through teaching and preaching based on this
theological method, congregational responses have been mostly positive and
enthusiastic. There have been a
couple of people who have expressed a lack of interest in such a focus on the
Trinity. But, for the most part,
members of the congregations have shown real interest in continuing to grow in
this Trinitarian direction. Some
have even expressed that this focus has brought joy and enthusiasm into their
church lives for the first time in years. Some
members have commented on finally feeling forgiven and loved by God for the
first time and also in deeper ways.
What I would like to do from this point is to design a small group study
plan that incorporates individual devotional aspects to Trinitarian theology,
such as daily devotionals and daily journal writings. And in a broader sense, I
will continue to ask these same questions in every aspect of church life:
mission, education, polity, and ecumenism.
How does the truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he
stands in for us in God’s presence, in our new humanity, and that we are
somehow included in this through the power of the Holy Spirit; how does this
inform what we know and believe about God and ourselves?
Works Cited Augustine.
“On Christian Doctrine.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Philip
Schaff,
ed. Vol. 2. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995. Balthasar,
Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1998. ---, Prayer. San
Francisoco: Ignatius Press, 1986. ---, The von Balthasar Reader.
New York: Cross Roads, 1982. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics.
G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, eds. 4 vols.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975. ---, The Gottingen Dogmatics.
Vol. One. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. ---, The Word of God & the
Word of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Barth, Markus. Ephesians 1-3.
The Anchor Bible. Vol. 34. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Campbell, J. McLeod. The
Nature of the Atonement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. Calvin, John. Institutes of
the Christian Religion. The Library of Christian Classics.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, MCMLX. Capon, Robert Farrar. The
Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the
Lost-and-Fond of Church History. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. ---, Between Noon and Three:
Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Currie, Thomas W., III. Ambushed
by Grace: The Virtues of a Useless Faith. Allison
Park: Pickwick Publications, 1993. ---, Prayers for the Road.
Louisville: Geneva Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. The One,
Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of
Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hart, Trevor. Regarding Karl
Barth: Toward a Reading of His Theology. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Hunsinger, George. Disruptive
Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. ---, How to Read Karl Barth:
The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford Press,
1991. Jenson, Robert. Essays in
Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995 ---, Triune Identity: God
According to the Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1982. ---, Visible Words: The
Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacrament.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Jinkins, Michael. Invitation
to Theology: A Guide to Study, Conversation & Practice.
Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001. Kavanagh, Aiden. On Liturgical
Theology. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992. Kruger, C. Baxter. God Is For
Us. Jackson: Perichoresis Press, 1995. LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God
For Us: The Trinity & Christian Life. New York:
Harper Collins, 1991. Moltmann, Jurgen. The Source
of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life.
London:
Fortress Press, 1997. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic
Theology. Vol. 3. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Peterson, Eugene. The Message.
Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1994. Power, David N. Sacrament: The
Language of God’s Giving. New York: The Crossroads
Publishing Company, 1999. Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction
to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. San Fransico:
Ignatious Press, 1994. Tllich, Paul. Systematic
Theology. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1963. Torrance, Alan J. Persons in
Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and
Human Participation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996. Torrance, James B. Worship,
Community & the Triune God of Grace. Downers Grove:
Intervarsity Press, 1996. Torrance, Thomas F. The
Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996. ---, The Mediation of Christ.
Colorado Springs: Helmer & Howard, 1992. ---, Royal Priesthood: A
Theology of Ordained Ministry. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993. ---, Theological Science.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. ---, Theology in
Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East
and West. London: Geoffry Chapman, 1975. ---, The Trinitarian Faith.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988. Zizioulas, John D. Being in
Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. New
York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Annotated Bibliography Augustine. “On Christian
Doctrine.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Philip Schaff,
ed. Vol. 2. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995.
Though Augustine is so well known
for his teaching on sacraments as outward signs of inward graces, his
section
on words as signs is quite
insightful with regards to the question of the sign
and what it signifies. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama:
Theological Dramatic Theory. San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1998. ---, Prayer. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. ---, The von Balthasar Reader.
New York: Cross Roads, 1982. This book deals richly
with how self-giving and suffering are in the very nature of God as
revealed
in Jesus Christ. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics.
G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, eds. 4 vols.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975. Though
a very daunting set of volumes, Barth’s
Dogmatics are built on the real presence of God in the Incarnation
and the
objective reality of what God accomplished for us in Jesus Christ.
---, The Gottingen Dogmatics.
Vol. One. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. These
represent the early years of Barth’s teaching. ---, The Word of God & the
Word of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.
This is a
great introduction to the early theology of Karl Barth. Barth, Markus. Ephesians 1-3.
The Anchor Bible. Vol. 34. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Campbell, J. McLeod. The
Nature of the Atonement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
The writing style is somewhat difficult to follow at times, but the
vision of
the death of Christ from God’s standpoint is beautifully portrayed as
God’s
passionate love for God’s people. Calvin, John. Institutes of
the Christian Religion. The Library of Christian Classics.
Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. MCMLX,
Book III, chapter 3, is where
Calvin deals with the ideas of legal repentance versus evangelical
repentance.
This strongly supports the notion of the vicarious penitence of Christ. Capon, Robert Farrar. The
Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the
Lost-and-Fond of Church History. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Page 85 has a
good overview of the liturgical movement in the 1900’s in comparison to
other
attempts at ecumenism. He
shows how the liturgical movement is centered in the
Eucharist. ---, Between Noon and Three:
Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
This is a provocative presentation of God’s grace. Currie, Thomas W., III. Ambushed
by Grace: The Virtues of a Useless Faith. Allison
Park: Pickwick Publications, 1993. Faith
is portrayed as an encounter with
the truth as opposed
to a utilitarian view of faith. ---, Prayers for the Road.
Louisville: Geneva Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. The One,
Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of
Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hart, Trevor. Regarding Karl
Barth: Toward a Reading of His Theology. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Chapter
three is very strong in presenting
Barth’s theology on the ontological reality of justification. Hunsinger, George. Disruptive
Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. He
has a great essay on Barth’s use of koinonia
along with a well-balanced view of where Barth’s theology and Roman
Catholic theology might find some common ground. ---, How to Read Karl Barth:
The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford Press,
1991. This a wonderful introduction to Barth’s theological
method. Jenson, Robert. Essays in
Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
This deals quite clearly with the “body of God” question. ---, Triune Identity: God
According to the Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1982. ---, Visible Words: The
Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacrament.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. This deals wonderfully with the body
of God, the present Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit in the
sacraments. Jinkins, Michael. Invitation
to Theology: A Guide to Study, Conversation & Practice.
Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001. This
is a good rendition of present day
Reformed Theology as
it focuses on the Christian doctrine of God. Kavanagh, Aiden. On Liturgical
Theology. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992.
This teaches liturgical theology as primary theology; it is a great
introduction
to liturgical theology. Kruger, C. Baxter. God
Is For Us. Jackson: Perichoresis Press, 1995. Kruger’s gift is
putting Trinitarian-incarnational theology in every day language.
LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God
For Us: The Trinity & Christian Life. New York:
Harper Collins, 1991. This book shows the importance of Trinitarian
theology
to one’s spiritual life. It
is comprehensive. Moltmann, Jugen. The Source of
Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life.
London: Fortress Press, 1997. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic
Theology. Vol. 3. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Peterson, Eugene. The Message.
Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1994. Power, David N. Sacrament: The
Language of God’s Giving. New York: The Crossroads
Publishing Company, 1999. Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction
to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. San Franciso:
Ignatious Press, 1994. Though thoroughly Roman Catholic and strictly
orthodox, Ratzinger shows the Trinitarian system of the Catechism
as it deals with the questions of the Eucharist.
Tllich, Paul. Systematic
Theology. Vol 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Torrance, Alan J. Persons in
Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and
Human Participation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996.
This is highly academic,
but the final chapter calls for a new method of theology that grows out
of
doxology. Torrance, James B. Worship,
Community & the Triune God of Grace. Downers Grove:
Intervarsity Press, 1996. This
is a beautifully written book on the nature of the
Triune God of grace. Torrance, Thomas F. The
Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996. ---, The Mediation of Christ.
Colorado Springs: Helmer & Howard, 1992.
These are
lectures that Torrance gave toward the end of his career.
They are very clear
and reference free. ---, Royal Priesthood: A
Theology of Ordained Ministry. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993. ---, Theological Science.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. ---, Theology in
Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East
and West. London: Geoffry Chapman, 1975. ---, The Trinitarian Faith.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988. This
is his seminal work on the
Trinity. Zizioulas, John D. Being in
Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. New
York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
This book is a good example of the
Eastern portion of the Church’s emphasis on the three persons of the
God-head.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ
the Center, New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
1
In using a picture of God and Christ as a repairman with a crescent wrench,
I developed the analogy by combing two similar analogies; one from Robert
Capon’s Between Noon and Three, and one from Baxter Kruger’s God
is For Us.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
© Copyright 1999-2009, Parallels. All Rights Reserved.