A Brief Introduction to Christology (Part 3)

Go to Part 2

By Dr Paul R Hinlicky

This Christology of Luther became explicit in the conflict with Zwingli over the promised presence of Christ in His own body and blood at the Meal. Here Luther distinguished between the faith that believes –his celebrated fiducia, justifying faith from the heart—and the faith that is believed, but not as modern theology thinks, at the expense of the latter. “First, what one should believe, that is, the objectum fidei, that is, the work or thing in which one believes or to which on is to adhere.  Secondly, the faith itself, or the use which one should properly make of that in which he believes.  The first lives outside the heart and is presented to our eyes externally, namely, the sacrament itself, concerning which we believe that Christ’s body and blood are truly present in the bread and wine.  The second is internal, within the heart, and cannot be externalized.  It consists in the attitude which the heart should have toward the external sacrament… Up to now I have not preached very much about the first part, but have treated only the second, which is also the best part.  But because the first part is now being assailed by man, and the preachers, even those who are considered the best, are splitting up into factions over the matter… the times demand that I say something on this subject also.”[1] What Luther went on to say amounts to a correlation between Pelagian man (whom he had opposed with the doctrine of fiducia as the helpless sinner’s justification) and the Nestorian Christ (which he now opposed with his Cyrillian doctrine of the communication of idioms):  the human person who is capable of justifying himself does not need the divine-and-human Christ who became the justice of God by taking on Himself the sin of the world; nor does he need to feed at the Meal of such a Christ, where His sacrifice is remembered and His victory proclaimed on behalf of the perishing, until He comes in final glory.

Luther’s Christological dispute with Zwinglian Protestantism has continued through the modern period. That the person Christ is this divine-human object of Christian faith does not entail, as liberal Protestant scholarship beginning with Schleiermacher held, that Luther’s Christology is naively docetist. In fact, the reverse accusation might be made. Schleiermacher knew that admitting the Cry of Dereliction would fatally compromise his doctrine of the human Christ’s perfect God-consciousness: “I cannot think of this saying as an expression of Christ’s self-consciousness.”[2] Appropriating the Antiochene Christology of the Indwelling Logos, Schleiermacher in his dogmatics regarded “the theory of a mutual communication of the attributes of the two natures to one another” as something “also to be banished from the system of doctrine and handed over to the history of doctrine,” since in such a communication “nothing human could have been left in Christ since everything human is essentially a negation of omniscient omnipotence.”[3] But for Luther, it is the latter metaphysics –finitum non capax infiniti—which is to be revised by the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. Indeed, for Luther, the person of Christ is the personal communion of idioms, that is to say, Jesus’s divine Sonship consists in His self-giving obedience to death on the cross, theologically, to His abandonment to the anti-divine powers by His Father in order to become His Father’s very love for those so captive and enthralled.[4]

The crucial point of Trinitarian personalism at this juncture was made by the early Lutheran scholastic Martin Chemnitz, who clarified Luther’s speculative exploration of the deity’s “repletive presence” (divine immensity or omnipresence) as a property communicated to the glorified Christ, hence as the condition for the possibility of Christ’s promised Eucharistic presence.  Were there such a metamorphosis of natures in Christ, however, it would follow that the man Christ would be present as His personal promise everywhere, just as God is present by nature, automatically, as it were. Such ‘pan-Christism,’ so to speak, is not Luther’s intention; he drew back from this implication already during the controversy with Zwingli by making this distinction: “It is one thing if God is present and another if he is present for you.”[5] Or again, “both God and Christ are not far away but near, and it is only a matter of revealing themselves…”[6] But to be revealed “for you” is a free act of personal will. To substantiate Luther’s distinction here, Chemnitz therefore spoke of the ubivolipraesens of Christ,[7] i.e. that Christ the divine-human person is present as He freely wills to be for us, according to His promise.[8] With this move, Chemnitz was correcting Melanchthon in Luther’s direction. Fearing the confusion or mingling of divine and human natures proscribed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon, Melanchthon had already retreated in Luther’s lifetime from the latter’s doctrine of the communication of idioms. For the mature Melanchthon, the ascription of suffering to the incarnate Son of God is a way of talking, not of being.[9]

At root, that divergence going back to Luther and Melanchthon is why Lutheran Christology is and remains controverted. When Melanchthon’s Christology forms the lens through which Luther is read, and this bias is further underwritten by the modern Kantian-Zwinglian framework of liberal Protestant theology, Luther’s actual Christology is not only rendered inert, but becomes the familiar embarrassment of ‘objectifying the personal’ as body to be consumed in the Eucharist, ‘historicizing the eschatological’ in the exclusive claim for the name of Jesus, ‘capturing the infinite’ in allegedly pure doctrine, and so on.  In place of such remnants of “catholicism” in Luther, the reduction of Christology to soteriology, and of soteriology to the felt needs of the present hour, is lifted up as the cutting-edge “Lutheran” contribution to modern theology. But this commendation is as confused as it is historically baseless.

In conflict with the liberal Protestant rendering of Lutheran Christology at the time when Hitler was being welcomed as the new savior sent from God to deliver the German people,[10] Dietrich Bonhoeffer insisted on Luther’s principle that it is “the person which interprets the work;” this is the reason why Christology precedes and governs soteriology. How, Bonhoeffer asked in the voice of the post-Kantians, “can the person of Christ be comprehended other than by his work, i.e. otherwise than through history?” Bonhoeffer replied: “This objection contains a most profound error. For even Christ’s work is not unequivocal. It remains open to various interpretations.” Only “when I know who he is, who does this, I will know what it is that he does.”[11] Yet decisively, since only the God who knows and searches the heart knows who anyone is, only God knows the person. Then knowledge of the person of Christ also seems to be blocked off from us. That is correct. It is God’s knowledge of the person of Jesus that is decisive, not ours. That is the point of saying that “Christology is not soteriology.”[12] Just as Luther’s Catechism has the believer confess: “… by my own reason and strength I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the gospel…”

Epistemically, we can know Jesus Christ, present for us –truly, as Bonhoeffer went on to say, for us, the Man-for-Others because the Man-from-God– only as a function of God’s apocalypse, that is to say, of the Father’s sharing with us His own Easter knowledge of His Crucified Son by the sending of His own Spirit who had raised him from the grave. The young Wolfhart Pannenberg made the same argument. “There is no reason for the assumption that Jesus’ claim to authority taken by itself justified faith in him. On the contrary, the pre-Easter Jesus’ claim to authority stands from the beginning in relationship to the question of the future verification of his message through the occurrence of the future judgment… Thus has been shown the proleptic structure of Jesus’ claim to authority… This means, however, that Jesus’ claim to authority cannot by itself be made the basis of a Christology, as though this involved only the ‘decision’ in relation to him. Such Christology –and the preaching based upon it—would remain an empty assertion. Rather, everything depends upon the connection between Jesus’ claim and its confirmation by God.”[13] If that is so, then Lutheran Christology cannot sustain the doctrine of the justification of the ungodly apart from a robust Trinitarian personalism, that is, without the Father who recognized His own divine love for the ungodly in His dead and buried Son, nor without the Spirit who recognizes the ungodly as those for whom Christ lived and died by raising them together with Him to faith and new obedience. To proclaim Christ alone requires more than Christology.

---

[1] See LW 36:335; WA 19 482:25 – 483:19; for more on this return to dogmatic theology in the older Luther, see Dennis Bielfeldt, Mickey L. Mattox, Paul R. Hinlicky, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).

[2] Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus ed. J. C. Verheyden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) 423.

[3] Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, Vol. 2 ed. H. R. Macintosh and J.S. Steward (Harper and Row, 1963), § 97,5  (412).

[4] On this see further Chapter Two in Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

[5] “This is My Body,” LW 37:68.

[6] Ibid., 66.

[7] See, e.g., Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures of Christ, trans. J.A.O. Preus, (Concordia: St Louis, 1971) 278.

[8] On this point, see further Paul R. Hinlicky, “Luther’s Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540)” in Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation ed. O. Bayer & Benjamin Gleede (Berlin & NY: Walter De Gruyter, 2007) 139-185.

[9] On this, see further Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken, 162-169.

[10] Bergen, Doris L., Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Steigmann-Gall, Richard,The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[11] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center trans. Edwin H. Robertson (NY: Harper & Row, 1978) 37-39.

[12] Bonhoeffer, Christ, 39.

[13] Wolfart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man trans. Lewis L. Wilkins & Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1975) 66.

A Brief Introduction to Christology (Part 2)

Go to Part 1

By Dr Paul R Hinlicky

Oswald Bayer has rightly called attention to the Sitz im Leben of the confessional as the very Western place where the question of justice and justification before God was posed in the conscience of distressed individuals. This is the place where in his struggle Luther finally conceived the priest’s words, Ego te absolvo, as the self-promising words of the present Christ.[1] The words of Christ are performances of the act of assurance, unilaterally realizing, as it were, the Preface to the First Commandment: “I am yours and you are mine.” “That the signum itself is already the res, that the linguistic sign is already the matter itself – that was Luther’s great hermeneutical discovery, his reformational discovery in the strict sense.”[2] In ipsa fide Christus adest – in faith Christ Himself is there, both as performer of the promise as well as worthy object of believing trust.  So the Finnish scholar Tuomo Mannermaa made the same Christological point about Luther’s teaching of the Christ who is present and active to save.[3]

Bayer, however, drew two problematic “rules” from this analysis of Christ’s presence as promissio: first, he argued that one cannot transform a promissory statement into a descriptive statement, and second, that one cannot transform the promise into an imperative.[4] This is overdrawn. Bayer’s fear was that by description one would seek to find another basis for trust than the Word itself, as if one then sought to legitimate its speaker by means of an modern historical-critical or old-fashioned supernatural verification; moreover, the promise would lose its true divinity as creative power, if it were transformed into an imperative, thus making its truth dependent upon an independent human response. These are legitimate concerns. However, a promissory statement entails analytically a description of the promissory agent, especially when the promise is one of self-commitment. Otherwise the believer would be in no condition to test the spirits to see that the One who so promises is indeed the crucified and risen One (as per Mark 13[5]); nor then would he be able to give an account of the justice of justification in the work of the crucified and risen Christ in the time of confession,[6] leaving the hapless believer in a dumb state of blind faith rather than of understanding faith ready for battle with principalities and powers. Second, the evangelical imperatives of Paul are not demands of the law which return the believer to her own resources, even if there is a danger of taking them that way. In fact, they are exhortations to the Spirit’s “new creation” already now to live indeed by the Spirit of Christ. The evangelical imperatives are not a third use of the law but a second use of the gospel.[7]

Christological doctrine is the theological description of Jesus Christ that designates Him, and Him alone, as the speaker of the divine promise on the grounds that His saving work on the Cross and Easter victory is the right by which He forgives sins and breathes the Spirit upon believers. Such Christology identifies the object of faith, when faith, activated in love and persevering in hope, is taken the Spirit’s own hearing in believers of Christ’s self-donating Word, summoning them thereby to walk in newness of life.

Not surprisingly, then, Luther’s Christology was already present in his pre-reformational writings, although it had not yet achieved the clarity and centrality that would later emerge.[8] A letter to George Spenlein dated April 8, 1516 articulates what would become the consistent pattern of thought, or model, of the life of faith which stands behind Luther’s development of the Reformation doctrine of justification: “… learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to praise him and, despairing of yourself, say, ‘Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, just as I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what you were not and have given to me what I was not.’ Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one. For Christ dwells only in sinners. On this account he descended from heaven, where he dwelt among the righteous, to dwell among sinners. Meditate on this love of his and you will see his sweet consolation. For why was it necessary for him to die if we can obtain a good conscience by our works and afflictions? Accordingly you will find peace only in him and only when you despair of yourself and your own works. Besides, you will learn from him that just as he received you, so he has made your sins his own and has made his righteousness yours.”[9] This motif appears at every stage of the Reformer’s career; it is his operative Christology, since Christ truly exists as the Man-for-others (Bonhoeffer). “The joyful exchange of our sin and Christ’s righteousness provides the operative model in Luther’s mind of how the event of justification transpires in uniting the believer with Christ in His death and resurrection. According to this model, forgiveness and the new birth are double-sided aspects of the one saving event of encounter with Christ in divine faith of the Spirit through the gospel, such that the sinner dies and a new creature is born.”[10]

The model works because the One who descended to dwell among sinners as the Man-for-Others is the incarnate God, even though dwelling among sinners seems to make Him indistinguishable from those whose company He keeps. Because it is “this man [who] is God,” then, the reference to the Spirit is not nugatory, who must provide a new language for notitia in the new perspective of fiducia.[11] “Faith” for Luther is divine faith, the work and gift of the Spirit, over which the Spirit disposes, since neither human wisdom nor human willpower can overcome the incognito of His humanity and the scandal of His cross. As the Creator Spirit raised Jesus from death, so also the Spirit raises the believer to faith, ubi et quando Deo visum est (“where and when it pleases God, Augsburg Confession V), that is, according to the Father’s good pleasure. Luther’s Christology is manifestly embedded in a vigorous Trinitarian personalism; Christology cannot do all the theological work for Luther, but itself refers to the Father who sent the Son, and the Spirit whom the Father and the Son send. With Trinitarianism, then, we are provided the kind of full-orbed theological description of Christ that is analytic to the saving presence of this crucified Man as the Speaker of a unilateral and unconditional promise of true good.

Go to Part 3

---

[1] Bayer, Oswald, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007) 49ff.

[2] Ibid., 52.

[3] Mannermaa, Tuomo, Der im Glauben Gegenwaertige Christus: Rechtferigung und Vergottung Zum oekumenischen Dialog, Arbeiten zur Geschichte und Theologie des Luthertums, Neue Folge Band 8 (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1989).

[4] Ibid., 54

[5] See Dennis Bielfeldt, Mickey L. Mattox, Paul R. Hinlicky, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008) 174-89..

[6] Paul R. Hinlicky, “Status Confessionis,” The Encyclopedia of Christianity, Five Volumes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans & Brill, 2008) V:198-201.

[7] See Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community, Chapter Four (Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 2010).

[8] See the classic articulation of it in great Reformation statement, “The Freedom of a Christian” (LW 31: 343).

[9] LW 48: 12-13; cf. LW 35: 49.

[10] Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther through Leibniz (Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 2009) 146.

[11] See Paul R. Hinlicky, “Luther’s Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540)” in Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation ed. O. Bayer & Benjamin Gleede (Berlin & NY: Walter De Gruyter, 2007) 139-185.

A Brief Introduction to Christology (Part 1)

By Dr Paul R Hinlicky

In some respects the Christology of classical Christianity has not found a more clearly focused statement: “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of His Father in eternity, and also a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord.” So Luther penned words in the Small Catechism which would echo through lips of catechumens for centuries after. Luther went on to say that Jesus Christ is a saving Lord, not a tyrant Lord, a deliverer by “His own precious body and blood” from sin, death and the power of the devil. The Lord Jesus by His resurrection from the dead has not only set free from those anti-divine powers, but won the delivered “to belong to Him, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in eternal righteousness, innocence and blessedness.”[1] A polemically sharpened statement of the same Christology is found in Luther’s Smalcald Articles: “Here is the first and chief article: That Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, ‘was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification’ (Rom.4[:25]); and He alone is ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1[:29]); and ‘the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 54[:6]); furthermore, ‘All have sinned,” and “they are now justified without merit by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus… by His blood” (Rom. 3{:23-5)].”[2] Elevated to authoritative status in the Confessional Writings of the Church that descended from his reform, such Luther texts make a Christological statement as central as unmistakable: faith alone justifies because faith is placed in Christ alone, who is the justice of the believer’s justification. This is the justice which comes for God and which avails before God, the justice both of the obedience to death of the man Christ and of His vindication by the Father on the third day.

Yet Lutheran Christology is a matter of controversy. A familiar but misleading take on it would be to think of Christology as a variable in relation to the constant of the chief doctrine, justification by faith. Christology would then be construed as a function of soteriology, as eminent modern Lutheran theologians like Bultmann and Tillich have argued. There is a basis for this construction in Melanchthon’s well-known battle slogan, “To know Christ is to know his benefits.” But the truth is, both historically and theologically, the other way around. The so-called “Reformation break-through” came in Luther’s realization of the active presence of the crucified and risen Christ in the Church’s word of absolution. This realization led to a radical and consequent thinking of this reality of Christ in the doctrine of the communication of divine and human properties in the person of the Incarnate Son of God. This Jesus Christ is the actual constant of theology in Luther’s tradition, while it is the preaching of justification which is and must be contextual (as per the art in the concrete historical situation of rightly preaching both divine law and promise and yet properly distinguishing them as God’s alien and proper works respectively).

The real presence of the crucified and risen Christ in the Church’s proclamation is the matter of the Church’s Christological doctrine; the present Christ in Word and Sacrament can in any case be experienced either as threatening or as promising. This variable of contextual experience is a matter over which the Spirit disposes, even, if not especially when the future threat of Christ as coming judge and the present promise of Christ as merciful Savior are rightly distinguished. That means that the Church’s authentic proclamation of Jesus Christ cannot guarantee an experience of grace; for the proclamation of grace alone may as readily harden hearts. The reason for this is that the presence of the risen Christ brings with it the stumbling block of His Cross. In Luther’s own words: “Now, all who regard and know Christ from a fleshly point of view are inevitably offended at him, as was the case with the Jews. For since flesh and blood thinks no further than it sees and feels, and since it sees Christ was crucified as a moral man, it inevitably says: ‘This is the end; he is gone; he can help no one; he himself is lost.’ But he who is not offended at him must rise above the flesh and be raised by the Word so that he may perceive in the Spirit how Christ precisely through his suffering and death has attained true life and glory.”[3]

Of course, one could abstract a message of grace from the presence of the crucified and risen Christ and offer this distillation as the Church’s message. One may proclaim grace in place of Christ, grace as a general divine principle which Christ does not bring and put into effect so much as illustrate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified this abstract preaching of grace as a general principle apart from the stumbling blocks of the cross of Jesus, of cross-bearing discipleship in His train, of daily and life-long repentance as ‘the Lutheran heresy:’ “Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means the forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which upholds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.”[4] Bonhoeffer’s last sentence is meant with full seriousness. A Christological heresy lies close at hand in the controverted legacy of Lutheran theology today. What is the truth?

Lutheran teaching about humanity before God in the doctrine of justification may be historically described as an “Eastern answer to a Western question.”[5] The question of the justice of God in history, the retrieval of the Pauline word-complex of justice and justification as hermeneutically central, and the inquiry into Christ’s saving work as an act of justice as well as mercy are all aspects of the Western question which can be traced to the seminal thinking of Augustine of Hippo. All in the great line of Western theologians ask such questions in their interpretation of Jesus Christ and His significance for human salvation. Where Luther stands out in this line is with his “Eastern answer,” that is to say, in his Neo-Chaledonian, not merely Chalcedonian, Christology.[6] That is to say: while one must avoid confusing divine and human natures, the point of this very rule is to specify the person Jesus Christ as that “one of the Trinity who suffered.” Of course, by putting Eastern Christology to work as an answer to the Western question, Luther’s Christology also transformed the notion of theosis or divinization practically with a new understanding of Spirit-wrought holiness in worldly vocations (as opposed to ascetic discipline in flight from the world).

Go to Part 2

---

[1] The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb & Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000) 355.

[2] Ibid., 301.

[3] “Confession concerning Christ’s Supper,” LW 37: 202.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship trans. R. H. Fuller (NY et al: Simon and Schuster, Touchstone Edition, 1995) 43.

[5] Paul R. Hinlicky, “Theological Anthropology: Towards Integrating Theosis and Justification by Faith,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter 1997: 34/1) 38-73.

[6] The reference here is to Cyril of Alexandria, and the teaching of the Third Ecumenical Council against Nestorius, and its reiteration in the teaching of the Fifth Ecumenical Council that “one of the Trinity suffered.” Of course, Luther also adhered to Chalcedon’s rejection of mixing or confusing the divine and human natures; his rejection of Osiander and Schwenkfeld, in whom he saw Eutyches redivivus, is sufficient proof of that.