Category: theology

Jesus was abandoned by all. He was hung on the cross to display his complete isolation and shame. All resources of support drained away from him, until he had nothing. In this visible world he was cleared out of all resources of public reputation and recognition. He descended through all intermediary levels of status and being until he reached the lowest point, left altogether without being, in total shame. But the forces of this world could not keep him down. Being unable to make their judgment stick, they have been publicly revealed to be without power. When he was raised by the Father, Jesus was set at the highest place. The Father reversed the action of mankind by overturning this public assessment of his servant. Because Jesus is raised from this total absence of status, those who shamed him are now shamed.

By his Spirit the victorious Son calls and draws out of the earth all the dispersed elements, all the bodies of the poor, hidden by wicked men, and brings them together to form one bright new body – the resurrection body, united with himself.

Jesus is handed over to the world. He is made passive. Passivity and passion become his action. Although Jesus is the circumcision, baptism and anointing, he is circumcised, baptised and anointed. Although he is the resurrection, the one who may never die, he suffers and dies. He suffers the world. If we are allowed to abuse the language a little, we could say that Jesus is worlded. He calls out from the world what is most intrinsic to it – death – and summons it together to a single point, that of the cross. When Jesus calls, death comes out of the world. He is able to break open the world and separate death from it. The indivisible Spirit drives division out. The world is Jesused. Death has no claim on him, so finds nothing in him by which it can gain purchase. Death is deathed. The Spirit makes the Son indivisible and so impregnable: the world cannot break him. God has allowed the tares to grow in the field, and though, like the kings of the earth, they grow very confident, their destruction is assured, for he has all this time prepared a place for them, a no-place. In entering the enclosure of death the Son is not enclosed, but breaks open what only he had held shut.

My wonderful Eerdmans editor asked me whether I could change some of my references to ‘sons’ to ‘sons and daughters’ to make it seem a bit more fair. On the spur of the moment I couldn’t say why I didn’t want to make the change. But now I have found the admirable Ken Collins deftly explaining what is at stake.

You are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:26-28)

Paul did not write â??sons and daughters of God,â?? because he wasnâ??t thinking of sons as masculine offspring. He was thinking of sons as legal agents. If Paul had written â??sons and daughters,â?? he would have been empowering the men but not the women. By saying that women are also adopted sons of God, he is saying that women are equally Godâ??s agents in this world. Now we have a whole new idea about what it means to be a Christian.

In the household of God, we are slaves who are being adopted as sons of God through the blood of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. In our new status of sons, we are heirs, but more importantly we are Godâ??s business agents in this world. God gives us a commission to preach the gospel, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to do all the good deeds that He has set out for us to do. When Scripture says that we are adopted sons, it does not mean that we are only loved and cuddled, it means that we are the agents of Godâ??s providence, the distributors of Godâ??s blessings, the instruments of Godâ??s grace, and the ambassadors of Godâ??s love to sinners, because it is for sinners that Christ died. It is through our words and deeds that God answers other peopleâ??s prayers, because we are His agents in this world.

Ken Collins Cultural Differences – ‘Son’

The one Son does not replace the many people who belong to him. He is the guarantor of their continuing manyness. He starts a community, and is its definition, but he does not represent its end. He rather grows and expands it without limit. The manyness of these witnesses to the Son, themselves provided by him, are our protection against the intensity of his otherwise unmediated presence.

Scripture prepares us. To this end it protects us, and in stages removes this protection from us. The resurrection has already raised this protection from one of our number. It is his unity with the Father, that effects the unity and efficacy of scripture. The patriarchs are presently mediated to us as one single instantiation of Israel, the co-presence of the whole company in the one person, Jesus Christ. As one and complete, he is the arrival of the many. We are being trained to perceive and receive this host in him, the one they have sent ahead.

The spiritual sons of Abraham are the ones who can tell the story of Abraham. Their narration of the action of God is witness to their paternity. God, the first actor of Scripture, creates a community, composed of patriarchs, prophets and saints, into which are to be integrated. He makes this cloud of witnesses and this diversity of speech and action shape us. God creates these many words and voices, and this crowd, for us. This crowd surrounds and accompanies us, and gives us our place. The witnesses of the old and new testaments form a single chorus that cheers, and shouts warning and encouragement. They line the road on which we now travel after the Son, willing us on, lifting us with their breath, and driving us along after him. They urge us not to give ourselves away to those other lords who prey on us, and they tell us to pass their encouragement and warning on. They are conveyors and amplifiers of prayers, who make the requests we do not yet know how to make for ourselves. The Holy Spirit utters these patriarchs, prophets and saints, and bears their voices to us. In turn they bear and utter the Son, and are made holy in the process. But these many witnesses are not replaced by the Son. The new testament does not replace or displace the old testament. These many witnesses, the old testament as much as the new, now mediate Christ to us. As he mediates them, they mediate him, and all their mediation is his work.

Scripture is the learner’s articulation of the lesson she receives from her instructor. This lesson can only be read in partnership with Israel, by the baptised community given the Spirit by the obedient Son. Thus the Christian can learn only within the Christian community, and only as this community itself learns from Israel, properly recapitulated by the Son. The Son transforms our movements into those of the community re-figured by him. Scripture is the orthopaedic tool by which a new set of practices are taught. It is the set of protocols which learners must learn to internalise, so the Word of God becomes their own mind and word. The single intention of the law is to propel its students towards adulthood and to the stature of Jesus Christ. The process of the production of the holy people is not finished. The discernment of progress, and thus the exercise of judgement, is part of the process of refinement. But if the law itself has become disordered, or Scripture is no longer properly heard, it can no longer order people into the place right for each. The Law without the Spirit effects only to stall our growth. Then the law, good and necessary to us in each specific stage, would confine us within it, just when we should be released and encouraged forwards to the next stage. The law designed to build us up, itself needs be maintained, and Christian doctrine kept in good order, so it performs this purpose of building up a people. The law is effective as long as Christ is present to his community by the Spirit.

Hermeneutics is the discipline the moderns had to invent after they had rejected ecclesiology. The Christian community is the proper reader of Scripture, and Scripture builds that community. Scripture and the Church are mutually constituting. The Church, the Body of Christ, is the only hermeneutic of Scripture you’ll ever need.

There can be no ghetto mentality within Orthodox theology. Theology which contents itself with speaking to a closed group, or which happily ignores intellectual trends outside its own ambit, or, still worse, which adopts an abusive attitude to those ‘outside’ its group (especially if they are ‘western’) to that extent adopts an anti-Trinitarian mode of being. In so doing, it turns away from Christ, and so loses touch with the principle of its own theological life, thus forfeits its identity as theology, and certainly fails to be Orthodox theology. Just as truly personal, communal and kenotic prayer is for the whole world, and disregards all badges or labels, so Orthodox theology must explicitly concern itself with that which lies beyond the walls of the Orthodox academy. All Orthodox theology must have a concern for that which lies outside the Church in the world.

Nonetheless, whilst all theology must be concerned with what lies outside the Church, there can be no theology which is outside the Church. The theologian can only draw his or her life from the eschatological Christ, and theological speech is an eschatological ek-stasis and witness which attempts to stand outside all the pettiness and smallness of the world we live in at the moment and speak to that world from the vantage point of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom which is tasted and shared in in the Church.

Alan Brown

Solly is reading Chapter Three of The Eschatological Economy. Here is a snippet of his commentary:

‘It needs a reminder here that for Knight the idea that sacrifice means ‘making holy’ comes in part from the Latin roots of the English word ‘sacrifice’. It is necessary to see that this is also how the practice appears in scripture of course, supplemented by such insights of the practice that anthropologists can supply us with. Sacrifice is here presented not only as the work of the Israelite, but the work of God on the Israelite, of making him a son, of making him a person.

Knight returns to the modern sensitivities to the notion of vicarious and substitutionary action, as exemplified in Kant’s philosophy of religion, and how this encapsulates in nuce the economy of modernity’s understanding of individuality, and resistance to the idea of relationism. You cannot do something for me, in my place, A is A, and A is not not-A.

Given, Knight explains, modern theology’s appropriating this position, and the con-joined idea that we are already persons [though really only individuals] then that explains the difficulties found with the doctrine that we are God’s work, our becoming is basic, not our being. Existentialism expressed that garishness and angst of this position, of man no longer in relation with man, but isolated in spheres of completeness, yet knowing it was not really so. R R Reno Redemptive Change: Atonement and the Christian Cure of the Soul has also criticised modern thought for its inability to propound a doctrine of personal and moral change when it also holds to an idea of humanity that does not need change, each individual is complete in themself.’

Solly’s commentary is a model of clarity. I am beginning to wish he had intervened a bit earlier, when the book was still a-writing.
Here is more of Solly’s analysis of this Israel-and-Adam Christology.

This is actually quite a Christologically focussed chapter, despite the title, and brings together the idea of what it means to be a son of Israel, as well as God’s Son, not only as Israel, but also as Christ. Knight also brings in an Adam Christology, a theme found in scripture but, he believes, not utilised to the maximum benefit, and proposes a new lease of life for adoptionist language in line with his thesis that ‘doing makes being’, ‘becoming’ precedes rather than flows from ‘being’. The question is then asked, What the work of the Son is, and this brings in the idea of sacrifice, and discussion about theories of atonement, and the modern rejection of vicarious and substitutionary actions.

His concern in the opening of this chapter is whether his theological proposals are backed up by biblical studies; can the text support the weight put upon it. Adam Christology is the scriptural theme he uses to draw the various threads of his thought together:

Solly gives you more analysis of the relationship of this Israel-Adam Christology.