Crisp Christology

I must first declare an interest. Oliver Crisp is a former Ph.D student of mine, one from whom I never cease to learn, and he kindly invited me to read some of this material before its publication. I may therefore reasonably be expected to commend this book, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London, T & T Clark, 2009), and this is what I shall do! This is the second collection of articles and papers that Oliver has written on Christological themes, the first being Divinity and Humanity, The Incarnation Reconsidered , (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Oliver has a project which he calls ‘analytic theology’ . This is the practice of theology using the rigorous standards of current analytic philosophy. (See Analytic Theology, New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, edd. Oliver D Crisp and Micheal Rea, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009). Analytic theology is thus not a type of theology, as is Process or Openness theology, but a way of doing theology which relies upon the making of careful distinctions, the use of definitions, the awareness of logical possibilities which may or may not have been actively canvassed in the past, the use of argument and inference, a sensitivity to the presence of self-contradiction, an interest in metaphysical modality, and so on. With such an outlook, analytic theology has strong ties of method and temper to the scholastic methods of doing theology of the medieval period, and of Reformed Orthodoxy, and even (though Crisp does not make the connection), with rationalist philosophers such as Leibniz.

This is not to say that the method of analytic theology is rationalist. Far from it. For as Crisp and Michael Rea construe it, such theology (as Christian analytic theology) operates within self-consciously held limits: the limits of the Scriptural testimony, the ecumenical creeds, and the confessional traditions, both the documents themselves and the theologians who endorse them, of the more fragmented church. All of these, except Scripture of course, is defeasible, but to each is attached a descending order of value and importance: first Scripture, then the creeds, then the confessions, then the individual theologians, doctors of the church. This is Christian analytic theology; but there could in principle be, as Oliver notes, Mormon, or Muslim or Manichean analytic theology.

So the orientation is firmly in the faith seeking understanding tradition which pretty well originated with Augustine. But though traditional, the outlook is not stagnant, content with merely i-dotting and t-crossing a rigid traditionalism. Crisp has an eye to the opening up of that tradition to various logical possibilities of a hypothetical kind – for example, ways of construing the Election of Jesus Christ, or the idea of multiple Incarnations, or the consequences for Christology of a materialist account of the person – in order to pursue further the task of understanding the faith. I think he would also say that the traditions themselves are much more complex and multilayered than it is conventional to regard them. More than once he refers to the importance of the need of a theological retrieval of the tradition. So in a sense the work is speculative, at least at the edges, probing and testing the tradition. But Crisp also has an eye to liberal and more (as he would see them, irresponsible) speculative modes of theologizing which from time to time he scolds for their lack of rigour, their obscurity, and their hasty foreclosing of various options.

These standards and techniques are well in evidence in this book, as is Crisp's knowledge of, and respect for traditional modes of theologising. After all, if you are going to stay within the parameters of the tradition, you need to know something about it, and Oliver knows a good bit about it, especially but by no means exclusively about the Reformed tradition. The chapters (some of them previously published as articles and chapters) are as follows:

‘Christological Method’ - focussing on the widely-used distinction between Christiology from above and ‘from below’ and arguing for its very limited usefulness if it is not to be used in a question-begging way.

‘The Election of Jesus Christ’ – a nuanced and historically informed discussion jof the distinction between Christ as the ground of election and as the means for achieving of the ends of election, with a discussion of Barth’s view.

‘The Pre-Existence of Christ’ - the senses in which the Logos, and Christ, may or may not be said to have pre-existed the Incarnation, in which issues of God and time are explored.

‘The ‘Fittingness’ of the Virgin Birth’ – Did the Incarnation require the virgin birth? Crisp argues that, strictly speaking it was necessary but concurs with Anselm that the virgin birth was nonetheless ‘fitting’’, appropriate.

‘Christ and the Embryo’ – an exploration of the nature of the union of human and divine in the womb of Mary.

‘Was Christ Sinless or Impeccable?’ Distinguishing between the de facto sinlessness of Jesus and his impeccability, possession of the modal property of being unable to sin, Crisp argues in favour of impeccability, particularly in response to the objection that such impeccability can find no place for the reality of temptation.

‘Materialist Christology’ – supposing a material anthropology , in what sense may Christ be said to have a ‘rational soul’? Crisp argues that a good sense can be given to this even assuming such materialism.

‘Multiple Incarnations’ – Taking up Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of multiple incarnations the author explores the possibility of such incarnations and the conditions under which there might in fact be such.

To give a flavour of the complexity and interest of the book, I shall say a word or two about impeccability and modality, which Crisp considers in his chapter on Christ’s impeccability. He makes a distinction: a sinless person does not, as a matter of fact, ever sin, whereas an impeccable person cannot sin. To call Christ sinless raises the embarrassing possibility that God could sin, since Jesus Christ is God.(131) So Christ must be impeccable.

What of impeccabiity, then? Crisp thinks that impeccability nevertheless allows the possibility that Christ has the capacity to sin. And this is not the same, as he points out, as doing the thing which one has the capacity to do. But it is the same as possibly sinning: for A to have the capacity to sin entails that possibly A sins. A capacity which could never be exercised is surely not a capacity at all. On this account, if Christ has the capacity to sin, then there is a possible world in which he does sin. And this also, it seems to me, is embarrassing.

Perhaps one should argue: Christ’s human nature, being true, unglorified human nature, could sin, considered abstractly, but the Mediator, God incarnate, possessing a true human nature, could not sin. Part of the humbling of God the Son (the central feature of the Incarnation, on some accounts), consists in the Logos keeping his human nature from sinning. He so loves the nature that he has been given, so perfectly loves it, that he attends with divine power and grace to it to such a degree that ensures that this human nature can never sin. There is no possible world in which the incarnate Son sins.

The Incarnation involves a humbling, like that of a nurse or carer who, by her self-giving, guarantees that her charge can (say) never fall over, and as a perfect human father necessarily keeps his son from being harmed; a person who would, without such care, be harmed. Christ is charged with caring for his human nature by (inter alia) keeping it from sinning, and so necessarily he does not sin. My suggestion is, then, that the sinlessness/impeccablity of Christ’s human nature is a special case; not mere de facto sinlessness, and yet not per se impeccability either; rather, per consequentiam impeccability. Crisp alludes to something like this view earlier, on the same page, but for some reason he does not tie it in to his discussion of modality.

Anyone interested in these topics and in careful attention to the philosophical and dogmatic issues that they may raise will find the book to be immensely rewarding.

A version of this review will appear in the Journal of Reformed Theology

Two Lessons from John Owen: I - The Trinity

John Owen’s short work A Brief Declaration of the Doctrine of the Trinity and also of the Person and Satisfaction of Christ, published in 1668-9, (in Works, II) at a time when Dr Owen and his wife Mary were resident in the home in Stoke Newington of the former Cromwellian General, Charles Fleetwood, and his wife Mary Hartnopp, the widow of Sir Edward Hartnopp. Owen was busy with others such as Baxter and Manton in devising ways of forming dissenting unity and presenting a united bid for toleration to the King. He had no pastorate at this time, but following the Declaration of Indulgence in 1671 limited toleration was granted, though not because the nonconformists were united, for they were not. Owen was for a short time after this the pastor of a small congregation which fairly quickly combined with the recently-deceased Joseph Caryl’s larger one. The membership of Owen’s congregation is a roll call of the upper crust of the former Puritan establishment; no doubt considering themselves a Puritan government in waiting, just in case the Lord in his providence turned the tide. But of course they waited in vain. The tide never turned. Owen died in 1683.

In the work of Owen’s that we are about to consider he has his eye on another strand of what proved to be a cause of the Puritan eclipse, on the rise of theological rationalism on the one hand, and on Biblicism on the other. Theological rationalism, in the form of Quakerism and Socinianism, with its intolerance of revealed mystery, and the Biblicism of the Socinians and of the Cambridge Platonists, which otherwise did not have much in common. The Cambridge Platonists, such as Benjamin Whichcote, the Westminster Divine Anthony Tuckney’s pupil, stressed the fallibility of human reasoning about Scripture and were contemptuous both of those who promoted unity of a confessional kind – for were not confessions mere human products? - and who also promoted doctrinal and practical preaching. For does not preaching go beyond Scripture, the preacher using his own fallible words? So the Cambridge Platonists held that Protestants should unite around the very words of Scripture alone, and the use of ‘right reason’ to establish fundamentals, such as the exisence of God and of moral obligation, and regard any interpretations of Scripture, in the form of confessions or in preaching, as necessarily secondary, inferior and fallible, the mere expression of opinion. This puts a rather different gloss on William Chillingworth’s famous saying that ‘The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible is the religion of Protestants’, though Chillingworth was not himself a Cambridge Platonist.

In this work Owen was, in effect, concerned to deny this Cambridge Platonist position, though he does not mention them by name, but there is except one reference to ‘right reason’, preferring to lambast the Socinians. He sets himself to walk a tight-rope by upholding the place of theological reasoningwhile denying the authority of human reason in religion. But the tide of anti-Puritanism that flowed as the result of the combined pull of Quakerism, Socinianism (or Unitarianism) and of Cambridge Platonism, was irresistible. Puritanism as a theological movement was swept away. Baxter’s church building in Kidderminster is Unitarian to this day, as are several of those that were not completely obliterated, and in the early eighteenth-century the Anglican Establishment became largely Unitarian and deistic, as exemplified for example by the case of William Whiston, the translator of the Works of Josephus.

In what must have been happier days for Owen, he wrote one in defence of the orthodox account of Christ’s atonement, A Dissertation on Divine Justice (1653) and then a major work against Socinianism, Vindiciae Evangelicae, (1655) . The first was written at the command of the Long Parliament, and dedicated to 'His Highness', and the second was also dedicated to the same man, ‘His Illustrious Highness, Oliver Cromwell’. And as we shall see, Owen was a Trinitarian theologian through and through By 1669, a doubtless chastened Owen wrote this short work, as he tells us on its title page, ‘accommodated to the capacity of such as may be in danger to be seduced’. Not a work of scholastic Puritan divinity, but of pastoral counsel. And, as I shall try to show, a work of value for us.

The Trinity

Owen regarded the Trinitarian character of God to be a plainly revealed mystery, and fundamental to the development of true religion. The work of redemption and reconciliation is intrinsically Trinitarian, and appreciation of this enriches our understanding and walk with God. This can be seen, inter alia, in a number of Owen’s works, most elaborately in his Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Each Person Distinctly, in Love, Fellowship and Consolation (1657) The emphasis is the same in this smaller work. Understanding and teaching the doctrine of the Trinity is vital so that ‘faith may be increased, strengthened, and confirmed against temptations and oppositions of Satan, and men of corrupt minds; and that we may be distinctly directed unto, and encouraged in, the obedience unto, and worship of God, that are required of us.’ (378)

The book deals with the Trinity, the Person of Christ, and Christ’s satisfaction. The whole thing comes to about 70 pages, with an Appendix. In this short talk I shall be concerned only with the first half, focussing on what I believe Owen can teach us, or remind us, about our understanding of the revelation of God the Holy Trinity.

Some have said that in the present-day the consciousness of the doctrine of the Trinity is not as great as it should be in evangelical churches; that there is a hesitancy over it in our worship, and in our theologising. It is marginalised, or at least it is not in the front of our minds. If so, this may be because it is thought that the Trinitarian character of God is something of an appendage. God is one, yes, and that is clear and straightforward to grasp, but he is also three persons, and that is more complex. We may even think that the very formulation of the doctrine is a sullying of the pure word of God by the intrusion of ‘Greek thought’. But Owen reminds us that we are called by Scripture to worship ‘the only true God’, God in three persons.

My aim is to draw attention to the two main features of how Owen understands the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to Holy Scripture, and secondly to emphasise one consequence of this.

The Trinity and Scripture

Owen’s main idea is to show that God is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each having distinct, mutual relations, is not an imposition on Scripture, or a theory about God, a ‘model’ of God as we are fond of saying these days, but it is found plainly in Scripture. Scripture itself is both clear and sufficient in the matter. The Scriptural portrayal of God's oneness and threeness is not misty, ambiguous, or vague. Its ‘express’ data are our basic datum. So the theological formulation of the Trinity in terms of the divine essence and a trinity of persons is not a clarification, much less an explanation, of the mystery of the Trinity. So what is it?

Before attempting to answer that question, let us see how Owen treats the Scripture. We are to begin with its plain assertions. It is our ultimate source of information about the Godhead, and our last line of defence. It sets forth a Trinitarian God. In our theological thinking ‘We produce divine revelations or testimonies, wherein faith may safely rest and acquiesce, that God is one; that this one God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost; so that the Father is God, so also is the Son, and the Holy Ghost’. (380) We start with the text. We do not first engage ourselves in terms such as ‘Trinity’, ‘substance’, ‘persons’, ‘properties’ and the like. We engage with Scripture. Owen's approach is a clear affirmation of the sufficiency and especially of the clarity of Scripture on the matter. I suspect that our commitment to Scripture is nowadays more cautious.

And so Owen begins to assemble some of the biblical data which (he tells us) ‘he suddenly repeated as they came into his mind’.

First, God is one: ‘Hear, O Israel; the LORD our God is one LORD’, Deut. 6.4., (and Isa. 44, 6, 8 etc.)
Secondly, the Father is God. (Owen does not stay long on this, as this is admitted by his opponents)
Thirdly, that Jesus Christ is God, the eternal Son of God.
Owen quotes texts of two sorts. First, those Old Testament texts which are applied to Christ in the New Testament. So Ps, 45.6 ‘Thy Throne, O God, is for ever and ever’ is applied to Christ in Hebrews 1.8.; Ps. 110.1. ‘The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand’ which is applied to Christ by himself, Matt.22.44. And so on.
Secondly, New Testament assertions in their own right: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God’ (Matt. 16.16); John 1.1-3 ‘’And the Word was God’ v.14 ‘And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father’; John 10.30 ‘I and my Father are one’. ‘Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God’. (Phil. 2.6) And so on.

About these and many other such data Owen says ‘For my part, I do not see in any thing, but that the testimonies given to the Godhead of Christ, the eternal Son of God, are every way as clear and unquestionable as those are which testify to the being of God, or that there is any God at all’. (386) And in conclusion of his treatment of the biblical data for the deity of the Son he says, ‘It appeareth, then, that there is a full, sufficient revelation made in the Scripture of the eternal Deity of the Son of God; and that he is so, as is the Father also’. (397)

Finally the deity of the Holy Spirit. Such texts as ‘Baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Matt. 28.19). And Acts. 20.28, ‘over which the holy Ghost hath made you overseers’; ‘As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them' (Acts 13.2), and so on.

Owen goes on (I summarise) to conclude that the Holy Ghost is distinctly called God; he is an intelligent, voluntary, divine agent; he knows, and works, he may be resisted and trusted, so that the Holy Ghost is a distinct divine person, and not merely the power or virtue of God or of any creature. He has divine rank, he is given the names of God and the properties of God are attributed to him, and so on. (401-2)

And these three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are one. Yet they are distinct, each having properties not possessed by the others.

So ‘There is nothing more fully expressed in the Scripture than this sacred truth, that there is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; which are divine, distincti, intelligent, voluntary omnipotent principles of operation and working: which whosoever thinks himself obliged to believe the Scripture must believe’. (406)

In establishing these conclusions from Scripture there is a process of induction used, gathering the evidence, letting it speak for itself. But this process is not, at the same time, unthinking proof-texting. For example, Owen considers the context of the texts he cites. This is most apparent where, in the case of the data proving the deity of the Son, he notes that certain expressions in the New Testament are applications of Old Testament teaching. He recognises the relationship of the Testaments, and the way in which the language of the Psalms and the prophecies is taken by Christ to apply to himself, and by others to refer to Christ. So there is induction, but it is an inductive process that itself involves interpretation and some prior understanding of the scope of Scripture.

So that is that, quite straightforward. But then what when this plain teaching of Scripture is assaulted? Then the church has employed other expressions to ‘further declare’ what is ‘necessarily included’ in the doctrine of God. God is one. In what respect is he one? Answer: in respect of his nature, being, substance or essence, ‘His eternal power and godhead’, (Rom. 1.20) (407) So this nature or substance of God is the one nature or substance of the three - Father, Son, and Spirit. (407) Each fully possesses it. So the distinctions that Scripture draws between the three cannot be distinctions between gods: otherwise we must conclude that since there are three persons there must also be three gods; and we become committed to a form of polytheism.

What then are these further expressions? We need the term ‘person’ or some equivalent term to denote the threeness. What is their weight, their value? To answer this we shall look in the next posting on what Owen says about Scripture is relation to our reason and to the explication of doctrine. Owen moves from induction to deduction.

Two Approaches to the Incarnation

Here’s a question for you: Is the Incarnation the start of a battle whose outcome is uncertain until victory is achieved? Or is it an act of unparalleled condescension, the successful outcome of which is certain from the beginning? I reckon that the answer to that question is important for an understanding of other features of the Incarnation.

Incarnation as military conflict

Here’s the contrast put in rather different terms. On the ‘battle’ understanding of the Incarnation, the Logos takes on human nature and he enters into conflict with the forces of sin an evil. The question is: will he win out despite his handicap? On this view an important part of what makes Gethsemane a drama is the uncertainty of the outcome. Not simply that the outcome is certain but that the onlookers don’t know what that outcome will be, but that it is uncertain for the chief participants, particularly for the God-man himself. Will Christ win out over the demonic forces of evil arrayed against him? On this view, by an unimaginably deep and rich exercise of spiritual power he did prevail, and triumphed over the forces of darkness, making show of them openly. He led a host of captives and gave gifts to men. (Eph.4;8) He is the head of a triumphal procession. (2 Cor. 2.14) So he ‘won’ our salvation, battling against the odds, taking the risks where the outcome was in doubt, and so, once victorious, he is adorned with the conqueror’s crown, and so was able to merit redemption for us. The ‘yet without sin’ of Hebrews tells us that he could have sinned, but that so great was his resolve that he won through. And so he is praiseworthy: the Father put all things under the feet of Christ. Alternatively, the Cross was a military risk that ended as a tragedy in which Christ became the victim of circumstances which suddenly and unexpectedly was reversed as the chains of death were burst apart.

Initially, there might seem to be something to be said for such a view. For as we can see, martial terminology, and the terminology of victory, are ascribed to Christ in the New Testament. He is the captain of our salvation, he has a Victor’s procession, he triumphed over the forces of darkness. He destroyed the one who has the power of death (Heb.2 .14) He resisted unto death. ‘Now is the judgment of this world, now will the ruler of this world be cast’ (John 12.31) This is violent language, to be sure, but is it the language of a victory that could have gone either way until it was finally achieved?

Incarnation as Condescension

When we look closer at that language, we see that Christ’s conquering is achieved through a kind of passivity, through suffering, through renunciation and dedication to the will of his Father. When tempted into physical combat he resists, he scorns weapons, and rebukes his follower Peter, commanding him to put his sword away. He could have called legions of angels to defeat the forces. He won a victory, to be sure, and he triumphantly led a host to the enjoyment of it, but this is a victory in which ends and means were perfectly suited, in which the victory was secured by a resistance to temptation and sin that was total.

Our modern use of ‘condescension’ is unfortunate, for it suggests the unwilling lowering to one person to the level of another, a ‘patronising manner’ as the Concise Oxford Dictionary puts it. A person who has such a manner is generally unpleasant. No mere human being ought to think of himself sufficiently elevated above another to have it in him to ‘condescend’ to the other, and so such a manner is never warranted. But in the case of the Logos the lowering was far from unwilling or grudging, and the distance to be travelled was much greater. He humbled himself. Our Creator, filled with kindness and grace, veiled his glory, emptying himself without in any way losing or abandoning that glory, the glory of deity. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. In identifying with us, God gave himself in union with human nature.

Apart from the never-to-be forgotten fact that the Incarnation was an act of the eternal Logos veiling himself in our flesh, and not a an act of a man becoming divine, I offer two or three lines of evidence is support of the condescension view: no doubt there are more.

First, there is the evidence of the synoptic gospels, that as Jesus’ self-understanding grows and unfolds, as, say, in the Gospel of Mark, what he comes to understand is that Christ knew of his fate, and of the success of his ministry, from the beginning.

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things…and be rejected by the elders…..and after three days rise again (Mark, 9.30-1)

There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see. kingdom of God after it has come with power. (9.1)

And thy will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise. (10.34)

But after I am raised up I will go before you into Galilee. (14.29)

Secondly, the primary emphasis of the New Testament in its depiction of the Incarnation is that it was a humbling. The key text here is Phillipians 2, as we have already noticed.

Thirdly, the NT, particularly the Letter to the Hebrews, sees the Passion in terms of suffering endurance. But there is never any doubt as to the outcome. Christ, whose sovereignty and impeccability are essential to him, is praiseworthy for his coming down. His victory is never in doubt, but what is astonishing is the manner of it, involving incarnation, humbling, denial, passivity, the need to resist the taunts and the intended seductions of sinful men. The temptation is the temptation to fight fire with fire. It is certainly not the temptation which takes its force from any possibility that the God-man might sin. He suffered, being tempted, tested. But what he was tempted to do was not to sin in the sense of break the law, but to sin by deviating from his calling. He endured face to face opposition, made all the more insulting because of his intrinsic dignity as very God.

The Hebrew Christians, to whom these words were addressed, were tempted to deviate from their calling as Christians to return to Judaism. The writer of Hebrews responds: you have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. It makes much better sense of the temptability of the Saviour as taught in this Letter to suppose that temptation and sin refer specifically to the temptation that the Jewish Christians were liable to; to apostatise from the Gospel, not to endure to the end. (The warnings against other sins, such as the failure to love the brethren, to be unfaithful in marriage, to be covetous, not to submit to lawful authority, and so on, are dealt with in Chapter 13, after the main argument has been completed, in a rather summary way, and without hardly a reference to the majestic argument of the body of the Letter.)

The writer shows that they have a Saviour who was tempted in all points like as we are, men and devils tried to him by offering him other alternatives. It was the very suggestion that was the trial, the test. It is not that Christ was tempted with every manner of sin, exactly as we are, but that we was tried by the repeated suggestion that he might abandon his calling in precisely the same kind of ways as Christians are tempted to abandon their callings to be the people of God. In his case, the very suggestion was a temptation. The ‘time of need’ (4.6) is precisely the time when the Hebrew Christians needed the grace to persevere: Jesus could give it, because he did endure, and so he can sympathise with persecuted Christians in their need. He ‘could have been saved from death’ (5.7) by his Father, but himself chose to suffer death, not deviating from the work that his Father had given him to do. He is a priest for ever, (not appointed as such after his suffering and death, but before it), and so, undergirded by the oath of God, he was able to guarantee a better covenant (7.17). He is not a mere temporary priest, an Aaronic priest, but the guarantor of salvation, one able to save to the uttermost those who come to God by him. Such a one was holy, blameless, set apart from sinners, (7.26)

Jesus endured the cross, the opposition of sinful men, despising the shame. He offered himself through the eternal spirit. Through him we have received a kingdom that cannot be shaken (12. 28), an enduring city (13.13) Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and for ever. (13. 8) There is no suggestion anywhere in Hebrews, as far as I can tell, that Jesus might in any respect have failed what he had set out to do.

What, then, of the ‘yet without sin’? Could Christ have sinned? Which means, could he have failed? Could he have disobeyed his heavenly Father? The type of answer which says that he could have thinks that it is of the essence of temptation that the one tempted is liable to fail, or to fall. But tempting is testing, and the testing of Christ consisted in his summoning of resistance to the seductions of the tempters which he had never experienced before. He had to endure these affronts to his holy character. He learned obedience to his Father’s will by the things that he suffered from his mockers who hurled at him the taunts that he should fail. His testing lay in having to be in the company of, and to endure, the sheer wickedness of such enticements.