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“We all know the same truth, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”1
Lemme get the criticism out of the way: don't judge the book by its cover. Okay, moving on.
I don’t know Jason as a colleague. But I do know him as a friend, the sort that won’t always tell you what you want to hear but one that is primarily concerned with what’s true, the sort that will follow his convictions wherever they lead, even to his own detriment. That has to count for something in this seemingly God-forsaken short life.
It is to this life as “water spilled on the ground, which can’t be gathered again” (2 Sam 14:14), and its nagging absurdity before the face of . . . nothing—Deus absconditus, if you will—that Jason confronts in his new book, The Destiny of the Species: Man and the Future That Pulls Him. The title of it behooves me to attempt immediately to alleviate any fears that while Darwin and the question of the origin of our species sometimes serves as the foil throughout the following pages, this book is decidedly not another pathetic battle for the beginning. It is, in brief, to turn the heads of every reader toward last things first. No doubt, the question of human origins is important. But the destiny of our species—now, that’s something upon which to fix our gaze.
Even if we were to grant the neo-Darwinian synthesis its basic veracity (as I do), the point is still the same: Are we humans going to live down to our natural instincts? Or are we going to live up to the creator God’s goal, bearing his image, reflecting his glory? Saint Gregory of Nyssa frames it as follows: In discussing the creation of man, he starts with the premise that the cosmos depends upon the sustaining Word of God and that all things came into existence by this power. He’s quick, however, to maintain a Creator/creature distinction: the act of creation was no necessity. Rather, creation sprung out of the “abundant love” of God; his desire was to fashion a humanity with the express purpose to share in his divine goodness. This, for Gregory, remains part and parcel of what it means to be created in the image of God.2
The theme of a longing that “pulls” us toward our destiny (to use Jason’s language à la Peter Kreeft à la Aquinas) is not unique. Many others in times past have thought similar thoughts. But Jason does so for a generation in desperate need to hear them again, and he does so in such a way that this generation will hear them.
Starting with this theme of humanity being drawn toward its future, rather than driven by its past, Stellman confronts us with the challenge to live deliberately in light of this truth. And the only way to consistently live in such a way is to embrace, wholeheartedly, the destiny of the species as homo adorans—worshiping man. Otherwise, life as l’étranger in the face of the absurd is all that’s left. More than anybody else, those who say they already follow this way must resist storing up treasures that "moth and rust destroy." But damn that flesh, that old man—sin—ever seeking to throttle us from its grave. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The age to come dawns upon us; all that was accomplished and applied through the faithful life, the ignominy of the cross, the surprising resurrection, and the glorious ascension and rule of God’s messiah, has invaded our lives. Nothing can ever be the same. And the world—its people, plants, and animals—are aching and groaning toward that promised hope for the future, when the creator God, through his son Christ Jesus, by the power of his Spirit, will turn everything right-side up again (the felix culpa, as it turns out).
However, in the meantime, per Woody Allen, we do all know the same truth (that death comes for us all), and, indeed, how we live our lives—our thoughts, words, actions—the stuff that fills them up, is our way of coping with (distorting even) that reality. Which distortion, then, will you let have the final word? Death? Or eternal life on a renewed earth in renewed, resurrected bodies?
1 Woody Allen: A Documentary, directed by Robert B. Weide (2011; New York, NY: New Video, 2012), DVD.↩
2 From his Address on Religious Instruction, reprinted in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 275–77.↩
They're decent reasons, but they're also largely skin-deep. There's a more fundamental reason that Protestants ought to reflect on Rome when a pope is chosen, and it's teleological and twofold in nature. (Note my assumption: Catholic, Orthodox, and creedal Protestant communions are Christian communions. Each have their tares, their wolves, their covenanters who don't persevere.)
The first teleological fold is one major goal in which our hope as Christians is placed, a fixed post that our triune Lord promises throughout the various texts of sacred Scripture:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the Christians who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, we who are still alive and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever.
(1 Thess. 4:16–17)
In short, we Christians are in this together, forever—whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, the resurrection to life on a new earth is our great hope. The election of a new overseer of the largest Christian communion in the world ought to promote Protestant reflection, precisely because we share the same destiny with the Christians in that communion.
The second teleological fold may be particularly distasteful to Protestant ears that don't share my ecclesiastical sentiments. It has to do with a more finite goal, one that is hardly fixed: the reconciliation and reunification of Protestants and Catholics in this time between the times. This is by no means a given, but it is a hope, and one I believe all Protestants should share. Caring about and reflecting upon Rome at such a time as this comes naturally if you think and hope that one day the pope himself will one day be a pastor under whom your pastor (and their pastors) ministers, at least in a collegiate sense (as primus inter pares).
Yet most Protestants don't even consider that their respective communions are not to be ends in themselves. They've forgotten that they're branches shooting off the one, mother trunk, and instead believe the lie that they are trees themselves, every bit as robust and as life-giving as the tree from which they sprang. It's not true. Much of Protestantism is wilted, particularly in those places where God's Word and Sacraments are neglected.
I hope this doesn't come across as a romanticized version of reality or flat-out naïve (or "young and cool," even though I am young-ish and definitely cool). It's just that I don't care about the things you do, or at least I don't think they're as important as you think they are. Put another way, I think it's far more important to reflect on Rome and her pope and our shared destiny than it is to continue, unfazed, in the work of building up your own little fiefdom.
Update: It has come to my attention that the "you" in the above paragraph may be misconstrued to refer to Carl Trueman. That is emphatically not the case. Carl is one of the last persons I'd suspect to be guilty of creating his own little fiefdom. Generally speaking, my antagonist around here is the autonomous, demagogic, second-degree separationist Christian leader. That's who I'm carrying on my make-believe conversation with in the concluding paragraph—whether or not he/she actually exists.
This marks our sixth (and final!) post in this series, continuing my response to Schleiermacher's points of criticism regarding the hypostatic union:
The inability to know anything objective about God, coupled with his suggestion throughout The Christian Faith that Scripture is in totem only an expression of human experience, of discovering one’s relation to God, paves the way for Schleiermacher’s christological dead end (insofar as it’s truly meant as a replacement to Chalcedonian christology; but see n. 7 of the previous post). Barth’s retort at this point brings God-talk back from the ledge: On the contrary, the purpose of the inscripturated Word is to be discovered by God, to bring the reader “face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.”1 That “the subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world” is properly basic to the ecclesial reading of the Word.2 For Schleiermacher, knowledge of God is either scientific or mystical; he shows no awareness that knowledge of God can be objective (i.e., “warranted”) without being scientific, and therein lies one significant problem with his program. Instead of a cosmic God-event that can be known in a particular place and time through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we’re left with the scraps of forming new relationships based on a mutual vague awareness of being utterly dependent on . . . pure potency, a “Whence” incapable of immanence.
Some of the difficulties associated with the language used in the patristic doctrine notwithstanding, Schleiermacher, despite his caveat of “complete agreement” with the sentiments expressed in the christological creeds, displaces the doctrine of those creeds—one person in two natures—by reducing the God-man to a man (albeit archetypal and ideal) with one nature. If Schleiermacher at times seems to waver between Ebionite and Apollinarian (or docetic) solutions, we’d not be far from his fears about the restatement (replacement) of the ecclesiastical formulae:
It would be difficult for anyone to prove that there is anything docetic or Ebionite in this description. It could be called Ebionite only by one who feels that he must insist upon an empirical emergence of divine properties if he is to recognize a superhuman element in the Redeemer; and the only thing that could be regarded as docetic is that in the Redeemer the God-consciousness is not imperfect.3
As we’ve seen thus far, on the one hand (according to Schleiermacher), in Jesus one aspect of his human nature—his God-consciousness—is perfect and thus his humanity is potentially unlike humankind’s (a kind of higher form). This implies docetism, in that if the God-consciousness was determinative of his every move, without constraint, then there was no possibility of real human actions or growth (ibid., 398). Thus (so the criticism goes), “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed.”4 On the other hand, Jesus was not the incarnate Word, the pre-existent Logos made flesh, but a human like the rest of us, save for his perfect God-consciousness. By “empirical emergence of divine properties,” Schleiermacher means those very attributes the church has always confessed about the Christ since its earliest moments—that God the Son was born of the Virgin and became fully human, he talked, ate, healed, forgave, suffered, died, rose from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of his Father. But, again, Schleiermacher takes umbrage with the notion that God can be in any objective sense, apart from our mutual feelings of absolute dependence, revealed in nature or man and thus be known as an object doing anything anywhere.
This challenges the core of the patristic doctrine (not to mention collapses under the weight of its own incoherence5), and as such would be considered nonsensical in their day: Why, they would ask, would anyone even bother to have a savior if that savior isn’t also God, doing what God and only God can do? The christological creedal question of the process of the incarnation, of the manifestation of the unity of God and man in the person of Jesus, may just be the wrong foot with which to start in many instances today.6 Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s alternative doesn’t go far enough, or precludes unnecessarily the heart of the Christian faith for the sake of its "cultured despisers." While beyond the scope of this series of posts, Schleiermacher’s version of redemption as it relates to the redeemer also has implications here: there is no need for vindication on the day of judgment, no real need for the cross or the resurrection or ascension, and thus no atonement worth mentioning. If Schleiermacher’s redeemer lacks dignity and looks small, it’s because so too does Schleiermacher’s rendition of what redemption entails. Indeed, “his Christology is the incurable wound in his system,” and “if the Bible and classical Christian dogma are right to see in Christ this final word, then it must be said at least that in Schleiermacher’s Christology with its great quid pro quo, executed with so much intelligence and piety, we have a heresy of gigantic proportions.”7
1 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: repr. OUP, 1968), x.↩
2 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson, James K. A. Smith, Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 9.↩
3 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (§96), 391.↩
4 Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, in “Letters on the Apollinarian Controversy,” Christology of the Later Fathers, Edward R. Hardy, ed. (Louisville: WJK Press, 1954), 218.↩
5 “If no human concepts applied to God, at least one human concept would apply to him—the concept of being such as to escape characterization by human concepts.” From Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19.↩
6 This is not to deny in any sense the validity or veracity of the christological creeds. Indeed, they were indispensible in combating the undermining of the central gospel message of the triune God’s condescension, of salvation by grace through faith because of the God-man, and they still provide authoritative parameters within which the community of Christ must do the work it has been called to do. I reckon the works noted in the previous post (n. 6) to be about the business of accomplishing the same in our day (not least in our post-Schleiermachian hermeneutical world), but without the ecclesial authority, of course.↩
7 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1982), 107, 104.↩
This marks our fifth post in this series, now responding to Schleiermacher's points of criticism regarding the hypostatic union:
Schleiermacher's third and fifth points we can treat at the same time. In them, we come to the crux of his criticism: How can there be a real unity of person in two natures? This has produced, according to Schleiermacher, an unavoidable precipice on all sides—either the two natures are mixed and form a third (e.g., Eutychianism), or the two natures are kept separated at the cost of the unity of the person (e.g., Nestorianism), or one nature becomes less important than the other and limited by it (e.g., certain kenotic or docetic or Apollinarian views). In practice, Schleiermacher rightly notes that this often manifests itself in the church in one of two ways: so emphasizing Christ’s deity that his humanity is obscured and vice versa.
As alluded to in the previous post, Schleiermacher depends heavily on the definitions given to words like nature and person during the course of his criticism. This gets him off track, but not indefinitely. Nature, for example, before Chalcedon, necessarily implied a hypostasis (the substantive existence of being; the term came to approximate “person” [i.e., the one who has this substantive existence] during and after Chalcedon).1 After Chalcedon, however, “‘natures’ could no longer be understood solely in terms of capacities abstracted from existing individuals,”2 but came to mean an essence with the attributes proper to it—a concrete reality, a particular being with its particular attributes or nature. Thus, in the time of Schleiermacher there would have been no reason to obsess over the pre-Chalcedon implications of the word nature or uncritically apply the popular definition of the word person in his day to the equation.
The argument itself also reflects that of Apollinaris of Laodicea and his charge against the Arians. Along with his eagerness to emphasize the deity of Jesus and the unity of his person, came the denial of the existence of a rational human soul in Christ’s human nature, this being replaced in him by the Logos, so that his body was a glorified and spiritualized form of humanity. “The effort to conceive the unification of originally independently existing divine and human natures into a single individual in whom both natures nonetheless remain distinct leads inevitably to an impasse from which there is no escape.”3 Hence Schleiermacher’s criticism on this point.
While his approach to this dilemma “from the ground up” (so to speak) is commendable, his failure to bring us to the great mystery of the incarnation is not. Studying Jesus’ aims, beliefs, actions, agenda—his sense of calling or vocation—through the lens of history can bring us to the Definition of Chalcedon (albeit with different words). As with the opposing parties in the early church, the problem for Schleiermacher “is insoluble so long as Christology is developed from the concept of the incarnation, instead of culminating in the assertion of the incarnation as its concluding statement."4 His answer, however, falls outside the bounds of Chalcedon; or, rather, his answer finds itself playing in an altogether different playground—one without fences.
Along with Karl Barth, retaining the language of an utterly unique incarnation in “two natures” while maintaining reservations about applying the concept of nature uniformly to both God and humanity, may be a helpful way forward.5 The union of God and humankind in Jesus is sui generis—unique, singular and irreplaceable, and therefore must be understood solely on its own terms. To conceive of the manifestation of God’s Christ through the appropriation of psychology, that is, the inner life of humankind (e.g., gefühl), is to grant a more fundamental union of God and man (in that moment before thinking and acting). No, says Barth, the incarnation of the one God-man in two natures has no analogy, and thus it cannot be twisted into a mere type or exemplification of the feeling of absolute dependence.
Finally, we come to Schleiermacher’s restatement of the creedal affirmation of the existence of God in Christ. In it he focuses, rightly, on the historical particularity of Jesus’ human activity as the basis of the confession that in him God became man. Again, it’s not so much this method that creates the problem, beholden to (or kicking off!) modern hermeneutics as it is6; rather, it’s the definition he gives to God (and “his” relation to the world) in conjunction with what he says about the person of Christ that’s the problem. Put another way, what Schleiermacher takes away with his doctrine of God, he does not quite give back with his christology.7 We'll see how when I try to wrap this up next time.
1 See G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (London: OUP, 1969), 1,500.↩
2 Bruce L. McCormack, “The Person of Christ,” in Mapping Modern Theology, Kapic, Kelly M. and Bruce L. McCormack, eds. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 155.↩
3 Pannenberg, Jesus, God and Man, 287. He goes on to posit “mutual interpenetration of the natures as a way toward understanding the unity of Christ” as a way forward in this particular discussion, 296–307.↩
4 Ibid., 291.↩
5 See Karl Barth, CD IV/2 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 58ff. ↩
6 For some good examples of this sort of work using (primarily) exegetical and historical methods (focusing on the human activity—or vocation—of Jesus as signposts to his divine identity), see Richard Bauckham, God Crucified (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); David Bivin, New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus: Insights from His Jewish Context (Holland, Mich.: En-Gedi Resource Center, 2005); Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994); Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); N.T. Wright, Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) and Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), to name a few.↩
7 He may come close, arguably, with his christocentric vision of revelation. See Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (§94), 387–88: Just as the natural world becomes “a revelation of God to us only so far as we bring that conception with us,” so too does the existence of God in humanity become revealed insofar “as we bring Christ with us in thought and relate to Him.” He is the only “other” in whom there is an existence of God “in the proper sense,” and as such we are not able to see a revelation of God anywhere unless we have first seen it in Christ, in whom the God-consciousness was “a perfect indwelling of the Supreme Being as His peculiar being and His inmost self.” And since it is only through the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, that God-consciousness comes to possess others, and since, further, it is only in reference to him that the world can be said to contain a revelation of God, we can say that he “alone mediates all existence of God in the world and all revelation of God through the world, in so far as He bears with Himself the whole new creation which contains and develops the potency of the God-consciousness.”↩
Now begins our fourth post in this series, picking up at Schleiermacher's revision of the hypostatic union:
Restatement
Schleiermacher then proceeds to hope that the above criticisms have laid a sufficient foundation . . .
. . . for such a revision, which attempts so to define the mutual relations of the divine and the human in the Redeemer, that both the expressions, divine nature and the duality of natures in the same Person (which, to say the least, are exceedingly inconvenient) shall be altogether avoided.1
He goes on to frame his restatement of the doctrine thus: The Redeemer is like all men in the possession of the same human nature, but distinguished from all men through the absolute power of the God-consciousness that constituted a “real existence of God in him.” In him the human was the perfect organ for the reception and representation of the divine. Insofar as all of the Christ’s human activity depends upon “this existence of God in Him and represents it, the expression (that in the Redeemer God became man) is justified as true exclusively of Him.” Similarly, every moment of his life presents a new manifestation of the incarnation of God, “because always and everywhere all that is human in Him springs out of that divine.”
So ends Schleiermacher’s judgment of this most foundational element of the ecclesiastical formulae regarding the two natures of Christ. In short, it “had better be given up . . . because it is an imperfect solution of the problem . . . and harmful because the occasion of persistent misunderstandings” (ibid., 390).
Response
Many criticisms and several affirmations and adjustments could be made from what has been presented in this series of posts thus far. It’s scope, however, is more narrow (not least in size)—that of christology. And further, we aim to respond to Schleiermacher’s critique of the creedal expression of the hypostatic union in his “§96 First Theorem.” What follows corresponds to the numbering in my last post, though not necessarily in the same order as presented there.
First, with respect to titles and other references to Jesus of Nazareth denoting his divinity, Schleiermacher’s wariness, based on socio-grammatical grounds, is quite right. James D. G. Dunn has summed it up well in his Christology in the Making (in his study on the “Son of God” in nascent Christianity, though the conclusions relate to every title, in that this reference to Jesus “has had both the historical depth and lasting power” of all the titles that have come to denote his divinity2):
They all denote one who is related to God (the divine) in some way—that is quite clear. But whether the relationship is of an individual who lived in close accord with God (specially favoured by God, specially pleasing to God), or of something much more (embodying deity in some way), that is not clear. Certainly ‘son of God’ as applied to Jesus would not necessarily have carried in and of itself the connotation of deity. . . . (ibid., 22)
In the earliest period of Christianity ‘Son of God’ was not an obvious vehicle of a christology of incarnation or pre-existence. . . . In other words, we have not yet discovered any pre-Christian or indeed primitive Christian talk of a Son of God descending to earth which could explain the appearance of such talk in the Fourth Gospel. To put it another way, the understanding of Jesus as Son of God apparently did not provide the starting point for a christology of pre-existence or incarnation. (ibid., 64)
On this first count, then, Schleiermacher anticipated a better reading of the Scriptures than what he had inherited.
Second, starting with the second part of his criticism first, Schleiermacher deems the word nature particularly misleading because it should only be applied to finite existence, and thus is totally inappropriate to God’s aseity and infinity. This argument misses the mark, since it doesn’t comport with the patristic understanding. The concept of “nature” and the concept of “being” were interchangeable by the time of the formulation of the christological creeds, and the former did not carry with it the denotation of finitude that Schleiermacher articulates.
His first part of the argument, however, that the word nature cannot be uniformly applied to both the human and the divine has some merit. The human and the divine are not on the same level of reality; but it is also the superiority of the infinite over all the finite that makes the doctrine of the hypostatic union so difficult to express. Put another way, in the ontological perspective of the Greek world in which the word nature was used and applied to both of Christ’s natures, a resolution to the problem of singular personhood in which these natures subsist cannot be expressed easily without confusion, which brings us to the next points.3
Brief mention must first be made of Schleiermacher’s fourth criticism, that the doctrine of the two wills of Christ adds to the incoherence and unhelpful nature of the creedal formulae. In so doing, he doesn’t move the conversation forward (uncritically relying as he does on his culture’s definition of person—with the addition of self-consciousness and the personality development it made possible).4 At any rate, it’s an extension of the real problem of ascribing two natures to one person, and to that end, he raises his most crucial insight—the question of the relation between nature and person, to which we will turn in the next post.
1 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith (§95), 397, and hereafter throughout the remainder of this paragraph.↩
2 James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 12. ↩
3 On the best reading, Schleiermacher’s concern here is motivated by his desire to protect the transcendence and holiness of God over against all things creaturely, and so he rejects all attempts to apply words in the same manner to both God and man.↩
4 For an argument of its coherency in relation to the hypostatic union in the incarnation, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 153–62.↩
We're launching right into our third post in this series:
First Theorem (§96): the Hypostatic Union
The Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD) set the parameters for what Christians believe about the person of God’s Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. This symbol of faith lays out several affirmations revolving around what is true of him. It made no attempt, however, to resolve its “apparent contradictions,"1 that is, to explain how the affirmations can be understood all together. The challenge for subsequent Christians with respect to christology has been to work out in a theologically consistent way how the antinomies of the creed can simultaneously be true.2
The doctrine of the hypostatic union immediately comes to mind: how can the divine (usually construed in infinite terms) be a (finite) human being at the same time? Before engaging this most crucial creedal proposition, Schleiermacher notes his intent:
The task of the critical process is to hold the ecclesiastical formulae to strict agreement with the foregoing analysis of our Christian self-consciousness, in order, partly, to judge how far they agree with it at least in essentials, partly (with regard to individual points), to inquire how much of the current form of expression is to be retained, and how much, on the other hand, had better be given up, either because it is an imperfect solution of the problem or because it is an addition not in itself essential and harmful because the occasion of persistent misunderstandings.3
Never mind for the moment that it’s the ecclesiastical formulae that are weighed and found wanting in every instance. The method itself is laudable. “If theologians are to reflect at all, and are not merely to repeat the definitions of the past, they must be free to suggest language that is technically heterodox (not heretical!) but may in time become orthodox.”4
In Jesus Christ the Divine Nature and Human Nature
Were Combined in One Person
Schleiermacher launches into his criticisms after noting that while he’s in complete agreement with the sentiment laid out in the various creedal passages he lists, “there is almost nothing in the execution of this aim against which protest must not be raised, whether we regard the scientific character of the expression or its suitability for ecclesiastical use” (ibid., 391). Those protests may be summarized as follows:
First, in the Scriptures the name “Jesus Christ” (as does “Son of God”), which are often taken to allude to both the human and divine natures of the one person, actually refers only to the subject of the hypostatic union (qua man and thus “not of the divine element in it before the union,” p. 392).
Second, use of the term nature in reference to both the divine and the human is confusing to the point of being unhelpful. “For how can divine and human be thus brought together under any single conception, as if they could both be more exact determinations, coordinated to each other, of one and the same universal?” (ibid.). Moreover, divine and nature commonly refer to opposite conceptions: Nature denotes the contingent and manifold phenomenal world in contrast with the unconditional and the absolutely simple world of the divine. “Always we use [the word nature] solely of a limited existence, standing in opposition to something else . . . active and passive . . . revealed in a variety of appearances.” The term thus cannot be used in conjunction with God. To do so betrays a polytheistic “heathen influence” (p. 393).
Third, the creedal formulae also implies a relation between nature and person opposed to common usage: while several persons can indeed have the same nature, here the formulae insist that one person has two entirely different natures. Person denotes a unity of life, but nature indicates the content of a person’s unity-of-life modes of action (which vary depending on one’s life). How can there be a unity of life with a duality of natures, unless one gives way to the other, especially since one of those natures (the divine) has a large sphere and the other a small? The Ego is lost altogether in this construct. The outcome is either the melting of the two natures into a third, which is neither divine nor human, for the sake of maintaining the unity of the person (e.g., monophysitism); or the separation of the natures at the cost of neglecting the person (e.g., Nestorianism); or the subordination of one nature to the other (e.g., adoptionism or docetism).
The attempt to make clear this unity along with the duality naturally but seldom results in anything else than a demonstration of the possibility of a formula made up by combining indications out of which it is impossible to construct a figure. On the other hand, as soon as the same writer avoids this formula of two natures, he not seldom says something which one can follow, and of which the figure can be drawn. (pp. 393–94)
Fourth, the question of two wills is inevitably raised. If Jesus Christ had two wills, the unity of the person would be unreal (“even if we try to conserve it by saying that the two wills always will the same thing,” because that only leads to agreement, not unity, p. 394); and, further, since understanding (i.e., reason) and will cannot be conceived as independent, the question of the duality of the understanding is involved, which brings us back again to the division of the person of Christ (i.e., it’s rehashed Nestorianism, or worse, it creates a schizophrenic Christ who wills one way one second, and another way the next, or wills in two ways simultaneously). In short, it’s unthinkable that a divine reason, “which as omniscient sees everything at once, should think the same as a human reason, which only knows separate things one after the other and as a result of the other” (ibid.).
Fifth, the formulae itself does not harmonize with the creedal formulae on the Trinity, which abandoned the unity of person for the sake of unity of essence. And when we ask how the divine “nature” of Christ relates itself to the divine “essence,” no answer is possible. If the doctrine of Christ involves dual natures, then the question “inevitably arises . . . whether each of the three Persons, outside their participation in the Divine Essence, has also a nature of its own as well, or whether this is a peculiarity of the Second Person” (p. 395). Furthermore, if we apply the usage of the word person in the doctrine of Christ to the doctrine of the Trinity, “then the three Persons must have an independent anterior existence in themselves; and if each Person is also a nature, we come almost inevitably to three divine natures for the three divine Persons in the one Divine Essence” (in other words, tritheism. Ibid.).
Thus we see, argues Schleiermacher, that the doctrine of the hypostatic union carries us far away from religion into hair-splitting, speculation, and confusion. Its practical use in the church is of little value.
What's next: Schleiermacher's restatement of the hypostatic union as well as my (hopefully helpful) response to it.
1 Kelsey, Thinking . . ., 69.↩
2 Indeed, according to Wolfhart Pannenberg, the Definition accomplished “no theological solution for the controversies preceding Chalcedon. It only indicates the criteria that must be unconditionally observed in every Christological theory” (Jesus, God and Man [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968], 292).↩
3 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith (§95), 390.↩
4 B. A. Gerrish (vi of the Foreword), summarizing Schleiermacher’s thought in The Christian Faith (§25), 108–11.↩
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