In his Mysterium Paschale Hans Urs von Balthasar tries to understand how the incarnation and death of Christ can be squared with the eternal nature of God. Does God suffer in some way? Is he 'changeable'?
The idea he expounds here is that the incarnation and passion were already existing 'possibilities' or 'realities' within God himself from the beginning. The Lamb of Rev 13:8 was after all 'slain before the foundation of the world'.
He quotes PT Forsyth saying:
'There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all...His obedience as a man was but the detail of the supreme obedience that made him man.'
The cross in other words already 'exists' in the relationship of the Son and the Father from before all worlds... it is not a new thing in that sense. Or, it always was a new thing...
20 comments:
And it's all based on a mis-reading of Rev 13.8: 'Before the foundation of the world' modifies 'written in the Lamb's book' not 'slain', as is clear from the parallel construction in Rev 17.
Hi Michael,
Have tried to post once or twice without success - not quite sure I've got my identity sorted out yet...
Appreciate that insight about the pre-existence of the cross, lots to think through.
HOWEVER - have you considered Meredith as a name...?
!! love Meredith. Ahh, my anti-Platonist friends out in force again!
Dave, God never WAS wrathful towards the Son, was he?
Have been thinking about this. Is a more helpful way to approach the matter to say that God's nature does not change: He is always and forever will be perfect justice and perfect love. What we see at the cross is how those unchanging attributes result in a temporary rupture within the trinity for our sake: the Son is forsaken by the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. At no point does the love/justice nature of the intra-Trinitarian relationships change. God is not "changed" by the cross; it reflects His eternal character, even in such a way that is consistent through the unfolding saga of the incarnation/crucifixion. Or have I misunderstood the debate…?
This sounds like Platonism to me. It suggests that there is a Form of the incarnation and passion above and that here on earth we just get some pale shade of it. This does a great deal of damage to my understanding of the incarnation and the passion being very fleshy events here on earth. The incarnation and the passion don't however function in that fleshy way now - Jesus is not with us in bodily form and we do not sacrifice him again. At the risk of being boring this is where the notion of instantiation makes sense to me. Christ was instantiated in the fleshy form in the incarnation and passion but now is instantiated in nature in Word, sacraments, Church.
But doesn't wrath require sin or evil? How can we say that the Father had wrath towards the Son in eternity? Can we say that wrath is in some ways a subset of holiness and love? Such that while the eternal relations between the Father, Son and Spirit are perfect, the very nature of a holy and perfectly loving God means that there is a way he will act towards one who offends him, just that in his eternal relations he never exercises that wrath because there is no sin? Is it too nestorian to suggest that the Father is wrathful towards the eternal son according to his human nature that had taken on the sin of the whole world, yet remained in perfect loving unity with the eternal son according to his divine nature?
Um... because the Father isn't ever wrathful towards the Son qua Son... is he?
Well I am not sure that 'God punished Jesus' is a biblical statement.
Whereas 'Jesus bore God's punishment for our sin ' definitely is.
well this has to have been my all time least popular post! people just aren't diggin' von B now, are we?
Just been reading through Isaiah 53. The language used of the servant certainly implies some kind of active punishment: "Stricken" and "smitten" by God; "it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer". The language of the servant having our "punishment" "upon him" is squarely within this context. Or do we not take this passage to be about Jesus...? ;-)
Well: two things to note in Is 53 -
1 - the servant is active in bearing the punishment.. that is, he freely takes up the punishment of the people.
2 - vs 4 is a little more ambiguous than that: the point it is making is that though we considered him despicable and God-forsaken, he was in this God-forsakenness bearing our infirmities...
Been pondering this some more - With Isaiah 53:4 I think it is more than just we consider Jesus despicable and God-forsaken: isn't this why in 2Cor 5:21 Paul talks of Jesus being 'made sin' and in Gal 3:13 he became 'a curse for us'. God is righteous and just - he would not condemn an innocent man, and it is because of our union with Christ that God's judgment of sin in Christ is proper. While he had no sin of his own, he did truly take on the sin of humanity, which thus became his. So in the sense that Christ was bearing the sin of humanity, I think I'd be happy to say that 'God punished Jesus' because what was mine became his (Luther uses a marriage analogy here). I believe Dr G. Williams suggesting in class the significance of the resurrection here is that as Jesus rises from the dead in the Spirit, he is vindicated by God as sinless in his own right.
Well of course: good point.
But still, the language of 'the Father punishing the Son' is problematic if left unexplained. He actively takes the sin, not as an innocent bystander, but as the judge judged in our place...
Whatever happened on the cross, I still think it's very Platonic (and a misreading of Rev 13) to draw that back into eternity and remove all novelty from the cross.
I'm pretty sure Byron is right to see here a misreading of Rev 13. I had the same query when I read Mysterium Paschale; and, frankly, this verse is about the only textual evidence von B has got to lean on.
But, in any case, is this Platonism? Well, perhaps. But there is a complication here because Balthasar believes that the events of the passion, cross and resurrection are ‘fundamentally transcendent events’ (MP, 246). That is, von B is not saying that the earthly drama is a representation of some timeless heavenly reality, but that the earthly drama is of one piece with an eternal 'event'. The historical does not signify the heavenly, but the historical is in itself 'meta-historical'. We are faced then with something like Kierkegaard's ‘absolute paradox’: the eternal in time.
Now, I'm not convinced that any of this necessarily makes sense, but at any rate it seems clear that we are not dealing with any naive Platonism. Moreover, von B develops an even more sophisticated position on this stuff in his later work - but unfortunately I haven't yet had a chance to get a handle on it.
Also, with respect to the Son being punished by God, it is worth remembering that throughout the OT the idea of 'atonement' is correlated with 'turning aside the wrath of God'. The sacrifice that atones is not so much a diverting of punishment from one to another, but an act of the guilty party which expressly recognises sin and its seriousness and which aligns one's will with the righteous will of God. These two elements are symbolically enacted in the sacrificial rite. And, for this reason, the sacrifice is effective to turn aside wrath - provided it is performed under the right conditions (e.g. a genuinely contrite heart).
Consider in this connection the somewhat gruesome story of Phineas (with thanks to Andrew Katay who has been emphasising the importance of this story for years) (Num 25; cf. Prov 16.6 and Sir 45.23). After the wrath of God has been kindled against the Israelites for their infidelity, Phineas takes matters into his own hands when he catches an Israelite in the act with a Midianite woman...
'When Phinehas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he got up and left the congregation. Taking a spear in his hand, he went after the Israelite man into the tent, and pierced the two of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly. So the plague was stopped among the people of Israel...
'The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: “Phinehas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the Israelites by manifesting such zeal among them on my behalf that in my jealousy I did not consume the Israelites. Therefore say, ‘I hereby grant him my covenant of peace. It shall be for him and for his descendants after him a covenant of perpetual priesthood, because he was zealous for his God, and made atonement for the Israelites.’ ” ' (Num 25.8-13).
The atoning sacrifice of Christ, then, can be understood as effective by means of the same logic. In his obedience to the point of death, even death on a cross, Israel's representative expresses his full recognition of the rightness of God's judgment on Israel (and the nations) and at the same time completely submits to God's will. (This idea is explored by John McLeod Campbell in The Nature of the Atonement: Christ offers perfect confession and repentance of sin, ‘a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man’ [1873 edition: 118].)
Christ therefore does what Deut 30 calls for:
'When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you, and return to the LORD your God, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today, then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, gathering you again from all the peoples among whom the LORD your God has scattered you.' (Deut 30.1-3).
The cross, on this way of understanding it, is a gesture towards God by Jesus Christ on behalf of humanity - a gesture of repentance and a humble entreating of God for forgiveness and reconciliation in spite of our guilt. It is, of course, for Jesus a supremely costly gesture, but he alone is capable of making it and is faithful in doing so. Clearly here we are dealing with something other than the quid pro quo, 'profit-and-loss theology' of the penal substitution model.
This is not to say that the penal substitution model is wrong. But there are a variety of metaphors used in the NT to describe the effectiveness of the cross, and I would argue that the idea of a 'sacrifice of atonement' is probably the most basic of all. What's more, I think it resonates with us as much if not more than the PSA story. Why don't we use it more in our gospel presentations?
Thanks Matt, an important angle. Do you see sacrifice of atonement as more important than Christus victor? Or are they two solutions for humanity's double problem - that we are at once guilty of sin and needing a sacrifice of atonement and also slaves to sin and needing liberation by a victor? If so, how are the two related?
Byron, I'd be interested to know how you hold them together. Here are a couple of my thoughts:
Christ's sacrifice is already a victory over sin in the sense that it erases 'the record that stood against us with its legal demands' (Col 2.14), and reconciles us with God. Here already the alienating effects of sin, for which we are responsible and under which we languish, are overcome. And, incidentally, this verse is followed by the gloss that 'He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it' (v15), linking it with the Christus Victor theme.
But there does seem to be more to the Christus Victor theme than fits into the sacrifice metaphor. For example in Rom 5.12-21 the death of Christ ('the free gift') is portrayed as a victory over sin in a second and equally important sense: it ends the universal dominion of disobedience through the sheer factuality of Christ's act of obedience. There is this nice quote from Edward Irving (quoted by Gunton in The Actuality of the Atonement): ‘As unfallen creation stood represented in unfallen Adam, so fallen creation stood represented in Christ’ (1865: 154). Here it is the incarnation itself that is the 'sacrifice' (the self-giving and humiliation of God) and the means of victory: Christ freely came under the burden of a fallen world’s infirmity and sin in order to start something new from within the fallen world, namely a dominion of righteous and perfected humanity ('the Kingdom of God'). The very body of Christ, then, is the battleground in the fight against the universal dominion of sin and death, and the battle is won through Christ's resolute faithfulness.
Now the puzzle with this model is how 'by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous' (Rom 5.19). After all, if there is a resurrection that is consequent upon this act of righteousness, it happens for Jesus and Jesus alone. How then is it also for me? I suspect at this point we need to read on to Rom 6: We are grafted into the victorious events of Christ's life, death and resurrection.
Baptism! ie the Spirit! is how it is for me... in Romans 6 anyway.
Also, the idea of Christ's vicarious obedience linked with the sacrifice motif makes a strong showing in Hebrews, esp chapter 5... one of my favourite passages.
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