We lack power because we do not experience our personal religion as a power. Religion is any or all of the things I have said, and we feel sincerely that it is so. Only it is not a power with us. Its experience is much that is admirable, not only the one thing that is commanding. There are so many powers that we feel ‘in practical effects to be greater. In admission, of course, the greatest of all powers is God, is faith, is the Cross. We concede that without saying and – we believe we believe it, But practically we retract the admission. In the retrospect of a single day of our life we are bound to admit that the things which have been practically recognized and effective with us, both in our conduct and in our view of life, have been different. We feel and own intensely the power of armies, states, and organizations. We organize force, equity, and industry, and we believe in organization more than it was ever believed – in. We are forced to admit what an immense power it is and is going to be. We are offered our choice between organization and ineffectiveness. The objects we are most set on for the time are such as organization alone can reach. At least they cannot be reached without it. Again, we feel easily the power of heroes, emperors, geniuses, even when we have more of the imperial than of the heroic, or the ‘inspired. We feel the power of personality, of eloquence, of sentiment. We recognize the vast power of money, the unprecedented part played by finance in the social economy and the modern time. We have a momentary and reactionary passion of belief in institutions, in institutional politics or piety. We know the power of science and its organization of knowledge. We have a sense never before given to the world of cosmos power, the collective force and energy of a perfectly coherent universe. These are but examples of power on the vast scale which we all feel, and they are in striking contrast with our sense of power which we associate with faith, or answer in it. Yet if in our faith we do not feel and own a power infinitely greater than any of the historic or cosmic forces of the time, our religion has but a limited future, and every effort we make to organize it into line with the powers which we secretly and practically call most effective, is bound to end in deep disappointment. We need organization, but it is very far from being the thing we most need, or need most immediately.
Resurrection
Forsyth on ‘The Power Of The Resurrection’ – Part 1
What we have most to complain of – in the Christianity of the day is lack of power. There is much interest, much charm, much zeal, much activity; there is a certain increase of reverence, of public respect for religion; people believe in the establishment of the Church who believe -in nothing else about it; there is a commendable ardour for evangelizing the outsider, for Church extension, for bracing up our Church organization. There is, moreover, an unprecedented sense of the beauty of Christ’s character, of the depths of His words, of their ethical pressure upon us in particular. Yet I venture to say that behind it all there is a sense of impotence of which we are often but semiconscious. A great part of our effort seems to go – in the flogging up of power, in the application of stimulants, – in scolding, sometimes, because the power does not come, sometimes ‘in cheering people on and insisting they could run if they would believe they could. Whereas the proper state of things is that our public efforts should go to the distributing of our power, and not to the acquiring of it or the working of it up. That should be done elsewhere, and not much in public. Power should inspire our collective effort instead of being the object of it.
Barth–Brunner Revisited 7 (final)
In this final post of this series, I simply want to make some concluding comments. Thanks for the feedback/thoughts I’ve received, particularly from Chris TerryNelson who looks after the Karl Barth Society website.
So here goes the final post in this series:
The long-lasting debate between Brunner and Barth, enmeshed in the broader and more fundamental issues of grace and nature, Gospel and law, and love and wrath, reveals that we are left with either an immanent-structural or a transcendent-relational understanding of what it means to be a human person. The choice, therefore, is between a rational-Unitarian or a Christological-Trinitarian understanding of human personhood. I consider that human personhood, both theologically and existentially, makes no sense apart from the Triune God in whose Image we are made.
With Brunner, I maintain that there is a moral element to the imago Dei, for since the Fall, as before, the imago lives in the demand of the Law. For although no-one has kept the Law (Rom. 3:23), God’s redemptive purposes remain unthwarted and unfrustrated (Jn. 3:16). However, there is no redemption outside Jesus Christ. In Him, every demand of the Law is met, and in Him the imago Dei is again a fulfilled reality. Barth was right to interpret Genesis 1:26 in terms of Christ. The imago Dei is the imago Christi (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15) and the imago Christi is an imago Dei mediated through the person of Christ. Barth states,
He was man as we are. His condition was no different from ours. He took our flesh, the nature of man as he comes from the fall … His sinlessness was not therefore His condition. It was the act of His being in which He defeated temptation in His condition which is ours, in the flesh … He emptied Himself … placing Himself in the series of men who rebelled against God in their delusion … In so doing, in His own person, He reversed the fall in their place and for their sake.
In Him, God draws near to fallen humanity freely offering the restoration of that relationship of obedience and service that is simultaneously the demand of the Law and the essence of the imago Dei. In Christ we are offered that which we can never achieve – the reversal of the Fall! The question of the imago Dei, therefore, can only be satisfactorily answered when it is brought into the theological arena of the doctrine of justification by faith (Phil. 3:9; cf. Rom. 3:22; 4:11; 9:30; 10:3, 10; 2 Cor. 5:21). Because of this righteousness, which has its origin in the righteous act of Christ, and comes to the believer as a gift (Rom. 5:17-19), those in Christ are justified. They become, always by grace, ‘new creatures’ (2 Cor. 5:17) and this ‘new man’ is one who is ‘after the image of him that created him’ (Col. 3:10). Hence, justification by faith and restoration of the imago are correlative terms. As T. F. Torrance affirms,
It is in Christ that we can really see that the original purpose of the works of God in creation is to reflect and image his glory … It is only in Jesus Christ, who is both the image and the reality of God, that we can think and speak of God in such a realist way that our human forms are not an empty shell but are filled from above with the Truth of God.
This means that the imago Dei is never an inherent possession, capacity or potentiality of the human creature but rather is always the gift of God through the Holy Spirit.
The issue revolves around the question of whether or not fallen humanity, dead in its sins, has a capacity for revelation and redemption; not in the material sense that we have anything other than our sinful and fallen life to bring to God, or indeed our rebellion and repeated attempts to put God to death – not, therefore, the capacity which the acorn has to become an oak, but rather, as Hart puts it, ‘the capacity which a gnarled and twisted piece of timber has to become – only through the creative fashioning skills of the woodworker or artist – something beautiful and pleasing to the eye’.
I consider that Barth, notwithstanding his strong denials, cannot, as long as he adheres to a doctrine of Incarnation or to the belief that God has revealed Himself to humans, avoid positing a point of contact in this second, carefully qualified, sense. The Holy Spirit may well be the ‘subjective possibility’ or ‘condition of revelation’; but He comes, as such, to fallen humanity who, while dead in their trespasses and sins, nonetheless are capable of being acted upon by Him in this redemptive and creative manner. This makes no claim for any inherent ability in the human creature to respond to God (it is the ‘Yes’ of the Man Jesus who vicariously responds for us). However, I consider that whatever Brunner thought of it, the distinction between a formal and a material imago Dei in fallen humanity, providing there is no split in the imago, is one which not only provides a very useful framework for discussion, but is something which Barth himself cannot ultimately avoid, although he never addresses it satisfactorily. And so the imago Dei in the human creature, although distorted, remains a ‘point of contact’ not because of our innate disposition but because of the Incarnation of the Word.
Humanity has certainly taken its inheritance, wished the Father dead, broken horizontal ties with sisters and brothers, and run away from home. But the imago Dei is not dead, however distorted, perverted and existentially, although never ontologically, uprooted from its Source. The imago Dei is a sinner. The imago Dei is a sinner. The imago Dei has robbed God. As Barth says, in the Fall, God is ‘deserted and denied by men; He suffers and is robbed. Sin is robbing God of what He is’. Also, as Brunner helpfully reminds us, ‘It is as a whole that a person commits sin; this is not due to some part of the personality. I am a sinner, not this or that aspect of my nature’. Sin, furthermore, has brought contradiction into the being of the human person: ‘not simply “something contradictory” in man, but … a contradiction of the whole man against the whole man, a division within man himself’.
Although sin is a devastating problem for humanity, and so for the creation (because humanity functions as creation’s priest), it is death that is the greatest dilemma. Yes, sin infects the human race. Yes, sin makes our goggles dirty so that we can’t see clearly, and yes, it makes our ears full of wax so that we can’t hear clearly, and even mishear, but death is humanity’s antithesis because it ‘makes clear the relationship of man to God – the negative, broken relationship under judgement’.
The divine warning to ‘the man’ was not, ‘for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely become a sinner’, but, ‘in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’ (Gen. 2:17). Even if sin is forgiven, the forgiveness remains null and void apart from resurrection (1 Cor. 15:17). It is nothing short of resurrection from the dead, resurrection in the man Jesus and His own triumph over death, which restores the imago Dei into life, and that ever in Christ. This is the great ex nihilo which refuses to allow the human creature to be nothing more than a sinner. While sin leaves no part of human nature uncorrupted, the ex nihilo protects human nature from becoming inhuman nature. This is because the essential nature of being human remains under the determination of God, not of sin. The dignity of the human creature cannot be relinquished or destroyed, thanks to the presence of God through which human persons continue to witness to Him even in their ‘condition of darkness and estrangement from the Source of [their] life.’ Before the new creation is consummated, opposition remains, but grace wins – that grace which lays the axe at the root of the whole of human existence and slays us so that we might be made alive! Anderson reasons this is because ‘even the disorder of human being through sin does not destroy the covenant basis on which the human exists. Indeed, the covenant becomes even more explicit as the gracious provision by which human life is supported’.
The only validity and hope of the imago Dei’s ontological existence and telos lies in God. So we live, with veiled faces, in faith, hope and love, and in the process we experience what it means to be human. We live, here and now, in the completed work-in-progress of the Cross–Resurrection experiencing ourselves as accepted and whole. Ultimately, the concept of the imago Dei is an eschatological one. It is our God-given destiny, and as such the implications for our understanding of ethics, relationships, and the church, indeed all of life, are enormous.
Baptism – an Evangelical Sacrament Part 7 (final)
I began this 7-part series by quoting a portion of Scripture from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and I have tried to show in this paper how that one baptism in this Pauline passage, points directly to Jesus Christ as the one Lord of the Church, for it was through his vicarious activity in life, death and resurrection that the Church came into being. Thus the Church can, and does, baptise, as it is in Christ. Christ himself was both the ontological ground and unifying core of the Church which he appropriated to himself as his own peculiar possession, and identified with himself as his own Body. Hence baptism in his name signified incorporation of the baptised in Christ as members of his body.One the other hand, one baptism pointed to the one Sprit, for it is one Spirit as well as through Christ that the Church has access to the Father. Furthermore, “the Holy Spirit is not only the bond of unity between the three divine Persons in the one being of God, but the bond of unity between God and human beings as they are baptised into the one Lord and are united with him and one another in one faith.”
It would be amiss of me if I did not also speak of the evangelical content of that one baptism, namely, ‘the remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’ (Nicene Creed). The forgiveness of sins was associated with baptism from the very beginning. In baptism we are united to Christ through the Holy Spirit in such a way that we partake of the whole substance of the Gospel, for all grace and truth are embodied in him. In other words, saving grace is not something detached from Christ which can be dispensed at will, but is identical with Christ in the unity of his Person, Word and Act. It is through the one baptism which we have in common with Christ, or rather which he has in common with us, that we share in all that God has in store for us. Because baptism is one (the baptism with which Christ was baptised for our sakes, and the baptism in which we are given to share in all he was, is and will be) to be baptised is much more than to be initiated into the sphere where forgiveness is proclaimed and dispensed in the Church. It is to be ‘delivered from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins’. It is to have our frail transient existence taken up into Christ himself in such a way that, without any loss to our creaturely reality but rather with its perfecting through his Spirit, it is united to God and established in union with his eternal reality.
‘The remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come’, belong together to the very core of this mystery, for they are the saving benefits that flow from union with Christ through one baptism and one Spirit, and are enjoyed in one Body. They are not benefits that we may have outside of Christ but only in Christ, and so they may not be experienced in separation from one another for they cohere indivisibly in him. Nor may they be enjoyed in the experience of separated individuals, but only as individuals share together in the one baptism of Christ and his Spirit. People are certainly baptised one by one, yet only in such a way that they are made members of the one Body of Christ, share in his benefits as a whole, and share in them together with all other members of Christ’s Body.
To be united to the crucified and risen Christ through the baptism of his Spirit, necessarily carries with it sharing with him in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Through his incarnation the Son of God took up into himself our physical existence enslaved to sin, thereby making our corruption, death and judgement his own and offering himself as a substitute for us, so that through the atoning sacrifice of his own life, he might destroy the power that corruption and death have over us. And through the resurrection of our physical human nature in himself Christ has set us upon an altogether different basis in relation to God in which there is no longer any place for corruption and death. Thus the central focus of Christian belief is upon the incarnate, crucified and risen Saviour, who is himself the ‘evangelical sacrament’ in whom we participate, for he has penetrated and destroyed the bands of death and brought ‘life and immortality to light’ – that is the forgiveness of sins and resurrection from the dead into which we are once for all baptised by the Holy Spirit. So, far from being just a promise for the future, baptism is an evangelical declaration of what has already taken place in Christ, and in him continues as a permanent triumphant reality throughout the whole course of time to its consummation, when Christ will return with glory in judgement, and to unveil the great regeneration which he has accomplished for the whole creation.
So here and now in the ongoing life of the Church we live in the midst of the advent-presence of Christ, already partaking of this regeneration and sharing in its blessings with one another. Because the Church is the Body of the risen, ascended, and coming, Christ, all that is said about the one baptism is proleptically conditioned by the future. Hence due to its union with Christ through one baptism and one Spirit the Church cannot but look through its participation in the saving death of Christ to its participation in his resurrection from the dead, and thus look forward in expectation to the general resurrection at the return of its risen Lord and Saviour when its whole existence will be transformed and it will enjoy to the full the sanctity and eternal life of God himself. So Paul writes: ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish’.
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