Some Big News on the PhD Front

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Some exciting news. I just had a Zoom meeting today with someone who is now going to be my doktorvater (doctoral supervisor) at the Université de Genève, the University of Geneva (Switzerland). His name is Professor Dr. Christophe Chalamet. He is a Barth scholar, in particular, and a theological scholar in general, a Reformed theologian, and someone who I resonate with deeply (I just found out). A great brother in Christ. And someone I look up to as this PhD project is about to get underway. I will be writing on a doctrine of sanctification in the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance, and then bring my own constructive twist as the final offering, within the body of the thesis (dissertation). The program is almost nearly fully funded, which of course has been a huge hurdle for me over the last many years (lack of funding to pursue this type and level of study).

I have been in shock all day; the meeting happened earlier in the morning. It has literally been decades of seeking and searching for this to happen; lots of prayer, and the Lord has finally said: Now! The Lord does exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ever ask or think. I could never have imagined a scenario like this. To get to study Barth and Torrance at a prestigious school like Geneva (that John Calvin originally founded), and with a Barth scholar who is well-established in the field, and highly respected among the peers. And even more importantly, who is a brother in Christ.

To the triune God alone be the glory!

On a Knowledge of Sin

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Missing the mark; that’s what sin is, or so I was told in Sunday school. To be sure, it is β€˜missing the mark,’ but what or who is the mark? All too often people, Christian and Heathen alike, presume to know what sin is; as if there is a self-understood, perceived standard for knowing what the depths of righteousness entails. That is, there is this notion that we inherently know what sin is by our own lights; as if we as a societas have the inner-Übermensch to stand outside ourselves, on our own self-generated will power, to look back at ourselves, the world, embedded in an unrighteousness, and name it as such. But this is to presume that humanity inhabits a pura natura (pure nature) wherein there remains a divine spark that allows humanity to operate as its own Deus ex machina, capable of self-salvation through its incalculable power and indominable β€˜holy’ spirit of self-governance. And yet this is to beg the question: is it really nature after all, imbued with its own eternal law, albeit gifted by God’s voluntas, that brings God-knowledge as the person negates self-knowledge as if the self is merely a mirror reflection of the divine (so, an always already present analogia entis)?

Barth shouts a resounding NEIN! Barth properly argues that there can be no proper knowledge of sin without first a proper knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, if an abstract knowledge of sin could be known, then as corollary, an abstract knowledge of God and a subsequent salvation could obtain. If the sinner could properly search the depths of the human, the fallen heart, it would be conceivable that they alone have the attributes of the Christian God, and as such, could prescribe their own way of salvation. Some might even think of this abstract way of salvation and naming of sin as what has come to be called: secularism. But as is the case with modernity and other epistemic frames of reference, its antecedent ideation has a source, particularly in the West, in and from the various Christian theological syntheses afoot. Barth rightly argues that it is the theologians of the purported β€˜neutral god’, the notion of godness synthesized with various and ostensible Christian expressions of purported dogmatic articulations of the Holy and triune God, that has led to the secular religion, both in the church and outside, that we swim in today.

Barth writes (at length):

But this knowledge of real sin takes place in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Why in this knowledge? We will first give the comprehensive answer: Because the God against whom the man of sin contends has judged this man, and therefore myself as this man, in the self-offering and death of Jesus Christ His own Son, putting him to death, and destroying him; and because He has revealed and continually reveals him as this one who is judged and put to death and destroyed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and His being and living and speaking and witness for all ages. Because the verdict passed in His resurrection from the dead unmasks this old man, showing that every man is before God, and therefore what I myself am before Him, the man who is judged and put to death and destroyed. All this came upon Jesus Christ for every one of us and therefore for me, in our place and therefore in my place. We are all those and that of which God Himself made an end in Jesus Christ, which transferred to the past in Jesus Christ. We are all wearers of the old garment which was there taken off and destroyed. Indeed, we are all the old man himself who there in Jesus Christ was overtaken by the wrath of God and condemned and executed. Jesus Christ suffered and died in our place, in solidarity with this old man and therefore with us, without any clever reservation in respect of a secret innocence or freedom or capacity for redemption which might be maintained and ascribed to this man and therefore to us; without any contradiction or protest as though what was happening to this old man and therefore to us in this judgment was unjust; without any control over the grace of God, which surely could not be too severe; without reckoning on any sudden turn in His favour, simply in hope in God, but in that hope only in the form of obedience in which Jesus Christ allowed that God was in the right and He Himselfβ€”and therefore the old man and ourselves whose place He had takenβ€”in the wrong, taking it upon Himself to be one with us, and as such to suffer what our acts and we ourselves had deserved before God. Because He is the One who has done this for us, the verdict of God passed in His resurrection and revealed in His being and living and speaking and witness is relevant to all men and therefore to ourselves as we have described it in a first approximation. As the verdict of God it has this complete and comprehensive content, including ourselves and our activity and being, and excluding any conceivable possibility of self-excuse and self-justification. And as the verdict of God it has the authority of His own direct and personal self-knowledge as the basis of what is now our true self-knowledgeβ€”true because in the self-knowledge which has this basis we cannot turn to any other revelation of God, to any God in a more original form, to any faith in such a form of God, attaining there to what is supposed to be a better knowledge of ourselves. In this verdict we learn what God knows about us, and therefore how it really is with us. For this reason its content is valid. For this reason, when we hear it, we have no option but to receive it and accept its validity.[1]

Let the self be damned, for sure it has been in the death and burial of Jesus Christ; and elevated afresh anew in the resurrection and ascension of the Son of Man for all of humanity as humanity in Himself. We will never know what we genuinely need to know outwith inhabiting the bosom of the Father in union with the eternal Son of God, who is the Christ, who is the man, Jesus, son of David, from the hinterparts, of Nazareth in the Galilee.

[1] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics IV/1 Β§60 [391] The Doctrine of Reconciliation:Β Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 34–5.

On Barth’s Christologically Conditioned Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the β€˜Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.

Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the β€˜Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that β€œneeded to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-Γ -vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its β€œHoly” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.

Barth writes,

We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalismβ€”supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.

As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinkingβ€”the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]

Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and β€˜Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.

Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his GΓΆttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of Godβ€”so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.

[1] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics IV/1 Β§60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation:Β Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.

The Mediatrix Between the World and Jesus, The Blessed Virgin Mary

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The mediatrix theory of the Virgin Mary being a co-mediator with Jesus between God and humanity (i.e., Maryβ†’Jesusβ†’Father) has a very early pedigree in the Latin or Western Catholic church. Jaroslav Pelikan makes clear that someone like Thomas Γ  Kempis (1380–1471), a middle medieval Catholic mystic, became a popularizer of the Marian mediatrix theory. He wrote and spoke in ways that had appeal to the masses. As Protestant Christians we shirk, we shrink back at such thinking, in regard to the Mariocentrism present within the Catholic mind; as we should (biblically). Even so, it remains the case that within Catholicism the cult of Mariology remains a radically present reality for the Church’s faithful. Pelikan writes,

The absolute necessity for a qualitative distinction between Christ and Mary served as a restraint on a tendency that had already become visible in the attribution to her of the title β€œmediatrix,” which during this period found an eloquent spokesman in Thomas Γ  Kempis. He called Mary β€œthe expiator of all the sins I have committed” and β€œmy only hope”; it was through her mediation that all mercy was granted, and through her intercession that all prayers were heard. Although Christ in his final hours of need had not sought her solace, mortals were to do so. Therefore, he said, β€œdo not seek only Jesus,” but β€œJesus at your right hand and Mary at your left.” Various titles, prerogatives, functions, and scriptural passages that had originally belonged to Christ were now by extension being β€œtransferred” to Mary. One of the most important proof texts in the early debates over the Trinity had been Proverbs 8:22–31, who designation of personified Wisdom as supreme among God’s creatures had been a crux for orthodox doctrine; but now this passage was a reference to Mary, who was the crown of creation. Transposing the words of John 3:16, a thirteenth-century theologian could say: β€œMary so loved the world, that is, sinners, that she gave her only Son for the salvation of the world.” The words of Matthew 20:28 about Christ’s giving his life for the redemption of many pertained also to Mary as, for that matter, christological proof texts such as Philippians 2:5–11, Hebrews 1:1–2, and even Matthew 11:27, pertained to Francis.

Nor was it only the function of Christ that Mary took over, but after his ascension into heaven β€œthe Virgin remains on earth, and, together with the Holy Spirit as Comforter and Teacher, she herself becomes the comforter and teacher of the disciples.” She had been the teacher of Joseph about the details of the incarnation; and at the crucifixion, when all the disciples wavered in their faith, she alone had been β€œthe total church and the total faith of the Christian church.”[1]

The Protestant might wonder how anyone could ever arrive at this type of Mariological doctrina. This has to do with a theory of authority and ecclesiology. Catholics, of course, maintain that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true and visible body of Christ on earth, and the Pope as her vicar. Obversely, as Protestants, it is maintained that Christ alone, along with his incarnate and glorified body, has taken His bride, His Church with Him to the right hand of the Father. The Catholic maintains, in keeping with their notion that the Catholic church is the prolongation of the incarnation on earth, that the Church receives supplemental revelation as that is provided for by the Pope’s ex cathedra representation of Christ (and Mary, for that matter) on earth. And so, Scripture is not the only or primary source of authority for the development of Catholic doctrine. Contrariwise, since the Protestant maintains that Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, along with His body, the Church, it is the case that Holy Scripture becomes the primary witness or attestation for the Church’s reality as it instrumentally serves as the ordained spectacles by which the Holy Church encounters her authority and head in Jesus Christ (viz. in a radical theology of the Word).

There are other developments that have led to the Mariology of the Roman Catholic church (and more recent). But the primary vector that allows for it is the space the Papacy provides for the β€˜development of doctrine’ (that goes beyond Scripture, which the Catholic might soften by saying: β€˜in a supplemental way’). Mary for the Catholic mediates for the sinner between herself and Christ (the judge), and the Christ for us before the Father. For the Catholic, Mary becomes the lynchpin between heaven and earth, as Pelikan so perceptively noticed for us. The centraldogma, it could be said, for the Roman Catholic church, is the primacy of Mary rather than the primacy of Christ. Is this to overstate things? I don’t really think so.

5Β ForΒ there isΒ one God andΒ one Mediator between God and men,Β theΒ Man Christ Jesus,Β 6Β who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time,Β 7Β for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostleβ€”I am speaking the truthΒ in ChristΒ andΒ not lyingβ€”a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. –1 Timothy 2:5–7

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan,Β The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300β€”1700), Volume 4Β (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 40.

Reflecting On Charles Taylor’s Social Imaginary and Buffered Self

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I read through Charles Taylor’s tome, Secular Age, a few years ago; it took me a couple years to get through. I think his sociological analyses, peppered with theological riffs, represents some of the most profound observational insights available. While I was reading through it, I found some of his theological eloquence lacking, especially with reference to his reading of Calvinism. But ultimately that lacuna didn’t subtract from his overall cultural and sociological analysis. For me his most poignant themes remain his thinking on the social imaginary along with the buffered [secular] self. These two intellections, respectively, have been most applicable in my day-to-day existence out there in the big world. These themes have helped me keep the world in order so to speak. In other words, they have allowed me to have the critical valence and distanciation necessary to continuously place the various cultural-identity-posture expressions into some identifiable frame; indeed, expressions presented by the heathen, the religious, and the Christian alike.

On social imaginary: this has served as a helpful psychologizing factor, as far as realizing that all of humanity has various ideational categories that they are consciously or subconsciously drawing from in order to navigate their relative places in this β€˜world system.’ It isn’t always easy to identify the various in-forming and out-forming pressures from whence the people are indeed formed. Even so, just knowing that there are clusters of various social imaginaries present in the world, an ordered filament, to one extent or another, an intellectual press that has a pedigree of development in the history of the world’s ideas, this helps me to approach people with an understanding that they aren’t as β€˜naked’ or absolutely subjective as they think they might be. And of course, this sword doesn’t just cut on them β€˜out there,’ but also on me, β€˜in here,’ in my own spiritual and intellectual development.

On the buffered self: this dovetails with the social imaginary. People, whether conscious or not, use various belief-structures, social imaginaries, often-times, as coping mechanisms that allow them to navigate a world of other people who might present with competing social imaginaries. This is to say, the buffered self in the modern and postmodern periods, respectively, often-times and relativistically, picks the ideas and theories of life that they have inherited from the past, consciously or not, to keep the other competing social imaginaries, out there, at bay. That is to say, that in our highly individualistic world, people deploy mechanisms of ideation and belief in order to keep the world of the other β€˜out there,’ in an attempt to keep a semblance of order internal to their own self-development and truths. The buffered self, I would contend, is simply representative of what might be identified as a modal collapse, an absolute immanentization of total reality, as perceived atomistically by each individual, into the turn-to-the-subject. That is, the buffered self, as the fallen self, vis-Γ -vis God, necessarily imbibes what it perceives to be the attributes of God into their own preponderances and activities in the world as human and individual agents. Thusly, the buffered self seeks a life of absolute autonomy, as monadic centers circumscribed purely by their own self-perception as gods among other gods; each god ostensibly capable of constructing their own worlds, their own truths.

The above, on a sketch, represents how it is that I have personally appropriated a couple of Taylor’s themes as critical mechanisms that allow me, in an attempt, to find some semblance of intellectual and sociological order, even whilst living in the midst of a world wherein each individual human agent believes themselves to be gods. From a biblically narratival vantage point what I have been describing, clearly, is a reference to the fall of humanity as that is described in Genesis 3.

The Great Chain of Being in TF Torrance’s Theology

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For TF Torrance there remains a β€œchain of being” in regard to knowing God. But it isn’t from the effects and vestiges of creation worked back to God, in a hierarchy of being, wherein knowledge of God is derived from for Torrance. It is the chain of being of the inner-triune being of God for us, as that becomes evangelical for us in the coming of Jesus Christ, wherein the chain of being for knowing God comes. Jesus is God’s point of contact between God and humanity wherein the hidden God becomes the revealed God, invading our fallen humanity from the inside-up, thus loving us into His life with the Father by the Holy Spirit; and allowing us, to become participant by grace in the eternal fellowship and Self-knowledge God has of Himself, as that has become for us, in the bosom of the Father, in the face of the Son [of David]. As such, for TF, there is no abstract or independent chain of being between God and humanity whereby a naked humanity clothes itself with the righteousness and knowledge of God; indeed, as it ascends the ladder from seen to unseen, from effect to Infinite Causer. For sure, that would be an intellectual Pelagianism, at best. The chain of being is God’s triune being that has chosen to not be God without but with us in the second person of His being, in the eternal Son, the Logos, Jesus Christ. The interpenetrative bond, the subject-in-being onto-relation coinherent between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a chain of being in perichoretic solidity that cannot be touched, but by the heart of God for us in Jesus Christ.

Knowledge of God Through Suffering: With Reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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When we suffer as Christians, we come to know God because we are no longer reliant upon ourselves, we have no resource in ourselves, and so we are pressed deep into the ground of our life in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul understood this well when he wrote to the Corinthian church,

8Β For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.Β 9Β Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead,Β 10Β who delivered us from so great a death, and doesΒ deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliverΒ us,Β 11Β you also helping together in prayer for us, that thanks may be given by many persons on ourΒ behalf for the giftΒ grantedΒ to us through many. -II Corinthians 1:8-11

When faced with the uncertainties of daily life, when pressed against the direst of consequences we really have nowhere else to go; it is really hard to deceive ourselves at that point, we are very vulnerable. This is the perfect scenario for God’s wisdom to reach us where we are truly at; we often do not realize how needy we are until we are needy. And this is whyΒ DietrichΒ Bonhoeffer wrote from his NaziΒ prison cell about God’s wisdom versus the religious wisdom of the world:

Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is theΒ deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. This will probably be the starting-point for our secular interpretation.[1]

What suffering does for both the Apostle Paul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is to tear back the un-reality, and un-truth of the human religions of the world; and instead, it shows us humans, especially us Christians (who may well have imbibed the wisdom of the world), how empty everything else is a part from our God who humbled himself to the point of deep suffering and agonizing death. It is in this instance in this moment when our suffering is seen to correlate with his suffering for us at the cross, and our knowledge of God increases in dependence upon his life; the life that death and suffering could not hold down.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Β Letters and Papers from Prison, 359-61.

*Written, originally, in 2014.

The Christian Existence: Contra Systemic Dualisms

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The right and left binary represents a dualism that genuine Christian theology rejects. Dualism generally says that there are equal and opposing forces, light versus dark, in a cyclical battle of yin and yang. The Kingdom of God is grounded in the reality of God become [hu]man. There is no dualism, no competitive relationship between the fallen and unfallen; all of reality is subsumed within the singular person of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christianity, the Gospel comes with different expectations. The Christian is not in a loggerhead with the darkness, per se; the Christian moves and breathes from within the atmosphere of the heavenly Zion. This reality is not of this world, and thus not of the dualisms that often frame this world system. We are emissaries of the living God in the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense we move differently than others, not being shaped by what the world optically presents to us as if it gets to determine reality by brute presence.

The aforementioned should have an impact on the Christian existence in this world. It should keep us moving towards and from the upward call in Christ Jesus. Politics, culture wars, and the like should never be defined by the whims and whams of the base person, the profane systems of thought progenerated by this world system; the evil age. Jesus is already reigning at the right hand of the Father (see 1 Cor 15), and will come once and for all riding on His white steed with the sword of God proceeding from His mouth. Maranatha

The Church as Prolongation of the Incarnation or as Witnesser: The Catholics and Protestants

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Ecclesiology for people in the churches is an underdeveloped, and even undeveloped teaching for most. Unless a Christian person is self-motivated to pursue study of this important doctrine they will most likely live their Christian existence within the darkness of absence (of teaching). I think this, in fact, has a lot to do with many so-called Protestant Christians swimming the shallow end of the Tiber River; i.e., to become members of the Roman Catholic church. In nuce, Roman Catholic ecclesiology entails the notion that the Roman church itself prolongates the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that the Roman ecclesia, for proponents of Roman Catholic theology, believe that its church is the visible embodiment of Jesus Christ Himself; thus, their reference to the mystici corporis Christi (β€˜mystical body of Christ’). Here is a snippet of a longer encyclical that Pope Pius XII wrote for the Catholic church with reference to understanding just what the Roman Catholic understanding of the Church is:

But if our Savior, by His death, became, in the full and complete sense of the word, the Head of the Church, it was likewise through His blood that the Church was enriched with the fullest communication of the Holy Spirit, through which, from the time when the Son of Man was lifted up and glorified on the Cross by His sufferings, she is divinely illumined. For then, as Augustine notes, [39] with the rending of the veil of the temple it happened that the dew of the Paraclete’s gifts, which heretofore had descended only on the fleece, that is on the people of Israel, fell copiously and abundantly (while the fleece remained dry and deserted) on the whole earth, that is on the Catholic Church, which is confined by no boundaries of race or territory. Just as at the first moment of the Incarnation the Son of the Eternal Father adorned with the fullness of the Holy Spirit the human nature which was substantially united to Him, that it might be a fitting instrument of the Divinity in the sanguinary work of the Redemption, so at the hour of His precious death He willed that His Church should be enriched with the abundant gifts of the Paraclete in order that in dispensing the divine fruits of the Redemption she might be, for the Incarnate Word, a powerful instrument that would never fail. For both the juridical mission of the Church, and the power to teach, govern and administer the Sacraments, derive their supernatural efficacy and force for the building up of the Body of Christ from the fact that Jesus Christ, hanging on the Cross, opened up to His Church the fountain of those divine gifts, which prevent her from ever teaching false doctrine and enable her to rule them for the salvation of their souls through divinely enlightened pastors and to bestow on them an abundance of heavenly graces.[1]

The Roman Catholic church maintains, as indicated by Pope Pius XII, that the Holy Spirit, as the enlivener and Creator of the Church has so mystically tied Himself into the visible manifestation of the Roman See, along with all of her sacraments, hierarchy of pastors, so on and so forth, that the only β€˜place’ union with God in Christ can obtain is if someone is brought into union with the mystical body of Jesus Christ; or, in the Roman view, with the Roman Catholic church herself. This union is supervened by the bishops and priests of the Catholic church, not least of which, is the Pope himself. Once inducted and confirmed into the Catholic church, through baptism and partaking in the Mass of the sacraments, it is at this time that the Catholic convert becomes a β€˜feeder’ on and mystical participant within the visible body of Christ on earth; or the Roman Catholic church. In this sense, and per Pius XII’s aforementioned words, there is a real sense wherein the Roman ecclesiology, with its insistent assertion on their status as the visible body of Christ on earth, that the Church itself becomes a prolongation of the incarnation. That is, for the Roman, the Church has become and is so entwined with the notion that Roma is now the apple of God’s eye, that she alone is God’s visible body on earth; that in order for communion with God to obtain for humanity, would-be Christians must come into, again, union with the mystical body of Christ; which is none other, according to Roman doctrine, but the Latin Catholic church.

Protestants, on the other hand, rooted in a radical theology of the Word of God, maintain that the body of Christ is fully present within the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, even as Christ has resurrected with that body, ascended with that body, intercedes in priestly session at the right hand of the Father with that body, and will come again with that body; His glorified body. For the Protestant, thusly, there is no prolongation of the incarnation of Christ as a mystical body of Christ, but rather its concrete existence in the flesh and blood of Imannuel’s veins as He has freely elected to be for us, with us, and not God without us in Jesus Christ.

Hence, Protestants are not burdened with the notion that we must present some type of mystical body of Christ to each other and the world writ large, as if that body is constituted by a physical address in Vatican City, Italy. On the contrary, Protestants understand that the esse of the Church is constituted by the literal body of Christ Himself for us. Resultantly, the Protestant doesn’t seek to point a would-be or already Christians to a particular iteration or expression of the Church in the world as the Roman does. The Protestant understands that their respective Christian existence is constituted, indeed by the Holy Spirit, by way of union with Christ immediately, directly. The Protestant bears witness to the finished work of God in Christ as the reality (res) of the Church in the triune God. Karl Barth writes on this status of the Protestant Christian similarly,

. . . Their existence in the world depends upon the fact that this alone is their particular gift and task. They have not to assist or add to the being and work of their living Saviour who is the Lord of the world, let alone to replace it by their own work. The community is not a prolongation of His incarnation, His death, and resurrection, the acts of God and their revelation. It has not to do these things. It has to witness to them. It is its consolation that it can do this. Its marching-orders are to do it.[2]

Barth rightly notes that the work of the Church is absolutely finished in the work of Jesus Christ. It is His work of salvation, of building His Church, that He has already accomplished; the Church’s task, by the Spirit, is to bear witness to this, her reality, in her Head and reality, Jesus Christ. The Roman church, alternatively, believes that it constitutes itself by re-presenting the Mass, the death of Jesus Christ, through the primary sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. There remains an unfinished work within the Catholic ecclesiology which makes the prolongation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ the most organic outcome. That is, because their remains a proving ground, so to speak, of the Christian’s worth to inherit eternal life through the treasuries of Christ’s merits, over and beyond the work of Christ’s atonement. And so, for the Catholic Christian, the Mass and its sacraments remain the portal whereby salvation might be constantly offered, affirmed, reaffirmed, over and again, as the Christian seeks to establish a level of sanctification whereby they are found worthy enough to in fact become real and ultimate participants within the mystical body of Christ. If the Church, as it is for the Roman, is a prolongation of the incarnation, then the incarnation, logically, requires further re-establishment and curation by the faithful; if in fact, the body of Christ can be shown to be the true body of Christ in the world today.

This requires further fleshing out. But hopefully there has been enough provided for the reader to start to digest.

[1] Pope Pius XII, MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI: ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON THE MISTICAL BODY OF CHRIST TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN, PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES ENJOYING PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE, published by, The Holy See, accessed 05-05-2026.

[2] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics IV/1 Β§59 [318] The Doctrine of Reconciliation:Β Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 312.

On the Orders and Disorders of the God-World Relation: With Reference to Augustine, Athanasius, Barth, and Torrance

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There are two orderings in the world structure: God’s real order, and man’s real disorder in an attempt to be contra God. God has freely and graciously elected to be for this world, as both the electing God and elected man, in Jesus Christ. Soteriologically driven theologies, like Augustinianism, sets these two worlds in a competitive relationship. Contrariwise, the Athanasian-Barthian-Torrancean combine thinks these orders from within the nexus of God and humanity in the reconciling and hypostatically uniting person, Jesus Christ. This combine allows the Christian to think the God-world relation from within the strictures God has setup, even in-spite of humanity’s inherent urge to fight against God as a condition of their fallen nature as lapsarian humans. Against the Augustinian effort to think the elect of God into God through a decree of God (decretum absolutum), the Athanasian complex is required to think the God-humanity relation from within the gift of God’s Self-givenness for the world, for humanity, from within the confines of His own second-person, the eternal SonΒ en sarkos, Jesus Christ. This Athanasian frame offers a cosmic frame of reference when it comes to things worldly, things salvific, so on and so forth.

Barth writes of this relationship presciently:

This is obviously the underlying form of our problemβ€”the real distance in which the God appearing in the human sphere, and acting and speaking for us in this sphere, confronts us to whom He turns and for whom He acts. Note that on the one hand it is God for man, on the other man against God. There are two orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another. Note that it is He and weβ€”and He and we in a direct encounter, we before Himβ€”how can we live before Him and with Him?β€”we with the God who by Himself reconciles us with Himself, we in His presence, in the sequence of His work and Word. On the side of man the only possible word seems to be a deep-seated No, the No of the one who when God comes and acts for Him and tells him that He is doing so is forced to see that his day is over and that he can only perish.[1]

As Barth rightly emphasizes there is no such thing as a competitive relationship between God and humanity. That is, because God has already become both the Yes and the No on behalf of humanity’s rebellion against God in His free movement towards humanity in Christ, and His equipoise movement of humanity towards God, in a Yesward movement, of Christ’s making. This is not to say, of course, that humanity no longer sees itself, consciously or subconsciously, in a Noward stance before the living and triune God; it does. It is just to say that even in that ongoing rebellious spirit, the one that has already been put to death in the archetypal humanity of the Second Adam, there remains no power behind it. Humanity’s rebellion, its no to God, has already been put down, and thus risen up in the Yes and Amen of God in Jesus Christ. Rebellious humanity, at this point, simply lives against their humanity already won for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

The work of God in Christ’s salvation for us is finished!

[1] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics IV/1 Β§59 [291] The Doctrine of Reconciliation:Β Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 284.