Systematic Theology (Volume 2)

The Beauty of Christ - a Trinitarian Vision

Douglas F. Kelly

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781781913758

Part One

The Trintarian context of the person and work of Christ

In light of the Father’s testimony to the Son, given us through the Scriptures which are inspired by the Holy Spirit, we consider the witness of Old and New Testaments to Christ (ch. I); the Names and Titles of Christ in Old and New Testaments (ch. II); Crucial passages on the Lord’s Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection and Ascension: John 1:1-18; Philippians 2:5-11; Hebrews 1:1-4, and Revelation 5:1-14 (ch. III), which prepare us for the accurate expression of their teaching in the Church’s doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of the two natures of Christ in one Person (ch. IV). Chapter V discusses significant details of the Church’s further understanding of the Hypostatic Union through the meaning of anhypostasia, enhypostasia, two wills, the communication of idioms, the communion of natures, Christ’s human development, Mary as Theotokos, and the ‘extra Calvinisticum.’ Chapter VI considers the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, which for much of the world since his time, constitutes the dividing line between believing and non-believing accounts of Christology, and even when not specifically mentioned, is often an underlying issue in any interpretation of the person and work of Christ. Chapters VII to X survey the ‘first state’ of the incarnate Christ: his Humiliation, and Chapters XI and XII study the ‘second state’: his Exaltation.

Chapter 1

The witness of old and new testaments to Christ

The first confession of the Church is that Jesus Christ is Lord. Lord, and other names, take us immediately back to the preparation for his coming in the Old Testament, which points the way to his being understood as agent of creation, last Adam, and primal image of God. He can be grasped only in the context of the history of Israel, as Head of the New Covenant, as Prophet, Priest, and King, and as victor over Satan and all the powers of evil. When we face the Lord Jesus Christ, we are brought face to face with the Triune God. In Christ we see what the being and actions of the eternal Trinity are like in space and time.

‘Jesus Christ is Lord’

‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Rom. 10:9) is the first confession of the Christian Church, and one that can only be made by the power of the Holy Spirit, who comes from the Father through the Son (cf. I Cor. 12:3). The very name ‘Christ’ means ‘anointed one,’ and takes us back into the Old Testament, without which we can never make sense of him whom to know is eternal life (cf. John 17:3).

The Old Testament Scriptures prepared over the long ages for their fulfillment in Christ, the Messiah, who, as the New Testament clearly reveals, is ‘one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’ (I Tim. 2:5), who was born ‘in the fullness of the time’ (Gal. 4:4). Here in chapter I, we study the background of the Old Testament preparation for Christ, from the work of creation, to the person of Adam, and especially through the history of Israel.

Old Testament Preparation for the Incarnation

Lessons from the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus

In his post-resurrection appearance to Cleopas and another disciple on ‘Easter Sunday’ afternoon on the way to Emmaus, the risen Lord dealt with their consternation over the suffering and death of him ‘whom they had trusted would redeem Israel’(Luke 24:21). The brutal defeat of the very one who was to restore the Kingdom of God in Israel seemed to disqualify him from successful completion of that much longed-for mission. Yet after that bitter disappointment, strange things had happened, for ‘certain women of our company’ found his tomb empty and were told by angels that he was alive (Luke 24:22-24).

The risen Christ, who had not yet revealed his identity, took them to the Old Testament scriptures to show that the promised Messiah first had to suffer, and only then enter into his glory (Luke 24:26). That is to say, the messianic expectations of that time (even among the disciples) had grasped only one side of the scriptural truth about Messiah, the true King of the Kingdom: before he was manifested as the ‘conquering lion of the tribe of Judah’(Rev. 5:5), he must first fulfill his office as suffering ‘Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,’ as John the Baptist had announced at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry upon his baptism in the Jordan River (John 1:29).

‘And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’ (Luke 24:27). This seems to indicate that he took them through the entire Old Testament canon in order to show them how his incarnate life, suffering, death and glorious physical resurrection were already set forth by Moses and the other inspired writers of what was at that time the only Scriptural record. How we would like to have overheard that conversation! Paul’s preaching in the synagogues of the dispersion must have been similar, for he mentions the necessity of Christ’s first having to suffer, then enter into his glory (cf. Acts 17:2-3).

Christ as Agent of Creation

Yet we certainly get strong hints of what the Lord must have pointed out that afternoon as we study the way the New Testament writers employ the Old Testament scriptures to show us who Jesus is and what his work involved. John 1:3 indicates that Christ, the Son of the Father, was the very agent of creation, while Colossians 1:16-17 states it in even more detail: ‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him; And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.’ Hebrews 1:2, 10 tell us that ‘[God] hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds…[unto the Son he saith] and, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands.’ Revelation 4:11 summarizes the entire history of the cosmos in terms of the pleasure of the incarnate Lord: ‘Thou are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power; for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’

Church Fathers, Medieval Christian scholars, and later Reformers understood the plural name of God (סיהִלאֱ) that takes a singular verb (ארֳבֳ in the Qal stem) to have been a sort of prophetic hint of the Trinitarian activity in the original creation. And they argued similarly for a Trinitarian reference in the consultative form of the verb ‘let us make’ immediately prior to the creation of mankind in the divine image (Gen. 1:26). That is certainly not the reading of rabbinical scholarship, but it has a long history in the church! In this regard, it is instructive to hear echoes of the debate between Justin Martyr, the Christian apologist, and the Jewish scholar, Trypho, on this matter as far back as the second century A.D. ¹

Creation by means of ‘wisdom’ and the interpretation of Proverbs 8:22

Some Church Fathers made much of the pre-incarnate Christ as the wisdom of God, through whom God the Father made the worlds. But this was not without its downside, as the fourth-century Arians, who denied the eternal pre-existence of Christ, used the passage in Proverbs 8:22 concerning the connection of wisdom with the divine work of creation to argue that, if Christ is wisdom, then he is subordinate to the Father and is finally a sort of higher creature. Basil the Great replied that the translation of Proverbs 8:22 should not be ‘the Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for all his works,’ but ‘the Lord possessed me as the beginning of his ways for all his works.’ ² ‘Possessed’ is definitely a possible option for translation, but the weight of the evidence, surveyed below, tends towards ‘created.’

Athanasius gives an exegetical survey of this verse in Contra Arianos. ³ He accepts the verb as meaning ‘created’, but argues that it refers to the created humanity of Christ, which was essential to our salvation. Similarly, Gregory Nazianzus accepted ‘created’ as the operative verb in Proverbs 8:22. But then he attempted to explain it so as to retain the eternal existence of the Son, who is often called ‘wisdom’. ⁴

The most reasonable approach seems to lie in the consideration that this remarkable piece of poetry in Proverbs 8 is a meditation on the relation of God to the wisdom by which he created the world and is not intended to be a precise statement of the relationship of the Lord to one of his attributes, or (in Trinitarian terms) of the relationship of the Father and the Son in the work of creation. Rather, it is suggestive, evocative, and ‘inner-connective’ in the way of poetry. In that context, wisdom can be thought of as a sort of characteristic of God, or even a companion of God in his work. Something like that seems to be the case in Sirach 24:1-28, where Wisdom is ‘the breath of God,’ created before everything else, and also connected to the Shekinah glory and the Law (Torah). Philo also spoke of wisdom as the ‘beginning and image of God’ (De Leg. All. I.43), by whose agency the world was completed (De Fuga 109), and wrought by divine wisdom (Heres 199).

So, when God in wisdom created the cosmos, it could poetically be said that the first thing he brought forth was wisdom, without one expecting to find in this poem (in terms of later ‘prosaic’ doctrinal teaching) precise formulations of distinctions within the Godhead that would have to wait until the coming of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As B.B. Warfield wrote: ‘The revelation [i.e. of the Trinity] in word must needs wait upon the revelation in deed…’ ⁵ James Dunn summarizes the background of wisdom in Judaism as it prepared the way for Christological teaching:

What pre-Christian Judaism said of Wisdom and Philo also of the Logos, Paul and the others say of Jesus. The role that Proverbs, ben Sira, etc. ascribe to Wisdom, these earliest Christians ascribe to Jesus… Paul seems to make the identification explicit in so many words when he proclaims ‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (I Cor. 1:24; also 1:30). ⁶

And Larry Hurtado points out the parallel structure of word and wisdom in Wisdom of Solomon 9:1-2 as an illustration of this process. ⁷

Yet it is significant that Irenaeus, the greatest Biblical theologian of the second century, does not use Proverbs 8:22 to point to Christ, nor does Cyril of Alexandria, the great theologian of the fourth century. One has to study other passages than Proverbs 8 to answer such questions. ⁸

Two Adams

The Old Testament sets forth Adam as head of the human race (cf. Genesis 1:27-28; 2:18-25, and possibly Hosea 6:7, if one translates ‘Adam’ as the specific person, rather than rendering it as the generic – ‘humankind’). Genesis 3 makes clear that all our true problems – alienation from God and from one another, death and judgment – go back to our first father’s ‘original sin’ (Gen. 3:6-20). This adamic theme is taken up particularly by the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:12-21 and I Corinthians 15:21-22, 44-49. He presents Christ as the Last Adam, who recapitulates the fallen person and work of the First Adam. ‘For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ… For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous’ (Rom. 5:17, 19). ‘And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit’ (I Cor. 15:45).

Dunn points out ‘…how Hebrews presents a classic statement of Adam Christology in Heb. 2:6-18… Christ as the one in whom God’s original plan for man finally (or eschatologically) came to fulfillment – that is in Christ the exalted-after-suffering one (the last Adam).’ ⁹

The comparison and contrast between the two Adams in a soteriological sense was explored more fully by the great second-century theologian, Irenaeus of Lyon, than by any other. Irenaeus says that as the first Adam had led the human race astray, so the Word comes as the last Adam to bring it back to God. Irenaeus writes with a Trinitarian understanding, ‘the Word arranging after a new manner the advent in the flesh, that he might bring back to God that human nature which had departed from God.’ ¹⁰

For I have shown that the Son of God did not then begin to exist, being with the Father from the beginning; but when he became incarnate, and was made man, he commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam – namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God – that we might recover in Christ Jesus. ¹¹

He had to be true flesh because it was Adam (a fleshly being) who had sinned and whose race needed redemption:

…and because death reigned over the flesh, it was right that through the flesh it should lose its force and let man go free from its oppression. So the Word was made flesh that through that very flesh which sin had ruled and domesticated, it should lose its force and be no longer in us. ¹²

Irenaeus continues, ‘He [God the Father] sent his creative word, who in coming to deliver us, came to the very place and spot in which we had lost life…. and hallowed our birth and destroyed death, loosing those same fetters in which we were enchained.’ ¹³

Dominion

The dominion given by the Lord to Adam over the rest of the created order (Gen. 1:28) is celebrated by David in Psalm 8. Yet Hebrews 2 puts the actual carrying out of this dominion by fallen mankind into a redemptive, Christocentric context (Heb. 2: 5-9).

The Image of God

The original creation by God of humankind in his own image is taken up by the New Testament as really having been in the image of Christ, the Son of God, who, in due season, through his redemptive person and work does all that is necessary to restore us twisted ones back into the beauty of the original divine image (cf. Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10).

Although much of his teaching was rejected by the church, nonetheless many of the Ante-Nicene fathers took the same line as Origen in positing a necessary difference between the original image of God (Christ) and mankind, who are ‘in his image’:

He [the antichristian philoso...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Thanks and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Persons Index
• Subject Index
• Christian Focus