Christ Alone---The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior

Stephen Wellum, Matthew Barrett

• Editorial: Zondervan Academic
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310515753
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología sistemática y ética

Professor of theology Stephen Wellum considers Christ's singular uniqueness and significance biblically, historically, and today, in our pluralistic and postmodern age. Christ Alone is a much-needed study and defense of the doctrine that provides coherency to the Christian faith.

If the church is to proclaim the same Christ as the Reformers, we must understand and embrace solos Christus with the same clarity, conviction, urgency, and abundance of joy as the Reformers. To that end, Wellum:

• Recovers the Reformers' basic insights by focusing first on two teachings: the exclusive identity of Christ and his sufficient work.
• Follows the historical roots of the doctrine and its developments to show how the uniqueness of Christ has come under specific attack today.
• Retraces the storyline of Scripture, from Christ's unique identity and work as prophet, priest, and king, to the application of his work to believers and our covenantal union with him.

Christ Alone seeks to recover a robust biblical and theological doctrine of Christ's person and work—and a renewed understanding that apart from Christ there is no salvation—in the face of today's challenges, unpacking why a fresh appraisal of the Reformation understanding of Christ alone is so important today.

—THE FIVE SOLAS—

Historians and theologians have long recognized that at the heart of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation were five declarations, often referred to as the "solas." These five statements summarize much of what the Reformation was about, and they distinguish Protestantism from other expressions of the Christian faith: that they place ultimate and final authority in the Scriptures, acknowledge the work of Christ alone as sufficient for redemption, recognize that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, and seek to do all things for God's glory.

The Five Solas Series is more than a simple rehashing of these statements, but instead expounds upon the biblical reasoning behind them, leading to a more profound theological vision of our lives and callings as Christians and churches.

PART 1

Christ Alone:
The Exclusivity of His Identity

CHAPTER 1

The Biblical Identity of Jesus Christ

Our understanding of who Jesus is and what he does must be developed from Scripture and its entire storyline. And while the full complexity of the Bible’s structure, categories, and intratextual dynamics lies beyond the scope of this volume,¹ the Bible’s own terms provide us with a clear picture of Christ’s identity and work: Christ alone is Lord and Savior, and therefore he alone is able to save and his work is all-sufficient.

There are four major pieces to the puzzle of Christ’s identity and his accomplishments: who God is, what he requires of humans, why sin creates a problem between God and humans, and how God himself provides the solution. These four pieces fall into place as the biblical covenants develop across time to reveal Christ in the fullness of time. The covenantal storyline of Scripture unfolds both God’s plan of redemption and the identity of Christ who accomplishes it. Over the next few chapters we will consider the teaching of Jesus himself and his apostles, but first we will consider how the structure and storyline of Scripture create the expectation and necessity that the Christ will bear a specific, exclusive identity. This covenantal storyline reveals both the necessity and identity of Christ and his work as the one person who (1) fulfills God’s own righteousness as a man, (2) reconciles God himself with humanity, and (3) establishes God’s own saving rule and reign in this world—all because, and only because, Christ alone is God the Son incarnate.

The Necessity of Christ and His Work for Our Salvation

The structure and storyline of Scripture reveals the necessity of Christ and his work. At the heart of solus Christus is the confession that the salvation of humanity depends upon the person and work of Christ. Necessity is a tricky concept in theology. To say that Christ is necessary for salvation is true in a number of ways, some of which can mean things that are unbiblical. Our immediate task is to define in what way Christ is necessary.

Anselm begins his famous Why God Became Man with these words: “By what logic or necessity did God become man, and by his death, as we believe and profess, restore life to the world, when he could have done this through the agency of some other, angelic or human, or simply by willing it?”² As Anselm practices a “faith seeking understanding” by wrestling with the why of the incarnation and the cross, especially in light of the awful cost both were to the eternal Son, the question of necessity naturally arises. Was the incarnation and the cross merely one of God’s chosen ways to save us, or was it the only way? Could the triune God, in his infinite knowledge and wisdom, have planned another way to save fallen creatures? Or were Christ and his work the only way? This is the question of necessity. Walking in the footsteps of Anselm today, John Murray also stresses the importance of Christ’s necessity: “To evade [questions of necessity] is to miss something that is central in the interpretation of the redeeming work of Christ and to miss the vision of some of its essential glory. Why did God become man? Why, having become man, did he die? Why, having died, did he die the accursed death of the cross?”³

These questions demand some kind of explanation, not only for the sake of the church’s theology in general but to warrant and establish Christ alone in particular. Why is Christ the unique, exclusive, and all-sufficient Savior? Scripture answers: because he is the only one who can meet our need, accomplish all of God’s sovereign purposes, and save us from our sin. Christ and his work are necessary to redeem us, and apart from him there is no salvation. But what exactly is the nature of this necessity? Since there are a range of options, we can first reject the extremes and then focus on the remaining two possibilities.

On one end of the necessity issue, some argue that our salvation does not require the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In what we might call optionalism, God is able to forgive our sin apart from any specific Savior acting on our behalf to satisfy God’s righteous demand. In the Reformation era and beyond, this view is found in Socinianism, various forms of Protestant Liberalism, and present-day religious pluralism. In all of its forms, optionalism argues that God’s justice is a non-retributive, voluntary exercise of his will uncoupled from his nature. God is under no necessity to punish sin in order to forgive us. On the other extreme stands the hypothetical view of fatalism. Fatalism argues that God is under an external necessity to act as he does in salvation. This view removes our salvation in general and the entire Christ event in particular from the sovereign freedom of God. He is bound not by his own divine nature and character but by some standard external to God. The standard for God’s actions is not God himself. Both extremes, however, err in the same way. Optionalism and fatalism both fail to understand the nature of God and the biblical presentation of his plan of salvation in Christ.

Beyond the extremes, within historic orthodox theology two options remain: hypothetical necessity and consequent absolute necessity. Throughout church history, many fine theologians have affirmed the hypothetical necessity of Christ and his work for our salvation.⁴ This view argues that Christ is necessary because God in fact decreed that salvation would come through Christ as the most “fitting” means to his chosen ends. But this necessity is hypothetical because God could have chosen some other way of salvation.⁵

The other orthodox option is consequent absolute necessity, the view favored in post-Reformation theology.⁶ This view argues that consequent to God’s sovereign, free, and gracious choice to save us, it was absolutely necessary that God save us in Christ alone. There was no Christless and crossless way of salvation after God made the decision to save sinners. Obviously, the absolute sense of necessity is stronger than the hypothetical sense. Simply put, the view of consequent absolute necessity claims that while God was not obliged to redeem sinners, once he did decide to redeem us, there is no possible world in which that redemption could be accomplished apart from the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of God the Son.

Historic Christianity has affirmed both of these understandings of necessity, so this is not a matter of orthodoxy. Yet hypothetical necessity appears to have more fundamental problems because it seems to assume that there is nothing about God’s nature that makes his forgiveness of our sins dependent upon a representative substitute, sacrifice, and covenant mediator who works on our behalf. This understanding focuses exclusively on God’s sovereignty, simply positing that in such freedom God could have chosen other ways of salvation. In contrast, the consequent absolute necessity of Christ arises from the perfections of God’s own nature. This view understands that the inherent holiness and justice of God are not limits on his freedom but the nature in which God acts perfectly within his freedom.

While both views of necessity are orthodox, however, which one is more biblical? This is an important question because it recognizes that some orthodox Christologies make better sense of the Bible than others. The best way to answer the question regarding the necessity of Christ is to let Scripture speak for itself, and in the next section we will trace the biblical storyline from the identity of God to the obedience he requires, to the disobedience of humanity and to God’s response. Throughout this unfolding story, Scripture creates both the expectation and necessity that God would bring salvation in the person and work of Christ. This implies that we must affirm no less than the hypothetical necessity of Christ, and as we shall see, the Bible’s own logic demands that in his unique identity and work, Christ alone is absolutely necessary given God’s choice to redeem a sinful humanity. It is not that Christ and his work are merely one way to save us among a number of possible options. Who Christ is and what he does is the only way God could redeem us.

The covenantal storyline of Scripture reveals the necessity of Christ and his work. And the same covenantal development also reveals the identity of Christ and the nature of his work. Christ is the one person who (1) fulfills God’s own righteousness as a man, (2) reconciles God himself with humanity, and (3) establishes God’s own saving rule and reign in this world—all because, and only because, Christ alone is God the Son incarnate.

The Covenantal Development of Christ Alone

Nearly fifty years ago, Francis Schaeffer put his finger on a serious problem that remains today. He wrote:

I have come to the point where, when I hear the word “Jesus”—which means so much to me because of the Person of the historic Jesus and His work—I listen carefully because I have with sorrow become more afraid of the word “Jesus” than almost any other word in the modern world. The word is used as a contentless banner . . . there is no rational scriptural content by which to test it. . . .

Increasingly over the past few years the word “Jesus,” separated from the content of the Scriptures, has been the enemy of the Jesus of history, the Jesus who died and rose and is coming again and who is the eternal Son of God.⁷

Schaeffer was right. The name “Jesus” has become a mostly meaningless word due to its separation from the content and storyline of Scripture. Jesus is now anything we want him to be, except the Jesus of the Bible. Imposing a foreign worldview on the biblical text, as many do today, necessarily obscures God’s authoritative revelation of Jesus’s identity.⁸ To proceed intratextually toward the Bible’s Jesus—who is the real Jesus of history—we need to read the Bible on its own terms. We must interpret Jesus within the revealed categories, content, structure, and storyline of Scripture. And this revelational reading starts with the identity of God himself.

God as the Triune Creator-Covenant Lord

Starting with who God is to identify Christ might seem to be an inefficient or needless investigation when the words and life of Christ are recorded for us in the New Testament. But we must start with the identity of God to make sure that we come to the Bible on its own terms. Scripture begins with God creating the world out of nothing and continues with God relating to his creation according to his character, will, and power. Who God is, then, shapes the entire course of human history and gives unity, meaning, and significance to all of its parts.

Who, then, is the God of Scripture? In a summary way, we can say that he is the triune Creator-Covenant Lord.⁹ From the opening verses of Scripture, God is presented as the uncreated, independent, self-existent, self-sufficient, all-powerful Lord who created the universe and governs it by his word (Gen 1–2; Pss 50:12–14; 93:2; Acts 17:24–25). This reality gives rise to the governing category at the core of all Christian theology: the Creator-creature distinction. God alone is God; all else is creation that depends upon God for its existence. But the transcendent lordship of God (Pss 7:17; 9:2; 21:7; 97:9; 1 Kgs 8:27; Isa 6:1; Rev 4:3) does not entail the remote and impersonal deity of deism or a God uninvolved in human history. Scripture stresses that God is transcendent and immanent with his creation. As Creator, God is the Covenant Lord who is fully present in this world and intimately involved with his creatures: he freely, sovereignly, and purposefully sustains and governs all things to his desired end (Ps 139:1–10; Acts 17:28; Eph 1:11; 4:6). And yet this immanent lordship does not entail panentheism, which undercuts the Creator-creature distinction of Scripture. Even though God is deeply involved with his world, he is not part of it or developing with it.

As Creator and Covenant Lord, rather, God sovereignly rules over his creation perfectly and personally.¹⁰ He rules with perfect power, knowledge, and righteousness (Pss 9:8; 33:5; 139:1–4, 16; Isa 46:9–11; Acts 4:27–28; Rom 11:33–36...