Purves Exploring Christology and Atonement

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9873-2
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Andrew Purves, the author of many works in pastoral theology, has spent his life exploring the significance of Jesus Christ for the life of the church. As a professor of historical theology, he has also investigated the significance of patristic and Reformed theology for understanding Christ. In Exploring Christology and Atonement, Purves brings these concerns together. If pastoral theology is about the person and work of Christ, then the study of Christology and atonement is essential to the ministry of the church.Drawing on his own Scottish heritage, Purves engages in a critical conversation about Christ?s person and work with three eminent Scottish theologians whose legacy stretches over two hundred years: John McLeod Campbell, Hugh Ross Mackintosh and Thomas Forsyth Torrance. Purves shows how their respective contributions to our understanding of Jesus Christ shape and inform the practice of the faith. The ministry of the church is rooted first and foremost in the ministry of God.

Andrew Purves is professor of Reformed theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books, including Reconstructing Pastoral Theology: A Christological Foundation and The Crucifixion of Ministry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Purves, Andrew

Leseproben

PREFACE

Christology and Atonement

THIS BOOK OFFERS AN ACCOUNT of the relations between Jesus Christ, who is the incarnate Son, and the Father, the result of which is the atonement, for in the incarnate Son the relation between God and humankind is savingly established. We cannot reflect on who Christ is, on his person, without having to reflect on his purpose and work. To cite the notable words of the German Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, “This is to know Christ, to know his benefits.” To reflect on Christology or atonement as separate categories would be to deal with abstraction. Thus the topic is Christology and atonement, the doctrine of Jesus Christ and, its consequence, the work of salvation. The consideration of who Jesus was and what he did must in every way be held together, for the one can be understood only in view of the other. That is to say, the hypostatic or personal union of God and humankind as the man Jesus of Nazareth and the atonement that he effects as the meaning and purpose of the incarnation belong together. Christ’s being and action are one reality.1

Clearly, too, this account of Christology and atonement must cast light on the doctrine of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for as the man Jesus, God, from the Father and by the Spirit, became incarnate for us and for our salvation. This undoubtedly is the great and central mystery of Christian faith, as it is also the central message of Christian proclamation.

Theology, however, exists not for its own sake. Certainly, one trusts, theology is offered to God as the voice of faith thinking about what faith confesses. But as a work of the church, theology also has a responsibility to lay forth its claims for the sake of ministry. For this reason, the conclusion of what we explore in the following pages addresses the relation between Christology, atonement and pastoral care. This is offered in view of the great need today for pastoral ministry to be fully informed at every point by theology and especially, it seems obvious to say, by the central doctrines of Christian faith. There is a sense, then, in which this is a work of pastoral theology, even of practical theology, for there is no knowledge of a nonacting God, and there is no God other than the God who acts for us in Jesus Christ. Reflection on Christology and atonement is reflection on the God who acts; this is the first and primary meaning of practical theology.

The exploration of Christology and atonement is done here by way of a presentation of the relationship between the Father and the incarnate Son as I am guided by the theologies of John McLeod Campbell, Hugh Ross Mackintosh and Thomas Forsyth Torrance. These three Scottish Presbyterian theologians, beginning with the induction of Campbell to the parish of Rhu in Dumbartonshire in 1825 and concluding with the death of Torrance on the first Sunday of Advent in 2007, represent a trajectory in Scottish Reformed theology that was both ecumenical and pastoral, drawing insight as much from the Greek church fathers as from the principal Reformers while also seeking to speak to the ministry of the church in Scotland. In due course, all three, especially Torrance, have become known beyond their native borders. All three were committed churchmen, with a heart for ministry and an evident, passionate piety.

McLeod Campbell, Mackintosh and Torrance worked with a critically realist view of the incarnation in which the pattern and nature of God in Christ were allowed to shape their thinking. Indeed, obedience demanded it. In, through and as Jesus Christ, God had in fact taken on human flesh, becoming as we are, to do from the side of God and from the side of humanity, in the unity of his incarnate personhood, that which was necessary for us to have a new life with God. Thus the atonement was worked out in such a way that it was entirely of God and entirely as human being, in that God as the man Jesus was wholly God and wholly human while remaining one person. That surely is the great mystery at the heart of the gospel that was grasped so clearly by the theologians with whom we will be in conversation. Rejected was any sense that the atonement was an instrumental or external act of God, the results of which are imputed to us; affirmed was the utter seriousness of the becoming flesh of God as the man Jesus so that the atonement was worked out within his incarnate life in history, atoning from the inside, as it were. In this way, these theologians cast Christology and atonement in historical and ontological terms rather than external or instrumental terms.

Central to the common perspective of these three theologians, each in his own voice, was the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ. That is, they saw Christ’s humanity not merely as exemplary but rather as through and through substitutionary, in which the covenant between God and humankind was entirely completed in and by him for us. God’s coming as the man Jesus was the act from the side of God and from the side of humankind that forged a new relationship in which everything that God requires of us is given by God and to God on our behalf by Jesus Christ. In this way, these theologians stood in the lineage of Athanasius of Alexandria, who taught that Jesus ministers the things of God to us and the things of humankind to God, all in the unity of his divine-human person. At the heart of this bidirectional ministry of Christ is the filial relationship between the Father and the Son wherein Jesus offers the Father in our stead the human life of obedience, trust and love that gladdens the Father’s heart. In this way, especially through Christ’s active obedience, the atonement is presented as a kinetic, relational and personal event entirely worked out through the relationship between the Father and the incarnate Son. This relationship is not something worked “above our heads,” as it were, but is stubbornly a divine act within history that establishes our relationship with God and acts upon us in such a way that we become changed persons. McLeod Campbell and Mackintosh especially, as we will see, repeatedly pull their readers back to what Mackintosh called an “experimental” faith, as by the Holy Spirit’s mediation of Christ we, with the apostle Paul, must speak of God in Christ for us, and we in Christ for God.2 Theology and piety belong together; theology and ministry belong together.

McLeod Campbell, Mackintosh and Torrance, arguably, are linked as a trajectory in Scottish theology that is more at home with the Scots Confession of 1560 than with the Westminster Confession of 1647. That is, the three theologians placed emphasis on Christology, with attention to the doctrines of the person, life and work of Jesus Christ, rather than on covenant theology construed in theistic rather than christological terms. Their arguments were conducted a posteriori and inductively rather than deductively and rationalistically. However, I do not think they constitute a theological “school” in the tight sense that word suggests. Each clearly remains himself. Nevertheless, Mackintosh was familiar with and somewhat critical of McLeod Campbell, and Torrance sat in Mackintosh’s classroom in Edinburgh in the early 1930s and writes affectionately of the influence his teacher had upon him. Torrance too remained deeply and critically appreciative of McLeod Campbell. (Full disclosure: I in turn sat in Torrance’s classroom in Edinburgh.)

My manner of approach here is to take up a number of themes that bear upon Christology and atonement as they arise in the writings of McLeod Campbell, Mackintosh and Torrance and engage in reflective discussion with them. The intended result, then, will be more than a monograph on three Scottish theologians. The goal is that by way of this process a case will be made for the relation between Christology and atonement that can guide the church today in preaching, teaching and pastoral care. In view is a contemporary presentation of Christology and atonement as that arises out of the discussions as they proceed.

So-called atonement theory is a wide-ranging and multifaceted inquiry. Whether we consider the shape of soteriology or typologies of atonement theories,3 the fact is that the ecumenical church (excepting particular denominations) never canonized any single theory in a manner similar to the doctrine of Christ or the trinitarian doctrine of God. Yet even given the accepted christological and trinitarian creedal formulations of the ecumenical church, much remains unexplained, as if the language used by the church fathers is intended to protect the central mysteries of God and Christ rather than explain them. With the atonement, certainly, we confront the great saving mystery of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. If we think we have explicated it, we haven’t! It is surely a mystery to be adored and received rather than a theological problem to be picked apart, analyzed and solved. Nevertheless, I wish in what follows to suggest one way, arising from engagements with the authors named, in which Christology and soteriology can be helpfully and hopefully construed. While offering this way, I recognize that no attempt at understanding can cover, much less explain, the mystery of our salvation in Christ.

There is a significant mass of material to draw from, especially in the case of Torrance, who produced a very substantial and often difficult body of published work. What follows draws mainly from principal publications in which the themes with which I deal are already apparent in the book titles. My working texts are John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement (1856); H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine...