The Christian’s Highest Good. Douglas Vickers

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СКАЧАТЬ D. Estelle, F. V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen have forced a new examination of the respects in which the Mosaic covenant, while it is to be understood as a form of administration of the covenant of grace, exhibits a works principle and, indeed, has been referred to by a long line of Reformed theologians as partaking of elements of the covenant of works.29 But in the contemporary evangelical-theological context, the church’s doctrinal formation finds its determinative nexus too often in its focus on man and his supposed capacities, intellectual and ethical, to the neglect of the biblical explanation of his fallen condition. For that reason, the objective realities of God’s implementation of his covenantal purposes in the salvation of the elect people he gave to his Son to redeem (John 17:6, 9) have not found a ready place or served as the orientation of thought. The biblical data that state that we are all the fallen children of Adam are only lightly handled. While the imputation to us of the guilt of Adam’s sin extends its disastrous deposit to the fact that we come into the world with a fallen nature, that fact does not find a ready place in the most common evangelical expressions.

      Any purported explanation of the human condition that sets out to avoid the reality of our original sin sits oddly with the biblical data and historic confessional theology. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states the case: “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery,” and “The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.”30 An adequate explanation of the human condition is discoverable only in a theology that understands that God, in setting forth his remedy for sin, has “delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Col 1:13). The Christian has been moved by the grace of God from his condition of solidarity in Adam to a new solidarity in Christ (Rom 5:12–21). That is the outcome of the triune God’s execution of his eternal decree of redemption.

      What was observed in the preceding chapter as the widening influence, in the history of thought in general and in the doctrines of the church, of the postulate of the competence of human reason in the discovery and formulation of truth has born its fruit in a contemporary man-centered, or anthropocentric, theology. Schleiermacher, whom we observed as the founder of modern theology in the early nineteenth century, has fathered a distant offspring. But Christian thought, to the extent that it is biblically responsive, is to be Christocentric. In that, it is theocentric. Its determining nexus and orientation is what has been revealed as the being, will, and purpose of God. For God has set forth Christ, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).

      Why, then, it is to be asked, did Jesus Christ come into the world? Theological doctrine that is grounded in divine revelation permits and requires various responses to the question. We shall return to that question more fully in the following chapter. But at this point we observe that beneath a biblically sustainable answer lies the identity of Jesus Christ, both his essential identity and his official, or economic, or redemptive identity. When we refer to the essential identity of Christ we have in view his distinguishable identity within the triune Godhead. “There are three persons in the Godhead,” the Catechism states, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”31 It is not being said there that the essence of the Godhead is, in some sense that would remain to be defined, distributed among the divine Persons. It is being stated that the full essence of God resides fully in each of the Persons. The divine mind, the divine affections, and the divine will are wholly in each of the Persons. It follows that Jesus Christ, who came into the world to be the Savior of sinners in accordance with the determinate divine decrees was none other than the Second Person of the eternal Godhead. When he was in this world, a divine Person who took a full human nature into union with his divine nature, he did not divest himself of his eternal glory or of the full attributes of his divine Personhood; though he laid aside the signs or insignia of that glory.32 It follows, moreover, that when he was in this world, as to his divine nature our Lord was both in this world and in heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit, while in his human nature he was in this world (John 3:13).33 Now, as to his divine nature he is both in heaven and in this world, while as to his human nature he is in heaven.

      The meaning of the descriptive term economic in reference to Christ’s redemptive identity refers in theological usage to the distribution of redemptive offices among the Persons of the Godhead. In short, it was the redemptive office of the Father to elect a certain, defined, and unalterable number of people to eternal salvation and to give them to his Son to redeem. It was the redemptive office of the Son to come into the world, to take a sinless human nature into union with his divine nature, to satisfy in that human nature all of the demands of the righteous law of God on behalf of the people the Father gave to him, and having done that, to bear in his death the penalty due to them for their sin. It was the redemptive office of the Holy Spirit to call to Christ those for whom he died, to convey to them the gifts and benefits that Christ purchased for them, to sanctify them, and to conduct them to glory. We speak, therefore, of the official identity of Christ, intending thereby reference to the redemptive office that he came into the world to discharge.

      As to his essential identity, Christ came, he said, to declare God to us: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John 14:11), he said on a memorable occasion (declaring the perichoresis or circumincession of the Godhead),34 when he replied to Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “The Jews took up stones to stone him” when he made his definitive existential claim, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30–31). But the essential identity of Christ is rendered indistinct, if not completely lost, in forms of modern theology, such as that of Paul Tillich, to note an extreme example. Tillich concluded that God is to be “understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being.”35 It is, of course, appropriate to say, with Herman Bavinck, for example, that “God makes himself known as absolute being.”36 Bavinck continues: “He [God] makes himself known as the one who is in an absolute sense. . . . God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being not becoming.”37 But modern theology in the fashion of Tillich, in its argument that “The being of God is being itself. . . . or the ground of being,” concludes that “If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance,”38 and therefore, “It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.”39 It follows from such doctrinal propositions that the autotheotic nature of the Second and Third Persons of the Godhead, and the distinguishable properties of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, are not brought into the relief that the Scriptures and historic Reformed theology have ascribed to them.40 The essential identity of the Person of Jesus Christ is not, thereby, well preserved.

      Our principal interest in the present work is in the biblical data regarding the redemptive office of Christ, who, as has been said, came into the world as the Second Person of the eternal Godhead to become Jesus Christ for our redemption. But as we shall see more fully, that redemptive office derives its significance from the eternal identity of God the Son whom the Father sent into the world. The apostle Paul, focusing his thought on the official or redemptive identity of Christ, makes the summary claim to Timothy that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15). The Lord himself said that he came to “lay down [his] life for the sheep” (John 10:15), for those whom, before the foundation of the world the Father had given to him to redeem (John 17:6). But before we look more directly at the import of what has just been said, we reflect on some common perceptions, in historic and literary opinion, of the identity of Jesus Christ.

      Who Is Jesus Christ?

      For two thousand years men have wrestled with the questions: “Who is Jesus Christ?” and “How are we to explain the presence of Jesus Christ in this world?”41 It would be a mistake, of course, to imagine that those questions have been universally engaged or have agitated the minds of all men СКАЧАТЬ