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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 August 2022
Supralapsarian christologies all hold that the incarnation is not contingent upon sin but may differ on the nature of the gift given to us in the incarnation. In this essay I conceptualize and evaluate a crucial difference between two supralapsarian strategies. One strategy, exemplified by Kathryn Tanner, focuses on the natures of the incarnate One: it argues that in the incarnation the Word takes on a human nature which, being transformed in the act of assumption, becomes the conduit of grace for those who share in the same humanity. The other, represented by Samuel Wells, thinks of the incarnation as a gift of a transforming presence of the incarnate person. In taking on human form, the person of the divine Word comes as close to us as God can – the invisible God now can be seen, touched, heard – and draws us into a community of friendship and love.
1 For a contemporary account of Chalcedonean christology, see McFarland, Ian A., The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019)Google Scholar.
2 This essay is part of a wider project to map and analyse supralapsarian christologies, in preparation for a constructive supralapsarian christology. For example, earlier I mapped arguments for a supralapsarian approach alongside the three biblical story lines of divine relating in creation, redemption and eschatological consummation: Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (Oxford: OUP, 2008). In ‘Supra/Infralapsarianism’, in Adam J. Johnson (ed.), The T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), pp. 769–74, I offer a short overview of different ways in which supralapsarian christological accounts make sense of the atonement. In ‘God and God's Beloved: A Constructive Re-Reading of Scotus’ Supralapsarian Christological Argument’ (forthcoming) I analyse a distinction between understanding the incarnation as an intrinsic or a functional supralapsarian good.
3 Tanner, Kathryn, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Christ the Key (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).
4 See Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, pp. 1–2: ‘In short, God, who is already abundant fulness, freely wishes to replicate to every degree possible this fulness of life, light, and love outward in what is not God; this is possible in its fullness only to the extent the world is united by God to Godself over the course of the world's time.’ Cf. Christ the Key, pp. vii-viii: ‘The central theological vision of [this book is]: God wants to give us the fulness of God's own life through the closest possible relationship with us that comes to completion in Christ. … In order to give us the entire fulness of what God enjoys, God must give us God's very own life and not simply some created version of it. God cannot give us everything that God has to give by merely transforming human life itself into some created approximation of divinity. God must attach us, in all our frailty and finitude, to God.’
5 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, p. 9.
6 Ibid.; cf. p. 53: ‘Once perfected by the inpouring of gifts from the Father, Jesus’ humanity becomes the means by which those gifts are poured out to us through the working of the Holy Spirit. … The Spirit radiates the humanity of Jesus with the Father's own gifts of light, life, and love; and shines through him, not simply back to the Father, but through his humanity to us, thereby communicating to us the gifts received by Jesus from the Father. … The condition for this inclusion of us in the dynamic of the Trinity's own life is our humanity with Christ, which is also worked by the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, the Son, sent by him for the completion of the Father's work ad extra.’
7 Ibid., p. 58.
8 Ibid., p. 56.
9 Ibid., p.57; cf. pp. 55–6: ‘our humanity is not assumed by Christ's, as Christ's was by the Word; our already formed persons are … This union with Christ requires tending in a way that humanity's assumption by the Son of God in Christ did not. Our union with Christ must be nurtured through the workings of the Spirit.’
10 Tanner, Christ the Key, p. 6.
11 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
12 Ibid., p. 12.
13 Ibid., p. 13.
14 Ibid., p. 14: ‘Jesus Christ is more than a paradigm for what is involved here; he has become for us the very means. The humanity of Jesus has the perfect attachment or orientation to the Word in virtue of his being one with the Word, nothing apart from it; and we gain the capacity of something like that through our connection to him.’
15 Ibid., pp. 24, 26.
16 Ibid., p. 34.
17 Ibid., p. 35.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 36.
20 Ibid., p. 73.
21 Ibid., p. 60.
22 Ibid., p. 252.
23 Ibid., p. 254.
24 Ibid., p. 260.
25 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, p. 102.
26 Ibid., p. 108; cf. p. 110: ‘Jesus is the one who lives in God, the one who is all that he is as a human being without existing independently of God, the human being whose very existence is God's own existence – that is the meaning of the hypostatic union. Otherwise expressed, in Jesus God becomes the bearer of our very human acts and attributes. By grace – by virtue, that is, of a life-giving relationship with Jesus that is ours in the power of the Spirit – we enjoy something like the sort of life in God that Jesus lives. We (and the whole world) are to live in God as Jesus does, through him. In short, there is an approximation to the hypostatic union that the world enjoys through grace, most particularly after the world's death, when it transpires that, like Christ, the only life or existence we have is in and through God … When the fire of our own lives grows cold, we come to burn with God's own flame.’
27 Ibid., p. 111.
28 Ibid., p. 114.
29 Ibid., p. 116.
30 See Wells, Samuel, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 20–1Google Scholar; see also his Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2017), pp. 7–10; and, earlier, Wells, Samuel and Owen, Marcia A., Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), esp. pp. 19–47Google Scholar.
31 ‘All the other actions of God – in being for us, working with us, and working for us – are all ways of preparing and redeeming the ground for the fundamental purpose of creation, salvation, and final redemption: God being with us. That is what was ever in God's heart, and what ever shall be.’ Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto, p. 24.
32 Ibid., pp. 232–3.
33 Ibid., p. 11.
34 Ibid., p. 27. Wells admits that his is an argument from silence: the Gospel writers seem to devote very little attention to what, according to Wells, is the crux of the matter. But Wells argues that the Gospel writers’ silence goes back to Jesus’ own attitude: ‘I suggest that Jesus took the centrality of with for granted. Part of my evidence for this comes in the frequent controversies in which Jesus reacts with exasperation when disciples and others don't grasp what seems to Jesus to be something that goes without saying. … Over and again Jesus is in debate about the company he keeps – about whom he is with. … Examples abound, but perhaps the most familiar arises in the controversies over whom Jesus eats with. … All these stories demonstrate the same principle: that Jesus takes for granted that being with the Father means being with this whole range of people; and that it is so intrinsic to his ministry that he only articulates it when he is criticised by those who find that ministry of being with problematic’ (ibid., pp. 146–8). In this essay, I am less interested in the arguments for the respective supralapsarian positions of Tanner and Wells than in their theological shape. However, in ‘All Things have been Created for Him: On Christ, Election, and Creation’, forthcoming in Edwin Chr. van Driel (ed.), The T&T Clark Companion to Election, I offer an exegetical case for a position much akin to Wells’ that is, I believe, on sounder footing than his argument from Nazareth.
35 Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto, p. 232. Wells continues by drawing out an explicit supralapsarian christological position: ‘The incarnation is the epitome of with; together with the resurrection, it is the epistemological center of a theology conceived around the notion of with. The question that discloses the dividing line between a theology grounded in with and a theology rooted in for is… “If there had been no Fall, would Christ still have come?” A theology rooted in for invariably replies, “No – since what would there be for the Messiah to do?” Such a perspective presupposes sin, in that it makes Christ's humanity dependent on a deficit – on a problem to be solved. By contrast a theology oriented to and shaped by with takes for granted that Christ would have become incarnate had there be no fall – since Christ being incarnate was the raison d'etre of the universe. The incarnation is the heart of a mystery, not the solution to a problem.’
36 Ibid., p. 244.
37 Ibid., p. 58.
38 Ibid., p. 43.
39 Ibid., p. 44.
40 Ibid., p. 25.
41 Ibid., p. 243.
42 Oliver D. Crisp also wrestles with this interpretative question concerning Tanner's christology: see his Revisioning Christology: Theology in the Reformed Tradition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 124–8.
43 Tanner, Christ the Key, p. 36.
44 Ibid., pp. 72, 73.
45 Ibid., p. 258.
46 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, p. 54.
47 Ibid., p. 55.
48 Ibid., p. 25.
49 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.4.2; John Duns Scotus, Quodlibet, q. 19.61. To approach the same point from a different angle again: this is where the logic of creation on the one hand, and of incarnation and assumption on the other hand, are diametrically different. In creation, as Tanner has rightly argued, the relationship between God and what is not God is non-competitive (see Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, p. 2 and passim). Given God's transcendence, God and humanity do not operate within the same plane of causality and therefore the creature does not have to decrease as God increases. But acts like assuming a human nature and thereby becoming incarnate mean for God to enter the created nexus of causality in which rules of ontological competitiveness do apply.
50 An additional question for the account represented by Tanner is how God perfects the human nature of Christ so that it may become an instrumental of transformation for Christ's fellow human beings. Tanner locates this in a deifying communication between Christ's divine and human nature (see, for instance, Jesus, Humanity, and Trinity, pp. 26–7, 30–32). This is a neo-Chalcedonian understanding of the metaphysics of the incarnation that is not universally accepted as legitimate. For this essay, though, I set this issue aside and concentrate on the transformative interaction between the incarnate One and other human beings.
51 Tanner first formulated her eschatology in ‘Eschatology without a Future?’, in Polkinghorne, John and (eds), The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), pp. 222–37Google Scholar. There she still presented it as a ‘thought experiment’ (p. 224). In the last chapter of Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, which is a slightly expanded version of this essay, Tanner makes clear her position on eschatology flows forth from her wider systematic theological commitments (p. 97).
52 Even while she does not mention him in this context, Tanner's eschatology is virtually identical to Karl Barth's, who argues that the eschatological future of creation is the preservation of the life lived. I analysed Barth's eschatology in Incarnation Anyway, pp. 111–18. For a wider analysis and critique see Hitchcock, Nathan, Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 See Van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, pp. 22–5.
54 Ibid., pp. 63–82.
55 Tanner hardly ever refers to Schleiermacher, and, as far as I know, the relationship between their theological models has never been explored. The structural parallels are however remarkable. Schleiermacher's notion of absolute dependence could be read as a version of Tanner's principle of non-competitiveness. In both theological designs the relationship between God and what is not God is conceived of as a salvation ontology rather than a salvation history. For neither does God's covenant with Israel, Jesus’ resurrection, his ascension or his return play a substantial role.
56 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and Trinity, p. 119. Presumably, the same holds for Christ. If eschatologically creation will only continue to exist as a ‘has been’, this would also apply to the created human nature of the incarnate One.
57 Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto, p. 27.
58 Such is indeed the position of Schleiermacher: see Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Christian Faith, vol. II, trans. Tice, Terrence N., Kelsey, Catherine L. and Lawler, Edwina (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016)Google Scholar, §99, addendum; p. 620.