Cur Deus Homo?

Cur Deus Homo? (Why did God became man?) is one of the most famous works on the atonement.

Why did Jesus come into the world? In John 18 we hear Jesus’ own answer: to testify to the truth (John 18:37). He says so in answer to a question about whether he was a king, clearly implying that he is indeed a king. Jesus is king by way of testifying to the truth, by gathering people around him who listen to his voice. He is not a king over people who live in a particular land or over people who are under his military thumb but he is king over those who submit to the truth, who belong to the truth. He thereby implies that a true king is someone to whom people listen, whom they follow.

As autonomous adults, mindful of many bad historical experiences, we, by and large, don’t like to listen to someone just because they are in a position of authority. Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably. We do not trust Him because He is the guy in charge. We acknowledge Him as being in charge because He is trustworthy.

Alas, many post-moderns like their own self-determination so much that they deny the very existence of objective truth. Pilate was a precursor for such an outlook in his lack of concern for truth – or justice, for that matter (ultimately it is hard to maintain a concern for justice without a concern for truth). For him, as for many today, it’s all power play.

In fact we find the same lack of concern for truth being spoken in the Sanhedrin – and Jesus puts his finger on it: ‘If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ (John 18:23)

But it isn’t just the drive for self-determination, the exercise of power that leads people to turn away from the truth, it is also the fear of power, of what might be done to them if they were to speak truth. So we find Peter denying Jesus three times –­ out of fear.

It turns out that turning away from the truth is not a modern phenomenon after all but has a long history. It is because we so readily turn away from the truth that Jesus came into the world. Why did God become man? To testify to the truth.

 

But why does this get highlighted in the Passion story? Why not in connection with the teaching of Jesus? The parables of Jesus speak of God’s kingdom. The Sermon of the Mount offers kingdom ethics. But it is here that the question is raised and answered: What sort of king is Jesus? One who came to testify to the truth. Presumably this is because it is his passion that profoundly testifies to the truth.

How so? E.g., by bearing witness to the fact that our lives belong to God who cares for us which is why it would be wrong, a denial of the truth, to seek our own comfort at the expense of doing God’s will.

The passion of Christ also testifies to the truth by showing up how readily we turn away from the truth, if it does not suit us. Christ’s suffering embodies our rejection of God, of God’s rule, our rejection of truth .It shows us that such rejection leads to death.

Best of all Jesus testifies to the truth of who God is and that He is worthy of our trust even when it leads to suffering and death because suffering and death will not have the last word.

Peter’s attempt at self-preservation at the expense of truth leaves him wretched. Jesus, by contrast, having sanctified himself in the truth of God’s word, as he had prayed for his disciples (John 17:17–18), is vindicated in his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably and by committing his life to the truth, rejecting the use of power to enforce his rule.

 

Can we independently verify the claim of Jesus to testify to the truth? No, not really. But Jesus did not fall from heaven. He was born to a Jewish mother as the culmination of a long history of God revealing Himself to humanity. Jesus fulfilled a pattern laid down in what we call the OT Scriptures. As Ian McGilchrist says about the “argument” he presents in The Truth of the Matter (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021)

And yet it is also not an argument, in the conventional sense, at all. If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.

Come and see! Come and taste! The truth will set you free and the new life vindicates the truth.

Why was it the Son who became incarnate?

“Because the Mediator must be God, redemption requires that one of the three persons becomes the Mediator (and thus the God-man, with two wills)” (Mark Jones). Why was it the Son who became incarnate and not the Father or the Holy Spirit?

David Kirk notes that ‘while the creation is a work of the whole Trinity…it also stands in a peculiar relation to the Son’ (citing Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:423).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made… (John 1:1-3 ESV)

The Logos becomes flesh because he is the one through whom and for whom all things were made (Colossians 1:16). The world, made through the Son, is to be saved through the Son:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17 ESV)

Mark Jones offers the following reasons (my headings and combining the last two reasons):

(1) The title "Son" for one person of the Trinity only

The Son of God is, by virtue of his title, more appropriately the Son of Man and the Son of a woman. In other words, it was not “fit” that in the Trinity there should be two persons who both bear the title of “Son,” which would have been the case had the Father become incarnate.

Turretin argued that the Holy Spirit, for example, could not be sent to be Mediator because “there would have been two sons, the second person by eternal generation and the third by an incarnation in time.”

(2) The Son is the middle person within the Trinity

the Son, as the “middle person” bears the best resemblance of the work as Mediator. He comes between us and God.

Turretin argues that “he who is between the Father and the Holy Spirit should be Mediator between God and men.”

 (3) Adoption as sons of God is the aim of salvation

The Son is peculiarly fitted to be Mediator since, according to Thomas Goodwin, “the main end of his being Mediator,” that is, the adoption of his people into the family of God, is “made one of the greatest benefits of all others” (Eph. 1:5).

The Son is the most suitable person to convey this soteric blessing insofar that as a Son Christ conveys sonship upon his people by virtue of his union with them (Gal. 4:4-5).

Again, in similar fashion, Turretin argues that it was fitting that “he who was a Son by nature should make us adoptive sons by grace.” Besides Trinitarian reasons, soteric factors – i.e. the doctrine of adoption – explain why the Son should be Mediator.

(4) The offices of priest, prophet, and king are most apt for the Son

Regarding the office of priest, it is the birth-right of the eldest Son in the family to be the priest. Therefore, to prove he was a Priest (Heb. 5), the author cites Psalm 2: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” As an intercessory priest the Son is uniquely able to approach the Father, which is a function grounded both in ontology (i.e. their natural subsistence) and economy (Christ’s work of mediation).

As a prophet, the Son is especially fit to be Mediator because he is the Word and Wisdom of the Father (Heb. 1:1; Jn. 1:18).

As a King, there is none so fit as the heir, “none so fit to have all Judgment and the Kingdom committed to him as God’s Son” (Goodwin).

[The last paragraph is an assertion rather than an argument. The argument may be in the first paragraph, given that the citation of Psalm 2 is more apt for kingship than priesthood. Priesthood and kingship are of course combined in Melchizedek, cf. Psalm 110.] 

Glory, Humiliation and the Christian Faith

Quotes and excerpts from chapter xviii: "The Glory and the Christian Faith" of Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949; Eugene: Wipf & Stock reprint):

"The conception of glory illuminates every part of the structure of the Christian faith." (83)

"To glorify God is both to rejoice in His works, and to own their absolute dependence upon the Creator." (83)

"It is...in the revelation of the Son and in the gift of the Spirit that the Father's glory is fully disclosed...The obedience of Jesus to the Father in His life and death and the vindication of Jesus by the Father in the Resurrection are the disclosure within time of a glory of self-giving love which belongs to God from all eternity." (84)

"It was in humiliation that the glory was revealed on earth." (84) - the humiliation of the eternal Word in the incarnation, the humiliation involved in the 'messianic secret', and the humiliation in the completion of His mission in suffering and death.

"This paradox of the Incarnation is apparent in the Johannine language. On the one hand the Son retains on earth the glory which He ever had with the Father: 'the heavenly Word proceeding forth, yet leaving not the Father;'s side' On the other hand the Son prays that the Father will bestow glory upon Him in the Passion and in the exaltation which will follow. There has been no abandonment of glory: yet the Son prays for glory and awaits the day when He will receive it. The right solution...seems to be that it is in His human nature that the Son receives glory from the Father, and He asks that through Passion and the Resurrection the human nature may be exalted into the eternal glory of the Godhead." (85)

"It is by the humiliation of the Son's winning of glory in the toils of history that the eternal glory of the divine self-giving is most signally disclosed." (86)

"Primarily and obviously glory suggests that aspect of the Atonement which is described in the phrase Christus Victor... But the Christus Victor doctrine does not stand alone: it includes, in the Fourth Gospel, the doctrine of a godward offering whereby sin is expiated...the glory of Christ's self-giving breaks the power of men's sinful glory of self-esteem." (86-87)

The meaning of the Church lies in "the mystery of the participation  of men and women in the glory which is Christ's." (87)

Two apostolic warnings: "the glory in the church is an invisible  glory...hidden from the eyes of the unbelieving world" (88) and it is "but a foretaste of the glory that is to come, and therefore the Church's sense of possession is mingled with the Church's sense of incompleteness." (89)

"The Christian hope is...far more than the salvaging of human souls into a spiritual salvation: it is the re-creation of the world, through the power of the Resurrection of Christ.
        Thus the hope of the beatific vision is crossed by the hope of the vindication of the divine design not only in man but in all things." (90)