Transcript
Let's begin with prayer. Almighty God, who in Thy Son Jesus Christ has taken our nature into Thyself, that our world and our lives may be transformed into Thine image. Conform our thoughts to the knowledge of Thy truth, we pray. Conform our lives into Thy service, for we ask it in Christ's name, amen. Professor Torrance, in this past week, has raised the level of theological intensity on this campus by several degrees. One of the great privileges of
having him with us for two weeks, instead of the usual in which Warfield lectures are so often crowded, is that this level of intensity can be maintained for a while, that we can have time to reflect and inwardly digest, reflect on inwardly digest what he has had to say to us, and that a certain dialectic can operate between these two weeks. Today we come to the lecture on Christ, the incarnate Savior, which Professor Torrance says is
the other side of the homoousion, which is the theme of all his lectures. Professor Torrance. Thank you, sir. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and became man and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand
of the Father, and he shall come again to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end. We considered the fact in the last lecture that the consubstantial relation of the Son to the Father arose out of the evangelical and doxological approach of the Nicene Fathers. They found they had to make explicit in exact and accurate ways the relation of the Son to the Father in order to conserve the very essence of
the Gospel of God's saving and redeeming work in Jesus Christ. But the consubstantial or homoousion relation of the Son to the Father was between the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ and the Father. Both ends of the homoousion, the divine and the human, have to be secured. Everything is emptied of evangelical and saving import if Jesus Christ is not fully and completely and entirely man as well as God. It was to make that clear that clauses
and expressions were added to the original creed of Nicaea relating to the humanity of the Son. But when we turn to the clauses of the creed that speak of the incarnation, we find that it is dominated by a soteriological concern for us men and for our salvation. At the beginning of his work on the Nicene Council, Athanasius points to the fact that when people were confronted with the mighty acts of Christ in healing the sick, making
the lame walk, opening the eyes of the blind and even raising the dead, together with his forgiving of sin, the Jews insisted on asking questions about his authority, demanding a sign from him, questioning his behavior on the Sabbath day and asking, why do you as a man make yourself equal to God? What they ought to have asked, Athanasius says, is why have you, being God, become man? It's in the light of that basic question, cur Deus
homo, that Christ is to be understood. That is, as he puts it, in terms of the Son's economy for our sakes. There can be no doubt that this was the primary question Athanasius put, as we can see from his earliest writing, the Dei Incarnatione, written before Nicaea, to the Contra Arianos and the Adeptatum in the years after Nicaea and again toward the very end of his life. His whole approach to the Father-Son relation, to the
doctrine of God as Almighty Creator and to the doctrine of the Son in his conceptual relation to the Father, was soteriologically oriented. We find the same soteriological slant in the extant works of the patriarch Alexander, in whose household in Alexandria Athanasius had been educated and whom Athanasius accompanied to Nicaea and whom he succeeded in the patriarchal sea in Alexandria. Thus, from the perspective of Alexander and Athanasius alone, we can see into the depth of the soteriological
slant of the Nicene theology. The Savior came, Athanasius insisted, not for his own sake, but for our sake and for our salvation. The concepts of incarnational economy, of economic condescension, the economicesum cadabasis, of God the Son, and the incarnate assumption of our human nature and condition, all for our sake, were quite dominant in his thought. Let us then consider the significance of the incarnation from this perspective in a number of paragraphs. First, as I remarked in
the first lecture, in the incarnation God the Son did not simply come into man, come in man, but he came as man. This was decisive, for it was a way of understanding the incarnation as an act of God himself in which he really became man and took the whole nature of man upon himself. In the fullness of his deity, he became man in the undiminished reality of human and creaturely being, without of course ceasing to be
God the Son. The incarnation is not the bringing into being of a created intermediary between God and man, but the incarnation of God in such a way that he is in Jesus Christ, both God and man in the fullest and most proper sense. The incarnation is expressed in such a way as not to give place to a dualist understanding of man, for it is the whole man whose body of his soul and soul of his body,
not a body without a soul or intelligence, that is meant. The incarnation is to be understood then as a real becoming on the part of God in which God comes as man and acts as man, all for our sake. This is the doctrine of what I call the vicarious humanity of Christ, which in many respects is still one of the most difficult that people have and we shall consider that a little further. Second paragraph, the incarnation,
far from being some sort of aesthetic epiphany of God in the flesh, involves the reality of human and creaturely being in space and time. The stress is undoubtedly on the human agency of the incarnate son and therefore on the reality of the whole historical Jesus Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified and buried and rose again from the dead. It was when this stress on the whole reality of
the incarnate nature and being of the incarnate son was challenged and heretically dualist notions began to creep back, that Athanasius wrote the highly important letter to Epictetus of Corinth in which he defended the unimpaired relation of the historical Jesus Christ to the eternal son. Now here questions were raised which troubled the church for some decades through Apollinaris, questions which denied the full reality of the humanity of Christ in respect of his human and creaturely soul and
mind. Apollinaris taught roughly that the divine logos replaces the incarnation. Now it is significant that here the defense of the whole reality of the historical humanity of Christ is offered in a soteriological context. For all humanity in its fullness of body, soul and mind was taken up by the incarnate son into himself in order to effect our redemption. In the offering of himself on our behalf to the Father and of us to the Father in him,
any deficiency in the humanity of Christ would spell a deficiency in his work of salvation for us and of our inclusion in him. The whole life of Christ is to be bestowed therefore as a continuous vicarious sacrifice and oblation and as such as indivisible for everything he assumed from us is organically united in his one person as savior and mediator. The same teaching had been given by Athanasius in his early book, the Dei Incarnatione, redemption of
the human physical body of Christ in our space and time and all by way of vicarious sacrifice for sin and triumph over sin and death. And third paragraph, the incarnate son took on him not only the form of man but the form of a servant for his incarnation was a humiliation in assuming our servile condition, our state under the slavery of sin in order to act for us and on our behalf from within what we actually
are. Now the Arians both before and after Athanasius had made it a point of searching the scriptures for every possible passage and text indicating the creatureliness, the human weakness, the mortality of Christ, his subordinate and servile condition which were stressed over against God the Father. Now instead of rejecting these passages, however, Athanasius seized upon them and stressed them in order to show that it was precisely in this servile condition that the eternal son came among us,
became one of us in order to be our savior. Here we find closely allied and knit together into each other the notions of the servant and of the priest. The teaching of Saint Paul and that of the epistle of the Hebrews, they were both reckoned Pauline in those days, were integrated. That is, the servant form of Christ was seen to be essential to his priestly oneness with us so that he could act on our behalf in
our place and in our stead before God the Father. This also had the effect of making the whole understanding of redemption or atonement one which is to be understood within the context of worship. Hence it is not surprising to find that these Nicene Fathers and post-Nicene Fathers reckoned that an essential part of redemption was reckoned to be redemption from false worship. I think that's something we can learn today. Now let us come to consider more
closely what atonement or mediation and redemption mean and again in a series of paragraphs. First, since the father-son relation, as I pointed out earlier, falls within the being and the life of God, the incarnation must also be regarded as falling within the being and life of God. It also follows that the saving work of Christ, the atoning, mediation and redemption which he carried out for us, falls within his own incarnate being as mediator. He is
the great God and Savior, the one mediator. The work of atoning salvation then is not one that takes place outside of Christ as something external to Christ or to God but as something that takes place within his own incarnate life and being in Jesus Christ within the constitution of his person as mediator, God and man in one person. And second, but because of the reality of the manhood of Christ, the whole of his human nature, the
atoning mediation, takes place within the human being of the incarnate Son in the ontological depths of the human and creaturely existence which he assumed from us in order to save. Thus, creation and redemption come together. That is to say, the act of atoning redemption does not take place outside of Jesus Christ between Christ and sinners through some sort of external judicial or moral transaction. The act of atonement then falls within the being assumed by Jesus Christ.
Atonement then is not an act of God done upon man but an act of God done as man and therefore made to issue out of man's being and nature toward God. Hence, the importance of bringing the servant of form of Christ and his priestly function together. Now, this is a point I believe of the greatest importance for it is a refusal to allow a dualist basis in thought to determine the meaning of atonement. Incarnation and atonement
are thought together for they cohere in one another. Incarnation is essentially redemptive and redemption is essentially incarnational and ontological. Thus, the ever repeated stress on forensic and judicial issues favored by western theology is really foreign to Nicene theology for the Nicene concept of atoning salvation is at a deeper level. In the third paragraph, the realism of the incarnation involves the coming of the Son into what Athanasius called our sin-enslaved condition, including the sin-enslaved state
of mind. It was flesh enslaved by sin which Christ took on himself from the Virgin Mary when he was made in the concrete likeness of the flesh of sin. It was flesh that came from Adam, fallen humanity. Now, this means of course that for Athanasius and Greek orthodox theology, as indeed John Henry Newman pointed out, the concept or the doctrine of the immaculate conception is quite impossible because the doctrine of immaculate conception puts Mary outside the
status of the very humanity to which you and I belong and from which Christ took his human nature. But let us note that when he became flesh, flesh of sin, when he took upon himself the Adamic humanity enslaved by sin, in the very act of assumption, he was engaging in redemptive and sanctifying operations. The incarnation from the very start was a healing, saving, redeeming, sanctifying, recreating act so that in assuming the flesh of sin from Mary,
the Son also sanctified it and became incarnate under our enslaved condition in such a way as not himself to sin, but in such a way as to bring his own holiness, his own obedience to bear upon the flesh of sin and in so doing, he condemned sin in the flesh. It's through exegesis of Pauline passage that these points are developed. Now this was a point that was later stressed by Cyril of Alexandria with immense power, but
it was also stressed by the post-Nicene and neo-Nicene theologians like Gregory of Jansen and strangely I think by Gregory of Nyssa who both took over and developed not least against Apollinarus, the doctrine that the unassumed is the unhealed which goes back to Irenaeus and the doctrine that what Christ did not take up has not been saved. Now it is granted and stressed by Athanasius that sin is entrenched in the human mind and not just
in the flesh and that it is our human mind that needs to be cleansed, redeemed and saved and renewed and that he claims took place in Christ as in the whole life of Christ he consecrated himself for us and us in himself so that in the whole life of Christ from his cradle to his grave he was engaged in sanctifying and redeeming the human mind. Now this alone comes again and again in Athanasius thought ought to
have warned patristic scholars that Athanasius was not a Neapolinarian and yet alas that is the idea that most patristic scholars take and I even heard a Roman Orthodox, an Eastern Orthodox bishop say this the other day. The taking of our mind that is alienated from God upon himself and the bending of our mind back into a right relationship with God through his obedient self-sanctification and consecration through his whole priestly activity on our behalf that is
absolutely essential to salvation and that is why also salvation involves as I mentioned earlier redemption from false worship. Paragraph four, Christ thus understood acted for us in the fullest sense of what we call representation and substitution. Athanasius for example is never tired of expressing, stressing like a constant refrain for our sakes and indeed he goes out of his way to pile together prepositions like anti, huper and dia as though no one is sufficient in order to
bring out the fullness and radical nature of the vicarious work of Christ for our sake on our behalf in our place in our stead for our need and so on. He varies them again and again and here also we see especially as this related to the priestly activity of Christ and the atoning operation which I'll consider in a moment, we have immensely stressed the concept of anti-psychon tied up with the notion of anti-lutron. Christ
gave himself a redemption for us but that redemption he expresses not simply in terms of the flesh or the body but precisely in terms of the soul and the mind, anti-psychon. And it's tied up with this that we have his notion of, his understanding of propitiation and expiation, catalogue and so on. Let me note then, it's quite false to think of the Athanasian or Nicene theology of atonement simply in terms of the de incarnatione and
then simply in terms of the incarnational aspect picked out from that, the so-called physical notion of redemption. Now let me pause here to emphasize this. Harnack, you may remember, attacked people like Irenaeus and Athanasius for concentrating upon what he called physical redemption or physical aspect of salvation as their redemption didn't have to do with our bodies, as their redemption didn't have to do with our actual historical concrete reality. All he was concerned with was the
mediation of certain divine ideas and yet he was the one that attacked Christianity for Hellenization whereas in point of fact it's so obvious now as we look back that no one more than Harnack was engaged in Hellenizing or Christianity. But I want to point out that practically all the historians of dogma, modern and earlier ones, neglect the fundamental teaching of Athanasius on the atonement. Take for example a familiar one which we use as textbook for another
years in Edinburgh, after that of Franks. But when Franks come to expound the history of atonement he keeps himself only to the day incarnatione of Athanasius and in the day incarnatione he misses out all those aspects in the day incarnatione which speak of redemption as priestly and forensic as well as incarnational and ontological. And basically the other historians of dogma do the same. In the same vein let me say the same thing about Cyril, Cyril of
Alexandria who bases his thought on Athanasius. I don't know anywhere in all theological literature where there is a fuller doctrine of atonement, where there is a fuller doctrine of justification to Christ than we get in Cyril of Alexandria. I once had an orthodox theologian come to me to write a dissertation on Cyril and I said to him delighted, nothing could be better. So after three weeks he came to me with a whole outline of his thesis
and I read the outline without having read a page of Cyril because it's simply taken from your orthodox text books from Carmerus or something like that, from Bellis. Now go and read your Cyril and pay particular attention to certain concepts and I noted justification, I noted the concept of stenosis, the form of a servant and the concept of atonement. After several months he came back trembling because he found in Cyril notions he had not found in
any of his orthodox text books. But I said to him, Constantine, Cyril is impeccably orthodox and if you don't know he's deviating from the fundamental teaching of the fathers. And he wrote a good thesis which was examined by John Kelly and one or two later works on Cyril and incidentally translated Cyprian for the first time into Greek and edited a few patristic works before the very young man he died. Why these things happen we don't know
with a brain tumor but a very fine and godly scholar. But I mention this to show that when you actually go back to the text you find a very, very different understanding of the fathers from that which is usually given to us. Now here we have in Athanasius and in Cyril understanding of the atonement which is rich and full in which all the various aspects, the dramatic aspect, the incarnational aspect and the liturgical, forensic or priestly
aspect of atonement, they are never separated, always involved together and it is undoubtedly the incarnational which holds the others together. But the incarnational is understood almost exclusively from the perspective of the satirical and priestly work of Christ. So here we have a doctrine of atonement which is formulated in such a way that no dualism such as that between soul and body is involved for it is the whole reality of man that is redeemed and is within
that stress that we have also emphasis laid upon what the westerns like to call the forensic as well as the priestly aspect of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ under divine judgment and ransoming from the power of evil through liberation from guilt. I don't know who perpetrated the notion that the classical doctrine of redemption Christus Victor was redemption from the devil. You find it very rarely among the fathers to be quite frank. It's explicitly examined and
rejected as early as Irenaeus. Athanasius will have nothing to do with it and it's not completely on the head by Gregory of Nazianzum although Nyssa tends to play with the concept. Granted that the doctrine of the priestly aspect of atonement does involve the mighty act of Christ in redeeming us from the powers of evil but as Irenaeus stressed right from the start the redemption that Christ undertakes is always an act of justice and never an act
of deception or trickery and therefore we cannot think of redemption itself taking place in such a way that we don't at the same time have a reestablishment of the righteousness of God and therefore a complete affirmation of divine judgment upon human sin and guilt. Our first paragraph characteristic of the concept of atoning redemption is that of what was called the blessed exchange. Some of you may be familiar with this from the Roman liturgy in which it's
spoken of as the mrabili comercium. This is often attributed first of all to Calvin but Calvin took it both from the Roman liturgy but in a different way in close away from the Greek fathers. The concept of blessed exchange and with the incarnate son took our place that we might have his place. Now this exchange or metathesis involving catalegate is expounded in the relations between the holiness of Christ and our sin. His life and our death,
his strength and our weakness, his will and our will and his impassibility and our passion. His eternity and our temporality or contingent and so on. All this takes place within the reality of the incarnate savior and within the ontological depths of our humanity which he assumed from us. It is redemptive and atoning exchange within our human existence, within the ontological bond restored and reformed as the creator Logos himself became creature and as such affects our salvation.
Now it is this concept of exchange that affects one or two things we have already noted. For example, when Christ the holy one of God, the holy one of Israel took our fallen humanity upon himself, took our flesh of sin upon himself, he took it in such a way that he brings his holiness to bear upon our flesh of sin in order that our flesh of sin might be sanctified in him so that he was made
sin for us and that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Or take the problem of impassibility which tended often to be misunderstood. What does it mean when we say that God in Christ suffered? Some later on would say he suffered impassively, he suffered without suffering. But the point is this, that God himself in Jesus Christ penetrated into our passion, our agony, our hurt, our violence, our condition under the judgment of God, but
in such a way that in the very heart of the Eloi Lama Sabachthani, we have father into thy hands, I commend my spirit, in such a way that he brings the eternal serenity, the eternal apathy into the midst of our passion. And so here we have a Christianizing and a reconstruction of the stoic concept of apathy, apathia, so that we cannot think of God as impassable in the Greek or the medieval sense, but on the contrary
as God taking our passion upon him, our hurt and our suffering upon him, absorbing it in himself in such a way that he suffuses through it all his own divine peace and conquers it by his serenity. That is part of atonement. Or we can take the same thing in another form. God incarnate his wisdom. He is the word. Jesus Christ is the very mind of God. And yet the word, the wisdom, the mind of God became
incarnate, became little in such a way that he took our ignorance upon him. Now this is not just an appearance of ignorance as Athanasius said, and Hilary emphasizes this again and again. He really became ignorant for us because he came among us as man. And therefore he shared to the fool our littleness, our ignorance, but in such a way that in and through his relation to the Father, he redeems our ignorance. He takes our mind and
he bends it back to God and brings it into such a relation to God that the light and the truth of God fill it. So that the doctrine of Christ taking our littleness and our ignorance upon him in order to impart to us the truth of God becomes an essential part of salvation. And so atonement does involve also salvation by knowledge. If the mind and understanding are involved, salvation by knowledge is an essential part of salvation.
It is because the whole Christ is not divided up. We cannot think partatively, to use Athanasius' term, of Christ anymore than we can think partatively of the deity, nor can we think partatively of the apollotrosis, the redemption which he undertook. And so we could go through all the relations of Christ to us and show how in the blessed exchange, everything that we were and are has taken up and at every point brought to bear upon the
recreative, the sanctifying, the healing, the peace-giving activity of God in such a way as to be transformed. And so here in the final paragraph, we find redemption and creation, creation and redemption brought together. Since evil is entrenched in our creaturely existence, it is into the depths of our creaturely existence that the Son of God penetrates in order to get at evil in its ontological depth and to deal with it there from within in order to
destroy it and at the same time to make good what evil has damaged and destroyed. Now here we have what Michael Polanyi later called an ontology of mind. This is quite clear in the Fathers that the mind is a creaturely being. It has its being and God in Christ took our creaturely being of mind as well as body and soul in order to penetrate into it and to deal with sin and evil, misunderstanding, darkness that become
entrenched in it. Redemption then is not accomplished by a mere nod, a mere fiat of God, but by an intimate movement of God himself into our human being and condition in order to save us from within and from below, in order to restore us back into ontological relation with himself, into the integration of human being and understanding. Now to expound this fully at this point, I would have to speak about the relation of this to the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which we shall be considering next day, but let me at this point put it in this way. This comes out clearly in Athanasios as Atharapionis or St. Basil's Dei Spiritu Sancta. If we have to think of the creation as the act of God which is Trinitarian, act of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the act of God which has a distinctive relation to the Father, distinctive relation to
the Son, distinctive relation to the Spirit, then in so far as the creation has a distinctive relation to the Spirit, we can put it in this way. This is precisely where Karl Barth has based his thought upon the teaching of Atharapion in Athanasios or Dei Spiritu Sancta of St. Basil. The Spirit of God is in his freedom to be present to the creature and to realize the relation of the creature to himself. So God doesn't only
act upon the creature as it were from above, from the creator to the creature, he doesn't only act upon the creature in Christ who penetrates into our creaturely existence, but who from below, this is the movement of the Spirit, the Spirit relates the creature back to God. This is what is called teleiosis. He brings the creature back to its true consummation in God, but the teleosis means two things. It means consecration, sanctification, and yet the bringing
of the creature back to its true end or completing it in God. Now atonement has to be looked at in the same way. So the Holy Spirit is also engaged in atoning activity. Pentecost cannot be separated from Calvary. That's why in the Greek orthodoxy, yesterday I attended, I noticed that they said, I was reading the Greek text, that here it takes place a sul liturgia, a sul liturgia. The Holy Spirit acts in such a way that
he fulfills the liturgy along with us because the Holy Spirit is there as we shall see tomorrow, acting on our behalf likewise. And therefore this doctrine in which atonement is thought of as operating from within the ontological depths of our being carries with it the doctrine of the Holy Spirit who in and through the redemptive activity of Christ takes our creaturely being and brings it back into union with God. So the Athanasian doctrine of the Spirit
is not a doctrine of the Spirit in me, but rather a doctrine of the Spirit in which the Spirit coming to me takes me and puts me in God. And that's what they call seosus, seopoiesis, which I shall come again to tomorrow. Well then redemption of this kind involves both the restoration of the original creature and the anchoring of our contingent existence in the creative word of God so that our contingent fleeting or ever-lessing or
corruptible, changeable existence, all these adverbs are used, adjectives are used, is now secured eternally in the very reality and being of God himself. Since redemption and creation are thus interlocked, the whole of creation is regarded as involved in the incarnation and in the saving work of Christ. If he who became incarnate in Jesus Christ is none other than the eternal word of God by whom through whom all things that are made are made and in whom
all the universe, visible and invisible, coheres and hangs together, if he became man in such a way that he came as man, in such a way that the divine and the human are inseparable from him, then not only all men but all creation is ontologically related to Jesus, to Jesus. The secret of every man whether he believes or not is then to be found in Jesus but more than that the secret of the whole universe is
to be found in Jesus because here in Jesus we have a window open to the whole creative and redemptive purpose of God, the whole sanctifying purpose of God and is therefore in Jesus who was crucified in space and time and rose again from the dead that we are to think of the whole creation of heaven and earth as in a profound sense already resurrected and consecrated for the glory and the worship of God. How could it
be otherwise when he who became incarnate is the very one through whom all worlds, all ages were made. At the same time this means of course that the stress upon the cross and resurrection which involves all creation carries with the fulfillment of our salvation throughout all space and time and thus reaches forward to the consummation of all things in the return of Christ to make all things new to judge the quick and the dead and manifest
the new creation. And so as I remarked in the earlier lecture the creed insists on stating that the kingdom of this Jesus, the kingdom of this incarnate Christ shall have no end. The incarnation, the passion and the resurrection of Christ are not a transient episode but a decisive and once and for all episode which endures forever unto eternity within the one being of the mediator and that is the secret of it. If the act of God
and salvation in Christ will be something external to Christ between Christ and us, between Christ and the world then when it had been completed it was over. But if atoning reconciliation and renew take place within the constitution of the incarnate son within the one person of the mediator then it is as eternal as Jesus Christ, the eternal son. And that is the staggering fact that our creation, our fleeting evanescent existence is thus securely anchored in the
very being and life of God. That is the ultimate point in the Gospel. Now to see the significance of that for the Fathers let me put it this way. Now recall a point made, used to be made by Keokukor, that when your mother or sister or wife is stitching up a patch in your garment she ties a knot at the end of it. She didn't stitch it up and then pulled it tight, it would all pull
out and nothing would be stitched up. Everything needs a knot at the end to be secure. Now the ultimate knot, the ultimate knot that we have here is the fact that this man Jesus is taken up into God and our humanity, our creaturely being is given a place in God and there it has the ultimate knot in eternal and unchangeable reality of God so that our salvation ultimately rests upon that being in Christ in God. That's
the staggering fact that the Greek Fathers take breath at again and again that's why they spoke about theosus or theopoiesis. Now in concluding let me point to two main lessons which we may learn from this Nicene and post-Nicene doctrine of the incarnate Savior. And the first is the one I've just been mentioning. Atoning salvation is not something to be thought of as a transaction external to Christ, between Christ and sinners, between Christ and the world.
It is not to be thought of then simply in terms of moral and judicial relations but is to be thought of as bound up with the incarnate being of Christ and therefore something in which we through the Spirit participate in Christ in God, points I shall discuss in the next two lectures. When I first went to teach in Edinburgh I occupied the chair of church history for two years and one of my predecessors was Professor William
Cullingham and so I thought I'd better read Cullingham's historical theology, be more familiar with it than I was, and to my astonishment, and he was dead right in some respects, Cullingham proceeded to attack John Calvin for a Roman Catholic doctrine of union with Christ and that he wouldn't have. All he could think of was some kind of judicial relation with Christ. Or to take another example, his colleague a little later in Glasgow, James Denny, when he
comments on Romans 6 says quite frankly, quite frankly, I can't understand what this union means and he says he could not understand it any more than a judicial union. So when Denny wrote his book on atonement, my predecessor and the dogmatics chair in Edinburgh, Hugh Ross Mackintosh, wrote pointing out that Denny's, the heart of Denny's doctrine of atonement was missing because he had no place for union with Christ. Or if we take a couple of Denny's own
colleagues in Glasgow, Trinity College Glasgow, if we take Or, James Or, I forget the name at the moment, the man who wrote The Humiliation of Christ. Now both of these are concerned, and I believe largely under the influence of James Or himself, both of these are concerned to show that the whole concept of redemption and salvation ultimately falls to pieces unless it is ontologically rooted in Christ and unless that ontological redemption is one in which we
are given to participate. Now these fathers, the Nicene fathers have I think something to teach us because by and large all Protestant theology or of the atonement, Protestant redemption is in terms of the external relations between Jesus Christ and sinners or the external relations between Jesus Christ and God and therefore they have to construe it in terms almost entirely of moral and judicial relations. But I believe that that has disastrous results in our understanding of society
and understanding of ethics and understanding of eschatology and indeed understanding of the Holy Spirit. This is then a primary lesson we must learn from the Nicene theology and I shall try and show in the next two lectures how it works out in Doctrine of the Spirit and Doctrine of the Church. But now one final point. If the Incarnate Son took our place and took our mind, our human mind and our human will upon him, took our
human soul upon him in such a way that he acts fully in our place, in our stead and on our behalf, then this means that Jesus Christ takes our place in every human act in which we are involved in believing, in worshipping and in praying so that we have to think of Jesus Christ as believer in our place, as worshiper in our place, as acting in our place, as obedient son in our place. Now this is
the point where the doctrine of saving grace and indeed the doctrine of justification by grace cuts at sharpest point against our natural ways of thinking. Each one of us has a natural egoism, a natural egocentricity and at the last resort we want to reserve some inner citadel where I am in control of my decision, my life. But in the Athanasian doctrine there isn't such a place. In the very depths of the ontology of your mind, ontology
of your will, ontology of your soul and being Christ has penetrated in order to take your place so that from the very depths of your being and mind and understanding he offers himself and you with him to the Father and you are saved as you share in that vicarious self-offering to the Father. And that's what the liturgy is about. Therefore, if at this point we allow the Apollinarian heresy to infect the liturgy, then all we
can offer in the end is a Pelagian worship of God. But that's precisely the kind of worship from which Christ came to deliver us. Now the next two lectures we should be concerned with the doctrine of the Spirit and we shall develop the ontological relation of that to the Father and to ourselves and work that out in terms of the doctrine of the Church. Thank you.