Transcript
MCCORD: Mr. Chairman, friends. It is with the deepest gratitude to the entire Princeton seminary community that I begin this last lecture. To President and Mrs. Mackay for the warm hospitality of Springdale, for arranging receptions, luncheons, dinners,
in which I was given the opportunity to meet the members of the community, the various departments. To Professor Hendry and his colleagues for their many courtesies, again to Professor Hendry and the Committee on Lectures for extending the invitation to inaugurate the Warfield Lectures. And
last, but not in point of priority, to the student body for its interest and its sticking it out through six hours that will not show on their transcripts. My keenest disappointment is that there was not time to meet with student groups and carry the theological discussions further. But if you will hold your fire, come September we can enter into
this sort of dialogue that is absolutely necessary to the theological enterprise and from which I can and expect to learn much. Now in the third lecture under the title, "The Reopening of the Question," I spent some time developing the character of the world view that began to emerge in the nineteenth century and that is still emerging.
We said that it is a view of reality that is not deductive and to sum it up in a phrase or a sentence, it is a view of the world in which now chance from our standpoint is indigenous to reality. There is an openness that does not require the miraculous in the old sense. There is Chronos, yes, and
Kairos, but Kairos not just in a punctiliar aoristic sense, not simply existential time. There are kairoi and they are not unrelated. In this sense, Professor D. B. Williams's criticism, I think, is criticism of much of contemporary theology, is valid.
He writes about God's grace and man's hope. He makes a plea for consideration to given to the reality of the redeemed life, to the relation between God the creator and God the redeemer. For he recognizes what is undoubtedly true, the influence of Marcion is not absent from much contemporary
theology. But Professor Williams, while carefully qualifying his conception of eminence to mean not identity with but entering into the determination of, still leans too heavily on the structure of process philosophy to satisfy us completely and to reflect accurately the point of view of biblical Revelation. With
the development of a new world view, we find ourselves in a position then to look at reality in such a way that it is not deductive, nor again is it a series of unrelated points. But rather we understand now both the nature of the historical and the nature of the personal. For in history, that is, in relations,
God is to be found. Here God deals with us and in this relation the nature of the personal is defined. God is more than the ground of being. Professor Tillich has helped us by pointing out that God must be beyond naturalism and supernaturalism, which would be the definitions of God that would apply to the two world views that we have looked
at and rejected. But it is this God who is beyond both naturalism and supernaturalism that has dealings with men. He is both the ground of being and personal being. He is the ground of being in the sense that all being is borrowed from God. Creation is not God. Creation
does involve a limitation, a self-limitation on the part of God. He brings it into existence over against Himself, therefore it is not autonomous, for it utterly and ultimately depends on Him. So God's being is one thing. The being of creation is another. And the being of man is a third.
Man doesn't carry his being around with him as a possession, he borrows it, as Calvin says, from God. His being is response to the word which is spoken to him, that is his being is in community, it is in relations. Now this it seems to me is what the Old Testament means by grace. I agree with Professor Snaith that
grace is not to be defined as love in action, principally because love, to be love, is always active. For that reason I can't understand God's love for Himself in an Aristotelian sense. Grace is fundamentally relation, the relation in which God created man and to
which he redeems him. Grace then is juxtaposed over against sin, for sin is bondage, the paradoxical bondage of isolation and collectivization. Bondage to self and to false community. Grace therefore in the Old Testament is the covenant, the covenant known as
act, the covenant which is enacted into the structure of history in the event of the exodus. This was the crucial event for the Hebrew, for in it God bestowed Himself in active and permanent relation. Hesed was a tie, a relationship upon which the whole existence of Israel
rested. It was based on no merit that was Israel's. Hesed was based on God's "hen." Deuteronomy makes this clear. The covenant is not based on the physical prowess of Israel, of all the peoples in the world they seemed to be not the giants, but the puniest. Nor again
is the covenant based on Israel's religious virtuosity, as if to say they were spiritual geniuses who had a future that God foresaw. No, we read, your fathers were just as you, they were proud and stiff necked. The covenant is the relation now which is
identical with grace, in which Israel is set by the love, the favor, the unmerited favor of God. In Israel's experience, it is not only -- the covenant not only described the present, but it pointed backward to an event still vivid in her ancestral memory, the covenant with
Abraham. Moreover it pointed to the future. It became typical of the Messianic hope of deliverance. It became the norm for Israel's theology. It furnished the tests for Israel's prophets, and it was the prototype of the decisive act still to come.
The covenant relation, the grace in which Israel was set, the restructuring of reality begun with Abraham was continuous with what was going on in Israel's life. For her life was mission. Israel was set into the structure of grace to be the
servant people of God. This was her vocation. She was to keep fresh and contemporaneous this event, that is the relation had to be maintained in order for God's character to be mirrored and His mission to be perpetuated, and it is this continuity described in the Old Testament that enables us to understand the setting of the incarnation, the
second exodus which was the fulfillment of the first. Therefore the incarnation is not Marcionitic. It has a background, and the background is the whole web and network of relations which are described in the Old Testament. We say Jesus was continuous with the old.
He was a Jew of the first century. He was the son of Mary. What does this mean? It means that He inherits Israel's history, the history of her relation with God, the history of the covenant. He inherits the history of the royal line. But does this mean because of the continuity between Jesus
and the Old Testament, between Jesus and the covenant that therefore we must understand that the flesh became the Word? Does this mean that creation was for the purpose of incarnation? Is there in history a progressive incarnation of God, awaiting Israel's
development or man's growth or the intuition of some religious genius who would lay hold of the basic identity between Deity and humanity? This seems to be the point of view of some contemporary Catholic theology, with their excessive emphasis on being. Lionel Thornton, an
Anglo Catholic, for example, maintains that from creation onwards there has been a kind of evolutionary development of man from one spiritual level to another, and that in each new level all the previous levels are representatively taken up and included. The incarnation is the highest of these levels, bringing creation to
its true end in God. Flesh has become the Word. The same is true with an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Father Bulgakov. He argues that the summit of man's rise, which began at creation, is the Virgin Mary, who has revealed in her
own life perfect human sanctity, thus proving that humanity has retained its true nature, capable and worthy of deification, capable and worthy of incarnation. Again, flesh becomes the Word. Man and God coalesce.
If I may put it crudely, Jesus achieves Deity and God pins a merit badge on Him. But it need not necessarily be thus. Indeed, in this explanation two things are missing. The first is the reality of sin and
evil. N.P. Williams speaks of evil's four dimensions. At the dimension of the physical, pain and disease, tornadoes, floods, droughts.
At the level of the aesthetic, ugliness and dreariness, the evil that is incarnate in a slum. At the intellectual level, ignorance and superstition that breed fear and
bondage, and at the moral level, at the level of human personality, sin. And somehow the four levels are related. This is what the Bible bears witness to as it speaks in terms not only of sanctions on man but of sanctions on
man's environment, and it's still true that wherever man goes his environment deteriorates. The first thing that is missed is the reality of sin and evil. It is not a thing to be over passed, a stage, something that is not ultimately real, but can be sloughed off with passage
and the development from level to level. And the second thing that is missed is that the meaning of incarnation is an act and not in being. We said the first and second day that the Eastern Orthodoxy has made incarnation synonymous with advent and the result is the deification of human nature.
But have not we made almost the same mistake. We have intellectualized the incarnation and we understand it as a revelation of truth. The atonement is a revelation of an eternal principle in God, not an act that is done, but
something which Jesus reveals. Well, you think of Abelard and say yes, but that's always been those who have been wrong on the subjective side of the atonement, those who insist that atonement means that the relation that is changed is with man, those who err on the side of moral influence. But the same is true if you will go back and
read the Protestant scholastic theologians. While they purport to take an absolutely different point of view, including the satisfaction of divine justice, you will discover that they are really saying that what Jesus does is to reveal something
already done. What He does is to reveal a principle that already exists in God and He simply illustrates it in history. This is the reason that then theology has treated the life of Jesus as if each event were pantomime. Why was Jesus
baptized in the Jordan by John? It's difficult to explain. If he is sinless and he comes to reveal what already is, then it is merely a pantomime in which he goes through charades. And what of the temptations in the wilderness? Are the temptations
throughout his career, as Hebrews bears witness to? They are basically unreal to him. They point to the reality of the Devil and the reality of temptation and the reality of these threats, but they were not threats to Him. And what of the cross? Even that is Docetized.
For it has no basic connection with that which already is and which Jesus comes to reveal to our intellects. He acts out something before us so that now we will understand. No wonder I say that nearly all of Protestant orthodoxy, and I'm speaking of that
as a historical epoch, no wonder that nearly all of Protestant orthodoxy is Docetic. The incarnation, on the other hand, is an act, and this is one of the two insights of Alleine. Alleine's first insight is that God was in Christ, that what was done
was done by the one God who is both creator and redeemer. Probably somebody ought to write a book now entitled Patripassianism revisited. For the ancient heresy of the Eastern church pointed to a truth that we dare not forget, that God is one, and that God was in Christ and that God did not desert Him in the lurch. And the second thing that
Alleine sees is that the incarnation is act in the sense that something is done into history so that it makes a difference on which side of the atonement that you stand. For the situation of man, of all men, is now changed. God in Christ enters history. This is
the point, this is the act that is discontinuous, the same God who created heaven and earth is the one who enters now in the form of a servant. And we're faced then with this paradox. Jesus is continuous with the structure of grace which has been enacted. He is discontinuous in that he represents also
and is God's act. But we must go further. In the third place, He identifies Himself with man. In this sense the Gospel is the Gospel of identification first, before it can become the doctrine of reconciliation. He identifies Himself with man not at the highest, but at the lowest. Not
where humanity reaches its peak to coalesce with God, but at the lowest, at the point of human need and human suffering, at the point of despair. This means that He stands under the threat, that His nature is real human nature, that there's nothing in human experience that
is alien now to God. This is the point it seems to me that Dostoyevsky was trying to work through and never successfully in all of his novels, and that is how can one represent the Christ figure? He did not want a deus ex machina although finally He had to settle for one, for the grand
inquisitor is His deus ex machina. But he struggled desperately with another dimension. God in the human person, the Christ figure. In Crime and Punishment it's Sonya Marmeladov, this slip of a girl, that mediates to Raskolnikov the presence
of God in His grace. It's she that can follow him to Siberia and can be the instrument of grace, with all the hardened ones who are sent there by the authorities. In The Idiot it
is the idiot, Myshkin, the prince. The first figure is feminine, and the weakness of Myshkin is his femininity. He is the epileptic, the one who suddenly before the seizure has this bright moment of clairvoyance
when all things seem to fall into shape and he sees things as they really are before swooning. But he throws Myshkin away, and he tries with the priest and with Alyosha until finally Ivan, the one we said who represented the Euclidian man brings in
Christ in a legend. And what is he like? He is the one who stands beside man and mediates to man the presence and the grace of God. Berdyaev writes that the picture he had of Jesus Christ from the beginning was the picture that
he learned there in The Grand Inquisitor, the Christ who does not moralize, who does not preach. That is not to say that he does not judge, for his appearing is his judging. His judgment is his presence with his burning love and passion. But he comes not to moralize, he
stands, he accepts. The strange thing as the legend closes is the kiss and the realization that although not a word has been spoken by way of rebuttal, that he loves the old man. Now this is what I think Dr. Tillich is saying in The Courage To Be, when he says the courage to be in this respect is the courage to accept the forgiveness of sins,
not as an abstract assertion but as the fundamental experience in the encounter with God. Self-affirmation in spite of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation presupposes participation in something which transcends the self, in the communion of healing. For example, the psychoanalytic situation, the patient participates in the healing power of the helper by
whom he is accepted although he feels himself unacceptable. The healer in this relationship does not stand for himself as an individual, but represents the objective power of acceptance and self-affirmation. This objective power works through the healer in the patient. Of course, it must be embodied in a person who can realize guilt, who can judge, and who can accept
in spite of the judgment. Acceptance by something which is less than personal could never overcome personal self-rejection, a wall to which I confess can never forgive me. No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation. Being accepted does not mean that guilt is denied.
The healing helper who tried to convince his patient that he was not really guilty would do him a great disservice. He accepts the patient into his communion without condemning anything in the sense of moralizing and without covering up anything. Now I'm
saying that in the incarnation God in Christ accepts us. He stands with us, without covering up anything, mediating to us God's redeeming love and He sets us into the dimension of God's new creation, which is the dimension of grace.
But how can this be so? And the answer is because He overcomes the threat. He can break the chain that binds us. He can shatter the old structures that hold us in thralldom. He
takes it upon Himself without letting it depersonalize Him. Sinful man is denatured, depersonalized man, as Brunner writes. He is still man, but he is denatured and depersonalized. But God in Christ takes this now upon Himself without letting it poison His
relations and depersonalizing Him. Let me illustrate. We know that when relations are poisoned in one respect then our relations with others are poisoned, and if you don't know it, your wife does. My point is, in Jesus Chris
this chain that tends to increase geometrically is broken because He refuses to let these relations depersonalize Him. He can take them into Himself and stop them.
I saw this illustrated in a church in Mannheim-Kafertal in Germany, a church that's built on a spot where God has been worshipped since the Saxon days. Before the war there was a large sanctuary, for while Kafertal is older
than Mannheim now the great industrial city has reached out and engulfed it. But during the war in several days and nights of saturation bombing the church was blitzed. And with its end, the end of the war, the people came creeping out of their warrens and hovels, and the first thing they wanted to do was to re-erect a structure for the worship
of God. They were poor, they could only build a very plain rectangular structure, with balconies along either side and across the rear. And then they wanted some symbolism, and they went to the Rhineland and brought back a woodcarver, a very eccentric genius, who moved
his cot into this bare building, slept there until he could somehow get the feel of it. The only thing that was left that marked the continuity was a font that went back to Saxon days, and then he began to carve. The wood was from a giant tree in the churchyard that had been blown down in the blitz, and he carved twelve apostles and
he attached them six on one side in front of the balcony and six on the other. He was Reformed. Paul was the twelfth apostle. He put Paul and John next to the pulpit, and he demoted Peter, and then, and then he carved Christ in heroic
proportion, attached to the reredos behind the pulpit. And as one goes close to look, he sees immediately a torn place in His side with a piece of shrapnel protruding and a slash in the shoulder and again a piece of steel, and the same wound in His knee and again bits of the
bomb. And the artist had made no attempt to remove these bits of steel and shrapnel, he left them there. Why? To say that which man had used for murder and destruction, that which had been used in relations to annihilate, to depersonalize, and to kill, Christ has
taken them into Himself and they are stopped, never again to be used for that purpose. Now that's the atonement, in a symbol. The act whereby we discover in Him not the revelation of an eternal truth charaded in time, not a pantomime without any
meaning, but an act in which God is present, in which in Jesus Christ that which depersonalizes us and makes us captives to isolation and to collectivization do not depersonalize Him, and we discover in that the meaning of history and the meaning of grace.
This is the way of authentic existence. This is the kingdom that He brings in His person. This is the realm of grace. This is the realm of truly personal relations. In the fourth place, God now has a stake in human nature and human history.
What was done in Jesus Christ was not episodic. Again and again I've emphasized that it was no tour de force. What it was was an illustration, more than that, a creation of the true character of creation. And the church is to be
characterized by the presence of this one who continues so to act through his spirit, to free man for this new dimension of existence. How does one begin to consider the church? Through some mechanical system of continuation?
As if to say that there is a mechanical chain of apostolicity in an office or in a series of persons, or in a content of body of propositions, somehow tangential to the church and also
above it. Or do we begin at the other extreme with the priesthood of all believers, which is very popular today? No. The late T.W. Manson, in two little essays that have recently been published, has pointed out that priesthood of all believers is terribly ambiguous.
What do you mean by all believers? Do you mean corporately all believers, as a corporate priesthood, or do you mean each believer, and if you can decide on that then what do you mean by priesthood? Fortunately, as Presbyterians, we don't believe in the priesthood of all believers. This is not a Calvinistic doctrine. It has bred all sorts of excessive
individualism down through the centuries since the sixteenth, so that at one time we were taught the three marks of a Protestant are the right of private judgment, individual's right to interpret the Scripture as he pleases, and the right of the individual's conscience. The priesthood of all believers assumes
that all believers are equal. Each has every gift, so that the believer in reality is a whole church in himself. The New Testament begins not there, with every believer equipped
with all the gifts, but with the risen Christ who gives gifts, some this and some that and some the other, and they are entered into personal relations not as a sort of fifth wheel, not as an addendum to the Gospel and salvation, but as
absolutely necessary for completion, not because we want to, but because we have to, because we need each other. We are incomplete without each other. And it is this realm, this structure of grace
that Jesus Christ relates himself to as head. He is not it. I suggested the first night the difference between Monism and Monotheism may be seen in the doctrine of grace. He is not it. He stands over it, he acts through it, indeed, he sometimes must go beyond it so far as our eyes can see. Again, turn to
Hebrews. What is the author saying? He is saying Jesus suffered outside the gate. Jesus is out of the world. And what is he saying to the church? Let us go forth to Him outside the camp. He's saying let's get out of church, let's not be fearfully cringing before the world around us. That Jesus Christ will be met out in the
world already at work ahead of us. He stands over it, He acts through it, but He creates His structure in His freedom where He will. That means therefore that we must, as Presbyterians, restore the doctrine of the congregation, for until we understand that the reality of the church is to be seen in the congregation we shall have a
Platonic conception of the church. This does not mean that the Presbyterian principle is invalid at all, but it does mean that when you divorce it from the life of the congregation and the reality of the dimension of grace that exists there in the relations then you have divorced it from the reality of the church. And the church properly understood is
the basic unit to society, even more basic than the family. This has been discovered again in communist lands. Look at the Hungarians. The Hungarians have seen the problem that I described that's so familiar the other night, the problem of the family which is now caught and the attempt is to grind it and destroy it. You can do this in many ways.
You can do this by taking the parents out so that there's no possibility of family. And what has happened is that the church, as the living congregation, has stepped into this relation and has carried on the program of nurture, has carried on a program of understanding and sustenance, a program of growth and awareness so that it is actually more basic
than the family. What about your problem in the inner city? Isn't it possible that the church again may step in and become indeed a structure of grace? Where the power and grace of God are mediated in this relation that is established?
Where families are only temporary, yes, in the structures of our dissolving society, but where there will be born a new structure that can stop the rapid decline of all community and all personality. Where two
or three are gathered together, we tend to think of Christ as a fourth, sitting up watching. Rather that in the relation itself, in what has happened here in this new dimension, Christ is present with all the fruits of his redemption. Now let me conclude
with a parable. If one opens the Bible in Genesis, he discovers that he is not in a dualistic world, that God and man converse together, that there is a relation and it seems to be natural.
Heaven and earth are not two separate places, they are contiguous, so that God can walk in the garden in the cool of the day and Adam can hear His footsteps, not His voice. Then sin,
rebellion, is the rift, but not a dualism in which now we have creation somehow removed, separated quantitatively, spatially. Now the rift is sin that cuts man off from
that which is present, that one who is there. Paul could speak of His being not far from us, any one of us. He is there always, pressing his claim, at the outer edge of our consciousness, but
sin is act that holds down His presence and perverts it into all these idolatrous shapes that man has created. But into this a new structure is introduced. The Old Testament is the record of God's introducing
himself, not once but again and again and again. Creating now this new dimension with Abraham, with Israel, always contextually, in Jesus Christ, through His church and in His church, and the end
is the Apocalypse, where now there is new heaven and new earth. Once again the two are seen together. God's throne is among men. Now we see this new structure is that which in the end is the true
nature of God's creation, the true nature of real reality. That's why theologically it is proper to say that heaven is God's recreated creation, rather than separating it into spatial categories that we have used too
long. This, my friends, is really the drama of which we are a part. This is why we don't despair. This is the universal element in the Gospel. This is the basis of our being co-laborers with God, because God's
grace is not simply an individual thing that still leaves history meaningless, but because God's grace is the Kingdom in which we are sent and which we ultimately inherit. For that's the picture of the true man of grace,
who has been told that a kingdom will be given him and he will be a king, and he will sit down with Jesus Christ to eat and drink in the heavenly banquet. Thank you.