<i>because in God’s glory, we are the ones truly glorified.</i>

What a corker! And how wonderful of you to remind us of it, Mark.

Mikey Lynch and Gordon Cheng,

You are very welcome for the series, glad you found it profitable.

Scott Doty,

Thanks for your contribution, it’s a good highlighting of the connection between God’s grief and the call to holiness.

I agree that we can provoke God’s wrath, grieve him, and please him.  My question is whether that means the same thing in our relationship with God as it does in our relationship with each other.

Genesis 6:5-6 does not only say that God was ‘grieved,’ it also states that God was sorry that he made man.  The overwhelming majority of Christians have understood that this cannot be taken at face value.  For God to be sorry that he made man in the way a human would be would mean that God had second thoughts about creating the human race. Such an idea would seem to contradict the Bible’s teaching about God’s perfect wisdom, his perfect knowledge of the future, and his control over the world, as well as his love for the world.

Consequently, most Christians read that ‘God was sorry that he made man’ and understand that it means something - and something very significant.  But they don’t read it as a straightforward window into the internal life of God. 

I’d suggest that Scripture’s language that God is grieved should be understood similarly - it means something, and something very significant, but it shouldn’t be read as trying to get inside God’s inner emotional life. 

It is, as with all of Scripture, primarily a statement designed to speak to our relationship with God in space and time, not primarily to speak directly about what is happening to God in his internal world.

Hi Martin,

Just regarding your first point on the above concerns: being a theological student at MTC presently, I often hear this one bantered around. 

It actually gets me thinking though: what evidence is there for this claim? Is it a claim from silence, or does it have substantial support?

Ie, “1. Much theologising, particularly in this realm, is somewhat troubling because it is not derived from exegesis so much as an imposition of a framework on exegesis.”

Anyway question is: what exegetical work through history have you interacted with on this doctrine?  Just curious, because I’d be keen to know who the exegetical work to check out…

Thanks,
Mark

Hello Martin, great to hear from you.

I love your five points - I think they open up the issues involved in this kind of question really well.  I’ve done a basic draft of an interaction with each point, but I’m going to try and just polish each one a bit and offer four of them (interacting with your points 1,2, 4 and 6) to Karen as possible posts.  I think the issues you raise push things out to issues beyond impassibility - and so they’d be great as the basis of fresh posts.  We’ll see what Karen wants to do with them.  From memory she was hoping to start a longish series of mine on forgiveness and repentance on Monday so she may not want to publish the four things as posts at the same time.  If that’s the case I’ll add them as four comments to this thread in a couple of days.

Point 3 is sufficiently contained that I think I can just post my interaction straight to comments now, while we wait to see what happens with the rest.

3. It undermines the relational nature of God. If “image” does incorporate any notion of relationship (as suggested by the plurality of the image in Gen 1) then the language of relationship could be expected to reflect something of the nature of the Creator in the creature made in his image.

My immediate question on reading this is: how does impassibility undermine the relational nature of God?  How do you know that passibility is a requirement for relationships?  What exegesis led you to that conclusion or, given your concerns in point 1, could this be an example of theologising that imposes a framework upon your exegesis? 

My further thought has to do with how you see image in Gen 1 and relationship. 

Deriving the idea that image involves being in relationship (rather than saying that image is something we are that makes being in relationship possible – which is the more classical view in the Christian tradition) from the fact that man and woman are in the image is, as far as I am aware, original to Barth.  And the more I dip into German Idealism (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger so far) the more his reading of Genesis 1 seems to fit neatly into his intellectual context.  The Hegelian tradition was trying to find a way to show how we aren’t something first, and then enter into relationships but that the relationships we are in define who and what we are. 

So Barth saying that being in the Image of God means to be in relationship is profoundly biblical in the sense that it is a reading of the Bible that entirely reflects a respectable intellectual tradition among non-Christian thinkers of his context.  It might seem profoundly biblical to us, because most contemporary evanglelicals are fairly strongly wedded to some kind of empirical foundationalism as their working epistemology (because our society is) and so good insights coming from the Continental Idealism tradition can illuminate aspects of life hitherto hidden in the powerful way that we generally associate with the Bible.  Nonetheless, usually we don’t think things are profoundly biblical when they match up neatly with the views of the intellectual elites of the time, unless we happen to like the views. We normally accuse the person of imposing an unhelpful framework upon the Bible.

I am happy for someone to decide that this was one of the (few) areas that Barth got it right in his rejection of pre-existing tradition even though Barth was reading the Bible in of a “theologising framework”, once that person has seriously weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives.  I’m somewhat less happy for someone who as their point 1 expressed concern about theologising imposing frameworks upon exegesis to then in their point 3 adopt a bit of Barth’s theology as though it is a self-evident exegetical observation that is immune to the same charge made in point 1 against alternatives. 

I don’t find passibility to be self-evidently necessary for relationships.  I find Barth’s exegesis about as convincing as suggesting that image in Gen 1 has to do with reproduction because the man and woman were commanded to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.  His view is a contender, but I would question whether, when the Bible as a whole is taken into consideration, it is any stronger a contender than more classical alternatives.

I think we’re going to disagree reasonably sharply on all five points - but I think that disagreement, and the way you’ve brought the issues back to such important principles with such an economy of words, might make the discussion valuable more broadly than just impassibility.

Gordon,

Only an evil genius would think of such an analogy; the rest of us would just think ‘lights’, ‘bushels’ and ‘under’ (but perhaps not in that order…)

Hi Mark

Thanks for these posts. I may have missed this along the way - but does the impassability of God apply only to the Father? The impassability of God holds that “God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer”  - but these are the very things that are claimed of Jesus.
To put the question pointedly - would you say that “on the cross God the son died”?

Hi Martin,

Humble apologies for getting your name wrong.  It does put you in the same rarefied company as Mr Spock, but I’ll try and make sure I don’t repeat the mistake nonetheless. 

Not sure what is going on with the comments being closed on the latest post.  I’m hoping it’s just a quirk that Karen can easily fix.  I’ll wait a day or two to see if we can make that happen, otherwise I’ll continue the conversation on your blog.

With your point:

In my desire to be brief I may have obscured the logic in my thinking above. My point 3 derives from the preceding points…

It’s not really a you thing here, but a me thing.  The building logic of your points is clear (at least to me).  Ideally, I would have responded to each point in turn.  But that would have then meant leaving your comment for a week until the second post went up (if I have correctly guessed Karen’s revised posting schedule) - which would seem a bit churlish to me, when that’s the only bit that’s going to be left in thiscomment thread.

I’ll leave your fine two paragraphs in your recent comment which expand your concerns on language as that is the subject of the next post in this new series and I don’t want to spread that discussion out over a couple of places.  It is possibly where you and I might have our strongest and most important disagreement so as you say, that conversation could prove to be very interesting (and I hope worthwhile for people too).

As to the question of image, I quite agree it was an aside - hence this part of the discussion being in the comments.  I also agree that, on balance, I think Gen 1 suggests that being in the image results in having dominion.

However, I think it is a jump that is not grounded in Gen 1 to go from ‘dominion’ to ‘relationship’.  ‘Dominion’ involves our relation to that part of creation that is not personal - we have dominion over things not persons. 

But ‘relationships’ usually is getting at our relation to personal realities - persons not things. 

I don’t have a relationship with a rock, a tree, or even, I would argue, a pet animal.  Not in the full sense of what ‘relationship’ is getting at.  But I have dominion over them.

It is one of my bugbears at the moment that we seem to be so relationship obsessed that we see relations as immediate proof of relationships (which makes me suspect a theologising framework of the bad kind).  It can be argued but when it is simply asserted that image incorporates relationships because it results in dominion then that’s bad theology passing itself off as exegesis, even if we might want to agree with the conclusions if a few more steps were put in the argument.

I will admit to being curious about a point I raised earlier.  Do you have a reason for thinking that passibility is necessary for relationships and so impassibility automatically undercuts the relational nature of God?

Hi Mark,

I’m not connecting dominion and relationship except to suggest that dominion probably does not exhaust the significance of the image and so image may include some relational aspects.

You asked,

I will admit to being curious about a point I raised earlier.  Do you have a reason for thinking that passibility is necessary for relationships and so impassibility automatically undercuts the relational nature of God?

As I tried to explain on the newer thread, impassibility undercuts the possibility of knowing God through his words because it renders the meaning of those words opaque.

Hi Mark

What am I missing?

I cannot see how saying that the two natures of Christ died on the cross contravenes both Nicea and Chalcedon.
It is certainly contrary to the statement “God the Son cannot die” (which I cannot find in Chalcedon or Nicea - and so am assuming is part of the doctrine of impassability).
Instead I think it could be argued that the view that the two natures died is in keeping with Chalcedon and Nicea that the two natures are indivisible and inseparable. By contrast the view that Jesus the man died but not God the son - divides the two natures at the point of death.

Thanks for your time
Tony

Hi Mark

No problems with the sabre-rattling - blogs should be a bit like college (IMHO) a place to fly a kite and have a robust (but healthy) disagreement.

Broadly speaking - I suppose for me - the suspicion/issue that I have had with the whole notion of impassability - is not that it constructs a framework - but that when it runs up against texts that do not fit its framework - it tends to say “this cannot mean what the text says it means”. For my mind the classic is “God made him who had no sin to be sin” (2Corinthians 5:21) - where its argued that the text cannot mean what it says - because of the impassability of God (I think Stott does this - though I have mislaid my copy of the Cross of Christ - where he argues that “to be sin” does not mean “be sin” but rather that “sin came close to Jesus”).

On the specific issue:
<blockquote>So either the Father is mortal, or the Son did not die according to his divine nature<blockquote>

I am not sure that I need to take either of the two options you have laid out. For my mind its like someone saying “well either the ransom was paid to God or the devil - which one was it?” - I just can’t help but think the question is the wrong one to ask - because it has been framed incorrectly.

<cite>Why limit this to death, if you are right?<cite>
Because I don’t think much (if anything) hangs on the other matters you’ve raised, and because I don’t think the Scriptures take me down that path.
But I do think the Scriptures push me to consider that on the cross Jesus (as God and man) dies. I cannot help but wonder if we are somehow diminishing the full scope of the horror, mystery and glory of the cross by saying something like “Jesus as man died on the cross but Jesus as God most certainly did not”.

I think what I want to say is “Tis mystery all the immortal dies”. And then in saying no more - be left reeling from the full weight of what should have been impossible occurring on the cross.

Hi Tony,

Broadly speaking - I suppose for me - the suspicion/issue that I have had with the whole notion of impassability - is not that it constructs a framework - but that when it runs up against texts that do not fit its framework - it tends to say “this cannot mean what the text says it means”. For my mind the classic is “God made him who had no sin to be sin” (2Corinthians 5:21) - where its argued that the text cannot mean what it says - because of the impassability of God (I think Stott does this - though I have mislaid my copy of the Cross of Christ - where he argues that “to be sin” does not mean “be sin” but rather that “sin came close to Jesus”).

Well, a framework that does not have to smooth some details is either very, very good, or (far more likely) the product of tortured reasoning from start to finish.  So I think you do have a problem with frameworks - you want them to give way as soon as they have to smooth a particular.  And that means that they aren’t really a framework at all.

I could agree with you on this kind of point only if I thought the Bible was primarily ‘flat’ in its use of language.  This is the other big dimension that I think is often missing in our discussions. (Something I want to blog on sometime.)

There is a spectrum of strategies when it comes to language.  One end is what I think of as low risk low reward strategies, the other end is high risk high reward strategies.  Academic and professional writing is a low risk low reward strategy - language is used with fixed technical terms, with careful complex sentences, where the rules of communication are designed to enable information to be expounded with a minimum chance of misinterpretation.  It’s a safe way of communicating but it can’t do much more than make good arguments - it can’t stir the heart, prick the conscience, stimulate the imagination (except by means of careful arguments).

Preaching and, even more, poetry are high risk high reward strategies.  Language is used in ways that are almost begging to be misunderstood: “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out;”  “This is my body.”  They capture the mind, stir the heart, but they often aren’t meant to be taken literally.  And they don’t bother to stop and say, “By the way, don’t take that bit literally.”

And then, in the middle, you can use a mixture of the strategies.  You can preach to people in a highly expositional style.  And I think that’s what Paul does.  He’s not writing to the Academy in his writings.  He’s preaching.  So that has to be taken into account. 

Sometimes he says things with a bit of a rhetorical flourish to drive home the impact, not so much to be giving a precise account of the specifics.  And sometimes he does the opposite.

We spend most of our time with Paul, so we tend to assume that he’s the baseline for biblical interpretation.  But I think that at times he can be harder to read than OT poetry - because at least there we know we have to think carefully about the possible ways language could be being used.

As a consequence I see taking ‘he was made sin for us’ as a figure of speech as far more responsible than you instinctly feel it is - it could be wrong, and needs to be argued on its merits, but it is entirely in keeping with the Bible’s, and Paul’s, way of using language.

When you adopt high risk high reward strategies then the responsible hearer needs to ‘smooth’ the details in light of the message as a whole.  That’s only a problem if you think that poetry and preaching aren’t proper ways of using language - and given the large amount of poetry in the Bible, God doesn’t share that conviction.

So I think frameworks smoothing details is far better grounded in the nature of Scripture than your concern acknowledges.

I’ll pick up the Christological issue with my next comment.

But I do think the Scriptures push me to consider that on the cross Jesus (as God and man) dies. I cannot help but wonder if we are somehow diminishing the full scope of the horror, mystery and glory of the cross by saying something like “Jesus as man died on the cross but Jesus as God most certainly did not”.

Possibly.  But that’s the kind of abstract argument that I don’t like:

And so on.

This isn’t a go at you, because I see this a lot.  But it’s a cheap way of arguing.  We need to argue the particular features of our particular view - good and bad, comforting and unsettling, and not try and win with invoking some abstract notion of some quality that purportedly attaches to our view.

If the eternal Son of God really and truly dies on the Cross then 1500 years of Christians have concluded that that’s an awe-ful lot of horror, mystery, and glory.

But if he dies in his divine nature, then at a minimum, he had to stop working in his divine nature until his body was raised from the dead.  Dead people don’t work.  Christ is the one Meditor between us and God, the one in whom all things hold together, and the one through whom the Father always acts.  Unless you opt for a view of ‘death’ that isn’t ‘death’ by any estimate that we normally have, then the view that Christ died in his divine nature begins to tear apart the whole shape of orthodox faith.  People related to God but not through the Son (because he was dead), the Father continued to act but not through the Son, everything held together but not in the One by whom and for whom it was made.

I agree that I am holding back from the ‘full horror’ of your view of the cross but that’s because I think that horror involves either evacuating death of its full horror, or smashing the Christian faih into little tiny bits.

I think what I want to say is “Tis mystery all the immortal dies”. And then in saying no more - be left reeling from the full weight of what should have been impossible occurring on the cross.

The problem is that “Tis mystery all the immortal dies” is said by someone who believed in Chalcedon and so did not believe what you want to say. If you are right, there is no mystery.  Obviously the immortal dies on the cross.  But the mystery is that the eternal Son truly and really died.  God cannot die, and yet, somehow, the Son of God really and truly died.  Behind Wesley’s line is the two natures each with their own properties but all true of the one Person that you want to deny.