'The Lord of Glory Was Crucified' (Croall Lecture #6 - Part 2)

Continuing from Part 1: In his sixth and final Croall Lecture on the person and work of Christ, Bruce L. McCormack has reviewed the history of Lutheran kenoticism in the nineteenth century (which concerned itself with those divine attributes that seem to be at odds with the Son's possession of a true humanity), and has made some exegetical observations on the prime passage for kenoticism, Philippians 2.  Here McCormack suggests that Paul has in mind the inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity of Yahweh Himself - not as a pre-incarnate Logos who must divest himself of certain qualities of divinity as a precondition of becoming a human person, nor as the mere humility of the man Jesus, but rather as God's Son who has the quality of humility from eternity.  The Son is always oriented to God the Father as one who is obedient and receptive.  In his human life, then, he lives and acts not from the power of His own divine nature, but in the power of the Holy Spirit.

As the lecture progressed McCormack addressed two more areas: 3) a return to the challenging issue of violence in atonement theory, including where the criticisms do and do not stick; and 4) the ethical component of man and woman's "being in correspondence" with Jesus Christ, the true human.

If you've been following along these past weeks you may remember that McCormack first addressed the challenges from contemporary theologians including J. Denny Weaver over the violence of the traditional doctrine of the atonement back in Lecture 1.  According to this challenge the traditional model of penal substitution indicates that violence is inherent to the doctrine of the atonement, the Christian faith, and even God Himself.  Much of this critique is easy to answer when we consider that God is the subject who is at work on the cross - that the Son and the Father are not acting at cross purposes, that the Father is not inherently wrathful towards us, that God's wrath and God's mercy are not to be played off against one another.

But the tradition has some difficulty make this case with consistency, precisely because of its failure to achieve the integration of the person and the work of Christ.  The tradition, for example, has been unable to entertain the idea of Jesus' death in God-abandonment, i.e. that the cry of dereliction (Mark 15:34) indicates that God the Father has actually withdrawn His sustaining presence from the Son and allowed Him to die a death that is separation from God in a real sense (that is, death as we would experience it under the conditions of our sin).  Because of the ancient commitment to the doctrine of divine impassibility, it has also hesitated to speak of death as an experience proper to God Himself.

What McCormack's new, Barthian take on kenoticism as the eternal humility and obedience of the Son of God does here is to introduce the possibility that humanity - including suffering and death - may be properly predicated of God in His second mode of being.  This is not a function of weakness but of power: the decision of God's eternal election is a decision to be powerless.  This is His sovereign determination.  And so God in His first mode of being (as Father) differs from God in His second mode of being (as Son) as majesty differs from humility.

There is no talk here of a "death of God," McCormack says, but rather of death in God.  This is an important point, and readers of Barth will recognize this refrain from Volume IV/1 of the Church Dogmatics.  On the cross God does not send His Son only to die a human death, to excoriate and terminate the life of his flesh; but rather God here takes death into God's own life.  He "drinks it to the dregs," experiencing death in its full horror and cruelty.  Yet God is not overcome by this experience, but rather it becomes the death of Death.

What of the charge of violence, then?  A well-ordered doctrine of the atonement makes it clear that it is not the violence in the event of Christ's death that has saving value.  Nor is it the suffering of Christ in the flesh that saves us.  For McCormack, the saving value is that Jesus' death is a death in God-abandonment, that it is an endurance of the full penalty for sin - separation from God and the end of God's creative sustaining of our creaturely existence.  Note that penal language still has a place here: Christ is dealing with the just consequences of our sin.  God has handed over Himself to those consequences, and so done away with them.  But violence has at most a didactic value: it depicts the triumphant end of the spiritual oppression that enslaves us.

And so some of Weaver's criticisms do stick.  He is right, McCormack suggests, to criticize the tradition for suggesting a transaction that takes place between the Father and the Son, a transaction which might as well take place outside of history, and which has no ethical component.

That ethical component is where McCormack chooses to finish his lecture series.  Jesus Christ introduces us to our own true humanity, and our "being in correspondence" with Christ makes possible our own realization of true humanity.  We are not transformed by means of a sort of "divine surgery" - no infused habit is added on to us, no substantially construed sin nature is ontologically healed.  Instead, the change in us is affected by an existential encounter with God in the Holy Spirit.  In an actualist metaphysic human beings are what we do; conformity to Christ, therefore, is itself ontological!  As we find ourselves in relation to God through Jesus Christ, the true human, we see what is simply the "eschatological signpost" of what we will be when we see our Savior face-to-face.

Our part to play in this orientation to God is nothing more than surrender, McCormack says.  This primary activity is possible through the gift of faith, and in turn it enables our renunciation of the human in favor of the divine.  It becomes stirringly clear here that an ontology of being in act is an ontology that is inherently oriented to ethics.  And that is a great strength.

Thank you for following along as I've done my best to draw out some important themes of the 2011 Croall Lectures.  It was very rewarding to attend them and to engage Professor McCormack in conversation over the course of two weeks, and I hope that I've managed to do justice here to what he said.  My thanks to him for the experience.  I'll say again that I have not tried to summarize any of the lectures in full, so if you'd like to fully engage the material do be on the lookout for the book when it is published in the next year or two (I hope).  That will also include several sections, and at least one full chapter, that didn't make it into the lectures.  (You'll also discover some of McCormack's more provocative moves that I've deliberately avoided going into here.)

I hope to follow up and conclude this series of posts with some final reflections of my own on the significance of McCormack's new typology for the doctrine of the atonement, and which elements are for me, several weeks later, still itches that demand to be scratched. In the meantime, any questions or comments you have to post would be most welcome.

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Croall Lectures: Series Index
Lecture 1: The 'Perils' of Penal Substitution
Lecture 2: The Incarnation As Saving Event
Lecture 2.1: T.F. Torrance and the Atonement
Lecture 3: 'Let Justice and Peace Reign'
Lecture 4: 'After Metaphysics'
Lecture 5: The Cry of Dereliction in Scripture
Lecture 6: The Humility of the Son (Part 1)

Lecture 6: 'The Lord of Glory Was Crucified' (Part 2)