The Week of the Compass IV

Part four of Rick Floyd's “The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited” unfolds more of the story the cross tells.

Learning about the nature of God through Jesus seems to me to lead inevitably to grappling with the original risk. That is, the risk of creating genuine “other.” Without God’s self-limiting—indeed self-emptying—all of creation would be pantheistic, panentheistic, or soullessly cold and robotic. The ruach would have only been inspiration (inhaling!) or simply energy spent to wind the toys. Without that act of risk, what's to die for?

(Space reserved for Michael McFerrin's "The Re-Creation of Man" pending artist's permission. Check out this beautiful piece here.)

The Necessity of the Pre-existence of Christ

 The phrase “the historic Christ above history” points to Forsyth's high Christology. If Christ truly shares in the Godhead, then he cannot have been created or arrived in time, but must have been God from before the beginning. The idea of a pre–existent Christ is, of course, seen here and there in the New Testament, most notably in John 1 and in Colossians 1:15ff, and portrayed in the art and hymnody of the church, as in this verse from a hymn:

Low within a manger lies 

He who built the starry skies

He who throned in height sublime

Reigns above the cherubim. (McGrath, Christian Theology, 293)

Forsyth's Christology requires such a pre–existent Christ if the atoning cross is to truly be an act of the God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth. Against the claim of “the history of religions school” that such passages reflect Gnostic influences Forsyth wants to argue that the earthly career of Christ requires that he has been part of the Godhead from before the beginning:

He could never be king of the eternal future if he was not king from the eternal past. No human being was capable of such will. It was Godhead that willed and won that victory in Him. If it was God loving when he loved it was God willing as He overcame. The cross was the reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act within Godhead. The historic victory was the index and the correlate of a choice and a conquest in Godhead itself. (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 270)

An important passage for Forsyth is Matthew 11:27: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and know one knows the son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 81) He cited this text against liberal critics to show that it was not just in the Gospel of John but also in the Synoptics that a high Christology was present. He argues that pre-existence is not some add–on to the Gospel, but an intrinsic feature of the Christ who is God. 

The Gospel requires a pre–existent Christ and Christian experience confirms it. For example he suggsts that Paul's affirmation of the pre-existence of Christ came from his experience, that he “worked back from the faith that all things were made for Christ to the conviction that, as the end was in the beginning, all things were made by Christ; and by a Christ as personal as the Christ who was their goal. (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 269)

So Christ's kenosis is not just an act in time but an act that was established from beyond time:

Christ's earthly humiliation had to have its foundation laid in heaven, and to be believed but as the working out of a renunciation before the world was.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 270) His emergence on earth was at is were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world's foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 271)

Notes from Rick:

(This is the original paper that I presented at the United Reformed Church Centre at Windermere, England in May of 1998, at a conference: P.T. Forsyth: Theologian for a New Millennium. It was gathered with the other papers into a book by the same name edited by Alan P. F. Sell. It later appeared also as a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Pickwick, 2000, Wipf and Stock, 2010.