The Week of the Compass VI

Wow, still lots of questions for today. Is what was carried out yesterday penal or punitive? Atonement? “at-one-ment”? Is it a sacrifice? Substitute? Is what happened yesterday right? Ultimately, what is to remain holy and in sanctity, the law? Where do you go if life does this to folks like this? What hope do any of us have?

Before jumping to any quick formulas for all of this, a couple words from Forsyth are grounding in spite of their being unsettling. No matter the possibilities, it only comes to reality, “it only passes from destiny…through a career.” However this death matters, it cannot be dismembered from the life Jesus lived.

In part six of Rick Floyd's “The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited,” see what you think of Forsyth’s take on all of this. What do you think of his analogy that ends this section? 

The Self-fulfillment of Christ

If kenosis by itself is inadequate what must be the corresponding plerosis? The question that Forsyth wants to address in his two–act Christology is how is the humanity of Jesus related to his Godhead? Forsyth want to take seriously both the historic Christ and his Godhead. He turns aside the liberal view that Christ is the apex of the spiritual evolution that emerges into a divine height in humanity, the divine blossom of the race, or its “heaven–kissing hill.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 33)

No, the historic Christ comes to save humanity and not to exhibit humanity's salvation. “The King makes the Kingdom, and not the Kingdom the King.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 334) It is an invasion not an evolution. “Man does not simply unfold to God but God descends and enters man.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 334)

It is not that divinity and humanity share in being, rather they meet in action. There are two movements, God to man and man to God:

God and man meet in humanity, not as two entities or natures which coexist, but as two movements in mutual interplay, mutual struggle and reciprocal communion. On the one hand we have an initiative, creative, productive action, clear and sure, on the part of the eternal and absolute God; on the other we have the seeking, receptive, appropriative action of groping, erring, growing man. God finds a man who did not find Him, man finds a God who did find Him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 336, The capital “h” on the last word is either a misprint or, more likely, Forsyth's subtle way of saying that God finds man only in Christ.)

Christ embodies these two movements in which God and humanity meet. Forsyth says that in Christ we have two things: we have the action of the Godhead concentrated through one hypostasis (or mode of being) within it, and we have the growing moral appropriation by man's soul moving Godward of that action as its own. This is the two–act Christology which is the heart of Forsyth's project. It has God entering our world: “We have that divine Son, by whose agency the world of souls was made, not now creating another soul, but himself becoming such a soul.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 338) And he enters it to bring man to God as Christ acts in his humanity to be obedient to the will of the Father. Christ never ceases to be what he has always been, but grows in consciousness of his divinity through the unfolding moral crisis which he enters in the world:

. . .the history of Christ's growth is then a history, by gradual moral conquest, of the mode of being from which, by a tremendous moral act, he came. It is reconquest. He learned the taste of an acquired divinity who had eternally known it as a possession. He won by duty what was his own by right.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 308)

Christ in his humanity shares the human reality of growth. Human life does not begin as a finished article. “It begins with certain possibilities, with a destiny engrained in the protoplast; but it only passes from a destiny into a perfection through a career.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 345) So Christ grows by moral struggle. He is tempted, but without sin. Again and again he must freely choose the way to go. Throughout his life he grows in his consciousness of what he was, although not in Godhead itself, which he always had. Here Forsyth is able to speak of a progressive incarnation, although in very qualified language:

We may speak of a progressive incarnation within his life, if we give it a kenotic basis. He grew in the grace in which he always was, and in the knowledge of it. As his personal history enlarged and ripened by every experience, and as he was always found equal to each moral crisis, the latent Godhead became more and more mighty as his life's interior, and asserted itself with the more power as the personality grew in depth and scope. Every step he victoriously took into the dark and hostile land was an ascending movement also of the Godhead which was its base. This ascent into Hell went on, from His temptation to His tomb, in gathering power. Alongside his growing humiliation to the conditions of evil moved his growing exaltation to holy power. Alongside the Kenosis and its negations there went a corresponding Plerosis, without which the Kenosis is a one-sided idea.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. 349)

Kenosis and Plerosis together constitute two movements of a single act of God. The more Christ laid down his personal life the more he gained his divine soul. “He lives out a moral plerosis by the very completeness of his kenosis; and he achieves the plerosis in resurrection and ascension.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 300)“

The moral struggle that Christ was involved in was the struggle to be obedient to the Father's will. It is the struggle to become a servant. What does Christ's becoming a servant mean? It means that he took on a state of subjugation in which he was called upon to render obedience. What Christ becomes by his kenosis is a servant, and it is the free moral act involved in his obedience to the Father's will that is decisive for his Lordship. 

It is not his suffering, but his obedience, that makes him Lord. Forsyth rejects the idea that what is satisfied in the atonement is God's wounded honor or God's justice:

We have further left behind that the satisfaction of Christ was made either to God's wounded honour or to His punitive justice. And we see with growing and united clearness that it was made by obedience rather than suffering. There is a vast difference between suffering as a condition of Atonement and suffering as the thing of positive worth in it, what gives it its value.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 67)

 But although Christ takes on full humanity there is a limit. He remains without sin, and must for only the sinless one can accomplish the work of the Holy God against sin. Forsyth counters the argument that this somehow makes him less than human. He argues that Christ was indeed tempted in every way that humans are, and that his struggles were real. “Because Christ was true man he could be truly tempted; because he was true God he could not truly sin; but he was not less true man for that.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 302)

What if kenosis involved the limitation of his knowledge of the impossibility of sinning? Clearly his struggles as recorded in the Gospels persuade us that he took the possibility of sin seriously. In the Garden of Gethsemane Christ struggles with whether the cross is truly the Father's will. Forsyth says that he chose not to know that for him sinning was impossible, and in doing so, shared the full human experience of temptation:

. . . to his own experience the moral conflict was entirely real, because his self–emptying included an oblivion of that impossibility of sin. As consciousness arose he was unwittingly protected from those deflections incident to inexperience which would have damaged his moral judgment and development when maturity came. And this was only possible if he had, to begin with, a unique, central, and powerful relation to the being of God apart from his own earthly decisions. So that his growth was growth in what he was, and not simply to what he might be. It was not acquiring what he had not, but appropriating and realising what he had. It was coming to his own unique self. I have already said that I am alive to the criticism to which such a position has been exposed, in that it seems to take him out of a real moral conflict like our own. And the answer, you have noted, is three-fold. First, that our redeemer must save us by his difference from us, however the salvation get home by his parity with us. He saves because he is God and not man. Second, the reality of his conflict is secured by his kenotic ignorance of his inability to sin. And third, his unique relationship to God was a relation to a free God and not to a mechanical or physical fate, or to an invincible bias to good.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 342)

For Forsyth the death of Christ is really a sacrifice, but it is not to a sacrifice made to God as much as a sacrifice made by God. “Atonement to God must be made, and it was only possible from God.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 365) Christ became sin for us, and took the penalty for that sin on himself. So the cross is penal but God doesn't punish Christ:

He was made sin. God did not punish Christ, but Christ entered the dark shadow of God's penalty on sin. We must press the results of God's holy love in completely identifying Himself with us. Holiness is not holiness till it go out in love, seek the sinner in grace, and react on his sin by judging it. But love is not divine identification with us until it become sacrifice. Nor is the identification with us complete till the sacrifice become judgement, till our Saviour share our self–condemnation, our fatal judgement of ourselves on Christ's name. The priest, in his grace, becomes the victim, and completes his confession of God's holiness by meeting its acting as judgement. To forgive sin he must bear sin.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 362) 

 This makes for a priestly Christ, a priestly religion and a priestly church. (See my “The Cross and the Church: The Soteriology and Ecclesiology of P.T. Forsyth” ):

New Testament Christianity is a priestly religion or it is nothing. It gathers around a priestly cross on earth and a Great High Priest Eternal in the heavens. It also means the equal priesthood of each believer. But it means much more. That by itself is ruinous individualism. It means the collective priesthood of the Church as one. the greatest function of the Church in full communion with Him is priestly. It is to confess, to sacrifice, to intercede for the whole human race in Him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 12)

The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace.” (The Cruciality of the Cross, 41)  

Atonement is substitutionary, else it is none. Let us not denounce or renounce such words, but interpret them. they came into existence to meet a spiritual necessity, and to seep them away is spiritual wastefulness, to say no worse. We may replace the word substitution by representation or identification, but the thing remains. Christ not only represents God to man but man to God. Is it possible for any to represent man before Holy God without identifying himself in some guiltless way with human sin, without receiving in some way the judgment of sin? Could the second Adam be utterly untouched by the second death? Yet if the Sinless was judged it was not His own judgment He bore, but ours. It was not simply on our behalf, but in our stead . . . .” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 83)

The atonement is penal but not penitential. The punishment of sin fell on Him:

The suffering was penal in that it was due in the moral order to sin. It was penal to Christ's personality, to His consciousness, but not to His conscience. It was not penitential. There was no self–accusation in it. He never felt that God was punishing Him, though it was penalty, sin's Nemesis that He bore. It was the consequence of sin, though not of His sin.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 85)

Forsyth offers this illustration:

Schamyl was the great religious and military leader of the Caucasus who for thirty years baffled the advance of Russia in that region, and, after the most adventurous of lives, died in 1871. At one time bribery and corruption had become so prevalent about him, that he was driven to severe measures, and he announced that in every case discovered the punishment would be one hundred lashes. Before long a culprit was discovered. It was his own mother. He shut himself up in his tent for two days without food or water, sunk in prayer. On the third day he gathered the people, and pale as a corpse, commanded the executioner to inflict the punishment, which was done. But at the fifth stroke he called, “Halt!” had his mother removed, bared his own back, and ordered the official to lay on him the other ninety-five, with the severest threats if he did not give him the weight of each blow.

 Forsyth concludes this story by saying, “this is a case where his penalty sanctified her punishment both to herself and to the awestruck people. Every remission imperils the sanctity of law unless he who remits suffers something in the penalty foregone; and such atoning suffering is essential to the revelation of love which is to remain great, high and holy.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 88)

 

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.