I Barth and the “Post-Barthians”

Rarely has there appeared in Christian theological history a passage more pregnant with momentous possibilities than this one. Some might be tempted to take it as suggesting no more than that the human Jesus was made the instrument of the Father’s redemptive purposes through his obedience to the Father’s will. “What the man Jesus does is God’s own work”: that much could have been said even by the most stringent Cyrilline. But, then, had it been Barth’s intention to affirm the broad lines of classical Christological orthodoxy, we would be hard pressed to explain why he says that the obedience of the human Jesus confronts us with the “inner side of the divine nature of Christ and therefore of the nature of the one true God” – or why he should say that God “is also able and free to render obedience.” Read traditionally, we would expect him to say that it could only be the inner side of the mystery of the human nature of Christ with which we are confronted by Christ’s perfect obedience; the mystery of the “second Adam,” perhaps, of the human being in whom the creation of human “nature” is made complete. But that is not what he says.

Seen in context, it is clear that the mystery of which Barth wishes to speak is the mystery of Christ’s deity.

The inner side of the mystery of which Barth speaks has to do with an inner-trinitarian relation; it is the relation of the eternal Son (or Logos) to the eternal Father in the immanent life of the triune God as the transcendent ground of all that the triune God does ad extra. “We have not only not to deny but actually to affirm and understand as essential to the being of God the offensive fact that there is in God himself an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination.”Footnote ³ What is happening here, I think, is that Barth is reading the lived relation of the Son to the Father characteristic of the Son’s mission in time back into the eternal processions – given that humility and obedience are grounded in the being of God. And so I return to the passage first cited above to ask: is there another possibility? Indeed, there is.

For if it is the case that the human humility and obedience of Jesus Christ are grounded, as Barth says, in God’s being as God (and are not to be seen as the consequence of a choice amongst options made for activity ad extra), then Barth has come very close to saying not only that there is in God an eternal humility and obedience that is rooted in the eternal generation of the Son, but also that this eternal humility and obedience has been concretely realized in time in, through, and as the obedient existence of Jesus; that the relation of the two is best described as one of an identity-constituting “anticipation” (in the procession of the eternal Son) and the fulfilment of that anticipation (in the incarnate life of the human Jesus in time), that these are not really two acts at all but one and the same act performed (in a way that will be explained in this book) by two agents (one divine and one human). What I have in mind is a conception that preserves the logic (if not the categories) of Chalcedon’s differentiation of God and the human – but does so in the form of a new, previously unheard of and untested, application.

So let’s pause for just a moment and think a bit about an action that “begins” as divine and “ends” as human; one and the same action performed by two agents. Here, two interpretive possibilities present themselves. The first (and again, the most traditional) would be that the Logos who assumes flesh according to the Chalcedonian model acts through and upon Jesus in the omnipotence proper to him, thereby making Jesus to be the instrument of his activity. That would, in fact, if taken at face value, ensure that there were but a single activity, though it would have been performed entirely by the first agent in the omnipotence proper to him while the second agent would have lost his agential freedom and responsibility in the process. If then we were to attempt to rescue the situation a bit by adding that, “well, but of course the full humanity of Jesus requires that he have a human mind, will, and energy of operation,” we could then also say that Jesus willingly makes himself to be the instrument of the Logos through his continuous receptivity to the divine activity through and upon him and, therefore, through the agreement of his will with the will of the Logos. This is, in fact, the position of Cyril of Alexandria, as we shall see in the next chapter. But it cannot be Barth’s position since Barth speaks of the incarnate God as lowly, weak, etc. – and not as acting omnipotently in the incarnate state.

The second possibility would be to reverse the flow of traffic, so to speak. On this account, the “assumption” might be construed as an act of receptivity on the part of the Logos, as an act by means of which the Logos continuously takes into himself all that “comes to him” from the human with whom he is joined; all that comes to him in the way of human “properties” and the experiences and activities they make possible. Receptivity on the side of the Logos would result, just as receptivity on the side of Jesus had done for Cyril, in a singular activity of the God-human – and not simply two carefully coordinated sets of activities that correspond each to the other so completely as to appear to us as one (as most traditional treatments of the so-called communicatio operationem have it).

But, now, if the Logos were understood to relate to the human Jesus receptively rather than acting through or upon him, then how are we to explain the unusual power displayed in Jesus’ miracles, his extraordinary knowledge of God and human beings, etc.? My own answer would be: by reference to the Holy Spirit who “conceived” him and gave to him the gifts needed for carrying out his mediatorial office in his baptism. No appeal to the Logos acting through him would be necessary – or even appropriate, under the circumstances. A single activity of the one God-human would be understood to “begin” in a determination of the eternal Son for receptivity to the Jesus who acts in the power of the Holy Spirit and to “reach its conclusion” (i.e. be realized concretely in time) in that human activity. Indeed, where the missions are read back into the trinitarian processions (as the self-constituting life-act of God), the “determination” of the eternal Son for receptivity would rightly be seen as proper to him, as belonging to the triune God in what Barth referred to as his second “mode of being.”Footnote ⁴

Barth himself did not get this far. The truth is that he set forth no “mechanism” by means of which we might understand how two agents could “unite” to perform a single activity, resulting in a single, unified history of the one God-human. He left us instead with a number of unanswered questions – which will be brought into the light of day in due course (in Chapter 3).

Now, admittedly, what I have set forth to this point is quite dense and difficult, and I had to add to Barth a “mechanism” (viz. a genuinely ontological receptivity) in order to say as much as I have – which may help to explain why no one has really thought about this second possibility until now. For the generation that followed Barth, it proved much easier to suppose that the second “person” of the Trinity simply is the man Jesus (full stop); that the Chalcedonian apparatus which Barth had continued to uphold in his own peculiar way had become too burdensome, that the humility proper to the second “person” of the Trinity and his obedience to the first “person” can be collapsed without remainder into the human humility and obedience of Jesus, leaving no distinction between them (not even that of anticipation and fulfilment). The “post-Barthians” who took this step could then say that the Father’s act of “identification” with the crucified Jesus simply is the Father’s act of Self-constitution as triune (an act in time with eternal, ontological significance). There are still two agents of the one history of God on this account but the two are now understood to be the “Father” of our Lord Jesus Christ and Jesus of Nazareth rather than the eternal Son and the man Jesus (as Chalcedon’s implicit dyothelitism requiresFootnote ⁵).

The “post-Barthians” I have in mind are, above all, Eberhard Jüngel and Robert Jenson.Footnote ⁶ Neither of them regarded it as necessary to retain Chalcedon or even the so-called Logos Christology of the early Greek apologists in order to uphold the Christological values they saw as belonging to the core of Barth’s interests.Footnote ⁷ Both understood themselves, therefore, to be thinking with Barth – and, to a degree not always appreciated, against him.

So if I should now choose to go behind these “post-Barthians” in an attempt to reestablish the credibility of the logic of Chalcedon (i.e. its basic distinction between the divine and the human in Christ) on the soil of Barth’s theology, that requires a bit of explanation. Defenders of Chalcedon on its own terms are not hard to find nowadays; not in the English-speaking world, at any rate. And at the other end of the spectrum, the more “liberal” Spirit Christologies are still to be found, especially in Europe. But there are few on either side who care to take up the Chalcedonian Definition critically with a view towards overcoming its defects from within. The battle lines are firmly drawn; one is either for Chalcedon on its own terms (call this the “literalist” option) or one is against it (on the same literal reading). And so virtually no one has stopped to ask, for example, whether there might be a Spirit Christology compatible with – and indeed necessary to – a revised Chalcedonianism.

And yet, such reconstruction is much needed. The collapse of the “Son” into the human Jesus gives rise to serious problems elsewhere in the “system” of Christian doctrinal teachings, above all in the doctrine of the Trinity. That a human being should be regarded as the second “person” of the Trinity generates tremendous differentiation in the Trinity. Indeed, a doctrine of the Trinity constructed on the soil of this understanding of the “person” of Christ will necessarily tend in the direction of “social trinitarianism” – that is, to an understanding of the trinitarian “persons” as distinct individuals, each equipped with his own mind, will, and energy of operation. The problem to which such an understanding immediately gives rise is that of unity. How are the three persons of the Trinity, understood in this way, still one God? It would seem that unity on this account would have to be replaced by a concept of a fellowship; by a communion of “persons” whose unity consists finally in an agreement of their wills in support of a shared aim. But there is a second problem as well. If the second “person” of the Trinity is collapsed into the Jesus of history, then it is likely that the immanent Trinity will be seen as eschatological, as complete only at the end of history and, indeed, as produced by the divine economy. The problem created in this scenario is that of how to understand the relation of the “end” to the “beginning.” Typically, in “post-Barthian” theology, suspicion is cast on the “preexistence” of the Son, the eternal generation of the Son having been collapsed into his birth in time (Jenson) or, perhaps, into the differentiation that is generated through Jesus’ death in God-abandonment (Jüngel). Doubts are raised with regard to the adequacy of talk of “modes of origination” for differentiating the members of the Godhead – a quite sensible move when seen in the right light, but one that need not result in the abandonment of the two categories employed in fourth-century orthodox trinitarianism that alone were actually biblical (viz. “generation” and “procession” – see Jn.1:18, 15:26). Divine simplicity and impassibility are rightly rejected by them but divine immutability goes out the same door without qualification. All of this could be avoided through a well-ordered revision of Chalcedon, one more thorough and complete than Karl Barth himself was able to achieve.

No doubt some readers will be surprised that this book should open with even a mild critique of the “post-Barthians.” Many readers of my previous work have wanted to reduce it in one way or another to a version of Jenson’s or Jüngel’s (if not Hegel’s) thought; to treat it as somehow derivative. And, I have to admit, such reductive misreadings are understandable – up to a point. For no one stands closer to me both as interpreters of Karl Barth and as constructive theologians than do Jenson and Jüngel. What joins me to them is a shared understanding of the central problems and questions needing to be addressed in a Christology. I am indeed a “post-Barthian” – but a “post-Barthian” in a different sense than they were. That will be made clear as we proceed, since they will be two of my principal interlocutors. In any event, my goal in this book will be to do what Jenson and Jüngel did, but to do it in a way that stands closer to Barth.

The Christological construct that will emerge in the final substantive chapter of this book may fairly be characterized as a pneumatologically driven two-“natures” Christology. It is my belief that it has the potential to overcome the divide between the traditional “Logos Christology” and modern Spirit Christologies. But I hasten to add: overcoming that divide (or any other that could be named) cannot be the goal of a genuinely Protestant theology. For Protestants, it is exegesis of the Bible that must provide the ground for the claims ultimately made. And that requirement does place a burden on me since no work of the length envisioned for this monograph can be exhaustive in its treatment of New Testament Christological material. Exegesis is only a part of our task here. So a selection had to be made. Some one strand of New Testament reflection on the “person” of Christ had to be given a leading role.

My own decision was influenced by the claim made by a fair number of Pauline scholars that the so-called “Christ hymn” found in Phil.2:6–11 contains the earliest Christology in the writings gathered together in the canon of the New Testament. Whether Paul himself authored all or even just parts of the “hymn” is a question of no great importance here. What is important, for my purposes, is that it addresses quite directly a question that had to arise almost immediately for any Jewish monotheist upon becoming Christian, viz. how can worship of a human being be reconciled with faith in the one God of Israel? Such a question had to be “early” – and asked with a sense of urgency. In any event, it is the “Christ Jesus,” introduced in v.5 and described in vv.6–8 as having humiliated himself through “self-emptying” and “obedience,” who is then said in vv.9–11 to have been exalted and given the “name which is above every name.” My contention will be that the name in view is the Name which God gave to God’s self in Exodus 3:14; the Name so sacred that Jewish believers had long since ceased to take it upon their lips is “given” by God the Father to Christ Jesus in his exaltation, thereby revealing that this one human being is proper to the identity of the God of Israel – so that worship of the God of Israel must include, for Christians, worship of Christ Jesus. That claim has been made by a leading New Testament scholar, Richard Bauckham; I claim no novelty for it.Footnote ⁸ What is novel is my understanding of the nature of the kenosis alluded to in v.7 – which provides the ontological conditions needed for generating a pneumatologically driven two-“natures” Christology.

II Kenosis

The classical dogmatic understanding of kenosis (after the time of Athanasius at the latest) understood the “self-emptying” subject to be the Logos asarkosFootnote ⁹ (the Logos “without flesh”) whose “emptying” consists in the addition of human nature to himself and not in the subtraction of anything proper to him as God. The Logos, Athanasius insisted over against the Arians, did not grow in wisdom, did not hunger, was not troubled in soul.Footnote ¹⁰ It is in his flesh alone that all of this takes place. Understood in this way, the flesh of Christ constitutes something akin to a “veil” behind or beneath which “the Logos remains what he was.”Footnote ¹¹ For Athanasius, as later for Augustine, “self-emptying” on the part of the Logos is an ontological precondition to incarnation, consisting in a willingness to conceal his glory in the veil of human flesh. This was also the view of the early Karl Barth.

The minority report prior to modern times was provided by Erasmus, Luther, and (interestingly) Calvin, all of whom made the subject of the “self-emptying” to be the Logos ensarkos – which allowed them to say quite forcefully that kenosis is a human activity. In Calvin’s case, it is the self-emptying that occurs on the human side that constitutes the veil of the divine majesty.Footnote ¹² It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the lived existence of Jesus of Nazareth throughout his earthly ministry and, most especially, on his way to the cross. A great many biblical exegetes today still follow the lead of Erasmus and Luther, especially, on the grounds that the “hymn” appears in a paranaetic context. Surely, it is often said, Christians can only reasonably be called upon to emulate the human Jesus – a divine act of “self-emptying” being unrepeatable and perhaps even without analogies. Whether this argument is as strong as its proponents think it to be almost doesn’t matter. One could argue that a decision between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos is a false alternative forced upon premodern theologians by a prior commitment (universally shared) to an understanding of “uncreated being” as simple, impassible, etc. To say, as the later Barth says, that what the man Jesus does is God’s own work and to say it in Barth’s sense would mean that the being-in-act of the eternally humble and obedient Logos is concretely realized in time in and through the humility and obedience of the human Jesus. With that conceptualization in place, a new option had been put on the table. For many long centuries prior, however, the doctrine of God presupposed by Christian exegetes and theologians mandated that a choice be made between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos as the subject of the “self-emptying.”

That remained true even for the so-called kenotic movement in the nineteenth century. I will be giving extensive attention to the Erlangen school and parallel movements in Chapter 2, so I will not say much more here than that it was basic to their Christology that the subject of kenosis should be understood as the Logos asarkos. So they too made a choice between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos. The radicality of their attempt to understand the act of “self-emptying” along the lines of a temporally limited surrender on the part of the Logos asarkos of the “relative” divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence was intended to shore up orthodox Lutheran Christology and render it less vulnerable to the corrosive acid of “life of Jesus” research in particular. They accomplished this by postponing Jesus’ participation in the “relative” attributes to his exaltation. In the state of humiliation, on the other hand, such participation had been rendered impossible by an (alleged) act performed by the Logos asarkos as an ontic precondition to the incarnation, viz. the act of surrendering precisely those omni-attributes. If the Logos did not possess them in the days of his earthly ministry, then of course Jesus could not have shared in them merely through being hypostatically united to the Logos. Such participation had to wait until the Logos took up those attributes once again in the exaltation.

But even the use made by a kenoticist like Gottfried Thomasius of a distinction between “essential” attributes and “relative” attributes (when faced with the charge of having introduced essential, ontological change into the being of the divine Logos) gives further evidence of the conservative nature of his thinking. By insisting that the omni-attributes were “relative” (i.e. that they belong to God not essentially but only by virtue of God’s relation to a world God need not have created in the first place), Thomasius could reasonably insist that no “essential” change had occurred in that these attributes were surrendered. What is often lost to sight here is the fact that the concept of divine “essence” present in this train of thought is still controlled by the twin concepts so beloved of the ancients, viz. simplicity and impassibility. That presupposition was left firmly in place.

Other, more radical, proposals will be considered at the appropriate place in this book. Suffice it to say that what will here be called “kenotic Christology” shares only the name with nineteenth-century versions thereof. An altogether different starting point is needed.

The concept of kenosis that will be set forth here will not presuppose a concept of God fully formed in abstraction from consideration of the narrated history of Jesus of Nazareth as attested in Holy Scripture. Where that has occurred, the testimony of Scripture with regard to the identity of the one who suffered and died in our place has been constrained, hemmed in, and sometimes even silenced with respect to important elements of what it wished to say. God cannot do or experience X, it was frequently said; therefore the meaning of any and every text must be limited to that which is compatible with the concept of God presupposed. But that will not be the procedure here. Nothing will be said of the immanent life of God that does not find a firm and clear root in the economy. A fully formed concept of God will not be presupposed but will emerge through consideration of the ontological conditions in God that would render coherent and credible the earliest Christian confession – made in response to the history of Jesus – that “Jesus is Lord.” The movement of thought will be from below to above in this precise sense.

Kenosis, as I understand the term, refers to that ontological receptivity in relation to the human Jesus by which the identity of the Son is established in eternity (as the personal property of the second “person” of the Trinity, we might say) and the unity of the Christological subject is secured in time. Insofar as ontological receptivity makes the Son to be an experiencing participant in the suffering and death of the human Jesus, the gap opened up traditionally between the natures of Christ by a prior commitment to simplicity and impassibility (so that suffering and death are confined to the human nature alone) is overcome. Kenosis, then, is just this: that ontological receptivity on the part of the eternal Son that makes the humility and obedience of Jesus to be his “own” – not merely in a figurative possessive sense but in a sense that makes it clear that the subject of that human attitude and activity is also the eternal Son.

All of this is stated with considerable economy, quite obviously. A more complete account – and defense – will be provided as the chapters of this work unfold. The crucial point to be made here is that my Christological proposal will not consist in a continuation of nineteenth-century kenoticism. Indeed, it will constitute a decisive break with that tradition.

III The Disposition of the Material in This Volume (An Order of Teaching)

Karl Barth wisely distinguished the exegetical task from the dogmatic task in the following way.

Holy Scripture contains a great deal of theology. But its human writers and editors did not put to themselves all of the questions that their writings awaken in us – and it cannot be wrong in principle to “extend” their intended meaning so as to address new and significant questions. That dogmatic theologians have always done this ought to be clear to anyone who has close knowledge of the history of dogmatics. A classic example that even the most orthodox among us would readily acknowledge is to be found in the doctrine of the Trinity. There is indeed a kind of primitive trinitarianism in the New Testament. But those who ascribed to Jesus the authority to do things that only the God of Israel can do (e.g. judge the world and forgive sins), or to be things only God can be (the “I Am” sayings of John’s Gospel come immediately to mind), did not elaborate a theological ontology that would explain the reality witnessed to by these claims and its possibility. At most, they put in place certain conceptual building blocks with ontological import – and left it to the early Church to elaborate a theological ontology capable of ordering them into a unified scheme. And so, Nicaea can rightly be regarded as providing an ecumenically shared “solution” to the problems created by early Christian worship of Jesus as Lord; not an inherently irreformable solution, mind you, but as the best solution offered to this point in time.

I mention all of this to say that the material in this volume will be arranged as Albrecht Ritschl arranged the three volumes of his great work Justification and Reconciliation: first, a critical history, then the relevant biblical material, and finally constructive theology. In our day and age it needs to be stated clearly that if I place history first, it is not because I think the dogmatic decisions of the ecumenical church are irreformable. And it lies far from me to think that every interpretation of the Bible must be consistent with them in every detail. I place “history” first for distinctively Protestant reasons, viz. because I am convinced that the history of dogmatic theology (and not just of conciliar decisions) is important for understanding the full breadth of options available to us in our efforts to interpret the Bible in relation to questions of enduring significance – and because close study of the history of dogmatics will also make clear what the unresolved (and, in some cases, unresolvable) issues are that still need our attention today, precisely as readers of Scriptural texts. Most of my closest allies and friends in theology have always been either Catholics or “evangelical Catholics.” They have been kind enough to overlook the fact that I am neither – and have extended me friendship anyway. I hope my own way of being guided by the history of dogmatics as a reader of Scripture will be respected by them even if I cannot share with them their understanding of the authority of Tradition. In any event, I will begin with a critical history of Christology with a focus on divine kenosis; not a neutral, disinterested description but a critical engagement with both the orthodox dogma as well as the leading kenotic theories up to the present day and their antecedents, which will make clear the wealth of solutions generated by prior dogmatic reflection.Footnote ¹⁴ I should immediately add that a critical history is not necessarily an “unfriendly” interpretation of sources. My own intends always to be fair to all who are considered. What makes my history “critical” is the turn towards comparative readings that enable us to understand the variety of dogmatic uses of Phil2:6–11 as belonging together to a history. The development of a doctrine – it will surprise no one – is never a straightforward affair, the evolution of an acorn into an oak tree (to borrow an image from Cardinal Newman). And it is not here. What we will find is not steady progress, but advances and retreats, pendulum swings – along with occasional attempts at innovation.

Exegetical theology will then be undertaken with as wide a knowledge of options available as is possible. When we turn to the task of interpreting the “Christ hymn” in Phil.2, we will be asking three questions (all of which presuppose knowledge acquired in the history of doctrine): 1) what does the “Christ hymn” require us to say as dogmatic theologians? What does it “make necessary”? 2) What does it rule out? In what ways might it chasten Christological options by establishing boundary lines whose transgression will no longer allow us to claim the “Christ hymn” as providing authorization for our constructive proposal? 3) What does it permit us to say? It is worth saying here that a truth claim can count as “biblical” even where it finds no explicit warrant in a single biblical text or texts so long as it can be shown to take up and further the spirit or core values at work in particular texts.

The constructive chapter in this work will take up the Chalcedonian Christology in its original wording and seek to evaluate its chosen categories while attentive to its core values – all under the guidance of lessons learned from the history of dogmatics and with an eye towards building on a foundation laid in Holy Scripture. It will also include an attempt to acknowledge the most obvious objections and to give a provisional answer to them.

IV Concluding Thought

This Introduction concludes where it began, with Karl Barth and his claim that humility and even obedience are proper to the eternal Son. If this be true, the ramifications for how the Christian God is understood are many and they are indeed profound. If the Son is eternally humble and obedient unto death, then a relation to this world in Jesus Christ is proper to the being of God.Footnote ¹⁵ And if a relation to this world in Jesus Christ is proper to the being of God, then no talk of God’s being can be appropriate to its “object” that looks away from that relation. It is, in fact, the being of God in the life-act that contains that relation that defines all “attributes” that are rightly ascribed to God. “Attributes” are, I would say, descriptions of the divine act of relating to us in Jesus Christ in the first instance; and descriptions of the divine act(s) of relating to the world in creation, providence, and eschatological consummation only as governed by that initial description.

What that means, among other things, is that terms like “infinity” and “eternity” do not define the being of God; it is rather the being of God in God’s relation to the world in Christ that defines them. To think about the being of God out of a center in God’s lived relation to the world in Christ is to forsake each and every abstractive tendency to treat, for example, the relation of eternity and time as strictly oppositional rather than committing oneself to thinking about God’s eternity as God’s irreducible otherness in God’s relation to time. It is to think of time not as alien to the innermost being of God but as taken up in Jesus Christ into God’s inexhaustible life without detriment to God so that time itself is transformed into the new time of a coming world in which death is no more and the experience of time – and, indeed, of “change” – is no longer controlled by the inevitability of dying. It is to think of eternity not as the negation of time but as both its ground and goal, as its origin and as its redemptive completion.

A second consequence of the starting point adopted here, that the eternal Son should be humble and obedient unto death, means that the differentiation of the trinitarian “persons” cannot be explained solely by reference to “modes of origination” (the Eastern view) or even to the “opposition of relations” to which these “modes of origination” give rise (the Roman Catholic view).Footnote ¹⁶ The explanation of what the trinitarian “persons” are must also include a careful elucidation of “personal properties” – since it is the eternal “Son” alone who is “ontologically receptive” to human suffering and death. Common properties are indeed significant; without them there is no unified triune subject. But without a material differentiation of “persons” of the Trinity, all talk of differentiation is a thinly disguised practical unitarianism. I will put all my cards on the table and say that I do not think the orthodox dogma of the Trinity ever escaped this practical unitarianism. And that is a real shortcoming. The principle of inseparable operations certainly contains a grain of truth. Revelation is a trinitarian act; that much is true. But where the principle is raised to the level of an absolute that requires us to say that if one member of the Godhead does something, all three do it, the step into practical unitarianism is unavoidable.

A third consequence: that the eternal Son should be humble and obedient unto death means that death is not simply the end of human life in this world but an end of human life that the eternal Son experienced directly in order to “relocate” it (hermeneutically and ontologically) from an event in this world to an event in the life of God; a “relocation” through which the power of death to define the very meaning of “finitude” is itself cancelled or annulled. In that this has taken place, death is no longer the defining feature of finite existence as known and experienced by us. By virtue of the fact that the eternal Son lives his death, that he exists in it, passes through it, and is raised from it, death as the defining feature of “finite” existence itself dies. It is absolutely delimited in being given its own absolute end. Finitude as proper to created being is itself transformed and, I would say, elevated. The “new world” is the “old world” but the “old world” made wholly new.

That all of this has significant implications for the problem of evil should be obvious. No longer are we condemned to think of God’s answer to suffering and pain only in terms of raw (indeterminate) power – that is, in terms of an alleged “impassibility” that kills death “on contact” as Bruce Marshall has itFootnote ¹⁷ – or to think of God’s relation to human suffering in terms of mere empathy (i.e. a dispositional state that amounts to little more than a sad shaking of the divine “head”). No, if the eternal Son is a full participant in the human experience of death, then God did not stand off at a distance, immunized against what we experience, but suffered what we experience for and with us as one of us.

Much more can be said and will be as my three volumes unfold. But now the time has come to plunge into our first task: the history of dogmatic reflection on the Christological problem ordered to and by the Pauline concept of kenosis.