God of Salvation

Soteriology in Theological Perspective

Murray A. Rae, Ivor J. Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317126546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The theology of salvation stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Very often the structure of Christian salvation is seen in terms of a single theme, such as atonement for sins, forgiveness, liberation or friendship with God. It is easy to reduce soteriology to a matter of merely personal experience, or to see salvation as just a solution to a human problem. This book explores a vital yet often neglected aspect of Christian confession - the essential relationship between the nature of salvation and the character of the God who saves. In what ways does God's saving outreach reflect God's character? How might a Christian depiction of salvation best bear witness to these features? What difference might it make to start with the identity of God as encountered in the gospel, then view everything else in the light of that? In addressing these questions, this book offers fresh appraisals of a range of major themes in theology: the nature of creaturely existence; the relationship between divine purposes and material history; the holiness, love and judgement of God; the atoning work of Jesus Christ; election, justification and the nature of faith; salvation outside the church; human and non-human ends; the nature of eschatological fellowship with God. In looking at these issues in the light of God's identity, the authors offer a stimulating and tightly-argued reassessment of what a Christian theology of salvation ought to resemble, and ask what the implications might be for Christian life and witness in the world today.

Chapter 1
‘It was the Will of the Lord to Bruise Him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God

John Webster

I

The chief task of Christian soteriology is to show how the bruising of the man Jesus, the servant of God, saves lost creatures and reconciles them to their creator. In the matter of salvation, Christian theology tries to show that this servant – marred, Isaiah tells us, beyond human semblance, without form or comeliness or beauty – is the one in and as whom God’s purpose for creatures triumphs over their wickedness. His oppression and affliction, his being put out of the land of the living, is in truth not his defeat at the hands of superior forces, but his own divine act in which he takes upon himself, and so takes away from us, the iniquity of us all. How can this be? How can his chastisement make us whole? How can others be healed by his stripes? Because, Isaiah tells us, it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; because God has put him to grief; because it is God who makes the servant’s soul an offering for sin. And just because this is so – just because he is smitten by God and afflicted – then the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand, and the servant himself shall prosper and be exalted. And not only this: the servant shall also see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he shall see his offspring.

As it tries to explicate how God is savingly at work in the affliction of his servant, Christian soteriology stretches both backwards and forwards from this central event. It traces the work of salvation back into the will of God, and forward into the life of the many, who by it are made righteous. Soteriology thus participates in the double theme of all Christian theology, namely God and all things in God. The matter of the Christian gospel is the eternal God who has life in himself, and temporal creatures who have life in him. The gospel, that is, concerns the history of fellowship – covenant – between God and creatures; Christian soteriology follows this double theme as it is unfolded in time. In following its theme, soteriology undertakes the task of displaying the identities of those who participate in this history and the material order of their relations. The Lord who puts his servant to grief is this one, dogmatics tells us; this is his servant, these the transgressors who will be accounted righteous.

So conceived, soteriology pervades the entire corpus of Christian teaching, and its exposition necessarily entails sustained attention to trinitarian and incarnational dogma, as well as to the theology of creatures and their ends. Indeed, no part of Christian teaching is unrelated to soteriology, whether immediately or indirectly. This does not mean that all other Christian teaching can be resolved into soteriology, or that other teaching is to be arranged around soteriology as its centre. Quite the contrary: making some variant of soteriology (such as the theology of the cross, or justification) into the rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum distorts the order and proportions of Christian dogmatics. Soteriology is a derivative doctrine, and no derivative doctrine may occupy the material place which is properly reserved for the Christian doctrine of God, from which alone all other doctrines derive. The question from which soteriology takes its rise, and which accompanies each particular soteriological statement, is: Quis sit deus?

The answer which dogmatic soteriology gives to that question takes the form of an exercise in biblical reasoning. Biblical reasoning is the analytical and schematic presentation of the Christian gospel as it is announced in Holy Scripture. Dogmatics is a work of reason which is set in motion by, and at every point answerable to, the self-communicative presence and action of God the Lord; it operates in the sphere of God’s rule, in particular, that rule exercised in the work of revelation. Dogmatic soteriology can, therefore, only be undertaken as attentiveness to the commanding address of God in the gospel, the ‘word of reconciliation’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Further, attending to this reconciling message of the gospel requires that reason itself be reconciled to God, for in the aftermath of the fall reason has lost its way, becoming estranged from and hostile towards God (Col. 1:21). If it is to discharge its office, therefore, reason must acquire renewed pliability and consent to God, teachableness. In practical terms, this means that as an exercise of theological reason soteriology is at every point directed to the prophetic and apostolic testimonies of Scripture, since they are the sanctified creaturely auxiliaries of God’s revealing and reconciling presence. Through their ministry, God addresses and quickens. This is why soteriology is repetitio Sacrae Scripturae.¹

How does this conception of the task of soteriology govern the way in which it goes about its work? First, it presses soteriology to order its presentation of the material with a firm eye on the dramatic sequence of the biblical economy of salvation, both in the larger plot of covenantal history and in the concentrated episode of the work of the Word incarnate.² Second, soteriology will acknowledge the priority of biblical concepts and titles, drawing upon them as the normative prophetic and apostolic stock of language and ideas which constitute the governing material content of dogmatic reflection. Third, soteriology will allow itself only such conceptual inventiveness and argumentative reordering of this material as serves to direct us to the biblical positum – by, for example, drawing attention to features of the biblical economy through conceptual summary, or by setting forth the identities of the agents in that economy. Fourth, accordingly, soteriology will be cautious about ordering its material around some theme (such as ‘facing’³ or ‘hospitality’⁴), or as a response to a perceived problem (such as violence⁵). Thematic or problem-oriented presentations are commonly nominalist and moralistic, since their centre of gravity lies not in the irreducible person and work of God but rather in some human experience or action of which theological talk of salvation is symbolic. Soteriology must fall under the rule which governs all dogmatic work, namely ‘the claim of the First Commandment’.⁶ To speak of dogmatic soteriology as biblical reasoning is to press home the noetic application of that claim.

But what of the material extension of the first commandment – that the doctrine of God precedes and governs all other Christian teaching? The rest of my remarks are given over to reflecting on this matter, the argument proceeding in three stages: (1) A sketch of the setting of soteriology in the corpus of Christian doctrine is offered; this is followed by (2) an analysis of the subordination of soteriology to the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to teaching about the processions and missions of God’s eternal and living fullness, and about the eternal purpose of God; (3) a brief concluding note on the human history of the Saviour. The argument in its entirely is to be regarded as no more than an extended gloss on a statement of Thomas: ‘knowledge of the divine persons was necessary for us … so that we may have the right view of the salvation of humankind, accomplished by the incarnate Son and by the gift of the Holy Spirit’.⁷ Only on this basis, I suggest, can we understand why it is good and wholesome to confess that ‘it was the will of the Lord to bruise him’.

II

Insofar as it attempts a systematic presentation of its subject-matter, dogmatics has an especial concern for the scope and integrity of Christian teaching. Particular doctrinal loci are not treated in isolation or simply seriatim, but as ‘topics’ or ‘episodes’ in a unified movement. That movement is the history of fellowship between God and God’s creatures; systematic theology portrays this history and indicates its ground in the eternal sufficiency and glory of God. Of the elements of this history, which is the setting for a theology of salvation, we may offer the following summary description.

The bedrock of soteriology is the doctrine of the Trinity. The perfect life of the Holy Trinity is the all-encompassing and first reality from whose completeness all else derives.⁸ God’s perfection is the fullness and inexhaustibility in which the triune God is and acts as the one he is. His perfection is not mere absence of derivation or restriction; it is his positive plenitude. God’s perfection is his identity as this one, an identity which is unqualified and wholly realized: ‘I am who I am’ – what the scholastic divines called the perfectio integralis in which God’s life is complete in itself. That completeness is fullness of life, the effortless activity in which God confirms his excellence as Father, Son and Spirit. God lives from himself, he is perfect movement, the eternally fresh act of self-iteration. This act is the ‘processions’ or personal relations which constitute God’s absolute vitality: the Father as the principle of the Trinity, the Son who is eternally begotten, the Spirit who proceeds – as this is the positive wholeness and richness of God’s life in himself.

God’s boundless immanent life is the ground of his communication of life. God lives in himself and gives life. He is not locked up in his aseity; his blessedness is not self-absorbed, for alongside the ‘personal works’ of God’s self-relation there are God’s external works in which, of his own will, he brings into being life other than his own, the life of creatures. He does so graciously, without compromise of his own freedom; he is not constituted or completed by the works of his hands, since as their creator he transcends them absolutely. And he does so lovingly, bestowing genuine life upon all that he makes and ennobling the human creature by appointing it for fellowship with himself.

In his free and loving act of creation, God gives to creatures their several natures and ends. To be a creature is to have a nature, to be a determinate reality having its being as this. And to have a nature is to be appointed to a history in which that nature is perfected. In the case of human creatures, the enactment of nature through time involves consent, that is, conscious, willing and active affirmation of nature. Human creatureliness involves (though it is not exhausted in) spontaneity. Beasts give no consent to their nature and end; human creatures do so, and their consent is necessary for the completion on the creaturely side of the fellowship with God for which their nature determines them.

These summary references to the doctrines of God and creation form the deep background to the economy of God’s saving works, helping us to identify the agents in that economy. This, according to dogmatics, is ‘what goes on’ in created time: the high and eternal God who is life in himself gives life to creatures. Against this background, what is to be said of the divine work of salvation?

Creatureliness is basic to being human. The nature and end granted by God the creator, and the consent in which they are enacted, are what it is to be human. Human being is being in fellowship, human history is the enactment of that being towards perfection. It is, however, inexplicably the case that creatures resist and repudiate their given nature and end, and refuse to participate in fellowship with God. Sin is trespass against creatureliness, but beneath that lies an even deeper wickedness, contempt for the creator in all its forms – pride, resentment, disordered desire, anxiety, self-hatred, a catastrophic regime of evil which the creature unleashes by creating a nature for itself and assuming responsibility for its own course. By sin the creature is brought to ruin, for as fellowship with God is breached, the creature is estranged from the source of its life and condemned to exist in death’s shadow. Sin humiliates the creature, robbing the creature of the dignity which it can have only as it fulfils its destiny for fellowship with God.

What stands between the creature and death? What secures the fulfilment of creaturely being against self-destruction? This is the subject-matter of soteriology. Creaturely defiance and self-alienation from God cannot overtake the creator’s purpose; God will confirm his own glory by glorifying the creature. The form in which God realizes this determination is a special creaturely history, one which is highly particular but which represents and gathers into itself all human history. This is the history of divine election and of the covenant to which it gives rise – the history of God’s determination of creatures for fellowship on the sole basis of his mercy. In it, God undertakes to bring human nature to perfection in accordance with his purpose. Its human subjects are the patriarchs, Israel and the church, that is, all who stand beneath God’s promise and summons. At its centre lies the time of the Word made flesh. He enacts the covenant fidelity of God; as this one, God ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: God of Salvation
• 1 ‘It was the Will of the Lord to Bruise Him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God
• 2 A Simple Salvation? Soteriology and the Perfections of God
• 3 Salvation as Judgement and Grace
• 4 Creation and Salvation in the Image of an Incomprehensible God
• 5 The Salvation of Creatures
• 6 Salvation and History
• 7 Salvation and Atonement: On the Value and Necessity of the Work of Jesus Christ
• 8 Salvation’s Setting: Election, Justification and the Church
• 9 Salvation Beyond the Church’s Ministry: Reflections on Barth and Rahner
• 10 Salvation’s Destiny: Heirs of God
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Authors and Subjects