A Theology for the Twenty-First Century

Douglas F. Ottati

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467460064
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Christianity in the United States is in crisis. Liberalism is declining, evangelicalism is splintering, increasing numbers of Christians are slipping away from churches, and more and more young people are for various reasons finding Christianity as they conceive it (a metaphysical thought system, or society of science-deniers, or an ideology for oppressors) not just implausible but repellent. At the same time, Christians across denominational and ideological divides are rediscovering a moral core, especially in the Jesus of the Gospels, that reactivates and unites them, and this kind of faith appeals to many who consider themselves averse to all traditional organized religion. But any revitalized Christian faith is going to need to understand its rootedness in, and interpretation of, Christianity's foundational texts and traditions.

Noted theologian Douglas F. Ottati steps in to offer a theology for this new era. Combining deep learning in texts and traditions with astute awareness of contemporary questions and patterns of thought and life, he asks: what does it mean, in our time, to understand the God of the Bible as Creator and Redeemer? Distilling the content of Christian faith into seventy concise propositions, he explains each in lucid, cogent prose. A Theology for the Twenty-First Century will be an essential textbook for those training for ministry in our current climate, a wise guide for contemporary believers who wonder how best to understand and communicate their faith, and an inviting and intelligent resource for serious inquirers who wonder whether the way of Jesus might help them grasp the real world while remaining open to the transcendent.

PART III

REDEMPTION

Chapter Seven

JESUS CHRIST AND THE COVENANT OF GRACE

In Jesus Christ, we come to know the God of grace. The God of grace whom we encounter and apprehend is the Creator-Redeemer who is gracious to us and to others, and by disclosing the gracious Creator-Redeemer, Jesus Christ fulfills the covenant of grace. Moreover, a number of images and symbolic ideas in the New Testament, including incarnation as well as the notion that Christ is the image or icon of God, may be understood to express and shape piety’s apprehension of the divine excellence or gratuity in Jesus as the Christ. That God is the God of grace is one way to summarize the upshot of Jesus’s teaching and embodiment of the kingdom as well as of his crucifixion and resurrection and our dying and rising with him. Again, piety’s apprehension in Christ of the God of grace is an existential knowledge that entails assurance; as Calvin says, it does not flit about in the top of the brain, but by the work of the Spirit takes root in the depth of the heart.¹ At the outset, however—as we embark on Christology proper or discourse and reflection about the Christ—the very basic and simple statement is the most critical one: in Jesus Christ we come to know the God of grace.

Proposition #47 God the Redeemer is God the Creator, and this equation has important consequences for the way we understand both redemption and creation.

This sentence is the mirror image of proposition #1 in part 1, and so my exposition here can be brief. In part 1, I emphasized that because God the Creator is identified with the Deliverer and Redeemer—as in Psalm 124:8,

Our help is in the name of the LORD,

who made heaven and earth—

there is a redeeming, renewing, or salvific dimension to the divine dynamic at work in creation and preservation. This in fact is also a feature of the early creeds and their close association of the Creator who makes all things with the Reconciler and the Sanctifier. Among other things, what emerges is a theology that shapes and expresses a piety or deep-seated disposition for which creation is not merely a prerequisite for redemption. Redeeming and renewing grace is embedded in the existence, constitution, and continuation of world. The nebulae, galaxies, geosphere, biospheres, societies, and histories are not merely a neutral backdrop or stage for human activity and purpose. They are the Creator-Redeemer’s cosmos of grace, a matrix of interrelations, processes, and events in which we encounter a renewing and redeeming trajectory.

Now in part 3 we turn around to emphasize the related and reverse point: God the Redeemer is God the Creator. Redemption therefore concerns nothing less than creation. Thus, in John 1 we are told that the Word or principle of redemption, in whom is life and who became flesh, was in the beginning, and that nothing was made or came into being without the Word. This close association of redemption with creation—an association that no world-denying spiritual dualist would countenance—lends to redemption the universal horizon of all things.

Consider, for example, the Christ hymn in Colossians 1:15–20.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Note the parallelisms. Christ is the firstborn of all creation through whom and for whom all things (ta panta) have been created, and in whom all things hold together. Christ is also firstborn from the dead, the one through whom God reconciles all things to Godself. Eduard Lohse adds that, “although there is no mention of it, it is presupposed here that the unity and harmony of the cosmos have suffered a considerable disturbance, even a rupture.”² Things threaten to burst apart. The Christ event that erupts into the history of the Christian community heals the wound and restores the coherence. It signals a cosmic reconciliation of all things to God, and so redemption strains toward the universal scope of creation.

The close link between Creator and Redeemer therefore impacts how Christian piety regards both creation and redemption. Redemption, as we emphasized in part 1, lends a renewing dynamic to creation and providence (or to cosmic ecology and cosmic passage). At the same time, and as we emphasize now, creation lends a capacious horizon to redemption, a point that comes to articulation in Paul’s striking motif of “new creation,” and also in the image in Revelation 21 of a new heaven and a new earth in which all things are made new.³ Grace abounds.

Proposition #48 The event of Jesus Christ points to a Trinitarian dynamic.

The New Testament presents the event of Jesus Christ in an expansive compass that extends in two “directions.”⁴ The genealogy in Matthew 1 extends the event of Jesus Christ “backward” to God’s covenant with Abraham, while the genealogy in Luke 3 extends it to Adam and the creation. Texts such as the account of Pentecost in Acts 2, Paul’s account of new life in Romans 8 (“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God,” v. 14), and his statements about spiritual gifts and participation in the one body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 extend the event of Jesus Christ “forward” toward renewal in the Spirit. The logic of these symbolic statements is clear. The event of Jesus Christ fulfills God’s promise to Abraham, through whom all people shall be blessed, as well as the promise inherent in the creation of the world and human beings. And it does so by its close associations with the Spirit, the reversal of Babel’s confusion, and the emergence of new life in a community called church that goes to all nations.

The two-way extension is a primary reason why the Christian community speaks of the event-of-redemption-in-Jesus-Christ that discloses the God of grace who extends a saving relationship or participation to all. That is, the one extension or expansion connects Jesus with the Creator, who chooses and delivers Israel. It links Jesus with God’s gathering and election of a people into redeeming relationship with Godself following the misdirection of creation in the cycle of corruption and violence described in Genesis 4–11. The other extension—toward the Spirit—links Jesus to a decisive expansion of this covenant to the graceful gathering of all nations into the people of God.

Taken together, as we noted in part 1, these expansions point to a Trinitarian dynamic of which Jesus Christ becomes the fulcrum. The covenanting Creator and God of Israel, the reconciliation accomplished in Christ, and the renewing work of the Spirit all exhibit the same movement or trajectory toward redemption. And, indeed, the event of Jesus Christ cannot be adequately understood unless both of these references, extensions, or expansions are taken into account.

Proposition #49 Jesus Christ fulfills the covenant of grace.

The extensions or expansions point to what John Calvin understood to be the one covenant of grace by connecting reconciliation and renewal in Jesus Christ with the Creator, who covenants with Israel and also with the Spirit and the church. Here, Calvin built on Paul’s idea that, in Christ, the blessing of Abraham, which remains with the Jews, comes also to the gentiles, who, by the Spirit, now are adopted as God’s children (Gal. 3:6–14; 4:1–7). Indeed, says Calvin, it is by Christ and the Spirit that we are “reckoned members of his [Abraham’s] tribe” and so become “children of God.”⁵

Biblical Themes

The scriptural bases for these ideas will become apparent if we return to the fact that when we open a Bible to the New Testament, the first thing we see is a genealogy (or family tree) of “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). That the New Testament begins this way is, of course, a result of the complex and somewhat political history of the formation of the canon, but it is also a theologically articulate result. It is as much as if, with the help of those who later decided on the canon, the writer or writers of the Gospel of Matthew were saying, “Listen. We are going to tell you about a very important person—Jesus the Messiah—and if you want to understand what we say, you can’t just consider him apart or alone. You need to look at him in the context of the longer story of God’s promises to Israel, from Abraham forward.”⁶

The genealogy’s somewhat artificial arrangement into three groups of fourteen generations each (1:17) also highlights important theological claims. (In fact, only thirteen generations are recounted in the third group.) Jesus is the descendant of Abraham (the first group), the one with whom God covenants to make a great nation (Israel), and in whom “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:2–3). He descends from the one with whom the people of God was begun, a people that, by God’s own free election or choosing, enjoys a sometimes rocky but nevertheless steadfast relationship with God. Again, as descendant of David (second group), the Messiah inherits the promise of the kingship or of God’s anointed one, and thus of God’s holy and just reign over the many peoples and nations (Isa. 2:2–4). These lines of descent are legacies of a divine faithfulness that has continued from the deportation to Babylon forward despite the faults and vacillations of God’s people (third group). Indeed, this rather stylized beginning to the Gospel of Matthew accords with its ending, where the risen Christ commissions his disciples to “go … and make disciples of all nations,” thus fulfilling the blessing of all the families of the earth by receiving all peoples into God’s people. As far as the Gospel of Matthew is concerned, with the coming of Jesus the Messiah, God’s gracious covenant with Abraham radiates into the entire world.

This is a basic outline, but there is considerably more to be said. If you went to Sunday school and were anything like me when I did, I suspect that when the teacher drew attention to a genealogy, you may have taken it as a bad sign: “… and Hezron, the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon….” Was our teacher really about to make us memorize this polysyllabic tongue twister? But it turns out that my anticipated drudgery obscured a fundamentally positive significance of genealogies in the Bible. “Be fruitful and multiply” is God’s blessing of generativity and life in Genesis 1:22 and 1:28, and so, every subsequent genealogy, no matter how taxing to memorize, both recalls and embodies this blessing, this basis for life’s continuing possibilities.

Indeed, that the Gospel of Matthew opens with a genealogy from Abraham forward links the coming of Jesus the Messiah rather explicitly with the blessing of life. How so? Because the way forward to Abram and Sarai, following the death-dealing cycle of violence and misdirection that introduces civilization in Genesis 4–11 and that terminates in Babel, is yet another genealogy, yet another chronicle of the continuation of life from generation to generation. And, in fact, by means of two further genealogies, Abram finally is connected to Noah and then to Lamech and the cycle of violence that engulfs humanity after Cain, and then also to Eve, Adam, and the blessing of created life itself. These mythopoeic narratives therefore insist that, even as all else fails (from deterrent schemes of vengeance to a primordial flood and the restarting of humanity and world with a clean slate), the blessing to be fruitful and multiply that was given at the creation to humans and other creatures continues. The blessing of generativity and life continues, if not quietly then at least somewhat prosaically and despite humanity’s recurrent and destructive misdirection; and with this blessing, the gracious possibility that humans and world may be rightwised also continues. At the outset of Matthew’s Gospel and of the New Testament itself, then, a genealogy that expresses the continuing blessing of life introduces the gracious fulfillment of new life.

This also helps us to make a theological connection between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and the one in Luke, which goes back not to Abraham but to “Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God” (Luke 3:38).⁷ Mythically and symbolically, we are being told here that Jesus represents a second chance for humanity, a new period, or a new beginning in history—in Paul’s terms, a “second Adam”—the rightwising fulfillment that makes all things new. The Creator goes out to make all things and hold them in relation to Godself—this, as we noted at the close of part 2, is the divine tendency. Now, in Christ, this same God (following Paul’s vocabulary in 2 Cor. 5:19) reconciles all things to Godself, and so the fundamental excellence or tendency of the divine becomes clear. Now, the Messiah, who descends from Abraham and even from the first human, reveals the promise resident in the act of creation itself, namely, that the great God of glory who creates is the good God of grace who redeems.

The Covenant of Grace

The classical Reformed idea of the one covenant of grace suggests all this and more. Although for Calvin, in one sense at least, there are an “old covenant” made with the patriarchs and described in the Old Testament and another made later in the New Testament, he also insists, “in substance and reality … the two are actually one and the same.”⁸ Indeed, “all men adopted by God into the company of his people since the beginning of the world were covenanted to him by the same law and by the bond of the same doctrine as obtains among us.”⁹

A primary reason is this: the covenantal relationship made with the patriarchs and the one made in the New Testament are both established by the free mercy and grace of God alone. Calvin underscores this point by quoting Leviticus 26:12, “I … will be your God, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Propositions
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Point of View
• I Method
• II Creation
• III Redemption
• Epilogue: The Sense the Trinity Makes
• Select List of Works Consulted