Sanctified by Grace

A Theology of the Christian Life

Kent Eilers, Kyle C. Strobel

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780567168696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Books on the Christian life abound. Some focus on spirituality, others on practices, and others still on doctrines such as justification or forgiveness. Few offer an account of the Christian life that portrays redeemed Christian existence within the multifaceted and beautiful whole of the Christian confession. This book attempts to fill that gap. It provides a constructive, specifically theological interpretation of the Christian life according to the nature of God's grace. This means coordinating the Triune God, his reconciling, justifying, redemptive, restorative, and otherwise transformative action with those practices of the Christian life emerging from it. The doctrine of the Christian life developed here unifies doctrine and life, confession and practice within the divine economy of grace. Drawing together some of the most important theologians in the church today, Sanctified by Grace achieves what no other theological text offers – a shared work of dogmatic theology oriented to redeemed Christian existence.

PART ONE

The gracious one

1

The triune God

Fred Sanders

Every account of the Christian life is suspended from a particular doctrine of God. Any soteriology is dependent on its presupposed doctrine of God for its terms, its structure and its scope. The doctrine of the Christian life is always aligned in some way with the doctrine of God, but it can be well aligned or poorly aligned. In this chapter I would like to sketch a way of aligning the doctrine of the Christian life with a well-formed doctrine of the Trinity. ‘Well-formed’ means, in this instance, a classical doctrine of the Trinity, complete with an explicit affirmation of the eternal processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father, together with an account of the way these processions form the background for the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the economy of salvation. The goal of this exercise is to ground the Gospel of God in the character of the God of the Gospel, to connect the Christian life to the living God.

The glorious irrelevance of the immanent Trinity

There are two errors to be avoided in undertaking this task, and it may be worthwhile to point them out before proceeding with the exposition of how the Christian life presupposes the triune God. First, a description of the difference the Trinity makes for the Christian life, if it is to be a helpfully dogmatic description, must not merely be a rehearsal of the work of God in the economy of salvation. Because the Christian life is immediately grounded in God’s saving actions, there is certainly much to say about the work of the Father, Son and Spirit in constituting the reality that is the Christian life. There is even much to say about how all the work of God is grounded in the character and being of God, such that God acts towards us as the one he is, and the graces of the Christian life take on the character of the Gracious One who is the electing God, the creating and providential God, the saving God and the perfecting God. Further, none of this can be elaborated concretely without making specific reference to its trinitarian character, because the one God who gives the Christian life its reality and identity is, to the uttermost depths of being, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All the external works of the triune God are indivisibly and identifiably the concerted work of these three, and every aspect of the Christian life is most fruitfully described in terms of the Son and the Holy Spirit carrying out the Father’s will. But all of that will be said in subsequent chapters. Leaving aside each of those topics for fuller elaboration in the course of this book, what is there to say about the triune God in himself? That is, bracketing for a moment the economic Trinity, what can be said of the difference the immanent Trinity makes for the Christian life?

Second, a description of the triune God that intends to highlight how it is aligned with the doctrine of the Christian life must resist the distorting influence of rushing towards relevance. It must devote its attention to the revelation of God’s identity first, without asking in advance which elements of that description might later prove informative or helpful for the doctrine of the Christian life. Many recent theological projects have erred at this point, describing the immanent Trinity in a way that underwrites practical concerns and goals, attending selectively to only those elements of trinitarianism that are judged to be relevant for soteriology or spirituality. Many such efforts to apply the Trinity to the Christian life, as Daniel Keating observes, have ‘become unmoored from the very reality they so ardently labour to apply. Caught up in the enthusiasm to make the Trinity applicable and relevant to any and every aspect of Christian life, they sometimes too readily select and appropriate one aspect of Trinitarian doctrine to the detriment of others, thus diminishing or deforming the doctrine of the Trinity itself’.¹ In much modern theology, the doctrine of the Trinity has suffered from being too relevant, or too immediately relevant.

It seems that there is something gloriously irrelevant about the doctrine of the eternal processions, in that if the doctrine is true, it is something true of God’s own identity, true before and apart from the salvation of fallen creatures, indeed apart from the very existence of any creatures. The Father always begat the Son, and there was never a time when the Son had not been begotten. It is this Christological and pneumatological aspect of the doctrine of God that we now place in alignment with the doctrine of the Christian life.

The task, then, is to describe the coherence or alignment of the doctrine of the Trinity with the doctrine of the Christian life. To set out the task in this way is to highlight the fact that it is not enough to link Christology and pneumatology to the doctrine of the Christian life, a task always necessarily undertaken by any account of the person and work of Christ and the Spirit. But to turn to the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit is to turn resolutely to theology proper, that is, to the doctrine of God, and not merely to the person and work of the mediator. Consideration of the mediatorial office of Christ always necessarily includes a consideration of soteriology, and consideration of the work of the Spirit necessarily includes consideration of the Christian life. Not so the doctrine of God. There is more to God’s life than the saving of creatures. Hypothetically, and counterfactually, God would be God without having freely taken on the administration of redemption; though thanks be to the God of salvation, we have never known a God who prescinded from saving, who withheld his sovereign covenant faithfulness to his unexacted promise. The God whose story is told in the Bible is the God who is caught in the act of rescue. Still, as John Webster insists, ‘the salvation of creatures is a great affair, but not the greatest, which is God’s majesty and its promulgation’.²

A particular God and a determinate sort of salvation

Now, because God comes absolutely first in any possible order of being, the doctrine of God determines the doctrine of the Christian life – theology proper norms and forms soteriology and everything downstream from it. A particular God will accomplish a determinate sort of salvation. A God having a certain character, or specified attributes, will bring about a salvation commensurate with that divine character. There are two proofs of this: the first is a proof from comparative religion, in which a wide variety of God concepts are found to be correlated with a wide variety of quite diverse soteriologies. Nirvana, Valhalla and Paradise are not just different words for referring to the same thing, but are names for competing, alternative visions of human fulfilment. The second proof is from the history of Christian doctrine. The major clarifying moments in the development of the Christian doctrine of God were yoked to moments of greater clarity about the character of Christian salvation. Nicaea, as defended by Athanasius, is the signal instance. The decisive step forward taken in that theological moment was the proof that Jesus Christ had to be confessed as fully divine, consubstantial with the Father, if salvation were to be sufficiently anchored. But notice that the Nicene proof only works if a particular notion of soteriology has been specified or at least presupposed. The Arian Christ – a mighty creature, called into being ex nihilo by the high God before the ages themselves were set in motion – could be counted as competent to save only if the content of salvation were decisively downgraded. What kind of salvation could the Arian Christ deliver? Since the Arian Christ is not fully divine, the salvation he brings could only be the kind of salvation made available by a third party, not so much a mediator as an intermediary, and one who, while towering imposingly above his worshippers (could such a being truly have human brothers?) must nevertheless be recognized as remaining infinitely lower than God. The Athanasian insight, in other words, is that soteriology is our best orientation to the truths of theology proper. In the order of discovery, and of tracing out a path of understanding, we often begin with the character of salvation and then reason our way to the confession of the character of the God who has thus saved.

What, then, is the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for the doctrine of the Christian life? Beginning from the doctrine of the Christian life, we can say that the God who adopts sinners into a filial relationship in which they cry ‘Abba! Father!’ (Mk 14.36; Rom. 8.15; Gal. 4.6) must be a God in whom the relationship of Father and Son already exists. Or beginning from the doctrine of God we can say: It is the eternal Son who becomes the incarnate Son to propitiate the Father and bring into being adopted sons. Or, to trace again the trajectory from here to there, we are born again through the work of the one who was born of the virgin because he was of the Father’s love begotten before the world began to be (Jn 3.3–7; 1 Pet. 1.3; Lk. 1.34; Jn 1.14). Or again from above to below, the eternal, internal flow of the life of God streams forth into the human nature of Christ, whose death and resurrection cause the streaming forth of new life in redeemed sinners. Or again, from below to above, we are given life by the death and resurrection of the indestructible human life of the one to whom the Father (who has life in himself) gave also to have life in himself (Heb. 7.16; Jn 5.26). Or again, from above to below, the one who shared the glory of the Father before the world existed, came among us full of grace and truth, so that we who beheld his glory are among those many children who he leads to glory (Jn 17.5, 17.24, 1.14; Heb. 2.10).

All the long lines of the life in Christ reach up towards the life of God in himself. All the trajectories of soteriology are launched towards something greater than soteriology. Indeed, without the doctrine of eternal generation, soteriology stops short of saying what it wants to be able to say. The task of soteriology is only half done when it describes what we are saved from, and even when it specifies the agent of salvation. Soteriology finds its real footing when it announces what end we are saved to; and that goal or direction of salvation has never been better stated than in the doctrine of trinitarian adoption. The character or the relationship that grace brings us into, at great cost to God the Father, is the filial character, the dependent relationship of a sonship which is not simply a created relationship but is our created participation in his uncreated filiality. As Ivor Davidson says, ‘At the heart of the beneficia Christi of which the gospel speaks lies a specific blessing: the opening up of the eternal Son’s native sphere to others, the drawing of contingent beings into the realm of his intimate, eternally secure relation to his Father.’³

Let us look first to the way the classical dogmatic tradition has described ‘the eternal Son’s native sphere’, then to its opening up for our inclusion, and finally to the benefits of the doctrine of the eternal processions for the doctrine of the Christian life.

From eternal processions to temporal missions

Classic trinitarianism has taught that the Son and the Spirit proceed eternally from the Father by way of two distinct, eternal, internal processions. The leading edge of this doctrine was the confession of the eternal generation of the Son; while the elaboration of the Spirit’s own personal mode of origination (spiration) came later in the history of doctrine. That a ‘son’ should come from a ‘father’ is evident from the revealed metaphors themselves (just as a ‘logos’ should come from a speaker), and so speaking of the Son as ‘begotten’ was natural for the early Christian tradition. The rise of Arianism, however, called for a conceptual defense of this simpler biblical language: Arians argued on the one hand that if the Son was begotten of the Father, there must have been a time before he was begotten, and on the other hand that all things come from the Father, so the Son is not qualitatively different from creation for his being generated. In response, the formulators and defenders of Nicaea argued that the begetting of the Son was not temporal, but eternal: He was always begotten of the Father, and there was never a time when the Father was the Father without the Son. Further, they distinguished between the Son’s being begotten by the Father and the world’s being created by the Father through the Son. Just as ‘a man by counsel builds a house, but by nature begets a son’, reasoned Athanasius, God brings forth eternally a Son who has his own nature: ‘the son is proper offspring of the father’s essence, and is not external to him’.⁴

When this argument is extended to include the Holy Spirit, the Christian doctrine of God is completed in its trinitarian form. When we meet the Son and the Holy Spirit in salvation history, we meet divine persons. They are eternal, and there was never a time when they did not already exist as persons of the Trinity, as God. Their coming into our history is not their coming into existence. But their coming into our history is an extension of who they have always been, in a very specific, trinitarian way. When the Father sends the Son into salvation history, he is doing something astonishing: He is extending the relationship of divine sonship from its home in the life of God, down into human history. The relationship of divine sonship has always existed, as part of the very definition of God, but it has existed only within the being of the Trinity. In sending of the Son to us, the Father chose for that line of filial relation to extend out into created reality and human history. The same is true for the Holy Spirit: when he is sent to be the Spirit of Pentecost who applies the finished work of redemption and live in the hearts of believers, his eternal relationship with the Father and the Son begins to take place among us. Having always proceeded from the Father in eternity, he now is poured out by the Father on the church.

There are helpful terms available for all of this in the traditional theological categories of trinitarianism. At the level of the eternal being of God, the Son and the Spirit are related to the Father by eternal processions. The Son’s procession is ‘sonly’, or filial, so it is called generation. The Spirit’s procession is ‘spiritly’, so it is called spiration, or, in a more familiar word, breathing. Those two eternal processions belong to God’s divine essence, and define who he is. The living God is the Trinity: God the Father standing in these two eternal relationships to the Son and the Spirit. These processions would have belonged to the nature of God even if there had never been any creation or any redemption. But turning our attention from God’s eternal being to the temporal salvation he works out in the economy of salvation, we see that by God’s unfathomable grace and sovereign power, the eternal trinitarian processions reach beyond the limits of the divine life and extend to fallen man.

Behind the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit stand their eternal processions, and when they enter the history of salvation, they are here as the ones who, by virtue of who they eternally are, have these specific relations to the Fathe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: The Christian life in dogmatic key – Kent Eilers and Kyle Strobel
• Part One – The gracious one
• Part Two – The graces of the Christian life
• Part Three – The means of grace
• Part Four – The practices of grace
• Bibliography
• Index