7 Conclusion
Chapter Seven
Conclusion
Scripture presents a living God who is transcendent and immanent. The transcendent God is not confined by creation. He is not limited by time or space. As immanent, this same God is at work within the created order, sustaining its existence. As Thomas Chalmers suggested, ‘the uniformity of nature is but another name for the faithfulness of God’. Yet these two broad categories do not exhaust the reality of the living God’s relation to us. God is also concomitant – he comes alongside, dwells with and travels with his people. Divine concomitance finds its quintessential expression in the incarnation of the Son who pitched his tent among us in real space and real time. As John Murray says, ‘The thought of incarnation is stupendous, for it means the conjunction in one person of all that belongs to godhead and all that belongs to manhood.’ This is a staggering claim. No surrogate came. Concerning God the Son, Irenaeus the second-century church father writes of ‘the only true and steadfast Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself ’. If this is not a reason for doxology, what can be?
explored the purpose of creation in terms of God’s creating and fashioning a palace-temple as his habitation for dwelling with the creature made in the divine image. In addition how God prepared the way for his ultimate incarnate concomitance from the very beginning by revealing himself in anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways was canvassed. In this chapter these latter three terms were defined. From the start, in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we found that the God of the Bible is often spoken of as though embodied. Herman Bavinck is even more bold: ‘It follows that Scripture does not merely contain a few anthropomorphisms; on the contrary, all Scripture is anthropomorphic.’ Moreover the chapter argued that a third category needs to be added to the two traditional ones of transcendence and immanence to discuss God’s relation to creation. The third category is concomitance. An excursus examined a venerable question: Would the incarnation have taken place irrespective of the Fall? Speculatively I argued yes.
In the portrait of God was amplified as we considered the divine deeds in Israel’s history with its fountainhead in the call of Abram. God was at work to redeem a people of his own among whom he could dwell. Once more God’s anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways were reviewed as we followed the biblical plotline. In this chapter the mysterious figure of the angel of the Lord was also considered, as was the phenomenon of anthropomorphic theophany.
The explored Israel’s hope and the promise of the divine presence with his people in the midst of the created order. Key texts were examined, including Psalms 45:6, 110:1, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13. Some argue that the Old Testament expected a divine Messiah and that the deity of Christ was taught in the Old Testament. Others disagree. I argued that the idea that the Christ is God is consistent with the Old Testament testimony but not demanded by it. We also considered how the Old Testament held out the promise of Yahweh himself coming to rescue his people. These ideas are left unsynthesized by Old Testament writers. We also saw that recent approaches to the typological reading of Scripture help us to understand how the incarnation was prepared for in a subtle way in the descriptors and promises relating to David and his house.
In , as we continued to follow the biblical plotline, we saw how the preparatory gave way to the actual as the testimony of the New Testament came into full view. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God stooped. Concomitance was now enfleshed as Immanuel (‘God with us’, Matt. 1:23). In the Old Testament in Genesis 6:6 God grieved over wayward humankind. In the New Testament we saw how Christ wept human tears at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He is the window into the heart of God. To hear Jesus is to hear the Word of God; to see Jesus is to see the character of God; to watch Jesus in action is to see God in action. R. T. France makes the point strikingly: ‘God no longer simply told His people about Himself, or even showed them by His actions. He came Himself, and walked among them, and men saw the invisible, God in a human body, the ultimate anthropomorphism.’ John’s testimony was joined to that of Matthew, for whom Jesus was the Immanuel of Isaianic hope, and to that of Mark, for whom God in Jesus comes to Zion, and to that of Hebrews, which affirmed both the deity and humanity of the incarnate Son. In retrospect these New Testament writers could ground their belief in the deity and humanity of Christ in the Old Testament Scriptures. This chapter also argued that the incarnation was of the one to whom the Old Testament anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms pointed. Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s theory of theories gave conceptual tools for understanding how the Old Testament prepared the way for an incarnation, although the incarnation in prospect was never explicitly in view in the Old Testament. The Pauline notion of mystery underlined the latter point and reinforced the argument that the Old Testament believers were not expecting an actual incarnation of the God of Israel. An excursus dealt with the debate over whether Old Testament saints knowingly encountered the pre-incarnate Christ. I remained unconvinced by those who argued that they did.
addressed the question raised by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages: Why did God become human? Unlike Anselm, however, New Testament answers rather than speculative ones were sought to the question. The appeal was to Scripture, not to reason with the Bible intentionally shut. A plethora of New Testament testimonies were canvassed that address the question of the rationale of the incarnation. I argued that Christ’s revelatory, representative, substitutionary, devil-defeating and moral-modelling roles are predicated on his assuming a truly human nature. An excursus was attached that tackled the question of whether the divine Son assumed fallen or unfallen human nature in the incarnation. I sided with the traditional view that Christ assumed an unfallen human nature.
In we considered the value of the incarnation in two aspects: theological and existential. We saw the value of the incarnation for theological method, for epistemology, for the doctrine of God and change, for affirming the created order, for valuing human life, for our understanding of mission, for the encounter between Christianity and other religions, with special reference to Islam, for the question of theodicy and defence, given evils, and for matters of dogmatic rank. We also explored the value of the incarnation at the personal or existential level. The incarnation matters with regard to our appreciation of the depths of the divine love and our sense of wonder at what the Lord has done on the plane of human history in this age and what he will do in the age to come.
The canonical story ends on a note of hope, a hope in which concomitance (God-with-us) is consummated in the world to come. In the end all is sacred space. The divine habitation is definitively built. The New Jerusalem has no need of a temple. God dwells in the midst of his people. The palace-temple has both rulers and priests. Creation has been reclaimed and transfigured. Order has been restored. Significantly the Lamb on the throne remains the incarnate one. The end point is no ethereal Platonic-style heavenly existence but a robust new heavens and a new earth. Christianity is not Gnosticism. The biblical testimony calls for discipleship, doxology and great expectation as we live as God’s people in between the comings of the great king. We are to set our minds on things above, as Paul expressed to the Colossians (Col. 3:1). In this life we walk by faith, in the world to come, by sight. Thus there is a day coming when the veiling will no longer pertain. All will be revealed. Hence the longing that ends the canonical presentation (Rev. 22:20): ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
Above all, the incarnation of the Son of God ought to fill us with humble wonder. A loving Father did not send a mere prophetic or priestly or royal surrogate, but the Son who both instantiates the perfection of all three and yet transcends them. This is what divine love looks like, as John makes plain: ‘This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him’ (1 John 4:9).