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Why Develop a Descending Christology?

A descending Christology seeks to understand Jesus in terms of the Trinitarian life of God. The preceding chapter traced how reflection on the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ led to the conclusion that God is eternally triune and that Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. This concept of God then becomes the starting point for a descending Christology that asks what it is about God that makes God’s being triune and leads to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The answers to such questions are necessarily speculative and seek to describe the ineffable, so as “to speak in some way about that which we cannot fully express in any way.”1 The basis for pursuing these questions lies in the experience of salvation through Jesus. This experience of salvation is also a commissioning to speak of God as encountered in Jesus as best one can, even though God remains mysterious, ultimately incomprehensible and so can never be finally known.2 Any understanding of God remains a work in progress and the limits of human knowledge have to be respected.

Yet a descending Christology is necessary because talk of God never takes place in a vacuum. It is intrinsic to humanity to exalt something or someone. People live within moral horizons that inevitably esteem some values over others, investing some with ultimate concern.3 Some form of at least a minimal theology seems intrinsic to human life.4 Though God is ineffable, still one’s ultimate concern or vision of God is expressed in one’s life. Talk of one’s ultimate concern or concept of God is inevitable in examining the vision one lives by. The question is not whether one has an ultimate concern, but what it is. If one claims God as one’s ultimate concern the question is which God one believes in. A descending Christology seeks to develop a consistently Christian understanding of God.

A descending Christology is speculative. It asks about what has not been directly experienced, the nature of God in eternity, on the basis of what has been experienced of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Such speculation is inevitable in any discussion of God or ultimate concern. It is not empty speculation if it proceeds on the basis of revelation as witnessed to in Scripture and with due attention to other forms of knowledge and experience. Without this inquiry the task of Christian theology to test the congruence of the church’s understanding of God with what it believes about Jesus remains unfulfilled. A descending Christology is a form of discernment, 5 an attempt to understand God as best one can in light of what one has experienced in Jesus Christ.

God as Living and Absolute

Christian theologians reflecting on Jesus’ relationship to God in the era of the council of Nicaea (325 CE) understood God’s being in terms of the Hellenistic axiom that the divine is absolute and impassible. This axiom developed partly through Plato and Aristotle’s critique of the depiction of the gods in the literature of Homer and Hesiod.6 In taking over this axiom Christian theologians internalized this critique of anthropomorphic understandings of God and affirmed God’s transcendence to humanity. Homer depicted the gods as the highest of beings, but as beings much like humanity in being subject to moral temptations and conflicts. Plato and Aristotle argued that God was beyond this. As the absolute, God was not a projection of humanity but the standard by which humanity should live. Patristic theologians took up this critique and in principle went beyond it, affirming God’s absoluteness, but also that God is living; able to do new things and moved by love to redeem creation.7 For the patristic theologians, God was not subject to temptation, but God was living. This last affirmation was undercut by their adoption of the axiom of divine impassibility. This axiom did not fit with the biblical notion of God as living,8 for life involves change and the actualization of potential. Adopting this axiom made it difficult to say why God created the world or acted to redeem it. The notion of God as absolute and therefore immutable expressed the power of God’s being in relation to sin and death, describing God as transcendent to both and so able to save humanity from them. But it cannot express the nature of God’s being as moved by love.9 This requires a more dialectical understanding of God’s relationship to creation, in which God is absolute but also internally related10 to it.

The Hellenistic notion of God as absolute and immutable gave rise to a conception of God known as classical theism, in which God does not change, has no need of the world, and receives nothing from it. This notion of God as having no real relation to the world is deeply entrenched in Western Christian thought, but has been accurately criticized as inadequate on the basis of Christology,11 its inner incoherence, and its effective history, particularly in relation to women.12 Yet the idea of God as radically transcendent to creation, acting freely in relation to it, out of love but not out of ontological necessity, needs to be preserved for the doctrine of God to be adequate to the biblical witness and contemporary experience.13 One way to do this is to understand God’s being as an expression of God’s goodness.

The Self-Diffusive Nature of God’s Goodness

Central to Jesus’ preaching was an emphasis on the goodness of God as absolute and determining God’s actions in history.14 St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) made celebrating God’s goodness central to his understanding of Christian life. This had an influence in Franciscan theology.

According to Anselm (c. 1033–1109 CE), God is absolute as that “than which nothing greater can be conceived.”15 Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274 CE), a Franciscan, applied this to God’s goodness. The good that is self-diffusive, that communicates and further expresses itself, is greater than the good that does not. God’s goodness, as “that than which nothing better can be thought,” must therefore be “supremely self-diffusive.”16 It must also be fully actual, as the good that is actual is greater than the good that is not. According to Bonaventure, the self-diffusion or communication of divine goodness occurs eternally in the generation of the second person of the Trinity and the spiration of the third. Through this God’s goodness is infinitely diffused and fully actual. Thus “the supreme communicability of the good demands necessarily that there be a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”17 Yet while God’s goodness is absolute in being supremely self-diffused in the Trinity in eternity, it remains open to further diffusion in time and space through creation and redemption,18 for the self-diffusive nature of the divine goodness is fulfilled in the eternal generation of the Word and spiration of the Holy Spirit but is not limited by this. Consequently it is open to further expression through the economic Trinity in creation and redemption. For Bonaventure the divine nature does not need this further communication and it adds nothing to God’s already infinite being. But creation and redemption are fitting and appropriate further expressions of God’s self-diffusive goodness.

Jonathan Edwards would develop this understanding God’s relationship to the world further, arguing that while God’s being is absolute it is also open to a relative but still real increase through the further communication of God’s beauty and goodness in creation and redemption.19 This understanding of God’s absoluteness is more coherent with Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God than classical theism, for in Jesus’ proclamation the final reality is not simply God, but God and the reign of God, or God and the redeemed creation.20 In the gospels God is depicted as radically transcendent to creation yet also internally related to it.

The Franciscan Innovation in Christology

The spiritual vision of St. Francis with its focus on the goodness of God led to another innovation in Franciscan theology that had precedents in patristic theology. In much of Western theology from Athanasius to Anselm, the main reason given for the coming of Christ was to save humanity from sin. However in patristic theologians like Gregory of Nyssa, the ultimate vision of the purpose of the incarnation is not simply overcoming the alienation of humanity and creation from God introduced by sin, but rather the deification of created beings, their entry into an eternal communion with God, “so that ‘God may be all in all.’”21 Here the reason for Christ’s coming is ultimately not to save humanity from sin, but to gather a community about God. Medieval Franciscan theologians took this idea further.

In the 1200s Robert Grosseteste and others argued that Christ would have become incarnate even if humanity had not fallen into sin. These theologians saw Jesus to be the perfection towards which all of creation was oriented. Even had there been no sin he would have still come to express God’s goodness, power, and wisdom.22 This idea found its fullest expression in the Christology of Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308). For Scotus Jesus Christ is the culmination or perfection of creation. If the main reason for Christ’s coming was to save humanity from sin, the “best thing God does in creation would be motivated by the worst thing that creatures do.”23 Scotus considered this view irrational. Goodness, not sin, must be the primary reason for Christ’s coming. Accordingly Scotus argued that the three persons of the Trinity together desire others to join in the praise, joy, and love that they share. Christ became incarnate so as to become the head of “a vast community of created co-lovers . . . destined for the beatific intimacy of sharing in the Trinitarian love-life.”24 Christ’s atoning work is a means to this more fundamental end. Creation is oriented towards the coming of Christ and is fulfilled in and through him. Aspects of this understanding the reason for the incarnation can also be found in the theologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher, I. A. Dorner, and Karl Barth,25 and in the more recent Christologies of Jürgen Moltmann and Marilyn McCord Adams.26

Noting these developments, we turn to understanding the place of Jesus Christ in the truine life of God and the reason for his coming. To do this, we first discuss the relationship of the economic and immanent Trinity.

The Relationship of the Immanent and

the Economic Trinity

The affirmation of the Council of Nicaea that God must be understood in Trinitarian terms implicitly affirmed a difference between the economic Trinity, God as encountered in history in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the immanent Trinity, God in eternity prior to creation and redemption.27 The latter is the basis of the former. What God is eternally in the immanent Trinity determines what God does in creation and redemption. The latter is a further expression of what is present in the former. The unity of the two must be maintained as Jesus can only mediate salvation if God becomes personally present to humanity and creation through him.28 Yet over centuries the connection between the two weakened in Western Christian thought until the renewal of Trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, when Karl Barth and Karl Rahner insisted that the doctrine of the Trinity was an explication of what was revealed of God or of the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ. According to Rahner, “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity”29 and vice versa.

However, this necessary emphasis on the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity must not obscure an equally necessary distinction between them. The two are not identical, for through “the incarnation the second divine person exists in history in a new way.”30 The second divine person is not crucified in the immanent Trinity, but only after becoming incarnate in the economic Trinity. The distinction between the two developed in order to preserve the radical transcendence of God to sin and evil.31 It remains necessary if Jesus’ crucifixion is to be taken seriously and God is still to be a source of hope for the final overcoming of evil.32

A second reason for preserving this distinction lies in the New Testament’s emphasis that in Christ a new reality appeared that has created a new divine/human situation.33 The new is by definition different in some respect from that which preceded it. John 1:14 indicates that in the incarnation “the divine life of the Logos itself underwent something decisively new.”34 As Karl Rahner argued, while God is immutable in the sense of not being subject to change in God’s self, the incarnation did involve God being “subject to change in something else.”35 The incarnation was a new event in the life of God involving a “becoming”36 on the part of the second person of the Trinity. This cannot be denied without undermining the New Testament claim that in Christ God has done a new thing. Once this is acknowledged the economic and immanent Trinity can no longer be understood as simply identical. Because the second person of the immanent Trinity exists “ in history in a new way” through the incarnation, the economic Trinity needs to be distinguished from it as well as internally connected to it37 in order to preserve divine transcendence and do justice to what is new here in relation to the immanent Trinity. Both the transcendence of God and the reality of God’s actions in history are at stake in bringing the unity and the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity to expression.

How can this unity and difference be maintained? The doctrine of the Trinity as a whole seeks to conceptualize what is perceived of God in Jesus Christ.38 The economic Trinity conceptualizes the experience of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in history, in God’s economy of salvation. The immanent Trinity is a theory “about the eternal ground and intrinsic structure”39 of the economic Trinity. It conceptualizes the eternal being of God; what must be presupposed in light of what is experienced in the economic Trinity. Following Karl Barth and others, one can say that in the economic Trinity the immanent Trinity “reiterates,”40 repeats, or further expresses itself in time and space. In this repetition, the unity of the economic and immanent Trinity is maintained. The goodness of God proclaimed and enacted by Jesus is the same as is shared and celebrated within the immanent Trinity, only now expressed in history. Conversely, this further communication of God’s goodness in time and space is new and different in its form, as it happens now in history, in the context of a fundamentally good creation distorted by sin. It also makes a difference to God as it brings into being an additional reality that did not exist before: the reign of God. As it does this it brings a relative but still real increase to God’s being. To conceptualize this we begin by sketching an understanding of the immanent Trinity.

The Immanent Trinity

The centrality of God’s goodness in the preaching and practice of Jesus suggests that it be taken as the primary divine attribute. This goodness, God’s agape or self-giving love, is also beautiful, so that one can speak of God’s goodness and beauty together. Following Bonaventure one can take the self-diffusive goodness of God as a key to understanding God’s Trinitarian being. Intrinsic to God’s goodness and beauty is a disposition, an energy and tendency, to further communicate itself. This disposition is fulfilled in the life of the immanent Trinity. It is actualized eternally through the free and creative assent of the first “person”41 of the Trinity.42 This assent is also key to understanding the Trinity. The self-diffusive energy of the divine goodness and beauty connects with a corresponding eros in the divine will for its further expression. This eros is not simply desire for something lacking, but also a productive will arising from joyful ecstasy in the divine goodness.43 At this point this eros is partly a desire for something lacking, for the self-diffusive nature of the divine goodness would not be fulfilled if it did not find eternal expression in the immanent Trinity. This rejoicing in divine goodness, assent to its further expression, and the actualization of it are characteristic of the divine life.