An act of pure grace

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . (John 1:14)

There is a reason why works of Systematic Theology discuss “Theology proper” and “Christology” before they bring up soteriology. In the Scriptures, some concepts must be understood in the context of other concepts, before other concepts can be brought in.

In what follows, Billings discusses a topic of Christology – bringing up the topic of precisely how “the Word became flesh”. Reformed Christology relies on the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), which according to Robert Reymond “addressed every problem that had plagued the church [up to that point] with regard to the person of Christ” (Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, pg 608). In addition, he says, “In my opinion, as an apologetical, ecumenical, and clarifying statement regarding the person of Christ, the Definition of Chalcedon remains unsurpassed. No other human creed has ever been written that captures as well as it does the exact balance of Scripture and permits all that the Scripture says about God the Son incarnate to be given their just due”.

That’s not the end of the story by any means. But moving then to the concept of “Union with Christ” (a topic of “soteriology” rather than “Christology”), the following selection discussing how Augustine, relying upon the pre-Chalcedonian Christology of his day (he wrote vs Pelagius approximately in the years 412-415) ties together both the Christology and soteriology to come up with his understanding of Sovereign grace:

If Christ was not adopted because of his prior merit or his prior human action—or even his human receptivity—then we must conclude that the Word’s joining to the flesh was “undeniably gratuitous,” Augustine argues. The fruit of this union of God and humanity is “good works,” but that should not be confused with the source of the union, which was solely from the grace of God.

Augustine goes on to spell out implications of the incarnation for his debate with Pelagius, arguing that his analysis of the incarnation can lead to insights about the way grace works throughout the Christian life. How could this be? Several levels of explanation are at work. If grace is a matter of divine and human agency working in harmony, what better place to look than the incarnation, where divine and human agency are in complete harmony? A related explanation is that, in considering what it means to be fully human, we must look not only to the first Adam but also to the second Adam, who is higher than the first. Since Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God, and Christians are being conformed to the image of Christ in salvation, we should seek a notion of freedom and a doctrine of grace that derives from this second Adam. Certainly, Jesus Christ is unique. He is the only begotten Son of God, while we can be daughters and sons only by gracious adoption. Yet in salvation, Christians participate in Christ and come to share in his new humanity. If Christ’s humanity is constituted through God’s gratuitous grace, then the new humanity that believers share must also be constituted by gratuitous grace. Indeed, if there were anyone who could autonomously merit the favor of God, wouldn’t it be Jesus Christ? But even Christ’s humanity was assumed by God as an act of pure grace, of unmerited favor—so also for those who are “in Christ.”

This profound Christological insight for anthropology was not lost on Calvin nor the Reformed and Lutheran scholastics after him. Indeed, in scholasticism this insight was further developed into the anhypostatic-enhypostatic distinction, which claimed that Christ’s humanity does not have an “independent existence apart from its union to the Logos.” … While this technical distinction was certainly a development—not simply a restatement of patristic terminology—it shares insights displayed by Augustine, as discussed above, as well as by other patristic writers. (J. Todd Billings, Union with Christ Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, ©2011, pgs 41-42).

On the concepts of anhypostasis and enhypostasis, Reymond writes:

While it is true that the Definition denies that the Son of God, already a person within the Trinity, took into union with himself a human person, insisting rather that the took into union with himself a full complex of human attributes (the doctrine known as the anhypostasia, literally, “no person”), these fathers would never for a moment have thought of Jesus, as a man, as being an impersonal human being. Jesus was personal, as a man, by virtue of the union of his manness in the person of the Son. In other words, as a person, the Son of God gave personal identity to the human nature which he had assumed without losing or compromising his divine nature. Never for a moment did the man Jesus exist apart from the union of natures in the one divine person, but then this means as well that the man Jesus from the moment of conception was personal by virtue of the union of the human nature in the divine Son. Wells puts it this way:

The Definition asserted that it was to a human nature … rather than a person … that the divine Word was joined. This means that all of the human qualities and pwers were present in Jesus, but that the ego, the self-conscious acting subject, was in fact a composite union of the human and the divine (citing David Wells, “The Person of Christ” ©1984, pg 108).

This explanation of the personality of the human nature of Jesus has come to be known as the doctrine of the enhypostasia, and is traced to the formal theological reflections of Leontius of Byzantium (c. 485-c. 543) (or Leontius of Jerusalem—there is some uncertainty here) and John of Damascus (c. 675-c. 749), who maintained that in the incarnate Christ and the humanity of Christ which was indeed personal from the moment of the virginal conception, as we have said, derived its personality from the person of the Son. But the same construction was surely implicit, before these later fathers wrote their theologies, within the Definition of Chalcedon itself by its declarations that Jesus Christ was one person with two natures, not two persons each within his own corresponding nature (Reymond 610-611).

Billings puts all of this into the perspective of how Calvin and other writers of the Reformation era built on these concepts:

Within the Reformation and post-Reformation period, this notion underwent development as well. While later Reformed thinkers such as John Owen incorporated this insight with great clarity and precision, an earlier form of the insight was already present in Reformers such as Calvin and Vermigli. Calvin in particular used this insight to emphasize the “salvation as communion with Christ” side of the coin (which we saw in Paul and John), even as he exposited his view of the bondage of the will to sin … (Billings, 42-43).