MICHAEL HORTON
VIEWING THE CROSS from the perspective of the ascension allows us to take in more of the expansiveness of what Christ secured at Golgotha. The ascension not only reveals the success of Christ’s atonement, but, like the resurrection, it is as constitutive of redemption as the atonement itself. Our Lord’s entrance into the heavenly sanctuary was not merely a victory celebration but an essential part of the victory itself. From the atonement we learn how God has saved us from condemnation, death, and hell, but the ascension highlights especially what he has saved us for: namely, communion with the triune God in immortal glory.
This paper is more like a prolegomenon to a biblical-theological treatment of the ascension. My principal concern is constructive: namely, to explore the impact of the ascension not only on the atonement but also on our broader cosmological and metaphysical assumptions. The question is never whether metaphysics but which one. On one hand, ever since Ritschl and Harnack, modern theology has shown us that attempts to rid Christianity once and for all of metaphysics in general and Platonism in particular more often than not succeed only by ridding Christianity of itself.1
On the other hand, weighty programs such as the nouvelle théologie, Radical Orthodoxy, and the New Finnish School have attracted some Protestant theologians to the cause of a renewed Christian Platonism over against a nominalist “extrinsicism” that led allegedly to secularism via the Reformation.2 Modern theology has been captivated by central dogmas and reductionistic typologies, including “Eastern” versus “Western” soteriological paradigms, with Christus Victor, participation and theôsis set over against the “legalistic” ideas of original sin, penal substitution, and justification. Exploring the atonement from the perspective of the ascension, I argue that these are false choices.
TALE OF TWO ASCENSIONS
One typology seems to me to have better historical justification than others that I have mentioned: the contrasting trajectories of Origen of Alexandria (182 – 254) and Irenaeus of Lyons (130 – 202). Like most generalizations, this one is also susceptible to exaggeration. Yet the differences are profound enough to have generated distinct trajectories even into the present day, and they turn to a large extent on radically different interpretations of Christ’s ascension.3
THE ORIGENIST TRAJECTORY
Origen wrote, “If we understand the ascent of the Son to the Father with holy insight and in a way suitable to God, we shall realize it is the ascent of mind rather than the body.”4 This thesis is generated by a cosmology that Origen delineates especially in On First Principles. The hierarchy that we observe in the cosmos and among human beings originates with a rebellion of rational souls prior to this world, meriting different levels of being.5 “And when they reach the neighborhood of the earth,” Origen writes, “they are enclosed in grosser bodies, and last of all are tied to human flesh.”6 Falling by their free will, these incarcerated spirits may ascend by their free will and merit higher stations; this world was created as a prison or school for winning back our wings.
Jesus’ soul alone remained united fully to the Logos, and he shows the fallen souls how to return to the Father, passing from earthly to soulish and finally to spiritual existence.7 Though less divine than the Father, the Son is the link between God and humans. The meaning of Christ’s death is twofold, Origen states: “the first” is that he “has left us an example” and “the second” is that he has gained “victory over the devil. . . .”8 Christ’s death involved no propitiatory sacrifice, since God has no wrath.9
The chief purpose of the incarnation was to reveal the invisible Deity to sensual creatures. Having done this, the Logos casts off his bodily carapace. Origen interpreted Jesus’ resurrection allegorically, as a passing from a physical to an ethereal body.10 The “spiritual body” of 1 Corinthians 15:44 indicates that
in the resurrection of the just there will be nothing physical [animale] in those who have merited beatitude. . . . The spirit [nous], in its falling, became soul; and the soul, when formed again in virtues, will become spirit again. . . . It follows from this that God and these beings [rational souls of angels and humans] are in some way of the divine substance.11
Thus, he exhorts, “Each of you should strive to become a divider of that water which is above and which is below.”12 Indeed, “the exodus from Egypt is also a figure of the soul which leaves the darkness of this world and the blindness of bodily nature.”13
God is a wise physician who sometimes applies strong medicine, but the fires of earthly purgation are always remedial, even for Pharaoh, Herod, and Lucifer himself.14 The wheat and tares that are separated by Christ at his return (Matt 13:24 – 30, 36 – 42) are opinions, not persons.15 As J. W. Trigg puts it, “To Origen this meant that, in the end, all rational creatures will be saved and restored to their original state of contemplative union with God, ‘for the end is always like the beginning.’ ”16
Origen’s tripartite anthropology is all-controlling. He draws the parallel between body, soul, and spirit and the division of the faithful into simple, more perfect, and highly spiritual, as well as the historical, moral, and allegorical meanings of Scripture.17 “One must understand the divine scripture intellectually and spiritually; for the sensible or physical way of knowing that is according to the historical meaning is not true.”18 When it comes to the “letter,” he advises, “Cast all this aside like the bitter rind of a nut.”19 “[L]et us seek out not the letter but the soul. . . . If we can do this, we will also ascend to the spirit.”20 Furthermore, external preaching and sacraments are contrasted with the inner word, washing, and feeding.21 The institutional church is different from the true church led by the real heirs of the prophets and apostles who are called directly by the Spirit, among whom Origen considered himself.22 There are even two gospels: a temporal gospel concerning the Jesus of history (for the simple) and the eternal gospel that transcends the literal meaning of the New Testament (for the spiritually advanced).23
Although that which is “spiritual” has priority in his thinking, Origen regarded the Holy Spirit as less divine than the Son — perhaps a high angel.24 In fact, the Holy Spirit is often identified with the human spirit, distinguished from the soul and body.25 The ascent upward is a descent inward, into the inmost self: “[T]hat first heaven, which we have called spiritual, is our mind, which is itself spirit. . . . Indeed this human, made ‘in the image of God,’ we do not understand as bodily.”26 Origen calls believers “to remove the earth from each of you and open up your fountain. For he is within you and does not come from outside, just as ‘the kingdom of God is within you.’ ”27
Origen’s cosmology is basically the exitus-reditus (exit-return) pattern of Plato’s Phaedrus, part of a common fund for disparate groups in Alexandria: Philo, Valentinus, and Plotinus who, like Origen himself, had been a student of the Platonist philosopher Ammonius Saccas. While the Gnostics set the upper world of spirit and the lower world of matter in stark opposition, Platonism allowed Origen to see the relation as more like a ladder. The lower rungs are, well, lower, but they have their place in the contemplative ascent.
The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 issued fifteen anathemas against Origen’s teaching, but there is probably no other figure charged with heresy who has enjoyed such enormous prestige and enduring influence in church history even among orthodox writers. Jerome led the Latin critique of Origen, replying to Origen’s defender Rufinus, “What you admire so much we long ago despised when we found it in Plato.”28 Although Platonism had saved him from the stark dualism of the Manichaeans, Augustine said he found nothing in the Platonists’ books that tell us that “the Word became flesh.”29 He added, “It is, I suppose, humiliating for learned people to leave the school of Plato to enter that of Christ,”30 although the extent of his own debt to Neoplatonism remains a matter of considerable debate.
While affirming the ban on some of Origen’s esoteric teachings, the metaphysical map for much of mainstream Byzantine and medieval theology was a theurgic Neoplatonism mediated especially by Pseudo-Dionysius.31 According to Pseudo-Dionysius, “To be deified is to enable God to be born in oneself.”32 Maximus the Confessor followed a similar line, arguing “that it is no longer necessary ‘that those who seek the Lord should seek him outside themselves.’ ”33 “God always wishes to become incarnate in those who are worthy of it,” he wrote.34 Similar expressions are found throughout the history of Christian mysticism, including radical forms of Protestantism where the “Christ within” replaced both the Holy Spirit and the ascended Jesus at the Father’s right hand.35
Through Pseudo-Dionysius’s influence especially, the church increasingly replaced Christ as the ladder of salvation. As Douglas Farrow summarizes, throughout the Middle Ages the ascension of Christ goes through successive waves of “internalization and marginalization” in favor of “the ancient Hellenic quest for the visio dei. . . . That was a worldview naturally resistant to the hard edge of biblical eschatology, but quite comfortable with a hidden Christ who is always ascending and a Mary who is always bringing him down again; with an endless liturgical rhythm in which the parousia (not unlike the philosophers’ stone) is always within reach yet forever receding.”36
With the Renaissance came a resurgence of Neoplatonism, often in less “Christianized” forms, as in Pico della Mirandola, who also presumed to lift the ban on Origen. Erasmus recommended the Platonists as the height of philosophy and Origen as the best of the Christian authors — of far greater spiritual value than Augustine, he said.37 J. B. Payne observes, “The starting point for Erasmus’s sacramental thought, as indeed for his whole theology, is the Platonic conception of the contrast between flesh and spirit.”38 And it was Erasmus, Farrow relates, “who in his attack on late medieval superstition repeats the point that ‘it was the flesh of Christ which stood in the way’ of an authentic spiritual faith among the apostles; that ‘the physical presence of Christ is of no profit for salvation.’ ”39
THE IRENAEAN TRAJECTORY
Irenaeus’s Against Heresies predated Origen’s work by a half-century and described the Gnostic consensus in terms that could include Origen’s basic scheme: “This, then, is the true redemption . . . that their inner man may ascend on high in an invisible manner, as if their body were left among created things, while their soul is sent forward to the Demiurge.”40 However, Irenaeus said that Christ did bodily “ascend to the height above, offering and commending to His Father that human nature which had been found, making in His own person the first-fruits of the resurrection of man.”41 He said, “For by the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit, man, and not a part of man, was made in the likeness of God.”42 Tertullian added in the same vein, Christ “carried it [our flesh] with him into heaven as a pledge of that complete entirety which is one day to be restored to it. Be not disquieted, O flesh and blood, with any care; in Christ you have acquired both heaven and the kingdom of God.”43
The Reformation was not a wholesale rejection of the long conversation between Jerusalem and Athens, but it was critical of the more Origenist trajectory evident especially in more radical forms of medieval mysticism that also shaped the thinking of Anabaptist leaders. In his debate with Erasmus, Luther claimed to have put Origen back under the ban and said, “I think that Denys [Pseudo-Dionysius] Platonizes more than he Christianizes.”44 In fact, it was this “ascent of mind” that the German reformer had in mind when he contrasted “theologians of glory” with “theologians of the cross.”45
Calvin’s dependence on Irenaeus should not be exaggerated; there were many patristic influences, especially Augustine and Chrysostom.46 Plato at least realized that the aim of humanity is union with “God,” Calvin says, yet “he could not even dimly sense its nature” apart from union with Christ. Only those “who raise their minds to the resurrection” have an accurate conception of the beatific vision.47 The reformer’s references to Origen are negative, and he described Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy as impressive at first but turning out to be “nothing but talk.” “If you read that book, you would think a man fallen from heaven recounted, not what he had learned, but what he had seen with his own eyes.”48
Hans Urs von Balthasar charged that Irenaeus’s “basic attitude cannot be assimilated by true Protestantism.”49 Locating Reformed theology within the more “Irenaean” stream, the balance of this paper challenges Balthasar’s judgment, highlighting the role of the ascension in defining this trajectory.
RECAPITULATION: THE TWO ADAMS
The christological emphases that emerged in Reformed circles reflect an Irenaean concern to highlight the saving significance of Christ’s humanity. The Word became flesh not simply to reveal God’s love, nor to blaze the trail for our educative ascent of mind, nor only to offer his body as a sacrifice, but to fulfill the covenantal role that Adam abandoned. This is most evident in Irenaeus’s doctrine of recapitulation.
RECAPITULATION AND ACTIVE OBEDIENCE
Irenaeus describes recapitulation this way: The eternal Son was sent by the Father to be “united to his workmanship, . . . so that what we had lost in Adam — namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God — that we might recover in Christ Jesus.”50 Irenaeus even refers to a “first covenant” made with Adam as the head of the human race, a “covenant of law” distinguished from “the gospel covenant.”51 Adam and Eve were created in true righteousness and holiness, but like children they were not yet mature or confirmed in immortal glory.52 Thus, the consummation can never be a return to the beginning, but rather, entrance into a state of glory that no human being has ever known. This story of the “two Adams” is not an allegory about something else but a historical reality that forms the plight-solution and promise-fulfillment pattern of Christian hope.
Defining recapitulation directly, Calvin says that it is the Son’s union with us and our union with him: the marvelous exchange. “Our Lord came forth as true man and took the person and name of Adam,” he says, “in order to take Adam’s place in obeying the Father.”53 “How has Christ abolished sin? He achieved this for us by the whole course of his obedience.” “In short,” he adds, “from the time when he took on the form of a servant, he began to pay the price of liberation in order to redeem us.”54 Christ not only bears our guilt, but by his meritorious obedience as the faithful Son of Man wins for us the right finally to eat from the Tree of Life. In the same vein, John Owen writes, “There is no contemplation of the glory of Christ that ought more to affect the hearts of them that do believe with delight and joy than this, of the recapitulation of all things in him.”55 Even more glorious than the first creation, “this new relation of the creation unto the Son of God” is “more beautiful than it was before.”56
Sin, Calvin says, springs not from “a lower appetite” or “sensuality,” but
unspeakable impiety occupied the very citadel of his [man’s] mind and pride penetrated to the depths of his heart. Thus it is pointless and foolish to restrict the corruption that arises thence only to what are called the impulses of the senses; or to call [these senses] the “kindling wood” [of sin].57
What Adam lost was communion with God, from which flowed all of the blessings of life, righteousness, and dignity.58 And grace is not a medicinal substance infused into the soul to elevate it toward the supernatural, as medieval theologians had argued.59 Rather, it is the favor and gift of the Father, in the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. As incarnate, the Son “is near us, indeed touches us, since he is our flesh.”60 It is not just in his divinity that Christ is life-giving, Calvin says. As the eschatological first-fruits, his humanity is “pervaded with fullness of life to be transmitted to us,” and this is why “it is rightly called ‘life-giving.’ ”61
The contrasting trajectories become clearer. First, while Origenism is concerned centrally with the ascent of the soul or mind away from our bodily history, Irenaeus and his heirs focus on God’s descent to us and his ascent to the Father in our flesh, taking our history with him into the age to come. Calvin says, “Christ aggregated to his body that which was alienated from the hope of life: the world which was lost and history itself.”62 Elsewhere he writes,
In this sense Irenaeus writes that the Father, himself infinite, becomes finite in the Son, for he has accommodated himself to our little measure lest our minds be overwhelmed by the immensity of his glory. . . . Actually, it means nothing else than that God is comprehended in Christ alone.63
Jesus came not merely to show us the way, but to be the Way.
Second, and related to the first point, everything that happened to Jesus will happen to those who are united to him. While for Origen the end is a return to the beginning, for the Irenaean trajectory the end is far greater than the beginning, with the Last Adam entering the everlasting Sabbath as our victor.
Third, by his ascension Christ has opened up a space within our history for the descent of the Spirit who brings the powers of the age to come into this present age. In fact, Owen observes of the ascended Christ,
He it is in whom our nature, which was debased as low as hell by apostasy from God, is exalted above the whole creation. . . . In him the relation of our nature unto God is eternally secured. . . . Heaven and earth may pass away, but there shall never be a dissolution of the union between God and our nature any more.64
These redemptive-historical events cannot be mapped onto a preexisting cosmology. Rather, they are the map.
RECAPITULATION AND ATONEMENT
In his great prayer recorded in John 17, Jesus has in view one dramatic movement from Golgotha to glory. His cross will secure eternal life for his people, and in his glorification those who are united to him will be brought into the intimacy of the Father-Son relationship (esp. vv. 1, 21 – 22).
Rather than treat recapitulation as one aspect of the atonement, I suggest that the atonement should be seen as a central aspect of recapitulation that is realized in the whole life and ministry of Christ from the incarnation to his return in glory. Christ’s threefold office is a recapitulation of the original commission given to humanity in Adam: as prophet, he is the true and faithful witness; as priest, the mediator who reconciles sinners to God; as king, the conqueror who brings the frightful disorder of the fallen world into a glory beyond even that of its original creation.
There is no basis therefore for any antithesis between Christus Victor and Agnus Dei, the atonement as victory over evil powers and as a propitiatory sacrifice. In fact, the key Christus Victor passages indicate that Christ’s conquest over the powers of Satan, death, and hell is based on his having satisfied the claims of God’s law and having borne its curse in our place (Heb 9:22; 1 Cor 15:55 – 57; Rom 8:1 – 23; Col 2:14 – 15).65 The legal aspect of our union with Christ is the basis for the mystical and organic aspects, just as the legal aspect of marriage or adoption is the basis for a secure and intimate relationship. Calvin affirmed Christ’s royal victory already in his atoning death, but he also underscored the real transition from the state of humiliation to exaltation.66
ASCENSION AND EUCHARIST
It was in the Eucharistic controversies of the Reformation era where differing views of the ascension engendered differing Christological emphases. Some Anabaptist leaders returned directly to Origen’s principal ideas. Among the magisterial reformers, though, there was still considerable debate. Zwingli maintained a friendship with Erasmus, sharing a fondness for Platonist philosophy and, at least early on, for Origen.67 W. P. Stephens notes that the Zurich reformer’s emphasis fell on “Christ as God rather than Christ as man.”68 He heartily emphasized Christ’s bodily ascension, but like Erasmus he argued that Christ’s physical absence from us is of little consequence, since he is omnipresent in his deity.69 Zwingli wrote, “Christ is our salvation by virtue of that part of his nature by which he came down from heaven, not of that by which he was born of an immaculate virgin, though he had to suffer and die by this part.”70
It is hardly surprising that Luther heard such statements as Nestorian, as did Calvin. Most basically for Calvin, Zwingli struck at the very heart of our union with Christ — the whole person, including his saving humanity. “For in his flesh was accomplished man’s redemption,” he argues.71 Calvin said, “It would be extreme madness to recognize no communion of believers with the flesh and blood of the Lord. . . . The flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself.”72 When we receive the bread and the wine, says Calvin, “let us no less surely trust that the body itself is also given to us.”73 The signs are “guarantees of a present reality: the believer’s feeding on the body and blood of Christ.”74 Otherwise, faith becomes a “mere imagining” of Christ’s presence — an ascent of mind that he attributed to Zwingli.75 The Lord’s Supper not only assures our minds but also “secures the immortality of our flesh” which is “even now quickened by his immortal flesh.”76
Calvin appeals explicitly to Irenaeus for his view of the Supper in several places.77 With Irenaeus, he insists that it is not enough that the Son united himself to our humanity; we must be united to him now in order to be saved. Hence, according to the Belgic Confession, although by his resurrection Jesus has “given immortality” to the humanity he assumed, “nevertheless he has not changed the reality of his human nature; forasmuch as our salvation and resurrection also depend on the reality of his body” (Article 19).
However, for just that reason, Lutheran Christology raised the specter of Eutychianism by positing that Christ’s divine attributes (such as omnipresence) were communicated to his human nature. According to this position, Christ is omnipresent even in his humanity, though invisibly, and this genus of majesty was his already at his incarnation.78 “Hence at his exaltation,” Bavinck summarizes, “Christ received nothing he did not already have. . . . Immediately at the moment of his incarnation, Christ is that which he could become.”79 I should mention in passing that at least on this point Karl Barth takes the Lutheran side in the controversy when he says that Christ’s exaltation “is completed already” in his humiliation.80 In fact, “His being as such (if we may be permitted this abstraction for a moment) was and is the end of the old and the beginning of the new form of this world even without his resurrection and ascension.”81
As Bavinck summarizes, “The Reformed view is that Christ is the mediator in accordance with both natures.” “The divine and human participate in both states in the one person. . . . His exaltation is thus a real change, a state gained as a reward of his obedience. The preposition διὸ (‘therefore’) in Philippians 2 as well as the Letter to the Hebrews points to Christ earning his exaltation through obedience.”82 Consequently, in the exaltation of “his humanity,” observes Bavinck, “our humanity was exalted beyond all prior dignity . . . so that same person is the subject of the exaltation in both his natures.”83 At the same time, the Reformed reject the Socinian view that this exaltation changed the divine nature as such, as if he were now divine in a way that he had not been previously.84
Calvin had no interest speculating about the whereabouts of the heavenly throne on which Christ is seated. “But what is the manner of the ascension itself?” he asks. Apart from the ascension in the flesh, the continuity between Christ’s earthly and heavenly existence becomes questionable — along with our continuity with him in our future resurrection. Indeed, Paul writes that Christ “ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things” (Eph 4:10 ESV). “But if to fill all things in an invisible manner is numbered among the gifts of his glorified body,” says Calvin, “it is plain that the substance of the body is wiped out and that no difference between deity and human nature is left.” By Christ’s own testimony, “he can be touched and seen,” Calvin adds. “Take these away and flesh now ceases to be.” A docetic ascension negates Paul’s assurance that “ ‘we await from heaven a Savior, . . . who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body’ [Phil 3:20 – 21].” We do not hope for “an invisible and infinite body,” but our glorified humanity together with our exalted Head. Yet Christ remains in heaven “until the time of restoration” (Acts 3:21).85
Explaining away Christ’s ascension in the flesh inevitably leads to a muting of the significance of Pentecost. Jesus said, “It is to your advantage that I go away.” However, where for Zwingli this was because it revealed his omnipresent deity, Calvin emphasized Jesus’ own explanation: “For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7 ESV).
The whole thrust of this farewell discourse is his ascension and the sending of the Spirit. Calvin says, “I willingly confess that Christ is ascended that he may fill all things; but I say that he is spread abroad everywhere by his Spirit, not by the substance of his flesh.”86 Calvin complains of his critics, “For thus they leave nothing to the secret working of the Spirit, which unites Christ himself to us. To them Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us. As though, if he should lift us to himself, we should not just as much enjoy his presence!”87 Similarly, Irenaeus said that the Gnostics “do, in fact, set the Spirit aside altogether.”88
Rather than pursue dubious Christological solutions, Calvin — like Irenaeus — pointed to the Holy Spirit.89 Douglas Farrow suggests that Calvin, like Irenaeus, “found it necessary to reckon more bravely than the other reformers with the absence of Christ as a genuine problem for the church. It is we who require eucharistic relocation.”90 Instead of moving from Eucharist to ascension, Calvin moved in the other direction, and this led him to stress “the particularity of Jesus without sacrificing sacramental realism.” This “forced him to seek a pneumatological solution to the problem of the presence and the absence.”91
Calvin was hardly alone in the development of this view.92 Nevertheless, I share Julie Canlis’s judgment:
The radical — even watershed — role that Calvin gave to the Spirit in the Lord’s Supper cannot be overstated. As had not been done since perhaps the patristic writers, Calvin attempted to take seriously the pneumatological dimensions of presence: the Spirit is not the Pentecostal replacement for Christ but the way to him.93
Calvin says, “In sum, God comes down to us so that then we might go up to him. That is why the sacraments are compared to the steps of a ladder.”94 Canlis observes, “The problem with medieval sacramentalism, in Calvin’s opinion, is that it reversed the direction of the ladder.”95 She adds,
If human life has been brought ‘up’ into God without change or confusion and our ‘partaking’ of his very humanity is raising us up into God’s triune koinônia, then we see just how essential the Eucharist is as a confirmation of Calvin’s doctrine of participation.96
ASCENSION AND DEIFICATION
Propitiation and victory underscore the danger that Christ’s death has overcome for us. Yet to be delivered from sin’s curse, and therefore from the kingdom of Satan, is not yet to be united to God. The atonement needs the ascension and Pentecost.
Athanasius famously stated, “He indeed assumed humanity that we might become God.”97 Given the consensus of the Eastern fathers on the distinction between God’s essence and energies, though, deification could never include any ontic overlap (univocity) between divine and creaturely being. In fact, Athanasius insists that we will be deified only in the Son, “without losing our own proper substance.”98 Irenaeus had made the same point: “Neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated.”99 The Son “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself,” says Irenaeus.100 A little further, he stipulates that this consummate union “will render us like unto [Christ].”101
All of these qualifications guard against Origen’s version of deification. Where Irenaeus sees Christ as passing through different stages of our human-historical existence (humiliation and exaltation), recovering what was lost in Adam, Origen sees Christ as passing from fleshly, to soulish, and finally to spiritual existence, as our example. At the cross, says Origen, “the dispensation of the flesh was ended.” Consequently, the Son is now indistinguishable from the Holy Spirit.102 We must no longer think of Christ as a human being circumscribed by space. “For it is not a man who is ‘wherever two or three are gathered in’ his ‘name’ (Mt 18:20); nor is a man ‘with’ us ‘always, to the close of the age’ (Mt 28:20); and when the faithful are gathered everywhere, what is present is not a man but the divine power that was in Jesus.”103 Similarly, Origen counsels, the soul that will “climb to the heights of heaven shall no longer be a man, but according to his word, will be ‘like an angel of God’ ” or perhaps divine; but in either case, “he shall certainly no longer be a man.”104
DEIFICATION IN IRENAEUS
In Irenaeus and other patristic writers, deification is the full realization of the gifts of immortality, complete restoration of the image of God, adoption, and the vision of God in Christ. For Irenaeus everything in deification turns on the activity of the three divine persons in the economy rather than on the believer’s ascent to God.105 The Spirit lifts us up into the eschatological life of Jesus Christ, presenting us to the Father. Irenaeus says that this occurs not by a “casting away of the flesh, but by the imparting of the Spirit.”106 Glorification is our true humanization: “The glory of God,” he says, “is a human fully alive.”107 Farrow notes that for Irenaeus,
The ascension of Jesus Christ is not the return of God to God. It is the ascension of the God-man to his rightful place, the place of glory that Adam and Eve never knew, but are yet destined to know. . . . We will be deified by the Spirit, knowing God by way of God.108
REFORMED INTERPRETATIONS OF DEIFICATION
If Calvin and other Reformed writers define recapitulation as a synonym for union with Christ, as I have shown, then it should not surprise us that they affirm deification (or glorification) as the consummation of that union.109
First, like Irenaeus, Calvin interprets descent and ascent in thoroughly Trinitarian terms. Calvin shared Luther’s emphasis on the downward descent of God in the flesh. “All who, leaving Christ, attempt to rise to heaven after the manner of the giants, are destitute,” Calvin warns in his comment on John 8:19. Herman Selderhuis notes from the reformer’s Commentary on the Psalms that “God does not command us to ascend into heaven, but, because of our weakness, he descends to us.”110 And yet, focusing merely on the descent was bound to limit — and did limit — the eschatological and pneumatological significance of Christ’s ascension for us. To Luther’s emphasis on the downward descent of Christ to us, Calvin adds the equally Pauline emphasis on the Spirit’s work of seating us with Christ in heavenly places. Calvin says that there is “a manner of descent by which he lifts us up to himself,” which Philip Walker Butin explains as follows:
Not only does Christ (in the Spirit) condescend to manifest himself to believers by means of visible, tangible, created elements; at the same time by the Spirit, the worshiping church is drawn into the heavenly worship of the Father though the mediation of the ascended Christ, who is seated with the Father in the heavenlies. For Calvin, this accentuates, rather than diminishes, the true humanity of Christ.111
It is this double movement — the descent of the Son in our humanity and the Spirit’s raising us up with Christ eschatologically — that gives Calvin’s doctrine of union a distinctively Irenaean flavor.
For both Irenaeus and Calvin, the believer’s ascent with Christ is a trinitarian operation. According to Irenaeus, Christ “has also poured out the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, imparting indeed God to men by means of the Spirit, and, on the other hand, attaching men to God by His own incarnation, and bestowing upon us at His coming immortality durably and truly, by means of communion with God.”112 Similarly, Calvin says that “for this reason Christ descended to us, to bear us up to the Father, and at the same time to bear us up to himself, inasmuch as he is one with the Father.”113
It is therefore not our ascent to a spiritual realm but Christ’s humiliation and exaltation and the Holy Spirit’s act of uniting us to him that is saving. The Father “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6). On Colossians 3:1 Calvin writes, “Ascension follows resurrection: hence if we are members of Christ we must ascend into Heaven, because He, on being raised up from the dead was received up into Heaven that He might draw us with Him.”114
Second, deif ication is the realization of our humanity, not our inner divinity. Created in God’s image, our likeness to God in his moral attributes is intrinsic to our human nature. Therefore, to be made consummately like God — as far as a creature can be — is not to be less human but more fully so. Like Irenaeus, Calvin observes that Christ is Son by nature; we are sons by adoption.115 Calvin quotes Irenaeus (AH 5.2.3): “By nature we are mortal, and God alone immortal.”116 Expounding 2 Peter 1:4, he writes, “. . . that God, then, should make himself ours, so that all his things should in a manner become our things . . . The end of the gospel is, to render us eventually conformable to God, and, if we may so speak, to deify us.” He explains:
But the word nature is not here essence but quality.... There are also at this day fanatics who imagine that we thus pass over into the nature of God, so that his swallows up our nature. Thus they explain what Paul says, that God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28) and in the same sense they take this passage. But such a delirium as this never entered the minds of the holy Apostles; they only intended to say that when divested of all the vices of the flesh, we shall be partakers of divine and blessed immortality and glory, so as to be as it were one with God as far as our capacities will allow. . . . But we, disregarding empty speculations, ought to be satisfied with this one thing — that the image of God in holiness and righteousness is restored to us for this end, that we may at length be partakers of eternal life and glory as far as it will be necessary for our complete felicity.117
Calvin’s explanation is virtually identical to that of John of Damascus, who teaches, “For these words do not mean any change in nature.”118 Believers will be “deified in the way of participation in the divine glory and not in that of a change into the divine being.”119
In the Institutes, Calvin observes, “Peter declares that believers are called to become partakers of the divine nature. . . . If the Lord will share his glory, power, and righteousness with the elect — nay, will give himself to be enjoyed by them and, what is more excellent, will somehow make them to become one with himself, let us remember that every sort of happiness is included under this benefit.”120 He asks, “What is the goal of our adoption which we attain through him, if it is not, as Peter declares, finally to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4)?”121 Immortality is not the spirit’s native origin but the prize that Christ has won for us.122 Creation in God’s image is “participation in God,” but justification and recreation in Christ by grace is a joy beyond words.123
It is striking that even after his deep criticisms of Osiander’s more Origenist view of union, Calvin nevertheless maintained that deification is “that ‘than which nothing more outstanding can be imagined.’ ”124 Nevertheless, “we are one with the Son of God not because he conveys his substance to us, but because, by the power of his Spirit, he imparts to us his life and all the blessings which he has received from the Father.”125 He says that the “fanatics” imagine that at death “we shall revert back to our original state,” erroneously conceived as absorption into deity.126
The same affirmations and qualifications of deification that we observed in Athanasius, Ireaneus, and Calvin are repeated frequently in formative Reformed systems. For example, Zacharius Ursinus points out that Christ is still present with us, not only by his divinity but also “by union with his human nature” through the same Spirit who united the Son to our humanity. “Our glorification results from Christ’s ascension into heaven.”127 This consummate conformity to Christ, then, is not a matter of becoming less creaturely but more truly human than we have ever been.128
Turretin affirms that “we will — in body as well as soul . . . be transformed into [Christ] by a participation of the divine nature,” made one in love with God and each other.129 And yet, he disagrees with Thomas Aquinas’s stipulation that “When . . . a created intellect sees God in his essence, the divine essence becomes the intelligible form of that intellect.”130 The real question is this: To what extent will we allow a union of creatures as creatures with God? “Believers are said to be partakers of the divine nature,” writes Turretin, “not univocally (by a formal participation of the divine essence), but only analogically.”131 Quoting John of Damascus, Turretin maintains that we will behold God not in his essence but in the face of Christ.132 Sharing Job’s hope (Job 19:25), we will behold the invisible God with our physical eyes — “that is, of the sight of the incarnate Son of God with respect to his human nature.”133
Similarly, Owen affirms that while God’s essence will forever remain “incomprehensible to our minds, . . . the blessed and blessing sight which we shall have of God will always be ‘in the face of Jesus Christ.’ ”134
For this intimate and eschatological conception of union, Calvin was fond of the organic image of ingrafting.135 The gospel “testifies that we shall be partakers of the divine nature, for when we shall see God face to face, we shall be like him (II Pet. 1:4; I John 3:2).”136 Elsewhere he adds,
This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty unto himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness.137
Third, and closely related to the previous point, to be united to Christ is to be in communion with his body. It is not the ascent of the lonely soul, Plotinus’s “flight of the alone to the Alone.”138 As the true humanizing of believers, recapitulation is also the true socializing of the anti-covenantal “disengaged self.”139
The mystical union is so real that Calvin can say,
This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church.140
Augustine coined the term totus Christus (“whole Christ”) to refer to Christ as head and the church as his body. A Dionysian interpretation of the church’s union with Christ, revived in our day, is mapped onto a Platonist anthropology. De Lubac writes, “The Christ, it has been said, needs the Church as a pneuma needs a sôma.”141 Jesus Christ becomes the invisible soul of the visible church. More radical (and less orthodox) is Graham Ward’s formulation of totus Christus. Calvin cannot have a robust view of the church’s participation in Christ, says Ward, because he is so fixated on the body of the “gendered Jew.” Ward’s own solution is to regard this body as infinitely expanded — “transcorporeal” — so that he “returns” in and as the church.142 This spiritual body is “more real than any physical body.”143 Suspicions are little dispelled by his protest, “This is not Origen’s ‘ascent of mind.’ ”144
No less real, the mystical union according to Calvin is eschatological, with Christ as the first-fruits. It is not the relation of one’s soul and body but of Vine and branches, Head and members, husband and wife.145 There remains an eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not-yet” that affects Christ and his happiness as well as us and ours. This interpretation clashes not only with more Platonist views, but with a Zwinglian logic that renders questionable a real union with God through Christ’s glorified humanity. Here I have in mind especially Karl Barth, whose reticence to identify God’s Word directly with anything creaturely, not to mention his lament concerning the triumph of “Calvin’s sacramentalism” over Zwingli in the Reformed confessions,146 represents a radical departure from Reformed teaching on union with Christ.
Fourth, justification is the legal basis for, rather than the alternative to, sanctification and glorification. Attempts to interpret Calvin as substituting union with Christ, much less deification, for justification are no more successful than the Finnish interpretation of Luther.
Like the contrived opposition between propitiation and Christus Victor, “ justification or deification” is yet another false choice unknown to the apostle Paul, who announced, “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Rom 8:30 – 31).147 From the security of the “once- and-for-all” aspects of this union (viz., election, justification, regeneration and adoption) there arises the “more-and-more” aspects. One cannot be united to Christ for justification without also receiving in him sanctification and glorification. “With a wonderful communion day by day, he grows more and more into one body with us, until he becomes completely one with us.”148 Through the Word and sacraments the Spirit works “to lead us little by little to a firm union with God.”149
In Calvin’s view, “Paul not only exhorts us to follow Christ, but also takes hold of something far higher, namely, that through baptism Christ makes us sharers in his death, that we may be engrafted in it.”150 Participation, not imitation, is the root.151 Just as Calvin added to Luther’s emphasis on Christ’s descent the equally Pauline emphasis on ascent with Christ, he added to Luther’s “once-and-for-all” emphasis the “more-and-more” aspect of our union.
Fifth, like Calvin, the most formative Reformed theologians identified glorification and the beatific vision with the resurrection of the dead as one event that glorifies us in body as well as soul.152 As noted above, Calvin observes that where Plato’s beatific vision is a flight away from our body, union with Christ raises our contemplation to the resurrection. John Owen observes that “Plato’s contemplations about the immortality of the soul” work against the hope of resurrection. He adds that this is the problem “in all contemplations of future glory when things are proposed to it whereof in this life it hath neither foretaste, sense, experience, nor evidence.” He stipulates, “No man ought to look for anything in heaven but what one way or other he hath some experience of in this life.”153 Turretin emphasized that grace does not annihilate nature.154 Our bodies are raised, not replaced.155 For us, time is not left behind, but fulfilled and perpetually renewed. It is “this time” defined by sin and death that is disappearing.156
These emphases suggest the closest affinity with the Second Council of Constantinople, whose eleventh anathema against Origen reads, “If anyone shall say that the future judgment signifies the destruction of the world and that the end of the story will be an immaterial physis, and that thereafter there will no longer be any body matter, but only nous, let him be anathema.”157
Over against the Neoplatonism that has frequently infected theology, writes Bavinck, “in Reformation theology” the antithesis to grace is not nature but sin.158 Grace is not simply “an aid to humans in their pursuit of deification”; it is “the beginning, the middle, and the end of the entire work of salvation: it is totally devoid of human merit. Like creation and redemption, so also sanctification is a work of God. It is of him, and through him, and therefore also leads to him.”159
CONCLUSION
I hope to have assisted in disproving Hans Urs von Balthasar’s charge that Irenaeus’s “basic attitude cannot be assimilated by true Protestantism.” If there are good reasons to reject the Kantian — ostensibly “post-metaphysical” — projects of Ritschl, Harnack, and their heirs, there are good reasons to resist the lure of a revived Christian Platonism (indeed, an explicit Origenism) with its sweeping narrative of nominalism mediated through the Reformation and its allegedly “extrincisist” view of the God-world relation.
Irenaeus had focused on the historical economy of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, and he upbraided the Gnostics for raising purely speculative questions. However, Origen could not suffer this response. While Scripture and church teaching were a good first step for the simple, he wrote, “what existed before this world, or what will exist after it, has not yet been made known openly to the many, for no clear statement on this point is set forth in the Church teaching.” This left plenty of room for speculation, and Platonism provided the advanced course in metaphysics.160
The ascension especially forces us to lay our metaphysical cards on the table. Does the biblical drama yield its own doctrine of participation? Can eschatology transform ontology? Does the story of Israel culminating in Jesus generate its own cosmology, or is the gospel a wonderful symbol or illustration of a truth that, as “Greeks,” we have always known deep down?
Biblical eschatology opens up the closed Platonist circle into a historical line. It is the movement from type to reality, promise to fulfillment within history, not from the lower world of matter to the upper world of spirit. At the same time, history itself cannot generate a single seed of its redemption; God must rend the heavens and descend to us. Even in Hebrews, the categories of earthly and heavenly have become transformed into the eschatological division between “this age” and “the age to come.” The old covenant belongs to “this present age,” while the new covenant inaugurates “the age to come.”
The ascension occurs not within the Gnostic drama or Platonist/Neoplatonist myth of exitus-reditus (exit-return), but as the fulfillment of a greater exodus that Jesus accomplished in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31) and a greater conquest of the whole earth by his Word and Spirit. “Thus,” Calvin concludes, “we look to our Head Who is already in heaven, and say, ‘Although I am weak, there is Jesus Christ who is my strength. Although I am full of all miseries, Jesus Christ is in immortal glory and what He has will some time be given to me and I shall partake of all his benefits.”161 With the ascension, Immanuel is not only God With Us, and God For Us, but Us With God.
1. According to Adolf von Harnack, “The account of the Ascension is quite useless to the historian.” Adolf von Harnack, New Testament Studies III: The Acts of the Apostles, vol. 3, trans. John Richard Wilkinson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 241.
2. The nouvelle theologians include Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Yves Congar. Explicitly indebted to the nouvelle théologie (especially de Lubac), John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward announced their own program in 1999 with the volume, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge), followed by a stream of cultural and theological monographs. See also Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and Participation, eds. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005).
3. In the foreword to his translation of the anthology, Origen: Spirit and Fire, Robert J. Daly SJ, acknowledges “the Platonizing cast of his thought” but adds that this “is, in itself, only a sign that he was a Christian thinker in the third century. . . . The real question is not whether Origen thinks as a Platonist, but whether in so doing he gives sufficient place to the incarnational aspects of Christianity.” Robert J. Daly SJ, trans., Origen: Spirit and Fire, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984), xiv. I agree entirely with his point but am less convinced that Origen’s thinking meets that criterion.
4. Origen, “On Prayer,” XXIII.2, in Origen: The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Rowan A. Greer (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), 126 – 27.
5. Origen, On First Principles, 1.6.2; 1.7.1 – 1.8.4.
6. Ibid., 1.3.1.
7. Ibid., 4.4.5n.1 and 4.9.2; cf. Origen, On Prayer, 23.2.
8. Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 131.
9. Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third Century (London: SCM Press, 2012), 101.
10. Origen, On First Principles, 4.2.1 – 4.3.7.
11. Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 50 – 51
12. Ibid., 53.
13. Ibid., 65.
14. Trigg, Origen, 142. In fact, Origen conjectures in his Dialogue with Candidus (Candidus being a Gnostic leader) that the Devil will be saved.
15. Ibid., 213.
16. Ibid., 105. See Origen, On First Principles, 1.6.2.
17. Origen, On First Principles, 4.2.1 – 4.3.7. Origen frequently contrasts the “outer shell” (the historical, earthly, and ordinary sense of things as understood by “the many”) with the “inner truth” that is mystical. See von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 44, 50, 51, 53, 55, 63, 65, 93, 102 – 109, 102 – 105, 115, 125, etc.
18. Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 93.
19. Ibid., 103.
20. Ibid., 105.
21. Trigg, Origen, 191, 194.
22. Ibid., 125 – 26, 144 – 46.
23. Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2011), 20 – 21. See On First Principles, 4.3.13. n. 7. The passage in view is from Jerome’s version and suggests that “the gospel which is to exist in the heavens is as far superior to our gospel as the preaching of Christ is to the rites of the old law. . . .”
24. Origen, On First Principles, 1.3 (and notes 1 and 4 on page 3 in the Butterworth edition).
25. Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 183.
26. Ibid., 55.
27. Ibid., 31.
28. Cited by G. W. Butterworth in Origen, On First Principles, 41 n. 1., from Jerome’s Con. Joh. Hieros. 19.
29. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Betttenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 10.29.
30. Ibid., 10.29.
31. A Syrian monk writing in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, Pseudo-Dionysius claimed to have been the philosopher who followed Paul after his speech in the Areopagus in Acts 17:34. This gave him enormous authority during the Middle Ages. In fact, next to Scripture, he is the author cited most by Thomas Aquinas. Only in the Renaissance-Reformation era was his pseudonymity proved.
32. Pseudo-Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy II, introduction in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, 162 vols. (Paris, 1957 – 1886), 3:392.
33. Quoted in Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (Bloomsbury, UK: T&T Clark, 2011), 24, from Evagrius Ponticus’s Gnostic Centuries, 2.35; cf. 2.62.
34. Maximus the Confessor, “Questions to Thalassiust, 22 in Patrologia Graeca, 90:321.
35. Douglas Farrow’s Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) provides a useful genealogy leading through various modern theologians and philosophers.
36. Farrow, Ascension Theology, 24, 163.
37. Trigg, Origen, 255.
38. J. B. Payne, Erasmus: His Theology of the Sacraments (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1969), 35.
39. Farrow, Ascension Theology, 23, quoted from The Handbook of the Christian Soldier, Fifth Rule (The Erasmus Reader, ed. E. Rummel), 146.
40. Irenaeus, Against Heresies in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts, ed. James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 1.21.5. (Hereafter AH.)
41. Ibid., 3.19.3.
42. Ibid., 5.6.1 (emphasis added).
43. Tertullian, Resurrection, para. 51 in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, trans. Alexander Roberts, ed. James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 545 – 94.
44. Quoted from Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, by Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 133.
45. See Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976).
46. Irena Backus, “Calvin and the Greek Fathers” in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Later Medieval and Reformation History, eds. Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Johannes Van Oort, “John Calvin and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden: Brill, 1997); A. N. S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); Richard Muller, Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 120 – 55 and 235 – 62. Augustine ranks first, although Calvin criticized Augustine on occasion for being too Platonist. See Comm. on Jn. 1.3 in Calvini opera 59 vols. In Corpus Reformatorum, eds. C. G. Bretschneider, H. E. Bindseil, et al., vols. 29 – 87 (New York: Johnson, repr. 1964), 47 – 48.
47. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.25.2; cf. 1.5.11.
48. Ibid.,1.14.4.
49. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2, Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil CRV, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh/San Francisco: T&T Clark with Ignatius Press, 1984), 80.
50. Irenaeus, AH, 3.18.1.
51. Ibid., 1.10.3. Cf. 4.16.1 and 4.16.3 and 5.16.3.
52. Ibid., 4.11.1 – 2.
53. Calvin Institutes 2.12.3.
54. Ibid., 2.16.5.
55. John Owen, “The Person of Christ: His Mediatorial Office in Heaven,” in Works of John Owen, vol. 1, ed. William H. Goold (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 1:372.
56. Ibid., 1:373.
57. Calvin, Institutes, 2.1.9; cf. 2.1.4.
58. Ibid., 2.1.5 – 6.
59. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), II-II, 23, 2; I-II, 110, 2.
60. Calvin, Institutes, 2.12.1.
61. Ibid., 4.17.9.
62. Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum, 101 vols., eds. K. G. Bretschnider et al. (Berlin: Schwetchike, 1834 – 1900), 55:219.
63. Calvin, Institutes, 2.6.4.
64. John Owen, “Preface to the Reader” in “The Person of Christ,” 1:276 – 77, 281.
65. I explore the integral nature of Christus Victor and propitiation in Michael S. Horton, Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 178 – 260.
66. A superb treatment of the subject is Jeremy Treat’s recently published The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).
67. W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 9 – 17. W. P. Stephens relates that Zwingli’s marginal notes on Romans “points to the overwhelming, but independent, use of Origen by Zwingli, although Augustine’s teaching on grace became steadily more dominant” (see Stephens, 18 – 19).
68. Ibid., 121. Stephens adds, “The Augustinian and Neoplatonist contribution is evident in the whole of Zwingli’s theology, and especially in his understanding of the sacraments” (254).
69. For a fair interpretation of Zwingli’s Christology, see W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, 108 – 128.
70. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, eds. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press, 1981), 204.
71. Calvin, The Gospel According to John, vol 1:1 – 10, trans. T. H. L. Parker; Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 4, eds. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959 – 72), 167.
72. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.9.
73. Ibid., 4.17.10.
74. B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 165.
Calvin75. , Institutes, 4.17.5 – 6.
76. Ibid., 4.17.32.
77. Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and the Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010, 159.
78. Bavinck provides a good summary of the Lutheran view from a Reformed perspective in Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 428 – 29, citing J. Gerhard, J. A. Quenstedt, J. Buddeus, F. A. Philippi.
79. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:428 – 29, citing Quendstedt.
80. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956 – 75), IV/2:250.
81. Barth, CD IV/2,132 – 133; also see my chapter, Michael S. Horton, “Covenant, Election, and Incarnation: Evaluating Barth’s Actualist Christology,” in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, eds. Bruce McCormack and Clifford Anderso (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 112 – 47.
82. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:418 – 19.
83. Ibid., 3:432, 435.
84. Ibid., 3:435.
85. Calvin, Institutes 4.17.27, 29.
86. Calvin, Comm. Acts 1:9; cf. Inst. 4.6.10 and 2.16.4.
87. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.31.
88. See Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 230 – 31, quoting Irenaeus, AH III.17.4, in Mary Ann Donovan, One Right Reading? A Guide to Irenaeus (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997).
89. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.10.
90. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 176 – 77.
91. Ibid., 177 – 78, emphasis added. Even after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, Farrow maintains that Calvin stands out as an early modern representative of this Irenaean trajectory against Origen and Pelagianism. See Ascension Theology, 40 – 41, citing Calvin, Institutes 4.17.27 and his commentary on Hebrews.
92. Without downplaying Calvin’s genius for clear formulations, he was indebted to Reformed colleagues like Martin Bucer and Philipp Melanchthon. Calvin said that the view he defended “received its finishing touches from Peter Martyr [Vermigli], who left nothing more to be done.” Cited John Patrick Donelly SJ, in his introduction to Peter Martyr Vermigli, Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donelly SJ, vol. 21 of Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press and Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), xiii.
93. Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 239.
94. Ibid., 160, quoting Calvin, Serm. 2 Sam. 6:1 – 7.
95. Ibid., 159.
96. Ibid., 160.
97. St. Athanasius, “On the Incarnation,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff et al., 2nd series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, repr. 1982), 4:65.
98. Athanasius, De Decretis in NPNF2, vol. 4, trans. John Henry Newman, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, repr. 1982), 3.14; cf. Against the Arians, in the same volume, 1.39.
99. Irenaeus, AH 5.36.1.
100. Ibid., preface to Book 5.
101. Ibid., 5.8.1.
102. Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, 135.
103. Ibid., 136 – 38.
104. Ibid., 358.
105. Julie Canlis makes this point in Calvin’s Ladder, 177, from Mary Ann Donovan, One Right Reading? A Guide to Irenaeus (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 118.
106. Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 183 – 84, quoting Irenaeus, AH, 581.
107. Irenaeus, AH, 4.20.7.
108. Farrow, Ascension Theology, 144, 150.
109. See J. Todd Billings, “United to God through Christ: Assessing Calvin on the Question of Deification,” Harvard Theological Journal 98, no. 3 (2005): 315 – 34. For a more thorough treatment, see J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
110. Herman Selderhuis, Calvin’s Theology of the Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 203, referring to Calvin’s comments on Psalms 42:2 and 24:7.
111. Philip Walker Butin, Revelation, Redemption and Response: Calvin’s Trinitarian Understanding of the Divine-Human Relationship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 118.
112. Irenaeus, AH, 5.1.1.
113. Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.26.
114. Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, trans. John King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), on Colossians 3:1.
115. Calvin, Institutes, 2.14.5.
116. Calvin, “Psychopannychia,” in Tracts and Treatises, trans. Henry Beveridge, ed. T. F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 3:478.
117. Calvin, Commentary on the Catholic Epistles, trans. and ed. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1996), 371.
118. John of Damascus, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith” in NPNF2, 9:65 – 66. Compare also with Calvin’s formulation in his Commentary on John 6:51.
119. Ibid., 9:31.
120. Calvin, Institutes, 3.25.10.
121. Calvin, CO 9.351, cited in Joseph Tylenda, “The Controversy of Christ the Mediator: Calvin’s Second Reply to Stancaro,” Calvin Theological Journal 8 (1973): 148.
122. Calvin, Institutes, 2.1.1.
123. Ibid.
124. Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvinism and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55:1 (2002): 40, comment on 2 Pet 1:4 (quo nihil praestantius cogitari potest) from CO 55.446:“. . . a kind of deification [quasi deificari].”
125. Calvin on John 17:21 in Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1840, repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 170 – 83.
126. Calvin, Commentary on the Catholic Epistles, 330; cf. Institutes, 1.15.5.
127. Zacharius Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G. W. Williard (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, repr. of 1852 ed.), 249, 252.
128. Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 114.
129. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. G. M. Giger, ed. J. T. Dennison Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992), 3:611.
130. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.12.5, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (repr. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1948).
131. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:190.
132. Ibid., 3:611.
133. Ibid., 3:610.
134. John Owen, “The Person of Christ,” 1:292.
135. Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 124.
136. Ibid., 105.
137. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.2.
138. Plotinus, translation in Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1983; repr. 1992), 51.
139. I borrow this phrase from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
140. John Calvin on Eph 1:23 in Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 218.
141. Henri de Lubac, quoted by Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 266. See also Henri De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1950), 29; Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, 3 vols. (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), 2:19 – 20.
142. Graham Ward, Cities of God (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 154 – 72.
143. Ibid., 180.
144. Ibid.
145. Augustine coined the phrase totus Christus to refer to the “whole Christ” as Head and members. In the Middle Ages, this idea was increasingly interpreted within the Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius, as the church (in effect) replacing the absent body of the historical Jesus. Michael Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 155 – 90.
146. Karl Barth, CD IV/4:88, 128 – 30; cf. The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 114.
147. The seventeenth-century Reformed divine William Ames observed, “Glorification is nothing other but the carrying out of the sentence of justification. . . . In glorification the life that results from the pronouncement and award given to us we now have in actual possession.” William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John D. Eusden (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983), 172.
148. Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.24.
149. Ibid,, 2.15.5.
150. Ibid., 4.15.5.
151. Ibid., 3.3.9.
152. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3:609, 612. As the Belgic Confession (Art. 37) concludes, “And for a gracious reward, the Lord will cause [his elect] to possess such a glory as never entered the heart of man to conceive.” From the ascension we are assured, according to the Heidelberg Catechism, “first, that Christ is our advocate in the presence of his Father in heaven; second, that he as the head, will also take us, his members, up to himself; third, that he sends us his Spirit as an earnest, by whose power we seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and not the things on the earth” (Heidelberg Catechism, LD 18, Q. 49). When Christ returns in the flesh, the Westminster Confession adds (32.3), “the bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor: the bodies of the just, by His Spirit, unto honor; and be made conformable to His own glorious body.”
153. John Owen, “The Person of Christ,” 1:290.
154. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3:618 – 19.
155. Ibid., 3:596, 618 – 19.
156. Ibid., 3:596.
157. “The Seven Ecumenical Councils” in NPNF2, vol. 14, 316ff.
158. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:578.
159. Ibid., 3:579.
160. Origen, On First Principles, preface, 7.
161. Calvin, Serm. Acts 1:6 – 8 (CO 48.619), emphasis added.