Book Update Archives - Page 2 of 16

March 16, 2025March 23, 2025

The Imago Dei and Righteous Relationality

Genesis 1:26-27 speaks of humans as made in the image and likeness of God. The meaning of this phrase has been hotly contested in the history of Christian thought. However, we can immediately reject is the interpretation first proposed by St. Irenaeus that “likeness” and “image” are distinct realities.

Early Interpretations of the Image of God

According to Irenaeus, the former refers to natural human faculties, whereas the latter refers to a special grace God gave to pre-lapsarian humans. This grace allowed humans to eventually participate in the divine life (i.e., a precursor of the later concept of theosis). As a result of the Fall, humans retain the image, but have lost the likeness.¹ Modern biblical scholarship has shown that the use of the terms “image” and “likeness” in tandem with each other is simply an example of the literary poetical parallelism common to the Old Testament and much of ANE western Semitic literature. Therefore, “image” and “likeness” possess an identical meaning.²

We can also easily reject St. Augustine’s³ and St. Thomas Aquinas’s⁴ claim that the mental faculties of memory, intellect, and will reflect the Trinity. Not only is there no exegetical basis for this claim, but the Bible knows nothing of Greek faculty psychology.⁵

December 30, 2024December 30, 2024

The Incarnation and Kenosis: the Son of God’s Humiliation

Before anyone can discuss Christ’s work, it is first necessary to examine the kenosis, or humiliation, of the Son of God in time. Indeed, the whole course of Old Testament history from the protoevangelium to the Virgin Birth is a kind of kenosis on the part of God. God pledges his very self in the form of the speech-act of promise and, therefore, places himself at the disposal of humanity. Later, he more specifically placed himself at the disposal of Israel in particular.

Having chained (berit, covenanted) himself to Israel through the gift of the divine Name and promise, God finally stood in such profound kenotic solidarity with his people that he actually became one of them. Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann correctly asserts that the whole history of salvation is a story of divine self-gift and humbling:

Consider how God the Father has humbled Himself by not only forming a lump of earth but also giving it a soul with His breath. Consider how God the Son has humbled Himself- he became a man, became the least of all people and took on the form of a servant; He became the most hapless of them; He was made sin for us; in God’s eyes He was the sinner of the whole people. Consider how low God the Holy Spirit has condescended by becoming a historian of the smallest, most contemptible, most insignificant events on earth, so as to reveal the mysteries and ways of God to mankind in its own speech, in its own history, in its own ways.¹

December 25, 2024December 27, 2024

The Son of God’s Incarnational Epic

The Incarnational Arc of Creation

Even in the midst of judging the old creation and its mangled narrative, God begins anew. He speaks forth a new narrative of creation through his gospel promise (Gen. 3:15). God’s promise is effective speech; creation gains its identity from its story. Thus, in order to redeem creation, God had to speak forth a new story. The historical narrative of redemption culminated in Christ’s recapitulation of the old creation (Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15) and its transcendence in the resurrection.

Every act of human rebellion within the biblical narrative meets with both an act of judgment and an act of grace. God’s possibilities are not exhausted by those established in his protological order and law. These are hardwired into creation as an expression of the eternal divine will, but they do not exhaust the divine will. God is not merely the necessary being of the philosophers, but as Eberhart Jüngel puts it, God is the “more than necessary being.”¹

The new creation does not negate the old creation, but envelops it, and incorporates it into itself. The new creation’s incorporation of the old creation into itself is analogous to the eternal Son’s incorporation (enhypostasis) of an impersonal human nature into his center of identity (anhypostasis). In this way, the tragic narrative of the Fall becomes a subplot in the comic story of redemption.

December 18, 2024December 18, 2024

The Eucharistic Miracle of Christ’s Substantial Body and Blood Given For Us

The Augsburg Confession affirms the ancient and medieval consensus of the Catholic Church that Christ’s flesh and blood are substantially present in the Eucharist: “Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.” This affirmation of the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper was integral to the Lutheran Reformation from the beginning.

In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther is critical of the practice of communion in one kind (i.e., the pre-Vatican II practice of withholding the cup from the laity), transubstantiation, and the the Mass as a sacrifice for the living and the dead. Nevertheless, unlike most of the other reformers, Luther is quite clear that there is a Real Presence based on his canonical, catholic, and evangelical principle. This real substantial presence was the overwhelming catholic consensus of the ancient Church from its inception….

December 1, 2024December 1, 2024

The New Heavens and the New Earth: The Marriage Supper of the Lamb

The resurrected people of God will dwell in the New Heaven and New Earth. Contrary to popular Christian piety, the Bible does not envision humans floating away from the temporal order to an immaterial and disembodied heaven. Rather, Revelation describes the New Jerusalem as coming down from heaven (Rev. 21:2). The presence of God fills all creation as a cosmic Temple paralleling the way the Lord had earlier filled the Tabernacle/Temple. St. John records that the New Jerusalem, which will be like an arboreal Temple (i.e., a new Eden), will have no Temple. Rather, God and the Lamb will be its Temple (Rev. 21:22).¹

Heaven is the Direct Presence of God

In this sense, it is not so much that humans leave earth for heaven, but that heaven and earth merge. Heaven is not a separate ontological realm, or physical created space. Instead, it is simply the unmediated presence of God. Daniel describes the ascension of the Son of Man as movement into the presence of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7). Hebrews reinforces this point by noting that Jesus’s ascension into heaven is one into the presence of God (Hebrew 9:24). In the same epistle, the author reminds readers that heaven “is not a part of this creation” (Heb. 9:11). In other words, heaven is God’s direct and unmediated presence; it is not a distinct created realm.