Finding What’s Fundamental: A Response to Samuel Wells

When reading this book, I began to notice that one of Sam Wells’ favorite words is “fundamentally.” ¹ This is a clue to the book’s method as well as to its intent. Both its method and its intent are to be welcomed for the seriousness of the possibilities they raise and the challenges they pose.

In method, Constructing an Incarnational Theology is a specifically theological exercise in something like transcendental reasoning. Wells seeks to work back from what he believes has been made manifest in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ (and continues to be made manifest through the activity of the Holy Spirit in the church and the world) to what must therefore be true of the life of God in Godself (to use traditional language, God’s being in se). The life of God is the necessary condition for all that we have been given to know and relate to and be transformed by in Jesus Christ. But, as is typical of transcendental reasoning, it is a posteriori that we come to know what is a priori, insofar as we can know it at all. In the case of God’s self-revelation to creatures, what is ontologically first comes epistemologically second. We arrive at it by devoting our attention to the incarnate one.

In intent, Constructing an Incarnational Theology is profoundly committed to the principle that doctrine’s adequacy (or lack of it) must be measured by its service to flourishing life. Doctrine, like the Gospel, is for the life of the world, and Wells is animated by his desire to show what such life, at its best, might look like. Unlike many of his previous books, this book frames the issues it discusses in an academic mode and adopts the scholarly apparatus of citations and footnotes. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking that it is—fundamentally—pastoral in its aims. To insist that doctrine should be answerable at such a bar is entirely proper, given that some of the church’s historical teachings have been surreptitiously life-denying or—worse—actively life-destroying. Wells’ book is an admirable attempt to ensure that doctrine stays in touch with its fundamental orientation to life.

This of course begs the question of what truly flourishing life is, and Wells is eager to respond to this question, in an account rich in illustrations as well as arguments, with the answer that it is with-ness. “Being with” is the vocation of human beings in their life with one another as in their relationship with God, in ascending degrees of intensity ranging from “presence” to “glory.”

Wells makes no secret of the fact that he wants to establish a comprehensive theological system, to which christology is central but in which all the major doctrines are addressed, and to establish it on different “fundamentals” from those that govern most of the alternatives he sees around him (Catholic, Protestant, and to a lesser but significant extent Orthodox). Above all, he is concerned to tackle what he sees as an exaggerated emphasis on the cross-as-atonement; that is, on Jesus’s death as a mechanism by which the creaturely problem of sin is solved. For Wells, to focus on the (supposed) atoning work of Christ on the cross is, paradoxically, to give sin too great a status in the unfolding of God’s purposes for the world, which is a world that God made for fellowship and predestined for glory. In Wells’ formulation, it is to turn a story centered on God into a story centered on humanity, and (in particular) on humanity’s failings. Although the book’s critique is directed very widely at representatives of many denominations in many historical periods, it is hard not to feel that there is also something more immediate that fuels Wells’ urgings, at a time of Evangelical ascendancy in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion more widely (and the loudly vocal prominence of a comparable strand of Christianity in North American public life and beyond). There is today no shortage of groups prepared to use the threat of schism as a tool of ecclesiastical and doctrinal leverage, and often in the service of a gospel with a penal substitutionary model of atonement at its heart. So Wells makes no bones about his impatience with accounts of salvation that emphasize what God in Christ does for us—in our place; on our behalf. That Jesus Christ came to be with us in the most radically conceivable way is, he argues, all the gospel anyone could need. ² It might be that suffering and death were entailed by that radical with-ness, but they were never the point.

And, to return to the issue of method, the transcendental move that Wells makes is to deduce from the radicality of the historical with-ness of Jesus in relation to humanity and the wider creation the shape of the eternal (in his words, “essential”) with-ness of God’s inner life. From the way in which God-is-with-creatures we can know how God-is-with-God. Christology opens a pathway to the doctrine of the Trinity, and although the book is subtitled “A Christocentric view of God’s Purpose,” it turns out to be a surprisingly—perhaps riskily—detailed evocation of what are presumed to be the dynamics of the trinitarian life of God.

I do not take issue with the idea that the immanent and the economic Trinity are (and must be) one. The implications of such a commitment for how much one can say about the life of God in se are where things become more controversial. In this regard, I am not convinced that Wells has consistently avoided the pitfalls of the sort of social trinitarianism (so adeptly critiqued by Karen Kilby) in which idealized forms of human interaction are attributed to the immanent Trinity before being used to underwrite arguments for how human beings should live. Thus, for example,

[T]he interaction of the persons of the Trinity is analogous to a conversation. A conversation is an informal mode of interaction that can involve two or more parties, in this case three, in which each party seeks to build on and enrich the previous contribution, and each participant is considered an equal partner in forming a degree of wisdom, entertainment, enlightenment or sharing greater than the sum of its parts. This is what the persons of the Trinity are engaged in all the time. (pp. 177–78)

Such social trinitarianism can pass itself off, enticingly, as no different from the method of transcendental reasoning I outlined at the outset: it typically presents itself as seeking a priori conditions in God’s life that will either correct or legitimize our various collective ways of doing things. ³ Its problem is that it too easily simply projects our transient preferences (for what makes for happy social arrangements and good interpersonal dynamics) into God as a post facto legitimization of such preferences; it is a closed loop. In this respect, it surely falls foul of Wells’ stricture that we must at all costs avoid substituting an anthropocentric story for a theocentric story.

The importance of the category of “story” for Wells raises a further question, about whether narrative is an appropriately “fundamental” way to characterize the inner-trinitarian life. Its benefits are, perhaps, that it allows one to appreciate an infinitely resourceful abundance in God which (“unresting,” to echo the hymn Immortal, Invisible) sustains all that is. Wells’ infectious ability to conjure the effervescence and inexhaustibility of God’s dynamic ways with the world is one of the most captivating features of his book.

But the costs of a “storied” immanent Trinity are that it makes the hypostases into dramatis personae in relation to one another. The risks of projection are acute here. So is the danger that in talking of “parts” of the Trinity, ⁴ one implies that in encountering the incarnate Christ in his ministry, or the outpoured Spirit at Pentecost, those involved were encountering something less than the fullness of the Godhead. Nicene orthodoxy insists, to the contrary, that each “person” is fully God, which makes the idea that there could be a rupture or a “puncture” (p. 256) in God’s triunity, or that the with-ness of God with God could be jeopardized in any way, ⁵ an incoherence. This incoherence is a consequence, I think, of “storying” the immanent Trinity in such a way as to render its persons as (or even as like ⁶ ) distinct, boundaried agents.

Arguably, then, it is only in the economic order that the relations of the Trinity can be given narrative display. In the economic order too, though, the language of a Godhead in jeopardy ricks obscuring the all-important truth that God’s agency is unconditioned (“nor wanting, nor wasting,” to echo the hymn again), and that it is only as such that the whole of creation can have its own, full agency without needing God to “withdraw” to make space for it or discovering its own created agency elbowed aside by divine interventions that compete for the same “space” or resources. ⁷ The creation can participate limitlessly in God through Jesus Christ only because Jesus Christ is in his divinity the infinite, everlasting Word. There is not some finite capacity in the second person of the Trinity that limits how much relationship he can have with creaturely others; all creatures have their being in and through him, and it is only by his (infinite) actualization of them that their own (finite, but genuinely own) activities play out. Here, Nicene orthodoxy safeguards precisely the intoxicatingly capacious “with-ness” that Wells would like to see, and it does so because of rather than at the expense of the divine aseity. It is a tradition that licenses, indeed necessitates, a non-competitive account of how divine and human agency are related: a with-ness in which the enaction of the true being of each and every creature is at once wholly the creature’s own work and wholly God’s doing. Wells, especially when discussing the Orthodox tradition and evaluating its doctrine of deification, is worried about “eliding” the Creator-creature distinction, but this anxiety can tip over into an awkward dichotomizing of human and divine realms of activity. Wells’ strongly framed distinction between what constitutes “a story about God” and what constitutes “a story about human beings” risks cementing this dichotomy. A more explicit accompanying acknowledgment is perhaps needed that the Christian faith in its healthier forms refuses the binary in the first place.

And so to two final binary formulations with which the book dallies, and which it might do better to resist. One is minor and can be dealt with in passing. The other plays a central role in Wells’ argument.

In discussing Maximus the Confessor in chapter 4 (“Orthodox Foundations”), Wells seeks to ground his account of “divine-human communion” in “the way Christ relates to us—the pattern of being with witnessed in his incarnate life” instead of in an account of the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, divine and human (p. 106). Perhaps, for Wells, Maximus’s focus on the latter (“humankind and divinity perfectly co-inhering in Christ’s person”) lacks the narrative texture and vividness that he seeks repeatedly to evoke for his readers as he summons them to live a more “with”-inflected existence. But there does not need to be an “instead of,” or opposition, here. On the contrary, it is just because of the perfect union of divine and human natures in Christ that his perfect way of being with us in history, in concrete relationships, is made possible, and that our imitation of him in our relationships with others becomes a receivable gift. And, indeed, Wells himself acknowledges this in the following chapter (“Medieval Debates”) when discussing John Duns Scotus:

Creation leads to the creation of those creatures apt to respond and relate to the Trinitarian God, that is, humankind, possessed with rationality, the capacity for understanding and free choice. For the relationship to be fulfilled, this human nature must become capable of receiving the Trinitarian glory and sharing relationship. To enable this to happen, the divine and human nature are united [in the incarnation]. (p. 131)

The second of Wells’ binary formulations that I would question is that between “with” and “for.” Wells fully anticipates that his claim that in Christ’s life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension even what looks like action “for us” is (fundamentally!) simply a mode of being “with us” will be likely to raise objections. He liberally acknowledges these likely objections at all the points in his argument when he knows they are bound to be at their sharpest. But I am not sure he decisively answers them in all respects.

His “Christ-like” example of the two swimmers, Yusra and Sarah—Syrian refugees who leap into the water when the boat that is taking them to Europe is on the verge of sinking in order to pull it and their fellow passengers to safety—is, Wells insists, really a mode of being with them:

They save two dozen lives. But fundamentally [N.B.] this is not something they are doing for others—they are doing it with them: it is a partnership. They are doing what they can do while others do what they can do. (pp. 287–88)

The detail of the “doing” of the “others” remains vague here, though of course there must have been activity of various sorts inside the boat. But that is not the main concern I have with this and other more explicitly christological and pneumatological examples in the book. The main issue, to my mind, is that Wells presses a powerful point at the expense of a nuance. In his desire to show how every apparent “for” is more fundamentally a “with”—to suggest, indeed (as he does at times), that there is no “for” in the incarnation, but only “with” ⁸ —is to close off the possibility of a rich exploration of how human selves who are most profoundly with one another are generally with one another in the mode of substitutionary action; in for-ness. So true is this that one might even say that the holy human self is fundamentally, in Christian terms, a substitutionary self. (Yusra and Sarah can be read as a powerful example of just this.)

Augustine could be our guide here. In De Trinitate, he argues that the reflective person should “live according to [her] nature, that is, [. . .] should want (appetat) to be placed according to [her] nature [. . .] subject to and over all that it should be in command of” (trin. X.7). Here, then, is a model of finding oneself by living together appropriately with other creatures (human and non-human): taking one’s right place in the universe. Augustine is fully alert to how easily this can go wrong as a result of sin:

For [the mind] does many things through deformed desire (cupiditatem pravam), as if it had forgotten itself.

Such deformed desire is the greatest threat to true with-ness. It alienates us from ourselves at every level: as individuals, as communities, and as whole societies.

How is deformed desire to be overcome? Wells might say we need to remind ourselves that we are part of God’s story and not a self-serving human story. Augustine would not necessarily disagree. But the way this works, for Augustine, is by our transformation through a “wonderful exchange” (mira commutatio) toward a Christ-like receptivity, in which the interconnectedness of creaturely selves is shaped toward an eternal fellowship in truth and goodness and beauty. This “exchange” is the result of a radically substitutionary act whose fruit is with-ness—a dynamic that is well brought out in Augustine’s commentaries on the Psalms:

But in fact he who deigned to assume the form of a slave [. . .] he who did not disdain to assume us into himself, did not disdain either to transfigure us into himself, and to speak in our words, so that we also might speak in his. ⁹

Here, we encounter Augustine’s principle of the totus Christus, in which the “head” speaks in and for the “members” of the body (a substitutionary for-ness) in order that they may come to speak and act in, and even as, him (a participative with-ness):

Without [Christ], we are nothing, but in him we too are Christ. Why? Because the whole Christ consists of head and body. ¹⁰

When Christ speaks in the words of the Psalms, he sometimes speaks “in our place”—as, for example, in the utterance “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”:

We can say, then, that our Lord Jesus represented [figurans] us, in the charity of his body, and that although he was personally without sin, he spoke in the name of his body of the tale of my sins (Ps 21:2). [. . .] Confess, then, you who are a member of Christ, that your head spoke there for you. ¹¹

The effect of this is the opposite of disabling for sinful creatures, however, for the speaking of the head in the members enables, in turn, the transfigured speech of the members in their head. The whole body can speak Christ’s perfect words of truth, in which knowledge and love are fully coincident. In this “wholeness”—this utter mutual implicatedness—the act of every part comes to be an act on behalf of the whole. Here is substitutionary action indexed to ultimate with-ness; eternal fellowship taking the form of utter and mutual for-ness. This is life in the body of the Christ who poured himself out for his fellow creatures (Mk 14:24 and par.), and whose followers, in turn, sacrificially pour out what they have received (Phil 2:13; Rom 12:1).

So universally and unavoidably are we “substitutionary selves,” I would argue, that the important question is not whether to replace “for” with “with,” but what forms of for-ness most embody and serve with-ness. This is a question for priests, politicians, and parents; for the present generation in relation to future generations (as it was for past generations in relation to the present one). We make decisions and we make sacrifices on behalf of others at every turn. It is all-pervasive. Even individual selves are subject to this substitutionary logic: I act now on behalf of my future self, suffering now for the good of that future self (or vice versa). ¹² By putting all his chips on “with” as though it were red as distinct from black on the roulette table, Wells misses the opportunity to do justice to the rich world of “for.”

A final remark in a positive vein. The spirit of this book seems to me to have something in common with the spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s challenge, articulated in two of his letters from prison (April 30 and June 8, 1944) to a theology predicated too entirely on the effects of the Fall. Bonhoeffer laments the sort of religious impulse (and also its secular offshoots) that thinks its job is to convince all comers that they have an all-defining problem to which only its doctrines hold the answer:

Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they scent luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They set themselves to drive people to inward despair, and then the game is in their hands.

But, as Bonhoeffer goes on to say:

The ordinary man [. . .] has neither the time nor the inclination to concern himself with his existential despair, or to regard his perhaps modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble, or a calamity. ¹³

In this challenge there is undeniable and deep value, and to answer it well requires strenuous thought about how to acknowledge the reality of sin, while not giving it either the first or the last word in what we say both about God and about human beings who, in the context of a good creation, are God’s beloved creatures. There is much to be grateful for in Sam Wells’ renewed pressing of this issue.

BEN QUASHKing’s College London, London, UK