Response to Engagements

Abstract

Samuel Wells responds to engagements of his book Constructing an Incarnational Theology by Brian Lugioyo, Ben Quash, Edwin van Driel, and Kirsten Guidero. He identifies five criticisms: (1) He neglects to engage with the classical Chalcedonian categories but insists on coining his own vocabulary; (2) his essence/existence distinction is undernarrated at best and Gnostic, Cartesian, or Nestorian at worst; (3) he is a social trinitarian, and this leads to a problematic account of the cross; (4) he misreads the notion of deification; (5) his for/with binary is overdrawn, and he misses the profound depth of substitutionary action. His unrepentant response explains why, valuable as all these criticisms are, none has persuaded him to change his argument. He notes the very different tone of Jonathan Tran’s response and commends Tran both for his panache and for his grasp of Wells’ true agenda. Wells also responds to two criticisms of his style.

Ben Quash is right to tease me about my proclivity for the word “fundamental.” The issues I raise in Constructing an Incarnational Theology are as searching as any I know. Which is why it’s such a great honor to feel my arguments are deemed worthy of such vigorous engagement and why I so deeply value the wisdom of my peers in exploring these things together. I know the endeavor is not to focus on me but on the vital matters in question; I am grateful for such wise companions in the pursuit.

Here I respond to what I perceive to be five major queries and two challenges to my method or style. I begin with Brian Luguiyo’s complaint that I innovate with philosophical categories but neglect to engage with the classical Christological notions in general and the Chalcedonian definition in particular. He’s right that I don’t spend much time on the hypostatic union. But that’s not because I want to sideline or bypass it. It’s simply because I don’t rest the core issues—God’s identity and purpose—there. I appreciate that’s perhaps a remarkable (or “bold”) thing to say. I don’t see God’s identity as being (dare I say fundamentally?) wrapped up in the hypostatic union because I see it as being about being with. Being with is the nature of the Trinity and the form in which God relates to us in Christ. It is the way the Holy Spirit makes Christ present prior to and subsequent to Christ’s tangible years among us, and the way the Trinity interacts with us eternally. It is God’s nature and purpose and our calling and destiny. A key question with which I wrestled while writing the book (but do not discuss in the text) was whether the two natures of Christ in themselves constitute an aspect of being with—i.e., in what sense, if any, it is instructive to assert that the divine and human are with one another in Christ’s person. I swung in different directions on this, but eventually Edwin van Driel persuaded me that Jesus embodied God’s purpose to be with us precisely by being with us—not by the hypostatic union. This is about relationships—not about a single individual, even a fully human, fully divine one. That certainly represents a consistent argument with my project as a whole. (Likewise, I have no disagreement with Kirsten Guidero that J. Kameron Carter’s portrayal of classical Christology is helpful—but it’s not material to my argument because Jay’s argument is about Christ’s nature, whereas mine is about Christ’s relationships.) I take no issue with the Chalcedonian definition as it stands.

This also constitutes my response to Brian’s disappointment that I don’t speak about Jesus’ flesh and don’t take a view on Mariological questions such as the immaculate conception. I understand Brian’s interest in such questions because, for example, in the case of Mary, if she’s seen as without sin, then it may open the door to a notion of Christ’s coming that promisingly isn’t centered on the Fall. But my argument isn’t rooted in these notions about the precise way Christ’s human and divine natures interact. It’s not that such things don’t matter—for example, the abiding fleshliness of the post-ascension Christ can offer significant insights for the nature of the post-resurrection flesh of humankind. And I certainly don’t deny the central commitments of Chalcedonian faith. The point is that I see these commitments as providing the groundwork for the utter “being with” of God and humankind in Jesus—whose focus is not the hypostatic union but the genuine relationships that made up Jesus’ tangible life among us and constitute the way the Holy Spirit has made Christ present before and since that tangible life.

Brian’s second criticism, taken up also by Ben Quash, is that the essence/existence distinction is undernarrated at best and Gnostic, Cartesian, or Nestorian at worst. I accept that essence and existence are terms that have an extensive hinterland, and that I haven’t gone to great lengths to explain why I’ve chosen them and how precisely my use differs from other uses. So any misunderstanding is in great part of my making. But here I face the territory that applies to other areas of dispute. I am trying to find a way through issues to which the full weight of the theological enterprise has yet to find a satisfactory answer. This and other such issues are not ones the “tradition” has settled, a consensus I’m therefore impudently disturbing. I elucidated the eight dimensions of being with because I found many people latched on to the notion of presence, and some got as far as attention. But if being with was to be as central to the theological quest as I was sensing it must become, there needed to be a whole lot more texture to the concept. In A Nazareth Manifesto, I articulated a thick description in relation to the Trinity and illustrated and tested it exhaustively, as I later did in subsequent books. A whole chapter in Constructing an Incarnational Theology is devoted to identifying the scriptural sources of the eight dimensions and showing how they are christologically determined. My coining of novel vocabulary is always designed to address a gap in the vocabulary that currently exists, not to distract sub-theologically from perfectly serviceable terminology I should have the humility to adopt.

There is no settled answer to the difference between created reality and the life to come (or for that matter, whatever preceded created reality). No one knows how to talk about matter beyond created time, narrative without time, or identity without narrative. Essence is the word I use for whatever the nature of that span before creation and after the last day—whether they are identical or different—may be. It may be loose to equate essence with God, and I certainly haven’t yet articulated the nature of time and matter within eternity, a vacuum that it’s understandable critics have noticed; but I do consider Constructing an Incarnational Theology as the first volume of a trilogy, to be followed by a study of the Holy Spirit: and such questions seem naturally to belong in the third volume.

Brian quotes me as saying, “it is essential to treat who God fundamentally is before exploring who God is in relation to humankind and the creation,” and suggests I should attend rather to the hypostatic union and be less governed by my desire to diminish anthropocentrism. I understand that his focus on the hypostatic union comes from his desire, which he and I share, to be entirely christocentric; but my project is not to locate Christ’s being with in the hypostatic union, but the reverse, i.e., to see the hypostatic union as the way the Trinity realizes its desire to be wholly with us without ceasing to be the Trinity. To say essence is prior to existence is not to make a dualist claim that spirit is superior to matter—this is not Gnostic or Cartesian. It’s not a Nestorian configuration that utterly separates the divine and human natures. It’s a recognition that creation is not eternal: something brought it into being, and creation will come to an end—something will come after it. Essence is the name I give to that something. I have no desire to overemphasize the difference between the divinity and humanity in Christ, and I have no quarrel with the formulations Brian proposes; I am simply highlighting that there is a realm in which the Trinity dwells that is beyond created existence.

In popular settings, I often speak of an hourglass in which one half is essence, and the other existence—and Jesus as the aperture between the two, utterly of each. While obviously highlighting the centrality of Christ, what this is designed to avoid is an exaggerated notion of creation in its own right, which I fear leads to an eschatology that’s largely about preserving creation in a recognizable form that emphasizes continuity: a subtle form of anthropocentrism. This, while I acknowledge its roots in some scriptural motifs, seems to me a denial of death and reluctance to wrestle with the sheer scale of eternity. However long creation lasts for, it’s not eternal, which means essence, as I call it, is of infinitely greater scale than creation. Creation is the theater of revelation: it is where all the things we understand to be true are disclosed. But the significance of those things is not limited to creation: creation is the keyhole through which we espy eternity. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).

The third and perhaps most forceful criticism among these responses is led by Edwin, supported by Ben: that I am (horrors) a social trinitarian. Edwin assumes a narrative in which Karl Barth upheld the classical conviction that “there is no ontological over-againstness between the trinitarian persons.” Ben links this to a more contemporary narrative within which Karen Kilby chastises such figures as Jürgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff, and to some extent, Colin Gunton, for daring to speculate about the inner workings of the trinitarian life, and Steve Holmes portrays the twentieth-century recovery of trinitarianism as being wholly out of keeping with the classical understanding, even in its Cappadocian form. At the heart of Kilby’s critique is the word “projection,” with its assumption that there is an agenda at work of nontheological or, at best, sub-theological notions about a well-functioning egalitarian democratic society being inserted into the highest level of dogmatic conviction and thus deriving an unparallelled validity. Around this surround a number of common frowns, from the scornful dismissal that this is soft-left instrumentalization of theology to a knowing wink that this is asking the doctrine of the Trinity to “do too much work,” with an anxiety that this is tantamount to tritheism (as if anyine really knows what that means), to an austere assumption that apophaticism is theology’s natural habitat, and no one should be looking for the ethical implications of any doctrine.

Again, I insist that my arguments are not recklessly breaking a mature consensus but seeking to wrestle with issues that, after 2000 years of erudite exploration, are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. For me, rooting being with in the Trinity—which I do in A Nazareth Manifesto, not just in Constructing an Incarnational Theology—is about identifying a consistent thread that traces God’s purpose from Trinity to heaven. Being with is the way the persons of the Trinity relate to one another, is the unique and grace-filled dynamic that God seeks to offer in the incarnation, is thus the reason for creation, is uniquely and definitively expressed in cross and resurrection, and is ultimately realized on the last day. Where’s the projection in that? My point is not that I’ve miraculously settled once and for all the mystery of God’s purpose: it’s that being with provides a compelling rationale, whereas most theological approaches either impoverish God’s purpose by picking up the story at the Fall or distort it (and God) by absorbing the Fall into God’s intended plan.

For Edwin, the folly of social trinitarianism is illustrated by what he sees as the self-imposed incongruities of my account of the cross. It’s not lost on me that the two most far-reaching criticisms of my work to be found in these responses are to be found in two theologians, Edwin and Ben, with whom my work has been closely aligned. Indeed my enjoyment of Edwin’s work is never greater than when he sharpens his marvelous analytical teeth to articulate the litany of critical implications he identifies in my portrayal of the cross. It will only exasperate him, but nonetheless fulfill my purpose, for me to say every one of his highlighted anomalies and nonsequiturs underline the point I’m making about the catastrophic nature of Jesus’ crucifixion. What Edwin describes as absurdities to me exhibit just how drastic the cross is. I don’t feel the need to explain how, for example, creation can continue to exist without the Son because I’m expressing a series of things that cannot be—yet are, briefly and astonishingly, not logically and permanently, and are on account of Christ’s utter commitment to be with us—that than which nothing more logical can be conceived.

The fourth criticism, led by Kirsten Guidero, is a plea—repeated on other topics by Brian and Ben—that I resist a temptation to polarize and bifurcate. In Kristen’s case, the issue is deification. For me, being with is so significant as an eschatological notion that divinization is potentially problematic because if the separation between the creator and the creature breaks down, what is lost is not so much the exalted creator-creature distinction, but their capacity to be with one another, which is the fulfillment of God’s original, unfolding, and unbreakable purpose. Kristen employs a variety of arguments to maintain that being with and deification are synonymous. I am certainly gratified that she endorses the broad sweep of my convictions about being with, and I welcome her conviction that Maximus and Nyssen offer grounding for the christological integration of the cosmos. These are arguments that pervaded my research into orthodox theology, where Geoffrey Ready, among others, continued to insist that what Maximus was asserting was what being with was articulating. I have no stake in suggesting Kristen’s reading of these things is more or less accurate than mine; only to reassert, as with the debate with Brian over Chalcedonian terminology, that I’m trying to make the argument on slightly different territory. I warm to the positive strand in Orthodox (and other) thinking that the deification tradition represents; it’s a healthy distance from the soteriologically driven theologies of scarcity I begin the book by criticizing. But if being with is to be what heaven is all about, I need to know the basic constituents of being with are being met—and my raised eyebrow in discussing deification is my sense that this remains unclear.

I can’t hide how overjoyed I am to read Jonathan Tran’s engagement. This is for three reasons. First, and most important, is the virtuoso skill of his theological imagination when harnessed to the true intentions of my book. For example, the way he positions racism within the configuration I set up is brilliant and generative—it shows how the argument I advance is as pertinent to contemporary theological priorities as to ancient questions. Second, and in the same spirit, often the best test of a theory is not to take issue with it at every turn but to see how it stands up to being stretched to its full implications: Jonathan does that as well as I’ve seen anyone do it in the eighteen years I’ve been writing on this subject. And third, I am plenty used to being told the New Testament is full of for, and I’d better get used to working-for notions of the atonement because Paul says so—arguments that seem to treat theology as bible study and bible study as word count; whereas Jonathan is doing genuine theology, which starts in a different place and says, given what we must believe out of a dialectical relationship between scripture, tradition, and reason, what do we do with the parts that don’t yet fully make sense. I am gratified that Jonathan states “this is first and foremost a story about God.” This is not a fashionable derivative, functionally idolatrous social trinitarianism.

But Jonathan’s style of engagement only highlights how far-reaching is the most significant challenge to my whole position among these essays, which comes from Ben Quash, who, characteristically deftly and intriguingly, takes on the epicenter of my project. Ben protests as follows: “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’—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.” I have no problem with the conviction that there’s such a thing as for in the service of with—that’s why I offered the illustration of Yusra and Sarah in the conclusion of the book, that’s how I understand Jesus’ healings, and that’s how I conceive of vocations to dentistry and podiatry. Indeed forgiveness is most often an act of for in the service of with—the with being restored relationship. But what Ben is suggesting here is something way beyond this. He seems to be saying that substitutionary action (the choice of a word so closely tied to a notion of the atonement seems remarkable) is not only definitively human but inherent to holiness. Which seems uncomfortably close to the whole philosophy I have spent the last eighteen years seeking to discredit. Why? (If I still need to say) Because on a human level, it centers the person working for in their need to feel effective rather than the person in need in their human dignity, validating the transaction of for over the relationship of with; and on a divine level, it sets up an anthropocentric theology by which God is instrumentalized as the one brought into the story to fix the human predicament of guilt and mortality, making existence a story of scarcity rather than abundance and inherent jeopardy rather than mutual joy. The whole being with journey began for me when I realized in heaven there is no working for to do because there is nothing to fix—not for us, and not for God. We are delivered from the shadow of substitutionary action, not empowered for the fulfillment of it.

Those are the five main challenges these responses raise, as I see it. In addition, I perceive two questions about my approach. One, from Kirsten, urges me to a wider range of conversation partners—not so much to change my view on key points, with which she has only passing issues of disagreement, but to amplify areas where more diverse sources would enrich my understanding. I welcome her suggestions and hope for the redemption of a second edition. While kind observers have occasionally noted my direct and arresting argumentation, none have ever complimented the exhaustive quality of my bibliographies, so I’m glad to be more amply resourced.

In a different vein, Ben laments my “impulse toward binary formulations,” and Brian, like a true critical friend, finds my tone “unnecessarily combative” and wonders aloud who remains as my ally once I’ve written off almost the whole theological academy as blasphemers. Touché. Since the publication of Constructing an Incarnational Theology, I have found three things. One, many have found the arguments for with compelling but have pleaded to be allowed not to let go of for. If I have been shrill, it is to highlight my concern that this is having one’s cake and eating it. Two, others have reviewed the arguments in A Nazareth Manifesto and recognized how far-reaching they were, in a way that only this later book made explicit. It’s understandable that observations about ethics and missiology seem initially less troubling than challenges to christology and soteriology; but readers of the earlier book can’t say they haven’t been warned. Three, certain formulations, like the characterization of idolatry as enjoying what should be used, and blasphemy as using what should be enjoyed, seem pertinent, revealing, and soaked in the language of enjoyment, which sits at the heart of being with. They’re not intended as personal insults but as calls to all theologians to be true to our calling and consistent in our judgments. By using the word blasphemy in this way, I’m not trying to be rude or hyperbolic: I’m seeking to make a truly theological case for my position, while withstanding more familiar arguments like “It’s not what a lot of verses in the New Testament seem to say,” “It’s different from what the church has long assumed,” or “Why does it have to be one or the other?”

Two of these wonderful correspondents cite the transfiguration as a point of convergence. I sense this moment and motif becoming ever more significant in my understanding of theology and of my three-part project as it unfolds. I am humbled to have such generous, forthright, and lucid dialogue partners as these with whom to behold transfiguration, as all true theology does.