What was observed in the preceding chapter as the widening influence, in the history of thought in general and in the doctrines of the church, of the postulate of the competence of human reason in the discovery and formulation of truth has born its fruit in a contemporary man-centered, or anthropocentric, theology. Schleiermacher, whom we observed as the founder of modern theology in the early nineteenth century, has fathered a distant offspring. But Christian thought, to the extent that it is biblically responsive, is to be Christocentric. In that, it is theocentric. Its determining nexus and orientation is what has been revealed as the being, will, and purpose of God. For God has set forth Christ, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).
Why, then, it is to be asked, did Jesus Christ come into the world? Theological doctrine that is grounded in divine revelation permits and requires various responses to the question. We shall return to that question more fully in the following chapter. But at this point we observe that beneath a biblically sustainable answer lies the identity of Jesus Christ, both his essential identity and his official, or economic, or redemptive identity. When we refer to the essential identity of Christ we have in view his distinguishable identity within the triune Godhead. “There are three persons in the Godhead,” the Catechism states, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”31 It is not being said there that the essence of the Godhead is, in some sense that would remain to be defined, distributed among the divine Persons. It is being stated that the full essence of God resides fully in each of the Persons. The divine mind, the divine affections, and the divine will are wholly in each of the Persons. It follows that Jesus Christ, who came into the world to be the Savior of sinners in accordance with the determinate divine decrees was none other than the Second Person of the eternal Godhead. When he was in this world, a divine Person who took a full human nature into union with his divine nature, he did not divest himself of his eternal glory or of the full attributes of his divine Personhood; though he laid aside the signs or insignia of that glory.32 It follows, moreover, that when he was in this world, as to his divine nature our Lord was both in this world and in heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit, while in his human nature he was in this world (John 3:13).33 Now, as to his divine nature he is both in heaven and in this world, while as to his human nature he is in heaven.
The meaning of the descriptive term economic in reference to Christ’s redemptive identity refers in theological usage to the distribution of redemptive offices among the Persons of the Godhead. In short, it was the redemptive office of the Father to elect a certain, defined, and unalterable number of people to eternal salvation and to give them to his Son to redeem. It was the redemptive office of the Son to come into the world, to take a sinless human nature into union with his divine nature, to satisfy in that human nature all of the demands of the righteous law of God on behalf of the people the Father gave to him, and having done that, to bear in his death the penalty due to them for their sin. It was the redemptive office of the Holy Spirit to call to Christ those for whom he died, to convey to them the gifts and benefits that Christ purchased for them, to sanctify them, and to conduct them to glory. We speak, therefore, of the official identity of Christ, intending thereby reference to the redemptive office that he came into the world to discharge.
As to his essential identity, Christ came, he said, to declare God to us: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John 14:11), he said on a memorable occasion (declaring the perichoresis or circumincession of the Godhead),34 when he replied to Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “The Jews took up stones to stone him” when he made his definitive existential claim, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30–31). But the essential identity of Christ is rendered indistinct, if not completely lost, in forms of modern theology, such as that of Paul Tillich, to note an extreme example. Tillich concluded that God is to be “understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being.”35 It is, of course, appropriate to say, with Herman Bavinck, for example, that “God makes himself known as absolute being.”36 Bavinck continues: “He [God] makes himself known as the one who is in an absolute sense. . . . God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being not becoming.”37 But modern theology in the fashion of Tillich, in its argument that “The being of God is being itself. . . . or the ground of being,” concludes that “If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance,”38 and therefore, “It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.”39 It follows from such doctrinal propositions that the autotheotic nature of the Second and Third Persons of the Godhead, and the distinguishable properties of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, are not brought into the relief that the Scriptures and historic Reformed theology have ascribed to them.40 The essential identity of the Person of Jesus Christ is not, thereby, well preserved.
Our principal interest in the present work is in the biblical data regarding the redemptive office of Christ, who, as has been said, came into the world as the Second Person of the eternal Godhead to become Jesus Christ for our redemption. But as we shall see more fully, that redemptive office derives its significance from the eternal identity of God the Son whom the Father sent into the world. The apostle Paul, focusing his thought on the official or redemptive identity of Christ, makes the summary claim to Timothy that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15). The Lord himself said that he came to “lay down [his] life for the sheep” (John 10:15), for those whom, before the foundation of the world the Father had given to him to redeem (John 17:6). But before we look more directly at the import of what has just been said, we reflect on some common perceptions, in historic and literary opinion, of the identity of Jesus Christ.
Who Is Jesus Christ?
For two thousand years men have wrestled with the questions: “Who is Jesus Christ?” and “How are we to explain the presence of Jesus Christ in this world?”41 It would be a mistake, of course, to imagine that those questions have been universally engaged or have agitated the minds of all men at all times. The realities of the human state as it naturally exists as a result of Adam’s fall argue eloquently to the contrary. But to reflective minds the questions of the identity and the objectives in life of Jesus Christ have been, in one way or another and at various times, imperative.
Among cultivated minds the question of “Who is Jesus Christ?” has spawned an extensive literature, both before and since Albert Schweitzer’s classic work, originally published in 1906 under the title The Quest for the Historical Jesus.42 The inquiry continued through the heyday of neo-orthodoxy and Rudolph Bultmann’s so-called demythologization of the Scriptures, where the pre-existence, virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus were under heavy attack.43 For the common man, the slumber of sin and his subjection to Satan have substantially quieted the quest. The “strong man armed keepeth his palace and his goods [captives in the slumber of sin] are in peace” (Luke 11:21). “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom 3:18). That is true, even though there are in every person “intimations of immortality,” to use the poet Wordsworth’s phrase, a sensus deitatis, a sense of God that is suppressed when it rises unbidden to the level of consciousness (Rom 1:18). There is a memory in the race of men. There exists a memory of paradise that rises unrecalled to the mind. By virtue of man’s creation as the image of God, there is finally irrepressible