This spark of this is the Eastern Christian, especially Greek, emphasis on the Incarnation and its role in the salvation wrought by Christ. A quick gloss of the topic is thus: Christ, being God and Man, purified Man by being God in the Flesh. Salvation was the Pure purifying the Impure. Now, some Eastern Christians focus on the cross, the resurrection etc., but some do not. I’m not parsing here, but entering into this theological topic.
Recently I’ve been immersed in a reading of Gregory of Nyssa. In his theology, Christ enters into Humanity and saves it by God’s presence. But it is not so merely by Incarnation. Simply put, the Resurrection is the key-focus, where Christ recreates Nature around himself. In Christ, God meets mankind and renews the Soul. Thus the Soul who was previously denied the presence of God by its own merits has Heaven thrown open before it. By participating in Christ’s Life the Soul enters into the same death (on the cross), and finds the same grace of resurrection.
Now I would never accuse Gregory of being a Pelagian, for he as many early Christians believed in the graced-ness of all Creation. If God called something out of nothing, if He imprinted His Image gratuitously, then we have no place to lay claim to anything. But, I will argue, Gregory’s conception (pun intended) of Christ’s birth is too much linked to philosophical categories of his day.
Now as a quick aside: we are all time bound creatures, linked as we are, providentially, to our own times and place. Our language conforms our thought-pathways. Our customs influence our ability to imagine and create paradigms. The point is not to escape language into the Ideal (even this Platonic fairy-land is linked to the concreteness of Hellenic culture).
What the Scriptures allow us to do is to put a question mark over our assumptions and ways. While the Scriptures were written in a particular milieu (one we neither reject nor try to reinstate), these were providentially chosen. The language employed in them still bears upon us (and influences us through the translation into the vernacular). We, who are Christ’s, are bound to stand under them as an authoritative, Spirit authored Book.
So when I say Gregory is too linked, I am not faulting him for using the Stoics, the Platonists, or the Aristotelians. This is Egyptian Gold we can use to make our way Home. In fact, I’m not really faulting him at all. What I am proposing, instead, is a different way forward.
Gregory speaks of a Nature that is singular, though with a diversity of persons. There is only One Man, though many human persons. This is the Man that Christ takes on, though He doesn’t merely do that. He has not just assumed the Ideal, but in the Real. As a Particular Human Person, He participates in Humanity. And as the New Man, He renews all persons. Christ recenters Human Nature around Himself.
What is Human Nature? For Gregory it is the life of the soul, which seemingly has a very Hellenistic definition. It is the Internal-Reality that contains all of Man’s inner faculties (will, reason, intellect etc.) But this is a diminution of any role the body (physical, matter) has. While he does not divorce the Body from the Soul (in fact they are analogously related to the Incarnation, being a mystical, inseparable, union), he privileges the latter over the former.
Modern times have rejected such a Dualism, and I can agree to a very limited extent. If the Mind, which for Gregory seems to contain all the elements of the Soul, is tethered to the physical, material Brain, what are we to make of the body then? Can we really just dismiss it as a carrying case? Can we really label it, as Gregory does, the mysterious provision of God for man’s inevitable sin? An inferior reality, a sacrament of sin (that is what Gregory labels our procreative functions)?
I would still argue that the Biblical revelation contains a dualism between the inner and outer man, but not one that highly exalts the one or banishes the other. In fact, it is not enough for man to have a soul. Paul refers to the psychikoi, the ‘soulish’ people, in battle with the pneumatikoi, the ‘spritual’ people. The former is according to this World, the latter enlightened and freed by the Spirit to see the Eschaton, the prolepsis (historical fore-taste) that is Jesus’ resurrection.
In other-words, the Scripture do not untangle the body, soul, or spirit, yet they do not collapse one into the other. The body is not a mere case and domain of sins. The soul or the mind is not merely a bodily generation, in best cases, or an illusion or delusion, in worst cases. We possess a mind and a soul that is both distinguishable from the material body, but not separable.
Well, if the Bible never engages a Human ‘Nature’, then what are we to make of it? Given that the concept is so weighed down with millenia of linguistic baggage, we ought to avoid such a question. Allow me to elaborate.
In the Beginning, God breathed into Man, but God commanded Adam. The Word is central to all of this. Adam’s “nature” is verbally constructed. Adam is designated to be a ‘cultivator’ and a ‘protector’ of the Garden. Yet in the Fall, such is lost. Well, not entirely. Considering that the Image of God is hardly mentioned in the Bible, maybe we should not make too much of it in the story of Redemption. Let me rephrase: not that it’s unimportant (it is), but rather since the Fall, and the presence of Sin in Man, it is effaced (c.f. both Gregory and Augustine make similar comments). In other words, it is a broken mosaic or a marred painting. It is dysfunctional.
But wait, I just spoke of ‘Man’. How can I if I eschewed ‘nature’? What is it that bind Man together? It is the Covenant. When God spoke to Adam, He spoke to His Children. All our held under both the Vocation and Fall of Man. The Covenant is what links Man together. God’s Covenant with Man is analogically similar to God’s inner covenant.
Now before some languish over the seeming juridiciality of a concept, I am not speaking of contract. There is something ontologically dissimilar between the synonyms. Marriage exists covenantally, not contractually. It is sealed by a ‘Middle Space’, a ‘spirit’, a facing towards one another. Contract connotes a facing-apart, separation by void.
It’s for this reason I’m not comfortable with labeling myself Calvinist. I believe that many Calvinisms are too juridicially angled and this failure to understand the outward and inner causes false dichotomies and divisions. Quite a few Calvinist accounts of salvation (many popular) are justly condemned as promoting a ‘legal fiction’. This has nothing to do with predestination, election, providence, or divine foreknowledge.
I’m with Augustine: if God calls us righteous (i.e. justification), then we will be so, not merely externally, but internally. Augustine’s explication of justification is not perfect, but it is much more balanced than future Protestant articulations. There is a Now and Not Yet in every call.
This is why I mention Marriage as an example of Covenant. In a Wedding, the two become one. This is not only a legal convention, but something deeper. Yet the couple, in that moment, are fully joined, though that joining is not fully realized. The hope is that the two more fully realize their vows in the course of their life. Similarly with friendship, one does not become more or less a friend (or married), but one’s appreciation of the bond subjectively deepens.
Thus a Covenantal defining of ‘nature’ is not one by mere external, but one that makes external all things, including the internal. It focuses on the disposition of the heart, it gives the inner stirrings words to understand. It makes the language of the soul visible. Here the Covenantal coinheres with the uniqueness of Human language.
Thus makes sense of many Biblical distinctives. God speaks the Creation into being and blesses it (He calls it good). God ‘calls’ Abraham. God constantly names and renames. The Word of God comes to Prophets. It is for this reason I argue for a verbal ontology: what we are is made of words.
Now I could go on longer to argue for a verbal ontology but will limit myself. And as a disclaimer, these arguments borrow from Speech-Act Theory, though I hope I am not so bound by these arguments not to transcend them or reject them when needed. I am merely stealing some gold from Egypt.
There are further implications for this, but perhaps this is a better way forward. Our ‘nature’ is brought into being by the Word, and we are constituted socially by the covenants we form. Our inner essence is a flowing language. We are not merely individual floating atoms in an empty cosmos, but linked together, in either death or life, by the words spoken over us and by us.
Our Humanity is such because God said “Let Man…” and our Salvation is assured by those sweet words “Come to Me those who are burdened and heavy-ladend and I will give you rest”. May all sons of Adam hear those words and may their hearts be cut. May our new ‘nature’ be constituted in the First-Born, the Only Begotten, the Eternal God, Christ Jesus.
