Meditation Worthy Thoughts on the Incarnation of Christ

Patrick Ramsey just posted a link to a great lecture by Carl Trueman "The Glory of Christ: B.B. Warfield on Jesus of Nazareth." This brief sample is worth chewing on by itself before going on to read all of Trueman's lecture.

It is, of course, a truism that the language of Chalcedon, of substance and personhood, is absent from the New Testament, and, of course, no advocate of the Chalcedonian definition would ever have claimed its explicit presence in the text. Warfield’s own view of the Chalcedonian definition is that it functions as a presupposition which makes the teaching of the Bible comprehensible as a single, unified whole. To quote him on this point:

Only on the assumption of this [the Chalcedonian] conception of Our Lord's person as underlying and determining their presentation, can unity be given to their representations; while, on this supposition, all their representations fall into their places as elements in one consistent whole. [6]

This is an important point which has a general application well beyond its specific concerns. For a start, it flags up Christ's humanity and divinity as the only means of making coherent sense of the gospel accounts of his life. It is thus not in the first instance an exercise in metaphysical speculation but rather an attempt to think out the necessary presuppositions about his person which make sense of the historical account of his actions and teachings given in the gospels. This is a very important point, particularly at a time when theological diversity is something of a buzzword among biblical scholars. The current trend is, I am sure, intimately connected to the increasing subdisciplinary specialization of higher learning, fuelled in large part by the information revolution; but Warfield is surely correct to point to the presuppositional nature of our theological approach to the Bible. If we go to the Bible without a commitment to the unity of revelation and the coherence of the biblical witness at the level of epistemology, then we will inevitably find ourselves drawing certain conclusions from that, such as the God of the Old Testament is not that of the New or the way of salvation for Paul is not the same as for James. It is perhaps no surprise that the Chalcedonian definition is being called into question by theologians at exactly the same point in time as the fundamental theological unity of the Bible is also being subjected to vigorous assault.

For Warfield, the idea that Christ is one person in two substances is one of the necessary counterparts of his commitment to the unity of scripture's teaching: in other words, it must be true because it allows the church to make sense of the Bible’s teaching about Christ. The formula itself is not inspired in the way that the Bible is inspired; it is not therefore sacrosanct; one can indeed go to heaven without ever having heard of the definition; but it is nonetheless a necessary presupposition, implicit or otherwise, if the message of the Bible concerning Christ is to be properly and thoroughly understood.

emphasis mine, and done so for obvious reasons.

Ramsey (who's posted some reflection-worthy words of his own on the Incarnation lately) also provided a link to Warfield's fantastic "The Emotional Life of our Lord," which it's been entirely too long since I've read. Criminal, really. If you haven't read it in the last month or so, I encourage you to get at it :)