Resurrection, Time, and Justification: Referencing Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Jenson 1793644926, 9781793644923

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Resurrection, Time, and Justification

Resurrection, Time, and Justification Referencing Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Jenson Sang Hoon Lee

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ISBN 9781793644923 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781793644930 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

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Chapter 1: The Contemporaneity of the Risen Jesus in Karl Barth’s Theology 5 Chapter 2: The Retroactivity of the Future in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Theology Chapter 3: The Retroactivity of the New Covenant

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Chapter 4: Toward the Eschatological Understanding of Justification: Premodern Accounts

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Chapter 5: Toward the Eschatological Understanding of Justification: Modern Accounts

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Chapter 6: The Physical Transcendence of the Risen One in Robert Jenson’s Theology

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

I want to express my sincere gratitude to my beloved wife, Moonjoung, for her unwavering support throughout my journey. Her love and encouragement have kept me going. My precious and wonderful children deserve my gratitude as well for their understanding and support. Their smiles, laughter, and jokes are wonderful gifts in my life that bring such great energy to me. Moreover, my parents, Dongwoo Lee and Myunghee Park, and my brother, Sangyun Lee, have supported me in prayer. It has been a source of strength and comfort to me to have their unwavering support. Lastly, the following chapters are revised versions of my previously published articles. For their kind permission to use these publications in this book, I would like to extend my gratitude to the publishers noted here: • Chapter 1 revises “The Plotinian Myth in Pannenberg’s Notion of Eternity and Time,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 22 (2020), 219–236. • Chapter 2 revises “The Victory of Jesus in Karl Barth’s Conception of Eternity,” Theology Today, 75 (2018), 182–92. ‌‌Soli Deo  Gloria

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Introduction

Contemplating time never fails to leave us baffled. This book is a far cry from making an attempt to unravel its mystery. Rather, it is likely to make it more baffling and mysterious as it reflects on time in light of Christian theology. For our inherited understanding of time will be put into question. To put it tersely, this book concerns the relation of the future to time. Questions exercising us in this book can be put as follows: Is the future completely in veil? Or does the future give us a gleam of itself and so beckon us to itself? Does the future reach out back to our present time? If that is the case, how does time flow? Only in a linear fashion? Can Christian theology offer its own distinctive understanding of time, for example, in view of its eschatology, the resurrection, and the doctrine of justification? In Christian theology, does the future retroactively affect the present? Is the concept of retroactivity essential to Christian theology in view of its doctrines of the resurrection, the last era, and justification? In its exploration, this book moves toward the concept of retroactivity given the implications of what Jesus has done or what happened to him: particularly his resurrection. The concept of retroactivity may not be a primary but a secondary concept, as it is derived from the implications of the resurrection and its salvific power over history and time. So in an attempt to unpack the mystery and power of the resurrection over the whole of history, this book will proceed as follows: Chapter 1 will address a question on the relation of eternity and time to see whether the concept of retroactivity of the future can be derived from divine eternity. It will focus on Karl Barth’s theology in which God’s eternity is understood as simultaneity and as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus to all ages of history. According to the towering theologian in the modern era, the first-century rabbi is present to people in the past, the present, and the future as their contemporary. It is important for us to reflect on his contemporaneity as it entails his retroactive presence in the Old Testament Israel. But how would it be possible? Barth bases this idea on the notion of God’s eternity which adopts Boethius’s concept of eternity in which the divine eternity is defined as simultaneity. By virtue of the simultaneity of the 1

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divine eternity, according to Barth, Jesus is contemporary to all in all ages. In this chapter, however, I put into scrutiny the conceptual connection between his concept of eternity and his notion of Jesus’s temporal contemporaneity (or trans-temporality). Furthermore, I will consider the outward vector of the resurrection in connection with the retroactive power of grace. Thus, we will be able to see critically how divine eternity, the resurrection, and the contemporaneity of Jesus play out in his theology and give us a hint at the concept of divine grace in retroactivity. Chapter 2 will continue to consider the relationship between eternity and time—particularly the future—now with special reference to Wolfhart Pannenberg and see whether the retroactivity of grace can be based on Pannenberg’s concept of eternity. In his theology, eternity is construed as the temporal totality. I will critically examine how Pannenberg’s notion of eternity as the totality cannot give rise to the concepts of the priority of the future and of grace in retroactivity, indicating a non sequitur on his account. Furthermore, this chapter will find out how the Plotinian mythical understanding of eternity operates as an underlying assumption in Pannenberg’s theology. Demythologizing the ancient idea of eternity, I will argue that the eschatological future does not arise from the end of time. Chapter 3 turns to the economy of salvation, from contemplation of the relation between time and eternity. It indicates that the concept of grace in retroactivity has been long laid in the history of Christian theology even though it has not come to the fore in the historical consciousness. The concept of retroactivity is not foregrounded in the theologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Kuyper, but their theological logic leads to it especially as they reflect on the scope of the New Covenant. It has been generally agreed that the salvific grace of the New Testament extends to the time of the Old Covenant, and thus it suggests the possibility that the divine grace operates retroactively for the salvation of God’s people in the old era. I believe that the discussion of this chapter can serve as a supplement to the understanding that the eschatological future arises from the resurrection and thus affirm the idea of grace in retroactivity from the eschatological future enclosed in the resurrection. The task of chapters 4 and 5 is to demonstrate how the development of a particular doctrine—the doctrine of justification—is related to the concept of retroactivity. In those two chapters, we will see how the doctrine of justification develops and has a juridical sense and how it leads to its eschatological sense, congruent with the concept of grace in retroactivity. The chapters will trace the doctrinal development as presented by Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, Karl Barth, Tuomo Mannermaa, and N. T. Wright. In the course of exploration, the later chapter will focus on the “ontology of the possible” as entailed in Barth’s theology

Introduction

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of justification and its significance for our primary interest. Furthermore, when it comes to our discussion on N. T. Wright’s doctrine which stresses the eschatological sense of justification, we will see his account stands in need of clarification and distinction between the two modes of the eschatological future. Overall, I will demonstrate how the Protestant doctrine of justification lends itself to an ontology of the eschatological future in which divine grace breaks into the present age from the End, whose eschatological reality arises from the resurrection. The final chapter explores with Robert Jenson the possibility that Jesus is contemporaneous and so retroactively present to the Old Testament with his full humanity. This chapter also takes modern scientific theories into consideration such as James Maxwell’s four equations and quantum entanglement. Suggesting a mathematical possibility of retroactivity in physics, the chapter attempts to encourage the reader to rethink a conventional, linear understanding of time. But what it does not do is wait on the verdict of science over theological reflection. Rather it converses with science, hoping to make our notion of time flexible enough to consider the relationship between the resurrection and time in a new light. After all, the chapter is to suggest the possibility that Jesus the risen one can be present to his people in all ages, including the past and the future, with his full humanity which belongs to the age to come. On the whole, this book is an attempt to elicit a contemplation on the power of the resurrection over time and history and thus on the salvation of the people in the past as well as in the future. In this book, I take it that Jesus as the risen is at the center of history, and I am inclined to affirm that the power of his resurrection can penetrate and reach out to the whole of history, proactively and retroactively, without the gnostic flavor, which is, without leaving behind his physical body. As Robert Jenson puts it—albeit in a perplexing way, the risen Jesus is the Lord of time around which time spirals “like a helix.”1 NOTE 1. Robert Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” in Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 35.

Chapter 1

The Contemporaneity of the Risen Jesus in Karl Barth’s Theology

Is there some power retroactively operating from the future to the present? What can be the ultimate basis for such an activity? In Christian theology, is there any doctrine from which we can derive the concept of retroactivity? From the fact that God is eternal, can it be derived? If that is the case, what aspect of God’s eternity can be the legitimate basis for it? Karl Barth’s theology suggests the concept of the retroactive operation of God’s grace in his account of the contemporaneity of Jesus. For Barth, Jesus is understood strikingly to be the contemporary to all people in all ages. The Jewish rabbi from Nazareth in the first century was present to some (if not all) people in the Old Testament time. Barth bases the fascinating idea on a certain feature of the divine eternity, that is, its simultaneity. In this chapter, I will put his construal under scrutiny and argue that the divine eternity as simultaneity cannot serve as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus in all ages. And yet I will positively engage with Barth, appreciating his understanding of the power of the resurrection by which Jesus is contemporaneous and so retroactively present to the Old Testament Israel. Let me first exposit. In the first place, even though Barth is undoubtedly the towering figure in Western modern theology, we shall find that his notion of eternity itself falls short in that it does not do full justice unwittingly to the victory of Jesus over death. Barth’s construal of eternity cannot serve as the legitimate ontological basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus. For that contention, this chapter will proceed by expositing Barth’s notion of eternity and critically engaging with his account of eternity and the contemporaneity of Jesus.

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BARTH’S TRINITARIAN AND INCARNATIONAL CONCEPT OF ETERNITY His account of eternity has (1) the trinitarian and (2) the incarnational characters and (3) the nature of the simultaneity of pre-, supra-, and post-temporal eternity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the major principle that guides Barth’s construal of divine eternity. Barth states, “A correct understanding of the positive side of the concept of eternity, free from all false conclusions, is gained only when we are clear that we are speaking about the eternity of the triune God.”1 The Father begets the Son, and he spirates the Spirit with the Son. In the eternal processions “there is order and succession. . . . There is a before and an after.”2 But this does not mean God’s eternal events take place in a linear fashion. Barth writes, “God is once and again and a third time, without dissolving the once-for-allness”;3 “eternity is not . . . an infinite extension of time both backwards and forwards. Time can have nothing to do with God.”4 What then is God’s eternity like? Barth adopts Boethius’s concept of eternity: “Eternity is the simultaneity of beginning, middle, and end, and to that extent it is pure duration.”5 The simultaneity is the character “that is lacking to time.”6 Further, Barth’s concept of simultaneity is stipulated with other cooperative terms: “the eternal now” and “stare.” “[God] is this nunc as the possessor of life completely, simultaneously and perfectly.”7 As Hunsinger comments, for Barth, “God’s eternal now is in one sense more like a mathematical point than a straight line.”8 At this point one may register an objection: if God’s eternal time—beginning, middle, and end—converges into a mathematical point of his simultaneous Now, then it seems that God’s eternity becomes frozen into a static state. But Barth avers that God’s eternal Now or his simultaneity is “the inclusion and not the exclusion of the various times, beginning, succession and end.”9 Therefore, the divine eternal Now “is also a fluere, but without the instability that belongs to all creaturely fluere. . . . [H]is fluere is also a stare, but without the immutability that belongs to all creaturely stare.”10 Here we may appreciate Barth’s rhetoric of dialectics between the unity and the distinction, the oneness and the threeness, and the stasis and the flow. However, a question can still be raised: would Barth’s dialectical notion of eternity work conceptually? How can stasis simultaneously be flow? How can stasis and flow be reconciled in God’s eternity? A preeminent philosophical proponent, Brian Leftow, has offered an analytic account for the plausibility of Barth’s dialectical notion. According to Leftow, “before and after” on Barth’s concept of God’s eternity is to be understood as causal order: “God’s eternity has a direction, as time does . . .

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[while] it does not ‘move’ as time ‘moves.’”11 For Barth, movement in God’s eternity is “best taken as a way of indicating a causal direction.”12 To translate this into terms of the doctrine of the Trinity, if the eternal generation and spiration are construed in temporal order and so in a linear fashion, then that will engender the Arian heresy: there was a time when the Son (or the Spirit) was not. So construed, Leftow’s philosophical support for Barth’s account is tenable, as far as it concerns God’s eternal event before and apart from all creaturely time. Yet, we should still continue to inquire how Barth’s notion of eternity as simultaneity will work particularly when it is juxtaposed with the incarnational character of God’s eternity in Barth’s account.13 Along with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the incarnation serves as another major guiding principle in Barth’s reflection of eternity. It may be legitimately said that while the doctrine of the Trinity determines the form of the doctrine of eternity, the doctrine of incarnation—precisely put, God’s eternal decision to be incarnate14—determines the material content of God’s eternity. For Barth, “eternity itself bears the name of Jesus Christ.”15 He states, “[A] correct understanding of the concept of eternity is reached only if we start from . . . the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus Christ.”16 So understood, God’s eternity is not pure timelessness. God took “time to himself”17 and “made it his own.”18 Without temporality in God’s eternity, Barth writes, “[t]he Christian message cannot be distinguished from a myth or dream. . . . [It] cannot be proclaimed in any credible way or received by faith.”19 Apart from temporality in eternity, the Christian talk of God would end up being “a mere appearance, a bubble constructed by human feeling or thought.”20 Yet this does not mean that the divine eternity has become entirely temporalized or historicized. Barth stresses that eternity does not cease to be eternity while it has the time of the incarnate Son Jesus within itself.21 Rather, it means that the temporality of Jesus Christ is placed at the center of God’s eternity. This christological construal becomes particularly visible when we turn to Barth’s talk of pre-, supra-, and post-temporal eternity. On his account of the pre-temporal eternity, Barth underscores the preexistence of Jesus. The eternal Son did not exist merely as the Logos asarkos but as “Jesus of Nazareth” even in pre-temporal eternity.22 To put this in terms of God’s election: by virtue of God’s eternal decree, the eternal Son was destined to bear the sin of the world and so anticipated the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus already in pre-temporal eternity. The pre-temporal Son was already “Jesus of Nazareth” in his anticipation of his temporal life.23 Thus, as Barth puts it, “Jesus Christ is before all time.”24 What then is the state of the Son in supra- and post-temporal eternity? Although Barth does not elaborate on the state of the Son in those subsequent forms of eternity, it is not difficult to infer that, also in those forms

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of eternity, the Son is still Jesus Christ. On Barth’s account, God’s supratemporal eternity moves in and with time. Supra-temporal eternity is not “without time, but causes itself to be accompanied by time”25 and “must not have the flavor of ‘timeless.’”26 So construed, the “supra-temporal” Jesus would be the man Jesus who lives in and with time.27 As for post-temporal eternity, Barth defines it as God’s time “after all time,”28 and yet he explicates the notion in eschatological and so temporal terms: post-temporality is the time of the final judgment29 and the final “revelation of the kingdom of God.”30 Of course, Barth would affirm that in post-temporal eternity, the judge and king of the kingdom will be Jesus. The post-temporal Son will be also Jesus. Thus, there is the self-same Jesus in pre-temporal, supra-temporal, and post-temporal eternity. THE SIMULTANEITY OF PRE-, SUPRA-, AND POST-TEMPORAL ETERNITY? Having looked at the three different modes of eternity, now let us return to the oneness of eternity, that is, simultaneity, following his dialectical method, and consider the consequences of bringing the three forms together into simultaneous oneness. As Molnar writes, for Barth, divine eternity is “simultaneously pre-temporal, supra-temporal, and post-temporal.”31 At this juncture a problematic ambivalence arises. Before we proceed, let us make a distinction between two types of simultaneity for our discussion. First, we can think of Simultaneity 1 (S1): God knows and experiences the whole course of history all at once in God’s immediate now. This entails that God does not remember the past or foreknow the future since God directly and immediately experiences them now—as if he experiences them all at once directly in one place. Hunsinger and Leftow’s analogy of a mathematical point would fit here. We can think of another type of simultaneity—Simultaneity 2 (S2): God knows all the events of history from the divine transcendental viewpoint, but God does not experience them all directly at once. The past, the present, and the future are simultaneously present in God’s mind and yet distinguished. Some events are in the past, and God can and should remember them. Some other events lie ahead in the future, and God still can and should foreknow and anticipate them. In his remembrance and foreknowledge, the whole course of history is not hidden, and yet there is a moment of God’s Now which is distinguished and distanced from the past and the future. In S2, God’s Now is flowing (fluere), not static, while it is true that God has the whole course of history in his mind. Having this distinction in place, now I will demonstrate the implausibility of S1, which Barth seems to hold, and I will turn to S2 as a viable alternative.

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A question arises as to S1: in Barth’s account, what would happen if the pre-, supra-, and post-temporal modes of eternity are all at once and simultaneous in the divine Now as if they are concentrated into the one mathematical point as Hunsinger and Leftow say? The pre-temporal Jesus is preincarnate; the supra-temporal Jesus is incarnate from a certain point of time—for supra-temporal eternity moves along with and in time. At this question, the question is: what happens if those different states are simultaneous to God the Son? Is his preincarnate state simultaneous with the incarnate state?32 Does the Son experience both states at the same time? Moreover, in S1, the moment of Jesus’s suffering in his earthly lifetime would be simultaneous with his complete victory over suffering, death, and evil. It follows then that the past moment of suffering would not go away but be ongoing in the divine Now. Can the Son be dead and risen at the same time in God’s simultaneous Now? Can he be suffering and victorious at the same time in the eternal Now? In the case of S1, the victory of Jesus over evil would be considerably impaired and become questionable. Here my concern arises for a theological reason, not because I simply favor a processional view of time and eternity or take it as common sense under the influence of Hegel. It seems Barth himself tends in this problematic direction and thus leaves room for clarification or modification. The problem emerges especially when Barth does not allow for “an infinite extension of time”33 in eternity and says, “Time can have nothing to do with God. . . . [In time] there is the separation and distance and contradiction which mark it as time and distinguish it from eternity as the creature from the Creator.”34 Also, Barth’s concept of eternal simultaneity is operative in close affinity with his concept of eternal Now. However, if every moment of the created time is present as “now” to God, then which moment is the real “now” in the divine consciousness? For example, again, is the death of Jesus “now” to God, or his resurrection? Or are both events “now” to God simultaneously? Tom Greggs offers a defense of Barth’s notion of eternity: For a lover of Mozart, it seems a musical analogy might perhaps be best: a chord comprises notes which are ordered and can be played in succession, yet which when played simultaneously do not cease to be what they are in themselves, but become something more in their simultaneity while still retaining their distinctiveness and order. Thus, one might understand eternity as the simultaneous playing of the notes of history in a way which does not dissolve their individual integrity.35

In this analogy, however, the past, for example, of suffering and death of Jesus is perpetuated in eternity and so considerably impairs the genuine present of the victory of Jesus, albeit unwittingly. To avoid such errors and uphold

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Jesus’s complete victory over sin and death, we need to accept a processional view of time and eternity in which Jesus’s suffering in Gethsemane and death on the cross have become past, and now he is risen and so is the victor in the truest sense.36 In an alternative understanding of the divine simultaneity (S2), it can be said that God knows all events of history from his divine transcendental viewpoint. S2 concerns the divine omniscience37 rather than God’s direct and immediate experience of all the courses of history at once. To put this in christological terms, the Son knows the whole course of history all at once while he does not experience them all at the same time. S2 allows for the procession of time in the divine consciousness: the Son Jesus Christ was crucified and died in the past, and now he is risen and ascended into heaven as the victor. The God Son can remember the past and foreknow the future, and so the whole course of history is not concealed but laid bare simultaneously in his all-knowing mind. So understood, S2 entails that there is the indicator of God’s genuine Now, the now distanced from the past and the future, in the divine omniscient consciousness. Which moment then is God’s Now? What is the indicator of the divine genuine Now? For an answer, we need to look to one of the three persons of the Trinity, the eternal Son who is incarnate, entered the creaturely time and became physical and temporal. Here I suggest his bodily experience serves as the indicator and so determines God’s Now. When the Son’s bodily reality was suffering on the cross, the crucifixion was his Now; when he is risen, his resurrection is his divine Now. So, the temporal experience of his bodily reality operates and serves as the indicator in the divine eternal and simultaneous knowledge of the whole of history—or the arm on the divine clock. The incarnate and temporal reality of the Son tells what time it is for God. Thus, the procession of time can be supplemented to a concept of eternity as simultaneity (S2).38 An operative assumption here is that the divine conscious perspective of the Son is located inseparably in the body of Jesus Christ. Here to posit another perspectival point of the Son’s consciousness beyond his human body would be equivalent to positing another person beyond the person of Jesus Christ. That would repristinate Nestorianism. If the Son is not two persons but one, then there must be only one perspectival point of his consciousness irrevocably and eternally embedded into his human body and his temporal experience by virtue of the incarnation. That divine-human perspective located within the body determines his divine “Now.” So the divine-human consciousness of the Son experiences the flow of time and knows the fact that his death is past and that his victory is now completely won. In the next step, we can say that the eternal Son’s bodily and divine knowledge and experience of the procession of time is not separated from but

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incorporated into the consciousness of the Godhead. By virtue of the relation to the second person of the Trinity who is eternally incarnate, the eternal God knows that death is completely past and gone. He knows the flow of time in conjunction with the consciousness of the God-man. The whole course of history is not contracted into the mathematical single point of the divine (experiential) nunc, due to the incarnate reality of the eternal Son while it is simultaneously present in his mind. So understood, it is not the created time in general that determines God’s eternity; the flowing time of the eternal and incarnate Son determines the intrinsic time of the eternal God. But do we have to posit another divine consciousness (of the Father and the Spirit) than that of the God-man and so beyond his body, the consciousness which never steps into the flow of time and stays untainted even from the human experiences of the second person? If the three centers of divine consciousness are posited in the Godhead, it may engender a heresy of tritheism. Even if there are, the God-man’s historical consciousness would coordinate with the other persons’ in their trinitarian relationship. Alternatively, if there is the one ultimate consciousness within the Godhead, still the divine eternal consciousness would not be severed or untethered from the historical consciousness of the second person whose time is decidedly determined by his incarnate reality and his experiences of the historical vicissitudes. BARTH’S CONCEPT OF ETERNITY AS THE BASIS FOR JESUS’S CONTEMPORANEITY? Now we are in a position to look at whether Barth’s concept of eternity can be the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus and therefore the basis for his retroactive power and presence. And yet before we proceed, we need to consider Barth’s construal of the resurrection of Jesus since the contemporaneity of Jesus is closely associated with his resurrection on Barth’s account. The concept of the trans-temporality of Jesus and so the possibility of the retroactivity arise from that account. This section will examine his theology with the following questions in view: How can Jesus be present in the past, the present, and the future? How is Jesus contemporaneous to all people in all ages? We need to note Barth offers an answer at the level of the salvific: it is due to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Barth, the resurrection has the power by which Jesus relates himself to all human beings in all times, as the resurrection-time breaks into the whole of history proactively and retroactively and encompasses its totality. From the center of history, the light of the resurrection bursts and spreads across all of history. As Barth writes, Jesus “was made eternal in the resurrection and therefore always present in His resurrection.”39 Importantly, Barth states

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that the risen man is present to all human beings “for every age from the days of His resurrection”40 as he has acquired the character of the divine eternity in some sense at the resurrection.41 On Easter morning, Jesus was risen and became “eternal”: the temporal barriers collapsed and melted before him. Barth puts it, “Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the Jesus Christ of Easter Day . . . is the basis of life for all men of all ages. . . . The event of Easter Day is the removing of the barrier between His life in His time and their life in their times, the initiation of His lordship as the Lord of all time.”42 Jesus’s death and resurrection now serves as the basis of life for all humans in all ages, and thus he is the Lord of history. In other words, by “the outward vector” of the resurrection, the first-century man is present in all other times.43 Even though Barth himself does not extensively elaborate on the conceptual link between the resurrection and the contemporaneity of Jesus, it seems obvious that his contemporaneity is a logical corollary of his account of the resurrection. Barth does not discuss the significance of the resurrection in his account of the contemporaneity of Jesus in the immediate context.44 And yet, as aforementioned, he states that Jesus “was made eternal in the resurrection and therefore always present in His resurrection and for every age from the days of His Resurrection.”45 In his exposition, Hunsinger aptly notes the logical connection between the resurrection and the contemporaneity of Jesus in Barth’s thinking and puts it, “This transcendent aspect of bodily resurrection meant that the person of Jesus Christ—(and not without) his life-history and his saving work—had been elevated into eternity. It meant that he had been made the ‘Contemporary of all human beings.’”46 Now that the resurrection can be considered to serve as the basis of his contemporaneity, it follows that “[a]s the Crucified ‘he lives and reigns to all eternity’. . . . As the One who was in this time, he became and is the Lord of all time, eternal as God himself is eternal, and therefore present in all time.”47 For Barth, Jesus has entered into eternity and been the Lord of all time with the marks of the crucifixion on his hands and feet and his side. Due to what happened in the Easter morn, Jesus is able to be present to all in all times, as the Crucified. Jesus “becomes and is [the] Contemporary”48 of all humans in the whole of history, from the beginning to the end, for at the resurrection occurred a “removal of the limitations of its yesterday, to-day and tomorrow, of its once, now and then.”49 At this point, the concept of retroactivity comes into view as the risen Jesus’s contemporaneity entails that he is also “the contemporary of Israel”50 even though Barth himself did not make clear the conceptual link between the contemporaneity of Jesus and his resurrection in his account. In his account of “Jesus as Lord of Time” (CD III/2), Barth states that Jesus “was in the midst of the fathers.”51 He adds, “[T]he patriarchs point forward to Jesus. . . . [T]he

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fathers do in fact speak of Jesus.”52 Jesus was there with them, according to Barth, even before he was born as a human baby, that is, “before this history reached its consummation.”53 “Consider the decisive place occupied by the Old Testament in the early Christian liturgy. Consider the ease with which the Church accepted the Canon of the Synagogue. Above all consider the degree to which the New Testament is impregnated with the Old. . . . They were forced to accept it because they looked back to Jesus”54 and because Jesus was there with their ancestors in their times. Since Jesus has been present throughout God’s redemptive history, despite the differences between the two Testaments, the believers in the New Testament era “could only form a single people with the people of the God of Israel, seeing the time of this people and their own tie fused into a single time of Jesus.”55 For this reason, Jesus could “say of Moses, ‘He wrote of me’ (John 5:46); and of Abraham: ‘(He) rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad’ (Jn. 8:56). And the Evangelist himself says of Isaiah: ‘These said (he), when he saw his glory, and spake of him’ (Jn. 12:41).”56 On Barth’s account, Jesus was already there with them in their own times before he was born, as the contemporary of Israel. Here it must be noted that while Barth insists Jesus was there in the Old Testament time, he also states that his contemporaneity is spiritual in nature. He writes, “Just as the tradition and recollection of Him makes Him Contemporary of the Church, so in the time of Israel the promise and expectation of His coming makes Him the Contemporary of Israel. In both cases it is a spiritual contemporaneity.”57 Having said that Jesus was present among the Old Testament Israelites as the contemporary of Israel, at this point Barth could have affirmed the full humanity of the contemporary Jesus if he had contemplated it in close connection with the resurrection and its outward vector. Barth could have spoken of Jesus more than in a spiritual sense and argued that the contemporary of Israel was no other than the risen Jesus and therefore a bodily being. But Barth’s account in Church Dogmatics III/2 stops there only to reaffirm the cliché: Jesus was “not simply absent, since in all its history He [was] promised and expected.”58 But conceiving Jesus only as the promised and expected one is significantly different from understanding him as the one who is fully and bodily present from the day of the resurrection. Still we need to note that Barth wants to argue more than that: the presence of Jesus in the Old Testament period cannot to be reduced to “the clue to . . . or the preparation for the coming of the crucified and risen Jesus . . . as though this were not an objective fact.”59 In his understanding, Jesus’s presence in the Old Testament time was more than a clue or preparation; it is something that was “objective” in nature. How then could it be that Jesus is spiritually and objectively present in the Old Testament? What does Barth try to say?

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Let us continue to follow Barth’s lead in Church Dogmatics III/2. On his account, the Son as the incarnate Logos and Jesus was even at the beginning of the creation. In his reading of John 1, Barth writes, “‘The same was in the beginning with God.’ The oὗτος here refers to the incarnate Logos. It is He who was ‘in the beginning.’”60 Barth’s thinking moves further back when he says that Jesus was there even “before created time began, in the [pre-temporal] eternity of God.”61 A man was existent in pre-temporal eternity when God established a plan for the creation. “The man Jesus is in this genuine and real yesterday of God’s eternity, which is anterior to all other yesterdays, including the yesterday of creation.”62 Barth is clear that it is the incarnate Logos. “[T]he man Jesus, whose incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection took place in the days of Augustus and Tiberius, is the fulfillment of the covenant and the meaning and purpose of creation. . . . He was also its ground. . . . He was already at the beginning of time. . . . Time in its beginning was enclosed by His time, and that extent was itself His time.”63 It is striking that a man constitutes the foundation of all creation. In the beginning was a man. But how can it be? How can we interpret this? Does Barth mean simply that the Logos asarkos was in pre-temporal eternity but speak of a man’s existence before the creation in a figurative sense? No. It is well-known that he rejects the concept of the Logos asarkos out of hand. It seems that he means the Logos incarnandus, the Logos who is going to be incarnate as some Barth scholars would interpret legitimately.64 That seems what Barth means. But can we take it in a plainer sense? Barth’s text itself suggests, if taken more simply: it is not the Logos asarkos but that the man Jesus—the incarnate Logos—is regarded as the ground of the creation. The very beginning of time itself is reached by the time of Jesus since his time extends to the very beginning of time. The one who was born of Mary, crucified, and resurrected constitutes the ground of the creation and was present even at the beginning of time. So construed, the whole of history from first to last is open to his time, the time at the center of history. His time extends itself from the center of history, reaching out to the entire history. In this regard, it is intriguing to note what Barth says: our notion of time should not be “too much hampered by his conception of ‘linear time.’”65 For Barth, “a certain contemporaneity”66 should come into play for our understanding of time since Jesus is the contemporary of all in all ages. Jesus as the contemporary of Israel, says Barth, “had not merely a forward dimension, into their own time in which He was in their midst, but also a backward dimension in which He was in the midst of the fathers.”67 With regard to Jesus’s presence in the Old Testament times, there are not only a proleptic aspect in prophetic visions and words but also the retroactive one. The concept of the retroactive presence of Jesus is about to come into view—albeit in an embryonic form.

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Given the nonlinear concept of time and the contemporaneity of Jesus, it would not be far-fetched to consider the backward dimension as the effect of the outward vector of the resurrection. If as noted earlier in Barth, Jesus was “made eternal” in the resurrection and it has the outward vector, it would be the man Jesus as the risen one who is contemporary in all ages by virtue of the power of the resurrection. If this is the case, Barth could have affirmed more emphatically the humanity of Jesus, the Logos incarnatus (incarnate) and his presence at the beginning of the creation and in the Old Testament period. He could have more plainly and straightforwardly said that Jesus the Logos incarnatus (rather than incarnandus) is the contemporary of Israel and of all humans in all ages and that his time is located at the center of cosmic history, reaching over and accessing to all times. “If His time is the real divine center of all time,” Barth puts it, “are we not forced to see it as the time which embraces and controls all time before and after Him?”68 Yes, we are. We can see it more clearly in the light of the resurrection. The man Jesus embraces and is available to all times before and after his time, as the risen one. Such a presence can be construed as the spiritual one and as the “objective” reality69—as Barth himself said.70 A CRITICAL REFLECTION Finally, we are in a position to raise a critical question: can Barth’s concept of eternity serve as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus? (Can it be the basis for the outward vector of the resurrection?) As we have seen, in Barth’s theology, Jesus was made eternal at the resurrection by which the first-century rabbi has become the contemporary to all humans in all ages. Jesus is now risen and therefore has become trans-temporal and can access to any point of history. At this juncture, it must be noted that at the resurrection, as Barth himself states, the earthly time of Jesus “acquired . . . the character of God’s time, of eternity, in which present, past and future are simultaneous.”71 For Barth, at the resurrection Jesus was made contemporaneous by virtue of the divine eternity which is the simultaneity of the past, the present, and the future and therefore of the pre-, supra-, and post-temporal eternity. He has acquired the contemporaneity due to the simultaneity. It sounds plausible that the simultaneity—the eternal Now—serves as the ontological foundation for the contemporaneity. However, a problem arises. If Barth’s concept of eternity is retained without modification, it can hardly operate as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus and for the retroactivity of his grace, reaching back to the Old Testament time. As we have seen earlier, Barth’s notion of eternity as

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simultaneity is interpreted to mean S1 that God immediately experiences the past, the present, and the future as and in his eternal Now. But as indicated above, such a construal in itself is problematic. Alternatively, even if it is interpreted to mean S2—God knows all events of the past, the present, and the future in his eternal Now while God can distinguish the three modes of time with his moving time-pointer, could it serve as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus? Even in that case (S2), it still falls short. S2 entails knowledge of all events in the entire history all at once and that it allows room for the “arm” in the divine clock. S2 concerns the divine knowledge of time, and yet the contemporaneity of Jesus entails the (transtemporal) presence: the divine power to be present backward and forward in time whether it is spiritual or not. So construed, it is a category mistake to base the power to be present backward and forward in time upon the immediate experience (S1) or the immediate knowledge (S2) of all events in time. It is a conceptual confusion between the trans-temporal presence on the one hand and the immediate experience (S1) or the omniscience (S2) on the other. It is implausible to make a logical transition from S1 or S2 (experiencing/knowing) to Jesus’s power to access and be present to any time in history. It is untenable to say that Jesus is contemporary because God’s eternity is simultaneity whether it is S1 or S2. One may say that since God is simple, the power to be contemporaneous to all ages is one with the divine knowledge and experience of all times at once. However, we cannot say for instance that because omnipotence is one with goodness in the divine simplicity, omnipotence can be the logical ground for the goodness of God for one can think of some omnipotent being which is not quite benevolent. But the fact that the eternal simultaneity cannot safeguard the contemporaneity of Jesus does not mean that eternity cannot be the foundation for Jesus’s contemporaneity. The divine power that cannot be separated from the divine eternity can and must be the basis for the first-century Jew’s contemporaneity and retroactivity. Due to the divine power that cannot be separated from the divine eternity (by virtue of the doctrine of divine simplicity), the temporal barriers are removed and collapsed before his presence. God’s eternity can and must be the basis for the outward vector of the resurrection and for the “contemporaneity” of Jesus even though it is not the aspect of eternity (simultaneity) that makes it possible. CONCLUSION For Barth, divine eternity is the basis for Jesus’s trans-temporal presence as the contemporary to all people in all ages. Even before the creation, Jesus is

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existent.72 But the question is: what aspect of the divine eternity makes his contemporaneity and retroactivity possible? What aspect of the divine eternity can function as the basis for it? I have argued that the simultaneity of the divine eternity as found in Barth’s account does not measure up to it. In the first place, Barth’s synthesis of the Boethian account of eternity with the doctrine of incarnation turns out to be problematic in that it introduces the incarnational characteristics and thereby the temporal vicissitudes into the divine simultaneous eternity. On his account, consequently, the divine eternity becomes the simultaneity of all the events that took place in the life of Jesus, including his death and his resurrection. What must be distinguished and distanced in the time of the man—his subjection to death and his victory over death—is taken together and concentrated into the mathematical point of simultaneity. The events which cannot stand together are brought into the divine eternal nunc. His suffering and death have not passed into the past but remain as a present event in the divine now, and therefore, on Barth’s account, it unwittingly and considerably undermines the victory of Jesus over sin and death. As Barth’s emphasis on the incarnate Son is wedded to the Boethian notion of eternity, the clarion call of the good news becomes muffled. Alternatively we have seen that the process of time is required even in eternity (contra Hunsinger) and that it should be more than a causal direction (contra Leftow). There must be temporal distances in eternity between the Son’s preincarnate state and his incarnate state, and between his subjection to death and his triumph over it. The miserable past should not linger on in the simultaneous eternity (contra Greggs). Even for the eternal Son, the past has passed (although not into oblivion). But this does not mean that the concept of simultaneous eternity needs to be jettisoned (contra Padgett) but that it needs a slight modification: Barth’s Boethian account of eternity stands in need of a pointer that would tell which moment is God’s Now. The doctrine of the incarnation suggests that the second person’s consciousness is inseparably united with the bodily existence of the first-century Nazarene. I have suggested that his bodily reality can function as the moving indicator of God’s Now even in the divine eternal and simultaneous knowledge of the whole course of history. Put simply, the bodily and temporal experience of the incarnate Son tells what time it is for God. If there cannot be a disparity between the time of the incarnate Son and that of the other persons of the Trinity in the eternal one Godhead, the past of his death cannot be considered simultaneous with the present victory that Jesus Christ has achieved when the Father raised him by the power of the Spirit. Thus, without the indicator of the flowing Now, Barth’s concept of the divine eternity remains in need of modification. His concept is so problematic in itself as to serve as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus.

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Further, it is a category mistake to say that the contemporaneity of Jesus is grounded in the simultaneity of God’s eternity. Even though it sounds plausible, the divine ability to experience all events of history as now (without “the pointer” on his “clock”—S1) or to know all of them as now with the pointer (S2) cannot serve as the sufficient foundation for the risen Jesus’s trans-temporal presence to all ages. In other words, the ability to see, know, or experience “from the highest viewpoint” does not necessarily entail that one can access to a different point of time. The divine simultaneous knowledge or experience does not necessarily give rise to the power to “move” from a moment to another. Yet I affirm with Barth: Jesus as the risen one is trans-temporally present to all ages. The risen one (as the Omega of the whole cosmos) stands at the center of human history. Being able to access to any age, the eschatological effulgence of the risen one can shine forth and break into any moment of history by virtue of the power of the resurrection, and so it encompasses the whole of history—from the creation to the End—in its eschatological light and with its outward vector of the resurrection. Concurring with Barth on this, now we are on the look for an alternative account on how the divine eternity can serve as the basis for the contemporaneity or centrality of Jesus to all in all ages. NOTES 1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 615. Hereafter CD. 2. CD II/1, 615. 3. CD II/1, 615. 4. CD II/1, 608. 5. CD II/1, 608. 6. CD II/1, 186. 7. CD II/1, 611. 8. George Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis: Barth’s Conception of Eternity,” in George Hunsinger, ed., For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 187. Hunsinger also says that it is like a circle and sphere when it embraces the temporality (Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis,” 187). 9. CD II/1, 611. 10. CD II/1, 611. 11. Brian Leftow, “Response to ‘Mysterium Trinitatis: Barth’s Conception of Eternity,’” in George Hunsinger, ed., For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 198. 12. Leftow, “Response,” 198.

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13. Barth’s Boethian conception of eternity has not been free from criticisms. Richard Roberts complains that for Barth “the reality of the divine denies, subverts, and supersedes the reality of the mundane” (Richard Roberts, “Barth’s Doctrine of Time,” in Stephen Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Methods [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979], 139). Ted Peters charges that Barth’s concept “tends to trivialize temporal succession, [and] render it ontological exterior to eternal substance” (Ted Peters, God as Trinity [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993], 149). In the same spirit, Padgett states, “What is missing from eternity as God’s time is the past-present-future distinction, which I have called process” (Alan Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time [New York: St. Martin’s], 143). Their concerns seem legitimate, but still we may ask: why should we maintain the processional view of time and eternity? Is it because our common sense tells us so? Or is there any theological reason? 14. It is crucial to note here that for Barth the eternal God—not a historical event like the incarnation—determines his eternity. 15. CD II/1, 622. 16. CD II/1, 616. 17. CD II/1, 616. 18. CD II/1, 617. 19. CD II/1, 620. 20. CD II/1, 620. 21. CD II/1, 616. 22. Cf. CD II/2, 115: “In no depth of the Godhead shall we encounter any other but [Jesus], There is no such thing as Godhead in itself.” 23. Bruce McCormack. “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology,” in John Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000), 98. 24. CD II/1, 621. 25. CD II/1, 623. 26. CD II/1, 623. 27. What would the “supra-temporal” Jesus be like? Since supra-temporal eternity is regarded as accompanying time “on high” (CD II/1, 623)—while moving with and in time—on Barth’s account, would the supra-temporal Jesus be distinguished from the temporal human Jesus and existent on the higher metaphysical plane, even when the Son is incarnate and lives his temporal life on earth? Or would the supra-temporal Jesus be identical to the incarnate one, Jesus of Nazareth, without any remainder? Whichever Barth supports, in either case, it would be legitimate to say that the eternal Son does experience the temporal life of Jesus. In connection with this, it will be argued later that there must be one consciousness of Jesus, not beyond his body but within his body. 28. CD II/1, 639. 29. CD II/1, 630. 30. CD II/1, 630. 31. Paul Molnar, “Can the Electing God Be God without Us?” in Michael T. Dempsey, ed., Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 99. Emphasis mine.

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32. Barth also argues that equal weight is to be given to the three modes of eternity (CD II/1, 631). 33. CD II/1, 608. 34. CD II/1, 608. 35. Tom Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39. 36. Here I do not want to develop a tension between the death and the resurrection. I am aware that the victory of Jesus Christ has been achieved already in his death. But for Jesus to be the true victor, the death should not be eternalized in God’s Now while the resurrection is. 37. This seems close to what Boethius meant. This reading is confirmed when Boethius says. “God’s divine intelligence can view all things from its eternal mind, while human reason can only see them from a temporal point of view”; “this is plainly a peculiar property of the mind of God”; “His knowledge, which passes over every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were taking place in the present” (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, book 5). However, if the sheer distance between the past of the Son’s suffering and death and the present of his absolute triumph is not conceptually allowed in the Boethian concept of God’s eternity. Boethius’s account also unwittingly compromises the Son’s victory. 38. One may ask: What was the “indicator” of God’s Now when the Son had no bodily existence, that is, before the incarnation? Was God temporally ungrounded, for example, during the history of ancient Israel? Does God only obtain a “now” when the Son is incarnated? Before answering those questions, I should note that my central argument that the Son’s incarnate reality serves as the indicator of God’s Now (of course, since the incarnation) does not require an explanation of how God was conscious of the temporal passage before the incarnation. It would suffice to say that God perceived the creaturely time differently than he is now, being one with the incarnate Son. As Torrance says, the incarnation was a new event for God (T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, [Edinburgh: T&T Clark. 1996], 238). Pressing his insight a bit further, I suggest that God perceives the flow of time in a new and different fashion since the incarnation. Yet, attempting to answer those questions, we may still indicate two things concerning the bodily presence of “the Son”: in the Old Testament. Israel was regarded as God’s Son (e.g., Ex 4:22). Their consciousness of the passage of time and history would be special to God’s knowledge of history. Another thing to note is the phenomena called christophanies. I do not think it heretical to believe that the divine and carnal figure who appeared to some Israelites was Christ. For example, see Augustine, The Trinity, Book 2; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 56.6; and Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.7.4. Does this belief lead to a docetic view of Christ, rendering his body something that he can put on and off like a jacket? I do not think so. We may regard christophanies as the appearances of the incarnate one, without denying that the incarnation is a once-and-for-all and irreversible event for the Son. This will be discussed further in the last chapter of this book.

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39. CD, IV/1, 322. For Barth, the resurrection is “the initiation of His lordship as the Lord of all time” (CD IV/1, 316). Here our consideration of the transcendent presence of Jesus, centering upon the significance of the resurrection, should be counterbalanced with the other major motif in Barth’s dialectic thought, that is, Jesus’s pre-temporal election. See George Hunsinger, Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 279–280. 40. CD IV/1, 322; cf. CD IV/4, 25. Emphasis added. 41. Of course, Barth would not deny that Jesus the Son of God has been eternal before the resurrection: the Son is (pre-temporally) eternal before the creation. 42. CD IV/1, 316. Similarly, Barth speaks also of “removal of the limitations of its yesterday, to-day and tomorrow, of its once, now and then” (CD III/2, 464). 43. R. Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 67. 44. In the section “Jesus, the Lord of Time” (CD III/2). 45. CD IV/1, 322. 46. Hunsinger, “The Daybreak of the New Creation,” 179. Whatever that he is elevated into eternity means, let us set that aside for now. We are going to talk about it later. 47. CD III/2, 440. In a similar vein, Barth also says, “His time acquires in relation to their times the character of God’s time, of eternity, in which present, past and future are simultaneous” (CD III/2, 440). 48. CD III/2, 467. 49. CD III/2, 464. 50. CD III/2, 482. 51. CD III/2, 482. 52. CD III/2, 481. 53. CD III/2, 482. 54. CD III/2, 482. 55. CD III/2, 482. 56. CD III/2, 482. 57. CD III/2, 481. Emphasis mine. 58. CD III/2, 482. 59. CD III/2, 482. 60. CD III/2, 484. Emphasis mine. 61. CD III/2, 484. 62. CD III/2, 484. Emphasis mine. 63. CD III/2, 483–84. 64. For instance, MacCormack, “Grace and Being,” 96. I am dealing with a different issue than the one regarding the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity. Basically, my view is that we should not uphold the economic Trinity at the expense of the immanent Trinity. Here I am just talking about the power of the resurrection and its outward vector, not sacrificing the significance of the immanent Trinity and the Logos asarkos. 65. CD III/2, 481.

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66. CD III/2, 481. 67. CD III/2, 482. Emphasis mine. 68. CD III/2, 482. 69. CD III/2, 482. 70. I am not saying that this is what Barth meant. But I suggest this would be a possible—not far-fetched—interpretation of Barth while it moves beyond him. The interpretation comes into view when we read Barth’s account of the contemporaneity of Jesus in light of the resurrection. 71. CD III/2, 440. 72. Does it mean that the historical Jesus preexists? This question will be discussed in the last chapter.

Chapter 2

The Retroactivity of the Future in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Theology

The eschatological future breaks into the present time of this age. Wolfhart Pannenberg has made such a fascinating claim often, and yet it is a puzzle tantalizing enough to generate some questions: How can the future break into the present? Can this idea be substantiated scientifically or theologically? Is it legitimate—at least theologically—to say that the omega of history affects our present time? If that is the case, God must be the source of its in-breaking power. So is the divine eternity. But what aspect of the divine eternity is it that makes possible the eschatological incursion of the present age? Does the simultaneity of God’s eternity make it possible? We have seen in the previous chapter that it is difficult to make such a claim. Or is it God’s eternity as the wholeness of time that can serve as the foundation of the in-breaking of the future? That is Pannenberg’s argument, to which we turn now for further reflection. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s construal of eternity and time is a momentous achievement as he has reckoned particularly with the significance of the eschatological future in his account. It has been widely accepted and acclaimed, and it is worth a close examination. The present chapter will critically examine his account of eternity and time, particularly focusing on the conceptual link between divine eternity and the final future. This chapter concerns how God’s eternity as the totality can give rise to the idea of the eschatological future as the locus of the ultimate causation (and so the trans-temporality and retroactivity of the future). A philosopher of religion, Willem Drees, has already opined that Pannenberg’s “transition from [eternity] to ‘future’” is philosophically invalid.1 Concurring with Drees’s philosophical criticism, I will argue that Pannenberg’s notion of eternity as the totality cannot give rise to the construal of the future as the locus of the ultimate causation and therefore cannot function as the basis for the retroactivity of the eschatological future. In addition, 23

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we shall see that the baseless notion of the priority of the future leads to some idiosyncratic doctrinal understandings of the Trinity and the incarnation. I will endeavor to establish the claim in three stages: (1) an exposition of Pannenberg’s construal of eternity and time, (2) a critical reflection, and (3) a doctrinal suggestion. PANNENBERG’S ACCOUNT OF ETERNITY AS THE TOTALITY OF TIME Pannenberg surveys significant concepts of eternity and time in Western Christian history. In his account, early Christian theology found a crucial element in the Platonic notion of eternity and time. “Plato did not abandon the timeless eternity”2 which stands in antithesis to time, and “the biblical belief in the eternal God [had] undoubtedly the most important reason for the favoring of Platonism.”3 For Plato conceived time as an “image of eternity”4 and thereby suggested “a (however limited) sense of participation in eternity.”5 In Pannenberg’s analysis, this philosophical understanding of eternity and time can be readily adopted into Christian theology as it can be seen in Augustine’s reflection later. However, Pannenberg is critical of the Platonic notion, for eternity is considered in the antithetical relation to time and therefore “bears no relation to time.”6 In line with the Platonic understanding, Augustine construes time as “the participation of the soul in eternity”7 and yet carries it further. In his reflection, Augustine finds that temporal duration is “the time‐bridging present.”8 In the human consciousness, as Augustine observes, the past recedes into oblivion, and the future approaches from the uncertain and unknown. The present runs between the already‐gone and the not‐yet, that is, between two modes of nothingness. Only the present appears to be safe from the threat of nothingness, but it flows merely on the specious ground—in fact, an “extensionless point.”9 It only runs on the extentionless verge of nothingness. Nevertheless, according to Augustine, there is somehow a stretching‐out in the human mind. The soul extends to the future and the past, and so the extension is achieved as a unity across time to some degree. The human mind “tends” toward a time‐bridging present, in which it can be grasped as a unity.”10 Pannenberg stresses that the act of the time‐bridge is “a remote inkling of eternity,”11 made possible by eternity. In that act of extension or attention (attentio), the human time participates in divine eternity,12 and eternity serves as the basis for the creaturely temporal extension, albeit in a limited way. But while largely following Augustine’s treatment of time, Pannenberg is not fully satisfied with it, due to the deficiency of the eschatological significance of the future.

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Pannenberg turns to Plotinus, who “took an important step”13 for in his account, eternity is defined as “the whole of life.”14 This notion of eternity as the totality of life has enduring influences on the Christian understanding of eternity.15 Boethius adopts it for his reflection of divine eternity. Resonating with Plotinus, Boethius writes, “Eternity . . . is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.”16 This Boethian conception, as Pannenberg notes, has impacted Barth’s understanding in which eternity is conceived as the simultaneity of past, present, and future. For Barth, eternity can be and is related to time, overcoming the antithesis or the qualitative differences of the two. In his account, eternity is not a negation of time but the “authentic duration.”17 As the authentic duration, eternity can be understood as the basis of the creaturely time, and the creaturely time as “participation in eternity,”18 as Augustine (and Plato) envisaged before. Pannenberg highlights it: “The ‘fleeting Now’ of our sense of the present corresponds only remotely to the lasting and abiding Now of [the divine] present.”19 For Barth, the divine Now of eternity enables the fleeting now to be time‐bridging and so to achieve simultaneous unity of the past, the present, and the future, though in a limited fashion.20 Pannenberg puts it tersely, “By giving us time God actually gives us eternity.”21 Barth provides an invaluable insight into divine eternity for the doctrine of the Trinity plays a significant role in his reflection—as we have noted already in the previous chapter. For Barth, the eternal authentic duration is not without orders since eternity is not of a monadic deity but of the Trinity. There are “before” and “after” in the immanent trinitarian life and being. The orders in divine eternity are constituted in the trinitarian processions and relations. Since the Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit, the Father is prior to the other two, and the Spirit comes after the first and the second persons.22 In eternity, while there are orders in the relation of the three, as Barth puts it, each person or order is “undividedly beginning, succession and end, all at once in His own essence. . . . This ‘all’ is pure duration, free from all the fleetingness and separations of what we call time.”23 Thus, the divine orders are in simultaneous unity. Further, Pannenberg indicates how Barth’s trinitarian approach overcomes the Platonic antithesis between eternity and time in another way. In Pannenberg’s reading, Barth strongly supports the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity: “The immanent Trinity is identical with the economic Trinity.”24 The life of Jesus is engraved into the heart of God’s eternity. The temporal succession is embraced by God’s eternity. Accordingly, Barth’s supra‐temporality is understood, in Pannenberg, as “in‐temporality.”25 The creaturely temporality is internalized in the triune God. Thus, in Pannenberg’s judgment, Barth’s trinitarian concept of eternity overcomes and “embraces the antithesis” of eternity and time.26 However, in Pannenberg’s

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evaluation, Barth’s concept of eternity and time stops short of the full‐fledged Christian understanding, for eschatology is still to be taken into account. For that insight, Pannenberg takes recourse to the idea of Plotinus. Of course, there is an aspect in which the ancient account rubs against the grain of Christian theology of time particularly when it comes to the genesis of time. In the Plotinian account, time was once characterized by unity and totality before the Fall, as eternity is, for it fully participated in eternity then.27 But due to its own “desire to control itself,”28 time has been broken into shards, that is, “into a sequence of separate moments.”29 In the Plotinian narrative, the succession of time begins with the Fall, not with the creation, and it cannot be congruent with Christian theology. However, Pannenberg believes, the Plotinian account of redemption still provides a crucial insight into divine eternity for on that account, the totality and unity of time can be retrieved when our time arrives at the final future.30 In the end‐time, the totality will be “given to time which makes possible the unity and continuity of time’s process.”31 “Eternity as the complete totality of life is thus seen from the standpoint of time only in terms of a fullness that is sought in the future.”32 At this point, the eschaton becomes constitutive of the redemption of time in this philosophical or mythical narrative. The primacy of the future comes into view in this understanding of time and eternity. Thus, in Plotinus, the nascent conceptual nexus between the future and eternity as the whole of life has emerged. Pannenberg highly acclaims Plotinus’s eschatological conception of eternity and time.33 Pannenberg says that Christian theology should combine NT eschatology and the understanding of God’s eternity with the help of Plotinus’s analysis of time. . . . In the future of the divine rule, the life of creation will be renewed for participation in the eternity of God. In it, eternity comes together with time. It is the place of eternity itself in time, the place of God in his relation to the world, the starting point of his action in the irruption of his future for his creatures, the source of the mighty workings of his Spirit.34 What is notable in those condensed sentences is his construal of the relation between eternity and time. Pannenberg’s thinking is imbued with the Plotinian idea that the totality of time lies in the final future. He approvingly states, “The [historical] process itself . . . as a whole will only come into view from the end, when it has run its course,”35 and “the totality of the existence is possible only from the standpoint of its future.”36 Thus, on Pannenberg’s account, the primacy of the future comes to the fore as he avows the Plotinian eschatological construal of eternity and time. In Pannenberg’s understanding, the Plotinian idea operates with an assumption that, as quoted above, “[in the future], eternity comes together with time. It is the place of eternity itself in time.”37 On his account, the future is the temporal abode for the eternal

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God’s presence. The future is, as Mostert puts it, “the point where eternity and time meet.”38 Having the Plotinian assumption in place, Pannenberg takes another significant step and suggests an idea of the retroactive divine engagement with the creation. Since eternity comes into time in the future, the future becomes the primary locus for God’s dwelling in time and from which God engages with the creation and guides the course of history. For instance, in the beginning, God did and does create the universe from the future: “The continued event of creation [proceeds] from the power of the future of God [even though] it suffers a temporal inversion whereby it seems to be a process moving from the past and to the future.”39 Also, in the divine providence, “each new event proceeds from the future of God, from which all creaturely forms take their origin and seek their fulfillment.”40 Thus, in Pannenberg, the eschatological future functions as the abode of God’s eternity in the created time and therefore the sole locus where the ultimate causation arises. Pannenberg’s account of the kingdom of God confirms the idea that eternity or the eternal God resides in the future. The kingdom of God is understood as the pressing immanence of the eschatological future. In Pannenberg’s theology, the divine dominion lies in the future, but not confined to it. God’s rule over the entire universe is regarded as the goal of the whole history, but it retroactively breaks into the path of history: “The kingdom of God, is already really present as the in‐breaking of its consummation from the future.”41 Particularly in the ministry of Jesus, the kingdom of God “became a power determining the present.”42 The life of Jesus constitutes the locus where the incursion of the eschatological future into the present occurs. For this reason, Pannenberg claims, Jesus could say “that if he by the finger of God cast out demons, then the kingdom of God had already come to them (Luke 11:20).”43 That is, “the eschatological future, and with it the eternity of God, really enter[ed] the historical present.”44 The in‐breaking of the eschatological future culminates in the resurrection of Jesus. His resurrection is “indeed infallibly the dawning of the end of history.”45 It is the “pre‐realization of the future”46 and the apocalyptic incursion of the eschaton into the present age. As the prime locus of the eschatological incursion, in Pannenberg’s understanding, the resurrection does wield the power of the future in its outward vector. That idea is of great importance in Pannenberg’s Christology, for the divine sonship of Jesus is constituted by the eschatological power of the resurrection. It retroactively reaches to the beginning, by virtue of which Jesus is the Son from the beginning. It is not that he was not the Son before the resurrection. He was, is, and will always be the Son: “Jesus was always one with God, not just after a certain date in his life.”47 It would be a misunderstanding to think Pannenberg’s Christology slips into adoptionism here.48

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The constitution of the divine sonship of Jesus at the resurrection entails that the eschatological future is somehow antecedent to the person of Jesus Christ. In Pannenberg’s thinking, since Jesus was made free from past conditions by the eschatological power, he has become and is the Son of God. Put differently, divine eternity is mediated to the man Jesus through the future. At this point, Pannenberg’s Christology significantly differs from the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. For Pannenberg, the incarnation is not an event in which the eternal Son has become human directly from the eternal realm, that is, from above. As the resurrection constitutes his divine sonship, the incarnation occurred by the mediation of the eschatological future through the resurrection.49 Now, I hope, it has been made clear that Pannenberg’s theology draws upon the Plotinian notion that the totality of life lies in the future and carries it forward to suggest that when God’s eternity comes in time, it comes into the future, rendering the final future as his temporal abode. From the End, God relates to the creation and its history, and thus the final future functions as the sole origin of the ultimate causation. Adopting this Plotinian tale, Pannenberg offers a Christology which differs from the traditional account. For Pannenberg, the life and work of Jesus are made possible by the power of the eschaton. Even the incarnation occurs by that eschatological power. CRITICAL REFLECTIONS: TIME AS A WHOLE? Apropos of Pannenberg’s futuristic ontology, some concerns have arisen. Luco van den Brom writes that in Pannenberg “in spite of all the historical dynamics suggested by its use of future tensed conceptuality, it turns out to be more deterministic than any traditional doctrine of decrees has ever been.”50 Along these lines, his theology has been considered as a form of determinism.51 For the eschatological future functions as the origin of the divine retroactive power with an ontological priority. Yet, my critical reflection concerns the priority of the future first—as it entails the idea of the contemporaneity of the risen one—particularly the conceptual nexus between the totality of reality and the exclusive causation of the future in Pannenberg’s account. Drees has already pointed out that Pannenberg’s “transition from ‘whole’ to ‘future’”52 is untenable. Drees charged: “Completeness [or the wholeness] is not achieved by moving towards the future. . . . Completeness is only achieved, within the context of physical understanding, by moving to the other level of description, in which all times are equally present at once.”53 On this critique, Joel Haugen, a fine proponent of Pannenberg’s theology, comments: “Drees’s critique of Pannenberg’s notion of the ‘future wholeness’

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of reality should not be brushed aside lightly.”54 He questions Drees’s reading of Pannenberg, indicating: “When Pannenberg speaks about the future as constituting the wholeness of reality, he is not speaking of just any future, or the future in general, but of what he calls the “ultimate future” or what might be called “the future of all futures.”55 He continues: “Such an ultimate future is beyond time, yet also comprehends within itself every moment of time.”56 Haugen holds that in Pannenberg’s theology, the ultimate future as the comprehensive reality lies beyond time. While that is an interpretive issue, we may remark that Haugen and Drees may concur, at least: divine eternity as the totality of reality is or should be beyond time. However, a problem surfaces—contra Haugen’s reading—when Pannenberg maintains a tenacious connection between eternity and the final future in time. Let me briefly register objections to Haugen’s interpretation, based on what we have seen earlier. First, it is important to note that Pannenberg asserts that the future is the meeting point of eternity and time when eternity enters time, as noted earlier. Accordingly, the future in question is the temporal locus from which God engages with the creaturely history and creates the universe. So construed, the future as the meeting point is not placed in the atemporal realm. Along these lines, in his account of the creation, Pannenberg insists that God’s act of creation proceeds “from the power of the future of God”57 and the creation “suffers a temporal inversion whereby it seems to be a process moving from the past and to the future.”58 If, as Haugen says, the ultimate future lies beyond time and is thus atemporal, then Pannenberg would not have spoken of temporal inversion. Moreover, Pannenberg has acclaimed and adopted the Plotinian idea that time becomes whole and restores its totality when it reaches the final—temporal—future.59 Here the future is some point in time that it can reach. Having clarified what Pannenberg has meant with regard to the “location” of the totality of reality, we are now set to expand Drees’s criticism. While his criticism is significant, it seems that it has not received sustained consideration.60 Hence, in line with Drees’s concern, I will attempt to carry his criticism a little bit further with a theological reflection, taking issue with Pannenberg over the relation between the future and eternity. My questions at this point are: Can the concept of eternity as the wholeness give rise to the primacy of the future that places the ultimate causation in the future exclusively? When God’s eternity is conceived as the whole of life, can it engender the concept of the future as exclusive causation? If his notion turns out to be faulty, then it would be untenable to insist that the eschatological future is retroactively and trans-temporally operative. And more importantly to our present inquiry, can it be the basis for the retroactivity or the trans-temporality of the resurrection?

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One of the most problematic ideas in Pannenberg’s account—in the wake of Plotinus—is that the future is the time when the created time becomes whole and achieves the unifying totality. At this point, I would agree with Drees’s criticism that the creaturely time cannot be made whole when it reaches the eschatological future.61 For there is always more time ahead of us. Even when the creaturely time arrives at the “final” future, infinite time still lies ahead of it. The infinite creaturely time will never be made a complete whole. Summing every moment up to a certain point of time even in the future will always end up becoming a part of the still extendable temporal line. Temporal procession—even infinite—does not lead us to a genuine whole. The temporal wholeness is impossible and always lies beyond even in the final eschatological future. Therefore it must be noted that Pannenberg’s idea of eternity as the wholeness cannot engender the idea of the priority and retroactivity of the eschatological future for it is impossible in the first place for time to achieve the totality of the wholeness. Some may come up with a different construal of temporal wholeness, a kind of “wholeness” in time. It is not a wholeness or totality, comprehending the infinitely extendable timeline all at once, but a series of events up to a certain point of time turns into a meaningful narrative whole. Such a narrative wholeness does not encompass the totality of the infinitely extendable time but a series of events in a certain and limited period of time. Events in time hang together in narrative coherence and make sense in light of the end of the narrative.62 In terms of Christian theology, the (final) Parousia of Jesus marks the End of the present age. In the light of the End, every event in this age can be interpreted as a meaningful narrative though it lies now beyond our understanding how the Parousia will shed a hermeneutical light on the whole of this age. In this case, it is not the future per se but a specific event at some point of history—the Parousia of Jesus Christ—that marks the End and does the hermeneutical work. With that divine intervention at a certain point of time, the long series of events will turn into a meaningful whole. Of course, the consummation of the divine intervention lies in the future for us now. But this should not mean that it is necessarily the future per se that makes it whole, for a (narrative) wholeness can be achieved at any time when Jesus comes again and in fact remains as a part, not the whole, of time as it could have been completed in the past or can be in the present.63 After all, it can be noted that for Pannenberg, the idea that the exclusive causation lies in the future is derived from the idea that the future is the meeting point of eternity and time and therefore that eternity—as the first cause— resides in the future. Even though it may sound legitimate, as seen earlier, the idea that eternity inhabits the future is indebted to the Plotinian thought that the future is the point when the whole of reality is realized and it becomes a

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proper abode for wholeness‐eternity.64 As discussed above, that ancient idea has been refuted as implausible. Furthermore, we may indicate that some doctrinal confusions can arise if Pannenberg is right in that the future is construed as the point of origin of everything. Let me briefly sketch how Pannenberg’s idea of the priority of the future in itself gives rise to some idiosyncratic doctrinal understandings, particularly regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. To begin with, it can be noted: Pannenberg does not deny the existence of the proto‐Trinity and therefore that of the Logos asarkos. In his thinking, this primordial form of the Trinity must be placed in the final future—not in pre-temporal eternity as in Barth’s theology.65 For, as seen above, the ultimate future is the first temporal locus for Pannenberg that God takes up when God comes into time. In effect, the future becomes the point from which God creates the universe, and the future is considered antecedent even to the creation. Then, it follows that the future is the accommodation for the proto‐Trinity and the Logos asarkos even “before” the creation. However, it is strange to place the proto‐Trinity and the Logos asarkos in the final future given that they are not the fully actualized or teleological form of the Trinity. The Son without flesh is a mode of his existence that he should leave behind, not the form that the Son will be in at the end. So is the proto‐Trinity: God should leave the “past” mode behind in order to reach the final and eschatological form of the Trinity (in time) in which the Son is fully incarnate and risen. Therefore, it is questionable to put such a proto‐mode of the Trinity in the final future. If it is still to be located in the last future, it would be due to Pannenberg’s strong commitment to the eschatological future, with the problematic and unexamined assumption that God’s eternity as the all‐encompassing reality must lead to the exclusive causation of the future. But would it not it be more judicious to put the proto‐Trinity back to the place where it was—that is, pre-temporal eternity—as Barth did, given that the Plotinian tale turns out to be a myth? Another theological problem is that Pannenberg places the incarnation second to the final future in his ontological strata and so subjects Christology to eschatology since he has rendered the ultimate future as the first and primary meeting point of eternity and time. On his account, there is a sense in which the incarnation is made possible by the power of the eschatological future, rather than the eschatological future originates from the person and the work of Jesus Christ. For Pannenberg, Jesus of Nazareth in the first century and the Logos asarkos in the eschatological future become one by the power of the future. The incarnation would not have occurred without the mediation of the power of the last day. An underlying assumption in Pannenberg’s thinking here is that eternity does not and even cannot intervene in the course of history directly. As a result, the eternal Son cannot become incarnate from the

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transcendent absolute eternity without the mediation of the future.66 Similarly, like other events of Christ, the resurrection becomes subject to the absolute power of the future. In Pannenberg’s theology, the future breaks into the first Easter morning and makes the resurrection possible. Furthermore, since the divine sonship of Jesus is established by the resurrection, according to Pannenberg, the whole person of Jesus becomes subject to the power of the future. The eschatological future as the ultimate origin is ontologically antecedent—or even superior—to the person of Jesus Christ. Some may say that Jesus’s dependence on the future is nothing other than his submission to God the Father and therefore that it is not his reliance on something other than God. On this construal, Jesus’s reliance on the eschaton is an expression of the internal relation of the Trinity. It is true that Jesus does not raise himself from the dead but is raised by the Father.67 However, our question is not about whether to understand Jesus’s reliance on the eschatological future as an expression of the internal relation of the Trinity, but about why we have to construe the Father’s act as arising from the eschatological future. Why cannot it be that the Father intervenes and raises the Son from the dead, immediately from above, if divine eternity is the genuine wholeness of time? Due to the illogical transition from the whole to the future, the rationale for placing God the Father in the future would be significantly undercut. After all, when God’s eternity is conceived as the whole of reality, cannot God’s eternity break into the past and the present as well as the future— directly from God’s eternal realm without the mediation of the final future? Why cannot it be that eternity comes into time from the eternal past, the eternal above as well as from the eternal end? When God has all three tenses of time at once, why is God to be conceived exclusively with reference to the future? Is it not that God is (in) the past and the present as well as the future? Would it not be more judicious to posit that God’s eternity is defined as pre‐, supra‐/intra‐, and post‐temporal eternity,68 rather than as the sheer future? Even if it is admitted that there is the priority of the future—or post‐temporal eternity—in God, the pre‐temporal eternity or supra‐temporal eternity should not be discarded in our reflection of divine causation or of God’s interaction with the creation. On the whole, we are led to cast doubt on the idea that the ultimate causation lies in the future only (as well as also the idea that time can be a whole) and the idea that the ultimate causation lies in the future only because eternity is the wholeness of time and time can be a whole. In short, the idea of eternity of totality of time does not necessarily lead to the retroactivity of the future (or that of the resurrection) firstly because time cannot be made whole and secondly because even if it is made whole, it still cannot give rise to the idea of the final future as the ultimate locus of causation. The wholeness of time can intervene history at any point of history; it does not necessitate the detour via the eschatological future.

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Given the invalidity of Pannenberg’s account of eternity and time and given that it cannot serve as the basis for the trans-temporality or retroactivity of the future, it cannot give rise to the idea of the retroactivity of the resurrection either necessarily. As the transition from wholeness to the priority of the future (the future as the locus of the ultimate causation and so as that of trans-temporality and retroactivity) is invalid, it is untenable to argue that because eternity is wholeness of time, it can give rise to the idea that the resurrection has the trans-temporal and retroactive power. A few caveats should be registered briefly before we move on: I have not rejected that eternity is wholeness but only that it can necessitate the priority of the future. I have not denied either that a particular event—the resurrection—can have the retroactive and trans-temporal effects on events in other times. Now let us move to my suggestion that a particular event in the middle of history can have such a power because that power lies in the person of Christ. A SUGGESTION: THE LOCATION OF THE ESCHATOLOGICAL FUTURE Instead of thinking that the causation lies in the future per se, it can be suggested that some power (not of a mechanical kind) to influence other beings and events lies in the person of Christ if we may think in terms of the salvation economy. In other words, such a source of power is found in the middle of history rather than in the final eschaton because of this person’s existence in history as the one who is inherently eternal and entered into time. This person’s event—particularly the resurrection—has significance for the whole of history, reverberating forward and backward in time. Here I will attempt to sketch my suggestion which dispenses with the Plotinian mythic assumption and yet maintains the concept of retro‐causation from the eschatological future which is found in the middle of history—in the person of Christ. To begin with, we may focus on the incarnation of the Son, the person who had eternity within himself and yet entered into the created time. The incarnation occurred in the middle of history without the mediation of the future. Eternity has entered into time from above at the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb.69 The first and ultimate locus of the union of eternity and time is the person of Jesus Christ, not the eschatological future. I opine that Barth and Torrance are more judicious here. As Barth writes, “God himself took time and made it his own”70 in the incarnation. George Hunsinger adds in his exposition of Barth’s theology: “When the Word became flesh, eternity became time.”71 In the same vein, Torrance avers, “a real union of eternity and time [took place] in Jesus Christ.”72 The incursion of eternity into time

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occurred in the person of Jesus Christ, and thus the union of eternity and time has been accomplished in his person. The eschatological kingdom—the New Creation reality—is imminent when and where the person of Jesus Christ is present. For his presence possesses the divine eternity which constitutes the source of the eschatological reality and so exudes the eschatological power of the kingdom to his surroundings. Thus, the source of the power of the kingdom can be placed in the person of Jesus Christ, not necessarily in the end of time. Placing the fount of the eschatological power in his person is congruous with the biblical account. In the Pauline epistles, the not‐yet reality of the promised future is found in the person of Christ. There is the New Creation in him (2 Cor 5:17) and therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ (Rom 8:1). Furthermore, our death and resurrection have taken place already in an important sense. While they are still in the future, they occurred already with Christ’s death and resurrection. For we were in him when he died and resurrected. Our death and resurrection were included in his death and resurrection. Torrance puts it this way: Our resurrection has already taken place and is fully tied up with the resurrection of Christ, and therefore proceeds from it more by way of manifestation of what has already taken place, than as new effect resulting from it. That is why the New Testament speaks so astonishingly of our having already tasted the powers of the age to come (Hebrews 6:5), for in Christ we are already living “in the end time.”73

Pannenberg himself is aware of the eschatological reality in Christ when he says: Already in the present believers by baptism are buried with Christ in his death (Rom. 6:3), and they are thus free of sin (v. 7) and reconciled to God even though on their earthly path death is still ahead of them. They have a share already in the Spirit of the new life (8:11) even though their resurrection is still future (cf. 6:5). Like John, Colossians is bold enough to describe the resurrection of the baptized as a reality that is present already (2:12), although here, too, the tension with the future of salvation persists when it says that the new life of believers is still hidden with Christ in God, to whom he has been exalted (3:3–4) . . . the new life of believers is still hidden with Christ in God.74

However, for Pannenberg, the power of the future does not originate from Christ but solely from the eschatological future. Pannenberg’s Christ seems entirely divested of his inherent eternal deity but has to wait for the eschatological power to come upon him. Without the power of the future, he is not

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the Son of God or the eschatos who possesses the New Creation reality in his person. Here in my suggestion, the priority of the eschatological future itself is not entirely discarded but modified: the eschatological reality of the New Creation is to be found in the person of Christ rather than in the future itself. The eschatological future in the person of Christ is affirmed as the foundational priority.75 Then, would it be still a form of determinism in reverse gear? Not necessarily. It can be argued that the eschatological future would not unilaterally dictate what should and will be done. It is noteworthy what Greggs says of Karl Barth’s doctrine of election in pre-temporal eternity: it is not an abstract principle but the person of Jesus Christ that determines the nature of election and thus “allows the space for human freedom which a principle never can.”76 God’s pre-temporal predestination does not dictate human destiny in a deistic or mechanical fashion. Room for human freedom and genuine relationship can be secured due to “the particularity of the person of Jesus Christ—a particularity which cannot be gained from a principle.”77 As Barth puts it, “In Jesus, one deals with a free person and his free act that cannot simply be grasped in the sense of conceptual apprehension or control.”78 Greggs writes succinctly: “It is in a person and not in a principle that humanity is elected.”79 Regarding the charge of “determinism in reverse gear,” the same point can be made: it is not a rigid principle of the chronological future but the person of the eschatos who relates to us in the reciprocal and free relationship. What Jesus does in his relationship with us is not dictated by the future destiny. Freedom is not overridden by any impersonal abstract principles but is established in the relationship between the free human being and other humans. CONCLUSION This chapter has found that Pannenberg’s construal of eternity as wholeness of time cannot be the basis for the retroactivity or the trans-temporality of the eschatological future. In regard to the eschatological future as the temporal locus of the ultimate causation, Pannenberg’s notion of eternity falls short of the proper basis to make the future such a locus of origin. First of all, its assumption itself turns out to be problematic: time is not and cannot be made whole even when it reaches “the end.” After all there is no end to time as it is infinitely extendable into the further future. Even if we do not reject the idea of eternity as the wholeness of time and assume that God can view the whole of time/history all at once, it must be indicated that such an idea of eternity does not logically lead to the idea of the priority of the future that

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the ultimate causation lies in the future per se. In line with that, I have demonstrated that the Plotinian idea lingers in Pannenberg’s thinking and leads to the exclusive causation of the final future. Plotinus’s idea that time can achieve its totality when it reaches the last future has an important bearing on Pannenberg’s construction. Drawing upon the ancient philosophical idea, Pannenberg has asserted that the final future is the temporal abode of God’s eternity and therefore that the eschatological future constitutes the exclusive origin of causation for all other events in history. In effect, for Pannenberg, every event in time, including the christological events—the resurrection and the incarnation—occurs by the power of the End. However, as I have insisted, the Plotinian idea itself is an unfortunate myth in the first place. Contrary to what Plotinus envisages, since the genuine wholeness cannot be achieved in time, the future cannot serve as the abode of eternity in time. Instead, it would be legitimate to hold that it is not the final future but God’s intervention at any point of history that makes a series of events into a meaningful narrative “whole” while the narrative wholeness is still a part of history. Nevertheless, when the Plotinian idea is operative in Pannenberg’s theological reflection, the proto‐Trinity is located in an awkward position, and the incarnation is not regarded to be eternity’s direct entry into time. And all the christological events become subject to the power of the future, which is external to Jesus. Having identified the mistaken assumption, I have also suggested that if, as Pannenberg maintains, God’s eternity is conceived as a whole of life, encompassing the eternal past and present as well as the future, it should be that God can intervene at any point in the course of history—from behind, from above, from within, and from ahead. As eternity can directly come into time without a detour through the future, the eternal Son can become incarnate directly “from above.” Without the faulty assumption, moreover, the proto‐Trinity can be returned to its rightful place, that is, in the pre-temporal eternity; it does not have to be “futuralized” as in Pannenberg’s theology. This chapter has also indicated that Pannenberg’s notion of eternity cannot be the basis for the retroactivity and trans-temporality of the risen Jesus either. For his idea that time can reach the end and becomes whole is faulty. Even though it is admitted that eternity is wholeness of time and that eternity can intervene history at any point of time, such a concept of eternity does not necessarily lead to the idea that a certain event in middle of history (e.g., the resurrection) has a retroactive and trans-temporal effect. Pannenberg’s idea of eternity as totality of time cannot secure the idea that the resurrection has the retroactive power. And yet, it has been noted that in the middle of history, there was the eschatological reality. This is not a philosophical but biblical consideration. There was the one who has the eschatological reality within himself and relates to

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other events in any time (the past and the future) as the eschatological reality. However, it must be noted that it occurs not due to the future per se but because he is the eternal Son of God in time. The eschatological reality is found in the middle of history—in the person of Christ who has entered time as eternity. The eschatological future in the person of Christ Jesus is not the future that the created time can reach by extending itself and being made the whole, for it is not the time that already exists on the same temporal horizon of ours. It is the time in Christ that is utterly new, and it can reach back to the Old Testament time. The eschatological future lies in his person. The New Creation reality is hidden in his person. So construed, the retroactive and trans-temporal power in the outward vector should be found in the middle of history, that is, in the time of Jesus Christ who had eternity in time and stands as the center of history, reaching all of history, to the beginning and to the end. NOTES 1. Willem B. Drees, “Contingency, Time, and Theological Ambiguity of Science,” in Carol Albright and Joel Haugen, eds., Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart Pannenberg (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 242. Some followers of Pannenberg regarded Drees’s criticism as legitimate but swept it aside nevertheless. Haugen briefly engages with Drees regarding his exposition of Pannenberg, as will be seen later in more detail (Joel Haugen, “Introduction,” in Albright and Haugen, Beginning with the End, 13). Wilkinson also notes Drees’s concern about Pannenberg’s theology, but his attention quickly shifts to “the risk of determinism” in Pannenberg (David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe [London: T&T Clark, 2010], 41). A similar pattern is observed in Jacqui A. Stewart, Reconstructing Science and Theology in Postmodernity: Pannenberg, Ethics and the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2018), 151. Henson focuses on a different aspect of Drees’s critique—the relation between religion and science, but not the questionable transition that Pannenberg makes (Shaun C. Henson, God and Natural Order: Physics, Philosophy, and Theology [New York: Routledge, 2014], 157–84). For most readers, the relation of eternity and the eschatological future in Pannenberg’s account raises issues of determinism. Some call it “futuristic deism” or “a kind of Calvinism set into temporal reverse gear” for, in Pannenberg’s account, the final future—not the pre-temporal divine decree or the causation in the past—determines the course of history (Luco van den Brom, “Eschatology and Time: Reversal of the Time Direction?” in David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot, eds., The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000], 165; Lewis Ford, “Nature of the Power of the Future,” in Philip Clayton and Carl E. Braaten, eds., The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988], 85; Cf. Lewis Ford, “God as the Subjectivity of the Future,” Encounter 41 [1980], 292). When the eschatological future is understood to play a decisive role in history, one can argue, it leaves no room for genuine personal relationship and freedom. The

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concept of the ultimate future as the ultimate causation, one may say, does not do a better job of securing freedom than the understanding of the past as the origin of causations. Regarding the priority of the future, McKenzie interprets it to mean that it is merely epistemological. It is not the future but “one’s idea of the future [that] is determinative for the present” (David McKenzie, “Pannenberg on God and Freedom,” Journal of Religion 60 [1980], 321). In my view, however, the predominant interpretation is that Pannenberg speaks of the actual influence of the eschatological future. In Hocknull’s exposition, Pannenberg holds that things are “set free from the future and brought, retroactively, into relation with the past and the present” (Mark Hocknull, Pannenberg on Evil, Love, and God: The Realisation of Divine Love [London: Routledge, 2016], 66). Lakkis puts it: “Time moves from future to past” (Stephen Lakkis, A New Hope: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the Natural Science on Time [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014], 137). For Russell, “the eschatological future reaches back” (Robert Russell, Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012], 15). In Mostert’s exposition, Pannenberg deals with “the creation from the future” (Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002], 161–74). In Pannenberg scholarship, the concept of eternity as the wholeness and the concept of the eschatological future as the ultimate causation are exposited in detail. However, the transition from the former to the latter remains unsubstantiated or requires more rigorous scrutiny. Hocknull exposits Pannenberg’s notion of eternity, saying that “from the perspective of eternity, past, present and future are simultaneously present. If I can put it crudely, the future is the part of eternity not yet released into time.” Then, Hocknull abruptly speaks of the power of the future as if there is no lapse in that transition: “Pannenberg is able to ascribe a reality and power to the future” (Hocknull, Pannenberg on Evil, Love, and God, 111). No careful account is offered on how such a transition is tenable. In Lakkis’s exposition, the primacy of “whole” over “part” is regarded as “philosophically and theologically necessary” (Lakkis, A New Hope, 158). But how it gives rise to the concept of the eschatological future as the ultimate causation remains largely unquestioned. See also Russell, Time in Eternity, 150–79, and Ted Peters, “Eschatology: Eternal Now or Cosmic Future?” Zygon 36 (2001), 349–56. 2. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols., trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991–1998) (hereafter ST), 1, 403. 3. ST, 1:403. 4. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. Philip Clayton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990) (hereafter MIG), 80. 5. MIG, 80. 6. ST, 1:403. 7. MIG, 78. 8. ST, 1:409. 9. MIG, 80. 10. MIG, 80 n. 26.

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11. ST, 1:409. 12. ST, 1:409. Cf. “We see this expressed in the ambivalence of Augustine’s description of time as distentio animi. Distentio means on the one side the temporal stretching of the consciousness and on the other its breaking apart, its rending into many bits and pieces” (ST, 3:599 n. 233). 13. ST, 1:403. 14. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.7.3, quoted in MIG, 76–77. 15. MIG, 78. 16. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts (London: Penguin, 1999), 5.6. 17. CD II/1, 601–2, quoted in ST, 1: 404. 18. CD II/1, 624, quoted in ST, 3:596. 19. ST, 3:598. 20. CD II/l, 624, quoted in ST, 3:597. 21. ST, 3:596. 22. CD II/1, 615. 23. CD II/1, 615. Emphasis added. 24. ST, 1:405. 25. ST, 1:406. 26. ST, 1:408. It is another issue to discuss to what extent Barth scholars would agree with Pannenberg’s interpretation, and that will take us far afield. For George Hunsinger’s interpretation of Barth’s Trinity, see George Hunsinger, Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 1–20. Also, at this very juncture, due to the synthesis of eternity and time in view of the incarnation, a problem arises, as we have noted in the previous chapter. 27. MIG, 77. 28. MIG, 77. 29. ST, 1:404. 30. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.7.11, quoted in ST, 1:408. 31. ST, 1:408. 32. ST, 1:408. 33. Cf. Mostert, God and the Future, 110: “Pannenberg credits Plotinus, not Heidegger, with first affirming the primacy of the future in the philosophy of time. However, for both the totality of existence is possible only in the light of its future. The part can only be understood against the whole, and the whole can be understood only as a future reality.” According to Pannenberg, Plotinus’s notion is superior to Augustine’s and Kant’s in that he upholds the primacy of the future and it is congruous with the biblical eschatology: “There is no parallel in Augustine to Plotinus’s notion of the primacy of the future. Biblical eschatology could have provided the impetus for such a move” (Mostert, God and the Future, 110); “Thus Plotinus’s derivation of time from eternity is superior to Kant’s reduction of everything to the transcendental subject” (Mostert, God and the Future, 111). 34. ST, 1:408–9. 35. MIG, 141.

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36. MIG, 141. 37. ST, 1:409. Pannenberg also says: “Through the future, eternity enters into time” (Wolfhart Pannenberg, History of Nature: Essays on Science and Theology [West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008], 35). 38. Mostert, God and the Future, 223. It is another form of a Plotinian idea. Since the totality of time is achieved in the final future, it would be natural to assume that eternity as totality comes at the last point of time. But when that assumption is operative in doctrinal reflections, problems loom large as will be seen. 39. ST, 2:112. 40. ST, 2:109. 41. ST, 1:390. 42. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 133. 43. ST, 3:604. 44. ST, 3:604. 45. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology Vol. 2, trans. George H. Kehm (London: SCM Press, 1971), 24. 46. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth,” in J. M. Robinson and J. B. Cobb, eds., Theology as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 113. 47. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968), 153. 48. For Pannenberg, the retroactive power penetrates even into the pre-temporal eternity and posits the pre-existence of the Son. In Pannenberg’s theology, the constitution of the divine sonship at the resurrection does not forestall the doctrine of the pretemporal existence of the Son. He endorses the pre-existence of the Son without losing his sight of the ontological significance of the resurrection. Pannenberg argues: “Preexistence statements . . . derive from the confirmation of his divine authority by his resurrection from the dead” (ST, 2:368–69). For the Son’s “preexistence . . . rests directly on the relation of the risen Lord to the eternal God” (ST, 2:369). In other words, the “identity and continuity of Christ’s person is established by Jesus’ resurrection both backwards to pre-existence and forwards to post-existence” (Pannenberg, “Postscript to the Fifth German Edition,” Jesus—God and Man, 469). “Only in the light of the resurrection is he the preexistent Son” (ST, 2:283). One may even say: for Pannenberg, “Jesus’ resurrection is even constitutive for the deity of the Father as well as for the divine Sonship of Jesus” (Kam Ming Wong, Wolfhart Pannenberg on Human Destiny [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008], 55). 49. Pannenberg provides a theological rationale for his rejection of the traditional view that the incarnation is completed in Mary’s matrix. Pannenberg says: “If the incarnation is identical with the event of Jesus’ creation in Mary, . . . Jesus was from the very first moment of his existence not a man in the same sense as all other men” (Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, 301). In Pannenberg’s judgment, the traditional view considerably undercuts the humanity of Jesus as it is overridden by the eternal Son in the incarnation. Pannenberg believes that the Chalcedonian construal cannot allow for the genuine union of the two in the person of Jesus. We should not “force

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together the theological antitheses” into one person (ST, 2:384). Pannenberg proposes a view of the incarnation as a protracted process over his earthly time: “If he had followed a different path in his human development, if he had not been baptized by John, if he had not been the herald of the rule of God, if he had not accepted the consequences of his mission by taking the path of suffering, he would not be the Son of God” (ST, 2:384). 50. Van den Brom, “Eschatology and Time,” 165. 51. Ford, “Nature of the Power of the Future,” 85; L. B. Gilkey, “Pannenberg’s Basic Questions in Theology: A Review Article,” Perspective 14 (1973), 53–54. 52. Drees, “Contingency, Time, and Theological Ambiguity of Science,” 241. 53. Drees, “Contingency, Time, and Theological Ambiguity of Science,” 242. 54. Haugen, “Introduction,” 13. 55. Haugen, “Introduction,” 13–14. 56. Haugen, “Introduction,” 14. 57. ST, 2:112. 58. ST, 2:112. 59. The Plotinian lens is operative in Pannenberg’s reading of Hegel and Dilthey in MIG, 107–9 and 147–52. 60. As mentioned in the introduction, Wilkinson, Stewart, and Henson have focused on a different aspect of Drees’s critique: the issue of determinism or the relation between religion and science. 61. Robert Russell said this in an email to me. I must thank him for his kind reply and this insight. 62. In a similar vein, Robert Jenson makes a narrative proposal: “Some stories dramatically coherent a la Aristotle are ‘realistic,’ that is, . . . they may be fitted to the ‘real’ world, the world as it is in itself prior to our storytelling. The use of realistic narrative as the normal way of understanding human existence supposes that reality out there, ‘the world’ itself, makes dramatic sense a la Aristotle, into which narrative the stories we tell about ourselves can and sometimes do fit” (Robert Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” First Things 36 [1993], 20). And Jenson argues that like a story, the reality can be understood and interpreted by the final end: “A story is constituted by the outcome of the narrated events. Within the sequence of events a specific opening future liberates each successive specious present from mere predictability, from being only the result of what has gone before, and just so opens each such present to its own content, given precisely as what it does not yet encompass” (Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 66). 63. However, it should not preclude the possibility that a certain event at some point of time (not the future itself) has a power to interpret every other event in a new light and to influence other events forward and backward in time. If there is an event that affects proactively and retroactively beings and events in other times, it would be not because the event is the future itself (as the totality of time—it is impossible as discussed earlier) but because it is a special event itself like the resurrection (as we have seen in the previous chapter) which has the outward vector and so the retroactive and proactive power on other events in time.

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64. Another problematic assumption lies in Pannenberg’s thought on the future and eternity. In his account, it is implied that time can become an appropriate accommodation for God’s eternity only when it has reached the final future and thus becomes a whole. It seems to suggest that God’s eternity as the all-encompassing totality comes into time when the creaturely time becomes a whole. However, at this point, does not Pannenberg—wittingly or not—introduce an idea of meritorious work on the part of the creaturely time? Does time have to arrive at the future so that it becomes a suitable accommodation of God’s eternity? If this is not what he means, then why does time have to be a comprehensive whole prior to its union with God’s eternity? On the contrary, is it not it the case that by God’s grace alone God comes in at any point of the creaturely time? Cannot God’s eternity come into time even in the middle of history when it is still a far cry from the End and from becoming the totality? At any rate, as indicated above, time cannot reach the final future that will make it a complete whole in the first place. 65. CD II/1, 621: “Jesus Christ is before all time.” Cf. CD II/2, 115: “In no depth of the Godhead shall we encounter any other but [Jesus]. There is no such thing as Godhead in itself.” 66. Here I am not addressing the issue of whether the incarnation is to be construed as a protracted process or as an all-at-once event. Pannenberg proposes the former. I take it that it would be possible for the incarnation to be a prolonged process even without the mediation of the future—that is, with eternity’s direct and unmediated incursion into time “from above”—although I would prefer the traditional view of the incarnation. I would not take issue here with his protracted view of the incarnation but only indicate that in Pannenberg’s theology, the event has taken up the lower ontological stratum than the eschatological future. But Pannenberg’s idiosyncratic proposal loses its impetus since the conceptual weight-bearing beam is considerably enfeebled. 67. Cf. Timothy Bradshaw, Pannenberg: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 83–84: “Pannenberg stresses that the true Christological matrix is the Father–Jesus relation, not the Word–Jesus relation. . . . The Jesus of history is the real content of ‘the Son’ rather than a heavenly entity called the Logos which is almost impossible to integrate into the historical narrative of Jesus and his eschatological identity.” Although it was indicated that Pannenberg admits the existence of the Logos asarkos at some point, let us assume for the sake of discussion here that Jesus’s dependence on the eschatological future is his dependence on God the Father rather than the Logos. 68. CD II/1, 621–30. 69. What then is eternity like? Should we stop thinking eternity is the totality of time? No. Regarding the relation of eternity and time, I take it that when eternity is conceived as the totality of life, encompassing the past, the present, and the future, God’s eternity may intervene at any point of time directly without the mediation of the future. The future in itself (that our time can arrive at by its self-extension) should not be the first and primary point of eternity and time, as suggested already, for such an understanding is philosophically untenable. Accordingly, eternity does not reside in the future only or render it the ultimate source of all events. Rather, eternity

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encompasses the whole of history and intervenes at any point without the detour via the future. 70. CD II/1, 617. 71. Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis,” 184. 72. T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2015), 273. 73. T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 37. 74. ST, 3:605. 75. I have not rejected God’s eternity as the basis of the priority of the future while rejecting the idea that God’s eternity as totality leads to or gives rise to the causal priority of the future. I take it that that God’s eternity can be upheld as totality at the extra-temporal level and that it can directly, without the detour via the final future, enter into God in the incarnation of the Son when the Son assumed the human physicality and temporality. 76. Tom Greggs, “‘Jesus is Victor’: Passing the Impasse of Barth on Universalism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007), 206. 77. Greggs, “‘Jesus is Victor,’” 206. 78. CD IV/3.1, 176. 79. Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogue with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 112.

Chapter 3

The Retroactivity of the New Covenant

Having1 seen Barth’s and Pannenberg’s accounts of eternity in relation to the retroactivity of the future (or of the power of the resurrection), at this point we probably can largely agree that it is not quite helpful to contemplate what eternity is or should be like to constitute the basis for the retroactivity or contemporaneity of the risen Jesus. It does not mean that eternity itself cannot be the basis for it but that it suffices to say that (not how) eternity is the basis for it. Perhaps it would be better to remain apophatic about how the two realms relate to each other. And yet, it should not mean that we are not allowed to speak anything about it; we can—at least at the level of the economy of salvation. As we have seen, it is the resurrection in the economy by whose power the risen Jesus is present to all in all ages. The resurrection is the locus of the outward vector by which Jesus is contemporaneous to all humans in the entire history. But why should or can the resurrection be considered to have the outward vector and the retroactive power to reach back—to the time of the very first human beings and even to the very beginning of the created time? Why should we speak of the contemporaneity of the risen Lord to all in all ages as the Lord of time? Why do we still have to consider the resurrection as the center of history from which the eschatos reaches out to all in all ages? In my musings, the answers are closely related to the salvation of the Old Testament people. So the gist of this chapter will be that for their salvation the Old Testament people need the grace of Jesus Christ that comes from his completed work in his earthly ministry and therefore from the resurrection. The present chapter will attempt to demonstrate that this idea can be backed up by the traditional federal theology even though it did not clearly enunciate the significance of the resurrection. The covenant theological idea that the Old Testament people as well as the New Testament believers are saved by the New Covenant entails that by the completed work of Jesus Christ, the people 45

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in the pre-Christ time could enjoy the fruit of salvation. Given that the resurrection is the moment that Jesus has completed all his works in an important sense, the significance of the resurrection comes to the fore. For that contention, the present chapter will see how eminent theologians’ accounts—traditional and modern—imply that the grace of the New Covenant retroactively reaches to the people of God in the Old Testament era. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO: CHILDREN OF PROMISE Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century already notes that the children of promise belong to the New Testament/Covenant. Of course, he is aware of the differences between the two Testaments through the Pauline contrast between Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4: “[T]he great apostle understood perfectly well what he was saying, when he described the two testaments as capable of the allegorical distinction of the bond-woman and the free, attributing the children of the flesh to the Old, and to the New the children of the promise.”2 The contrast goes on: “The children of the flesh, then, belong to the earthly Jerusalem, which is in bondage with her children; whereas the children of the promise belong to the Jerusalem above, the free, the mother of us all, eternal in the heavens.”3 And yet, Augustine perceptively indicates that there were children of the promise in the Old Testament era. If some people in that period were the children of the promise, then it follows that as Paul says, they belong to the New Testament/Covenant and to heavenly Jerusalem even before the inauguration of the New Covenant in history. Augustine writes, “[T]he happy persons, who even in that early age [the Old Testament age] were by the grace of God taught to understand the distinction now set forth, were thereby made the children of promise, and were accounted in the secret purpose of God as heirs of the New Testament.”4 Thus, the Old Testament people can be “the stewards and bearers of the old testament” and crucially “the heirs of the new.”5 Augustine holds, for instance, that the Psalters who confessed their sins and praised God were genuine heirs of the New Testament. He discusses a question: “Shall we deny that he belongs to the new testament who says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me?’ [Ps. 51] or he who says, ‘He has set my feet upon a rock, and directed my goings; and he has put a new song in my mouth, even a hymn to our God’ [Ps. 40]?”6 His answer is that we cannot deny it. If anyone genuinely confesses his or her sin and seeks God’s Spirit to be poured into his or her heart, the person is a Christian. But genuine confession of sins and desire for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit cannot happen without the administration of the New Covenant. In effect, for Augustine, it can be legitimately said that the New Testament is

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not temporally limited to its own era but that it transcendently extends to the children of Abraham in the Old Testament time. JOHN CALVIN: THE SAME BLESSINGS EXTENDED TO THE OLD TESTAMENT ERA An inkling of the retroactivity of Jesus’s salvific power also is found in John Calvin’s account on the relation of the two covenants. His account suggests that the New Covenant—the salvific work of Jesus and the Spirit—is transtemporally operative in all ages. First of all, it can be noted that Calvin lays emphasis on the continuity between the Old and the New Testaments: “As the apostle [Paul] says . . ., the promises of the gospel are contained in [the Old Testament].”7 The Old Covenant has the gospel in itself as the New Covenant did, for it was “established upon the free mercy of God.”8 Even though the two Covenants are different in form, they are the same in substance: “The same covenant is common to us and to the ancient people.”9 As Jonathan Beeke has aptly put it, “[T]he redeemed church, whether in the Old or New Testament, expected (and even now expects) the ‘same inheritance’ and ‘common salvation’ offered in the one mediator of ‘the covenant of his grace.’”10 Given the identical divine grace in both covenants, Calvin refers to the “sacraments” in the Old Testament which he finds are equivalent to the baptism and Lord’s supper in the New Testament. Calvin indicates that in the events of Exodus, Israel’s crossing the Red Sea was their baptism and that their eating of manna amounts to their participation in the Lord’s supper. The ancient sacraments provided the Old Israel “with the same benefits . . . [and] manifested his grace among them by the same symbols [cf. 1 Cor 10:1–6, 11]. It is as if [God] said: ‘Suppose you trust that you are out of danger because both Baptism, with which you have been sealed, and the Supper, of which you partake daily, possess excellent promises.’”11 Calvin stresses that the Old Testament “sacraments” were not administered merely to fill their stomachs but that they were proper ones with the spiritual blessings and benefits. He quotes Paul, “They ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink” [1 Cor 10:3–4].12 Thus, Calvin “conclude[s] with full certainty that the Lord not only communicated to the Jews the same promises of eternal and heavenly life as he now deigns to give us, but also sealed them with truly spiritual sacraments.”13 At this point, we may infer: if the spiritual effect of the sacraments relies on nothing other than the work of Christ which was completed in his earthly lifetime, then it would be possible to argue that the work of Christ in the first century carries the spiritual effects over to their time in the Old Testament era. Thus, we can see that the trans-temporality—the

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retroactivity and the proactivity—of Christ’s events is at least implied even though Calvin himself does not make it explicit. Calvin is clear that the Old Covenant is not merely carnal but also spiritual in nature. When it comes to God’s relationship with the Old Testament Israel, Calvin insists that God “did not declare that he would be a God to their bodies alone, but especially to their souls.”14 They were “not in hope of carnal, earthly, and temporal things, but in hope of spiritual, heavenly, and eternal benefits.”15 God’s promise to be the God of Israel was not merely carnal but also spiritual and eternal blessings. Calvin states, “God promised that he would ever be their God. This he did that their hope, not content with present benefits, might be extended to eternity.”16 For Calvin, it was the case even at the time of their patriarchs: “The spiritual covenant was also common to the patriarchs. . . . which both illumines the souls of the pious into the knowledge of God and, in a sense, joins them to [the Word].”17 By the spiritual light of the new covenant, the ancient people of Israel could have true relationship with God and the eternal blessings from him. Even before the time of the patriarchs, “Adam, Abel, [and] Noah . . . cleaves to God by such illumination of the Word. . . . Without any doubt they entered into God’s immortal Kingdom. For theirs was a real participation in God.”18 Their covenantal relationship with God was as spiritual as the new covenantal relationship is. They entered the kingdom of God and enjoyed genuinely the participation in God. Furthermore, even before their times, that is, “from the beginning of the world,” people could enjoy the perfect and spiritual fruit, and thus “shared with us [the NT believers] the same blessing unto eternal salvation.”19 In substance and nature, the Old Covenantal blessings are the same as the New in that both of them are salvific and spiritual in nature. Calvin unpacks the common nature of the two covenants in view of the twofold grace in accordance with his Reformation theology. The dual grace is justification and sanctification (regeneration) for Calvin. “When . . . [Moses] speaks of keeping the Commandments, he does not exclude the two-fold grace of Christ, that believers, being regenerated by the Spirit should aspire to the obedience of righteousness [i.e., sanctification], and at the same time should be reconciled freely to God through the forgiveness of their sins [i.e., justification].”20 The first spiritual blessing is justification which is already deigned in the Old Testament era as in the New Testament time. Calvin writes, “[T]he gospel preaching [in the Old Testament] . . . declares nothing else than that sinners are justified apart from their own merit by God’s fatherly kindness.”21 In Calvin’s account, the Old Testament contains the gospel of justification, so Abraham could be justified by faith. There is no doubt that sins of the Old Israelites were forgiven in their time.

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For as often as God promises the sons of Abraham that they should be his people, that promise has no other foundation than in his gratuitous covenant which contains the forgiveness of sins. Hence it is as if the Prophet had added, that God would expiate all the faults of his people. . . . God follows us with his paternal favor, while he bears with us, and does not call us up for judgment, but buries our sins, as is said in Psalm 32:1, 2, “Blessed is the man to whom God does not impute his iniquities.”22

In the Old Testament era already, God bestowed the grace of forgiveness to his people, and they were called blessed as their iniquities were expiated accordingly. They had the blessing of justification before the Judge. Following the grace of justification, the second one bestowed to the Old Israel should be the sanctification by the Spirit. For one cannot be separated from the other in Christian life. Calvin states, “Christ begins with forgiveness of sins, then presently adds the second grace: that God protects us by the power of his Spirit and sustain us by his aid so we may stand unvanquished against all temptations [i.e., sanctification].”23 A justified believer would naturally grow in faith and lead a holy life in the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When one’s justification is declared on the basis of the merit of Christ, the Holy Spirit works and makes the individual holy. But would it be true of the Old Testament era as well as that of the New Testament? But one may raise a question: would Calvin indeed affirm that there was the operation of the Holy Spirit to sanctify the Old Testament believers? Certainly, there was a sign of the work of the Holy Spirit. The priestly unction of oil can be considered as such. The anointing of all the vessels in the tabernacle was the act of consecration, by which they were made holy. “God would have all the vessels of the sanctuary set apart by this sacred anointing from common use.”24 However, for Calvin, it was “by no means any virtue or efficacy for sanctification.”25 It was only “a type of the Spirit, from whom as its only source all holiness emanates”26 and “a symbol of all the gifts of the Holy Spirit.”27 At this point, it is noteworthy what Calvin writes of the indwelling of the Spirit in his commentary on Hebrews. There Calvin deals with the question “whether there was under the Law a sure and certain promise of salvation, whether the fathers had the gift of the Spirit.”28 Calvin answers, “Yes, it is evident that they worshipped God with a sincere heart and a pure conscience, and that they walked in his commandments, and this could not have been the case except they had been inwardly taught by the Spirit.”29 It is striking that Calvin avers: the Holy Spirit was inwardly given to the Old Testament people even though, according to the prophet Jeremiah, the internalization of God’s law or the Spirit is definitely a distinctive feature of the New Covenant (Jer 31). The outpouring of the Holy Spirit into the people of God is clearly the

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administration of the New Covenant. Calvin is aware of what Jeremiah said about the new covenant, and yet he insists “that [Jeremiah] does not expressly deny that God formerly wrote his Law on [OT people’s] hearts and pardoned their sins.”30 Hence, Calvin insists that the law was inscribed on the hearts of the Old Testament people already. Even in the Old Testament era, the Spirit was given inwardly and thus indwelt God’s people. Calvin confirms, “Truly, as Peter testifies, they were endowed with the same Spirit of faith whereby we are reborn into life [Acts 15:8]. We hear that that Spirit who is like a spark of immortality in us, . . . dwelt in like manner in them.”31 The way in which the Spirit dwells in the New Testament believers is similar to or even the same as the way in which the Spirit does in some of the Old Testament people. He dwelt “in them.”32 It is evident that the Spirit’s indwelling comes with the blessing of sanctification—following that of justification. The Holy “Spirit was given to them that they might do good.”33 Good work is conducted in the power of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament believers. So Calvin writes, “[T]he children of the promise, reborn of God, who have obeyed the commands by faith working through love have belonged to the New Covenant since the world began.”34 The Old Testament people could have rebirth (regeneration) and obey God’s commands sincerely. The operation of the Holy Spirit in their hearts was evident, including the sanctification. Without the sanctification of the Spirit, they could have not obeyed the divine moral decrees. Importantly, as Calvin notes, it has been taking place “since the world began.”35 It entails that the blessings and operations of the Holy Spirit are not limited to the post-Pentecostal era but reverberate to the time of the Old Testament. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for them to enjoy the salvific blessing of the Spirit: the indwelling of the Spirit and the sanctification. In terms of the unction of the Spiritual oil, it cannot remain external to the Old Testament people. The oil of the Holy Spirit is poured on the head of the High Priest in the first century and flows down over the whole of history and so to his whole body, and “this is the anointing from which he receives the name of Christ, which he imparts to us; for why are we called Christians.”36 The oil of the Spirit flows down to the whole body of the Priest, all members whether they are in the past, the present, and the future, transcending temporal distances and gaps. What about the presence and work of Christ in the Old Testament era? To begin with, we may note what Calvin puts tersely, “[T]hey believed especially in the Mediator.”37 Generally speaking, in Christian theology, for there to be salvation of people, “it was necessary for them to direct their eyes to Christ.”38 So it would be tenable to argue that the finished work of Christ had to be effective even in the period of the Old Covenant.

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As one of the effective works of Christ, for Calvin, there is the illumination of the Word. Calvin states, “[T]he spiritual covenant was also common to the patriarchs [and to the New Testament believers]. . . . which both illumines the souls of the pious into the knowledge of God and, in a sense, joins them to [the Word].”39 The ancient people could have true relationship with God and the spiritual blessings from him as the Word who is Christ illuminated them when he broke into their lives with his divine light of glory and salvation. Even before the time of Israel, “Adam, Abel, [and] Noah . . . cleaves to God by such illumination of the Word. . . . Without any doubt they entered into God’s immortal Kingdom. For theirs was a real participation in God.”40 In Calvin’s reflection, the work of Christ—such as the illumination of his salvific light—was carried out even before the time when the Word came into the world in flesh. At this juncture, Calvin’s intriguing interpretation of a verse from the Epistle to the Hebrews is notable. In his comment on Hebrews 13:8, “Christ remains, yesterday and today and forever,” he writes as follows: “Paul is not speaking there simply of Christ’s everlasting divinity but of his power, a power perpetually available to believers.”41 Undoubtedly the divinity of Christ in eternity remains the same “yesterday, today, and forever.” It can be readily affirmed. And yet what is noteworthy here is that in Calvin’s interpretation, what remains the same is not just the divinity of Christ but also—we can put it—the economical power for salvation of believers. The salvific power of Christ in the economy remains the same yesterday, today and forever. It can be taken to mean: the power of Christ for redemption reaches to believers for their salvation “yesterday, today, and forever,” that is, in all ages throughout the whole of history. So construed, it is plausible to suggest that the power of salvation—which arises from the work of Christ finished in the first century—trans-temporally reaches and is applied to believers in all ages. If his work exerts power and influence yesterday, today, and tomorrow of the entire human history and if the salvific power of Jesus is based on and arises from what he has done in the first century, it is tenable to hold that the effect and power from the first century reach back to the Old Testament people trans-temporally and retroactively. Even though Calvin did not spell out the retroactivity of the saving grace and power from Christ, it is avan la lettre on his account. On the whole, it must be emphasized that in Calvin’s reflection, Israel’s covenantal relationship with God was possible only through Jesus Christ, the man who existed in the first century. With regard to the presence of Christ in the Old Testament time, Calvin writes, “The fathers [in the Old Testament] had the Word; with it they also had eternal life.”42 But one may pose a question here: what would it mean that the patriarchs “had” the Word? We may think of the Word of God who

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came to Abraham in flesh (ensarkos) and did things that would have been hardly possible without flesh: he ate, walked and talked with Abraham. The enfleshed Word of God was there with Abraham. At this point, the palpable carnality of the presence of the Word in the ancient time could have had Calvin contemplate the possibility of the retroactivity and trans-temporality of the first-century man in his flesh and his transcendent power. But he has not developed that line of thinking further. And yet, at least Calvin could say, “Who, then, dares to separate the Jews from Christ, since with them we hear, was made the covenant of the gospel, the sole foundation of which is Christ?”43 One may say that Calvin does not explicitly discuss the retroactivity of the presences and works of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and yet he concludes that “[t]here is . . . no reason why God should not have extended the grace of the new covenant to the fathers. This is the true solution of the question.”44 A question should be raised: where did the grace of the new covenant extend to? Here Calvin states that it extended to the time of the fathers in the Old Testament era. It would mean that Christ’s and the Spirit’s works done in the middle of history extended to the time of the fathers effectively for their salvation. So construed, the concept of retroactivity of divine grace seems inevitable at least here in Calvin’s thinking—albeit not clearly stated. ABRAHAM KUYPER: THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT TIME In the wake of Calvin’s theology, Abraham Kuyper develops his theological account in a pneumatological register and attributes the retroactive power to the Holy Spirit. Kuyper writes, “Re-creation brings to us that which is eternal, finished, perfected, completed. . . . This eternal work must be brought to a temporal world . . . ; hence that work must make history, increasing like a plant, growing, blossoming, and bearing fruit. And this history must include a time of preparation, revelation, and lastly of filling the earth with the streams of grace, salvation, and blessing.”45 When the “eternal” work of re-creation (the New Creation) was brought into the created history, it takes root in the soil of history and develops through the phases of sprouting, burgeoning, blossoming, and fruiting. But the question is “[w]hether the generations that lived during the long period of preparation before Christ . . . were partakers of its blessings.”46 Kuyper answers affirmatively: “In the ages before Christ God’s elect shared the blessings of the work of re-creation. Abel and Enoch, Noah and Abraham, Moses and David, Isaiah and Daniel were saved by the

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same faith as Peter, Paul, Luther, and Calvin.”47 For Kuyper, the people in the pre-Christ time could have salvation by the same faith. Kuyper’s reflection moves onto another question: how could it be that the people before the earthly time of God-man “have his faith accounted unto him for righteousness”?48 Kuyper underscores the significance of the outpouring of the Spirit. By the power and work of the Holy Spirit, the Old Testament people could have faith as the New Testament believers did. Yet, a question is raised: “How could there be any saving operation of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament if He were poured out only on Pentecost?”49 This is a question related to the concept of retroactivity of saving grace. His answer comes as follows: “[T]he almost unsearchable work of the Holy Spirit, whereby, on the one hand, He brought into the history of our race that eternal salvation already finished and complete which must run through the periods of preparation, revelation, and fruit-bearing.”50 For Kuyper, the Holy Spirit brings into history—even into the time of “preparation”—the work “already finished and complete” by Christ Jesus on the cross and resurrection. So if the Holy Spirit applies the work of Jesus finished in the first century to the Old Testament people, a concept of the retroactive grace of God inevitably comes into view. On his account, the Holy Spirit is the agent who makes the salvific grace of Christ retroactive in time. By virtue of this pneumatological trans-temporal operation, “God had a church from the beginning of the world.”51 So understood, in the time of the pre-incarnation, it can be said, “the Spirit’s re-creative work must consist of two parts: first, of the preparation of redemption for the whole Church; and secondly, of the sanctification and consolation of the Old Testament saints.”52 In the Old Covenant era, the Holy Spirit not only “performed a special work for the saints of God by giving them a temporary service of types and shadows”53 but also makes the people in the pre-Christ time enjoy the fulfillment of the types and the reality that vanishes the shadows. Such a pneumatological operation originates from the time of Christ. JOHN FRAME: THE NEW COVENANT INTO THE OLD COVENANT We can turn to John Frame, one of the eminent Reformed theologians of our day, for elaboration of the concept as he indicates that three covenants—the covenant of redemption (pactum solitus), the Universal covenant, and the new covenant—are unencumbered by temporal restrictions. Pactum solitus is the pre-temporal one, and so “it has no beginning in time, no datable ratification ceremony. Its benefits come to all of those of all times who are elect in Christ.”54 It embraces all the elect in all times who are eternally chosen in

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God’s pre-temporal decree. Another trans-temporal covenant is “the universal covenant.”55 To put it tersely, that is the covenant between God the Creator and the other created beings, which is always and universally binding as long as any creature exists. The third covenant is trans-temporal although it “does have a temporal inauguration.”56 This is the New Covenant, marked by the lifetime of Jesus Christ. In his earthly time, his atoning work ultimately serves as “the source of all human salvation from sin: the salvation of Adam and Eve, of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses, of David, and of all of God’s people in every age, past, present, or future.”57 While this covenant has a beginning in time, it entails that it reaches back to the time of the first humans. Even though the salvific work has been done and finished in the lifetime of Christ at the center of history, its power and effect are not limited to a certain block of time. For, as the predecessors already indicated, it would be impossible for any creature at any time to enjoy the eschatological blessing without the retroactivity of the New Covenant, that is, what the first-century rabbi has done in his lifetime. Frame himself puts it succinctly: “The efficacy of the New Covenant, unlike that of previous covenants, extends to God’s elect prior to Jesus’ atonement”58 and performs “circumcision of the heart” and inscribes the law to their hearts so that they might become Israelites “inwardly” and partakers of the New Covenant.59 In close affinity to his Reformed predecessors, Frame affirms the trans-temporality of the first-century work and therefore its retroactive power. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC TEACHING: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION BY CHRIST Would the Roman Catholic offer a different view on this? In a cursory reading, it may appear that Thomas Aquinas’s teaching diverges from those accounts we saw earlier as he argues for a progressive development of the New Law/ Covenant. When he deals with the question “whether the New Law should have been given from the beginning of the world,”60 his answer is negative, and he gives the reasons “why it was not fitting for the New Law to be given from the beginning of the world.”61 According to Thomas, first, it should not be given until sin has been “cast out of man through the accomplishment of his redemption by Christ Jesus,”62 that is, until Jesus accomplishes salvation on his cross and resurrection. Aquinas quotes John 7:39: “As yet the Spirit was not given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”63 The second reason is that the New Law (or covenant) needs to be brought to perfection over time. Aquinas admits the New Law is already there in the Old Testament era but as a seed-form which needs further development: “The New Law is in the Old as the corn in the ear” which takes time to bring forth “first the blade,

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then the ear, afterwards the full corn in the ear.”64 While the new law is there in the old time, it is not operative and therefore is not ripe yet to become a gift of salvation. The third and last reason is that human beings need time to realize their wretchedness and misery due to sin and “acknowledge his need of grace.” Thomas quotes, “The Law entered in, that sin might abound: and when sin abounded grace did more abound”65 (Romans 5:20). On the whole, Thomas holds that God’s gratuitous revelation takes time to develop until it becomes mature and complete, and that it cannot be operative until the time of Christ. Furthermore, to those who believe that “the New Law is not distinct from the Old”66 Thomas states that the Old Covenant is “the ‘law of fear’ inasmuch as it induced men to observe its commandments by threatening them with penalities” but that the new is “Law of love”: people obey it freely and voluntarily from the heart. For Aquinas, the two substantially differ. The Old Law “restrain[s] the hand, not the will”; “the New Law, which is the Law of love, . . . restrain[s] the will.”67 However, Aquinas also indicates, like other theologians, that there were people in the Old Testament era who belonged to the New Covenant and enjoyed the fruit of the salvation which arises from the New Testament. He states, “There were some in the state of the Old Testament who, having charity and the grace of the Holy Ghost, looked chiefly to spiritual and eternal promises: and in this respect they belonged to the New Law.”68 They have “faith in Christ” and “the grace of the Holy Ghost”69 whether implicit or explicit. So there were people of the New Covenant in the Old Testament era. “In like manner in the New Testament there are some carnal men who have not yet attained to the perfection of the New Law.”70 They are those “even under the New Testament, . . . lead to virtuous action by the fear of punishment and by temporal promises.”71 Aquinas also states that the Old Covenant did not bring the Holy Spirit into history, by which one can freely submit to God out of love and that it is the New Covenant. “[T]he New Law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Ghost, which is given to those who believe in Christ.”72 Yet, given that there were some people who freely submitted to God and his law out of genuine love, it follows that they received the Holy Spirit in their own time and that this is the administration of the new covenant. At this point, the Roman Catholic theologian would be favorable toward the idea of the retroactive pneumtaological operation in the pre-Christ time. The concept of retroactivity of God’s salvific grace is also noted in a Roman Catholic mariology. Douglas Farrow indicates an apostolic constitution issued by Pope Pius IX, saying, “The retroactive power of what God accomplishes in Christ is implied in the definition of Ineffabilis deus (1854) that ‘from the first moment of her conception the Blessed Virgin Mary was, by the singular grace and privilege of almighty God, and in view of the

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merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of mankind, kept free from all stain of original sin.’”73 Mary’s immaculate conception, Farrow says, wholly depends on divine grace. Importantly, it is “not another grace than the grace that is vouchsafed in Christ,” and it is “retroactively operative . . . based . . . on the merits of Jesus Christ.”74 The logic of Farrow’s mariology can be applied to anyone who lived before Jesus’s birth and received divine grace, although in no other case did it result in immaculate conception. If so, it may be argued the divine grace which they received is nothing other than the grace of Christ, which is rooted in his work—the cross and the resurrection. So construed, the grace of Christ that was bestowed on those who lived before Jesus’s birth must be retroactively operative on them. CONCLUSION The Augustinian-Reformed federal theology suggests the idea of retroactive grace by which the work of Jesus is applied to the lives of the people in the Old Testament era and so they could receive the grace consubstantial with that of the New Testament. Augustine points out that there were children of promise in the Old Testament era who belonged to the New Covenant and so enjoyed the fruit of salvation. In a similar vein, Calvin argues that the Old Testament people could relish the grace of salvation which arises from the same work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit even though their works were completed in the first century. The salvation of the Old Testament people is possible due to the administration of the New Testament as it extends from the center of history even to the beginning of history. Kuyper picks up this thread and develops it with a pneumatological register. The Holy Spirit is the agent who makes the retroactive operation of the grace of Christ possible. The people before the time of Jesus could be saved as the ruach applied retroactively the work of Christ to the Old Testament believers even before he was “sent” on the day of Pentecost. Frame also affirmed it with his Reformed predecessors. Also in Roman Catholic theology, Thomas Aquinas affirms that there were people in the Old Testament era who belonged to the New Covenant while arguing for a developmental view of the covenant. In a similar vein, a recent Roman Catholic scholar, Farrow, elaborates the implication of Mary’s immaculate conception, according to which Mary’s conception of Jesus was possible and sinless due to the retroactive operation of Christ’s grace even though he was unborn and his work was incomplete at the time. That was done on the basis of what will be done in the future, crucifixion and resurrection. On the whole, in view of the necessity of completion of Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s works for the salvation of the Old Testament people, it seems

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inevitably clear that the trinitarian event at the center of history is not confined by restriction of space and time but transcends them and penetrates the whole of history from its center proactively and retroactively. In that regard, Barth’s theology of the resurrection can be closely aligned with the federal theological idea as both entail the trans-temporality of the work (and the person) of Jesus Christ. Or, we can say Barth’s theology of the resurrection (particularly the idea of the outward vector of the resurrection) can supplant the retroactive interpretation of the federal theology. For Barth, Jesus is present to all ages from the day of the first Easter, and therefore contemporary to all humans. One subtle difference may be that Barth’s focus lies on the person of Christ while the traditional federal theology on the work of Christ. At yet, overall, it can be stated that the salvific power of Jesus Christ based on his completed work in the first century can retroactively operate (Calvin, Frame, Aquinas, and Farrow) from the day of the resurrection (Barth) and by the power of the Holy Spirit (Kuyper). NOTES 1. This chapter is indebted to Brandon Adams’s blog: https:​//​contrast2​.wordpress​ .com​/2021​/10​/25​/ot​-saints​-were​-saved​-by​-the​-new​-covenant​-quotes​/. 2. Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, in Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I Volume 5 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), ch. 14, 189. 3. Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, ch. 14, 189. 4. Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, ch. 14, 189. 5. Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, in Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I Volume 5, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), Book III, ch. 6, 404. 6. Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, Book III, ch. 6, 404. 7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 2.10.3 (hereafter Inst). 8. Inst. 2.10.4. 9. John Calvin, Commentary on Deuteronomy, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2009), 30:19. 10. Jonathan Beeke, Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ’s Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 90. 11. Inst. 2.10.5. Emphasis added. 12. Inst. 2.10.5. 13. Inst. 2.10.6. 14. Inst. 2.10.8. 15. Inst. 2.11.10. Emphasis mine. 16. Inst. 2.10.9. 17. Inst. 2.10.7.

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18. Inst. 2.10.7. 19. Inst. 2.11.10. 20. Calvin, Commentary on Deuteronomy, 30:19. 21. Inst. 2.10.4. 22. Calvin, Commentary on Ezekiel, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapid, MI: Baker Books, 2009), 11:20. 23. Inst. 3.20.45. 24. Calvin, Commentary on Exodus, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2009) 40:9. 25. Calvin, Commentary on Exodus, 40:9. 26. Calvin, Commentary on Exodus, 40:9. Emphasis added. 27. Calvin, Commentary on Exodus, 40:9. Emphasis added. 28. Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2009) 8:10. 29. Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews 8:10. Emphasis mine. 30. Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews 8:10. 31. Inst. 2.11.23. 32. That does not mean that there is no difference between the two Testament times for Calvin. There is: God’s revelation in the OT era remains obscure as it “shone like the moon and stars in comparison with the clear light of the Gospel which shines brightly on us” in the NT era (Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews 8:10). 33. Inst. 2.11.10. 34. Inst. 2.11.10. 35. Inst. 2.11.10. 36. Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2009), 11:1 or 2. 37. Inst. 2.11.10. 38. Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews, 8:10. 39. Inst. 2.10.7. 40. Inst. 2.10.7. 41. Inst. 2.10.4. Emphasis mine. 42. Inst. 2.10.7. 43. Inst. 2.10.4. 44. Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews, 8:10. 45. Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri de Vries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1946), 51. 46. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 51. 47. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 51. 48. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 51. 49. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 51. 50. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 51. Emphasis mine. 51. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 52. 52. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 52. 53. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 53.

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54. John Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2013), 81. 55. Frame, Systematic Theology, 81. 56. Frame, Systematic Theology, 81. 57. Frame, Systematic Theology, 80. 58. Frame, Systematic Theology, 82. 59. Frame, Systematic Theology, 82. 60. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), q106, a3 (hereafter ST). 61. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a3. 62. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a3. 63. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a3. 64. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a3. 65. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a3. 66. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 67. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 68. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 69. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 70. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 71. Aquinas, ST I-II, q107, a1. 72. Aquinas, ST I-II, q106, a1. 73. Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 83, n. 50. 74. Farrow, Ascension Theology, 83.

Chapter 4

Toward the Eschatological Understanding of Justification Premodern Accounts

Can a concept of time be derived from theology with a central focus on Jesus Christ and the eschatological future? Does a Christian doctrine demand a concept of time that places Christ at the center of history and implies the retroactivity of the eschatological future? Is there any doctrine in Christian theology, other than the doctrine of the resurrection, which supports the idea that divine grace operates retroactively? The previous chapters concerned the resurrection as the event in which Jesus becomes contemporaneous to all in all ages and thereby the New Testament grace reaches out retroactively to the Old Testament people. Now we shall see in this chapter that the retroactivity of Christ’s grace can be further substantiated by the implications of the doctrine of justification. The justifying grace of God reaches out to sinners in all ages from the eschatological future, which arises from the first Easter morning. The salvific grace of justification comes to sinners in all ages retroactively, from the eschatological future in the person of Christ the risen one who has the New Creation in himself. It will come to light as we survey the doctrinal trajectory which reveals the external and forensic natures of justification and the eschatological construal of the justifying grace. In the following, the doctrinal development will be sketched in broad strokes, following the accounts of Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Karl Barth, Tuomo Mannermaa, and N. T. Wright.

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AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO: RECTIFICATION OF THE UNIVERSE Augustine’s early medieval account of justification provides an important background to the upcoming Reformation theology.1 Augustine stresses the Apostle Paul’s teaching that every human being is under God’s judgment and that “no man living is justified in God’s sight.”2 Accordingly, he says, “[N]o man is justified unless he believes in Christ and is cleansed by His baptism.”3 It is clear for Augustine that if people are justified, they are “justified and just by Christ, not in themselves but in him.”4 Humans “cannot by any means be justified and redeemed from God’s most righteous wrath—in a word, from punishment—except by faith and the sacrament of the blood of Christ.”5 Without faith (and a sacrament), no one can be justified. Put differently, it is “the grace of God by which alone a man can be justified”6 “without which no man is justified.”7 As Eleonore Stump points out, “[Augustine’s] views on grace develop . . . [and become] increasingly insistent that the will of faith is a gift of God in the sense that God alone is the cause of it.”8 It is not a human being but God alone who sovereignly initiates the process of salvation. God gratuitously gives salvific faith to those whom God is pleased with so that they might believe and be justified. For our salvation, “God operates [in us] that we might will.”9 God’s sovereign and salvific will precedes, awakens, and enables the human will to have faith in Jesus and consequently be justified. At this point, it might appear that Augustine’s theology stands in close affinity to the Reformation monergistic theology in that he teaches that humans are justified by grace alone. Yet it should be noted that Augustine stresses faith as the human will. He poses a question: “Are we then doing away with free choice through grace? God forbid!”10 “[T]he will by which we believe is taken to be a gift of God’s . . . but to consent to the calling of God or to dissent from it belongs to the [human] will itself.”11 The giver is God, but the recipient of the gift is the human being. God’s grace is received through the human will. So Augustine says, “[T]he soul cannot receive and have these gifts . . . except by consenting. And so whatever it has and whatever it receives comes from God, but to receive and to have comes from the one receiving and having.”12 All good things come from God and are given by him, and yet the ability to consent and receive them unmistakably belongs to the human agents. Furthermore, for the pre-Reformation theologian, justification is understood as a protracted process.13 In Augustine’s theology, Jesus is understood as the one who “works justification in his saints that labor in the trial of this life.”14 Justification is to be worked out in the believers’ lives throughout their lives in perseverance. Sometimes Augustine seems to make a distinction—à

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la the Reformation theology—between justification and sanctification when he says, “[E]ven after he has become justified by faith, grace should accompany him on his way, and he should lean upon it, lest he fall.”15 Here the Christian life after justification seems differentiated from justification itself. But other times, Augustine writes, “For, just as the eye of the body, even when completely sound, is unable to see unless aided by the brightness of light, so also man, even when most fully justified, is unable to lead a holy life, if he be not divinely assisted by the eternal light of righteousness. God, therefore, heals us not only that He may blot out the sin which we have committed, but, furthermore, that He may enable us even to avoid sinning.”16 Augustine thus makes a distinction between remission of sin (blotting out sin) and avoidance of sin and between being fully justified and leading a holy life, as the Reformation theology does: the distinction between justification and sanctification. But in that passage, it is still God’s righteousness that assists the believer to avoid sinning throughout the person’s life—which the Protestant Reformers would regard as “sanctification.” So Augustine’s theology differs from the Reformation theology, and it would be blatantly anachronistic to impose such a distinction on the fifth-century theological account. It would suffice to note that such a distinction is not yet clearly made in Augustine’s reflection. As justification is considered as a protracted process, it is legitimate to conclude, as McGrath holds, that for Augustine, “[j]ustification entails a real change in a person’s being, and not merely in his or her status.”17 For the process of justification, as Augustine puts it, God “operates without us that we might will; but when we will, and will in such a way that we act, he cooperates with us.”18 God initiates the salvific process in a purely monergistic way; humans only follow what God has started. And yet once the humans receive divine grace, God and the humans enter into a cooperative and synergistic relationship in which the light of God’s righteousness accompanies believers in their lifelong journey to the city of God.19 Lastly, it is noteworthy, for Augustine, divine justification is not limited to the private realm, that is, conversion of individuals; it also involves rectification of the whole creation. For Augustine, the scope of justification (or justice) is broad enough to cover “the restoration of the entire universe to its original order,”20 which of course includes the sociopolitical order.21 So construed, his doctrine of justification comes close to a theory of social justice. The Latin term iustitia can be translated as justice or righteousness in English. For the Latin father, it was natural to contemplate the issues of justice alongside the doctrine of justification. In his doctrine of iustitia, Augustine defines justice as the “virtue which gives every one his due”22 and argues that every human being and every creature should give their due to God the creator.

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When everything can find its proper place in relation to the Creator and to the other creatures, justice is achieved in a society. In that just and right order, the human soul can have “its proper command over the body . . . , the reason its just authority over the vices,”23 filling the “void of true justice.”24 When it comes to human relations, the just society does not allow a human being to step over other fellow human beings—only “over the beasts.”25 No one should live under oppression or in slavish bondage. Put differently, no one should be overpowered or enslaved by the lust of dominion (libido dominandi). But this means strikingly that it would be better for one to be a slave than a master who is intoxicated by libido domandi.26 Of course, when justice is fully meted out, that is, such libido will be completely vanquished, and there will be no slave. Or everyone will be a servant to one another. Until then, civitas terrena can enjoy only vestiges of justice. To evaluate, it seems reasonable and judicious to extend the scope of justification to include the social, political, and cosmic aspects. All things in the universe and the universe itself call for justice and rectification. In his account, Augustine plainly points out that complete justification or rectification will be realized only in the eschatological city of God. But he does not consider the possibility of the in-breaking eschatological reality—from the future into the present—in his account of justification even though he probably might have been tantalized by the possibility in his account of the twocovenant relation, where he spoke of the operation of the New Covenant in the Old Testament time.27 Or we can say that he is unable to conceive the possibility at this point since his account of justification is not greatly exercised about the legal aspect of justification in the medieval era. THOMAS AQUINAS: A LONG PROCESS OF JUSTIFICATION Thomas Aquinas’s account of justification does not so much differ from his predecessor’s. For Aquinas as well, justification is construed as a long and continuous process: it is “a movement towards justice, as heating implies a movement towards heat.”28 Yet for Aquinas, a key term infusion is introduced when he states, “The entire justification of the ungodly consists as to its origin in the infusion of grace.”29 Divine grace is “pouring in” (infusion) and cascading into the soul, and therefore it can be called interior righteousness without which one cannot be exculpated of his or her sin.30 For Thomas, justification instigates “a certain rectitude of order in the interior disposition of a man.”31 It yields subjection of “the inferior powers of the souls . . . [t]o the superior, i.e., to the reason,”32 and the reason to God.33 Thus, for the medieval

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theologian, justification occurs inside the believer, achieving justice and order in her, subordinate to God, in a long process.34 It is remarkable that for Aquinas, the infusion itself is an instantaneous event while justification is protracted. “[T]he infusion of grace takes place . . . without succession,”35 that is, “in an instant.”36 The infusion of grace occurs all at once. Furthermore, it is God who initiates the process of justification. At this point, it comes in proximity to the Reformation understanding of justification—except that justification occurs inside the believer. In the Roman Catholic theologian’s view, however, justification does not occur without the cooperation of the human will. It can and should be granted that God alone initiates the infusion of grace, but when the response is called for to the divine act,37 it is “a movement of free-will [that] is required for the justification of the ungodly.”38 Thus, “God’s motion to justice does not take place without a movement of the free-will.”39 When God pours out his divine grace into the human soul, the human “mind is moved by God,”40 and the human volition is awakened to humbly receive the salvific gift.41 The human volitional movement is certainly consequential to God’s act of infusion, but not temporally subsequent to it. God “infuses the gift of justifying grace that at the same time He moves the free-will to accept the gift of grace.”42 God’s cascading grace takes no time in awakening the soul to receive it in her volitional will. Upon being touched, the soul revives as the pure and cooperative recipient of grace. But Aquinas is aware that there are some cases in which the cooperative will is not required for his or her own justification. Some people would not be able to exercise their free will for themselves due to their ages—whether too young or too old—or due to their mental disabilities. For instance, “infants are not capable of the movement of their free-will.”43 In that case, “it is by the mere infusion of their souls that God moves them to justice.”44 For those, Aquinas teaches, justification may take place without their own voluntary acceptance of divine grace. They can be baptized by the will of those who can represent them (e.g., parents) and thereby can be bestowed the grace of justification. In this regard, we need to note that for Aquinas, justification “cannot be brought about”45 without the sacrament of baptism. Aquinas clearly states, “[A] man is justified by baptism.”46 For Thomas, “[b]aptism is a spiritual regeneration”47 for it takes sins away—both original and actual. It is “a remedy not only against original, but also against actual sins, which are caused by our will and intention.”48 But Aquinas does not mean that mere administration of this sacrament would eradicate sin without one’s humble submission to God—at least the representative’s consent in faith would be required. Otherwise, it would be “useless to employ Baptism as a means of justification.”49 Aquinas even holds, “If an adult lacks the intention of receiving the

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sacrament, he must be rebaptized.”50 “Faith” or volitional consent is required for one’s justification; without it, the sacrament is of no effect while it is also true that faith alone (without the sacrament) cannot make someone justified. Another sacrament, penance, cannot be untethered from justification in Aquinas’s theology. The lifelong process of justification requires believers to do penance. Justification consists in “a movement of the free-will against sin, which is the act of penance.”51 Thomas writes, “[Even] charity, faith, and mercy do not deliver [the sinner] from sin, without Penance.”52 Here penance is not just a form of a human effort to get himself out of sin but a humble subordination to the passion of Christ. Thomas elaborates, “The act of the virtue of penance is subordinate to Christ’s Passion both by faith, and by its relation to the keys of the Church; and so, in both ways, it causes the forgiveness of sin, by the power of Christ’s Passion.”53 Thus, justification cannot be done without the sacrament, for the passion of Christ operates effectively through it. For Aquinas, the believer cannot be justified by faith alone without an act of penance.54 In the course of justification, according to Aquinas, one’s inherent righteousness may increase and decrease. It is not an all-at-once and invariable event, as the Protestants would argue later. In the Roman Catholic view, one’s righteousness begins in an imperfect state and “may afterwards become perfect; because ‘charity begun merits increase, and when increased merits perfection,’ as Augustine says (In Epist. Joan. Tract. V).”55 One’s righteousness may change in degree within herself until she receives the final verdict from the Judge. In sum, for Aquinas, justification of the ungodly consists in a long process that begins with God’s initiative act of infusion by which “God moves the soul interiorly,”56 and at a touch of divine grace, the human soul is awakened to receive the gift from God with his own will. Her justification begins also with the sacrament of baptism, which is also the regeneration itself. It continues with the sacrament of penance by which one subjects herself to the passion of Christ. Thus, justification occurs by God’s infusion of his grace, through baptism, the believer’s volitional acceptance, and through her subjection to the passion of Christ by penance. Whether it occurs at once or in a protracted period, justification takes place overall as a process that covers what the Protestants would call “justification” and “sanctification.” Now it can be indicated that in Roman Catholic theology, justification is not construed as an all-at-once event as in Protestant theology. Although infusion is regarded as an instantaneous event, it is not regarded as a juridical pronouncement. Accordingly, it is quite unlikely for us to see the idea that the final divine verdict in the eschatological future has been brought forward to the sinner’s present time for his or her justification. The concept of retroactive grace is hardly nascent from the soil of the medieval theology of justification until the

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time of the Reformation. As seen in an earlier chapter, a hint of the retroactive concept of grace was betrayed in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s accounts of the New Covenant, but not in their medieval accounts of justification. MARTIN LUTHER: THE EXTERNALITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS TOWARD THE FORENSIC SENSE Now a high-profile departure was prompted from the Thomistic doctrine of justification, and it marks a crucial step toward the discovery of its eschatological nature. It was heralded as Martin Luther laid a strong emphasis on the externality of Christ’s righteousness, and it paved the way for the eschatological understandings of justification and grace. Luther’s notion of divine righteousness refers to Christ as the sole basis of justification of sinners. In the Reformer’s theology, the forensic sense of justification has not quite come to the fore yet. It is Philip Melanchthon who developed the forensic sense in the wake of his predecessor’s theology. In Melanchthon’s reflection, the law-court motif comes to the fore and is directly related to the final judgment on the last day. Thus, a tenacious link between the present justification and the eschatological future (the last-day judgment) is forged in the Reformation theology and fertilizes soil for the emergence of the eschatological concept of grace. It was a momentous breakthrough for Luther: justification has nothing to do with what is inside the believer. Justification of the sinner purely depends on what is external to him: the righteousness of Christ.57 Luther writes, “I am indeed a sinner according to the present life and its righteousness as a child of Adam where the law accuses me, death reigns and devours me. But above this life I have an alien righteousness, another life, which is Christ.”58 The justifying righteousness is above and outside the believer, and for that reason, even when the fiercest tempest of Anfechtung strikes the soul, she can remain calm and tranquil, fixing her eyes on Christ her righteousness. Anxiety cannot drag her down into the deep dark water and cannot do anything to her salvation. The believer is absolutely safe, securely anchored into the transcendent and imperturbable reality, the righteousness of Christ. It is like “the sun itself—unaffected by even the most tempestuous of winds.”59 The foundation of one’s salvific justification does not lie in the soul but outside and above her, as the unchanging and once-for-all reality. The righteousness of Christ would not increase or decrease depending on one’s cultivation of her holiness or virtue inside the soul. Her righteousness remains absolute and unwavering as it is not inherently hers but Christ’s on which she stands. Yet it is to be noted that in Luther’s theology, righteousness inside the soul occurs in correspondence to the external righteousness. Luther writes,

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“Through faith in Christ, . . . Christ’s righteousness become our righteousness and all that he has become ours. . . . This righteousness is primary; it is the basis, the cause, the source of all our own actual righteousness.”60 Christ’s righteousness remains external from first to last as the primary one, and yet another kind of righteousness comes as the secondary. Luther states, “The second kind of righteousness is our proper righteousness, not because we alone work it, but because we work with that first and alien righteousness.”61 In Luther’s theology, the righteousness of Christ is not infused or introduced into the believer’s soul, and yet the “proper” righteousness arises within the believer in response to Christ’s. A Luther scholar, Else Wiberg Pedersen, indicates Luther’s nuptial analogy and says: “[T]hrough the first [Christ’s] righteousness arises the voice of the bridegroom who says to the soul, ‘I am yours,’ but through the second comes the voice of the bride who answers, ‘I am yours.’”62 Christ’s righteousness calls for the bride’s response. This is a call-and-response relationship, with Christ’s righteousness leading and the bride’s righteousness following in an antiphony. Wiberg Pedersen writes, “This gracious giving of alien righteousness prompts the bride’s proper righteousness to sanctify her through faith, following the example of Christ’s servanthood.”63 In this interpretation, the righteousness of Christ remains outside; the righteousness of the bride—another kind—is generated within her and responds to her bridegroom’s.64 But this “interior” understanding of righteousness does not and should not make us confused with the Roman infusional doctrine of justification as the righteousness of Christ as the source is always transcendent over the soul.65 In Luther’s theology, as the divine righteousness remains external and the believer is justified by it, the believer remains as a sinner even when he is justified. The Reformer does not allow for any form of fluctuation in righteousness. The external righteousness of Christ remains absolute and unaffected by any vicissitudes that the believer experiences in his life. In effect, the believer is always simul iustus et peccator in the present age. The believer is fully righteous due to the foreign and absolute righteousness of Christ and yet still sinful due to the abiding wretchedness and sinfulness inside the soul. It may be said that she is outwardly justified and inwardly remains sinful. Now as we trace the trajectory of the doctrinal development, it is important to note that Luther’s strong emphasis on the externality of righteousness naturally leads to the forensic sense of justification in his follower’s thinking. The seed form of the concept already lies in Luther’s thought, and it has developed in Melanchthon’s hand.66 In Luther’s account, the marriage between Christ and his bride and fröhlicher Wechsel served as controlling motifs for justification; in Melanchthon’s, the courtroom image comes to the fore.67 Eramus’s translation of the Bible played an important role in the development of the doctrine of justification. In 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam offered a

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new Latin translation of the Greek New Testament, in which the Greek word logizomai in Romans 4:3 was of decisive importance for the emergence of the forensic sense of justification. Whereas the Vulgate translated logisētai as reputatum, Erasmus rendered it as imputatum in his 1516 translation. The Vulgate term “repute” “ascribes to an induvial his intrinsic qualities . . . , ‘impute’ applies extrinsic qualities (a ‘synthetic’ usage).”68 The distinction of the two terms was not significant enough for Luther to formulate his theology in the way his follower would do later. In 1515, “Luther [only] noted a distinction between reputare and imputare (WA 56:4217),”69 but it has not substantially shaped Luther’s theological thinking. It was Melanchthon, one of his followers, who instilled the forensic sense into the Lutheran legacy in view of Erasmus’s translation. Melanchthon “could hardly have failed to notice the forensic implications of the concept of ‘imputation’”70 as found in Erasmus’s widely circulated Bible. In his Römerbrief-Kommentar, Melanchthon highlighted “this verse, this translation, and this definition of imputation, using [the word acceptilation] constantly in parallel with the word acceptation.”71 The word “‘acceptilation’ is a Roman legal term, referring to the purely verbal remission of a debt, as if the debt has been paid—whereas, in fact, it has not.”72 It concerns one’s “status rather than an ontic and inner change as if one’s debt is pronounced remitted in a courtroom.”73 In this regard, “Melanchthon (followed by others) began to use words and images—‘pronouncement,’ ‘acceptation,’ ‘forensic’—taken from Roman law.”74 So construed, justification does not mean a change that occurs inside the believer but a change external, that is, a change of status in a legal sense. Melanchthon wrote, “[In justification,] he is pronounced righteous forensically.”75 Melanchthon’s classic formulation comes in his Epitome philosophiae moralis (1538): “[O]ur righteousness before God consists in this, that God forgives the sins by grace alone, without work, merit, or worthiness on our part, whether it precede, accompany, or follow, but that God bestows and imputes to us the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (donat atque imputat nobis iustitiam obedientiae Christi).”76 The righteousness of Christ is not infused or inserted into the human soul; it is reckoned to her and thus imputed as righteous. In his theology, Christ’s righteousness remains external as in his predecessor’s Reformation theology. Thus, the forensic sense has emerged in the Lutheran legacy as a natural corollary of the concept of external righteousness. This maneuver is important in bringing about the eschatological aspect of justification, and so it can be readily linked to the (justifying) grace in retroactivity from the eschatological future, for the forensic and legal sense should come from the eschatological divine judgment.

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JOHN CALVIN: JUSTIFICATION FROM UNION WITH CHRIST In the course of the Reformation history, the Lutheran legal sense of justification met some challenges even in the Protestant camp as Andreas Osiander criticized Melanchthon’s forensic construal of justification. Osiander argued, “[W]e attain favor with God not by imputation of Christ’s righteousness alone, because it would be impossible . . . for him to regard as just those who are not just.”77 According to John Calvin, “Osiander laughs at those men who teach that ‘to be justified’ is a legal term; because we must actually be righteous.”78 Furthermore, Osiander avers that justification occurs “as the essence of the divine nature is poured into us.”79 Justification takes place as an inner change thanks to the inpouring of God’s essence. His divinity constitutes his righteousness by which believers are justified, as Osiander teaches: “Christ is our righteousness because he is God eternal”80 rather than because he was obedient to the Father even to death in his earthly ministry. For him, believers become “substantially righteous in God by the infusion both of his essence and of his quality,”81 not due to the active and passive righteousness of Christ which was achieved in his lifetime as God-man. In effect, Osiander leaves room for deification as the justified become partakers of divine nature and so “deified” in union with God.82 One can legitimately say that for him, justification is deification. Calvin ripostes to him and says that Osiander’s account gives rise to the mixing of essences. Calvin agrees with him to the idea of union with Christ, but the Geneavan Reformer stresses that it should not mean “Christ’s essence is mixed with our own.”83 Calvin indicates that in Osiander’s justification, the transfusion of “the essence of God into men”84 occurs as God’s nature is poured into humans. Consequently, it considerably compromises the Creator-creature distinction. As for Osiander’s rejection of imputed righteousness, Calvin quotes Psalm 32:1—“Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven”—and argues that the believers’ blessedness consists in “the whole of righteousness in free remission.”85 Being partially righteous cannot be deemed “blessed.” When God justifies a sinner, she is justified in the fullest sense and therefore called blessed, for justification does not occur inside, depending on the fluctuating degree of the believer’s inner holiness but on the divine juridical pronouncement. It is clear that Calvin adheres to the forensic sense of justification. But does it mean that Calvin would fully endorse the externality of righteousness? It may appear that Calvin ratifies the forensic sense of justification. However, there is a subtle difference in emphasis: Calvin does not stress alien righteousness as much as Luther and Melanchthon do. It is important to

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note that Calvin says: “We do not . . . contemplate [Christ] outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us. . . . [W]e put on Christ and are engrafted into his body.”86 His primary emphasis lies on the doctrine of union with Christ rather than on that of alien righteousness. In Calvin’s soteriology, union with Christ antecedes and shapes the doctrine of justification. As Julie Canlis points out, the reformer’s theology “cannot be boiled down to [his] fight for the ‘imputation of righteousness over against Osiander’s substantial ‘impartation,’ or even [his] thoroughgoing ‘forensicism’ versus Osiander’s ‘participation.’ . . . Calvin’s primary concern is a correct doctrine of union and participation: how it is that we are incorporated into Christ and his benefits.”87 In a similar vein, McGrath states: “Calvin understands both justification and sanctification to be the chief beneficia Christi. . . . Sanctification is not the effect of justification; both justification and sanctification are effects of union with Christ.”88 The controlling motif in Calvin’s thinking is union with Christ, against which the legitimacy of other soteriological doctrines are to be measured: the externality of Christ’s righteousness, the forensic understanding, sanctification in distinction from justification, etc. The doctrine of external righteousness is subordinate to the doctrine of union with Christ and is not so much foregrounded in Calvin’s theology as in Luther’s and Melanchthon’s. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Calvin welcomed the ecumenical consensus achieved in the Regensburg colloquy (1541). In the time of the Reformation, when the hope of the rapprochement between the two circles was not entirely snuffed out, both camps came together for a doctrinal ecumenical conference. At first, it seemed promising when both sides earnestly endeavored and strikingly reached a mutual agreement. The consensus was reached: saving righteousness is inherent and imputed. Both the Roman Catholic internality and the Reformation’s externality of righteousness were affirmed in their conclusion. As Lane indicates, the concept of “duplex iustitia”89—internal and external—was “the key contribution of Regensburg . . . [which] crucially taught that we can have confidence before God not because of our inherent righteousness, which remains imperfect, but because Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us.”90 For our justification, the believer solely depends on the righteousness of Christ, the external one, but he has a responsibility to grow the inherent righteousness inside the believer. How did Calvin respond? He had not expected much from the ecumenical endeavor before the colloquy began, but it seemed that he was surprised to find that “the Roman Catholic side had yielded a remarkable amount.”91 He also found “that this article contains nothing that is not to be found in ‘our writings.’”92 The Reformer, who was present but did not participate in the discussion, welcomed with enthusiasm the key concept as “the substance of the true doctrine.”93 However, those who were not present in the colloquy did

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not share his excitement. “Luther, who was not present, saw it as a patchwork of conflicting ideas. On the Catholic side, some defended it vigorously, and those who objected mostly complained that it was ambiguous, not that it was unorthodox.”94 In the end, their ecumenical venture ran aground. Calvin’s first enthusiasm was much dampened soon after his fellow Reformers could not accept the ecumenical consensus. Eventually, Calvin himself was distanced from his earlier position: “[T]hree months later Calvin wrote very negatively about the colloquy as a whole.”95 And yet it should be noted that Calvin did so “without recanting his judgment on Article 5.”96 So it can be said that Calvin stayed with Luther in the same camp while his understanding of justification is not completely congruent with Luther’s—at least at some point in their lives. Overall, it seems that the forensic sense of justification did not play a central role in Calvin’s theology as much as it did in Luther’s while the French reformer’s theology bears familial resemblances with those of Luther and other Reformers. In sum, Luther’s repeated references to Jesus Christ’s obedience to the Father as the basis of justification gave rise to the Protestant concept of external (or alien) righteousness, and it developed into the forensic concept in Melanchthon’s reflection. But Calvin, another magisterial Reformer, put more emphasis on union with Christ than the forensic sense of justification, and in this regard, his theology may not fully square with his Lutheran colleagues.97 Calvin even welcomed the ecumenical proposal for the concept of double righteousness—external and internal righteousness. At this point, in view of the forensic sense and his strong emphasis on union with Christ, Calvin’s doctrine of justification may have led to an idea that the eschatological verdict of God on the ungodly is issued from the work and person of Christ for their justification. A link between union with Christ and the eschatological nature of justification, based on the forensic nature, could have been more explicitly forged in his account. But it is not explicit enough to give rise to the notion that there is the eschatological reality within the person of Christ on which justification of the present sinners is based and that it is how the eschatological future breaks into the present.98 NOTES 1. Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38. 2. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 42.49. 3. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 41.48. The role of baptism in Augustine’s doctrine of justification comes close to that of Aquinas, as will be seen later.

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4. Augustinus, In Ioannis Evangelium Tractatus, in J. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Latina vol. XXXV, col. 1401. 5. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 2.2. 6. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 11.12. 7. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 11.12. 8. Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” in David Meconi and Eleonore Stump, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 175. 9. Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 17.33. 10. Augustine, De spiritu et littera, 30.52. The extent to which the Reformation theology would be aligned with Augustine’s theology would be debatable at this point. In what aspect or to what extent can Reformation theology affirm that faith is the human will and act and so the human will is involved in justification. 11. Augustine, De spiritu et littera, 24.60. 12. Augustine, De spiritu et littera, 24.60. 13. The extent to which the magisterial Reformation theology is aligned to Augustine’s theology in regard to the doctrine of justification is debatable. At this point, the two would be not easily conflated. 14. Augustine, “The Spirit and the Letter,” in Augustine: Later Works, selected and trans. John Burnaby, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 249–50. 15. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 6.13. 16. Augustine, De natura et gratia, 26.29. 17. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 48. 18. Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 17.33. 19. The heirs of the Reformation may not be fully satisfied with Augustine’s theology in this regard as they do not find the all-at-once-ness (as a legal verdict) and monergistic nature of justification sufficiently emphasized. However, again, it would be an anachronistic reading of Augustine if one seeks to find the purely Reformation elements in Augustine’s theology and flatly identifies his theology with that of the sixteenth century. 20. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 54. Emphasis mine. 21. As McGrath points out, the doctrine of justification in view of political theology deserves more scholarly attention. There is an astonishing lacuna in respect of “the significance of Augustine’s understanding of justification to his social and political thought” (McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 38). 22. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19.21. 23. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19.24. 24. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19.24. 25. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19.24. 26. Here Augustine’s primary concern is not the abolition of slavery itself but the liberation of humans from libido dominandi. The fifth-century theologian is not an activist to put an end to slavery itself, so his tone can be frustratingly dubious. “This servitude is, however, penal, and is appointed by that law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and forbids its disturbance; for if nothing had been

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done in violation of that law, there would have been nothing to restrain by penal servitude. And therefore the apostle admonishes slaves to be subject to their masters, and to serve them heartily and with good-will, so that, if they cannot be freed by their masters, they may themselves make their slavery in some sort free, by serving not in crafty fear, but in faithful love, until all unrighteousness passes away, and all principality and every human power be brought to nothing, and God be all in all” (Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19.15). 27. See chapter 3 of this volume. 28. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 113, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947) (hereafter ST). 29. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 7. Emphasis mine. 30. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 2. 31. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 1. 32. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 1. 33. Here Aquinas’s account resonates with Augustine’s theory of iustitia. 34. Cf. “Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part 3, Section 1, Chapter 3, Article 2, I, 1989). 35. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 7. 36. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 7. 37. Simon Francis Gaine, “Aristotle’s Philosophy Aquinas’s Theology of Grace,” in Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, eds., Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 117. 38. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 4. 39. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3. 40. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 4. 41. Perhaps Aquinas seems to come closer to monergism than it is commonly supposed. Cf. Alan Spence comments, “[W]ithin an Aristotelian theory of motion, all movement, including that of the human free-will has its ultimate source in the action of the one unmoved mover.” Alan Spence, Justification: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 47. 42. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3. 43. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3. 44. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3. 45. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3. 46. ST III, q. 68, a. 7. Cf. The Council of Trent affirming that “nobody can be justified ‘without being washed for rebirth or wishing to be.’” 47. ST III, q. 68, a. 11. What about an unborn baby? Aquinas writes, “Children while in the mother’s womb have not yet come forth into the world to live among other men. Consequently, they cannot be subject to the action of man, so as to receive the sacrament, at the hands of man, unto salvation. They can, however, be subject to the action of God, in Whose sight they live, so as, by a kind of privilege, to receive the grace of sanctification; as was the case with those who were sanctified in the womb” (ST III, q. 68, a. 11). 48. ST III, q. 68, a. 7.

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49. ST III, q. 68, a. 4. 50. ST III, q. 68, a. 7. 51. ST III, q. 86, a. 6. 52. ST III, q. 84, a. 5. 53. ST III, q. 84, a. 6. 54. ST III, q. 84, a. 6. 55. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 10. 56. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 10. 57. Luther sees the doctrine of justification as the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. WA 40 III 352.3: “Quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia.” (Here Luther's writings are quoted according to the Weimarer Ausgabe: Martin Luther, Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, Weimar: Bohlau, 1883–1993 [hereafter WA].) Cf. “Ariculus iustificationis dicitur articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae” (Theological scholastica didacta [Hanover, 1618], 711). Compare with Aquinas, who claims that what initiates justification is no other than the grace of God, as seen earlier. 58. Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians (1535),” in Timothy Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 90. 59. WA 57.233.16–19. 60. Martin Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness (1519),” in Timothy Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 120. 61. Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness (1519),” 120. 62. Luther, “Sermon on Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Kirsi I. Stjerna, Timothy J. Wengert, and Hans Hillerbrand, eds., Word and Faith, Vol. 2 of The Annotated Luther (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 17. 63. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, “Luther and Justification,” Dialog 56 (2017), 136. Cf. “[T]hey have Christ as their righteousness and seek the welfare of others only, not of themselves” (Wiberg Pedersen, “Luther and Justification,” 137). 64. Houvinen’s interpretation also maintains the externality of Christ’s righteousness as he construes Luther’s notion of fides apprehensiva Christi in a way that it still stands in contrast to infused faith (“fides infusa”). Fides apprehensiva does not bring Christ into the believer but becomes “disposed toward” him (Houvinen, Fides infantium, 157–70, quoted in Olli-Pekka Vainio, “Faith,” in Olli-Pekka Vainio, ed., Engaging Luther: A (New) Theological Assessment [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010], 141n12). 65. Luther upholds the alien righteousness of Christ which supposedly remains external to the believer. But McGrath’s reading of Luther is noteworthy at this point as he suggests “internalization” of the alien righteousness in Luther. As McGrath rightly indicates, for Luther, “[f]aith is fides apprehensiva, a faith which ‘grasps’ Christ and makes him present” (McGrath, Iustitia, 228). Vainio’s observation is in agreement: “The verb apprehend appears in the Commentary over 300 times. In some studies, Luther’s notion of faith is summarized in the formula ‘faith that apprehends Christ’” (Vainio, “Faith,” 141n10). As faith grasps the external righteousness, McGrath interprets it to entail: “Christ is none the less really present within believers, effecting their renovation and regeneration” (McGrath, Iustitia, 229. Emphasis

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added). The reality once external is introduced into the believer by faith. However, one may raise qualms about such an interpretation for it seems to move Luther’s doctrine closer to the Roman doctrine that God’s salvific righteousness is infused into the believer and becomes inward. The traditional or inherited interpretation of Luther’s doctrine can be put into question. While suggesting the inwardness of righteousness in Luther’s theology, McGrath holds that God’s righteousness does not stop being external: “Luther is able to assert at one and the same time that the righteousness of believers is, and will remain, extrinsic to them” (McGrath, Iustitia, 229). Later in this chapter, we will see that a similar interpretation is offered by Tuomo Mannermaa who construed faith as equated with the presence of Christ and thus opens up a possibility of the inwardness of Christ’s righteousness. 66. “It is . . . clear that Luther’s doctrine of the iustitia Christia aliena laid the conceptual foundation for such a doctrine of forensic justification” (McGrath, Iustitia, 213). 67. McGrath, Iustitia, 238. 68. Lowell Green, “The Influence of Erasmus upon Melanchthon, Luther and the Formula of Concord in the Doctrine of Justification,” Church History 43 (1974), 185. Cf. “In his Paraphase on Rom. 4:3 Valla has treated imputare, reputare and accepto ferre as synonyms: ‘logisētai.’” (Green, “The Influence of Erasmus,” 186n9). 69. Green, “The Influence of Erasmus,” 186. 70. McGarth, Iustitia, 240. 71. Stephen Strehle, The Catholic Roots of the Protestant Gospel: Encounter between the Middle Ages and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 68. 72. McGrath, Iustitia, 239–40. 73. McGrath, Iustitia, 240. 74. Peter Toon, Justification and Sanctification (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1983), 63. 75. Melanchthon, Apology, Article IV, 252, in Toon, Justification and Sanctification, 63. 76. Melanchthon, Epitome philosophiae moralis (1538), quoted in Green, “The Influence of Erasmus,” 199. 77. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classics, vols. 20–21, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 3.11.12, 741. 78. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.11, 738. 79. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.6, 731. 80. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.5, 730. 81. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.5, 730. 82. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.6, 731. 83. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.5, 730. 84. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.5, 730. 85. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.11, 739. 86. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.10, 737. Compare to Julie Canlis’s translation, which is a bit different: “We do not regard [Christ] as outside of and distant from us, in such way that His righteousness is imputed to us in mechanical fashion” (Julie Canlis,

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Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010], 141). 87. Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 141. 88. McGrath, Iustitia, 256. Emphasis added. 89. Lane calls it duplex iustitia (double righteousness) even though the term itself is “not found in the article” (Anthony Lane, “Why Was Luther Hostile to Article 5 on Justification Agreed at the Religious Colloquy of Regensburg, 1541?,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 22 [2020], 112). 90. Lane, “Justification by Faith 1517–2017,” Tyndale Bulletin 69 (2018), 287–88. 91. Anthony Lane, Regensburg Article 5 on Justification: Inconsistent Patchwork or Substance of True Doctrine? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 39. 92. Lane, “Justification by Faith 1517–2017,” 288. 93. Lane, “Justification by Faith 1517–2017,” 288. Cf. Article 5 of the ecumenical statement reads as follows: “Although the one who is justified receives righteousness and through Christ also has inherent [righteousness] . . . (which is why the holy fathers made use of [the term] ‘to be justified’ even to mean ‘to receive inherent righteousness’), nevertheless, the faithful soul depends not on this, but only on the righteousness of Christ given to us as a gift, without which there is and can be no righteousness at all. (2) And thus by faith in Christ we are justified or reckoned to be righteous, that is we are accepted through his merits and not on account of our own worthiness or works. (3) And on account of the righteousness inherent in us we are said to be righteous, because the works which we perform are righteous, according to the saying of John: ‘whoever does what is right is righteous’ [I Jn 3:7]” (Lane, “Why Was Luther Hostile to Article 5 on Justification Agreed at the Religious Colloquy of Regensburg, 1541?,” 124). Emphasis added. 94. Lane, “Justification by Faith 1517–2017,” 288. 95. Lane, Regensburg Article 5 on Justification, 39. 96. Lane, Regensburg Article 5 on Justification, 39. 97. Cf. Ted Peters offers a reading in which Luther’s doctrine of justification comes close to Calvin’s. In his reading, both emphasize union with Christ. Peters concurs with Brian Gerrish who states, “For Luther, as for Calvin, faith culminates in the thought of union with Christ” (B. A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982], 80, quoted in Ted Peters, “The Resistance of Self-Justification to God’s Grace,” Currents in Theology and Mission 46 [January 2019], 65). Peters also indicates Barth’s reading in which union with Christ is a decisive factor in Luther’s theology of justification: “In causa iustificationis ist—das ist Luthers im Galaterbriefkommentar klar hervorstehends Grundthese—die unio cum Christo der entscheidende Faktor” (Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, IV/3, Studienausg ed. [Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1986–1993], 632, quoted in Peters, “The Resistance of Self-Justification to God’s Grace,” 65). In Peters’s reading, Luther “does not separate the person (persona) of Christ and his work (officium) from each other. Instead, Christ himself, both his person and his work, is the Christian righteousness, that is, the ‘righteousness of faith.’ Christ—and therefore also his entire person and work—is really and truly present in the faith itself (in ipsa fide Christus adest)” (Luther, “Commentary on Galatians 2:16 of 1535,”

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Luther’s Works, vol. 26, 129 [St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1963], quoted in Peters, “The Resistance of Self-Justification to God’s Grace,” 65). Christ is present in believers, and his indwelling presence is nothing other than righteousness which justifies believers. Righteousness does not remain outside but indwells those who believe in Christ. This reading stands in contrast to “the forensic school” and in close affinity to Tuomo Mannermaa’s reading of Luther which we will discuss in a moment. Yet, if Peters’s reading is right, then a question remains why Luther could not agree with Calvin’s acceptance of the ecumenical agreement. 98. Also given that the eschatological reality in the person of Christ is the reality in which the church is one—that is, the one body of Christ—Calvin could have been consistent in welcoming the ecumenical proposal, envisioning one and the same eschatological reality of totus Christus. But the mutual condemnation on this issue unfortunately obscured the eschatological vision. Afterward, The Council of Trent (between 1545 and 1563) anathematized the Reformation doctrine of justification: “If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them . . . , let him be anathema” (“Decree Concerning Justification,” CANON XI, ch. 16, trans. H. J. Schroeder [Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 1978]). For Trent, the Holy Spirit act is necessary for one’s justification: the infusion of righteousness into the believer. For Roman Catholics, the forensic understanding of justification is deviated from their orthodox teaching as “we are not merely considered to be righteous but are truly called righteous and are righteous” (“Decree on Justification,” ch. 7). Inner change and spiritual growth are required for justification. Accordingly, the Protestant principle sola fide was also rejected and anathematized. Justification requires human cooperation and “the works which they have done in Christ” (CANON XI, ch. 16). “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified . . . [and] that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, . . . let him be anathema” (CANON IX). The infused righteousness which is initially partially complete may increase or decrease in degree. The believers are to be “more and more justified” (Rev. 22:11) with “faith cooperating with good works” (ch. 10). The partially complete righteousness within the believer leaves some “debt of temporal punishment,” which needs to be purged “either in this world, or in the next in Purgatory” (CANON XXX, ch. 16). Thus the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification leads to the doctrine of purgatory, which the Reformation descents will raise qualms at.

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Toward the Eschatological Understanding of Justification Modern Accounts

Now we proceed to the modern doctrines of justification. The forensic sense of justification evokes the image of the heavenly courtroom in the final judgment and is therefore readily linked to its eschatological aspect. It can be said that the eschatological aspect was nascent in a seed-form under the surface of the Reformation theology of justification, and it will naturally come to a point where it sprouts up, making the eschatological nature more visible. Now to see the emergence of the eschatological character of justification in modern accounts, this chapter will focus on three theologians—Karl Barth, Tuomo Mannermaa, and N. T. Wright. In our exploration, we will also see the distinction between “the antecedent eschatological future” and “the consequential and posterior one” in order to affirm that the (antecedent) eschatological reality in the risen Christ relates to the whole history of this age, retroactively from the center of history. KARL BARTH: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE POSSIBLE A towering modern theologian, Karl Barth is unmistakably Protestant in that he affirms the forensic imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Barth upholds the alien character of justification when he writes, “The righteousness of God is righteousness from outside— . . . justitia aliena.”1 Barth is clear: justification occurs outside us and so remains external to us since justification is constituted by the event of Jesus Christ—that is, what Jesus has done in his earthly ministry. The believer’s righteousness is “iustitia alienan, because first and essentially it is iustitia Christi, and only as such nostra, mea iustitia.”2 Capturing Luther’s compelling insight, Barth puts it, “That is why our 79

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justification is not a matter of subjective experience and understanding. That is why we cannot perceive and comprehend it. That is why it is so puzzling to us.”3 In his exposition, McCormack aptly states, “[J]ustification, for Barth, is something that is complete and effective in Jesus Christ.”4 It is indeed a Christ-centered doctrine. Barth also affirms the judicial and forensic nature of justification, stating, “the divine verdict of acquittal . . . stands at the heart of justification.”5 He indicates the inextricable relation between justification as God’s judicial verdict and his wrath. Barth does not mitigate the severity of God’s wrath on sin and sinners that “flames forth against [humans].”6 God’s wrath upon the whole of humanity “utterly abandons them. It burns them right down to faith.”7 The divine judge executes his justice, and his wrath consumes exhaustively in regard to sinners and sins. It is clearly God’s juridical act on sinners. Now having that said, it must be noted that what burns fiercely is not just the divine wrath but God’s love in his righteousness. Divine love is “the reverse side of His righteousness, of the judicial sentence. . . . [His judgment] is not foreign to the love of God. On the contrary, it is His love which burns in this way, burning away in men that which opposes and defies it, in order that they really live by faith in Jesus Christ.”8 For this love, God became a man in whom “He, the Judge, was judged in our place and favor.”9 The judgment has been executed by the Judge on himself in the Son for sinners in his burning righteous love. Thus, on this man, judgment and justification occurred at once. “[I]n the same judgment [of Jesus on the cross] in which God accuses and condemns us as sinners and gives us up to death, He pardons us and places us in a new life before Him and with Him.”10 Put differently, in his condemnation and justification, Jesus and sinners belong together. In his condemnation we are condemned; in his vindication—the resurrection—we are justified (and resurrected). What is his is ours. Thus, as Barth stresses the divine judgment and vindication that occurred to Christ and to believers, he underlines the forensic construal of justification in the Protestant tradition. As the judicial character is affirmed, the concept of imputation is also retained in Barth’s thinking even though he says that “we are saying far too little when we use a favorite expression of the Reformers and call it an imputation of the alien righteousness of Jesus Christ.”11 It seems that Barth wants to emphasize the absolute reality of justification more than the term “imputation” appears to suggest. Barth writes: There is no room for any fears that in the justification of man we are dealing only with a verbal action, with a kind of bracketed “as if,” as though what is pronounced were not the whole truth about man. Certainly, we have to do with a declaring righteous, but it is a declaration about man which is fulfilled and therefore effective in this event, which corresponds to actuality because it creates

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and therefore reveals the actuality. It is a declaring righteous which without any reserve can be called a making righteous.12

God’s justifying verdict does not create a pretense of righteousness but the reality that has been fulfilled, actual, and effective. What God’s verdict creates is not semblance. It is not merely a verbal action that leaves the reality unchanged but the reality itself which makes everything different, more real than any other present realities. When the divine verdict is pronounced to make it so, it really becomes so, and it is true of justification of the ungodly. Even though imputation is not a key term in his account of justification, it does not suggest that he has jettisoned the notion entirely. After all, the doctrine of imputation is a natural corollary of the doctrine of alien righteousness. As McCormack indicates in his exposition, “The [Reformation] language of imputation wanted to say that the basis for our justification is to be found, always and at every moment, in the ‘alien righteousness’ of Christ and not in ourselves.”13 Barth wants to stress the realness of righteousness that has been declared on the sinner, not the “as-if” flavor that the doctrine of imputation seems to infuse although he affirms it. At this point, it is important to highlight some significant implications in Barth’s theology of justification. As he affirms the characteristic features of the Reformation doctrine, his theology paves the way to what can be called “ontology of the possible.” One of his notable proponents Trevor Hart clarifies it as follows. According to Hart, the ontology of the Protestant doctrine confronts “the traditional western post-Aristotelian identification of the real with actual.”14 Hart states that such an ontology constitutes “the very weave of the fabric of Barth’s entire theological enterprise, the scandalon which underlies every section of the Dogmatics, whether it is explicitly mentioned or not.”15 The ontology of his Protestant justification is an “alternative ontology which we must seek to take into consideration in interpreting Barth at every stage.”16 In Hart’s analysis, Barth’s evangelical doctrine entails an “ontology of the possible,”17 which “would alter decisively the center of gravity in the eschatological dimension of the doctrine, making the future which God has established as a possibility for me more real in relation to me than the present in which, along with the rest of creation, I groan and travail, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God.”18 The ontology of justification refers to and upholds the reality and weight of the promised future—that is, the ontological status of God’s verdict on us which occurs in the eschatological future and yet is effective in our present. It gives due weight to the reality of what is going to be real in the promised future and recognizes the effects on the present, which operates more powerfully than things in the past and the present. The eschatological future is perhaps more real than any power of status quo. The

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Protestant doctrine of justification underscores the in-breaking power and reality of the “not yet,” that is, that of the divine justifying verdict, which is a promissory and invincible reality. Put differently, the evangelical doctrine of simul peccator et iustus offers a unique ontology in which the promised future is incursive into the present. Barth writes, “[The believer] is both together: simul peccator et iustus, yet not half peccator and half iustus, but both altogether. And the pardon of man, declared in the promise concerning him, the reality of his future already in the present, is not less than this: totus iustus.”19 The doctrine indicates the reality of “not yet” which has broken into the present, furtively and powerfully operating in the sinful present travails. Barth also puts it, “In [Jesus’s] speech and action, in His person, there is actualized the kingdom of God drawn near.”20 The doctrine of justification is a doctrine that issues a clarion call: the kingdom of God has come. The future is here. Now “where is reality to be located?”21 Hart’s question is simple and crucial. In Barth’s theology, the reality as such points to the person of Jesus Christ. The eschatological reality of the divine declaration, which is also the reality of the eschatological future, is to be located in the person of Jesus Christ. Hart elaborates: If we would deal with truth and reality, then for Barth we must turn not to our own empirical experience, nor to some metaphysical sphere beyond that experience, nor to God’s future, nor to divine intention per se; rather we must consider the concrete history of the one man Jesus of Nazareth. It is here, Barth insists, that the divine intention for man has been actualized (not just anticipated); it is here that the eschatological future of God has broken decisively into history.22

The man of Nazareth has the actuality and fulfillment of the promised future in his own person. He himself is the eschatological reality that encompasses and comprehends the whole of the new reality—that is, the New Creation— within himself. At this point, if we take this a bit further, it can be legitimately said that the ontology of justification, that is, also of the promised future, entails the concept of retroactivity, for the eschatological future relates to the present retroactively in the divine justifying verdict. The divine pardoning declaration as the eschatological reality is pronounced and issued to those travailing in the sinful present. When it is admitted that the eschatological future relates to and breaks into the present in the divine word, a concept of grace in retroactivity comes into view. God’s saving grace is retroactively operative from the reality of the promised future to the present. The eschatological future effectively communicates itself to the present, destabilizes and overturns the status quo of this age: declaring the ungodly righteous, the pious ungodly, the

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poor blessed, and the rich condemned. The eschatological reality unsettles and subverts the established values of the present age. The divine justifying verdict is the very act of retroactive incursion from the eschatological future. Thus, the concept of grace in retroactivity becomes patent via the Protestant forensic understanding of justification, which arises from the emphasis on the alienness of Christ’s righteousness. So the forensic understanding of justification provides a segue into “the ontology of the possible,” in which the reality of the future emerges more real and powerful—albeit hidden—than any powers of status quo. Put differently, in the Protestant legacy, the doctrine of justification naturally lends itself to the ontology of the eschatological future in which God’s promised future is fulfilled and realized and from which his grace makes an incursion of the present. TOUMO MANNERMAA: JUSTIFICATION AS DEIFICATION The forensic sense of justification has not remained unchallenged even from the Protestant camp itself. Some modern Lutheran theologians in Finland put the forensic sense into question as Osiander did in the time of the Reformation. The “new” interpretation of Luther spearheaded by Tuomo Mannermaa comes up with a fresh Protestant account that unsettles a well-established strand in the Protestant legacy. As American Lutheran theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson indicate, the Finnish school of Tuomo Mannermaa insists that “‘in faith itself Christ is really present,’ a literal translation of Luther’s ‘in ipsa fide Christus adest.’”23 They add, “This idea is played off against a purely forensic concept of justification.”24 In the traditional forensic understanding, the sinners do not become actually and effectively righteous but are only considered righteous: “It is as though we are righteous.”25 The “as-though” flavor should be removed from the Protestant account, as it is not Luther’s original intention, according to the Finnish theologian. Mannermaa’s account of justification can be unpacked in terms of the doctrine of God. In his theological reflection, God is the one who gives what God is to others, and it is what God does inherently in eternity. So the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes the undercurrent of the Finnish account of justification. The Finnish theologian writes: According to Luther, the divinity of the triune God consists in that “He gives.” And what he gives, ultimately, is himself. The essence of God, then, is identical with the essential divine properties in which he gives himself, called the names of God: Word, justice, truth, wisdom, love, goodness, eternal life,

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and so forth. . . . God bestows on the believer God’s essential properties; that is, what God gives of himself to humans is nothing separate from God himself.26

God is triune and gives what he is to “others” within himself in the pre-temporal eternity: from the Father to the Son, and from the Son to the Father in the Spirit. The self-gifting occurs within the Godhead before the creation of the universe. But the act of self-gifting has not been limited to the Godhead only. The divine Being radiates and cascades outwardly and gratuitously in goodness and love over to the creation. In his overflowing plenitude, God gives what he has and is to the creaturely others, and the creaturely recipients are bestowed the gift from God, the gift which is no other than Godself. To put it in terms of justification, God gives us righteousness and so justifies us, and that is nothing other than the act of God’s self-gifting. The believer is given what God is—the divine righteousness out of his abundant grace, and thereby the sinner is justified. In justification, the sinner receives the gift of Godself. When the sinner listens to the preaching of the gospel and receives the Word, he receives the divine righteousness, that is, the very essence of God. Here the Word is inseparable from divine righteousness: the sinful recipient of the Word cannot avoid receiving righteousness, remaining unrighteous and unjustified. The receipt of the Word makes justification inevitable. Also, crucially, the Word and righteousness received by the human being are one and the same with God himself. They are homoousios with God as they are one divine essence. The righteousness—received with the Word—is God himself. When God “grants righteousness . . . , [he does not remain] absent himself” from the gift of righteousness.27 The gift of righteousness is the gift of God himself and therefore of his essence. According to Mannermaa, “‘The righteousness of God’ is identical to the Hebrew expression ‘God the righteousness.’”28 The divine attribute is God himself, and it is given to the sinner as a gift. In the Finnish account, therefore, justification is God’s gratuitous self-gifting to the ungodly.29 For that reason, Mannermaa unflinchingly avers that Luther’s doctrine of justification entails deification (theosis). God’s act of justification as his act of self-gifting involves the believer’s receipt of God’s essence and therefore results in deification of the recipient. Those who receive righteousness with the Word receive God himself, and the act of reception of God himself deifies the human recipient. In this sense, justification is deification. Mannermaa indicates what Luther himself wrote: “Much has been written about how man is to become divine; they have made ladders on which one might climb up to heaven and many such things . . . so that you may become full of God [and . . . ] that your whole life be completely divine.”30 Here we can see that Luther is favorable toward the concept of deification. Justification does not

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only mean absolution of sin but also “participation in the being and thus in the properties of God.”31 When the sinner receives the divine property, righteousness, in justification, she does not receive part of the divine Being but “become[s] completely divine . . . [in] all abundance.”32 So, Mannermaa strikingly insists, “The concept of deificatio is at the very heart of the Reformer’s doctrine of justification.”33 In this regard, of course, Mannermaa’s interpretation makes a favorable ecumenical gesture toward the Roman Catholic church as well as the Eastern Orthodox church.34 As Mannermaa has rejected the judicial aspect of justification, he views the righteousness as something internal to the believer. That was one of the primary concerns for the Finnish Lutheran from the beginning. In his diagnosis, the problem with the traditional understanding of Luther’s justification is that “the Christus pro nobis (Christ for us) is separated from the Christus in nobis (Christ within us).”35 However, on Mannermaa’s account, the righteousness does not remain outside the believer but “[t]he righteousness which is present in faith—that is, Christ—is within the Christian as an actual reality.”36 That is what Luther calls “‘formal righteousness’ (formalis iustitia), that is, a real righteousness that is there in the reality of the Christian’s being.”37 Thus, a sense of internal righteousness is engendered in the Finnish Lutheranism as in Roman Catholicism. However, it must be noted: it does not mean that the Finnish Lutheran doctrine of justification completely squares with the Roman Catholic doctrine. Mannermaa does not mean that the believer should nurture and grow righteousness to a greater degree within himself. In the Finnish theology, like the traditional one, the level of righteousness within the believer does not fluctuate in accordance with the human merit. Mannermaa states, “[E]ven when this righteousness is present in a human being, it remains . . . God’s own righteousness, of which the human being cannot boast. [In that sense,] Christ in nobis is Christ extra nos.”38 Christ is present not in part or in varying degrees but fully and completely in the believer as a whole. So is the righteousness in the believer. There is another aspect that Mannermaa’s theology of justification bears some resemblance to the Roman Catholic teaching for it has ethical implications within it for his account includes love as the essential element of justification. On Mannermaa’s account, righteousness and love are inextricably related and so inseparable from each other as both of them come from God and are the simple essence of God. Once the believer is given righteousness, he cannot be given just a part but the whole of the divine Being, that is essentially love itself. Consequently, “the Christian in his faith partakes . . . [in] love” as the property of God.39 Put differently, in justification, if the Word is given and so Christ is given into someone, “Christ . . . as donum, brings love with him.”40 In this regard, Mannermaa quotes Luther: “[F]aith loves

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and acts, as Galatians 5 says: ‘Faith is active through love.’”41 Justification brings divine love into the believer and so enkindles the soul for the love of God and of others. The ethical implication is clear: As the believer participates in the divine love by faith in justification, he is empowered to love others by the love that God himself is and so is essentially divine. In this regard, as Mannermaa quotes Luther, “[A] Christian is through faith free and lord over all, but is bound by love and is everyone’s servant.”42 Thus, social ethics is entailed in the doctrine of justification: “Believers give themselves freely to their neighbors and take upon themselves their neighbors’ burden, misery, sins, poverty, and weakness as if these were their own burdens, their own misery, their own sin, poverty, and weakness.”43 The modern Lutheran theologian boldly reinterprets the doctrine of justification so that it may entail ethical implications. By so doing, it comes to have a considerable ecumenical potentiality to envisage rapprochement with Roman Catholicism. Most evangelicals may find the Finnish account laudable in that it sustains attention to Jesus as the foundation of our justification, rather than to the role of the human cooperative merit to it. Some may find Mannermaa’s rejection of the forensic sense of justification understandable in a way, for the Protestant forensicism does not entail the inner change of the believer. Some or many Protestants may have had the urge to rethink the Reformation doctrine in a way that it cannot serve as an excuse for some moral laxity in Christian life as the Finnish scholar seems to do. So it is commendable and understandable in a way. However, despite the fresh approach to the doctrine and its ecumenical significances, it is not fully satisfactory in that it does not offer a fuller understanding of justification: as it rejects the forensic aspect of justification, it does not effectively throw a spotlight on the eschatological aspect of justification. N. T. WRIGHT: THE ESCHATOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION In recent decades, debates on justification were stirred up, and an English church theologian has attracted a wide audience and many critics in the transatlantic regions and beyond. Bishop N. T. Wright has legitimately underscored the eschatological aspect of justification and so opens up a possibility of the concept of retroactive grace. In this section, I will offer a brief account of his doctrine of justification and critical responses from evangelical theologians, seeing how he forges a link between the present justification and eschatology. In the course of our exploration, I will indicate a problem with his account and highlight the need to distinguish modes of the eschatological future.

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Wright defines justification as “what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world.”44 He is clear that “‘justification’ in the present, anticipat[es] the verdict of the future.”45 On his account, it must be noted, Wright makes a distinction between the present justification and the future justification. The present justification concerns whether one belongs to the Abrahamic family: “This present declaration unites all believers into a single people, the one family promised to Abraham (Galatians 2:14–3:29; Romans 3:27–4:17).”46 One’s membership is the primary concern here. Even though the soteriological sense does not come to the fore, Wright does not totally sweep it aside. He insists that the newly formed community by the present justification is “the people whose sins have been dealt with and forgiven as part of the fulfilled promise of covenant renewal (Jeremiah 31:31–34).”47 He continues, “Membership in this family cannot be played off against forgiveness of sins. The two belong together.”48 Thus, while Wright does not reject the soteriological sense, his primary emphasis lies on its community-forming nature of the present justification.49 The future justification, according to Wright, is the final verdict of God “in accordance with one’s ‘works.’”50 Many evangelicals have qualms about it or even bristle at it when one speaks of justification and the human work in the same breath. And yet it should be noted that Wright speaks of the future justification here—not the present one. It is hard to deny that the future justification occurs on the basis of one’s works, as it is amply attested in the Bible.51 Wright refers to Romans 2:1–16 and writes: The verdict of the last day will truly reflect what people have actually done. It is extremely important to notice . . . that Paul never says Christians earn the final verdict, or that their “works” must be complete and perfect. . . . They are seeking it, not earning it. And they are seeking it through that patient, spirit-driven Christian living in which . . . from one point of view the spirit is at work, producing these fruits (Galatians 5.22f.), and from another point of view the person concerned is making the free choices, the increasingly free.52

At this point, it is important to note that for Wright, the work to be judged on the final day is not something that the human agent has done alone but with the help of the Holy Spirit. Wright stresses that it is “the ‘works’ done by the Christian through the Spirit (e.g., Romans 8.12–17).”53 On his account, the Spirit involves justification—in regard to the future verdict. Wright writes that Apostle Paul “warns us against attempting to construct a complete ‘doctrine of justification’ without reference to the spirit.”54 Here by including the Holy Spirit in the future justification, Wright offers a trinitarian account of justification.55 He insists that it is not “wrong, or heretical, to declare that as well as and also because of our absolute faith in the crucified and resurrected

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Saviour [as] we also trust in the life-giving spirit who enables us to say ‘Abba, father’ (Romans 8.12–16) and ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Corinthians 12.3).”56 Again, he does not refer to the role of the Holy Spirit in the present justification but in the future justification. It is the work done by the believers—those justified in the present—in the power of the Holy Spirit.57 So while the present justification involves the divine juridical verdict on one’s membership of Abrahamic family,58 the future justification involves one’s work done by the power of the Holy Spirit. At this juncture, questions can be raised: How are the two modes of justification related to each other? How is the present justification related to the future justification? Wright states: “[T]he present verdict . . . anticipates the verdict that will be issued on the last day. . . . [However, w]e are not yet told, though we are given a few hints, how the present verdict and the future verdict will correspond to one another. . . . [We are told only] that it is so.”59 Wright says that he does not know how they correspond, but he does not remain merely baffled. He turns to Christology, saying, “In order to understand . . . how that future verdict is correctly anticipated in the present . . . , we need to understand one more level of the covenant: Christology.”60 He writes, “Sin was condemned there, in his flesh, so that it shall not now be condemned here, in us, in those who are ‘in him.’”61 In line with this, it can be said that we died in his death; we are raised in his resurrection. We were condemned in his condemnation and justified in his vindication, that is, his resurrection. In other words, we are justified as we “stand on resurrection ground.”62 For Wright, “The resurrection . . . is the beginning of God’s promised new age,”63 and it “awaits fulfillment when victory is won over all enemies, including death itself, so that God is all in all (1 Corinthians 15.28), when creation itself is set free from its slavery to corruption and decay, and comes to share the liberty of the glory of God’s children (Romans 8.18–26).”64 Thus, Wright offers a christological account in regard to how the present and the future justifications are related. And yet, it still remains obscure how christology can be the answer to the question of the relation between the present and the future. It only suggests that the beginning of the New Creation that emerged from the resurrection awaits the fulfillment of promises and the ultimate and final victory. Crucially, Wright holds not only that the present justification is a prolepsis of the future justification but also “that [future] verdict has been brought forward into the present.”65 By so doing, Wright hints at a concept of retroactivity in which the future verdict comes to the present time and justifies those who believe in this age. “Moving back from future to past, God’s action in Jesus forms Paul’s template for this final justification.”66 On Wright’s account, the origin of the present justification lies in the future. It is not just

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that the present history unfolds into the future but that the future breaks into the present. In this dynamic, the future justification relates to the present one. At this juncture, however, some problems lurk here, which we will discuss in a moment. But, for now, let us briefly survey the criticisms leveled against Wright. Per Contra the Anglican theologian, most critics argue that the present justification is soteric in nature rather than community-forming. The divine verdict both in the present and in the future are salvific acts of God. While most critics appreciate the eschatological aspect of Wright’s theology of justification, they stress the homogeneity of the two modes of justification. One of the critics, Michael Barret states, “The New Perspective on Paul [including Wright] has rightly stressed the eschatological nature of justification but has done so at the expense of justification’s soteriological identity.”67 It is noteworthy here that critics by and large ground the present justification in the eschatological reality captured in the resurrection of Christ—which I would call the “precedent future” as will be discussed later. John Fesko aptly puts it, “All soteriology, including justification, is eschatological because of its connection to the resurrection of Christ, the in-breaking eschaton.”68 In the same vein, Richard Gaffin states, “All soteric experience derives from solidarity in Christ’s resurrection and involves existence in the New Creation, inaugurated by his resurrection.”69 Barret concurs: “[T]he justification [that the resurrection] effects is soteric.”70 In their remarks, the conceptual connections are well established between the present justification and the resurrection as the eschatological reality of the New Creation. The reality of the New Creation in the resurrection constitutes the basis for justification of the sinner in the present age. If it is the case that God’s justifying grace comes from the eschatological future of the resurrection to the present, the “retroactive” character of grace comes into view as a significant element for the metaphysics of justification.71 A PROPOSAL: FROM THE FUTURE OF SHEER GRACE Critics’ emphasis generally lies on the soteric sense of justification, but mine is placed on the relation of the present justification to the eschatological future in Christ for a theological understanding of time and history. For another critical reflection, I would like to point out some dubious or problematic aspects of Wright’s account which can be revealed with the following questions: From which future? What kind of future is the present justification issued and pronounced from? The questions themselves may sound odd, but I suggest here that we need to make a distinction between two modes of the eschatological future. One kind is a future in which the divine verdict is pronounced in accordance with the believer’s deeds. It can be coined

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the posterior future since it comes after the present as an outcome of what has been done in the past and the present. In this kind of the eschatological future, our good works will be measured against the divine juridical and moral standard in the final judgment. While Wright is not always clear about which future is brought forward to the present and becomes the basis of the present justification, there was a moment when he states, “God will declare on the last day that certain people are ‘in the right,’ by raising them from the dead; and that verdict has been brought forward into the present, visibly and community-formingly.”72 In his remarks, it is suggested that from the future of the final judgment—the future of the general resurrection, God’s verdict is issued for the present justification. It is the future when all people are judged according to their works. At least here, Wright seems to say that the divine incursion of the present occurs from the posterior future which comes as a consequence from the past and the present. Another kind is a future that inhabits and ensconces itself in the person of Jesus Christ. There is no condemnation but justification in Jesus Christ. The old creation has passed away in his death, and the New Creation has come in his resurrection. The risen Jesus has the New Creation in his own person. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the person is the new creature in the new cosmos, for the person of the risen one is the new cosmological and eschatological reality. At this point, a proposal can be offered: in my understanding, God’s verdict is issued for our present justification from the eschatological future encapsulated in the person of the risen Christ—not from the posterior future. The eschatological—and yet precedent—future in the risen Christ has nothing to do with our merit but everything to do with what Jesus has done. The Father’s verdict is pronounced upon Christ in the Spirit at the resurrection without any contribution of human good works. This precedent future in Christ does not allow any room for the human merit in justification. Rather, the human work is manifested and culminated egregiously at its worst at the crucifixion of Jesus. So understood, justification has been accomplished by Christ alone for us and so has become the foundation for our justification.73 The present justification comes from the precedent eschatological future captured in the person of the risen Christ alone, from the future without the human merit. It is crucial to make such a distinction in the mode of the eschatological future. Otherwise, it follows that the human merits affect his or her own present justification. If the present justification occurs when the future justification is “brought forward” to the present, and if, as Wright seems to suggest, that future refers to the final future in which God pronounces justification in view of the human works, it follows that one’s merit in the future becomes infused into his or her own present justification. Such an understanding will

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lapse into the idea that human merit is indispensable to his own justification. To avoid that error, alternatively, the future hidden in the risen Jesus Christ should be considered as a determining and constitutional factor of our present justification. By so doing, the Reformation principle solus Christus in the present justification will be upheld. Otherwise, it would cause confusion between the precedent future in and of Jesus Christ and the posterior one in the final judgment day, and it may lead to a synergistic—or even (semi-)Pelagian—soteriology. This suggestion is well aligned with what Hart calls “ontology of the possible,” the ontology of justification worked out in reference to Karl Barth’s theology. For the resurrection is the justification and vindication of Jesus by the Father, the divine Judge, and by that event, Jesus is the one who has the reality of the eschatological future, that is, that of the New Creation in himself. The future in the risen Christ can be regarded as a “possibility” since it is a future. Although the future is the time of “not yet” and “the possible,” this possibility is not void of ontological weight. It is a reality, more real than what is experienced—visually and audibly—in the present age, for the divine justification/vindication powerfully declares, determines, and shapes our present. What occurs with Jesus as the event of the New Creation and so of the eschatological future occurs with those in him, determining and shaping their identity and reality. The construal of justification as the resurrection leads us to see that this is also a juridical and forensic event for what happened to Jesus Christ was the divine Judge’s verdict of the highest court that has transcended and reversed the verdict of this world on him, by the resurrection. The resurrection of the Son is God the Father’s verdict, vindication, and justification, carried out with the power of the Spirit. Of course, it is also a juridical event for us as it is for our Head. Also, it is a trinitarian event as it involves the work of the Holy Spirit (as well as those of the Father and the Son). But the pneumatological operation for justification is not to enable and help the believer to produce good work in her life as Wright says, but to make it possible with his power that Jesus is risen from the dead and so vindicated and justified by the Father. Into this trinitarian event of justification and vindication, we are taken up. So construed, this divine juridical event does not have the worrying “as-though” flavor, which the Finnish Lutherans would avoid, as it has objectively occurred to Jesus in the resurrection and therefore to those who are in him. Justification as an objective event occurred with Jesus and with those who are in him. This objective event of justification is an irreversible and complete reality, more real and powerful than any other subrealities of the past and the present. The identity of those in him is not based on merely a subjective emotional vindication but on a concrete and historical event. Furthermore, as the justification of Jesus is his resurrection, he is present to

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the Old Testament people as justified and vindicated. As Barth’s theology suggests, Jesus is the contemporary to all from the day of the first Easter. So when he is present to the Old Testament people, he was there with them as a person vindicated and justified by the Father with the power of the Holy Spirit, as well as wrapped in the glory of the New Creation. CONCLUSION This chapter has seen how the juridical construal of justification can give rise to the concept of grace as an incursion of the present by the eschatological future in Jesus Christ. In the early doctrinal accounts offered by Augustine and Aquinas, the eschatological character was not clear enough. Justification was understood as a lifelong process that accompanies the ontic change in believers. In their medieval theologies, justification was construed as an event that takes place within the soul of the believer. In the Reformation era, Martin Luther offered the external concept of divine righteousness, which is not affected by subjective internal turmoil. Even when the fierce of Anfechtung strikes the soul into the depth of anxiety, she remains safe as she is anchored into the external, transcendent, and imperturbable righteousness of Christ. Melanchthon has developed Luther’s construal of alien righteousness and offered a forensic account with the help of Erasmus’s translation. The importance of the juridical verdict came to the fore in the Lutheran follower’s reflection, and that motif could be readily connected to eschatology, that is, the eschatological verdict of the divine Judge. So those Lutheran understandings can be considered as a significant step toward the eschatological understanding of justification. In modern theology, Karl Barth followed the Protestant legacy, and in view of his theology of justification, “the ontology of the possible” has been worked out which challenges the ontology which equates the real with the actual. In the ontology of justification, the real is equated with the actual of the present but the promissory of the future, which is couched in the justifying verdict of God. The doctrine of justification entails the ontology of the possible and thus of the eschatological future, in which the future is not confined within itself only but makes an incursion of the present and thereby subverts status quo and renews and empowers those who receive the message from and of the future. Thus, as we have seen in Hart’s interpretation, Barth’s Protestant doctrine of justification provides a segue into a construal of grace breaking from the future into the present age. Another modern account of justification has been offered by Mannermaa. The Finnish Lutheran made an audacious move to reject the longlasting Lutheran legacy, the forensicism, and it creates possibilities of

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ecumenical rapprochement with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. For Mannermaa, justification is construed as the divine act of self-gifting to the believer. God gives sinners his righteousness as the gift of the divine Being itself, and thereby the ungodly are justified and so deified at once. The understanding of justification as deification enabled the Finnish Lutherans to make a favorable gesture to Eastern Orthodox, striking up meaningful conversations with them. Also, by construing righteousness as a gift for the believer, Mannermaa’s thought came close to the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification even though the level of righteousness does not fluctuate in the believer on his account. For Mannermaa, the gift of righteousness cannot be partial in the human being as the Being of God cannot be divisible but simply whole. Accordingly, the sinner becomes fully justified—not partially. Their ecumenical effort and their concerns about the ethical laxity in the Christian life can be deemed laudable. However, full justice still needs to be done with a view to the eschatological import of justification. A leading biblical scholar, N. T. Wright has effectively brought up the eschatological aspect of justification, rightly maintaining the distinction between the present justification and the future justification. He stresses that the latter is pronounced on the last judgment day in view of the works done in one’s life with the help of the Holy Spirit. That idea can be readily agreed: the future justification is not by faith alone but by faith and human merit as Jesus himself taught in the gospels. However, it causes a bit of confusion when Wright suggests (seemingly) that the divine verdict from the final judgment is brought forward into the present. To avoid confusion, a distinction must be made between the two different modes of the eschatological future, that is, between the precedent eschatological future in Christ and the posterior one on the final judgment day. The former is located in the person of Christ as the basis of our present justification; the latter on the horizon of time. The posterior future cannot serve as the basis of the present justification, for it is the outcome of our present life, and human merit is infused into the posterior future and the present justification. It would make the present justification fused with human merit after all. It should be Christ alone and the future in him that base the present justification. God’s justifying grace arises from the eschatological reality of Christ and breaks into the present time of those who believe in Christ. It is retroactive grace for it is issued from the eschatological reality in and/or of Christ.74 Thus, the doctrine of justification entails the concept of the retroactive grace of Christ, the one who has the eschatological reality in himself, and it reaches believers in all ages in its outward trajectory. The Reformation doctrine which has the forensic sense and emphasizes the eschatological nature of the divine verdict helps us to see the incursive activity of the eschatological future to the present.

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NOTES 1. Karl Barth, The Epistles to the Romans, trans. from the 6th ed. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 93. 2. CD IV/1, 549. 3. CD IV/1, 549. 4. Bruce McCormack, “Justitia aliena: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Evangelical Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness,” in Bruce McCormack, ed., Justification in Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2006), 196. McCormack also puts it, “The ground of our justification is always, at every moment of earthly existence, to be found in Jesus Christ. Justitia aliena—first, last, and always, the doctrine of justification is about alien righteousness” (McCormack, “Justitia Aliena,” 195). Cf. Harink’s insightful comment on this point: “Barth sees that justification is simply another way of saying that in the cross and resurrection God puts to death the whole cosmos and raises it again from the dead” (Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013], 50). 5. McCormack, “Justitia Aliena,” 192. 6. CD II/2, 487. 7. CD II/2, 487. 8. CD II/2, 487. 9. CD IV/1, 284. 10. CD IV/1, 516. 11. CD IV/1, 283. 12. CD IV/1, 95. Emphasis added. Barth also writes, “[T]he alien righteousness which has been effected . . . in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ does become and is always ours, so that in Him we are no longer unrighteous but righteous before God, we are the children of God, we have the forgiveness of our sins, peace with God, access to Him and freedom for Him” (CD IV/1, 283). Emphasis added. 13. McCormack, “Justitia Aliena,” 193. 14. Trevor Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification: ‘Imaginary Differences’?” Irish Theological Quarterly 59 (1993), 99. 15. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 101. 16. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 101. He also states, “To do otherwise is to engage in interpretative mischief and inevitably to misrepresent the substance of his thought” (Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 101). 17. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 99. 18. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 99. Emphasis added. 19. CD IV/1, 596. Emphasis added. 20. CD IV/2, 292. 21. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 99. 22. Hart, “Barth and Küng on Justification,” 100–101. 23. Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, Union with Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2000), viii. 24. Braaten and Jenson, Union with Christ, viii.

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25. Braaten and Jenson, Union with Christ, viii. Emphasis original. 26. Tuomo Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating? Modern Finnish Luther Research,” in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Union with Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 10. 27. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 28. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 15. Cf. “‘[T]he wisdom of God’ in its turn is equally ‘God the wisdom’; and ‘the power of God’ is ‘God the power.’ The properties of God, which at the same time form the essence of God” (Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 15). 29. It becomes clear at this point that the subterranean idea at work in Mannermaa’s theology of justification is the doctrine of divine simplicity. In God’s self-donation for justification, God does not give part of himself but the fullness of his indivisible Being so that we may “not . . . [have] a piece or even a few pieces of God, but all abundance.” Luther, 17 WA 17 I, 438, 14–28, quoted in Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 30. Luther, 17 WA 17 I, 438, 14–28, quoted in Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 31. “[T]he Christian in his faith partakes . . . [of] love. Christ . . . as donum, brings love with him” (Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16). 32. Luther, 17 WA 17 I, 438, 14–28, quoted in Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 33. Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 46. In the same vein, he says, “[T]he presence of Christ means a particular kind of divinization of Christians” (Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 64). Cf. It is debatable whether Mannermaa’s Luther is pre-reformation or legitimately reformational. 34. One may think the Finnish Lutheran view comes close to that of Osiander that Calvin has denounced for “the mixing” of natures between God and humanity. The extent to which Mannermaa’s theology bears resemblance to Osinanderism would be arguable. However, Mannermaa’s deification would not mean that the humans become omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. 35. Braaten and Jenson, Union with Christ, viii. 36. Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 24. 37. Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith. 24. Emphasis added. 38. Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 25. 39. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 40. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 16. 41. Luther, 19 WA 17 II, 98 13–14 quoted in Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 18. He also writes, “Clearly, Luther’s understanding of the relation between faith and love is grounded on his concept of participation and/or theosis” (Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 18); “faith . . . imports love along with it” (Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 17). 42. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 18.

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43. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 19. Cf. “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian” (Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 19). 44. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper, 2008), 140. 45. N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009), 147. 46. N. T. Wright, “Shape of Justification,” in Pauline Perspective: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 217. 47. Wright, “Shape of Justification,” 217. 48. Wright, “Shape of Justification,” 217. 49. A question may be raised: “Is this ‘ecclesiology’ as opposed to ‘soteriology’?” [Wright answers] Of course not” (Wright, Justification, 146). 50. Wright, Justification, 108. 51. For example, Psalm 62:12; Proverbs 11:31, 24:12; Matthew 16:27; Romans 2:6; 1 Corinthians 3:8, 4:5; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Colossians 3:25; 1 Peter 1:17; Revelation 20:12. 52. Wright, Justification, 167. 53. Wright, Justification, 108. 54. Wright, Justification, 85. 55. He says, “Indeed, I and others have long insisted that the doctrine is Trinitarian in shape” (Wright, Justification, 85). 56. Wright, Justification, 86. Emphasis original. 57. “[T]he point about the holy spirit, at least within Paul’s theology, is that when the spirit comes the result is human freedom rather than human slavery. . . . [T]he more the spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through, to take free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-won habits of life and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen” (Wright, Justification, 164). 58. “For Paul, a stress on ‘justification by faith’ is always a stress on the present status of all God’s people in anticipation of the final judgment” (Wright, Justification, 211). 59. Wright, Justification, 179. Emphasis original. 60. Wright, Justification, 81. 61. Wright, Justification, 84. 62. Wright, Justification, 233. 63. Wright, Justification, 85. Emphasis added. 64. Wright, Justification, 85. 65. Wright, Justification, 147. 66. Wright, “The Shape of Justification,” 217. 67. Matthew Barrett, “Raised for our Justification,” in Matthew Barrett, ed., The Doctrine on Which the Church Stands or Falls: Justification in Biblical, Theological, Historical, and Pastoral Perspective (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 591. Barret refers to what Paul says in Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (Barrett, “Raised for Our Justification,” 591).

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68. John Fesko, Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2008), 238. 69. Richard Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), 138. 70. Barret, “Raised for Our Justification,” 594. 71. Cf. I opine that Michael Horton could have made clearer which future is referred as the basis of our present justification. Horton writes, “Applying the ‘already but not yet’ distinction to justification either unhelpfully cracks the door open between justification and the final judgment or is simply irrelevant. Instead, we should see justification as the future verdict of the last day brought forward into the present by the Spirit through the gospel proclaimed and sealed in the sacraments” (Michael Horton, Justification Vol. 2 [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018], 275). It might leave an impression that Horton says: the present justification is the divine verdict of the last day judgment retroactively issued into the present. 72. Wright, Justification, 147. 73. If any role is to be assigned here to the Holy Spirit as in Wright’s account, it can be held that the Spirit works with or on Jesus Christ for his justification, that is, his resurrection. For Jesus was raised by the power of the Spirit. The doctrine of justification is still construed in a trinitarian manner but apart from any human merit. 74. Cf. “In the person of the resurrected Jesus himself the eschaton is now fully present and actualized, and so, in him, the end is beginning to be made available to all. It is here in the resurrected Jesus that the new eschatological life of the Spirit, a life that will be entirely free from suffering” (Weinandy, Does God Suffer? [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000], 234).

Chapter 6

The Physical Transcendence of the Risen One in Robert Jenson’s Theology

From the center of history, Jesus saves. In the middle of history, the power of the future arises and reaches out to all ages for he was resurrected as the eschatos there and then. The future is not locked in itself but reaches out to other times—the past and the present, as Pannenberg argues (chapter 2). The eschatological future is in the first-century man Jesus, as the Bible says, and is contemporaneous to all in all ages, as Barth argues (chapter 1). According to Barth, he is available to all in all ages from the first Easter morning. The Christian tradition (in the theologies of Augustine, Calvin, and the followers) has already suggested the idea when they construed the New Covenant as extending itself to the old time (chapter 3). Particularly, in their doctrine of justification, the Protestants have stressed its forensic nature for justification comes from the eschatological verdict of the Judge, and so it can be taken as eschatological in nature. It can be said that it comes with the inbreaking power of the eschatological future, which arises from the justification and vindication of the Son by the Father in the resurrection (chapters 4 and 5).1 So Barth could say with a little bit of twist to the Johannine prologue: “Jesus” was in the beginning. For the modern theologian, it was not the Logos asarkos but “Jesus” who was there when the creation became into being. The arresting sense of the statement can gain impetus when it is considered with his rejection of the doctrine of Logos asarkos. So understood, it would follow that the Logos ensarkos—Jesus—was there in the beginning. However, the impetus was much blunted when Barth said that it was only the spiritual presence of Jesus.2 The initial audacity of the claim stops short of working out an innovative metaphysics as his initial theological logic is not fully prosecuted. Barth could have more consistently carried this on, affirming the full humanity of Jesus whose presence has the outward vector from the resurrection. 99

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Then questions can be posed: To what extent can we affirm that Jesus was at the beginning of the creation? Can we say genuinely—more than Barth does—that Jesus, the incarnate Son not the Logos asarkos, was at the beginning of the creation? Can we say that Jesus was then and there as the risen one in full humanity, banishing the gnostic whiff which separates Jesus from his full humanity? In this regard, we need to note an eminent Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, who worked out his theology in the wake of Karl Barth and moved beyond him, prosecuting his christological insight in his reflection. Jenson rejects the doctrine of Logos asarkos (as Barth does or more than he does) and therefore could suggest that the man Jesus was there in the Old Testament era, including the beginning of history. A stumbling block on the road to this understanding, however, is that Jenson’s suggestion is perhaps too implicit and has occasioned some misunderstandings and misinterpretations of his theology. So the aim of this final chapter is to offer a legitimate exposition, clearing misinterpretations of his theology, and move toward affirmation of his innovative idea about the man Jesus as the risen one and his relation to time. Also, in the course of this chapter, we will contemplate the scientific possibility of the physical entity being retroactive to the past.3 FOR A LEGITIMATE READING OF JENSON’S THEOLOGY Jenson’s account of the preexistence of the Son has often been criticized rather unfairly as his underlying logic and his insightful notion of the transcendence of the Son has gone unnoticed. Jenson’s account deserves a fresh and careful reading that uncovers its subterranean logic and conviction. In this section, we will critically examine misleading analyses of Jenson’s theology, analyses offered by major critics such as George Hunsinger, Simon Gathercole, and Oliver Crisp. The Pre-existent Son Only as a Narrative Pattern? It is understandable that critics find it puzzling when Jenson states the following on the pre-existence of the Son: “[T]he Son appears as a narrative pattern of Israel’s created human story before he can appear as an individual Israelite within that story.”4 According to Jenson, “what ontologically precedes the birth to Mary of Jesus who is God the Son . . . is the narrative pattern of being going to be born to Mary.”5 Before Jesus was born in a Jewish family in the first century, he existed as a narrative pattern in the Old Testament time. So construed, the pre-existent Son is not the Logos asarkos. For Jenson, the

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pre-existent Son or the Logos is never in “an unincarnate state . . . , but a pattern of movement within the event of the Incarnation, the movement to incarnation, as itself a pattern of God’s triune life.”6 The life of Israel as presented in the Bible is the Life and Being of the Son who was going to be born as a human being and so as Israel. Israel’s narrative, at some point of history, was made into a human being through the birth to Mary. In their readings, most critics have concluded that Jenson’s theology of the pre-existence of the Son leaves no room for his personal existence as he pre-exists merely as a pattern. George Hunsinger argues that in Jenson’s theology “the Son enjoys no antecedent reality.”7 As a result, the reality of the pre-existent Son remains “merely embryonic and potential”8 in Jenson’s theology. It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the heretical error of Arianism.9 Or if Jenson does not repristinate the old heresy, his christology can be considered “at least ‘neo-Arian’”10 since the Son’s existence merely as a narrative pattern certainly lacks the weight of the reality. In Hunsinger’s reading, Jenson allows a time when the Son was not existent—as a real person. Simon Gathercole’s understanding of Jenson’s christology does not much differ from Hunsinger’s. Even though the tone of his criticism is rather softer than Hunsinger’s, Gathercole also catches the scent of Arianism when he says, “The plain sense of Jenson’s language might imply that he is falling into Arianism.”11 As a way of criticism, Gathercole presents his New Testament christology, highlighting the fact that the Son indeed pre-exists as a real person: first, “the Logos, who is also Son of Man and Son of God, is ‘in the beginning with God’”;12 second, there was Christ as “the co-agent in creation . . . through whom all things came into being”;13 third, there is “Christ’s presence and action in the history of Israel.”14 Gathercole elaborates: in the New Testament theology, Christ was understood as “accompanying Israel’s wilderness wanderings” as the rock and as the one whom the Israelites tested.15 Also, the prophet Isaiah is considered to have seen “Jesus’ glory and spoke[n] about him”16 in John’s gospel. Lastly, Gathercole highlights that the pre-existent Son is a real person: he is “real and personal, because it is invariably the case that the person of Jesus Christ defines the ‘that’ and the ‘how’ of pre-existence.”17 It is intriguing to see that the New Testament scholar makes a close connection between the pre-existent Son and Jesus: “Just as the New Testament identifies the risen and exalted Lord with the Jesus who was born, lived, and died, so also the New Testament identifies this one who was put to death and exalted with the one through whom all things were made.”18 Gathercole seems to affirm that “Jesus Christ is pre-existent as divine wisdom”19 as he is not fully satisfied with D. G. Dunn’s understanding of Christ as “the preexistence of God” since Gathercole believes “this is not what Paul actually

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says.”20 Gathercole underscores J. Habermann’s point: “Die Person Jesu von Nazareth das entscheidende Kriterium für die personale Präexistenz war.”21 The extent to which Gathercole’s New Testament theology upholds the idea that Jesus was in the beginning is not always clear as it leaves a question: whether he really means that Jesus the man from Nazareth is the pre-existent Son who was in the beginning. Yet, Gathercole makes a close connection between Jesus and the pre-existent Son, and the closer the connection is, the closer his christology comes to Jenson’s even though the critic fails to recognize the striking similarities with his theology. Oliver Crisp also cannot find the personal pre-existence of Jesus Christ in Jenson’s account. While being puzzled by Jenson’s notion of the Son as “a narrative pattern of Israel’s created human story,”22 Crisp attempts some interpretations: first, he suggests it is possible to read Jenson to mean that Christ pre-exists his human birth to Mary in the form of the Spirit. “Christ exists ‘within’ the life of Israel in some fashion, prior to his Incarnation rather like the Holy Spirit is said to exist ‘within’ the lives of Christians.”23 But Crisp is aware of Jenson’s blatant rejection of the Logos asarkos24 and therefore that such an interpretation has no room in Jenson’s theology. The second possible reading offered by Crisp is that “Christ is identical with all the people who make up Old Testament Israel.”25 In this reading, “Christ preexists as Israel.”26 But he considers “[s]uch a claim . . . so theologically exotic”27 for “this raises all sorts of theological problems. For instance, it would mean that Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, and Malachi are all God Incarnate.”28 In fact, Jenson would not balk at such a claim if it is understood in view of the doctrine of theosis. The Old Testament Israel can be considered as “Christ,” on Jenson’s account, since they are united with Jesus Christ and become members of his body. In this union, Israel is “divinized” and regarded as “Christ,” without creating many christs or “additional God-humans,”29 but the one and only totus Christus. Christ is embracive and accommodative of other human beings in his own body and so can be a corporate person. Jenson puts it, “[In the final eschaton,] Christ will know himself as his people with no more reservation; he will be the head of a body that he does not need to discipline. Thus he will eternally adore God as the one single and exclusive person of the totus Christus.”30 Crisp offers another possible interpretation: Jesus as a man pre-exists his birth to Mary:31 “it is Christ (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth) who pre-exists the incarnation, and not merely a divine entity who has yet to become incarnate.”32 Crisp is right here to indicate that for Jenson, the Son is never unincarnate and that this claim has “the eschatological dimension” which has to do with the idea that “Christ’s sonship . . . comes ‘from’ his resurrection.”33 Here Crisp’s interpretation is on the right track even though he finds this difficult to apprehend how a man pre-exists the time of his birth. In fact, his interpretation

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comes close to what Jenson really means when he says, “Christ pre-exists as Jesus of Nazareth and as the narrative pattern of the history of Israel?”34 Here Crisp does not have to put a question mark on what he thinks Jenson seems to say. Contra Jenson’s revisionary christology, Crisp insists that Christ preexistent in the Old Testament time must be existent “according to the divine nature, not as a human being.”35 The critic’s claim is understandable and widely accepted. However, he fails to note that a crucial concept comes into play in Jenson’s thought. The critic could have understood Jenson better if he realized that the concept of retroactivity plays a significant role in the subterranean stream of Jenson’s account. At this point, let us be clear that Jenson affirms the real personal preexistence of the Son. Contra the critics’ readings, Jenson’s christology in fact underscores that there was the Son of God, that he is more than a narrative pattern. In this regard, his understanding of the theophanies in the Old Testament is noteworthy. In his theological reading of the biblical narratives, a prophetic formula—“The word of the Lord came to” someone in Israel— can be interpreted not merely to mean that “[t]he Lord said to” someone36 but also that the Word did come. Jenson indicates that the Word came to Abraham, had a conversation with him, and even took a walk with him.37 The Word came as he walked. Here the Word that the patriarch encountered was not only an audible but also a visible and tangible reality. It was a real person. Jenson quotes a second-century Greek father Irenaeus: “The Word of God, who is the Savior of all and the ruler of heaven and of earth, who is Jesus, who assumed flesh and was anointed by the Father with the Spirit, was made to be Jesus Christ.”38 Jenson indicates: “Irenaeus’ Logos, whether preexistent or walking among us, is always the person Jesus.”39 For Jenson, even in the Old Testament time, the Logos was always the man Jesus whose person defines the fact and the way that the Logos pre-exists as “das entscheidende Kriterium.”40 Jenson’s understanding of “the Angel of the Lord” and “the Glory of the Lord” in the theophany narratives is also notable. In his reading, the angel and the glory demonstrate a double identity as they are identified as the Lord and distinguished from the Lord in the narratives. “These appearances were recognized by the rabbis as one reality, God’s Shekinah . . . as one who is other than God yet is the same God.”41 In other words, they demonstrate the homoousios relationship with the God of Israel.42 In Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel of God (Genesis 32; Hosea 12:4), he was the angel from God and God himself. For his face-to-face encounter with him could have taken Jacob’s life away. The Glory of God displays the same structure of its identity: when Solomon dedicated the temple as the house for God, it was the Glory of the Lord that moved into the place.43 How can the enigmatic figure have the double identity? Or who can have such a structure of identity—but

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the Son, who has the homoousios relationship with the Father? Thus Jenson sees the Son’s presence already in the Old Testament theophanies, the Son as the glory and the angel like one person.44 Jenson also turns to Gregory the Great’s hermeneutic of Ezekiel’s vision. In his commentary, he indicates what the pope states, “We should observe how the order is maintained: above the living beings is the firmament, above the firmament is the throne, and above the throne a man is delineated. For above holy men still living in . . . the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is . . . the man Christ Jesus.”45 In his medieval theological reading, it was Jesus who was on top of the hierarchical structure in the prophetic vision. It was a man. Jenson concurs with him: “The enthroned and onrushing figure [the Glory] . . . who calls Ezekiel to prophecy, looks like a man because he is one: Jesus the Christ.”46 For Jenson, the pre-existent Son in the Old Testament time was not just a narrative pattern but a real person. Jenson would uphold for instance what Gathercole argued: there were “Christ’s presence and action in the history of Israel.”47 It was the man Jesus who pre-existed. The protological Logos was not “the pre-existence of the Son as the existence of a divine entity that has simply not yet become the created personality of the Gospels,”48 but the Nazarene who is fully God and fully man. In Jenson’s hermeneutics, the Word in the beginning is “precisely the aggressively incarnate protagonist of this Gospel’s narrative.”49 The man is the coagent in creation through whom all things came into being in Jenson’s account.50 It was the man who encountered the patriarchs in his double homoousios identity and appeared in the visions of the prophets like Ezekiel. So the comings and engagements of this figure in the Old Testament time could not but display “the fleshly, incarnational character of God’s relation to Israel which makes the Christian claims about Jesus intelligible in the first place.”51 But how could it be that there was the man Jesus even before the time of his birth? If our thinking can break loose from the moorings of the linear concept of time, we can interpret the Bible in a way that allows for the considerable significance of “the Lord’s fleshly involvement with Israel.”52 Untainted by the modern (linear) concept of time, genuine and serious hermeneutics could allow ones to see Jesus throughout the Bible as we have seen in the above readings even though it now sounds too naïve to the modern readers. If we are untethered by it, such hermeneutic of the biblical narrative requires a revisionary understanding of time. If we can discard “too simple a scheme of successive states of the Word, that he is first unincarnate and then incarnate,”53 a new notion of time can emerge.

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Is the Future the Past? As already hinted at earlier, there is another perplexing strand woven into the fabric of Jenson’s theology: his idea of the eschatological future, that is, his concept of the priority of the eschatological future. It indeed sounds idiosyncratic that Christ’s futural existence precedes his human birth to Mary. Jenson insists, “Christ’s birth from God precedes his birth from the seed of David in that in God’s eternal life Christ’s birth from God is the divine future of his birth from the seed of David.”54 For Jenson, the divine existence of the Son precedes his human birth to Mary as the former possesses the eschatological future. The eschatological existence of the Son is considered divine and as “the post-existence” of the Son, which Jenson finds “more central in the New Testament than is the notion of ‘preexistence.’”55 In his critical assessment, Hunsinger avers that Jenson redefines the concept of the pre-existence of Christ so drastically to mean his “post-existence.”56 In Hunsinger’s analysis, Jenson plays a “fast-talking shell game” in which the original meaning is replaced with its antonym, resulting in a reversal of concepts: the future means the past, and the past means the future. Gathercole’s diagnosis comes in a similar vein: Jenson’s revisionary christology neglects “the protological dimension of Christology”57 and focuses excessively on the eschatological aspect.58 Another critic, Crisp, offers a little bit better understanding of the Lutheran theologian as he rightly points out that for Jenson, “it is the futurity of the Son that is somehow ‘prior’ to [his birth to Mary].”59 But he does not pursue this line of thought but finds it frustrating: “What can this mean?”60 After all, Crisp deems it incoherent.61 Those critical and misleading interpretations are widely accepted62 and remained unchallenged unfortunately, preventing a deeper exploration of Jenson’s works and the underlying logic behind his condensed text. Our next step is to consider how the real person of the Son pre-exists and how the post-existence of the Son can be considered pre-existent. How can a man pre-exist his birth?63 In Jenson’s reflection, it is possible since Jesus is risen and he is fully God. First, the resurrection of Jesus entails that he now possesses the telos of humanity and the eschatological reality of the New Creation in himself. The resurrected one now possesses the reality of the New Creation and so can be regarded as the eschatos. Jenson indicates that the bodily existence of the resurrected Jesus in his post-resurrection appearances was “elusive because he is not present but future: his appearances are appearances of what is not yet.”64 When the disciples gathered in a house with the doors shut and no one opened the door for him, Jesus appeared to them.65 The risen Jesus also came to two disciples on their way to Emmaus. They could recognize him only in a eucharistic context, but then Jesus “vanished from their sight.”66 In the post-resurrection narratives, the way of his presence as

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the risen one is not like that of his presence as the pre-resurrected one. His post-resurrected presence is not impeded by spatial restrictions although he has the fully bodily existence. So Jenson states that the presence of the risen one is not “subject to the regularities of this age.”67 The laws of physics of this age cannot dictate the physical and bodily existence of the age to come. It can be legitimately said that matter of this age differs from that of the age to come and that the laws of physics that govern the universe of this age are overridden by those of the New Creation. He is now “an inhabitant of the age to come.”68 His presence now “is elusive because he is . . . [the eschatological] future”69 belonging to the New Creation. Secondly, we need to acknowledge that this resurrected man is fully God. He is the coagent of creation with God the Father. Creatures submit to their Creator and his presence: so does space-time, paving a way for the coming and going of the divine eschatos. Precisely because of this divine and eschatological nature of the resurrected Son, he can be present to anyone at any time whether it is the past or the future as the space-time is open to his divine presence. In terms of time, the eschatological reality of the future that the risen one has in himself can be present at any point of history. Thus, the future is superior to the past and the present as it is inextricably related to the person of the risen Christ. In other words, the time of the New Creation recursively makes an incursion of the present and liberates it from the past, breaking off the chain tethered to the past conditions. So for Jenson, the procession of time is “recursive”70 by the retroactive movement of the future. Put differently, the entirety of history is open to the future reality that occurred in the middle of time. All of history is porous to the presence of the risen Lord. As Jenson puts it tersely, “Time is more like a helix, and what it spirals around is . . . Christ”71 who can access any point of history as the risen one. So “how could it be that someone born in 4 B.C. could . . . have spoken to and through Jeremiah or that someone who died in A.D. 30 could . . . have spoken through, say, the seer John”?72 How could it be that “the incarnate Christ speaks in all Scripture”?73 How could it be that prophets like Ezekiel saw “Jesus as the risen Christ”?74 How could Jesus be in the beginning of the creation as a real person? How can a man preexist even the time of his birth? How could his post-existence be his pre-existence? Because he is risen and fully divine. THE RETROCAUSALITY IN PHYSICS Thus Jenson has suggested the idea of the retroactivity of the risen Jesus’s physical presence. If the spiritual power of the resurrected Jesus reaches back to the time of the Old Testament, then why not his physical presence as

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well? If Jesus is the resurrected one and so fully human, it would be natural to think that his bodily presence can also reach back in time to the patriarchs, for example, to have a walk and a conversation and even to wrestle with them. In this section, we will explore the possibility of the retroactivity of a physical entity. Modern physics suggests a possibility of retroactivity in nature. If physical retroactivity is possible as it suggests, there is no reason to think the physical presence of the risen Jesus cannot be. Yet, a caveat is to be registered here: I do not employ the following theories of physics to underpin the theological idea of Jesus’s retroactive presence. One may be worried that if the theories employed here are replaced by new ones, this theological proposal would collapse as it loses its scientific foundation. But theological ideas can stand without scientific underpinnings. The aim of this section is not to provide a scientific basis for theology but to unsettle our conventional linear understanding of time so that we may be open to the possibility of physical retroactivity in time and enrich our understanding of the risen Lord and his relation to time. Robert Russell, a physicist who admires Pannenberg, refers to a time-symmetric theory in which a combination of forward and backward causality gives rise to the present.75 Turning to James Maxwell’s equations, which demonstrate how electric and magnetic fields are after all the same phenomenon,76 Russell points out a mathematical possibility that electromagnetic waves travel backward in time: “Maxwell’s equations can lead to the classical wave equation for E in the vacuum: δ2E/δt2 = c2∇2E” (where E is the electric field; t is time; c is the speed of light).77 This equation remains invariant when “-t” is substituted for “t,” that is, even when the time inversion is performed.78 If this is applied to the case of the sun, the following is implied: while it is true that it takes about eight minutes for the sunlight to travel and arrive at the earth, Maxwell’s equations suggest a possibility that the waves of sunlight reaches this planet “eight minutes before they are emitted from the sun.”79 Put differently, it is possible to think that light moves “outward from the source [e.g., the sun] but backward in time . . . from the present into the past.”80 Also, indicating that there is a wide application of time-symmetric theories to gravity, cosmology, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics, Russell avers that the physical retrocausality can be “consonant with the kind of eschatology”81 that modern theologians such as Pannenberg would offer, in which the future emerges as a form of causation. So construed, it would also conform to Jenson’s idiosyncratic and revisionary notion of the physical presence of the risen Jesus. Huw Price, an eminent scientific philosopher, also argues for physical retroactivity in nature. On his account, the concept of retrocausality is derived from the fascinating physical phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which

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can be explained as follows: Suppose two particles become “entangled” at a source, and then they are sent to different laboratories, one to Alice’s and the other to Bob’s. When Alice measures the behavior of her particle, the behavior of Bob’s particle perfectly correlates with hers. To put it precisely, their “correlation” occurs in an anti-correlated manner: if one particle passes through a polarizer, the other is always blocked, and vice versa.82 Importantly, even when the particles are separated by vast distances—even light-years apart, their (anti-)correlation occurs instantaneously. It takes no time for one particle (Alice’s particle) to influence the other (Bob’s particle) even when they are light-years apart.83 In this experiment, it appears that the two particles “communicate” with each other instantaneously, that is, at a superluminal speed. Albert Einstein famously called it “spooky action at a distance” since he was averse to the idea of the superluminal speed communication. According to his theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Einstein and his colleagues Podolsky and Rosen provided an alternative explanation on the quantum entanglement, an explanation that avoids the “spooky” idea of superluminal speed. Their theory is known as EPR (Einstein Podolsky Rosen) for short, which proposes the existence of “hidden variables”: when two particles interact for entanglement at the source, it proposes that they have already “shared some information” so that they may be able to behave in a correlated way in the future when measured by Alice. So their (anti-)correlation occurs instantaneously according to EPR. In this proposal, Einstein and his colleagues rule out the possibility of their superluminal communication of the two particles in Alice and Bob’s labs. The EPR theory, however, was disproved by another physicist, John Bell. Price remarks at this point that it is critical to note exactly what Bell’s argument (known as Bell’s inequality) has disproved. It is generally assumed that Einstein’s concept of “hidden variables” has been rejected by Bell, but Price claims that what has been disproved is the concept of “local hidden variables,”84 that is, hidden variables that satisfy the Assumption of Locality. The Assumption is a principle that there is no action or one’s influence over the other at a distance. An entity can be influenced when something that influences it is in the immediate surroundings.85 Put differently, according to Price, there still is a possibility that there are hidden variables or information communicated “at a distance,” that is, even when the two are not locally close enough—even when the two particles are light-years apart. Now for the two particles to communicate at a distance even when they are temporally distant, the theory of time-symmetry should come into play. Price says, “At the fundamental level, physics is almost entirely time-symmetric in the sense that if it allows a process to happen then it also allows the reverse process to happen (roughly, what we would see if we reversed a video of the first process).”86 With this time-symmetry theory, the concept of retroactivity

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in physics comes into view. It can be elaborated in the account of the two particles in Alice’s and Bob’s labs: Alice’s act of measurement of her particle (Particle A) in her lab affects the same particle at the source, that is, back in time when the same particle was with the other (particle B) for entanglement. Being influenced by Particle A in Alice’s lab, Particle A “communicates” with Particle B in their entanglement at the source. Then, Particle B carries the information, knowing when to behave in correlation to Particle A, that is, at the time when Particle A is measured by Alice.87 Thus, according to Price, the communication from Particle A to Particle B occurs, that is, from the particle at Alice’s lab to the particle at Bob’s lab instantaneously, because Particle A can communicate to itself, retroactively from the time of the measurement to the time of the entanglement. In this way, Price offers an explanation of “spooky actions at a distance” without compromising Einstein’s theory of relativity, that is, the idea that nothing can travel faster than light.88 In other words, Price resolves the tension between Einstein’s theory and quantum mechanics with the concept of retroactivity in physics.89 To return to our theological discussion: if, as Price and Russell suggest, a temporal distance is not a barrier for some physical entities of this age, it would be more so with the physicality of the new age, that is, of the risen one. At this point, it must be noted: I do not mean that the risen Jesus’s transcendence can be explained by physics—by the time-symmetric retroactivity. There is a stark disparity between the two ages between the physics of the old creation and that of the New Creation. The subatomic physical realities as we know it still belong to the former; the risen one’s physicality to the latter. Belonging to the order of the New Creation (and as its creator), the risen one’s eschatological physical reality is unbounded by any temporal distances and restrictions of this age. His resurrected presence transcends the space-time of the present age while his resurrected form is objectively physical. Perhaps, his eschatological presence could be present to the people in this age since he moves in his own divine and eschatological light—perhaps at a superluminal speed. His eschatological divine light may exceed the speed of natural light. It is congruent with Jonathan Edwards’s theological reflection of the eschatological light of the New Creation and of the risen Jesus. He states that the resurrected saints “will be able to see from one side of the universe to the other” because they will not see “by such slow rays of light that are several years traveling” but by the light “emitted from the glorified body of Christ.”90 If as Edwards suggests, the uncreated and eschatological light moves faster than the created one and the risen one effuses that divine light of the future, the risen Jesus in his light may be able to do what natural and created light cannot do. He may move in his own divine and eschatological way. Still one may indicate that Jesus’s physical existence is not massless while subatomic particles are. That would be why some subatomic particles can

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move fast—even back in time—whereas his body cannot. But it must be noted that Jesus’s resurrected body is not of mass as we know it in the present age. Isaac Dorner said of the age to come: “Matter [of this age] will have exchanged its darkness, hardness, heaviness, immobility and impenetrableness for clearness, radiance, elasticity and transparency.”91 The constituents of his physical body are not made of the material of this age but that of the New Creation. His physicality is not governed by the laws of physics of this age. IS REJECTION OF THE PRETEMPORAL EXISTENCE OF THE SON NECESSARY? Before we conclude, let me be clear that I have not followed Jenson’s lead all the way. At least, there is one aspect of his revisionary metaphysics I have found hard to concur with, and so I stand with most critics on this. With critics, my concern lies in Jenson’s blatant rejection of the pretemporal, pre-incarnate state of the Son. It is his rejection of the extra-temporal reality of the Son. The Lutheran theologian’s disavowal of extra-Calvinisticum has gone too far. Jenson never allows any form of reality of the Son beyond the flesh and blood of Jesus. For this reason, the Son is always incarnate: He has never been and never will be unincarnate. The second person of the Trinity is always and eternally fully man. There was no time when the Son was not a man. At the very early stage of his career, this Lutheran theologian bristled about the deity beyond or behind the man Jesus. Jenson rode roughshod over the pretemporal eternity. So his theological project, that is, his revisionary metaphysics, has begun. The temporal or eternal locus of divine election needed to be relocated and placed on the horizon of time. The eternal generation of the Son also needed to be temporalized within the block of time of the man Jesus. The transcendence of God required rethinking in relation to the eschatological future. The pretemporal eternity or extra-temporal eternity now was to be thought of as the final future. Why did Jenson make such an audacious move? His Lutheran instinct has driven his theological reflection. Luther’s dictum “Don’t give me that god”92 serves as an axiom in his theological reflection. The Lutheran theologian interprets this even to entail that there is no divine reality beyond the flesh and blood of this man Jesus. The Logos is never asarkos. Therefore the Son is never pretemporal or pre-incarnate. The Son is the Alpha and Omega as this man. He is transcendent as this man. Jenson’s early study of Karl Barth already gave expression to his Lutheran instinct and his scruples against the pretemporal eternity. His complaint

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about Barth’s theology is that Barth has put emphasis on God’s pretemporal eternity so that God’s eternity has absorbed all the ontological significance and weight of history, leaving nothing to the temporal and historical events. Even the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ have already occurred in pretemporal eternity in some crucial sense. For Barth says, “God’s election as the beginning of all things is God’s self-surrender in his eternal decree. His self-surrender: for God gave—and this is not something that has just now happened. . . . And therewith He surrendered himself, He gave himself up [for humanity].”93 Jenson comments, “To put the matter in extreme form, everything that happened in Jesus Christ’s history on earth happened in eternity, and in God’s pretemporal eternity.”94 Having observed the perennial patterns of thought in Barth’s notions of God’s eternity, of Jesus’s time, of primeval history, and of the related concepts, Jenson has come to a conclusion: “Barth is not being rhetorical. . . . He means that in a particular but very real sense, the Incarnation [and the rest of the life of Jesus] happened in eternity before all time.”95 If this is the case, Jenson argues the man Jesus in human history cannot but be a mere repetition of what was before, that is, of the pretemporal eternity. More problematically, Barth says, “Our time . . . stands under the sign and shadow, of . . . God’s time.”96 This entails, in Jenson’s view, that the Jesus in human history is reduced to a shadow of the pretemporal Jesus. Consequently, the ontological weight of the temporality and the carnality of Jesus is sucked into the black hole of the eternity past and so into the unknown. The carnal and temporal life of Jesus is deprived of all its ontological significance and left merely as a copy of the eternal event. If this conceptual move is pursued, a kind of Gnosticism would emerge. Eternity has everything; history has nothing. Or Nestorianism looms large. This is intolerable for the Lutheran theologian who would never downplay the bodily existence of the Son in history and accept the dichotomy between the two. To avoid this error, Jenson has deconstructed what robs the incarnate (and so temporal) Son of its ontological significance: pretemporal eternity and its kindred form, atemporal eternity. However, as critics have pointed out, Jenson has gone too far here. To secure the ontological significance of the incarnate reality of the Son, I argue, his pretemporal life does not have to be disparaged. The bodily existence of Jesus would not be merely a repetition but the fulfillment of the destiny of the pretemporal Son. Here, I take it, the fulfillment enacted in the incarnation is not a move from deficit to fullness, but from perfection to perfection.97 (Even though the humanity is an addition to the Son who is already perfect.) So I share the concern of most critics concerning Jenson’s disavowal of the Son’s pretemporal existence. Yet I take it that Jenson contribution is still important in that his revisionary theological thought encourages us to think of the transcendence of the Son in

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the economy and the implications of his resurrection for our understanding of time. Since he is risen, and he is the eschatological being from the resurrection, he can be present to all ages of history without being a specter. For he is now to all ages of history as the risen one, therefore, as a fully human being. And his eschatological presence is the irreversibly bodily one in the economy. CONCLUSION The present chapter has offered a legitimate exposition of Jenson’s theology of the Son’s pre-existence. For Jenson, this pre-existent—not pretemporal— Son in the Old Testament era is no other than Jesus Christ himself. In Israel’s history, some Israelites could take a walk with him, converse with him, dine with him, and even wrestle with him, as if he was a man. It was because he was a man, Jesus of Nazareth. The anthropomorphic appearances of God or some, if not all, Shekinah phenomena were the appearances of that anthropos, who divinely and fleshly has engaged with Israel. This hermeneutic may be inhibited by some antecedent assumptions like a linear conception of time. Or such hermeneutics may ward off those assumptions. In line with the traditional teachings, affirmed in the previous chapter, that the spiritual power of the risen Jesus or the effect of the New Covenant can break into the time of the Old Testament, and also in view of the pan-temporal scope of the New Covenant and the outward vector of the resurrection, the present chapter has explored whether the physical presence of the risen one can be retroactively present with the people of Israel in the time of the Old Testament. In our exploration, modern discussions of time in physics could unsettle our inherited and linear understanding of time. Particularly, the two scientific arguments for retrocausality, as derived from Maxwell’s equations and quantum entanglement, have been discussed for a concept of retrocausality. There is also a theological rationale: if the spiritual power of the risen Jesus can be present to the Old Testament Israel and effect their salvation as Barth would argue and other theologians would suggest,98 why wouldn’t he do so with his physical presence when his resurrection is a bodily resurrection? Why should one separate the presence of Jesus from his humanity? Should we not banish the gnostic whiff here? Also, in line with what Jonathan and Dorner said of the New Creation, I have suggested that his new physical existence would be unencumbered in a more transcendent and liberal manner than any physical entities of this age—including subatomic particles. So he would be retroactively present in the time of the Old Testament. He has the new physical body of the age to come.

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NOTES 1. As seen in the previous chapter, I have argued, the future in the person of Christ is not to be equated with the time of the final judgment when our merit is measured against the divine justice. 2. CD III/2, 481. See discussion on the Contemporary of Israel in chapter 1. 3. The Lutherans have a stronger emphasis on the humanity of Jesus than the Reformed do. Of modern theologians, Robert Jenson stands out and has unabashedly affirmed the humanity of Jesus even in his “pre-existent” mode. He has offered an idiosyncratic account of his pre-existence as the “post-existence.” So it would be significant to look into his theology and unpack it more fully than others do. Also, let me register some caveats: while I draw upon Jenson favorably, I do not accept the whole of his theology uncritically. One of the major threads that runs through the fabric of his theology is his audacious identification between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity by way of blatant rejection of the atemporal realm of the Trinity. Jenson has temporalized and “futuralized” the atemporal and immanent Trinity. As a result, it is construed as the eschatological Trinity. The transcendence of the immanent Trinity is thought of as the eschatological future. The eschatological future has replaced the divine transcendence in the Lutheran theologian’s revisionary metaphysics. On that issue, I do not follow Jenson. The following proposal in this chapter does not come at the expense of the atemporal immanent Trinity. And yet, this should not mean that one can sweep his theology aside easily. What I would appreciate and explore with Jenson is the possibility of the centrality of the risen Jesus Christ and his relation to time. 4. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141 (hereafter STh). 5. STh,1:141. 6. STh,1:141. 7. George Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: A Review Essay,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002), 172. 8. Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology,” 172. 9. Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology,” 171. 10. Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology,” 171. 11. Simon Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son in Creation and Redemption: An Exposition in Dialogue with Robert Jenson,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), 45. 12. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 39. 13. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 39. 14. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 40. 15. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 40. 16. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 41. 17. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42. 18. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42. 19. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42. 20. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42. Emphasis is mine.

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21. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42: “The person of Jesus of Nazareth was the decisive criterion for personal pre-existence.” 22. STh, 1:141. 23. Oliver Crisp, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 72. 24. Crisp, God Incarnate, 72. 25. Crisp, God Incarnate, 73. 26. Crisp, God Incarnate, 72. Emphasis added. 27. Crisp, God Incarnate, 73. 28. Crisp, God Incarnate, 73. 29. STh, 2:341. 30. STh, 2:339. 31. Oliver Crisp, “Incarnation” in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain R. Torrance, The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167. 32. Crisp, “Incarnation,” 167. 33. Crisp, “Incarnation,” 167. 34. Crisp, “Incarnation,” 167–68. 35. Crisp, “Incarnation,” 167. 36. STh, 1:78. 37. “He brought him outside and . . . he even took Abraham for a walk” (STh, 1:79). 38. Irenaeus, Against Heresy, 3. 9. 3, quoted in STh, 1:140. 39. STh, 1:140. 40. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 42. 41. Jenson, “Once More on the Logos Asarkos,” 132. 42. Robert Jenson, “The Bible and the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002), 331. 43. Jenson, “The Bible and the Trinity,” 332; emphasis added. 44. The Word of God also has the double identity: when the Word came and said, “I am . . . ,” his self-introduction was responded by his people as they said, “O Lord, . . .” According to Jenson, “This word, as actually spoken, is precisely the trinitarian Logos” (STh, 1:79). 45. Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel, VIII, 20.20–27, quoted in Robert Jenson, Canon and Creed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 84–85. 46. Robert Jenson, “On Dogmatic/Systematic Appropriation of Paul-Accordingto-Martyn,” in Joshua Davis and Douglas K. Harink, Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 157. Emphasis original. For Jenson’s theological exegesis on this, see Robert Jenson, Ezekiel, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 44–45. 47. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 40. 48. STh, 1:139. 49. STh, 1:139. 50. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 40. 51. Robert Jenson, “Toward a Doctrine of Israel,” CTI Reflection 3 (2000), 5–6. 52. Jenson, “Toward a Christian Doctrine of Israel,” 6.

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53. STh, 1:139. 54. STh, 1:143. 55. STh, 1:142. 56. Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology,” 172. 57. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 48. 58. Gathercole, “Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son,” 50. 59. Crisp, God Incarnate, 74. 60. Crisp, God Incarnate, 74. 61. Crisp, God Incarnate, 75. 62. See John Byung-Tek Song, “An Assessment of Robert Jenson’s Hermeneutics,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (2013), 86; Thomas H. McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism?: Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 134. 63. Crisp, “Incarnation,” 167. 64. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (New York: Bobb-Merrill, 1969), 158. 65. STh, 1:197. Emphasis added. 66. Luke 24:51, quoted in STh, 1:197. 67. STh, 1:197. 68. STh, 1:197. 69. Jenson, God after God, 158. 70. “The temporal infinity that leads all things does not stretch forward on and on, nor yet circle round and round. The triune God’s infinity is the Spirit of someone; thus it has the recursive shape marked by the preposition” (STh, 1:219). 71. Robert Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” in Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 35. 72. Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” 35. 73. Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” 35. 74. Jenson, “The Trinity in Ezekiel,” Lutheran Forum 44 (2010), 9. Emphasis added. 75. Robert Russell, Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 341. 76. Russell, Time in Eternity, 342. The equations are: (1) ∇ · E = 4πρ (2) ∇ × E + (1/c)δB/δt = 0 (3) ∇ · B = 0 (4) ∇ × B − (1/c)δE/δt = (4π/c)J 77. Russell, Time in Eternity, 342. 78. Russell, Time in Eternity, 343. 79. Russell, Time in Eternity, 343. 80. Russell, Time in Eternity, 343. 81. Russell, Time in Eternity, 347.

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82. Huw Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” in C. Stewart and R. Hewitt (eds), Waves of the Future (Sydney: Science Foundation for Physics, 2005), 229. 83. Anton Zeilinger, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 11. 84. Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” 230. 85. Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” 226: EPR puts the assumption of locality this way: “If at the time of measurement . . . two systems no longer interact, no real change can take place in the second system in consequence of anything that may be done to the first system.” 86. Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” 232. 87. Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” 233. 88. Price, “Einstein and the Quantum Spooks,” 225–26. 89. For this, Price turns to O. Costa de Beauregard, who proposed: “Alice’s choice could affect Bob’s particle indirectly . . . if the effect followed zigzag path, via the past. Alice’s choice could affect her particle ‘retrocausally,’ so to speak, right back the common source, in turn correlation Bob’s particle with Alice’s choice (and vice versa),” (Huw Price and Ken Wharton, “Disentangling the Quantum World,” Entropy 17 [2015], 7754). 90. Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, 926 quoted in Robert Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 182. 91. Isaac Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 429, quoted in STh, 2:351. 92. Martin Luther, Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, WA 26, 332: “Mir aber des Gottes nicht!” quoted in STh, 2:214. 93. CD II/2,161, quoted in Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Nelson, 1963), 81–82. Jenson’s emphasis. 94. Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 78–79. 95. Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 67–68. 96. CD I/2, 66. 97. “[I]n the incarnation God became man without ceasing to be God” (T. F. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 242). 98. For example, Augustine, Calvin, and Kuyper as seen in the previous chapter.

Conclusion

Time is porous to its center for he stood there. Time does not go merely in a linear fashion for it is not future-proof. It is open to the eschatological power of the future which arises from the middle of history. History is permeable to the inbreaking power of the resurrection as it makes an incursion into the rest of history and as the light of the dawn in the Easter morn prepared the way for the Light of the age to come. The tomb could not hold the eschatological effulgence inside. On that morning, the whole universe received the true light. The whole of history is penetrated by the divine eschatological superluminal light of the resurrection. No shadowy corners of history will remain untouched by his light. Wherever and whenever his light touches, it does so without leaving the full humanity of Jesus behind. He was of course not a wraith but a fully human being, standing at the center of history, shining in the light of the resurrection, and is present to his people at any age of history in that divine and eschatological light. His renewed physicality is unencumbered by anything of this age for it is not subject to the laws of physics of this age. The laws cannot dictate his presence—albeit physical—since he is now not of this age but now of the age to come. His physical presence transcends the realm of this age while it can make itself available to any moment of this age as and whenever he wills. Now to recap: in this book, we have seen that the eschatological future breaks into the present not because God’s eternity is simultaneous. God’s simultaneous eternity logically cannot serve as the basis for the contemporaneity of Jesus (contra Barth). The future retroactively makes an incursion into the present time not because God’s eternity is wholeness (contra Pannenberg). The notion of eternity as wholeness falls short of being the basis for the retroactivity of the future. For time cannot be made whole as it is infinitely extendable into the future. Accordingly, his notion of time is questionable that the future arises from the end of time since its assumption itself about time turns out to be problematic. So I set aside the relationship between eternity and the transcendence of Jesus, I have limited our contemplation to the economy of salvation and the power of the future (and resurrection), 117

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affirming the trans-temporality of Jesus with Barth that at the economic level, Jesus is contemporaneous to his people in all ages of history and that he is so from the first Easter morning. In this regard, we have looked at the temporal scope of the New Covenant which is considered largely to extend to its previous era. The theologians like Augustine and Calvin did not base the idea of the extension of the New Testament on the divine eternity as modern theologians like Barth and Pannenberg do. Their reflection on this issue is largely soteriological in nature and therefore focuses on the economy of salvation. In their traditional theologies, it is affirmed that the people in the Old Testament era could be saved due to the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Their traditional contemplations do not specifically refer to the resurrection as the source of the outward vector of the salvation power—that is, of the New Covenant—but we can consider their covenantal understandings congruent with Barth’s idea on the resurrection: it has the outward vector reaching out to the whole of history. The doctrine of justification is of particular importance as it can be understood as the legal verdict, as the Protestants emphasize, and thereby it leads us to discover the eschatological aspect of the doctrine. I have indicated that the legal and judicial aspect of justification comes into view in the Lutheran legacy for it stresses the juridical sense of the doctrine. Also, in the wake of the Protestant tradition, Barth’s “ontology of the possible” suggests the idea of the priority of the future: the eschatological future verdict has power over the status quo. Thus, the eschatological aspect of justification becomes prominent in modern discussions. N. T. Wright is one of those who brought up the eschatological aspect of the doctrine in recent decades although it needs some clarification. So, in our exploration, I have made a distinction between two modes of the eschatological future and argued that the justifying verdict of God the Father issues from the “precedent” eschatological future, which arises from the center of history, that is, the resurrection. The basis of our justification is not to be located in the “posterior” mode of the future, the day of the final judgment at the end of this age but at the center of history. Thus, the eschatological sense of justification lies in the resurrection of Christ. The eschatological verdict comes from the future, achieved in the middle of history. Lastly, as the eschatological justifying salvific power arises from the reality of the New Creation and thus from the middle of history, we have contemplated the possibility that it is not just in the spiritual sense but also in the physical sense that Jesus the risen one is retroactively present. The possibility of physical retroactivity is explored in special reference to Robert Jenson’s theology. Thus, his full humanity in the eschatological and divine light can and does transcend the limitation of the laws of physics of this age as he

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desires to reach out to the people in the old age of darkness. Thus, the full humanity of the risen one is affirmed, and the gnostic whiff can be banished. It is probably because the radiance of the resurrected one is incomparable to the natural light of this age. The light of his glory is not created but divine and not of this world but of the world to come. His divine and eschatological light of glory does not slow him down to the speed of natural light, hampering him from making himself available to anyone at any time in history. By the supernatural and eschatological light, he was present to the patriarchs for a meal, a walk, or even a wrestling match. In the radiance of the resurrection, the man was there for a carnal engagement with Israel. By the outward vector of the resurrection, he is contemporary to people in all ages. So the people in the Old Covenant could taste the fruit of salvation as the New Testament people do. They could enjoy the benefits of the atoning work of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit due to the outward vector of the resurrection. By virtue of his supernatural light of the future, the salvific effect of the New Covenant was not limited to its own age but extended itself to the old covenant people. By the same grace, they were justified and experienced the rushing wind of the Spirit inwardly as well as outwardly. History itself was and is liberated from the past conditions and its status quo by the inbreaking power of the eschatological future, blowing from the time when Jesus came out of the tomb. This man in the eschatological radiance is the Lord of history, standing at the center, to whom the whole of history is laid open. So what does this have to do with our Christian life? The retroactive grace calls us to look at the light of the future and finds it in the middle of history. We cannot really understand a story until the last page of the book is turned over. We do not know the meaning of an event until we have a broader or whole context in view. Only in light of the End, we can construe the meaning of an event and that of history that we have often struggled to apprehend in our lives. True meaning dawns only in the light of the final future. If the resurrection has the light of the eschatological future, it is by that light in the first century that we can interpret the meaning of events in our lives and history. But it is not that we bring the light to a certain event for our understanding, but that the light itself takes the initiative, breaks into our time and ravishes us. The eschatological future comes to us in freedom, bestows a new meaning on our lives in history and thus defines who we are in light of the resurrection. That is our justification. The final verdict of the Father on the Son Jesus has reversed all other subordinate judgments and the resultant execution of him. The divine verdict has been pronounced on him in the resurrection—and on us too in the same event as Jesus has embraced us all in his life, death and resurrection, that is, in his condemnation and justification. It is pronounced on us from the resurrection-future and frees us from all other judgments and

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opinions. Caustic criticisms and excessive praises from others and even from ourselves are reversed by the divine justification, which defines us anew. We also need to understand others in light of the future-resurrection. Without the eschatological light of justification, we don’t know who they really are. Until the light of the resurrection is shone upon them, we do not understand them. The outcasts and the marginalized are not who they appear to be now in this world. They are who they will be for they will be and so have been justified by the Father’s verdict. They have been accepted into the fellowship of the New Creation. Thus their identities as well as ours are revealed in the light of justification, that is, the eschatological future in the resurrection. The current situation is also not that which seems to be now. The current situation may be bleak like Israel’s journey in the desert where there was no food and water. But the eschatological future beckons us to see beyond the current situation and to itself, that is, the promised land, flowing with milk and honey. But again, it is not just a matter of subjective interpretation. It is not only that our sight reaches over the desert out to the promised land of the New Creation but also that the reality of the New Creation comes and presents itself to us—albeit partially. The fruit of the vine in the promised land was delivered to the people of Israel while they were still in the desert. The fruit from the eschatological future can be delivered and tasted while we are still here in the present age. Jesus looked beyond the cross to the glory of the resurrection, and the rays of the resurrection penetrated the dark hours of the crucifixion and inundated the presence of Jesus on the mountain when he was transfigured. Particularly, the ray of the eschaton penetrates through the gate of heaven like the eucharist. There the fruit of the promised land is delivered to our desert place. A taste of the New Creation can be enjoyed around the table as it is the locus of the kingdom feast. The otherworldly taste of the fruit may take us into a state of reverie and ecstasy of the New Creation. There the humanly impossible unity is envisioned as we participate in the one body of Christ even in the middle of our hostility toward one another and wars against each other. Grace is more powerful than our penchant for power, division, and violence. The New Creation reality is a gracious invincible victory over our present sin and misery. At the gate of heaven, we are shone and entranced by the light of the eschatological future and taste the fruit of the vine taken from the land of the eschaton. Being charged with the energy of the New Creation, we can continue this journey until the eschatological kingdom comes on earth. Still there is another implication for our lives in this age for the New Creation is cosmic and social. If as I have said, the resurrected Christ is the one who has the reality of the New Creation in himself, there is a sense in which Christ has the new universe in himself while it is also true that he is

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in the universe. Put differently, while the first-century Nazarene is contained and so locatable in the world, it is also true that in a sense, he “contains” the whole of the (new) universe in himself. Christ is a cosmic figure who is in the universe and has the universe in himself. It may be considered a cosmic Christology. It is well connected to a temple Christology since the temple can be understood as the creation itself: the two heavens and the earth. The two rooms—the holy of holies and the holy place—can be regarded as the two heavens (one invisible and the other visible); the courtyard as the earth.1 Now if Christ is the temple, he can be considered the cosmic reality. A social implication emerges from this cosmic understanding of Christ. For the cosmic new order entails a new social order. So construed, Augustine was right when he spoke of justification in relation to the concept of justice. For him, justification is the rectification of all things in the universe and thus involves the concept of justice which envisages all things put in the right order. His pre-Reformation doctrine of justification was right on track in this regard. But justice is not a principle far away from our present reality. For it can come into contact with us, and we can gather around the gate of heaven for its rays and fruits. The rays of the New Cosmos shine in, and the fruit gives us energy. They subvert the values of the status quo so that we may envision a new society or a community of justice which embraces those on the margins and binds us all into one in the eschatological love and hope. Thus, the future comes to us. NOTE 1. G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Nottingham: Apollos, 2018).

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Index

adoptionism, 27 Arianism, 101 Aristotle, 41, 74 atonement, 54 Augustine, 2, 20, 24, 25, 39, 46, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 72, 73, 74, 92, 99, 116, 118, 121 baptism, 34, 47, 62, 65, 66, 72 Barth, Karl, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 31, 33, 35, 39, 43, 57, 61, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 92, 94, 99, 100, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118 Bell, John, 108 the Bible, 68, 69, 87, 99, 101, 104, 114 Boethius, 17, 19, 20, 25 Calvin, John, 2, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 61, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 95, 99, 116, 118 church, 3, 13, 18, 47, 53, 66, 74, 75, 76, 78, 85, 86, 96, 103, 115, 121 creation, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 38, 40, 52, 63, 81, 84, 88, 90, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106, 109, 121 deification, 70, 84, 93, 95 Dorner, Isaac, 110, 112, 116

Eastern Orthodox, 85, 93 Edwards, Jonathan, 109, 112, 116 Einstein, Albert, 108, 115, 116 election, 7, 19, 21, 35, 110, 111 Erasmus, 68, 69, 76 eschatology, 1, 2, 3, 8, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 52, 54, 61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 72, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 99, 102, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121; the posterior future, 89, 90, 93; the precedent future, 89, 90, 91 eternity, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 55, 63, 70, 83, 84, 105, 110, 111, 115, 117, 118; futuralized, 36, 113; as nunc, 6, 11; as simultaneity, 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25; as totality, 2, 11, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 72, 85, 117 ethics, 86 eucharist, 47, 120

131

132

Index

faith, 7, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 93, 95 Farrow, Douglas, 55, 56, 57, 59 federal theology, 45, 56, 57 Frame, John, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59 freedom, 6, 18, 25, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 46, 47, 56, 62, 65, 66, 70, 73, 74, 86, 87, 88, 94, 96, 97, 113, 114, 115, 119 glory, 13, 51, 88, 92, 101, 103, 104, 119, 120 God, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 121 Gospel, 47, 48, 52, 84, 97, 101 grace, 2, 3, 5, 15, 19, 21, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 119, 120 Greggs, Tom, 9, 17, 20, 35, 43 Gregory the Great, 104, 114 Hart, Trevor, 81, 82, 91, 94 heaven, 10, 84, 103, 120, 121 hermeneutics, 104, 112, 115 Holy Spirit, 6, 7, 11, 17, 25, 26, 34, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 73, 78, 84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 102, 103, 115, 118, 119; indwelling, 49, 50, 77, 119 Hunsinger, George, 6, 8, 9, 12, 17, 18, 21, 33, 39, 42, 100, 101, 105, 113, 115 Irenaeus, 20, 103, 114

Israel, 1, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 47, 48, 49, 51, 101, 102, 103, 104, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120 Jenson, Robert, 3, 41, 83, 94, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 Jesus, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 62, 72, 79, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120; ascension, 10; crucifixon, 10, 12, 13, 14, 53, 54, 56, 80, 87, 90, 94, 120; incarnation, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 31, 36, 100, 102, 104, 106, 110, 111; preexistence, 7, 40, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 112; resurrection, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120; temple, 121 judgment, 25, 40, 49, 62, 67, 69, 72, 79, 80, 87, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 113, 118 justice, 5, 63, 64, 65, 78, 80, 83, 93, 113, 121 justification, 5, 48, 49, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 113, 119, 120, 121; as deification, 70, 84, 93, 95, 102; future justification, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93; as imputation, 49, 69, 70, 71, 78, 79, 80, 81; as infusion, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 78, 81, 90, 93; present justification, 67, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97

Index

Kingdom of God, 40, 48, 51, 57 Kuyper, Abraham, 2, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 116 law, 49, 50, 54, 55, 67, 69, 73, 74 Leftow, Brian, 6, 9, 17, 18 Logos (the Word), 7, 33, 42, 48, 51, 52, 75, 83, 84, 85, 103, 104, 114 lordship, 3, 12, 20, 21, 40, 45, 47, 101, 103, 106, 107, 114, 119 love, 38, 50, 55, 74, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 95, 121 Luther, Martin, 2, 53, 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 95, 116 Lutheran, 69, 70, 72, 83, 85, 86, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 105, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118, 121, 122, 131, 135, 141, 148, 157, 158, 159, 162, 170 Mannermaa, Tuomo, 2, 61, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 93, 95 Mary, 14, 40, 55, 100, 101, 102, 105; immaculate conception, 56 matter, 80, 106, 111, 120 McGrath, Alister, 63, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77 Melanchthon, Philip, 2, 67, 69, 70, 76, 92 merit, 48, 49, 69, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 97, 113 mission, 40, 77, 96, 121 narrative, 26, 30, 36, 41, 42, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 ontology, 2, 3, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 70, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 95, 101, 109, 116, 118, 120; of the possible, 2, 81, 83, 91, 92, 118 Padgett, Alan, 19, 74 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 2, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35,

133

36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 99, 107, 115, 117, 118 Pentecost, 53, 56 Plotinus, 2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41 Pope Pius IX, 55; Ineffabilis deus, 55 Price, Huw, 107, 108, 109, 115, 116 Protestant, 3, 63, 66, 70, 72, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 92 providence, 27 quantum mechanics/physics, 3, 107, 108, 109, 112 redemption, 26, 51, 53, 54 Reformed, 2, 21, 39, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 95, 96, 99, 113, 116, 118 regeneration, 48, 50, 65, 66, 75 revelation, 8, 52, 53, 55, 58, 81 Roman Catholic, 54, 55, 56, 65, 66, 71, 78, 85, 86, 93 Russell, Robert, 38, 41, 107, 109, 115 sanctification, 48, 49, 50, 53, 63, 66, 71, 74, 76 Shekinah, 103, 112 sin, 7, 10, 17, 34, 46, 54, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 96, 120 solus Christus, 91 soteriology, 2, 3, 33, 34, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 62, 67, 71, 74, 87, 89, 91, 112, 117, 118, 119 superluminal speed, 108, 109, 117 theophany, 103, 104 theosis, 84, 95, 102 Thomas Aquinas, 2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 72, 74, 75, 92 time: linear, 1, 3, 6, 7, 14, 104, 107, 112, 117; retroactivity, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 66,

134

Index

67, 69, 79, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 93, 97, 100, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 117, 118, 119; symmetry, 107, 108, 109; trans-temporality, 2, 11, 16, 23, 29, 33, 35, 36, 47, 52, 54, 57, 118 Torrance, T. F., 18, 20, 33, 34, 42, 114, 116

Trinity, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, 39, 83, 110, 113, 114, 115 unction, 49, 50 Wright, N. T., 2, 61, 79, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 118

About the Author

Sang Hoon Lee holds a PhD in systematic theology from the University of Aberdeen and currently serves as a professor in systematic theology at Bethel Theological Seminary in South Sudan, where he teaches intensive courses, regularly traveling from the UK. He is also an affiliated researcher at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, Belgium. Previously he had experience of teaching systematic theology at Union School of Theology and Trinity College Bristol, UK. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of trinitarian theology, christology, and eschatology. He has published several academic articles on these topics in journals such as International Journal of Systematic Theology, Theology Today, Scottish Journal of Theology, and Pro Ecclesia. He has also published a monograph, Trinitarian Ontology and Israel in Robert W. Jenson’s Theology in 2016. When he’s not busy, he can be found relaxing with some good music recommended by his daughter or enjoying some sweet tunes played on the guitar by his son.

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